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A conversation with Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, author of GLASSWORKS
Can you talk a little bit about the real glassworks that inspired you to write the novel?
Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka were a father-and-son team of Czech glass artisans who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making costume jewelry, laboratory equipment, glass eyes, and (most famously) incredibly detailed botanical and marine invertebrate models. You're just as likely to run across the Blaschkas in a science museum as in an art museum—the best-known collection of their work is the Glass Flowers exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. There's a persistent caginess to any explanation of the Blaschkas' techniques, how exactly these models came to be. When asked about the source of their skill, Leopold's advice was to "get a good great-grandfather who loved glass"—a glib aside, minimizing their mythic talent as well as five generations of family legacy. Though I can't relate to the particular circumstances, in general this impulse resonated with me: some things feel too important to address in any form but a joke. Glassworks ended up being a fictional biography not of the Blaschkas but of the glass models themselves, which felt so alive and compelling and winkingly mysterious that they suggested entire worlds. But it's the Blaschkas who set everything in motion.
The four sections in Glassworks span more than 100 years. Can you talk a bit about writing across different eras, and how the passage of time influenced how the characters understood that family secrets at the heart of the novel?
As in life, the passage of time in Glassworks is a matter of contradictions: each of the four sections is siloed, yet from the reader's perspective the whole thing is a continuous spiral. Each section degrades, in a way, with more being lost to silence with each passing generation. Yet there is also obvious accumulation—of memories, of legacy, of history, of trauma—as each character has access (albeit flawed) to a "past" that to their ancestors was only unknowable future. (At one point, Flip condescendingly imagines Ignace and Agnes cluelessly "sitting on the cliff-edge of all that history" in the 1910s. She's having this thought in 2015.) Glassworks starts with Agnes in 1910, but only because it had to start somewhere—this is in no way the "beginning" of this family's story; characters in that first section struggle with inscrutable impressions of their ancestors. And by the same token, I hope it's clear that Flip's section is not the "end"—it's just that after a certain point, it's time to let the reader go about their day. There's a moment in the third section where Kent describes a science-fiction film about interstellar travelers "who don't get to see where they came from or where they're going"—to which Cecily replies, "Which is everyone." That's how I thought about time, writing Glassworks: I tried to stay away from any sense of finality, of absolute origin or culmination; we are all the protagonists of our own lives, and distantly influential minor characters in someone else's.
Is there anything surprising or unexpected you came across in your research?
There are a thousand answers to this question, but probably the thing I've noticed most has been the way researching Novak's work cleaning skyscraper windows has affected my view of New York City. I've started to notice curtain walls everywhere; which buildings use setbacks or "cathedral drops"; opaque spandrel versus vision glass. Any time I run across some structure or ornamentation that makes it hard to imagine how a building's windows are cleaned, I end up Bianca Alexis standing on the sidewalk for a few minutes puzzling it out. I'm not sure I ever get anywhere close to the real method, but writing this book has made me permanently mindful of something I used to take for granted.
Glassworks is full of rich, complicated LGBT characters who both struggle with and embrace their gender and sexual identities. Can you talk a little bit about the queer characters in the novel, and how you think about what an expanded definition of what a "family saga" means in the book
Not every character in Glassworks has the vocabulary and context to be self-aware about this, but they are all negotiating their gender and sexual identities—and, finding themselves to be outliers in their families of origin, make rebellious sacrifices in search of lives and relationships that feel authentic to them.
Multigenerational novels tend to treat genetics as paramount in defining family—or if not genetics, at least a structure "straightforward" enough to map onto a family tree at the front of the book: romantic partners, raising children. And it's often in contrast to this that we define the concept of "chosen" queer family: a healing act of individual agency, but "a dead end" from the point of view of the larger story. In Glassworks I wanted to collapse several false distinctions there— starting with the idea that a "family saga" means the literary equivalent of a 23andMe swab. I also wanted to explore how "chosen" family can wound one another as severely as any blood relatives, and that people who do not formally raise children still have profound cascading effects—positive and negative—on their communities, lasting generations.
How does the catharsis function in Glassworks? What do you hope the reader comes to understand about the Novak family at the end of the novel?
Glassworks is certainly not a novel with a "moral"—there is no sorting the characters into successes and failures, or by the (in)correctness of their actions. But I think one of the questions this book is interested in is when we can trust catharsis, and when it is a tempting fantasy: a lifetime's worth of pain and confusion, atomized in a single moment of clarity! I mentioned earlier that there is no "beginning" or "end" to this family's story—time and experience are endlessly cumulative, and no feeling, no state of being is final. This is true of the Novaks, individually and as a group, and I hope readers come away from Glassworks thinking about the constancy of being in process.
Can you talk a little bit about the glass motif and the various ways different characters interact with glass and the making of glass?
One way to describe Glassworks is as a novel about a family business that doesn't realize it's a family business. In section one, Ignace is a traditional lampwork glass artist; in ensuing generations, doggedly rebellious descendants end up designing liturgical stained-glass windows, taking a squeegee to Manhattan skyscrapers, and firing strangers' ashes into memorial glass ornaments in a strip-mall office park. Glass is a pretty miraculous substance, malleable yet eternal, and there's no limit to the ways it can turn up in our lives. For a family constantly renegotiating its relationship to its own legacy, no medium felt more appropriate.
Glassworks is not only an intimate and tender multigenerational novel, it's also a lot of fun. How do you balance the sacred and the absurd?
The characters in Glassworks are navigating the fact that life can be funny, even ridiculous, as often as it is heartbreaking—and not uncommonly at the same time. (A joke, after all, is just a sentence that ends in a surprise.) There's a long list of coping mechanisms on display here, from science and religion to marijuana and Broadway musicals, all of them enjoyed with at least some measure of personal eccentricity. I think part of that "balance" comes when anything that began as a distraction from life shifts to being part of the framework we use to understand it.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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