*

JOSHUA MOHR: Nobody treats our friend insomnia with much respect, Michelle.  I’ve been trying to champion it as I toured for my last book, “Damascus,” touting how long my work day is: when others sleep, I get to scribble.  In my world, insomnia is a good thing.  Have you been an insomniac long?

MICHELLE HAIMOFF: Ever since I can remember I couldn’t fall asleep at a normal hour. I remember standing in my crib late at night as, like, a three year-old, bored out of my mind. I read an article somewhere that circadian rhythms are like eye color and some people are genetically nocturnal. I refer to this article (which I could have read anywhere – The Huffington Post, a mattress ad) all the time.

Do you think nocturnality has a genetic component?

MOHR: Some people just wake up at 5 am, even without screaming kids.  Some people slog through the day until midnight and finally seem ready for action.  For me, what’s so exciting about the middle of the night is that the world is so quiet between midnight and 5 a.m.—no email, no texts, no nagging responsibilities.  It’s certainly my most creative time of the day.  Is it yours, too?  How does insomnia impact your art? What’s different about writing in the middle of the night?

HAIMOFF: I have a very hard time focusing during the day. I’m ADD during the day. But as soon as everyone else has fallen asleep, I can finally focus. Once I start writing late at night, I can just go. I can write till dawn without feeling tired. If I could do that during the day I would, but the day is too distracting. I’m not just talking about phone calls and the Internet, although that certainly plays a part, but I can sense that people are out and about, and their energy somehow makes it impossible for me to focus.

When I was nearing the end of my novel I would stay up from dusk to dawn and then sleep all day. I hated it. I didn’t like being off the natural schedule. It made me feel lonely and depressed. But it’s how the book was getting done. I felt like I had no choice. It was the temporal equivalent of hanging every page of the manuscript on the walls. I needed to be able to read through the whole thing in one quiet sitting.

MOHR: I think it’s really interesting what you’re saying about being lonely and depressed while being an insomniac writer.  We have to sleep sometimes, and that usually ends up being some time while the rest of the world is awake.  Loneliness is always one of the reasons I write: to talk to a stranger, to communicate with somebody I don’t know.  I love the idea that books can introduce people to one another that will never have the chance to meet in real life.

You statement about loneliness, though, makes me wonder if you’d rather be a daytime writer.  Does that appeal to you?  Writing books on more of the banker’s hours?

HAIMOFF: Writing in a coffee shop kind of appeals to me. I could never get anything done in a coffee shop, but I think it would be fun to get dressed up and sit there with my laptop drinking a soy latte like a writer in a movie. I find the freelance/creative lifestyle to be so much less glamorous than the corporate grind. Sometimes I have a fleeting moment of insanity where I want an office job just so I can wear the day-to-night looks I see in magazines instead of the KCRW hoodie I’m wearing now.

I’m with you on the fever dream thing. It’s hard to break free from the sobriety of daytime communication and let yourself write frankly. But night writing is like a temporary portal into a private writer’s retreat. It strips away that layer of civilized self-consciousness that normally only large quantities of alcohol can. Drinking and writing has never worked for me personally because I don’t care about being productive at all if I’m so much as buzzed, but I find that writing in the middle of the night can definitely reduce my inhibitions.

I write to talk to strangers too. I’ve always felt like there were so many friends I could make if only we had access to each other, and publishing provides that access. It’s like that Salinger quote, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” I love reaching out to writers on Facebook or Twitter and getting a response and I love getting Facebook or Twitter messages from strangers (or long lost friends) telling me they liked my book. For me, that kind of feedback is the best part of the process.

What’s your favorite part of the process?

MOHR: Yeah, hearing from people that they’re reading the work is amazing.  It also relates to loneliness, in that it’s a temporary salve.  I always feel better when I’ve spoken to somebody through a book.   Especially as an indie writer—so obviously earning a living is off the table—the idea of connecting with other people who loves literature is cathartic.

I was thinking last night about my insomnia and pondering how it’s tied to my odd work ethic.  When I’m working on a book, I can’t sleep.  Period.  It gets pretty nuts.  But when I’m between drafts or taking time away, I always sleep better.  Is it like this for you, too?  Is your insomnia somehow threaded with your work ethic?

HAIMOFF: Definitely. I’ll do anything to meet a deadline, even a deadline I make up arbitrarily in order to motivate myself. If writing’s on my mind and I try to sleep I’ll just end up laying in bed thinking about it anyway, so I figure I might as well be up working. I can go on vacation mode and sleep great, but inevitably I end up feeling guilty about not working. As you know, when you’re a writer it’s not like you get paid vacation time.

Throughout my life, I’ve come up with different theories as to why it’s so difficult for me to get onto a regular sleep schedule. What are your thoughts on the following? Do you relate to any of these?

a) Too much international travel as a little kid (my dad’s family lives in the Middle East and we traveled there about once a year from Los Angeles).

b) My dad himself is a bit of an insomniac, so even if it’s not genetic, I still could have been used to someone futzing around the house in the middle of the night.

c) It’s a way to put off the tedium of getting ready for bed (flossing, etc.) for as long as possible.

d) It’s a mature way to be afraid of the dark.

e) It’s a sign of genius (this one’s obvious.)

d) Something about vampires, but I haven’t really fleshed that one out yet.

