Within the first page of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, he managed to convince me to never eat octopus again. The protagonist, a writer who’s set to receive a sizeable advance, is enjoying a celebratory meal with his agent at a swanky restaurant noted for serving tiny cephalopods that have been massaged to death. He describes eating an animal that “decorates its lair, has been observed at complicated play,” then goes on to sense “a conflation of taste and touch as salt was rubbed into the suction cups; a terror localized in my extremities, bypassing the brain completely.” This is a rather heavy hinting at the metafictive manipulation to come, and exactly what makes 10:04 a strikingly original and energetic novel.
10:04 is set primarily in New York City, with the story bookended by hurricanes; it begins with the relatively benign Irene and ends with the unprecedented destruction wrought by Sandy. The year between the two storms is long and circuitous: Our unnamed narrator is attempting to tease a full-length novel out of a well-received short story, helping his best friend conceive a child (through in-vitro fertilization because, as she’s proclaimed to him, “fucking you would be bizarre”), dating the acclaimed conceptual artist of the moment, and dealing with a potentially fatal heart condition. There are also two notable, comically trying experiences: mentoring Roberto, an elementary school student from Sunset Park, and embarking on a writer’s residency in Marfa.
Lerner’s protagonist, much like the one in his debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, is incredibly anxious, to the point where his extreme neurosis makes him affable. Take, for example, his twisting musings on his own selfishness:
“While I stirred the vegetables I realized with slowly dawning alarm that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cooked by myself for another person — I could not, in fact, ever remember having done so…On various occasions, I’d said to a woman I was interested in, ‘I would invite you to dinner, but I’m a terrible cook,’ at which point I would hope she’d say, ‘I’m a great cook,’ so I could ask her to come over and teach me; then we’d get drunk in the kitchen while I displayed what I hoped was my endearing clumsiness, never learning anything.”
In fact, the dining scenes are some of the most enjoyable to read in the book. His protagonist typically gets drunk (“All that vanished with the first sip of gin…without ceremony I dispatched the giant steak I had ordered, inhaled it, basically…”), and becomes simultaneously more gregarious and neurotic; these scenes manage to sizzle with manic energy while, at the same time, be somberly observant. Lerner enters staid affairs and builds recognizable caricatures out of some very serious people: “The distinguished professor was sitting immediately across from the distinguished male author and seemed more than happy to receive his logorreah; a younger woman — probably also an English professor but too young to be distinguished — was sitting beside him, smiling bravely, realizing her evening was doomed.”
10:04 is creatively layered in a way that is fresh and exhilarating — the narrator is in the process of writing the book that readers happen to be digesting, but Lerner also includes the short story, “The Golden Vanity,” which gained him attention after being published in The New Yorker in 2012, as well as another fictitious children’s book that he helps his mentee publish. (They are both excellent in their own rights.) One of Lerner’s great strengths, as with Atocha, is the quiet hilarity of his prose; it’s self-deprecating without being overdone. The narrator takes care to point out every bit of absurdity, both internal and observed. The humor (think: awkward attempts at masturbating in the fertility clinic) doesn’t make his more poignant scenes — describing his father dealing with his grandmother’s death, or wading through post-Sandy New York — any less touching. Rather, it bolsters the serious affairs and draws you deeper into the narrator’s psyche so that you find yourself hanging on to every word of his winding, exquisitely-crafted sentences.
In reading Don Quixote, the greatest novel of “madness,” it is helpful to understand that Cervantes wrote in a culture whose social constructions of madness were no less nuanced — and in some ways no less humane — than our own. Dale Shuger’s Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain illustrates this by examining documents from over one hundred legal cases in which the defense of insanity was invoked.
Madness (locura) played a complex and highly public role in the social life of Cervantes’ Spain. Though some of the “mad” (locos) were confined to institutions, most were not. And even the institutionalized were not hidden from public view: large groups of them were paraded daily through city streetssometimes in motley garb, riding on mules — to collect donations that defrayed the expenses of their confinement.
We often contrast contemporary treatment of the mentally ill with a hazily imagined barbaric past. The horizon of this imagined past is always receding: in the 1950s (the era made infamous by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), when a half million Americans were confined to state mental hospitals with few legal protections — — and lobotomy was a common practice, psychiatry saw itself as humane and progressive. Now, we might consider it evidence of progress that our mental hospitals hold less than a tenth of the numbers they once did; yet many of those who would have been hospitalized at midcentury are now in jail, prison, or homeless.
Just as those diagnosed with mental illness in our time are met with a mixture of sympathy and stigma, early modern Spaniards had ambivalent attitudes toward those they deemed mad. Locos were often excused for their deviant behavior; but they were also commonly targeted for open mockery, as happens constantly to Don Quixote.
In Cervantes’ Spain, madness was a legal defense both in secular courts and in the Inquisition. People accused of heresy often pled insanity — sometimes with success. But an official label of locura could result in curtailment of one’s legal rights — as a diagnosis of mental illness can in our time.
In early modern Spain, physicians testified in court as expert witnesses, claiming to discern true madness from malingering. Priests distinguished demonic possession from both — and from “legitimate” mystical experiences. Of course, there was nothing scientific about any of this; but then, psychiatric diagnosis still lacks an objective, biological basis today.
Asylum charters make it clear that, at least in theory, the mad were to be treated with compassion. Available evidence suggests that physical restraints (such as cages) were only used as a last resort. This is not to say there was no cruelty or maltreatment: confinement precipitates abuse — as the treatment of people diagnosed with mental illness in contemporary US prisons testifies.
Cervantes’ Spain, for all its cruelty, had its claims to compassion as well. Locura had spiritual significance, and charity toward locos was viewed as particularly meritorious. During the celebration of Holy Week, twelve asylum residents were chosen to play the Twelve Apostles. Asylum administrators washed these “Apostles’” feet.
