Ranking Every John Le Carré Adaptation

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Well before the genre borders gave way––before discerning readers could recommend to their discerning reader friends a Pulitzer-nominated author’s post-apocalyptic zombie horror novel, a sci-fi story that reads like a linguistics lecture, or a telepathic vampire detective story from Knopf (not actually a thing, though you sense it could be)––there was the spy novel. There was Graham Greene, and then a little while later John Le Carré, born David John Moore Cornwell, an Oxford dropout turned intelligence officer (first with MI5, then with MI6), turned perennially bestselling novelist. Le Carré gave readers the spy-versus-spy and inside tradecraft they craved, but with a dose of literary modernism and a disillusioned worldview. It was just the thing for the new Cold War era; the European frontier was opening, motives were blurring, and everyone knew James Bond was a superhero, not a man.

Despite the presence of spies, Le Carré’s work is not a natural fit for the screen. The shifting perspectives, the disorienting time shifts, the coded interactions that require two or three hundred pages of immersion before you can feel confident in even identifying the main characters, or explaining the gist of their basic interactions––how do you put all that into a two-hour visual experience while also staying true to the art, and selling popcorn on top of it?

Regardless, the genre has proved irresistible over the years, and fortunately for us there have been some successes in the bunch. Since the author is now looking back on his career (Le Carré’s excellent memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, comes out today), we thought that this would be a good opportunity to review in parallel the state of the man’s work on screen.

So here it is, 1–16: The Definitive Ranking of Every John Le Carré Adaptation.

1. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film, 2011)

The Circus at its dreary, paranoid, internecine best. And all that hallucinatory orange decor… Gary Oldman embodies George Smiley like no other actor (heresy, we know). He’s observant, cynical, so pensive he’s at times almost comatose, and then suddenly that strange brew of cunning and resolve boils over. Tom Hardy steals a few scenes as Ricki Tarr; same goes for Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillam. Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux grabs a few, too. (Come to think of it, this is really one of the best ensemble casts.)

Is the Hungary mission a little convoluted? Do you have to rewatch this movie two or three times before the plot starts to makes sense? Sure, but nobody said espionage was simple. Disinformation is half the game.

2. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)

The original, and still the model for how to make a successful Le Carré adaptation. So many factors convened to make this movie work. Burton, as Alec Leamas, was at the height of his powers, capable of conveying more emotion, more world-weary ambivalence at a glance than most actors can summon over the span of a career. Director Martin Ritt was back from the blacklist, with a darkening world vision. The Bond series was in full force, ready to be undermined. The film noir tradition was alive and well, and audiences were learning to value atmosphere and ambiguity over plot twists.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is core Le Carré: a disillusioned spy in Cold War Central Europe, lost in a mire of lies, schemes and betrayals, carrying on in the name of professionalism and gamesmanship, more than love of country or any particular belief in the cause. No film better captured the geo-political moment––or the personal disenchantment––of the supposed détente.

3. The Constant Gardener (2005)

Forget the spooks and spies (well, sort of). This is post-Cold War Le Carré, where aid workers, diplomats, and pharmaceutical reps are the new avatars of the quiet fight for world morality. Directed by Fernando Meirelles (responsible for 2002’s City of God), The Constant Gardener relies on a washed-out palate to establish an eery, starkly beautiful fever dream of East Africa. While Rachel Weisz is the story’s impetus, Ralph Fiennes is its beating heart: he perfectly captures the Le Carré sense of ambiguity, noble intention, and ultimate bewilderment.

4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (TV series, 1979)

This is a controversial opinion, obviously. The original TTSS adaptations starred Alec Guinness, after all. (Read The Pigeon Tunnel, if for nothing else than Le Carré’s Guinness anecdotes. A taste here, courtesy of The Guardian.)

This is still one of the best-loved BBC productions of all time, and still a high water mark. The performances are subtle, the story compelling, and the atmosphere thick. The cinematography however is more in line with television standards of the day, and doesn’t equal the strange panache of the 2011 film adaptation. By all means though, watch both, on repeat.

5. The Night Manager (2016)

Tom Hiddleston has a real future in Le Carré adaptations. He’s compelling and worldly, if not overly gifted (in spite of prevailing Internet opinion), with an overall Bond-ian charm.

The story, on its own, is a bit far-fetched. A former soldier serving as a hotel employee in Cairo is recruited to track and trap a notorious arms dealer (Hugh Laurie). But the joint BBC/AMC miniseries pulls it off with style, and Le Carré’s world has never looked better. Director Susanne Bier has the eye, wit, and patience to illuminate the author’s scenes, not an easy feat on screen.

6. The Looking Glass War (1969)

There are two things you need to know about The Looking Glass War. Frank Pierson, of Cool Hand Luke and Dog Day Afternoon fame, wrote and directed the adaptation. And it stars a young Anthony Hopkins. If that’s not enough, God help you.

7. Smiley’s People (1982)

Look, these are good adaptations. I’m thrilled they exist and will watch them again every few years. Alec Guinness’ Smiley astounds. Karla comes over. There’s a lot to love here. But a great adaptation requires a visual style to match the author’s prose, okay? BBC workaday filming is fine, but you need a little more to move up in these rankings.

8. A Perfect Spy (1987)

Considered Le Carré’s most personal novel, this one plumbs a father-son relationship and hits hard on the analogy between confidence games (the father’s) and geopolitical betrayal (the son’s). The series gets points for coherence and nuance but a knock against because it doesn’t take on Le Carré’s trademark time shifts, opting instead for a relatively linear telling.

9. The Tailor of Panama (2001)

Pierce Brosnan was born to play Andy Osnard — smug and charming, bullying and considerate, cynical to the bone, and given to doing business while seated on vibrating motel beds. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn’t up to his performance. The canal zone, which should be a viper’s nest of shady business and tropical hustlers, is somehow neutered in translation. Geoffrey Rush and Jamie Lee Curtis bring the opposite of charisma to the screen. And the dance scenes… well, nothing can justify them. Still, they are having fun. And the scenes of Rush practicing his tradecraft very nearly make this a good movie.

10. A Most Wanted Man (2014)

This one’s a by-the-numbers Le Carré adaptation, except for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance. Hoffman was nearing the end of his too-short life, and it’s impossible not to watch this movie without noticing his anguish. The accents are distracting — Hoffman, Rachel McAdams and Willem Dafoe all play Germans. The unspooling of the plot is a little ham-handed. Still, this is a solidly middle-class Le Carré movie, and certainly worth watching (now streaming on Amazon Prime), especially if you’re interested in the nuances of asylum applications in contemporary Europe (do go on…)

11. The Deadly Affair (1966)

This one gets even more confusing than your typical adaptation, since a rights dispute between studios required a lot of name-changing. (The movie is based on Le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead.) James Mason stars as ‘Charles Dobbs’ — the Smiley avatar. Most significantly, Sidney Lumet directs.

12. Our Kind of Traitor (2016)

The most recent adaptation has a lot going for it: Russian mobsters, Ewan McGregor, Susanna White (an accomplished miniseries director — see Bleak House and Generation Kill) with her flair for portraying corruption, and Stellan Skarsgård, who is legally obligated to appear in every international thriller, but who still manages to bring something to each role. Somehow, though, none of it quite works. It’s a pleasant enough movie to watch, but ultimately not all that gripping.

13. The Russia House (1990)

The luminaries who travel through Le Carré’s orbit never cease to amaze. The screenplay for The Russia House was written by Tom Stoppard. Are you in the mood for a publishing world/espionage thriller? Did you love Sean Connery in The Presidio. (Wait, he was in something else, right?) Is Michelle Pfeiffer your one and only femme fatale? Then, this might be your cup of tea.

14. A Murder of Quality (1991)

This was a TV movie, apparently. Featuring Denholm Elliott, Indiana Jones’ Dr. Marcus Brody, who also starred in the 1953 adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, and the original TV movie adaptation of The Bourne Identity from 1988.

15. Endstation (1973)

A West German film production. We didn’t see this one. Neither did you. Let’s not pretend.

Couldn’t even find an image, so enjoy more from 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

16. The Little Drummer Girl (1984)

This 1984 release fell prey to a classic Le Carré adaptation trap — trying to fit the entire plot into a single movie. The result? Utter incoherence, followed by boredom. Still, it stars both Diane Keaton and Klaus Kinski, which ought to be a hell of a pairing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Final Unpublished Collection Set for Spring 2017 Release

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In the years before his tumultuous 1937 Hollywood move, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived at North Carolina’s Grove Park Inn. His wife Zelda was receiving treatment at a nearby sanatorium. Tucked in the mountains, mired in alcoholism, and already careening towards his untimely death, the author wrote many of the stories set to appear in his final unpublished collection: I’d Die for You, due out from Scribner in April, 2017. Said to be a stylistic departure from his better known work, the publisher claims the collection will “provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career.”

The title story draws from the author’s southern exile, heightening the events of a particularly traumatic interview with The New York Times, which was described by Thomas Wolfe as “a lousy trick, a rotten…piece of journalism.” In the fictionalized account, Fitzgerald is said to have added a full Hollywood film crew to the rural pine forests, foreshadowing his impending departure to the west.

Unlike The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s most read posthumous release, I’d Die for You contains finished work presented as the author intended it to be read. He had, in fact, attempted to publish the collection during his lifetime; however, because of content Scribner describes as “controversial [for] depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship,” it was considered unsellable. Refusing compromising edits, Fitzgerald left the stories unpublished, despite financial struggles and a need for critical attention.

This is not the first unreleased Fitzgerald material to crop up in recent years. Just last August, Strand Magazine published “Temperature,” a story found in his Princeton University archive that follows Emmet Monsen, a hard drinking writer with cardiac disease. For the time being though, it seems like these pieces are the last of their kind. If I’d Die for You actually ends up being the final word from The Great Gatsby author, the collection should be an interesting conclusion to an illustrious and tragic literary legacy.

Leopoldine Core on First Meetings, Fantasies & Getting to Know A Character

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Leopoldine Core’s stories filled a void I didn’t know was there. Selecting a favorite from her debut collection When Watched is an impossible task — each entertains, delights, and impresses. Her plots are meticulous, surprising, and her characters are fascinating: the kind of characters you’d want to get a phone call from, just for the chance to hear them speak. They say the kind of biting things that make you laugh, then cringe. Most of the nineteen stories in When Watched explore the relationships — sexual, friendly, and otherwise — between pairs of characters. Core’s fiction picks away at the vulnerabilities and impulses that incubate in us, both when we’re alone and when we’re stuck with other people.

Core answered my questions about the work of crafting her stories and why she likes to put characters together and see what happens.

Claire Luchette: One of the joys of reading your characters is the attention you give to how they think and feel and act in public, as opposed to when they’re alone. It hints at a self-awareness that is so important to a character’s psychology. Do you think we’re more ourselves around other people, or when we’re alone?

Leopoldine Core: The self isn’t a single entity — it contains so many trembling, conflicting parts. This is why I like to shuttle between the outer and inner worlds of a character, so you can see what they say and are unable to say. I remember a teacher once telling me that I should know my characters entirely — even if I don’t share every detail of who they are in the text — I should know. But I tend to have the opposite experience when I write. There is so much I don’t know about these people — a story is just a glance and that is my attraction to the form, how partial it is. You are thrown into someone’s existence for minute and then they’re gone and maybe the story keeps going in your head. I don’t know exactly who these people are and I write from exactly that point of unknowing — of desire.

