DANCE WITH SNAKES

Horacio Castellanos Moya
translated by Lee Paula Springer
Biblioasis ($15.95)

 THE SHE-DEVIL IN THE MIRROR

Horacio Castellanos Moya
translated by Katherine Silver
New Directions ($14.95)

by Scott Bryan Wilson

Senselessness, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s first book translated into English, appeared last year to seemingly universal and effusive acclaim. Now two more of this acclaimed Salvadoran writer’s works have appeared on our shores. Both are quite different from Senselessness, which was a bleak, Bernhard-influenced tale of a man hired by the Catholic Church to proofread a 1,100-page document containing the testimonies of villagers who survived government-sanctioned torture and slaughter.

Originally published in Spanish in 2000—four years before Senselessness—The She-Devil in the Mirror is a less refined warm-up for that novel. Like Senselessness, it’s told in monologue, only the narrator here is an upper-class woman named Laura Rivera whose friend, Olga Maria, has been murdered. Laura narrates in almost real time, bouncing from opinion to conjecture to remembrance in the space of a few sentences:

Life is a catastrophe. How could this have happened to her? You went to her last birthday party, remember? She was so happy to be turning thirty—she said the best part of life was just beginning, always so optimistic, so vivacious. Those sons of bitches, those cowards, they should all be killed. Doesn’t her hair look great?

As Laura begins to investigate the murder in her chatty way, she learns that she is a suspect and begins to weave together the strands of a major conspiracy involving police corruption, prison escapes, and illicit affairs—only to find herself succumbing to paranoia as “Robocop,” as she calls the main suspect, comes after her.

Though it’s a full-fledged mystery story, the mystery itself is less central than her narration. Whether giving her political opinions:

He’s so different from that idiot we have for president now, that stupid fat old man, his own mother doesn’t even like him, I voted for him just so the communists wouldn’t win. Imagine what a terrible situation, my dear: we had to choose between that moron and the communists.

her thoughts on the sexual prowess of her ex-husband Alberto:

I like being on top, but not all the time. I’m telling you, I was always the one who had to be in charge: he just lay there in bed, with his undershirt and shorts on, like a plank of wood. Of course: he claimed that he’d catch cold if he took off his underpants and T-shirt. What a calamity.

her opinions on fashion:

Jesus Christ: look how those people are dressed. God save me. And that frightful-looking creature, where did she come from? Look at that one with the miniskirt: she looks like she’s a cellulite saleswoman. People no longer have any sense of the ridiculous, my dear; vulgar is as vulgar does.

or complaining about a friend (though it sounds like she could be describing herself):

What bothers me most about her is that she never stops talking; I swear I’ve never known someone who talks as much as Kati. She thinks everyone else needs to listen to all her nonsense. She just won’t stop: talk talk talk.

Laura’s nonstop, insistent voice becomes the novel’s driving force, revealing a contradictory and unreliable woman who is hard to label: she reviles most aspects of religion, yet people who are anti-torture are “human rights communists.” She refers to everyone as “my dear” in a way that is both charming and insulting. Through it all, Laura’s really talking about—even though she most likely does not know it—the corrupting nature of power and money, the downward spiral of society, and all the layers of pettiness that often define who we are.

At one point in She-Devil, Laura mentions her friend “Rita Mena, the reporter . . . she’s a compulsive liar, ever since she covered that story about the snakes; do you remember that huge scandal, about that maniac in a yellow Chevrolet full of snakes who went around terrorizing the population a few years ago?” She’s actually recalling the plot of Dance with Snakes, a novel that is, in the very best spirit of the phrase, batshit insane. In it, we find an unemployed sociologist who is unhappy; when a homeless man living in a yellow Chevrolet begins parking in front of his apartment building, he sees a chance to change his life. He switches identities with the man and begins living in the car, only to find that the man keeps four snakes as pets—snakes that talk to him and do his bidding. He then goes on a spree of murder and destruction, commanding the snakes to kill anyone in their way.

Dance with Snakes is essentially a thriller, and Moya uses the conventions of the genre to create a terrific amount of suspense and terror. But once we get to what is easily one of the most bizarre and discomforting sex scenes in all of literature, it becomes clear that—as with his later She-Devil in the Mirror—Moya is only constructing a traditional thriller on the surface. As opposed to She-Devil, however, the narration here is very straightforward; we have no reason to doubt the veracity of anyone’s claims despite the fantastic nature of many of them, as when the sociologist describes his interactions with his adopted snakes, which he calls “the ladies”:

The din outside was tremendous. The ladies were in a kind of orgy, biting everything in sight. I had closed the door and window to block out the screaming, but I could still feel the terror of the fleeing crowds beating in my eardrums. In just a few seconds the street had been destroyed. There were dozens of bodies lying twisted on the ground between the vendors’ stalls, as though there’d been a machine gun attack or an earthquake. I thought we shouldn’t call too much attention to ourselves. I opened the car door and yelled for them to come back. They came in excited and out of breath. I started the car while they gossiped like maidens in a tearoom, which was unlike them.

Dance with Snakes is the more “pulse-pounding” of the two novels, for sure, but both offer up incredible characterizations and Moya’s takes on the political situation in Latin America, with plenty of barbs directed at religion and the police. Hopefully we will see more of his fiction translated in the coming years.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2009/2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009/2010

David Updike
St. Martin’s Press ($24.99)

by Daniel Picker

David Updike’s aptly titled Old Girlfriends fans the embers of old flames. The second story, “In the Age of Convertibles,” brightly paints the milieu of 1960s youthful romance—“the beautiful, inaccessible girls we would see on the beach . . . the pantheon of goddesses of our high school, tanned and bikinied”—before the protagonist focuses on one less ethereal, a girl with “a beautiful constellation of freckles that spread across her upper chest, just above the top of her floral bathing suit, and the pale, intoxicating edge of untanness.” Updike’s painterly gift with description carries through the collection, making the reader wish there were more stories to savor.

Old Girlfriends is Updike’s first collection since Out on the Marsh two decades ago. The stories are set in the Northeast, in New York City, and in England, Africa, and the Caribbean. They cross both geographical lines and lifelines, moving from adolescence to old age while touching on the lives of young sons, graduate students, a middle-aged couple, and a widowed grandmother, among others. Updike effectively moves across various times of his characters’ lives while exploring the inner life of his male protagonists, who both mature and age.

To the author’s credit, judgment is reserved even as the characters sometimes make questionable decisions. In “Geranium,” the narrator observes the compromises of an older couple who coast through society’s stop signs; the title brings to mind Matisse’s still life while the story captures a calming French ethos. “Still Shining Brightly in the Sun,” in which a grandmother struggles for independence while proving an essential landmark for her university student grandson, also presents rough roads. But it is difficult to state when Updike’s driving is best, or what time of life he travels most brilliantly, for the stories all shine.

Both “Love Songs from America” and “A Word with the Boy” are set on foreign soil, and both stories powerfully embark on the path of the father-son relationship—the latter so strongly that it reads like autobiography. While all the stories are rife with brilliant description and laced with shades of subtle irony, the title story (also the longest story) drops off an old girlfriend before driving through a blizzard in a Volkswagen Beetle to return home with a new girlfriend. This Bildungsroman exemplifies Updike’s generosity as an author, and his protagonist’s gradual journey to commitment.

The final story, “Adjunct,” begins uncharacteristically with more streamlined narration; pages fly by, but as events and details accumulate, the story deepens. The single professor is left with the departure of his crush: “His face was still flushed and the ends of his fingers tingled where they had touched her hair. Beside him, the seat where she had been sitting was still warm. He pressed it with his hand.” With its window to a night’s lost chance, and to life’s and love’s near misses, it is a fine end to the journey of Old Girlfriends.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2009/2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009/2010

Vincent McCaffrey
Small Beer Press ($24)

by Kristin Thiel

Although longtime Boston bookseller Vincent McCaffrey’s first novel is debuting in the fall, it’s much more of a winter book—and for more reason than that it’s set in and around the crisp Beacon Hill neighborhood from late fall through Christmas. A young Jimmy Stewart could play protagonist Henry Sullivan, also an online bookseller, as he shuffles through beers with best friend Albert and barkeep Tim, awkward encounters with his recently deceased landlady’s daughter, calls for appraisals of dust-gathering books, and lots of death. What begins as just a strange period of time when several acquaintances die soon solidifies into two book-related mysteries.

Albert, who runs a trash removal business, includes Henry in one of his more unique finds, a sealed-off attic apartment whose interior indicates it has been untouched for a hundred years. Henry falls in love with the room’s pristine collection of early twentieth-century bestsellers and with the letters inhabitant Helen Mawson had kept. His fantasies about Helen’s life easily accompany his cataloging of the find, and supposition becomes truth, adding sturdy texture to the rest of the novel and skillfully shedding light on some long-forgotten literary history.

Henry’s week is already busy, but even the two-day notice his new landlady has given him becomes a brief aside when he receives a call from a former lover. Meeting with Morgan Johnson again, Henry’s life progresses from appraising her personal library to investigating a murder and dealing with multiple branches of her family, friend, and professional trees. McCaffrey, however, never crosses into Murder, She Wrote- or Miss Marple-type categories, in that Henry doesn’t become an earnest amateur sleuth, nor does he add “detective” to his business cards in hopes of Hound becoming the first in a series.

One of the strengths of this book is McCaffrey’s droll description throughout. He writes about Henry’s phone:

It was a fifty-year-old black rotary which still had better sound than any new one he had tried . . . . One thing he did not like was that strangers could call him . . . and enter his small universe without permission . . . . But then, he had often admitted to himself that he liked the unexpected quality of lifting a receiver and not knowing what he was going to get . . . . Then again, he did not like to be suddenly presented with problems he could not take the proper time to consider.

And about one of Morgan’s well-known friends:

In warmer weather, he famously wore a navy blue blazer jacket with no shirt and shorts and sneakers with no socks . . . he disdained underwear. Though his body seemed to grow a sufficient mat of red-black hair to keep him warm in cool weather, he did alter his wardrobe in winter to a Harris tweed . . . but still avoided shirts. He was known to strip naked at parties and swim in whatever pool of water was near at hand. Though he was a professed vegetarian, he had established a reputation for biting photographers, reporters, and presumed girlfriends.

As quick as McCaffrey’s wit is, so is his un-saccharine sentimentality. In response to a client’s demand that he tell her about the most valuable thing he ever found in a book, Henry answers, “A poem.” His father, a gruff man of action and not of contemplation, once surprised Henry by reciting a poem “as if in answer to some hidden question” before turning back without explanation “to his chore in the kitchen.” A black-and-white photograph of “long-dead film stars captured in their candy-colored prime beneath glass made Henry think of the butterflies” at the natural history museum. And about books in general, Henry is a re-reader, and for that reason, “there had never been anything more than fitful curiosity at a library. There was no sense in getting involved with books there.”

In the end, that careful attention is what makes Hound evoke such a Jimmy Stewart–movie atmosphere. It wraps up completely like a, yes, package—but an honest one, skillfully wrapped and artfully offered.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2009/2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009/2010

Robert Greer
Fulcrum Publishing ($24.95)

by Jaspar Lepak

Set near Hardin, Montana, in 1991, Spoon is a modern-day Western, complete with good guys, bad guys, and inclement weather. This time, the battle of good and evil takes place at Willow Creek Ranch, and the good guys are the Darley family, who have owned and farmed the land for generations. Threatening their way of life is Acota, a money-hungry energy company greedy for the coal that lies underneath the ranch’s land. The Darleys are strong fighters, but they wouldn’t stand a chance against Acota without the timely arrival of Arcus Witherspoon (nicknamed Spoon), a part-black, part-Indian, clairvoyant drifter who can do just about anything.

