Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Little Orphan Annie.
There are a lot of orphans in the world but the most famous is Little Orphan Annie. She was first a cartoon, and later became a play and movie. Annie proved to be so popular that many other cartoon orphans followed, such as Batman and Superman. I asked a real orphan also named Annie what she thought of Little Orphan Annie. Real-life Annie said it was an unrealistic depiction of orphan life and asked me if I would adopt her.
It’s unfortunate that cartoon orphans take the spotlight off of real orphans like Annie. It makes real orphans feel insecure about their singing abilities, and it creates false expectations for prospective parents when faced with the harsh reality of what real orphans are like. I learned that the hard way.
In the original Orphan Annie strip, she is adopted by a man who — judging by his attire — I presume to be a butler. Why a butler would choose to take on the responsibility of a child when he already has so many other responsibilities is beyond me.
For the most part, Annie is an okay kid but I generally find her boring. I much prefer the spunkiness of Punky Brewster. If Punky is an orange soda, Annie is a glass of water with sand in it. Nothing against sandy water. Without sandy water we would never have mud or any of the enjoyable mud-related things. What I’m saying is, Little Orphan Annie is like mud to me.
I feel comfortable saying this because she’s not a real girl. If she should ever somehow come to life, I will have to delete this review. If orphans can read, I would feel awful if she read it. I suppose that’s one of the best things about her — she isn’t real, so I’m free to say whatever I want to about her.
Probably the weirdest thing about Annie is that she never changed her clothes. She always wore the same red dress. Some may see it as a bold fashion statement, or a lack of creativity on the part of her creator Harold Gray. I see it as a symbol of her steadfast inability to change. With a butler for a dad she could have had any dress she wanted because he could have sewn one. Traditionally, butlers can sew.
No one knows whatever happened to Little Orphan Annie. Did she go back to the orphanage like some orphans do when things don’t work out? Did she grow up and adopt some orphans of her own? If so, did she force them to all wear matching red dresses in some bizarre attempt to recreate her own childhood?
Maybe she hired a private investigator to find her parents and ask them what the heck. That was my advice to real-life Annie.
BEST FEATURE: Not having any parents makes her origin story a mystery! WORST FEATURE: Her hair. Have you seen it? It looks her brains were squeezed through the pores of her head like Play-Doh.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing an envelope full of cash.
“Every landscape has its card-carrying genius.” — Juan García Madero
A few years ago, on Twitter, Guillermo Parra wrote, “Venezuela is a continuous goodbye.” Guillermo is a poet, a translator, and a friend. Maybe it’s the kind of offhanded aphorism that invites too much drama — that it portends to a sentimental perspective. But I never allow myself sentimentality, even when I should. I liked Guillermo’s words very much. It spoke to my experience, and to much of my family’s experience, too. Venezuela’s present moment is an erosion of a distant and imaginary country. When I first started writing this, there were tanks rolling down the streets of Caracas, outside of my father’s window. The tanks are gone now, but the situation is as dire as it was then. If our recent conversations are indicative of anything, he’s ready to leave.
My father’s uncle, Carlos Castillo, is a filmmaker. He’s made low-budget art films on 8mm film for years. A few of them have screened at Cannes, though I’ve never seen any. I’ve found stills on the internet, and the films sound interesting enough, but that kind of second-hand experience doesn’t amount to much. In the summer of 1972, the Austrian filmmaker Hans Müller spent a weekend with Carlos in Caracas. I believe Hans was directly responsible for the few European screenings of my great-uncle’s movies.
Venezuela’s present moment is an erosion of a distant and imaginary country.
I remember Carlos telling me about the first day Hans visited — they were walking down a hot, crowded street in Parque Central, eating ice cream. After exchanging a few nebulous remarks about the political situation in their respective countries, licking droplets of strawberry and chocolate ice cream sliding down their knuckles, Hans asked Carlos, “How do Venezuelan filmmakers approach reality?” Carlos responded: “Hans, this is a crazy country where anything might happen — mattresses could fall from the sky, and no one would bat an eyelash.”
After finishing their ice cream, Carlos and Hans turned the corner down a sleepy side street near the Teresa Carreño Theater, away from the oppressive heat of the sun. It was covered in mattresses. There was an accident; a delivery truck had overturned. A trail of mattresses littered the sidewalk up to the open container of the truck. I assume the truck was delivering them, maybe to a warehouse, or a department store. Hans thought that Carlos had planted the whole scene, like an elaborate set for a film, but he hadn’t.
Carlos Castillo (right) with Diego Rísquez (left). Carlos is holding flowers. Photo taken by Hans Müller.
I’m not sure how Carlos met Hans. I’ve asked him a few times and always got different answers. He said that Hans was a friend of Lissette, Carlos’ wife. He also told me that he met Hans in Iran, where Carlos once screened his most successful film, Hecho en Venezuela (1977), which takes place in a garbage dump, though he didn’t explain why Hans was in Iran. Another time, he said that they met on the Paris Metro, where the two struck up a conversation because they were reading the same book, Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963), in English translation, a language they both spoke poorly. I can’t imagine either of them reading Hopscotch in anything other than their native languages, especially Carlos. They probably met through friends in their field, the most boring and obvious rationale, which is why Carlos didn’t mention it.
My mother used to tell me that a bag of cocaine cost about the same as a cup of coffee, if you can imagine.
Hans’ visit was during one of Venezuela’s last periods of economic prosperity. Even then, most of the country was still very poor, and mired in political corruption. My mother used to tell me that a bag of cocaine cost about the same as a cup of coffee, if you can imagine. Hans was visiting Venezuela for two reasons: he was on his way to Santiago to act in a few scenes for a noir murder-mystery directed by Chile’s most prestigious filmmaker, Raúl Ruiz. Ruiz had asked Hans personally if he would consider playing a small role in the film, because he admired Hans’ work greatly, and thought that Hans had a good face. Hans was staying in Caracas for a few days before filming because he was also doing research for a brief anthology on contemporary Latin American cinema. He wanted to interview Carlos for the book, and a few other filmmakers in Chile and Argentina, including Ruiz, of course.
I don’t know my great-uncle Carlos Castillo very well. In fact, I only have a few vague memories of him, from before I left Caracas for good. I left when I was eight, and while I used to visit in the summers, I haven’t been back in over fifteen years. When I think about my life in Caracas, I feel as if I’m remembering a movie I half-watched at some point in the distant past. I can see angles in the landscape — Mount Ávila presiding over the city in its valley. I can see the food and useless images of the beach. I can see the dirty, hazy city and the super markets that always smelled like raw meat. But it’s more or less indistinct, which to some may sound upsetting, though I don’t think so. I don’t remember my childhood, not really, just like Georges Perec. This gives me the great liberty of inventing much of it.
from Hecho en Venezuela. Standing in the garbage dump, blindfolded.
Carlos wanted to introduce Hans to Juan Loyola, a family friend, and a conceptual artist. In his lifetime — he’s dead now, sadly — he’d been arrested for his work and radical politics several times. Carlos thought it would be fun for Hans to participate in Juan’s chatarra project. In Spanish, chatarra usually refers to scrap metal, but it’s a word with a particular connotation in Caracas — a city that’s more like a country, and given as much deserves its own language. For Caraqueños, a chatarra is a rusted, decayed car, abandoned in the streets. Many stay in the same spot for years, if not decades. In the 1970s and 80s, the city was covered in chatarras, most of them in poorer neighborhoods. Juan’s project was simple in conception: he would find a chatarra and re-paint the car in the colors of the Venezuelan flag. He had to work at night, quickly and alone. The police had no problems arresting Loyola, punctuated by a casual beating for his vandalism. But he was essentially painting trash — reframing the public’s unwanted furniture.
