Amsterdam is a New York native and a Melbourne, Australia resident, as well as an experienced nurse and book jacket designer, among other things. We spoke by phone during the author’s recent return trip to the United States.

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The Rumpus: What challenges did you find in balancing the story’s ensemble?

Steven Amsterdam: There were plenty. Putting it all together, I actually made an Excel spreadsheet. Which doesn’t sound like the muse at work, but it was a really good way to focus. I had to keep track of who was how old and how relationships had changed. So on one axis there was each character’s name… There was a way to look at each character’s relationship to each other character, by the year the story was taking place. So I at least knew the chronology.

Rumpus: So continuity maintenance.

Amsterdam: Yeah. I suppose the place where it really becomes an ensemble is the scene where they’re all at the same table, at the end. And in my early fantasy of that, everybody was going full force with their powers, but I don’t know if the novel would have held up if I had done it that way.

The challenge of it was keeping track of people aging. And to some degree you have latitude, because people change, and their attitudes toward others change. So I could imagine that a character could do almost anything at any time, and that was the freedom of the whole thing. But keeping track of what was plausible for certain characters [was the challenge].

Rumpus: Did you find yourself with favorite characters that threatened to overtake the rest? Even when Giordana’s a teenager, for instance, she struck me as the most writerly of the family.

Amsterdam: She is a little more writerly. In both the books I’ve written, I’ve ended up writing the first chapter relatively late in the process. Which I have to recommend if you’re writing a book, because it takes a lot of pressure off of starting a book.

I feel different attachment to each of them. They each demanded a different part [of me], different voices. And it was nice being able to access my inner anxious mother, my grieving older guy. I originally thought of doing it all in first person, but I thought that might actually demand a little too much closeness.

Rumpus: You strike an interesting balance with respect to time and place. Readers get a sense of how characters are aging, but you’re judicious about period signifiers too. It wasn’t until Sasha’s chapter—which has references to mid-period Madonna, the Internet—that period details really jumped out to me at all. So I wanted to know how you weighed a sense of time and place against a feeling of the universal, or relative timelessness.

Amsterdam: I labor over that. I don’t know if you caught it, but in the first chapter, there’s a question of making a long-distance phone call, which we don’t really speak of anymore. I do have a timeline in mind… When I started writing this, there were two stories. One was set in Australia, and one was set in the United States. I don’t know if this is a scam, or a trope, or what you would call it, but I decided on this middle ground.

Rumpus: I had wondered about that, actually. That maybe your Australian readers were reading this as a story that took place in Australia, and your American readers—unless maybe they read your author bio beforehand—will be reading this as a story that takes place in the United States.

Amsterdam: Honestly, the terrain, the city-country relationship, is more America. But I hesitated on saying Chicago. I work with a writing group, and no matter what I write, [my friend] Michelle always says, “I don’t know if I have a strong enough sense of place here.” And Michelle writes place beautifully. She can give you Sri Lanka 1922 versus Sri Lanka 1928. She knows all that stuff. But I get overwhelmed with those details. It’s easy for me to get lost, anchoring things that much.

In some ways it liberates the story to just be a story, like a parable, if you don’t have time and place. Because if I’d said I’d set the whole book in Dubai, what would you have thought of it? It’s a whole different world.

I was conscious in Sasha’s chapter, Ruth’s chapter, that everybody’s on a [cell] phone, and that was with phones just coming in. I had wanted the novel to end around next year. It might in some ways serve as a little bit of a fudge. It’s also because, unless they’re written well, those details tend to be things I gloss over. I’m never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like. So the test I always have is, do we need it?

Rumpus: There’s the cliché that those details are a gateway to the universal, but I wonder in practice how often that’s true.

Amsterdam: In some ways those details are a barrier to the universal. There are certain details you would get from this family in terms of their socioeconomic status, their level of consumption—they’re not really worried about shelter, particularly—that you could figure, there are certain places in the world where this family might be. It is something I would say that I struggle with. I feel like I should anchor something. And I’m not sure if I’m actually doing that for my next book anyway.

Rumpus: Each section of your book functions more or less as a discrete story against this larger family history, and I wanted to know if you have guiding criteria for what makes a story effective.

Amsterdam: I’d like to think that a story is going to describe a shift. And it’s one the narrator, the protagonist, might not be aware of, but that the reader will be able to see. But a distinct shift. Sometimes I find those shifts can be too subtle in short stories, and I hope for something more than minor shifts. The last chapter was the one I wrote five times, because otherwise it would’ve had a repetitious feel.

