In 2009, I interviewed author Ken Layne. He told me, “I had a kind of crisis just before [high school] graduation, in part set off by a lot of desert road trips and juvenile delinquent camping and discovering a book by Edward Abbey in the school library called Desert Solitaire.” When asked about the politics of the culture wars, he wrote: “This country has been in steep decline for three decades now… We haven’t seen this kind of income/wealth divide between the rich and the working poor since the 1920s, and America sure isn’t on the rise.” With statements like these and his other political writings on Wonkette, the political website he edits, it is no surprise what his politics and his worldview are. What is telling, however, is that he appears to be turning statements like those above into actions: he recently announced his retirement from the political blogosphere, and the release of his new novel, Dignity, seems to codify his ideas—the mystical power of the deserts of the American West and a populist fatalism—perfectly.

Dignity immediately makes you ask questions. Who is the messianic figure known only as “B?” Who is “N,” and why is he writing to communities thrown to the four corners of the desert West? What are the “three poisons” that the communities are to avoid? And why is it the book named after a single noun usually associated with self-respect and decency? The answers to these questions are delicately revealed over the course of this epistolary novel, but not by the way of traditional story development. He answers the questions strictly through mostly one-sided correspondence, and he does it masterfully. The only summary narrative you will find is not on its pages but on the back cover:

“A packet of hand-scrawled letters found in a stranger’s rucksack tells of self-sufficient communities growing from the ruins of California’s housing collapse and the global recession. In unfinished Mojave Desert housing tracts and foreclosure ghost towns on the raw edges of the chaotic cities of the West, people have gathered to grow their own food, school their own children and learn how to live without the poisons of gossip, greed, television, mobile phones, and the Internet.”

This summary captures the essence of the book, but it doesn’t truly explain the gravity that this book possesses. Dignity takes place over a 10- or 15-year period after a significant economic collapse. The collapse creates a radically new view—or a return to a primitive view—of material necessity and more importantly, the concepts of ownership and property. This is presented as a positive development by Layne’s primary scribe, the aforementioned “N,” but it comes with many extraordinary ills. The destroyed economy has also destroyed the tax base. Social services that once provided the basic needs for many people have been completely decimated in budget cuts. Public services like transportation and parks have met the same fate. Perhaps worst of all, the government has become hyper-militarized, resulting in paranoid and abusive behavior towards people who would have been considered citizens in the years before the collapse.

Ken Layne

Within the turmoil and chaos of these revolutionary times, a small group in Los Angeles decides to go off-grid and try their hand at providing for themselves, eventually leaving the cities for the unpaved cul-de-sacs and unfinished houses abandoned by builders and financiers throughout the once-rapidly growing region. Layne makes these futuristic communities extraordinarily believable in several ways. He takes the current housing crisis and extrapolates it to believable ends, allowing the self-sustaining villages to carry their somewhat humorous subdivision monikers such as “Cabernet Ridge” and “Mariposa Landing.” He gets into the psychology of wants and needs to present a very believable moral and social landscape as well. The community members are refugees from contemporary society, and they bring with them the human baggage that accompanies any transitioning lifestyle and culture. In order to survive, they return to their most basic needs and rely on community to provide. They barter and build, harvest their own food, educate their own children, and police their own ranks. They also grow: by the end of the book, they spread all the way up the coast of California and into northern Nevada.

Layne also captures their spiritual needs in what is the most prominent undertone in this book: a return-to-earth paradigm. The denizens of places like “Hawk Ridge at Truckee Meadows” and the “Villages at Newhall Ranchos” are spiritual people. They ritualize evening meal times, musical fellowship, and solstice events. In fact, readers will notice that Layne’s epistolary novel is not comparable to its classic predecessors like Frankenstein or Dracula but far more similar to the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Like Paul the Apostle’s writings to the early churches after his conversion, the author of these letters, the mysterious “N,” spreads similar messages. The difference, of course, is in the theology, which is more akin to the writings and views of John Muir and Edward Abbey.

No doubt this is what Layne intends with this book. Dignity makes a statement about why we live the way we do, and why we are fearfully awaiting a grotesque collapse to make changes. At times, the cynical and violent government plots and the human despair in his desert towns seem to be warnings of how far mankind can fall, but that is not the whole story. As the title indicates, Layne is really writing about the opportunities underneath all of that human pain—opportunities for peace, for hope, for fulfillment, and above all, for basic dignity.

