'The White Hot' asks: If men can go find themselves, why can't women?

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And my guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Quiara Alegria Hudes, writer of "In The Heights," "Water By The Spoonful" and the memoir "My Broken Language." She recently published her first novel, "The White Hot," and it opens in a locked bathroom. The bathroom is the only place April Soto can escape her small, chaotic life. She's 26 years old and lives in a Philadelphia row house with her mother, grandmother and her 10-year-old daughter, Noelle. She's the book's antihero - volatile, quick to anger, driven by a heat she calls the white hot. The bathroom is where she goes to cool down or disappear.

Until one day, April visits her daughter Noelle's school and sees an art project - a drawing of their home. And there April is, locked in the bathroom. The hiding place she believed was private had actually never been a secret at all. Her daughter had been watching the whole time. This realization hits hard, sparking an urgent need to run. And so April buys a one-way bus ticket to the farthest place she can find. "The White Hot" unfolds as a letter - a mother writing to the daughter she left behind, trying to explain the choice that changed both of their lives.

Hudes won the Pulitzer Prize for "Water By The Spoonful," which explored addiction and trauma in a Puerto Rican American family. She also wrote the book "In The Heights" and adapted it for the screen. And her memoir, "My Broken Language," traced her multigenerational upbringing in Philadelphia, a world she explores in "The White Hot." Quiara, welcome to FRESH AIR.

QUIARA ALEGRIA HUDES: Thanks. I'm excited to talk.

MOSLEY: There are very few acts we judge more harshly than a mother who leaves her child, who abandons her child. And as I'm reading the book, I was wondering how you let go of that judgment to bring life into April, if you ever even held that judgment to begin with.

HUDES: You know, the book came out a few months ago, and the more time and distance I'm separated from its active writing, the more I'm reflecting on it. And I almost started to cry when you asked the question because it makes me emotional that April is this antihero. She's done the unthinkable. She's left her child. And we know that from the beginning. It's not a spoiler. But what the book doesn't detail as much, because it's just a given, is that she didn't leave her child. She stayed with her child. When she was pregnant as a high schooler, as a teenager, the dad saw that and wanted no part of it, and he took off. So she actually made a - she's the one that made the decision to stay.

And I wonder if even me writing the story of her leaving and not the story of her staying did her a slight disservice, but I don't think so. I think that she has this message to give to her estranged daughter who she left when she was 10 years old. And she wants this daughter to know, look, I stayed for 10 years, but here's what it's like to be a woman who takes her life into her own hands and who has agency. And maybe I waited too long to learn these lessons. Maybe you can learn these lessons a little bit sooner.

MOSLEY: You know, April - I mean, she's very clear. She has this understanding that her words can't really justify why she left, but the words really is all that she has. And so she writes her daughter this letter, as you said, to be read when Noelle is 18 years old, and it's about specifically the first 10 days after she left. So I'd like for you to read this passage. And if you can start with, I have told you about these 10 days.

HUDES: (Reading) I have told you about these 10 days, Noey (ph), hoping some of it might be useful as you determine what kind of woman to be. We are stuck with the project of becoming ourselves, a task we ignore to our great peril. Do not absolve me. Do not forgive me. Only hear me. Consider my story. Up until age 10, you saw matriarchs following the doctrine of duty. But now, through my betrayal, you've seen an alternate way. Whichever path you choose, at least you know it's not the only option. Freedom is a brutal assignment with many punishments. Conformity's punishments can be even harsher, though they're often less visible. Blow out your candles. Be careful what you don't wish for, the curiosities you're too successful to speak, the hungers that threaten disruption. In one of the books about women who leave their children - remember the librarian's list? - a narrator says something like, sometimes you have to escape in order not to die. I don't think the tricky part is the escape. Abandonment is easy. Any fool can do it. No wonder dads leave all the time. Siddhartha was neither noble and questing nor depraved. He was a dude acting on a whim. No. The real challenge is noticing you are dying in the first place because it happens incrementally, year by year, and camouflages itself as life.

MOSLEY: Thank you for reading that. We heard April reference "Siddhartha." That's a - the book from Hermann Hesse from 1922. It's about a man who leaves his family to find himself. We call that enlightenment. When I finished the book, I was really reflecting on this, like, April's envy of that freedom that Siddhartha has. I mean, that's clear. Although with April, it's called abandonment. And when did you first identify that double standard?

