Paul Beatty, Deborah Levy, and more make the shortlist for the prestigious prize
Today the Man Booker Foundation released their shortlist for the organization’s yearly literary prize. Starting with 156 nominees, the candidates for the prestigious award were whittled down to a longlist of thirteen in July. Now only six remain in contention for the £50,000 prize. Notably, two-time recipient J M Coetzee (’83 and ’99) missed the cut.
Started in 1969, the prize was limited to authors from The UK and British Common Wealth until it was expanded in 2014. To date, an American has yet to win, although Paul Beatty could reverse the trend with The Sellout.
An interview with the author of the incendiary new novel, Loner.
If you’ve enjoyed Teddy Wayne’s prolific output of humor pieces in McSweeney’s and The New Yorker, or if you read his breakout second novel The Love Song of Jonny Valentine — a brilliant first-person account of a Bieber-esque pop star’s life on tour — none of this would prepare you for Loner. In the pitch-black story of Harvard freshman David Federman’s obsession with a female classmate, Wayne plumbs male privilege and status anxiety with disturbing insight. It’s a novel I read in one sitting and then immediately pressed on friends and strangers, if only so I could repeatedly exclaim “Holy shit!” and “That ending, right?”
It’s not a stretch to say the Whiting Award winner’s third novel might become the most incendiary book since Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Or at least the most subversive graduation gift for the class of 2017. I conducted this exchange with Wayne over email on his brief vacation before the book’s publication.
Chapman: I think of the campus novel as the writer’s equivalent of the pop ballad: everyone thinks they can do it, and yet 99.999% of them are terrible. Walk me through the genesis and composition of Loner. Did the clichés of the campus novel cast a shadow? Did you have any particular examples in mind while writing?
Teddy Wayne: I wrote a bad campus novel when I was 24, so I guess I am the 99.999%. Amateurish craft issues aside, it was the kind of book you’d expect — overly sentimental, semi-autobiographical in all the wrong ways, conventionally coming-of-age. Thankfully, it was never published, and I discovered in part through writing it that I’m better at imagining protagonists who are dissimilar from me, which I did in my next two books. I remained interested in returning to a campus novel, but knew I would have to do it in a subversive, darker way to avoid the problems that had plagued my first effort. The Secret History is an obvious antecedent in that regard. But I was guided more by a few other non-campus works of art: The Talented Mr. Ripley, Lolita, Notes from Underground, and Taxi Driver, especially. If you take the flesh of one genre and hang them on the bones of another, you often get interesting results.
If you take the flesh of one genre and hang them on the bones of another, you often get interesting results.
Chapman: One of the narrator’s more troubling aspects is his relative innocuousness, at least on first impression to both the reader and the other characters. I’ve met several David Federmans. I imagine we all have. It’s tempting to say his pretension and intellect shield his monstrousness — a New Jersey born, 18-year-old Humbert Humbert — there is, equally, the environment of the Ivy League campus, circa now. Harvard’s codes, class system, and culture of enabling (to use a loaded word) is much more present than, say, The Secret History’s lightly drawn Hampden, which felt more like a town-and-gown container for the characters’ movements. What do you think the relationship is between David’s actions and Harvard in 2016?
Teddy Wayne: Those are two separate elements: Harvard, and 2016 (or whatever contemporary year the novel is set in, which is undefined). For the former, David is drawn to Harvard for the same primary reason nearly all its students are: its name. There are other legitimate reasons to go to the school, but its global reputation is what first gets the attention of its aspirants, especially the highly ambitious and status-conscious, which David is. Humbert wants to recreate his lost childhood love and gratify his perverse urges. David wants recognition, he wants to be the best, and he wants to elevate himself beyond his already cushy New Jersey-suburban-professional background and into the rarefied air of Manhattan’s upper crust. Harvard — and Veronica — is his ticket to do so.
As for 2016, if this novel were set when I attended college — the late 1990s and early 2000s — it would be very different. Although that era came at the tail end of the first modern collegiate wave of identity politics, it’s much more powerful and widespread now, and David, as an insecure and entitled young white male, chafes against it. He is threatened by what he sees as the silencing of his own voice, feels he is being persecuted for the sins of his ilk elsewhere, and most of all frustrated that he is not reaping the sexual and social benefits of his privileged status. But, as you pointed out, he seems relatively innocuous at first. It was important not to portray David as an outright monster from the start, or it would render him cartoonish and fail to implicate any readers who might share similar attitudes.
Chapman: To borrow a half-remembered concept from those days, identity politics is a rhizomatic subject, with particular challenges to representation in fiction. Were there different approaches in the earlier drafts that you eventually abandoned? How much did research play a role?
Teddy Wayne: The book became more suffused in identity politics, or at least in David’s simmering-anger response to it, as I revised it. The first draft was a more straightforward exploration of obsession, with class as the main complicating factor (David is from a professional suburban background, but wants entrance to the world of Veronica, who is from the upper echelons of Manhattan.) After I finished it, I realized it was just as steeped in David’s relationship to his masculinity and to current gender politics. Right around this time, Elliot Rodger went on his rampage in Isla Vista and published a disturbing manifesto that was directly about his feelings of masculine inadequacy, and that, too, informed my revisions.
As for research, aside from attending the school a while ago and reading the books and authors that are name-checked in it, I went back to Harvard for an event while I was writing it and spent a night with a group of freshman boys, getting a feel for them socially and asking them questions about their experiences, and hung out with some other current students. I also tried to get into a final club party, to refresh my memory, but they wouldn’t let me in, which felt appropriate.
Chapman: While Kapitoil and The Love Song of Jonny Valentine were also voice-driven narratives, there was an innocence and lightness to them. Was it difficult to stay inside David’s head? I’m imagining cold showers after each writing jag.
Teddy Wayne:Loner can be read in a few hours, so the reader is spared from living in David’s mind for too long. It took me about two and a half years to write, and at times it was reminiscent of the feeling I get when I end up curiously poking around horrible anonymous user comments on the internet or tweets: a fascinated disgust that makes you despair for humanity and makes you flagellate yourself for being curious about it in the first place. David’s thoughts aren’t quite as aggressively noxious as the kind of comments I’m talking about, but he sinks into a nastiness that was sometimes hard to shake off after a writing session.
At times it was reminiscent of the feeling I get when I end up curiously poking around horrible anonymous user comments on the internet or tweets.
Incessant bleakness can make for an unpleasant reading experience, so I tried, too, to make David’s narrative voice funny when possible — Lolita, aside from the lyricism, gets a lot of mileage out of Humbert’s humor that cuts against his misdeeds.
Chapman: Let us never forget “(picnic, lightning)”… We have to tip-toe around the plot, since the ending is a forehead-slapper that makes one want to immediately grab the nearest bystander, form an impromptu book club, and debate/discuss/rend garments. Without giving anything away: how did you come to the confessional mode of address and the larger frame of the novel?
Teddy Wayne: This, again, changed substantially in revision. Initially, it was narrated just in the first person, and then I changed it so David addressed Veronica as “you” throughout. (This is far from the only book about obsession that uses this first-person-addressing-a-second-person voice; it’s a convenient way to magnify the narrator’s voyeuristic sights on his quarry.)
Where David was at the start and end of the novel, at what point in time he was narrating from, and whether this was an interior monologue or written document also changed substantially (as did the events at the end). Originally, he was explicitly narrating from the present, thinking about the past; then he was writing about the past; in its final form, it starts in the present, with early foreshadowing that tells us he is writing this from some period of time later. It adds (I hope) tension without giving away exactly what has happened, and without explaining why David is writing the text that is Loner.