The stories I love are usually told by other people. Each person invents a logic of their own when they begin a sentence with, “One day…”
The stories I love are usually told by other people. Each person invents a logic of their own when they begin a sentence with, “One day…” Watching that logic refract and swirl into idiosyncrasy is, for me, the pleasure of the story. The events and their significance are always debatable, if not entirely arbitrary. What matters most is who’s telling you what and for what reason. I won’t make an exception here. I would rather read along, and abandon writing for a moment. Hans was quickly convinced by Juan and Carlos to paint a chatarra during his stay in Caracas. Here it is in Hans Müller’s words, from his essay collection, The Opposing Light: Essays on Films and Filmmakers (1996), only recently translated into English —
Juan Loyola painting a chatarra with a friend. They haven’t yet added the seven stars of the Venezuelan flag.
The day I met Juan Loyola, Carlos took me out to dinner at what looked like an expensive seafood restaurant in Alta Mira, but none of it made sense. It was in the basement of an office building, and while the waiters were dressed in formal attire — almost too formal, maybe, it made me a little uneasy — they all yelled at each other as if they were living through an unending, collective marriage for years. While taking our order, our waiter punched another waiter in the arm for having made a mistake with a drink order earlier in the evening. Thinking it was a bit of aggressive camaraderie, I laughed, but Carlos didn’t. The waiter looked furious and didn’t hide his general animosity from us.
The menus were baffling. The food sounded delicious by description alone, though at the time my sense of Spanish was not as developed as it is today. What struck me as curious, however, were the covers of the menus: they were filled with pictures of disembodied asses on both sides — a collage of asses, all of them cropped at the cusp of the cheek and the small of the back. The various genders of the asses were indistinguishable, though I tried my best to guess while we were waiting to place our order. I remember the restaurant was lit by candlelight only; I could barely see Carlos’ face, even though he was sitting right across from me, smiling or whistling or folding his napkin like a piece of origami.
“Do the menus have something to do with the name of the restaurant?” I asked. We were waiting for our food and already had a few drinks. We started at his apartment.
“No,” Carlos said, “the restaurant is called Restaurante en el Sótano. Restaurant in the basement.”
I laughed. I felt that such literalism either augured very well for the food, or very poorly.
“So why the asses?”
“I don’t know. I think I remember a waiter telling me once that the owner’s son — an artist — won a bet with his father and the result was asses on the menu. Two or three years ago the covers of the menus were just brown leather. Now it’s asses. I think people like it. Either way, I wouldn’t believe whatever the waiters say.”
A man approached our table. It was so dark in the restaurant that I couldn’t see him for a moment. I thought that maybe our waiter had come back to say something disparaging to us. It was Juan. Carlos didn’t tell me he was joining us for dinner. There was a big, idiotic smile plastered on Juan’s face; I though that maybe he was high. I didn’t know if I should take it as a threat or as a welcome. He sat down next to Carlos, and introduced himself.
Carlos had been talking about him all day, so I had to feign ignorance when asking him the usual questions about his life and his work. I was essentially interested in his chatarra project — I thought that it risked the possibility of being too allegorical, that Juan was maybe attached to the easy cache of re-appropriating images of nationalism for protest. But Juan surprised me.
“What I find most interesting about what’s happening with the chatarras,” he said, “is that they only last for about two days or so, at the most three.”
“What do you mean by ‘last’?” I asked.
“The government sends a sanitation crew to tow the chatarras after I paint them. All of them. They erase them.”
I heard a loud smack on the other side of the room — another waiter communicating with his co-workers, maybe. I turned my head to look but it seemed as if no one else in the restaurant was interested, or had even noticed.
“He’s basically doing ecological recovery for our city. By accident,” Carlos said, laughing.
“More or less,” Juan said. “I wish they would let a few of them stay, but I guess that would compromise this unforeseen development.”
I thought it was brilliant. Juan was repurposing the city’s refuse — the government’s casual indifference at the environment of the poor — and instilling it with the specter of a symbol, opaque as it may be. The government in Venezuela essentially found this gesture unacceptable. So unacceptable, in fact, that they provided a service that would not have been granted without Juan’s trespasses… [86–88]
Juan Loyola performing a public reading in 1990. People on the floor and people walking around him.
The rest of Hans’ essay switches from narrative to theory. Carlos, Juan, and Hans paint a chatarra, though it’s an uneventful experience. They find one in Los Chorros, at the end of a dead-end street — close to where Carlos lives now, actually, and about a mile east of Alta Mira. The street is deserted, with the exception of a few listless, stray dogs, and the process goes uninterrupted. Hans sounds a little dejected, as if he wanted to run away from the police, or get into a fight, or experience some kind of simulacrum of art meeting activism in South America — a place many well-intentioned Europeans think of as a magical island filled with bleeding-heart radicals who play out Leftist political fantasies from a safe distance.
Films are particularly effective at achieving this type of narrative rest, because the images are always moving, even when they’re not.
But I shouldn’t let Hans inherit the naïve politics of some of his compatriots: he makes it work, at least in the essay. The story of his weekend in Caracas shifts into a contemplation of Raúl Ruiz’s poetics of cinema, one that’s distinctly opposed to what Ruiz calls the “central conflict theory.” Hans cites Raúl: “A story begins when someone wants something and someone else doesn’t want them to have it. From that point on, through various digressions, all the elements of the story are arranged around this central conflict.” Ruiz’s opposition to this method, one that dominates Hollywood films, is not rooted in a rejection of easy entertainment, or pop consumerism, but in a personal narrative ontology: to understand narrative not as a preoccupation with past or future concerns, but as an anchor to a total present which makes itself available for “an intense feeling of being here and now, in active rest.” Films are particularly effective at achieving this type of narrative rest, because the images are always moving, even when they’re not.
Hans mentions meeting Ruiz a few days later in Santiago, where he tells him the story of his weekend in Caracas. Ruiz suggests that it’s possible that Hans didn’t allow himself to be available to Loyola’s work — the chatarras were already being projected into an imaginary future, where something is always going to happen.
from Hecho en Venezuela. The garbage dump is a place of many endings.
I had my tarot cards read the other day. A friend read them for me. I don’t really believe in those kinds of things, but I was excited nonetheless. Believing in the future is embarrassing enough — I might as well listen to the cards. My last card, the card that’s supposed to tell you what’s to come in the next few months, was the five of swords. It doesn’t bode well. My friend told me that it usually means conflict and isolation — hurting people, pushing them away. It signifies difficult things from your past coming back to affect your future. If it sounds like it could mean anything, I think it’s because it does.
I was telling my father about it when I talked to him on the phone recently. I thought it mostly funny; it didn’t incite anxiety, though maybe I was looking for someone to legitimize my lack of concern.
“You know, it’s funny,” my father said, “I still have this painting that Juan Loyola made for you.”
I remembered it. Or at least, I remembered the memory of the painting, though I couldn’t recall what it looked like.
“It’s of a chatarra. A woman is painting it. It’s kind of dark, a little too gray. But it has your name on it, on the bottom. It says: “Para Sebastian, el futuro del siglo XXI.”
