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AE: You'd mentioned the comparisons between your novels and the work of P. G. Wodehouse. Was Wodehouse -- who was also a lyricist like yourself -- an influence on your writing?
JK: I read a lot of Wodehouse in my early twenties, and I loved the work. I loved particularly his inventiveness with language, and as a playwright--somebody who had only written dialogue before--I was very struck by the comic possibilities that English prose offered that I'd never really thought about. There were just all kinds of fantastic, wry jokes and descriptions and similes and metaphors that you could make in a sentence in a work of prose that you really can't resort to on the stage because you're confined to the way people actually speak.

Though, of course, that speech, if you're a comic writer, is in some way going to be, in some circumstances, heightened--you're going to make your characters a little more glib, a little more clever, and let them say all the things we wished we'd said--there are still limits on how hyper-articulate they can be and the kinds of sentences they can pull out of their mouths.

It's understood when you sit down to read a work fiction that every paragraph is composed and revised at leisure, and can sparkle, and can be articulate and linguistically complex in a way that you would never buy it, just flying off the hook extemporaneously, because [in a play you have to believe] that these characters are existing and speaking in the moment.

And when you get people who are just impossibly witty or articulate, and speaking in elaborate sentences and images, you just say, "Where the hell are we? Nobody talks like that!" But you accept it all in a work of prose because, of course, it is written, it is composed, and you can use all kinds of [storytelling] devices.

Wodehouse was a master of all of that, and I loved his plotting, I loved his stories, and it seemed curious to me, at that time in my early twenties, that nobody wrote novels like this any more. It seemed to me that an entire genre--an entire school [of literary style]--was just lying there, neglected and waiting to be picked up again. So when I sat down to write the story, I said, "What would it be like to try to write something with that kind of Wodehousian spirit, but far more contemporary, and involving the [kinds of] characters and sexual impulses that are more of interest to me?"

So I tried to transpose Wodehouse's spirit into a gay contemporary world, and using some of the same kinds of metaphors and similes that he used. [For example], on the second or third page of Blue Heaven, Phillip is at a gallery opening and an artist who is incredibly hungry for praise sees him and comes over, and Phillip describes him as "fixing me with a hungry, expectant look, like a vampire watching a hemophiliac shave." That's the kind of joke you would never put into a character's mouth [in a play]; it would just sound impossible glib for somebody to say that on stage.

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