Rumpus: The notion of a major shift and a minor shift is interesting to me, because I was also wondering how you had determined you’d finished a story.

Amsterdam: Now that I’m thinking about a couple of them, I feel like I almost aim for the second before a shift happens. The way Giordana’s chapter ends, she’s being lectured, she’s putting the whole day’s events together, and she’s an adolescent, so she’s still making sense of the world, but I felt that going forward, she would have a clearer vision of her mother and the dynamics in that household—and sex, even—than she did beforehand. But it’s not necessarily something that happens within the last scene.

Rumpus: That’s interesting too, because her encounter with her father has the feel of a climax as well.

Amsterdam: Yeah, that shook things up sufficiently for her. Where the story ends…the one paragraph before you stop typing, I generally find. Do you write?

Rumpus: Yes, I do.

Amsterdam: How would you define where the story ends?

Rumpus: God knows.

Amsterdam: Are you a planner?

Rumpus: To an extent. I got back into writing prose fiction after doing some work-for-hire genre fiction, which compelled me to do more writing on my own time.

Amsterdam: There would be interesting lessons to be learned in doing that.

Rumpus: Yeah. I think for better or for worse, I’m a planner because of knowing, in those genre stories, that I had certain beats to hit and expectations to meet.

Amsterdam: [When] I’m working on something novel-shaped, there’s just so much reverse engineering.

Rumpus: Especially if you write your openings at the end, I can imagine all the work that would entail.

Amsterdam: Yeah. I think you can plant things better if you know where you’re going. Obviously there are different ways that people want to sit down and do it. But I definitely find that that informs where I’m ending. In the same way that I’m not going to tell you what a living room looks like, I’m not going to tell you what just happened, but hope that the reader is engaged enough to imagine the rest.

Rumpus: Now that I’ve mentioned cheapie genre stuff—I grew up on superhero comics, and at a time when the deconstructed superhero story had become a genre in itself…

Amsterdam: What does that mean?

Rumpus: Are you familiar with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, for instance?

Amsterdam: Not the inside of the book.

Rumpus: That’s a high point of this sort of sub-genre. There’s no shortage of less sophisticated versions of that story. The shortest way I can think to put it is people with powers and tights who are also struggling with alcoholism—those easy ironies.

Amsterdam: Right. There’s a term…mundane science fiction, or mundane fantasy. Not mundane as in boring, but the everyday meets the magical.

Rumpus: Sure. With your novel, I saw parallels with that deconstructed superhero genre, but also with magical realism, so I wondered what forms of anxiety of influence you might have experienced while writing it.

Amsterdam: Anxiety’s plenty, but with this and with my first book, I tread with a certain amount of blessed ignorance into an area where I’d read some but certainly not a lot. If I had to think of [reference points]—George Saunders, Judy Budnitz—where the extreme is brought down to its mundane detail…

With both books, I wouldn’t describe it as anxiety. I’d describe it as a kind of…engagement of influence? I certainly had anxieties in writing. The midpoint of anxiety with this particular book was about halfway in. I heard that one of the [major TV] networks was doing No Ordinary Family, and I completely panicked. And by the time I was done panicking it had been cancelled. It wasn’t the same thing at all, and of course I hadn’t invented that idea… You know, it is how it’s carried out, the voice.

It’s this theory I have about charm. We describe a book by working in a certain genre or engaging these kinds of effects, but what we stay for is really the way it’s written, the characters we really like, and is the story put over successfully. But it’s hard to break a story down into that, so you don’t describe it that way. You say it’s a story about this. I mean, often you’d say it’s a story about this but you have to read it anyway… You know, a five-hundred-page novel about baseball—but you really have to read it.

I think I’ve digressed a bit. The anxiety of influence was probably more…the way writing has come to me is more, Am I doing what I’m trying to do? Is this the voice I want to find? Is this the point of the story?

Rumpus: Not to put words in your mouth, but more an anxiety of execution.

Amsterdam: Yes, I like that. That’s fine.

Rumpus: In terms of how the stories are received, what can arise from working with the fantastical…A reader can take the events of the story at face value, or a reader can confine those fantastical elements to the realm of metaphor, and I wanted to know if there are specific ways in which you hope readers engage with a story. Or do you wash your hands of that once you’re finished with the writing?

Amsterdam: I had a very unusual experience with my first book in that it was put on the Year 12 reading list in Australia, which means that I still go to high schools and discuss it. So I’ve really washed my hands of hoping to understand how people understand it. Teachers have their own theories, and students come up to me with amazing theories. And that book, to the same degree, leaves the reader a lot of space to put in their own interpretation.