That made me laugh. I told him I was writing a story about Carlos and about Juan and about a few other things. I asked him if he could take a picture of the painting, but he doesn’t own a camera, or a cell phone. He said he would ask his neighbor if he could borrow one, but I’m still waiting for a photo. I told him I wanted to include it in my story. He asked me what else I was writing about.
“Parasitism. I want to write a story that’s parasitic in nature — writing that only exists through other work. It’s called “Hecho en Venezuela,” like Carlos’ movie. I think it makes sense.”
“It does,” he said, “though you don’t always have to make sense.” He paused. “What time is it there?”
What I find more interesting is that a person effectively changed the time for an entire country.
We had been talking for an hour and both lost track of time. He had to go to a friend’s party; I did, too. It was 8:45 in Philadelphia, so that meant that it was 9:15 in Caracas. In 2007, Chávez reestablished the meridian that was used in Venezuela between 1912 and 1967, setting their clocks back half an hour. There were several reasons provided for the decision, for example, that it helped farmers in the far west of Venezuela, so that they didn’t have to wake up as early in the morning. Many took it as a symbol of Chávez’s megalomania. I don’t really have an opinion either way. What I find more interesting is that a person effectively changed the time for an entire country. People who existed in one time were, one day, permanently moved to another.
One of my favorite films, Tsai Ming-Ling’s What Time Is It There? (2001) is about a street vendor who sells watches in Taipei. He meets a young woman who’s moving to Paris in the next week, so the vendor sells her a watch before she goes. He doesn’t know her very well, but he forges a connection with her nonetheless, or maybe simply an obsession. The film exists in a narrative present, like Ruiz’s films, that doesn’t reveal the psychological conditions of its characters in a way that allows for closure, or even intelligibility. In fact, the street vendor never sees the woman again after she leaves. He watches François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) on repeat, perhaps as a way of maintaining a connection to the woman’s new life in France. Watching the film is a way through which the street vendor creates a living connection in disparate temporalities — however delusional it may be.
What I love about the film is that it frequently presents long, static takes of the street vendor at home, alone and in his pajamas, watching the Truffaut movie. We are effectively watching him watch the film. The 400 Blows, as you may know, is about a young boy attempting to make sense of the neglect and emotional apathy of the authority figures in his life. In the last scene — the movie’s most famous — he wanders the beach, dispossessed and uncertain of his future. The camera freezes on a close-up of his face, where he permanently lives. In What Time Is It There?, the street vendor’s gaze reflects a kind of permanence of its own. He watches the movie in a present that’s endlessly eroding, one that provides him an anchor to a different time, but which also functions as a closed gate between his time and another. Like the old man in Kafka’s “Before the Law,” he sits outside, waiting for the moment of entry.
I read Álvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death (2016) a few weeks ago. It’s a stunning novel interspersed with obscure historical research, absurd fictions about its central personages (which include Caravaggio, Quevedo, and Galileo, among others), intricate structural play, and a lightness in Enrigue’s prose which makes it a total delight from beginning to end. Two-thirds through, the narrator — maybe you could even say Álvaro himself — interrupts the novel to tell the reader: “I don’t know what this book is about.” The admission is startling. I felt that I had never read something so generous in a novel. It reminded me of one of Enrigue’s earlier short stories, “On the Death of the Author,” where he concludes with the following: “Sometimes writing is a job: to obliquely trace the path of certain ideas that seem essential to put on the table. But other times, it’s to grant what’s left, to accept the museum and contemplate the sum while waiting for death…To put our little boxes on the table and know that what ended was also an entire universe.”
Two-thirds through, the narrator — maybe you could even say Álvaro himself — interrupts the novel to tell the reader: “I don’t know what this book is about.”
When I first started working on this, I wanted to write an essay that was filled with lies, one which placed the source of its affect (which is always a burden) elsewhere. The truth is that given its intent, its lack of narrative fixity, and its subject matter, a true ending is impossible. Or maybe I’m simply allowed to end wherever I place the final period, which is what always happens anyway. If I finish with any faith (which I’m allergic to), it’s that perhaps Ruiz, or Carlos, or Müller, or Loyola would accept this baggy museum. Maybe one day this will be a book. That way, I can forestall my punctuation a little while longer, for an imaginary future, where something is always going to happen.
Matthew Neill Null’s collection Allegheny Front is as notable for the strength of its prose as it is for the ways in which it eludes expectations. One story focuses entirely on the shifting relationship between a group of bears and the humans living nearby; another story leaps ahead several decades at its conclusion to show how the aftereffects of its violent resolution are perceived in the decades to come by people with no knowledge of the events described. It’s a way of finding compelling drama in the spaces normally left blank in histories and stories, and it’s to Null’s credit that these stories never feel academic or dry. Instead, they’re as visceral and tense and the landscapes and relationships that they describe. I talked with Null via email about the roots of this collection, the influence of Henry Green and Shirley Hazzard, and how he found the ideal juxtaposition of humanity and the natural world.
— Tobias Carroll
[Read Matthew Neill Null’s story, “Gauley Season,” on Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.]
Tobias Carroll: Landscapes, nature, and history all play a major part in the stories contained in Allegheny Front. Did you have an overarching theme in place from the beginning as you put the collection together, or did it become more apparent as you reviewed the stories?
Matthew Neill Null: Those are my concerns as a person from West Virginia, and predated my becoming a writer, so the theme cohered without my trying for it. My novel Honey from the Lion was dedicated For the land and the people. Allegheny Front is dedicated For the animals. Many of the stories pivot on fraught interactions between humans and animals. Too often the land is used merely as a stage, animals as props. For me there is a triangular relationship between humans, the land, and other forms of life. Without those three legs, the world tips over.
This is a landscape of ghosts more than one of the living…
This is a landscape of ghosts more than one of the living, as the population has cratered and the houses have gone to ruin. One’s gaze is forced backwards. My family has lived in West Virginia (and western Pennsylvania) for generations, from the colonial period on, so our history is imprinted on that land and vice versa, a legacy of settlement and decay. I could show you the creek-bed where my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother, a Huguenot woman, was scalped and killed. I helped a friend build a cabin there. We set up a portable sawmill and skidded pines off the flat. In order to pay off his mortgage, he had grand plans to sell it to a well-heeled person from D.C. along with some acreage, to someone hunting a rural escape hatch after 9/11, but ultimately it was too isolated to make good real estate. So he lives there now and takes his coffee where her body was found in 1786.
Those who live there experience the same struggle they had one hundred and fifty years ago: they love the land, yet are forced to destroy it in piecemeal fashion simply to get the money necessary to remain living there. Timber. Oil. Coal. Natural gas. It’s ghastly, but I don’t see any other way it could have happened. I’ve noticed that most people who criticize extractive industry live comfortable lives in suburban/urban contexts that are impossible without cheap sources of fuel. My family has taken part in all of it. If you live there, even if you aren’t directly taking part in extraction, you are providing services for the workers who do. Which has saved us from the sin of sanctimony.
TC: Over how long of a period of time were these stories written? Did you find that you had to be near the landscapes described in the stories in order to more accurately depict them?
MNN: Between 2008 and 2013. During the same period, I wrote my novel, Honey from the Lion, which was set in a very specific place and time (the high timber-camps circa 1904), so the stories served as a counterpoint as well as a rest. Now and again I craved to write about a time when people could use cellphones. Range around, you know? Also, the lumber camps were by definition a male world, so stories like “Telemetry” and “Mates” allowed me to explore female characters in a fuller sense.
