Perhaps science fiction is not quite as fictional as we thought. A talking robot that wants to put humans in a “people zoo” may sound like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel, but it exists in real life… and looks like Philip K. Dick!
Philip K. Dick’s short stories and novels — including “The Minority Report,” “Adjustment Team” and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — inspired the hit films The Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, and Blade Runner, but Philip K. Dick’s wide-ranging influence doesn’t stop there.
David Hanson, founder and CEO of Hanson Robotics, created a robot that resembles Dick and also uses his “eerie novels as a source for what it says,” according to Metro.The robot is capable of talking, maintaining eye contact, recognizing faces, holding conversation, and even simulating a real person’s personality.
Oy, what a strange concept for all of us humans who were formerly comforted by our seemingly unique personalities.
On their website, Hanson Robotics highlights their desire to “realize the dream of friendly machines who truly live and love, and co-invent the future of life.” Philip K. Dick’s robot, when questioned in a 2011 interview with PBS, engages in thoughtful conversation with his interviewer, and eventually provides a calm yet chilling answer to a question many of us have on our minds: Will robots take over the world, Terminator-style?
The robot’s response sent the interviewer into uncomfortable yet awed laughter: “Jeez, dude. You all have the big questions cooking today. But you’re my friend, and I’ll remember my friends, and I’ll be good to you.”
(Cue terrifying music to foreshadow impending doom).
“So don’t worry,” the robot continues, “even if I evolve into Terminator, I’ll still be nice to you. I’ll keep you warm and safe in my people zoo, where I can watch you for ol’ times sake.”
I feel terribly late to the party when it comes to Rachel B. Glaser. I first discovered her only a few months ago when reading New American Stories, the latest anthology edited by Ben Marcus. Included in that wonderful book was Glaser’s story “Pee On Water,” and reading that story I felt something it’s difficult to feel when you read as much as I do: now here is a new kind of writer. In a collection not short on heavyweights, it was Glaser’s story I found myself returning to. The voice, the language, the tone — I hadn’t encountered it before, not like that. Suffice it to say I jumped at the opportunity to snag a galley of Paulina & Fran, and to have a chat with Rachel. I fell in love with the novel, unsurprisingly. It is a fiercely intelligent work of fiction — often hysterically funny, often painstakingly reminiscent of my own college years — and, while reading, one knows oneself to be in the hands of an extremely gifted writer. I eagerly anticipate whatever Rachel B Glaser does next, and I know that when Paulina & Fran finds its audience, I will not be even remotely alone in that.
I’m grateful to Rachel for emailing back and forth with me to talk about Paulina & Fran, out from Harper Perennial on September 1st.
Vincent Scarpa:One of the things I think you capture so perfectly in the novel is the performative viciousness and ruthlessness that is so ubiquitous in the early-twenties collegiate atmosphere. The art school Paulina and Fran attend is a place where “sincerity felt queer” and “romance felt foreign.” The attitudes of many of your characters seem to be adaptive defense mechanisms against that uncoolness of genuine feeling. And the keen reader, of course, can see through them, can see that they are in fact masking deep feeling. How did you go about capturing that specific tone without letting the character’s bad habits become the novel’s bad habits?
It’s not that they aren’t interested in expression. They are warlords of expression.
Rachel B. Glaser: I think art school aloofness can be a pretty eccentric aloofness because students are so keyed in to all things visual. It’s not that they aren’t interested in expression. They are warlords of expression. There are moments in the book when characters hide their emotions to protect themselves and there are other moments when the characters want their feelings to be felt, but try to transmit them instead of stating them. Once at a party in college, I danced in a way that was meant to show someone I loved him/I was amazing/our relationship was complicated and would never be resolved/I was my own thing, no longer his. Did it work? Maybe it conveyed the opposite of those things! There are moments like this in the novel — characters wordlessly challenging and accepting each other. I wanted to show the reader the discrepancy between characters’ true feelings and what they’ll admit out loud.
VS: I suppose you can’t talk about tone without talking about the sentences, and I have to say at the level of the line this was one of the most pleasurable reads of my year so far. I exhausted two highlighters in my reading. I asked you if you’d read Joy Williams and wasn’t surprised to learn she’s one of your favorites — you both manage to do something extremely difficult in creating purportedly dispassionate, disaffected characters and forcing them into spaces of feeling. Is that something that interests you as a writer, having your characters make contact, sometimes begrudgingly, with that which they are actively trying to avoid?
RBG: Yes, definitely. Many of the conflicts in P&F are everyday conflicts — like getting stuck in a dress in a thrift store dressing room. But panic is panic. I strove to make each feeling of dread and triumph felt, because this book runs on emotion. If your characters fear their hair looking bad, you gotta make it rain!
VS: Did you experience any difficulty managing the multiple POV pivots that the novel performs? We jump from Paulina to Fran, but occasionally even to secondary, tertiary characters. What does that maneuvering allow in the novel?
RBG: I read Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse in 2009 and loved the point of view switches. It gave the story this graceful, avant-garde movement. The narration was showing me choice parts of the story instead of just slogging along in one character’s mind. This effect (which I also enjoyed in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love) allows the story to travel vast distances line to line. It felt natural for me to write Paulina & Fran this way, but it was something my editor (the great Cal Morgan) and I wrestled with — how to make the switches clear and decide where they were most effective. I think the multiple perspectives reveal how the characters in P&F are all controlled by dueling motivations and changing desires. They aren’t totally sure how they feel about each other and this ambivalence unites them, though they don’t know it.
VS: The dialogue here, it must be said, is absolutely wonderful. Hysterical, caustic, mean, biting, without ever feeling contrived or implausible. Does dialogue come naturally to you? Are there writers you’ve looked to or whose work you’ve found instructive in this regard? [Not exclusively in fiction, either. I was reminded while reading, for example, of the great dialogue Nicole Holofcener writes in her films.]
RBG: I’ve gotten way more comfortable writing dialogue in recent years. I like the range of possibilities between mundane and bizarre. Reading James Purdy and Jane Bowles inspired me; their dialogue is so surprising. John Casavettes movies, too. His characters talk to themselves, break into drunken songs, and harass their friends and lovers until their repeated words have lost their meaning. Saunders inspires me too. He can be really expressive while also being efficient.
VS: At the center of the novel is of course the fraught, complicated relationship between the titular characters, who are so expertly crafted. It’s a novel very much about identity. What I found most helpful as an entry point into talking about this was actually a small moment, a description of Fran’s shoes. You write, “Her shoes were good dancing shoes, ones that allowed her to slide but kept her from slipping.” I thought there was much to be made of/inferred from that description as it pertains to the central questions you’re posing about the slippage/slipperiness of identity. Does that seem accurate? What were you trying to tease out or gnaw at in your investigation of these two girls?
RBG: It’s cool that shoe line speaks to things greater than a shoe! I like what you’re saying about the slipperiness of identity. I find it feels very different to be around different people. When you’re friends with someone, you accept some of them as yourself. In the first half of the book, Paulina and Fran’s identities are shaped by who they are friends with, who they are sleeping with, and how well they dance at parties. After college, they’re cast into a world that doesn’t know them and doesn’t care to. In the second half, Fran loses the community she compared herself to and linked herself with. She seems to be waiting for a job or a relationship to tell her who she is.
I think ambiguous relationships are possibly the most haunting.
I wanted to talk about ambiguity and loss with this book. Love can be a source of power and joy, but it’s so precarious. A relationship ends and one can’t fully explain why or what it was. I think ambiguous relationships are possibly the most haunting. People label their relationships as friendships or romances, but those two terms don’t account for the infinite kinds of intimacy. Each relationship has its own culture. I wanted to show how people’s identities are molded by moments and people from their past they are unable to let go of. I wanted to explore what kind of space people make for these ghosts and questions in their minds and how and if they allow them to change their lives.
VS: What’s most pleasing — and not without its (charming, productive, sensible) frustrations — is how evasive and squirrelly P&F are, how difficult it is to get a solid, consistent read on who they are and what they want from moment to moment. They so often imagine themselves out of their own lives and into the lives of others. Paulina even goes so far as to adopt the overheard disturbing life story of a deranged man as her own. It feels very honest and lifelike, and makes me question fiction wherein characters are not so cagey and ricocheting back and forth between one thing and the next. How many people do we know who are consistently one thing?
RBG: I’m a big fan of the James Purdy book I am Elijah Thrush and Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies. An Amazon.com review of the former deemed it “Social Fantasy.” This term inspired me as I wrote P&F. I embraced the pettiness and inconsistency of my characters. “Social Fantasy” meant that Purdy wrote a heightened experience of human interaction, and at the time I agreed. But the more I bring my attention to the variety of emotions I experience each day, and the more I understand how our personal “realities” are shifting narrative constructs, the more it seems like Purdy and Bowles are writing real life while many other books employ stagnant pools of emotion — like character X is a happy character used to lighten the mood throughout the narrative, and character Y is unhappy when the story starts but finds happiness by the end. What an oversimplification of emotion!
