Like his last titanic tome, A Book of Memories, the new novel—written over the course of 18 years and published in the author’s native Hungarian in 2005—is a manic, meandering narrative, a multitude of stories that don’t come together … at all, really. The book can, at times, be exasperating and tenaciously dense, but there’s something especially alluring about incomplete narratives. It might be the incompleteness itself, or the refusal to adhere to the accepted forms of story—beginning, middle, epiphany, dénouement, author acknowledgements. That kind of thing worked for Aristotle and Horace, but there are times when the old structures no longer bear weight. In 1863, Ibsen started writing three-act plays, a big deal back then. But was it? Is it shocking when a novelist says, “Screw this noise”? The novel was born out of such a proclamation, and more than anything, I’d argue, what keeps the novel relevant in this day of the critically over-acclaimed high-brow TV show (The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, et al.) is the comparative freedom with which the novelist can fuck the narrative police, breaking out into the unchartered territory of—well, not experimentation, per se. I’m not trying to mount an argument in defense of experimental fiction: there are far too many variables, and anyway I’d just be regurgitating what the brilliant Ben Marcus has already said elsewhere.

But Nádas—what’s going on with him? Every sentence in the new book seems to carry moral significance, without being linguistically heady. And the book, the gargantuan, unwieldy book contains no center, yet doesn’t fall apart. Nádas writes:

There was somebody else in him, another being who was not a person but who followed his every thought and movement. Whatever he missed, whatever he did or intended to do, this someone was watching impassively, voicing no opinion but not leaving him alone either.

…and one has the sense that he is talking about himself, about what every writer goes through—the agony of composition.

Embarrassingly, I’d managed to get by in life without reading Nádas until now. Of course, I remember seeing A Book of Memories at 57th Street Books when it was published stateside, and I remember reading Susan Sontag’s review and putting it on my mental must-read list. But something didn’t stick, no doubt a result of my own adolescent ignorance. Until I picked up Parallel Stories, Nádas somehow seemed to be too histrionic. Which of course was what drew Sontag and Deborah Eisenberg to him. As Eisenberg wrote of A Book of Memories:

Here in the West, fiction writers are welcome to be absolutely outspoken; maddeningly, no one much cares what we say—we pose no threat. […] It is as if fiction has largely come to be treated as a self-enclosed arena, and judged by standards that have little to do with the living world beyond it; in our life of the moment, which is both highly politicized and highly commodified, whatever we have to say is in danger of being transmuted, as soon as it hits the paper, into something trivial and inessential.

It is an intoxicating notion, especially in our new American millennium, already so filled with terror and financial collapse: Does the torment of totalitarianism foster a morally important narrative consciousness? Can any American writer, free from the trappings of the state, to paraphrase Eisenberg, create a novelistic world filled and layered with the shadows of self, as Nádas has done—or does this kind of writing necessarily proceed from the pandemonium of living in a dictatorship? Yes and no. I certainly don’t think someone like Vladimir Sorokin, had he been raised in the vast mall-clogged suburbia of New Jersey or California, say, would have peppered his absurdist black comedies with quite as intense scatalogical hijinks (perhaps if he’d grown up in Florida). Would Sarah Palin have provoked the buggery Stalin did? Of course not. And yet I do think, as Nádas himself has pointed out, that living under the incessant paranoid watch of a Communistic regime led, directly and indirectly, to the chaotic novelistic structure evident in Parallel Stories. “Under conditions of dictatorship,” Nádas has said about his stylistic approach in the new novel,

one asked whether or not a novel had ethical commitments. I decided that it did. But in a democracy this is no longer the case. Nobody could have foreseen the end of the dictatorship, including me, but it was the reason why I started on a new novel—working at a mad pace—that no longer accepted self-limitations, even for ethical reasons. The stuff of this novel was closer to anthropological or ethical description, if you like—more dispassionate, more attuned, on and off, to answering the question “What sort of a being is man?”

Of his sense of structure Nádas has said that it derives from chaos, “not in the present-day sense of this word, of course, but in the ancient Greek sense [...] not chaos as a synonym of disorder, lawlessness, or a brothel in Mexico, but chaos in that each story has an aspect that you cannot tie to anything else. The structure,” Nádas continues, “is chaotic because the world is chaotic, and I, the novelist, do not want to create an arbitrary semblance of order in this chaos. I’m not capable of it; I would be telling a lie if I said I was.”

Susan Michod, "Labyrinth (The Eyes Have It)", 2007

But creating arbitrary order in chaos—isn’t that what novelists have done since time immemorial? Isn’t that, too, what you get when you endeavor to put one word after another, when the measure of each word adds up to sense as opposed to randomness or nonsense? Without order the words would just be marks on a page—right? But I have always been attracted to writers who create their own methods, no matter how mad they may seem, perhaps because I myself, when writing, reject the order of an outline, preferring instead to fumble my way into the darkness ahead, sometimes knocking my head against a brick wall, sometimes—not as often as I’d like—finding a golden nugget, a multi-dimensional turn of phrase, something that doesn’t suck on second reading. It is precisely the involuntary nature of Nádas’ writing that attracts me, and that is why this new novel, brimming with the sensory textures of elision and longueur, is so compelling to the early-twenty-first-century reader.

With its asymmetrical structure and center that somehow will hold, Parallel Stories recalls those other peculiarly constructed (and, more often than not, flatulent) novels 2666, Cloud Atlas, and … there really are quite a few: Infinite Jest, Tree of Smoke, Underworld, Against the Day in our immediate past, boomeranging back to the founding texts of the idiosyncratic literary vision, including but not limited to Absalom, Absalom!, Moby-Dick, and Hopscotch. And as in those unpredictable, misshapen tomes, in Parallel Stories the author sets his own narrative rhythm, neglecting to follow any accepted rule or regulation. Clearly denote time and place? Nádas isn’t interested in that. Keep narrative perspective singular in each given block of text? Nádas prefers to float, as if through air, from one consciousness to the next, taking his time, dancing slothfully around the room of his imagination from character to character, almost always without forewarning. The critic James Wood might call it free indirect speech, but it seems in Nádas’ case to be a bit more far-ranging. In Parallel Stories, almost every character gets his narrative close-up.

And this, I think, is what will be of incontrovertible interest to the budding young practitioner of narrative: the digressions. Almost every other paragraph the novelistic gaze meanders from one thing to another, not unlike a movie camera pans around a diner in a forgotten film, from a phone ringing and ringing to a man standing at a window to the naked woman he has left behind in bed, jarred awake by the phone, still flushed from last night’s entanglements. She

forced herself back to sleep because she wanted to forget what had happened during the night and dozed off, or was startled to wakefulness again. Not because of the morning noises and not because of the persistently ringing telephone. It was as if she were taking a ferry docked now at this shore, now at the other. It seems she must have really been dreaming; she dreamed of crossing over. She dreamed of shores that did not differ from each other; no bushes or trees, not a single tree anywhere, only farm wagons, jostling cattle and people wrapped in clouds of dust as they streamed forth from the vast lowlands. The last images of her dream remained glued for a while to the surface of her wakefulness. The river was enormously wide, murky, the surface of its dull, glistening water almost convex. From one shore the other shore could not be seen. But I should see it, she thought half-asleep, remembering the shore she had left, but it’s impossible this is an impossibility. At the same time, she did not know what she should be seeing. The words clattered hollowly in her head; she did not comprehend their meaning even when awake.

One can imagine the writing workshop being held in some neo-Cubist pantheon, the disgruntled mid-list novelist offering his critique to the hopeful yet unsuspecting young writer, no doubt to the effect of hey, man, cut this whole thing—it’s repetitive, it sure as shit doesn’t move your story along, and who writes about dreams nowadays, anyway? Dreams are cliché, dude. But, in fact, the digression does serve a purpose. Not only does it speak to the troubled history which has afflicted the writer’s hometown, the political crossings people make between Buda and Pest. It also illuminates the plight of the young woman, Gyöngyvér, who herself is a stranger in a very strange land. And so the political and the personal are merged, and Nádas is able at last, a couple paragraphs later, to dispense with some very narratively important information: “The young man named Kristóf had in time become her obsession.” And this is how the reader comes to know that we are lost in a love triangle of sorts, only since this is Nádas and not the unbearable lightness of Kundera, we are soon ferried off into turbulent murky waters, in this instance Hungary circa 1956, when around 20,000 students, stoked by post-war repression and economic turmoil, crossed the Danube River en masse, chanting lines from a popular censored poem of the period, We will no longer be slaves, as they convened in front of the Országház or Parliament Building. Rather than direct us in to the heart of the uprising’s darkness, however, Nádas positions us at a curious remove, namely in an “eighty-year-old exceptionally eurhythmic building” where, we’ll soon find out, only not just yet, quite a few of the novel’s characters reside. The next pages, rather than detail the copious horrors of the uprising being quashed by the Hungarian secret police and, eventually, the Soviets, introduce us to the plight of the building’s architect, a bit of a dandy, it seemed to me, but also “fit, aggressive, sly, and mean.” The next mention of the Revolution comes buried within the architect’s story, “a few senseless submachine gun bursts sprayed” into the building. Only later do we arrive back to our original story line, one, it turns out, of a vast many. The Da Vinci Code this is not, mercifully: and yet the reader is still kept at the edge of his seat, as it were—due in large part, I think, to Nádas’ sly reliance, on the one hand, on the meandering tensions of a neo-classical storytelling and, on the other, the stylistic flourishes of the nouveau roman.