The exception is “In the Second District.” I began toying with it as an undergraduate, overhauling it again and again, for nearly a decade. I tried many different perspectives, perhaps resisting the first-person voice, which is not my natural mode but ultimately suited the story. It’s funny, an ex-girlfriend read the book and told me she remembered certain images from the very first draft: the Chinese merchants measuring the bear’s gallbladder, the dogs boiling at the cave mouth. I write a first draft quickly, often in one go, then give it the Isaac Babel treatment over a number of years:
“The first version of a story is terrible. All in bits and pieces tied together with boring “like passages” as dry as old rope…It yaps at you. It’s clumsy, helpless, toothless. That’s where the real work begins. I go over each sentence time and time again. I start by cutting out all the words I can do without. Words are very sly. The rubbishy ones go into hiding.”
Actually, I wrote these stories at a great distance from West Virginia, in radically different landscapes. Most in an ugly, flood-ravaged, land-grant library in Iowa City. Others in Wyoming, Key West, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. But maybe I would have written the same stories sitting on a rock in Dolly Sods, playing the autochthon. Impossible to tell. I didn’t begin writing until I left the state. Next year I’ll be in Rome. I look forward to more cognitive dissonance.
I’d rather live in West Virginia than anywhere else, but like most of my generation, financial necessity drove me away. Which is a great shame. My family still has hundreds of acres of land. When I try to think of ways to live there, I’m flummoxed. In the other places I feel adrift, anonymous, without history.
TC: At the end of “Something You Can’t Live Without,” the narrative shifts somewhat and focuses on the way that the landscape changes over the decades that follow the story’s climax. What prompted that as a narrative conclusion? Did you always have that in mind, structurally speaking?
MNN: I did have that in mind, a leap forward through decades, following the decomposition of the drummer’s body, having it break apart and travel, letting the beasts scatter him, letting other people encounter his bones. I wanted to force the reader to reckon with the idea that the story never ends, not even with personal demise; the narrative leaves us behind; stories are minute rituals that prepare us for death. The land rolls on without us. The fields on fire. The maps burning with mold. The names we give lost. The buildings collapse. The closing of that story might be the most important passage I ever write. Which is odd, considering I did it at 24. It was the first story I finished for the book.
I’d rather take a risk and fall short than do conservative work.
At that particular time in my life, I was around people who would make silly pronouncements about what a short story must not do, must not be. “If your main character dies, the story just has to end. You have no point-of-view. By definition you can only tell a story through one character’s eyes.” Whatever. So I wanted to kill off the main character and let this disembodied voice roll out the last few pages, to defy these narrow confines. I often write in an omniscient mode, which has fallen out of fashion. I want a narrator that can go anywhere, perceive anything, indulge in prolepsis, reveal what the characters do not know. In this mode you’re writing without a net. Just willing up a world out of language, out of a handful of dust. If you write a stupid line, you can’t blame it on your poor marionettes. I’d rather take a risk and fall short than do conservative work. People tend to love or hate my writing. I’ve made peace with that. One esteemed novelist told me I should write for television, as he found my dialogue salvageable. But I don’t admire his work, either, so that rolled right off.
TC: “Something You Can’t Live Without” is one of a few stories in Allegheny Front set in a particular moment in the past. When you’re working on a historical story, do you generally begin with a moment and time and go from there?
MNN: Honestly, not at all. My stories are image-driven. I begin with visions that come floating up from my subconscious. In the case of “Something You Can’t Live Without,” the cave-bear’s skull imbedded in the rock, the man rubbing blood off his neck with a neck-tie, the shrieking cloud of passenger pigeons, and the twin boys holding dead foxes, one red, one gray. In “Mates,” for instance, I saw that eagle nailed to the barn siding like an emblem, something you would see on a flag or a coin. In “Natural Resources,” a bear rocking an abandoned washing machine.
This may be an unorthodox tack for a fiction writer. The story, for me, always begins with image, or, if not an image, a sentence, a scrap of phrase. My writing practice is the knitting of these disparate pieces together. All else comes later: character, setting, plot. I reason that if the visions haunt me, they must have some cryptic import. By stringing these images together, I build a narrative skeleton. I make no distinction between contemporary or historical stories. The time will cohere around the vision.
TC: Was there anything that you did while writing any of these stories that surprised you?
MNN: Yes, that a publisher took them and I signed the contract! My stories tend to be expansive, lush — this isn’t in tune with the zeitgeist. I had the pleasure of noticing that most editors who published my stories in magazine are poets, not fiction writers. I play better with poets. I’m unabashedly concerned with the textures and music of language.
Embrace messiness and difficulty, rather than trying to grab a coveted spot in next week’s New Yorker.
The slender tale well-told has never been my love. I’ve been told I’m a novelist masquerading as a short story writer, but now I reject that, as it implies there is a certain done thing. I like writers who are unruly and push at what short story can hold, can be. Eudora Welty. Babel. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Mavis Gallant. James Salter. Ron Hansen. William Trevor. Annie Proulx. Faulkner. Primo Levi. Calvino. Cortázar. That said, when I wrote this book, I was purposefully trying out different modes and perspectives — I need that to hold my interest, some technical challenge goading me along like a splinter in my foot — and so “Mates” and “Telemetry” are the more classical, Chekhovian stories. Others expand. MFA-world has narrowed the idea of what the story can be. I’d like to see my generation blow it back open. Embrace messiness and difficulty, rather than trying to grab a coveted spot in next week’s New Yorker.
For me, the writer must be a stylist. This can take many forms. Mavis Gallant might not dazzle one as a Bellow does on the sentence level, but her paragraphs are so rich, supple, and alive. (In another fashion, Henry Green does it by creating a disconcerting web of language where the matter at hand is never quite discussed, where partial thoughts and sentences hang in midair.) I remember talking to another fisherman about “live water” in a trout stream — these transitional zones of conflicting currents where the very water seems a living thing. It can’t be explained, but it’s unmistakable, you know it when you see it. The same with good prose. You feel it even before your mind can articulate what makes the dead syllables come to life. Like the question in Ezekiel, asked in the valley of skeletons: “Son of man, can these bones live?” Yes. Living prose transcends setting, character, and the other workaday facets of fiction. You see this in writers like Evan S. Connell and Sam Lipsyte, Muriel Spark and Shirley Hazzard. Writers who do it on every page, rather than lucking into it. Before Cheever died, he said in a speech that “a good page of prose remains invincible.” No hyperbole. He believed that. It kept him alive through years when he shouldn’t have lived. It has meant the same to me.
TC: “Natural Resources” focuses mainly on a population of bears over time and their interaction with the humans who live nearby. How do you go about making a very dry subject into compelling fiction?
MNN: Oh gosh, I find interactions between humans and animals endlessly fascinating. I never thought it dry. In a place like West Virginia, where people hunt and fish and live close to the bone, animals fill out your world as there are so few people. I would lay in bed, wondering what the deer were doing up on the ridge. How the trout lived under ice. I still consider the world in this way. I live on Cape Cod, and the calendar of the year isn’t divided so much by the months as by the premonition of digging clams in winter, the return of the striped bass in spring, the time to jig for squid off the pier in high summer. All this to do with sustenance and light.
As in that story, we used to drive to the Clay County dump at night and watch the bears feed on garbage. We called it “the poor man’s safari.” Then a woman smeared her toddler’s hand in honey, so the bear would lick it off and give a good photo-op, but instead the bear took the kid’s hand off — and welfare took the kid.
