Bernard Cohen

Yes, I think that the relationship that the students have with their mentor, there's a really strong mentorship that's going on there and the milieu that the students are in is a really powerful force in the novel.

Yes, it's heading more towards the form that you might expect from a memoir and in some ways it's making claims to those sorts of truth claims throughout it.

I don't know.

I didn't quite like it in this novel.

I thought that there was a defensive reason almost for it, which was like you change the names of the character and, you know, the title Immigrant Montana.

There's no place called Immigrant Montana, but there is a place called Emigrant Montana.

There are two characters, Laura and Francis.

Francis is a priest and Laura a nun.

And they're involved with what's thought to be a conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger and make him admit to being involved with war crimes and that sort of thing.

The real characters were called Father Philip Berrigan and Sister Elizabeth McAllister.

They were betrayed by a convict in the real world called Frederick Douglas, who becomes in this book Douglas Adams.

No relation to the Hitchhiker's Guide man, I assume.

Right, yeah.

All of those bits of, all of those slippages, my concern was that why wouldn't you tell the actual story if these paralleled them so closely?

Is it because if you don't quite get something right or if the angle that you're taking on it, you can say, well, it's not really true.

So I thought it was a defensive position in that way.

Did you agree with that, Kate?

Well, yeah, I thought that the effect of those changes was not to strengthen the fiction or the narrative but to not exactly to weaken the truth claims of it because the stories did seem to parallel but to put the storytelling in a kind of doubt.

What did you think the effect of it was?

I loved the language.