When T. J. Darley picks up the hitchhiking Spoon, he gets the sense right away that Spoon is something special. The Darleys can use the extra help at the ranch, but when T. J. brings Spoon back to Willow Creek, his do-it-yourself father needs convincing. With the help of an outrageous bet and some prodding from T. J.’s mother—a spitfire with a heart as sweet as her homemade pies—Spoon is hired on, and from that moment, the reader knows there isn’t a better man for the Darleys to have at their side.

Spoon comes to Hardin County seeking his roots, but T. J. Darley is also on a quest. Freshly graduated from high school, T. J. has put his college scholarship on hold because while he knows better than most people where he comes from, he doesn’t know who he is well enough to decide his next step in life. Spoon’s opposite problem—knowing who he is but not where he comes from—acts as a guide to help bring T. J. to his answer: “I found myself wondering what it was that drove a man like Spoon, and then wondering even more what it was that drove me.”

On Acota’s side lies money and power, while the Darleys have only their love for the land, a gumshoe lawyer, and Spoon. It’s a close battle all the way to the finish, including foul play so audacious that threats, manipulation, and violence nearly leave the Darleys helpless to protect what is rightfully theirs. Ultimately though, Spoon comes into their lives not to save the ranch, but to help T. J. realize who he is and what is most important to him. If only everyone could have an Arcus Witherspoon enter so heroically at the right time. In Spoon, Robert Greer has created a character sure to win a place in readers’ hearts.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2009/2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009/2010

Vivant Denon
translated from the French by Lydia Davis
New York Review Books ($12.95)

by Laird Hunt

The night was superb; it revealed things in glimpses, and seemed only to veil them so as to give free rein to the imagination.

This little book of lovely and loving deceptions has had a colorful history. First published in 1777 by one M.D.G.O.D.R.—which Peter Brooks, who introduces this bilingual volume, lets us know should be interpreted as Monsieur Denon, Gentilhomme Ordinaire du Roi—No Tomorrow was long attributed to Claude Joseph Dorat, an eighteenth-century writer of some note. As if possible misattribution weren’t enough, the tale was later recast as a pornographic adventure story in one instance, bowdlerized by Balzac in another, and released in 1812 in a revised edition with no author’s name or initials whatsoever.

The variety of guises in which No Tomorrow has appeared—and this handsome new translation by Lydia Davis must of course be considered another—is in keeping with its subject: the semi-divine smoke and gorgeously warped mirrors of eighteenth-century erotic adventure. Our unnamed narrator, twenty years old at the time of the events in question, leaves the opera one night in the company of his lover’s friend, the enigmatic, beautiful Madame de T——. He accompanies her to the home of her long-estranged husband, with whom she hopes to reconcile without sacrificing her racy lifestyle, and agrees to lend his (im)moral support in this endeavor. The husband greets them, frowns a bit, then goes to bed, leaving the pair at liberty to climb the proverbial mountains of pleasure. Or rather to think of climbing them, to resist climbing them, to begin the voluptuous ascent, to scamper mischievously, coyly back down:

“Oh,” she said in a heavenly voice, “let us leave this dangerous place; our desires keep multiplying here, and we haven’t the strength to resist them.” She led me out.

The evening of moonlit exertions reaches its crescendo in a literal hall of mirrors hidden away in the husband’s château. This secret room, built for Madame de T——’s pleasure years before, seems to our young narrator to be the place where all will finally be unveiled . . . except that a servant barges in at the crucial moment, so that instead of veils being cast aside, more are put in place. Which isn’t to say that the narrator leaves his night of anticipation empty-handed. In fact, his admiration for Madame de T—— (in whose clever scheme he played a willing, if unwitting, central role) is greatly increased by night’s end, and he leaves more adequately armed to carry out his own conquest of love’s complexities.

At fewer than thirty pages, No Tomorrow is a marvel of compression. Denon (aided and abetted by Davis, no stranger to the economical arts) builds clever commentary on the art of love into effective narrative exposition, as when he writes, “Kisses are like confidences: they attract each other, they accelerate each other, they excite each other.” Kisses simultaneously commented on and accomplished! No Tomorrow, then, both describes and embodies the ethos—perhaps a little too lost to us now to appreciate fully—of seeming to withhold while actually giving. And giving a great deal.

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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Penguin Books ($15)

by Steve Street

The Moroccan worlds Tahar Ben Jelloun creates in this compelling novel—one in the title city and another in the lives and minds of a variety of Moroccan emigrants to Spain—are so well drawn that when an overt analogy to Mexican-US immigration appears, it’s startling. That situation suddenly seems far away, because Ben Jelloun makes the Mediterranean feel so familiar, its people and their problems very much like those at home, despite the cultural and religious differences that tend to loom as large in Western minds as the minarets in news footage. Ben Jelloun’s characters and their concerns are plain and understandable, whether they’re sympathetic characters or not. Even a minor one like the recruiter for a terrorist cell—the savagery of whose activities is in no way softened or justified in this book—is shown to be human, with a facial tic and a history of studying literature at the Sorbonne, before embracing a fundamentalist form of his faith for reasons sociological, economic, and political, as well as spiritual.

The psychological and the historical, too, are as important as the human in this far-reaching novel. The story centers on one Azel and his mother, sister, and three lovers: two women and a wealthy older Spanish man. “Azel” is short for Azz el Arab, literally “the pride, the glory of the Arabs!” as he informs another character, admitting in almost the same breath, “Unfortunately, the Arab world of today is a shambles. So am I.” College-educated but unemployed at the book’s start, soon victimized by both a kingpin of the Tangier underworld and corrupt police, Azel dreams to the point of obsession about leaving the country—so when Miguel López offers him a job in his Barcelona art gallery that would qualify him for a visa, Azel accepts, even though the strings attached are fairly evident. “Poverty is a curse,” he says in one of the long, lyrical monologues Ben Jelloun’s characters deliver in order to reveal to us their anguish, their souls, and insights on their own issues, as well as those of other characters, the region, and the world. “It roots you to the spot, pins you down on a wobbly chair and you’re not allowed to stand up, to go see if the sky is more pleasant somewhere else.”

Azel and his sister Kenza are allowed to cross the eight and a half miles of sea between Morocco and Spain—legitimately, unlike a cousin who’s perished in an illegal attempt to burn up the straits. The people they meet in Spain and the changes they go through there, together and alone, keep us turning the pages and satisfy our desire for fully dimensional lives. Some of the characters do seem constructed sociologically, as if to represent a cross section of this world: they range from Azel’s illiterate mother and deceased cement-plant worker father, to party girls and criminals, to Azel’s fourteen-year-old neighbor Malika, whose hands and health are ruined in the freezing shrimp-shelling plant where she works—which, like a character itself, in one of the book’s many informative digressions on up-to-the-minute current events, is placed in a globalized economic context of exploitative outsourcing. But even the minor characters are sharply etched and emotionally involving—as with Malika’s “dream [that] had the perfume of childhood,” her “ladder . . . to a sky that was always blue.”

The main characters—Azel, Kenza, Miguel, and a handful of others—are of a meticulously delineated psychological complexity. Even at its smoothest Azel and Miguel’s relationship, for example, might be described as dysfunctional codependence, but even after its roughest stretches, both men express as much care and concern about each other as any two other characters in this novel. The effect is a sense that what holds Ben Jelloun’s far-flung and often desperate world together—as in the world we live in, at its best—is the connections between people.

At times the full characterizations can get a bit tedious or jarring. This book is not for the homophobic and maybe not for the homosexual, either, in its frank depictions of a variety of ungentle sexual practices and even less gentle attitudes toward them. And there’s some stereotypical behavior and dialogue by and about characters when they’re defined by gender or sexual preference. In 1975, Ben Jelloun’s doctoral thesis was in social psychiatry—on “affective and sexual problems of North African workers in France,” according to his web site—and in places this 2005 novel reads as if he’s still using some of that early research.

But more often, discussions of sex lead to cultural insight. One of the most incisive comes from Sihan, the woman Azel loves best, when he admits to her the full nature of his relationship with his benefactor Miguel. “Don’t get upset,” she tells him; “sexuality’s not the only thing in life. To me, you’re Azel first of all.” Compare this to the preoccupation with sexual preference and gender identity that over the last forty years has come to dominate our own public discourse in law, religion, and politics, as well as in popular culture. An effect of these frank descriptions is to de-emphasize sex by demystifying it and putting it in context: in Ben Jelloun’s book, it’s simply a human behavior among many others.

His literary technique is not always subtle, either. Narrative pacing is deftly but quickly handled in forty short chapters, often named after the character whose thread they follow. Imagery and language, however, are precise and stirring throughout. “So it turns out that I had to leave Morocco to finally fall in love, to experience that marvelous state that makes you so light, and so present,” Kenza says about a Turk she meets in Spain, where Miguel has brought her as his wife of convenience after converting to Islam (with, in another deepening of his character, surprising sincerity). Such interior states and character motivations are often explained to us omnisciently, as if the Western creative-writing workshop dictum “Show, don’t tell” is inverted in the East, or in soul-baring spills of dialogue to another character.

This might result in some impatient page-counting and rolled eyes, and it does provoke at least one howler, when Ben Jelloun writes of a minor character given to unprovoked shouting and commotions in the streets: “Nobody knew why he had these fits of anger, but a keen observer would easily have seen that he was psychologically unstable.” Such awkwardness may be a function of the text’s translation from the French, Ben Jelloun’s language of choice. But it’s rarely that intrusive, and the translation, by the noted Linda Coverdale, is fluid and lucid. Most often, thanks to the lively character developments and plot turns, our eyes are on the people in this world.

That’s because Tahar Ben Jelloun knows what he’s doing: the author of books of poetry and nonfiction as well as fiction, he won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for his 1987 novel La nuit sacrée in his adoptive (since 1971) France. And in 2004, he received both the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Cross of the Grand Officer of the Legion d’Honneur for the novel This Blinding Absence of Light. But he’s no pedant, as is evident in ten pages of conversationally informative notes at the end of Leaving Tangier, offered to amplify names, terms, customs, regional histories, literary and Koranic references, and other Arabic allusions in this rich and illuminating text.

The book’s world is fictional, of course, and sometimes even fanciful. The opening evokes a longing for escape so strong it’s been given a name by the thwarted loungers at Tangier’s Café Hafa, where after dark “the twinkling lights of Spain . . . appear” on the horizon; occasional later passages qualify as magical realism. But it’s our twenty-first century world, all right. The Café Hafa exists, according to the first note, and details like a scanner in a Tangier doctor’s office and a Barcelona street hustler’s “cell phones with fiddled SIM cards” further anchor us in the present. So do dissections of issues from globalization to individual identity (sexual, ethnic, and otherwise) to the historical cycles of racism. Some of these are expressed in characters’ monologues or thoughts, others with devices like a journal Miguel’s father kept when he fled to Morocco from Franco’s regime in Spain—an earlier generation’s inversion of the Arab diaspora that’s made Islam Europe’s fastest-growing religion, with a million adherents in Spain and up to almost ten percent of France’s total population.

Before addressing the social, economic, and political consequences of such new heterogeneity, Europe’s secular and/or Christian majorities have had to adjust to the very idea of otherness. We Americans do too, and those who realize that isolationism is a valid concept only for polygamous sects and kidnappers will welcome this book as an excellent way to open the mind and the heart.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2009/2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009/2010

by Scott F. Parker

Because of the degree to which David Foster Wallace articulated his own project in his interviews and nonfiction (and in his metafiction)—and because of the strength of that articulation—the standard most readers judge him by is his own. The most prominent example of this is in the judgment of how his work fits into the contemporary canon; the consensus among critics and readers is that DFW is in the vanguard of a movement responding to postmodernism, but of course, it was DFW who first told us that’s what he was doing. It’s a good reading regardless of whose it is, but it would provide a welcome sense of intellectual integrity and objectivity if it were someone else’s.