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Wormwood, Nevada, the latest novel by David Oppegaard, is the story of Tyler and Anna Mayfield, who transplant from Omaha, Nebraska, to their temporary home in central Nevada. They moved west for a new start on life, a year of teaching, and with hopes that they could parlay it into something bigger.

Tyler and Anna met in college, where they were both literature majors and shared many formative experiences: He was defined by the sudden disappearance of his older brother, Cody, and she by her victorious run as a Nebraska beauty queen. Moving in with his aunt in the desert community of Wormwood, the two explore their new reality: a town populated by the lonely and the desperate. Before they can get comfortable, a meteorite lands in the center of the town. This bizarre event has an equalizing effect: Everyone in Wormwood, from the authentic cowboy to the town drunk to the former Miss Nebraska, embarks on a journey to find what they seem to have lost in the open desert: themselves.

The strongest aspect of Oppegaard’s work is the way in which he captures the essence of a small central Nevada town. Wormwood is a “scrubby cluster of aluminum-sided buildings and concrete,” with a “gray strip of highway to the east, and beyond the highway just more sagebrush, as far as a person could see.” Economically, it is a town at once embittered by the belief that it is disregarded by the state’s population centers—“Hell, even the government would forget about us if it didn’t want our taxes so bad”—and eager to find a tourism draw that might bring with it “heaps of money, commercial development, a major chain restaurant.” Socially, it’s a rural community like any other that peppers the Nevada landscape, full of people who have chosen the solitude of the desert, and the others who just seem stuck there.

David Oppegaard

Though Oppegaard convincingly and at times beautifully describes Wormwood as though he had spent many days there, you will not find it on a Nevada map. He gives clues to its location, though at times these contradict one another: Late in the book, he implies that it is on old US Highway 50, the historic Lincoln highway which runs through the center of the state, east to west; earlier, he writes that it is 300 miles northeast of Las Vegas, putting it, presumably, near Austin, Nevada, a town that could work with his description of Wormwood; and even earlier he states that it is two hours from Vegas. Nevada is somewhat famous for its relaxed traffic laws, but traveling 150 miles an hour seems impossible, save by alien spacecraft. Luckily, late in the book, Oppegaard provides the reader with just such a vehicle.

Aliens as characters and plot devices aren’t such a great leap for readers aware of Nevada’s rural population’s long focus on beings from other planets. Home to the mysterious Area 51, the Extraterrestrial Highway, and even Art Bell’s famous radio show, Coast-to-Coast AM, broadcasting from Pahrump, Nevada, the desert is a place where alien adherents and aficionados have gathered for decades. Pahrump, the towns along the Extraterrestrial Highway, or anyplace near enough to Area 51 to benefit economically from its presence could easily pass for Wormwood. For the people of Wormwood, the visitors serve as an impetus to start experiencing the lives they have been putting off.

The name Wormwood serves as a multiple metaphor, symbolically referencing at least four interpretations of the bitter plant. Most obviously is the use of wormwood in the preparation of absinthe, the banned-in-America bitter known for causing hallucinations. It is also a loose translation of the Ukrainian word chornobyl, thus referencing the devastating 1986 nuclear disaster, Biblically speaking, wormwood offers two references: in Exodus, Moses grinds up wormwood and puts it into his followers’ water for them to drink; at the other end of the Bible, in the Book of Revelation, God punishes his people with the plague of wormwood, one of the signs of the end of the world. Oppegaard invokes all these meanings as the townspeople search for real meaning in their own lives. Hallucinations, premonitions, dreams of nuclear holocaust, all push them to seek fulfillment, closure, and a sense of being a part of something that matters. Oppegaard weaves these various interpretations through the novel masterfully and subtly, leaving the most intriguing for the final pages. The result is complex and compelling, a book that appeals both for its treatment of the spectacular and its interesting take on its characters’ personal growth.

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A Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is a theory about the way wars will be fought in the future. RMAs often drive recommendations for technological and organizational change in military institutions. Gunpowder, for instance, led to massive changes in the way wars were fought and thought about.

Earlier this year, two books were released that suggest technological advances will combine with human nature to bring about the next RMA. The books, P.W. Singer’s Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution in the 21st Century and Capt. Paul K. Chappell’s Will War Ever End?: A Soldier’s Vision for Peace for the 21^st Century, were released within days of each other; they ask some very similar questions, and even come to some of the same conclusions, but their approaches could not be more different.