In studying the history — and literature — of mental illness, we are better served by turning a skeptical eye on the practices of our own era than by a smugly superior attitude toward our predecessors.
If I ever meet a man named Manuelo from Paris, he’d better watch his fucking head. I mean it. I told her one day when I was soaked with rain, in a white shirt stained brown from shoulder to opposite hip, from a cheap leather strap wet from the rain. I was using the strap to hold a bag with my belongings in it. It needed to be said. I’d been walking in rain lost talking, talking to myself, appearing at an art opening in NY to meet Catherine, and each past boyfriend of hers came by to shake my wet hand. Each one looked at me and stifled a gasp, a laugh, a crack — I gripped her elbow, staring at her ex’s tie clip, and said, “Never make me shake hands. If we don’t make it, don’t you ever introduce me. You hear me? I don’t want to be anybody’s former anybody. Please, don’t make me shake a damn hand. I might not give it back.” Giving her some credit, I wasn’t easy to be with.
I looked through a very expensive telescope in a grocery store parking lot tonight, and saw what’s out there.
And it’s impressive!
I mean in space.
I saw the craters of the moon in blinding bone white brilliance, rippling in light and I don’t know what. But rippling and bone white right into the craters was mostly enough.
I saw Saturn.
This is not a metaphor. This is not about Manuelo and whatever he is doing over there with Catherine in the boot of the boot. Can you imagine what he is doing with her? In Italy! Christ!
(This is all what I felt and wrote while living at the new ranch only a few months and Catherine went off with a Spanish man named Manuelo who she’d met in Paris, where she was visiting during living for a few months in Italy after I moved to Texas, and we were still together, and I felt it, the moment he touched her and I somehow knew it, what had happened, while staring at St. Jude’s Chapel’s mural, sitting down to coffee and steak and eggs in Dallas, and later found out, and the times matched up, and I fell to writing this all down.)
I tried to give the man anything. Anything. Food, bottles of wine, sushi, my home to stay in. He wanted nothing — the man with the scope.
I want to tell you about the man with the scope. I mean to tell you what is out there around us in space. I want to tell you about her.
Catherine. Her name is like space and what there is unto itself that I saw out there. Last time I told it I showed her all wrong — in the wrong light. Last time, she came back and we went to Puerto Rico. We saw wild horses. We swam in the dark before the moon rose to swim and the water lit up wherever we swam and made glowing dots green on our skins in the dark. We had rode a motorbike all over the island, me driving too fast, as fast as it would go over the wild, bumpy, bare earth to the sea to swim in a bioluminescent bay full of sharks. Her dark hair and pale skin and a vein dark across her unknown heart.
I was held up at gunpoint by a man in Puerto Rico and the man who held me up had tears in his eyes. I made him give me a cigarette after I gave him my money, which wasn’t much. I had thought about punching him, since it was just me and him, and he was bleary eyed, leaning against a palm tree on a motorbike, but I just made him light my cigarette. He was so Christian about it. Him crying for robbing me in the dark. He had a great .45. Catherine was back in the room, naked under the sheets. I was six and a half feet tall, searching, white fake Indian cowboy, with the world going two-thousand m.p.h. around itself at any given point, and the peyote in my senses for six years so far, as I went cooling through my pants and sky and the world and I made that sonofabitch light my cigarette and he cried and circled me in his hidden drugged pain. For the shame of not carrying his pain without the drugs, maybe he cried. I was still overcoming pancreatitis. (There’s more to this story. This was before Texas, after the hospital, before Manuelo.) He had his friends come over from across the street where they’d hid in the dark. Back then I felt if I stared anyone in the eyes they could see my inner self, straight from the peyote, could see I was the real genuine leather. Now I’d be afraid and serious. They tried to translate but I already spoke Spanish. I’m talking about he who robbed me and lit my cig and his friends from across the street. They were so sad when they heard about the pancreatitis. I made the mistake and told the crying robber I didn’t want the rest of his cigarettes because I was getting over pancreatitis. They said the word pancreatitis like the last part of the word was titties. I felt so foolish, smoking, as a cop drove past and I signaled I was doing fine.
She won’t come back this time. (Catherine. It’s been years.)
[I went on my first date after Catherine, and the woman’s tooth had broken in half the night before. She kept the date and stuck the tooth, the broken away half, up in her gumline to hold it in there. It was one of her front ones. She kept excusing herself to the bathroom. With dinner served, it kept falling out and she would say, “My tooth. My tooth!” and cover her mouth with her hand and relocate to the bathroom for repair. During the meal, it (her tooth) kept falling out into her creamy pasta and she would search and dig for it with her fork. I took her home by cab after the dinner during which her half (tooth!) kept coming out, remember, and she would return to the bathroom and return to the table. I was embarrassed, but as a man, you know, you can’t just leave. You can’t just say, “I’m sorry, this isn’t working. I am going to go home.” There are certain performances, you know, for everyone, and we aren’t all animals, us animals. She tried to get me to kiss her wildly in the cab. I wish I could say I had wildly kissed her. That I had kissed her and gone mad with passion. I kept thinking about Catherine and what I was doing in exchange for losing her. Fink I was. I should have thought, what a girl! So willing and ready to see me she comes with a broken tooth stuck up within the gumline.]
I moved into the ranch house full of a family’s things. There’s pictures of boys with big ears on a wall. One wall has a cutout of Texas made from yellow wood, with varnished little shelves. On a clothespin glued into a tin of an old heat lamp is a sign made many years ago. It says, Mother my darling Mother my dear… I love you… I love you… each day of the year. There is a candle in a drawer, shaped as an 8. There is a bottle of Norrel perfume in the bathroom and photos of people who came from Mother my darling, Mother my dear, and I am not from this family. I rent this home. The Mother my darling is dead as can be.