Enter "Footnotes: New Directions in David Foster Wallace Studies," a conference whose purpose is boldly stated in its program: “The critical discussion of David Foster Wallace has thus far been limited to a few aspects of his most popular works. Our conference seeks to expand the response beyond the popular imaginations' categories of 'difficult,' 'postmodern,' and 'genius,' as well as beyond the author’s own articulation of his project as a response to irony. We hope to encourage reconsideration of Wallace with an emphasis on new perspectives of his entire oeuvre.”

Curious if this would be possible, I went to New York in November hoping to discover new ways of thinking about a body of work that has repeatedly busted my head, my world, and my relationships with language and literature wide open. I’m far from alone in this. People who dig DFW tend to dig him pretty deeply and be fairly devoted to trying to understand his work better. This is made abundantly clear to me when, at the conference, I realize that despite having read everything DFW has written (most of it twice, the stuff I really love more than that), I am still on the casual end of the spectrum of attendees.

Organized by two English PhD students from the City University of New York, Alexander Engebretson and Judd Staley, the conference takes place at the Martin Segal Theater in the CUNY Graduate Center, across the street from the Empire State Building. Upon entering the Graduate Center I encounter a doorman, and our exchange goes like this:

Him: Hi. Which event are you here for?
Me: The David Foster Wallace conference.
Him: Sorry. Which one?
Me: "Footnotes."
Him: This one? (Pointing to a list of rooms blocked out for something called New Hope Conference.)
Me: Maybe in a way, but no that’s not it.
Him: Sorry.

I start to panic, stunned the doorman doesn’t recognize what a big deal this conference is, but a woman walks by and says something to someone about "Footnotes." I catch up with her at a folding table where Engebretson and Staley are telling the early arrivers that the room isn’t ready yet. I walk over to the café and try to start feeling like a journalist, though I have studied neither English nor journalism. I have a notebook that amateurishly has “journal” printed across the cover; I’m jotting furiously in it. When I emerge from the café fifteen minutes later I know full well the encounter with the doorman is significant.

The folding table outside the Martin Segal Theater is covered with books and staffed by grad students. For sale are most of DFW’s books. I notice only two missing. Signifying Rappers, co-written with Mark Costello, one of two DFW books that never really gets discussed—Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity is the other—is hard to find, which explains its absence from the table but not its absence from discussion. (It should be required reading for anyone who’s ever owned a hip hop album.) The other missing book, strangely, is the hugely popular Kenyon College Commencement Speech that was published as the book This Is Water after DFW’s death. This speech is widely read and discussed, so why it isn’t here I can’t even really guess. (After the conference I’ll have to go elsewhere to buy a copy for the friends I’m staying with in Brooklyn.) I check in at the desk and casually place my name tag over the nerdy cover of my notebook.

Inside the theater are seven rows of five chairs on either side of an aisle, making for seventy mostly full chairs. (Later the room will be totally full, with people standing in back.) I snag the only available end seat and look around the room. Of many scruffy beards in attendance, only one grows beneath a brown ponytail. Of many howling fantods in attendance (including Nick Maniatis, host of the DFW website of the same name, seated directly behind me), only one would-be exploding head is fettered by a tightly wrapped bandana. And most anyone who isn’t affecting a DFW facade maybe could be without much trouble. For a literary conference there are very few gray heads of hair present,¹ though there is one man who very well might be the inspiration for Infinite Jest’s Lyle. I have no more time to see who else is lurking here, because Alexander Engebretson is introducing the conference and setting the day’s goals: to promote a long and fruitful discussion of DFW that moves beyond the reductive terms our mass media has used to define him (“genius,” “troubled artist,” etc.), and beyond DFW’s own dictum that his project was largely a response to ironic postmodernism. “We have a responsibility to consider him,” Alex says. No one in the room needs convincing.

The first panel, “Consider the Career: Early Fiction to Late Nonfiction,” gets the day off to a scholarly start with Connie Luther’s discussion of DFW’s use of poetic allegory as a method of connecting with audiences who are too jaded to read stories in an emotionally sincere way. It occurs to me I might have done well to make time for an English class somewhere along the way. Elizabeth Freudenthal goes next and, among other things, contrasts the identities of the two main characters in Infinite Jest. Hal’s identity is oriented inside out, while Gately’s is outside in. A main theme of the novel is that Gately’s method is a viable way of dealing with human suffering, while Hal’s way will only perpetuate sameness. This isn’t a shocking reading, but the terminology seems useful and relevant to what we’re doing here today. Adam Kelly uses his talk to look at DFW’s essays, which divide into three categories: narrative essays, where DFW is a professional noticer; discursive essays, where DFW tries for a renewed moral sincerity after postmodernism; and political essays, in which DFW sought, à la Richard Rorty, to give democracy primacy over ideology. Filters (and now aggregators) serve as coping mechanisms in the information age, but they, almost by definition, put beliefs before information—an anathema for DFW, and the reason he, unlike many liberals, was willing to take the right wing seriously. As Kelly puts it, “his ‘we’ stands for the public as a whole.”

After a ten-minute break—during which I accidentally break the tongs for the fruit plate—everyone sits back down for the “Filmic Entertainments” panel. If there is a low point in the day, this is it. The papers aren’t uninteresting, but they lack—to use Zadie Smith’s term—the urgency of the rest of the day. A couple bits of interest from David Hering’s talk: Oblivion is the first book of Wallace’s in which he is confident enough not to be authorially present in the text, and in it there are no explicit mentions of literary precursors.²

During the next break between panels I don’t bust anything, but I do notice approximately half the presenters are male and half are female. A quick glance around the room reveals men outnumber women in the audience roughly seven or eight to one. Why the discrepancy between presenters and attendees? Does DFW appeal to male readers? If so, why? One woman who is clearly excited by DFW is Maureen Eckert. She’s sitting just in front of me and has been bouncing in her chair and nodding her head vigorously all morning. I didn’t know who Maureen Eckert was before right now, but I’m reading her name off the program as she steps behind the lectern to begin the next panel: “The Philosophies of David Foster Wallace.” Turns out she’s one of the editors of the forthcoming book version of DFW’s famous undergraduate philosophy thesis. I’ve been looking forward to this panel, and find myself disappointed and put off when Eckert condescends to explain the philosophy so that we can understand it. Maybe that’s why the most interesting note I take down during her talk is “animated speaker.”

It’s the next talk and a so-what feeling is coming over me. The "Footnotes" program quotes from Infinite Jest: “These academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go . . . ” This isn’t fair to Thomas Tracey, who is doing good work on moral responsibility in DFW’s fiction, especially in Girl with Curious Hair, but I find myself thinking I’d rather go read the book. The moderator looks terribly bored and I can’t find any urgency anywhere. Next up is Joshua Sperling, a young kid from Yale, who is surprisingly the most engaging presenter of the morning. When he gets to questions at the end, he answers them thoughtfully, rather than with prepared remarks, and has no problem saying “I don’t know,” which earns him a great deal of credibility when he does know something. Among what he does know (or at least contend) is that subservience to addiction in DFW is like subservience to industry in Heidegger: we end up working for what’s supposed to work for us. Not that DFW is a Heideggerian; while Heidegger says “questioning is the piety of thought,” there is a prominent anti-intellectualism running through DFW’s work. Fittingly, this is the talk in which a cell phone rings. Everyone gets a good chuckle out of the timing. I use the pause as an opportunity to note that many in attendance are using little electronic gadgets for note-taking. In my old-fashioned notes, I write, “What other author could generate this kind of discussion? [illegible]? Dostoevsky?”³ At this point in the day it doesn’t occur to me to note that no one has yet cried. It doesn’t seem relevant.

After lunch, which only relates to the conference insofar as the guy next to me afterward wonders what kind of sauce I spilled on my pants,⁴ I sit down for the next panel: “Biography, Reception, and the Role of the Internet.” It is during this panel that the emotions start to come out, by which I mean the sadness that everyone in this room has carried inside themselves for a little over a year now releases into the air, and suddenly there is perfect attentive silence from the audience. No one is tired, despite it being right after lunch and the coffee having been put away. And it’s because of one thing: the suicide. It goes against the integrity of the academic attention we owe DFW, but the truth is, this conference is a kind of public mourning for readers who have lacked closure since his death. We’re reluctant to admit it (the conference could have been held all the same if DFW were still alive) but his death is a significant part of today, and this becomes obvious during the biography panel. The big question is how do we read the suicide: medical illness or cultural symptom? If one of the major themes of DFW’s writing is to trust in the face of doubt, it can be tempting to read the suicide as a failure of the writing to convince the author: Wallace couldn’t receive the gift of his own writing. I can’t imagine a bleaker story than this one—thankfully I don’t think it’s the right one.

Matt Bucher, in his talk, quotes George Saunders saying, “He was the first among us.” It’s such an earnest and vulnerable and true thing to say, and sad thing to hear, that this is when the tears start coming, from Matt, from me, from others—but that’s not what matters. What if, instead of killing himself, he’d gone J. D. Salinger on us? We wouldn’t have the same reaction. It’s not just the unwritten words we’re sad for. His entire project (again, self-defined) was about connecting us to one another, giving us hope, showing us that we don’t have to suffer alone: loving us. And we love him because he loved us. And so there’s an opportunity now to think that love wasn’t enough. For him. And where does that leave us? During the Q&A Matt will say, “People are raw. There’s more to come.” And maybe, because of the suicide, it’s too soon to have a conference like this. We know we should take Christine Harkin’s advice and pick a narrative for his death, set it aside, and get back to the text, but we kind of can’t yet. We’re still raw.

The next panel is starting. “Language, Communication, and the Project of Wallace’s Fiction” is probably the best of the day. Mary Holland begins the session by looking at where DFW’s fiction fits in with postmodernism. Coming on the heels of the biography panel, it’s wonderful to hear her say, “Wallace’s voice in this essay [the McCaffery interview] is shocking, willing to risk sentimentality and bare a beating heart in order to argue the necessity that fiction do the same.” Because Wallace’s fiction succeeded at this,⁵ he helped us—to borrow from the title of Holland’s paper, which is borrowed from the McCaffery interview—understand better “what it is to be a fucking human being.” I think it’s because we’re so sincerely thankful for this lesson that even now, returning to a text-based, academic talk, speaker and audience are in tears. What makes Holland’s paper the day’s highlight⁶ is that in addition to being interesting it is also vital, urgent. It's a passionate reading of Wallace that helps us readers understand the texts and our readings better. It’s an academic paper that seems to somehow care for its audience, which is one way DFW defined art. But as inspired as this reading is, is it a new direction in DFW studies? When Holland says, “Wallace’s whole project in fiction can be summed up as an attempt to enact empathy in a world whose contemporary culture of narcissism, along with the infantile narcissistic nature of the human self, acts at every turn to prevent it,” I agree, but this is a reading of Wallace derivative of Wallace himself. Later on, though, I will feel like something has most certainly been clarified:

I have argued that this was his project all along, to get outside of his head by putting his distinctive, fully human voice in the heads of his readers, and in so doing to show us the pleasure, value, and necessity of struggling to get outside of our own. Then his acts of mediation via language, attention to the problems of language, and drawing attention to the very fact, form, and constructions of language in his fiction, function absolutely not to intellectualize the reading experience, to disaffect its characters or its readers, to wrench it from humanizing history, or to construct a fun house of ever-receding reflections of signification. Rather, Wallace through his pointed, earnest, urgent uses of mediation instead begins to show us again through language what it is to be, quoting his interview with McCaffery, “a fucking human being.”

