Lanier+Brown

by Weston Cutter

Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier

 

Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget was one of 2010′s great reads, but what was weird was that it was a great read in a (to me) surprising way. The book actually was wrestling with structural questions of the internet and how it is used; I’d begun the thing thinking (as lots of the promo material’d have us believe) that Lanier, father of virtual reality (dude coined the term, a fact you’ve seen like 17% of the time you’ve seen his name, probably) was going to just talk about the ‘net, and to a degree he did, but what’s wild about Gadget is that it’s one of the smartest policy books in recent memory, even if the policy in question has to do with hugely amorphous questions of the internet and how we use it vs how we should.

So now there’s Who Owns the Future, which is an even better policy book than Gadget. I feel like I should keep backpedaling and defend the position that Lanier’s ultimately putting forward policy arguments, but the evidence is right there early on as Janier begins his book wondering about the $1B value of Instagram with its in-the-teens number of employees vs. Kodak when it had 100k+ employees and a similar valuation. Janier’s asking the great, seemindly obvious question: how does that square? If Instagram can be said to be worth $1B, what’s the value? Lanier’s the sort who writes (seemingly offhandedly) sentences like “Information always underrepresents reality,” a fact I bring up only to say that what he’s doing is emphatically not an isn’t-the-net-cool-let’s-aim-for-utopia sort of cash-out book. Dude’s got serious ideas and serious values and is rigorous about articulating them in ways lots of wonky folks would be wise to learn from.

Lanier ultimately is proposing a new way to look at the quantitative value that’s being created online by its users—those of us whose searches and likes and similar purchases are helping companies mine more and more speific and precise demographic info from which they can make money from advertisers. To go much more into it here would be to ruin the book, and the book’s too good to rob its oomph from readers in this way. Also, finally (and it may be small potatoes, but it’s cool): Lanier’s writing style is wonderfully loose; there are chapters, and then each chapter’s got like page-long considerations or sections, and the smallness of the bites that Lanier offers—this breaking of things down and down—ends up making the reading feel wonderfully intimate, like you’re actually sitting there, shoulder to shoulder with this incredibly insightful and smart man as he works his thorough way through some very heavy issues with great grace. It’s a hell of a book. I’m already excited for whatever he’ll write next.

 

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

 

The entirety of my relationship to rowing or crew or any of that is that I with some regularity use the rowing machine at the downtown Y—meaning I know next to nothing of the actual exprience of rowing aside from having some familiarity with a few of the specific motions of the ordeal.

The entirety of my relationship to significant world affairs is that I’m alive, and a voting citizen. Much past that, I’m moot: I pay taxes, I’ve protested certain things, I’ve written letters to elected officials, but that’s really it.

The entirety of my relationship with group activities—team sports, for instance—is that I played in a band in high school (one could argue an MFA program has a group activity aspect, and in its way it does, but the sublimation of individual goals for larger accomplishment is, obviously, not paramount in that setting).

And the entirety of my relationship to any pursuit of something like pure excellence is rooted mostly in writing, I suppose. Writing of course offers those of us fool enough to chase it the opportunity to carefully bring the blade of our souls or self or whatever to bear against rawer material in an attempt to capture or create some sensation.

All of this may seem sort of silly, sure, but here’s the thing: Daniel James Brown‘s The Boys in the Boat—the story of the nine rowing boys who won gold in the 2000 yard rowing event at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (yes: Hitler)—is a staggering story made (largely) of the four strands listed above, and the book’s just remarkable, gorgeous, incredible (not least for how it starts: Joe Rantz, one of the ’36 boys, was Brown’s neighbor, and the book starts with Rantz, in hospice care, telling Brown this story).