Luchette: Many of these stories also focus on partnerships — pairs of people, and the intimacy between them. What interests you about duos?

Core: I find it easier to talk to one person than a group of people and my stories reflect that. Often in a group — though this isn’t always true — the conversation stays a bit lighter, a bit more polite. But when you talk to one person, if you like each other, a lot is revealed very quickly. So when I’m writing, I like to jump right into that intensity, use it.

It’s also spatial — it’s a set up I understand, two heads side by side in a room. I grew up in a narrow, messy apartment in the East Village. There literally wasn’t a lot of room to move around, so at best I would invite one friend over and we would sit on my bed and talk and do our homework and eat. I did everything in bed because it was the one surface that was always clear. And so I guess I grew accustomed to being very close to someone when I spoke with them, and to often being alone. My neighborhood wasn’t very safe, so most of my free time was spent indoors. And somehow I wasn’t bored. I liked being home in bed, talking to someone or myself. I still do.

It’s so revealing, how we behave when encountering each other for the first time.

When I’m staging a story, I like to find ways of putting two people with nothing in common right next to each other, and trapping them in the room or the car, seeing what they say. Like when people are first meeting in a story, how they interview each other — or some people never ask the other a single question, they just talk about themselves. It’s so revealing, how we behave when encountering each other for the first time.

Luchette: “When Watched” delves into the highly imaginative mind of Theo, a young girl who dreams of disappearing. What was challenging in writing her?

Core: “When Watched” was the first story I wrote. I wanted to write a story that emphasized the ways kidnapping is eroticized in the culture and I was struck with the idea that the child in the story would join in the fantasy — staging her own death. I didn’t want to erase her though, that was a fear of mine. I didn’t want to drown the character out with my theories about pop culture, you know? The story is about someone who feels unseen, unloved — indeed, neglected, so as the writer, I wanted to be sure to see her. I wanted the story to live very much in her mind. One feels a moral obligation when writing about children — not to flatten out their humanity, their weirdness. I spent a long time thinking about who Theo was, having conversations with her in my head. Because I knew that once she was real, she would write the story, carry me to the end.

So much of what drives my work is the tension between fantasy and reality — and the fact that you can’t quite separate them, they start to fizzle together in the same pool.

Luchette: These stories are all narrated in the third person — usually close to one character’s thoughts, but in some cases roaming between characters (like in “Historic Tree Nurseries”). What does the close third person offer you, the writer? Is it control, or maybe more objectivity?

Core: I write in the third person because I like hovering over the scene, seeing the surface of everything. I write kind of dull stage directions and then punctuate them with feeling — or that is my goal, anyway, to keep the terrain uneven, pinball between flat and lush language. Really I write in the third and the first person — because I dip into the mind’s of my characters quite often and these thoughts occur in the first person. And dialogue, which accounts for the bulk of most stories, obviously occurs in the first person. I like shuttling between the third and first — I want to have both always. I want to be inside and outside. Because my experience of being alive is exactly that way, these constant shifts in attention to the material world, the world of other people and the world of my own head.

Luchette: In “Orphans,” we follow Miranda as she gets to know Drew, a homeless transgender guy from AA. Drew ends up being so much more compelling than Miranda, though. Is it always clear to you from the beginning which character you’ll follow through a story?

Core: That story was such a surprise. I didn’t know what would happen to Miranda, this character I felt so maddened by. Her behaviors are excruciating to watch, and yet they set the scene for much about the world around her to be revealed. When people say stupid things, ask insensitive questions, make choices based on total delusions, behave greedily — they stand to be corrected by those around them. I like watching that happen in a story. Miranda is a bit demented. She represents a part of the culture that lives in so many of us — the part that fears and mis-sees the exact person it hopes to fuck. Violence against trans people is brought on mainly by desire, I think. Because trans people are so incredibly beautiful, and for many people, they can’t bear this — their desire for a person who challenges, indeed shatters, gender norms. Miranda is violent in her stupidity, mostly, her addiction to the nimbus of her own fantasies. I wanted her to meet someone who would emphasize her hate and fear and desire and total narcissism — point it all out.

Luchette: You also write poetry. How do you navigate the truths you want to explore in poetry versus fiction?

Core: My poetry could be categorized as nonfiction. It is generally drawn directly from experience, written in the first person, and quickly. I think if I spent a lot of time on my poems or made an effort to fictionalize them, I would ruin them. They leap right out of me and I try to preserve them in that state — I have a protective impulse, maybe.

Whereas so much time goes into my stories, so many hours of lying in the dark thinking. All the elements of the plot have to hook together in a particular way, even if it’s a story about a woman who never leaves her bed. And I’m generally writing about at least two people, sometimes more, so their voices need to be distinct. This is why I write the dialogue first, so I can build an intimacy with the characters before I begin describing them in the third person. If I can read ten pages of dialogue without any names indicating who said what and still know exactly who is talking, then I feel ready to start describing the room and the faces in it. But I also sometimes use dialogue in the place of describing the face. I like when the words passing between two people show us what their bodies look like.

I like when the words passing between two people show us what their bodies look like.

I spend hours reading my stories aloud, sometimes tape recording them to see what sounds true and what doesn’t. I write fiction but the work needs to be grounded in a living reality — a world I believe — or I’ll abandon it.

Reading In The Schools by Hannah Rahimi

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The woman tells me I didn’t have to call. “Just sign up on the website,” she says.

“Oh, but I wanted to call,” I tell her. She doesn’t understand. Unless you are too old to use the internet, you are not supposed to want to call strangers.

Why did I want to call? I wanted someone to think highly of me when I signed up to read for Reading in the Schools. The internet doesn’t think highly of anyone unless you’re the right kind of active on twitter. Neither does the woman, it turns out.

I will be visiting Lake St. Public School for one hour a week to read to a little boy or girl in need of extra attention. Extra attention: these are the words from the Reading in the Schools brochure. On the phone, I tell the woman I would really like a girl. I tell her if everything goes well I might be able to do two hours. She is not impressed.

Why do I need someone to think highly of me? Shouldn’t Reading in the Schools be about reading in the schools and not about the person reading in the schools? In an ideal world. But is there any harm if my ego gets a boost while I devote an hour a week to the literacy and general well-being of a nice little girl?

As you may have guessed, I am in a funny phase of life. Not ha-ha funny. This is one way of saying I am divorced. Actually, not yet divorced. There are still papers to be delivered and signed. But for all intents and purposes I am divorced. I have cashed in five weeks’ vacation from my job at the Hamilton Archives and am staying at my parents’ house in West Toronto.

Actually, a little bit ha-ha funny. I make more jokes than I used to. I make them up from scratch.

What did one grain of sand say to the other before they broke up?

You’re such a beach!

“You’re planning to just mooch off us indefinitely?” This is my mother upon my arrival, half-kidding, half-Mussolini, half-tickled to finally use mooch in a sentence. My mother is the kind of woman who has a crossword with breakfast, Sudoku with lunch, bourbon with dinner, and cutthroat Scrabble with anyone who will play her over dessert. My father refuses to play. He is more of a rummy man.

I don’t mean to imply that divorce always = funny phase of life/moving in with parents. Only that in my particular case it has turned out this way. My future ex-husband, Arlo, is thriving, for example, post-separation.

Here is how we met: I was walking down College with a box of cannoli when someone behind me shouted, “Veronica! Hey, Veronica!” I turned around. There was a man: lion-mane hair, bowleg walk: Arlo, though I didn’t know it yet. Eyes met, sweat dripped, guts lurched, cannoli was shared, then fluids, terms of endearment, keys, rings, subtle barbs, pregnant silences, suspicions, admissions, apologies, retractions of apologies. Then rings were removed, flung into compost bin, retrieved from compost bin, rinsed in sink, etc.

To clarify, my name is not Veronica. My name is Abby. According to Arlo, the back of my head and the back of my navy pea coat are dead ringers for the back of Veronica’s head and the back of her navy pea coat. For a while Arlo and I told that story at parties. We stopped when we realized we were broadcasting to the world that our relationship was founded on a misunderstanding.

Why did I turn around? I hear a name that isn’t mine and turn in total obedience. You think I’m Veronica? I’ll be Veronica! What kind of person does that?

Of course, when I turned around, Arlo understood I wasn’t Veronica, but all the same there is a part of me that has been living on as Veronica these past four years. She is spunky and a little bit French. Now she is gone, along with my favorite mugs, and I am left to deal with what remains of Abby.

My mother tells me that doing nothing will make me depressed. “I’m already depressed,” I tell her. “And anyway, I am soon to be a Reader in the Schools.”

“Are you sure you’re qualified?” she says.

Magda and I sit in a corner of the school library on cushions that smell like apple juice. “What do you want to read?” I say.

“When is snack time?” she says.

Magda is not what I expected. She isn’t bigger than the other children but I get the sense that she is denser. If I were to drop her in water, she would sink twice as fast as another girl her age. Which is seven. She has a smoker’s voice and glasses with yellow plastic frames.

I pull Corduroy off the shelf and Magda plunks into my lap. Such affection for a total stranger — where are her defenses? I wasn’t like this as a child.

Corduroy, a stuffed bear, is getting into trouble, losing buttons, breaking into department stores. Magda is an impatient child who likes to flip the page before I finish reading. I want to tell her to slow down, that she will regret living this way, that before she knows it there will be no more pages to turn, and then what?

We finish Corduroy with 56 minutes to go.

In the middle of Clifford the Big Red Dog a boy sidles up. He looks like an illustration, all ink-splash and sprite. Magda gets territorial and elbows him away. “Magda!” I say, but she just shrugs. “That’s Devin,” she tells me. “He’s always doing the wrong thing.”

When I bring Magda back to her classroom Mrs. Gordon says, “Thank you, Abby. We’re very grateful for your support, aren’t we, Magda?”

Magda is staking her claim on goldfish at the snack table, and waves dismissively. “What did you read?” asks Mrs. Gordon. When I tell her, she is aghast. “Those are pre-school books,” she says.

Well I enjoyed them.

Arlo sends an email with the subject What if we just. In the body of the email is a hope that I am doing well. He may sound nice but it’s important to remember that he is sleeping with his daughter’s friend. Now that I am gone, she has moved in and is probably drinking from my “I Hate Broccoli” mug. A friend of his daughter. You’d think his daughter, Caroline, would mind, but apparently she is very enlightened and never thought I was right for him anyway. I have been trying to figure out why she would feel this way. Arlo once showed me pictures of his boyhood in Edmonton and Caroline said, more to him than to me, “Roland Barthes says photography is like a puncture wound.” Caroline is a grad student. Arlo is a professor of linguistics. I’ve gotten my share of degrees but I have never liked people who mention French intellectuals in casual conversation, so I said, “Roll-on Bart? Sounds like a Simpsons-themed deodorant!”

I guess you could say I made my judgment before she made hers, which is some consolation.

What if we just what, Arlo?

My father is baking corn muffins. To my knowledge he hasn’t made corn muffins since I was six years old. That was around the time we engaged in a practice called Mean Cuisine. Mean Cuisine = putting surprising things in my mother’s food. For example, soy sauce in coffee.

Another thing I did at six was chinning. I invented chinning. I used my chin as a weapon by digging it into the arm flesh of my enemies.

When my father cooks he listens to the CBC. Early in life, I learned that listening to the radio is a conversation. When Stuart McLean says, “Hello, I’m Stuart McLean,” at nine o’clock on Saturday morning, my father looks up from his corn muffin batter and says to the radio, “Hi Stuart.”