HUDES: Well, this book is fictional all the way. But one thing I do share in terms of my life story with April is I read "Siddhartha" in high school, and I was enraptured by his story of who am I? What is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of my life? At the same time, I had a similar response to how April responds in the book, which is, well, gee, isn't that lovely? He gets to just go leave it all behind and find God.

I grew up in a very spiritual household. My mother is a spiritually gifted woman. And I wanted her to take a pilgrimage - a lifelong pilgrimage like Siddhartha took so that she could find her own version of enlightenment and we could benefit from the wisdom that she discovered. But she had to, like, find God while she was doing the dishes. So I remember feeling kind of bitter about that, even in high school, feeling like a lady wouldn't get to do that. Just dudes get to go on the road, hit the road, be the pilgrim, take - make their progress.

MOSLEY: Yeah. You know, there's this moment happening right now with stories about mothers who leave. Teyana Taylor - she just won a Golden Globe for playing a mother in "One Battle After Another." And in the film, she's this revolutionary who abandons her daughter. And Teyana actually said that she took that role because the character would shake the table, and it certainly has. There's this discourse. It's winning awards, but there's this mixed reaction, specifically with Black mothers in particular. And the critique, among many things, is that it's not realistic. And I wonder, did you have any concerns about this story feeling realistic?

HUDES: After I finished the book and my mother read the story, she called me up and she said, you know, it reminded me of so-and-so. It reminded me of so-and-so. And I hadn't consciously thought of these women's narratives, these matriarchs' narratives in my family that she was referring to or in the community. And when I say community, I'm particularly referring to the Puerto Rican community in Philadelphia, which is the community of my childhood. And what she reminded me was we knew so many women who had left their children. But the reason I hadn't clocked it, and the reason it was kind of invisible or hidden in plain sight is because other women took over the labor of raising those children. An auntie, an abuela, a cousin, an older sister. In one case, we thought of a father who stayed when the mother took off. So I had really thought of it as kind of a fantasy in some ways when I wrote it. And here was my mom actually pointing out to me, no, this reflects the reality you grew up in.

MOSLEY: Why was rage the emotion for April? Why was rage the white hot?

HUDES: I think it's not an emotion I have such healthy and direct access to. And so I wanted to explore that through a fictional character. You know, what is anger? What purpose does it serve in our lives? It's mostly been the province of men in popular culture and in cultural narratives. You know, what is an angry woman? And is there a way that anger can be productive, actually, in addition to its destructive components? And one of the things we discover in April's story is that as a child, she witnessed a pretty traumatic act of violence.

Now, those of us who are familiar with PTSD know that when faced with, you know, something that triggers that memory, it's fight or flight. It's freeze or fawn. And so I wanted to write this character who fought. She didn't fight when she witnessed this violent act. Instead, she got into schoolyard fights, you know, on the playground. And she became a really good fighter, and that got her into a lot of trouble. And really, the book is about her transforming this kind of raw elemental energy that she's been overly easily tapped into, which is her rage, transforming its power into a different source and release in her life by the end of her 10-day journey in this book.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Quiara Alegria Hudes, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author of the new novel "The White Hot." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE AMERICAN ANALOG SET'S "IMMACULATE HEART II")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, I am talking with Quiara Alegria Hudes about her debut novel, "The White Hot," which tells the story of April, a young mother who one day buys a one-way bus ticket and leaves her 10-year-old daughter behind. The novel takes the form of a letter explaining her actions to her daughter. Hudes won the Pulitzer Prize for her play "Water By The Spoonful," wrote the book for the Tony Award-winning musical "In The Heights" and is the author of the memoir "My Broken Language," which was selected as One Book, One Philadelphia in 2022. Much of her work draws from her upbringing as part of a multigenerational Puerto Rican family in Philadelphia.

So much of your work keeps returning to Philadelphia, which we're going to talk about. But your origin goes back even further to Puerto Rico, your grandmother's journey to this country. She took her own quest. She took her hero's journey to come to Philadelphia. What did you grow up knowing about that journey?

HUDES: It was neat growing up in Philadelphia and hearing my elders' stories from Puerto Rico, where they came from. My abuela came with her daughters in tow, so my mom was 12 years old when they all arrived in Philadelphia. Now, they originated in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which is a coastal town. And they were farmers.

