K.M. Soehnlein is the author of three novels and the recipient of a Lambda Award and the Henfield Prize. In his widely praised first novel, The World of Normal Boys, Soehnlein’s teenage protagonist, Robin MacKenzie, not only contends with the difficulties of realizing he’s gay but also with his guilt for his younger brother’s death in a playground accident. In his second novel, You Can Say You Knew Me When, Soehnlein nailed the manners and mores of San Francisco in the era of the dot-com bust.

His new book, Robin and Ruby, is a sequel to The World of Normal Boys, set in the mid-1980s. Robin, age 20, and his sister Ruby, age 19, take turns narrating the story. When Ruby disappears from a party on the weekend that marks the anniversary of their brother’s death, Robin takes off to find her, only to discover she isn’t exactly in need of rescue.

K.M. Soehnlein lives in San Francisco and teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco (where this interviewer also teaches). Today, April 1, Soehnlein will read at Books Inc. in San Francisco (Market St.); on April 7, he will read at Barnes and Noble in New York City (Broadway at 82nd St.).

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The Rumpus: Why a sequel?

Soehnlein: In The World of Normal Boys, Ruby didn’t get a lot of time on the page. She’s a crucial character, but in the background. I felt Ruby was as much like me as Robin was, perhaps even more so. When I was a teen I was pretty religious, intensely involved in Catholicism for many years. For Ruby, this begins in The World of Normal Boys; she prays, goes to church, sets up an altar for her brother Jackson when he’s lying in a coma. I knew her religious phase wouldn’t last forever, and I wanted to come back to her on the other side of her religious involvement, when she’s stopped believing.

The other reason I wrote this novel was that after writing two books with male characters I wanted to write from a different point of view.

Rumpus: At Robin’s and Ruby’s age, it seems so important to the struggle for identity to believe passionately, absolutely—and you capture this so well. Each of them comes to a moment of insight when they begin to realize things can’t be held to that hard, and that life will be changeable. What drew you to this subject?

Soehnlein: Knowing that we’d meet Ruby at the point where she stopped believing, I knew I was also going to have to deal with what you do with your capacity for belief if you don’t have an object for your belief. I remember being in the same position as Ruby, when I no longer believed in God as I was raised to believe. But I still am a believer—it’s a personality trait, to be someone who can believe. But then what do you believe in?

Rumpus: Art! The last resort of disillusioned Catholic boys and girls everywhere…

Soehnlein: I believe in art, and more fundamentally the freedom to express one’s self creatively. Ruby and Robin don’t know yet what they’ll ultimately believe in or how they’ll organize their lives. They’re kind of in limbo.

I am always interested in characters who are in these kinds of transitional moments in their lives, when it’s not clear where they’re going to end up. It’s interesting territory for fiction. Robin’s situation is the opposite of Ruby’s: He’s believed only in himself because he struck out independently at a young age. He’s realizing he’s more connected to people in his life than he’s allowed himself to admit. He goes from being someone who’s independent to someone who’s sort of interdependent—involved with his sister and also with his friend George, who’s an important part of the story.

Rumpus: The era of the novel matters a lot to these themes. The early days of the AIDS epidemic followed right after the early days of sex-without-shame, especially for women and gays. And then the gate just slams on it. There was so much paranoia, and at the same time the crisis brought out such altruism and brotherhood among gay men. Interdependence.

Soehnlein: The book takes place in 1985, so AIDS has only just been named. A character like Robin is mostly not being altruistic in the face of this epidemic—he’s just scared. I wanted to capture the fear that would hover over someone like him, who’d been sexually active for the last few years, and show how he would make decisions based on that fear—like looking for a “safe” boyfriend he’d imagine could protect him from the risk of infection. Having said that, I wanted the epidemic to live in the background. The characters are aware of it, even driven by it, but it’s not the novel’s subject.

Rumpus: Ruby narrates what is her first genuine sexual experience, with Chris, a boy for whom she has deep feelings. It’s so wonderfully done—how alive she becomes when she’s with him, their responsiveness to each other, their fumbling, their combustible anxiety to get it right. Completely convincing. Part of what’s going on for brother and sister is the fear that somewhere else, vivid life is going on, and they’ve been left behind—which matters so much to this sex scene. Ruby and Chris start to undress, and she takes him by the hand: “Just to walk across a room half naked—it’s not something she’s done before. The only sound is the rain on the glass, coming down hard, as if someone outside is clattering on an electric typewriter, writing down their story as it happens.” You are a wonderful writer of sex: you’re explicit but still erotic, which is a rare feat, and the sex is full of emotion and opens up so many dimensions of character.