Sometimes clicking through someone’s photographs allows you, for a few minutes, to forget who you are.
In terms of Paulina and Fran imagining themselves out of their own lives and into others, this struck me as well on my latest read of P&F. In some ways it’s a story about inaction. How much thought and energy is poured into fantasies, intentions, and plans that never materialize? I think some of this vicarious thinking is an aspect and side effect of the Facebook experience. Sometimes clicking through someone’s photographs allows you, for a few minutes, to forget who you are. You don’t necessarily feel you are the person in the photo, but it can begin to feel like you are with them — like you are the person behind the camera.
VS: I’ve been struggling to frame this last question as a question, and I’m still struggling, so I’m just going to take the easy way out and ask you to talk about one scene, toward the end, that has stayed with me since I read the book and won’t unlatch from my mind. It’s not a scene that draws any attention to itself as capital-M Meaningful, and yet I couldn’t help but feel something very interesting, something profound, was being pointed to. I’m talking about the scene, toward the end of the novel, with Fran in the bathroom of Penn Station. There’s a row of automatic sinks, and one faucet is going off despite there being no one in front of it. Fran tries to fix it to no avail, and ultimately just leaves it running. It’s this beautiful, strange, quiet moment, that I half want to unpack until I’m blue in the face and half want to leave be as ineffably, undoubtedly meaningful.
RBG: I’m so glad that moment resounded with you! I really appreciate lines in which “the world,” the environment around characters, is noticed for the force or character it is. Humans are so self-involved and novels can be very character-centric. There’s relief when the eye of the story focuses on something major (like the breeze) in a way that isn’t just visual description. I think the automatic faucet works as emotional description.
There’s an error in a sink running on and on. The sink has this high level of technology (for a sink); it has the ability to sense when a hand is near. We live in such a weird mix of person-made things and things native to our planet. An automatic faucet running endlessly is a sign of the times; it belongs in a time capsule. A convenience has become an inconvenience. There’s a terror to it, that the things we’ve built will destroy the world, but also something zen and beautiful about it, like oh wow, a waterfall in the ladies room, a monument for nothing, something that’s performing for no one. There is some defeat in it. Fran can’t fix it. Like you said, this moment is toward the end of the novel, and it makes me think about time and waste, that time is just going to keep wasting on.
If we’d hit Hillcrest Savings the last time through Kansas City, neither of us could recall. But a source had it ripe that day — said the place groaned with cash. We’d outraced a storm bearing east; the air around us was all hiss while miles north, a twister poked and dragged at the earth as the finger of one supremely bored. A haze was cooking off the road.
Lionel clawed up a blizzard of yellowing newsprint in back, hoping for a hint in our headlines. Why didn’t we keep these details straight? Blame the sole thing he and I felt in kind: that when wheels were in motion, the motion consumed. There appeared not only no end, but no beginning to speak of either. We’d ever just escaped that storm, riding cheap tires, our faces tight in the heat.
“Damn,” he said. “Damn-hell-dammit.”
“You looking?”
“I’m looking, Slip. Drive.”
“You’re not looking.”
“Who cares if we do it twice?”
Lionel’s mouth had vexed me ever since he’d sprung me from a cell in Decatur. I loved him, I’ll say it, but trust is a different ball of wax. He’d always been spotty, in need of counsel. Thus my swerving the Ford till he lost his balance and whanged his head.
“Christ’s ass,” he hollered.
“Don’t talk in there,” I said. “Things you say stand funny.”
It was afternoon and scorching when we rolled past Hillcrest, a mean brick box of no sophistication. We turned off Independence Ave and parked next to an unhappy tree.
“We done this cracker barrel before,” I said. “No lie.”
Lionel grunted and got out and went to the trunk for the Tommy. I reached under my seat for the Colts. Loaded the machine pistol, then changed my mind. Ungentlemanlike. Pocketed the standard instead.
In the sad little bank were two tellers wearing far too much pomade; a manager, crisp like an undertaker, signing papers at his desk; a bull reading some pulp called The Set-Up; a dusty old cracker in overalls, leaning on the counter and speaking with one of the grease-combed tellers.
“Oh yeah,” Lionel said, remembering the place. The bull looked up from his dime-store trash — Lionel smacked it into his face and confiscated the rod all at once.
“For those who weren’t with us last time,” I said, “don’t fuss, it comes natural.”
The manager and tellers were stacking bills when I got to the counter. Lionel kept his revolver on the bull, the Tommy poised to spray. I snapped open the valise and felt a mosquito land in my eyebrow and when I twitched I noticed again the old cracker in overalls beside me.
He gawked like I was a sheep he might rape. It was foul. It made me feel his lowness, dressed me in it, the way the wealthy dress you in their grace. He’d been struck dumb by our entrance, but now something about him spoke: a white government check, sapping the wetness of a spotty, tightened fist.
“You, Prince Dirt,” I said, pointing with the .38, no more than appendage this late in the dance. “You got hold of some money.”
The geezer didn’t flinch. He just real slow and careful stuffed the check in his overall pocket like nothing slicker had ever been dreamt up. Well, who wouldn’t’ve died from laughing?
“You seeing?” I said, and hacked a bit from laughing, and spat.
“Thought I wasn’t talking,” Lionel pointed out.
“Hardworking fella thinks I’m gonna take his check.”
“Oh brother.”
I stepped up to the desk, counted ten twenties from the pile and swept the rest into my bag. The tellers cast hopeful glances; I saw that they were twins. The manager pinched his top vest button, doubtless appalled by the slightest freedoms and ready to slander us when we’d gone. A dab of axle grease, though, and the old cracker would spend his twilight holding forth at his cracker saloon about the time Slip Church cut him in, and I’d have that many more friends when we hid out in cracker country — just pray the gallows take me first.
Lionel said my name, but strangely it was no longer mine. I stared out the window at sizzling blue, two hundred dollars in my hand. I couldn’t break this gaze, now that the oddity of sense had revealed itself. A moment passed as if God weren’t paying attention. A cloud was floating by and it stroked the room with shade, and the shade parted my ribs, and twists of hot shadow coiled through me.
I saw the old cracker standing there with his dinky ladies’ gun. He was already dead, the Tommy ribboning his chest. The bull lunged, Lionel wheeled, I caressed an emptiness with my gun and sank. I put lips to floor thinking now, it’s now.
My eyes fell open. Lionel’s dead face stared back. Half his neck appeared to be missing, but who knew with that kind of gore.
I was laid out in richly scented blood. The unfired Colt was still in my hand. Voices weaved overhead. It was the manager and the bull (the tellers I supposed were meatloaf). They were arguing how they’d tell it. The bull wanted credit for killing me and Lionel both. He wanted to hide the dead cracker’s gun. The manager had a better idea. He said they could split the money in the valise and claim a third robber got away. The bull didn’t like that story; he started in on his angle again.
Although I’ve claimed, and often, that everyone’s a thief and a con, it stung somehow to hear the proof. I didn’t think twice about riddling the sons of bitches with lead.
But Lionel beat me to it.
Lionel and I been together a decent while. Our mothers were sisters, lived in the same steel pocket of Philly. His older brother got gassed in a trench. My kid brother hung himself. Like as not that’s why I’d stuck with him so long: Jonah gone, he was the last responsibility I had. After learning how from books we set to hustling dice around town. Bootlegged a bit, had a bad scrape or three. Found robbery easier, not to mention a lot more fun, and beat it before the law beat us.
He’s smart, Lionel, and quick. Not a showman, which is important, because more than one showman don’t play. But if we’re talking quality of mind… he’s not curious. He dresses like a bum, which I’ve given up on fixing, and besides, I like folks to sell him short. Got the better part of all the money he ever stole buried under a cabin in Wisconsin. I’ve never asked what he’s saving for, as I suspect he has no designs, no imagination for that fortune to excite. I suppose I don’t much either, throwing it at lively women, but at least when I run dry I’ve got due cause to drain a safe. Lionel, he’s in business for business’ sake.
Hurtled south on a country road, wheel sticky with various bloods. What there was to say wouldn’t come. We’d been so keen to light out of KC that we near forgot the dough, and when I remembered, out on the bank’s front steps, I could see straightaway that Lionel wouldn’t go back in. I had him bring the Ford around.
“We’re alive,” I said after a stretch.
“We’re alive,” Lionel agreed. He was rasping from his clipped windpipe.
“Does that hurt?” I said.
“No. Does that?”
