Toby Lloyd on the differences (and similarities) between the U.K. and the States

Toby Lloyd grew up in London and studied at Oxford before moving across the Atlantic Ocean to get an MFA from New York University. His upbringing in the United Kingdom and writing studies in America helped shape who he is as a person and as a writer.

His debut novel, Fervor (in America, Fervour in the U.K.), is about a Jewish family in London who discovers their daughter is a witch. Lloyd carefully mediates on religion, family, politics, and education throughout the book while sprinkling horror themes.

We emailed the author to learn more about his past and what drives him as a writer. Check out the Q&A below!

I’d love to start by getting a brief background about how you became interested in reading and writing while growing up. Who was influential to you, and what books inspired you?

Unusually for a writer, I was not a big reader as a child. It was in my teens that I became interested in books. The novels I read at that time were mostly orange penguin editions that I found on my parents’ shelves – writers from their youth and a little earlier. Graham Green, Iris Murdoch, Evelyn Waugh, and Scott Fitzgerald for instance. Big canonical stuff too: Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Austen, Dickens, Eliot. I don’t think I understood all that much of what I read at first, but now and then I would come across phrases and paragraphs that seemed not just intriguing but somehow important. I don’t remember exactly what I was looking for, but I recall the strong sense that books might contain some hidden message for me, if only I read them carefully enough. A bit like Henry James’ ‘Figure in the Carpet.’ Everything I had to read for secondary school—your middle and high school, that is—I disliked on principle. The writer who most captured my imagination then, and remains a constant presence, is Philip Larkin. 

You moved from the U.K. to get your MFA from NYU. What was behind that decision to come to the States and was there ever a path where you studied writing in the U.K.?

I always wanted to move to the States. It was a wonderful thing to catch a one-way flight when I’d never lived outside the UK. I think to a lot of Brits, America seems like the artistic center of the universe. It did to me. New York especially was where so many of my favourite films and music and books came from. I’m thinking of Sydney Lumet and Martin Scorsese, but also The Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth. I’d grown up on that stuff. And New York is full of literary ghosts. Ahab, for instance, starts his mythic quest in what he calls the city of the Manhattoes. The list of writers who lived and died in New York City is ridiculous. Edith Wharton, Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison spring to mind. And so New York seemed not just the perfect place to write fiction. If I moved there, it seemed like my life itself might take on the shape and proportions of a novel.   

NYU had the added attraction of generous fellowships and EL Doctorow on the teaching faculty. Another of my favourite writers. 

I did apply for courses in the UK at the same time but was not successful. Perhaps there is something American about my literary sensibility – later I was to sell the rights to Fervor in the US before I sold them at home in the UK. It’s odd, because I feel my writing is very English, but maybe I’m not the best judge.  

What were the first kernels of Fervor? Did it start with wanting to write about a close-knit family or were the horror-tinged elements first? Or, another element?

The novel grew from several sources. One was reading the early books of the Bible with great enthusiasm in my late-twenties and coming to view them as brilliant experimental fiction rather than dubious national history. Another was my love of supernatural horror films: Nosferatu (both versions), The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Witch, St Maud. At a certain point, I started to wonder: where were the Jewish horrors? A third source was a lifelong fascination with literalist religion and belligerent atheism. 

A few weeks ago, when the U.S. cover was revealed you tweeted about it being a novel with two names (Fervour vs. Fervor) with two very different covers. I’m curious as you were writing if you thought about American vs British readers and how they would connect with the book. As someone who spent time writing in both countries, do you feel readers in both places crave different things?

I used to believe America and Britain were essentially one big English-language literary culture. I was misled by the phenomenal transatlantic success of a few famous names, such as Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen. When I arrived in the US, I realised there were some very well-known British writers who no one I met in America had heard of. No wonder: their books weren’t even in the shops. When I returned to the UK, I realised the opposite was true of some of my favourite American writers. Hardly anyone in the UK reads Cynthia Ozick or Francine Prose, for instance. 

So I have to conclude that, yes, British and American readers want different things. Or at any rate are given different things by their respective markets. I was aware, for instance, of a very strong tradition of Jewish American fiction which does not have an exact equivalent in the UK. Did that affect how I wrote Fervor? I can’t say that it did. I just tried to write as good a book as I possibly could, unsure whether anyone (outside of me) would like it. 

The book uses numerous retellings of Hassidic legends. Why was it important to use these tales, as well as notate when you used those retellings, in the book?

All books are built upon the edifices of other books. There are many retellings in my novel, not just of Hassidic Tales, but also of Biblical stories, jokes, and historical incidents. These are the narratives my characters use to orient themselves in their lives. I felt the need to notate source material where it struck me as obscure – an opportunity to point readers in the direction of writers I love who are not widely read. When was the last time you heard anyone talk about Myer Levin? 

What are some titles from other writers that you can recommend that touch on similar themes for readers who enjoy your book?

My favorite living writer of Jewish fiction is Cynthia Ozick, whom I’ve mentioned already. She seems to have read everything and has an intelligence and a wit that is entirely her own. Her story collection ‘The Pagan rabbi’ and her novel Heir to the Glimmering World are first rate. American Pastoral by Philip Roth had a profound and lasting effect on how I view narrative fiction. Dan Jacobson’s The Rape of Tamar is a brilliant retelling of a Biblical legend. Francine Prose’s Judah the Pious is, like Fervor, indebted to folkloric tradition, as is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Satan in Goray. And I’m a big fan of Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, which approaches Zionism and the troubled history of the Middle East in a manner both humorous and oblique. Apart from the Cohen book, which was published after I’d begun querying agents, all the above were influences on Fervor.