It’s the middle of the afternoon and Timothy Jacobs is the last speaker before the keynote address. He acknowledges the tiredness in the room with a joke, but it’s not enough to keep the moderator from falling asleep during his talk. This is too bad for Jacobs, because his reading of Infinite Jest is wonderfully insightful and helpful. But watching the moderator doze is funny. He nods off slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, then as soon as his eyes close fully his head falls dramatically. He snaps awake, laughs it off, drinks some water, and does it all again. And then one more time. The guy immediately in front of me isn’t even trying to stay awake. Why is there no coffee after lunch? But back to the talk: “I’m in here” are the words of the wraith-narrator, according to Jacobs. The argument is convincing, I think, but the reasons come too quickly for me to write them down. So instead of recounting his argument, I’ll give one upshot from this interpretation that I find helpful as a reader: Jacobs’s raconteur theory says that the whole book is narrated by one speaker, who we should imagine is sitting across from us next to the fire and just spinning a fantastic yarn. What’s to gain from this reading? Exactly this: when the fire goes out, we don’t ask, Is everything resolved? We ask, Did you empathize? Did you identify? Does your heart hurt? As with Holland, this isn’t a new reading of DFW as much as a helpful one. Those are essentially DFW’s own terms, but I get them a little better now.

And now for the fireworks. Maureen Eckert, the philosopher who nodded in so much agreement during the morning panels, has nodded angrily throughout Jon Udelson’s talk. When it’s time for Qs, her hand is first up and first pointed at by the just-risen moderator. The problem for Eckert is that Udelson has overstepped his bounds in discussing Wittgenstein and Descartes. She’s marking her philosophical territory in a bizarrely aggressive way. The mood in the room moves from surprise to tension to amusement to annoyance to incredulousness in rapid succession. Her question is just a rant, really. Udelson tries to respond, but she’s still going and her voice is louder even though he has the mic. At some point Jacobs cuts her off and says, “Is there a question?” And there isn’t. Who knows if he even mistook whatever she’s accusing him of having mistaken? Who cares? I barely even want to read Wallace’s philosophy thesis now. Udelson is angry now, and he uses the mic to shout her down a bit, and he gets a chance to respond. Short summary: he didn’t do what she’s accusing him of. Her response: I’ll talk to you in private. No one is asleep at this point. It’s a relief when she disappears. I don’t know if she sticks around for the keynote or not.

If not, too bad for her; Stephen J. Burn is a fun and engaging presenter. He seeks accessibility in his talk, as he argues that DFW is among a group of writers composing post-postmodernism. It’s another DFW argument that can be traced back to DFW, but like those of Holland and Jacobs, it’s a good one. The way in which anything struggles to go against or in response to postmodernism is an interesting puzzle, because it is one of the tropes of postmodernism to co-opt whatever it needs to perpetuate itself. Barth’s fiction incorporating the death of postmodernism is a familiar example,⁷ but the point that even Barth’s nonfiction ends up being about Barth and writing is well taken. DFW’s nonfiction, in contrast, is much more engaged with the world outside the author’s head. This seems deeply related to every way people have tried to define his project. DFW is writing for us. “These academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go . . .” This conference is about as academic as things get. Does it help us? Is it supposed to? Burn says DFW resists material reductionism. Does that mean he would have resisted the reading of his suicide that might have been most helpful: that there was nothing that could be done about it? Was that, in fact, part of the problem? If we’re going to talk just about the text, and try to figure out where or what or who DFW is, how can we? We’re too close. We’ve got no perspective ground to stand on. For everyone in this room at least, he is the water. We haven’t even read his final novel, let alone had time to process it. How can we consider his body of work? It’s not dead yet. He is the water. Until we get out of it, what can we say?

So, new directions in David Foster Wallace studies?—no. A challenging and instructive and cathartic day?—yes. But something is still confusing. DFW thought we read to feel not alone, which means he thought it was his duty as a writer to help us feel connected. Avoiding the intentional fallacy was one of the motivations for holding this conference, but since we know connecting people was one of this author’s goals, there’s a temptation, with his suicide hovering over his life and work, to feel abandoned right now.

That’s why how we read DFW’s suicide, at least at this time, is entirely relevant, given the nature of his work, to what we make of his work. If the cause was not in his brain, it would be hopeless for us. If it was a problem with his brain, his death was probably unavoidable, and hopeless only for him. The latter is easier to live with, and it’s probably more true. Jonathan Franzen said in his memorial speech that it wasn’t DFW vs. the disease. That’s right. The disease was inside of him, a part of him. It was one of the conditions of his life, and there was a significant chance all along that it would be the cause of his death. And the saddest thing of all is that the thing he wanted so much to give us (“I wish you way more than luck”) is one thing the disease prevented him from giving himself.

An academic’s job, a friend told me recently, is to keep the debate going. I don’t think the debate’s started yet. But there are a lot of us swimming around, and eventually we’ll get out of the water, dry off a little, and be able to consider the vastness of this ocean.

 

¹ A possible explanation of this phenomenon from Zadie Smith: “There is a weird ambient sameness to Wallace’s work. He was always asking essentially the same question. How do I recognize that other people are real, as I am? And the strange, quasi-mystical answer was always the same, too. You may have to give up your attachment to the ‘self.’ I don’t mean that Wallace ‘preached’ this moral in his work; when I think of a moralist I don’t think of a preacher. On the contrary, he was a writer who placed himself ‘in the hazard’ of his own terms, undergoing them as real problems, both in life and on the page. For this reason, I suspect he will remain a writer who appeals, above all, to the young. It’s young people who best understand his sense of urgency, and who tend to take abstract existential questions like these seriously, as interrogations that relate directly to themselves. The struggle with ego, the struggle with the self, the struggle to allow other people to exist in their genuine ‘otherness’—these were aspects of Wallace’s own struggle.”

² Although, I mentioned Rorty in the preceding paragraph, and one story in Oblivion takes its title from Rorty’s best-known work.

³ When I later reread the Dostoevsky essay from Consider the Lobster I’ll say, “Yeah, Dostoevsky could.” And I’ll really wonder who [illegible] was.

⁴ It was soft tofu soup from Korea Town.

⁵ Although it’s worth mentioning Holland takes the minority position that IJ fails at this, and Wallace doesn’t succeed until his nonfiction book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

⁶ This is not just my opinion. As she finishes, the guy next to me turns and shouts in my face, “Wow! That was fantastic!”

⁷ Burn did mention that Barth hasn’t yet read Infinite Jest, but that he says he intends to get around to it one day. Burn then quipped—and who can disagree?—that he doesn’t believe him.

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Often called “a citizen writer” like her friend and mentor Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams is one of the foremost explorers of the American landscape. Raised and still residing in Utah, she has penned more than a dozen books that imply a blurred division between the worlds of nature and humanity, a cleft leaned heavily upon by a previous generation of literary naturalists. Her 1991 memoir Refuge that brought her international acclaim parallels the death of her mother with the flooding of the Great Salt Lake as an examination of loss and grief. A 2004 essay collection, The Open Space of Democracy, offers of a vision of citizen engagement yoked to an engagement with natural places. In 2008, Williams published Finding Beauty in a Broken World, an associative tessellation of genocide, the endangered prairie dog, and mosaic making, each bowing toward the question embedded in the book’s title.

In 2006, Terry Tempest Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, its highest honor given to an American citizen. She is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. I spoke with her in a hotel room in San Francisco, where a large picture window captured the region’s legendary fog lifting off the shoulders of Mount Diablo.

Kevin Smokler: I’m particularly interested that we’re having this conversation in San Francisco, a major metropolitan area that has enormous reverence for the natural world. The boundaries of the city were redrawn by the 1906 earthquake and pretty much left that way. It’s also where much of the established environmental movement—the Sierra Club, for example—calls home. And yet at the same time it is a place of change and innovation. It seems like a place where the soul of how we regard the environmental movement is being played out.

Terry Tempest Williams: I think that’s so true, and you can even see it structurally with the new building at the California Academy of Sciences. It’s the most green building in the world. You stand on the roof with these beautiful mounds, with these holes that allow light to trickle down, with all these different elevations, and it allows you to forego your perspective as a human being and almost see yourself as other. I just loved it.

KS: How do you see that building as connecting the older version of environmentalism, which focused on the protection of open spaces, and the “bright green” environmentalism being pushed by Silicon Valley, the idea that brainpower and technology can create a greener, more sustainable world?

TTW: Well, I think the California Academy of Sciences embodies that, because they erased the old buildings, they reduced their physical footprint as well as their carbon footprint. But they kept the wonderful brass seahorse banister that you still hold onto as you ascend and descend, and many of the old dioramas are still there, again almost a museum within a museum. So they’ve built on the tradition that was there, but they have far surpassed it into a wider, broader conversation.

KS: I bring this up by way of talking about your new book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, which has the metaphor of a mosaic at its center. I don’t know if it was coincidental that this book came out in the waning months of the Bush administration—would it have had the same title if it came out six months later, with this renewed sense of hope so many have with the Obama presidency?

TTW: I’ve always believed that books come out when they are needed. This has been an eight-year project; I work slowly, and it was fascinating traveling around the country after the book came out because half of the tour was during the Bush administration and the other half was when Obama had been elected president. With both administrations, we are being asked to think about how we repair what’s been broken in these last eight years—in terms of environmental policy, in terms of social discourse, in terms of the very act of a democratic society. How do we create beauty in a broken world? How do we create a view of sustainability in an economy that is crashing? How do we reconfigure our lives, how do we pick up the pieces and create a meaningful life? So, yes, we have a different form of leadership but the questions remain the same.

Unknowingly, I started this book on September 11. I was in Washington, D.C., with eight or nine photographers who were there for an exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, called “In Response to Place,” sponsored by the Nature Conservancy. We were about to hold a press conference and were sitting around the table talking when the security guard came in and said, “The Twin Towers have been just been hit, and the Pentagon’s been struck. We need to evacuate this building. We have reason to believe the White House might be next.” And we just went on talking. There was nothing in our imagination that could accommodate that information. And then he came in again and said, “What didn’t you hear?” Together, we ran outside and saw the black plume rising from the Pentagon with people running across the White House lawn . . . I saw how quickly the rhetoric of our country changed and I made a decision in that moment that I would speak out. I literally heard myself saying, “There are many forms of terrorism. Environmental degradation is among them.”

That whole year, I was writing op-ed pieces, and I had essays that were canceled because people felt they were too unpatriotic given where we were. But, as I’ve said before, I realized my rhetoric was becoming as hollow and brittle as those I was opposing. In one conversation with my father, I was ranting and he walked out of the room saying, “Why don’t you talk to me when you have something interesting to say?” I realized I had lost my poetry, and I wanted it back.

Sometime later, we were in Maine. I took a walk to the ocean where I called out a prayer: I said, “Give me one wild word . . . . ” And the word that came back to me was “mosaic.” What I love about the creative process, Kevin, is that I could never have imagined, never, that that one wild word would have led me to Italy to study mosaics in Ravenna, would have allowed me to see my own home ground differently, would lead me to the fate of the prairie dog and see my own country an ecological mosaic, broken and beautiful, and would ultimately, lead me to Rwanda to create a genocide memorial, a mosaic, literally from the rubble of war.

KS: You’re very proud to be an American, aren’t you? That was, until recently, a very unfashionable thing to say in left-of-center circles, but I get the sense that it’s part of the fundamentals of who you are.

TTW: Well, we are Americans. I’ve always believed that you work with where you are—I am a Mormon woman who was raised on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in the American West in the United States of America. But, by the same token, much of my life has been spent resisting traditional forms of democracy, resisting traditional forms of orthodoxy, be it the United States government or the Mormon Church.

I come from a devout Republican, Mormon family—my father’s the Marlboro Man without the cigarette—and growing up, the conversations around our dinner table were anything but peaceful. You know, the Endangered Species Act was shutting down my family’s pipeline business and I was advocating the rights of the desert tortoise. It’s a complicated history and it’s a paradoxical history. I’m proud to be an American but the United States government has largely decimated my family through nuclear testing in the 1950s and ’60s. Nine women in my family have all had mastectomies and seven are now dead. My brother passed away from lymphoma in 2005, one of five men under age fifty to die from blood-born cancers in their neighborhood. We have a history of betrayal with this nuclear legacy that is not so unlike that of native people in the American Southwest. I’ve chosen not to avert my gaze—I question my religion, I question my government, but I acknowledge that I come from both.