What I’m thinking of is discussions with the marketing department, which loves magic. I sat down with the marketing department and said, “There’s actually this metaphorical level…” They’re like, “Yeah, that’s not going on the cover.”

Rumpus: It’s funny you mention the cover. I’m looking at the U.S. version—I don’t know if it was different in Australia—but the red lightning bolt, the bold yellow…

Amsterdam: The needlepointed cover?

Rumpus: Yes. The iconography embedded in that—I’m sure it directed my reading of the book in one way or another.

Amsterdam: I used to do jacket design, and I’m very conscious of covers, and probably meddle more than other authors would. There’s a cover I’ve always had in my mind for this book which seems almost impossible to design, but it had a picture in mid-shift, like the framed pictures in the last chapter [the contents of which change as a character rearranges past events]: the process of a person being erased, doing something with a photograph.

That wasn’t going to happen. So the lightning bolt was taken in some ways from the Australian edition. John Grey designed the Australian and English edition, and Riverhead Books used the lightning bolt but wanted to get the idea of family in there with the needlepoint.

Rumpus: At what point did you realize that superpowers was a trope you could use to explore this family?

Amsterdam: The first thing I wrote was the Ben chapter [in which a young father considers recent failures and learns to fly], and really just because I’ve always thought flight was fun and wanted to write about flight, and because I knew a lot of househusbands who were having a really bad time with it. I thought flight might perk up a marriage here or there.

Not long after that, I was reading The Year of Magical Thinking, and I don’t know if [Joan Didion] says it in there—or maybe I made it up—but it seemed like there was a meditation on, what if all these delusions of grief could come true? And I liked the idea of an older person suddenly discovering a magical power. Because someone in my writing group said to me—he’s seventy-two, seventy-four—”Why’s he just getting his power now?” And I like that. I wanted to see what that would look like. Because, you know, for an older person, that sort of distraction would look [to an outsider] like dementia.

When I got done with Peter’s chapter, that early version of it, I thought, Okay, these guys are related. What’s going on? And then I went, did Natalie’s chapter, moved onwards.

Rumpus: You mention that distraction, the probable appearance of dementia, and I was really intrigued by the Alek chapter. Had you conceived that character as a means by which to write about mental illness? Or did it become clear to you that someone with those abilities to manipulate past events would inevitably be misunderstood by people around him.

Amsterdam: He became the cornerstone of my understanding of the book and this family. I work as a nurse. My first year as a nurse, I worked at a psychiatric ward. And I definitely heard people suggest things to me that, to me, didn’t seem very real, as we’re supposed to reflect back openly and empathetically. And I thought how much more room there was for the magical, or the schizophrenic, in other ages. Today they would be institutionalized and medicated.

I suppose a sense of injustice for Alek—describing that injustice—became important to me in terms of understanding [the characters’] various ages. There’s a line he has about how he was variously perceived—how he was a wild, imaginative child, and on and on, but that the wild, imaginative child that doesn’t stop being imaginative… The play we have when we’re little—if it doesn’t stop, what do you do?

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Lars Iyer
• The Rumpus Interview with Tom Kaczynski

If Laurel and Hardy stumbled into Mike Leigh’s Naked, the result might resemble Iyer’s novels. Composed largely of abusive, gin-soaked exchanges between two minor intellectuals, Spurious, Exodus and Dogma recall the cultural acumen of David Markson and the heightened banter of Withnail and I. Iyer, writing as Lars, documents W.’s fits of self-loathing, his fits of Lars-loathing, and his attempts to understand Kierkegaard, as well as an endless series of collapses: the gradual decline and many plagues of Lars’s apartment, as mold invades and then rodents; the twilight of W.’s career, as university bureaucrats shunt the humanities department in favor of sports science. In Exodus, the duo prepares for a final, ineffectual revolutionary act.

Iyer’s own attempts at subversion have been more successful. In his literary manifesto, “Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss,” he urges writers to note literature’s diminished cultural significance within their texts, to produce fiction as autopsy—to “show the author as ape, the author as idiot.” In Lars and W., he has created two very memorable such idiots.

Iyer serves as a lecturer in philosophy at the Newcastle University in northeast England. He began the project that became his literary trilogy by serializing Spurious on the Internet, which is also where he and I conducted the interview below. Even across a platform of limited conductivity such as Gmail, the charged indignation that runs through Iyer’s novels became still more apparent. He has the character of a serious person. He’s also responsible for some of the funniest fiction of the last several years.