In Wired for War, Singer, a 29-year-old Brookings Institute fellow, argues that the next RMA will be built around robotics. He addresses pertinent philosophical questions such as whether machines can commit war crimes. Perhaps most intriguingly, he argues that in diminishing the emotional risks of combat, robots on the battlefield may also defuse emotional calls often used to rally support for wars, perhaps diminishing the human appetite for war altogether.

Rather than focusing on technology, Chappell’s book deals primarily with a historic and deeply controversial question: “Is man naturally violent or peaceful?” Chappell, also 29, graduated from West Point in 2002 (where he was a classmate of this reviewer’s), was deployed to Baghdad in 2006 and 2007, and currently commands a Patriot battery at Fort Bliss, TX. Will War Ever End? is the precursor to his forthcoming book, The End of War.

Chappell’s book is actually two complementary works. One is descriptive, analyzing the nature of humanity and questioning the assumption that it is inherently violent and aggressive. The other is prescriptive, calling for action and laying out loose guidelines for how mankind might start the process of achieving peace in our time.

Few authors would dare to engage in such a deeply controversial and historic argument, and fewer would do so from such a personal perspective. Chappell’s strikingly intimate work details painful experiences that have caused him to look for explanations of man’s basic nature. He starts by trying to understand “every Army’s greatest problem”—how militaries condition soldiers not to retreat when battle begins. He starts with the early Greek militaries, moving all the way up through the contemporary American military’s system of medals for valor, along the way developing a psychology of warfare that supports his overall assertion that it can be ended.

Humans are inherently peaceful beings, Chappell argues, and we require cooperation and community for basic survival. He details “the indestructible bond” of unconditional love between soldiers, and from the soldiers to those for whom they are fighting and willing to die. Aggression and posturing, on and off the battlefield, are tactics to avoid a fight altogether by mentally overwhelming the adversary.

Chappell offers two key terms, redefined for the psychological lexicon of warfare: fury and rage. Fury is the combination of unconditional love and adrenaline that makes us fight for loved ones who are in danger. Conversely, rage is the combination of hatred and adrenaline that leads to a limitless and irrational violence. “Fury,” Chappell notes, “is a survival instinct that makes us natural protectors but not natural killers.” Rage results not only in harm to our fellow man, but also to ourselves because of the diminishing qualities of hatred.

The logic of Will War Ever End? is summed up as follows:

“It is a fact that war drives people insane, that the greatest problem of every army is how to stop soldiers from running away, that being loving allows us to be brave, that cooperation is the key to our survival, that unconditional love builds an indestructible bond between people, that we have a stronger instinct to posture than to kill, that fury motivates us to protect our loved ones, that hatred is always painful, that unconditional love is inherently joyful, and that unconditional love is stronger than hatred. This is simply who we are and these facts prove that human beings are not naturally violent. War is not inevitable, and we all have the power to help end war and ensure the survival of humanity.”

Paul K. Chappell

Chappell goes on to describe how humanity can unlock its naturally peaceful nature. The necessity of changing the path we are on, he argues, is enhanced by rapid increases in combat strength throughout the world. “A hundred years ago, human beings were developing automatic machine guns. Today we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over.” A new model will also be necessary to combat real sources of terrorism in the current age of asymmetric warfare.

He calls for “Soldiers of Peace,” modeled after Gandhi and Socrates, to wage peace with ideas and words instead of weapons. He calls upon us to return to the principles of unconditional love and struggle toward a “New Enlightenment.” This, he claims, will allow us to understand the mechanics of hatred and how it leads to warfare. Lastly, he asks us to start at the local level by discussing these ideas with our friends and family.

Readers of Chappell’s book will almost certainly fall into two immediate camps: those who view his theses as achievable and those who view them as naïve. Critics will point to Chappell’s reliance on the book On Killing, by Lt. Colonel David Grossman for its psychological schema, and they will question some of his premises and conclusions. Supporters will be extremely pleased that a veteran of modern warfare offers this hope for a peaceful future. But even if they disagree with his ideas, honest readers will conclude that Chappell has undertaken a huge and important project, and will look forward to seeing how it is further developed in The End of War, and to finding out if, in fact, peace is the next Revolution in Military Affairs.

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“That gorgeous cholla cactus outside the window also has horribly sharp spines. The desert is an incredibly violent environment. Plants and animals had to get mean as hell in order to survive.”