Much of the book hinges on relationships between humans and animals. In contemporary America, we find animals bloodlessly shrink-wrapped in the grocery aisle, or we inflict Stockholm Syndrome on our pets and fetishize them. In my book as in my experience, the interaction is more immediate, without the filter of sentiment or the factory slaughter-house.
We prize the human perspective too much. I wanted to force the reader to think about the bears.
We prize the human perspective too much. I wanted to force the reader to think about the bears. Everyone seems to know the Bechdel Test, a concept I found fascinating and ingenious. So I wanted to create this other kind of test. Are the animals doing anything when people aren’t around? If so, what? Otherwise animals are merely props for humans. That is morally repugnant. Their lives have richness.
Also, in “Natural Resources” I wanted to write the type of story that has no discernible human characters, in terms of a single perspective, but wills up a world merely out of a disembodied voice, purely on language. Along with Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” served as models, but I wanted to take it further, describing change partly from the perspective of animals, valuing that, breaking away from the narrow human realism that mostly characterizes our stories.
TC: “Natural Resources” and “Gauley Season” make use of unorthodox points of view: second person and first person plural, respectively. How do you best find what works for a particular story?
MNN: I don’t really think of point of view — for me, it’s a shorthand concept, too reductive as it concerns the merely visual. I think of narrative consciousness, a certain stance/personality the narrator takes toward the world. So I don’t consider “Natural Resources” second person. It’s unyoked from viewpoint, singular or plural. I doubt Faulkner, Joyce, or Tolstoy ever thought of point of view. It’s a concept that the MFA world began stressing as a teaching tool, which I understand, but now writers take it seriously. In a common workshop setting a challenge is taken as deviation. “Strike one! You dipped into another character there!” Rules are anathema. There are no rules. This ain’t golf. “Throw away your mind,” as Dr. Vigil says in Under the Volcano. I try to do what feels right.
As I said, a set technical challenge sometimes pushes me on like a wind-up toy. Like, “This story won’t have dialogue.” Eudora Welty fascinates me because she has a natural ear for speech, perhaps her greatest gift, yet she’ll write a story like “First Love,” with the deaf-mute boy Joel Mayes as protagonist, and she’ll deny herself the ability to feature human speech because she wants to explore that aspect of the boy’s experience. I adore that. She’s taking a risk. She cut out her own tongue and wrote toward her weakness, toward the unknown.
TC: Dynamics related to class and education both play a large role in “Telemetry.” How do you best integrate aspects like these into the wider scope of a short story?
MNN: Americans have never been good at talking or writing about class. One ignores it, or one becomes didactic and thumbs Das Kapital like a lunatic. There are better models. For example, Isherwood’s Berlin Stories is all about class, but that’s not the first aspect that comes to mine when one thinks of the book, or even the tenth. The book wears that concern so lightly, but class informs every page, rippling there, like the shadowy light a swimming pool casts upon a ceiling. Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus is a more direct treatment of class, but even so, it’s so nuanced and fleet-footed — that vision of villagers tossing Clement Attlee in effigy on the bonfire! You get it in a sentence or two, then Hazzard moves on, dropping it. So deft.
Henry Green wrote:
“Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.”
Amen.
Robert Stone’s Hall of Mirrors is another fine model, I think, from someone who knew the underside first-hand, the child of a schizophrenic, out of orphanages and Marist homes. Class is all, yet is never spoken aloud.
TC: What would you say that you’ve learned from writing these stories that you’ve been able to apply to your subsequent fiction?
MNN: Writing, for me, is thinking aloud about the world. A story is the fossil record of that thought. After that, I move on. You could say I’ve learned nothing. I don’t look back except to say that I’ll never have to write a story like “Something You Can’t Live Without” ever again. No point in doing the trick twice. Of course, in a commercial sense, the world craves that you do the same trick over and over, but dedicated artists — say, Joyce, Faulkner — tore down their art and made it anew in each book. But the temptation is there. You even see a great writer like Flannery O’Connor repeating in certain lesser stories, doing imitations of herself.
After Allegheny Front I may never write another story. I may write a thousand more. I don’t know. The snake sheds its skin. So now I’m looking for a new syntax.
While science fiction’s prestigious Hugo awards have been racked with controversy after reactionary voters stuffed the ballot boxes to limit diversity, SF’s other prestigious awards, the Nebulas, are showcasing science fiction’s great diversity this year. In the 2016 awards, all of the categories were swept by women writers except for the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation which went to the female-led film Mad Max.
Congrats to all the winners and finalists!
Novel
Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Del Rey) Raising Caine, Charles E. Gannon (Baen) The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK) Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK) The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (Saga) Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard, Lawrence M. Schoen (Tor) Updraft, Fran Wilde (Tor)
Novella
Wings of Sorrow and Bone, Beth Cato (Harper Voyager Impulse) “The Bone Swans of Amandale,” C.S.E. Cooney (Bone Swans) “The New Mother,” Eugene Fischer (Asimov’s 4–5/15) “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn,” Usman T. Malik (Tor.com 4/22/15) Binti, Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com) “Waters of Versailles,” Kelly Robson (Tor.com 6/10/15)
Novelette
“Rattlesnakes and Men,” Michael Bishop (Asimov’s 2/15) “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead,” Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed 2/15) “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds,” Rose Lemberg (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/11/15) “The Ladies’ Aquatic Gardening Society,” Henry Lien (Asimov’s 6/15) “The Deepwater Bride,” Tamsyn Muir (F&SF 7–8/15) “Our Lady of the Open Road,” Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s 6/15)
Short Story
“Madeleine,” Amal El-Mohtar (Lightspeed 6/15) “Cat Pictures Please,” Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld 1/15) “Damage,” David D. Levine (Tor.com 1/21/15) “When Your Child Strays From God,” Sam J. Miller (Clarkesworld 7/15) “Today I Am Paul,” Martin L. Shoemaker (Clarkesworld 8/15) “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” Alyssa Wong (Nightmare 10/15)
•••
Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Ex Machina, Written by Alex Garland Inside Out, Screenplay by Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley; Original Story by Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen Jessica Jones: AKA Smile, Teleplay by Scott Reynolds & Melissa Rosenberg; Story by Jamie King & Scott Reynolds Mad Max: Fury Road, Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nick Lathouris The Martian, Screenplay by Drew Goddard Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt
•••
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
Seriously Wicked, Tina Connolly (Tor Teen) Court of Fives, Kate Elliott (Little, Brown) Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan UK 5/14; Amulet) Archivist Wasp, Nicole Kornher-Stace (Big Mouth House) Zeroboxer, Fonda Lee (Flux) Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older (Levine) Bone Gap, Laura Ruby (Balzer + Bray) Nimona, Noelle Stevenson (HarperTeen) Updraft, Fran Wilde (Tor)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing a mystery book.
Thrift stores are some of the best places to buy used books. Not only are the books cheap, but just a few feet away is a brand new outfit waiting for you to pick it out and wear while you read your new book! I chose a pair of overalls.
The downside of buying a book at a thrift store is that the cover might be so utterly mutilated as to render the book’s title and author credit illegible. That’s what happened to me with this mystery book. The cover had been torn in such a way as to eliminate any useful information. And the book’s indicia had been scribbled out. I have no idea what book this is or who wrote it.
And because the entire book is in Spanish I don’t even know what it’s about. I read the book from cover to cover and the only word I recognized was ‘burrito.’ The only clue as to the content is the cover image. It’s a horse eating grass, and in the background is a man being strangled. The horse has no idea what’s going on and all I can think is I hope the horse doesn’t turn around because not only will it have to witness a murder, but there’s no way that horse could get to the victim in time to save him. The horse would undoubtedly be full of guilt for not being able to prevent a death. To be honest, the cover image really fills me with a lot of anxiety.