MOHR: I love this list!  I laughed out loud at the idea insomnia is just a way to avoid flossing.  That’s fantastic.

Besides the fact, it’s obviously a sign of genius, the one from your litany that stuck out the most to me is being afraid of the dark.  As I’m typing this now, it’s a bit before 1 a.m. and there’s not a single light on in my apartment, besides the creepy glow from the laptop.  I’d never really noticed or thought about this until right now, but I basically write completely in the dark.  And it’s not as if I can’t flip the switch.  I paid PG&E.  But I dig that nothing else in the world is visible to me except the words while I work.  It’s all about the art!

I teach in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco, and I always push my students to try timed-exercises—setting a stopwatch and just writing for ten minutes straight, fifteen minutes straight, whatever.  No editing.  No overanalyzing.  There’s no time to be self-conscious or hedge any bets.  And that’s the state I tend to work in late at night: the house is utterly dark.  I feel brazen on the page.  Is that a part of your process?  Does the literal darkness empower or liberate your imagination like it does mine?

HAIMOFF: Hell no! I’m terrified of the dark. I have all the lights on when I write. But I think the darkness speaks to the idea of writing in a vacuum. My version of this is writing in utter silence. I can’t compose so much as an email if I can hear someone else’s conversation or a song or the TV on in the background.

And I do timed exercises all the time. Seth Godin talks about the “Lizard Brain” or amygdala, which prevents us from taking risks, even relatively safe risks like self-expression. He argues that we procrastinate, not necessarily because anything more pressing demands our time, but because the primal part of our brain keeps us from publicly embarrassing ourselves (by thwarting potentially bad writing, for example). In order to override the irrational lizard brain, sometimes we need to force that first push. Writing quickly, even if it’s just for ten or twenty minutes, can do this.

Do you battle with your lizard brain?

MOHR: I always draft quickly.  But that just means I have to do like 25-30 drafts for every book, which is fine by me.  I have a compulsive personality and writing gives me something positive to fixate on, rather than booze or drugs.  So insomnia coupled with a book that’s not quite right, a chapter that’s a mess, these are the challenges that excite me.

I love how we both write books, both suffer from insomnia, and yet our processes are pretty different.  It just goes to show that at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how a writer gets her work done—the only thing that matters is that she’s actually writing.  It’s about 2 a.m. and I’m just about to dive in on this new book I’m wrestling with.  The house is dark.  It’s raining outside.  There’s actually lightning, which is pretty rare in San Francisco.  For the next five hours, Mr. Hyde gets to do his worst.  How about you?  Will you scribble this evening?

HAIMOFF: I will probably do what I do way too often, regardless of how late I stay up. Fall asleep with a thought that I promise myself I’ll remember when I wake, and then lose it forever because I didn’t take the time to write it down.

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The literati have been impatiently awaiting the inaugural titles from Richard Nash’s new publishing venture, Red Lemonade. Nash spent most of the millennia as the editor extraordinaire at Soft Skull Press. He has the reputation as a “writer’s editor.” In fact, Jonathan Evison said of his time working with Nash: “He was a vast store of knowledge, so that the otherwise mystifying publishing process made sense. He champions work that might otherwise fall under the commercial radar, and he works his tail off for his writers.”

Our impatience is finally over. Red Lemonade’s released its first couple titles this season and among them is the fearless Zazen. Its author is first-time novelist Vanessa Veselka. She’s penned a dystopic romp through a ravaged America. It’s the best kind of imagined world because it’s one ripe with recognizable humanness amidst unpredictable narrative bends.

That humanity starts with Veselka herself. She offers no short-cuts for her characters. Instead, she courageously splatters them onto the page with all their strengths, faults, and biases. She trusts her reader to compile interpretations of what makes these people authentic.

The writing in Zazen is absolutely beautiful on a line-by-line basis. Often, authors fall into two distinct camps: those who write gorgeous sentences, but who can’t spin conflict-driven yarns, direct storytelling taking a backseat to narrative navel-gazing; on the other side are the ones who emphasize plot, building much more filmic stories, yet those authors never take the time to make each sentence stand on their own as pieces of art.

The lucky few are able to do both of these things simultaneously—think Denis Johnson, John Fante, Lynda Barry—and Veselka is one of them. “On the grave itself someone had pressed beads into the dirt. Hundreds of them sprinkled, set and flashing like pyrite in a creek.”

In lesser hands, symbols loaded with such morbid weight would be abused, pounded on like power chords in bad punk rock songs. Veselka, though, paints such things with a brush neither too light nor too extreme. She gives us enough so that the moments can be easily visualized, even when she renders scenes we’d rather not picture so viscerally. This highlights another of the book’s great achievements—the sublime dignity rendered while the world crumbles.