Norman Mailer's character timeline for "Harlot's Ghost"

I should come right out and confess that I’m not a huge fan of what might be called stylistic fussiness. Style for style’s sake, especially when it comes at the expense of story, strikes me as unnecessary and show-offy, even when it’s packaged as one of the founding texts of the nouveau roman, such as Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie. So I’ll leave it to someone else to explain exactly how Nádas incorporates the tenets of the nouveau roman, although one thing that strikes me about his style is a curious avoidance of question marks. My guess is it has something to do with the indeterminacy of growing up under the oppression of a Communist dictatorship, or else it’s nothing more than a stylistic tic, not altogether dissimilar from someone who leaves the bottom button of his untucked button-down shirt unbuttoned “just because.” No, it’s not accidental, it can’t be accidental—a writer like Nádas, we want to think, doesn’t do anything “just because.” And he’s not, among literary titans, alone in his stylistic peculiarities. Faulkner’s fetishization of italics is well-documented, although originally he wanted each voice in The Sound and the Fury to be printed in a different color ink. Cormac McCarthy, perhaps our most popular “difficult” writer, avoids pretty much everything outside the comma and the period. And Thomas Pynchon has largely foresworn the semi-colon since Gravity’s Rainbow was published (a couple semi-colons appear in Mason & Dixon, albeit only in quoted texts such as letters and the like).

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s any direct correlation between a writer’s punctuation preferences and his narrative strategy. But there is a correlation, all the same: Certainly, how Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Pynchon and Nádas tell their tales is affected, stylistically as well as narratively, by whether or not, for instance, they use quotation marks in their dialogue. The question, it seems to me, is where does the digressive urge come from and why am I—why are any of us, writers and readers alike—particularly attracted to it? Why do we want fractured narrative and incompletion? Why do we want the center not to hold? Is it because of our increasingly fragmented culture, or because when, in my own case, as a kid, I liked to read Choose Your Own Adventure books? I’m not convinced I’d developed an exhaustion with traditional narrative back then—indeed, the fact that I also devoured Agatha Christie paperbacks was evidence, if any was needed, that narrative and I got along just fine.

Or more simply:

If the great English novelist and linguist Anthony Burgess was onto something when he wrote, in A Mouthful of Air, that literature arose as an expression of “loneliness and exile—a cry in the dark, whistling in the dark”—then what are we to do with these writers of irregular and imperfect texts like Nádas and, for that matter, Bolaño, David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell? Does the narrative irregularity emerge out of their stylistic exile, or the other way around?

“My job as a novelist,” writes Nádas, “is not to come up with compact theories for interpreting the world, but to retain the narrative’s independence and spontaneity alongside existing theories or in opposition to them. The process should not break down, even though the world is not symmetrical and in theory the process should break down.”

Intertextuality, interconnectivity: we live in an age of overlapping narratives. Stories are told, no longer only in books, but in a cloud—that, at least, is what the ingenious techno-wizards of the age would have us believe. In a way, it’s true: stories infiltrate our lives and memories through a variety of ways—television, tablet, smartphone, dumbphone. Ads on subways, 3D banners on the infinite Internet: the words might try to sell something, but what we’re buying is story. And it’s inescapable. If we try to escape narrative, narrative finds us, sinks its mangled teeth into us, tries not to let go. Then again, narrative has always been a predatorial species, it seems to me—it seeks us out, not the other way around. Of course, being stalked by narrative isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Depends on the narrative, I suppose. And you—you might not want to have anything to do with narrative, but then you’d be shit out of luck. Unless you’re a novelist, in which case you’d be shit in luck. For the novelist, after all, nothing is as thrilling as being unable to escape the advances of the novel you’re writing.

This narrative seizure—incantatory, dream-like, addictive—has been the stuff of literary legend. We all know about the Surrealists and their automatic writing, and Jack Kerouac might have locked himself up in a bathroom and pounded out On the Road in a tub in what one must imagine was a dizzying—not to mention uncomfortable—three-week bender. Even Kafka, as Milan Kundera reminds us in Testaments Betrayed, wrote his long story “The Judgment” in a “single night, without interruption.” As Don DeLillo suggests, in his fantastic Paris Review interview, this is the state writers aspire to—but it’s a state of writing not without its contradictions. “You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way,” DeLillo says. “You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas.” But, DeLillo realizes, “you [also] want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.”

But where does this urge for narrative release come from? From the oral tradition, perhaps: according to a case study of Turkish romance storytellers, published in the Journal of American Folklore, the digressive mode developed hundreds of years ago as a way to invite modernity into stories. Beowulf is mostly digressional, and Homeric epics are unafraid to veer off from their central narrative course, into the deep waters of the unexpected. And then, of course, there’s the stylistic restlessness of the first novels. Defoe, Cervantes, Swift—one could argue, I suppose, there’s a Choose Your Own Adventure aspect to their work. Modern, manic, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman strikes me as stylistically daring as the latest Pynchon or Mitchell. And not purely narratively speaking: page 71 of the original, for example, is an entirely black page, intended to portray sorrow, or so we’re told, although when I gaze into its void I see the book of the future, whatever that may be.

In its beginnings, so in its ends: something like that. Not that the novel will end. Even in this new age of the glorified serial drama, of The Wire and Deadwood. But, no matter how good TV gets, no matter how much it tries to replicate narrative playfulness on the screen, it will never be able to compete with the original harbinger of “this completely weird outpouring strangeness,” as Jennifer Egan, no stranger to narrative jujitsu herself, has said of the novel. Even if we’re not, as Egan has it, exploiting the possibilities as much as we should be, the novel will adapt. It will evolve.

To paraphrase Don DeLillo: the novel leads; it doesn’t follow. And that is why books like Tristram Shandy will always matter to those of us who care about these things. After all, we don’t read the book that was inspired by Tristram Shandy—we read Tristram Shandy. We don’t read Gaddis’s imitators—we read Gaddis. We read the trailblazing lunatics who are unafraid to follow the form into uncertainty.

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• What We Become

We planned on meeting at a coffee shop in the West Village, but ended up wandering along the banks of the Hudson, where we were promptly swarmed by one too many middle-aged dudes in gold Ed Hardy t-shirts.

***

The Rumpus: You’ve written about everything from douchebag ex-boyfriends to cat porn and Portuguese clowns. It’s frightening to think where all this stuff comes from.

Sloane Crosley: It’s a “Where do babies come from?” kind of thing, where I—although wait, that’s actually an unfair analogy. Because that’s an easier question.

Rumpus: “Where babies come from”?

Crosley: Yes, because there’s an answer to that. A singular one. It’s not like, oh, they come from someplace different. Some people get them from the store—Gummy-bear babies—and some people get them from sex, you know? So in a way, that’s the answer to your question about what I write: Gummy bears and sex—because this stuff comes from someplace different every time. Sometimes you have a broad theme in mind, and you hone it in. And sometimes it’s a random funny story you expand upon. I mean, if you told me to write an essay about absolutely anything right now, I’m not sure what I’d write about.

Rumpus: Well, if your first two books are any indication, it’ll probably come from somewhere in your autobiographical past, right? As opposed to something about, say, Goethe.

Crosley: That one’s on the docket! But yeah, that’s not exactly true. I just finished writing a piece for Playboy about mohelim, the rabbis who chop the foreskin off the babies, interviewing a ton of them, researching bris culture, figuring out what clamps they use—and that’s certainly not my own life, because I don’t have a penis and it’s never been chopped. But you’re right, I do mine my own life a lot, but then everyone does. You have to have some connection to what you’re writing about, I think. It’s really hard to get away with stream-of-consciousness ruminations about miscellaneous topics without knowing what you’re talking about.

Rumpus: You’ve been attracted to the form of the humorous personal essay, like David Foster Wallace, David Sedaris.

Crosley: David Rakoff. All the Davids. It’s funny, the Jonathans take over fiction and the Davids take over nonfiction. What’s up with that? That would be great if that was your question—why don’t you end every question with “What’s up with that?”

Rumpus: Yeah. OK. What’s up with that—that form, the humorous personal essay?

Crosley: I think it’s what comes out naturally. The interesting thing about the question “why are you writing about what you’re writing about” is— The dirty secret of the answer. That would be that I don’t know. But that doesn’t make for a very interesting interview, does it? People assume that once you have a modicum of success that everything you did up until that point happened on purpose. And that you have the answers. Because you didn’t fuck up. But you do fuck up. I mean, there are essays I wrote that will never see the light of day. There’s a novel I wrote that will never see the light of day. The writing isn’t the problem, hopefully. By now I feel comfortable saying, OK, that’s on purpose, that’s not an accident, X is what I’m doing and Y is not. Meanwhile I try to figure out what I’m actually doing.

Rumpus: You mean your voice—finding your voice?