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The Rumpus: Given Spurious’s origins online and the way the novels in your trilogy all resist a traditional story arc, how did you determine when an instalment of the trilogy was finished?

Lars Iyer: It’s tempting to say of my fiction what Peter Handke says of his: “These narratives and novels have no story. They are only daily occurrences brought into a new order.” On this account, the daily occurrences in question were those reported on my blog; the novels simply reordered those occurrences into a whole. In a sense, this account is true, although Dogma and Exodus are no longer really rooted in blog posts that reported occurrences as they happened.

But there are stories in my novels: Lars’s battle with the damp, in Spurious, with the rats, in Dogma; the characters’ attempts at intellectual and political collaborations throughout the trilogy; the founding of an intellectual movement in Dogma, and the occupation of W.’s university campus in Exodus. These stories do, however, lack a traditional resolution—the damp does not disappear, and if the rats all die, they are replaced by flies; W. and Lars neither succeed nor fail in their collaborations. The arc is never completed. It’s not stories that I sought to do away with, then, but the idea that a story could be rounded-off, resolved. I wasn’t concerned so much with discrete events as with non-events, happenings that never really come to term. I wanted to let these non-happenings resonate with one another.

There are also thematic arcs in my trilogy—topics the characters discuss, events they undergo. Béla Tarr says that he wants to include the stories of landscapes, buildings, and other inanimate things in his films. For my part, I want to include stories of ideas, as they are discussed and tried on for size by my characters; as they are subjected to strange metamorphoses and criss-crossings; as they seem to take on a life of their own. True, I didn’t seek to resolve these “thematic” stories, either. It was enough to let them reverberate in a certain way—to let them echo with the more conventional story arcs at play in the novels. That’s what happens, say, with the theme of the everyday in my work, or with the theme of the apocalypse, or with the theme of speech.

How, then, do I decide where one novel ends and another begins? Perhaps only by feeling that I’ve exhausted something, that I’ve subjected something to a sufficient number of repetitions.

Rumpus: Was the writing of Exodus different in this respect, knowing that it was the final installment?

Iyer: In Exodus, I had to draw together the larger arcs which run from novel to novel. There had to be a sense of climax—even if it was only an anti-climatic climax! I draw on the Book of Revelations, the final book of the Bible, with its great vision of the apocalypse, which reveals God’s plan for the universe. But the apocalypse of Exodus reveals no plan and brings nothing to an end. Nothing is going to save the characters—not ideas, not politics, not even their friendship. So what happens next? Bathos. Another ordinary day. The same, the same, the same.

Rumpus: Following Lars and W. from place to place, from preoccupation to preoccupation, were you ever challenged to not write personal or intellectual growth into the story?

Iyer: I wanted the second and third volumes of the trilogy to explore the constitution of the characters—their shaping by various social and political factors. The backstories of both characters were of importance, not because they related personal or intellectual growth, but for exactly the opposite reason: because they conveyed a kind of entropy; a sense of exhaustion and failure. W. reports the collapse of his youthful capacity to work, when he started drinking and smoking as a postgraduate at Essex University, and [associating] with Lars. And W. recounts the stories that Lars has told him, about Lars’s ill-fated world-travels, his time spent unemployed and precariously employed, his years in a Manchester squat… Lars’s travails are granted a revelatory significance by W. W.’s sure that the sad stories he recounts from Lars’s past testify to something important—perhaps to the essence of capitalism, or the essence of religion.

Rumpus: For the uninitiated, Americans like me or people anywhere outside the academic world, how would you describe the health of the humanities at British universities? (That is, how many steps away are you from teaching badminton?)

Iyer: British universities are going the way of American ones. There has been an effective privatization of almost all university degree subjects in the last couple of years, with undergraduate fees doubling and tripling. This will lead British students to graduate with the kind of debt to which American students have become accustomed. At the same time—and, again, Britain follows America in this—there has been a push for universities to squeeze out less “vocational” courses.

Rumpus: W.’s sports science students are, without exception, resistant to his attempts to tacitly teach philosophy. Are you aware of any successful efforts to push back against these trends, either from students or from faculty?

Iyer: There’s a whole army of very well-educated and committed lecturers who find themselves in environments that appear quite unfriendly to speculative thought. I correspond with a guy in the U.S. who smuggles in the most abstruse continental philosophical thinkers into the modules he teaches on medical ethics. I’m sure this occurs all over the place.