Most significantly (I think), The Boys in the Boat is 100% immedest in its aims and goals—Brown’s swinging for distant fences, and I think he hits it. I don’t know about you, but lots of the nonfiction I receive and read is microhistory-type stuff: a history of the hand, or a consideration of holistic medicine, whatever. Brown’s Boys is big-aimed and trying to be both macro and micro: it’s a story of these nine young men and their unbelievable efforts and dedication and will and strength, but it’s also the story of why these young men, in this pursuit of theirs, has significance and relevance, both regarding the world in which they accomplished it and the world today.

It’s a stellar, stellar read, and you’re wise to get on this. Fingers crossed the book continues to pick up the attention it richly deserves.

Richard Lange’s Fantastic ANGEL BABY + Free Book

by Weston Cutter

Richard Lange‘s last book THIS WICKED WORLD hit in 2009, and his collection DEAD BOYS was before that, meaning: you may have heard of him already. I hope you have. If you haven’t already heard of him and gotten on board, fear not: now is your time. Lange’s new book ANGEL BABY has just been released, and I shit you not, dear reader: this is among the year’s very best books (which is saying a good bit, given that this year’s already had great stuff from Brian Kimberling and Jean Thompson and Bob Hicok and Jess Walter and Susan Steinberg and Holly Goddard Jones and there’s still stuff coming from Lindsay Hunter and Laura van den Berg and Paul Yoon and Alissa Nutting and the great Pelecanos and Robert Boswell and etc. etc. etc.). ANGEL BABY could real easily be pegged as a nice, pulpy beach read, a fizzy thing one gives to fathers to knock off their one-a-year book quota, but Lange’s latest is larger than the genre it’ll be tried to fit into. It’s a crime book, certainly, but you should approach this book the same as you would a Richard Price novel: crime’s there, but the world of the book is the size of the very world.

ANGEL BABY is one long chase: in the first few pages, Luz—a drug kingpin’s wife—makes a bloody escape from the life she’s been trapped within, and fleeing sets all other pieces in motion: folks are hunting her, folks are helping her, and all the characters swirl in a Tijuana-to-Cali cast that’s got as much breadth and flesh and blood among them as you could hope for in a book (for real: there’s a character who shows up for all of like maybe 5 pages—he’s loaning a car to one of the main characters—and there’s a moment that exposes precisely, perfectly who he is, and the moment’s devastating, and you’ll understand when you read it). Anyway, plenty: this is the book to be reading, people. I’ve got a free copy of the book to give away, so email me (wlcutter[at]hotmaildotcom) by Wednesday 5/29 and I’ll pick a winner thereafter (US addresses only).

And now: here’s an email interview conducted with Richard a week or so back. For real: put ANGEL BABY on whatever list it is you keep.

This might be a stupid question, but here goes: do you feel any sense of *anything* re genres—any sense of responsibility, or where you’d fall on a theoretical map, or whatever? My friends and I got into DEAD BOYS and read it as literary fiction. Sure, it was pulpy and dark, but ultimately it was offering the sort of sentence-level glories of lit fiction. I fear I’m dancing around it. Here: there’s Lahane and Price and maybe five other guys (they’re all guys, that I can tell) who write genre stuff that’s also considered ‘literary.’ Not that many. I’ve wondered lots about it. It seems the two—dark/crime/genre and literary—are antagonistic, to a degree. Does it feel that way, to you, from inside? How do you square that stuff? Is it something you’ve thought of, at all, ever?

I don’t put myself into any category as a writer, I just write. “Crime” “Literary crime,” and “neo-noir” are the terms most often used to describe the books, even Dead Boys, which has very little actual “crime” in it. I’m more about character, milieu, and language than plot. That said, however, I prefer novels with plot, or at least plenty of incident, something to pull me along. I never planned to write novels, so when I had to write This Wicked World in order to get a two-book deal with Dead Boys, I was nervous about writing long. I decided to take a structure I was familiar with, the murder mystery, and use that as a template to write about the people, places, and situations I was interested in. I was trying to make things easier on myself, and I figured that by having certain milestones imposed on me by the plot structure, I’d be reminded to keep moving along and have a road map to lead me through the writing of the book.