Crosley: Not really. For me, plot is the hardest thing. Structure is the second hardest. And I feel like that’s true for every aspect of my life. Whenever I move in to a new apartment—if you came to my apartment right now you would think that I’ve lived there for eight years, and in reality I’ve lived there since October. That’s because I like to get all the little details right and then I consider the more practical things. The pictures are all hung just so—I have a power drill, stuff goes into the wall right away. But whoops, I’m sitting on the floor and maybe I should get a sofa. And I write the same way. I move in from the least logical point and figure it out later, and luckily that works very well for humor writing.

Rumpus: My favorite essay in the new book is the last one, “Off the Back of a Truck.”

Crosley: I just started writing this thing. It’s really about two different people, and that was hard, because on the one hand the facts of the case are this one person, but I’d forgotten how that relationship felt—I had no emotion about that. I remember it being bad. I just didn’t remember how it was bad. And one of the first things I wrote in that essay was the line equating the brain to any other organ in the body. If you’re kind and healing to it, it will be kind and healing to you: it’ll do you a solid. But when it came time to writing about what happened, how do you dig up the memories you threw out? I got around that by applying what I felt about a more recent heartbreak—there really have been two big ones—and so that was an extraordinarily difficult essay to write. Imagine taking the two worst romantic slights you’ve had in your life and combining them into this one two-headed monster. Now think about it constantly like your book depends on it. Because it does. It’s a lot like The Incredible Hulk.

Rumpus: Like The Incredible Hulk?

Crosley: OK, not like The Incredible Hulk I don’t know. I mean, I know it’s different than the other essays in that book, but I don’t quite know how. Which is unfortunate because a lot of people seem to have an emotional reaction to it and I wish I could replicate it, but I really don’t know how to provide them with the ingredients. Or give them to myself. Basically, I thought about writing it and because I had this intense aversion to writing about boys, I thought: How do I make it funny and not stupid? And that was where a lot of essays in the second book come from. How do I take something that’s not really funny and make it funny? A bear gets smacked by a car—how do I make that funny? Is it funny? And in “Off the Back of a Truck,” there were two ways. One, this parallel story of the furniture salesman, and, two, the universal story of getting over the breakup. I think it’s really funny, how people get so devastated over breakups and can’t see anything else in their lives. It’s the water boarding torture of the human heart.

Rumpus: Yeah, there’s a sadness in the second book.

Crosley: This is what happens when you write a funny book when you’re a little more than casually depressed, I guess. This is what comes out: Round 2. I think some people are disappointed by this book, to be frank.

Rumpus: What? Why?

Crosley: I think they think it’s not funny enough. It’s like with Saratoga Springs, New York—there’s more bars per square block in that town than anyplace outside, say, New Orleans. And I think that’s what people wanted with the second book—just replace beer with jokes. It’s not like I got bullied into anything. I knew what I was doing eventually. But when people complain that the second book isn’t quite enough like the first, I’m, like, listen people, there’s a line of progression here. It’s not like I gave you a pop album and then produced an album of ukulele music.

Rumpus: You’ve been called the “voice of your generation” and “the lady Larry David”—or was it Larry Charles?

Crosley: Larry David is another David! A hidden David.

Rumpus: But the pressure’s on, you’re supposed to be writing for some generational zeitgeist, right?

Crosley: I didn’t even know I had a generation. There’s a great line from Dazed and Confused: “The 60s were great, the 70s sucked, so the 80s are going to be amazing!” And as a viewer you’re like oh, man, little do you characters know the nostalgia that will develop for the 70s. It’s that whole idea from Midnight in Paris, of not loving the one you’re with. For me, when I get too detailed with my childhood references, I’m just glad that people get it. So I don’t see myself as the voice of my generation, whatever that is. I think it would be unfortunate if that were true, because then I should be saying a hell of a lot more.

Rumpus: Now it’s like The Gossip Girl generation, and nobody seems to be saying anything important about that.

Crosley: Is that our generation as well? God, I hope not. I think I come from the Facts of Life generation. I wasn’t allowed to watch Married With Children or I might have come from the Married With Children generation. But the Facts of Life generation was very floaty and weird, because I just feel like we didn’t have the technology. I very specifically remember—

Rumpus: Before email. We grew up before email.

Crosley: Yes. My senior year of high school, there was this girl named Leah. We were kind of friends in high school. We weren’t great-great friends, but we were both chatty enough to be like “are you on AOL Instant Messenger? I am too!” And I remember typing to her the next day how weird it was that we had this alternative life, this disconnected conversation. Then I went to a small school for college and—I wonder if they still have this—there was a list you could check to see who else was online at six in the morning, and it would only be a few people. We were still learning how to use all that email stuff to inform our romantic relationships. It wasn’t supplementary to human relationships. It was completely separate. Then it went through a phase of being supplementary to human relationships, and now the majority of our relationships with people are online or via text messages. And then after my generation, I don’t know. There were a lot of people named Cindi.

Rumpus: After us?

Crosley: Before us. Sorry. But that’s what I mean, is you and I are in this weird in-between land of hyper-colored shirts and Kudos bars. Do you remember Type 1 versus Type 2 tapes? Those are ours. But a detail like that is so fucking subtle. And I think that’s why nostalgia is such a powerful thing for us. We had so much change so quickly. It was so hard to hold onto a movement or a trend. Then with the web, our actual day-to-day interactions with each other fundamentally changed from the time we were in high school until college. We’re on the line. We didn’t grow up with the Internet and we didn’t grow up without it. [Dude in a gold Ed Hardy t-shirt walks past.] See, that’s not us. That’s someone else’s generation. The D-bag Generation. Oh, which is also something we didn’t have. We didn’t have the term “douche.” Or we did, but it was literal. It was something you did to yourself.

Rumpus: Now we want nostalgia right away. We want it packaged up, like Twitter or Facebook—we want to record our own history while it’s still happening.

Crosley: Yeah, but that’s just wanting fame. That’s nothing new. But I do think we’re more obsessed with nostalgia because of all this stuff. Honestly, if whatever you want to do with your life is ingrained in your personality enough, the latest technological fad is not going to affect it. Not at all. If you feel that being on Twitter is going to encroach upon what you’re going to write, then whatever you’re writing is probably pretty weak and not of huge value. I believe in distraction. I’m distracted right now but it’s not the Internet’s fault. It’s like saying looking at real-estate porn all day is affecting my ability to be an architect. I mean, it’s distracting as hell, but so are a lot of things. TV is distracting, living in New York is distracting, flowers are distracting. Look at the birdie out my window. I didn’t have the Internet at home for a long time, but now I do. And it’s really distracting and sometimes I want to punch it but my computer was really expensive.

Rumpus: You should pull a Jonathan Franzen and cauterize your Ethernet port.

Crosley: I should totally do that. It’s so funny to me when writers get extremely Spartan. I was talking to a writer I worked with once who said she was so disgusted by her own TV-watching that she unplugged the TV, wrapped the power cord around it and threw it in the closet. I mean, don’t be so dramatic about it. Just turn it off. Also the Internet can be a good thing. Sometimes you’re working on something that calls for a Google search.

Rumpus: As long as you don’t spend all day Googling yourself.

Crosley: I guess that’s better than spending all day douching yourself. Or is it the same thing? How does a douche work anyway? Clears everything out? I should Google that.

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It’s appropriate, then, that Adrian first turned his novelistic gaze upon multitudinous Walt Whitman, in Gob’s Grief, before he tackled maternity wards, meteorological calamities, self-governance, and the biblical story of Noah’s Ark in the apocalyptic The Children’s Hospital—one of my favorite novels, the kind of book you will immediately start urging all your friends to read once you start it. And I wasn’t the only one: a Guggenheim, a place on New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, and a prestigious Cullman Center fellowship followed. Now Chris has published his third and arguably most emotional novel to date, The Great Night, a kind-of retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in contemporary San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, which happens to be infested with faeries. Yeah, faeries.

The Rumpus: Doctor, divinity student, and novelist. How do you find time to balance all your hats?

Chris Adrian: Part of the reason I’ve managed to do lots of different stuff is that I’ve been doing a lot of it as a student or trainee, which has limited my professional responsibilities to some extent. And the people in charge of me have always been very nice about granting me time away from one place or another. That will all get a little more complicated as I grow up as a physician and have to find an adult job in the world of medicine.

Rumpus: Novel-writing isn’t an “adult job”?

Adrian: It’s a grown-up enterprise, but probably not one you can reasonably expect to feed yourself with.

Rumpus: That’s interesting you said that, though, because you’ve talked about how your “real job” drives your “need to write.”

Does the influence ever run the reverse way?

Adrian: As much as I like to spend time in the extended Smurf village of my imagination, there’s something nice about getting to go to a day job where there are concrete expectations of you and concrete things to be done that generally are helpful to other people, whether that’s something as complicated as organizing a course of treatment for a child with cancer or just writing an antibiotic prescription for an ear infection. But it doesn’t take much time spent in either world to want to go back to the other.

Rumpus: Working in such an emotionally charged environment must be exhausting. I can’t even begin to imagine. How do you not get overwhelmed by all the sadness and—I mean, how do you manage to write after a full day at the hospital?

Adrian: I usually don’t! Though it’s more often physical instead of emotional exhaustion that gets in the way.