KS: Patriotism is a kind of love, and love is a complicated thing.

TTW: I love this country. I love it physically, and I love what it attempts to be, and I think we’re now in this resurgence of “what does it mean to engage in a democratic society with our highest and deepest selves?” I was at Obama’s inauguration and I still have trouble talking about it. For eight years, so much of what we value in terms of public lands was vanishing in the interior West. You look at Wyoming and it’s an open wound because of the oil and gas development. You look at parts of Utah, it’s the same thing. And I kept thinking, “Why aren’t we in the streets? But on Inauguration Day, Kevin, I realized we are in the streets, and now it’s about saying, “What can we create together with this new president who is asking us for sacrifice and service?” So I think it’s an incredible transformative moment, though we arrived here out of heartbreak.

KS: How do you imagine the next four years?

TTW: As a series of peaceful uprisings. I think now is the time when we really need to work hard to make sure that these ideas about constructive social change culturally, ecologically, and politically come to pass. And that’s only going to happen if people support the leadership, because the same power structures are still in place, and it’s not in their best interests to change. It may be that we need to be really creative about what civil disobedience looks like under the Obama presidency.

As a nation, we are saying, “We don’t know what to do because we’ve never been here before and the old forms are no longer working for us.” And, in many ways, I think this is what I was working with artistically with this book. Structurally, I did away with chapters and traditional headings; gone. I unmoored the entire text during the last six months of writing the book; I realized, “I don’t need to call this book ‘Mosaic,’ I need to create a mosaic.” My life doesn’t have beginnings, middles, and ends; it’s a continuum. And that’s what I wanted the book to be—a mosaic made of words with fragments: stories, newspaper clippings, poetry, political discussions, biological discussions, and a running narrative between three landscapes (Italy, Utah, and Rwanda). I took some risks. There’s a hundred pages of prairie dog notes, and my editor said, “You cannot write a book with a hundred pages of prairie dog notes.” But I wanted the readers, if they were willing, to enter that landscape of witnessing and I wanted them to be as bored and out of their minds as I was those first three days of field work, where it’s like, “Oh my god, there’s nothing happening here.” But as I slowed down, the world revealed itself in the most wondrous ways, and prairie dogs became individuals. I wanted the reader, if they were willing to stay in that place of presence and witnessing, to become engulfed, enthralled, and enveloped with prairie dogs as well.

KS: Is that what you’ve heard from readers thus far?

TTW: Well, if I count my father, who said that the prairie dog section is so boring that no one is going to finish it, and if they do, the rest of the book is such a downer they will be sorry they did. But I think there have been many other people who have understood it, and who stayed with it. I just had a woman email me who has started a prairie dog-watch society—she’s outraged that this is a species that could become extinct within this century; she’d never known that before.

I felt it was crucial, Kevin, that readers slow down and have time to build a resiliency in their souls with prairie dogs before entering into the section about Rwanda, and that the bridge between the prairie-dog village and the genocide survivors’ village would be my brother’s life and death. I think it was what Mother Teresa meant when she said: “We can’t take on the masses, it’s too much for us, but we can understand the suffering of one.”

KS: It all matters, doesn’t it? A cynic might say, “Well that’s very solipsistic,” but I get the sense that you begin there and you light from it very quickly.

TTW: Well, we’re human, this is our world, and I think we learn that that which is most personal is most general. And so, in a sense, we disappear into this larger world. I had a very dear friend, an amazing writer whom I admire greatly, who said, “Terry, you cannot publish this book. You cannot compare the plight of prairie dogs with the Rwandan genocide, you can’t do it.” And I wrote back and said, “You know, I understand the risks, but the extermination of a species and the extermination of a people are predicated on the same thing: prejudice, cruelty, arrogance, and ignorance. And if we can’t make those connections, if we can’t begin to see the world whole, even holy, I think we’ll continue to live in this fractured, fragmented state that is this seedbed of war.

KS: It reminded me John McPhee’s essay “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” which equates the former glory and dilapidated present of Atlantic City to the playing of the Monopoly board game. We can see it as a diminution, or we can see it as another way of understanding, a way of relating something that may be far away to something that we know.

TTW: I’m just haunted by our capacity to avert our gaze. When you think about it, there were once five billion prairie dogs in North America; there are ten thousand Utah prairie dogs left now—that’s it. They’re so vulnerable and then you wonder, what were we doing in 1994? America was debating at the United Nations, whether or not these acts of violence in Rwanda constituted “a genocide.” Meanwhile, while we were discussing semantics, one million Tutsis were slaughtered. I was thinking about the power of language, the power of the words “vermin,” “varmint,” “Tutsi,” “cockroach,” “genocide.” Genocide wasn’t even in our vocabulary until 1943, two years before World War II was over. Language has the power to influence our actions, to change our consciousness. Empathy, resiliency; these were the words I was using to create an alternative story in terms of a literary mosaic.

KS: On the idea of “mosaic,” I’m really interested as to how you reconcile as a writer this struggle between the personal and public, because it seems to me you deeply value your connection with other people, and yet the art you practice is a solitary one.

TTW: It is a struggle, and the people who are closest to me know I am a very private person. I’m an introvert, and yet, because of my passions about landscape and community, it propels me into a public sphere. And that’s what democracy requires of us, to participate, to engage.

So you have to be fluid and you have to be present but, as my friends and husband and family will tell you, when I’m writing, I’m not available—no one knows where I am. I disappear. I have a real gift for it, you know? I really know how to disappear; I don’t care about email, and I don’t have a cell phone; wherever I am, I’m there 1,000 percent and when I’m gone, I’m gone. All writers have their own survival strategies in how they manage to carve out time to create. I do try to construct a life that has boundaries: I teach in the fall. In winter, I try to be quiet, and that’s when I write. In the summer, I just love being out in the desert or mountains, and that’s family time. But nothing is as clean and neat as that, as you well know.

KS: How do you feel about the term “nature writer,” someone who writes about nature?

TTW: I’ve seen my books cataloged in libraries in every section imaginable, including occult, so I don’t really worry about the definitions. I don’t know how to think in boxes, and so none of my books have been single-subject, so to speak. I think of my books like ecosystems, where boundaries are fluid, not fixed, and I guess that’s how I see the world. As a writer, I am interested in patterns and semblances.

KS: Does that definition, to your mind, place you within a continuum of other writers? Do you have literary grandmothers and grandfathers? Siblings? Children?

TTW: I know the writers that have mattered to me, that continue to matter to me. Certainly Wallace Stegner, his elegance of language about the American West. Edward Abbey was also important to me—I had the pleasure of knowing him and walking with him in the desert. He was fierce and irreverent. You never knew what was going to happen when you were with him. I recall him saying to me, “If you’re only getting good reviews, you’re not pushing yourself as a writer, you’re not pushing the culture enough.” I’ve never forgotten that, as a writer it is our obligation to disturb the status quo and to widen and deepen the conversation.

And Rachel Carson, of course. I remember in 1962—I was in the second grade and we were outside in my grandmother’s yard—she was feeding the birds and she said, “Can you imagine a world without birdsong?” For her, that was not just a metaphor, it was a reality, and that potential loss was embedded in my mind and my imagination.

I would also add Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, J. M. Coetzee, and John Berger, as other literary mentors. And many poets from Denise Levertov to Muriel Rukeyser to Rexroth to Miłosz. Whitman, of course.

KS: Do you read widely?

TTW: I read all the time, because I think, growing up my books were my community. That’s where I would write in the margins, “Yes, exactly.” They kept me sane at times when I was very, very lonely and wondering, “Does anyone else feel like this?”

KS: You have a great line in Refuge that says, “We don’t pick our obsessions, our obsessions pick us.” Do your admirers demand you return to the topics you’ve written about whether you want to or not? I’m sure people still ask you about “Cancer” and “The Great Salt Lake,” things like that.

TTW: It’s funny, just recently, I was asked to talk about Refuge in Salt Lake City at Westminster College. It was the first time in twenty years that I had been asked to speak about this book at a college or university in my home state of Utah.

I think it’s important that as writers we ask the tough questions in our communities and beyond, but that we do it in a way that opens hearts rather than closes them. And I think that’s best done through story, but for me each book is inspired by a question—a question that keeps me up at night, that’s burning bright. With Refuge it was “how do we find refuge in change?” With Leap it was “what do I believe?” And with this book it was “how do we find beauty in a broken world?”

KS: How do you know when one project is over and the next one begins?

TTW: You know, I don’t think of my books as projects. I think of them as questions. It’s the questions, I swear, that I’m obsessed with. I think I know it’s over when I’m holding my manuscript in hand and my editor says, “You cannot revise anymore.” But I make great friends with the copy editor and the copy editor’s assistant, so at the last minute I can still revise. My editor signed off on this book in January of last year, but I was still rewriting in June. I love the revision process. For me, that’s when a book begins to shine.

KS: But if you have a body of work like you do, someone can come back and say, “Ms. Williams, I’ve just gotten around to reading Leap and I’d really like to talk to you about Hieronymus Bosch.” Are you tempted to say, “I’m not doing Hieronymus Bosch any more”?

TTW: No, because I love Bosch. We set a place for him around our table for seven years [laughs]. You don’t know where or when your work will find its way into someone’s heart. It always moves me deeply when a reader responds, especially family. When my brother was having chemotherapy, it was six months before he died; we were sitting in the hospital and he looked at me and said, “I would give anything to know what Mother was thinking before she died.” And I said, “Steve, there are clues and this is hard for me to say,” and he said, “I know, Refuge, I never read it.”

He went to Commonweal, which is a cancer retreat center, and that’s where he read it. And he called me and he was very emotional and he just said, “How could you have known twenty years ago that you were writing this book for me?”

KS: What did you say?

TTW: Nothing, I just cried. You know, you do your work and you don’t know what the outcome is going to be; those are the acts of faith, and writing has always been a process of discovery. And in that sense, I think, these books don’t belong to me; they just have their own life in the world, like water.

KS: I got the sense from Finding Beauty that you’re a person of many talents and interests, and I’m interested to know how you settled on writing as the primary mode by which you would express that.

TTW: I love my freedom and writing, honestly, is the only thing I can do that sustains that kind of freedom and that holds the magnitude of my curiosity. I think writing is always ahead of us and it draws us forward into unknown places. And I love that, I love not knowing where I’m going, I love that feeling of being overwhelmed, realizing I know nothing. I must have read a hundred books on Rwanda. I have a whole library on prairie dogs, a library on Philip II of Spain when I was writing Leap . . . it’s really the way I educate myself.

Writing also gives me the opportunity to teach, which I love, as well. I’m completely committed and devoted to the next generation. I know the people that were committed to me growing up and, for me, this is the full definition of sustainability. It’s now being able, at this point in my life, to turn to college students and say, “What are you thinking, what is it that you are passionate about? And how can I help support you in the story you wish to tell?”

KS: Much of your writing seems to come from a place of wonder and possibility, yet one that is well researched. There’s nothing I like better than learning things, and yet the amount of information we have available to us—the sheer amount of things a curious person can be curious about—is incredibly large and can create a lot of “din in the head,” as Cynthia Ozick would say. So how do you stay a well-informed person with the things you care about and yet not suffer from information overload?

TTW: I’m thinking of footnotes, but I don’t know why. In Leap there’s fifty pages of footnotes, all these backstories, and at the last minute of the last hour, I did the same thing with this book. To me, it’s all part of this associative life. I realize I can never know enough; I don’t know anything. But it is the attempt to see the connectedness of all things, the pursuit and possibility of a patterned life. At the very least, I follow my instincts and immerse myself in the questions that obsess me.