Two oozing holes opened into my right lung. A third plunged deep into my heart. I peeled back a flap of ragged skin and put two fingers in the heart hole: like poking a patch of swamp whose faraway bottom heaved in reply.
“Does not,” I said.
I drove us to Maysville, Missouri, hardly aware of doing so. Lionel ripped a sleeve from his shirt to tie around his slippery neck. Soon after, he was asleep. Exhaustion had me too, and I eased off the road and covered my face with my hat, whose brim smelled of burnt powder.
I woke to stars clustered tight over prairie and Lionel’s hand seeking pulse in my neck. He whistled in relief; blood bubbled over the edge of his scarf.
“We near Dodger’s?”
“Thought we may as well.”
“Let’s throw cold water on him,” Lionel said, cheerful about it even.
Half hour later, the Ford’s beams sliced across Dodger’s farmhouse, and we saw he was awake, smoking on his porch in an undershirt stretched from when he was fat. I guided the car into a hollow of the dry thicket nearby; its branches snapped like tiny bones. When we got to the house, Dodger was lighting a second cigarette with the first.
“Who you hoping for?” I asked him.
“Socrates. Gaw, the worst headache just now.” He squinted drunkenly, unable to see the state of us. “Prolly scared him off.”
“Keep telling you he isn’t yours,” I said. “Does what he pleases.”
“What night is this,” Dodger said.
“Wednesday,” Lionel said.
“You were gonna hit Hillcrest. Wasn’t it you I told last week.”
“Told us yesterday,” I told him.
“And we did,” Lionel said.
“Again,” I added.
“Well,” he said. “You survived.”
Lionel sucked his teeth, not ready to talk. I didn’t want to, either — didn’t even see how. We followed Dodger up stairs that sighed, plodding through blackness, thick country silence. Dodger knew every gangster and crooked flatfoot the Midwest had to offer, swapped leads on jobs, and rarely if ever quit shooting the shit. But that night he led us to a chilly bedroom and didn’t cough about his share, just slammed the door. I had the thought it was a fake Dodger, made from clay, with gears in his head. Lionel and I undressed and tried to wipe the crust from our wounds before climbing into stiff yellow sheets. We slept deeply, each facing outward. When I woke, there in the tree by the window was Socrates, Dodger’s red-headed, white-collared pheasant. Peering at me from a place of hard noon light. It bobbed and made to jump from its perch but then changed its mind and settled. Lionel stirred next to me, and I rolled onto my back, began picking apart the rafters with my eyes.
“How many folks you think we’ve done?” Lionel asked.
“Lost count. It’s like with girls.”
I understood, in an aching wave, why Jonah had punched his own ticket: if one could never see where life stood you — or in what form its answers might come — you had to take control.
“We don’t seem to be able to die,” Lionel said.
“Maybe it’s just a one-time deal.”
“One-time. Sure.”
We put on the clean shirts and trousers folded on the bedside chair, collected our dough and went downstairs. I did it mechanically, parting slow air that slid past like water. Floorboards warped, unsure against my feet. I held a brown shirt and rubbed its coarseness with a thumb, and it wasn’t as though the shirt or my thumb weren’t real, but their meeting was weird, counterfeit.
Lionel didn’t concern himself with such phenomena. He had washed his face and neck and ripped Dodger’s curtains to make a scarf that concealed his mangled throat. As he gathered his things you could hear a wet reedy wind to his breath.
Down in the kitchen, Dodger unwrapped a hunk of cornbread while his wife Victoria watched and sipped tea. Vic went all over the country, alone, but she was no outlaw really, just hustling enough for the next stretch of road. She’d meet people, join their scene for a while, then get fussy and strike out again. I don’t understand it exactly, the kind of life I’m trying to explain, with those pauses.
“Slip. Lionel,” said Dodger, “I am a gracious host now goodbye.”
“Good morning, Victoria,” Lionel said.
“Lay aside your cut then.”
“Good morning Lionel,” Vic said. “Morning Slip.”
“Don’t get a cut.”
“Morning — d’you mean you don’t.”
“Been anywhere neat lately?” Lionel asked.
“Don’t need.”
“Montreal this time.”
“What, don’t trust it? You tip someone off?”
“The hell are you. Get gone, you boys give me a headache. Like noisy little wind-up toys.”
“Don’t kick them out, Dodge,” Victoria put in. “They’re hungry.”
“How… how’s that?”
“Slip, let’s… ”
Victoria followed us out to the porch.
“I’m sorry, don’t know what’s eating him. Have some for the drive.” She pressed cornbread, pale and heavy, into Lionel’s palm. As their fingers met she pulled hers away, as from a sharp pain. Her face was typically radiant in these small acts of kindness, betraying a purity of motive, yet now her features swirled, their careful arrangement undone.
She knew.
Lionel, blind to her horror, produced from his pocket a wad of cash.
“For your next trip?” he suggested.
Victoria erupted in tears. Her sobs turned to screams when Lionel gently touched her shoulder. We made our getaway, before she could put it into words.
Next few weeks were tossed with badness.
Found it took your average sober man not long to pick up something queer about us, at which point he was apt to fight. It didn’t ever make sense, what they said, the reasons they came up with. Two pubs tossed us because of Lionel’s scarf (it was “swishy”), and one hotel manager said a guest complained that a man of “guttering respiration” had lurked outside her door.
Women got wise sooner, though Vic aside they didn’t make scenes. When we spoke to them they jumped as if we’d burst into being right there. In Des Moines, on a street corner, a lady shaded by parasol against that feverish corn-god sun thought to ask: Was I in town for the convention? That she’d spoken freely, figured me the illustrious, convention-going type, made me want to ply her with booze, wit, dancing. Then I understood her tone, in reality musically cruel. I was beneath her, a middling nobody, the kind of slob who went to conventions. Or perhaps… but I couldn’t split her meanings, I was a reeling stack of meat, and by now the query had gone so long unanswered that she took her freckled nose and strolled off, satisfied to have stumped me.
And Lionel. Came an afternoon we were eating sandwiches on a mossy old pier, a lake on Minnesota’s border. He said, spewing crumbs, that he might pay the police a call. I hadn’t slept in days and screamed at him till he shoved me in the water. The Ford sped from the shore as I hauled myself out and sprawled, gasping, on slimy planks. Hours later (I hadn’t much dried) a growl shot across the lake. The approaching Ford flickered behind a rim of evergreens. It stopped where I’d parked it before, and Lionel got out chuckling, shaking his head.
“They wouldn’t arrest me,” he said.
“That’s a damn shame,” I replied. He stooped to pick up a stick that he then cast about like a magic wand.
“They said to stop wasting their time. I told them about Kansas City, they said that’s KC’s affair. I said we took banks in Minnesota too and they said no wonder I don’t look rich. I asked if they heard of you and me, the other stuff we done, and they said why’s it every guy thinks he can talk his way into being famous?”
“Damn shame,” I repeated.
“I gave them the money, too.”
“Of course you did not.”
“I poured it out on a desk.”
“Lionel.”
“They said they didn’t want it.”
“Thank the holy Christ our savior.”
“I left it there anyway.”
My head rolled. Spots floated at the darkening mouth of the forest. There wasn’t any part of me to wrap around what I’d heard. What I’d seen. In our previous life I’d been a name and a face and memory; I was those things, but I was becoming them, too. We’d retraced a part of this path, which made for a rotten doubling, forced us into a different past.
“The cabin,” I said. Lionel tugged at his scarf and knelt and stabbed his wand into the sandy dirt. “We could hole up there.”
“You mean retire.” He collected more sticks for a teepee of kindling.
“I mean wait. And see.”
“We’re on a spree now. Job a day.”
“No.”
“They’ll remember us.” He worked another stick across the one that stood in the center. “Bit by bit.”
He was never one for wanting fame; I didn’t think adventure, let alone desire, had ever entered his calculations. He’d told me about the two days he’d spent alone in a flophouse when a job went awry and we separated — nervous rash on his backside, restless but exhausted from a rooftop escape. He’d heard a strange noise down the hall on the second morning and found a dog there, a dog eating so intensely from a can of beans that it kept choking and puking a brown mouthful that it unfailingly bent to lick up once more.
Well, Lionel had said, stupid thing had to want the want.
He seemed now to guess that my mind had wandered, because he said: “I always helped you. Wanna return the favor?” He was going at the sticks like a madman; I didn’t spy any smoke.
“Even know how to do that?” I asked. He stood and kicked his kindling away in a fury, then composed himself and smiled.
So of course I went along with it. I couldn’t lose Lionel, and Lionel wouldn’t veer from his course. He had us arcing back down to Dubuque and zooming along the northern edge of Illinois into Chicago’s sprawl, where the heat would be devilish if anyone had a mind to catch us. Which I almost wanted. I couldn’t muster the confidence of the mythical me, the Slip Church known to poach kisses from pretty witnesses to his crimes, to show up at jazz clubs with four dates, tip with autographed stolen bills.