Zazen tells the story of Della, a precocious waitress at a vegan restaurant. She’s a thoughtfully caustic protagonist who is an absolute joy to spend time with. The camaraderie that the audience develops with her is essential, too, because the novel offers a grim view of the future. Yet as we push deeper into the book, it never feels like a slog. You want to flip pages, even as conditions worsen, spirits wane, hopefulness desiccates.

Vanessa Veselka

Veselka accomplishes this not only with the sheer majesty of her words, but also with humor. Yes, there’s a levity that buoys the book above the surface of other apocalyptic stories. “God is a broker!” says the guru from the Church of Enlightened Capital. “We are his clients. We each have a role to play in this free market…How will we invest?”

As Della wings tofu scrambles to her customers, bombs are going off all over town. Many Americans are immigrating to destinations deemed safer around the globe. Yet Della decides to stay—at least for now. Inexplicably, she decides to call in the occasional bomb threat of her own, trying to convince the person on the other end of the phone line of her threat’s verity.

The pacing of the book revs up once Della starts spending time with radicals. There are many fractured groups convinced of their own righteousness. They all have plans for how to get the country back on track. In these passages, it’s painful to recognize post-9/11 America, paranoia feeding preemptive violence leading to even greater devastation.

Veselka offers no easy answers for the chaos unfolding outside the characters’ homes. The allegory is that there is no allegory. There is no quick fix; maybe there’s not a long-term fix either. People search amid the bomb threats and explosions and dangerous terrain of everyday life for ways to persevere.

Bombs are always going off, she tells us. But there are also flashes of elation, even if they seem fleeting as compared to the mass of atrocities. Are these true solutions or commercial breaks? That’s for every reader to determine on her own. Veselka makes a cogent case that among the misanthropy, there’s love left in our bombed-out planet.

As Della tells us, “The world is a violent child none of us will get to see grow up.”

Despite that knowledge—or maybe because of it—Della is going to love life anyway, no matter the paltry life expectancy. That’s a certain kind of faith, one Zazen articulates with devastating acuity.

Related Posts:

• The Transience of Identity: The Rumpus Interview with Vanessa Veselka
• “So Are You Helpless, Tragic, or Stupid?”
• “Revolutionary, Disruptive Technology”: The Business of Books
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• Nash and the “Shitiffication of the Book”

Rumpus friend Joshua Mohr recently sat down for a chat with Patrick DeWitt, whose latest novel, The Sisters Brothers, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly: “DeWitt has produced a genre- bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving.”

***

The Rumpus: I love your new book. It’s a picaresque romp in the old west: gun slingers, saloons, the gold rush. What led you as a writer to this terrain, especially since your first novel, Ablutions, was set in new millennial Hollywood? Was it a conscious choice to veer to an entirely different milieu?

Patrick DeWitt: It was very much a conscious decision to veer from the first book, not so much the contemporary setting as the shit-wallowing subject matter. I wanted the sophomore effort to be free from specific personal experience, but I needed to maintain a personal connection to the story and characters, because that’s what made Ablutions engaging for me to work on. I came to the time period–1851–more or less by accident. The Sisters Brothers started out as an exercise, basically, that continued to grow, and my interest in it grew also; at some point I realized I was working on my next novel, and that it was a western, and there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do about it.

Rumpus: I really like the idea that as writers our material tells us what it wants to evolve into: we listen to the words, rather than steering them (hopefully). What was the writing exercise that launched the project and since so many Rumpus readers are aspiring writers, would you recommend this tactic as a way to turn your imagination loose on the page?

DeWitt: Exercise might not be the correct word. But it occurred to me that the garden-variety neurotic is underrepresented in historical novels and movies, specifically westerns, not because he didn’t exist, but because he was/is considered an uninteresting or ignoble person to focus on. With that in mind, I wrote a testy exchange between two men riding side-by-side on horseback. One of them was self-doubting and vulnerable, while the other was confident to a fault. The scenario ballooned and exhausted itself and I set it aside. Later I found a book about the Gold Rush at a yard sale, and in flipping through this I was reminded of the two men. I picked the piece back up and the larger story began to take shape

Rumpus: “The garden-variety neurotic”: I tell my students that anybody can make a compelling character on the page if the writer does her job right to really inhabit that foreign set of perceptions. What were the struggles trying to get to know a neurotic, to make him charismaticin scene? And how far into the process did you make the determination that having them be brothers would be beneficial to the narrative?

DeWitt: I think everyone is neurotic to some degree, or can relate to the neurotic’s fears, however distantly. Speaking personally, it wasn’t all that much of a stretch to get into the narrator’s head in this way. The question of making him charismatic was something else altogether. I had to ask myself what I find appealing in others (frankness, self-deprecation, curiosity, morbidity) and then try to blend these traits into the narrative voice. Realizing Eli and Charlie were brothers happened at around the thirty or forty page mark. On the one hand it was aggravating to have to go back and rewrite them as siblings, but really, this is where the book took off for me.