I myself tend to talk to the radio in a more confrontational manner. I take issue with voices of authority. The weatherman, for one. “Real Feel?” I said to him yesterday when he inflated the temperature by six degrees and then smugly prescribed light layers. “Who are you to tell me how it really feels?”

I am curious about Magda’s home life but I do not want to pry. Instead I ask, “Do your parents know about me?”

“They’ve never met you,” she says.

“Yes, but have you told them we are reading books together?”

“Sure,” she says. Sure. Like she’s placating me.

I am ashamed. I say, “You pick the book today, Magda.” I say, “Remind me to teach you about chinning.”

“What do you read the little girl?” my mother asks.

“This and that,” I tell her. “Whatever’s on the shelves.”

My mother doesn’t like this answer. She thinks the majority of children’s books involve cartoon animals who smile too much, i.e. Clifford the Big Red Dog. “Children are much smarter than we give them credit for,” she says. “They can handle intelligent, nuanced animals like Anansi the Spider and Brer Rabbit. Clifford is an idiot,” she says, “created by adults who think children are idiots.” She suggests I take some of my old books to read to Magda. She shows me where she keeps them in the attic.

“Thank you,” I say.

She says, “Arlo called.”

“Smell that?” I say to Magda. “That’s the smell of books. When I was your age I thought it smelled like cake.”

She sniffs and considers it. “It sort of does,” she concedes.

I can tell she likes the idea because she breathes like a yogi for the rest of the hour. I read her a book I brought from the attic. Miss Rumphius. Before Miss Rumphius was named after her marital status, when she was just a girl called Alice, she spent a lot of time with her grandfather, a painter. Sometimes he would let her paint the skies into his landscapes, which Magda and I agree would be quite the honor. Alice’s grandfather encouraged her to lead a life of adventure and then settle by the sea when she was finished with traveling. The caveat, because isn’t there always a caveat, was that she do her part to make the world beautiful.

“Wait,” says Magda, when I go to flip the page. She says, “Look at her hair.”

It is true that Alice has wonderful hair, a flaming cloud. With age it streaks white in all the right places. When we get to the picture of her house by the sea, we sigh. A gate, a mound of golden grass, a filigree cottage over water.

“Do you think it’s the ocean?” I ask Magda. “Or a lake? Or a pond?” Sometimes it is hard to come up with the right questions. I try to be educational.

“I think it’s a bay,” says Magda with a hush. In her voice, gravelly and reverent, “bay” is everything we’ve dreamed of. I hear a small gasp of agreement and realize that Devin is standing over my shoulder, hanging onto the bookshelf.

“Sit,” I say, and he does. Secure in my lap, Magda tells Devin he can turn the next page.

Friend to all! Reader extraordinaire! Champion of Reading in the Schools!

Wouldn’t it be nice if. Lately I’ve been thinking. It occurred to me. In the body of email after email, Arlo hopes that I am well. An observation that CBC does not sound the same when no one talks back to it. An offer: Do I want him to send along my favorite mugs?

What did one egg say to the other when it started crying in the café?

You’re cracking up.

This happened, minus the egg part. After avoiding most people in the weeks that I’ve been living with my parents, I let my friend Carol convince me that getting out was paramount to my recovery. Recovery. Like divorce is an illness? Then again, I have been spending more than the usual time in bed. We met yesterday at one of those cafés that is ruthlessly cool, all reclaimed wood and austerity. Everyone in that café is a contemporary dancer. They all live in the same neighborhood and drink cortados.

Carol sat me down, got me a mocha, blasted me with her best Dr. Phil look and said, “So how are you?” Then came the egg incident, minus the eggs. Actually she didn’t say, “You’re cracking up.” She said, “You’re a wreck!” Seconds later, she was ashamed to have made a judgment on my sanity and tried to cushion it with a hand on my hand. “You’re better off without him,” she said. “You’ll meet someone else,” she said (with her eyes on her latte art). “The best thing is to keep busy,” she said.

“I am a reader,” I told her, “for Reading in the Schools.”

Here goes. In the body of the email, a hope that I am well. A heads-up to check my mailbox, the real one not the virtual: the papers are on their way.

My father says that when he met my mother he knew within an hour he’d spend his life with her. I do not believe in that kind of knowing. I do not.

When Magda sees me at the door of her first grade classroom she runs over to throw her arms around my waist.

“Hey there Magda,” I say as I stumble from the force of it. There is something Olympian about her, and eager. It has been a long time since somebody hugged me with pure, eager strength. Together we walk down the hall to the library. We say hello to Ms. Margles at the desk. I sign our names in the Reading in the Schools ledger.

I breathe in and say, “What’s that great smell?”

Magda says, “Books!”

We giggle. Such is the pleasure of routine. We retire to our corner, but there is Devin on our cushion, with a grown-up of his own, a small woman with a pixie cut. Devin doesn’t even glance our way. Has he procured his own reader? What a picture the two of them paint, all button nose and eyelash.

I have always marveled at women with pixie cuts. How do they acquire such small skulls, such bird-bone faces? Once a year I paste my photo into pixie cuts on those websites where you can pair your face with somebody else’s hair, and every year the result is the same: a square peg in a round hole (i.e., a heart-shaped face in an elf toupee).

I will admit I feel defeated, though it is unclear by what: the loss of territory? The great hair? Magda and I march hand in hand to another corner. She gives the bookshelf a little kick before she sits. “Devin is always doing the wrong thing,” she says.

We are in the mood to read Miss Rumphius a second time. Near the end of the book, when she is old and somewhat infirm and living in her enviable cottage by the sea, Miss Rumphius has to come to terms with the fact that she hasn’t done her part to make the world beautiful. She has only made it beautiful for herself, with her nice living situation and backyard full of flowers. What selfishness, she realizes. What sadness. In sympathy, the illustrations fade to pastel. This time, as last time, Magda looks up at me when we get to this page. She doesn’t say a word, just raises her eyes to mine with — what? Distress, bewilderment, entreaty. She has unknown the ending so that she will feel these things as she felt them the first time. So that she will feel the full weight of the joy that comes after.

Miss Rumphius is out for a walk, windblown chic, when she notices lupines in the grass. The wind from the sea has distributed the seeds from the lupines in her garden. Then, of course, comes Miss Rumphius’s revelation. She spends the rest of her days strolling the countryside in a marvelous cloak, flinging seeds every which way, giving lupines back to the world.

My mother sits at the foot of my bed. “Will you help me with the crossword?” she asks, and I know the divorce papers have arrived.

What is the word for a throat that’s sore with sadness?

What is the word for the phantom of a body around your body? (Like the limbs that ache after you lose them.)

What is the word for the feeling of being too tall for your childhood bed?

Soon I will have to return to work. I will have to find an apartment. Soon. I will not be able to be a reader in the schools when I am working full time in Hamilton. What was I thinking, signing up for Reading in the Schools when I only had five weeks?

As if they know of my betrayal, the children are gone from the classroom. There is a note for me on the door. Dear Abby, Grade One is outside celebrating spring. Magda would love for you to join us. Signed, Mrs. Gordon.

In the playground the whole school wriggles with abandon. One of the teachers has turned a boombox out the window to play Paul Simon. Teachers dance, children dance. The littlest ones bounce in a crouch while the bigger ones articulate their shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, feet.

Devin hangs between two girls who are very tall and competent-looking. They maneuver him around the yard saying, “One, two, three, up you go!”

Magda sits alone on a swing, watching people dance. I realize I know almost nothing about her. I don’t know whether she is popular or shunned or somewhere in between. Is Mrs. Gordon fond of her? Do the children mock her glasses, her funny strength? Is there something in her for them to admire?

She takes off her glasses and rubs one eye with her fist, like a baby. It could be that she is crying but I don’t think so. I think she is tired. Not tired. Weary. She holds on loosely to the chains and sits chimp-like with her knees up, heels resting on the edge of the swing. Then she lowers her head to her knee, rests her chin there, presses it — she is chinning.

Why stop at photography, Caroline? Sight is a puncture wound. Why stop at puncture wound? Sight gores me. The sight of Magda weary on the swing, chinning her own knee.

The smile on her face when I approach: glass shattering to beads. I have to tell her; of course I have to tell her. But not yet.

“We don’t have to stay out here,” she says firmly. “We can still go to the library.”

“Great,” I say, with as many exclamation points as I can muster. “Let’s go.” But she just sits there, eyeing the playground.

“Abby?” she says. She sounds more formal, more deliberate than usual, perhaps because she’s never actually addressed me by name before. I like the way she says it, as if the name belongs to someone sharp and curious.

“Yes,” I say.

“Could you push me, please?”

I see a child on a swing and don’t immediately think to push? Where are my instincts, my adult skills? I am better with indoor activities, I tell myself. Reading, for instance. Dutifully, I shuffle around and place my palms on her slouching back. “Okay,” I say. “Here goes.”

My first push is laughable, a mere nudge, but she makes the best of it, pumping her legs to gain momentum. I do better the second time, and soon enough she is sitting up straight and traveling in regal sweeps. Why don’t people do this more often? Swinging requires no eye contact, no speech. It is a relief to apply yourself to nothing but the gradual gathering of someone else’s speed.

I grow ambitious. I remember, from my own days on the playground, the currency of choice for popular parents and reckless siblings: the underdog. But how exactly does it work? I was always the one swinging while someone else took care of the mechanics. What if I accidentally knock her off? If she kicks me in the head? From the vantage point of the ground, the potential for awkward calamity seems endless.

It is possible, as my father likes to say, that I am overthinking the matter. I do my best to breathe deeply. I follow through my push until Magda is just beginning to arc upwards, and then I let go and charge forward, ducking beneath her rising feet, as she shrieks into the air. That shriek, all terror and delight — the enviable sound of a child forgetting herself.

When I stop running, I turn back to watch. How long the motion stays with her; how far she flies.

Gabriel García Márquez to Grace the New Colombian 50,000-Peso Bill

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“Face of Colombia’s second largest bill” can be added to the extensive resume of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez. The rumors have been circulating since his death in 2014, and last week, following an official ceremony in Bogotá, Colombia put its new 50,000-Peso bill into circulation, featuring two images of the country’s beloved “Gabo.”

Best known for his novels 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, the famed magical realist will share the bill with two members of the Arawak tribe, a native people of Colombia, who are pictured along with a rendering of La Ciudad Perdida. The ruin in the nation’s coastal mountains predates Peru’s Machu Pichu by approximately 650 years. Fittingly, beside the author’s portrait, a cluster of butterflies flutters.

While literary figures do not appear on currency often, Marquez finds himself in good company. In the 1990s, Charles Dickens was featured on the British ten-pound note and fellow 19th century novelist Jane Austen will grace the bill beginning in 2017. Additionally, James Joyce graced Irish currency for a decade before the introduction of the Euro in 2002. The bill also included a line from Finnegans Wake: “Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs,” an artistic touch notably lacking in the various iterations of the American Dollar.

Writing Against the Fact

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Strangeness, truth in non-fiction, and the space between the real and unreal

“I should not have believed a word he said.” Gay Talese disavowed The Voyeur’s Motel, his book about Gerald Foos, a man who allegedly spied on his guests at a Colorado motel he owned from the 60s through the 90s. The Washington Post broke the news that property records show Foos did not own the motel for eight years in the 1980s and, so, the factuality of Talese’s book, of his claims, of the story, of what Foos did or did not see or know or do, were in question. A day later, Talese reclaimed ownership of the book. It became real again. It became true again.