Rumpus: If I’m remembering correctly, your first excerpt, from Gob’s Grief, about Walt Whitman caring for the Civil War wounded, was published before 9/11. It’s interesting—and, I’m guessing, no accident—that your work has become more magical since. Has this been a guided evolution or are you simply tracking the way the world has changed?

Adrian: That probably has more to do with my own particular involutions of style and obsession than with anything else. 9/11 led me to wonder about the intersections between personal and national ethics in a way that I find somehow easiest to express by writing about the moral agonies of Cheerilee the My Little Pony. But the project I’m working on now depends a little more on Cotton Mather than Cheerilee, so maybe that will change in the next couple of years.

Rumpus: Has Cotton Mather been hovering in the back of your mind for a while now? I’m not sure I’d be entirely surprised.

Adrian: Yes, he’s got a little daybed in there.

Rumpus: The Children’s Hospital are filled with moments of otherworldly beauty, of course, but The Great Night—I mean, Shakespeare, the faerie kingdom, and yet the book’s still gritty, still grounded in death and disease. I kept thinking of the faeries as kinds of cells trapped in the body of the faerie kingdom in Buena Vista Park, which might make the menace Titania unleashes the ultimate cancer.

Adrian: Well, the intersection between Titania and human illness was deliberately engineered, but I guess I saw the fairies as a neutral force, even if they are largely amoral. Perhaps this was a holdover from my D & D training as a kid. Aren’ t elves generally neutral good, at best? I suppose I meant them to stand in for a particular type of person (like myself) whose moral education is necessarily incomplete until they fall in love for the first time.

Rumpus: And that’s what the humans learn over the course of their “great night”?

Adrian: Something like that. It’s probably a little different for each of the three of them, but  basically they all learn that magic and love are both change, and that this is an open secret that stands in opposition to the open secret that says we’re all going to die, and it’s all for nothing.

Rumpus: “Thank God Henry had lost his pants […] and thank God the girl was such an anxious bitch”: The Great Night, more than your earlier books and stories, is wickedly funny. Was that kind of levity something you wanted in the book to balance out the fanciful flights, or did it grow from reinterpreting Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Adrian: Probably both, though there was a lot to try to live up to in the play, in terms of echoing or even just acknowledging the humor in the original. A very large part of the story is based on my own misadventures in a failed-and-redeemed relationship, and part of what made that bearable to write about was making fun of myself, even if the jokes ultimately only make the fullest sense to me and that one other very special person.

Rumpus: There’s also something bittersweet about the humor in the book. As you write in reference to Molly and Ryan’s relationship, “There was always going to be intimations from the world that there was more to be had, something different and something better, beyond what they were sharing together.”

Adrian: My favorite part of the play is the Pyramus and Thisbe bit that the Mechanicals put on, precisely because it is simultaneously absolutely hilarious and absolutely heartbreaking. The places where I approach that sort of thing in this novel are a retarded and degraded version of what’s done in the play, but I feel like I would be happy with even achieving .00001% of that.

Rumpus: How much did you pattern The Great Night on A Midsummer Night’s Dream? There’s a Russian Matryoshka doll vibe I don’t recall from the original, stories nestled within stories.

Adrian: The structure was set form the beginning, in part because the novel’s structure was built off the play’s structure. But the structure did change as I worked in the sense that I felt increasingly liberated upon further readings of the play to work away from it, or at least to let what felt compelling to me about what I was adding to or changing about the story of the play to make room for itself. And a lot of that change came in the form of those layered narrative sneaking into or hiding within the main story.

Rumpus: Speaking of layered narratives, I’ve noticed that you’re creating a self-contained fictional universe a la Faulkner, filled with characters appearing and reappearing from book to book. Jordan Sasscock pops up in The Children’s Hospital, and so does Pickie Beecher; Pickie’s also the abortion in Gob’s Grief, as Alexander Chee pointed out to me.

Adrian: I think it’s probably more a matter of having too much affection for some characters to totally let them go than it is a matter of trying to construct a coherent world inhabited by everyone in all the novels and stories. In Pickie’s case, I felt like I had left him hanging in a way that he probably didn’t deserve at the end of the first novel, and so I tried to give him a happier ending at the end of the second.

***

Chris Adrian photo by Gus Elliott

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Now Sayles has unveiled his most ambitious project to date in any genre, A Moment In the Sun, a bloody, brilliant, nearly 1,000 page globetrotting epic set at the turn of the last century, a time not so different from our own, it turns out.

John recently took time out of his very busy schedule to talk to The Rumpus a block or so from New York’s Port Authority. He had to embark on a cross-country road trip promoting the book, but we still ended up talking for almost two hours, clocking upwards of a meaty 15,000 words by the time he had to go.

***

The Rumpus: Your new novel, A Moment in the Sun, is written in—I wouldn’t say English, exactly, because you’ve taken and twisted the language to make it your own. It reads like a tornado of voices.

John Sayles: Every character has their own language, voices and styles. There’s a chapter from the point of view of a correspondent, and it’s written like the correspondence of that time. I read a bunch of those guys, Richard Harding Davis, and picked up on their locutions, which aren’t locutions we use anymore.

Rumpus: You were channeling them?

Sayles: You get into it and pretty soon—when actors play a character on a TV show for a long time, they’ll just get the script back to the new writers and say, My guy does not talk like that, because they’ve internalized it. They know the vocabulary and the rhythm of that character, and that’s how I start writing with this—it’s a dialogue, how the character expresses themselves, so I can find out who they are.

Rumpus: Is this something you just turned on? Like it was fluid, when you’d sit down to write you’d be able to tap into that voice and all its idiosyncrasies?

Sayles: Once I developed the characters, the book evolved or the screenplay—it started as a screenplay that only dealt with the Wilmington story and the 24th infantry, so only Royal Scott. And when I decided to expand it, make it into a novel—because I had always felt I was cramming too much—I felt like, who else do I want to hear from? And I felt it’s important to hear what everyone in America is hearing, so I had to have something about the media. That’s the newspapers and the early film stuff.  Which was all bullshit, it was—

Rumpus: Bullshit as in propaganda?

Sayles: It was probably as accurate as most of what we’re getting today, unfortunately, but I went back and I looked at all the political cartoons of the time period, and there is this—when the Filipinos are drawn, they look just like Cubans and Mexicans, with sombreros, straw hats and raggedy clothes. Then within weeks of the Philippine–American War, they went for a Japanese look, and by the end of the first year of the war, they’re cold black savages with bones, literally bones in their noses, and grass skirts and wooden spears. So if you’re an American, that’s what you think a Filipino is, and there were these films—what we would call a documentary—and the filmmakers just rounded up some African-American guys over in East Orange and put white clothes on them and said, You’re the Filipinos, and this was like Star Wars but only a minute long, and it was amazing. It was the first time you could see a real battle on screen, even though it was the New Jersey National Guard and a bunch of African-Americans. And I wanted a character who was in one of those films, so that’s Niles Manigault, and then I wanted a white guy, a working stiff who ends up in the Philippines, in one of the volunteer outfits, and that’s Hod, and then Diosdado—I wanted him to have a lot of access to a lot of things and be good with language and start as a spy in the inner circle, then get pushed out when he becomes a guerilla, which is what happened to a lot of those guys. They were kind of peacocks and very proud of their European training but they ended up in this dirty war in the jungle with a bunch of guys who didn’t speak Spanish. And then you say, What is my emotional structure for this character? Where do I want Hod to end up? What’s the odyssey that Royal takes? Is he going to make it home or not? How’s he going to get out?

Rumpus: One scene I really loved was the boxing scene with Hod and Joe—

Sayles: Joe Choynski is actually Joe Choynski, who actually fought fights in Alaska. He got busted in Texas for having a fight with Jack Johnson, and you weren’t supposed to have an interracial fight then. Most states, boxing was just illegal, but in Texas it was legal, you just couldn’t have an interracial fights. Choynski and Johnson both went to jail and were put in the same cell, and while they were there for a week, Choynski taught Jack Johnson a lot about defense and footwork and that was when Jack Johnson started to—he already was a great fighter, very raw and young and Choynski was a good teacher. So there are a lot of guys in the book who seem like fictional characters but are real characters that just aren’t known anymore.

Rumpus: What drew you to the turn of the last century in the first place?

Sayles: When I was doing research about Cuba for Los Gusanos, I went back to the Spanish–American war to see where this thing started. The acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam could have been Cuba, too. There’s a long tradition, especially in the southern states, of wanting to add Cuba as a state or a territory because it had slavery, and they said, Oh, no no no, we’re doing this out of the goodness of our heart, the poor Cuban people are suffering, but nobody knew about the Philippines and Guam, so the minute we beat the Spanish so easily, the expansionists got big eyes and said, Where else are there Spanish? We just sunk their fleet in Manila, just let the Filipinos take over the rest of the country and then we’ll decide what we want to do. And we decided to take over. President McKinley said, I got down on my knees and Jesus told me we couldn’t leave these poor people to their own devices so it’s our Christian duty to take over, and that’s a lot of what I wanted to put into the narrative of the book—what was the mentality of the time? Incredibly racist time. The beginnings of eugenics, which ended up in Hitler’s hands. So when I discovered that there was such a thing as Philippine–American war, I said, How come I’m thirty-seven years old and I’ve never heard of this? I read a lot of history—how come I don’t know about it? And I asked some of my Philippine–American friends and Philippine friends, What do you know about this? And they said they weren’t taught it in schools, because who did their educational system? We did. And we didn’t have a big standing army, so when the Cuban thing started, we needed a lot of troops, and you had very explosive situations like you had white Georgia volunteer troops right next to African-American troops, and you had a major riot—this is in the book—the riot in Tampa and literally when they were sent down to Cuba, they had white and black troops and a rope separated them down the middle of the deck. The black guys on one side, the white guys on the other.