Rumpus: Well, you did a fantastic job, not only making the narrator, Eli, a fully realized character, but the brother, Charlie, is equally as fun to spend time with. They are hilarious, and the novel’s dialogue absolutely crackles. You write some of the best dialogue out there right now. Is that all revision? Where/when do you know how to pick the right words for your characters to speak? And any advice for writing successful dialogue?

DeWitt: I do tend to read dialogue aloud, more so than any other parts–to act the conversations out a little. I mean, I’m not stomping around the room and changing outfits, but I try and actually imagine the scenarios. If I’m having trouble putting words in a character’s mouth, nine out of ten times it’s because I don’t know who the character is. I just started this new thing last week and the narrator’s really foggy–funny one minute, melancholy the next. He’s a wealthy businessman, and I’ve never known any wealthy businessmen. What’s his private vocabulary? Is he eloquent, or brash? Does he curse? What are his interests? I haven’t figured it out yet. When I do, I’ll go back to the start and re-write the parts where his isn’t acting like himself.

Rumpus: Revision can be so idiosyncratic from author to author, what’s your specific process?

DeWitt: If I’m working end to end on a completed draft, it’s textbook slash-and-burn carnage, followed by a period of buffing with a shammy, repeated until I’m truly lost, and don’t even know what I’m looking at any more. At this point I go to my trusted readers, and by gauging their reactions I’ll know one of three things has come to pass: 1) I’m done 2) I’m not done 3) I’ve totally messed up and written something the world must never see.

Rumpus: Your novel is very scene-oriented, very cinematic, almost a kind of neo-Spaghetti Western. Was that a conscious decision to pace it in that manner or was that how the story wanted to be told?

DeWitt: No, not really. I did notice, when it came to the formatting/typesetting stage that most of the sections are under five pages, which I think keeps things moving at a good clip. But I wasn’t doing this consciously.

Rumpus: Structurally, you do something in this novel that I’ve never seen before: there are a couple “Intermissions” scattered throughout the action. I was wondering why you decided to use this tack, and also how you determined which chapters were “intermission-worthy.” Did those sections have different “rules” that you set up for yourself?

DeWitt: I can’t remember the original motivation. I think I was trying to amuse myself, which is always dangerous. But those two sections deal with a supernatural element in the shape of a not very nice little girl who may or may not be a seer. I actually suggested to my editor at Ecco that we cut the intermission titles. But she pointed out, correctly, that without the titles those parts were jarring in that they seemed to come out of left field. They’re more effective when the reader knows they aren’t a part of the immediate story.

Rumpus: Setting is an important part of this book. Gold Rush San Francisco is such a vibrant, raucous place. How did you research that era? And more importantly, how did you write a book that didn’t draw attention to its research? Didn’t pummel the reader with peripheral facts?

DeWitt: I wrote a book that didn’t draw attention to its research by not doing very much research in the first place. I looked things up as I needed them, but scouring around for facts is not my idea of a good time. One thing I did do, which probably doesn’t pass for research, is that I used old photographs as prompts. This is how the character of Hermann Kermit Warm came about. I cut out a picture of a prospector from the yard sale book I mentioned earlier, tacked this to the wall in my office, and made up a person based on the image. Anyway, my not having firsthand experience of what I was writing about wasn’t that much of a handicap because character and personality took precedence over setting detail from the start.

Related Posts:

• Claire Messud on making friends with Characters
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***

THE RUMPUS: We’ve all heard the sexy story of the 20-something know-it-all who gets an MFA from Colombia and—poof!—puts out a bestselling first novel. But most working writers follow less sexy routes to publication. Tell us about your apprenticeship. Why did you persevere when nobody gave a fuck?

JONATHAN EVISON: I wrote six unpublished novels, and too many unwanted short stories to count, before All About Lulu was published. I physically dug holes and buried three of my novels in the ground—salted the earth so nothing would ever grow there again. And I loved every minute of it!

I never bothered doubting the occupation, because nothing was going to deter me from doing the thing I loved more than anything else in this world (besides drink beer). Throughout my 20-year apprenticeship, I did virtually every conceivable menial job you can think of, from roadkill hacker-upper to “hot talk” radio jock (the former being infinitely more rewarding). And I’m still drawing from all of these experiences, which is more than I can say about the time I spent sitting in classrooms. Having my work rejected time and again was a minor annoyance, at most. I had the work. I just kept licking envelopes and collecting form rejections as a form of due diligence. If nobody ever published any of my work, and I died in complete obscurity, surrounded by feral cats, I’d be writing novels up until the end.

RUMPUS: That’s quite a visual: you, literally burying your own novels. I’d imagine there’s catharsis there, but also some grief. You’re ambitious on the page, and in such ambition, an artist has to be willing to chance conspicuous failure. Did you worry about that when writing West of Here, a book that meanders between the 19th and 21st centuries, with a sprawling cast of characters?

EVISON: Oh God, yeah. I knew that West of Here stood a great chance of being a stupendous failure. After all, the narrative lens of the novel was conceived as a goddamn kaleidoscope! But I had to go for it I love the challenge. If I’m not pushing myself, the entire process becomes dull—like playing in the fourth quarter of a blowout. What amazes me—and what I would’ve never believed, had you told me four years ago—is that more than one commercial publisher would view it as something with blockbuster potential. Holy cow!