Catherine is hard and keeps herself to herself and everyone who sees her sees she is hard but there is something else to Catherine. She has a child inside her — a girl who may have written the sign from the shelf on the wall. She hasn’t lost that. She is intact. She can write, too. Have anyone. What a beauty full of brains and a good heart, but I said I would show her this time. Anything went wrong with me, she’d say, “I think it’s a good thing” and then tell me why. She would hold my ear to cool us down. She put up with me being insane in NY, smoking, on nicotine patch systems, chewing drugged gums, running too many miles in all directions snapping on my forehead with my fingers and dressed in the same clothes everyday, panicking with visions in NYC. We moved to my family’s home in Oregon in the desert. We bought lingerie and had fires. She took to running. Her hardness has kept the child in her alive, maybe, along with her immense beauty, or she isn’t hard at all but I made her so with me (first chasing her around before and after classes with the old man in the hat, then when I was with her and cowering in New York in her room, smoking up all night with fear from exhaustion and so in love with her while she just tried to sleep, me talking and moaning and putting it in her with her sleeping, thinking and sensing with my corpus something evil all around in the buzzing city night, me: up, up, up. In love with the old man with the feather in the city with the city in America with America! She and I both working to be true.) Manuelo must see her, now. I wanted to make her pregnant and have a live baby. I once or twice or every time came inside her with hope we might make life without her consent — to carry on the great family. Hers and mine, both.
There was and is a church in the town where I grew up and at the front is a mural in gold squares and blues and reds and greens and it is Jesus with a pierced side bleeding and the blood turns to fire and the fire into wine in a chalice and from the chalice doves appear and fly upwards in rippling white. My parents married in the church. I was baptized in the church and I loved the church and later I became afraid of the church and loved the church as well.
(My brother was baptized there too. We wore the same lace gown. He then I. We were like little Christs and grew side by side toward our trouble making heartfelt lives. We had our differences of course. We didn’t stay two by two. We each had our path, but by the end and the way through we never turned a back. We always loved one another. In the end and all through he loved me and let me grow up the way I did, into the thing I am, the man, if you want to say that, and I always felt and feel he was the secret greatest. There’s more of him to come! [He died at 33, year I am now.] I cannot believe he has gone on, rode on ahead, not here with us, me, crazy, and my family, dead. But I wrote this before he left.)
(I smoked a strange drug with an Indian when I was a younger man and went back to the church ((on the drug)) in Ohio with my spirit. You leave your body on this drug. I saw the stained glass windows pinwheel with light and geometry. They were always beautiful in physical presence. But this was warmth and light not from the sun through glass but from God, or from the soul of the self, the universe, from the tomahawk of what was loaded up for me in that pipe, which the brain lets rip when you die, which also makes you dream, and there was no anxiety of being — anxiety that being separate from the universe is the source of all pain and suffering I wasn’t separated. I felt God beside me and in me and I in It. Looking without the eyes. Feeling God behind the poker face. I felt the world after death and it is beyond impressive! Hours later a car flew off a cliff before the rig I was in, which had a driver who’d picked me up hitching. Who had one leg but never mind that, the driver’s half leg. This was real life. The car that flew off the road landed at a forty-five degree angle and nose planted in the river, standing on its grill in the water like an enormous arrow. I rushed down a herder’s path and held a boy alive and in shock and felt parts of him go soft. He looked into my eyes, which back then were clear and I showed anyone. Others had come down switchbacks from the road high above. “You’re doing fine,” I told him. I felt the easiest sense of calm. Old God and me looking into him with great affection. A helicopter came out of the sky. Times like that the world isn’t doing too bad in America. Boys and girls coming down in a helicopter to save him and his girlfriend, she in worse shape, who knows if she lived. He did, I believe, but her, who knows. They lifted them into the sky. There we were, finding our own way home from then on and forever. I was sort of wearing a half dressed outfit, by this time, and the man with the half leg had me drive him to the Mission in San Francisco, my golden town. The driver, now I’ll tell you, had lost half his leg in a single nod off on junk. Circulation. Me in a half dressed state, barechested in youth. When he scored and shot, what was I still doing there? He filled the center chute with his own blood mixing with the junk. I guess I wanted to see it live, and then he shot some up to the sky. There was, on the ceiling of the RV he drove, blood and brown from before. What was my cue? Arrivederci, I was off, and not to cocksucking Italy.)
Sometimes I get to thinking of her over there with Manuelo and Italy and how it’s every girl’s dream to go to Paris and fall in love and then I get in my little rig and drive to walmart in town and walk around at two or two-twenty-three a.m. and look at anyone. Look at all those people. I have seen an odd armadillo in the grass tottering on its legs — and I think of all the men who ever loved and lost and went out to outer space to live with themselves.
Then a song on the radio plays as I drive over the stumpenly remains of a freshskinned skunk torso twisted in the roadway stinking through the boat of my car’s undercarriage.
She’s over there in Paris with Manuelo. She was visiting Italy only, she said. You have got to love the thing that will not cease itself or be killed or to let itself die. Guess that’s not us. Once it’s gone, how can you love it? Is it something else you are loving then? When it comes to sexual love? Mother my darling… Mother my dear… I love you… I love you.
I picture them in Paris. I have never been there, but I imagine the streets are prettier than here.
In a desk in this home I rent there is a box of Mirado quality writing pencils — the best! There is a small clear sharpening box taped to the box of pencils. Somebody taped that there. Let me tell you, they’re the best!
At the grocery store tonight, there was a man with a very nice telescope. He was waiting for fools like me who wanted to look out into space. He moved the position of the telescope and found the moon. I looked into the scope.
I once saw my sister being born. Me and my brother did. I watched a man in a uniform with scalpel and blood dripped into a silver bowl and I watched my mother scream. Yell, really. Yell and yell. Whoop. Whoop. Whoop. Mother my darling… Mother my dear…
Saturn was so far away, even through the telescope, it looked like a little trick on a screen.
Manuelo isn’t half the crazy that I am. I can prove that, too.
