Mice 1961, Stacey Levine’s third novel, came very close to winning the 2025 Pulitzer for Fiction. It was one of the prize’s three finalists, but the judges selected a fourth-placed novel, Percival Everett’s James, due, apparently, to a stalemate at the top that couldn’t be resolved. Levine is a Seattle writer. She has lived and worked here for as long as I can remember (she was raised and born in St. Louis, Missouri). Her first book, My Horse and Other Stories, won the PEN/Faulkner Literary Award for Fiction in 1994. Her second novel, Frances Johnson, published in 2005, played a role in her winning The Stranger’s Genius Award for writing in 2009. Her latest novel, Mice 1961, is set in Miami during the month, April, that’s now remembered for US’s failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs Invasion. 

Though this world-historical clusterfuck plays an important role in Mice 1961’s plot, particularly in its penultimate chapter, the greatness of the novel is not found in the story but in the way it’s told. And this is the way it should be. One doesn’t read literary fiction for narrative design—the sole function and art of the kind of detective fiction that counts Dorothy L. Sayers as a master of the interwar years (1920s and 1930s). The art found in Mice 1961, as well as Levine’s other novels and short stories, concerns language, the English language. Levine handles words and sentences with what can best be described by the German word for a form of care that’s philosophically (or existentially) sensitive, sorge. You will not find a neglected word, sentence, passage in this book. Such is her sorge.

What follows is a conversation I had recently had with Levine. I emailed her questions; and she emailed me her responses.

When I learned your new novel, Mice 1961, was a finalist in this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, I admittedly thought it had to be more conventional than your previous work. But when I read the novel, I was surprised to see you were all there: the witty humor, the brilliant flashes in descriptive passages, the testing and retesting of the limits of the language, the dreaminess, the ghostliness, the care. You had surrendered nothing to the market. How was this possible? How did you pull it off? I really want to know.
When I started writing it, I thought about the publishing marketplace’s pressures all the time in the back of my head, such as: Who will ever publish this thing unless it “clips” along briskly picking up complications, then has a big car chase, solemn resolutions, etcetera. It didn’t help that an agent read some of the pages and declared the MS “a bit slow.” (The book wound up not having an agent; I connected with a publisher myself.) It was so annoying and crushing having those continual market thoughts… until finally, I formed those concerns into a little meta shelf inside the book. It’s the part where the main character, Girtle, is frustrated even if mesmerized that she finds herself inside this story and how she hates knowing that an obligatory “helper” character is going to come along and “save” the white-blonde female protagonist Ivy (who is nicknamed Mice). Once I installed that shelf in the book, the writing got a bit easier.

Do you think your narrator, her commentary on the nature and expectations of a novel, played a role in catching the attention of the Pulitzer people? (By the way, Girtle reminded me of the narrator of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote, and the Helper, of the KGB-like assassin Gradus.)
Maybe, but really I have no idea; the Pulitzer jury members are notably silent after the fact regarding their judging processes. But to your question, maybe, because the character’s commentary forms another layer in the book. As in, a novel can contain exposition, descriptions of characters or setting, the main narrative and supblots; another element could be a meta layer in which the narration interrogates itself. You know this from music, where a piece could get layered with strings or other percussion or something and that adds another side to the whole. 

There was almost 20 years between your second novel, Frances Johnson, and Mice 1961, your latest and third novel. What took you so long? (I know you also published a collection of short stories, The Girl with Brown Fur: Tales & Stories, in 2011, so it’s not like you were dormant or anything.)
Because during the economic downturn, I got laid off from UW Medical Center and wound up getting a teaching job to support myself. I hadn’t taught very much before that, and it was SUCH a steep learning curve, just all-consuming. And then there’s all the grading at night. A friend put it this way: “When people teach, they just kind of disappear.” How true. I could only write substantially on weekends or school breaks. In the end it was the best thing for this book, because lots of time helps cure a novel and makes it better. Also teaching English classes helped me, a pretty shy person, learn to talk on my feet and get to know grammar rules really well. I just accepted that it was going to be horribly slow but that I’d finish the book someday. 

Mice 1961 takes place in Miami, a place that has a climate and culture that’s very different from the Pacific Northwest. More curious yet, the locations of your first novels are fictional. Miami is a real place in the world. Why did you select Miami to be your first actual city? Why not Seattle, your own city? For as long as I have known Seattle, I have known Stacey Levine.
My novel Frances Johnson is also set in Florida, though in a fictional town. I guess Florida is my conceptual sandbox. I’ve thought of setting a novel in Seattle, but Seattle is so here.

Your novel takes place in 1961? What drew you to this period and its political climate, the Cold War?
It wasn’t an intellectual decision. Initially I just got the impulse and feeling to write about this. Then I wanted to describe white insulated Americans of that era who were adjacent to passionately pro-Castro Cubans and fierce Batista supporters. I mean the human animal gets so emotional about their countries and leaders. Think of the cultural split here and now. I did a lot of reading about the Kennedy era and even a weird self-published book by one of the Alabama Air Guards whom the CIA hired to fly on the Bay of Pigs mission in April 1961. I also got a small grant from Artist Trust to go down to Miami and research. It was so necessary for this book. 

What happened to my favorite character in Mice 1961, Mrs. Lou Fox, the rich “philanthropist from the neighborhood who generally bought and sold painted plates”? She wonderfully floats into the party/potluck in the second section of the novel. She is amazing, she crackles, and just when you are ready for her to do her snobby thing for the rest of the book, she suddenly leaves the party and the novel. Mrs. Fox lasts for barely two pages. Where did she go? Is she in another novel you might be working on?
Oh she’s so spoiled! Would you believe there are about 40 characters appearing or mentioned in the novel, including the dogs? Most of them are fly-by-night characters, neighborhood folks at the party. Now how are all of those going to have an arc? Are you saying that wouldn’t be impractical? I love Mrs. Fox though, with her husband sitting in the idling car. Who the hell is he? Oh—I guess he is Lou Fox. But I wonder what he would be like. I also love Sheila, the baker, and the beatnik poet Harry Kulp, and the little dentist, Dr. Warm.

I’m leaving all these people in the dust. My new book doesn’t have them.