Rumpus: Since you’re in the United States this February, I also wanted to ask, how have the U.S. readers you’ve met responded to the trilogy? I’m curious because of the cliché about Americans as fundamentally more optimistic than the British—Superman comics versus violent sci-fi anthology 2000 A.D., The Office U.S. versus The Office U.K., those points of contrast… Now that we’re all apocalyptic thinkers, do you think British misanthropy is more relatable to audiences outside the region?

Iyer: British misanthropy isn’t nearly as widespread as you might think. Over the last thirty years, our country has been steadily colonized by a compulsory positivity. In a theatre bar near where I live in Newcastle, they’ve put up the word “lovely” on the wall, in seven-foot high letters. L-O-V-E-L-Y: spelt out in capitals, without context, without justification. What inanity, and in a city that has been subjected to the most stringent of council cuts! L-O-V-E-L-Y: in the midst of devastation! This empty positivity is everywhere in contemporary Britain, as it is more generally in the West.

Eric G. Wilson has argued that the happy capitalists of American see the world narcissistically:

From an early age we are taught to translate the creatures around us—though they be toads that glisten or mica shining at noon—into clean surfaces on which we can project our dreams of total happiness.

But this narcissism depends on a kind of performance, an artifice—the following, as Wilson has it, of a “prefabricated script, some ten-step plan for bliss or some stairway to heaven.” As such, it passes over the reality of the world: toads, mica, council cuts, devastation… This is what makes so many people so alienating to be around. They have no sense of reality. They feel unconstrained by real things—by things right in front of them. They’re not able to attune themselves to people who are not like them. They can’t register despair and failure. The only word in their brain is, Lovely. At the same time, as Wilson argues, the happy capitalist is full of a kind of unease, to which the drive to artifice is a response.

It would be wrong, I think, to suppose that this unease is a question of what the existentialist calls anxiety or despair. Wendy Brown is very lucid on this matter. Neoliberal capitalism does not produce individualized despair—a sense of anxiety over the vanishing of meaning from the human world—so much as what she calls “quotidian nihilism”—a vaguely-felt sense of pointlessness, which can be addressed by understanding yourself “as a speck of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things.” It is as such a “speck of capital” that we choose a romantic partner, a college at which to study, a career, or a particular investment. Without providing meaning, neoliberalism provides a certain direction, Brown argues. It provides the kind of “ten-step plan for bliss” that Wilson writes about, even as this “stairway to heaven” cannot wholly banish a diffuse sense of meaninglessness.

It is striking that the contemporary insistence on positivity, on artifice, of narrating your life in a certain way, is at one with the insistence on redemptive life-arcs, on the implicit idea of life as a journey, that we find in contemporary literary fiction. Both are a response to a more general unease, a free-floating, collectively-experienced nihilism.

In our happy-happy, lovely-lovely times, the past exists only as an opportunity for sentimentalism, the present as a moment in ongoing personal growth, and the future as some vague dream of fulfillment. How, in this context, can this unease be marked? How do you register the distance between an inane, corporate optimism, and the reality of financial upheaval, debt, climatic change and so on? By a hyperbolic performance of despair—an antidote to the hyperbolic performance of happiness! By a re-valuation of the significance of mental suffering, attempting to internalize it, to undergo it, to ponder it rather than let it wander through our lives. By re-narrating our disasters, reclaiming failure as a legitimate response to our social conditions, as a way of witnessing the truth. By heeding the to-and-fro of everyday speech—our grumblings, our laughter, our little protests at the world, seemingly so unimportant. By recapturing ridiculous moments of joy snatched from the jaws of stress and frustration. By remembering what there can be of friendship, what there can be of love. By observing the stress lines on the executive’s face. By tracking the slow hurricane of quotidian nihilism, as it drains life of all meaning and direction, as it plays out in the most ordinary of circumstances. By writing about the misery of adolescents in the suburbs. By writing about futureless youth. By unleashing a wild, misanthropic laughter at the imposture of the happy capitalist. By decrying the destruction of the commons. By quoting from the books we read that help to diagnose the horror. By undoing all story arcs, letting them spin themselves into nothing.

Rumpus: “The contemporary insistence on positivity”—this phrase struck me because of all the doom and gloom a person can find even in the most mainstream, revenue-generating cultural products of the last few years. The narratives don’t necessarily reflect this kind of positivity. The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead—the success of these franchises depends on audiences buying into the possibility of collapse. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises—I think this is an ideologically incoherent film, but at least a film that’s ambivalent about the status quo and the uses of power.

