Rob Spillman on Finding Your Community, Joining the Conversation, and All Tomorrow’s Parties

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Rob Spillman’s childhood was split between Berlin and the States, between living with his father, a concert pianist, and his mother, an opera singer who became an arts administrator. Spillman found himself in the battered paperbacks of Kerouac, Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and in music, particularly punk, his portal to another world. In his memoir, All Tomorrow’s Parties (Grove Press, 2016), Spillman traces his journey as a young man, crossing cultures and continents to find his place in the world and the arts.

Spillman is the editor of Tin House and the editorial advisor of Tin House Books, among other endeavors. He and I discussed the challenges of writing memoir, his musical and literary influences, and why it’s crucial to contribute to the literary ecosystem.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: A major theme of this book is the conflict one has between being responsible and devoting your life to your art. Your mother wanted you to have a career and play it safe with a job. Your father devoted his life to his art. It’s a conflict many of us struggle with.

Rob Spillman: It’s a constant struggle, I think, for many artists, who long for ultimate creative freedom but also struggle with the need to feed themselves. And the dueling desires for unlimited freedom and security. Especially when you are young. And for me, that was exacerbated by not having any real roots, so I felt no real attachment to place except for Berlin, which was more nostalgic. After I left I didn’t know anybody there, so it wasn’t like I had family ties or a family legacy there, so that all combined to exacerbate my wanderlust.

DS: You write about your growing awareness of your talent for assemblage, of bringing together people from all walks of life. Can you discuss how this is manifested in your life now, particularly with your involvement with Tin House?

RS: I kind of recognized this talent, at the time when the book ends, but I didn’t know I could do this as a life. I didn’t know that I could actually use what I describe as a talent for assemblage to run a literary magazine, and also to be out and about in the literary world and bringing people together, forming community through Tin House workshops and the magazine. And now I’m the chair of the PEN membership committee and on the board of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, and on the board of Narrative 4. All these organizations are about creating community and bringing people together. I feel lucky I was able to figure that out and was able to channel what was — I didn’t understand at the time — a talent.

DS: One of the ways you began to discover yourself was in music, particularly in punk. You have this playlist on Spotify; you quote lyrics throughout the book. Can you discuss the development of that?

RS: One of the themes of the book is the idea of influence and being constructed by my influences and trying to find my own voice and sense of self in others. I failed in this book in many different ways — it took me ten years to write and I failed. I tried to write it straight-chronological-linear, and then I figured this format out. I wanted the influences to be really explicit. That’s why I have the songs and the quotes at the beginning of each chapter — to create a soundtrack and kind of a Greek chorus of the pressures I was feeling and the influences I was feeling at the time. It’s still that way. I’m still influenced by this music and these feelings, but I wanted to be explicit.

DS: So was the format of All Tomorrow’s Parties ultimately plotted out, or did you go on instinct?

RS: Originally I had written it in that linear, chronological time, but I decided to break it up. The focal point of the book is Berlin. I wanted the two parts — me growing up in the shadow of Berlin, and me going back to Berlin — to reflect on one another. And when I wrote them straight chronological, those two parts were kind of far apart and they weren’t playing off of each other. When I decided to intersperse them, I felt there was more tension and torque. I was also able to put things and to play around with where information was dropped, so that you could find things out of chronological order and refer to the other section. I was able to get away with sleights of hand. My hope is that it creates a tension to find out how the plot is going to come together.

DS: There’s so much pressure to do everything quickly nowadays. Do you want to talk about taking ten years to write this book?

RS: It wasn’t straight linear work. I would work on this for a few years, put it down and think, ‘oh this is just not working at all,’ and then I would start over and just bash my head against the wall again and again. I did multiple drafts. It wasn’t until I figured out the structure that it came alive to me, and then it came along a lot more quickly. The challenge with memoir is that the goalposts are always moving and every single day you change and your relationship to the material changes and you have to come up with a fixed persona where you’re writing from, so you can kind of fix the material. Otherwise you will drive yourself totally crazy. A real pivotal book for me was Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. She’s so good at articulating the challenges of writing about the self, and the need to get a certain perspective on yourself. It sort of clicked into place after I read her book.

DS: What other books impacted you?

RS: My influences are many. I felt liberated by reading people like Maggie Nelson. Bluets was very influential for me. The sort of freedom to mess with form, that really impacted me. Also, strangely, Mary Ruefle’s essays in poetry — the way she was able to fearlessly leap around and make autobiographical jumps — “Wait, you were just here, and you tripped over there. How did you do that?” But it’s working.

DS: Recently Tin House published Clare Vaye Watkins’ On Pandering, an essay so popular it crashed your website. Could you talk about how you came to publish that?

RS: Yes. I’m super proud of that essay. Claire delivered that as a lecture at the summer workshop in July. And during the middle of it, the room was completely electric. You felt like you were in the presence of something really important. She was articulating something that a lot of us were feeling. Particularly every single woman in the room was resonating with what she was talking about. I thought it was really important to get that out into the world, and I worked with her to turn the lecture into an essay. We just tweaked things a little bit to turn it into an essay, and then I really wanted to make sure it got out there far and wide, so we posted it for free right before the issue came out. I was actually in Jerusalem when it hit, and it was trending there at two in the morning. I saw the website crash and I was like, “Oh, great.” It was amazing to see it resonate. I think we had 30,000 views the first four hours it was posted so it obviously struck a nerve.

It’s still resonating. She and Marlon James were on NPR’s morning edition yesterday talking about it. When I can do something like that it’s a great feeling, when you can contribute to the cultural conversation like that.

DS: This is kind of coming out of left field, but thinking of the recent terrorist attacks and other incidences of extremism, do you think that people commit these acts because of a lack of art in their life?

RS: I don’t know if it’s a lack of art. It’s a lack of empathy, which may come around to a lack of the arts. Being open to art and culture from around the world means that you have to be empathetic, that you have to listen to what the other listens to or sees.

When I was traveling around Palestine and Israel, 99% of the people I met wanted peace and wanted dialogue, but there are barriers there — explicit barriers, walls up everywhere and sniper towers — so it’s really hard for them to have a conversation. And there’s this distrust. People like Trump are not helping the world at all with their demagoguery, which furthers the talk of ‘otherness.’ So I don’t think it’s a lack of art, it’s a lack of meaningful conversation with people different from yourself. Social media does not help. We tend to talk only to each other, with like-minded people. It’s hard to have an honest conversation with someone who has different views from you.

A couple of months ago I wrote this snarky piece on Salon about how short-sighted self-published authors are on Amazon. They’re getting money but they’re not contributing to the literary ecosystem or the general ecosystem, because Amazon doesn’t pay local taxes, and so on. One of the main self-published writers on Amazon wrote a really funny, kind of flaming piece on his blog about my post. And I actually reached out to him and started a dialogue and said, “That was a funny piece. Why don’t we have a conversation on Salon where we actually talk to each other?”

And he was so shocked. He said, “Salon never airs our views. We just don’t have these kinds of conversations.”

So we actually did have an honest back-and-forth, minus the usual name calling. It’s so hard to have a real dialogue.

DS: At the Tin House workshop, you talk a lot about being a good literary citizen. Could you expound on that?

RS: I feel that if you want to be a member of the ecosystem you have to contribute to it. And that means actually buying books, supporting other people, reading other people. You can’t just take from the ecosystem. It won’t work. We all have to contribute to the vitality of the ecosystem and this goes for all ecosystems. It’s a general problem for the world — this selfishness — that I think everybody is waking up to.

It’s going to be interesting to see. The pendulum is swinging back now. It’s interesting to see because you know digital book sales are down across the board for early adopters. Now people want actual books and they like real curation from independent bookstores, and independent bookstores are thriving. And SPD, Small Press Distribution — they’re the biggest distributors of poetry in the country — they developed software to digitize poetry titles, and no one wanted them. They got out of the business of making poetry eBooks. People wanted their poetry, in the physical form. All these signs are intriguing to me.

Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday

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by Debbie Graber

Kevin Kramer starts his new job on Monday. The executive team counts down the minutes to his arrival. The executive team is made up of four white men, one woman, and one man who claims to be a “Pacific Islander” on tax forms, but everyone knows he’s Armenian.

Kevin Kramer is exactly what the Products Profit Center needs in a senior vice president. He was groomed in corporate. According to Kevin Kramer’s impressive résumé, he worked previously for Procter and Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, and Mrs. Fields. According to the transcripts from his breakfast interviews, Kevin Kramer lives and breathes corporate.

Kevin Kramer speaks in a low baritone, softly but with authority. He talks about concepts like “tonnage” and “low-hanging fruit.” Even though 85 percent of the executives surveyed had no idea what Kevin Kramer was talking about, 100 percent of them fell in love with Kevin Kramer from his first interview.

Kevin Kramer is a pro. He always maintains eye contact. His handshake is firm, but not too firm. His hands are supple and moisture-free. One executive, after shaking Kevin Kramer’s hand, thought his fingers felt a bit rough. It turned out that Kevin Kramer played bass for years with his band, the Butt Gerbils. When they couldn’t get any gigs, they changed their name to Punkster. That executive later fantasized about Kevin Kramer playing “Stairway to Heaven” onstage with Robert Plant. She thought about Kevin Kramer touching her with his rough, bass-hardened fingertips, and she came harder than she had in months.

Kevin Kramer says, “Leaders aren’t afraid to hurt people’s feelings in the best interests of the company. Leaders have no problems dispensing justice swiftly. Leaders never lose sleep at night. I sleep like a baby.” This is why Kevin Kramer starts on Monday.

The executive team cheers when they see Kevin Kramer drive his navy-blue BMW into the parking lot Monday morning. One executive says, “Let the hammer fall. Godspeed.”

This executive never washes his hands after visiting the men’s room. He also refuses to say thank you when someone holds the door to the patio open for him, unless that person is another executive or that sexy Indian girl in software.

When Kevin Kramer starts on Monday, he parks in his own parking space, with his name in bold on a placard. No one else in the company has ever had their own personally designated parking space, not even the CEO. Eighty percent of employees surveyed complained about the lack of parking. Kevin Kramer realizes that many in the company will be angered by this change to the parking space policy.

But Kevin Kramer refused to take the position of senior vice president unless he could be assured of his own parking space, and the executives agreed to his demand, provided that they too would receive their own parking spaces. The executives also tabled the plan to build a new parking garage for everyone else until 2020.

On Monday, HR sends out an e-mail explaining the new parking space policy. So as not to single out Kevin Kramer, the e-mail mentions the others who are important enough to get their own spaces. One executive says, “It’s about fucking time!”

This executive used the word fuck as much as possible, because he liked to think of himself as Tony Soprano, if Tony Soprano had been born in St. Louis and became a CPA.

Kevin Kramer has been hired to put new corporate efficiencies into place. Kevin Kramer makes these efficiencies up during meetings. He does his best work under pressure.
Kevin Kramer starts on Monday because the executives decided the company needed a paradigm shift. The CEO Jon Goldfarb had become too involved with everyday operations. He was a nice guy, but an egghead. He was socially awkward with clients at hockey games and other events that were supposed to be fun, not painful.

According to a survey, 72 percent of clients characterized Jon Goldfarb as “annoying.” One client wrote on the comment section of the survey, “Can someone please teach Jon Goldfarb the fundamentals of baseball so he can stop quoting actuarial tables when the bases are loaded in the bottom of the ninth?”

The executives also decided that Jon Goldfarb was too big of a softie to get rid of dead weight, and as a result, unproductive employees had been hanging on to their jobs for years. These employees did zero work while gobbling up health benefits and overtime and accumulated paid time off. The executives hoped that the new senior vice president would fire the employees doing their jobs poorly. The executives also wanted the senior vice president to bring a hipper vibe to the company, making it more “relevant” and “twenty-first century,” which 56 percent of surveyed clients indicated were desirable traits for their payroll company to have.

Kevin Kramer is a tough negotiator. He told Jon Goldfarb during his breakfast interview, “Your company is in the toilet. The competition wants to bury you, and while you waver trying to make a decision, they will hire me. And then I will bury you.”

Jon Goldfarb sipped his coffee and pushed his eggs around his plate. He personally found Kevin Kramer to be kind of an asshole, but he had read the survey that indicated 100 percent of the executives believed he was “the guy,” so he offered him the job. This is why Kevin Kramer gets whatever he desires.

Kevin Kramer’s office is new. Architects were hired to build his new office out of a corner office and a neighboring file room. The burliest members of the facilities department were offered overtime to spend a weekend moving the files out of the file room. When a few smaller employees complained that they were being discriminated against due to their size, HR arranged for everyone in facilities to receive Subway coupons. That shut everyone up.

Kevin Kramer is introduced around the Products Profit Center on Monday morning. He meets Judy, a hefty woman with white hair who is in charge of user acceptance testing. Judy has been an employee at the company for twenty years. Her passion is not user acceptance testing, but “Judy’s Corner,” a column in the company newsletter. “Judy’s Corner” is filled with employee anecdotes and upbeat sayings that allude to Jesus Christ.

It is company policy that all religions are tolerated, even religions that 79 percent of surveyed employees considered “weird.” Because of this and because of all the new employees in software development recently outsourced from a company in India, Judy has been told to steer clear of Jesus in her column. She sometimes reprints Family Circus cartoons when she’s out of ideas.

Kevin Kramer says, “It’s a pleasure to meet the famous Judy.” He was given the latest issue of the newsletter at his breakfast interview. He read it while taking a dump that Monday morning at home.

Judy beams, saying, “Kevin, I want to include a personal story from you for the ‘Corner’ this month,” to which Kevin Kramer replies, “I’d be happy to.” But later that Monday, Judy receives an e-mail from HR, telling her that unless she takes the early retirement package offered her, she risks losing all her benefits. By the end of the day, she is gone.