But that’s what I mean by discovery. As I got deep into the book, I realized that it was the characters and the place that were making the novel work, in spite of any grandiose formal constructions I was employing to challenge myself. The story and the themes became so much easier to access when it’s flesh and blood.

RUMPUS: It’s the only honest way to put a story together. But that takes guts, right? Writers need guts. What else do aspiring writers need to crack into this surreal game?

EVISON: You need a shitload of stuff, above and beyond raw talent. You need audacity, faith, savvy, luck, but mostly discipline, to my way of thinking. A lot of sitting in a chair at uncomfortably early hours of the morning, and getting lost inside your imagination. Getting to that place consistently is nothing less than a discipline, not unlike yoga (as much as I abhor yoga). The road is riddled with distractions, self being a big one. It’s a difficult thing to forget yourself, to put your whole life on some back burner, to forget anything exists outside your imagination, and give yourself to your characters. But that’s what you’ve gotta do to get the job done convincingly. Or, at least, that’s what I have to do.

RUMPUS: I know you used to play lots of dirty rock and roll. How does music affect your writing? I tend to like my literature like the best kind of punk/indie—sloppy, vibrantly alive with its flaws, thrumming with the severities of life… Are you a rock-and-roll writer?

EVISON: I’m a rock-and-roll writer in the sense that I like to destroy a hotel mini-bar and fill the bathtub with ice. But as far as the actual rhythm and pulse of my writing, I’d say it varies. Lulu was a rock-and-roller. West of Here is more of a big, stringy orchestral piece. I would characterize The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving [Evison’s forthcoming third novel] as a soul ballad, maybe. The book I’m writing now is more of a country song. But most of all, I love green M&Ms and mini-bars and bathtubs that hold lots of ice.

RUMPUS: How much time do you devote to a manuscript once you have a rough draft completed? I tell my students that the hard part of writing a novel is the amount of work after draft one. Do you agree?

EVISON: I’m obsessive. My first draft is about a tenth draft. I reverse-engineer a lot, so I’ve re-invented the beginning and the middle by the time I get to the ending, making the whole concept of drafts rather liquid, from where I’m standing. The fucking things are just never finished! Either I have to bury them, or an editor has to pry the damn thing out of my hands in the twelfth hour, before I can bring myself to let them go. And once I finally let them go, I have no misgivings or regrets with them, because they’re like my kids by that point. I just hope the world will be kind to them.

RUMPUS: Last question. Let’s say a writer-friend of yours needs a pep talk. She’s struggling to see the quality of her writing. What would your speech be to help fire her back up?

EVISON: Well, first I’d say it’s probably a good sign that she’s being critical of her work. The best writers are often the ones who are toughest on themselves, and hold themselves to the highest standard, even if that standard is unrealistic. You gotta keep yourself honest! You gotta be humbled by the game, just like a ballplayer, who is gonna fail seventy-five percent of the time he steps to the plate.

Just about every time I go through one of my manuscripts with a red pen, I think it sucks, at least in large part. But when I’m done, it usually sucks less. That’s the goal, right there, and a damn noble one: to suck less. We can all do that, with a little elbow grease.

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I’ve been trying to write a book review of Ron Currie’s Everything Matters! for the last few weeks. I’ve been trying and failing splendidly.

In fact, more than writing anything, I’ve been doing a sort of literary circuit training—pacing around my apartment and slugging absurd quantities of coffee and snarling to myself about slinging postmodern bullshit all over the page when all I was trying to do was talk about Everything Matters! which, by the way, no matter how far I stray off topic, is a really good book and you should read it. Phew, at least that’s on the record.

Guess what I’m saying is this: Why does peer review suddenly feel like a total violation?

Ever since my first novel came out a couple months back, I’ve been having a hard time seeing why I’d want to publish something that might impede another writer’s ability to find the biggest audience that she/he can. So that leaves me only a couple options:

1. Only review books I love and will therefore write glowing things about (seems sort of boring).

2. Don’t review books.

Problem is, I like book reviews. I like the dialogue they have the potential to incite; I like the idea that they help people weed through the glut of material that exists in the marketplace. We need responsible sources—publications that have proven themselves over time to be thoughtful, forthright, and fair—to inform the public about new books.

Since this all started with an attempt to discuss Currie’s Everything Matters! I decided to contact him directly, despite the fact we don’t know each other, and ask what he thought constituted a good book review.

“A review should discuss whether or not a book succeeds at what it set out to accomplish,” he said, “and then explain why it did or did not.”

I like Currie’s idea that a review should be an organic response to the narrative itself, the reviewer attempts to decode the book’s conceits, its subtext and “message.” In doing so, she/he might hopefully use direct evidence from the text to bolster an argument on the successes and failures of the author’s execution.

This was a helpful point, but because I agreed with him, my confusion morphed a bit. It isn’t that I’m against deconstructing the tactics a writer has chosen to use; my concern is more about the legacies of publishing such a discourse. I’d hate to think that my words might dissuade a potential reader from engaging with a writer’s work herself/himself.