Chapman: I imagine this book will be hotly debated and argued over by plenty of readers, but I wondered if you had anyone specific in mind: undergraduate book clubs? Recent high school grads? Bros about to attend their ten-year reunion?
Teddy Wayne: Who ends up reading is completely out of my hands, but I suppose it would yield some interesting and possibly productive discussion among incoming college freshmen. I suspect Harvard will not be assigning it for this purpose.
Chapman: Let’s hope some insurrectionist alumni airdrop copies during freshman orientation. With three novels under your belt — and dozens, maybe hundreds of published short pieces — I’m curious to hear your 30,000-ft view of The Wayne Oeuvre.
Teddy Wayne: A good portion of those short pieces are not written to be Profound Timeless Art but more to Pay the Monthly Rent, so let’s remove those from consideration. The three novels, now that they’re all finished, all feature outsiders who enter some high-stakes late-capitalist arena (Wall Street, music industry, Harvard) trying to make their mark and simultaneously forge intimate relationships, and the ongoing question is whether they’ll be able to retain their souls under such duress. The (more serious) journalism is usually concerned with whether we’re losing touch with our humanity because of technological shifts. The (sharper) humor pieces typically take aim at some fundamental hypocrisy or absurdity in the culture. So I suppose what interests me in all my writing is some combination of the topical, via cultural critique, and the universal challenge of human connection.
Revealing the interiority of a character in a way that feels natural, yet resonates powerfully within a reader is one of the most difficult tasks of the fiction writer. Considering how powerful that emotional connection between reader and character can prove, and how empty a story can feel without it, it’s vital that the writer bridge the distance between reader and character in ways that are subtle and inconspicuous — unless, of course, an author has some higher purpose in being intentionally conspicuous — rather than clumsy, so as not to call attention to the writer’s hand at work and thereby break the fictitious world of the story, what John Gardner dubbed the ‘narrative dream.’
But how does one accomplish this? It depends on the circumstance, of course. There are occasions in fiction where it’s perfectly appropriate for a narrator to say, So-and-so felt sad/happy/anxious. But rarely are such basic expositions enough to make me feel known as a reader, to illuminate aspects of my own experiences that I didn’t yet understand or couldn’t yet articulate.
The most obvious alternative — a lengthy expository digression into the psyche of a character, perhaps accompanied by physical cues, i.e., So-and-so felt more upset than she’d felt in her entire life, so upset she thought she might die, her stomach was in a knot, her throat was on fire… generally proves detrimental to how I experience the story. Such straightforward descriptions, even when accompanied by metaphor, rarely provide any greater nuance of emotional experience and usually pull me out of a story’s fictitious world rather than draw me into it.
Something as simple as a car parked on the street surely looks different to a lottery winner than to someone who just got evicted.
A third option — what I’ll call indirection of image — is often a more successful approach, especially in crisis moments in a story, when emotions are most charged and complex. By indirection of image, I mean an instance in which a writer takes into consideration how a certain character would see (or, for that matter, smell/hear/etc.) a particular setting or image based on his/her emotional state. Something as simple as a car parked on the street surely looks different to a lottery winner than to someone who just got evicted.
In other words, indirection of image is a way to take abstract emotions and project them onto something concrete. Doing so creates the potential to explore interiority at a greater depth than what’s afforded by mere exposition. It’s a way to portray emotions that transcend simply happy or sad or anxious and instead swirl together a whole host of others that are more intense and nuanced and ambivalent. This swirling often creates a more compelling interior emotional landscape — the human heart in conflict with itself, which Faulkner said was the only thing worth writing about.
This swirling often creates a more compelling interior emotional landscape — the human heart in conflict with itself, which Faulkner said was the only thing worth writing about.
A good example occurs midway through ZZ Packer’s story “Brownies.” The narrator, Snot, belongs to a group of Girl Scouts who decide on their second day of Brownie camp to “kick the asses of each and every girl” in their rival troop 909. Snot is a quiet character — she reads “encyclopedias the way others read comics” — one who’s not accustomed to getting into trouble, let alone causing it. Yet Snot is the one who comes up with the idea to jump troop 909 in the bathroom. A change is occurring within Snot, an interior progression, and Packer relies on the physical setting of the camp bathroom to reflect that: “Inside, the mirrors above the sinks returned only the vaguest of reflections, as though someone had taken a scouring pad to their surfaces to obscure the shine.”
Snot is becoming a person she herself wouldn’t recognize — simple enough. But the choice to reveal this through indirection of image is an important one. The description of the mirrors works first on a physical level to establish a vivid setting — mirrors in many public camp bathrooms do in fact look like that–and thereby transport the reader. More importantly, the image of the mirrors, and that Snot notices their scouring, works on a metaphysical level to reveal her interior emotional landscape, something Snot herself cannot express in explicit verbiage in the narrative present — she’s only a fourth-grader, after all.
Alternatively, because “Brownies” is a retrospective narrative, Packer might have chosen to utilize a sort of flash-forward. Snot, wherever she is while recounting this past-tense story, might reflect on her fourth-grade self, revealing explicitly to the reader things that younger Snot cannot in the narrative present (in fact, Packer does so successfully at the end of this story). But it’s not the best choice at this moment, as a flash-forward would at best break narrative momentum and at worst pull the reader out of the fictitious world Packer has created, shattering “Brownies”’ narrative dream.
As it reads now, using indirection of image, Packer invites the reader to experience Snot’s interior state as Snot herself experiences it. Packer doesn’t reduce Snot’s interiority. As a result, the reader feels alongside Snot the foreignness of her first inklings of this self-realization. Indirection of image leaves the reader room to project their own emotional experiences onto the narrative, to match them up against Snot’s and see where the edges fit and where they don’t. Because of this, a reader is more likely to identify with Snot and feel known by the fiction itself. Packer’s is a graceful maneuver that occurs in a single line, and the dramatic action of the story continues along.
A similar example occurs midway through William Gay’s story “My Hand Is Just Fine Where It Is.” The story’s protagonist, Worrel, takes his lover, Angie, who is sick with terminal cancer, to the hospital. Angie is married to a different man. Needless to say, the emotions at play here are vast and complicated.
Sitting in a hospital’s waiting room, here’s how Worrel comes to view a copy of Newsweek magazine — something that at first glance (or first draft) might seem insignificant to the story:
…The sheer amount of work that had gone into producing the magazine he held in his hands made him tired. Lumberjacks had felled trees that had been shredded and pulped to make paper. Ink had to come from somewhere. Other folks ran presses, stacked the glossy magazines, delivered them; the US Mail shuttled them across the country…. The magazine grew inordinately heavy, all these labors had freighted it with excess weight. He could hardly hold it.
Like Packer’s mirror, Gay’s Newsweek works on multiple levels. It’s admittedly unusual that Worrel reads so much into the magazine, but Gay establishes earlier in the story that Worrel is a thinker and a wonderer — when reminiscing about his many kisses with Angie, the narrator claims on Worrel’s behalf “In these tawdry moments are worlds, universes.” Rather than smacking of literary device, the way Worrel sees the copy of Newsweek is believable and adds depth and nuance to his character.
The way he sees that magazine contains his ongoing struggle in loving an unattainable woman, one who is dying.