And there's varying points of view on why they left. Everyone has a slightly different story. It's quite a "Rashomon" sort of narrative. Maybe they left because there had been a kind of infidelity from her partner. Maybe they left because my eldest aunt needed better health care than was available to treat a condition she was facing. The thing I loved about hearing these stories is they were wholly, wholly, wholly unlike the world that was familiar to me. I didn't step foot in Puerto Rico till I was 9. So up until the age of 9, I had to just imagine, what is a mountain in Puerto Rico?

What is a farm in Puerto Rico? What is it to sleep under mosquito netting every night? What is it to feel your first refrigerated drink, you know, when you're 5 years old because you've only had warm, fresh cow's milk? Like, you don't have a refrigerator. So these were real stories that, to me, felt like fables or imagined lands. And I think I had to leave Philadelphia to write my community's stories because I kind of only know how to tell the story in hindsight, when you've already left it. That's how I grew up hearing them, so that's kind of how I tell them now.

MOSLEY: Philadelphia is such a strong character in your work. You've set plays there. Your memoir, of course, is there. And now this novel. Of course, it is your hometown. So, of course, there's this inherent inclination to rep it. But what is it about the city in particular that almost makes it, at times, a very central character in so much of your work?

HUDES: The thing that really turned me on about living in Philadelphia growing up was this simultaneous disconnect and overlap between the fact that it is a mythological part of American history and also, it's just a very real place where very real people live. And so I would get excited walking. You know, I was kind of like a rebellious teen. I would be wearing, like, my heavy motorcycle boots.

MOSLEY: (Laughter).

HUDES: Walking around downtown with my notebook, writing poems. And in the historic part of downtown, there's cobblestones. And they're kind of these blue, shiny, eroded cobblestones. And sometimes they'd have to dig them up. The city would dig them up and find unmarked graves beneath them, find pottery remnants and shards from American Indian groups - would find kitchens that had, you know, that revealed through their clues the history of slave labor even in Philadelphia.

And so here you are. You're walking over, 10 feet below your boots, layers, centuries of Philadelphia history. And all that history is layered on top of an extensive stream network that got kind of paved over. So there's layers and layers and layers of geologic history, colonial history. And then I'm walking north on Fifth Street, and when you crossed Girard Avenue, at least in my childhood, it was almost this invisible wall. Like, boom, you're in a different part of town now. This is called El Barrio. This is where the Puerto Ricans live. And...

MOSLEY: An invisible border.

HUDES: An invisible border. And you could feel them. It's like a little air pressure change. And I found that that segregation, which I was very hip to as a kid - you can see it plainly - it kind of had some silver linings and it had some real problems to it. For me, the silver lining was that it created this kind of closed ecosystem and incubator of brilliant culture. So you go into north Philly, and the dancing is the best you're going to find in Philadelphia. The music is blasted, and it's some of the best music the Americas have produced. This is golden age salsa. Play me a kind of music that with more sophistication and joy weaves together our nation's history. It doesn't exist. Like, this to me is pinnacle music, mountaintop music. So this kind of cultural innovation.

Also, I found on the blocks in north Philly there was a savviness about body diversity that really countered the popular culture, OK? When I grew up, it was, like, heroin chic, Kate Moss. All these supermodels are very skinny. Anorexia and bulimia almost becomes a fad. And here I step into north Philly, and women are showing their curves. They're not covering up their curves. Like, bike shorts and a tank top is an outfit where someone's belly can spill out, and they're showing it. And so I savored the cultural treasures that this segregated community was able to develop.

By the same token, there was terrible municipal services. There was very little trash pickup. There was blight - extreme blight - where there were blocks and blocks of abandoned lots, where it just was scary to walk down them. It's like, there's no witnesses if I scream here, you know? So this is Philadelphia to me. It's a long answer, but it was an incredible place to have a local culture and also feel that in relief against our kind of national historical mythology.

MOSLEY: And in the midst of all of that, as every teenager does, you're trying to figure out who you are. Your parents weren't together for most of your childhood, and you write about this in your memoir. I mean, like many kids of separated parents, you shuttled between two worlds, which you've said created an identity that wasn't just a bifurcation. It was like a - I think you described it as a - is that even a word?

HUDES: (Laughter).

MOSLEY: A quadrifurcation (laughter).

HUDES: You know, the feeling I remember is - there's so many identities, and oftentimes they're directly at odds with each other. And so really, it's those friction points that become my identity. Do I fit squarely in the Puerto Rican community? Do I fit squarely in the white community that my biological father was part of, even though he left when I was fairly young? And now I'm with my mom and my Puerto Rican stepfather. You know, where do I belong?