KS: I’ve often thought that in a world where there’s too much to learn and where everybody has to be stuck in their appropriate cubbyhole, there’s too little communal experience. The closest we come is things like presidential elections, things like September 11. And the solace I take in that is that if everybody is an expert on his or her own little square of ground, it means we often know nothing about a lot of the rest of it. And so, the commonality we have is not what we know but what we don’t. The shared communal experience is the process of learning itself.

TTW: And I love that, because to me, what’s most compelling now are the questions, not the answers. I think if we can ask the right questions then we’ll be heading in the right direction. It also occurs to me that, in my time with my students, the thing that they are most hungry for is experience. We’re so tied to the internet, to the virtual and abstract, that two weeks with prairie dogs now seems unusual. That’s no time at all, but in the scheme of our distracted lives, it’s a lot because our days are so fragmented. How long do we ever really concentrate or have a sustained moment of focus? To have an hour where we’re not on the phone, where we’re not checking email—I think people are hungry for communion, whether it’s with the land or another person. And it goes back to presence. To me, that is the definition of the sacred—that you are fully present with the person you are with and that you know you are being met with the full capacity of that other person. To be seen, to be heard. The art of deep listening is what creates compassion.

KS: In Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, he talks about fifty years ago, when people as politically different as Senator Robert Byrd and Senator Ted Stevens used to fight like cats and dogs on the floor of the Senate and then go out and have drinks afterwards. Now it seems like there’s an orthodoxy to progressivism that is as destructive as the narrow-mindedness on the other side of the political spectrum.

TTW: That’s why I’m so grateful for my family, because they’re constantly challenging me. The question I keep asking myself is, “If I’m interested in a change of consciousness, how is my own consciousness changing?” And I think if we really want this country to change, how must we change ourselves? This is a time of tremendous transition. We need to be gentle with one another as we make these radical shifts of behavior toward a more sustainable world, a world responsive to climate change, poverty, economic disparities, and ecological health.

It reminds me, going back to the mosaic, that it’s bits and pieces; how will we put them together to find this common whole? In that sense, I think this is such a beautiful time of opportunity and creativity to create these new assemblages, you know?

And again, what motivates us? I think it’s heartbreak. How do we live and love with a broken heart? To me, that’s always the question.

Click here to purchase Finding Beauty in a Broken World at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Refuge at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Leap at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2009/2010 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009/2010

Brian Evenson’s fiction is peopled by estranged ciphers, paranoiac wanderers, hyper self-aware talking heads, broken but not beaten skeptics, philosophizing cutthroats, and no small number of maimed and dismembered. Over the course of ten books, most recently the story collection Fugue State (Coffee House Press) and a limited-edition novella, Baby Leg (New York Tyrant Books), Evenson has proven that he’s as much a provocative storyteller as he is a masterful syntactical stylist; his sentence-driven narratives circumvent conventional story expectations and trespass genre boundaries while simultaneously navigating ontological and epistemological quandaries.

No stranger to awards, Evenson was a finalist for both the prestigious Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award for his novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press, 2006); his story collection The Wavering Knife (FC2, 2004) won the IHG Award, and he has received an O. Henry Prize and an NEA fellowship. Other recent books include Last Days (Underland Press, 2009), and Aliens: No Exit (Dark Horse Books, 2008); his co-translation (with Joanna Howard) of Marcel Cohen’s Walls has just appeared from Black Square Editions. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

John Madera: The first time I read Fugue State, I was riding on a late night bus to New York City. And once again I learned that it’s unwise to read terrifying stories when all the lights are out save two tiny bulbs above your head. One scary moment hit me while I was reading “Wander.” I had zoned out from fatigue and came to the point where the harried company are in the hall and see “a hole brimmed with water, and through that hole came a bluish light and heat, and looking closer one could see the shape of a blinking eye.” At that moment, I felt—in a kind of faint echo of that episode of The Twilight Zone, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”—that if I turned to look outside my window, I would have seen that eye staring at me. This all brings me to my first question: why do you write scary stories?

Brian Evenson: The story you tell reminds me of a semester when I was in college when I was taking seven classes (all of them English courses) and working the night shift at a 24-hour taco place. Six of the seven classes met in the same room, so I’d just sit at the same desk as the classes flowed in and out around me. I was getting more sleep on the two days of the weekend than I was getting during the whole rest of the week and began genuinely to feel like (a) I was going crazy (which I probably was), and (b) the entire world was a hallucination. There were times, sitting in that classroom, when I felt like the desk itself was opening in front of me like a hole that I was about to fall into. Weirdly enough, all that didn’t scare me (though it’s probably good that my girlfriend at the time talked me into dropping the job). Instead, it fascinated me, and caused me to revise notions I had had about consciousness, about what it was and what it could do, and about what it had to do with me. On one level, many of my stories are attempts to investigate a consciousness that has undergone stress or trauma or collapse, because I really think that consciousness reveals things about itself in that state that it doesn’t when the armor is up and it’s protected. As a reader, I like stories that change me, that open me up in ways that I don’t expect, that worm their way through my armor and keep on working virally on me long after the story is over. I’m trying to reproduce that effect in my own fiction.

JM: Sometimes, when I reflect on how destructive our militarist, consumerist, sexist society is to most of the world, and how diminished the possibility there is for any kind of substantial change, especially when the post-industrial world may be likened to an elevator where, if one person lights up and smokes there, everyone leaves it smelling like an ashtray, I almost yearn for some kind of giant reset button, some terrible cataclysm, where almost everything is wiped away—a clean slate, a new beginning. It’s one reason why I enjoy post-apocalyptic novels, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to Dhalgren to The Road, and why I will watch any film with this theme no matter how schlocky, from Planet of the Apes to I Am Legend. This is most likely a residue of my evangelical upbringing, which was filled with stories of plagues, floods, and the like. What post-apocalyptic fiction teaches us, among other things, is that the idea that paradise ensues after the fallout is a fallacy on many levels. In Fugue State the post-apocalyptic theme serves as a backdrop for several of your stories, sometimes explicitly (“An Accounting,” “Wander,” “The Adjudicator”) and sometimes hinted at (“Desire with Digressions” and “Fugue State”). So what is it that attracts you to writing this kind of story? What stories, novels, and films in this genre have affected you deeply?

BE: It probably has something to do with my own religious background as well (Mormonism), and the way that’s become oddly fused with/complicated by an intense philosophical nihilism. I think there’s a constant struggle in me between a kind of relentless optimism and an exhilaratingly bleak worldview; in life I tend to default to the former, and in my work to the latter, and that somehow creates a very workable, albeit potentially schizophrenic, balance. But I think also it’s because my formative years in the late ’70s were a heyday for post-apocalyptic movies. There was a sense in general then, at least among my peers, that the world was ending, that the ecosystem was collapsing, that things were likely to break down completely. Then people were distracted by things like the introduction of the kiwi fruit and the frozen bagel and swoopy hair, and we stopped being people and started being consumers, and through the ’80s and a good part of the ’90s we seemed just to forget about these fears, to repress them. But those fears have started to surge back up again with a vengeance both in popular and literary culture. I think they were always present for me and have always been at the heart of my work.

Two movies that I watched when I was eleven (in 1977) have always stuck with me, though I’d guess if I went back and watched them again I’d probably think they were awful. One was Day of the Animals and the other was Damnation Alley. Around the same time I was playing Gamma World and watching the gas lines (the latter was a little earlier, when I was seven or eight, but it made a huge impression on me). Philip K. Dick was a big influence on me in terms of post-apocalyptic work as well, as were a lot of other SF writers, and I think that Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast did a lot to cement a certain worldview for me. Also David Ohle’s Motorman. More recently, I was impressed by The Road, which initially I wasn’t sure about but which worked on me for months after I finished it. But I’ve watched and read a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff over the years. Each of the stories you mention above tries to take on post-apocalyptic themes in a different way, playing with different genres and subgenres.

JM: Many of your protagonists are either trying to break down blocks in their consciousness, or they are struggling to maintain their identity, their sense of self, in the face of its fragmentation. These are psychological portraits without feeling like case studies. How do these kinds of stories evolve for you? When I read that Sindt had failed in his critical examination of Roger Craven’s work, its “concern with dislocation and possession, its insistence on postulating all human relations as a form of torture,” I thought it might have been a winking self-deprecatory jab, as it might also serve as an apt description of many of your stories in Fugue State. There are sisters’ fragmentary relationships with their parents in “Younger” and “Girls in Tents.” The narrator in “The Third Factor” finds himself “alone and adrift.” In “A Pursuit,” the paranoid, perhaps delusional, narrator admits that his own psychology is “a decidedly murky affair.” How much psychology have you studied? And where do your interests and allegiances lie? What schools of thought do you privilege over others, if any?

BE: I think my stories tend to evolve eccentrically; I never know exactly where they’re going to take me until I’m almost done with them—if I figure that out too quickly, I don’t end up finishing them. I’m very interested in the way that consciousness structures itself and also interested in the way that we, as consciousnesses (if that’s what we are), interact with the world, about what it feels like to be embodied in a particular situation. I never took a psychology class in college but have read a lot of psychiatrists and philosophers who deal with similar issues: Freud, Jung, Klein, Kristeva, Bachelard, Foucault, Ferenczi, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze and Guattari, etc. I’m also very skeptical of a lot of generally accepted notions about the structure of the mind—I’m not convinced, for instance, that there is such a thing as a subconscious, at least not in the way that Freud and others discuss it. That model leaves a lot to be desired. I find Deleuze and Guattari provocative and feel they move in a more productive direction, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus. More recently I’ve been reading Thomas Metzinger, and find his models very compelling.

JM: What is the short story form for you? Do you find yourself working on them as separate entities in between novels? Do you begin stories without regard for what they are going to be until you’ve made a lot of progress within them—that is, is there a certain point when you realize, “This has the makings of a short story,” and then take it from there to completion? Or do you begin with the idea of a form?

BE: I’m always working on three or four things at once and usually have a few stories I’m working on as I’m trying to write a longer piece—a novel or novella. Some of them never get finished, and some get finished and then put into a drawer to be revised later and some actually work. I’ve got pages of notes of ideas for stories that I’ll probably never get around to writing, and which say things like “man looking for his brother so as to prove that he's not him.” I once knew what I intended by that but no longer know. With most of these notes I no longer have any idea what I was actually thinking when I wrote them.

Sometimes a story will start from those notes or from a fleeting thought or in response to something I’m reading or listening to. Other times, I’ll simply sit down to a blank page and try a few starts at random until something clicks. Still other times, I’ll have a mood or a character name or something else in mind and I’ll try to tease something out of it. It’s a very random and organic process for me and never works in exactly the same way twice.

JM: One of the things that bothers me about anthologies of classic short stories is how unimaginative the choices are. As much as I love Cheever’s “The Swimmer” and O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” if I see them included in an anthology or labored over again in some book, I think I’m going to yelp. If you were asked to compile an anthology of short stories, with an eye toward under-recognized greats, what would you include? And to make it fun, what story/stories would you choose as demonstrative examples for each of these respective subjects: image, voice, persona, point of view, character (as expressed in its myriad forms), setting (concrete, symbolic, mood), plot, journey, conflict, unity, fragmentation, backstory, flashback, exposition, rhythm, density, metaphor, satire, parody?

BE: I’m pretty resistant to the idea of teaching a story as demonstrating a particular element, because I think it’s only how all the elements of a given story come together that make it interesting, and all the parts of a story work rhizomatically to reinforce and transform one another. I talk about many of the elements you mention when I teach narrative theory, but when I do it’s usually with a number of short excerpts from dozens of different stories, as a way of preparing students to think of these elements function organically, complexly, and multi-tonally in a longer story.