Forty-seven percent of employees surveyed thought the company newsletter was “pointless.” Thirty-six percent thought it was “heartwarming,” “a great way to stay abreast of employee happenings,” and “the only way to find out if any retired employees had died.”

The executive team had plans to revamp the newsletter into an interactive website, but they never got to that item on the agenda during their offsite planning session at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Getting rid of Judy is just another reason the executives are happy to see Kevin Kramer in his new corner office, standing on his eight-hundred-dollar Aeron chair.

After Kevin Kramer starts on Monday, the old guard starts to get nervous. The old guard are those employees who, when surveyed, thought it was okay to wear their pajamas to work. Some of the new guard will also be nervous, but only those who had gotten comfortable wearing shower shoes to work. The new guard figures that the old guard will have to go first, before Kevin Kramer sets his sights on them. But Kevin Kramer is unpredictable. For example, while he did away with the company newsletter, he inexplicably kept the interdepartmental potlucks going for a time. He even contributed a crockpot of chili that he claimed came from a family recipe.

If any of the employees who chowed down on Kevin Kramer’s chili thought it tasted off, or maybe that it smelled like dog food, they will never tell each other, let alone Kevin Kramer. No one will ever tell Kevin Kramer the truth, and no one knows this better than Kevin Kramer himself.

For a few months, Kevin Kramer does little work. He observes the Products Profit Center’s workflow. He attends meetings but says nothing. He spends most of the time looking out his office window, watching the employees smoke in the courtyard or slurp their 7-Eleven Slurpees.

He wanders the floor of the call center, and, hiding behind the potted ficus trees, listens to the representatives answer client calls. He refuses invitations to lunch from other executives, which makes them squirm. He spends hours in the break room, buying up all the strawberry Pop-Tarts.

He chats with Doc, the security guard, about Doc’s years in the Marine Corps. Kevin Kramer doesn’t understand a word of what Doc says, because no one understands a word of what Doc says. In that regard, Kevin Kramer is no different from anyone else in the company.

Finally, Kevin Kramer devises a plan. He doesn’t create a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation. He doesn’t tell Jon Goldfarb, even though Jon Goldfarb has been asking for a status report for weeks. This type of behavior solidifies Jon Goldfarb’s opinion that Kevin Kramer is a big douchebag. But Kevin Kramer’s survey numbers have been rising every week since he started, so Jon Goldfarb keeps his mouth shut.

At this point, Kevin Kramer hires an assistant. It is Kevin Kramer’s practice to watch his workload pile up until it appears he will never be able to get on track. Then he hires an assistant whom he has already chosen in his mind. Kevin Kramer calls Debi Baker in human resources to let her know whom he has decided on.

“Kevin, the way it works around here is that HR hires all new employees. We need to interview candidates and see résumés,” Debi says.

“Debi, you have intimate knowledge of my new assistant, because you will be my new assistant,” Kevin Kramer says.

Debi pauses and finally says, “Kevin, I’m not an assistant; I’ve been in human resources for twenty-five years, so . . .”

“Do you accept your new position as my assistant, or will you leave the company of your own volition?” Kevin Kramer says, munching on a Twizzler.

Debi says nothing.

Kevin Kramer waits on the line, listening to Debi wheeze. Debi mentioned during Kevin Kramer’s employee orientation that she has terrible asthma that acts up when she’s stressed out. Asthma was the only thing Debi talked about during the new-employee orientation. She told the new employees, “Just read the handbook to learn about your benefits. It’s the standard crap you’ve seen a thousand times.”

“Okay,” she says finally. Then she hangs up.

Kevin Kramer estimates that Debi will last five weeks as his assistant. Kevin Kramer is always right about these things. As he suspects, she is a terrible assistant. Kevin enjoys asking her to stay late to research special paint that can turn his office walls into giant white boards. He makes Debi come in at six in the morning to answer support calls from international clients. He offers her services to whatever area of the Products Profit Center is short-staffed during the workday, and then asks her to do his work after six or on weekends.

Kevin Kramer listens to Debi wheeze in her cubicle, listens to her weep, until HR informs him that she has gone out on stress leave. Then he replaces her with Jenna, a support representative from the call center. Jenna seems eager to move up in the company. She has a golden tan and wears short skirts. Kevin Kramer noticed her right away during one of his secret excursions to the call center, her headset slightly askew on her head due to a clump of hair extensions.

Kevin Kramer has a thin, pretty wife and two adorable children with wide-set eyes just like him. But like any executive groomed in corporate, he does not mind a little eye candy around the office. He does not mind an office flirtation and, if the situation calls for it, a quickie on his antique desk.

The first quarterly meeting where Kevin Kramer is in attendance is a happening. He is treated like a rock star. The executives surround him, hoping to get into his good graces by complimenting his Brooks Brothers shirt. Most lower-tier employees are too shy to approach him, but a few brave or stupid ones try unsuccessfully to chat him up before one of the executives shoos them away. Jenna is one of the few who is allowed to approach Kevin Kramer at the meeting.

Forty-eight percent of employees surveyed called the quarterly meetings “thinly veiled attempts to spin lousy performance numbers into gold.” One person commented, “One would find more truth in a North Korean radio broadcast.” Twenty-four percent wrote that they “wished there were more variety in the breakfast offerings, including some gluten-free options.”

Kevin Kramer samples the muffins and the low-pulp orange juice, and sits in the front row. Many significant issues are discussed during the meeting, such as client survey results and the company’s plan to rearrange the lobby furniture. Kevin Kramer’s mind wanders to Jenna’s firm ass. He doesn’t pay attention in the meeting, because once his plan is implemented, all client survey results will be shredded. Also, to increase sagging revenues, the lobby will be rented out to an H&R Block franchise, and it will bring in its own furniture.

One executive presenting at the meeting says, “Our company employs some of the smartest people I’ve ever known. And we’ve just gotten ten IQ points smarter with the addition of Kevin Kramer!”

Everyone applauds, and Kevin Kramer is jolted out of his reverie. He realizes that people are clapping for him. He stands up and waves. Afterward, every other executive makes a point to say how smart everyone in the Products Profit Center is, even though 100 percent of the executives surveyed indicated that “trained chimps could do a better job than most of the employees.”

Kevin Kramer was born in Skokie, Illinois, to educator parents. Kevin’s mother remembers Kevin helping her load the dishwasher every night after dinner. Kevin’s father remembers that Kevin had an avid interest in marine biology when he was a kid.

Kevin Kramer was a decent student, but did not distinguish himself in any way. He applied to the University of Michigan and Northwestern and was rejected by both.

After two semesters at Oakton Community College, he was able to transfer to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he dropped out after his junior year. Kevin’s parents, when surveyed, cited that he “seemed to lag socially behind the other students.”

Kevin Kramer’s résumé lists his alma maters as Northwestern University for undergrad and the University of Michigan for his MBA.

Kevin Kramer puts his efficiencies into place slowly. Initially, every other garbage can disappears from the Products Profit Center floor. Employees are told that they must share garbage cans with their neighbors. A few grumble, but most accept the change without incident.

Then employees realize the fluorescent overhead lights seem dimmer than they used to be. Under Kevin Kramer’s cost-cutting plan, every other lightbulb is taken out of the fixtures. Some employees with astigmatism complain, and a few get doctors’ notes and go out on stress leave.

When Kevin Kramer started working in the corporate world years ago, he was paunchy and always seemed to be sweating. But after carefully studying the executives he worked under, Kevin Kramer wised up. He hired a personal trainer and got his teeth whitened and started smiling more, so that his sweatiness seemed less gross. It’s gotten to the point now where no one even notices the sweat circles under the armpits of Kevin Kramer’s faintly checkered Brooks Brothers shirts. People instead are fixated on his poker face, looking for signs. Since a meeting during second quarter that 45 percent of the attendees found “worthwhile, for once,” only to learn two hours later that they had all been terminated, no one knows what to make of anything that Kevin Kramer says. They only know to fear him, which is exactly what Kevin Kramer depends on.

Kevin Kramer demands information on a constant basis. He makes managers compile data on customer complaints into five spreadsheets separated out by product and complaint, only to demand the same information in a graph format and also as a PowerPoint. He halts all development of software, telling the executives, “We’re not in the business of software development; we’re in the business of people development.” He contracts with an expensive life coach to help oversee the department, and then fires her after a week.

Kevin Kramer personally writes phone scripts for the call center representatives to use when speaking to clients. The scripts begin, “Thank you for calling Entertainment Solutions. We’re people who get it!” He demands that managers write up any representative who does not stick to the script. He fires several representatives who, while sticking to the script, do not comply with his new “no shower shoes at work” edict.

Kevin Kramer demands new budgets from each department that must be 30 percent lower than the old budgets. Kevin Kramer will never look at all the information painstakingly collected and delivered to him on schedule. He asks Jenna to shred every document on his desk. He enjoys watching Jenna, wearing a fitted pantsuit, bending over the shredder, feeding in each piece of paper one by one.

Kevin takes Jenna to lunch for her performance review. During the meal, Jenna peppers him with questions:

“So how did you get started in business?” she asks. “What advice can you give to a young go-getter like me?”

Kevin Kramer orders a glass of Zinfandel. He tells Jenna that he got his first job at a commercial real estate company in downtown Chicago. He started watching the executives, and figured out quickly it was the way he wanted his career path to go. He neglects to tell Jenna that most of the executives he studied did nothing except take meetings, go to lunches, and play golf. After a while, Kevin Kramer began to sell a lot of commercial real estate to start-up companies — companies that had no real product but lots of money due to the dot-com boom. Kevin Kramer was savvy enough to know that he needed to get out quickly if he wanted to make a huge profit.

After a few more glasses of wine, Kevin Kramer tells Jenna that he lived with his parents for a long time, into his late twenties, because he was saving his money. He never wanted to have a starter home, or car, or wife. Kevin Kramer wanted only the best for himself, so he waited, patiently, honing his business acumen. Even though Kevin Kramer is a little drunk, he knew better than to tell Jenna that he owed much of his success in business to teeth-whitening treatments.

After several hours, Jenna tells Kevin that she has to go home to feed her cat.

“I’ll let you drive back to the office,” he says, throwing her the keys to his Beemer.

Kevin Kramer wants to hold Jenna’s hand while she drives, but he can’t figure out the best way to position himself.

“Thank you for lunch,” Jenna says after pulling into his space. “It was neat hearing all your stories.” Then she hops out before Kevin Kramer can attempt to kiss her.

Kevin realizes that he didn’t give Jenna any feedback on her job performance. When he is surveyed, he calls her “a flawless worker” and says that she makes “everything seem effortless.”

Kevin Kramer sends out an e-mail to everyone in the Products Profit Center, explaining that for the financial health of the company, the department is to be reorganized. He makes everyone change cubicles twice in a two-week period, citing “productivity principles” and “agile business units.” He dismantles the break room and turns it into a storage area, saying, “A new and improved Zen break room will be built by fourth quarter, or whenever the funds become available.” He merges the software developers with the IT department, claiming, “They all do the same thing anyway.”

Kevin Kramer has facilities change the toilet paper in the restrooms to cheaper one-ply sheets. These sheets emit a thin layer of toilet paper dust as sheets are pulled off the roll. The employee suggestion box is flooded with complaints about the toilet paper, but Kevin Kramer isn’t concerned. This kind of reaction is to be expected from employees who realize on a subconscious level they are about to be purged.

The executives are also not concerned. After all, Kevin Kramer had done wonders for the other companies listed on his impressive résumé. It was just a matter of time until his unorthodox magic worked. One executive said, “Kramer is either a genius or a madman. Either way, when he leaves, I’m taking his chair.”

This executive later received an e-mail from Kevin Kramer with nothing in it except for a photo of Kim Kardashian and the words “Isn’t she your cousin?”

During this period, the suggestion box is dismantled. An e-mail goes out to employees, saying to forward all suggestions to kkrocks@gmail.com. Only a few employees are foolish enough to send their suggestions, and soon afterward they are reassigned to part-time status. Kevin Kramer is certain these are the employees whom the executives, when surveyed, called “dumber than dirt.”

Kevin Kramer likes to work as late as he can into the evening. He often misses dinner with his family, and spends hours online shopping for presents for his wife to make up for never being home. He pauses on the engagement ring section of the Tiffany website. He sometimes watches Jenna working diligently at her desk, and wonders what she would say if presented with a three-carat solitaire engagement ring in a Tiffany-blue box. He imagines her eyes widening, and can envision her jumping up and down with excitement. He can practically see the tears running down her soft, young, tanned face, smearing her perfectly applied Maybelline mascara.

Occasionally, Kevin Kramer will look at online photos of narwhals, the rare unicorn whales he remembers reading about as a child.

People have begun parking illegally in Kevin Kramer’s parking space. Initially, HR sent out e-mails telling employees to move their cars, but they went unheeded. Kevin Kramer started calling the towing company himself to remove the offending vehicles.

Kevin Kramer hires expensive consultants as “usability experts.” He explains to the executives that before any of the company’s software goes out to the marketplace, it will have to pass muster with the usability experts. Some in the executive team argue that all the software is by definition supposed to be usable, but because they fear Kevin Kramer’s wrath, they back down. Kevin Kramer hires his neighbor Karl, an unemployed soap opera actor, and Karl’s brother-in-law Jay to be the usability experts. Kevin Kramer broached the subject to Karl at a neighborhood Fourth of July party.

“How much are you paying?” Karl asked.

“I don’t know, like two hundred dollars an hour? That seems right to me,” said Kevin.

“Can my brother-in-law Jay get in on the action? He’s not too popular with my sister lately since she found out he’s been spending seven hundred dollars a month on porn sites.”

