Interview: James Lasdun

When things go wrong – the Nagels' young daughter disappears after a sleepover at a neighbour's house in Cape Cod – Nagel is convinced she has been kidnapped and begins to doubt his own judgment.

Lasdun writes: "Was this it? Was this the catastrophe he had felt preparing itself inside him? His obscure abiding sense of himself as a flawed and fallen human being seemed suddenly clarified: he was guilty and he was being punished. A feeling of dread gripped him. Childlike thoughts arose in his mind: propitiation, sacrifice…"

"I am an anxious man, so I guess I am Joseph Nagel," says Lasdun, when we meet in New York, adding that like many of the short stories in It's Beginning to Hurt, which has had reviewers comparing his immaculate prose and elegant storytelling abilities to Nabokov, Kafka and Updike, it has autobiographical elements.

An Anxious Man, which won the inaugural National Short Story Prize in 2006, is based on an incident that happened to 49-year-old Lasdun (who was born in London) and his American wife, the writer Pia Davis, on holiday in Cape Cod with their son and daughter, aged nine and 13.

"Our daughter struck up a friendship with a neighbouring family's daughter and disappeared on us," he says. "She was staying over and in the morning they'd gone – and we realised we knew nothing about these people. There was a very simple explanation, but somehow it stayed in my mind. It was something I wanted to write about. I also wanted to write about a guy who gambles – with money and with his daughter, a guy who takes risks."

Sophisticated and disturbing, his stories tell of other uncomfortable realisations: a teacher worries about his troublesome sister until he discovers a suspicious growth on his neck which makes him confront his mortality; a London barrister meets a friend from university – now a Trotskyite – who makes him uneasy about his bourgeois lifestyle; a would-be adulterer realises he has been sustained but also cowed by his self-image as a doting husband and father. In the beautifully economic title story, a mistress tells her married lover: "I'm in love with you and it's beginning to hurt."

In the erotically charged The Woman in the Window, a woman claims she's trapped in her apartment. "That happened to me about two days after I first arrived in New York," Lasdun says. "I was 27. Then, the city was considered a somewhat dangerous place. In my mind, danger was lurking at every corner. This woman leaned out of her window on a street in the West Village and said, 'Excuse me, could you come up and smash my door down because I'm locked in?' I thought I was going to get mugged. Being an English gentleman, however, I could not say no. It was a strange situation and it haunted me, but it took me 20 years to write about it."

He's the son of Sir Denys Lasdun – the architect of London's National Theatre – and also writes poetry, award-winning screenplays and novels, including Seven Lies, which made the Man Booker longlist in 2005. He teaches poetry and fiction workshops and has lived in the US since 1986, where he has taught at Princeton, Columbia and New York University. He and his family live in upstate New York, near Woodstock, "at the top of a long, dusty, isolated road", which they are beginning to find almost too peaceful.

He writes in a room in a barn looking out over woods and mountains, with a steady procession of deer, turkeys, groundhogs and the odd bear passing by. He's written two novels and three books of poetry. It's Beginning to Hurt is his third short story collection.

The screenplay he co-wrote for the film Sunday, based on one of his short stories, won both the Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance in 1997, which, he says, was "a little like winning a prize for skateboarding – it wasn't my real profession".

Another of his stories, The Siege, was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci for his 1998 film Besieged. Both Lasdun's novels, The Horned Man and Seven Lies, have been optioned by film-makers and he's just completed his screenplay of the latter for an independent producer. "We'll see what happens to it," he says. "I'm not holding my breath."

Lasdun is tall and rangy, with the thoughtful stoop of a bookish man and a face that somehow seems mournful even when he smiles. He says that his late father, who died in 2001, taught him everything he knows about being – or trying to be – an artist.

"I am grateful I had him for a father. He was a wonderful role model for a writer, since he was totally uncompromising."

However, his father also suffered severe depressions and was haunted by anxiety about his reputation – another angst-ridden man – so the controversial National Theatre loomed large in Lasdun's childhood. The 13-year-long saga of the travails of the building created tumultuous tensions in the household and the talk was all of what the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, thought, what Jenny Lee, or some other cabinet minister, had said and what Laurence Olivier wanted. Nonetheless, when Lasdun's father was satisfied with a job, a tremendous joy would radiate from him. "He had a huge capacity for delight," Lasdun says.

Sir Denys, a kindly man, had an aversion to many professions and was deeply suspicious of "wordsmiths", Lasdun wrote in a moving memoir of his father for Modern Painters magazine, although poetry and fiction were deemed all right, because they were purely imaginary activities.

Lasdun likes to joke – "or half-joke" – that he's the first person ever forced into poetry by his father, a man whose origins were "a strange, sketchy, fantastical mixture of international comings and goings, of the bohemian and the bourgeois, the cosmopolitan and the provincial, the English and the 'foreign' that he never quite pieced together".

Lasdun acknowledges he's a man searching for a cultural identity as are so many of the protagonists of his novels and short stories. Raised in a secular Jewish family, he and his two siblings lacked a Jewish identity, yet his father would declare: "We're not English."

In fact, it's hardly surprising that Lasdun should have become a writer since he grew up with colourful tales of family lore and legend. His businessman grandfather, a cousin of the Bolshoi Ballet designer Leon Bakst, died of fish poisoning when Denys was five.

His grandmother was a concert pianist whose career was cut short by arthritis. The daughter of a Jewish Yorkshire cigar manufacturer, she grew up in Australia and was the first woman motorist to run down a pedestrian.

The moral puzzle of self-identity continues to exercise Lasdun. It's a theme he's visited many times in his poetry – "my family's psychology:/ Anglo, Super-Anglo and Yid", he writes in his collection Woman Police Officer in an Elevator. Still, he's happy being an outsider, which is one reason he feels at home in the US, although he and Pia talk of moving to either London or Italy. Recently, they wrote a book together about walking with their children in France. "For four months we just moved from gte to gte. It was pretty blissful. We did a book 12 years ago, about walking and eating in Tuscany and Umbria – hard work! Unfortunately, the latest book came out just as nobody had any money to travel anywhere."

In An Anxious Man, Joseph Nagel rues: "Whatever you did, it seemed you were bound to regret doing it, or not having done it sooner." Words from the heart, acknowledges Lasdun. "Anxiety is a subject that's always with me, which is why I wanted to write about a worried man. The sad thing is I always thought, 'OK, I'm afflicted with anxiety but as I get older it'll surely go away.' It just gets worse and worse! I'm a born worrier – just like my father," he says, his handsome features lapsing into their familiar hangdog expression.

It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Jonathan Cape, 16.99. James Lasdun appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival tomorrow at 8:30pm, and August 22, at 5pm.