Some of the stories I always come back to, when I’m teaching full stories and trying to get students to understand how all the different elements of a story are working together, include William Trevor’s “Miss Smith,” which I think does amazing things with shifting the reader’s sympathy; Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor,” which does something amazingly manic with doubling and which may be my favorite story ever; Isak Dinesen’s “The Roads Round Pisa” or “The Monkey,” both of which do things that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else do; Peter Straub’s “Bunny Is Good Bread” and “Lapland,” which do very important things in terms of questioning the relation of genre to literature; Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” which manages to collapse as a story while still establishing an incredible resonance; D. H. Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer,” because it works even though it does all sorts of things that contemporary writers have been taught a story shouldn’t do. I often teach Kafka’s “A Fratricide”—it’s far from his best story, but it’s very rich in the things it can teach a writer; I can talk about it for hours. I love, too, to teach Muriel Spark’s novellas, Ohle’s Motorman, Dambudzo Marechera, Barbara Comyns, Leonardo Sciascia, Ann Quin, Jean Echenoz, Éric Chevillard, certain Chekhov stories, Bruno Schulz, Heinrich Böll, Nabokov, Gary Lutz, Stanley Crawford, Kelly Link, etc., etc. There are a lot of writers I draw on and they’re different every semester, which is probably why I find it difficult to stick to an anthology. I end up teaching stories that I think are likely to be helpful or important to particular students.

JM: Would you talk about the relationship between genre and literature? Also, would you talk about when you first started teaching and how your style has evolved since then? Were there any pedagogical models that you found useful? What teachers have affected your approach?

BE: I think the clear and judgmental division between genre and literature is a 20th-century notion and is something that strikes me as very dubious. I think that different sorts of writing have always fed each other and that there’s always been a very active exchange that cuts across genre lines. That’s not to suggest there’s a free-for-all, only that the allegiances are much more complex than any categories would suggest. There are excellent books on both sides of whatever line you want to draw, and also awful books on either side of whatever line you want to draw. At a certain point I realized that my reading patterns were basically hopping across all sorts of divisions, that I was learning as much or more, say, from Dashiell Hammett or Jim Thompson or Mervyn Peake as I was from Raymond Carver or Flannery O’Connor.

I was never in an MFA program, so I kind of had to make things up as I went as a teacher. As an undergraduate, I worked closely with a Welsh poet named Leslie Norris who had a tremendous impact on the way I thought about writing and teaching writing. He had a real ability to approach any work in its own terms and also read voraciously, so had lots of models that he could draw on. Even though I was never in his New York class, Gordon Lish was also very useful to me in terms of getting me to think very closely and intensely about the dynamics of individual sentences. Pedagogically, I’ve always done workshops that are reading intensive, but in the last six or seven years I’ve moved away from a standard workshop and toward a model I now call the diminishing workshop, which involves an increasingly intense approach with increasingly fewer people.

JM: Would you reflect on your notions of space in your fiction, how it’s structured, divided, compromised, and trespassed in your stories? “Girls in Tents” strikes me an eloquent meditation on space, changing spaces. What is a window to you? A road? (There is that lovely mirroring in “Desire with Digressions” of the narrator walking “up the dirt road and then up the gravel road and then down the paved road,” and then later, when he returns, he walks “up the paved road, down the gravel road, down the dirt road.” What does a door mean to you? Some passages from “A Pursuit” come to mind:

Inside, the house was brightly lit, a generator slowly humming just behind a rear wall. Beside the sink was a bucket of silty water and into this I placed the flowers. The cone of paper I removed and smoothed flat, intending to use it to write a note, and this I would have done had I not noticed, just then, the line of blood trailing from the fireplace grate to the bedroom door. I approached it and prodded it with the tip of my shoe. It was mostly dry, but somehow that did not reassure me . . . .

I am by inclination a curious man but have learned through the years . . . to squelch this curiosity. Perhaps my first ex-wife was lying dying on the other side of the door, or perhaps she was already dead. Perhaps this was not her blood at all but the blood of another and she was there beside the cold corpse of the man (assuming it was a man) she had killed . . . . To find out, all I had to do was step across the room, perhaps four modest strides in all, and open the bedroom door.

But I could think of no scenario whereby I stood to gain anything by opening the door. I had read in my impressionable youth too many crime novels not to know that these things always go awry, that certain doors one should never open.

BE: Well, I’m very interested in movement through space and also in things that stop or interrupt that movement, the kinds of trajectories we take in certain real and metaphorical directions and the way those trajectories get deflected, reversed, or blocked. I’m very interested in space, partly because of an interest in Gaston Bachelard’s work. A lot of my stories are based around very simple movements—needing to get out of a house but not being able to, feeling both bound to a place and wanting to escape it, orbiting around a place or a thing. I don’t think I primarily see things like roads in Bakhtinian chronotopic terms, though with a story like “Desire with Digressions” you can make an argument for that. I’d also like to think that a window is a window and a door a door, but I think it’s a little disingenuous of me to claim that. I think for me a window is often also a mirror and a ghost, both in life and in fiction. More recently I’ve gotten interested in the fact that Old Norse for window is “vindauga” which means “wind eye”—that somehow complicates my sense of what a window can be. Sometimes a door is just a door, but the problem with a door is that it always opens up on something and until it’s open you don’t know for certain what lies behind it. I’d also argue that until it’s open you don’t understand the space you’re currently standing in with your hand on the doorknob. A door is basically a vertical hole and going through a door can be very much like falling through a hole. The door in both “Younger” and “A Pursuit” is also the point where, because it’s not opened, a trajectory is deflected. When that happens, the unknown presence behind the door festers and deforms, becomes the occasion for an imagined trauma that has actual rather than imaginary consequences.

JM: One of my favorite passages from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is his discussion of intimate spaces, how discovery of the “immensity in the intimate domain is intensity, an intensity of being, the intensity of a being evolving in a vast perspective of intimate immensity.” There is a kind of claustrophobic feeling to the spaces in “A Pursuit” and to the rooms in “Fugue State.” In “Desire with Digressions,” the narrator comes back to his house and finds it “still, the floors and furniture dim with dust.” In “Dread,” the narrator wants to “systematically dismantle” his house. Would you talk a bit about how/why your characters interact with their spaces in such intense ways? If you were to do a topographical study on the spaces you inhabit/have inhabited what would you concentrate on? What spaces have impacted you personally? What correspondences can be made between these spaces and your being?

BE: I like the notion of an intensity of being, but also think my work is fairly foreign to the idea of intimate immensity. As you suggest, much of my work is about enclosed spaces, confinement, limited spaces, in which immensity isn’t found, or if it is, it turns into a kind of madness. One of my earlier stories, “The Polygamy of Language,” has a character who is convinced that if he can just get his enclosed space right then a kind of immensity of understanding will crack open and reveal itself to him. But all his attempts to make this happen fail. The universe remains mute. The most intimate and potentially immense space in Fugue State is probably the tent in “Girls in Tents,” but even that can’t save the girl in the way she hopes it will. Or maybe it’s the armpit that functions as a cave in “Younger” and actually does accomplish something, even though that something is quickly swept away. I suppose that you could argue that the plastic bag around the head in “Life without Father” is my rebuttal to the Bachelardian space you reference—that intimate spaces are, for me, very much tied to annihilation.

When I was very young, my sister Kristen (who later changed her name) and I had a white toy box that had a small cubby in the bottom of it with a door and a lock. One of us could just barely fit into the cubby, our arms and legs and the rest of our body touching all sides of the space. We used to take turns having one of us lock the other in and then we’d go to the door of the room and yell things like “I’m leaving now! Bye!” It was at once terrifying and perversely fun. I often think about that toy box and what it felt like to be in there, which I suppose means, in very real terms, that part of me never came out. We also used to build tent cities, taking over the whole living room, and that imaginary, semi-claustrophobic, and somewhat magical space was very important to me. There are a lot of other spaces, both in childhood and well after.

JM: Many of your stories in Fugue State are concerned with looking, seeing, and blindness. There is the artist’s struggle in “Bauer in the Tyrol” to see and the difficulty he finds rendering what is there. In “Helpful,” the narrator goes blind after being struck by a wire and, besides dealing with this loss, attempts to make his wife see. Several of the characters bleed from their eyes in “Fugue State” and experience myriad visual and other types of disorientation. And in the same story there’s Arnaud, who in the end is caught in this vicious circle of “looking for something or someone.” In “Wander,” there is the man with no name and no father, whose eyes “had sizzled away in the sockets.” They’re looking at, for, or forward to something but they usually fail. Why?

BE: Human communication and connection are things that work relatively well on a coarse, unexamined level, but the more specific we get in terms of trying to get people to occupy our position, to see what it’s like for us, the more dubious things become. There’s a certain point that we just can’t go past, at least not methodically. I’d say the same about knowledge. On a day-to-day level we “know” things well enough to get by, to function, but at bottom it’s almost impossible to know anything with any sort of certainty. Art, both written and visual, is a remarkably imprecise process, and the act of artistic creation infinitely frustrating, but when it works it’s amazing.

Usually when you feel genuinely close to someone or when a work of art has an effect it’s because the rational has been short-circuited in a very positive and necessary way. The main character in “Helpful” is desperate to make his wife empathize with his situation; what he does rationally makes sense to him, but he hasn’t empathized with her situation so the results can only be disastrous. I don’t know, though, why blindness and impaired vision come up in a lot of my work. Probably it’s part of a larger interest in consciousness and the way perception affects it, but it probably also has to do with my own eye-related fears.

JM: What are some aspects of artistic creation that you have found “infinitely frustrating?” What are some ways that you circumvent its imprecision?

BE: Well, the thing that’s most frustrating is when I feel like I have all the components for a good story and the story itself just isn’t coming together. Or, even worse, it’s come together but it just isn’t as good as it could be and I can’t figure out why. So much of good fiction is intuition, so much builds up almost imperceptibly through very simple gestures of language and rhythm and repetition and arrangement and velocity, that a really excellent story manages to accomplish something without you knowing what it’s doing to you as it does it. There are a lot of writers who can do that at one iteration, that create that effect the first time you read them but not upon later readings. But there are only a few writers who manage to maintain that effect through multiple readings, who have stories or novels that remain numinous and subtle and resonant no matter how many times you read them. W. G. Sebald is like that for me, as are Nabokov and Dinesen and Beckett at their best. Stendhal is wonderful that way—the complexity of his style and the interaction of that style with his ideas is astounding. Bolaño is remarkable in being someone who holds up with multiple readings but writes in a remarkably unadorned style: that’s incredibly difficult, as you can see with someone like Raymond Carver. You can read most Carver stories once and then you see the mechanisms in them, the way they work as they’re developing. He’s a good writer, but except for a few stories he’s not a writer that stands up well to rereading.

All of that is to say, I guess, that what’s infinitely frustrating about writing is that you so rarely achieve so fully what you want to achieve, and when you do you don’t do so in a way that you can duplicate. I want to write stories that get inside readers’ heads and continue to work on them after the story is over, and I want them to be the kind of stories that, if you reread them, will get into your head and go to work again, maybe in a different way. But there’s always going to be a modicum of failure in every effort. You just have to accept that as part of the process and struggle against it—either that or learn to be satisfied with something you shouldn’t be satisfied with.