“Sure, the more the merrier,” Kevin said, taking a swig of his Miller Lite. Kevin Kramer only drinks light beer when he drinks beer at all.

By the end of the third quarter, Jon Goldfarb is unhappy with the Products Profit Center’s performance. Seventy-five percent of clients surveyed indicated that customer service has gone downhill, and 80 percent say that they planned on using a competitor in the next twelve months. He meets Kevin Kramer over steaks to discuss the situation.

“As much as we can’t stand our employees and, for that matter, our clients, it is our job to take care of them,” Jon Goldfarb says. “It’s nothing personal; it’s business.”

“People need to learn to take care of themselves,” Kevin Kramer says. “It’s our job to take care of the company. We can’t be enablers.”

“But we’re a service company,” Jon Goldfarb says.

“We need to take care of the company, in spite of the service,” Kevin Kramer says, taking a bite of his porterhouse.

Kevin Kramer realizes that his time at the company is drawing to a close. His ideas have gone mostly unappreciated. His cost-cutting measures, while having worked a little, have created poor morale among the employees. The walls of the Products Profit Center are banged up, given that employees have moved desks a number of times. Someone spray-painted a pentagram on Kevin Kramer’s parking space placard.

Kevin Kramer decides it’s time for a game changer. He gathers all the managers into the conference room and demands that each one of them give an extemporaneous two-minute speech on why they should be allowed to keep their jobs. A few break down in tears. More than one asks what “extemporaneous” means. Some beg for Kevin Kramer not to fire them, citing family problems and undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Several walk out in disgust and tender their resignations. Overnight, someone spray-paints the word pussy on the desks of those former employees. Thirty-two percent suspect it is Kevin Kramer, but 43 percent think that Kevin Kramer put one of the usability experts up to it.
Kevin Kramer receives this message on his voice mail: “Hi Kevin Kramer! You’re a wanker!” Kevin Kramer will have a sneaking suspicion that it is his former assistant Debi, faking a British accent.

One morning, Kevin Kramer arrives early to work to find that someone left a poop on his desk. Twenty-eight percent of employees surveyed believed that the person, whomever it was, squatted on Kevin Kramer’s desk and pooped, while 35 percent believed the person brought the poop in from a separate location.

HR sends out a memo to remaining employees, requesting that they please refrain from pooping on Kevin Kramer’s desk. They will have to send out a subsequent e-mail a few days later, requesting that employees refrain from pooping on Kevin Kramer’s Beemer.

Jon Goldfarb takes an extended leave of absence, leaving Kevin Kramer to deal with day-to-day company operations. By this time, Kevin Kramer has let go of most of the Products Profit Center staff and has not hired any new people. He turns on his computer only to surf the Internet for gifts for his family. He realizes his son will turn eleven soon, eleven being the age that Kevin Kramer’s parents bought him his first Time Life book about marine mammals.

Kevin Kramer wonders what would have happened if he had followed his first love. Would he be a captain on a research boat, jetting out to the warm waters of Baja, California, to study humpback whales? Would he be saving the endangered right whales found in the Atlantic and off the coast of Australia? Kevin Kramer refrains from asking himself why he has so much compassion for marine life and none for his colleagues.
Kevin Kramer quietly contacts corporate headhunters, letting them know he is looking for a new job. He lines up a few breakfast interviews for after the holidays. Kevin tells his wife he’s thinking about leaving the company, but that she shouldn’t worry. He will find something within a matter of weeks, as he always does. Kevin then uncharacteristically spends an hour playing Barbies with his daughter, saying in a high-pitched Barbie voice, “I hope Ken asks me to the prom!”

Kevin Kramer’s wife watches her husband and daughter playing together. She hopes the children won’t be too upset when they leave Kevin Kramer home while they visit her parents in Florida for the holidays. Kevin Kramer said he had too much work to do and needed to stay in town this year. Every year, Kevin Kramer says he needs to stay in town due to too much work. His son surprises him this year by saying, “Have a nice Christmas, Dad,” before he can even tell the kids the news.

The day before Christmas Eve, Jenna tells Kevin Kramer that she’d like a word with him. She sits on the edge of his antique desk and tells him she’s leaving the company.

“My boyfriend and I are moving to Portland,” she says. “It’s a lot more relaxed in Portland; the people are cooler and not so judgmental.”

“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” Kevin Kramer says. “You only mentioned a cat.”

“I really liked working for you,” Jenna says. “If you don’t mind me saying so, a lot of people here thought you were an idiot, but I think you’re an expert in business. Business is a freak show, right? You do whatever you need to do in order to survive. It’s like evolution — survival of the fittest.”

“It can be,” Kevin Kramer says.

“I’m sure you will make this company great, eventually, maybe,” Jenna says. “I can’t wait to apply the principles I’ve learned here. I bet I’ll be a big success in Portland.”

“I’m sure you’ll knock ’em dead,” Kevin Kramer says.

Jenna slides off the desk and retires to her cubicle. After she leaves for the night, Kevin Kramer walks aimlessly through the empty Products Profit Center. The ficus trees have been dead for a while, as everyone in facilities was let go and no one else bothered to water the plants.

Kevin Kramer wonders for not the first time in his long, esteemed career if he could grow fins out of his hands and feet, and sprout a tail. He would drive his BMW to the beach and shimmy his way into the cold water. Only then could he imagine his best life, frolicking in the waves off the Pacific coast — careless, happy, and free.

Writer Horoscopes for April 2016: April Commas Bring May Comas

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by Apostrodamus

Aries (March 21 — April 19)

This is a good month to see how the sausage (aka your cyborgian flash fiction, your one-act play starring milk-fed youths of the great Midwest, or your Tumblr-turned-novel) gets made. It’s gross, maybe lonely, work. There’s a decent chance you’ll barf. But the skies say: stay upright, keep writing. Go word by word; revise lines so one sentence slips to the next. If you do it right, you’ll squeeze out some nice fat pages. If you don’t, well, loiter round lit parties in the second half of April — and cut your agony with cheese cubes.

Lucky participle: Bangin’

Taurus (April 20 — May 20)

If you’ve ever wanted to write a book with 300+ characters (human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate/polyanimate) this is the time to do it. Neptune is sextile your decan all g-d year, which means you’ve got an executive club membership to the human condition. You’ll be picking up the vibrations of mass consciousness through 2017, and stray humans and animals may find you in the streets and tug gently at your sleeve with a simple request: Let me tell you my story. Listen well, steady Taurus, you are the empathetic ear, and the world will bring you its tales.

Lucky participle: Listening

Gemini (May 21 — June 20)

If you’ve felt mired in ancient systems (voicemail, adjuncting, all-white readings), April brings some relief. And you don’t have to go it alone: draw energy from fellow literary citizens to make headway. They might introduce you to an editor who’s all heart-eyes and incisive-squiggles over your work. Or they might ask you to take part in an anthology along with one or two of your personal faves. Stick with the community vibes in your writing too — go light (group bands together for survival, jokes), dark (group bands together for survival, murder), or conspiratorial (lizard people slink together for total human domination!).

Lucky participle: Communing

Cancer (June 21 — July 22)

If the rose-colored glasses you donned last month have cracked or the epic love poems turned to revenge haikus, fear not, Cancer! The first week of the month you’ll be tetchy and fear your writing is not up to snuff — a former colleague whose writing is sooo not as good as yours may publish to much acclaim, or you may find yourself inundated by so many rejection emails you think you’re being spammed. Fuggedaboutit! The new moon on April 7th brings new opportunities for blow-your-mind genre-bending, genre-breaking, genre-erasing work. So be like fellow Cancer Octavia E. Butler: write down your intentions and go make us something cool and weird we’ve never imagined.

Lucky participle: Imaginating

Leo (July 23 — August 22)

Power to Leo: this month lions ride high, buoyed by success and seltzer. Odds are good you’ll star in a victory montage, no “please clap” necessary. Soak it in the first couple weeks — you might land that giant byline. Your novel on grim, supernatural Antarctic voyages (there were dogs, then there weren’t; a cornucopia of body parts; doubling down on cannibalism with werewolves) could win some hearts. Handshake your way to any deals on the 14th or 20th. Your astral representatives are rooting for you.

Lucky participle: Gnawing

Virgo (August 23 — September 22)

It’s a pity that writers have to eat, but they do, and rarely does one happen upon a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker — never mind a web service provider or a landlord — who is willing to be paid in poetry. Same goes for the IRS, which I’m sure we all wish stood for Innovative Rhyme Scheme. But there’s no reason your tax returns can’t be “innovative,” “fresh” “fiction” “from one of the best new minds of our generation.” April 5–12, is a good time to negotiate contracts (with your publisher and the government!) so send them both a finely wrought haiku before the 17th, which is, apparently, National Haiku Poetry Day.

Lucky participle: Innovating

Libra (September 23 — October 22)

If you’ve been in a writing slump, Libra, chin up. The stars are right for you to dispatch creative gremlins and find your dream collaborator. Play with form, visit the Neapolitan Novels, veer into nonfiction. When it comes to project partners, watch out for thirsty non-pals (aka more demanding, and far less adorable, fleshy Tamagotchi). Hold fast for that psychic click — some writers might find exchanges with visual artists mega fruitful this April.

Lucky participle: Cathecting

Scorpio (October 23 — November 21)

Your flesh is willing enough — to cram yourself in another spine-yanking writing stance — but your spirit could stand a little refreshing. Some writers swear by runs to jog plots loose, some opt for chlorinated epiphany. But for you, the skies urge: for maximum pages, get a uniform. Even designated work socks would do. Or dress in restorative monochrome. Or try an invigorating Lishian jumpsuit. This is a terrific month to rekey your routines. Don’t forget to stretch (give your back a bone, jeez), and keep an eye on the 22nd; the full moon might beam big project news.

Lucky participle: Power posing

Sagittarius (November 22 — December 21)

Dang, Sagittarius, news from the astral plane says you’re some kind of word genius — at least for the first two weeks. This is an ideal time to draft a new story (save revision for May, when we’re deep in Mercury retrograde) or apply for a residency — the more isolated, the better. A very productive vibe is zen-apocalypse. After the 17th: your editorial engine isn’t as dire as a Flowers for Algernon situation, but you’ll appreciate it if you hunker down early (maybe with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos?), and get to typing.

Lucky participle: Generating

Capricorn (December 22 — January 19)

If the starfolk were correct last month, you’ve got a stack of new pages under your belt (we all carry our novels in our pants, right?), and are most likely reading this while strutting around and patting yourself on the back (it’s ok, you deserve it). Not only are the stars impressed with the fact that you can walk around so elegantly with that stack of paper in your pants, but it looks like you’ve got more good fortune in the months ahead. After the new moon on April 7, you can take a break from your breakneck-speed writing, and start showing those pages around (a new copy, please, not the version stained by crotch-sweat).

Lucky participle: Pimpin’

Aquarius (January 20 — February 18)

If you’re hard up for inspiration, take a trip — astral or IRL. Get weird in the woods (this month has strong vibes for cryptozoological encounters), or funnel your anxieties into Herzogian monologues. Avoid islands whose economies rely on honeybees; if you find yourself in a bear suit, it’s too late and the skies are sorry. But try not to worry, Aquarius. April is still exceptional for inventing, writing, and negotiating like a pro, at least before the 17th. (Avoid rituals!)

Lucky participle: Not beekeeping

Pisces (February 19 — March 20)

Shake off last month’s aggravations like a fish with new legs and a mind toward (writerly) evolution (that stinky single-genre pond is so last month!). The first half of the month your reputation proceeds you — your hypeman Darwin has been running his mouth — and for good reason: you didn’t grow those legs quickly. You put in the time, apprenticed as a tadpole for a while, and honed your writerly strut. Furthermore, your second house is all lit the fuck up this month (let us pause for a moment to consider what it would be like to have a second house IRL… ok, good), which means this a great time to use your rep and talent to whip those acquiring editors into a bidding frenzy (and maybe get that second house?).

Lucky participle: Strutting

Electric Literature is Moving to Medium

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Dear Readers,

This morning, Medium announced that Electric Literature will be joining the Medium platform as one of its inaugural partners, alongside publishers like The Awl, The Ringer, The Hairpin, and others.

Electric Literature’s mission is to keep literature a vital part of popular culture by embracing digital innovation, and moving our website to Medium’s publishing platform supports that mission. As a non-profit, we’re always looking for ways to have the greatest impact with the most efficient use of our resources. Medium’s large and engaged community of writers will allow us to promote literature to a new audience, grow our readership, and further support our writers by helping them build their online platforms.

Readers can still find us on electricliterature.com, and we hope that you’ll also follow us on Medium at medium.com/electric-literature so that you never miss a post. While you’re here, please enjoy our new look and mobile-friendly reading experience. By early summer, we’ll fully migrate to Medium, and electricliterature.com will be our only URL.

We believe this new publishing platform will help Electric Literature remain a vibrant and independent organization, with a publication that matches our vision of where literature is headed.

As ever, thank you for reading!

Yours,

Electric Literature

Always Afraid, Always Alone: On Writing and the Zombie Inside Us

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There are four species of fungus growing in the Brazilian rainforest that exhibit powers of mind control over ants. They hijack an ant’s brain and use the body for spore dispersal. Some fungi create “infection pegs” that stick out like poisonous horns. Others grow explosive spores. One fungus instructs the ant to bite down into whatever it’s standing on in order to remain stationery while the fungus matures. It’s easy to picture a forest floor covered in an army of infection-antlered ants as they mindlessly follow the bidding of their mycological masters.

This is how I imagine we all must have looked from someone taking a helicopter tour of Denver that October Saturday afternoon: a dark line of ants shuffling up and down the 16th Street Mall, thousands of us infected by a contagion that spreads by contact, by sight, by word of mouth, and by film, by graphic novel, by survival guide and oral history: the Z-Virus. The uninfected had little warning of the Fifth Annual Denver Zombiecrawl.