Soehnlein: I’ve thought about this and even taught classes on writing about sex, and I’ve looked closely at different writers’ sex scenes. On the level of craft I’ve given it a lot of thought. The pitfalls are simple: It can sound clinical or medical, which isn’t right, or pornographic, because the characters disappear. The key is to remember a sex scene is a scene of dramatic action and psychological development. You need to pay attention to emotion and to a character’s self-awareness or lack of self-awareness.

The biggest problem in the fictional treatment of sex is that it’s not treated as part of the story but as a pause from the story. The best sex scenes in fiction are the ones that advance the story. Robin and Ruby each have sex in the book, but they have very different sexual interactions, and in terms of the writing style, I’ve made different choices for each of them.

Rumpus: The brother-sister relationship is a big part of the book. What drew you to that as a subject?

Soehnlein: Not a lot of contemporary fiction is written about brothers and sisters. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey was an inspiration for me. In Franny and Zooey, the sister gets in trouble and the brother comes to help her out. But I wanted to make sure that in my novel the sister had more to do than lie around on a sofa muttering, which is what Franny does for two-thirds of Salinger’s novel.

It’s about transitioning from adolescence, when you live together with parents and see each other every day, to the era when you don’t live together and start to grow apart and have to figure out how you’re going to have an adult relationship. This is Robin and Ruby’s first glimpse of what they might have and it’s about a childhood dynamic that they now need to shed. In some ways, it’s about learning to be kind to each other.

Rumpus: Wasn’t that dynamic affected by Robin’s pretty extreme risk-taking as an adolescent?

Soehnlein: Robin took risks as a teenager while Ruby was a good girl. Now Robin wants to stop taking risks at the very moment when Ruby is ready to. The other thing that’s important is that Ruby no longer wants to be treated as the younger sister, somehow inferior to her older brother. One of the key moments for me occurs after Robin finally finds Ruby, and she says, “I’m not a damsel in distress. I don’t need rescuing.” What if Franny could take care of her problems without Zooey?

Rumpus: How did you find the voices of these two characters?

Soehnlein: It was very hard to do, but I wanted to try to make their sections sound different enough. There were two elements to that. First, character. If you’re using a metaphor, does it come out of the character’s world? The things Robin notices should be different from the things Ruby notices. Then there’s the level of nerdy writer craft stuff. I thought a lot about grammar, syntax, punctuation. If you look closely, I use certain punctuation marks in Robin’s section that I do not use in Ruby’s, almost an artificial means to distinguish one from the other.

Rumpus: But a lot of times when you find the voice for a story, it feels received—like you’re in a trance, channeling this other being.

Soehnlein: Yes. But most of the choices I made about sentence structure and so on happened during revision.

Rumpus: Which makes sense—in the first draft your energy is pretty much taken up with plowing through the story.

Soehnlein: I had to just loosen up and let it happen, but there were points when I was very conscious of all these elements of style.

Rumpus: The back-and-forth of it is hard to explain as a teacher because students approach it with the sense that they have a creative mind and an analytical mind (all that right brain/left brain hooey), and the two are not friends.

Soehnlein: Living in the world of the workshop, which I do as a teacher, you have to be articulate about craft. And that often involves imposing analysis on work that’s in a pretty raw state. But revision is a creative act, not merely an analytical imposition of rules of style on a more creative first draft. That’s a myth—that the first draft is more creative and everything after that is ruining creativity. Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, “First thought, best thought,” benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they’re the best of his writing.

A knowledge of craft is not the enemy of creativity. You sit down to write and realize, today’s going to be a really unconscious day and I’m going to let it all out. Or, today’s going to be analytical. And some days all mixed up.

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A boom economy may be only a sometime reality, but it’s a perennial fixture of the American imagination, in which prosperity is inextricably linked to the middle-class dream of happiness. There are all kinds of fallout for being in the grip of this illusion, which powers Eric Puchner’s gut-wrenching novel Model Home. Set in the mid-1980s at the height of the Reagan era (a mirror for the Bush era we’ve all endured), the novel tells the story of Camille and Warren Ziller and their three kids. The family has moved from Wisconsin to Southern California so Warren can pursue a real-estate windfall, and the novel opens as this dream has begun to crumble.

Warren has built a housing development in the desert, on the risky assumption that suburbia will keep expanding; the development turns out to be located close to a construction site for an industrial waste dump. Warren’s car has been repossessed, his credit cards rescinded—though he’s not above trying to sell houses to unsuspecting customers, his project is in ruins and he has yet to admit the truth to his family. Before the novel closes, worse disasters will befall all of them.