Packer’s child protagonist, Snot, is unable to describe explicitly how she feels in that camp bathroom, at least in the narrative present. Worrel, on the other hand, might well be capable of describing his feelings — at least on a surface level. He’s tired, of course. He’s worried. But rather than rely on Worrel to describe how he feels, Gay projects the way Worrel feels onto something concrete. Through this projection, Gay achieves a more accurate reflection of Worrel’s interior state. In a crisis moment of the story, the reader experiences Worrel’s exhaustion and his worry manifested, beyond surface-level adjectives. The way he sees that magazine contains his ongoing struggle in loving an unattainable woman, one who is dying. In that copy of Newsweek, Worrel — and thereby the reader — reckons with his helplessness and his sense of unfairness in the world. It’s an impressive breadth and depth of emotion, and Gay’s use of indirection of image — the way Worrel’s interiority is simultaneously revealed and left, to a degree, ambiguous — invites the reader to experience it the way that Worrel does. Even if the reader can’t articulate precisely everything that Worrel is feeling — are there even words for it? — they surely experience it on a level that is deep and resonant.
As a final example of how indirection of image can reveal complex interior landscapes, consider Rebecca Lee’s story “Fialta.” A couple of especially strong instances at the end of the story encapsulate, in ways that call little attention to Lee’s hand at work, the richly ambivalent crisis the story has been building toward.
A watered-down premise of the story: while at an architecture residency, an unnamed narrator falls in love with another resident named Sands. But Stadbaaken, the architect who runs the place, has dedicated Fialta, the residency, “not to the fulfillment of desire but to the transformation of desire into art.” As another Fialta resident puts it: “It means not to fool around.” Yet Stadbaaken is perhaps sleeping with Sands. He eventually catches the narrator and Sands making out, makes a big show by sweeping a Thanksgiving turkey off the dinner table, and the next morning Sands meets up with the narrator in a cow barn on the Fialta grounds for a last goodbye.
“And then the door opened. The cold, dim day rushed in, and, along with it, Sands.” The sensory details in the second line are unlikely and curious — the narrator wants badly to see Sands again, but doesn’t expect to; in fact he’s certain that he won’t. Then she appears, and the day seems to him “cold, dim.” Lee makes a similar move in the next full paragraph. The narrator acknowledges explicitly that he will have to leave Fialta, and then comes another unusual description of Sands: “But there was still the morning. [Sands’] hair and skin were the only moments of darkness in the brightening barn.” The inverse of this imagery would be a more obvious way to reveal the interior state of the narrator; Sands’ hair and skin would be the only moments of brightness in the dark barn — he is, after all, happy to see her.
The work of this reversal is (at least) twofold. On a surface level, it challenges the expectation of the reader, which calls less attention to the authorial move here — the indirection of image — making it feel like less of a literary device and holding intact the story’s narrative dream. But moreover, the imagery in this moment acknowledges the ambivalence of this situation, the scope of what’s actually occurring in this crisis moment. The narrator is happy to see Sands of course, but their relationship is effectively over. On its surface, this is a situation with emotional upswing — the narrator is getting a thing that he wants. But Lee inflects the imagery of the moment with darkness — emotional downswing — to remind the reader of the temporary nature of the narrator’s happiness. Lee orchestrates a beautifully ambivalent moment here in which she simultaneously holds to the light jubilation and grief, almost in equal measure, at the same time.
Lee orchestrates a beautifully ambivalent moment here in which she simultaneously holds to the light jubilation and grief, almost in equal measure, at the same time.
Unlike Snot and perhaps Worrel, this nameless narrator is perfectly capable of explicitly articulating just how he feels and does so in the story’s final paragraph: “I could practically have predicted my leaving to the hour, but my heart was caught up in the present, whirring away and still insisting that this was the beginning, not the end.” That’s beautiful — it’s as if the emotional tenor of the story is folding in on itself. The language in which the narrator describes his emotional state is hugely compelling, and the sentiment is all-encompassing, at least insofar as the concerns of this story. But Lee first employs indirection of image to lay crucial concrete groundwork for this final exposition. Without the initial curious descriptions of Sands’ face, the ambivalent disparity inherent in those moments’ construction, the narrator’s final exposition wouldn’t feel as whole and total.
It could be that Faulkner was a touch narrow-minded in his aforementioned evaluation. Perhaps the human heart in conflict with itself isn’t the only thing worth writing about. However, it is one worthy and gainful thing — replicating in art interior emotional landscapes that make readers feel known, especially when those landscapes can’t be adequately explicitly articulated. Packer, Gay, and Lee all three utilize ndirection of image to plumb this tenuous, shadowy, ambivalent landscape, each in ways that are emotionally resonant, all without calling attention to the artifice of their fictions.
The NEA’s Annual Arts Basic survey shows literary readership is at an all time low
Last month the National Endowment for the Arts published their Annual Arts Basic Survey (AABS) and the results were bleak, if not surprising. For decades there has been a downward trend in American adults who read literature — although there was a brief uptick in 2008 — but 2015 marks the first year in 33 cycles of research that the percentage has dropped below 45% to a dismal 43%.
While it looks bad, it’s important to note that the NEA only considers “reading novels, short stories, poems, or plays not required for work or school” as literary participation. With the exclusion of non-fiction, it’s hard to gauge how illiterate U.S. society truly is.
The study also shed some light on who is reading. Unsurprisingly, the more education one has, the more likely they are to read.
From the NEA’s Annual Arts Basic Survey (AABS)
An individual with a graduate degree is more than twice as likely to consume literature than a high school graduate. The largest margins of difference are seen in this demographic factor. The gender gap in literature is also significant. Only 36% of men are reading literature, while about 50% of women are engaging in reading some type of literary form. (Let’s be clear that this isn’t only because of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise.)
Ageists who want to fault millennials for the continual decline in literary reading are wrong to do so. Across the board, there wasn’t much considerable variation in the amount literature age groups read. Everyone is hanging out in the 39–49% range.
From the NEA’s Annual Arts Basic Survey (AABS)
In the age of iPhone apps and Netflix streaming, it can be hard to find the time and concentration to read good literature. If you ever feel that you are among the 57% of Americans not reading enough, Electric Lit is always here with a recommendation, or a short story (oh, and we have an app for that).
Electric Literature’s second annual Genre Ball is the literary costume party you have been dreaming of. The Friday before Halloween, come dressed as your favorite genre, book, or character for a night of dancing, carousing, and general merriment to support Electric Literature.
Cocktail Reception — VIP Ticket Holders Only Electric Literature Headquarters 6–8PM Electric Literature Headquarters (3 Blocks from Ace Hotel) 1140 Broadway, Suite 704, New York, NY 10001
The Genre Ball — VIP and Partier Ticket Holders Liberty Hall at Ace Hotel New York 20 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001 8–11pm After cocktails, we’ll go three blocks to the Ace Hotel to join the rest of the partiers for an evening of drinks, dancing to tunes, and a costume contest judged by our illustrious hosts. Onsite facepainting will be available from Sheila J. Faces and tunes will be brought to you buy Health Klub DJs.
Dress: Costumes are optional, and cocktail attire is suggested for those not in disguise. Those in costume will have a chance to win the grand prize in our costume contest: a one night stay courtesy of our friends at Ace Hotel New York.
Pictures from the 1st Annual Genre Ball. Photo credit: Aslan Chalom
The 2016 Genre Ball is hosted by:
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes The Sun
James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods
Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock
Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under
Anna Noyes, author of Goodnight Beautiful Women
Helen Phillips, author of Some Possible Solutions
Hannah Pittard, author of Listen to Me
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens
Lynne Tillman, author of What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
Teddy Wayne, author of Loner
Costume suggestions: apocalyptic bandit; adulterous aristocrat; teenage detective; product of an unfortunate lab incident; raised by nuns; raised by wolves; boarding school dropout; small town dreamer; adorable pickpocket; mysterious benefactor; ragtag team of misfits (group costume); space traveler; intergalactic queen; misunderstood outlaw; grizzled cop who’s seen it all; fun-loving orphan; mother of dragons; whatever pops into your head.