JM: “Bauer in the Tyrol” is the story of an artist on some sort of a retreat whose deteriorating skills mirror his wife’s slowly ebbing life. After several failed efforts to render a figure in plaster, and after considering modeling his wife’s dying face in plaster, he decides instead to draw, and here we’re offered one of your most startling passages:

In an instant, almost immediately, he had captured her profile, almost too easily somehow, yet when he looked at her again he saw it was not the same face and he drew it again, on top of the first profile. He kept drawing, adding to the profile the rest of her and the bed, and he kept drawing, the lines multiplying. He watched the head of his wife being transformed, the nose becoming sharper, the cheeks growing more and more gaunt, the open, almost immobile mouth seeming to breathe less and less. He kept drawing. He had never really seen his wife, he realized, and he realized further something that unsettled him, that he wasn’t seeing her now. But there was nothing for it but to keep drawing. Toward evening, he was seized by a sudden panic in the face of her oncoming death, and looking down at the paper he realized, through the haze of lines, that every image was being destroyed but in that destruction something was arising unlike anything he had ever seen. A bed, a harrow of lines, the many ghosts of his wife, and all of them somehow, in their erasures and obscurements, beginning to add up to his wife herself. He kept drawing, trying to bring her out. But she was dead; there was no longer anything to bring out. He hesitated, trying not to look at her, looking instead at his own solitary and solid hand, afraid to let go of his pencil, wondering what line he could possibly bear to draw next.

The way the sentences tumble along makes the underlying emotions much more powerful. I wonder if you would talk about your rhetorical strategies here, the voices and texts that may have informed it, and also in those stories I consider its cousins in terms of its tone and language, namely, “In the Greenhouse” and “Alfons Kuylers.” Reading these stories, the balmy and wonderfully suffocating prose of Joseph Conrad comes to mind.

BE: I think for a story to work well it has to have a certain texture, and that texture has to shift in a way that gives it a significant relation to the story itself. There are moments in my prose where, for lack of a better term, velocity increases, it becomes harder to catch one’s breath, sentences become more rapid and tumbling in a way that both reflects the character’s state of mind and hopefully gets under the reader’s skin. It happens in the stories you mention and happens in a somewhat different way in the last part of “Invisible Box” as well. In “Bauer,” there’s an allusion to Alberto Giacometti’s writings that’s embedded in the paragraph you quote, and it may be that which partially inspired the style of the whole. But yes, Joseph Conrad, who for me is one of the most brilliant stylists of the English language, is certainly there and is important to me, always will be important to me. Conrad must be a presence in “Alfons Kuylers” as well—hard for me to think about writing about the sea without thinking of Conrad—but that story is also partly a response to Raúl Ruiz. The lineage of “In the Greenhouse” is a little more difficult for me to sort out; I think it’s coming from a different place, more influenced by early Thomas Bernhard (Frost, etc.) and notions of observation found there, though that’s complicated by a number of other things, very few of them actually literary.

JM: Earlier you mentioned that you want stories to open you up in unexpected ways. And now you talk about how you want stories to get “under the reader’s skin.” It seems to me that in Giacometti’s drawings he was doing something similar. With a combination of erasure and an intricate meshing of lines he gets under the skin of the subject. His sculptures strike me as doing something very different. There he’s strictly reducing, subtracting as a way of finding what’s left. The kind of burrowing in Fugue State is mainly achieved with cumulative sentences. What is it about this kind of construction that you find so attractive?

BE: Yes, I love Giacometti’s drawings, love the way he overlaps lines and seems at once to be constructing an image and effacing it. The same with his paintings, but perhaps to an even more extreme degree, so that sometimes the faces are reduced to a blackened mass somewhere between life and death in what Reza Negarestani calls (in admittedly a different context) nigredo. I like the sculptures as well, particularly the early sculptures, but for me his drawings and paintings do something to the mind that the sculptures don’t. The late sculptures are bodies eaten away by remoteness, by distance; the drawings and paintings function and create a kind of figuration that verges on abstraction and in which the very thing that creates the image is what destroys it. Aesthetically I find that remarkably appealing, and I find the tension it creates very attractive.

JM: “Ninety over Ninety” stands out as a very different story in this collection and in relation to the rest of your work. What inspired this story? Are there any other stories in the works for you with this tone?

BE: I had the title before anything else, but had no idea what it meant. I also had a sense that the story would take place in the publishing world, but nothing else. Actually that’s not quite true about the title: the title that came to me first was “90 über 90,” which probably had something to do with the relationship of German companies to American publishing and which sometimes I still wish I would have used. I still don’t know where the dolls came from. Yes, it’s much more overtly satirical than my other work in the collection, more playful. It wasn’t inspired by anything that happened to me specifically, though I think there are certain echoes that you could probably trace back to actual people and actual events. No plans for other similar stories at the moment, though I suppose that could change.

JM: In a way, “Girls in Tents” feels like a look into the recent past of the two girls in the earlier story “Younger.” Here the father has left the mother and the girls cope with their shattered feelings and allegiances by making tents in their home, “a substitute house within the larger house,” where the two girls could be “alone but together, and nothing changing unless they wanted it to.” The girls feel that “when the father had left, it was as if he had taken part of the house with him.” It’s a theme you return to in another story here, “Helpful,” where the narrator, drifting away from his wife, reflects: “They were living in the same house, but for him it was no longer the same house anymore. It was as if they were living in two different houses that overlapped the same space, himself and his wife knocking slightly against each other as they passed through two different places.”

What’s the relationship between these two stories? Also, to what do you attribute your fascination with children’s perceptions of frightening events?

BE: They’re very connected, though one story is perceptually close to the younger child and other to the older. And both the stories are closely connected to an older story, “The Ex-Father,” which is a pretty direct response to some of Hans Bellmer’s photographs. I don’t see the pair of girls in each of those stories as exactly the same, but more as versions of one another, and each of the stories as trying to get to the heart of a certain kind of childhood trauma that we all experience intimations of when we’re children. I drew heavily on my own experience as an older child, but also on my fears as a divorced father and my desire to understand what my children must have been facing. In both “Younger” and “Girls in Tents” almost nothing happens, but it’s a nothing that will resonate for years and years for those girls. Those stories demanded of me a kind of merciless emotional honesty that I found almost unbearable. I originally planned to do more of them but just couldn’t.

Not long ago I came across the notes that led to “Younger”:

Kids uncomfortable in a house.

Kids left alone, not knowing if they should call their father, not wanting to offend him.

There is less of me but I understand myself better.
A directive from on-high, a breathing tube, letters.

Two girls in the house, told not to open the door for anyone, told also to go to school when the alarm rings. Alarm rings, but someone knocks on the door.

Don’t know what to do, progressively becoming more imaginative, increasing pressure. Pedersen kids.

Final piece—like an epilogue: “Years later, she would still call her sister, trying to understand what, exactly, had happened.”

They’re in that order, all on the same piece of paper. You can see in that too the split that led to “Girls in Tents,” and also see certain things abandoned or rearranged—the way for instance what I thought to be an epilogue immediately became the beginning of the piece, and the dropping of that “but I understand better.” I have no idea what the directive from on-high and the breathing tube were all about . . . The weirdest thing for me is “Pederson kids,” which suggests I had that William H. Gass story, which is very, very different, in mind.

Also found the notes that led to “An Accounting,” which were much more succinct and vague: “A devastated Midwest, a religious state.” They’re usually more like that.

JM: While “An Accounting” certainly doesn’t read as an allegorical tract, some kind of moral seems to be proposed. Actually, “proposed” isn’t the right word—it’s far more subtle than that. So how did the story evolve from that thought fragment above? Another thing that’s striking about the story is the narrator’s voice. How do you bring these disparate consciousnesses to life on the page, give flesh to them? How do your words become flesh?

BE: I think there’s something potentially moral proposed, but by a voice whose motives remain suspect, unclear. I think that that suspect quality is something that infuses both the voice of the narrator and the voice of the author implied behind the piece, whose motives may well be suspect in a different way, if that makes any sense. Hopefully the reader’s relationship to the piece itself is very complicated by the end, his or her allegiances unsettled.

I don’t remember exactly how the story developed. Very early on the narrator’s voice took on a quality that seemed archaic, at once biblical and 18th century, and that seemed essential to me. But the moment when it started to feel like a real story to me was when I named the dog Finger.

JM: I wonder how you negotiate your various roles and responsibilities and schedules with your life as a writer, and do they in any way determine the form or the approach you take with your creative projects.

BE: I think initially roles and responsibilities and schedules did determine shape, and I ended up writing a lot of short-shorts and sectioned pieces. But I eventually started to feel that was too binding, that it didn’t accommodate certain kinds of things I wanted to explore, so I’ve taught myself different strategies for approaching longer forms and keeping them going even if I’m facing a very fragmented week. I have little prompts to remind me of the direction I’m going next time I sit down, just a word or two in brackets, which I often ignore. I also write by hand and then will type what I’ve written in before continuing to write by hand the next day. I used to stop writing only once I’d completed a section or a discreet unit, but I’ve deliberately stopped doing that. I find that more interesting things seem to happen when I stop in the middle of a paragraph or even in the middle of a sentence, that it lets my mind continue to work in a way that stopping at the end of a complete unit doesn’t. I don’t think that would work for everyone, and I know it wouldn’t have worked for me when I was a younger writer—I needed control and discreet shape then to the same degree I need chaos and chance now.

JM: I noticed in your acknowledgments that you thanked Gary Lutz “for his meticulous reading of the manuscript.” Would you talk about Lutz’s fiction, and whether you think it’s influenced your work? And then would you talk about what role he played in the completion of Fugue State?

BE: Gary is a dear friend; we’ve known each other for a long time, since the mid-’90s. I’m a great admirer of his fiction; he does things with language that nobody else does, and I love the kind of wandering and deceptive ease that many of his stories have—they’re incredibly and wonderfully structured but the structure is organic and perfectly submerged at the same time the language is incredibly wrought. He’s one of the great contemporary writers. In terms of influence, I do think I’ve learned a great deal from his writing and from the dynamics of his sentences, but we end up applying things very differently, so I don’t know how visible that would be. For Fugue State, he read the manuscript through several times and caught some errors and other things that I’d missed, and also made me rethink a stylistic gesture in a critical way.

JM: Care to elaborate on that “stylistic gesture”?

BE: No. It would take a lot of explanation for almost no payoff.

JM: What is the best dynamic for you with an editor? What are your expectations from him or her? What do you want them to look for, question, critique? And what do you see as your role when you are editing other people’s work?

BE: I want an editor who has a clear aesthetic, even if it’s an aesthetic I disagree with. I have reasons for everything I do, and I’ve been teaching long enough that it’s easy for me to manufacture a reason to justify something that shouldn’t be justified, so I like an editor who is willing to make me think seriously about what I’m doing, even if in the end we disagree. And someone who can be clear about how they’re reading a particular story or passage. I try, in the classroom and in my own editorial gestures, to respect what authors are trying to do and make it better in those terms, but also to challenge them and try to shake them out of their complacencies.

JM: Just to throw a curveball at you, I know you’re an avid music listener and have written some music reviews and such, so if you were a musician, what instrument would you play and why? Also, what are your favorite things to listen to while you write and what are your top ten favorite albums of all time?

BE: I’m not a musician and never have really wanted to be, though yes, I listen to music almost fanatically and obsessively. I end up often fixating on an album or a song and listening to it obsessively when I’m working on a piece of fiction, but what that piece is varies dramatically from album to album. Top ten favorite albums is almost impossible because I think things shift and change for me all the time and I’ll go from listening to something excessively for months to not listening to it at all. The things I’ve been listening to repeatedly over the last few years include Sunburned Hand of the Man’s No Magic Man (especially two tracks, “Every Direction” and “The First Degree”), Death Vessel’s Nothing Is Precious Enough for Us (great lyrics and incredibly beautiful singing), Scott Walker’s The Drift (which may be my favorite album of all time) and Tilt, Girl Talk’s Night Ripper, Sunn 0))) (pretty much everything), Growing’s His Return, Earth’s Pentastar: In the Style of Demons and Hex (Or Printing in the Infernal Method), Hecker’s Sun Pandämonium, John Oswald’s Plunderphonics and Plexure, Belong’s October Language, and then old favorites like The Fall, Belle and Sebastian, Talk Talk, Radiohead, the great David Bowie, Echo and the Bunnymen, Can, Faust, Neu!, Schnittke, Schoenberg, etc., etc. If you ask me again in six months, it’d probably be a somewhat different list.

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