This was my favorite part of the interview that will stick with me for some time:

Joe Meno: …When I look at the last twelve years, it seems like the trend in publishing is to write these big, 700-page books, where there’s this certain tone that feels a little bit sarcastic, or there’s this bombardment of information about economics or World War II. As I was writing the book, I thought, Well, that’s real interesting, and it’s an interesting use of the novel. But you could also use the novel to do this really small thing. This thing that would never be a film, or never be a TV series, because it’s only about these two people.

There’s a bunch of novels that follow that, they just haven’t been produced here in the last fifteen years or so. Books like Goodbye, Columbus, or a number of French novels from the 50s that have this really beautiful, bare, focused quality.