Are these immensely popular stories—that literally depict the collapse of society—release valves for unease? I can’t consider any of them radical pieces of work, but I’d like to know how they fit within the trends you’ve outlined here.

Iyer: The films and television programs in question concretize our unease and dread, in stories full of human agency. Even if the heroes in such works have many elements of the villain, and the villains something of the hero, the belief in broadly meaningful human action is not in question. Batman has agency—he can change things, however difficult this might be. This is a marvellous fantasy, especially when compared with the directionlessness and pointlessness of our lives!

Here is A., a fictional character in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or:

…[L]ife is not as it is in the novel, where one has hardhearted fathers and nisses and trolls to battle, and enchanted princesses to free. What are all such adversaries together compared with the pale, bloodless, tenacious-of life nocturnal forms with which I battle and to which I myself give life and existence?

Everyday life under neoliberalism doesn’t allow for much in the way of meaningful human action. Who are the villains of films and television programmes, compared with the pale, bloodless but tenacious sense of meaninglessness that passes through our ordinary lives? What are the battles of The Dark Knight, compared with the more diffuse struggle we maintain against “quotidian nihilism”? If the Italian Marxists my characters so admire are right to tell us that there has been a “step-change” in capitalism, that capitalism now operates directly on our souls, then it is we ourselves, body and soul, who give life and existence to neoliberalism.

Rumpus: Elsewhere, you’ve described Exodus as an attempt to write a “‘big’ book,” but it’s also very much a book of its time, taking place around the financial collapses of a few years ago, not shy of referencing Anchorman when appropriate—its concerns are as localized as they are universal. What do you consider your work’s relationship with posterity?

Iyer: I have been determined to plunge my fiction into cultural ephemera of the most transitory kind. My characters live in the everyday world that is so familiar to us that it seems almost invisible. My aim is to make it visible, to concretize, at the most banal level, what it means to experience both “quotidian nihilism” and the kinds of “quotidian joy” to be found in banter and chitchat. Perhaps it is part of the business of fiction to show how the universal plays out at the level of the local—to concretize abstractions like “precarity” or “capital flight”; to show how corporate restructurings and lay-offs, “non-linear” methods of organizing the workforce, are actually experienced—or rather, as Richard Sennett has argued, as they damage our very capacity to register and accumulate experience.

As for posterity…will there be anyone reading novels in twenty years time but literary scholars? Will there be anyone left alive in a hundred years time?

Rumpus: In your manifesto, you discuss literary life as “a dead ideal,” and our loss of literature as a source of tragedy and revolution. A reader senses that Lars and W. also mourn this loss, to the degree that they’re aware of it, but they’re also both total boobs. What advantages did you find in using figures of fun to engage with a loss that genuinely troubles you?

Iyer: Yes, the characters are first of all ridiculous, even as they might have the right instincts about certain things. To be sure, we laugh at them, but I hope that we also laugh with them—their blackly comic treatment of certain topics resonates with a more general cultural uncertainty, a sense of lost norms, of disorientation, to which, I think, we can all relate. I think the reader can take W. and Lars seriously when they mourn modernism’s sense of the importance of literature and philosophy, or when they decry the effects of contemporary capitalism.

Rumpus: Similarly, a reader of Exodus can find evidence of the damage done by the privatization of education, and W. is at once a critic of capitalism and a ridiculous person. Did you ever feel that the range of your critiques was limited by the intellects of your characters?

Iyer: I have high regard for the intellects of my characters! W. makes sense of some difficult texts—those of [Franz] Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen, Kierkegaard and others. Lars, the narrator, might seem idiotic, if you see him from W.’s perspective, but he is the narrator of the trilogy, and to narrate is, etymologically at least, to be an authority—one who knows. Lars, the narrator, knows what he’s doing! No idiot could have written my trilogy—or at least that’s what I tell myself!

Rumpus: Lars’s voice is deceptively complex—the first person gives us access to his interiority, in theory, but much of what we learn about Lars, we learn from Lars’s quoting of W.’s opinions about Lars. Much of this is abuse, of course, and a reader might be tempted to wonder why Lars sticks around.

Iyer: Lars, the narrator, tells us very little about himself directly. It is almost entirely through W.’s reported speech about Lars, that we learn about Lars. This creates a distance, which allows Lars to take on a mythical character. His outline is blurred; he doesn’t seem quite real. And it is because of this that I hope his reported experiences of meaninglessness and pointlessness take on a representative character. In W.’s accounts of him, Lars becomes a stand-in for a reader likewise searching futilely for a direction in life.