With my second novel, Angel Baby, I wanted a less-convoluted plot, something more basic, and I hit upon the idea of a chase. Once again, I was looking for something that would pull me and the reader through the book while allowing me to write about the characters I’d created and giving me some interesting and exciting situations to put them into. This Wicked World, yeah, I can see why they called it a crime book. It has the bones of one. But Angel Baby? I don’t know. What exactly is the crime in that one? To me, it’s a study of five desperate people going to desperate lengths to get what they want. I wanted to write about Tijuana. I wanted to write about La Mesa Prison. I wanted to write about Compton and Tecate and Luz and Malone.

Critics and editors and publicists can call the books whatever they want. It’s their job to shorthand stuff. I get the luxury of putting no labels on what I do. And if calling me a crime writer sells more copies, I’m all for it. If I can write what I want and actually sell books, that’s great!

What was the learning curve like between THIS WICKED WORLD and ANGEL BABY? I don’t want to venture too much—I liked the former well enough—but there feels like…there feels some massive, massive power unleashed in ANGEL BABY that I at least didn’t find as easily in THIS WICKED WORLD. Did it feel that way from inside of the writing as well? Was this novel easier than its predecessor?

With This Wicked World, I was feeling my way through the process as I wrote it, learning as I went along. I found myself wrestling with plot a lot, and vowed that this time, on Angel Baby, I’d simplify that aspect in order to concentrate more on the things I mentioned before, character, setting, and language. Perhaps that’s what you’re responding to. I also spent a year writing stories between the two novels, and I always learn a few new narrative and stylistic tricks from working shorter. Angel Baby wasn’t easier to write than This Wicked World, but I had more confidence in my ability as a writer and a real determination to assert more control over the tone of what I was writing.

More about this novel, as well: how long did it take to write? And how did it get its start—was it Luz, was it the actual opening of the book, with her making her get-away?

Angel Baby took a year and a half to write. This Wicked World took two years. The first thing I came up with for Angel Baby was the character of Malone. I read a story in the L.A. Times a number of years ago about a white American burnout who was driving illegals across the border for a Mexican pollero, and that stuck with me. Luz and the other characters came along later, as I started sketching out the story in my head. When I settled on a chase as the structure, Luz moved to the forefront and took over.

And this might be a silly, too-noodly question, but I’m real, real interested: how much did you know, and when did you know it, on writing through ANGEL BABY? I don’t want to give stuff away to readers who haven’t gotten through the thing yet, but I want to specifically ask about the characters who die in this story. How far into the book did you get before you realized who wouldn’t make it to book’s end? And (I apologize if this gets too nerdy or whatever) how do you decide who dies? It seems like a tremendously tough decision; part of me is frustrated that one of the characters who died in this book did, simply because his was a heartbreaking story that simply kept getting worse. It seems like a sort of moral calculus, and I can’t even imagine what goes on in that character-based number crunching, and any light you’d like to cast on that process would be deeply welcomed.

That character you’re talking about was set to die from the very start. He was doomed. Another character was also supposed to die, but got a reprieve as the book developed. When people used to ask what I was working on, I’d say I was writing the saddest novel ever written. Some readers bitched about the “happy” ending of This Wicked World, and maybe I was reacting to that. By the time I got about halfway through Angel Baby, though, I’d decided that it wasn’t going to be the saddest novel ever written, just a very sad one. So, in answer to your question, the story ended up dictating who lived and died. The book wouldn’t have worked like it does if I’d stuck to my original plan, and I was on the ball enough to see where things were going and adjust my course.

How is your stuff California literature, or does that even matter? It obviously is (CA lit), again and again, if for nothing other than the fact that it’s all set there, but is there something *Californian* about your stories, your characters, the stuff that goes down? I truly don’t know (and wouldn’t be able to hazard a guess, given that the CA spectrum includes TCBoyle, Sal Plascencia, Aimee Bender, etc.), but I’m curious if you’ve got any considerations on this (for the record: I’m from Minnesota, and I’m clueless about what midwest writing is, but a week doesn’t pass that I don’t wonder about what it is, or what it includes or is like).

