City of Refuge

"It focusses on right before, during, and months after the disaster. It’s got two characters. I feel obligated in my book to talk about the president and the mayor and the governor and local officials. What I love about a novelistic treatment is that there are two characters: one is a white, alternative weekly editor. The other character is a black man from the Lower Ninth Ward who ends up in Houston. It was interesting for me because I was reporting on life in Houston. If you were rescued from New Orleans, the odds were good that you ended up in Houston. At least 100,000 people from New Orleans ended up in Houston, which is a huge number. So I read quotes, and I talked to a few people. But there was something about him spending half a book with this one man as he was trying to get his mind around the fact that he lost everything, that his home was practically destroyed, his possessions, all his keep sakes. Now he’s dealing with it perched in Houston in a hotel or a couch and is slowly trying to rebuild his life. He captured so well the strangeness of life there. You have to rebuild a life knowing that your greatest hope is that you’re going to destroy that life and get back to New Orleans. You can’t just sit in Houston indefinitely. So it’s about these two people trying to figure out how to do what’s best for them while meanwhile everyone else, from the president to the governor to the mayor on down, hasn’t a clue. Tom, who I met once — very nice man, great writer — does a nice job of weaving in the bigger story on the outside, of the indecision, while really focussing on these two human beings struggling to figure out what happened and what they need to do now."