As you say, much of what W. says to Lars takes the form of insults. Why is Lars, the narrator, so careful to report these insults? There must be an element of enjoyment here. W. is paying real attention to Lars; his insults are bespoke, tailored exactly to the particularities of his friend—they are the very opposite of the generic blandishments the happy capitalists dish out to one another. W. insults Lars, I think, in the name of friendship. And it is in the name of friendship that Lars writes his trilogy, which is as much a tribute to W. as it is a piss-take.

Rumpus: Would you agree that as the reach of literature contracts, the barrier between high and low culture also becomes more porous? I’m thinking of what people are calling our Golden Age of TV. A program like Mad Men is executed with stylistic rigor and engages with the false promises of material society—with tragedy, if not revolution.

Iyer: Perry Anderson claims that television had a particularly big role in the breakdown of the distinction between “high” and “low” culture. The arrival of color television was, he argues, the technological watershed of the postmodern era. The barrier between high and low culture becomes irrelevant with the onset of color television. A great levelling occurs, which is no bad thing if we think of older snobberies towards popular forms.

And Anderson points to something else of interest: television did not have a modernist past. The continuous visual gabble that floods the popular imaginary is not rooted in the great innovations of the modern period. Of course, there are exceptions—we might think of the formal innovations of [British teleplay writer] Dennis Potter’s work. But, in general, television obliterates the memory of modernism, and the aesthetic and political energies associated with it.

Everyone says that the cultural vibrancy that was once found in the novel is now to be found in our “Golden Age of TV.” I’m in no position to judge. Certainly, Mad Men is magnificent (except for the first half of season three). Novelists can’t compete with this kind of immaculately-rendered realism. Nor can the novel compete with the ease with such a series can be enjoyed—simply turning on the television and relaxing on the sofa with your partner, while sipping a glass of wine. Reading is much more laborious, much less companionable. But this difficulty of reading—the difficult joy of reading literary fiction, where the word literary refers to what makes a book alien in some sense—still has a kind of importance. Anything that wrenches us from the easy enjoyment that defines our time.

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A visitor to Tom Kaczynski’s Minneapolis home could be forgiven for expecting stockpiled batteries, a wall of canned goods, or other staples of the doomsday prepper’s inventory. The comics that compose Beta Testing the Apocalypse, out this month from Fantagraphics, are linked by themes of alienation and societal overreach, as well as the threat—or implicit promise—of impending disaster. And so it’s an obvious irony, but one that bears mentioning, that numerous well-stocked bookshelves and a scattering of coffee mugs are what actually fill Kaczynski’s living room, while an endlessly affectionate golden retriever rolls around the hardwood floor. The cozy arrangement might be understood as a benefit of dog ownership, or evidence that running a micro press—Kaczynski runs Uncivilized Books, publisher of Gabrielle Bell’s acclaimed 2012 collection The Voyeurs, from a home office on the house’s top floor—leaves little time to gear up for the End of Days, were Kaczynski also not welcoming, generous with his time, and open about his process and ambitions.

For these reasons alone, a visitor could probably guess that he is not a native Minnesotan.

Kaczynski was born in communist Poland, but the shadow of a British author looms conspicuously over his work: J.G. Ballard. As with Ballard, Kaczynski’s stories are fringe science-fiction narratives about base yearnings, otherness, and collapse, captured with stark monochrome palettes and spindly line work. In “Phase Transition,” a shut-in’s busted air conditioner inspires him to cast off his civilized shell. In “Million Year Boom,” a freelance designer helps engineer the creation myth of a global conglomerate and discovers the newest iteration of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones. And in “Cozy Apocalypse,” a couple attempts to disaster-proof its marriage, while markets crash and floods fill the suburbs.

These stories, and the nine others that complete Beta Testing, are the result of more than six years of work. They’re informed by Kaczynski’s time in Poland, then Germany, and then the United States, from the Twin Cities to New York and back again. Our conversation started at the beginning, and with the inevitable: cheap genre comics.

***

The Rumpus: You grew up with Polish sci-fi comics, as opposed to Marvel and DC books. Were comics easy to come by when you were a kid?

Tom Kaczynski: They were pretty widely available. Not in the way of American comics—you have these series that go on and on. It was more European-style: albums that would come out every now and then. There was a magazine called Fantastyka. It was a melding of [European comics anthology] Heavy Metal and a sci-fi or pulp magazine, because it had comics, but it also had short stories, serialized novels and things like that. And that had one of my favorite comics, Funky Kovol, a crazy science-fiction romp.

Rumpus: Did you gravitate toward sci-fi, or was that the dominant genre in Poland?