Well, I kind of belonged - maybe this is why I remember that border of Girard Avenue so well because that border between spaces is what I felt like the most. And I often did feel like a migrant in my own life. I was always traveling between places, traveling between languages. Like, you know, my Spanish is kind of embarrassing. And my English kind of separates me - English as my first language separates me from a lot of my closest family members, let alone the spiritual languages, the musical languages. And so, yeah, it was those friction points that made me feel kind of alive. And now I know, as a writer, that's what I'm always digging into. You know, where are the moments where the dichotomy is the reality and is the truth?

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BEBO VALDES TRIO'S "LAMENTO CUBANO")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, I am talking with Quiara Alegria Hudes about her debut novel, "The White Hot," which tells the story of April, a young mother who one day buys a one-way bus ticket and leaves her 10-year-old daughter behind. The novel takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter.

Hudes won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play "Water By The Spoonful" and wrote the book for the Tony Award-winning musical "In The Heights." Her memoir, "My Broken Language," was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and selected as One Book, One Philadelphia in 2022. Much of her work draws from her upbringing as part of a multigenerational Puerto Rican family in Philadelphia, a world that she also explores in this novel.

I want to know more about your mom's spirituality. She was a high priestess in the Afro Cuban Lucumi tradition. What does that mean? What did it look like?

HUDES: So this was something really beautiful. As I mentioned, my mother, she was born into spiritual gifts. And she sees the world through very different eyes than I have. She could see spirits when she was a child and it scared her. She didn't understand it a lot of the time. It marked her as different in her community.

And it came with senses of responsibility, too. You know, she used to see, oh, so and so came to me and said, I'm dying, I'm dying. And then they would rush to that elder's house, and this elder had died in their sleep. So she saw a few deaths before they occurred. And then they started coming to her, asking for her insight. And it's more than a child could shoulder. So for many years, she kind of tamped down her spiritual proclivities because they scared her.

But one of the great experiences of my life, really starting in middle school, was - she had always told me about her spiritual life and her spiritual gifts. But she really started opening the door to serious and rigorous study when I was maybe in about middle school. She started studying Lucumi, which her older sisters also participated in. It was popularly known as Santeria at the time. I kind of shy away from that terminology because it was just used in such ugly ways in my youth, really almost as a slur or as an othering sort of word. So I use Lucumi...

MOSLEY: Lucumi.

HUDES: ...Which does not have those same connotations. It looked like Mom doing ceremony in our living room. There aren't churches. This is a living room practice. She would have scholars. And by scholars, I mean priests. This is a very intellectual practice. You have to study deep history to gain seniority and respect in the religion. They would grate coconut and put it on my kneecaps. And I would sit there and meditate for an hour as that cleansing spirit entered me. And they prayed over my head.

They would make me a bath of flower petals and different herbal remedies, cascarilla - which is, like, powdered eggshell - to open my pathways, to help me not be depressed. I was depressed as a kid. They would chant in Yoruba. They would chant in Spanish in my living room with the bata drums. It was a very culturally awe-inspiring experience. My living room was often the site of sacred practice. It was super cool.

MOSLEY: Quiara, you studied music composition at Yale, not playwriting. You were going to be a composer. What happened?

HUDES: (Laughter) I stayed a composer. My instrument is now words. I'm not practicing for hours alone at the piano every day. Instead, I'm practicing storytelling in my mind and on pieces of paper every day. So I have studied dramatic structure since my musical studies ended. But I actually think those musical studies are more informative for how I structure a long form narrative and also how I kind of think about writing at the sentence level. I love music. I love the cadence of words. And it's just sentences are the funnest place to play in service of a larger story.

MOSLEY: You and Lin-Manuel Miranda have been collaborators for - now it's been about two decades now. So "In The Heights," "Vivo." That is really a particular kind of trust. It's like handing the emotional architecture to someone else. And it's a mix of the story and the music. How did you two learn to build together?

HUDES: I can see now that one of the things that weaves through the pieces I've done with Lin is we're very playful. They're joyous works. They're effervescent works. You know, "In The Heights" is probably the happiest thing I've ever written, followed closely by "Vivo" (laughter). And we just get that kind of playful side out of each other. It's a little bit more natural to him. He's a very upbeat and optimistic person. I definitely have a dark, broody side that comes out in pieces like "The White Hot."