The lucky winner of the costume contest will receive a free one night stay courtesy of our friends at Ace Hotel New York!
There are three ticket levels available:
VERY IMPORTANT PARTIER — $200: Mingle with the Genre Ball literary hosts and guests of honor at the Electric Literature offices, just down the street from the Ace Hotel. Enjoy appetizers and drinks with us before the Ball begins.
PARTIER — $100: Attend the Genre Ball at Liberty Hall at Ace Hotel New York.
VIP ONLY — $100: Attend the VIP reception at the Electric Literature offices with literary libations, hearty appetizers, and prize-winning authors.
PARTIER IN ABSENTIA: Support the Genre Ball from afar with a donation in the amount of your choosing.
Alan Moore doesn’t do small. That’s true both in terms of the size of his works–sprawling comics narratives, a series of short films leading into a feature, or works in prose that could suffice for home exercise–and in terms of their density. Several of Moore’s comics have prompted extensive online annotations: Jess Nevins did so for his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books, in which Moore mashed together several centuries of pop cultural history into a massive adventure story that became increasingly philosophical. Moore is currently most of the way through Providence, an H.P. Lovecraft-inspired story with artist Jacen Burrows; there’s a collaborative project underway to document all of the allusions in there, too.
All of this serves as a kind of prelude to the prediction that Moore’s long-in-the-works novel Jerusalem will likely prompt plenty of discussion about the references, cameos, and allusions made within it, which cover everything from historical references to literary homages, from narrative threads that take hundreds of pages to pay off to cryptically metafictional structural devices. To state that this is a book that swings for the fences–perhaps not a perfect metaphor, given the very English nature of the story being told–doesn’t quite do it justice. It swings for the fences beyond the fences in a way that would also like for an observer to question the notion of fences. It’s Moore’s Ulysses, his Dhalgren, his doorstopper engaging with grandiose themes and experimental styles. Which marks this as a mightily ambitious novel in both scope and style, but which can also lead to an occasionally uneven experience. Is it a bold work? Yes, and a singular one, for better or for worse. Moore has opted to zero in on a number of lives in the Midlands city of Northampton to tell a story about, well, everything.
It begins in 1959, as a five-year-old girl named Alma Warren travels through the city of Northampton with her mother Doreen and her younger brother, Michael. There are neatly witty moments to be found here: Michael’s enthusiasm for life causes Alma to suspect “that he was rather shallow for a two-year-old, far too concerned with having fun to take life seriously.” But there are moments here that defy logic: the strange use of dialogue, which seems both familiar and somehow alien; the presence of a group of barefoot men in a storefront working on carpentry; the sense of some knowledge that’s just beyond understanding.
One of these men is referred to as “The Third Borough,” and this sparks something in Alma: “Alma had heard of the Third Borough, or at least it seemed she had.” Soon enough, more mysterious terms come up: a Vernall’s Inquest, the Porthimoth di Norhan. Vernall is a kind of title, but it also refers to a surname found further back in the Warren family. And soon enough, this strange scene is revealed to be a dream, and Moore leaps ahead to Alma and Michael (now called Mick) several decades later. Shifts between decades in a handful of sentences, the porousness of the boundary between dreams and waking life, the long histories of places and families–all of these are the material from which Jerusalem is made, and they’re concepts to which Moore returns again and again.
The novel is composed of three parts. The first of these, “The Boroughs,” is a fragmented narrative, jumping between the novel’s present-day (in this case, 2006) setting and a series of vignettes from Northampton’s history over the previous centuries. Sometimes the jumps from chapter to chapter seem arbitrary; at others, there’s a seamlessness present–a supporting character in one chapter, such as Henry George, a black American haunted by his country’s history of racism, ends up at the center of the next, for instance. And Moore’s approach here is somewhat naturalistic: there are abundant scenes in which characters walk the streets of the city, noting buildings and structures along the way. (It’s not exactly a shock when a member of the Joyce family shows up, though in this case it’s James’s daughter Lucia.) And there are plenty of scenes of gritty realism: several generations of families living in close quarters, illnesses that carry off small children, the way that physical or mental health can collapse in an instant. And there’s also, in one early chapter, the presence of sexual violence–something that Moore has been criticized for using as a plot element in several of his works. (This article by Kelly Kanayama summarizes this criticism well, and points out certain issues with the handling of sexual vioience in Moore’s writing that could also, unfortunately, apply to Jerusalem.)
Slowly, Moore details in the narrative’s historical gaps, showing the reader several generations of Warrens and Vernalls. Themes and images recur: notably, a torus, a ring-shaped object that results when a circle is spun on an axis. Some chapters are wholly realistic; in others, characters have visions of angels, speaking to them in bizarre languages–“…aeond their cfhourvnegres orfflidt Heerturnowstry awre haopended”–that impart concepts over and above the words used. Other characters see things in the corners of rooms, sparking the sense that they’re being somehow observed by tiny people, or people at a distance. One character, shortly before his death, observes “how the corners of a building were made cleverly, that they could be unfolded in a manner whereby the inside of them was out.” Strange things are afoot here, and even with the narrative leaping through time, this sense of disorientation prevails.
For all of these invocations of the cosmic, the transcendental, and the boundaries of sanity (it’s not for nothing that the novel’s second part bears an epigraph from H.P. Lovecraft), what really suffuses the novel’s first part is a dread-inducing sense of mortality. Numerous characters ponder their finite lifespans; numerous characters conclude that there is no afterlife. The overall effect is incredibly bleak. A middle-aged poet named Benedict Perrit, a contemporary of Alma and Mick, wanders through the city in one chapter, musing on the changes to it over the course of his life and the way that he’s been tormented by writer’s block. In a handful of paragraphs, he thinks back on his own life and legacy.
He was thinking about dying, how he did each morning soon as he woke up, but now there was no hope the morbid thoughts would vanish with the day’s first drink, not when its last drink was just then expiring horribly beneath Ben’s tongue. He was alone there in his room with death, his room, his death, its inevitability, and there was nothing to defend him.
It gets even sadder from there.
The novel’s second part, “Mansoul,” exists as an extended flashback to a moment in Mick’s childhood, alluded to in the prologue, when he was clinically deceased for a while, only to be revived. If “The Boroughs” was largely a work of realism with occasional flashes of transcendence–think David Peace’s GB84 or William T. Vollmann’s The Royal Family–“Mansoul” is something else entirely. The novel’s tone becomes much more fantastical, as another layer of reality comes into focus and some of the stranger moments of the novel’s first four hundred pages are given a wholly different context. Or, to put it another way, readers wondering what the hell is going on with the corners of rooms will find their answer,
Emotionally, it’s something of an intentional rollercoaster, featuring the introduction of the novel’s one truly villainous character, along with a group of adventurers, the Dead Dead Gang, traveling through the borders of time and space. The book becomes much stranger here, at times recalling the Chums of Chance scenes in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, a novel with which Jerusalem has much in common. But it’s also still a middle section: certain narrative threads are paid off, while others are started, several of which won’t be resolved until the novel’s closing pages.
Fundamentally, however, it’s also a more hopeful section. For all of the grappling with concepts of death, mortality, and frustrated ambition that went on in the novel’s first part, this exists as a kind of refutation of it–or, if nothing else, an expansion of the book’s horizons. It’s a welcome shift: this is a book that can become crushingly depressing in its initial pages, and so the more freewheeling chapters that follow allow for a beneficial change in mood.