On the Mall, families had brought their children out to enjoy the warm sun of one of Colorado’s 300 clear days a year. Girls from a volleyball squad, in town for a tournament, whispered about the waiters at the Paramount Cafe. Weekending couples held hands with Banana Republic bags under their arms. The Tilted Kilt drew all the single men within a two-mile radius, like ants to sugar — only the sugar’s dressed in ultra-short plaid skirts and unbuttoned Oxfords. Tourists: a fungus that leeches life from the host but plays itself off as symbiotic.

I’d like to say the masses ran in fear. I’d like to say fear was still an important, insectoid reaction buried deep in their brainstems and not predominantly reliant on the faint buzz of a first-response text message: U Shld Worry, 4Rlz. I’d really like to say they took one look at our bite wounds before they all fled to high altitude ski resorts.

But that wasn’t what happened.

I’d really like to say they took one look at our bite wounds before they all fled to high altitude ski resorts.

The families, the teenage girls, the couples, the single and the innocent and the curious — they all gawked at us through camera phones. They tagged us in their Facebook albums on the spot, unphased, acting even less animate than us. Their diffusion of responsibility was a result of naïveté, cynicism, and denial — the way a bird might look on a single ant as a minor snack, ignoring the rest of the colony that could swarm it in seconds. The strangest thing was the way they watched us with an air of expectation, as if we thousands weren’t enough. No one said, “Maybe this is real.”

***

After a year of living in Boulder and working in Denver, I’d come to a fundamental yet still depressing realization: I was going to have a lot fewer friends here than I did during my MFA in Illinois. My teaching gigs, my commute, and my writing all worked against establishing any core crew. Moreover, I kept falling through the cracks when it came to meeting people and making it count. I considered eye contact with Safeway cashiers to be small victories. And when the Baseline Liquor Store clerk stopped asking to see my ID, at first I thought it great, then I reconsidered why it was he knew me so well. I’d come, I was afraid, to the wrong place.

I’d come to a fundamental yet still depressing realization: I was going to have a lot fewer friends here than I did during my MFA in Illinois.

But on the BX bus from Boulder to Denver the morning of the Crawl, I wasn’t alone. When I first got on, I exchanged eyes with three zombie girls. I myself wasn’t ghouled up yet. All I wore was a Salvation Army sports coat, white khakis, and a writers workshop t-shirt. My backpack held vials of fake blood, scissors, and apple chips.

I said to one, “Hey, you’re a zombie.”

In response, a deadeye stare.

I ended up at the back of the bus in an empty row.

From the highway, Denver’s skyline was both eye-catching and uncomfortably vulnerable. The Hyatt and the unfinished Spire with its guts exposed to the sun loomed over us. A brief vision came then: one of me, standing beneath the Spire as it collapses; I survive the debris, but I’m stuck under it forever, wanting to pass out, gasping for air, wishing I were dead.

Before the Crawl officially started, I had to undergo some changes.

I waited in line for forty-five minutes to get my makeup done by one of two amateur face-painters. Their jars asked for donations (money or brains). I ate my apple chips. With my scissors I cut openings in my white pants and tore them further. I did the same to my shirt and sports coat. Then out came the fake blood I’d had for years. I smeared it down my legs. I put a handprint on my shirtfront. In the reflection of an office window, I looked enough of the part.

***

“Zombie” is originally from West African Voudou lore, where a wizard (a bokor) controlled someone in an entranced state. Pharmacological explanations claim that a mix of neurotoxins and dissociative drugs were given out. After falling into a state of death-like suspension, people then “rose from the dead” with little will power. Contemporary zombies are a combination of the supernatural and the scientific: usually the result of a rogue virus that turns the living into brain- and flesh-desirous ids of varying speeds and IQs, ranging from toddlerishly slow (Night of the Living Dead) to marathon-action Nazis (Dead Snow). Skyline Park’s crowd had grafted itself to every possible niche of zombiedom.

At first, the females in the crowd could be herded into two distinct camps: tenth-graders Goth-thin at ninety-eight pounds in one, and in the other thirty-something-year-old mothers. But the more I wandered the crowd, the more it diversified. Most women were some form of sallow urbanites with black hair, quarter-sized spacers, chest tats. They wore what they could get away with: halter tops in rags and fishnet, a once-immaculate wedding dress. One woman was the kind of pregnant best described by the ancient epithet “heavy with child”; she’d glued to her distended stomach the painted-red arms and legs of a doll in a new definition of the fetal position. Overall, I was forced to question my own argumentative position concerning necrophilia.

Overall, I was forced to question my own argumentative position concerning necrophilia.

The men all had deep-bruise-colored faces, their shoulders hunched or humpbacked. Their attire matched an impromptu prom with a black metal cover band: sports coats and leather, sweatshirts and shit-kickers. For the crawlers, anything in the closet was viable costume. It’s one of the details that makes zombies so appealing: they look exactly like us.

***

An ant’s brain contains about 250,000 brain cells. A human: 10,000 million. This means a colony of 40,000 ants has — collectively — the same size brain as a human. I’ve always wanted to describe my own theory of writing as trying to command a colony of ants. So a 40,000-word short novel manuscript = a self-sustaining colony = a functioning, creative, isolated human mind. But even this falls short. When I’ve been staring at the computer screen and my vision starts to blur because of the creeping anxiety that I haven’t typed a word in twenty minutes, the words smear into rows of small black bodies with tiny, jointed legs. Each ant, representing a single word, contributes some task to the greater whole. Some are carrying home Butterfinger shards. Others are digging tunnels. Despite the variety of tasks, this theory also implies that each word, like each ant, is visually the same, limited in scope and flexibility. This isn’t true of words. A more appropriate metaphor might be a hive of all insect species, interbreeding, ensuring the collective survival. But if the earth is indeed a beehive in which we all enter by the same door but live in different cells, then it is a very lonely planet to live on. And fiction seems to be one of the few endeavors where loneliness is confronted and relieved.

…if the earth is indeed a beehive in which we all enter by the same door but live in different cells, then it is a very lonely planet to live on.

***

My greatest fears are loneliness, stupidity, and being buried alive. I don’t chalk it up to coincidence that becoming a zombie would solve, or alleviate, all three of these.

I will always be afraid, too, of the opening scene of Joe Versus the Volcano. In it, a white-and-black suited Tom Hanks merges with a crowd of identical suits as they enter a factory while a soulful cover of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” croons in the background. Each employee files across the screen with his head low-slung, lifeless, marching to the refrain: “I owe my soul to the company store.” Give them some blood-soaked Oxfords and they’d be a perfect zombie horde: no awareness, no fantasy, no feelings in general. It’s why a zombie apocalypse always results in a total social breakdown, a leveling of the sub-/urban playing field. Everyone is reduced to the same decaying mouth with legs. There is nothing romanticize-able here, as opposed to, say, vampires or wizards. Instead, people flock to zombiedom because it symbolizes rebirth. It’s a chance to start over, even if it is a potentially finite reincarnation into a Kafkaesque role of a sleepless creature with deep-set memories of a previous life now dominated by the need to colonize by consuming the facets of said previous life. Only instead of a cockroach, you’re one ant among thousands.

My greatest fears are loneliness, stupidity, and being buried alive. I don’t chalk it up to coincidence that becoming a zombie would solve, or alleviate, all three of these.

The Crawl’s stream had a kind of shitty choreography to it. Some never fell out of character with their feet dragging and arms out-stretched like they’re preparing for a physical. Others broke a smile, laughed the laugh of people who actually sound like they’re in a great deal of pain. A dozen disco undead rollerskated by in afros and bloodied bellbottoms. A seven-foot Mickey Mouse with crazed yellow eyes and fangs cast a striking profile; his gaze reduced children to tears of spiritual crisis and lifelong fears of Orlando. When the crosswalks said go, traffic cops formed a human-chain across the road with signs that read “Warning. Zombie Crossing Today.” Everyone belted out the hallmark hello: Mwooararuur Rumm-Marrrbruuum.

On one corner you could even, for a steep price, take a picture beside a semi-replica of Ecto-1 with red corn syrup splattered across its hood. It appeared the Ghostbusters had expanded their public services — and their private ones. Accompanying you in the picture were four female Ghostbusters with skin-tight uniforms, low-cut tops, and proton packs more than vaguely phallic. I couldn’t decide if it took a tremendous ration of self-assurance to play these voluptuous knockoffs or a definite echo in their skull cavity. I declined to pay for a photo.

***

The undead and the uninfected were two sides of a populace — two sides of a very large communal brain, with only about 10% of it really being used and the rest just gray matter conduction — and here in Denver, each side was addressing the other head-on for possibly the first time. The Mall acted as corpus callosum, negotiating information between the hemispheres. On the right, we had the intuitive instincts that processed visual wholes, holistically and subjectively: the zombies. On the left, we had the logical, rational side that focused on language and individual parts through an objective lens: the uninfected. The zombie was all craving without the analysis, the human all analysis without the craving.

Often, there are times when thinking crosses these two hemispheres, only to fall through the sizeable crack between them. In Boulder, I’d particularly exhausted all reasoning as to why I was lonelier in a beautiful state in the happiest city in the country than I was in rural Illinois where I’d ritually go bike riding through this one cemetery north of my attic apartment and drink spiced tequila from the bottle against a blank headstone. The two roommates I’d moved to Colorado with were in the first stages of splitting apart over a girl who wasn’t worth the six-year friendship; I came home every evening from teaching, expecting to find my apartment sunken into the ground from the growing rift between Hayden and Kyle. My larger problem, however, was that I didn’t know who or what relief I was searching for — I only knew it was out there.

Loneliness is a grown-into perception.

Loneliness is a grown-into perception. A reflected impression that in every direction you look everyone in the world has his back turned to you. They form a wall. They block out the sun’s warmth. They don’t hear you asking for help or even acknowledge you are there to begin with. Yet, the most damning part is that we the lonely usually build this wall with our own hands, sometimes unknowingly, all before it comes falling back down on top of us.

***

On October 13th of that year, a few weeks before the Crawl, I watched on television the first of thirty-three men pulled out of a two-foot-diameter hole. Each man was greeted with the ecstatic Spanish cries of a crowd thankful for real miracles. I remembered the first announcement of the Chilean copper mine’s collapse. How my lungs felt immediately smaller, my body electric with an airy, unseen pressure. I could both imagine and never imagine the sensations of those buried 700 feet down. I wondered if they could hear anything beyond their own heartbeats. Did the earth’s molten core hum for them? Did it drive them wild with claustrophobia? The first contacts with the miners were notes. Then came videos of thin, bare-chested men who waved to the camera, ashen and clammy. I found myself obsessed with the footage. I researched drilling equipment. I listened repeatedly to Luke Kelly’s “Springhill Mining Disaster”:

In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia
Down in the dark of the Cumberland Mine
There’s blood on the coal and the miners lie
In the roads that never saw sun nor sky.

[…]

Eight days passed and some were rescued
Leaving the dead to lie alone
Through all their lives they dug their grave
Two miles of earth for a marking stone.

Two years before that miraculous October, I’d found myself at closing time in a tiny pub in Cork, Ireland. Before the barmen shut off the taps, an older, pock-faced man in a Gatsby cap stood up in the corner of the room and sang that very song a cappella to a small, drunken crowd that stayed as quiet as the dead. I didn’t know for a long time why that song never let go of me. For many nights after that, I cocooned my pillows and blankets around my head. It felt safe. But it was also hot and small. And so always I left a thin gap to the cooler air of my bedroom. Then I’d sing some lines of Kelly’s, always surprised, when I threw off the cocoon, by the neon stars affixed to my ceiling by the one who’d lived before me in this underground Colorado apartment.

When some of these tombs were later reopened, they found clawmarks inside the coffins’ lids.

In the late eighteenth century, during epidemics of cholera and yellow fever, sometimes a person would fall into such an ill state as to seem already deceased. Tradition mandated that the dead be buried by sunset. When some of these tombs were later reopened, they found clawmarks inside the coffins’ lids. Safety coffins were invented, most notably with a tube through which one could view the corpse as well as a string attached to an aboveground bell. However, pop phrases such as “graveyard shift” and “dead ringer” are falsely attributed to these devices.

I’d seen such graves in Charleston during my undergraduate years of stalking the numerous cemeteries, particularly the Circular Church’s, where, over time, the ground had risen ten feet because the church kept burying new bodies on top of the old ones. What was a lonelier experience than being interred in total dark only a few feet below those still free to walk around, with your final deathbed attendants only ants and fungi? I believe now I spent so much time in necropolises because I was waiting for something to happen, for someone to arrive and join me.

***

The zombie is both the embodiment of and the cure for isolation. On the one hand, the undead know no feelings of love or friendship or respect for roommates’ ex-friends-with-benefits; consequently, one can function entirely on its own, yet it always seeks to create more of itself. It calls to mind a line from the late Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine: “Each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid, always alone.”

The zombie is both the embodiment of and the cure for isolation.

On the other hand, one undead is no different from the next. Everyone wants the same thing. In some cases, they even work together to achieve it. In Max Brooks’s novel World War Z, a U.S. soldier describes the zombie horde’s communication abilities: “One G sees you, comes after you, and moans. A click away, another G hears that moan, comes after it, and moans himself, then another one another click away, then another. Dude, if the area’s thick enough, if the chain’s unbroken, who knows how far you can pull them in from.” Ants exhibit the same behaviors. Much like the undead, they rely on smell, or pheromones. The Argentine ant has been found in super-colonies covering the west coast of Japan, 560 miles in California, and a 3,700-mile stretch along the Mediterranean coast. Billions of Argentine ants, including these three super-colonies, all belong to one mega-colony that rivals humanity in scale of world habitation. Yet, humanity created this mega-colony by introducing ants to every continent except Antarctica.