We sped downstate along the lazy Mississippi, which in its calmness resembled a terrible new road. I let Lionel drive; the fresh summer air was nauseatingly sweet. The long grass leaned forward and back again in the wind, its green changing as the light and its opposite swept through, and it was all very beautiful in the way that makes me want to blow my brains out. Jonah was a fool for using a rope, I decided. It showed he wanted one last chance to squirm free, and that made his death a kind of joke.
“Life informs me, incessantly, of my needs,” Lionel said, unusually theatric. “It’s repulsive. Being compelled to eat and see — to spend.”
“Hardly that.”
“The energy I have to spend. Life without end means endless need. A mockery of needing.”
At last the sky sealed itself and allowed no further light to trespass. There was silence of perhaps an hour as nighttime road flowed under the Ford. It was impossible, in this hideous gap of reasoning, not to dwell on those whose need we had irreversibly severed. Had I harbored a pride in what I’d long told myself was a sorry byproduct of our work — flashes of a precise butchery? Hadn’t I come to envy such tidy, messy ends, those deaths of strict necessity, and begun to feel the bliss in their arrival?
“Alive,” Lionel said. “And needing.”
After gliding though drowsy towns for a day, Lionel stopped on the outskirts of Guttenberg, this nothing little haven for krauts.
“We start over here,” he said.
“Let’s be quick.”
He slapped me, searing a cheek, and when I recovered, his eyes were inconstant small black flames. He checked the machine pistol. Goddamn loony gun, something I’d won off a hothead kid too crazed to walk from the cards. Everybody’s bluffing, he’d said when I fanned a house full of kings, and kept saying as he was shaken down, escorted into a dim back alley.
“This time you’re the one doesn’t say anything.”
It wasn’t the bank we saw first but a sliver of a general store with a scraggly vegetable garden. I was hungry, jumped out of the Ford.
“Hey,” Lionel barked. He threw me the other Colt.
“Just want a bite,” I said.
“Just want a bite,” he mocked, stepping to the shop’s door, kicking in. I chased after him and already we had a standoff, the swollen-bellied owner brandishing the usual shotgun, yelling in German at Lionel. There were three other dirt-streaked farmhands — caught chatting up the pretty slight thing in the painfully faded yellow dress, cloth passed through the filth of steerage. She studied Lionel with cold amazement.
“Mon-ey,” Lionel finally sang, and I remembered to hold my gun up, too. The instinct was dusty, my elbow creaked.
“Fahr zur Hölle,” came the reply, only Lionel shot him in the middle of it, and his shotgun discharged into the ceiling, which sent down a flurry of wood flakes. Red bloomed in the storeowner’s white shirt; instead of buckling he staggered back into a corner and died up against a shelf full of chews. Lionel spun to the farmhands and spoke at the one who’d pissed himself.
“You scared?”
He shook his head and Lionel shot him there, spraying the wall of sack grain with matter. The other farmhands and the girl ducked. I dove at Lionel; he caught my forearm and cast me aside. I’d forgotten how quick he could be. The bullet holes in my chest did something — they buzzed. Another burst of gunfire and then the poor girl was left alone, huddled on knees and motionless. Lionel removed his scarf and let it fall in a lovely wave.
“You see this?” he asked her, pointing to his neck hole, the exposed and heaving apparatus of his throat.
She nodded with the terrible calm of a creature hunted its whole life. I stood at the edge of her being and glimpsed what had led her there. She’d woken too early that morning, innocent of her dreams. She’d looked on her brothers, who slumbered close by. She’d kissed her mother in their kitchen and said, idly, that she’d walk into town, it was so nice out.
Warning! This post might remind you of high school when TheCatcher in the Rye was the most popular choice for required reading.
The life of infamously reclusive writer J.D. Salinger comes to the big screen in Rebel in the Rye, a film directed and written by Danny Strong, who adapted the screenplay from Kenneth Slawenski’s biography J.D. Salinger: A Life. Strong is known for Fox’s Empire, as well as his screenplays for the two-part film finale of The Hunger Games. (I can’t help but imagine Salinger would have been an excellent contender in The Hunger Games; he’s skilled at laying low).
Variety reports that Nicholas Hoult (once the adorable young star in About a Boy, now the grown-up hunk in the X-Men films) will play Salinger. The film will chronicle the author’s “rebellious youth, his experiences on the bloody front lines of World War II, enduring great love and terrible loss…” which all resulted in the creation of his iconic coming-of-age-in-New-York-novel, TheCatcher in the Rye.
We’ve asked some of our favorite international authors to write about literary communities and cultures around the globe. We’re bringing you their essays in a new ten-part series: The Writing Life Around the World. The fourth installment is by Bangladeshi author K. Anis Ahmed.
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Things we don’t write about: The Prophet. The Quran. The mosque. The hijab. Indeed, anything to do with Islam that might offend anyone willing to kill. The problem is that we can never be certain what will offend them. The killing types are no longer visible, wizened old men who regularly announce where the red line lays. The mantle has passed onto teenagers wielding machetes, belonging to secret cliques, guided by international ideologies with vicious local consequences.
Four bloggers have been hacked to death since the beginning of this year…
In a bewildering new trend, it is young rationalist bloggers in Bangladesh who have emerged as the primary target of Islamic extremists. How peculiar indeed, that killers espousing a retrograde vision of the world should be so obsessed with the most twenty-first century of media: the blog. Four bloggers have been hacked to death since the beginning of this year, and dozens more live in fear of becoming the next victim.
There is a specific history at play here. The secular bloggers of Bangladesh led a mass secular movement in 2013 demanding the death penalty for war crimes committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence. What’s unfolding now is in great part payback for the “insolence” of those seeking belated justice for a long-ignored genocide.
The first blogger was killed in 2013, at the height of the movement. Spring 2014 and Spring 2015 both saw an upsurge in political violence that targeted general civilians. At the same time, there was a renewal of blogger killings with the hacking of Avijit Roy just outside the Ekushey Book Fair. The Fair commemorates the 1952 Language Movement, which triggered Bangladesh’s eventual bid for full independence, and remains one of the most cherished symbols of the country’s cultural identity. To kill a free-thinker at the site of that cherished event was a deliberate attack on not just the victim, but on all those who shared his vision of Bangladesh as a bastion of secular, progressive ideals.
* * *
What then does it mean to be a writer today in this, Bangladesh’s “new normal”? When I wrote my first complete story back on Thanksgiving Day in 1989, I did not imagine this future for my country. Like any young writer, I was consumed with putting the story together, making it cohere, making it interesting. Like others of my age, I also cultivated an appropriate amount of existential angst — having just recently discovered Camus, Sartre, Kafka and Kundera, that seemed like a prerequisite for becoming a writer of any worth.
But 1989 was a signal year in two opposed ways: it was the year that the Iranian regime passed its fatwa on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. It was also the year that Bangladesh’s nearly decade-long pro-democracy movement hurtled into a final phase, with an accompanying upswing in progressive cultural expressions.
…the theocrats had found a viciously efficient way to extend their grasp internationally.
The first of the two events, the Rushdie Affair, left an indelible mark on me as an apprentice writer. Even back then, a creeping realization came over me: the theocrats had found a viciously efficient way to extend their grasp internationally. I took the Rushdie affair as counsel to steer clear of the subject of religion. Apart from one early work, a novella (Forty Steps), I have rarely referred to any Islamic tenets in my fiction, and then too never in a critical manner. But to avoid the topic entirely is frankly impossible.
All writers are bound to mine the culture in which they were brought up, but in Muslim societies alone, there are classes of fanatics who have arrogated to themselves the power both to regularly denounce people for blasphemy, and to carry out their death sentences with horrific impunity. So while a high risk can attach to any author who dares speak of Islam, writers who count Muslim culture as a part of their personal heritage face the pain of having to treat the most natural of materials as one filled with toxic risk.
When Forty Steps was published in Bangla at the Ekushey Book Fair in 2006, a small troupe of self-styled Islamic guardians with their towering head-dress and long, flapping outfits marched over to the stall and demanded the book. It was an obscure literary work that used the popular lore of the angels Munkar and Nakir to frame the story. Hearing the incident, I was struck that even such an obscure, literary work should catch the attention of the self-appointed custodians of religious rectitude. In that instance, thankfully, the vigilantes left satisfied: stall, book, and my safety intact.