Rumpus: That rope probably didn’t do much—

Sayles: Yeah, and it didn’t work in rock-and-roll, either. That’s what Honeydripper was about. They did the rope thing in clubs down south and kids, being kids, knocked the rope down and started dancing together, and the cops would come and stand between them. That’s how scary rock-and-roll was down south—even up in Baltimore. John Waters remembers that show. Anyway, I just felt like here are two major things happening at the turn of the century, which is the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of American imperialism and both are based in racism.

Rumpus: There’s something about that time period that resonates with what’s going on now. Wars on foreign soil, racism.

Sayles: Yeah, it’s not why I wrote the book, but those parallels are inevitable. I mean, Amigo could have been set in France during the Nazi occupation. But what interested me about this thing is, it’s all the stuff that’s going on today but there are no euphemisms. Nobody’s trying to make excuses. They’re saying I’m an imperialist, I’m a white supremacist, I write for the North Carolina Caucasian—that’s the name of the newspaper, the Caucasian. And the minstrel shows—all the humor was ethnic or racial, really, really nasty stuff. People always ask me about movies, and if you look at the history of American movies back then, they were part of the problem. The way racism and sexism and ethnic slurs are presented until about the late-sixties, early-seventies, they’re part of the problem. Eventually they became part of the solution, just by showing people who were a little more human, a little more three dimensional. But in the beginning, you have books like The Leopard’s Spots, by this preacher Thomas Dixon, and it’s this pro-racist book based on the Wilmington racial code—Dixon’s next book was The Clansman, which was made into A Birth of a Nation—and it’s got a blurb from the president of the United States.

Rumpus: I didn’t know that, that’s insane.

Sayles: That’s how the Americans got their information, from this incredibly racist popular culture, and the style of the book—I feel that’s what history is. Historians tend to boil it down and simplify it and say, Here’s what was really going on, but it depends on who you were.

Rumpus: Can you talk about the dialogue in the book? I mean, with historical books either you try to approximate exactly how people spoke back then and you get this wooden drivel, or you say screw it—what was your approach?

Sayles: It’s a combination of things. I try to think of the character’s education, what they read, if they were able to read or not. You look at the people who could write—Mark Twain wrote very good dialogue—and you look at that and try to hear it and see what’s going on and then you think about what they couldn’t write. Take the TV series Deadwood—I thought they might have gone overboard once in a while, but they weren’t saying, Well I’ll be hornswoggled. They were saying fuck and motherfucker and you find that every now and then in letters, and you add it all up and that’s your character. You read fiction of the time, nonfiction, diaries. People generally express themselves better in print than in voices, but I mean, Ring Lardner developed his style as a sportswriter who traveled with the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, and the story goes every morning he’d have breakfast with the time and there was a guy next to him who’d order the same thing he’d order, and he realized the guy couldn’t read. One day the guy goes to Ring, Hey, look, I want to play a joke on my wife. I want to tell her I’m learning to type and you got a typewriter, right? So he told Ring what to write, but the guy wasn’t very articulate and he started dictating these letters and Ring realized, he uses the language in this strange way, maybe I should misspell some things. What would he misspell? And he realized that’s a voice, and his first short stories were told in that voice. And that’s what you do.

Rumpus: This book is huge, massive. Did it change a lot while you were writing it?

Sayles: It expanded.

Rumpus: It expanded?

Sayles: It expanded, and I just felt while I was writing it that the book had gotten to a size—this happens with things when they get to be the size of Moby-Dick—where it’s not a tight little story anymore, and it’s never going to be a tight little story. This is a book you can walk around in. I felt comfortable taking a chapter and giving it to a character. There’s something that happens in Auburn prison—what if I just give a whole chapter to a guys who’s there, and we’re kind of waiting for him to get the news about what happened to McKinley because we don’t know if he died or not? Or Mei, the Chinese woman, there’s a long complicated history between the Philippines and the Chinese, especially in Manila, and this is a time when millions of people in China were starving, were desperate for anything, and they’ve got all these foreigners coming and so I chose a character who is so ignorant, she’s smart but she’s so ignorant, she doesn’t know anything. She can’t read or write, she’s been kept in this little village, starving, sold into prostitution. Everything is new to her and very raw so the style of writing can be almost fable-like as she’s discovering things, but there’s a basic human quality she keeps throughout and I just felt like that’s a perspective that you don’t usually get. We have The Good Earth, which is just about these very stylized Chinese people, but in this book, in this mosaic, I didn’t want to leave anybody out.

Rumpus: So it’s about giving voice to the voiceless—

Sayles: Or just telling the story in a complex and mosaic kind of way and feeling like wait a minute, here’s a whole part of the story that’s not represented and I just at least want one window into it, just one little peak.

Rumpus: And that’s the importance of storytelling, finally, you mean? Whether it’s movies or books, that’s why we tell stories?

Sayles: The minute this turns into a novel and not a screenplay, a couple things happen. One, you can have many more points of view. This book would not make a movie, it’d make a fifty-part mini-series, maybe. But in the process you don’t have that time to structure peoples’ experience. It’s very important in a movie what follows what. This needs to happen and then this happens next. A good action movie is like a rollercoaster ride, whereas a novel like this a long journey down a river. There are some slow parts and some rapids and—oh, shit, here comes a waterfall.

Rumpus: Exactly.

Sayles: The other thing that happens is that I could do anything in fiction I feel like if I do it well, if I make people think things, wonder about things, feel things. In a movie, you lose that interior monologue. When I adapt a novel, I read the novel and it’s internal monologue, and I’ve got to find a way to express that. As a writer, a lot of what you do is you say, Who’s my character? What’s going to happen and what’s my character going to understand or not understand? In the correspondence chapter, Niles Manigault, he’s thinking things he’s not going to say, because he doesn’t want to blow his informant. I wore the wrong clothes. How am I going to make a name for myself? He’s an asshole, but he’s an even bigger asshole than you know at the time—so that’s a nice thing, to have both of these experiences, an omniscient point of view where you leave it up to the reader, where you present evidence and let the reader make the connections, but also give them the personal experience of the character experiencing it. It asks you to empathize with people you would never come across and many you wouldn’t want to hang out with.

Rumpus: And that’s why we tell stories.

Sayles: There’s a couple of reasons people tell stories. Traditional oral storytelling—and I got into this in The Secret of Roan Inish—is about passed on from generation to generation. Sometimes they’re cautionary tales, other times they’re about who we are. We tell the story over and over. I was raised Catholic. There are gospels and these are allegorical stories that tell you about your religion or what we as Catholics believe is our central story or our central being. Native Americans have these stories, the Irish have a lot of these stories. Here’s someone else’s story. Here’s somebody you will never meet—oh, how exotic. Here’s a bunch of stories about a bunch of guys who go and chase whales. And you know what’s amazing? As great an adventure the story is, there’s also some pretty heavy human stuff that you could apply to human beings in general when they get into a dark place. So then what fiction becomes is a way to understand the world and a way to understand other people, and maybe yourself but other people too, and in the end a lot of what I try to do in books and movies is take you into other people’s lives so you can get a sense of how they see the world.

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Given his incomparable literary curriculum vitae, you might expect that Mitchell’s prose would be overwrought and inaccessible: “postmodern,” “experimental.” Yet, somehow, as the legion of his overzealous fans well know, Mitchell’s books are fun, fast-paced page-turners—language-drunk, sure, but open any at random and you’ll find sentences like this: “Ross Wilcox’s breath smelt like a bag of ham.” Or this: “Witchy trees bent before the enormous sky.” Or even: “A lanky, zitty foreigner.” Or, from his magisterial new novel: “The snow is scabby and ruckled underfoot.”

Mitchell and I met one muggy evening last month to chat about Jacob de Zoet, grammatical geekery, the blind bravado of the juvenile writer, “difficult” fiction, and the perils of communication. Despite his lofty literary accolades, in person Mitchell is mild-mannered, charming, exceedingly modest, and frightfully funny—for an Englishman.

***

The Rumpus: When I was reading your new novel, I kept wondering whether it was really difficult to do. Not just the research but finding the novel’s voice. I mean, compared with Black Swan Green, in which you’re writing in a language you’re presumably somewhat familiar with.

David Mitchell: It’s a bit hard, writing books, isn’t it? I’m not sure I can compare the books. When you’re making them work they are fulfilling, and that fulfillment is not a quantifiable quality—it simply is. Chekov could have written a better book, but he couldn’t have written a better sentence—there’s nothing wrong with it. Isn’t that great when that happens?

Rumpus: That makes me think of what Don DeLillo said about the pleasure of writing, putting sentences together on a page. Something along those lines.