There are multiple sides of Moore as storyteller present in Jerusalem. The detail with which Northampton past and present is rendered is impeccable; at times, the novel reads like a scale model of the city. (It’s probably no coincidence that a scale model of the city makes an appearance late in the book.) Moore’s skill at pulp storytelling is also on display here: the “Mansoul” section is gripping, a psychedelic chase sequence over hundreds of pages that manages to interpolate several powerful personal histories, a couple of narrative threads that pay off brilliantly at novel’s end, and a neat thematic counterpoint to the fatalism expressed by many characters in “The Boroughs.” But Moore is also fond of pastiche: several of his comics have included lengthy text sections written in a particular style or echoing particular genres: pulp serials especially. This was particularly true of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the third volume of which contained a host of pastiches, ranging from a lost Shakespearean play to pornographic comics set in the world of George Orwell’s 1984 to (perhaps least successfully) The Crazy Wide Forever, a Kerouac-meets-pulp fiction tale. The last of these, unfortunately, indicates that even a writer as skilled as Moore with the emulation of other styles has their limits.
Which is to say that by the time the novel’s third part, “Vernall’s Inquest,” begins, the novel is roughly two-thirds over and has, so far, begun an intense narrative escalation. It is in the novel’s final third, however, that Moore fragments the narrative, shifting styles from chapter to chapter. “The Steps of All Saints,” which answers a number of narrative questions set up nearly a thousand pages earlier, is told as a stageplay, for instance. Sometimes this can be incredibly powerful, as with his juxtaposition of one man’s life in the 20th century with thousands of years of history leading up to him. At others, it stops the narrative dead in its tracks. “Round the Bend,” for instance, is told in a uber-stylized fashion–“At the frays marchins awf the cupse she treps amokst the betterclapsand dayzes…”–which reads less like a choice made out of necessity and more because Moore wanted to incorporate that style into this work.
There’s another wrinkle to this work as well. At the center of this work are siblings Alma and Mick Warren. They’re introduced in the novel’s opening, and their conversational give-and-take anchors the book, providing a recognizably human element amidst the stylistic flourishes and metaphysical explorations. Alma herself has moved into fine art after an early history of working in pulpier terrain, leading some invocations of the likes of Michael Moorcock along the way. But for all of the expansiveness of the narrative, there are also a couple of references that hit closer to home on first reading. (Moore’s Acknowledgements point to a few more figures taken from real life and his own history in Northampton.) The most interesting of them is the presence of artist Melinda Gebbie in the novel. Gebbie is described as Alma’s best friend, which, given the real-life Gebbie’s long history with comics and surreal art makes sense. However, absent from the novel is Gebbie’s real-life spouse: a writer who you might have heard of by the name of Alan Moore.
This, in turn, may lead to speculation as one reads Jerusalem: is Alma intended as a kind of fictional surrogate for Moore? Her pulp background and fondness for multi-disciplinary work certainly suggests it. Or are Alma and Mick a sort of joint surrogate for Moore: Alma the artist, Mick the participant in the ecstatic? It’s an additional wrinkle atop an already-turbulent work. And while trying to place the author into a work where they don’t specifically appear can be a tiresome critical game, one assumes that Moore had a goal in mind when he placed his romantic partner and frequent artistic collaborator into the narrative but left himself out.
What, then, to make of Jerusalem? I found large chunks of it to be breathtaking in their scope; I found many of the passages, especially those in its first part when characters wrestled with mortality, to be incredibly moving. Certain individual chapters, such as “The Breeze That Plucks Her Apron,” about a woman’s evolving relationship with death and the community around her in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are beautifully self-contained narratives, moving in their precision. And that doesn’t even address some of the book’s most memorable scenes and motifs: the history of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” the glimpse of a near-future England, the way that art can both save and destroy lives, a character wandering through time eating a bizarre fruit called a Puck’s Hat, and the novel’s meditations on Englishness, which seem particularly relevant in this post-Brexit era.
The way that certain plot threads pay off over the entirety of the novel is a testament to Moore’s craft. But it’s also unwieldy in places–an aspect that Moore tacitly alludes to when, in the closing pages, Mick encounters a work of art that shares numerous qualities with the novel we’ve all been reading, and finds himself alternately fascinated and bewildered by it. Perhaps the filial relationship between Alma and Mick is a kind of evocation of the bond between writer and reader. That’s also of a piece with Moore’s approach here, in which the form of the novel takes on a number of permutations over the course of the narrative. This isn’t to say that it narratively insulates itself from criticism, but it does seem like a way of making some end runs around it. (Curiously, one could also read aspects of Jerusalem as Moore’s response to Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles–which, given the hostility Moore directed at Morrison in a 2014 interview, seems an interesting case of one-upmanship.)
Fundamentally, this is a novel about the interconnectedness of life, and of the shifting ways that people encounter life and death. It’s both a novel of stark urban realism and a hallucinatory work in which a shapeshifting devil can make an appearance. And while some of the ways in which narratives pay off don’t entirely click–the idea of one character’s tragic backstory helping them to save another isn’t one of the better narrative tropes at work here. But the ambitions of this project make for a book that remains compelling. “[P]overty lacks a dramatic arc,” one character notes about two-thirds of the way through Jerusalem. And in this narrative of humble lives amidst an epic backdrop, Moore makes his own humanistic correction of that.
Alexander Maksik’s excellent third novel, Shelter in Place, opens with a sentence so viciously specific that I spent the whole first page in a daze: “In the summer of 1991 my mother beat a man to death with a twenty-two ounce Estwing framing hammer and I fell in love with Tess Wolff.” This line serves as a good summary of the plot that follow, and also provides a clue as to the impact the book exerts. Set in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s, the novel follows the fate of Joseph March, a twenty-one-year-old college graduate from Seattle whose life takes an unexpected turn when his mother is sent to a correctional facility. He moves to White Plains, Washington, to be closer to her, bringing the love of his life along for the ride, but fails to anticipate the extent to which his mother’s taste for vigilante justice will prove infectious to those around her.
Shelter in Place is, like the women in Joseph’s life, forceful in a way that’s hard to pin down. In the novel’s exploration of violence and obsession, it brings to mind Patricia Highsmith’s work — sometimes the bruising Ripley novels, sometimes the damaging passion in The Price of Salt — and the unsettling questions Maksik raises about mental illness and its inheritance made me think of Mary Gaitskill’s great short story “The Other Place.” At the same time, Shelter in Place is a book suffused with real human warmth — a love story, albeit an unconventional one.
“I am certainly not the same person in the morning as I am at night,” Maksik tells me during the interview which follows. “I am not the same person in one place as I am in another.” His novels, too, are always changing, pushing into new terrain. I met him for the first time in 2012 and soon became a fan of his debut, You Deserve Nothing (2011), and of his next book, A Marker To Measure Drift (2013). The latter was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a finalist for both the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. Shelter in Place feels to me like an even more accomplished novel: a book to shake your sense of self, by a writer doing exactly as he pleases.
Jonathan Lee: How quickly did this first sentence come to you — 1991, the Estwing framing hammer, Joseph falling in love and a man falling down dead? What kind of work did you hope it would do?
Alexander Maksik: The sentence itself came to me very quickly, one of those you write and like, but don’t quite know what to do with. It wasn’t until the last few drafts that I made it the first sentence, the first chapter.
It is, of course, a writerly device: by beginning in this way I’m introducing two fundamental facts — falling in love and his mother’s crime — which have entirely altered and shaped Joey March’s life. I also like that the sentence introduces a narrator so unsure of himself, so suspicious of fact and memory and form, that he attempts to compensate by beginning with an impossibly tidy summary. He’s trying to tell a story, or several stories, without having any idea how to do it. A declarative line like that, absent any overt poetry, which appears to withhold nothing, seems to him the best way to begin. And from the outset, he struggles with the same question all writers do: What the fuck am I making? And like most writers, he begins with the necessary pretense that he knows.