So that was my next question to Currie: Why would one writer want to openly criticize another writer’s book?

Currie: “Often I think it manifests as professional jealousy… Writers tend also to be sophisticated and, by definition, good with words, and so are able to wrap this jealousy in the sheep’s clothing of protecting the language or standing guard at the gates of the canon.”

The obvious caveat here is that I’m asking Ron Currie, a total stranger, to comment on an abstraction, the motivation for peer review, an issue that of course has a multiplicity of answers. There are hordes of reviewers, all with different reasons and values and rules for doing what we do. So I recognize I’m asking him to comment on something he really can’t comment upon: my very personal crisis regarding peer criticism.

Currie mentions jealousy—but for me, that isn’t quite it. Certainly, I come across phrases or sentences, scenes and chapters that others have so beautifully written that I wish I’d penned. But I don’t want to “punish” the writer by lambasting her/him in a review. If anything, I want to make sure more people find out about these accomplishments by helping in any way that I can. I want there to be camaraderie among authors, peer support, not peer dissension.

Thus, my problem comes from the other side of the spectrum (I think). I’m not worried about envy, I’m worried about putting obstacles between an author and an audience. The old adage feels true to me: If I don’t have anything nice to say, I should probably just shut up. At the end of the day, what’s the point of hurtling epithets at another writer’s book?

Yes, I like to read book reviews, and in the past I’ve enjoyed writing them. Right now, though—and who knows if it will change—it feels like a violation, a petty way to throw a wrench into someone else’s artistic career. A publishing career is hard enough without people who should be on the same team wielding criticism like a weapon.

Joshua Mohr

Other writers and reviewers will disagree with me—and, obviously, that’s fine. I just think it’s interesting that only since my novel has come out I do feel intimidated and ashamed and malicious at the prospect of peer review. The best reviews are neither hatchet jobs nor blow jobs—the best ones talk about a book’s strengths and weaknesses (every book has both). And after a thoughtful analysis, the readers of a review can make an informed decision about whether they want to spend the money to experience the ride for themselves. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

Currie gets the last word: He says that reviewers are “contributing to what should be a serious conversation about a particular book’s importance, its place, if any, in American literature. No mean task, and one that should be approached with care and fellow-feeling.”

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The Chicago Tribune calls Joe Meno “an unmistakably American author.” Meno’s new novel, The Great Perhaps, looks at an unmistakably American family, the Caspers, with all their anxieties, ambiguities, and doomed attempts to find simple answers to complex questions. Equal parts sad and funny, The Great Perhaps manages to weave the 2004 election, the Iraq War, and even World War II into a topsy-turvy story of the Caspers’ attempts to hold themselves together. Meno is the author of four previous novels, including Hairstyles of the Damned (2004) and two collections of short stories, including the illustrated volume Demons in the Spring (2008). He and Rumpus writer Joshua Mohr (Some Things that Meant the World to Me) recently read together at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, OR. Beforehand, they had dinner and talked about Meno’s work.

**

Rumpus: I just heard David Sedaris is reading across town at the same time as we are. Pre-sold 700 tickets, or something viciously ridiculous like that. Do you think anyone will come to our reading?

Meno: The formula that I use is that you want to have one person in the audience for every hour you traveled to get here. You drove?

Rumpus: Recklessly. About ten hours.

Meno: I flew two hours. All we need are twelve people.

Rumpus: It’s thrilling that the bar is set so low. Maybe we should have a kissing booth. That’ll pack ‘em in. How long did you work on The Great Perhaps?

Meno: I started it a couple weeks after the 2004 election. Really, the book was a way for me to ask the question why had the country made the decision it had, in reelecting George Bush. And also how that administration was defined by fear, using fear to push forward their agenda.

Rumpus: I was curious about your decision to write in the present tense. Did that happen in the revision process or in the book’s conception?

Meno: I was writing in 2004 and it was 2004…

Rumpus: That saves miles on the ol’ time machine.

Meno: It was weeks after the election. Even though I knew [the book] was going to come out a couple years later, the conflict and drama of those characters was connected to that one specific moment, the weeks leading up to the election. Ultimately, it’s about a fear of complexity. The different family members have a fear of a world that’s become too complex for them. They’ve gone to some simple answer or oversimplification.

Rumpus: I can empathize. So does the word “Perhaps” in the title echo each character’s interpretation of fear?

Meno: You got it. To me the most beautiful things are the things you’re still trying to figure out. We need complexity. The thing we were most missing in the weeks leading up to the invasion in Iraq was any kind of complex discussion. Instead we were arguing the merits of war through bumper stickers or CNN newsbytes. It wasn’t a right or left thing. It was an oversimplification of a really complex idea.

Rumpus: And a blaring deception, or series of deceptions.

Meno: Exactly. And the reason the deception worked was because people were in a complete state of panic. One of the reasons the Republicans were successful was because George Bush was able to pronounce his ideas in three or four word sentences.

Rumpus: I don’t think he had any other options.