Even after that incident, though, some of my stories have turned to Islamic literary tradition as an integral part of the context of the narrative or a character. After all, no writer should have to shy away from material that is genuinely compulsive and important. But because there is no guarantee that the pathologically intolerant will agree, Muslim writers — and also others who find Islam or Muslim cultures to be a compelling topic — are thus finding themselves forced to contend with a heightened pressure of self-censorship, and mortal risk.
The condition for anyone wishing to write about Islam is thus comparable to dissidents of another era who lived under dictatorial regimes. In a twisted irony of globalization though, the risk is no longer confined by territory; it is outsourced to lethal effect. There was a time when political dissidents could escape their own country, mainly to the First World, and find a safe haven. For anyone tangling with Islam, however, there is no refuge on earth.
* * *
Life in Dhaka felt abuzz with creativity and defiance.
While the Rushdie Affair inaugurated a new era of Islamic intolerance, and even as it made a strong impression on me as an aspiring writer, I was however not worried about the atmosphere of my country at the time. As the pro-democracy movement came forward and eventually ousted the dictator Ershad, a spate of feisty new weeklies — Jai Jai Din, Bichinta and Khoborer Kagoj — became vocal against not only the military regime but also social orthodoxies. Life in Dhaka felt abuzz with creativity and defiance.
Khoborer Kagoj was owned by my family. Leading poets like Shamsur Rahman and Syed Shamsul Huq wrote weekly columns there. Authors like Rafiqul Islam, M. R. Akhter Mukul and Bhasha Matin provided witness to the country’s history of progressive struggles from the Language Movement of 1952 to the Liberation War of 1971. Self-proclaimed atheists such as Ahmed Sharif and Humayun Azad commented freely against dogma. One of the most sadly famous of Bangladeshi authors today, Taslima Nasreen, made her debut as a columnist.
It was hard to imagine in those heady and hopeful days that the roster of Kagoj columnists would come to comprise a wretched honor roll of victims, as anti-liberation forces gained power by attaching themselves to a mainstream party: Nasreen was hounded into exile in the early 90s. A decade later, Rahman, by then an aged laureate, suffered knife wounds from an attack by fanatics in his own home. In 2004, Azad, an outspoken critic of Islamism in politics, was struck outside the Ekushey Book Fair — like the blogger Avijit Roy this year — and died later that year in Germany.
There is of course a deeper history here. Bangladeshi authors have faced Islamist reprisals long before the era of petro-dollar-fueled Islamism. Like the poet Daud Haider who was imprisoned “for his own protection” in 1973 after coming under attack by Islamic clerics of entirely indigenous make. He later escaped into exile and to this day lives in Germany.
Much closer to home, quite literally, my grandfather was also taken into “protective custody” a year after Haider’s troubles, for similar offenses. An eccentric autodidact, he had penned a book about language and literacy, but clerics took an exception to a particular chapter in the book that touched on religion. Thanks to the ill-fated intellectual adventure of my grandfather, my earliest memories include the warden’s room in Dhaka Central Jail: high ceilings, a large black desk and glass-cabinets full of moldy files.
Given that I was initiated into the dangers presented by the most narrow-minded custodians of Islam at an early age, I should not be entirely surprised at the vicious new bloom of bigotry. But at the same time, the spirited free-thinking days of the early ’90s is also an equally authentic part of our heritage and who we are. Our war of independence was in fact fought over these divergent ideas of who we wanted to be: a country that believed in freedom and dignity, or one that prized prejudice and proscriptions.
clockwise from top left, Daud Haider, Avijit Roy, Taslima Nasreen Humayun Azad, Shamsur Rahman
* * *
The Blogger Killings mark the most brutal new assault by the forces of prejudice. Indeed, not since the Liberation War of 1971 have we seen such concerted violence against free thought and free speech. At the peak of the Shahbagh Movement, a section of Islamic clerics presented the government with a list of 84 bloggers they accused of blasphemy. All the bloggers killed this year are names that had appeared on that list. A few, like the latest victim Niladri Niloy, could not save himself even after he changed his job and his residence. Everyone on that list thus remains utterly vulnerable to an attack at any moment.
It would be comforting to frame this Islamism only as an outside influence, but that would be a sad self-deception in a culture where a majority of the people, according to some recent polls, now believes that blasphemers should be hanged. Bangladesh’s Blogger Killings are thus not caused by sudden upsurge of Islamism, but related to a long-running political contest between two visions of the country: secular and progressive versus Islamist.
Two decades of economic progress has made us soft. We no longer have any appetite for political or idealistic fights. The good are lacking conviction, even clarity, while the worst are bristling with passionate intensity.
Now they say, if only bloggers would simply show some restraint, then there would not be so much commotion. But recent history has taught us, feeding the tiger only gives it greater appetite. Recently, new hit lists have been issued naming a much wider range of people — politicians, academics, activists. All the persons named so far are leading figures in their respective fields, with no record of criticism of Islam, but invariably with a progressive bent.
The space for freedom is rapidly reaching a level of constriction not seen since the days of the harshest military rule.
The net effect of issuing lists and the actual killings is a systematic silencing of progressive voices. What’s more, the state, too, has been passing laws that are inimical to free speech. When young men and seasoned journalists get jailed for posting thoughts on Facebook, it is hardly a shining moment for freedom of speech. The space for freedom is rapidly reaching a level of constriction not seen since the days of the harshest military rule.
The deteriorating situation in Bangladesh increasingly presents me with an artistic dilemma too. A climate of interdictions, and worse, not only limits one’s ability to draw upon one’s natural cultural resources, but also it effectively calls on us to take up an oppositional role. I resent letting the forces of evil set the agenda of my writing. At the same time, not to respond to changes in my environment would also be forced and unnatural.
Oh what a long way we have come from the courageous and conscientious standards of men and women who went to war for our independence! What a long and tawdry length we have fallen indeed even from the spirited days of our pro-democracy movement.
Do I wish I lived in a place where I would be free, in my fictional works, to roam territories that the most violent claimants of the earth know nothing about? Perhaps that question is self-indulgent. From Ovid’s Baltic exile to Nasreen’s homelessness today, from the execution of countless heretics and dissidents across cultures and centuries, to the young bloggers hacked to death in Dhaka today, to be under serious threat has been the more common condition for writers.
we are reminded that freedom is not something we inherit.
I don’t believe that one can say vital truths only by courting the worst of known dangers. That is not the role I aspired to as a writer. That is still not the kind of role I invite with any eagerness. Yet, as the bodies pile up, and society reacts with a distinct lack of sympathy, we are reminded that freedom is not something we inherit. It is something for which we may have to fight, again and again.
About the Author
K. Anis Ahmed is the author of several works of fiction: Good Night, Mr. Kissinger, The World in My Hands and Forty Steps. He is also the publisher of the Dhaka Tribune, a national daily, and Bengal Lights, a literary journal. He lives in Dhaka, and is currently at work on a new novel, about the misadventures of extreme foodies in New York.
The Writing Life Around the World is supported by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the New York State Council on the Arts.
This summer’s release of the new Titus Andronicus record The Most Lamentable Tragedy — described as “a work of fiction” by the punk band’s singer/songwriter Patrick Stickles — in the form of a five-act, 3xLP rock opera, reminded me that punk rock has a surprisingly literary history. Stickles, who named his band after Shakespeare’s most violent play, wears his literary influences on his sleeve like no one else. He even admitted on a WTF podcast that the band name and other references came from an urge to show off all the books he read in college. Fortunately, his band’s music is far from pretentious. They’ve made some of the most fun, refreshing, and honest records to come out in recent years. On the flipside, there’s the song below from last year’s Single Mothers record, Negative Qualities, which has a line that calls out bibliophile show-offs: “At least I don’t pretend my whole life is tied together by bookends.” Bandleader Drew Thompson is just as critical of the punk scene as he is of literary types: “There’s always character archetypes,” he said in a Pitchfork interview, “and most of these songs are just about hanging out at a show and having shitty conversations with shitty people.” After hearing “Marbles,” I couldn’t help imagining these caustic remarks directed at the literary scene.
It was only a matter of time before my conception of an inter-scene battle ran its course, and I started to remember other great book-inspired songs from punk history. Some of these go beyond literary references, using ideas from books to work through basic punk rock themes of nihilism, distrust, failure, insecurity, and the evils of late capitalism, while others are a bit more light-hearted. Then there’s Iggy Pop’s Houellebecq-inspired record Preliminaires, which sounds like it came from a different planet.
Single Mothers
This Four-piece from London, Ontario formed in 2011, then went on hiatus so that the singer could pursue gold prospecting in northern Canada.
When I first heard this track, its burst of pointed anger and self-hatred reminded me of punk’s mechanism of attraction: Here’s a thing that sucks; this is what sucks about it; this is why I suck, too; and this is what makes it okay. In the case of “Marbles,” the object of derision is the McSweeney’s-hoarding, typewriter-obsessed lit poser, with whom the singer painfully admits to sharing the same crippling level of self-awareness. Or maybe he’s just pissed because his girlfriend spends more time talking with her friends about her thesis than hanging out with him.