Lee: Merritt Tierce has said of Shelter in Place that it poses a “hard, important, and perhaps unanswerable question — how do you live with your self?” It occurs to me that perhaps all of your work to date has grappled with that question. In what ways might this new novel connect with, or depart from, You Deserve Nothing and A Marker To Measure Drift?
Maksik: I hope it’s true that everything I write grapples with this question. Certainly, all of the writing I most admire does. How do you live with your self and how does that self live alongside the selves of others?
I have made a conscious effort to write about widely various people, in widely various worlds, but in the end, I suppose, on some level, I do keep writing the same book. How depressing. On the other hand, I like to think that over the course of my writing life — and it’s certainly true of Shelter in Place — that my characters have become progressively better at living with their selves and with those of others. And there’s something appealing in the idea of having a body of work wherein I might chart that progress.
Lee: What did you struggle with most as this novel took shape?
Maksik: Structure and voice. I wanted to move quickly and seamlessly across time, to write a book that would reflect an active memory. Added to that was the problem of a bipolar narrator whose patterns of thought changed according to his rapid shifts of mind. I wanted those changes to be provoked not only by his present environment and experience, but also by recollection. Memory incites both physical and linguistic response. To do all of that, I had to constantly move between different languages, moods and times. And to do it while also telling a coherent story was a challenge.
Lee: Are you a planner?
Maksik: I am decidedly not a planner. I begin everything more or less blind and try to find my way to the end.
Lee:And did it feel refreshing to return to the first person in this novel?
Maksik: In many ways, yes. It’s such an immersive experience, and I love that. I also like being free of the responsibilities of omniscience — and its falsity. The first person necessarily makes a story incomplete, which I think generally makes for a truer novel. The whole notion of a reliable narrator is a fiction. All narrators are unreliable. I despise books in which every question posed is answered. There’s an implicit argument in those books which says that somewhere there exists a series of answers, a perfect conclusion. In large part this is why I tend to write in either the close third or first person. Though I would like to take a shot at a sort of Tolstoyan omniscience, if only to move in and out of the minds of dogs.
Lee: What did you seek to sustain and erase from Joseph’s sentences as you revised?
Maksik: Joey writes sentences that I would not. He can be melodramatic, a bit baroque. He’s earnest and naïve, doesn’t always see the obvious, doesn’t ask certain questions that someone else might, doesn’t answer others. So the trick was trying to reconcile the language of the novel with his particular personality, his ever-shifting moods. On one hand you want to be true to character, but you also don’t want that character, that personality, to subsume the story. Or, more simply, you don’t want him to become so irritating that readers fling the book against a wall. While I was revising, I spent a lot of time searching for that balance.
Lee: Tell me a little about the structure of the novel, its short chapters — the gaping white space — and the way the narrative sways back and forth in time. Is that an intentional way of getting at Joseph’s sense of Tess — ”not as a physical thing, but as a tone, the way all the absent exist within me”?
Maksik: I wanted the structure of the novel to reflect the “structure” of Joey’s mind. The short chunks of text are a way for him to try, quite physically, to make order out of chaos. To convert the disarray of his mind, his history, his present life into self-contained, clearly-bordered objects. So much of the novel deals with his desire, and failure, to turn madness and disorder to symmetrical systems. He is moving so rapidly between the present and assorted pasts, trying so hard to apply a logic to his life, it makes sense to me that he would construct his story this way.
Lee: There are moments when the novel seems to imply something epistolary in its own form — ”Talking to myself. Talking to my parents. To Claire. To you.” Or, much later: “Dear Tess, Dear Mom, Dear Dad, Dear Claire.” Was this sense of address always there in the book?
Maksik: Joey refers to what he’s writing as story, love letter, eulogy, and prayer. It is, in turns, all of these things. The direct address aspect of the novel has been there from the start, but it’s changed significantly from early drafts. It’s far less prominent here and I removed some of the addressees.
Lee: Your last book garnered a good deal of admiration for its sentences — comparisons to the prose of James Salter, and so on. Did you find yourself in pursuit of the so-called “great” sentence in this novel, or something else?
Maksik: Honestly, I’m a little tired of writers talking about sentences. Years ago, under the influence of a certain academic cult and, not knowing what to say, I once told a novelist I admired that I was interested in “language-based novels.” Can you imagine speaking anything stupider, more redundant or hollow? What I meant was that I like to read writers who pay attention to music, to rhythm, who have control and precision, who avoid, at all costs, cliché. Or, more succinctly, I like good writing. But not at the expense, or in place, of unusual, compelling characters and stories. Writers are always saying that they read for language, for the beauty of sentences. Well, maybe so, but I’m never sure what that means exactly. What counts as beautiful? If I’m always noticing the “beauty” of an author’s sentences, then I’m going to stop reading very quickly. I read (and write) to feel, to communicate, to lose myself. Nothing is more irritating than a writer constantly interrupting me to demonstrate just how observant or sensitive he or she is — how the water sparkles, how the dust falls. I say this as someone who has sinned terribly in this regard.
Writers are always saying that they read for language, for the beauty of sentences. Well, maybe so, but I’m never sure what that means exactly. What counts as beautiful?
Lee: There’s perhaps a preoccupation in the book with each person holding different selves within them — with each of us being somehow more than one person, or at least being capable of quick transformation, whether that’s through mental illness or through everyday acts of naming: “Good morning Joe, Joey, Joseph.” What were you interested in exploring here?
Maksik: This goes to your earlier question about living with one’s self. Which is to say, living with one’s selves. It is, of course, a more pronounced problem in someone suffering from bipolar disorder, but it’s hardly one exclusive to the mentally ill. I am certainly not the same person in the morning as I am at night. I am not the same person in one place as I am in another. The woman before a flight is not the same woman after. We are constantly slipping between selves and often those selves are at war with one another. The notion of a single self is as much a fiction as the notion of a reliable narrator, or the possibility of a perfect conclusion. In many ways, nearly every character in this novel is struggling to make peace with her or his many selves. Tess, who you point out is always calling Joey by a different name, is as dramatically split as anyone in the book. Really, I think the central tension of the novel derives from this struggle.
Lee: This is also a novel that’s very aware of its status as fiction, I think. Was that important to you? “These are not the lies I want to tell,” Joseph says at one point, before steering us back in to his version of events, and there’s the great moment when Joseph follows a stranger around, watching his habits, trying to reassure himself of the reality of the man, but becomes aware that he can never climb inside his life, “this man [he’s] spent all day inventing.”
Maksik: I think, to some degree, all novels refer to the act of writing. And that’s particularly true when you’ve got a first-person narrator who is consciously recalling events, and, in Joey’s case, writing those events. In many ways, his struggles — how to tell a story, or many stories, faithfully, honestly — are mine in my role as novelist. I’m always suspicious of meta-fiction — even the term bothers me, the way all jargon bothers me. Still, in this case, I found real pleasure in writing about those struggles. I came to see just how closely aligned the act of writing a novel and the act of recollection can be. Both are hopeless efforts to communicate with the known and unknown, to make some sense of one’s experience in the world. To, in essence, turn experience into fiction.
Lee: Are you a writer who’s interested in exploring different forms of violence in your work? It seems to recur.