I’m a California writer because I’ve lived here all my life and because I set my stories here, but I’ve never set out to write “California” stories. I like to have certain amount of “truth” when it comes to milieu, so I write about places I’m familiar with. That means Southern California, specifically. So, of course, my books will have beaches in them and Hollywood and the desert and glimpses of the various groups who have moved here seeking better lives (Latinos, Asians, Armenians, Midwestern beauty queens). Also, there’s this interesting mixture of hopefulness and bitter disappointment that fills the air in L.A., a byproduct of the dreamers of all stripes who make their way here. And that leads to a certain desperateness that shows up in my work in a lot of different ways. Like, “If I can’t make it here, what the fuck is wrong with me?” Southern California is the end of the known world for a lot of people, their last stand, and that makes it a great place to write about.

Do you have a preference between stories and novels? In an interview, you mentioned that after THIS WICKED WORLD you’d planned to go back to stories next, but now here we are, 4 years later, with another novel instead (though you’re publishing stories still, of course, in big literary journals, and getting in Best Mystery Writing, and etc.). I guess the question is: how much do you plan regarding what comes next for you, writing-wise?

As I mentioned earlier, after This Wicked World I went back to stories for a year, using my Guggenheim money to support myself. When that started running out, I decided it was time to begin another novel, because I might actually have a chance of selling a novel, whereas the stories weren’t making me a dime. As soon as I finished Angel Baby and got a check for it, I went back to stories and finished a new collection that’s about to go out to publishers. I’ve started another novel, and there will be another one after that. So, yeah, I do have a vague plan. A couple of years ago I would have told you that I prefer writing stories to writing novels because of the freedom the story form allows – no plots to contend with, no “connective tissue” to try to make interesting for the reader and myself, no months and months of slogging with no end in sight. As I neared the end of this collection, though, I found myself looking forward to beginning a new novel. I craved structure. So maybe I’m evolving, I don’t know. There’s also the career consideration. I write for a living, and you can’t make a living writing short stories.

Are there contemporaries of yours, or folks you’re reading at present, who blow your mind? I guess this is a fan-ish question along the lines of: I like your stuff a whole lot, and can find some aspects of your work in other places, but I’d love to know what you read, would love to trace through your own list of what you like.

My reading is all over the place. There’s always a classic. The last one was Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and currently it’s The Odyssey. I’m also reading Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, whose Jesus’ Son changed my writing life, and I’m about to finish Long, Last, Happy, the Barry Hannah collection. There’s also Book 1 of Shelby Foote’s Civil War history and a Vietnam guidebook for an upcoming trip. I also read the L.A. Times from cover to cover every day. I just finished Jerry Stahl’s new one, Happy Mutant Baby Pills, which will be out in November, and George Pelecanos’ The Double, which is out in October. Both were excellent. The last book that really knocked me on my ass was 2666 by Roberto Bolano. I pooh-poohed him as a flavor-of-the-month until my girlfriend forced me to pick it up. It’s one of those books where the author has to teach you to read it (Absalom, Absalom comes to mind), so it takes a little time to get into, but if you stick with it, the rewards are immense and lasting. You feel like a gnat as a writer when you finish something like that. But in a good way.