Why do you suppose he did it? Why are we so interested in space? Whose stars are those you see at night? Who has got his hands upon Catherine right now? Her skin lit up green in a dark moonless bay? Her whole heart alive. The man with the telescope, his eyes were screwed up like he hadn’t spent much time looking at things down here. What do you think makes a man do a thing like that?
Harry Potter fans who want to relive the story without rereading the entire series should check out this gorgeous illustration by Lucy Knisley. Knisley places the entire story, from staircase to victory, into this beautiful comic.
Nearly every song on John Darnielle’s fourteen albums with his band, The Mountain Goats, is under four minutes long. Many are far shorter. But their brevity never leaves anything to be desired: whether the track is riotous and punchy or hauntingly slow, the lyrics all unfold into extraordinary stories. It’s no surprise that there was a petition started in 2012 to name Darnielle the next United States Poet Laureate.
Darnielle has been one of my favorite storytellers for going on a decade now. His songs are lush with literary, biblical, and historical allusions and flung across both small town America and far-off locales. The characters are colorful and often profoundly damaged — many would make compelling protagonists if they had their own novels to star in. Take “Fall of the Star High School Running Back”: in 1 minute and 49 seconds, we learn of a star football player who suffers an injury that ruins his chances at a professional sports career, falls into drugs, mistakenly sells acid to an undercover cop, and gets tried as an adult. (Oh yeah, and there’s a Biggie reference snuck in there too.) Whole albums can be devoted to one story arc: Tallahassee is a spectacular, devastatingly beautiful record that tells of a wildly dysfunctional couple (a pair of recurring characters in The Mountain Goats’ discography) who move to Florida and deal with the bitter realities of a viciously co-dependent, crumbling marriage.
I was ecstatic when I heard that the prolific songwriter was writing his first full-length novel:Wolf in White Van. The narrator is Sean Phillips; deeply scarred from an accident that happened when he was a teenager, he lives a reclusive life. He supports himself through subscription sales to Trace Italian, an intricate, mail-order role player game that he created some years back. When two teenage players take the game too seriously, he’s forced to face the consequences from the fallout while the reader is slowly revealed Philips’ own disturbed past.
I talked to John Darnielle about writing Wolf in White Van, role-playing games, eating too much candy, and what he’s reading these days.
Spoiler alert: This interview reveals several important plot points in Wolf in White Van.
I’ve always been really into your lyrics, and your albums often tell these great, comprehensive stories. And I know you’ve written a 33 ⅓ book. How was your creative process different for writing your first full-length novel?
It’s completely different. A song, I don’t want to say there’s nothing to it…lyric and melody and prose are very different things. I don’t sit down on the floor with a notebook working on my novel. And that’s how I write songs, I write songs in front of the piano or the guitar and I ad lib them out loud and they come together between that and the notebook. Whereas writing prose is a matter of sitting in front of a keyboard — a manual typewriter or a computer — and typing and writing an outline. I would never outline a song. [Laughing] And I have very harsh judgment of someone who outlines a song lyric.
The last chapter of the book is the first I wrote, and I wrote it right after I turned in Master of Reality. And it was very different then. It went through a lot of changes over the years, because there wasn’t any game when I started writing it. It was comparable to a song in that I was ad-libbing: I was writing a story and things were happening and it started to circle toward what what felt like an obvious ending. And, well, that would be a short story and not a particularly good one. It would just be a short story where somebody seems to die at the end. I asked well, what else is in that story? And started to tease it out from there. I went the other direction.
I do throw away a lot of drafts for verses and stuff, but nothing compared to this. The original draft of this, there were multiple narrators, and every person was trying to piece the story together. And I did that for a year and a half or so and then I threw all that away. I mean, it’s around somewhere, I pitched it all and at that point, I had the characters developed in their own voices and I could filter them all through the main narrator. So it’s more expansive, and it’s just bigger.
So that big change came about a year and a half ago?
No, no, a year and a half into it. I guess I started writing…I don’t know when I turned in the 33 1/3.[Laughing] I don’t have a sense of years. I had enjoyed working on a bigger thing ’cause it’s sort of like touring. It tells its own story to you as you do it. And it’s kind of invisible to everyone else. You go through this process of understanding the work itself and what it is to you. So I wanted to start on something — I was sitting around the house and I wanted to tell a different story. I think I had just watched a documentary about some teens who shot themselves.
What was the most difficult part of writing this for you?
The thing is, it’s challenging but I don’t think of it as very difficult — in part because I’ve done manual labor. [Laughing] I enjoy it, so the harder it is, the better it is.I did run into some structure stuff where I would have to sit down with the various chapters and figure [it] out. There’s the present day…then it sort of drifts off like a continent becoming islands toward the end so that by the final chapter you’re not in the present day at all. I had to keep track of the sort of thing you draw diagrams for, but I’m really not good with diagrams. I don’t have a good sense of space.
So keeping track of that involved — once I had the whole manuscript printed out — sitting down on the floor with it, putting the chapters out like pieces of a puzzle. And at one point, there was a big liberating moment when I realized that Chapter 16 should be Chapter 2. Right? And it was before what you have in front of you, but once I did that it was like “Oh! Hold up! Now that’s a lot clearer.” So the hardest part was keeping the structure coherent. Here’s a story taking part in two different pasts, plus the present day — so sort of braiding them was the hard part.
I want to go back to the game for a bit. I can’t believe that Trace wasn’t in the book initially because as I was reading it, I immediately thought, “Trace sounds awesome.” I had never come across mail order games before. I didn’t even know that was a thing.
Yeah! Neither did I!
And I wanted to know if you played mail-order games growing up.
