Bio:
Andrew Pippos spent part of his childhood getting underfoot in his family's Greek-Australian café. When he grew up, he worked in newspapers and taught in universities. This is his first novel, and it packs in everything he knows about growing up in a noisy, complicated, loving family. He lives in Sydney.
Why do you tell stories? Fiction offers us an experience. Sometimes, in a narrative, we witness a transformation—a change in a character and in a culture. And I believe there are truths about life that are best expressed in the form of stories. Also, stories offer us entertainment and escape. Not for a second have I thought that reading or writing fiction are ridiculous things to do. I want to contribute to an art form that has given me so much.
Describe your debut in one sentence. LUCKY’S is a multi-generational story that revolves around a man nicknamed Lucky and his pursuit of love and family while his fortunes in the cafe business rise and fall.
When and where do you write? During the day I write at a desk in my bedroom. At night I work at my kitchen table.
What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing? First: the support of my family and friends. Second: other’s people’s beautiful books. Three: coffee.
Can you explain how your childhood influenced the book? (apart from a demonstrable love of Greek food obviously.) My first experience of community came from the time I spent in the cafes run by my grandmother and uncles and aunts. The café environment was the place where the extended family gathered and where I heard unforgettable stories about the wider world. Some of these stories were stark: my uncle (actually my father’s cousin) told me his methods for stealing food during the Greek famine of 1942. And some of these tales were amusing—and probably not entirely true—like the story about another uncle who drove a car across NSW in second gear, not knowing that cars had more than two gears. The café was the frame through which I saw the world. It was the place where my imagination was formed. When I decided to become a writer, I knew my first book would somehow involve the old Greek cafes of Australia.
Is Lucky’s the start of a concerted campaign to bring back to popularity the wartime, big-band clarinet stylings of Benny Goodman? There is no doubt that few songs are as joyful as Stompin’ at the Savoy. But I’m not about to campaign for a Benny Goodman revival. Big band music had a brief resurgence in the late 1990s and I get the sense that our culture collectively decided back then: no, that’s quite enough of that.
Is there a part of you that misses the Australia you were raised in? You paint it with a mixture of nostalgia but also relief that we’ve matured as a nation since then. Clarification: most of this novel is set before I was born! The heyday of the cafes was probably the 1950s and 1960s. As a writer and reader, I am naturally drawn to lost worlds. When a milieu has disappeared we can at last apprehend the fullness of its story. The cafe was a social hub and an early fixture of Australian multiculturalism but, as an institution, it was not perfect. For example, the pressures of the assimilation era meant that the Café Greeks could not put their own food on the menu. The conditions of settlement dictated that these professional cooks from a proud food culture instead serve dishes that were foreign to them.
I am not nostalgic about the Greek-Australian diner in the sense that I long for their return to city streets and country towns. Yet I am deeply indebted to the milieu. During my childhood, during the most impressionable time in life, I was allowed to inhabit the world of cafes. My father and uncles and aunts and grandparents were the first people to tell me about Greek myths and literature. They retold the myths as if gossiping about people we all knew, or people they’d left behind in Ithaka. These childhood conversations are among the great gifts of my life, because this is where my love of literature begins.
Lucky’s has quite a cast but all are drawn with real warmth, were you conscious of giving each character their own space to exist meaningfully within the novel?
In my novel there are many characters and narrative strands, but they’re all part of the same object. They’re all connected. I believe that each part needs to be strong in order for the whole arrangement to work. Now LUCKY’S features several minor characters, including two murderers, a failed classicist, an editor at The New Yorker magazine, a gameshow host, and a café owner called Achilles. My favourite minor character might be Sophia. Her experience at a sewage treatment plant—a digression of sorts—reveals something important: she has utterly lost one world, and now she intends to find somewhere better. The novel also features a pet snake called Louis II. To me, this pet snake is like the monsters found in myths and fairy tales, except the goal here is not to kill the monster, but to keep it alive. Louis II is adorable in some ways. Like a monster in mythology, Louis is a minor figure who nevertheless gives the heroes a purpose, who brings them together in a shape that resembles a family. And perhaps together they can be the people they once set out to be? Are these spoilers? I don’t think so.