Four New Ones

by Weston Cutter

The Summer of Beer and Whiskey by Edward Achorn

 

This is a book about, real generally, the 1883 baseball season, and, specifically, a guy named Chris Von der Ahe, who founded the team that’d become the St Louis Cardinals (before that: Browns). Here’s what I can say: I love me some baseball, and I absolutely put my infant daughter in a MN Twins onesie yesterday in hopes that doing so would help my team halt their sudden SIX GAME slide (it didn’t work). What I mean is: I care about baseball a fair amount. I bring that up because: The Summer of Beer and Whiskey is, in its way, rivetingly good reading, and is great: I had but the dimmest notions of what baseball could’ve been like 130 years ago, and this book certainly does a very good job establishing what that world of baseball was like (drunker, wilder, bawdier—it reads, honestly, a bit as if baseball then was like a drunker version of minor-league [or midwest league, anyway] ballteams at present). Baseball, too, at the time (in the 1880′s) was losing popularity, dropping in public significance, etc. This Von der Ahe helped inject a massive jolt into the sport, and this book’s the record of that, and it’s a fine, interesting, illuminating book (the hedging you might feel throughout this review is that this isn’t necessarily a barn-burning page-turner of a book—it was work, for me—and there’s a sepia in the writing that can get wearying). Still: good enough.

 

I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro

 

This is as good as everyone said it was. So fucking good. Here’s how good it is: you don’t realize, as you’re reading it, that it’s actually amazing. You know that feeling? It’s akin to the first time you hear someone like Bon Iver (or lately, for me, Laura Marling): you don’t notice how good what you’re hearing is because it sounds so natural, so easy. Here’s a proposition: it’s easy to respect/be amazed by someone like Wallace or whoever because it’s clear how much work that takes. Harder to parse the glory of is smaller, more domestic stuff—Quatro, obviously, or Caitlin Horrocks, or Jean Thompson. Anyway, enough: get this fucking book. Holy shit is she good. I am 100% certain I’ll be coming back to this collection before this year’s out. That sort of good.

 

River Bend Chronicle by Ben Miller

 

Here’s what you should think when reading this book: JEAN SHEPHERD. If you don’t know that name: he was a famous radio personality and hosted a show that was freewheeling and wild and amazing, but he’s since become more famous for having written and narrated A Christmas Story. Regardless: it’s the shaggy, all-inclusive voice and idea and animating spirit of Shepherd that seems (to this reader/reviewer) to be guiding River Bend Chronicle, which is subtitled “The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa.” Miller’s a fine guide, if (I think) overwindy: there’s a too-muchness in this memoir that (for me) burdens the reader more than 100% necessary for the enterprise (that could actually though have just as much to do with the fact that Miller’s writing style’s comprised of pages-long paragraphless chunks [these chunks are complete packages, on their own, but one does eventually feel exhaustion on coming up on one each time; it’s akin to engaging in a gchat with someone who never just says “I’m good, how are you?” but instead details *everything*). I mean no disrespect on any of this: Miller’s scope is LARGE (the prologue, I kid you not, runs from page 3 to 49). If you’re willing to do such lifting, you’re rewarded with a story about an eccentric family in the 1960s and 1970s, in the Quad Cities in Iowa (Rock Island, specifically), and one kid’s attempts to make sense and meaning of all of it.

 

Critique of Pure Reason by Gabriel Blackwell

 

I’ll read anything by Gabriel Blackwell at this point. I don’t know if this was just perception, or what, but it felt, in the 90s/00s, that there was much more interesting experimental stuff going on in fiction, which experimental stuff specifically tasked itself with wrestling through/into various forms (I may believe that simply because I came of readerly age at that time, so maybe I should just say that it felt like that in those years for me). I bring it up simply because Blackwell’s stuff is awesomely, interestingly experimental, but formally experimental: “Story (with Dog)” operates as a large-scale if-then set up (“IF a character A exists SUCH THAT character A is human AND is male AND has been vacationing in Yalta for a week and a half AND is married to a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows…” that’s the first bit of the first paragraph/sentence, which, yes, wraps up with a then). I guess the thing is that the title’s not cutesy: this is a book ultimately addressing or attempting to engage with aesthetic and emotional concerns through the bakery or shop or kiosk of math or logic or reason, and I’ll here cop to a pretty firm readerly hunger for such moves, and Blackwell (as he did with Shadow Man, which was a genre-breaking thing as well) delivers. Again.