***

Night came on in Denver after the neon sunset set the blood on everyone’s lips ashimmer. Somewhere near the Capitol Building a DJ set had started. Elsewhere were private parties I wasn’t invited to or concerts I didn’t have tickets for. It grew cold as I wandered the Mall with my makeup cracking and growing sticky. I’d be hitting the BX soon, back to Boulder.

In the glare of the Tilted Kilt’s sign and the flashing blue of Ecto-1’s beacon, it became difficult to tell just who was who. Some of the crawlers had taken to walking at a normal speed. Some had changed into slightly wrinkled designer clothes, prepared for a night on singles’ prowl. The woman in the wedding dress continued to parade around with her ghoulish groom. They passed a bottle of something orange back and forth. I’d have taken his place in a heartbeat.

The spectators had changed, too. Toddlers moaned for food or sleep. The older kids chased siblings around the Hard Rock Café. Parents grew sleepy from the time change. And those without kids stumbled drunkenly between kitschy bars and local breweries. Their words slurred and their legs didn’t work as well as before. Night does this. It inspires iniquity because the morning promises rebirth. Tourists act like locals and locals like tourists.

I swore I could hear something breathing out there in the dark, hear it pumping blood, hear it thinking two sides of the same thought.

And yet night also incites an uncommonly alert wistfulness and an insectoid desire for something elusive. Down Arapahoe Street, I could see far enough west to the campus where I taught English. Beyond it, the Rockies had disappeared. The moon was up but dim. I swore I could hear something breathing out there in the dark, hear it pumping blood, hear it thinking two sides of the same thought. I was avoiding the bus to Boulder because it meant returning to stacks of hastily written student work. And I was avoiding the oppressive silence between my roommates. Most of all, I was avoiding crawling into bed alone under a barrel vault of pillows.

On that street corner, between a parking lot and a high rise, I felt stuck. But for one of the first times in my life, I took comfort in it, for, as Poe writes, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague,” and thereby easily crossable, via corpus callosum or pheromone trail or zombiecrawl. Yes, I was alone out here, but that’s because I was waiting desperately to hear that singular moan which would send me in the direction of fellow, lack-minded company and give me a reason to be where I was.

Toward the climax of Compendium I of Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel The Walking Dead, there are two pivotal pages devoted solely to one frame. The protagonist Rick Grimes descends into madness as he and his fellow survivors take refuge in a prison. Throughout the book, there is always the question of how to maintain humanity in the face of overwhelming anti-humanity. The prison gates physically separate the living from the undead. What becomes clear is that little else does. After an argument, Rick proclaims, “We are the walking dead!” He doesn’t mean we’re already dead. Rick is expressing the novel’s thesis: because the gap between us is so slim, we should take extra care that we don’t cross that gap without realizing it. Naïveté, cynicism, and denial are the slippery slopes that hide such clouded crossings.

***

I missed the bus by five minutes. The next one would leave in an hour. I found myself in one of those bars I’d crawled by earlier. No one else in there wore any makeup or jackets with elbow holes. Once again, I felt like I was in the wrong place.

The bartender was a little older than me. She had long dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a profound confidence that only survival of the fittest brings. She would have made a stunning undead bride. As she finished washing a glass, she asked, without looking, “A drink?”

I said yeah, and when she did look, she stopped. I knew I couldn’t have been the first undead to walk in that night. But she looked at me like no one else had the entire day.

She said, “You’re one of those zombies.”

Instead of giving her the deadeye stare, I said, “You’re right. I am.”

“For a second there, I thought about what I’d done if you really were a zombie.

I said, “Hopefully it’s not ‘stop and take a picture.’”

We both laughed.

She brought me a PBR. I watched the Rockies lose again. In the mirror behind the bar, my eyes looked like old pieces of coal. My matted hair shone coppery.

After I paid, she came over. “Do you all, like, just happen to love zombies that much?”

“Maybe a little too much.”

“Of course Denver would host something like this.”

I agreed. I left to catch the bus. But I tipped her very well.

If I were smarter and smoother, I would have kept talking to her. She would have told me how she’d always wanted to be a professional horseback rider. After a few more beers, I would have told her how I’d always wanted to be an entomologist. How I’d once owned an ant farm. This inch-wind gap filled with sand between two pieces of glass set in a plastic green stand. My parents bought it for me at the age when you’re either incredibly into bugs or incredibly not.

I couldn’t think of a more interesting thing to look at. This was the place they were in. I wondered how they knew what to do and where and when.

Once introduced into the farm, the ants immediately started digging. After only a few days, their tunnels formed dark, looping roads. The ants built rooms far underground. I fed them ant food. It was like watching snow on TV, but better. I looked for patterns. I didn’t name them or recognize them. They worked tirelessly. I slept and the ants didn’t. A tunnel would collapse and they’d repair it. I couldn’t think of a more interesting thing to look at. This was the place they were in. I wondered how they knew what to do and where and when.

I don’t remember if the ants died or if I finally released them. But I hold this memory close, like an ant does a leaf when the fungus commands it to bite down. By itself, this means very little. But with some investigation, it matures to cast a much larger shadow, a foundation that finally leads up to the building’s spired top where I can see things more clearly. I’d like to think that, were I to catch the Z-virus, I’d retain some shred of this memory without the baggage of whatever it must represent in my life. I’d contract the plague in exchange for some company and peace of mind. Among many, I would gladly be a single marching word.

Elizabeth Crane on Building a Novel from the Conversations of a Mother and Daughter

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Elizabeth Crane’s newest novel, The History of Great Things, is a series of imagined conversations between a woman named Betsy Crane and her mother, Lois. This novel isn’t simple autobiography, but is inspired by Betsy and her mother: narrative Betsy is an author, and narrative Lois leaves her life in the Midwest to pursue a career in the opera. As mother and daughter tell each other’s stories — some real-ish, some imagined wildly — Crane illuminates a kind of emotional truth that’s independent of facts. The History of Great Things is fascinating, heartbreaking, genre-inventing stuff. It’s not quite a memoir and not a kind of novel you’ve probably read before. But it’s wonderful.

Heather Scott Partington: The History of Great Things is told in alternating points of view, as a conversation between Lois and Betsy. You also interject conversations between them as they argue about the details of the story, who remembers what, and what could have happened. How did you settle on this particular structure? Did it evolve in layers? Can you talk about the inception of the novel?

Elizabeth Crane: I was really inspired by Percival Everett’s book Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. I hadn’t read him before that, which is a terrible thing that shouldn’t have happened that I am currently remedying by working my way through everything he’s written, but I was really hit by that book, which has a vaguely similar structure, though the two characters are a father and son. So my initial thought was just, what if I could sit down with my mom now and we could really try to tell each other’s stories? It did end up evolving some from there, because I had to make some difficult choices in terms of the direction the stories went, which seemed to be kind of infinite. Should they be close to real? Totally far away from real? So totally far away from real as to be absurd? Point-of-view choices became a little boggling, and I threw some early attempts out. In the end I kept it as simple as I could and just had them tell each other’s stories as they really might have imagined them to the best of my ability. But then it got weird because there’s almost twenty more years of my life since my mom died where she’d not even know any of the basic facts. So that George Saunders thing came into my head, as it often does–how do I fling my little car forward from here?

HSP: One of the things I like most about the interjections or arguments between Betsy and Lois is that they allow the reader to see you confronting and challenging yourself on the page. It reminded me of Dinah Lenney’s essay, “Future Imperfect.” It lives in that same wheelhouse of self-interrogation. From a reader’s perspective, it’s easy to read a piece of writing and think that it was conceived whole and complete by the author, and Great Things belies that kind of mythology in a fascinating way. What was it like to push yourself into uncomfortable situations (to say nothing here of the fact that you did this by creating a “you” character, and a “your mom” character to do it — we will get to that in a second)? Was it important for you that the reader sees it?

EC: Oh, I love that piece of Dinah’s so much. I think I’ll make my students read it this week, so thanks for reminding me about it! Anyway, it’s a great question–when I’m writing, I really try to put whatever anyone might think way in the back of my mind, otherwise I will for sure not write certain things at all. But I think of the questions I have as a reader, and the questions I have for myself about the work, and hopefully these address some of the ones the reader will have as well. But also, some of those questions and ideas Lois has about fiction are as true to her own ideas as I remember them, and I did think that there might be some readers out there with similar questions. As far as uncomfortable goes–this was the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been writing a book. Does that answer the question?

HSP: Gender roles play an important part in the story: for Lois, they define much of her action, and for Betsy they define so much of her reactionary life choices. I want to ask a question here about strong role models in your life, and how you came to define your own sense of success. But I am realizing that is impossible to do without acknowledging that at the heart of The History of Great Things are many emotional truths and a fair number of literal truths. And, you know, names that are the names of you and your mom. So let’s deal with that first. (1) How were you impacted personally by real-life Lois’ ideas about the roles of men and women; (2) Did those ideas impact or inspire you to be who you are, and (3) how did that affect narrative Lois and narrative Betsy?

EC: (1) Oh man. Success is one of those words (and its frenemy ambition) that are tough ones for me to parse. I did have to work hard on letting go of any ideas of success I thought the world might have had for me so I could aim for a life that I wanted for myself, which mainly meant writing and trying to find meaningful work. It took a while. (Also: filing Reactionary Life Choices for a future memoir title.) Anyway, I was impacted greatly, and in a lot of ways, but ways that are a little hard to measure. It’s my idea that she had a great deal of internal conflict about gender roles. Obviously, she grew up in a time when they were more clearly defined, and some of those old ideas stayed with her. And then she crossed into an era when that began to change, and that appealed to her and it probably opened up a lot of opportunities for her, but some of her more traditional beliefs were still hard to shake or reconcile. Sometimes it seemed like she’d take these ideas as they suited her, though, because she might just as well say, “Fuck that shit!” about some idea of propriety, like let’s say cursing in polite company. Anyway, the easiest way to say it is that there were mixed messages, and so especially when I was younger, I’d take on her ideas–like there was something wrong with me if I couldn’t find a guy (vs. making a perf legit choice to be single). For sure, she expected that I should be able to support myself, and that was absolutely not an idea she grew up with, and/but, I think at the very least, it’s fair to say that she liked having a husband with a steady income.

(2) All this said, I really do think the fact that she relentlessly pursued her goals did far more for me than anything she ever actually said. She did what she wanted to do. I personally got a little sidetracked on the way to doing what I wanted, but in the end, that’s the message that won. And make no mistake: as a little girl, I was in awe of her. Lots of my friends moms worked, but mine was on the stage in fancy costumes singing opera, and I got to travel around the world with her. It felt very glamorous and special to me.

(3) It definitely affected the narrative usses, because so much of what’s in the book are things I wish I could have had the courage to talk much more with her about in real life. I tried to get some of this on the page, and I think the dialogue between the chapters definitely reflects a certain way that we engaged with each other. My whole daughterly thing was always about wanting to be understood, the quintessentially angsty young person cliché, but something I came to at least wonder about, and kind of gave to Narrative Lois (I think that might be her new name, thank you) was that maybe Real Lois understood Real Me better than I gave her credit for. I mean, maybe she didn’t. But that’s why fiction is awesome!

HSP: There is interesting tension in the story about these two women who both want, as Betsy says, “to mean something.” But for Lois, meaning something is defined externally, and for Betsy it is different — internal and external, which really made me think about how writing allows us to control what we put out into the world — what we reveal, what we don’t reveal, etc. How did the idea of truth (“imagined realism”) affect the writing of this novel? As the characters both tell each other, it’s not a memoir. But it is something that feels so emotionally true, even as we see it evolve on the page. Can you talk about what that meant to you as you wrote it?

My own brain causes me enough trouble. Imagining being in hers hurt my heart.

EC: I’m really glad to know that came across for you. I think the main thing, because I knew I was going to veer farther and farther away from real stories, was that the characters had to be real. So what you’re getting in the book is very true to me and my mom, personality-wise at the very least, and I hope, emotionally. In a certain way, it should seem like writing about my own inner life would be easier, I know how I feel/felt, right, but writing about my inner life from someone else’s view, in a way that might be close to what’s emotionally true, was not easy. In some ways it was much easier for me to imagine what it might be like to be in her head than it was for me to imagine what she truly imagined about what was in mine. Ultimately what it meant was that I had a greater-than-ever empathy for how challenging it might have been for her to exist in her head. My own brain causes me enough trouble. Imagining being in hers hurt my heart.

HSP: Did it mess you up to write as your mom writing your story and vice versa? I loved this book and I couldn’t put it down, but it kind of messed me up for a few days after I read it. I mean that as a compliment. It really made me think in a way that was both uncomfortable and kind of beautiful, and I certainly didn’t live it. How did you go there long enough to get it on the page? If your answer is something like “that’s a dumb question, Heather, because as a writer it’s my job,” I will understand.

EC: Ha! Um, all caps YEAH. It was surprisingly painful, and I say surprisingly because at my age, after years of therapy and everything else, I think “Oh, I’ve worked through this, you know, I’ve got plenty of distance or whatever, I’ve written about her before” and that may all be true, but she had a profound influence on my life in the way that same-sex parents often do, particularly ones that had any kind of issues and had maybe not lucked into the thing that would have really helped them. I’m tied up with her in all kinds of ways, still, for better and worse. I hope that was of use here. But I really thought it would be different when I sat down to do it. HA, again.

HSP: So many authors are put off by questions about the autobiographical nature of their prose, but you have always been very open and honest about it. Do you find that’s more freeing to just let people know that you’re drawing from life, or do you still get annoying and weird questions? Did you wrestle with the naming of your characters at all, or were they always Lois Fred, and Betsy?