Don Waters’s story collection, Desert Gothic, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. He is the recipient of the 2009 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in fiction and the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. His short fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Epoch, Tin House, The Believer, the 2009 Pushcart Prize anthology, and Best of the West 2009. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his partner, the author Robin Romm.

Rumpus: What’s the story behind the title of your book, Desert Gothic?

Waters: Let me just say that I have a major brain crush on Flannery O’Connor and many other Southern Gothic writers. Southern Gothic themes speak to me. When I put the collection together, I realized that there was commonality between my writing and Southern Gothic. Some characters have deformities and a certain physical grotesqueness. Some characters are sent on journeys. And of course, there’s the regionalism aspect. But my stories take place in the American desert. So I thought it was natural, as a sort of umbrella description, to title the book Desert Gothic.

I like Joyce Carol Oates’ explanation that the gothic imagination is a blend of the sacred and the profane. The opening story in Desert Gothic certainly fits this description. But in general, I think the term gothic tends to confuse. One reviewer wrote that there was nothing gothic about the book. I disagree. There’s an entire body of literature that fits into the gothic model. The confusion comes from the label, I think. We have gothic architecture, historical gothic novels, gothic music, and when I was growing up, at least, an entire subgenre of teenage kids with interesting choices in eye makeup. Anyway, the word has long legs. It spans centuries. It’s bound to confuse, which is okay. I like that.

Rumpus: What are the connections between the stories in your collection?

Waters: The American desert, of course. That’s the connection, especially the Nevada and Arizona deserts.

Our culture has mythologized the desert as this enchanted, magical, somewhat holy place, particularly here in Santa Fe. Take a look at a picture of Monument Valley or a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Both can be awe-inspiring. Such massive beauty humbles you.

But I wanted to add a correction to some of that. When you live in the desert, as I do, you understand that the opposite also applies. That gorgeous cholla cactus outside the window also has horribly sharp spines. The desert is an incredibly violent environment. Plants and animals had to get mean as hell in order to survive. Not long ago, I went on a hike in the mountains north of Santa Fe. The views were glorious. And then later in the day, a poisonous centipede crawled over my bare foot in the bathroom. The desert is full of contradictions.

Rumpus: Did you intend for the desert to serve as an extra character in your stories?

Waters: Not necessarily, but the desert certainly is present in a major way. Desert cities are also represented. Reno, Las Vegas, Tucson. Initially, when I put the collection together, I had eighteen stories in front of me. I think fifteen out of the eighteen were set in the desert. I chose the strongest ten, and those became Desert Gothic.

It just so happens that the desert is in my lungs. I love the Pacific Northwest, and parts of the east coast, but all those trees make me feel so crowded in. I need to be able to see distances. The desert is all about distances. It’s also a fine place to gain perspective and realize how small our lives really are.

Rumpus: One thing that really makes your collection extraordinary is the unique characters at the heart of each story. Can you explain the commonalities these characters share?

Waters: They’re all flawed, and they all fear death. Each of them, in their way, also recognizes the absurdities in life, although they may not come out and say it. In other words, they’re human.

When I draft a character in my notebook, I like to give that character a string of DNA. If I know a character’s strong qualities as well as deficiencies, then I begin to understand what the character wants. If I know what the character wants, I begin to understand the story better.

I don’t like reading books where the characters don’t have at least one thing wrong with them. I stop believing the story, the characters, all of it.

Rumpus: The details in your characters—from their occupations to their health to their religious beliefs—are rich and add tremendously to the stories. How much research did you have to do for them?

Waters: Character detail is always important. When I’m looking into a character’s occupation or health problem, I tend to do a lot of research. Sometimes too much. When I was in Oakland, CA, I lived across the street from a mortuary and down the block from a crematorium. I wanted to invent a character who worked there, and an employee at the crematorium was tremendously helpful. He told me almost everything he knew. The story wouldn’t have the inside jargon without his help. Usually, when I’m researching, I just find out who the expert is and contact them and ask questions. Recently, I needed information about zoo animals. Instead of going to the library, I called the San Diego Zoo. I called the National Zoo in Washington. I called the Oakland Zoo. You can always get great anecdotes when talking to someone one-on-one. You won’t get that by reading an encyclopedia entry. People are generally very nice and willing to help.