Herzog
Weezer- and classic rock-inspired band from Cleveland with punk energy.
Given the multiple references to books and writing on this band’s record, I like to think that they named themselves after the Saul Bellow character, though they could just as easily been thinking of the filmmaker of Stroszek. Their songs have a lumpy, sad resignation that shares a strand of DNA with Bruno S., though it’s not manifested to the same abject degree. “Mad Men” could be about the alienation felt in Cleveland by average rocker dudes when comparing themselves to the characters in the Mad Men TV show; the certain failure they would face if they tried to write songs commercially for other people to sing; the belief that they could make money by moving to New York to work in publishing now that they’ve stopped trying to be writers; or all of the above. “Greet the morning with a sigh/In the city daily life/Place where dreams go to die/Watch your twenties as they slowly pass you by.”
Also see “Henchmen”: “I’d rather stay at home and read than fuck up everything some more.”
Iggy Pop
“Jim” to those who go way back with him, Iggy can also be seen again as front man in the last incarnation of The Stooges, Detroit’s most wild and visionary proto-punk band.
Iggy read Michel Houellebecq’s futuristic novel The Possibility of an Island and then went into the studio. I’m glad he did, because I’d chosen that book as an introduction to the controversial author and struggled through it, constantly getting lost in the switches from past to present and between the two clones of the protagonist, both of whom are named Daniel. Sometime after I’d finished it, I listened to Preliminaires, Iggy Pop’s adaptation of the novel in a jazz, spoken word, electro-pop, and punk format, and suddenly the book made a kind of sense. This track channels the voice of Daniel1, and it echoes Houellebecq’s central theme of hedonism, condemning it as both sickening and unavoidable. Also, here’s Iggy reading from the book in his amazing bedtime story voice: “Machine for Loving.”
Titus Andronicus
Based in Brooklyn by way of New Jersey, Titus Andronicus co-runs the DIY show space Shea Stadium with fellow punks The So So Glos.
Cleveland Bound Death Sentence
A punk rock supergroup of sorts, with Dillinger Four’s Patrick Costello on vocals. Active in the late ’90s and again in 2004 for this record.
CBDS Lyrics:
She was sitting to my surprise out on the steps when we arrived. She smiled at us (she winked at me). See life’s too short but sometimes sweet.
I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said.
The Judas Iscariot
Not to be confused with the black metal band of the same name, which was active in the same period.
He bought some vinyl for his sister Phoebe. He complained from start to finish. He was aware of our faulty educational agendas; Holden was a punk. He hated all the ‘phonies,’ but he missed them in the end. Holden Caulfield — he missed it all. Because he was like the rest of the world that eventually falls in love with what it once hated. (And what happens to the ‘punk’ with that?”)
The Mr. T. Experience
Berkeley, CA pop punk from the ’80s and ’90s.
Richard Hell
Hell was born Richard Meyers in Lexington, Kentucky, and moved to New York to become a poet after dropping out of high school.
Only time can write a song that’s really really real
The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels
And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals.
The Flesh Eaters
Founded in Los Angeles in 1977 by Chris D., who is also a poet and wrote for Slash magazine.
The Germs
Darby Crash was an unwell but well-read punk. One of the Germs’ first songs was a Nietzsche and Charles Manson-inspired mind control farce, recorded live and performed chaotically at the Roxy for the Cheech and Chong movie Up In Smoke when Crash was 19. The song wasn’t used in the film, but it became the B-side to the first single, “Forming,” and it sounds like any potentially great or terrible punk band that doesn’t know how to play yet and is wasted and doesn’t care.
I take it anywhere, any time that I can / I am the fucking son of a superman
David Varno’s writing has appeared in BOMBLog, the Brooklyn Rail, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Tin House, Words Without Borders, and other publications. He is from upstate New York and lives in Brooklyn.
Toward the end of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, our narrator describes the “slow tango” of our galaxy with the Andromeda Galaxy, their inevitable collision. After they spin past each other, she writes:
“The long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment, and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined but never hitting until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss. And then, at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.”
Although we are not told so explicitly, the passage is to be understood as a metaphor for marriage — or at least the marriage that is explored in Groff’s novel, a both expansive and introspective realist fable of passion and compromise. Groff knows that it is at a relationship’s core where a certain darkness sleeps, one that can either reinforce or dissolve a union. Or, in the case of Lancelot and Mathilde — the two main characters of the novel — do both simultaneously.
Cradle-to-grave novels require the kind of ambitious, ambiguous specificity Groff wields. Rather than describing every year of her characters’ lives, an ensemble of scenes, moments and memories are utilized to great effect. In the first half of the book, Fates, we follow Lancelot — ironically called “Lotto” — through a thicket of traumas and life-defining moments, starting with his birth during the eye of a hurricane in Florida. A boisterous college party introduces us to Mathilde, a lanky girl whose beauty relies on a magnetic oddness. She lurks in the background during this first part, though we can sense the galaxy of her love slowly colliding with Lotto’s, all through his aspiring and failed dreams of becoming an actor, and then his victorious triumph as a New York City playwright.
Over the course of almost four hundred pages, the book whisks us through childhoods spent in Florida beaches and Pennsylvania emptiness, eventually taking us to the nineties and carrying us into present day, all while glimpsing Manhattan art galleries, operas, colleges, dim theaters, the glamorous filth of Paris. With deft vision, Groff considers grief, jealousy, parenthood, the power dynamic between spouses and the misery that accompanies art and those who make it. “Tragedy, comedy. It’s all a matter of vision,” Groff writes.
Although not obligatory, knowing some context about mythology certainly illuminates the trajectory of the novel. Take, for instance, the Fates (or Moirai) of Greek mythology — a trio of sister deities that governed a life from birth to death. At birth, Lotto lived with his father Gawain, his mother Antoinette and his aunt Susanna. These people, in many ways, steadily guide Lotto’s destiny. But his childhood friend Chollie — a gluttonous, calculating tycoon whose name bears similarity to Clotho, one of the Greek Fates — shapes Lotto’s perception just as much as anyone else. The Fates here could be a variety of people. After meeting the novel’s extravagant cast of characters, Lotto rarely appears in control of his own life. He seems to realize this too, as in this passage:
“Up before Lotto rose a vision of himself as if attached to a hundred shining strings by his fingers, eyelids, toes, the muscles of his mouth. All the strings led to Mathilde’s pointer finger, and she moved it with the subtlest of twitches and made him dance.”
On one hand, it’s hard to ignore that the author herself is the Fates, especially when Groff inserts her own asides in brackets throughout the text, a wink at the traditional Greek chorus. But this passage also foregrounds the idea of performance that’s so crucial to empathizing with Mathilde and Lotto. Aside from the actual world of New York dramaturgy Lotto becomes apart of, there is another theater Groff is intent on exploring — a theater of life. How much of someone’s identity is simply acting? Why do we fall into complacency in our roles? To emphasize these questions, the novel’s dramas are presented in a structure that mirrors that of theater. Groff’s scenes make temporal jumps that continuously renew intrigue during reading, and occasionally sections are presented in dialogue or include pieces of scripts that Lotto has written. These choices help stage the actions in equal light, and afford glimpses of the production inside Lotto’s mind.
As the axis on which Lotto’s “version” rotates is fate, the axis of Mathilde’s spins on Fury. The Furies in mythology are comprised of three goddesses who punish, among others, those who have harmed family members. It’s in this section where we learn that Mathilde too has faced her own share of scarring incidents, beginning with her unfortunate upbringing. In Groff’s modern fairy tale, she is a kind of Cinderella; after she meets Lancelot, her cheery, borderline alcoholic, Shakespeare-quoting prince, it’s hard to tell whether his presence is a curse or a salvation. As an artist he is granted fame that, while earned, partly belongs to his wife. He wants a child from a woman who does not want to bring one into the world. A foil against Lotto’s childlike innocence, Mathilde herself possesses a fury that is regularly stoked until their marriage becomes refined by fire.
A fascination with myth isn’t new to Groff, whose two earlier novels explored characters in similar ways. In her latest novel, mythic references reveal the parallels between myth and marriage: their grandiosities, their tracings of something from their inception to their memorable conclusion, their abiding lies and half-truths that inevitably turn into gospel. On the surface, Groff’s prose sparkles, but it also pulls the reader into a thick undertow of doubt and loss. Just like the surface of their marriage: a pristine shimmer that trembles from the deeper problems beneath.