Mitchell: If they’re good words. If they’re dense words, you’re damned. There’s nothing wrong with the sentence—that’s what you write toward. It’s quirky if it needs to be quirky, it’s prosaic if it needs to be prosaic. When it’s fit for purpose—supremely fit for purpose—then that’s when I polish stuff up. But first you have to get stuff out to polish. When you’re sixteen and writing, you think you know everything about everything, and the older you get the more familiar you become with your own ignorance. Your writing, hopefully, has more spontaneity and verve as you age. When you’re 27, you’re more apt to be like: “Oh God, I need to do this two-thousand-page scene before I go to bed.” “OK, well. Let’s do it, then.” And you do it.

Rumpus: And you think it’s brilliant and you don’t want to change a word.

Mitchell: Precisely. Now it can take painstaking weeks—God knows—to excrete a single sentence. It can be like having a hemorrhage, but one hopes the quality is superior the greater the excretion. Hemorrhaged books sometimes work, in a youthful kind of a way. On the Road, for instance, is a classic hemorrhaged book.

Rumpus: Is that how you wrote The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet—sentence by painstaking sentence?

Mitchell: I got the scene out first, even if I knew it was a bit rubbish. I used three hashes a lot to let myself know when something needed a lot of work. At the end of a scene, I circled back to the treble hash marks and polished it up. Perhaps by then everything had changed. Books are made of changes of minds. The actual writing of the book, I’ve found, teaches you how you should have written the book.

Rumpus: So you’re an obsessive reviser, then?

Mitchell: I can’t leave a book alone. I need very patient people at the printers and the typesetters—I always find things that begin to work themselves out when I’m writing, or rather after I’ve written. “Maybe” or “perhaps”—or perhaps “possibly?” They’re all quite different, though, aren’t they? The same word, but one glance of the eyeball and sometimes it needs to be “maybe” and other times it needs to be “perhaps.” I don’t quite know why, but you do have a sense when you’re in the voice.

Rumpus: You’re one of those writers whose work always attracts an enormous amount of critical and academic attention. I don’t want to think about how many Ph.D. theses are being written about your oeuvre right this very minute.

Mitchell: The best critics perform an important function, but it’s not one I’m hard-wired to do. I just find it exhausting having to marshal arguments and defend them against possible objectors. An analogy I often use is that writers are like duck-billed platypuses and critics are taxonomists, and to us duck-billed platypuses the question of whether we should be considered as an egg-laying mammal or what is a pointless exercise. A duck-billed platypus is interested in swimming, finding food, having sex, laying eggs. A novelist’s job is to write a novel, not worry about how it fits into one’s oeuvre or whether it captures the postmodern experience or whatnot. It might be my own ignorance. Perhaps there are writers who consider such things, but I’m really just interested in finding out where a story goes and helping it get there. There are beautiful, magical descriptions of the nighttime in the beginning of Huck Finn—I’ve never wanted to dissect that magic, I just want to read it and experience it.

Rumpus: Your writing is highly enjoyable, but if you put a gun to my head and told me I had to write something critical about your work, I’d focus on the stammer. In Black Swan Green, specifically, but also in the new novel, there’s a fascination with language and communication—

Mitchell: Or uncommunication, as it were. But yes, exactly.

Rumpus: Jacob’s an interpreter, but he can’t always communicate with who he wants to communicate with.

Mitchell: There’s always the problem of getting what you’re thinking out into the world, isn’t there? I think possibly genes and certainly environment makes us a walking bundle of archetypes, and as a human and as a writer one of my major preoccupations is incommunication. Isn’t it true how everything contains its opposite? How can you have a knowledge of beauty without knowing what ugliness is? Or, or—do you know what I mean? A phenomenon contains its opposite. To have a knowledge of phenomenon is, by default, to know about the opposite. This leads, among other things, to a fascination with words. We aspire to be master communicators, right? But that must also mean we are deeply versed in non-communication, in fluffing it, in getting it wrong, in duff sentences, in not saying quite what you mean and the consequences of that. Stammering makes me an expert in that. I’ve obviously thought about this link a lot, because one of the questions people ask me a lot is “If you hadn’t stammered, would you be a writer?” I think I would have been, but I would have been a different writer. I wouldn’t have had this theme of incommunication. I can identify at least three ways in which they are related. One is—

Rumpus: Stuttering and writing?

Mitchell: You scan the sentences ahead and you see the danger words, the words you won’t be able to say, and then you re-engineer the sentence to be able to go around it. That’s a practical crash course in sentence construction. That, in turn, leads to a practical crash course in register. If you realize you can’t get out the second syllable “less” in the word “useless,” you substitute “futile.” That might fix the vocal problem, but it creates another problem. If you’re amongst a bunch of thirteen-year-old boys, you can’t say a word like “futile.” Everyone will think you’re mad. But again, it’s bloody useful stuff for a writer. You learn your registers. I mean, there they are, all these fancy words, some of them on high registers and others on less educated registers. If you’re a writer and you use a word like “autodidacticism” to describe a character, it completely saves you from having to mention that that character went to college. As a consequence, you develop a higher vocabulary, because you need substitutes.

Rumpus: You need four different words if you can’t say one, for example.

Mitchell: Precisely. I think—I can’t prove it, but I suspect our interior voices are far richer than our spoken voice. If you are one of those people who speak in perfectly mellifluous, complex sentences, I would humbly suggest you think them instead of saying them. It is, of course, impossible to be able to compare a writer’s inner voice and his spoken voice in the quality of the diction and the grammar, but I like to think that stammerers’ inner voices are going to be far more articulate and sharper than someone who isn’t affected by a speech impediment.

Rumpus: Stammering, then, clearly seems to have contributed to your fluency with different voices. Is that why you’re such an apt literary ventriloquist?

Mitchell: I hear what you’re saying, and here’s a new thought for me: perhaps it’s a craftily manifested wish fulfillment on my part. The times I’ve thought I wish I could speak like that guy, or I wish I could chat somebody up unstutteringly. I wish, I wish, I wish—I wonder if that “I wish” is fuel or a kind of power.

Rumpus: Is that why so much of your writing is about being an alien among natives?

Mitchell: Possibly novelists are all aliens among natives. We should all wear little signs around our necks that mark us as aliens. It happened a few weeks ago, where I completely lost it and I was sobbing my eyes out. I happened to glance and there was a mirror in the corner of the room. I stopped crying and looked in the mirror—oh, so that’s what grief looks like. That’s something only a novelist would do—or an alien. But to get back to what you said… I would say one must be someone else to a certain degree to portray that character convincingly, his voice and his thoughts. The implication of your question is that one needs to escape oneself. I don’t think that is the case for me.

Rumpus: One of the really interesting things, which I’m guessing is related to the issue of stammering, were the dialogue interruptions. For instance, in the middle of a line of dialogue, the narrator will interrupt with a haiku-like description.

Mitchell: There are different types of interruption, but in general I just think that’s how people speak. We’re not virtuoso language users and never have been, and I think we like to recognize when other people have little verbal tics, because we do it, and we like to read people who say the wrong word. For me, it’s oh, you as well. I’m not so lonely. I’m not so alienated in the world. Specifically with Jacob de Zoet, there were a couple of ground rules I wanted to abide by. One was that I wanted the reader to read quickly. If you have a lot of one sentence paragraphs, then your eye is moving down the page instead of across it, and I wanted to achieve that. I also liked the idea of having two sentences going concurrently—you’re reading one and then another comes in and interrupts. Another ground rule I abided was compression. I wanted a verbal compression on the page. There are relatively few communication verbs in Jacob de Zoet, and this is because when you have speech marks you already have the verb said. Conventionally we do it, but in a book where I wanted to achieve this dense compression, I couldn’t allow myself any tautologies. Instead of wasting a verb saying that someone said something, I wanted to convey more information that was needful. The last thing I wanted to do was to take out the business of who is saying what and where and when. I wanted to convey that information in spoken dialogue whenever possible.

Rumpus: How did you harness all the different voices in the book? I mean, it’s 1799 when the book starts and it’s not like you can put an LP on and hear how people speak.

Mitchell: You’ve got what you want to say, and then you translate that into speech. For instance, natural language plus education level plus gender. I often used passive verbs to denote when a Japanese woman is speaking, so I could avoid them saying “I.” I thought it was a bit too pushy and upfront for a Japanese woman of the Edo-era to begin a sentence with the word “I.” If the pronoun is omitted, then you wonder if she is referring to herself or to someone else. “Shall” instead of “will” gives a more antiquated feel. “If” is really a twentieth-century construction. “If I hadn’t eaten that oyster, I wouldn’t have vomited” would become, “Had I but not eaten that oyster…” The educated Dutch were allowed to speak pretty much like we do in an English idiom, with the exception of, “Oh, that’s not my cup of tea;” whereas the British speakers can say something like that. That’s how you do it.

Rumpus: You make it sound easy. Which is interesting, I think, considering that your books are often described as “difficult”—and I mean that in the good sense.

Mitchell: Why write easy to write books? If it’s well-written, it shouldn’t be like trying to lug a freezer up eight flights of stairs. I think really good writing is not easy to read, but also not overly taxing. All I know is that I love reading books, and when I write I want my books to be like the books I love: solid, thoughtful, cliché-less, and both mindful of the ugliness of the world and also the beauty of being alive.