Kaczynski: Any genre you can think of over here, they had an equivalent over there. So if you had a policeman, he was a Communist Party member policeman, sometimes fighting capitalist criminals.

Rumpus: Were Western comics available at all?

Kaczynski: Not too many of them. Mostly other European comics. Like Thorgal, for example, which is a Viking comic—comes out of Belgium, but it’s drawn by a Polish artist, Grzegorz Rosiński. His work was really popular, partly because he was Polish. But there were also funny animal-type books; Asterix and Obelix; a French book called Kajko i Kokosz, which was this little Slavic village being attacked by Germanic tribes—pretty funny and weird.

Rumpus: Are many of these available in English? Or any kind of archival format?

Kaczynski: Not that I’m aware of. I’d love to bring some of the stuff over, now that I’m a publisher, but I don’t think any of it has made it over yet. Thorgal has, but that’s Belgian, so it has had Western exposure for a while. But not many things specifically Polish.

Rumpus: And what are the first comics from the United States you remember reading?

Kaczynski: There was an English-language library in Poland catering to people who were learning English, and they had one volume—a reprint volume, and I’m sure it must have been a British volume—of a Fantastic Four comic that had Spider-Man in it. It’s kind of hazy. I didn’t really see serialized American comics until I moved to Germany, where they were reprinted as books or sometimes again as pamphlets.

Rumpus: By the time you arrived in the United States, did you have an American genre comics phase, or were you deep into Dan Clowes—

Kaczynski: No, I went through [that phase]. I got into X-Men in Germany, and Spider-Man. I was reading Conan the Barbarian for a while, too. So when I moved over here, I was seeking out those comics. And when I realized there was a whole subsection of stores—comic book stores—there was no going back. This would have been late ’80s, early ’90s.

Kaczynski: I tend to dislike everything new that I’ve done. There’s always some kind of nagging feeling that I’ve missed something. For whatever reason, the newer work is always mildly incomprehensible to me. But after a certain period of time passes, I can look back at the stuff and say, “Oh, I can live with that. That’s not a bad story.” I mean, they are artifacts of their time, too. I’d have done things differently now, but you just have to live with the fact that you produce these artifacts and they become older and older, and your relationship with them changes. And that’s fine.

Rumpus: Much of Beta Testing features characters who have been numbed, who live in these highly corporatized capitalist prisons, basically. Did you have reservations about engaging in the marketplace as a publisher when you started Uncivilized, meeting capitalism on its own terms in a very direct way?

Kaczynski: That’s a difficult question to answer. One of the problems with capitalism—

Rumpus: And I ask it understanding that every one of us in the United States is a part of the process, is implicated in the excesses.

Kaczynski: Absolutely. My problem with capitalism as its defined is that it’s impossible to get out of. And that’s one of the problems with critiques of capitalism. It’s so completely consuming that you can’t really think your way out of it. Which is something I’ve thought in the past. That we’re doomed, trapped in this giant organism, and no matter how much you try to think your way out of it, you’re always going to be in it. You either believe that, and it’s a self-defeating thing, or you believe it’s possible to alter it in some ways, or that there is an outside.

Rumpus: Do you consider your work to be inherently pessimistic?

Kaczynski: That’s another difficult question. Because something I’m really fascinated by right now is utopias. Utopian thinking, coming up with alternative worlds where things work differently. I have two different tracts in how I work. Most of the Mome work is fiction—just straightforward fiction. As a writer, I’ll take certain positions that I don’t necessarily believe, but I will take them to whatever natural ending point I think they have. But I also do more essay-type comics. I don’t now if you’ve seen my Trans mini-comics, which are much more essay-like, where I can examine these ideas more directly rather than through fictional characters.

I feel like utopia, the idea of overcoming these giant societal structures, is present even in the very pessimistic work. There’s something there—an adjustment that happens [to the characters]. And to us it may look monstrous, but I don’t know if it would look monstrous to the characters themselves.

Rumpus: The character in “Phase Transition” seems to find some sort of peace or balance.

Kaczynski: Right. So I think there’s some kind of underlying optimism. But sometimes you have to dig deep.

***

First panel from “Cozy Apocalypse,” second panel from “Phase Transition,” third panel from “The New,” and “Noise: A History” in full, all featured in Beta Testing The Apocalypse, © 2012 by Tom Kaczynski.

Click here to read the first three pages of “Million Year Boom,” one of the stories featured in Tom Kaczynski’s new collection, Beta Testing the Apocalypse.

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