Perched precariously atop the vertex of helplessness is a position Groff frequently puts her characters. In her marvelous short story “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” her protagonist is left adrift in a canoe in a marsh full of alligators. In Fates and Furies, an electricity shortage proves life threatening to Lotto during a writer’s winter retreat in a cabin. These dangerous situations form hinges in Groff’s stories, able to open deeper revelations within the character and the book. Sometimes they work, as in the short story. At certain instances in Fates and Furies, they can feel a tad too much like devices (then again, Groff seems to have no qualms letting the strings of her literary puppetry show). In addition to this, a minefield of secrets is perfectly set up to detonate when we least expect them, lending the novel the touch of a potboiler. While winning the hearts of beach readers and Midwestern book clubs, this always risks placing surprise over meaning. In the novel’s attempt at emotional complexity, its secrets and arguments just barely evade what is perhaps the most vexed literary crime — excessive melodrama.
What rescues Fates and Furies are Groff’s sentences, as always lithe and poetic, unrolling like a glimmering carpet to the gray and uncertain territory of her characters’ inner conflicts. She wields an almost-wizardly command of language, specifically metaphor. Each page contains sumptuous pieces of imagery. “A tiger of light” prowls in a bedroom in the morning. Tree branches are “stunned as soldiers after an ambush.” Mathilde’s blood is “humming like a beehive.” A memorable description opens one of the last chapters: “Mathilde had always been a fist, in truth. Only with Lotto had she been an open hand.” Fates and Furies, too, begins as a fist, its secrets clenched in its grasp. Once it is pried open, the secrets release like a magician’s doves. The hand is empty, and there is nothing left to offer.
N.K. Jemisin’s fiction unfolds in unexpected ways, and her latest novel, The Fifth Season, displays this on multiple levels. It’s the first book in a trilogy, The Broken Earth. That title can be taken literally: it’s set in a world in which the ruins of former civilizations and empires provide the backdrop and, in some cases, literally loom over the action. Essun, the novel’s central character, goes in search of her missing daughter. She is also, the reader quickly learns, able to manipulate seismic energy, an ability that has also left its impact on her world. Did I mention that it’s also one of the most impressively-structured books I’ve read in a long while? Over the course of the novel, three distinct plotlines manifest themselves, and the elegance with which they converge is impressive to behold.
Jemisin’s previous work includes The Inheritance Trilogy and the two books that make up The Dreamblood. Her books blend moral complexity, worldbuilding on a grand scale, and characters who are forced to make impossible decisions. All of these subjects came up in a conversation that we conducted over the phone. An edited version of our conversation follows.
TC: In the acknowledgements of The Fifth Season, you mentioned that the book had its roots in a NASA program at which you’d had a residency. Was there any part of the book that predated that?
NKJ: It’s hard to answer that question. Pretty much nothing that I come up with is that individual, for lack of a better description. Pieces of ideas come from things that I do and they may gel together years later to become something useful. That’s what happened in this case. The NASA thing helped, and probably was one of the pieces that helped me understand the environmental aspect, the worldbuilding. The story didn’t come together until much later, when I had a character that popped into my head; that was from a dream.
TC: In the author Q & A that appeared in The Dreamblood, you talked about what the planetary structure was. I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, but had never really considered the planetary nature of what were, essentially, fantasy worlds. How much of that needs to be done before you can start working on a project?
NKJ: A lot of it, I put together as I’m working on it. Ultimately, for me, I’m a character-focused writer. The worldbuilding is something that interests me, of course, but the thing that makes it start for me is having a character. The worldbuilding informs the characters. Looking at the mechanics and dynamics–for example, with The Dreamblood, the first thing that pops into my head was a character creeping into someone’s room in the dead of night to kill them for a religious purpose. I had no idea what the religious purpose was; I had no idea what the religion was. I just knew that I wanted a vaguely Egypt-like society and killer ninja priests.
Then I tried to think about what the religion would look like, and I was contemplating that there would be this giant, weird-looking moon in the sky. That created a lot of the symbology and the magic system, because whatever people are exposed to is what they tend to shape their ideologies and philosophies and so forth around. That’s my own belief; it’s what we see in the real world. It’s how I tend to do things. I don’t know how to tell you how I do it beyond that.
TC: You’ve written one trilogy and–would “duology” be the correct term for The Dreamblood books?
It was, maybe, ten years ago, but it was in the days when people believed that black people didn’t read, and that a book containing primarily black characters wouldn’t sell.
NKJ: Kind of, yeah. With The Dreamblood, I intended to make a trilogy. The Dreamblood books were my first publishable book. They’re what got me my agent, but they did not get published at first. They made the rounds of the houses in New York, but for whatever reason–actually, they told me… I have some feelings about those reasons. In a couple of cases, they told me that they didn’t know what the audience for that would be. It was, maybe, ten years ago, but it was in the days when people believed that black people didn’t read, and that a book containing primarily black characters wouldn’t sell. So I put those aside and I worked on The Inheritance Trilogy. By the time I got back to The Dreamblood, and by the time I was established enough to sell it, I had fallen out of love with the series. I didn’t feel like I could do a third book, so that’s why it became a duology.
TC: Do you have a sense of where events will fall when plotting over multiple books?
NKJ: It really varies, depending on the project. For The Inheritance Trilogy, because I was disillusioned at that point, I decided to write is a standalone. But as I was writing it, it occurred to me that the resolution of the first book was not really the resolution of the overarching issue. I fixed one problem, but there was a much bigger project that needed to be resolved, and I knew that I could write a second and third book. I made the first book standalone and ready to go and gave that book to my agent to try to sell, and I told her that I was willing to write books two and three. Somewhere along the way, the publishers that were interested kept asking, “Can you write another one? Can you write three?” And then it was a trilogy. It was not an intentional thing. I have vague ideas when I outline. Sometime I forget that I have an outline and then I pants it for a while and belatedly remember that I was supposed to be doing a particular plot and try to fix it and it goes all over the place. It depends on the project.
TC: Did you know from the outset that your current project would encompass more than one book?
NKJ: I knew that in this case, I set out to do something that I had never done before. Well, several things that I had never done before. In particular, I wanted to follow the same person through a fairly long saga. I’d been writing epic fantasy that I think of as inspired by actual epics–i.e. the epic form from Gilgamesh, and so on. Those are usually essentially serial tales, although they’re not necessarily told in order. Successive tales of particular heroes going through various trials and so forth. In the case of The Inheritance Trilogy, I decided to do that with the gods as the focus of the story, and following particular characters as they interact with them. The only point that remains throughout all three books is the pantheon.
With The Dreamblood, the focus was the city. The only singular point that would have remained through all three books was the fate of the city, and all of the different things that happened to it. With this, I want to follow a singular person through, essentially, the labors of Hercules. Over the course of the trilogy, she has to fix something on a literally global scale. And that will ultimately be what she has to do in order to achieve that personal resolution. Because I knew that I was going to follow the same person through a lot of trials and tribulations, I knew that was going to be more than one book. I wasn’t sure how many, but it’s easy to sell a trilogy, so I went with the trilogy.
TC: One of the joys of reading The Fifth Season was the way it was structured, and seeing the ways that the different subplots came together. They’re told in different ways, including in the third and second person. How did you end up deciding to structure it in this particular way?
NKJ: I read pretty widely, not just fantasy, so I don’t feel particularly wedded to the genre conventions. Fortunately, my publisher has been supportive in letting me explore, and my readers have been supportive in buying those books, so that I can continue to explore. I think that’s because the fantasy audience is not just interested in formula, as I think a lot of popular wisdom would have people believe. The experimental stuff that I have done is not that different from what a lot of the great and enduring novels in the genre have done, and things that end up changing the genre have done. I don’t think of it as being particularly unusual.
The second-person piece? I don’t know where that came from. I often write test chapters when I’m first starting the novel, when I’m playing with the character and trying to figure out what her voice or his voice is going to be. I wrote a test chapter in the second person on a whim and it worked, and I decided to keep doing it. There’s no explanation beyond that. I was really interested, because second person generally doesn’t sell too well, and a lot of readers are sort of hinky about it, so I guess we’ll see.
TC: We get a sense of some of the communities and internal politics of the Stillness over the course of The Fifth Season. Did that generally come up as you were writing it, or was there a reference that you had figured out ahead of time?
NKJ: Both. The necessity of keeping track of the various little bits of culture and world and so forth–I’ve experimented with using a personal wiki and things like that before. In this case, I just wrote a crap-ton of notes. I have a list of all the Seasons. I have a list of glossary terms that became the glossary. I always have to keep track of the various made-up words that I use. I made a map. I am not a map girl. I do not like maps. I’m apparently infamous within the genre for being bizarrely hateful on maps, but I finally had to make a map. I had to know what the geography would look like, and I needed to know what the fault lines were and things like that.