What happened was I started with this image of a kid having a day and then putting a gun in his mouth. I decided not to go forward from there, I decided to go backwards instead. I had to figure out — what does this person then do in his life if he’s alive? And my initial draft was very different. He was sort of a scarecrow figure. But I thought no, you know, you would live a quiet life and just be yourself. You wouldn’t seem that remarkable to yourself after a while. And that it would be kind of healthy and good and you’d sort of understand that was your path, whatever toll it took on your appearance, it was just your path.
In practical terms, you can get a job and so forth, but I think of this guy as being kind of outcast in a sense. And I asked what you could do for a living, and, you know, there’s all kinds of things you can do from home. I knew a lot of guys who made a decent living being distribution for records that didn’t actually sell in big numbers. But if you were the point of contact — if you were AX/TION in Massachusetts or AJAX in Chicago — you could actually get a pretty decent rent check together just brokering all these small releases to the people who wanted them around the world. There was a whole culture and I thought, well, I don’t wanna write about a guy who does music mail order.
But then I thought, what else could you do? I remember starting to ask around. I actually do [play] now, while I was still working on it — my wife and I, some friends of ours were into that. And my friend Clayton said “we have a weekly game,” so I now go into a table-top thing. We don’t do D&D, but games of that sort, where you’re improv-ing moves within an environment that’s known chiefly to the game master. But yeah, I thought it just seemed like a thing you might be able to do and I thought that I had seen ads for it. And it turned out, when I asked Jason, the guy I know who writes games now, he told me the name of a company, Flying Buffalo. And they do [write games], but it’s computer generated entirely. But the thing still is huge. The Trace game is this theory of assembly that happens at one point and then it just exists in cabinets, as opposed to these automatic moves.
I know computer games take the same amount of time to put together, probably even more time, but there was something about Trace that seemed so mystical and complicated. Which it is!
It’s the engagement. When you play a computer game, even if it’s in the first person, you are moving some other creature around. If you do this thing, you are making a bunch of “I” statements about what you’re doing. You’re kind of method acting. It’s kind of not surprising to me that a couple of players could get pretty engaged. And I would think, if I was the narrator, it’s kind of surprising more people don’t go off the rails. It’s a pretty involved thing to do.
So, you mentioned that you initially had that last chapter when he shoots himself first. And just reading the final draft, we know that he’s disfigured but we don’t really know how it happens until you reveal it very casually.
That’s what makes it hard to talk about. Like, when somebody interviews, there’s this fact that runs throughout the book and you’re supposed to be figuring it out but you can’t go like “well the thing that he does” [Laughing] You can’t do that.
We’re so sensitive to spoilers now, but I’ve never encountered one in a book like this, where I truly don’t want to reveal it because I just loved the way that you did reveal it. And I was wondering, was there a lot of rewriting so that it’s seamless and casual and you just drop it in. Did you have a more obvious way of revealing it at first? Were you just going to say it from the start?
So, it was a question that was hanging with me as I wrote the chapters. I said, well, at some point I should state it baldly, you know, what happened, and be done with it. And that’s when I spent half the day researching guns and what kind of gun you could do that with and survive.
Originally I had him shooting himself with a shotgun. Then I discovered that if it’s a shotgun, you don’t live. You would not live. I had to watch — I mean, I did not have to — but I found stuff of people who were being taken to emergency rooms and stuff. And I went oh, a Marlin 39A, it looks like he could…I mean, I would never under any circumstances turn one on myself or anyone else, but so it was that. You dance around how to reveal and I ended up writing that line, “when you shoot yourself in the face with a Marlin 39A,” was the first clause of it. I thought, that’s the only way to do that. Once you start talking about it, you start talking directly…and that’s how it came to pass as this. So yeah, for me, it was sort of like, doing all the research and saying well, you know, once we put it on the table, we should put it directly on the table.
That scene, followed by his dad telling him that he didn’t want him at his grandmother’s funeral sort of destroyed me.
Right, that’s one of my favorite scenes in the book.
I can imagine that must’ve been very difficult to write, but it was great.
Yeah, that was a heavy one. It was one of those things where, in its own sense, writing is a form of role play. I have never been disinvited to a funeral, it’s something I imagined. But if you’re living within the weave of the story well enough, then it gets pretty upsetting to think about these people who won’t be fixed.
I also wanted to talk a bit about the two sets of teenage male-female friendships. We have Sean and Kimmy back in the day when Sean was in high school, and Lance and Carrie, whose turn in the game obviously ends quite tragically. And I couldn’t help flashing back in my mind to Cathy and the singer in This Year, which I know is autobiographical. So what draws you to writing about adolescent friendships, both in your books and your music?
I think they were pretty defining for me. It’s plainly the case that I always, as a child, got along a lot better with girls and women in my life than I did with dudes. I was kind of afraid of dudes, I was a scrawny guy. Up until junior high, high school, all the readers I knew were girls. And that’s what I liked to do, was read books. I remember, a very, very fond memory I have — it was a defining month, or maybe three months, for me. I can’t put parameters on it. I was bullied badly in junior high, I didn’t want to hang out where there were people because it was risky. But it was a big junior high, outdoor campus, so I would go to the end of the field and sit at the bleachers and read my book. And there was one other person doing the same thing. It was a girl named Teresa Lee Yang and we didn’t really talk a lot. We talked a tiny bit about our books and then would sit and read silently for an hour. And it’s like, “well, I’ll see you tomorrow.” [Laughing] And it was a defining relationship for me, in a really quiet way. And it was 8th grade, I think, so the year just ended and it was the end of that. But yeah, those are the relationships that have defined me most, I think.
So what were you reading back then, on the bleachers? And what are you reading now?
Back then, I read science fiction. That was it. I was gonna be hardcore, I was gonna be a guy who went to conventions. I did go to one. This is the thing to understand about science fiction fandom back then: now that all takes place online, it is a massive, fairly well-coordinated fan experience. It’s big, the movies make millions upon millions of dollars. But to be a science fiction fan in the late seventies, early eighties, you used to belong in a really small club. It was a minor subsection of the publishing business. It did okay, but science fiction writers weren’t generally reviewed that much. Heinlein would get reviewed, but they weren’t as respected and it was a subculture. Where I would argue now that it’s pretty much the general culture.
