How Large Should the Circle Around a Writer Be?

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, George Saunders, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.

Literature is the freedom to say anything, the authority to combine words any way you wish. But that infinite license has a flip side: The page is very blank, and the endless number of possible choices can overwhelm a writer. When I spoke to Jonathan Lee, the author of High Dive, for this series, he explained how he became lost inside his novel, intoxicated by the temptation to endlessly describe—until lines by Zadie Smith reminded him that no writer can say it all, and inspired him to make some tough choices. We spoke about the personal, artistic, and political implications of determining one’s scope of focus, and the difficulty of deciding where to draw the line.

High Dive revolves around a real-life event, the Brighton Hotel bombing, which took place in 1984. A member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) used a homemade bomb (cobbled together out of camcorder parts, a kitchen timer, and 20 pounds of blasting jelly) in an attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. At first, the novel primarily concerns itself with the the daily duties and private longings of the hotel staff. But when nitroglycerine blows a hole in the roof, the wider world comes into view.

, which was a Barnes & Noble, the , the , and others, and has been translated into a dozen languages. Jonathan Lee lives in New York, where he is a senior editor at Catapult. He spoke to me by phone.