Maksik: It took me a long time to realize just how interested in violence I am. I know that sounds like the first line of a serial killer’s memoir. What I mean is that at some point a few years ago, I looked back at all the fiction I’d written and was surprised to discover how much of it dealt with sudden, unexpected and severe violence. I’m not entirely sure why that is, where the preoccupation comes from. Partly, I suppose, because it’s ubiquitous, because it frightens me, because I’m drawn to it. But more than anything, I’m interested in, and repulsed by, the idea that violence so closely corresponds with popular and regressive notions of masculinity and courage. In this book, I wanted to explore and subvert those ideas. Most of the violence in the novel is perpetrated by women. All the roles traditionally played by women are played by men, and vice versa. And as a result, it’s striking the way the novel changes, the way readers’ allegiances and sympathies shift.
It took me a long time to realize just how interested in violence I am. I know that sounds like the first line of a serial killer’s memoir.
Lee: There’s a lot of well-written sex between Joseph and Tess. Why is sex something Joseph obsessively narrates? I thought at one point of a line I like from A Marker to Measure Drift: “Desire focused the mind. It eliminated extraneous thought.” Does that hold any relevance here?
Maksik: I’m not sure I agree with you that his narration of sex is obsessive. Or even that there’s a lot of it. Certainly no more so than his narration of violence, or moments of platonic tenderness.The sex he does describe is fundamental to his longing to understand Tess, and is revealing of their relationship, of his intense attraction to her. She is an aggressive, highly physical and adamantly independent woman. She behaves, both sexually and otherwise, in a manner that is generally — and stupidly — attributed to men. All of this draws Joey to her. I think it’s essential that the reader sees these things — her strength, her power, and the way that Joey responds to it. But it’s also true that in the act of these recollections Joey finds refuge from his present life. It does, momentarily, eliminate extraneous thought.
I can’t understand why so often, even now, perhaps more now, there is so little sex in “literary” fiction. How is it that we’ve become so prudish? Why do writers so often dodge an integral aspect of human relationships? It’s such a missed opportunity and only makes writing fiction more difficult. It’s like writing without the use of verbs. I read those stories in which two people fumble with a set of keys, push each other against an entryway wall and then suddenly the sun is coming up and someone’s bringing someone else a cup of coffee. Why do we so often resort to that weak Hollywood device? Are we afraid that the MPAA is looking over our shoulders just waiting to slap an NC-17 rating on our novels? In a manner of speaking, I think, more than ever, we are.
Jonathan Lee is the author, most recently, of High Dive, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and a New York Times Editors’ Choice.
Ginger is neither ginger-colored nor the color of an actual piece of ginger. She is gray. “Great Dane” is a misnomer, too, although she is a large dog of I guess Danish descent. What she is is a fucking dinosaur, all muscles and a thin layer of what looks like a Muppet’s felt and a long neck and bright blue eyes that convey deep intelligence and, falsely, empathy. She is about my height when she sits.
“Ginger is an aggressive dog,” Mrs. F — — tells me. “You just have to…” The dog barks so loud it is like it is barking into a microphone. Mrs. F — — is long and beautiful like the dog. She is youthful in demeanor, and blonde. Her husband is an affable and handsome sandy-haired nurse who will have to come rescue me a couple times when I set off their house’s alarm. Dante used to go check on the dog for about an hour every day, for $15 an hour, and now I am taking over. Mrs. F — — gives me an IPA from the fridge and we sit on plastic chairs in the sun in the cedar-chip-covered backyard and she tells me how devastated she was when she visited Dante and saw the state he was in, hooked up to all those tubes. How she can’t sleep. Says to help myself to the beer in the fridge anytime. During the day, when there are no people around, the dog is kept in a big white metal cage at the center of the living room, in front of the hearth, so the layout of the house is kind of like a scene from the Inferno where the Cerberus-like Satan sits in the center of the ninth circle and all around him lie caverns of ice in which are frozen probably Hitler, Pol Pot, John Wayne Gacy, but if all that stuff was instead just nice furniture from Crate and Barrel, books, a chess board, framed diplomas and pictures of the F — —s’ wedding, their blonde kids posing with baseball bats… The dog bites her arm and shakes it around like a branch. “Ginger?” she says authoritatively. “Ginger? No. No. Down. Ginger! Ginger, no! No!” The dog lets go and takes off running across the house. “So you just have to be assertive.”
There are good and bad days with Ginger. Mostly she’s into fetching. Sometimes she gets into a part of the house where she’s not supposed to be and intimidates the shit out of me regarding her right to be there. Frequently her massive gray equine form will startle and she will start trying to communicate something to me urgently, she will put her big tragic mutant paws in my lap and bark in my face and howl.
One day I drink a glass of water in front of their sink and my hand slips and breaks a different glass. I clean up the broken glass and put it in the trash, and drink more water out of the first glass. I drink the whole thing before realizing that there are shards inside the glass I’m drinking out of, and all I can think of is the possibility of glass traveling through my digestive system right now, just fucking shit up left and right, and me dying suddenly and unexpectedly of internal bleeding on this family acquaintance’s kitchen floor, a monster dog lapping up my blood, no goodbye to anybody, no explanation, because all the glass is cleaned up.
It’s been nearly ten years since Roberto Bolaño’s epic Mexico City novel, The Savage Detectives, was published in English translation. It was a generation defining novel, the story of vagabond poets traversing the great federal city during the tumultuous 1970’s. The novel, translated into English by Natasha Wimmer, became a translation sensation, launching Bolaño into Gabriel Garcia Marquez-like lore.
Bolaño wasn’t Mexican by birth, and lived the latter part of his life in Spain and yet his shadow continues to loom large over Mexican fiction, and depictions of Mexico City. Bolaño and his Mexican contemporaries, who wrote about and lived in D.F. during the post-boom years, (including Carmen Boullosa, Daniel Sada and Juan Villoro) were themselves a bridge from the previous golden generation of Mexico’s Nobel literature laureate, Octavio Paz.
“We tend to see literature as cyclical, generational. And so it is. Like humanity, literature comes and goes in waves.”
Long the center of Latin America’s literature and art, mid to late century Mexico City was a place where writers and intellectuals sought refuge from the violent conflicts that ravaged central and south America — the reverberations of which are still being felt today.
We tend to see literature as cyclical, generational. And so it is. Like humanity, literature comes and goes in waves. Now, a new generation of Mexican novelists born in the 70’s and 80’s, and led by the recent astronomical success of Valeria Luiselli (Sidewalks; Faces in the Crowd; The Story of My Teeth; all published by Coffee House Press) has turned its gaze to the vast metropolis of 20 million people.
In the Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera (translated by Lisa Dillman) we’re taken into the depths of D.F. during a mysterious pandemic. As a fixer of sorts, the protagonist, known as the Redeemer, ranges back and forth across an unnamed capital city brokering a peace between two rival families, the Castros and Fonsecas — each holding the child of the other hostage. The book is written in the vein of Frank Miller’s tale of crime and underworld, Sin City, and tinged with classic, yet ironic, Shakespearian tragedy (one of the hostages is even called Romeo.
“[W]ritten in the vein of Frank Miller’s tale of crime and underworld, Sin City, and tinged with classic, yet ironic, Shakespearian tragedy.”
The city streets are nearly empty as the story begins. “For the past four days the message had been Stay calm, everybody calm, this is not a big deal.” Of course it is and it isn’t.
The Redeemer lives in the Big House, where he lusts after a neighbor, Three Times Blond, whose boyfriend won’t go outside during the epidemic to visit her. The Redeemer swoops in.
“This might be the last woman I’m ever with in my life, he said to himself. He said that every time because like all men, he couldn’t get enough and because, like all men, he was convinced he deserved to get laid one more time before he died.”