Rumpus: Your writing echoes some of the themes and feelings evoked by fellow Reno native Willy Vlautin’s band, Richmond Fontaine. What is it about Reno, and the desert, that allows both of you to develop similar themes independently?

Waters: I suppose we saw and experienced a lot of the same things. Reno, when I was growing up, felt small. But there were so many larger-than-life characters there. Joe Conforte, for example. He owned the Mustang Ranch brothel. He fled to Brazil in the 1990s because he had so much trouble with the law. But I remember that he also used to give away free turkeys at Thanksgiving. Why did he do this? Goodwill? Because he was a nice man? I still don’t know.

I guess that being born and raised in Reno elicits similar reactions. And those reactions can be strong. After all, it’s hard not to walk past a downtown Reno motel that rents rooms by the month and not wonder about the busted lives living inside those shag carpet rooms.

I’ve been all over the country, driven from the west coast to the east coast ten times, and Reno still strikes me as completely unique. When I lived in New York, it felt odd to admit that I was born and raised in Reno. Many people had never met anyone from Reno. I felt like an alien, and for good reason. It’s as though I’d breathed a different kind of air my entire life. Who else in the country gets raised amid neon casino lights, pawn shops, slot machines inside grocery stores, and legal brothels just outside of town?

As for the band Richmond Fontaine, well, count me as a fan. A very nice woman at Sundance bookstore in Reno turned me on to the band when I gave a reading there. I bought several of the band’s albums. I especially love The Fitzgerald, named after the downtown casino. When I first listened to that album, I thought it sounded like the soundtrack to my book.

Rumpus: Is there a particular author or work that you believe has been more influential to your writing than others?

Waters: That’s a tough question. I don’t want to omit anyone. Naturally, I could list for you the authors that get royalty treatment in my bookshelf. Amy Hempel, Edward Abbey, Joan Didion, Ben Fountain, Don Delillo, Patricia Highsmith, and of course Flannery O’Connor and the so-called dirty realists.

This may sound like an odd pairing, but Vladimir Nabokov and Dennis Cooper have had a tremendous influence. My writing is nothing like Nabokov’s or Cooper’s, but their influence burns bright.

I read Nabokov’s Pale Fire when I was twenty-one. He opened up new worlds. His writing is brilliant and playful and dangerous. He was unlike anyone I’d ever read. At that time, I couldn’t get enough. I read something like seven of his novels that year. And when I read Cooper’s book Guide, his prose simply disassembled me. He writes in a colloquial style that’s poetic and sharp as a diamond. He also redefined for me what’s possible in a novel.

Rumpus: Your book captures life in the desert and its cities like only a native could. What kind of response do you get from those outside the desert west?

Waters: With this book, in particular, the purpose wasn’t just to write about the desert and its cities and people. That’s what I know, so I drew from that. I don’t consider myself a western writer, or a southwestern writer, but I don’t mind the label either. In the book I wanted to explore hard-scrabble lives on the outer economic seams. I felt a very strong obligation to write about people and situations that are so often overlooked. Not to mention, there’s an inherent sense of narrative pressure when writing about lives on the brink.

The responses have been kind, in general. A friend in New York said that I brought the desert landscape to life. He said that he’d never been, and the descriptions were vivid. That’s always nice. Otherwise, I just hope to tell a good story.

Rumpus: The city of Reno conjures up something unique in the American mind. What are your favorite references to the city in the broader culture?

Waters: One favorite reference, besides Johnny Cash’s famous line about shooting a man in Reno, would have to be from Tom Waits’ song “Hang on St. Christopher.” It goes something like “Hang on St. Christopher. Get me to Reno and bring it in low.” I always imagine cruising into town on east I-80 and driving a muscle car while listening to that song.

I also like Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie, Hard Eight, which was filmed in Reno. I haven’t seen that one in a while, so I wonder if it would hold up. I also have a vague memory about being an extra in that ridiculous Kingpin movie. But I will neither deny nor confirm the scene in which I do or do not appear.

Rumpus: What other projects are you working on?

Waters: I’ve been working on a novel for the past two and a half years. I have a draft of it now. These days, I print it out and demolish the pages with a red pen. So far I’ve done this seventeen times. I don’t know who said it, perhaps Joyce Carol Oates, but she said that writers are all masochists. Whenever I sit down with my red pen, I have to agree. Of course, there’s also a bit of pleasure to be found in pain.

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