Another thing about this book that fills me with anxiety is the guilt I feel for buying this book used. The author won’t receive even a quarter from me. Partly because the book was only ten cents, but also because authors don’t make any money from used book sales. It’s the same thing as if I downloaded the book off the internet or borrowed it from the library.
The interesting thing about reading a book you can’t understand is that you never know when the bad part is going to come, so you spend the entire time on the edge of your seat. But then the bad part never comes so you end the story on the edge of your seat, still craving some climax or resolution or something, anything.
There were several pages torn out from the middle of the book. It looked to be about 60 or so pages. I was left wondering what happened in that period. How did the characters’ lives change, if indeed the book has characters in it. And were there any more burritos? I’m never going to know.
BEST FEATURE: When people ask me what I think of this book I can say it’s indescribable and that will make the book sound much better than it is. WORST FEATURE: Being seen reading a mutilated book with 60 missing pages makes me look weird.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing peanut butter on celery.
More than a celebration of beauty, great poetry is often an unapologetic acceptance of human fragility and the sharp darkness it’s wrapped in. Juliet Escoria’s Witch Hunt is the kind of poetry collection that digs into its author’s past traumas, lingering regrets, emotional and physical scars, and the memories of her most dismaying experiences to somehow create a communal song about how messed up, sad, and insolently self-destructive humans are. In fact, more than a poetry collection, Witch Hunt is an invitation to look at and probe all of Escoria’s wounds, which much like Nietzsche’s abyss, end up looking back at and probing the insides of the reader.
While a large percentage of contemporary poetry is either trying too hard to experiment on new ground but lacking a narrative to do it with or, on the other hand, still tied to themes like love, heartbreak, and beauty, the poems offered in Witch Hunt are about the “suicide attempts, the drugs, the hospitalizations, the relationship I had as a teen where he left bruises.” Page after page, Escoria digs around her past with a scalpel in order to present bloody, black-and-blue morsels of her journey, and the result is a collection that’s uncomfortable to read and impossible to forget.
Witch Hunt is divided into eight sections, but depression, chemicals, abuse of all kinds, despondency, and dealing with the past/processing memories are all cohesive elements that can be found throughout the collection. Also, there are parts within those sections that read like smaller subdivisions. One in particular is “Letters to ex-Lovers,” in which Escoria directly confronts past partners with unforgiving honesty. The first lines of “Dear Patrick” are a great example of her devastating honesty:
I’m not sorry for forgetting your address or your phone number, but I must admit I do have some regrets about the loss of your face. When I think of you there is nothing anymore, just static.
Escoria’s first book, Black Cloud, introduced the world to a voice that wasn’t afraid to go into the darkest corners of life and pull out whatever hides there. This new book, however, feels more dangerous because it already visited those places, so that any trace of fear is gone, any hesitancy has vanished, and the fact that her past has already been cracked open only means the author had to dig even deeper to deconstruct herself. This process leads to writing that’s viciously straightforward and stouthearted, writing that isn’t afraid to say things that most people would keep to themselves:
Sometimes when I look at a cute baby or an animal I think about it getting run over by a train and the noise it would make.
Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep I think of a giant, ripping the roof from my house like a sardine can and plucking me off into the night. He takes me home and lays me out on a baking sheet and I am too scared to run away. I’m put in the oven and it is very warm in there and it makes me sleepy. I am left in there for a long time. It feels like decades. Eventually I am all dried up and crispy, so the giant takes me out and chops me into a fine powder and lines me into rails and then he snorts me.
As the discussion about trigger warnings rages on, Escoria has released a cannon on the world. Breathtakingly raw and remorseless about the elements it brings to the table, Witch Hunt is intoxicating and sexy, dangerous and painful, strange and unexpectedly hypnotic in the way only things that make you feel like a voyeur can be. This book constantly walks the line between poetry and flash nonfiction and inhabits the interstitial space between journal and gutter manifesto. Some literature takes the spotlight, thanks to its creeping, unrelenting darkness, and this is one of those books. Sure, there are tiny slivers of hope sprinkled along the way, but each time the reader comes across one, what came before has been so disarming that it is impossible to bend down and pick it up. Ultimately, this is Witch Hunt’s greatest achievement: it shows us the ways Escoria lives and has lived, how she has dished out pain and how she been hurt, and we are thankful to be hurt alongside her.
Wikipedia describes Mark Haddon, simply, as a novelist, but it might be more accurate to call him a literary renaissance man. Best known for the much-beloved 2003 mystery novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — which sold over 2 million copies and was adapted into a Tony and Olivier-award winning play — Haddon is also the author of nineteen books for children and young adults, as well as two other critically acclaimed novels, a play, and a volume of poetry. His latest, and undeniably darkest, work is the short story collection The Pier Falls (Doubleday, 2016). Depicting characters in extreme, often near-fatal, states of loneliness and despair, there is also a rich vein of empathy and black humor running through these nine diverse tales. And diverse they most certainly are. One story is set in Ancient Greece; one in the Amazon jungle; another on the surface of Mars. The title story, told at a chilling remove, details the devastation wreaked upon a group of holiday-makers when a pier collapses in a sunny English seaside down in 1970, while “The Gun” — an O’Henry Prize-winner in 2014 — is an almost unbearably tense coming of age piece about a boy and his neighbor discovering a handgun.
I spoke to Mark over Skype in early April and, despite the unfortunately-timed construction symphony which erupted outside my window as I dialed his number, we managed to discuss everything from hate speech and banned books, to literary adaptations and the thrill of using fiction to blow apart childhood memories.
— Dan Sheehan
Dan Sheehan: Carol Birch in The Guardian called you “a master of the excruciating family set piece,” remarking that family has become your speciality. Your novels A Spot of Bother and The Red House, as well as your stories “Breathe” and “Wodwo,” all contain scenes of painfully escalating tension within family units in domestic spaces — what is it about this environment that so appeals to you as a fiction writer?
Mark Haddon: When I began writing fiction I wanted to write big novels about big subjects and learned, painfully and slowly, that I had other, smaller subjects where I was at home, subjects that suited me. Family is one; houses is one; what goes on in the mind when it’s not working properly is another. I’ve had to give up on those dreams of writing the big novel and admit that I’m actually at home on this quite small scale. And given that stories simply don’t happen without flaws, suffering and conflict, if you’re writing about families, houses and minds then painfully escalating tension with family units in domestic spaces is pretty much essential.
DS: Though you have addressed the “larger” themes of mental illness and psychological disintegration — both within that domestic sphere and in the wider, more anarchic world outside of it — time and again in your work; whether it’s bipolar disorder in your play Polar Bears, hypochondria in A Spot of Bother, or Schizophrenia in “The Weir.” Do you think fiction that deals with these subjects has a societal value beyond the artistic, in terms of our understanding of mental illness, or is that asking too much of stories and storytellers?
Literature has to work by stealth and in spite of itself.