Puchner has impressive credentials as a writer. He’s a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford and his short story collection, 2005’s Music through the Floor, was deservedly praised for both skillful storytelling and fluent style. In Model Home, his first novel, Puchner so often gets things just right. Like the Zillers’ dream of prosperity, Puchner’s story splinters as it’s told from the perspectives of various family members, so that a reader is privy to all the missed connections. Puchner knows how to bring home the ache, to let us feel with the characters that connection is only just barely out of reach. Warren, nostalgic for their former life in Wisconsin, recalls that “the house was a minefield of shoes, and he could identify his children by the creaks they made in the floor above him.”

The best characters in this novel are the three kids: Dustin, the family’s golden child, who’s just about to leave for college; Lyle, a sixteen-year-old girl; and Jonas, age 11. Lyle wholeheartedly rejects the “Golden State” mentality (which she terms “a fascist condition”), and she counters her mother’s chirpiness by making lists of things she hates, which include “people who call old women ‘cute’… volleyball… people who use the term ‘110%’… people who order in Spanish at Mexican restaurants,” and “anyone who says the sentence: And WHO do we have here?” You gotta love her. Jonas, the youngest child, wouldn’t fit in anywhere: He’s obsessed with death and disaster, dresses in orange from head to toe, and picks the raisins out of his cereal only so he can sprinkle them back on.

Eric Puchner

But it’s Dustin, the eldest, who’s at the heart of Model Home. Everything about him is marked by ease—his charm, good looks, bright future, his picture-perfect girlfriend, Kira. Even his dabbling with a rock band seems like playacting at rebellion, yet Dustin is drawn to “freaks” and “outsiders,” at some gut level suspicious of the charmed life he’s leading. One of the pleasures of this novel is Puchner’s eye for detail: as Dustin walks on the beach, we’re told that “he loved, when he walked, the way the sand fleas rose in front of his feet before he stepped, psychically attuned to his stride, as if there were an invisible person walking in front of him.” What’s so nice about such details is that they not only convey physical reality with heightened attentiveness, they offer rich characterization—of the whole family, it’s only Dustin who steps into the Southern California dream with ease—and even foreshadowing, as that “invisible person” stands for a self that Dustin isn’t ready to acknowledge.

When Kira’s fifteen-year-old sister, Taz, enters the scene, less attractive than Kira, weirdly dressed, with scabby ears she compulsively picks at, Dustin falls for her, desperate to counter her cynical, mocking view of him. Puchner portrays these two kids not as spoiled or insulated, but as vulnerable to something less than genuine in their middle-class world. Their compelling attraction to each other is completely convincing.

At first glance, the Ziller family’s fissures seem pretty ordinary, but the deepest fissures lie within the parents, both of whom are inexplicably unsatisfied with their perfect life and even with their children. Warren, losing his grip as financial disaster worsens by the day, is desperate for his oldest son’s love, and ends up breaking and entering in an effort to help Dustin out of a jam. When he’s caught and arrested, he confesses his financial problems to his wife, and the family takes off on a camping trip, a last stab at anything like normalcy. On their return, Dustin is devastatingly injured in an accident the family believes—mistakenly—was caused by Jonas.

In the wake of the accident, the family’s disintegration accelerates. Warren’s relationship with his wife begins to evaporate—Warren mired in grief over his son’s tragedy, Camille wishing she could have some space in which to feel happy. Dustin endures excruciating physical suffering and a profound emotional desolation, and when he admits to Lyle that he hates everyone now—that he can’t overcome his “glitch”—she feels ashamed of “those lists she’d kept of people she’d hated.” Faced with the ruins of her brother’s life, she can’t feel compassion for her own ordinary flaws and feels guilty for wanting to escape to college. Yet she’s determined to do it. Jonas believes they all hate him for causing the accident, and will eventually put himself, too, at terrible risk, in a tense sequence that provides the novel’s climax.

Trauma has a searing power of erasure, and at his best Eric Puchner lets us witness this happening to his characters and grieve with them. He’s better at conveying this trauma’s effect on the three Ziller children than on their parents—Camille is the novel’s least convincing character, and it’s hard to see what connections the author wants to make between Warren’s morally flawed dream and the horrific ordeal the family undergoes, between Jonas’s “born” misfit status and the one brutally imposed on his brother. Terrible things can happen at random—and Model Home deliberately stresses this—but sometimes those events are so overwhelming it’s difficult for a fiction writer to carve out the necessary space for readers to consider how character is fate, to perceive what choice is left to characters and whether those choices can count for much.

But what a challenge for a writer to set for himself. In the closing section of Model Home, the very small degrees by which each main character tries to negotiate a lost faith in wholeness are finely drawn, and Puchner makes us feel how much those small degrees matter in the face of despair and irretrievable loss.

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The stories in Do Not Deny Me, Jean Thompson’s new collection, are concerned with main characters whose lives are scraped bare, who live in a world flattened by boredom and limitation. These characters do not even have the energy to name or recognize their existential dilemma as such, and small nuisances stand in for crises on a larger scale. Every once in a while, the reader, like the characters, gets the faintest hint of the transformation that ought to be triggered but is never quite accomplished.