So it's really about just being like - you know, you remember when you were a kid and you'd have a friend, and you'd just be like, hey, you want to come over and play? That's it. Like, that's the basic relationship that we have when working. You want to come over and play? And what are we working on today? You know, I had this idea. I wrote this scene but maybe it will be better as a song. Check it out, Lin. And an hour later, he's like, I've got to hook for it.

I remember working on the animated movie, "Vivo," together. And I had this idea for a new character, who ended up becoming quite central to the movie. She was just on the periphery at first. And this is the character of Gabi. And she's a wild child. She just - she's always at volume 10. She's always the loudest one in the room. She unapologetically takes up space. And Vivo is a very kind of uptight, Type A musician. He wants to practice his scales, and he wants them to not have a note mistake in them. OK, Gabi does not care about the note mistake.

And so we're talking about this character. How do we weave her in? And I was like, you know, she needs a song. I think she's going to - let's give her a big, crazy song. And he's sitting there on the floor and he's going, (vocalizing). And this is how I know. We've worked together for long enough. I'm like, he's already got a hook in his head. And a few minutes later, he's jotted down or thumbed these words into his notes app in his phone, own drum, ho-hum.

And I'm giving him some more language. Well, here's a monologue she might say about taking the school bus home. You know, a whole big monologue. He takes three syllables from that, and it becomes, I get my own seat on the bus. So it's really like a hacky sack game. Come over and play and let's do hacky sack. And what we're going to keep in the air is the ideas, the word, the energy of a scene.

MOSLEY: Let's hear an excerpt from that song, "My Own Drum," from the soundtrack of the 2021 animated film "Vivo."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MY OWN DRUM")

YNAIRALY SIMO: (As Gabi Hernandez, rapping) I bounce to the beat of my own drum. I'm a wow in a world full of ho-hum. I'm a wild young lady, but you know something? I'd rather be at home with my own drum. I bounce to the beat of my own drum. I'm a wow in a world full of ho-hum. I'm a wild young lady, but you know something? I'd rather be at home with my own drum. I had a violin, but I wrecked the rental. I play the tambourine, and I'm never gentle. See what I mean? That was accidental. But now that we're a team, we'll be instrumental. Instrumental, ha. See what I did there? I made a pun, ha. I'm having fun, ha. I'm never done, ha. I'm just one young woman, (vocalizing). I bounce to the beat...

MOSLEY: That's Ynairaly Simo singing "My Own Drum" by Lin-Manuel Miranda from the animated film "Vivo." My guest, Quiara Alegria Hudes, co-wrote the screenplay for the film. She also wrote the book for "In The Heights" and adapted it for the screen. Her most recent project is a novel, "The White Hot." We'll hear more of our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONNY ROLLINS' "SKYLARK")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes. When we left off, she was talking about how much fun it was to work with Lin-Manuel Miranda. For the animated film "Vivo," he wrote the music, and she wrote the screenplay. They also collaborated on the musical "In The Heights." Hudes wrote the story, and Miranda wrote the music.

This sounds like a dream. It sounds like a dream because there's no ego here. Has that ever been an encounter, though, where you guys are kind of at odds at a particular - you have a different interpretation of what the - it should be.

HUDES: No. Not - I don't remember a single time, to be honest. If we're feeling like something's not working, we just are kind of like, hmm, OK, noticed. And I found with writing, identifying that something is not quite working - is not quite firing on all cylinders - is very different. It's almost a separate act from remedying that. One does not follow the other necessarily. So it's just kind of like, OK, let's put a sticky note on that one. And let's keep working, and then maybe we'll come up with an idea in a roundabout way. So very little ego.

When I'm working alone on a play or on my books, that's where I'm warring with myself much more actively. No, no, no, it can't be this. It has to be that. It can't be this. It has to be that. And so I think that my pieces I've created on my own have a kind of tension that reflects those internal battles as I'm writing a little bit more clearly. And the lightness of the pieces that I've written with Lin probably does reflect a little bit of our working process together.

MOSLEY: When I hear you talk about this, I'm just thinking what this means is you have to give your projects time and space. Because if you're putting a Post-it and saying, this is not working, only time is going to allow you to kind of see the pieces to put together. Is that what you mean by, like, one thing doesn't happen right after the other? You know, finding the solution doesn't happen right at the point of diagnosing the problem.