A day later, Talese reclaimed ownership of the book. It became real again. It became true again.

John D’Agata has said that straight fact is insufficient for revealing human emotion. D’Agata himself wrote a book centered around his years-long argument with his fact checker, Jim Fingal, over an essay he wrote for The Believer. In this talk with Slate, D’Agata says, “You feel misled by my essay[…]I accept that. You feel that it’s inappropriate for me to have done this. While I feel that it’s a necessary part of my job to do this. By taking these liberties, I’m making a better work of art — a truer experience for the reader — than if I stuck to the facts.” In the essay in question, D’Agata includes any number of details that are inaccurate or describe things he could not have known. One example is D’Agata pushing against insistence that he correctly name the color of a brick at the base of a tower.

This turn — from truth to something not quite true, then back to the real — says about fact that it is malleable, fluid, intangible. When we say that truth is stranger than fiction, perhaps what we’re seeing is the magic of unreality in the strangeness. Fact is strange when it becomes unreal. When it is too real.

This is haunting. This feeling of unreality shocks us from the experience. We become so very aware of ourselves in relation to the fact of what is revealed. In the unreality — whether we’re talking what is reported to be fact, or in fiction — we find ourselves. We can talk about truth versus fact. We can talk about fiction’s job being to reveal something true about humanity or lived experience. But, I see in the unreal a sort of truth. The unreality is powerful. Perhaps we should embrace writing against the real.

The unreality is powerful. Perhaps we should embrace writing against the real.

I am writing a book with Jill Talbot. In our essays, we write to each other in a sort of call-and-response. She writes, I respond. We are writing our lost loves as ghosts that haunt, and writing the mourning of place as points on a map lost to us. It occurs to me now that one crucial element of the book is now unreal.

With the last essay we wrote, I wrote about a relationship in present tense. Of someone I love moving to another city to wait for me to meet her. Jill and I edited the essay toward its final version. It was true with that edit. I’m writing about fact now as that relationship has since become past tense. It is a ghost. A point on that map. I wonder about its truth. What changes in its reveal now that what I say is unreal?

I write in the essay that the eventuality of leaving Atlanta, of joining the woman I love, is a sort of future becoming. I wrote:

“I am already thinking about which shared things she will take with her and which things I will hold onto until I reach her. There’s a picture of us I took when we visited Baltimore for a wedding. We look so happy there — she lies across my lap, smiling up at me and I’m looking down at her. What you can’t see in that picture: we were near breaking right then. Because of me. I don’t want to write that down right now. I don’t want you to see it. But, know that it’s there in that picture. I know that’s the one thing I need to keep with me. Something to call me back to her, something to remind me of my future arriving.”

She haunts the rest of the book, too. She is there in present tense. I realize now that we need to edit the basic essence of part of the book entirely.

What was true about that paragraph then is true in a different way now. Or, the truth is different than what it was. Or, an entirely new truth is conjured from the writing’s new unreality.

That paragraph is shocking now, where it was simply an attempt at understanding before. The shock reveals something new to me, something I might not have seen until now. The ghost as a mirror. John D’Agata says that “[w]hat I didn’t realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don’t get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist. You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.” Though what I wrote was a different kind of true than it is now, I create myself, my forebears, in the act of writing. I write not fact, but toward the creation of truth. I write against the fact in the hope that I come to know the ghosts in me.

We write as a form of play. Play is unreal, generally, but we feel it as tangible. We believe in its unreality.

I created a forebear in that paragraph, though I did not know it then. That version of me calls to me from the page. It’s a mythology now. I’m not sure what to make of it, yet. I have not read Talese’s book. I don’t know if the reality of what is written is true or a different sort of true. I don’t know if I care. But, in the making of the mythology is creation of understanding. We write as a form of play. Play is unreal, generally, but we feel it as tangible. We believe in its unreality.

I’m thinking a lot about Rebecca Solnit’s writing lately. I recently finished The Faraway Nearby, which is in part about loss — of memory, of parents — and I finished this book just before my relationship ended. I do not wish to create meaning, or pretend there’s inherent meaning, in that fact. But, something sticks with me from the book: the image of apricots, lots of them, filling Solnit’s home, picked from her mother’s tree as her mother suffered from Alzheimer’s. She writes, “[t]his abundance of unstable apricots seemed to be not only a task set for me, but my birthright, my fairy-tale inheritance from my mother who had given me almost nothing since my childhood.”

We believe in ghosts perhaps because we need them.

We believe in ghosts perhaps because we need them. We need our ghosts to show us who we are, who we are becoming. The apricots mean a number of things to Solnit. They are a fairy tale and they are dangerous. She writes their meaning later, long after they’ve disappeared from her home. The fact of the apricots means nothing, really, but there’s magic in conjuring meaning from them. That paragraph I wrote is true in an unreal way now, but it carries meaning still. I want that unreality — it is dangerous and violent at times and carries the capacity of fairy tale transformation. I need to feel the shattering in what the truth reveals.

A Dog Following the Advice of His Nose: an Interview with Mauro Javier Cardenas

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This week sees the release, at last, of Mauro Javier Cardenas’s long-gestated debut novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press), the coldest hot-blooded book I’ve read in many years. Like its cast of characters, the novel is colorful and disarming, bristling with idealism and disillusionment and profoundly embattled intelligence; like the country it brings to life without ever fully inhabiting, it’s noisy and claustrophobic and a dizzying thrill to get lost in. Because Mauro was beset with other book-launch obligations, we conducted this interview by email. His answers have been translated from his first language (Emoji) and lightly edited.

Daniel Levin Becker: Pretend this first question is coming from someone who knows nothing about you and has done no research whatsoever, including reading your book: why Ecuador?

Mauro Javier Cardenas: Because I missed my friends? Because I can still speak the highfalutin insult Spanish my friends and I would spitball at each other at my Jesuit high school in Guayaquil, Ecuador? Because I can still see Mazinger chasing Maid Killer across the soccer field of Colegio Javier? Or Microphone Head speechifying by Don Alban’s cafeteria? Because I boarded a plane to the United States after graduation and my friends, even the closest ones, ceased to exist for me? Because I wanted to return but didn’t? Is Padgett Powell going to be pissed about this? Do you know what he calls his (my) method of composition? Subconscious accretion.

DLB: How did the novel come to take the form and shape it did?

MJC: One succinct woof answer: I followed my nose. A less succinct woof answer: I like to believe the opening of Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald had tremendous influence on how I assembled The Revolutionaries Try Again. In Austerlitz, you don’t quite know why the narrator is telling you about raccoons and doomed fortresses, but you sense a submerged connection between them. I wanted to understand how he achieved this effect so I searched for everything Sebald and found an interview where he explains his method. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, W. G. Sebald says, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner, invariably finding what he’s looking for. For instance: Cardenas questions the value of Voice of Witness at a dinner — → Cardenas becomes transcriber for a Voice of Witness project — → Cardenas decides his novel must end with a Voice of Witness monologue — → Cardenas can’t explain why this must be so — → Cardenas writes Voice of Witness monologue and hopes for the best. My mother, a transcendental therapist, would call this approach letting the unconscious do its work. My former devoted Catholic self would point out this approach is no different than being a devoted Catholic: always in search of connections and signs. My current sans devotion self would also point out Cortázar assembled Hopscotch the same way. Did I miss anyone? Does anyone else want to weigh in? Ah, yes, the guy with the day job in quantitative data analysis wants to say he (1) hates fiction patterned with pocket rulers, (2) does eventually analyze his haphazardly assembled sections in a spreadsheet, (3) would like to end with a line from Wendell Berry recited by a percussionist at a concert: every day do something that won’t compute.

DLB: Can we see one of those spreadsheets?

MJC: Here’s a spreadsheet for the Leopoldo & Antonio at Julio’s Party chapter. The cumulative % was important for me to keep track of what surfaced when for the characters. The little table below is to keep tab on the balance between modes of narration.

Early version of Chapter XIII

DLB: Same question about form and shape, but on the sentence level. One reason your writing excites me so much is that it often mimics what I recognize as the rhythm of a noisy mind: it feels like I’m reading thought directly, in all its overlap and chaos. But then — if it took you more than a decade to finish this book, can that really be true? What’s the path these words took from your brain to the printed page?

MJC: I was exactly after what you call the rhythm of a noisy mind, Daniel: the dramatization of interiority, the overlaps and chaos and imaginary dialogues and blank memories. In other words the objective (to paraphrase Adam Phillips) was to find forms of incoherence that were readable. In other words I needed extremely flexible high-speed sentences (unlike the last two sentences, which require “in other words” to perform a simple overlap). I began by writing what I will call traditional long sentences, sentences that often rely on affirmations and negations to keep going on, and then I wrote what I will call my emdashed sentences, sentences that look like a horizontal JR by William Gaddis, and then (by trial and error, 100 words a day, year after year letting chance and whatever I was reading and whatever was happening to me interfere with the course of the sentences, thinking of the emdashed sentences, which I’d assigned to Rolando & Eva, as subversives infiltrating the traditional long sentences, which I’d assigned to Antonio & Leopoldo) I combined the two types of sentences, which yielded what I sometimes call long sentences with voices, sometimes performance of an impulse sentences. These, as you know, are the only kind of sentences I write now. I should have called them long sentences with snakes so I could end this question by saying, in other words, mister Levin Becker, The Revolutionaries Try Again can be read as the history of my [redacted] snakes.

DLB: What didn’t end up making it into the novel? Having read much of it in various earlier stages, I’m aware of some things that have changed (the most tragic to my mind being “maidkiller” becoming “maid killer,” a much less priapic nickname for a penis), but what stands out to you, structurally or sentimentally? Which darlings were you sorriest to murder?

MJC: I wish my approach of blanking parentheticals after writing them (coma con Joe, coma con Joe) and then trying to write about their potential content to dramatize my blanks in memory had worked. I was also attached to the following circa 2005/2006 sentence because it was one of the first ones that felt alive with the rhythms I was after, although it was too satirical in tone to keep, but I still love you, satirical sentence of my youth:

Along Rumichaca Street Antonio rushes to his first revolutionary meeting. At least he thinks it will be a revolutionary meeting. Although he knows that there will be no speeches about guerrilla uprisings. No plans to arm the poor on the hills of Mapasingue so they can descend upon a city that’s repulsed by them. No disquisitions about a new socialism penned by the young intellectuals of the Universidad Católica. No proclamations of a new presidential model with the power to bulldoze backward congresses with tanks, although this last notion does appeal to him, and there will be none of these partly because Antonio’s the kind of revolutionary who as a boy preferred clay saints over bronze soldiers (San Ignacio over Simon Bolívar, to his grandfather’s dismay), and partly because those attending this meeting wouldn’t appreciate being descended upon, and partly because all the young intellectuals he knows have either fled to Florida or opted for a career in business administration. Except Leopoldo. And Antonio, of course, who fled but has returned. And what a term, this revolutionary: super whitening toothpaste, triple decker tacos, digital monster tractors: everything around him seems to be revolutionary: on a billboard on the way to the San Francisco airport (the toothpaste), on an inflight magazine on his flight back to Guayaquil (the tacos), on posters on telephone poles along Rumichaca Street (the tractors). And yet despite the term’s debasement, and what to others might seem like a slight radical agenda, he still believes he’s heading to something revolutionary, leading him to conclude that perhaps revolutionary for him means: a protest at the corner of Rumicacha and Boyacá interrupts him, aiding him in postponing the conclusion that perhaps revolutionary for him means: any activity that includes him.