MH: I think it has value, but only insofar as you don’t write it for that reason or publish it for that reason or force it upon readers for that reason. It’s paradoxical, isn’t it? It’s the Keats quote “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” Literature has to work by stealth and in spite of itself. It’s hard to read great novels without coming out the other end changed in some way, without your empathy broadened to some extent. But that wouldn’t happen if they were written as self-help books. Apropos of which, I was particularly proud that to find out yesterday that Curious Incident has appeared on two very different lists. In the UK it was added to a list of books recommended by the reading agency for doctors to prescribe to young people who are struggling with their mental health. I think that’s a wonderful thing. If you can read a book instead of taking a pill, then read the book. Read to find out more about yourself. Read to find our more about the world. In the US, on the other hand, the American Libraries Association included Curious on their list of ‘Most Challenged Books’ in schools and libraries throughout the US. I was one above the Bible and two above Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, but three down from 50 Shades of Grey, sadly.
DS: Well that was always going to be a tricky one to beat.
MH: [laughs] Between the Bible and 50 Shades of Grey, what a great place to be. More seriously, one of the unexpected upsides of the novel being challenged, and occasionally being banned, repeatedly throughout the US is that in almost every case the inevitably heated arguments always create a debate about freedom of speech, about censorship, about atheism and profanity in books, about why we read and what we expect to get from it. So, there are two very different examples of the way in which a book can have a societal value and I’m very chuffed that Curious appears in both categories.
DS: You haven’t shied away from criticizing the policies of the current Tory government in Britain; do you worry about the political climate at the moment with regard to some of the issues we’re talking about?
MH: There are reasons to be profoundly depressed about pretty much everything the Tory government is doing at the moment, most notably the systematic destruction of a welfare state upon which they, as wealthy people, have never relied, but which is essential for the health and welfare of millions of people for whom they appear to have no empathy whatsoever. Thankfully, freedom of expression isn’t something most writers have to worry about here. In any case the new arena in which those debates are fought is on the internet and the main focus is not political but personal — who has the right to offend and who has the right to be protected from offence. Part of the puzzle is a practical one. How do you sustain an environment in which people can express themselves freely and anonymously without it being an environment in which they can abuse others freely and anonymously. More interesting, I think, is watching old political paradigms shifting to accommodate a new landscape; witness Germaine Greer’s attempts to square the transgender experience with the feminism of the seventies and eighties. I don’t deny that it’s a genuine puzzle but it’s not one she has handled with sensitivity.
DS: I remember reading recently about a somewhat similar situation at the Decatur Book Festival at Emory University last year. Roxane Gay was in conversation with Erica Jong and at the Q & A which followed, Jong was asked how feminism might better include women of color, to which she answered “feminism has always included women of color.” It became clear that, even though there were these two champions of the feminist movement up on stage together, the opinions of one on some significant issues were very much stuck in a previous era, and were no longer in sync with how the new, more inclusive generation, feels.
MH: Absolutely; and I don’t think these discussions apply to books that much, because books are written slowly and published slowly and read by people who choose to read them. So it’s not a problem for writers in that sense, but it is very much a problem on social media. What’s really difficult on social media — not for me of course because I’m a white middle-class man so I can say anything I want and I’m not going to be abused. It’s not like I’m a woman with an opinion — is that when you have a potential audience which includes the whole world, it’s very easy to offend people and very difficult to discuss certain things.
DS: Turning to The Pier Falls, I don’t think I’ve ever read a collection that was set across such a broad and disparate range of places — you move from a seaside town in Britain to ancient Greece to the Amazon jungle to the surface of Mars, to name but a few. Did you envisage a unifying idea or theme when you began to put together this collection?
MH: Well, there was no overarching plan. I was just trying to write the stories that I could write. I had started many, many more stories than there are in the collection and I either stopped halfway through or threw them away. So instead of those nine being a deliberate choice of situations and characters, they were what remained when I threw away the stories that didn’t work. And then post-hoc I had to look at them and ask myself whether there was a theme. And I’m still not sure how much that theme is accidental or representative or what’s going on inside my head.
Unlike a lot of writers, I think the short story has given me much more freedom than a novel. I feel that I can take bigger risks. I mean, I would never set a novel on Mars because I would think that it’s simply not going to work, and there is no point in trying to put a year’s work into it just to have it go nowhere. But if it’s a short story, I can take that risk. Ironically, Clare Alexander, my agent, said to me “Mark, you seem to write novels in which nothing happens and short stories in which everything happens.” I had never really thought about it like that but I think she’s right.
DS: You’ve written close to nineteen books for children and four for adults so far, as well as a play and a volume of poetry. As a writer of different forms, but also an illustrator and visual artist, what aspect of your work brings you the most joy?
MH: This is an awful answer, but I rarely get joy from writing. I get a lot of joy from having written well, which happens sometimes. The actual process I find quite painful. I often wish that I did something which gave me flow, that psychological sense of being immersed and forgetting where I am and what the time is, but that never happens for me with writing. It used to happen more when I was doing illustration and sometimes it still happens when I do certain types of art, but sadly never with writing.
DS: I was fascinated by the undercurrent of black humour that accompanies disaster in many of these stories. Is that something that organically infuses your writing style now or did you consciously want to move toward a darker, more biting place with this book?
…there is a pleasure in writing a book that seems not to have come from the pen of the person who wrote that nice novel about the boy and the dog.
MH: Undeniably there is a pleasure in writing a book that seems not to have come from the pen of the person who wrote that nice novel about the boy and the dog. I quite liked putting that person to bed. I’ve been trying to get out from under that person for quite some time. But as far as the humor goes, I think there’s a region where humor, meaning what is funny, blends into something broader: an empathy and generosity that’s often not funny at all but which is a very close cousin to it, a warm way of looking at the world, and I think that’s certainly there. There’s also something in that which I think is very British. We lived in Boston for a year and one of the biggest cultural differences, for me, between the US and Britain — and there are lots, especially in Boston, which, with its bizarre anglophilia is a particularly odd place — was that I find certain stories of horrific trauma actually very funny. I remember telling friends in Boston about what I thought were very funny stories from back home, and they would look absolutely horrified, apart from a couple who would laugh and then say “I’m terribly sorry, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Canadians.” So I learnt to keep my amusement at horrific physical trauma to myself.
DS: The Curious Incident play has been a tremendous success, on both the West End and now Broadway (7 Oliviers and 5 Tonys). Was the prospect of stage or screen adaptation something that excited or concerned you in the wake of the book’s release? Does the idea of adaptation of your work in general fill you with dread?
MH: Except in rare circumstances, I think writers should steer clear of being involved in adaptation, for the same reason that surgeons don’t operate on their own children: you’re just too close to be objective. I’ve adapted other people’s work for TV, for example, and I know that you have to be harsh. Different things are needed. You have to make cuts which are often very painful for the original author. I also know writers who have been involved in trying to steer an adaptation in the direction they want, and you can lose years of your life trying to do that. I think you should take the check and go home, or if you still really want to be that involved, don’t take the check. I think the secret, and I discovered this retrospectively with Curious, is choosing the right people to do the adaptation. If you get the right people, it’ll work. If you get the people who are almost right, you can’t compensate for that yourself. My one stroke of genius with the stage adaptation of Curious was choosing Simon Stephens, who in turn wanted Marianne Elliott to direct and Frantic Assembly to do the movement. I had to do nothing except keep a sort of Zen-like detachment from the whole process. In the case of Curious, the reason it worked was not because it was a good or less good adaptation of the book, but because it was a celebration of what you can do on stage. I think if your main concern is to have a good adaptation of your book, then you’re sunk. Whereas if someone wants to make a great play or film using your book as a starting point, then I think you stand a much better chance of being pleased by what comes out at the end.
DS: This can often be a terrible question to ask authors, but have you decided on your next project?