…the main thing that’s irksome is that on occasion there’s this implication that there’s a lack of imagination involved if you use things from real life in fiction.

EC: I think the main thing that’s irksome is that on occasion there’s this implication that there’s a lack of imagination involved if you use things from real life in fiction. Which makes no sense. The opposite is actually true for me; I really, really struggle with writing non-fiction about myself, sometimes the same material I’ve written about in fiction. It’s not because I’m not willing to share it. It’s a weird creative block where if I know it has to be true, my writing, generally, goes deadly dull. (It’s something I want to do though, so I’ll keep trying.)

Character names: they were always Lois, Fred and Betsy, no wrestling. I changed a couple of names of other real-life people if I thought they might conceivably see it as less than flattering, regardless of it being made up. Because it will be read as nonfiction, by some, some in my own life I’m sure, even though that very topic is discussed in the book itself. But the names thing was again inspired by Percival Everett, even though it’s been done by a very long list of other writers as well. (see also Ruth Ozeki below) It just seemed like yet another way to play with the form, to acknowledge where these characters came from but challenge a reader to think beyond what that might mean.

HSP: If literature worked like Pandora: Say someone read The History of Great Things, and was like YES, THIS. THUMBS UP, I am going to hang out on The History of Great Things book station… What else would be next in the rotation? The rest of the fabulous Elizabeth Crane oeuvre, naturally. But are there titles by other authors you’d recommend? I can’t think of anything that uses your “super-weird blend POV-science” because it is distinctly Cranian, but are there other books that you love that challenge the notion of truth? Or are related in a different way?

EC: Ha! I love this question. For sure the Percival Everett book. I fear putting things on this station that will imply that I think that I deserve to be in their company, but I also have to put Long Division by Kiese Laymon in there, if ever there was a POV-sciency book I think that one is it. For sure A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble is fresh in my mind (you can’t ever go wrong with Kelly Link), maybe Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce, a little Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli because why not, a little The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim, a little Walker on Water by Kristina Ehin.

HSP: What are you working on now?

EC: Augh! A story collection. But three months ago I was working on a novel. Story collection! I’m stickin’ with it! It’s close. Ish.

HSP: There is a wonderful exchange between Betsy and Lois where Betsy is explaining reviews and why she writes stories — not just happy stories, but complicated and sad stories — and Lois talks about why she would never want to read anything complicated or sad. Betsy explains why she writes, and in a roundabout way, why she reads. What have stories meant to you? Has that changed at different points of your life?

EC: Oh god, it’s changed and changed so many times. I always liked weird/different/dark things best, from the time I was a kid. Hard to say what that was about at the time. I had an illustrated book of Mommy, Mommy jokes that so were so not funny, not even then, but I think the subversiveness of it was still appealing. Hm, why has this not ever come up in therapy? Anyway, even with a book like Harriet the Spy, recognizing myself in a misfit girl in New York City when I was eight meant everything to me, and that she had a sort of outlet in writing completely changed my course. So there’s that. Actually I couldn’t get enough of books about kids in New York City back then, misfit or not. I’m sure now that I was really trying to process where we had landed, which was so overwhelming at the time, and truthfully, I’ve spent my life trying to figure out my relationship to that place, and I still read a lot of books on that subject (Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York is a favorite, also hello Vivian Gornick!). I was actually telling Ben, though, that I didn’t really get into reading short stories until well into adulthood — my vague memory from high school and college is that once in a while there’d be one like Flowers for Algernon or The Lottery that spoke to me, but for the most part I remember thinking I didn’t ‘get’ short stories. Which is weird because we had a Norton anthology (that I still have, with my old notecards in the back) that had some pretty great stories in there. For a long time in my twenties, my reading was very weirdly all over the place (True crime! Judith Krantz! Tama Janowitz!) and then at some point I finally figured out how to locate writing that I really dug. And once I came upon David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, Rick Moody, Lydia Davis, Ali Smith, my head more or less exploded. I just had no idea that writers could do what they were doing, this marriage of story and exciting prose I hadn’t seen. It did something for me that I hadn’t learned in school, that there was room for me to write not like them, but like myself. And of course, you know, the other obvious reason I love fiction is the same as anyone, to learn about how other people live, which is everything.

The Unsettling Gaze of Han Kang

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Flesh permeates the work of the novelist Han Kang. Her novel, The Vegetarian, obsesses over it. Unsurprising considering the bulk of the story follows Yeong-hye, who, after a disturbing and bloody dream, becomes a vegetarian. Although a strong Buddhist tradition exists on the peninsula, for most, meat is an essential aspect of Korean cuisine and culture, and reflects Korea’s status as a growing economic power. Besides kimchi, Korean-style BBQ is probably its most recognizable gustatory export, and you can find it from Los Angeles to Yangon.

In the novel, Yeong-hye’s husband is particularly displeased and confused by this sudden conversion. He wonders, “How on earth could she be so self-centered? I stared at her lowered eyes, her expression of cool self-possession. The very idea that there should be this other side to her, one where she selfishly did as she pleased, was astonishing. Who would have thought she could be so unreasonable?” These sentences provide keys to some of the central concerns of the novel beyond that of its title. There’s the inability for a man to comprehend a woman’s interior life that does not revolve around himself (“this other side of her”). The concept of choice in a strictly hierarchical and patriarchal culture (“she selfishly did as she pleased”). Throughout the novel these issues appear over and over as most of those around Yeong-hye find it conceptually impossible to empathize with her.

There is also a deep embarrassment brought on by Yeong-hye’s new choices. Out at a company dinner, Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat means his husband loses face as his boss and coworkers marvel at the idea that anyone would choose such a diet. His boss even gives the table the old lecture that “meat eating is a fundamental human instinct, which means vegetarianism goes against human nature, right? It just isn’t natural.” Instead, vegetarianism is associated with ideology, which is of course also part of human nature. But never mind that: Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism simply makes everyone uncomfortable. Her family is no better. Her mother worries, “How can that child be so defiant? Oh, you must be ashamed of her!” while her father, a bellicose, Vietnam vet, screams at her during a catastrophic family meal, “‘Don’t you understand what your father is telling you? If he tells you to eat, you eat!’”

This discomfort accelerates as Yeong-hye’s mental state deteriorates, and becomes the real heart of the matter for Han. Mental health is a particularly taboo subject in South Korea, and, like Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat, is another thing that confuses and shames her family. After her dramatic suicide attempt at the family meal, her husband leaves her (no great loss as he spends large parts of the first third novel ignoring her mental state when he’s not raping her), her family is ashamed enough to abandon her; her brother-in-law, who is obsessed with her body, takes advantage of her. Only her sister, who is fearful of what Yeong-hye’s fragile state implies about her own possible downfall, is left to care for her after she is committed.

Discomfort is what Han Kang does best. Her writing is strongest when she makes the reader linger over difficult imagery or ideas that South Koreans are reticent to broach. In Human Acts, Han announces these intentions right from the first sentence: “‘Looks like rain,’ you mutter to yourself.” This second person narration unsettles, instantly dislocating and relocating the reader. We are no longer passive, but are made into actors within her story. Such technique has been deployed recently by other Korean writers, such as Kyung-sook Shin in Please Look After Mom, and although Han does not use it for the entire novel, she slips in and out of it, to jarring effect. Han wants the readers to be actively involved in her story, to feel as if these things are happening to them, something to which we will return.

The “you” in this case is Dong-ho, a sensitive young man caught up in the turbulence of the Gwangju Uprising. He’s no revolutionary, just a middle school student whose best friend, Jeong-dae, was shot during a protest. Trying to find Jeong-dae, or at least his body, Dong-ho arrives at a school gym that has been turned into a makeshift morgue to house many of civilians that Korean army special forces have massacred. Unable to find Jeong-dae, he decides to remain at the gym, helping a young woman named Eun-sook and a energetic, committed man Jin-su to take care of the rotting corpses.

Forgive the digression into history lesson, but it’s important to understand the context of the Gwangju Uprising. It had tremendous bearing on the Korean history that unfolded in its wake, which is Han’s chief focus. The Uprising, like so many attempts by citizens to wrest democratic control from rigid authorities, ended in massacre with nearly 250 dead, though citizens of Gwangju argue staunchly that at least several thousand were killed. The fallout led to years more of stiff repression, disappearances, and anti-democratic rule.

The Gwangju Massacre was the bloody conclusion of a bloody eight months following the October 1979 assassination of president Park Chung-hee at the hands his own security chief and close friend Kim Jae-gyu. Park is principally credited with the economic “Miracle on the Han River”, but was losing his grasp on power as the economy stumbled and citizens grew increasingly weary at Park’s repressive policies. His death left an enormous power vacuum into which strode general Chun Doo-hwan who initiated a coup d’état that December. Chun was described by former US ambassador Richard L. Walker as “one of the shrewdest, most calculating, politically smart people I’ve known” and instituted martial law to crack down on the democracy movement that had been gaining strength in the late ‘70s.

Spring is the traditional protest season, and it was a veritable powder keg in 1980 as anti-government protests surged across campuses, factories, and cities. Chun poured gasoline on this fire invoking fears of that the unrest was being instigated by North Korea. One of his acts was to throw future Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae-jeon back in jail, a move perceived as especially incendiary to the people of Gwangju, the rebellious city from whence Kim hailed. Chun unleashed the military on the city with disastrous results as domestic press was suppressed while pitched battles, indiscriminate beatings and killings, and massive protests ground the city to a halt. At one point citizens repelled the army, which withdrew to the edges of the city where they licked their wounds and planned their revenge. This thin glossing of events1 gets us to to the beginning of Han’s tale.

It is better not to think of Human Acts as a novel. Rather it’s Han’s reckoning through literature with the tremendous sorrows of recent Korean history.

Dong-ho’s responsibilities in the ersatz morgue involve ministering to the corpses as they decompose in the cool dimness of the gym and showing them to families seeking loved ones. This leaves lots of time for Dong-ho to consider this situation. He’s confused, as any teenager might be having witnessed his own police and military beating old men in the streets and shooting his closest friend. Why, for example are the protesters singing the national anthem or shrouding the corpses in the Taegukgi (the flag of South Korea)?

Han’s second person narration makes this atmosphere overwhelming, and more than once I became aware of how I was forcing myself to continue to slog through these descriptions of flesh:

Every time you pull back the cloth for someone who has come to find a daughter or younger sister, the sheer rate of decomposition stuns you. Stab wounds slash down from her forehead to her left eye, her cheekbone to her jaw, her left breast to her armpit, gaping gashes where the raw flesh shows through. The right side of her skull has completely caved in, seemingly the work of a club, and the meet of her brain is visible. These open wounds were the first to rot, followed by the many bruises on her battered corpse.

Because Han inserts readers into the narrative so explicitly, she seems to be directly addressing those responsible for Gwangju, asking that those who perpetrated these crimes walk in the shoes of those they so brutalized. Chun Doo-hwan, for example, still lives, while Park’s daughter is now the South Korean president. She has been courting controversy recently by proposing public schools use government approved history textbooks that opponents say may whitewash Gwangju and its aftermath. Such a state makes Han’s book even more important as the country continues to struggle to confront these lingering griefs.

At one point we (that is Dong-ho) speculate, “There are no souls here. There are only silenced corpses, and that putrid stink.” This foreshadows Han’s second innovation in perspective which is to plunge us into the point of view of Jeong-dae’s soul, trapped in a pit of rotting corpses dumped outside the city.

At first Jeong-dae is confused, “No one had ever taught me how to address a person’s soul before.” But Han doesn’t let us rest easy. She confines us in this new entity’s panic as it works out the strange logic of incorporeality. “I thought of my sister, only of her. And I felt an agony that almost broke me. She was dead; she had died even before I had. With neither tongue nor voice to carry it, my scream leaked out of me in a mess of blood and watery discharge. My soul-self had no eyes; where was this blood coming from, what nerve endings were sparking this pain?”

Slowly, Jeong-dae coomes to accept this new state of being as he begins to realize the metaphysical implications of “I wasn’t Jeong-dae anymore, the runt of the year. I wasn’t Park Jeong-dae whose ideas of love and fear were both bound up in the figure of his sister.” This chapter is a unique meditation on the finality of death and includes some of the most poetically alive passages in the novel.

However, it’s the aftermath that Han is especially interested in. She wants to know how these momentous, and still taboo events, that led Dong-ho to that gym and into the fray of these larger events shaped the lives of the survivors. As we move forward through time, Han paints vignettes of Jin-su, Eun-sook, Dong-ho’s mother and several other characters all interconnected by the boy’s tragic, dually meaningful and meaningless death.

Han prefers plunging readers directly into moments, while maintaining a tone of matter-of-factness. She’s not interested in building context from the outset. Instead she sends us forward and back through her characters’ memories. Eun-sook’s chapter, for example begins, “At four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, the editor Kim Eun-sook received seven slaps to her right cheek. She was struck so hard, over and over in the exact same spot, that the capillaries laced over her cheekbone burst, the blood trickling out through her torn skin.” Violence and mystery combine with Han’s flat tone to reflect the loneliness that pervades the lives of Gwangju’s survivors.

A friend of Jin-su’s begins his story in a similar tone, “It was a perfectly ordinary biro, a black Monami biro. They spread my fingers, twisted them one over the other, and jammed the pen between them.” Han makes state brutality a banal affair, full of visits to the censor’s office and methodical, senseless torture. These are things that make it so difficult to for its victims to cope with. As Eun-sook recollects of post-Gwangju, “Life was a constant skirmish”. Han’s characters are tired and harried by their memories, which seem always return to Dong-ho, to that moment in the final day of the Uprising when the soldiers seemed to exert brutality just because they could, exacting their revenge at losing face to a rag-tag bunch of idealists.