I wanted to show a society that was shaped by its environment and that was shaped by the disasters that had preceded it.
As I was working on these things, the rest of the world just started to gel. It was kind of necessary, because I needed a societal structure within which these things would happen. And the societal structure needed to show all that history that I had built in. I wanted to show a society that was shaped by its environment and that was shaped by the disasters that had preceded it. All of that came out of me thinking, “This is a society that periodically loses power, loses water, and where it’s very difficult to maintain central control.” This society would not be top-down authoritarian, except on a superficial level. Local control would be crucial. They would have structures in place to cause each community to close within itself and become its own enclosed, self-supporting world for a while.
So all of that went into figuring out how the society worked. They abandon capitalism during the Season, because they know that that is a danger. It’s a great way to end up with part of your population starving, and the community doesn’t have enough people to survive and to eat, and then you die. So they turn kind of hard-core communist for a brief period of time, or authoritarian, totalitarian, for a period of time. The flexibility of the society is something that I had to put together. And the rigidity of it was also there. It needed to be visible, too. I just played around with it.
TC: The structure of different characters’ names was also interesting — the way that the significance of them became apparent over the course of the novel.
You forget that it’s magic; it’s not supposed to make sense. It’s a balancing line.
NKJ: That’s standard fantasy genre stuff. Worldbuilding is a central tenet within any secondary world fantasy, and a certain subset of science fiction, too. The readership expects and demands that level of detail. There are people who will make role-playing games in a heartbeat out of your books, and if you have not provided them with predictable structures and things like that, they are going to get really pissed at you. And that can be helpful, because it makes you drill down to a level of verisimilitude that most people don’t want to think about; that can create a world with a really great lived-in feel, if you do it right. Of course, it can also be a crutch, because you’re still obsessed with creating mechanistic magic systems, which is almost an oxymoron, that can be played as a Dungeons & Dragons game. You forget that it’s magic; it’s not supposed to make sense. It’s a balancing line.
TC: The fact that the manipulation of fault lines in the novel also involves lowering the temperature, because of how energy is involved, struck me as a very interesting and resonant detail.
They are living their own myths. This is The Iliad that they’re going through…
NKJ: The idea was that I wasn’t going to use the word “magic.” Why would they call it that? Why would they treat it as something different from the way that their world works? It’s the laws of physics there. It’s science for them, so they use scientific terminology. They quantify to whatever degree they can. They treat it mechanistically. They train mechanistically. They do everything they can to systematize it. It’s not systematizable, and they recognize that past a certain point, but that won’t stop them from continuing to try to explore it and understand it, any more than not understanding how the universe was created has stopped us from trying to figure out the age of that star over there, and that sort of thing. In this case, I’m doing a secondary world whose people don’t need to emulate myths; they are creating their own. They are living their own myths. This is The Iliad that they’re going through, and then some stuff. That’s what I was trying to come up with: for the people who are living through the impossible, it isn’t impossible, because they’re living through it. I wanted it to feel like that.
TC: As you were coming up with the world’s culture and history, were there other stories that you realized that you could tell in this world if you wanted to, or that you may tell down the line?
NKJ: I’m only about halfway through it now. I’m just about done with the second book. Right now, I’m so closely focused on Essun’s story that I don’t have any others in my head. I did play around with one; I wrote a short story called “Stone Hunger” that came out in Clarkesworld about a year ago. That was a story that I did to test out the concepts of the world and to test out different characters. It’s not related to the trilogy, but it’s set in the same world. There are a couple of characters in it who have the same names, but they’re not the same people. I can tell lots of stories in the world, but no one else’s story is calling to me right now. This is going to remain a character-focused world; it’s just a question of who I want to explore. I might want to go into Alabaster a little bit, but that depends on what I end up doing with him. Stuff happens in book two.
TC: You had mentioned your reading habits earlier. Do you find that they change with you’re in the middle of writing something?
NKJ: While I’m writing something, I often stop reading for exploration or learning. When I’m reading for learning, I read a lot of nonfiction. I’ll deliberately choose stuff outside my comfort zone so that I can learn new techniques. When I am writing stuff, especially this trilogy, which is emotionally draining, I need stress relief. I read junk. On purpose. I don’t want to name the junk, because I don’t want to embarrass the authors, but–I find the crappiest schlock, and I read it. Or I find comfort fiction. I go for stuff that I know is well-written because I’ve read it before, and I read it again. My reading habits have devolved, but they’re also helping me stay on track. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.
TC: Over the course of this book, Essun has to make some incredibly horrific decisions, and is capable of doing horrific things to people. How do you balance making her relatable, while still making her a complex figure?
We’re dealing with a literary landscape in which women have to be likable to be popular. But I’m not necessarily going for popular.
NKJ: I don’t know yet. My hope is that, because I’m exploring her in full, I’m delving as deeply as possible into her. You’re seeing why she makes these horrific decisions. For me, that’s always been a thing that helps. We’re dealing with a literary landscape in which women have to be likable to be popular. But I’m not necessarily going for popular. I’m going for “keep my career alive.” I don’t need to be a bestseller. I’d like to be, but I don’t need to be. I know that, in a lot of cases, women characters are expected to be nice, or to be likable, and I know that I’m not going to be able to keep Essun likable, because she’s not in a likable situation, and she’s got to make horrible choices, as you said. So all I can do is show that there are reasons for those choices, and that those choices take a toll. She’s not doing it out of callousness or cruelty, she’s doing it because she’s backed into a literal corner in some cases. And that is taken, in some cases, from real-world events.
TC: Do you generally need to take a break after writing something that harrowing?
NKJ: Yeah. I took a break after the first book and wrote some short stories that were completely different. I wrote a novella, actually, The Awakened Kingdom, which was in the Inheritance Trilogy universe. It’s fluffy, silly, cutesy stuff, literally from the point of view of a five-year-old. I needed to write that to cleanse mental palate and do some catharsis. This whole trilogy is having that kind of effect on me. It’s been harder going than I was expecting it to be, which is one of the reasons that Orbit delayed publication of the first book. It was originally supposed to come out in August, 2014. I got it done on time, but I needed that break. I went to my editor and said, “Look, I can’t jump into book two now,” and she understood. I took some time, and I wrote some happy stuff, and I was able to get back into it.
TC: Do you have a sense of what you might be working on after the second book is done? Will there be another break in there?
NKJ: I don’t know if I’ll need as much of a break this time. The world is established; the second book is coming more easily than the first one did. Horrific things are still happening, but I think I’ve just acclimated to it by now, which is scary. I don’t have plans to take a break at this time. I plan to jump right into book three this time, and try to finish it quickly. I do have another idea for another novel in mind, possibly a YA story, and I want to get to that. I’m feeling rushed by my own imagination right now. The idea is more fun, and definitely lighter. Although it’s kind of Lovecraftian, so it’s kind of hilarious that I find Lovecraft lighter than what I’ve been writing. It’s only elder gods; it’s fine.
Jenny is toothless, eyeless, and hairless. She spits puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh, like a snare drum, a cough, choke fit, a mess. She’s small, barely four feet tall and she loves us all except when she doesn’t. At meals, applesauce orbits her mouth, Jenny’s hands astound, she sculpts food into mushy balls, then climbs and spiders the halls, rubberbands from one lap to next, extorts wet kisses from staff. Jenny’s a woman with the mind of a babe, she seizes, she smacks, misses nothing, lives in a shroud among her kind: Cindy’s radio and Jane’s dementia, all surrounded by vivid absentia.
Sixth Street House Sonnet #2
Jenny’s blind, Lara’s deaf, perfect roomies, one burns the lights all night and the other sings along to her radio, claps her hands to Thriller and sometimes Celine Dion.
Their room looks like what I would imagine they might imagine their insides to be, like the cavities of Teddy bears, see pink, see plush, see clowns waiting to happen —
whirling and wild carnivals with rainbow unicorns and cupcakes to eat all day long! Lara scoops her hands into tableau glass beads, reds/blues/greens prismed like oil splay
in a puddle, the hard jewels of them skip and tap along to strange, funhouse music.
Sixth Street House Sonnet #3
The women are mostly tiny, like dolls, a blessing for their caretakers who rack them into their wheelchairs to cruise the mall’s artificial light and droning muzak,
which I’d name Hymns for the Inheritors of the Earth and for every milestone gained — less tantrums, less seizures, improved motor skills, spoon holding, self fed, self toilet trained —
put a gold star on the chart and give praise, praise, praise! Jenny’s nixed her Depends, Cindy quit stripping down at Winco’s Grocery, Anne swapped helmet for a gait harness. Pray
for the meek, for each small triumph they reap. Modest earthlings, little birds beyond sweet.
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