Thompson, the author of four acclaimed collections, including Throw Like a Girl and Who Do You Love, seems to have deliberately pared down her style in Do Not Deny Me to suit the tenor of recent times: the collection seems inflected by the moral and cultural exhaustion of the George W. Bush era, in which bewildered resignation suffices in place of a deeply felt despair.

Yet these stories are anything but grim, thanks to Thompson’s wicked sense of humor. In “Soldiers of Spiritos,” the first story, Penrose, an English professor who is by his own admission a “dinosaur, a relic,” is simply clocking hours until retirement. The stately, scholarly articles he used to write have been abandoned in favor of a critical theory invested in everything but the text: “All the new, bright young hires wrote of hegemony and late-capitalist strategies of empire and protofeminists and psychomorphology and colonialism and other reification. It was an evil code he was unable to crack.” Thompson has irresistible fun skewering the jargon of contemporary literary theory, but her main character has lost interest in the alternative too: “It had been discouraging to realize that great, timeless literature, even that portion of it for which he had professed his special affinity and critical passion, was not an endlessly refilling well.” Penrose, like so many of the characters in these stories, has lost faith in the act of investing in his own life. His only solace in this strange new world gutted of meaning is to write a science fiction novel, Soldiers of Spiritos, that thinly disguises his faddish colleagues as conquerors of a people who can only mount a “doomed resistance.” And then one day as he is teaching Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night, an “unremarkable B student,” Sarah Snyder, bursts into tears in class. Later, when Penrose counsels her in his office, the girl’s predicament—her feeling response to literature gets in the way of her ability to wield critical theory—ignites just a tiny spark of conviction in him, “an ember flaring as they breathed on it.”

Jean Thompson

Such small, precarious moments of victory are the best these characters can manage. In “Do Not Deny Me,” Julia, after the death of her boyfriend, is briefly lured by the mystical promise of the occult (clairvoyance, contact with the dead) but ultimately realizes that this is a way of dodging rather than facing her grief. In “Woman at the Well,” a woman serving a life sentence for murdering her husband attends a prison Bible Study group for lack of anything better to do, but when one of the inmates has an epileptic seizure, she’s jolted into compassion for another young prisoner, seeing in her a “sweet baby girl” where before she saw only a cruel tormenter. In “Treehouse,” Garrison builds a treehouse in his backyard, an utterly purposeless project for a man whose daughter and son are grown. Inexplicably alienated in his job, his marriage, even his relations with his children, Garrison pursues this project because “mindlessness was what he wanted. But you couldn’t go after it straight on. You couldn’t even really want it. You had to sneak up on it, forget all about it, and if you were lucky it showed itself, like a rare bird.” The true purpose of the treehouse is to provide himself with a refuge from a world “too cluttered with bewilderment and pain.”

The best stories in Do Not Deny Me make us feel the alienation and disorientation of Thompson’s characters as an experience that is paradoxically rich, emotionally and metaphorically. The precision and originality of her language enable us to inhabit this leached despair and feel how close it veers to genuine anguish, to the almost-possible investment of real feeling. Which is why we can sympathize with the incapacitated stroke victim who plots revenge on his controlling wife, or the calculating corporate hack who routinely betrays others but is spellbound when he watches a construction worker fall several stories to his death. Which is why we can be terrified—and once in a while consoled—by people who almost come to grips with the nameless source of their despair.

Yet some of the stories also feel thin. In “Little Brown Bird,’ the portrait of a woman who quilts in order to smother her confusion and pain comes off as sentimental, and a few other stories attempt to get too much from the trick of unreliable narration. At times race consciousness serves as a pat shorthand for the shortcomings of the main characters. Yet these failings reflect the challenges Thompson sets for herself and which she manages brilliantly in other stories. She’s determined to make the quotidian—lives lived on diminished terms—suggest a horror at the periphery, and to document the courage it takes to acknowledge this.

And she’s going to war with the debased language of a media-saturated culture. In the last story in the book, “Her Untold Story,” the recently divorced Lynn watches reality TV, shows that “aimed to find the most miserable and deserving people in America and shower them with consumer goods: clothing, appliances, real estate.” Lynn’s own disappointments somehow do not live up to the standards of television hosts who do their “hopped up best to yank at the heartstrings,” and yet it’s in the acutely observed, quiet miseries that Thompson locates sympathy for her character and an odd hopefulness. The story ends as Lynn sets off with a fellow divorcée for a jog, her one strategy for warding off despair, and repeats to herself the catchphrase “joyful in our beings” until such time as joy might be possible for her again. This small declaration of faith beautifully evokes the aims of the work as a whole.

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