It is better not to think of Human Acts as a novel. Rather it’s Han’s reckoning through literature with the tremendous sorrows of recent Korean history. She wants to unmask the darkness that surrounds South Korea’s meteoric rise into the world of the OECD and bilateral free trade agreements, give voice to the multitude who struggled against repression, whose lives were irrevocably altered, often not for the better. There is little redemption for her characters, and Human Acts, like its predecessor The Vegetarian, does not make for cheery reading. This works well because these acts result in scars that will never fully heal. Human Acts jumps around, from character to character, testing out points of view; it’s restless, always seeking answers where there are few obvious ones. Han is left with the small acts of people trying to maintain what little dignity wasn’t stolen from them by a government that is in many ways intact, still operating on policies that stifle citizens and protect the state. Dong-ho’s mother perhaps sums this up best, saying “The thread of life is as tough as an ox tendon, so even after I lost you, it had to go on.”

  1. Anyone interested would do well to begin with Dan Oberdorfer’s account in The Two Koreas (Basic Books). Han Kang also provides several essential texts she used while researching the novel. ↩︎

The Great Fictional Artists of Literature: A Reading List

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Novelists, like painters, make worlds and atmospheres out of images. In different ways, we both work with setting and perspective, with motifs and patternmaking. For the most part, we both work alone, unknotting the problem of how to give experience tangible form. Many writers I know, myself included, fantasize about being able to paint or sculpt. But none of the visual artists I know wish they were writing novels. Writers covet the fixed edges and lines of a painting or an installation piece, the way the work can often be taken in from a distance of six feet.

Perhaps this envy accounts for the long history of writers creating visual artists as fictional characters in their novels and stories. We identify with the artists’ dilemmas and private angst, with the long hours spent alone on something the world has generally not asked us for. Sometimes the visual artist in fiction is also a proxy for the writer, making observations about the chaos and beauty of the world without the clutter of exposition or the dear reader asides of the 18th century.

I kept thinking about the invented and enigmatic artists of fiction as I was researching and writing The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Sarah Crichton/FSG, 2016). The painter Sara de Vos is based on two historical women, but she is mostly invented. Judith Leyster and Sara van Baalbergen were the first women painters to be admitted to a Guild of St. Luke in the Netherlands during the 17th century. Despite being well known during her lifetime, Leyster was forgotten for two centuries and all her paintings attributed to men until 1892, when a collector discovered her monogram on a “Frans Hals” he’d purchased. Today she has some three-dozen paintings to her name. Baalbergen, meanwhile, is a complete cipher. None of her work has survived and virtually nothing is known of her life.

Building an artist character out of the gaps and silences of history, or the observations and biographies of living artists, is nothing new to the novel or short story. Fortunately, I was able to learn from literature’s breadcrumb trail of fascinating, fictional artists, searching for the way they think and see on the page.

Here’s my selection of literature’s most interesting fictional artists.

1. Klara Sax from Don DeLillo’s Underworld

Don DeLillo

An aging conceptual artist who oversees a massive project to paint decommissioned B-52 bombers out in the deserts of the American Southwest, Klara Sax is subversive, smart, intuitive and “looked famous and rare, famous even to herself, famous alone making a salad in her kitchen.” Just when you think you’ve got her pegged with her cryptic dialogue, suede blazer, plaid pants, and black cigarettes, DeLillo takes us back in time to 1950s New York. We witness her becoming the iconic artist and thinker, demolishing one world and building its successor.

2. Peterson from Donald Barthelme’s short story “A Shower of Gold”

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In Barthelme’s funny, absurdist story, Peterson is a struggling sculptor who is recruited to go on a TV show called “Who Am I?” With his enlarged liver and artistic ideals, Peterson agrees to go on the show but refuses his art dealer’s suggestion to cut one of his pieces in half (made from car radiators and a switchboard) for an easier sale. After a series of absurd encounters — the President makes a cameo with a sledgehammer in Peterson’s studio — the story culminates in the filming of existentialist television and Peterson’s insight: “The absurdity is punishing me for not believing in it.”

3. Elaine Risley from Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye

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At 50, Risley returns to her childhood city, Toronto, for a retrospective of her work as a painter. She is surprised to find that the provincial city in her memory has morphed into a cosmopolitan mecca. Atwood deftly creates the mind of an artist trapped by time — Elaine’s childhood friend and tormentor, Cordelia, keeps bobbing to the troubled surface. The past is experienced as the present and we see the shards of a transfixed memory like a vivid collage.

4. Basil Hallward from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

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Heavily censored in Victorian England, Wilde’s only novel recounts the story of Basil Hallward, a painter who transforms his life and art when he creates his masterpiece — a full-length portrait of the beautiful and suggestible Dorian Gray. Influenced by a philosophy of hedonism, Gray makes a Faustian wish for the painting to age and decay in his place. As Gray’s morality disintegrates, the painting turns ever more hideous and Hallward fears that he’s turned his art into a kind of idolatry. The nature of abstraction and the “terrible pleasure of a double life” are at the heart of this novel of art and delusion.

5. Frenhofer from Honoré de Balzac’s novella “The Unknown Masterpiece”

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The invented master painter of the 17th century, Frenhofer has held sway over several real artists, including Picasso, who rented out the Paris studio which he believed was featured in Balzac’s story. As the greatest painter of his day, Frenhofer harbors a secret — an unfinished portrait of a courtesan that is revealed to be a jumbled mass of color and lines. Frenhofer is plagued by doubt but aspires to the absolute, to something beyond form.

6. Hurtle Duffield from Patrick White’s The Vivisector

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Published in 1970, three years before White became the only Australian to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, The Vivisector explores the nature of the artist’s suffering and inspiration. Duffield ingests the world around him, turning love and acquaintance into artistic fodder. At one point, he smears his own feces onto a self-portrait, at another, he has an adulterous affair with a depraved Greek woman named Hero Pavloussi. White paints artists and God as “vivisectors” of the human condition.

7. Gulley Jimson from Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth

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Narrated by the down-on-his-luck abstract painter Gulley Jimson, the novel explores the artistic compulsion as Jimson lies, cheats and steals to serve his practice. The voice is colloquial and rapid-fire, revealing the entitlement and slantwise gaze of an artist who has arrived at his unique point of view.

8. Austin Fraser from Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter

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Fraser paints vivid depictions only to cloud them with a top layer, a theme of obfuscation that burrows deep into this beautiful and haunting novel. Transformed by a summer on the shores of Lake Superior, Fraser discovers his muse and lover, Sara, a model he returns to each summer. But detachment and self-absorption keep the painter from recognizing the dangers and gifts of his own story — the clarity lurking below the cloudy upper film.

9. Tom Birkin from J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country

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The story follows Birkin, a shell-shocked WWI veteran who is hired as an art restorer to uncover a mural in Yorkshire. Haunted by war and the dissolution of his marriage, Birkin begins to find solace in the medieval depiction buried beneath layers of whitewash on the wall of the village church. Centuries of grime are stripped away just as Birkin rediscovers human connection, a restoration of the spirit.

10. Masuji Ono from Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World

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Like so many novels about artists, this one uses age and retrospection as a launch pad for narrative. In post-WWII Japan, Masuji Ono reflects on his declining reputation, having offered his talents to the propaganda machine of the empire. An artist’s denial and the competing strands of a legacy swirl in the undercurrents of this magnetic novel.

“Enjoy Your Mutiny, Captain” — Read a New Short Story from David Nutt

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FICTION: THE RIM, BY DAVID NUTT

LaRoche and DeWalt and DeWitt wait around the rim, squinting through the steam, the guilt, dreaming of the next career. This current situation, not really a career-type situation. Their crisis management skills, nowhere near par. LaRoche looks across the void of newly punctured earth and notices DeWalt with a loogie pronounced in his cheek, about to launch.

“Swallow that shit,” LaRoche says.

“Mmhhnnmm.” DeWalt moves his head in the negative, a vigorous slosh.

“Don’t be a motherfucker. Think about Hard-G Giles. That hole’s not even an hour old.”

A long stretch of cable dangles slack into the dim gap at their feet. Not a bad hole, LaRoche thinks. Another hot rash of guilt ensues.

DeWitt nudges DeWalt and DeWalt swallows the phlegm.

“I don’t wanna think about Hard-G Giles,” DeWalt says, a bit breathless.

“What?” LaRoche glances up from his fuzzed reverie.

“The look on his face.”

“Yeah,” DeWitt adds. “His face.”

“I didn’t see his face,” LaRoche says. “He had a face? I mean, he was left with one? It happened so fast.”

“You think he took that lame-ass Tupperware with him?”

LaRoche shoots DeWitt a caustic look.

“I liked you more when you talked less,” LaRoche says.

“Yeah, dude, well, I liked Hard-G Giles more when he had a face.”

“Touché.” DeWalt reaches over to DeWitt, arm angled for a high-five.

“Get that fucking thing away from me,” DeWitt snarls, and spits in the hole.

DeWalt retracts the hand and holds it up with the other hand, mid-air, like a civilian mugged at gunpoint, saying to LaRoche: “Enjoy your mutiny, captain.”

“Captain…” LaRoche can’t muster the words, any words.

DeWalt looks over the rim, downward, Hard-G-Giles-ward. “God, that’s a big fucking cunt of dirt,” he whispers.

DeWalt is wearing the orange flame-retardant jumpsuit from the job before the office job, a sentimental favorite, still a little charred on the sleeves and chest and crotch region. “That Tupperware, man. You remember how it made those ghostly whooshing sounds every time he opened it to get his lunch? That noise always chapped my ass, roiled my hemorrhoids. Now I sorta miss it. Probably got crushed under the thing along with the rest of him. They’re both halfway to hell by now. Tupperware. The actual brand.”

“The man had an abiding love of tofu Reubens.”

“Abiding. Good word.”

“Tofu?” LaRoche asks, head swiveling. “Really?”

“He abided himself right into the goddamn grave.”

“That thing is no grave,” DeWalt says, leering at the hole. “A grave has a bottom.”

“God’s own glory hole,” smirks his former cubicle-mate DeWitt, his khakis ink-and-blood spattered, clip tie and shirttails blowing loose in the wind. But his smirk shrivels. “At the very least, the dude could’ve left us his tool holster, his hardhat. The goggles he wore strapped around his squinty Hard-G-Giles-like face.”

DeWalt flicks an old cinder from his lapel. “That machine, man. You hear it? I think it’s still running.”

The three men lean over the hole and listen.

“I don’t hear anything,” LaRoche says.

“Must be all that guilt clogging your ears.”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“You pressed the button.”

“Not on purpose,” LaRoche replies. “I just bumped into the thing that bumped the other thing, and thatthing fell and crushed him and they both — ”

“You broke the goddamn earth,” DeWalt says. He turns and kicks a clump of loam at DeWitt. “Ain’t that right?”

DeWitt’s head, though, is heavy with other things.

“You okay, DeWitt?” LaRoche asks.

DeWitt looks up blankly and says, “Whitney.”

“Huh?”

“Whitney,” DeWitt repeats. “Why the hell did my folks name me that? Whitney DeWitt? What a stupid fucking name.”

He gives the ground under his deerskin loafer a halfhearted stomp. The ledge loosens and folds and then he too is gone. Just gone. There isn’t even any cable to dangle after him.

“Holy fuck all,” DeWalt moans. “You see that?!”

“Wha?” LaRoche asks.

“DeWitt, man.” DeWalt points at the hole, the crumbled rim, a haze of stirred dirt. “He gone!”

“You sure?”

“Look, man!”

“I am looking,” says LaRoche, not looking at all. Instead he’s fussing with his daisy-yellow safety vest, brand new and ill fitting, the plastic reflectors that look pasted in place. He’s trying to manage his attentions, his guilts, his vectors. The problem, LaRoche thinks, is that he doesn’t have anything to manage them with.

“Ir-re-spons-i-ble!” DeWalt finger-stabs each syllable in the dusty air.

LaRoche squints harder and studies the man’s ruddy cheeks, his face flash-flooding.

“Are those tears?”

“Shut up.”

“No, I’m serious. I mean, is that what tears look like? Because those are great tears, man. Really. Well done. They almost sorta look like slugs, don’t they? Strange griefy slugs.”

DeWalt chews the rough knot of his tongue, a stoic mourner, refusing to wipe the slickness off his hot fireball face as he glares at the vacant spot that held DeWitt.

LaRoche shrugs.

He dangles his foot over the hole, dances it a bit, and draws it back.

“You hear that?” LaRoche looks up, looks around. “Anybody hear that?”

When Popular Fiction Isn’t Popular: Genre, Literary, and the Myths of Popularity

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Genre Vs. Literary Has Nothing to Do with Popularity

Is the novel dead? Are MFA programs worth it? Can characters be unlikable? Genre or literary fiction? Is the novel dead because MFA programs are fighting a genre war with unlikable characters?

Sometimes it feels like there are only five topics the literary world can write about, but despite the sheer number of think pieces on these subjects, there tends to be very little said in the way of actual facts. When we get into a debate like self-publishing vs. traditional publishing or “genre” vs. “literary,” we’ve wandered into the book world version of conservative vs. liberal. Arguments revolve around feelings, constantly redefined terms, and moving goal posts rather than any interest in truth or understanding.

Take Damien Walter’s article in The Guardian claiming that “Literary fiction is an artificial luxury brand but it doesn’t sell.” Walter pretends he is attacking the literary snobbery, yet the piece is overtly condescending toward readers of books Walter looks down upon. For Walter, people who read “high-end literature” only do so because they (falsely) think it “make(s) you look cool” while readers of genre fiction are people who buy books “because they love them.” It isn’t just that literary fiction doesn’t sell, but its readers are poseurs who don’t even actually like books! Claiming anyone who reads books you don’t like is a fake reader who buys books out of bad faith is about as snobbish as you can get.