***

Rumpus original art by André Eamiello

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***

The Rumpus: One thing that struck me about Super Sad—

Gary Shteyngart: Super Smelly Supersaver!

Rumpus: Yeah, great title. And the cover, it’s like a Twister game mat or something. Was that intentional? If so, what’s that say about your authorial intentions?

Shteyngart: It’s supposed to be a twister. I was signing copies of it at BookExpo America and people were like, “SuperSuper Super Super, Sad Sad Sad Sad?” So it may confuse some people. Which is good. We want them thinking from the start. Puzzling it out.

Rumpus: Speaking of bafflement, Super Sad has a really dark vision of the world, which is actually scarily true. America is bankrupt, the global economy has collapsed and is pegged to the Chinese yuan, everyone knows when they will die and is essentially illiterate, addicted to their äppärät. But you actually had to amp up the apocalyptic dread, right?

Shteyngart: When I started writing SSTLS in 2006, I thought things were going to get bad. This is the premonition I had. I know when things are going in the crapper, growing up in the Soviet Union. I had no idea things were going to get so bad so fast. That really threw me, and I was going back and forth with my brilliant editor, and every draft the real world keeps getting worse and worse. How the hell am I going to keep up with this? At the end I was like, OK, it’s all going to collapse, the Chinese and Norwegian hedge funds are going to end up buying everything. Imagine if McCain had won! Things could have been a lot closer to what’s described in my book. Part of me was thinking, Hmm, if McCain wins I will look like un prophète, but then I was like, Fuck it, the health of the country is more important than my book. Let Obama win.

Rumpus: Black humor and satire used to play a big part in American fiction in the early postmodern years or whatever, but then it seemed to disappear for a few decades, with a few notable exceptions. You’re obviously committed to bringing it back with a vengeance.

Shteyngart: Satire disappeared from American fiction, but American fiction also disappeared from American fiction. I mean, talk about taking a backseat to the dialogue. It’s not even in the dialogue anymore. Who cares anymore, right? The big behemoths that the last roaring lions put out there (Franzen’s The Corrections, Eugenides’s Middlesex) have heart and anger in equal measure, and they’re brilliant books, don’t get me wrong—but what’s a book that can roar now? I’m trying to roar. Who knows if anyone’s tuned in to the lion frequency.

Rumpus: Exactly. It seems like a lot of the fiction being written here—the stuff that’s being published, anyway—even the allegedly “experimental” stuff is really watered down and trite compared to what’s coming out of England and Europe. And who knows what’s out there that’s not even translated yet.

Shteyngart: I worry about that, and I’m part of the military industrial complex, by which I mean the MFA complex. While we’re making very competent writers, but are we placing competency above—I love stories that are messy, that have a shambolic quality, that’s what I love. Are we sanding away some of those edges and creating a very bland and similar generation of writers? That would suck! When I try to “fix” my students’ stories, a part of me is thinking what am I doing? Let some of this gusher run, man.

Rumpus: I’ve always thought that your writing allows for a little messiness, and especially this new book, it’s filled with absurd riffs and craziness.

Shteyngart: Especially compared to my last book, Absurdistan, which was a very controlled book. In Absurdistan I was working with some—I hate to use the word “tropes,” but here it comes—tropes which had a more traditional Russian satire quality to them. Dead Souls or something like that. In this book, I just wanted these two characters, Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park, to speak to each other. And when we speak to each other it’s a mess. I wanted to capture that messy quality. What if I let the messiness and sloppiness get out of hand just a little bit? What if I surprised myself emotionally by following where this story goes?

Rumpus: What surprised you about this book?

Shteyngart: That I could allow the love story to take center stage with each subsequent draft. The initial drafts read like a bad version of an Isaac Asimov science-fiction magazine. I mean, that was what I grew up with.

Rumpus: Isaac Asimov?

Shteyngart: Oh, God. [Makes masturbatory motion.] Anyway, but then it became—the more knowledge I dropped on this book’s fat ass, the less it was compelling. The more I pulled back and let this love story go, the more I felt confident of the book’s vitality. All I want from a book is to feel like it’s as alive as I am, but a lot of the fiction I encounter is just dead. It says, “I’m a piece of wood, but a brilliantly designed piece of wood.”

Rumpus: A very pliable piece of wood.

Shteyngart: I’m so pliable! Look at me, I’m the Woodster! Mwah-mwah!

Rumpus: You teach a course on immigrant fiction. More contemporary stuff or like Roth and Bellow?

Shteyngart: Bellow was an immigrant like I’m an octopus. He was from Montreal. But yeah, there’s so many reasons why immigrant fiction is so popular nowadays. One of the reasons is we don’t translate shit. We’re scared of these freaky foreigners. But an immigrant’s safe, in a way. We’re part American, part something else. We’re not that threatening. We explain the world to America. We’re the bridge. Sure, we come from furry, bizarre cultures, but we canmake you feel like “So this is what Brighton Beach is like!” It’s interesting, because other nations—Germany, France, for example—translate boatloads, but the immigrant fiction scene, at least in Germany, is hardly as strong as ours. There’s not that many immigrant writers in Germany. They go directly to the source. You want to know about Turks? Translate a Turk—and not just Orhan Pamuk. A Turk you’ve never heard of. A young Turk, if you will.

Rumpus: There are a lot of young Turks writing these days, even if fewer of us are being published.

Shteyngart: This is a supply-and-demand problem. There’s a lot of supply, but not much demand. The more fiction gets taken apart at the MFA level, the more it gets worked over, the more we take it apart—nobody’s reading this shit! This is the problem. I mean, what? Who? Are we really just writing for this small priesthood? Are we just writing for this small, select group of people? That, to me, that’s frightening. Not pointless but approaching pointlessness.

Rumpus: And there’s the Twilight books and all that crap.

Shteyngart: Serious literary books used to have a choke-hold on the national penis. It was incredible. Philip Roth sold 400,000 of Portnoy’s Complaint the first year it was out!  His plumber said, “Hey, ain’t you the guy that writes them dirty books?” I had a cable repairman come to the house and he took a look around my apartment and said, “Why you got all them books?” What he was thinking was, You have a twenty-five-inch TV and eight million books. What are you, an idiot?

Rumpus: It’s all about how big your äppärät is—is that what you’re saying?

Shteyngart: I wonder. I hope this is cyclical. I hope right now we’re in the butthole of literature, and that at some point people will throw off the chains of their äppäräti, their iPhoney and whatever else they use, and go back to an introspective life. That’s for subsequent generations. This generation is fucked. We can’t keep up with the technology we’ve created, and it’s like we were invaded by a barbarian horde and we don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think that the iPhone and everything else that is now a major part of my life is a punishment that I’ve inflicted on myself for sins that I can’t quantify. This is maybe—I don’t know—going back to Hebrew school, but since the iPhone came out, my life has gotten progressively worse. I land on a plane and I get nervous if my iPhone—my äppärät—can’t connect. It’s like I’m running a Fortune 500 company. I’m supposed to be a fucking writer, working in solitude, right?

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Jennifer Egan

In person, as I found out when I interviewed her near her Brooklyn home, Jenny is a serious intellect fully engaged with the culture with almost scary DeLilloian intensity. She’s also funny, down-to-earth, totally cool, and, it turns out, a newly minted PowerPoint pro.

***

The Rumpus: When we were e-mailing back and forth, setting this interview up, it seemed really important to you not to do an e-mail interview. Have we forgotten how to communicate in person, or do you need a break from typing?

Jennifer Egan: I think, from a journalist’s standpoint, which I know probably almost better than the other side, there’s nothing more convenient than an e-mail interview, because you don’t have to do anything, really. You write the questions, the interviewee spends a lot of time crafting their answers—they do all the work you would have to do, normally. I mean, transcribing is obviously a nightmare. But more than that, you have to shape the interview and cut out all the fat, and try to make it sound like speech while also being intelligent enough to read. So I understand the pros of the email interview, from the interviewer’s point of view. But I do think there’s something lifeless about online interviews.

Rumpus: You mean that whole “Twenty Questions” thing?

Egan: You can just feel that no actual conversation took place. And the writer’s just trying to sound articulate, of course—if you give a writer the job of writing answers to questions, of course they’re going to labor over them and polish them. But that’s not always the most readable interview, in my opinion.

Rumpus: There’s a big difference between spoken speech and written speech. I mean, some people write beautifully, but when they speak it’s all circumlocutions and stammerings (myself included). I don’t know if there’s a literary history of the relationship between writers and speech impediments, but I bet there’s a connection there.

Egan: I like spoken communication. I don’t write that way. Richard Powers dictates his books—I could never do that! I actually think, when it comes to an interview especially, there’s no substitute for communicating with a human being face-to-face. I honestly find that it’s just so boring to sit there and answer these questions in a vacuum. It’s so dull. So I guess I derive a little energy or excitement from talking to an actual human being.

Rumpus: Which is interesting, because your new novel begins with a Xanax-popping kleptomaniac, and ends with the fragmentation of language, with babies communicating via scary handheld gizmos and “people who stopped being themselves without realizing it.”