Harlan Ellison was somebody I read constantly: I thought he was the greatest, I had a bunch of autographed books of his. And I liked Fritz Leiber. I liked a lot of horror, which you could not get your hands on. It was very hard to get a hold of stuff. The only specific horror zine I remember then was called Whispers and it was hard to get copies of Whispers. I had a couple. Writers like Robert Aickman, Dennis Etchison, who I think was doing novelizations of stuff — and all that stuff opens on to this whole universe of mid-20th century, post-Lovecraft, but it goes more interesting directions for me. August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen, Dennis Wheatley: all these weird, very strange dudes — [Laughing] some of whom have very unsavory politics. When I would get that, it was my favorite stuff. I really loved it.
Now, I read mainly, you know, what you’d call literature. [Laughing] I like stuff that’s harder to read, is a general rule. William Gass is a big guy for me. And right now, I’m reading something that’s not difficult and super pleasant. It’s called Hilde, I saw it on the desk of Sean at Farroux Strauss and Giroux and I said “can I have that?” Nicole Griffith, Hilde: it takes place in 8th century England. It’s the kind of stuff I’ve really been enjoying the past couple of years. Like I read Thomas Malory’s Death of Arthur and I was like “You know what? It’s time for me to be reading Merlin stories.”
And which writers would you say influence your writing the most?
I think William Gass, but I don’t think I sound like him. The thing about William Gass is he’s one of those guys who, if you told me, “oh yeah, this sentence here took me 10 hours to write,” I would believe him. His most recent book, Middle C, is about a single sentence. That’s the subject of the book. About a guy who is writing a sentence. [Laughing] His previous book was about a guy who was writing a preface to a book. [Laughing] But Middle C is about a guy who’s writing a single sentence and trying to get it exactly right. And I don’t know it’s what I actually do, because what I do, I think, is a little more about the mood of a movement toward a moment. It’s what I do in these little darkly illuminated moments. But I think the guy I’m looking at all the time is William Gass. And Joan Didion. Those are both sentence fiends. To me, Joan Didion is not about her subject matter. She’s about the sentences. She’s about the clauses. She’s about the way that they run and stack up on top of each other to create an effect.
My last question is not a question, but I just wanted to tell you I really loved the description of Sean going and buying a ton of candy and you describe him as sounding “an octopus feeding underwater.” And as someone who goes and buys a lot of candy and goes and sits in front of the TV and eats it, that’s exactly what it sounds like.
[Laughing] Thank you very much.
I’ve been cracking up about that.
The thing is, I’m speaking from my experience there. I’m a giant candy fiend. I’ll eat all the candy. The other thing is, there a bunch of scenes in the book, and I wonder whether it’s all of the best ones, right? Where I’m going well, I can give him this trait of mine. You know, why not? And it’ll just be a different trait if it’s in a person who’s quite different.
If that one stands out, it’s it’s because I am a guy who, when we stop on tour at a gas station, people will see what I’m buying and be like “are you really…naw…c’mon” and I’ll be like “nah, it’s good. It’s delicious. It’s the Bubble Gum flavored Mike and Ikes. I gotta have ‘em.”
In the latest FSG Originals video, Catherine Lacey, author of the fantastic debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing, talks to Isaac Fitzgerald and Sasha Frere-Jones. Watch it above.
If you’ve logged into Facebook in the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen the “List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way” meme. It was so ubiquitous that Facebook took notice and decided to run the data to determine the most common books picked by English-language users. The top books weren’t very surprising:
Harry Potter series — J.K. Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
The Lord of the Rings — JRR Tolkien
The Hobbit — JRR Tolkien
Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
The Holy Bible
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
The Hunger Games Trilogy — Suzanne Collins
The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
The Chronicles of Narnia — C.S. Lewis
The Atlantic also posted a graph showing the different clusters of books that users tended to post. It’s always nice to see people celebrating books, but my favorite part of book lists is learning about books that I haven’t heard of before. So with that in mind, I thought I’d make a list of ten books that stayed with me that not that many people have read. These books all only have a few dozen to a few hundred ratings on Goodreads (for comparison’s sake, the most recent George Saunders collection has 24,000 ratings and the first HarryPotter bookhas several million.) Since you don’t need me to tell you that Franz Kafka, Flannery O’Connor, and Vladimir Nabokov are amazing, here are ten books I love that you may not have heard about before:
Ben Okri is a celebrated contemporary African author and a 1991 Man Booker Prize winner for his novel The Famished Road. However, Americans barely read any contemporary foreign literature — much less fabulist fiction writers from Nigeria — so Orki remains, sadly, under-read here. Stars of the New Curfew is a powerful story collection that mixes folklore and spirits with modern Nigerian life. At his best, Okri achieves the beautiful, eerie, and moving feeling dreams. I’ve always been drawn to authors who can take reality and twist it into new, unpredictable forms. Okri’s hallucinatory unreality is something that has always stuck with me. Most critics would likely label these stories magical realism — although Okri rejects the label as lazily used. Recommended for fans of Kafka, Murakami, or Marquez.
The most recent book on this list, Karate Chop came out this year as the first book from A Public Space’s new collaboration with Graywolf. This short collection — only about 100 pages — by the Danish Nors is filled with sharp little gems of fiction. The fifteen short stories are realist stories, but realist in the bent way of Diane Williams, Lish-edited Raymond Carver, or Amy Hempel. Nors keeps readers on their toes and isn’t afraid to be a bit nasty with her characters. Highly recommended for fans of very short, minimalist fiction. The epigraph to the book sets the tone:
I come from a home with cats and dogs, and those cats were so much on top you wouldn’t believe it. They beat up on the dogs morning, noon, and night. They got beaten up on so much, those dogs, that one year they’d saved up so much hatred they chased one of the neighbor’s cats into a tree with the idea of hanging around until it came down again, after which they ate it.