There are some other nonsensical arguments in Walter’s piece, such as his claim that David Mitchell — most famous for his genre-bending Cloud Atlas — is being penalized for “wander[ing] off the reservation” of literary fiction and experimenting with genre with his current book. That’s kind of like arguing that David Lynch will be penalized for being weird in his next film.

Walter also defines literary fiction as “an artificial luxury brand” — I’d love to know what a “natural” luxury brand is — “the Mercedes, the Harrods and the Luis Vuitton of high culture.” But those luxury brands are ones that cost more and are marketed to affluent customers as socioeconomic status symbols. Literary fiction books mostly cost the same as SF or thriller novels. Even the idea that literary fiction is favored by the actual elites of society is highly suspect. You are far more likely to find John Grisham and Dan Brown novels in the houses of politicians, lawyers, and hedge fund managers than the works of Lydia Davis and William Gaddis.

You are far more likely to find John Grisham and Dan Brown novels in the houses of politicians, lawyers, and hedge fund managers than the works of Lydia Davis and William Gaddis.

But what I’d like to focus on is the oddly persistent myth that genre fiction is “popular fiction” and that literary fiction is pointless and obscure. Or, as Jennifer Weiner regularly argues, that book critics and literary awards overlook the kind of fiction that real readers actually like. The idea even comes up in intra-genre wars, such as when the conservative SF Sad Puppies — who caused the biggest stir in science fiction this year by organizing a coordinated Hugo voting campaign — argued that science fiction is being destroyed by books “long on ‘literary’ elements” and short on what makes science fiction “popular.”

There is an odd cognitive dissonance that happens in these conversations, where we are simultaneously supposed to believe that literary fiction is “mainstream fiction” and genre fiction is “ghettoized,” and also that literary fiction is a niche nobody reads while genre authors laugh all the way to the bank. Throw into the mix a recent Wall Street Journal article on the increasingly practice of giving million dollar advances to literary debut novels, and you can see that the truth of the matter is pretty unclear.

A Note on My “Team”

Since the genre/literary debate is such a political one, I should probably lay out my cards. I’m an avid reader of both genre and literary fiction. My debut book was generally reviewed as “genre-bending” and featured literary realism stories alongside stories about cosmic horrors, fairy tale journeys, and zombies. Earlier this year, I co-edited and published a science fiction anthology that featured both “genre” and “literary” authors. I’m hardly of the opinion that books shelved as genre are inherently inferior to those shelved as literary. Artistically, I’m rooting for both sides.

Ultimately, though, I think that sales are an entirely irrelevant question in art (more on that at the end). My favorite books in both the genre world and the literary world are never the ones that sell well. What’s popular in any field is largely a matter of money and luck. My interest in this issue is with the persistent misconceptions and contradictions that abound.

How the Popular Pie Is Divvied Up

Is genre more popular than literary fiction? If you combine every single non-literary genre together, the sales are the vast majority of the market. However, the same people who make this argument typically say “literary fiction is just another genre.” So this is akin to saying that US-based NBA teams score more points than the Toronto Raptors. Sure, it’s true, but it doesn’t actually tell you anything about how good or bad the Raptors are. Non-superhero films sells more tickets than superhero films. All foods that aren’t pizza sell more than pizza. That doesn’t mean superhero films and pizza aren’t popular.

So this is akin to saying that US-based NBA teams score more points than the Toronto Raptors.

So are individual genres more popular than the genre of literary fiction? Well, that depends on which genre you mean. Despite the regular conflation of “genre fiction” with “popular fiction,” most genre fiction is not popular at all. I don’t merely mean that most books that are published in the various genres are unpopular — although that is certainly true. Most books don’t sell much period. I mean that most genres and subgenres are niche markets. You rarely see steam punk or bizarro fiction titles flying up the bestseller list. You rarely even see westerns or horror novels. By what measure are they “popular” fiction when literary fiction, which does regularly reach the bestseller lists, is not?

In reality, the bestseller lists are completely dominated by thrillers/mysteries, romance novels, and YA. Literary fiction titles are a regular staple. Other genres — westerns, hard SF, non-YA fantasy, and horror novels not written by Stephen King — are much less likely to appear. If you scroll through the New York Times combined print and ebook list, you’ll see a couple literary titles each week sandwiched between a bunch of big name thriller and romance authors like Grisham, Roberts, and Patterson. You’ll also see a handful of traditional adult SF or fantasy titles, but they are typically works that have been adapted for TV or film, such as Andy Weir’s The Martian. One could argue that Anthony Doerr and Jonathan Franzen are exceptions, and of course they are. But George R. R. Martin and Stephen King are exceptions in their genres too. The bestseller list is 100% exceptions.

Using Neilsen BookScan — the industry’s sales tracking system that captures most, though not all, of the print market — I looked at the different categories for adult fiction that have sold more than 50,000 copies. (Children’s books, middle grade, and young adult are an enormous part of the market, but that’s a topic for another post.) For adult fiction, Suspense/Thrillers had 28 titles that made the cut, and Mystery/Detective had 17. Fiction General had 25 and Classics had 20 titles. None of the other genres had double digits, not even Romance. Western and Horror/Occult/Psychological each had 1 title that made the cut. Fantasy had 6, but only one that wasn’t written by George R. R. Martin.

The category Fiction General in BookScan includes many titles that Weiner would call “commercial women’s fiction.” Still, about half of those high-performing titles would be considered literary fiction (such as Doerr, Adichie, Ferrante, and Franzen) and basically all the Classics (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, etc.) are literary titles. It would probably be fair to clump Mystery and Thrillers together, and several of the Fiction General titles could be shuffled to Romance, but no matter how you slice it, literary fiction is one of the larger chunks of the popular adult fiction pie.

A Note on BookScan and Those Numbers

BookScan is estimated to account for somewhere around 75% of the retail print market, so these does not tell the whole story. Some genres, like science fiction and romance, do well in ebook form. Still, it gives a good estimation of the relative selling power of different books.

I’m sure some readers will think it unfair to include classic titles. But is popularity only measured in the short-term? Is a book that sells 100,000 copies in a year, but is quickly forgotten, more “popular” than a book that sells 10,000 copies a year for 50 years? Even focusing only on contemporary titles, literary fiction makes up a larger percentage of popular books by this measure than most genres. (FWIW, many of the bestselling genre books are also from previous decades. For example, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None are listed in Science Fiction and Mystery/Detective in BookScan.)

Looking at the BookScan titles also shows the murkiness of genre categorization though. One of the best selling books in Science Fiction is Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a finalist for several major literary awards (and also the ire of Sad Puppies types). Plenty of other books could be categorized in different genres, or multiple genres at once. Genre distinctions are anything but clear.

What’s Popular Is Whatever You Want it to Be

The above is only looking at the most popular books, not the entire market overall. Some genres do better or worse in the long tail and are larger or smaller slices of the entire industry. And then again, some genre readers are more rabid buyers of books. Romance readers are infamous book devourers, and thus their portion of the reading population will be different than their portion of sales. In short, it is complicated. But the above numbers give a good overview of how the popular break-out books break down.

However, too often it seems their interest in “popular books” is actually only an interest in books that are popular in the styles they like. Take this interview with Weiner and Jodi Picoult from their famous Franzenfreude. The two authors bend their arguments into bizarre shapes trying to define what “commercial” fiction is in opposition to Jonathan Franzen, an author whose last two books sold at Stephen King levels (the #5 bestselling and #8 bestselling books of their respective years). Many of the titles Weiner and Picoult slag on here and elsewhere actually sell more copies, and are thus more truly “commercial,” than books they say are overlooked. Weiner says “How seriously am I going to take the paper’s critics when they start beating the drums for Gary Shteyngart” and then mocks Shteyngart’s BookScan numbers for the first week of his (then) new novel. Yet all three of Shteyngart’s novels have sold in six figures, making him a pretty darn popular novelist in any genre.

(Picoult also has very ahistorical comments about the popularity of famous authors like Jane Austen. But again, the facts are less important than truthiness in these debates. Austen may have, in actuality, been read mainly by the elites of her day–an era when about half of England’s population was illiterate to begin with–but she feels like she should count as a writer who writes for the masses.)

In fairness to Weiner, her main argument is that book review sections, like in the New York Times, don’t review as many commercial women authors as commercial male authors. I think that Weiner has a point, as there is plenty of sexism in publishing and women authors are often not treated as seriously as male authors. And Weiner is correct that romance and “women’s fiction” are not treated with the same respect as other genres. However, I wonder if Weiner conflates different issues, and is practicing a form of literary erasure by implying that women authors in most genres don’t count as women genre authors:

@fischermichael0 That’s my point! If NYT reviews thrillers and mysteries and fantasy, it should also cover women’s genre fiction.

— Jennifer Weiner (@jenniferweiner) September 2, 2015

Most likely, the readership of mysteries and thrillers is largely women — as is true of fiction as a whole — and the idea that the genres of Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, and Ursula K. Le Guin are “male genres” is, to put it nicely, a stretch.

The New York Times is not perfect of course. But I will say that the New York Times does a far better job of covering non-white writers, international writers, and writers of poetry and short stories than the bestseller lists. Their 100 notable book list had a roughly equal gender split. A newspaper that only devoted coverage to popular fiction would be a newspaper that only covered white American novelists.

The (mostly) conservative white men of the Sad Puppies movement, and their more odious Rabid Puppies offshoot, nominated a slate of books that was by and large a list of relatively poor-selling books even as they claimed to be representing popular science fiction. On the other hand, many of the best selling science fiction titles of last year (Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, etc.) were exactly the kind of literary titles the Puppies claimed were making SF unpopular. But to the Puppies it feels like their favorite books should be popular and it feels like literary SF shouldn’t be. Even more so, the Puppies complained that the Hugos were being awarded to people of color, queer writers, and other writers on “social justice warrior grounds.” Yet again, this seems entirely a matter of feeling instead of reality. A scroll through the list of recent Hugo winners shows that most have been white writers, and most have been white men.

Big in an Alternate Reality

When Walter and similar critics call literary fiction’s status “artificial,” they seem to imply literary fiction is being wrongly inflated by literary critics and awards. I’ve heard this argument many times. I must admit I find this idea pretty baffling. Commercial fiction is more likely to have massive corporate marketing campaigns with subway ads and full page spreads in popular magazines. A gushing review from actual literary critic is “artificial” while a Times Square billboard is “natural”?

A gushing review from actual literary critic is “artificial” while a Times Square billboard is “natural”?

The underlying argument seems to be that even if these books aren’t actually popular they are still popular in some theoretical sense, because they are the kind of books that could be popular in some alternative world. (This is essentially the Sad Puppies argument. The SF books they like don’t sell well because the evil Hugos and SF critics are pushing literary novels on the SF public.) In this way, all “real” genre is popular because it is all theoretically accessible and written to be fun and engaging.

Only someone who doesn’t read widely in genre fiction could actually think this. Plenty of genre fiction — especially in the SF, fantasy, and horror worlds — is as inaccessible as the most avant-garde poetry chapbook. Epic fantasy series often include detailed encyclopedias of their fictional worlds, hardly something accessible to casual readers. SF novels are often written in jargon and tropes that outsiders wouldn’t understand. And, most importantly, lots of really interesting, boundary-pushing work exists in the genre world. I doubt anyone would argue Gene Wolfe isn’t a SF author, and I also doubt anyone would honestly say his work is popular fiction. His books are every bit as dense and complex as the most “luxury brand” literary novels you could name, but they swim happily in the sea of genre.

And all that’s as it should be! Some of the most exciting genre work is written only for fans of those niche subgenres. That isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

The Focus on Popularity Is Horrible for Literature

Which brings up the larger point: the incessant focus on popularity is an artistically-deadening feature of modern discourse. Far too many people tout sales numbers as some kind of armor against criticism, and think that the highest compliment you can ever pay an artist is that their work “sells well.” Sales have essentially no relation to quality. In fact, sales barely even have any relation to sales. By which I mean, books that sell well today are pretty unlikely to be selling well 50 or 100 years from now. How many best-selling titles from 100 years ago do you recognize? (Note: this Winston Churchill is not the prime minster. In fact, the American Churchill was so famous that the British Churchill wrote under the name Winston S. Churchill to avoid confusion. But the former is now totally forgotten while obscure-in-their-day contemporaries of his like Franz Kafka are widely read.)

The massively popular books are very rarely among the best, whether shelved as “genre” or as “literary.” Want to know what the best-selling book of the year has been? Go Set a Watchmen, a cash-grab novel that many have argued was unethical to even publish. The second? Grey, another cash-grab where E. L. James rewrote 50 Shades from a male point of view. (And, yes, Hollywood “reboot” culture is absolutely coming to the literary world in the near future. I mean, hey, it’s popular.)

There is an entire world of literature, quite literally. Yet you would never know it from the bestseller lists, which are populated by the same handful of names year in and year out. Those names are almost entirely white English-speaking men and women. They write in a narrow range of styles and subject matters. We should be extremely wary of anyone who wants book coverage to focus even more on the handful of white American authors who dominate sales.

We should be extremely wary of anyone who wants book coverage to focus even more on the handful of white American authors who dominate sales.

The overwhelming whiteness and homogeneity of popular books is not something that would be addressed by focusing even more coverage on the same handful of popular books. (To say nothing of what it would do to short stories, essay, and poetry collections.)

If you are determined to compare popularity, at least do so with actual facts. But it would be far better if we focused less on popularity, and more on the wide range of amazing books from all genres and corners of the globe that are daily ignored for yet another think piece on already popular books.

Originally published at electricliterature.com.