Meno: But it worked. John Kerry had these very rational arguments that went on for paragraphs.

Rumpus: He bored his target audience.

Meno: Exactly.

Rumpus: A lot of male writers shy away from the idea of having to manufacture even one teenage female’s psychology on the page. You just went for it, though, and have two in this book. What was that experience like?

Meno: One character, Thisbe, I used her in a short story, someone searching for God. Then in a play, but it didn’t really work. I thought she was interesting. To me, characters always start with a question. For Thisbe [the younger of the two teenage girls in The Great Perhaps], it’s, “What’s so attractive about evangelical Christianity? Or any kind of fundamentalist religion?” It’s that the answers are already there for you, and there’s something comforting in that. Ultimately, what she’s really looking for is love.

Rumpus: This idea of starting with a question: I don’t think novels should answer the questions they posit, but instead should lead to new questions. It’s not the writer’s job to decrypt narrative.

Meno: Yeah. These characters found some resolution, but clearly they still have other lives to lead. Lives with more questions. The question is more interesting than the answer. All these characters rely really heavily on having a simple answer. Hopefully by the end of the book, they come to realize the question is the thing they should be devoted to. And that’s the book’s title. That’s the whole idea of it. Can you get rid of fear by adding a different threat?

Rumpus: Can you preempt chaos with more chaos?

Meno: Exactly.

Rumpus: Don’t give away too much. We’re trying to sell books for you here. One of the things I love about novels—and this seems like a paradox—is that only through the individual, the character, can a writer make a greater statement about humankind.

Meno: It’s got to go back to character.

Rumpus: So is each character in The Great Perhaps making a different social commentary, or just illuminating a different view on the prism of life?

Meno: That’s a great question.

Rumpus: I was pretty proud of myself when I scribbled that bad boy.

Meno: Each of the five family members has oversimplified everything in their life down to one thing—for Jonathan [the father] it’s the squid; for Madeline [the mother] it’s this cloud person she becomes obsessed with; for the [older] daughter Amelia it’s this bomb; for the other daughter [Thisbe] she becomes infatuated with a girl; for Henry [paternal grandfather] it’s the idea of escaping. That one single thing will save them. When actually, you need all of those. You need science, religion, politics, and history. It works like a prism, exactly like that.

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The world will end in a matter of hours… unless Lowboy can lose his virginity.

Word is getting out about this guy John Wray and his new novel, Lowboy, which is garnering all kinds of hype—and deservedly so. It’s everything a solid book should be: a fast fun deranged grim thoughtful romp through the minds of a devastatingly nuanced cast of characters.

Lowboy pairs readers with sixteen-year-old Will Heller, a.k.a. Lowboy, a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds and wandering through the New York City subway system. The date is November 11^, and the world will end in a matter of hours because of global warming. That is, unless Lowboy can bring down his body temperature and thus cool planet Earth—and the only way to do that is to lose his virginity.

Can’t you hear Wray warping prom-night persuasions for generations to come? “Come on, baby, if we don’t screw, the world will overheat!”

One of the really smart decisions Wray made when putting Lowboy together was to rely on other narrators besides Will to tell the story. It’s worth noting that Will’s voice and thought process are not made into caricatures, and that the author rendered him with empathy and dignity; yet, even given Wray’s delicate hand with Lowboy’s psyche, a novel narrated entirely by a schizophrenic might have come to feel like an assault. The reader needs periodic respite, and more pragmatic narration, as we delve into the subterranean: underneath Manhattan in the subway system, but also under the surface of Lowboy’s mental illness.

Will’s mother Violet and police detective Ali Lateef fulfill this need. Despite their polarized motivations for wanting to locate Lowboy—Violet to ensure her son’s safety and Lateef to keep the general public protected from a schizophrenic who has shown violent tendencies in his past—Violet and Ali enter into a reluctant partnership. Their chapters anchor us in a concrete space-time and provide reliable contrast to the sometimes bemusing way Will disseminates information. Ripe with her own system of haunts, Violet describes Will’s history and the evolution of his illness to Lateef, providing the reader with essential information as it is organically transmitted from one character to another.

The novel’s plot torques to a dizzying velocity once Lowboy tracks down his old friend Emily Wallace. She is seventeen and had been Will’s closest friend prior to his institutionalization. (She played the lead role in the incident that landed Lowboy in the hospital). Emily’s motivations for reconnecting with Lowboy remain opaque, but somehow over the years she has fallen in love with Will, and even though she knows he can be dangerous, she disregards self-preservation in the name of their affinity. A stretch? Maybe. But within the pages of the novel, Emily’s decisions make sense, thanks to Wray’s deft rendering of a precocious, caustic, and rebellious teenage girl.

Lowboy and Emily end up back in the subway system. The divide between Will’s perceptions of what is happening and Emily’s reactions presage a growing disconnect and danger:

When he’d told Emily everything she looked at him and laughed. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she said. “Was I supposed to recognize the tune?”
“Tune?” he said, forcing the word out of his mouth. His voice sounded wet.