Although technically non-fiction, the pieces in An Elemental Thing read more like prose poems. Weinberger’s essays take a focal point — such as “The Wind,” “Tigers,” or “The Vortex” — then spiral out in a dazzling combination of myth, history, facts, and cognitive leaps. I’d never read essays like these before, and have been looking for more since. (Perhaps the short essays of Borges are similar.) The effect is like falling into a Wikipedia hole as rewritten by a poet. The second essay, “Changs,” is, well, literally a list of people named Chang from Chinese history. Here’s a quote from the first essay, “The Wind”:
Wind was the vengeance of unhappy ancestors. Wind came from the mouths of snakes, and shamans wore snakes to blow them to the other world; in China or in Mexico, the shaman was portrayed in its gaping jaws. WIND, the character, was constructed from the pictograph of a sail and the pictograph of a snake. WIND plus SICKNESS meant “insane.” WIND PURITY was sexual longing; HORSE WIND was a horse in heat; MALE WIND was sodomy. An anonymous woman in the 5th century sings:
“When Lauren was a small girl, she would stand in the Kansan fields and call the cats. One by one they would come to her through the grass, across which lay the ice of the coming winter; and she could see them in the light of the moon.” — the opening lines of Days Between Stations
A lot of people know Erickson, but I often find that even people who have read and love him have never read his spectacular debut novel Days Between Stations. The easiest point of comparison is not fiction, but the films of David Lynch — although it predates Blue Velvet by a year. There is, for example, a hallucinatory jazz club called the Blue Isosceles owned by a man who wears an eye-patch and a blue trench coat. If you like dreamy, mythical novels you should give Erickson a try.
Like Steve Erickson, writers and readers know Joy Williams and yet not that many have read my favorite work by her. Taking Care is, for my tastes, one of the greatest American short story collections ever. In a recent Paris Review interview, Joy Williams was speaking about Don DeLillo and said, “His work can be a little cold perhaps. And what’s wrong with that? The cold can teach us many things.” That could apply to Taking Care. These stories can be dark, violent, and cold — but they can teach us many things.
Spanking the Maid may not be Coover’s greatest book, and it certainly isn’t one of his most famous. It is, however, the one that has stayed with me the longest. This novel is one of the most impressive sustained riffs in literature. The book has only two characters (a maid and her boss) and two locations (a bedroom and a bathroom), and each chapter reaches an inevitable, titular conclusion. And yet the slim book is packed with ideas, and a great example of what a writer can do if they are audacious enough.
Gene Wolfe is a highly respected science fiction author — sometimes called the science fiction Nabokov — who has never quite crossed over to mainstream readers. If you haven’t read him yet, and the idea of SF stories with the dense, lyrical style of Nabokov appeals to you, then this is the collection to check out. The collection is very uneven, but it contains three of the greatest novellas I’ve read: “Tracking Song,” “The Death of Doctor Island,” and “Seven American Nights.”
In what is maybe a trend on this list, here is another collection of bizarre, surreal short stories. Can Xue is a contemporary Chinese author whose work would fit nicely between Franz Kafka and Bruno Schultz on a shelf. If you like weirdo, moving short stories as much as I do then you will want to read Can Xue.
“Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel — and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.”
I put Hardwick on my list of great short novels you can read in a day a couple weeks ago, and I’m going to recommend it again here. This is a completely unclassifiable book that blends fact and fiction, truth and lies, memory and invention, narrative and musings. I was assigned it in a class on books that cross the line between fiction and non-fiction. I haven’t read another book that is as successful at doing so since.
“The future is forever a projection of the present.”
Abe’s best book is his most famous: The Woman in the Dunes. Inter Ice Age 4 is nearly as stupendous, though, and not nearly as well known. If you love weird science fiction and can get your hands on a used copy, you will be in for a treat. The novel starts as a murder mystery that scientists attempt to solve by connecting the corpse to a supercomputer… and it only gets weirder from there.
DNA India reports that McDonald’s India is swapping toys for books in their Happy Meals. Vice President of Business Operations for McDonald’s India, Ranjit Paliath, said:
It is interesting to note that while in the UK the average number of books owned by a child under 6 years is 6 books, in India the figure is only 3 books for every 100 children! We aim to distribute about 1 million books during the programme with the goal of helping support parents efforts to inculcate the habit of reading among kids from a young age.
McDonald’s is partnering with Scholastic and DK publishers to provide children with educational books about such topics as space, animals, and the human body.
To channel James Crumley: Benjamin Whitmer and I are drinking Mexican Cokes right out of the heart of a fine Saturday afternoon next to an unlit campfire at Vedauwoo in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow Forest. Talking about books, guns, and the general point of it all.
Court Merrigan: Your latest novel, Cry Father, comes out on 9/16. Why this book? Why this story?
Benjamin Whitmer: Part of it came from spending time in the San Luis Valley, down in southern Colorado. A buddy introduced me to the area, and you know, I’ve got a couple kids myself, I was thinking about what it meant to be a father. And so I took a drive through there with my ex-wife and kids and pretty quick came up with the ideas for the characters.
But also, I’m about ten years old at heart, and I wanted to write an outlaw novel. Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, you know? About people heavily flawed and deeply disturbed. Those are the characters I like, but I wouldn’t recommend any of them as role models.
It’s funny, you know, people comment on what they see as the overt masculinity in my writing, and I have to tell you, the men in my books, they’re not paradigms of good masculine experience. I mean, which of these guys would you want to be like? How are they masculine, in any real sense of the word?
But you can’t write an outlaw book about bankers.
CM: How about a happy ending? Debts paid, victims rescued, wrongs righted?
BW: Nope. I don’t do redemption.