DLB: After such a long construction period, what made the novel finished? Does it feel that way to you now, or have you just moved on because it was time to move on? (I feel like I should know whether or not you subscribe to the never-finished-only-abandoned view of art, but I don’t.)

MJC: I used to think and perhaps still think of a novel as a radius of associations, where associations are like Christmas lights or stars in a constellation (I don’t understand the aversion to mixed metaphors in the USA, by the way, everything’s mixed up inside our brains, no?), and in the beginning the radius is dark so my task consists of switching the lights on, one by one, a task that obviously cannot be completed unless I live inside the radius, and some components like my high school memories will have an easy-to-find light switch, sure, but I’m a fan of the weird wires so most of the time my light switch is magic — do you like magic? — I don’t, Thom Pain says, enough about me — yes, Padgett Powell might have subconscious accretions but I have magic, clap once, twice, feed the radius with everything in the world, clap again, and once all the lights are on, the novel is done.

I don’t understand the aversion to mixed metaphors in the USA, by the way, everything’s mixed up inside our brains, no?

DLB: The book’s title — which I love — seems to me emblematic of the critical (in both senses) distance the novel manifests towards its characters. What was it like living with them for so long? How did your attitude and sympathies toward them evolve over time?

MJC: Someone said to me recently that the women in the book change the book, and I said yes, the appearance of the women in the book coincided with the appearance of my daughters, who have opened doors to rooms I did not know existed — the platypus, tata — rooms from which I like to believe I have been able to approach my characters differently, as if they were at the same time me (let’s satirize these guys!), my children (let’s pretend we’re not afraid let’s keep them safe under a dome of love!), and not me since too many years had gone by and I was no longer the same age as my characters (let’s feel loss and be nostalgic about them!). No wonder I dedicated The Revolutionaries Try Again to my daughters. In other words, mister Levin Becker, The Revolutionaries Try Again can be read as the history of my [redacted] lifestages.

DLB: Which makes me think of our friend Tony Tulathimutte’s various comments about writing a character whose identity is bound to be conflated with your own based on biographical/demographic cues. Antonio’s story mirrors yours at a number of points — which you’re not shy about making known, at least given the publicity materials Coffee House has been using — so how do you anticipate this playing out in your case?

MJC: I read Tony’s always incisive comments and thought aha, yes, that’s why his favorite section of my novel is the monologue in which the Fat Albino, the grandson of the greatest oligarch of them all, rants against Antonio and Leopoldo, two of the so-called protagonists of the novel, who think that, unlike everyone else in Ecuador, they are not fraudulent — I’ll tell you about that duo of thieves, the Fat Albino says — and so I read Tony’s always incisive comments and thought he’s right, if Antonio were a stand-in for me I might have banished his unsavory behaviors and thoughts for fear of being seeing as a bad person, but fortunately Antonio is not a stand-in for me but a stew of fact and fiction, and in any case if someone were to ask me about Antonio and his resemblance to me I would say think of the whole book as my alien child, mister, ripped out of my stomach over a period of 12 years.

DLB: Okay, long one, sorry in advance for being that one reading attendee who talks about nothing for four minutes and then says “can you speak to that?” But: where the book’s critical distance from its characters is most vivid for me is in this deep sense of doubt it seems to have about the ability of ideas — artistic, scholarly, religious, whatever — to change the world. To start a revolution, obviously, much less finish one, but also simply to attain a whole, existentially reconciled life. (Like, it’s satisfying to know and think about David Hume and Arvo Pärt, but what does that do to address economic disparity and lack of potable water, “destitution and injustice,” etc.) So now that you’ve written and published this brilliant novel both filled with and about ideas, what does it mean to you to join the firmament of artists and thinkers who represent that which you both love and doubt? Is success for this book different from success for its author?

MJC: How do we explain the coexistence of death squads and brunch? In How Holocausts Happen: the United States in Central America, Douglas Porpora brings up a condition called pluralistic ignorance, where we reinforce in each other the mistaken conviction that nothing is really wrong so that we don’t have to skip brunch. Will I skip any celebratory brunches if success comes for the book? No. But don’t ask me to stay for the churros (I’ll take those to go, though).

How do we explain the coexistence of death squads and brunch?

DLB: What’s the weirdest textual tic you indulge when you’re drafting? (For example, I rewrite sentences to get rid of ugly gaps in the right-hand margin; another friend of ours abhors sentences that end with the letter R.)

MJC: I don’t think this one is too weird,

but I draft my sentences like this,

one line until I hit a punctuation mark,

which I decided to do after I transcribed a slice of To The Lighthouse by hand the same way so as to learn how Woolf structures her rhythms,

yes,

like this,

a long line followed by a short one,

almost never a long line followed by a long line.

DLB: Name three authors you’re secretly afraid you’re influenced by.

MJC: Sometimes I am afraid to reread Saramago or Woolf or Antunes because I know I will be able to spot their influence, but most of the time I love to see how I’ve swallowed pieces of them to forge pieces of me.

The Alligator King

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Shared Worlds, Malaprops, and Creating Fiction, by Jeff VanderMeer and friends

On July 30 of this year, six intrepid writers, including myself, created a round-robin story, sentence by sentence, at the legendary Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. The others, fresh from teaching at the Shared Worlds teen SF/fantasy writing camp at Wofford College, were: Shirley Jackson Award-winner Nathan Ballingrud, NYT bestseller Tobias Buckell, critically acclaimed writers Julia Elliott and Terra Elan McVoy, and Bloomsbury US first-time novelist Leah Thomas. They’d just spent a long week having the students do writing exercises, critiquing their stories, and having one-on-one sessions with those students, with special guest Thomas Olde Heuvelt arriving late in the week to talk about his U.S tour for his novel HEX and being a writer from the Netherlands.

I help run the camp and my wife Ann serves as the editor in residence, and it’s always extremely rewarding. This is our ninth year of operation and the tradition of reading at Malaprops after the camp has become a kind of lucky charm, a great way to support a local Carolinas institution, and a nice way for writers who’ve worked hard with the students to unwind after the camp. This year, with such a cohesive and great group of writers, it seemed appropriate to create our own shared world through storytelling.

Shared Worlds founder Jeremy L.C. Jones set out the rules: “Each writer gets thirty seconds to think up the next sentence in the story, and we start with Julia Elliott. The audience will get to participate. Ann VanderMeer’s the editor. [If she feels it’s not going well] She can slam the brakes on this monster … redirect, edit, ask for more cats…” Olde Heuvelt asked, “Do we get electrical shocks when someone takes too long?”

No, there were no electric shocks, but each writer did get one pass. Here are the results — with exclusive illustrations created by Shared Worlds in-house illustrator Jeremy Zerfoss.

— Jeff VanderMeer

AUNT FRANCINE & THE ALLIGATOR KING

(line by line)

Julia Elliott: Alligators, they say, creep right through her living room, and possums suckle litters on her velvet couch. Birds nest in her moss-festooned chandeliers. Open any closet and moths spew out.

Terra Elan McVoy: And yet she was still having trouble getting a jar of peanut butter open.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: So when I visited her, for the sixth time in a row, I was like “Where do you hide the coffee in a place like this?”

Leah Thomas: She said, “The coffee is not the issue, it is only the peanut butter that I am preoccupied with… “

Tobias Buckell: But that was the problem with visiting Aunt Francine.

Jeff VanderMeer: PASS!

Nathan Ballingrud: What no one knew is that the coffee was hidden in the attic with the vulture.

Julia Elliott: When Aunt Francine poured wine upstairs to feed the vulture it had this annoying habit of peeling off her liver colored pantyhose and piling them into a damn pile on the floor.

Ann VanderMeer: Not enough cats [in this story]. Add more cats! More cats.

Terra Elan McVoy: So, since the vulture feeding always made my skin crawl I made myself useful and had to throw the peanut butter in.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: “Don’t worry too much about Aunt Francine’s antics,” my mamma told me before I visited her.

Leah Thomas: “You know she hasn’t been the same ever since the cockroaches crawled into her ears.”

Tobias Buckell: “…And don’t worry, it was only three missing husbands.”

Jeff VanderMeer: But the real problem was in the basement, not the attic.

Audience Member: I should have known better than to ignore the alligators.

Nathan Ballingrud: The alligator came stirring from his slumber.

Julia Elliott: And hordes and hordes of kittens worshipped the Alligator King … adorable.

Terra Elan McVoy: I heard his slippery step upon the stair and turned and the door opened [and I was] aware all I had in my hand was that godforsaken jar of peanut butter.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: As I smelled its stinky breath, I thought “Darn, I need some Smuckey.”

Leah Thomas: If only Smuckey were here, and if only Aunt Francine had not removed her pantyhose because everyone knows what draws the gator from the basement.

Tobias Buckell: Smuckey was always the faster thinker of us.

Jeff VanderMeer: Smuckey would have known exactly how to get that alligator king back in the basement, but I had no such luck.

Nathan Ballingrud: And the door creaked open and the alligator came walking into the living room, and Aunt Francine looked around and smiled.

Julia Elliott: Then she reached for her hidden jar of peanut butter and opened it and pulled out a rotten spoon from the stoop and dipped it into the peanut butter and held it out and the alligator came and licked dollops of peanut butter from the dissolving spoon.

Terra Elan McVoy: The kittens, upon seeing their king, feasting happily broke into song.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: I’ll PASS on that.

Leah Thomas: “Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.”

Tobias Buckell: “Oh great Alligator King, denizen of the basement, bringer of all things good to adorable kittens, we salute you.”

Jeff VanderMeer: “Look,” the Alligator King said, “I’m really sick of getting this kind of reception when I just come out for some stinking peanut butter.”

Nathan Ballingrud: PASS.

Julia Elliott: [To the tune of the Meow Mix commercial] “Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow … “

Terra Elan McVoy: Then I felt the old affection Smuckey always had for me covering me like a warm blanket and giving me the knowledge of exactly how to most beautifully wrap up this sixth visit with my Aunt Francine and her singing kittens.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: I also remembered a thing my mamma [said]… she knew exactly what to do in a situation like this.

Leah Thomas: Could it be that Smuckey and the Alligator King were one in the same? (Everyone loves a terrible twist near the end of the story.)

Tobias Buckell: Because it was only after Smuckey had disappeared that the Alligator King showed up.

Jeff VanderMeer: “For eff’s sake,” [the Alligator King] said, “I’m standing right here while you’re standing right there looking at me.”

Jeremy Jones: Anyone in the audience? Anyone?

Tobias Buckell: They’re like “You dug your hole deep enough.”

Second Audience Member Contribution: “Sorry,” I said, “this is only my third time visiting my Aunt Francine and I’ve never met you before.”

Nathan Ballingrud: I moved to give him the jar of peanut butter but I gave him the coffee instead.

Julia Elliott: So the Alligator King upended the coffee can and gobbled up every last [bit].

Terra McVoy: Immediately upon licking the last coffee ground from his mouth, however, a hideous hissing crackling sound began to emerge from his stomach.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: So I turned to Aunt Francine and I said “Can we now play Monopoly?”

Leah Thomas: I’m sorry, in this game of life, we only play Trouble.

Tobias Buckell: PASS.