Three New Ones

by Weston Cutter

(before anything else: this came up this wknd at the Rumpus. Anyway)

Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley

I feel terrible for now having gone far too long without shouting about this book. I’ve yapped before about two other books which are up the same alley as this: there’s Something in the Air by Marc Fisher, which is a history of radio, and there’s Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner, which is a history of recorded music. I’m not sure if there’s any obvious or overt way these three books overlap—they’re microhistories, sure, and written by guys, but past that I’m not sure. But here’s the deal: Exploding the Phone is sas good a book of nonfiction you’ll read this year, and you need to read the thing as soon as you possibly can. In the most basic way, it’s a history of phone phreaking (if you know what a blue box is, or know anything about Cap’n Crunch, you needed this book yesterday). In a far more fleshed-out and interesting way, it’s a book about the invention of a system (the phone system, specifically) and the people who came in after the system was made and were interested in the system—in understanding it more fully, finding its strengths and weaknesses, etc.

Phone phreaking was the precursor to computer hacking, in its way: when phone systems ran on analog carrier systems, the system ran on sounds, on actual tones, and some people were keenly, deeply intruiged by the fact that there were specific combinations of tones that allowed their users to make free long-distance telephone calls—which, certainly, was a huge deal (I grew up in the 80s and 90s, a time of $.25/minute long-distance charges, and the height of phreaking was earlier, when prices were even crazier). And sure, of course: objectively phone phreakers were breaking the law, and were stealing from Ma Bell. But the thing that’s most engaging and wonderful about Lapsley’s book (which, let’s note, features a foreward from Woz of Apple, a phreaker himself with his pal SJobs) is how it highlights the sort of exploratory pleasure that actuall drove phone phreaking: most of the young men who actually were interested in it and who got involved were interested in phreaking more as an untellectual pursuit, interested in the challenge of the thing.

If you’re lucky, you have friends like that—friends who are enamored of systems and want to know more about it. One of my close friends—the first person I recommended this book to—works IT, and he *loved* this book—because, ultimately, whatever poking around he’s done online, perfectly legal or otherwise, has been animated by insatiable curiousity. It’s easy to make scary books and movies about black hat hackers who rob folks blind, and it’s easy to dismiss all those acts as crimes when we only consider them in such contexts; the panties get harder to bunch when we all realize that some folks who are testing the bounds of security are driven by curiousity, by the same engineer’s what-if that drove, well, folks like Steve Jobs. Who knows. Maybe that’s not the case, and maybe Exploding the Phone is just a real sweet almost halcyon book about the good old days before digital and everything else, when technological crimes were almost aw-shucksishly quaint. I’d like however to posit though that the book’s a gigantic grinning what if, a thick, riveting read that should, if you’re doing it right, reconfigure whatever certainties you think you’ve got about those folks benignly fascinated by systems. This is as close to a necessary book as I can imagine this year.

The Virtues of Poetry by James Longenbach

I teach poetry every semester, and one of the hardest things to do, semester-in, semester-out, is walking through a poem’s moves. I don’t know the terms everybody else uses for this act, but all it means is to go very very slowly through a poem trying to note all it’s doing (with language, image, meaning, etc). The reason it’s so hard to do a walk-through with a class is both 1) sure, poetry’s sort of hard, but more significantly 2) most folks have never ever come across a decent walk-through of a poem before. Most of us have not spent all that much time or energy keeping our ear very close to a poem, for pages and pages of thinking and consideration. What’s hard about that work, of course, is simply this: attention. In fact, almost *anything* is easier than trying to sit quietly and think/work/walk through a poem.

All of which is preamble to say: James Longenbach’s The Virtues of Poetry is glorious and beautiful and is the smartest book I know of which tries to apply itself to walking through some poems. Here’s how good Longenbach is: I don’t like Ashbery. Don’t get his work, don’t care for it, have read lots of it. Longenbach’s chapters on the man are the first things I’ve read that’ve made understanding Ashbery even seem like something worth attempting. More than that: Longenbach, throughout The Virtues of Poetry, helps slot individual poems in a larger context of the development of poetry, a gift to the reader almost inestimably large. It’s a colossal book—get this now. For real. Also, this review at the Sycamore Review is far better than this one I just did.

