Zasada’s Average Characters Pose Larger-Than-Life Questions 

Marc Porter Zasada likes to say that he grew up in the suburbs, but whether they were in the Bay Area or somewhere around Washington, D.C., it doesn’t really matter which ones. “My great ambition was to leave the suburbs, mentally and physically,” he says. He certainly achieved that goal, as he’s now a longtime resident of Los Angeles whom locals may even recognize as “The Urban Man” (the name of his former radio show on LA’s KCRW). But Zasada never lost his penchant for questioning the quotidian, as each of his diverse characters does in The Impossible Shore, his compilation of intriguing, interlocking short stories.

Zasada studied English at Stanford, and he has since had several careers, ranging from newspaper editor to book reviewer to high-tech marketing and more. He and his wife also raised four children, all now adults, but he still found time to pursue his own writing. Over six years and a total of 240 radio shows, Zasada’s Urban Man essays explored contemporary life in LA, as in a tongue-in-cheek argument that Hollywood writers must be the most religious people on Earth (as their heroes always seem to succeed by divine intervention). “The Urban Man essays were very much about ideas,” Zasada says. “I think in terms of ideas. And I think in terms of stories.”

Six years ago, Zasada found himself revisiting ideas he was toying with when he was 25 years old. Of eight old short stories he unearthed, he thought three were “salvageable,” and they inspired him to start work on The Impossible Shore. Zasada prefers not to single out which stories he crafted almost 40 years ago, in large part because he sees Shore as being in its own genre. It is more than a classic collection for the way that its themes and characters interweave, but it is not quite a novel either. “It’s as much an essay as a work of fiction in a way,” Zasada says. “The stories argue and speak to one another.” 

Kirkus Reviews calls Zasada’s stories “pitch-perfect renditions of small, dejected lives with evocations of the cosmic sublime.” While taking readers from the streets of present-day New York, where hallucinations drive a man to change his life, back to 18th-century California, where a Native American confronts the beginnings of the modern world, Zasada’s omnipresent narrator offers pithy observations as he examines very different characters, all longing for meaning, whether they be rock stars, deli managers, or closeted political advisers. 

Zasada’s stories strike a tricky balance between hopeful, tragic, and comic, as in “The Freedom of the Dead,” in which Dr. Abigail Becker, a contemporary scholar of comparative religion, finds herself in a dreamlike but combative conversation with Ohr LevTov, the deceased 19th-century Hassidic Rabbi whose works she has been discussing with her students. His comments lead her to reconsider her entire existence: 

Briefly, but efficiently, as her students continued to drone in aimless speculation, Dr. Becker re-evaluated her life. Like most of us in the early twenty-first century, she was really good at re-evaluating her life. Indeed, to stay in practice, most of us re-evaluated our lives several times a day, even without prompting by dead thinkers. Socrates may have said that the unexamined life was not worth living, but in our time, most of us would call the unexamined life “a nice break.”

Among the writers that influenced Zasada the most while crafting Shore, he cites Dostoyevsky and E.M. Forester for the ways that they built characters who were not exceptional—people who were living the most regular of lives but who still wrestled with the greatest of questions as they contemplated their own existence. “I think everyone’s life is a philosophical journey where you keep trying to figure it out,” Zasada says. “Or maybe that’s a plague of modern humans.”

Another aspect of modernity preoccupying Zasada is the effect of the past on the present. Across the cycle, Zasada revisits certain characters to show how they evolve over time, while individual stories also portray seemingly small events, letters, or encounters that end up rippling out and having a profound effect on his principal characters themselves or how they affect others they never even meet. For Zasada, that tension between the past and the present was an important theme that traverses the whole book. “It’s about the way a small thing can change everything and how we live with that tension all the time,” he says.

Shores has other cosmic implications too—God himself makes appearances, sometimes to darkly humorous effect, as when he orchestrates great twists in the story “Certain Inevitabilities”—but they don’t offer the characters any easy, definitive answers. These elements rather reflect Zasada’s own openness to different traditions; he was raised Catholic but converted to Judaism as an adult and has studied both Buddhism and Islam.

That breadth of influence can be felt particularly in “The Dignity of Man,” which follows Mafaz, a Pakistani man who loves Western culture and idealizes California. (That story ranks as Zasada’s personal favorite, as he spent time in Pakistan in the early 1980s, a trip that left a lasting emotional connection for him to the country.) Like Zasada himself, each of his characters is piecing things together from different religions, philosophies, and their own ideas. To him, they are all striving to create a narrative for their own lives. “When they do that,” Zasada says, “they create their own philosophies. And I think we all do that….We’re always piecing things together.”

Zasada is currently at work on a nonfiction book that will tackle some similar ideas through a different lens, namely what success and failure mean in today’s world. He is not sure when he’ll return to fiction, but he continues to be drawn to how people in today’s world constantly rethink their lives. For him, that may be the real plague of modernity. “There is a sense of a greater or more passionate life that we could be living. We can’t really define it, but we’re always trying to find it.” 

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.