Jeff VanderMeer: Francine said, “I’m actually only here for another purpose entirely and I’m just glad somebody came over and the Alligator King came up from the basement because there’s really something I have to tell you.”

Nathan Ballingrud: And then she pulled off her mask.

Julia Elliott: There was another mask and then she said “It’s time for me to molt and I need you to help me, go get a jar of Vaseline.”

Terra Elan McVoy: The Alligator King made a second sound of hissing disgust and headed back down to the basement. I would never know for sure if he had really been Smuckey or not.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: So I crossed the street to the drug store and asked for a bottle of Vaseline and the lady behind the counter said “Not again.”

Leah Thomas: PASS.

Tobias Buckell: I stared right back at her and said “What’s an acceptable substitute?”

Jeff VanderMeer: And she said “Peanut butter.”

AUNT FRANCINE & THE ALLIGATOR KING

(all at once, now…)

Alligators, they say, creep right through her living room, and possums suckle litters on her velvet couch. Birds nest in her moss-festooned chandeliers. Open any closet and moths spew out. And yet she was still having trouble getting a jar of peanut butter open.

So when I visited her, for the sixth time in a row, I was like “Where do you hide the coffee in a place like this?”

She said, “The coffee is not the issue, it is only the peanut butter that I am preoccupied with… “

But that was the problem with visiting Aunt Francine.

What no one knew is that the coffee was hidden in the attic with the vulture. When Aunt Francine poured wine upstairs to feed the vulture it had this annoying habit of peeling off her liver colored pantyhose and piling them into a damn pile on the floor. So, since the vulture feeding always made my skin crawl I made myself useful and had to throw the peanut butter in.

“Don’t worry too much about Aunts Francine’s antics,” my mamma told me before I visited her. “You know she hasn’t been the same ever since the cockroaches crawled into her ears. And don’t worry, it was only three missing husbands.”

But the real problem was in the basement, not the attic. I should have known better than to ignore the alligators. [Because now] The alligator came stirring from his slumber. And hordes and hordes of kittens worshipped the Alligator King … adorable.

I heard his slippery step upon the stair and turned and the door opened [and I was] aware all I had in my hand was that godforsaken jar of peanut butter. As I smelled its stinky breath I thought “Darn, I need some Smuckey.” If only Smuckey were here, and if only Aunt Francine had not removed her pantyhose because everyone knows what draws the gator from the basement.

Smuckey was always the faster thinker of us. Smuckey would have known exactly how to get that alligator king back in the basement but I had no such luck.

The door creeped open and the alligator came walking into the living room and Aunt Francine looked around and smiled. Then she reached for her hidden jar of peanut butter and opened it and pulled out a rotten spoon from the stoop and dipped it into the peanut butter and held it out and the alligator came and licked dollops of peanut butter from the dissolving spoon.

The kittens, upon seeing their king feasting happily, broke into song.

“Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow…Oh great Alligator King, denizen of the basement, bringer of all things good to adorable kittens, we salute you.”

“Look,” the alligator king said “I’m really sick of getting this kind of reception when I just come out for some stinking peanut butter.”

“Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow … “

Then I felt the old affection Smuckey always had for me covering me like a warm blanket and giving me the knowledge of exactly how to most beautifully wrap up this sixth visit with my Aunt Francine and her singing kittens.

I also remembered a thing my mamma [said]… she knew exactly what to do in a situation like this.

[But] could it be that Smuckey and the Alligator King were one in the same? Because it was only after Smuckey had disappeared that the Alligator King showed up.

“For eff’s sake,” [the Alligator King] said, “I’m standing right here while you’re standing right there looking at me.”

“Sorry,” I said “this is only my third time visiting my Aunt Francine and I’ve never met you before I would be interested.”

I moved to give him the jar of peanut butter but I gave him the coffee instead. So the Alligator upended the coffee can and gobbled up every last [bit].

Immediately upon licking the last coffee ground from his mouth, however, a hideous hissing crackling sound began to emerge from his stomach.

So I turned to Aunt Francine and I said, “Can we now play Monopoly?”

“I’m sorry, in this game of life, we only play Trouble,” Francine said. “I’m actually only here for another purpose entirely and I’m just glad somebody came over and the Alligator King came up from the basement because there’s really something I have to tell you.”

And then she pulled off her mask.

There was another mask and then she said “It’s time for me to molt and I need you to help me, go get a jar of Vaseline.”

The Alligator King made a second sound of hissing disgust and headed back down to the basement. I would never know for sure if he had really been Smuckey or not.

So I crossed the street to the drug store and asked for a bottle of Vaseline and the lady behind the counter said “Not again.”

I stared right back at her and said “What’s an acceptable substitute?”

And she said “Peanut butter.”

What Keeps Peter Tieryas Awake at Night?

Posted on by 007595

As I write this I am reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle for the first time. I considered reading it before diving into Peter Tieryas’ United States of Japan, which is described as a spiritual successor to PKD’s novel, but I couldn’t wait to dive into Tieryas’ book. From the description of the book to the awesome robot on the cover I could not resist cracking it open.

All that said, and if I’m being completely honest, I didn’t expect to love USJ. I expected to enjoy it and to be entertained, but I did not expect to become obsessed. And obsessed is probably a light word. I have been consumed by the world Tieryas created. I have thought about it daily for months. It has been a source of artistic inspiration that I have found in few books the last couple of years. So, naturally I was honored and excited when Tieryas indulged me in an email exchange that spanned months and spawned numerous other exchanges aside from the interview.

Art, powerful art, is often described as transformative and that is exactly what the combined experience of reading the book and corresponding with Tieryas has been.

Ryan W. Bradley: United States of Japan set me to thinking about alternative history. There are multiple schools when you break down basic plots. I have very little interest in the hypothetical “go back in time and kill Hitler” brand. What I realized draws me in is thinking about how the world would look for the everyday person and dealing with the realization that no matter the changes that are made there’s no such thing as “Utopia.” I think USJ falls into this camp. That said, what intrigued you most about exploring the alterations of World War II history and their effect on the society you crafted?

Peter Tieryas: Most Star Trek episodes focus on the senior staff, but one of my favorite episodes is Lower Decks when they show the perspective of regular crew members who are eager to get the attention of the officers. It was a completely different viewpoint from what I was used to, but also a more relatable episode as it was about the “everyday person.” I mention that because I was intrigued by the idea of what the world of The Man in the High Castle would be like for that everyday individual, someone with an office job, a bureaucrat, or, as it’s an authoritarian society, a member of the secret police. Not so much in the ‘60s as in High Castle, but what it would be like closer to our own time, skipping ahead a few decades. Would Axis rule have changed? What would the technology be like? How different would culture be since the memory of America pre-WWII would pretty much be a historical footnote? I’m making the assumption that with the advent of the Axis, religious perspectives would also change from a more Christian-influenced society to a Shinto one with the Emperor revered as a god. Would the judgment on what entails “good and evil” change? Would there be certain absolutes between alternate histories? Or would their system of values be almost unrecognizable by our standards? I was intrigued exploring these ambiguities and it was difficult finding the balance of being true to what they might espouse while writing characters that, even if not likable, could be understandable. If there’s one big regret I have in the book (among many), it’s that the timeline/mystery structure of the novel being split into hours and days precluded me from having moments where I could just slow down and bask in the society, showing how people shoot the shit in the USJ.

RWB: There’s a slippery slope, I think, in writing about characters who have a occupational relationship to the material. To reduce it to the basest versions: scientists in science fiction, wizards or dragons in fantasy, aging professors in “literature.” Something interesting happens when you start telling those stories in relation to the outlying characters.

By going further into the future you’ve also given your story a new dimension of being a second generation issue. USJ deals with some familial legacy questions that books like High Castle didn’t have the opportunity to explore. What kind of source material did you look to, whether research, personal experience, etc., to craft that tension between generations?

PT: One of the driving ideas behind USJ was trying to understand, what would the second and third generations in that alternate history think and believe? In High Castle, people still have memories of the world pre-Axis victory so they have a connection to it. But in USJ, they don’t.

I had to ask, would the morality and cultural values of those in the USJ be totally different, having been raised in a completely different environment? The generational divide could also be considered a philosophical one. These people don’t pine after a world they don’t/can’t remember. Axis domination is just a fact of life, and one they wouldn’t consider bad or evil because there’s no anchor of “good” to judge it against.

I think what made this more interesting was reading about life in Japan while WWII was going on. Propaganda hid defeats after the US entered the war, so that for those back at home, it sounded like everything was going great. It reminded me in many ways of the way the Iraq War was portrayed. I still remember Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” Speech. I think many Americans felt it was all over. None of us knew the conflict was just beginning and that all these years later, there still wouldn’t be peace. And the more news poured in from the front, the more people began to realize things weren’t going the way we’d been hearing about. The Iraqis view of America is totally different from our view, just the same way the view of those being attacked by the Nazis would be different from those under German rule (and the Japanese Empire as well). So those contrasts and dichotomies became an area I really wanted to delve into and explore.

A lot of that came from reading wartime accounts from those who lived through WWII, especially the civilian side. Some of that came from talking to people who had family members that lived through took place in Asia during the Pacific War. Another chunk of it had to do with my own experiences living in America (and Asia).

For the clashing and tension of generations, it really comes down to questions about ethics and morality. Is that part of the environment? Or is that something innately understood? I’d like to think it’s a combination of both, but as is shown in USJ, living for decades under an authoritarian regime changes their ethical system. Akiko’s attempt to find her “humanity” is part of the driving force in the book.

RWB: There’s a cultural relativism that goes hand-in-hand with moral relativism, and I think it’s easy, especially for Americans, to forget that every country’s citizens are going to see events differently, because our framework is not theirs. But I think something you express really well is the curiosity that comes in being a citizen of any country, any government. There is no “anchor” as you mention, to judge the USJ’s actions against, but as soon as there is a glimmer of an alternative, you see a person like Akiko have this drive to learn and investigate, even if she is, in many ways, a model citizen. It’s human to wonder about alternatives, once they are seen to exist.

You talk about the research that went into crafting the world view of the book. That is a part of fiction writing that fascinates me. Did you know what you were looking for at the start and seek that out or did your organic learning lead you places you didn’t know you’d end up? How did it work with the actual writing, were they concurrent or linear, going from research to drafting phases?

PT: It was definitely organic and this is part of where the nightmares came. The more I started researching about the Empire and its citizens, the more I started finding corresponding patterns and cycles with our own times. A lot of the extremism that happened had its roots in the economic turbulence of the ‘30s. That was right after the Great Depression where the entire world economy collapsed. People couldn’t just charge things to credit card the way we do now to stave off debt, and inflation made even the most basic requirements ridiculously unaffordable. It’d be like if you were told overnight, dinner costs a million dollars. How do you support your family? To what extent would you go to protect those you care about? And that’s where the back story began to take inception. Ben’s parents only appear for a short bit, but I talk about how the transition from the US Dollar to Yen caused great upheaval in the American economy.

It’d be like if you were told overnight, dinner costs a million dollars. How do you support your family?

With how volatile the economy and stock market have been the last few years, it was contemporary news headlines that had me asking myself, what if things take a drastic shift? How will we react as Americans if we default? Once I started seeing the history in that light and found the human core I could relate to, the specific nationalities might be different, but the fears, the hopes, and even the cruelties could have an understandable, if detestable, commonality. So much that at certain points, I actually swapped out Axis acts (which were often cruel to an inhuman extreme) with the forms of torture in contemporary life that people seem to regard as more palatable. And when that’s met with abhorrence, I wonder, why is it that the fiction arouses more anger than facts? Have we become numb to it when it’s foreigners aka “enemies?” That’s another aspect I explored in the atomic bombings of San Jose, Sausalito, and Sacramento. When it’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is there a different understanding of the price of war than when it involves American civilians? Again, questions like this kept me up at night and I understood why Philip K. Dick struggled with the idea of doing a sequel and eventually opted not to do one.