HUDES: Yeah. You know, there's this saying - you know, if you stare directly at the sun, you'll go blind. Writing is not problem-solving. If you try to solve a problem in writing, you'll have solved the problem, but will you have made the piece more artful? Not necessarily. So that's why things need to breathe. It's like, OK, now we know, you know, this - there's a family argument in "In The Heights" that we worked on forever. Nina comes home, and she's got big bad news to deliver to her parents. She's really, really struggling as a first-generation college student. And she knows her parents are not going to fathom the struggle. They're just like, you're making our dreams come true. You've made it. And she's like, it's a whole different beast out there, guys.

Now, that was a song. That was a different song. That was a scene. It was a different scene. It took so many tries to kind of get that moment dramatically right. But that doesn't mean that, therefore, for two months in a row we were just working on that every day. I mean, we'd just suffocate it if that was the approach. So it's like, OK, let's write a song about the piraguero selling ICEEs on the street. And that's going to clear our spirits. That's going to give us some new artistic energy to work with. Oh, and maybe there will be a solution that kind of comes and finds us for that other problem we were dealing with.

MOSLEY: Were there biographical elements of Nina - of your life in Nina?

HUDES: Definitely. Being the first in the family to go to college was a big one. And that struggle of - you know, like Nina, my parents came to Philadelphia, really built a life, a calling, a community and a family in the Puerto Rican community. It was an under-resourced time, and my parents were working very hard in north Philly to create health centers, to create bilingual services, to create infrastructural need. And they were doing this within, as I mentioned, a very enclosed and tight-knit Puerto Rican community. Then for me to go off to a space that there's almost no Latinos at, they had really not been in a space like that in their life. And so that was a shock to me, and it was a shock I couldn't totally convey to them. They didn't totally have experience with that.

MOSLEY: They couldn't know what they didn't know. You know, I'm thinking about - there was this criticism about colorism in the screen adaptation of "In The Heights" centering on this absence of dark-skinned Afro-Latinos in lead roles, despite the film being set in Washington Heights, which was a neighborhood with a large Afro-Latino population. Of course, you were not the casting director, but how do you think about the limits of maybe a writer's responsibility versus this institutional decision-making in Hollywood?

HUDES: You know, that was - I'm just filled with so much sadness and regret at that and also resolve. Knowing what I know now, should I ever be in a similar space, I know some places to scream a little louder. I'm still not so familiar with Hollywood that I kind of totally understand the machinations there and all the decisions that get made. And I do look back now, and I can reflect and see a few moments where I was in the room and therefore had a voice in the room. And I could have been a little louder. I thought I had been loud enough, and I hadn't been. I tried, and at moments, I failed. By the same token, part of me as a writer anticipated that casting this movie is going to be hard.

MOSLEY: Oh.

HUDES: And so I even - I can see in my screenplay, I was already guarding myself against certain things happening. So I wrote in to Nina's dialogue in my screenplay for "In The Heights." I was worried that it would be cast as all light-skinned actors. And so I was like, let me make sure that part of what Nina's experiencing is some anti-Blackness. So I actually wrote that into the dialogue because I didn't contractually have say over casting, but they can't change my dialogue.

MOSLEY: I've heard you say that "The White Hot" kind of sits on one end of the spectrum and "In The Heights" is kind of on the other. What do you mean by that? Can you say more about that?

HUDES: Well, for one thing, I was a young writer writing "In The Heights." It was 2004. I moved to New York in August, and by October, I was working with another unknown writer. I was one, Lin was the other, and here we are working on this thing called "In The Heights." And he is such an effervescent spirit, and that spirit was really baked in. It's a celebration of a community, right? "In The Heights" doesn't have a lead character, per se. There's Usnavi, who's our lead storyteller. But really, it's the story of a community. And it's - it explores how do I honor my community in an authentic way that's true to my individualism? So there's that end of the spectrum, right?

And then at the way other end is "The White Hot." And the question there is, how do I leave my community even if I love it? How do I leave the only people who know me and love me? How do I find agency in a landscape I've never, ever seen? And so, those feel like really different questions to me. The question of how to leave is one that April discovers and answers in the book.

MOSLEY: Yeah. Quiara Alegria Hudes, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you.

HUDES: Thanks so much for bringing up some stuff I hadn't even thought of with the book yet.