Going Clear by Lawrence Wright

This came out too long ago now (January)—surely you’ve made up your mind. Maybe you haven’t. If you haven’t: get and read this fucking book. Please note that this is the most balanced and level-headed and generous assessment of a consistently controversial *thing* I could imagine: read the book as balm for yr own curiousity about Scientology, fine, but also read it to be amazed by the breadth of Lawrence Wright’s soul, basically, and how he can (I think) present a monumentally human and humane picture of an organization lots of us don’t know all that much about. It’s a stunner. But, again: you should’ve gotten it in January.

An Interview with Jean Thompson

by Weston Cutter

Jean Thompson‘s been on my list since I don’t remember when. Her collection of stories Who Do You Love was my first exposure, and her last two novels—2011′s The Year We Left Home and the very recently released The Humanity Project—are both so quietly fantastic that it’s hard to even get a grip on them. Here’s what happens when you read Thompson: you read her fiction (and she’s equally good at short stories and novels, so, really, just take your pick), and you shut the book, and there are some sentences maybe that hang with you, and certainly there are characters and moments they lived/moved through which cling to yr head, but what you’ll likely feel is simply that you just came in contact with a very good book. What happens next, though, is the magic: you keep living, and you maybe read another book or three, or you see a movie, hang out with friends, whatever. Time passes in which you live, and about a week after you finish a Thompson book, you realize that her fiction somehow does a better job of capturing the felt experience of lived reality better than almost anything. That, at least, is what happens to me: Ms Thompson’s plenty stunning at the sentence level, but her work ultimately ends up meaning so much (at least to me) because years later I’m still thinking not just about characters of hers but actual scenes—I’m still picturing what I pictured years back while reading something. I can say that about few writers and their work. She’s incredible. You should absolutely be reading her. Below is an email she graciously took part in over email recently.

 

How did The Humanity Project begin? What was the hook or shelf on which the whole thing began to be built? Mostly I’m interested in this because of how widely it travels.

 

The genesis of The Humanity Project:  I wanted to write something that was somewhat larger in scale than, say, the story of two people in a marriage gone bad. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)  The expansive title is something of a clue. I wanted to pose the question — not necessarily answering it — how we cope with difficult times (economic, personal, environmental), how do forces beyond our control shape us?  Fairly quickly I decided on a structure of different characters taking turns with different chapters. I wanted one hard-luck guy, Sean, and I set about multiplying his sufferings, like God did to Job.

 

Then there’s a somewhat organic, somewhat manipulated process of building on to that first narrative, as in, what if Sean had a son? What if there was another guy, another father, having to cope with a much more troubled teenager?  What if this second guy had a  downstairs neighbor, who happened to work for an old lady, who happened to employ the son, etc. I did want the characters to begin as separate story lines that gradually cross and intersect. It always interests me when those sorts of coincidences occur in our actual lives, though I posit no theory of cosmology that explains it. But I did want to reinforce the idea that we’re all in this together, whatever “this” comes to mean in the book.

 

This might be totally impossible, but I’m curious if you feel that there’s a contemporary school or group of writers with whom you either a) feel aesthetically aligned or b) see your work as being aligned with. I’ve got ideas of folks whose work seems engaged in similar stuff as yours (James Meeks’s The Heart Breaks In, for instance), but I’m curious.

 

I suppose I think less about particular writers — though I like the idea that those of us working with similar material might form some kind of literary street gang — but rather about inhabiting a particular turf. In my case, that’s the continent of the real, or what is now being called “the social novel”, which I interpret as novels about a recognizable world, and those of us who populate it. There are other continents out there, labelled Fabulism, or Crime, or Vampires. Plenty of land for everyone!

