Was that part of your intention?
Means: I can’t write fiction out of an intention. That’s when it goes flat. I don’t have a single method except to dig in and to respect the story. Most move ahead on a straight line, one way or another. In one a man refuses to tell his story a group of men around the campfire, but we get to hear it, we’re privy to it, and it’s a straight narrative with some leaps in point of view. Some of the stories are road narratives. In a few, the characters do a lot of talking, and, sure, they do talk the way we talk at the table, or the bar, spinning it out, and I was thankful when they began to speak. If you listen to a certain kind of talk—and I get my fill, believe me—it’s often in mythic terms, always a bit of folklore fueled and governed by some deep moral—or amoral–code.
Rumpus: There’s often a darkness to your stories and a good deal of violence and death, but in these stories there’s more interest in criminality – and in some cases celebrated crimes, legendary stuff. Has that been a long interest of yours? It’s always been for me.
Means: I’m not interested in criminality, per se. If anything, I think my heart goes the other way. My concern most of the time is with the victims, with those eaten up and devoured. Specific souls in specific predicaments in specific places are the way to go for me. I just heard something on CNN a few days ago: a woman lost her little boy in a terrible car crash and every year, for the last three years, she put a pot of flowers on his grave (they showed it, a rather ugly hunk of what seemed to be gardenias), and each year the flowers were stolen, so this year the police put a GPS unit in the pot and tracked the flowers to this guy’s house. They showed the tracking device blip moving across a map. He was giving the flowers to his mother-in-law. That’s the kind of story I like. I wonder how the cop felt, watching the blip on the map as it moved across town? I wonder why the guy picked those flowers to steal? I wonder about the mother’s grief. The world is beautifully symbolic.
Rumpus: I really liked “Reading Chekhov” and the way the characters operate alongside those in “Lady With the Pet Dog,” as though these smart internal people have inadvertently found themselves caught inside a ruthlessly astute short story, which can’t end well. Can you talk about where this one came from?
Means: I love Chekhov. All I can say is that adultery, like fishing, hunting, hiking in the Russian woods, gambling, dueling, war, love, drugs, poverty, wealth, is traditional story material: a crime against honesty, vows, the church (if you believe), the body. It can be a betrayal of the heart, time itself, usually taking place in quiet, discrete places. I’m drawn to quiet places. In part, that story came out of putting those characters in the New York landscape. The feeling you get walking down through Riverside Park on a hot summer afternoon and suddenly arriving along the Hudson River; the secretive sense you get when you’re in wooded areas in a city–that sweet smell of concrete and tar and grass mixed together. What I admire about Chekhov’s story is the way it spins out into the future at the end, and yet the reader is still watching Gurov cut a watermelon back in the room. Chekhov buries the moral lines in the complexity of reality. As Flannery O’Connor said, “It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.” Gurov was a misogynist who couldn’t survive without women, and then he fell in love and became a contradiction and a paradox and fully human. Chekhov’s story is great because it betrays the reader who at first thinks it’s a simply about adultery and then in time comes to find that more than anything it’s a genuine love story. My story is simply a story about adultery. Or maybe it’s something more. I’m not sure.
Rumpus: “The Knocking” reminded me of the apartments I’ve had where I heard way too much of my neighbor’s doings. I remember waking up in Syracuse to a man yelling to his girlfriend “You don’t call the cops on your man!” I’m wondering if there’s something from your own life you summoned for this one.
Means: Well, suffice it to say I had a few real knockers in my life and they drove me close to madness. Those old pre-war New York buildings have thin walls, and floors, and you hear things you really don’t want to hear. That story—now that it’s in print—reminds me of Cheever’s story, “The Enormous Radio.” In his story, a magic radio allows access into the lives going on in various apartments around the main characters. In my story, the radio seems to be planted inside the narrator’s head. It’s feeding back to him his own emissions.
Rumpus: Along with this – sounds are very important throughout the collection. I’m thinking of the honking the woman in Nebraska does not hear, caused by her own weight on the car horn. Can you talk about the way you write to the other senses, and not just what is seen.
Means: I haven’t really thought about it and didn’t know there were so many sounds in the stories until you mentioned it. I just met the artist George Condo, and he told me there are a lot of colors in my stories. You have to be firing on all cylinders. All five senses have to be totally alive to what’s happening. At least it has to feel that way. One sense or another moves into part of a scene. Of course there’s something more to it, I’m sure. You can’t think about this stuff when you write. You have to be as close as possible as you can to the story. On the other hand, in life outside the work you do have to listen carefully, listen all the time, and really work to find new ways pay attention. You’ve got to pause and spend time sniffing, staring, and listening.
Rumpus: “The Spot” is a brutal and terrific story, with so many twists and turns. I also loved the names in this story, Shank and Ham and Billy T. I wonder from where this story arose. Maybe from our need to make sense of the senseless, or as you put it “a textbook case of discard and loss.”
Means: That statement—“textbook case”—is the story’s point of view, not mine. In general, I don’t think that way. I took a return trip to Niagara Falls a few years back, and my family can attest to the fact that the falls scared the hell out of me. I held my daughter’s hand and stood there looking over that lip, that edge, and then when I refused to go on the Maid of the Mist, the boat that goes up near the falls, everyone was upset with me, but I felt something powerful–love and fear–and it stuck. I lived in an old house in a small Ohio town one summer, with some really scary ex-farm kids who were using serious hardcore drugs. For some reason, that played into the story. The Kalamazoo River is in there, which played a big part in my boyhood and was at that time one of the most polluted rivers in the country. Each year, passing through Cleveland I stand at a spot not far from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and look out at the lake, and that inspired the opening. But the truth is, as to what really inspired me to write the story, I’m evading your question because to answer it would be to touch upon some deeply personal matters. In this age of blunt confession, there’s always a temptation to divulge, to spill guts, but for me at least, doing so at this time in my life would destroy the fuel that drives me to write.
Rumpus: There’s such dexterity with time, the way you can slow way down and examine single crucial moments and then span a decade in a single paragraph. I’m thinking of the leap in “The Gulch” where we see how this story will live in the character’s personal folklore. Often we’re given glimpses of a character’s future and then returned to the moment in which that future is determined. Discuss?