I could happily not read about people like me in books for many, many years.
MH: Well, publication can end up taking a lot of your time if you’re not careful so I’ve always thought that you have to have another book well underway beforehand. Its always dangerous talking about these things in public because you can invoke that terrible curse, but I’ll take that risk: I’m about halfway through a novel about a house fire. It grew out of several things I discovered while writing the stories in The Pier Falls. I’d often tried to write about my past, but I don’t have a very interesting life story. I grew up in Northampton and nothing much of interest has ever happened in Northampton. It’s the middle of Middle England and I had a middle English upbringing. But I know it in detail and I often remind myself that, in a way, everyone’s life is of equal value. Having said that, people who’ve had the childhoods that I had have occupied too many pages in literature for too long. I could happily not read about people like me in books for many, many years. But the conundrum then is how do you use that past without writing a story that feels somehow smug or entitled or cosy. We all know those types of middle class novels, and I think they’re more common over here than in America. I realized that one way to do it was to go back and destroy parts of those lives [laughs]. The story “The Pier Falls” is actually based on a lot of my childhood holidays. When I tried to write about those holidays reverentially, the story became slightly saccharine and not terribly interesting. But then I realized that if you want to destroy — a place, a building, a structure, a family, a family occasion — then you have to write about that destruction with the same attention to detail and the same love that you would use if you were building it up from scratch. So I realized that instead of writing about the pier I remembered from my childhood, if I just smashed it to pieces, it would be the same pier but somehow more gripping.
DS: In a way, it made the story doubly terrifying because it felt known, it felt experienced, to the point where I found myself turning to Google to tell me more about this horrific real life event.
MH: And I think it’s also true of “Wodwo”. I know that kind of family, that milieu, really well, but the question was how to write about it in a way that was genuinely interesting. And I realized that one of the ways to make it interesting was to send someone in to tear it to pieces. And I’m allowed to use this material that I know so well, because I’m being so unpleasant to those characters! There’s a release to that as well, there’s a release in going back to your childhood and stamping all over it. It’s rather thrilling, worryingly thrilling when you realise you can do it. So that was in the back of my mind when I started writing about a house fire. I’ve always been interested in houses. I think, largely, because my father was an architect. I’m not someone who notices the clothes people wear or who remembers conversations word for word, but I could give you a good 3D sketch of all the buildings I’ve been in over the past six months. It’s one of the main languages in which I think about the world, so I decided to write about a house but then, having learnt from “The Pier Falls” and “Wodwo”, I thought “I’ll write about a house, and destroy it.”
The fan tweeted at Rowling about her struggles with bullying and suicidal thoughts, and said she wished to get a “expecto patronum” tattoo — a magical guardian spell in the Harry Potter universe.
@jk_rowling i wanna get 'expecto patronum' tattooed & it'd mean the world if it was in ur handwriting. here's why:')pic.twitter.com/fhldRiju3w
Lydia Millet deserves some sort of award for her books titles alone. Entries include Oh Pure and Radiant Heart; Love in Infant Monkeys; George Bush, Dark Prince of Love; How the Dead Dream; Ghost Lights; Magnificence; and Mermaids in Paradise. Sweet Lamb of Heaven is Millet’s 14th novel, her sixth in the last five years. She deserves another award for this heroic output.
The new novel has much in common with her other recent books: piercingly elegant sentences, a wide range of styles (“My books can’t be one thing all the way along,” Millet has said. “They always twist and turn, tonally.”), a love of the natural world and disgust with what humans have done to it. The threat of extinction in particular hangs above much of Millet’s work. In Sweet Lamb of Heaven, it shadows a young mother as she faces another threat, similarly malign, but more personal and immediate — the threat of a man against a woman.
The book initially resembles a diary whose canny author, Anna, tells us that she used to hear voices. Now she’s hiding out in a coastal Maine motel with her effulgent little daughter in tow and an ice-hearted husband in pursuit. Anna and this sociopathic man, Ned, used to live together in Alaska, but they’ve been estranged for six years. For a while, Ned hadn’t cared that Anna had taken their kid and left, but now he wants “his girls” back in Anchorage so they can serve as stage props for his burgeoning career as a politician, a Family Research Council-type. As Ned begins to take increasingly menacing (and eventually violent) measures to get what he wants, Anna’s sanity begins to unwind, and the narrative accelerates. Sweet Lamb of Heaven twists and turns into a thriller.
And like any proper thriller, the book piles questions onto the reader. How far will Ned go? What’s with all the other guests at the motel? But the novel’s central mystery is the source of the voice that Anna had been hearing. Anna tells us that she didn’t have any other symptoms of mental illness, and she says the voice doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a hallucination. It did seem tied to her daughter, Lena; Anna first heard the voice when Lena was born and it went quiet once she learned to talk. Anna writes,
The voice made light of what it held to be false ideas — for example, the yearning for an all-powerful father who grants wishes and absolves. On that subject it seemed to evince something like condescension, rattling off mocking wordplay when we passed a church marquee or once, another time, when I stood at the front door trying to get rid of a Witness.
Without offering any pat explanation for the voice, Millet uses it as a vehicle for ideas about God, nature, and language. It’s a brilliantly simple conceit that carries an incredible amount of symbolic weight.
Millet sets Ned up as a kind of antithesis to the voice. He is the cold rationality to its nonsense, the physical magnificence to its ephemerality, the mortal evil to its divine rightness. And his noxious right-wing politics seem particularly appropriate to contemporary American politics — it’s no stretch to read Ned’s dialogue in Ted Cruz’s voice — and the concerns that animate Sweet Lamb of Heaven are in direct conflict with the narrow worldview promulgated by Ned and Ted.
But Millet’s ideas can be more interesting than her characters. Anna’s mind is agile enough to make her a good mediating intelligence, but everyone else might have been culled from central casting. Lena’s precocious and adorable; the motel manager is avuncular and a little mysterious; the local librarian, who serves as a romantic interest, is virtuous and noble, if a tad overbearing. Anna describes her husband compellingly: He’s attractive and charismatic “Both before and after we were married, men and women alike would confide in me about their attraction to Ned,” but also cruel, manipulative, and sinister. “Ned’s monotony of empty assertions in the service of self-promotion, self-replication and mastery for its own sake, his reach that extended past the boundaries of even the body — that was a weapon without end.” He’s not merely sociopathic, but Satanic, reaching past the boundaries of even the body. But when Ned appears in any way, when he says or does anything, his menace starts to deflate. When he’s trying to be ingratiating. he says inane things like, “You like that Mexican Co-cola, don’t you? Cane sugar, not corn syrup? We need to bring that old-style Coke back to the U. S. of A.” When he’s mad, he snarls and calls Anna, “Bitch.” Ned’s a serious threat — at one point he breaks Anna’s nose — but there’s a gap between how he’s described and depicted.
In the end, the flatness of the characters isn’t too troubling of a flaw. In fact, it’s pretty typical for novels of ideas. You read Millet for the evocative power of her sentences and the moral force of her thought, not for her Strong Male Antagonists. Millet’s an interesting writer with bold ideas, and her plot only gets more engaging with each page, and these qualities make Sweet Lamb of Heaven a worthy entry in an excellent, rapidly growing body of work, evidence that Millet’s in the midst of a significant creative outburst.
Click here to read an interview with Lydia Millet about Sweet Lamb of Heaven and the future of the literary thriller. Click here to read one of Lydia Millet’s story, “Girl and Giraffe,” as part of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