CM: I believe you, because Cry Father contains one of the most noirish line I’ve come across: “You don’t have to be particularly unhappy to shoot yourself. Your average life will do it.” That’s one of those lines that just has a ring to it beyond the particular plot point at which it occurs. Is that a credo, or just the words of a damaged character?
BW: I don’t know if it’s a credo, but it’s true to what I’ve seen. I’m hitting that middle-age period where everybody’s looking around at their life and going, “What the fuck have I got myself into? This is it?” Seems like everybody’s miserable for the life they didn’t live. The irony is that I’m probably the happiest person you’ll ever meet. My kids are beautiful and healthy, and it took me so long to get published, let alone for anybody to read anything I wrote, that all the rest is just gravy. It ain’t perfect, but what is?
CM: No cops in Cry Father. At all.
BW: Nope. Everyone is completely outside the law. They just don’t exist on that scope, where the police pay attention. Places like that are real in, say, unincorporated Adams County in Colorado, and the people live there are, too. I just took some of those folks and exaggerated them.
CM: Outlaw country.
BW: That’s it. Outlaw places and outlaw songs. That Billy Joe Shaver song that Waylon sang, “Ain’t No God in Mexico,” you know? That’s all about finding some place where there is no law, and the characters in Cry Father, they’re always looking for that place, beyond the law, whatever it costs them. And when they find that outlaw country, they don’t leave.
CM: How about the violence in Cry Father?
BW: Violence resolves nothing, not in my book. People say the violence is gratuitous, and I want to ask, what violence isn’t gratuitous? I mean, it’s not gratuitous to the novel. People will say, “the violence doesn’t serve any purpose, it isn’t doing anything.” No. It’s just not doing what you want it to do.
CM: In Cry Father, you write, “It’s almost impossible to measure the damage that damaged young men can do to themselves. Spending their nights drinking, doing whatever drugs they can afford, fumbling through the kind of endless and circular conversations only damaged young men can tolerate. Conversations full of self-pity and self-hatred they can only end by the sudden imposition of physical force.” The endlessly repeating nature of that sort of violence — because there are always more young men, everywhere, — is that what you mean by “violence not doing what you want it to?”
BW: Yep, that’s pretty much it. I had a lot of friends who lived that way, and I was one of the most pathetic. It ain’t real attractive, but that’s what a lot of us thought it meant to be a young man. Some of us lived through it, and some of us didn’t. I’m not a real religious guy, but there’s that old line, “there but for the grace of God go I.” Someday I’ll get that tattooed on my forehead to remind me how lucky I am.
CM: Alcohol and drugs figure heavily in Cry Father. But everyone’s using for a reason, and none of it’s fun. As Patterson Wells says of the men on the disaster-area crews: “The men I work with, they don’t grieve. They drink, then they erupt.” Would Cry Father be a totally different book if everyone were teetotalers, or would these damaged people find some other route to eruption? Games of horseshoes? Religious war?
BW: Man, I don’t even know what a teetotaler would look like. I mean, I know they exist, but I assume I’ve got a better chance of seeing a unicorn. Everybody’s got something to slow them down or speed them up, prescribed or otherwise. I’ve never met a true teetotaler in this country, and nobody looks like they’re having fun. Everybody I know is just trying to keep everything from falling apart. I don’t think my characters are that much different than anybody else in that regard.
CM: Your ambition. What are you after?
BW: I’m not real modest, but I have modest goals. I want to write a book better than the ones I’ve written. So next I want to write the best third novel I can. I know I’m not going to make a living at it. I’ll always have to have a day job. If I wrote the best country noir novel ever written, and I won’t, I’d still have to have a day job. So I just want to write better every time.
It’s just so incredibly arbitrary. You write the best book you can, and then, yeah, you try to sell it to a major publisher, as happened with Cry Father. That’s the market and I’m not trying to tear that down or anything. The folks at Simon & Schuster have been amazing, and my editor’s brilliant. Working with him has been one of the great highlights of my career. But you know, every book I’ve read the last six months has been from a small or even micropress. The big publishers have no kind of monopoly on quality, and there’s a lot better writers than me who haven’t been as lucky.
What I’d really like to do is get my kids through college, buy some cheap land in southern Colorado, and put a trailer on it. Then I’d be good.
CM: Guns. What’s your favorite, and why should everyone have a favorite?
BW: My current favorite is a Wiley Clapp Ruger GP100 .357. They had a run of only two thousand, I think, two or three years ago. It’s my pride and joy. It just has this incredible set up, a rear wide-notch Novak at the rear and a fiber-optic front sight. I had a trigger job done to it, and you can nail anything you point at.
People get all excited about guns. Every time I get into it online with someone, I keep finding how little people know about what they are livid about. Fact is, it doesn’t matter. They hate guns, reflexively. I don’t, reflexively.
I try not to get into the gun debates anymore, but watching what happened in Ferguson I’m a lot less scared of the guns my neighbor has than the guns the cops do. They’re armed and behaving like an occupying force, and I hope people don’t lose sight of that. One of my best friends, Paul Schenck, was killed last year in a village of 3000 in Ohio. By a SWAT team surrounding his house that included snipers, almost a hundred officers, and two armored vehicles.
Lately my thought on it is that I’ll support any and all gun laws, as long as they start with the police.
Sometime between taking Snapchats and not getting off your lawn, the youth learned how to read. According to a new Pew Survey, Millennials read more books than Americans over 30:
88% of Americans under 30 read a book in the past year, compared with 79% of those age 30 and older.
Of course, this may be because Americans under-30 are more likely to be in school and be required to read books. Still, it’s nice news for the literary world. The rest of the Pew survey looks at library usage and shows Millennials still value public libraries in the internet age.
The most surprising finding in the new Pew survey is that under-30 Americans are more likely to think “a lot of useful, important information that is not available on the internet” than older Americans (62% vs. 53%).
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