 

This is entirely personally motivated, but I’m curious if writing’s gotten harder since you no longer are full-time teaching. On the one hand: the idea of writing full time sounds fantastic; that said, I feel like I at least would have a really hard time being totally internal and on my own—I end up liking how teaching forces me out of myself, into the world. Clearly I’m projecting, but I’m still curious.

 

I get a lot more writing done now that I am not teaching, and in fact wonder how I ever managed to accomplish anything while I had a full-time job. Answer:  I was younger then, had more energy, and didn’t know any better. I do think that one needs to engage with the world in whatever way is available. If not via the workplace, then wherever else the world presents itself. There are times I miss having colleagues, and being part of a community of writers, and of course, wonderful things can and do happen in the classroom. But I do not miss looking for parking spaces, climbing the same set of stairs for the umpteenth time, and department meetings, department meetings, department meetings.

 

I apologize if the following comes across as anything other than 100% respectful: do you, or did you while writing The Humanity Project, get at all nervous or anxious about  portraying harrowing stuff like a school shooting? Here’s the background: I was at Virginia Tech, and lots of us have tried to write about not even *that* shooting, but just shootings or school violence in general since, and there’s this weird aspect of respect for or deference to the horror of it that has, far as I can tell, tripped up quite a few of us. Is there a difference, for you, in writing about something that large and fraught? (for what it’s worth: the moments of the shooting in THP were amazing, and Linnea’s experience was incredible, and harrowing, and goose-bump inducing).

 

First, in the matter of school shootings, and your experience at Virginia Tech:  what a dreadful thing to have experienced first-hand, and I am sorry for that. It does not surprise me that any of you who

witnessed and survived it have difficulty in writing about it. There is trauma, there is, as you say, respect and deference. You may find that with time the experience itself settles and becomes somewhat easier to approach, in either fictional or non-fictional ways. Just as novels about war are often written some years after the fact of them, it takes time to digest what happened, and also, what it might really “mean” to you, that is, what persists and needs to be addressed.

 

As for my treatment of the same sort of event – wholly imagined on my part – yes, of course there was anxiety, wishing to be convincing without being exploitative. The shooting in my book is an unexplained act. Even the shooter’s mother has no real insight into him. And I don’t attempt to enter his head or provide him with motivation. I would not be capable of doing so. I wanted what we call “random, senseless violence” dropped into my characters’ lives, to see what sort of rippling effect it would have on this fictional world. I wanted the event to be terrible without seeming sensationalized, and I am glad to hear that you thought it worked.

 

Do you think of yourself as a midwest writer? Does such a categorization even remotely come into your world or bearing? I’m a very very proud midwesterner (from Minnesota, currently in Indiana), and lots of writers I really enjoy happen to be from here, or based here (RPowers with you there in U-C, Wallace before California, Roxane Gay, Ander Monson, etc. etc. etc.), and I inevitably ask this question simply because I don’t think there’s anything like an answer or anything, but I’m always curious how those writers who live in the midwest process or consider that effect/aspect on/of their work.

 

Am I a midwest writer?  Well, we grow where we are planted, though it’s hard to identify a common thread among myself and any of the writers you mention. And “The Humanity Project” is largely set in northern California – a place I lived for a time – so on occasion, I take my act on the road. I don’t know if there’s a midwest sensibility or regionalism in the same way you can speak of southern regionalism, nothing that makes any of us particularly hip, exotic, quaint, etc. We’re all just folks here.

 

(I’m stealing this Q from Roxane Gay’s interview of Meg Wolitzer in Bookforum): what do you like best about your writing?

 

I think I’m a pretty fair psychologist, of fictional creations, at least. And sometimes I am inordinately fond of a particular turn of phrase, and sometimes these hold up under scrutiny.

 

Finally: what’s the view out your window?

 

My back garden waiting for me to  plant, weed, dig, clip, and otherwise exert myself.