RWB: I believe that I read somewhere that the opening, where we see the end of the war and Ben’s parents, was actually a late addition to the book? Was that a product of the ongoing research? Were there other stories or historical tidbits you came across and wanted to use but couldn’t fit in the story you were telling?

PT: The opening was much shorter in the original draft. That’s when I visited the Japanese-American museum in San Jose where they had a recreation of one of the original internment bunks. The thing that was so shocking to me was that the people who were “interned” there were American citizens who’d committed no crimes, and yet were forcibly removed from their homes. If you were even a sixteenth Japanese, meaning your great-grandfather was Japanese, that meant you had to report to the camps. Some people had worked their whole lives just to establish a living, whether a business or a trade, and that was gone overnight. The photographs and notices ordering people to report for internment were of places that I recognized in San Francisco. These people’s lives were ruined and everything put on hold for several years. Why?

I couldn’t understand it. A few years after their imprisonment, when they were released, the guide told us many of the elderly didn’t want to leave as there was nothing to go back to. Many of their homes and businesses were snatched up by others who saw their vacancy as an opportunity to exploit.

Then I got to wondering, what if America started losing the war? What if they became scared of what this portended for those they’d imprisoned in those camps? Would things change in a negative light? What would be the perspective of the Japanese-Americans who’d been imprisoned to learn that they were being liberated by the Imperial Japanese Army?

There are lots of tidbits from the research I wasn’t able to use. Too many. Fortunately, I’m exploring them in a side story set in the USJ world and will take that further in the official sequel.

RWB: I’m glad you mention the sequel, because I think you are in a situation where most writers don’t find themselves, even as common as sequels and series might seem sometimes. Did you see USJ as a series or as more than one book from the outset or, if not, at what point did you realize the universe you had created would encompass more than one story? And what did you learn writing the first book that you have carried over into the sequel?

PT: I originally saw it as one book. Describing life under an authoritarian system took a big emotional toll because I’m a “method writer” (sorry if that term evokes a pompous feeling, ha ha) and try to become the characters I write about (which honestly sometimes weirds out my friends!). But as the book started coming to an end, another side of me didn’t want to leave the characters in the world yet. I wanted to know more about the USJ. I mentioned earlier how I had that one regret in not being able to just hit the pause and look around the world. I really wanted to get a glimpse at what it was like in other cities and their social circles. But would I get that chance? I spent a lot of time thinking about that so it is a very nice situation to get that opportunity and to know there are people who are looking forward to sequels.

The “official” sequel was going to follow some of the main characters and continue their arc. But before that, I actually wanted to take a step back and spend the length of a novella following the daily life of a student in the USJ. 40K words in, I find myself still going full steam, enjoying this in some ways more than USJ because not only was I familiar with the world, but I was spending time in some of the wackier/fascinating locales in the alternate America. Since I’ve paid my tribute to PKD in the first, I also felt a bit more liberated. I was worried that the first one, being a spiritual sequel, would stray too far from the spirit of the original, especially with its focus on the Asian side. But now, I’m taking the series in my own direction without feeling a sense of restraint which is both exciting and daunting in that it’s totally new ground.

Since I’ve paid my tribute to PKD in the first, I also felt a bit more liberated.

I learn from every book. I read many of the reviews. Most have been superb. Critiques usually revolve around the level of violence (for those who weren’t familiar with the past and were taken by surprise by the extent of the brutality), to the implausibility of mechas in the 1980s (I find it fascinating here that I actually followed PKD’s lead in which he mentioned the Nazis are colonizing space using robots, only taking that two decades further).

A few readers have specifically criticized the dream sequences which I interjected as a sort of allegorical representation of the bridge with the alternate universe, our world. In a repressed society, I felt dreams would be even more wild. So while most of the book is told in an almost restrained and brisk fashion to represent the general atmosphere of fear, there are bursts of language hinting at a deeper underbelly whenever the characters (particularly Akiko, but Ben too when he gets tortured) let their guard down. It was an experiment and as several people people found it distracting from the main narrative, I’m removing those sections for future iterations.

The rest, I’ll discover as I write and carve away. But having that first one in place as a sort of guidebook with specific rules makes it easier to focus on the characters and themes rather than the worldbuilding, even though there’s plenty of that left to do.

RWB: Sequels sometimes get a bad rap, but it seems like there is an advantage to them in the sense that some of that world building work has been done. Suddenly there’s almost a sense of writing about your hometown. Do you see the sequel and any future books in the universe as a “series” or as “stories of the USJ”? In essence, do you still see yourself writing a direct sequel or has the foray into the life of a previously unseen character opened up a broader scope for the world you created?

PT: A lot of times, and this is just my personal speculation, but I think it’s because either the sequel doesn’t get enough time, or the reasons for making it aren’t necessarily because there’s a story there. I’ve heard theories how if there’s X work (whether book, film, or game) and X amount of interest, a sequel has to come out within X amount of time in order to have the attention/excitement continue to build. Which is true in a sense. At the same time, if you rush something out to meet demand and the quality suffers — I think the saying goes, you can forgive a movie/game/book if it’s late, but not if it’s bad. Blizzard Games is a perfect model for that. They’re known for delaying games as long as it takes to achieve quality. They want to stay true to that world and reward the fans with an amazing experience. The same goes for Nintendo. I very much believe in that model and hope I can always stick to it.

For the USJ trilogy, I’ve always envisioned this as Agent Akiko Tsukino’s arc. I was heavily inspired by Yukio Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. All four books revolve around Shigekuni Honda, though in each, there’s a new character that’s the focal point. There’s themes between all four books, and yet each feels uniquely independent. The chaotic harmony threading through that “sea of fertility” is ripe for evolution and growth. So that’s what I originally was hoping to do after USJ came out. But I started getting really depressed again diving into the world of USJ, getting into the minds of the secret police as they tracked down a different kind of group. I was tantalized because this one had a bonafide villain, whereas the first one focuses more on tracking down Mutsuraga as a general threat (a la Man in the High Castle). But the more I got into it, the more I felt this sense of dread re-inhabiting that USJ state of mind.

On top of that, the areas I wanted to explore, I couldn’t because it detracted too much from the main narrative. I actually wanted to stop everything taking place and inject a scene where everyone has a day off so I could follow the characters around. No hunt, no villains, no Tokko business. Just follow the characters for a day (or two) having breakfast, driving to work, find out stupid things like what their bathrooms are like, where they drink, read books, go on dates, etc. I know, it sounds boring, right? But I wanted to know more about this world and just kick it with some different characters that live in a world where Nazis have developed all sorts of crazy monsters and you can see mechas stomping through the city on any given day. With the secret police members, I felt this approach probably wouldn’t work. So I started the above mentioned novella set in the universe with a different cast (that is now a novel). It’ll be very different in tone and structure to the first USJ and is more of a “story of the USJ” than a sequel. I love that because I feel way more freedom to improvise. Also, this story is much more focused on mechas which has been a blast to write.

I wanted to ask you: is there a big divide between literary and genre fiction? Are they mutually exclusive? I only bring this up because on two separate instances, “literary” authors have expressed their disappointment in me for writing “genre” with a big mecha on the front cover of my book without even reading my book. I was so surprised. I’ve never thought of myself as a genre writer per se and find these categories somewhat misrepresentative of what goes into any given story. They’re more of a marketing category, no? Good writing is good writing irrespective of whether there are mechas or not in the story?

RWB: It’s interesting that you mention how the historical background of the world brought on depression. That’s a side of this kind of writing people don’t think about. But I know that feeling of being emotionally drained by a topic you’re writing about. There’s an intensity and a grief almost. I think what you describe is a part of the maturation of a writer, too. We all experience it to one degree or another, finding where we can push ourselves, but also how to regain the enjoyment of what we’re doing.

Another aspect people don’t talk about much is the pressure of writing a sequel or a series. I imagine that, in part, that is what you’re talking about when you discuss the original ideas for a direct story arc surrounding Akiko. Bucking that pressure must have a lot to do with your publisher, Angry Robot. Were there discussions about your plans or your feelings about changing things up for the second book?

And to answer your question, it would depend on who you speak with. There are definitely literary writers and academics who look down on genres. But I have encountered the flipside of that as well, people who think that writing realism is boring and pointless. Obviously both points of view are very narrow and reductive. Like anything else in life there are great works of writing in any genre, just as there are terrible “literary” books. There is a false impression, especially in some circles, that literary equates to “better.” I’m the first to admit that I don’t read much science fiction or other genres, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying a Neal Stephenson novel as much as one by Dave Eggers, though they couldn’t be more different. What they have in common is that they are both masters when it comes to storytelling.

PT: Intensity, grief, and sense of responsibility. What weighed on me the most was that a lot of the facts in the Pacific side are not well known here. Can you name some of the important WWII military figures in the Japanese Empire? How about in China, Korea, Singapore, India, Thailand, and more? I ask this because I’ll admit; I myself didn’t know many. I’d heard of a few, but they weren’t names I grew up with the way it was in the western front with the obvious figures like Hitler, Rommel, Goering, Himmler, Guderian, and others on the German side (on the American side, there’s obviously MacArthur, FDR, Churchill, Patton, and so may others). But it wasn’t the historical personages that were on my mind as I wrote USJ. It’s the fact that somewhere between 20–30 million civilians were killed in Asia. 20–30 million civilians, which doesn’t include military casualties. In bringing to light their experiences, I kept on thinking about all those who’d died and suffered heavy bouts of self-doubt. It wasn’t just the horrible photos I saw, but reading their accounts, hearing their stories, that made this such a difficult experience. I reworked sentences, took out anything that felt extraneous, and tried to create a plausible alternate history without spoonfeeding facts to readers in the form of an obvious chronology (although I eventually relented and did a little bit of that with Akiko).

In terms of pressure for the sequel, honestly, I don’t feel much because the sense of pressure I felt after United States of Japan was so intense, the day it published, it was like a flood releasing inside of me. If anything, I’m going to enjoy working on the sequels a lot more than the original. As for Angry Robot, they’ve been fantastic, totally supportive, and always a joy to work with. I’m immensely grateful to them for the chance to do more books in the series.

I am passionate about storytelling and feel anyone can do it in any genre, format, or style.

Genre vs. lit: Words and stories were the way a younger me came to enjoy, understand, and even endure the bleaker aspects of life. I am passionate about storytelling and feel anyone can do it in any genre, format, or style. That’s why I enjoy experimental works as much as poetry and even the next blockbuster. Every story is important to me and serves a special purpose. I recently read a view of USJ which said that while they recognize it’s a great and meaningful story, they were actually hoping for some popcorn escapism to cheer them up. I totally empathized. Sometimes I too just want to see big robots fight each other without any rhyme or reason. Escapist entertainment has its value as does highbrow independent literary works that push the frontiers of language. But why do they have to be mutually exclusive? I think if anything, the two working in conjunction produces the best results. I’m time and again struck by Iain M. Banks’s Culture series and how gorgeous his prose is. Margaret Weis fired my imagination growing up as a kid as I wandered the worlds of Dragonlance. I loved the philosophical sorties in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. How can you not marvel at how lyrical Aliette de Bodard’s writing is in The House of Shattered Wings?