MOSLEY: Quiara Alegria Hudes' new novel is called "The White Hot."

Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews a novel by Irish writer John Banville. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE BAD PLUS' "THE BEAUTIFUL ONES")

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. In 2020, celebrated Irish writer John Banville metaphorically killed off Benjamin Black, the pen name under which he had been writing crime novels. Banville said he no longer felt he needed the pseudonym. So over the last few years, his crime series starring the Dublin coroner simply known as Quirke has been reprinted with Banville's name on the cover instead of Black's. The final novel in that series has just been reissued. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review and an appreciation.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: It's a particularly bleak January - reason enough for literary escape. But while some readers opt for sunshine, maybe a romance or historical novel, others are drawn to a genre that transports us deeper into darkness while also affirming the power of reason to arrive at some clarity. I'm talking, of course, about noir fiction, and turning up just in time to accompany us through the gloom, here comes Quirke again.

Quirke is the antihero of a series of mysteries set in 1950's Dublin, written by Irish novelist John Banville. A coroner and pathologist, Quirke, who goes by one name only, dwells, as he's put it, down among the dead men in the basement morgue of a hospital. Banville, who won the Booker Prize for his 2005 literary novel "The Sea," published his first Quirke mystery in 2006 under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Holt paperbacks has been reissuing the novels under Banville's name. The seventh and last reprint has just come out.

"Even The Dead" affirms what we Quirke admirers already know, namely, that there never was much distinction between Banville's so-called literary novels and his mysteries. Both are graced with Banville's signature pensive atmosphere and a subdued beauty of language. "Even The Dead" finds Quirke recovering from traumatic brain injuries he sustained in a previous investigation. He's suffering from absence seizures, which Quirke describes as the odd moment of separation from myself. We're told early on that he had pills to make him sleep and other pills to keep him calm when he was awake. And so the days trickled past, each one much the same as all the others. He felt like Robinson Crusoe, grown old on his island.

Back at the morgue, Quirke's assistant, David Sinclair, is unsympathetically hoping his nasty boss never returns. But when examining the charred corpse of a young man, an apparent suicide who crashed his car into a tree, Sinclair finds a suspicious indentation of the skull. Reluctantly, Sinclair calls on Quirke for a consult. Meanwhile, Quirke's semi-estranged daughter, Phoebe, is approached by a terrified young woman she recognizes from the secretarial course they both took. Turns out that this woman, who's pregnant, witnessed the murder of her boyfriend. You guessed it. The boyfriend and the body in the morgue are one and the same.

This barest of plot summaries makes even the dead sound like a contrivance, when in actuality, the intersecting relationships here are in accord with the claustrophobia of Banville's 1950's Dublin. This is a city infused with the heavy cloying fragrance of malt roasting in Guinness' brewery and blue cigarette smoke and a smell of cabbage and boiled bacon. Like Quirke, the city itself seems to be suffering from a series of absence seizures, a lingering post-World War II malaise and dampening of appetite that could also be ascribed to the stifling power of the Catholic Church.

The past, as it does in all noirs, returns here in the form of a storyline from previous Quirke novels about the Magdalene laundries run by the church, where fallen women were sent to work often against their will. And Quirke, long tormented by the mystery of his own origins, finally achieves a limited epiphany.

In most mystery series, it would be a deal-breaker to begin with the final novel. But if you've never read a Quirke book before, it won't matter where you start. The primary draw of this moody and intelligent series has never been its plots. Instead, listen to the dark lyricism of this passage, where Quirke reflects on growing up as an orphan.

(Reading) Sometimes it seemed to him that all his life he had been standing with his back to a high wall, on the other side of which an endless circus show was going on. Now and then there would come to him on the breeze the sound of a drumroll or a surge of raucous laughter from the crowd. Why could he not scale the wall and jump down and run to the flap of the big top and peer in? Just to see what the performance looked like, even if he didn't go inside, even if he were only to have that one hindered glimpse of the dingy sequined magic - that would be something.

I'd say, the only reason not to read the Quirke series - wherever you begin - is if you've never in your life felt like that.

MOSLEY: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Even The Dead" by John Banville.

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(SOUNDBITE OF HENRY BUTLER AND STEVEN BERNSTEIN'S "DIXIE WALKER")

MOSLEY: FRESH AIR's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

(SOUNDBITE OF HENRY BUTLER AND STEVEN BERNSTEIN'S "DIXIE WALKER")

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