In Lowboy’s mind, he was disclosing the story of his time and tumult in the hospital, but all Emily heard was him singing or humming or whistling. The reader never learns for sure, and it doesn’t matter: the point is that his urgency is taking on a dangerous singularity and there’s the growing sense that Emily might not make it out of the subway system alive.

The plot constricts: Will Lowboy rape her to save the world from global warming? Will Violet and Lateef make it in time to protect the children from the squeals of Will’s mental illness? And finally, with a wider scope, readers are made to wonder if any of us are safe from our own obsessions. We may not be schizophrenics steered by our illnesses and rummaging through the subway system, but we have all been guilty of putting our self-importance before the greater good.

Lowboy himself says toward the book’s end, “There has to be a reason Emily. Otherwise why this sickness. Without it there’s only running away and kissing you… There’s only poor sick Will… Thank God there was a calling… Thank God about the air.”

The last 100 pages of Lowboy are a marvelous, unpredictable sprint. This is the sort of novel that you brew coffee at midnight to finish. It demands your attention, despite the duties of the next day. It demands the kind of singular purpose Wray might just be warning us about.

**

See also: The Last Book I Loved

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A review of Ethan Canin’s America America

In the beginning of Ethan Canin’s novel America America, the country is mired in an unpopular, seemingly futile war, the collective faith in the President—in this case Richard Nixon—has waned, and an under-the-radar, liberal senator strives for the democratic nomination to restore faith and aplomb in the United States.

Does this sound vaguely familiar?

What’s most impressive about the parallels between the book and our current tumult is that it was published in June, 2008, before the Democratic Convention – let alone the general election. Here, though, is where most of the similarities fall off and America America takes on a life of its own.

Canin’s novel’s focus on Corey Sifter functions as a frame story, the adult Corey reflecting back and commenting on his experiences as a teenager. This device serves the novel well, as it allows the narrative to have two tines: the reader privy to the main heft of the book, Corey’s teenage years; but we also see Corey as an adult, a successful reporter, husband and father of three grown daughters. Corey’s contemplations, his ability to have some semblance of perspective about his system of teenage experiences, let the reader get to know him on independent planes.

Ethan Canin

The son of working class parents, he is taken under the wing of Liam Metarey, local tycoon who owns most of their small town in western New York. Corey performs odd jobs around the Metarey estate and is infatuated with the Metarey’s daughters, Clara and Christina, and ends up marrying the former.

One of the things that remains opaque throughout the novel is Liam Metarey’s affinity for Corey, be it paying him ample money for simple jobs, inviting him to fly in the family airplane, discussing politics with him, or “greasing the wheels” so Corey can attend a prestigious high school (on Metarey’s dime). But I appreciated not knowing Metarey’s precise motives: the two share a kindred bond, and sometimes in life that’s as much explanation as we get. It’s successful here because Canin so convincingly relays their interchanges, conveying the inherent respect between them. Great writers not only know which questions to explicate, but which to let percolate and thrum in the reader’s mind.

The plot really revs up once Metarey decides to try and help Senator Henry Bonwiller run for the Democratic nomination in the 1972 election. Canin presents Bonwiller as a mysterious man, an alcoholic Lothario who speaks to Corey in laconic bits of information. Corey is given the task of driving the senator around the area when his personal driver is indisposed. Though Bonwiller never really confides in Corey, the boy hears enough conversations to piece together his own version of who Bonwiller is. America America is as much about the power of memory, the way in which we freeze people, almost manufacture their characters through reminiscence, as it is about a thwarted attempt at the White House. Bonwiller places second in the Iowa caucus, much higher than anyone had anticipated. Morale around the Metarey estate is high. But in one night everything changes: Bonwiller, in the car with a young woman with whom he is having an affair, has an accident. The precise details are never laid out for the reader but left to waft through inference and innuendo.

Later, as a father and newspaperman, Corey’s reflections on his teenage years answer a lot of questions that the reader struggles with. He has a high school intern, Trieste, working with him at the paper; her questions about the past—the Metareys, Senator Bonwiller, the campaign minutia, the car accident – serve as proxy for the reader’s own questions. In a sense, Trieste becomes the skeptical balance to Corey, whose loyalty to Metarey, and marriage to his daughter, renders him not fully reliable as the teller of the story.

Canin’s prose is clean, almost always well executed; he’s a master of grounding a reader in space-time. At times, his imagery can be a little lazy – for example, Corey’s insecurities and social awkwardness are described as “a cloak I’d forgotten I was wearing.” But these moments are few and far between, and America America is populated with unstilted, straight-ahead storytelling.

Paul Bowles once said that all good novels are detective novels, and that axiom holds true for America America. Until the very last page, you’re hoping to understand each nuance of the plot, every supple detail of the characters. You’re hoping to understand something about our America through the tragedy told here. You hope our young senator and President-elect will rise far higher than Henry Bonwiller and restore dignity to our tarnished country.

Finally, you hope that Corey’s version of the past is no model for the future: “I’d witnessed the making of a politician: how the ritual of deference precedes the auction of influence, and eventually the orgy of slaughter.”

**

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