As the story proceeds we are introduced to many other characters — Neeyanderthal, the Unruly, Dolphin — few introduced by their proper name, adding to the dystopian feel of the tale. The Redeemer, with his muscle Neeyanderthal, goes back and forth organizing the exchange of hostages, but ultimately what is exchanged are their corpses. Romeo Fonseca was taken of his own asking, hit by a van and helped by the Castro brothers, out at the same nightclub. But the Fonsecas didn’t know this and kidnapped Baby Girl Castro, who dies from the mysterious epidemic, when they hear from witnesses that the Castros were seen putting Romeo into their car. It was, as the Redeemer says to Mrs. Castro, “A tragedy with no one to blame.”
Above all, Transmigrations is a character examination of the Redeemer, a story of how a man gets caught between two worlds. The Redeemer talks of his “black dog”, a presence he feels, like the hair pricking on the back of one’s neck, when a moral stand, a test occurs. He failed his first test as a kid in the barrio growing up, when a group of thugs beat up and carried off an already destroyed man. And since then, the black dog has haunted him.
“He learned to live with the cur, at times even to conjure him. […]His black dog was a dark mass that allowed him to do certain things, to not feel certain things, he was physical, as real as a bone you don’t know you have until it’s almost jutting through your skin.”
Herrera is best known for his novel Signs Preceding the End of the World a borderland story of going north and the grit of cartel violence. Transmigrations takes a different tack on that modern and yet distinctly Narco theme. Herrera’s Redeemer moves into and out of the drug-laced bordello and night club scene with it’s “juniors”, the sons of Mexico’s business and political elite, who live with the impunity provided by their family names. It is a land where no one is clean, nothing what it appears.
Mexico City has long been a safe zone where the cartel land violence rarely reached. But with the return of the long ruling, autocratic PRI party, under President Enrique Peña Nieto, drug violence has slowly but steadily crept into Mexico City. The recent, excellent Interior Circuits, by the journalist and novelist Francisco Goldman, digs deep into this phenomenon that Transmigrations hints toward.
To walk the long Reforma avenue, tuck into the many bookstores that line Mexico City’s famous Zocalo square, or happen upon a crowded, midday lit reading in the Palacio de Belles Artes — is to realize that Mexican literature is indeed thriving both at home and in translation.
Even more exceptional novels, set in and inspired by Mexico City, like Transmigrations (and the recent, excellent Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña París) are on the horizon: I’ll Sell You a Dog by Juan Pablo Villalobos (And Other Stories) this August and Laia Jufresa’s Umami(Oneworld) this September — and next year Empty Set (Coffee House) by the groundbreaking visual artist Verónica Gerber Bicecci.
Loneris about David Federman, a freshman boy at Harvard running away from his suburban New Jersey origins, who becomes infatuated with a charismatic, upper-crust Manhattanite in his dorm, Veronica. His abiding attraction to her is not only about love and sex, but ambition, status, and class, and his belief that, through her, he can elevate his (already elevated) station in life.
Obsession is a popular topic to write about in fiction, in part because it resoundingly answers that most clichéd of MFA-workshop questions, “What does the character want?” (Or the actor’s question of “What’s my motivation?”)
Obsessive desire has a way, too, of isolating the monomaniacal subject, blotting out the rest of the world and ultimately leaving him alone in the grips of his crazed passion. As David’s obsession deepens in Loner, so does his sense of alienation among his classmates.
A great deal of pop songs are also about romantic obsession and loneliness (often in the same breath), and many ostensible love songs, when you examine the lyrics, are really avowals of stalker-like pursuit or thoughts of the object of desire; the British seem to have a particular fondness for this kind of ballad. Here are ten that in some way informed my portrayal of David:
1. “Every Breath You Take” by the Police
This is probably the most famous “stalking” song, with its verse-ending refrain of “I’ll be watching you.” David consistently watches Veronica through the novel — across the cafeteria and campus, in the classroom and her dorm suite, on Facebook. In an academic paper he discusses Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay on the male gaze in cinema, but doesn’t interrogate his own use of it, in either his lived experience or the text of Loner (which he has written, in the first person but addressed to Veronica in the voyeuristic second person).
2. “Always on My Mind” by the Pet Shop Boys
It’s been covered by hundreds of artists, but the Pet Shop Boys version is the first one I heard. David’s roommate listens to the song on repeat after he’s been dumped. The song is about regrets after the severance of a relationship, though, not about obsession, and David, who shows a very limited capacity to feel for others, can’t empathize in the slightest with his heartbroken roommate.
3. “Creep” by Radiohead
Aside from the chorus’s self-loathing assertion of being a creep and a weirdo, a few lines from this resonate for David. “When you were here before / couldn’t look you in the eye,” Thom Yorke sings, and David, too, is unable to sustain eye contact with Veronica despite his constant surveillance of her. Then there’s the lament “I wish I was special,” after detailing the loved one’s own specialness, which speaks to the narcissism behind obsession, that it’s ultimately concerned with the hole-filled identity of the obsessive himself, not the other person.
4. “No Name #1” by Elliott Smith
In an early draft, I had a minor character quote one of the lines from this song. I decided it was too on-the-nose and cut it, but still thought frequently about the lyrics, especially from the opening — “At a party / he was waiting / looking kind of spooky and withdrawn / like he could be underwater” — and then the ending, about the pain of feeling invisible and not fitting in (similar to “Creep”’s “I don’t belong here”): “Leave alone, ’cause you know you don’t belong / you don’t belong here / slip out quiet / nobody’s looking / leave alone / you don’t belong here.”
5. “Alone in My Home” by Jack White
Jack White’s song is about willfully and defensively closing oneself off from the world to ward off hurt. David, on the other hand, spends a lot of the novel in involuntary sequestration, sometimes in public while set apart from others, but often in his bedroom, where he feels the pain of his solitude most acutely.
6. “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals
Another British obsession song (“I can’t get any rest / People say I’m obsessed”) that’s sometimes mistaken for a love song thanks to the vernacular connotation of being driven “crazy” by a loved one (“She drives me crazy like no one else”), as well as to the exuberant electric guitar and synthesizer, up-tempo and thumping drumbeat, and falsetto singing. But the title evokes, more literally, being driven insane by one’s love and the desperation that accompanies it: “I won’t make it on my own / no one likes to be alone.”
7. “So Lonely” by the Police
A post-breakup song whose title is conspicuously about loneliness, it also feels of a piece with the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” while sharing the conviction of obsession ballads (see above, “She drives me crazy like no one else”) that this is the one person who can do it for the speaker: “But I just can’t convince myself / I couldn’t live with no one else.”
8. “Empty Shell” by Cat Power
This is one of Cat Power’s most beautiful songs (again, about heartbreak and missing a former lover), which uses a jaunty fiddle and a few self-affirming lines near the end (“I don’t want you anymore”) to set up the devastating and vulnerable turn of the final couplet: “Every night, every night alone with you / every night, alone now.”
9. “Pictures of You” by the Cure
David snaps a clandestine photo of Veronica and looks repeatedly at her Facebook profile picture (until he later gains access to her complete trove of photos). People can develop compulsive fixations when seeing the same photo over and over of someone, letting it substitute for their conception of the subject — or, as this song goes, “I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you / that I almost believe that they’re real.”
10. “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” by Peter Sarstedt
Like David, the singer is enamored of a woman from an elite social circle (“And when the snow falls you’re found in St. Moritz / with the others of the jet set / and you sip your Napoleon brandy / but you never get your lips wet, no you don’t”). And, also like David, what he most craves is access to her inner world, the one her jet set doesn’t know about, in the quiet moments when she, too, is alone: “But where do you go to my lovely / when you’re alone in your bed / tell me the thoughts that surround you / I want to look inside your head, yes I do.”
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