Egan: Even though I would be sad if all communication were reduced to the kind of T-ing I was creating, one thing that struck me was that there’s a kind of poetry to the fragmentation. That’s also the case with the PowerPoint chapter. Initially, I thought, I really want to write fiction in PowerPoint, but I also thought, it’s kind of sad that I want to write fiction in PowerPoint. But in fact, while I was using PowerPoint, I found that there was a kind of beauty to writing that way that was distinct from conventional fiction, and that I really believed in and enjoyed. While I have a kind of dread about where the culture is going, I feel like when I engage with the forces I dread in fiction I often end up finding more value in them than I expected to, intellectually. That said, I wasn’t thinking about the end of the book as a dystopian vision at all. I was just exploring the possibilities.

Rumpus: Is that what your were trying to reproduce, then—the destructive, broken quality some of the best rock-and-roll has?

Egan: Yeah, totally. That was my structural model, and that’s why the novel has an A side and a B side.

Rumpus: Speaking of the novel’s structure, it’s part short story collection, part novel, part PowerPoint presentation. Did that formal restlessness come about organically?

Egan: It evolved very organically. I started with the first piece, “Found Objects.” At the time, I was between projects and thought I’d just write a story. I had gone in to a bathroom and seen a wallet lying under the sink, and I found myself pondering the wallet and postulating an alternate version of myself who would take the wallet. Who would that person be? Why would she take the wallet in the bathroom? That’s where I started writing out of, and then there was a mention of the wallet-thief’s boss, Bennie Salazar. I write pretty instinctively, so it’s not like I was thinking about it much, but at the time I intended it as a humorous sketch about a neurotic record producer, who sprays pesticide under his arms and sprinkles gold flakes in his coffee as an aphrodisiac. You know, these decadent rock-and-roll habits. But then I found myself thinking who is Bennie Salazar? Why does he do that stuff? Which prompted me to write the next chapter. And the same thing happened again: a minor character would catch my eye, and I’d want to crack them open. I knew pretty early that it wasn’t a conventional novel, or a story collection—it didn’t fit into the standard literary genres that were available to me, so I thought, well, it’s a record album. The pieces all relate, they tell one big story, whereas often in a story collection—certainly collections of connected stories—there tends to be a sameness of tone and world, and I really didn’t want that. I mean, my God, would you ever have songs that were tonally the same on the same LP? That would be a disaster. There’s always this effort to contrast, to follow something really loud with something quiet. I love that, and at the same time, it’s an homage to a form that’s sadly gone—the LP, even the CD. Now we buy music in this atomized way which I find sad from the point of view of the musicians, because now they’re unable to conceive of large visions and have the general public engage with them on those visions. They can only sell their vision in defragmented form. Who sees the whole thing? I found that poignant, and since the book is so much about time and change, it’s a poignancy that seemed apt.

Rumpus: When you were writing Goon Squad, were you conscious of whether or not you were writing a so-called “rock-and-roll novel.” I mean, books like DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet, Hornby’s High Fidelity, Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments—it’s even been argued that Wuthering Heights is a “rock-and-roll novel.”

Egan: Did I think about that as a genre?

Rumpus: Yeah, but whereas most of the rock novels I’ve read don’t really capture the spirit of the music, Goon Squad strikes an authentic rock-and-roll vibe, I think.

Egan: You know what? I didn’t worry about that. I’m not really interested in what literary writers have to say about rock-and-roll. No offense. No offense. I just—I often feel there’s a yearning to be a rock star hidden away in there, and I think that’s sweet but uninteresting, and in a way kind of universal. Who doesn’t want to be a rock star? Actually I don’t want to. I have performance anxiety—and I’m not very musical. So no, I didn’t think, I’m going to write a rock novel. I just, again, unlike in every other one of my books, this one was not driven by a strong conceptual or philosophical vision. I really went about it very inductively and laterally. In fact, with this book, even the ideas I did have about how it would all fit together turned out to be wrong. I thought it would go backwards in time, then I thought it would go backwards and then into the future. And it would have been too intimidating to declare:   I’m going to write a Rock Novel. I just thought, I want it to be fun. In terms of literary history, I thought about it more as a novel about time, and I did think carefully about who else has done that and what they did, Proust being Number One. I thought about other literary novels about time and I wanted to be a part of that conversation. Maybe why I wasn’t too worried about whether or not it would work as a rock-and-roll book was because I was actually interested in technological change and its implications, using the music industry as a kind of lens.

Rumpus: When I was reading Goon Squad, I kept thinking of Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar, another book that’s formally daring and that addresses the relationship between memory and time.

Egan: You’re hitting on something important. I think there’s a huge amount of tension around the issue of time, and especially chronology, in fiction, and we’ve been wrestling with that from minute one. Look at a book like Tristram Shandy, which is so crazily experimental in a way we still have yet to match. There’s such a desire not to just say:  this happened and then this happened and then this happened. The tension is between the incremental and inexorable passage of time and the leaping, stuttering quality of consciousness. The two do not match up. One result of that is that time is passing gradually, but we experience its effect as very sudden. Our perception of time is full of all these gaps. That really interests me, and I think it informed the fragmented structure of the book. I wanted to capture as many shocking discoveries of time having passed as possible, which is difficult to do if you’re just moving forward in time. I also was just really interested in gaps. Things that happen when you’re not looking. Again, I wasn’t thinking about this in a very conceptual way, but I think this is why I felt so driven to write in PowerPoint, even though I had never used PowerPoint. It allowed me to do, in the boldest way, the thing I was trying to do already: to write incorporating gaps and interruptions, to try to elude the straitjacket of chronology that writers always struggle with.

Rumpus: Is this all made worse by the technological developments at the end of your book, the hand-held gizmos the babies have?

Egan: I didn’t think too much about those devices and their relationship to time. I saw them more as radical measures of change and evidence of time having passed. I remember growing up, it was always important for older people to tell me what things I had that they didn’t have when they were my age, technologically. Like my mother would say, “We sat around and we listened to the radio.” Well, that was very boring to me as a kid. Who cares? Let’s turn on the TV. That was my view at the time. But it’s funny, I have that same urge now. I find myself saying to my sons, “Guys, I just want you to understand, that when I was little there were no answering machines. When you made a phone call, someone was either home, you got a busy signal, or the phone rang and rang and rang.” My younger son listened very carefully, and then he said, “Mommy, was there electricity when you were little?” And I thought, all right, I’m going too far with this. But I mean, the idea that all you could do to reach someone was call their house and hope that they’re there and not on the telephone—those are your only chances of talking to them. And now look at us—you can’t get away from people.

Rumpus: And email—there’s no letter-writing anymore, for the most part.

Egan: Exactly. I do not have and I do not want remote email, and I plan to stand my ground for as long as I can.

Rumpus: Because you don’t want to—

Egan: Because for me, psychologically, I don’t see any good reason I should be on email all the time. I’m not running a major corporation. I have a telephone. Anyone can reach me. But what I witness is people who cannot stop checking their email. I don’t want that. It feels compulsive, and I’m not looking for any more compulsions. But it’s interesting, I wonder how that is affecting time. I think a lot about how technology affects distance. I went to Europe at age eighteen with a backpack. I was completely alone in the world. If I wanted to talk to someone, I had to wait in line at a phone place to even call home, which I did maybe once a week, and if nobody was home I didn’t talk to anyone. And I felt really—it was a formative experience for me to feel so isolated and so disconnected. How do people do that anymore?

Rumpus: They don’t.

Egan: There’s no such thing as disconnected anymore. Personally, I think it’s too bad, although as a parent I’m thrilled. I don’t want my kids wandering around without a connection to me, and yet for them it’s too bad, because they’ll never have access to that human experience of being totally disconnected. How will that change them? How will it change us all? The feeling of time passing, for me anyway, is partly the sense of no longer knowing the people I once knew. You move through worlds, and now everyone is back in touch. How do you measure your own growth and change if no one ever leaves?

Rumpus: To get back to something we were talking about earlier. Genre. It’s something that’s on a lot of people’s minds these days. Does it still exist? And if not, what the heck happened?

Egan: Actually, I don’t really care too much about genre. I think it’s a selling tool. Basically, it creates a kind of shorthand that makes some people’s lives easier.

Rumpus: You mentioned Tristram Shandy. That’s one of the biggest genre-busters out there.

Egan: How about Cervantes? How crazy is Don Quixote? Even nineteenth-century novels, which are supposed to be so staid, they’re actually not. I reread Middlemarch recently. It’s narrated by a really flexible, intrusive, at times quite strange, overbearing, but also very funny and arch narrator, and it’s not even a first-person narrator. Although at times the narrator addresses the reader in the first person. I think if you did that now you’d be perceived as being a little out there. I mean, I do think we’ve gotten really quiet about pushing any limits, all limits, as fiction writers. I would love to see more craziness out there. The novel began as this completely weird outpouring of strangeness. It was there from the beginning. It’s inherent in the form. At least the possibilities are there, but I feel like we’re not exploiting the possibilities as much as we could be. I just want to feel some playfulness happening on the page, and if genre has started to hold people back, then it’s time for genre to disappear. Or change.

[Editor's note: The end of this interview was conducted using PowerPoint. View it below.]

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