Noah Hawley Keeps Changing Lanes

AUSTIN, Texas — Noah Hawley tries never to approach a story the same way twice.

When FX asked if he’d like to make an X-Men television series, Hawley came up with “Legion,” a surrealist mind-bender in which the protagonist hears and sees things that aren’t real.

He has made four seasons of “Fargo,” a show loosely — very loosely — based on the Coen brothers’ film. Every season, he replaces the characters, picks a new setting and still calls it “Fargo.”

His sixth novel, “Anthem,” out this week from Grand Central Publishing, is an exploration of contemporary America laced with magical realism. It features vicious political divisions, climate change, an insurrection and a study of what it’s like to be young in a collapsing world. It also includes a witch who is impossible to kill, a teenager who has regular chats with God and an outbreak of teenage suicides.

Hawley, as you see, is busy. An author, show runner and director, he even sang on the soundtracks for “Legion” and “Fargo.” These days, he said, he just calls himself a storyteller.

“A big part of what I’m trying to do,” he said over iced tea in Austin last month, “is to bypass that part of your brain that’s been trained by the thousands of stories that you’ve consumed in your lifetime.”

A composed presence, with some salt in his chocolate-colored hair, Hawley, 54, started out wanting to be a musician. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989, he moved to Brooklyn with his band and got a day job as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society. His band, Bass Nation (the name “came off looking like the fish,” he said), played gigs and toured a bit — Hawley played guitar and sang — but it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere. So he started writing.

“What’s it adding up to if I’m playing Limelight on Thursday night at nine o’clock?” he recalled of an old club in New York City. “Am I making progress? Am I not making progress? If you write 10 pages, you’ve got 10 pages. There’s something very literal about it, and I could do it myself. It didn’t involve living in a van with three filthy, penniless men.”

A few years later, when he was living in San Francisco, he sold his first novel, “A Conspiracy of Tall Men.” His mother, Louise Armstrong, was also an author, and through her, Hawley said, he found an agent. (“I asked him once what his accent was,” Hawley recalled, “and he said ‘pure affectation.’”)

One of Hawley’s first attempts at a novel, set at a college, had been sent around to editors but never sold. One editor, he was told, felt Hawley was reluctant to make changes. That was news to him.

“I will change anything you want!” he remembered thinking. But in the intervening years, that perception about his openness to feedback doesn’t seem to have changed much.

“What I’ll hear is, ‘Oh, the network has a note, but they’re afraid to give it to you,’” Hawley said. “Which is so interesting because I never yell at anybody about anything. But that’s good because I don’t necessarily want the note,” he joked — or he seemed to be joking.

“I can be difficult to read sometimes,” he said. “But on some level, that can be good, too, because a lot of this is a poker game.”

After his first book was published, Hawley wrote a screenplay and an adaptation of his novel, and from there started writing TV pilots. Three of his pilots were bought and never made. In 2004, he moved to Los Angeles and took a job on the procedural series “Bones” so he could learn how to make a show.

It was a good move, so good that he didn’t have to stay in L.A. for long. Five years later, Hawley and his family moved to Austin, where they have lived off and on ever since.

Today he and his wife, Kyle, live on a sort of mini-compound on a half-acre with their two kids, who are 9 and 14, his wife’s aunt and three dogs. The property originally held four small cottages, built as housing for workers at a lumber company, two of which have been connected to make the main house.

Two cottages remain, one of which is Hawley’s office. It has an area that can be transformed into an editing bay, a few instruments (a guitar, a bass and a mini drum set for his son) and a big roll of brown paper mounted near his desk. He started thinking about stories visually a few years ago, he said, and sometimes likes to lay them out using bubbles, arrows and grids.

Natalie Portman, who starred in the movie “Lucy in the Sky,” which Hawley directed and co-wrote, said she was struck by how he balanced work and life.

“It felt like he was prioritizing his family,” she said in an interview, “in a way that is not very common for directors.” If they weren’t in town during shooting, for example, he’d fly back to Austin over the weekend, she said. His decision to make his home there, she added, helped him to keep a bit of distance from the world of his work.

“Even while, obviously, being incredibly successful in Hollywood, he’s been deliberately maintaining an outsider perspective, which is wonderful,” she said. “You feel it. It feels like friends of mine, not like people I work with. He feels very much of the world, and not of the entertainment industry.”

Despite his many years in TV, Hawley said he has a love-hate relationship with writers’ rooms. “I tend to think of them as a group of very different people with very different brains, and the only common language they speak is plot,” he said. “That’s not necessarily how I tell the story.”

People are trained that back story equals front story, he explained. Say a character’s mother left when he or she was very young; traditionally, that’s going to take the wheel of the narrative. But it doesn’t have to. What you want to avoid, he said, is getting to a point where you, as a writer, are just “holding on while the plot plays itself out.”

The kernel that became “Anthem” started percolating about five years ago. Hawley had published his previous novel, “Before the Fall,” with Hachette, and Michael Pietsch, the company’s chief executive, was eager to sign him up for another. Hawley’s editor had just left the company, so Pietsch offered to edit the book himself.

“You could do worse than the guy who edited ‘Infinite Jest,’” Hawley said of Pietsch.

During the summer of 2019, Hawley was planning to work on the book during a two-month family vacation in Europe. At a bookstore in London, he collected a stack of novels that had been “eureka moments” for him, he said, including “The New York Trilogy,” by Paul Auster; “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” by Milan Kundera; “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” by Gabriel García Márquez; and “Song of Solomon,” by Toni Morrison.

“And now you’re traveling around with a box of books, and you’re like, ‘Why didn’t I just buy two?’” he recalled. “But it felt critical that I get them all.”

“Anthem” is woven together using a number of contemporary threads, mostly seen through the eyes of teenagers who are battling to save themselves and one another. One of the main characters, Simon, is the scion of a pharmaceutical fortune made by selling opioids. A culture war descends into armed conflict, in a way that reads like it must be a riff on Jan. 6 — except that Hawley wrote it the previous October.

“One of the ideas explored in the book is what unifies us now when there are so many things that tear us apart,” Pietsch said. “Imagine being a kid, hearing that the oceans are dying, that the bees are dying, reading about the opioid epidemic, seeing these political battles and reading about sexual predation. This sense that the world you’re growing into is being destroyed before your eyes, and what’s going to be there for you? What must that be like, and what can you do?”

The book feels cinematic and at times fantastical. An insurrectionist points a gun at one of the protagonists and says, “There is no God,” and then a missile explodes behind him. An enchanted Amazon truck magically supplies materials for our heroes’ needs, whether it’s to hogtie an adversary or stitch up a wound.

“The magic realism of the book,” Hawley said, “it was a relief, because magic realism has a way of making ugly things beautiful. Think about Márquez and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ and the amount of tragedy in that book that’s offset by the whimsy, and the beauty of just not knowing what could happen next.”

Hawley hasn’t started thinking yet about another book, but he has been sketching out ideas for the next season of “Fargo” on those big sheets of brown paper.

“I have the luxury of when I have ideas, I think, ‘Well, what is it?’” he said. “‘Is it a show? Is it a movie? Is it a book?’ But for something to be a book, it means you’re going to live with it for three or four or five years. There has to be enough there. It has to be about things — for me — that are more than just: ‘Is he going to get the girl? Are they going to get away?’”