RWB: You’re right. Even as a former history minor there are very few names I can pull out of the ether beyond the United States, England, and Germany. Of course Tojo in Japan. Mao was a commander in the Chinese Army, I believe. And Zhukov in the Russian Army. When it comes to history in the United States the things we learn that pertain to other countries are the devastations. They are talking points. It’s a way to boil down history, and it’s an incredible disservice, not just to the past but to ourselves.

I had a tumultuous childhood as well and was a voracious reader from an early age. For me, I think there was a calm to it. Sitting in my room reading was a way to have some peace. I read anything and everything. As long as a book is engrossing in terms of the writing I will give it my time.

I don’t think there’s any kind of solid agreement on what makes something literary, but what concerns me more as a writer and a reader is a book that is viewed as disposable. I believe writing is important as any art. I’ve never read the Song of Fire and Ice/Game of Thrones books, but George R.R. Martin seems to take his time writing them despite pressure from his audience. I respect that over someone churning out books like they’re episodes of a TV show. Creating art and creating entertainment shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

You seem mindful of wanting to write something that people will enjoy, but also of wanting to steer clear of producing something just for the sake of producing it. How do you balance your internalization of reader opinions with crafting a story you can get excited about? Because many writers will tell you to filter those opinions out.

PT: I often think about Clarence Budington “Bud” Kelland. Have you heard of him? I’m copying and pasting this from wiki:

“Clarence Budington “Bud” Kelland (July 11, 1881 — February 18, 1964) was an American writer. He once described himself as “the best second-rate writer in America”. Although largely forgotten now, Kelland had a long career as a writer of fiction and short stories, stretching from 1913 to 1960. He was published in many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post and The American Magazine. A prolific writer, his output included sixty novels and some two hundred short stories.”

60 novels, 200 short stories, and his work inspired over 30 films. But I’d never even heard of him until I came across his name randomly in an article mentioning people who were famous during their time but are forgotten now. Contrast that with someone like, say, Herman Melville, who during his life was pretty much panned outside of his first two books, Typee and Omoo. Near the time of his death, he wrote a long poem. “Among the longest single poems in American literature, the book had an initial printing of 350 copies, but sales failed miserably, and the unsold copies were burned when Melville was unable to afford to buy them at cost.” And by “1876, all of his books were out of print.” Yet now, he’s considered one of the great American writers. (I personally love his work including White Jacket and Mardi which inspired parts of my earlier book, Bald New World, as well as his long novellas like “Billy Budd” and “Benito Cereno.”)

I went on that long segue just to point out how you can never tell the fate of a writer based on popularity, critical acclaim, and even sales. Ultimately, what we do will most likely be forgotten in a short period of time. In a year or so, most people won’t even remember United States of Japan. (fingers crossed that they do!)

So in that sense, I definitely try to keep everything I do in perspective. Writing is a love for me. Well maybe not writing so much as telling a story I feel passionate about, as writing is the technical expression of that desire. And as with any writing/story-telling, you’re doing it for an audience. Otherwise, you can just write journals to yourself. I try to take a serious look at what I love, studying my own reaction to favorites scenes in books, films, and games, then learn from them. How did they do that? What was the tempo in the diction and the number of syllables per sentence (Steinbeck is a master of rhythm)? How much description versus dialogue?

Learning how the masters did it is part of the development of a writer. But reviews can also be enlightening.

Technique is so important as is character development, and the latter is especially hard to do in a way that is organic for the reader. Learning how the masters did it is part of the development of a writer. But reviews can also be enlightening. You’ll always have your share of nasty reviews that just hate your work outright and those, I’ve come to filter out (though occasionally, one will slip through, stab me in the tongue, and convince me I should quit writing). There’s also criticisms that I can agree with. One I get on USJ a lot as I mentioned above is people’s shock at the amount of violence. But that’s intended. I didn’t want to censor the violence of WWII; I wanted to depict it in a brutally honest fashion, so I not only accept it, but embrace it. It’s when you start seeing a consensus about certain aspects of your writing that is producing an unintended effect that I go, oh, I should learn from that. Case in point, the dream sequences I mentioned above which will get toned down as it was detracting from the narrative experience. Then again, I get confused when other reviewers state that the dream sequences are their favorite part and they love the prose there!

The main thing I try to do is take the role of an audience member. Is this something I’d like? If yes, then I stick with it. I know my tastes are weird, so it might not always agree with everyone out there. But that’s okay.

‘With tears distill’d by moans’: The Bittersweet Hopefulness of ‘Holding the Man’

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Timothy Conigrave’s memoir, Holding the Man, was published in his native Australia in 1995. The title of its first section keys you in immediately to what preoccupied a young Tim: “A Head Full of Boys.” Despite growing up at the end of the freely loving sixties (when “the world seemed very exciting for a nine-year-old”), Conigrave was not spared the bullying and badgering that greeted most young boys who happened not to be like the others. As he describes it, he never cared much about sports and would not have been able to define what “holding the man” even meant. What he did know, however, was that he had an unusual interest in other boys. He gives us his thoughts after he’d started up at a new all-boys school:

Sitting nearby was the sunglasses boy. I was thinking about his looks. What makes me think he’s handsome? I like the way he is. Calm and cool. Would the other guys think he was handsome?

Cover of first edition (1995)

Holding the Man’s most touching moments happen when Conigrave finds himself navigating, in ways both intellectual and emotional, his own sexuality. The book is honest in its exploration of the oft-hushed musings of pubescent homosexual boys, as well as in its frank mining of the limits of radical queer sexual politics in the 1970s and 80s. “You know I love you,” he tells his then boyfriend. “But I’m worried that we’re missing out on what people our age are supposed to be experiencing … I don’t believe that it’s fair to expect our lovers to fulfill all our needs.” Page by page we are guided through a personal narrative which overlaps crucially with the conversations happening around gay liberation in the late decades of the twentieth century.

In contrast, the filmed adaptation of Conigrave’s memoir excises these schoolyard moments almost entirely, opting for a framing device that allows for brief flashbacks. The film, directed by Neil Armfield, opens not with a bumbling young Tim negotiating his newfound same-sex attraction (a chastely erotic friendship with his fellow schoolmate, which endearingly ends with a realization: “Fuck, I’m a poofter.”). Rather, we’re given a first glimpse of our protagonist in his thirties, running down an Italian seaside street towards a payphone. When he finally connects with a female friend he is desperate to ask her: where had John been sitting during that first dinner that they had all shared together? He is already starting to forget, and he wants to get all the details right.

The effect of this structural change from the book is twofold: it dispenses with the narrative teleology that memoirs such as Conigrave’s depend on, and in doing so makes the film less about Tim than about the budding romance between him and his eventual partner, John Caleo. While the love story between the two is at the heart of Holding the Man the book, in minimizing Tim’s questioning teenage years the film refuses to simply walk its viewers through a narrativized version of what it’s like for someone to realize and act on their own homosexual urges, engaging the audience in a different way: by expecting more. Similarly, the film, released first in Australia in 2015, refuses a linear narrative for John and Tim’s romance — and later, of John’s death — shuttling strategically between them instead.

The real Timothy Conigrave and John Caleo

This strategy, of flashing back to their shared memories, immediately transforms the material into a narrative about grief. Not about AIDS — which we soon learn precipitated John’s decline — but about the aftereffects of that incredibly immense loss. The short phone call alerts us to the dual facts of John’s passing and of Conigrave’s heartbreak. When Tim runs out of change and must begrudgingly go on without being able to accurately recollect and thereby resurrect John (was his former lover sitting next to or opposite him at the party that night?), his feeling of strandedness overwhelms the screen.

As if in preparation for that moment, in the filmed version we are first introduced to the teenage Tim as he gets ready to perform Paris’s monologue at Juliet’s tomb. Dressed in full Shakespearean garb and awkwardly reciting his lines before his classmates (who snicker when the drama teacher asks him to imagine, by way of inspiration, what it might feel like to lose his girlfriend), Tim eventually finds his bearings. Unknowingly, he delivers the words that distill the loss he’ll come to feel for himself, when the boy he has in mind is gone:

Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew, — 
O woe! thy canopy is dust and stones; — 
Which with sweet water nightly I will dew,
Or, wanting that, with tears distill’d by moans:
The obsequies that I for thee will keep
Nightly shall be to strew thy grave and weep.

In this nod to Romeo & Juliet both the film and book reveal an aspiration to treat the story as a break and continuance of the long history of star-crossed lovers. But, rather than the expected comparison of Tim and John to the play’s eponymous lovers, their story is instead tied to Paris — to his grief, his tears (and, for readers of the Bard, to his ill-fated death, which follows shortly after this heartfelt scene).

Still from ‘Holding the Man’ (2015)

And yet, the very specificity of Holding the Man fights back any attempts to pinkwash its subject matter. This is an unabashedly homosexual film which tackles gay sex (even and especially in tandem with its treatment of AIDS) with welcome revelry. And again, because the film refuses a linearity of narrative, it manages to push back against reductive assertions that promiscuity led to its protagonists’ diagnoses. Not only are we given steamy sex scenes before and after Tim and John learn their HIV status, but the film stages its most heartbreaking moment as a tender lovemaking scene late in John’s struggle with his illness. Walking into his own childhood room, where years earlier John had asked Tim to screw him (“I want you inside me,” he pled), the scene functions as a meaningful re-performance of their youthful sexual bliss.

Still from ‘Holding the Man’ (2015)

Sporting a shaved head and carrying around an oxygen tank John sits on his bed, yet again asking Tim, “Will you screw me?” He may be frail, and the ensuing lovemaking awkward, but its depiction regardless speaks to the film’s staunch refusal to vilify consensual sex between men in the age of AIDS, while also celebrating the strong bond these two boys, whom we’ve seen grow up together, have with one another.

To top it off, the scene features a song written especially for the film, which restates that grief is the central narrative engine here. Composed by out singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, “Forever and a Year” is a melancholy ode to a lost loved one, even echoing Paris’s monologue:

A drop of rain, I swear
I felt upon my forehead
Why is it now
I cannot wipe my brow
’Twas not a drop of rain
And now your hands, I am holdin’
It was a tear
Forever and a year

Rather than using the track as a form of emotional underscoring after we’ve witnessed the loss, or presenting it diegetically with an onscreen depiction of tears, Armfield instead deploys the song for what turns out to be the last moment of sexual intimacy between Tim and John. It’s a powerful moment for the way it re-centers sex as integral to their relationship. At once caregiver and sexual partner, we see Tim holding John in his arms, cradling his frail boyfriend while fucking him, appropriating the sports expression that gives Conigrave’s memoir its title.

Still from ‘Holding the Man’ (2015)

Armfield confronts us with a radical image that brings together the two inescapable tropes of the AIDS film — sex and death — marrying them in a heartwarming and heartbreaking tableau. By the time Wainwright croons, “There’s only bright skies about us, just look away, just turn the other way,” the audience has been invited not to ignore the impending grief, but to embrace instead its palliative force. The bittersweet hopefulness of Holding the Man does not depend on a disavowal of the pain and suffering of men like Tim and John; nor does it presume to tie their story to an unwavering arc of progress. Instead, it focuses on the timeliness and timelessness of their love, their lust, and above all, their grief.

‘Holding the Man’ is currently streaming on Netflix.