Hawley just calls himself a storyteller
‘Fargo’ showrunner looks at what unifies us in his sixth novel
AUSTIN, Texas — Noah Hawley tries never to approach a story the same way twice.
When FX asked if he’d like to make an X-Men television series, Hawley came up with “Legion,” a surrealist mind-bender in which the protagonist hears and sees things that aren’t real. He has made four seasons of “Fargo,” a show loosely — very loosely — based on the Coen brothers’ film. Every season, he replaces the characters, picks a new setting and still calls it “Fargo.”
His sixth novel, “Anthem,” recently released from Grand Central Publishing, is an exploration of contemporary America laced with magical realism. It features vicious political divisions, climate change, an insurrection and a study of what it’s like to be young in a collapsing world. It also includes a witch who is impossible to kill, a teenager who has regular chats with God and an outbreak of teenage suicides.
Hawley, as you see, is busy. An author, showrunner and director, he even sang on the soundtracks for “Legion” and “Fargo.” These days, he said, he just calls himself a storyteller.
“A big part of what I’m trying to do,” he said, “is to bypass that part of your brain that’s been trained by the thousands of stories that you’ve consumed in your lifetime.”
Hawley, 54, started out wanting to be a musician. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College
in 1989, he moved to the Brooklyn borough of New York City with his band and got a day job as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society. His band, Bass Nation, played gigs and toured a bit — Hawley played guitar and sang — but it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere. So he started writing.
A few years later, when he was living in San Francisco, he sold his first novel, “A Conspiracy of Tall Men.” His mother, Louise Armstrong, was also an author, and through her, Hawley said, he found an agent.
One of Hawley’s first attempts at a novel, set at a college, had been sent around to editors but never sold. One editor, he was told, felt Hawley was reluctant to make changes. That was news to him.
“I will change anything you want!” he remembered thinking. But in the intervening years, that perception about his openness to feedback doesn’t seem to have changed much.
“What I’ll hear is, ‘Oh, the network has a note, but they’re afraid to give it to you,’ ” Hawley said. “Which is so interesting because I never yell at anybody about anything. But that’s good because I don’t necessarily want the note,” he joked — or he seemed to be joking.
“I can be difficult to read sometimes,” he said. “But on some level, that can be good, too, because a lot of this is a poker game.”
After his first book was published, Hawley wrote a screenplay and an adaptation of his novel, and from there started writing TV pilots. Three of his pilots were bought and never made. In 2004, he moved to Los Angeles and took a job on procedural series “Bones” so he could learn how to make a show.
It was a good move, so good that he didn’t have to stay in LA for long. Five years later, Hawley and his family moved to Austin, where they have lived off and on ever since.
Today he and his wife, Kyle, live on a sort of mini-compound on a halfacre with their two kids, who are 9 and 14, his wife’s aunt and three dogs.
The kernel that became “Anthem” started percolating about five years ago. Hawley had published his previous novel, “Before the Fall,” with Hachette, and Michael Pietsch, the company’s CEO, was eager to sign him up for another. Hawley’s editor had just left the company, so Pietsch offered to edit the book himself.
“You could do worse than the guy who edited ‘Infinite Jest,’ ” Hawley said of Pietsch.
During summer 2019, Hawley was planning to work on the book during a two-month family vacation in Europe. At a bookstore in London, he collected a stack of novels that had been “eureka moments” for him, he said, including “The New York Trilogy,”
by Paul Auster; “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” by Milan Kundera; “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and “Song of Solomon,” by Toni Morrison.
“And now you’re traveling around with a box of books, and you’re like, ‘Why didn’t I just buy two?’ ” he recalled. “But it felt critical that I get them all.”
“Anthem” is woven together using a number of contemporary threads, mostly seen through the eyes of teenagers who are battling to save themselves and one another. One of the main characters, Simon, is the scion of
a pharmaceutical fortune made by selling opioids. A culture war descends into armed conflict, in a way that reads like it must be a riff on Jan. 6 — except that Hawley wrote it the previous October.
“One of the ideas explored in the book is what unifies us now when there are so many things that tear us apart,” Pietsch said. “Imagine being a kid, hearing that the oceans are dying, that the bees are dying, reading about the opioid epidemic, seeing these political battles and reading about sexual predation. This sense that the world you’re growing into is being destroyed
before your eyes, and what’s going to be there for you? What must that be like, and what can you do?”
Hawley hasn’t started thinking yet about another book, but he has been sketching out ideas for the next season of “Fargo.”
“I have the luxury of when I have ideas, I think, ‘Well, what is it?’ ” he said. “‘Is it a show? Is it a movie? Is it a book?’ But for something to be a book, it means you’re going to live with it for three or four or five years. There has to be enough there. It has to be about things — for me — that are more than just: ‘Is he going to get the girl? Are they going to get away?’ ”