SOURCE: Brooke-Rose, Christine, and Nicolas Tredell. “Christine Brooke-Rose in Conversation.” PN Review 17, no. 1 (September-October 1990): 29-35.

In the following interview, originally conducted on March 6, 1990, Brooke-Rose discusses her novels in terms of realism, modernism, and postmodernism.

[Tredell]: Your latest novel, Verbivore, is a very inventive, very witty work, but it also seems to me to have a very sombre resonance. There's a strong sense of an ending, an apprehension of a fall, after an excess of noise, into a possibly terminal silence. How do you feel yourself about the book?

[Brooke-Rose]: Yes, I was trying to explore the possibility of our minds being completely altered by the media, and if the media suddenly collapse, which is what the book is about, can we actually go back to a premedia mentality? And we can't. Society was very structured and layered, but everyone knew where they were. This was not necessarily a...