Next, early June will bring the U.S. release of another debut novel: Francesca Segal’s The Innocents. Billed as a recasting of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence—but set within a modern-day London Jewish community—this one hits many of my readerly and writerly interests: reworkings of classics I’ve loved, Jewish literature, and the international accent.

P.S. In keeping with the internationalist focus: If you missed my recent reviewlet covering Anne Korkeakivi’s debut novel The Unexpected Guest (set mainly in Paris), now is a perfectly fine moment to read it.

• Watch and listen: Patrick McGuinness recently visited Villanova University and read from his work there.
• Courtesy of The Man Booker Prize: a Reader’s Guide (PDF) for The Last Hundred Days.
• Listen to Francesca Segal read from The Innocents.
• Read Francesca Segal’s Granta essay, “In My Father’s Footsteps,” about her father, author Erich Segal.

The book turned out to be Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Harper/Ecco 2006), and as I read its stories I desperately wished that I’d been the one who wrote them. His characters—ranging from a grad student in ornithology who gets kidnapped in Columbia to a soldier who marries a Haitian voodoo deity—seemed to leap into abysses of their own creation, and Fountain followed them all the way to the bottom before watching them climb painstakingly out. I wasn’t the only one who loved the book, as it earned its author a bevy of decorations, including a PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

Thanks to Che I’ve been on the lookout for Fountain’s debut novel for quite some time, and have occasionally pestered him by email to find out when it would be published. So when I heard about Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, published by Harper/Ecco just this month, I had to be the first kid on my block to read it.

From the first page, I wanted be the one who’d written Halftime even more desperately than I’d wanted to be the one who wrote Che. The novel grabbed me, started running, and didn’t give me a chance to ask where we were going. Halftime unfolds on Thanksgiving day during a Dallas Cowboys (a.k.a. “America’s Team”) football game, when a group of American soldiers on leave from Iraq are celebrated for their bravery in battle. It turns out that an embedded TV news crew caught a fierce battle on tape, which turned the “Bravo Team” into temporary celebrities.

At the center of this is Billy Lynn, a nineteen-year-old Texan who earned a Silver Star in Iraq but must, like the rest of his fellow Bravos, return there after his Thanksgiving reprieve. Fountain drills into Billy’s life and psyche, not relenting until he has brought all of his protagonist’s dreams, fears, contradictions, alliances, and assumptions to light. The pointlessness and release of war, his own virginity, his miserable wheelchair-bound father, the patriotism that he wishes would be simpler than it has become, the sister who wants him to go AWOL from the war.

Along the way Fountain sends us into the lives of Lynn’s comrades and the smorgasbord of people he meets at Texas Stadium. There’s Sergeant Dime, who rides his men non-stop but often appears like a mythological trickster, a Loki or Coyote who sees through the world’s folly. There’s Shroom, poor dead Shroom, who expired in Billy’s arms in Iraq and who still offers him, beyond the grave, an alternative way to make America and human life itself add up to more than the sum of its parts. We meet a movie producer who can’t quite land a deal to get the Bravo Squad’s story on the big screen, Beyoncé Knowles (from a discreet distance), the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and a bunch of angry roadies armed with pipes. Along the way, Billy and his fellow soldiers will gradually learn just how completely they’ve been sucked into the American spectacle-making machine.

It’s as kaleidoscopic and unflinchingly absurd as the novel with which it will most often be compared—Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—or as Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of Night. Fountain’s language, from start to finish, takes brave chance after brave chance as it rages through the book like a storm. I don’t like to throw the “G-word” out casually, but let me say this: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the first great novel of America’s twenty-first century wars.

Interview:

Steven Wingate: May is national short story month, and you’ve made your name thus far as a short story writer. Can you describe your experience of making the transition from one mode to another?

Ben Fountain: The transition started around 1992, and has been painful, slow, and riddled with failure. I’ve got two complete novels in the drawer, along with a big chunk of another, and my only excuse is that I must not be very good at this, and what I’ve managed to figure out about writing novels took me a long time to learn. I think one of the main problems with the defunct novels is that I felt the need to set everything up in logical, painstaking detail—so much backstory before the real story got going, which was maybe my way of being lazy, of avoiding coming to grips with the real story and all the gut-it-out work that would involve.

They say that every project teaches its author how to write it. What was the process like of learning how to write Halftime, and how did that differ from learning how to write Che?

Handling “time” in Billy Lynn was much more of a challenge than I remember it being in any short stories I’ve written. Billy Lynn takes place over the course of one day, but to do what I wanted to do I had to figure out how to slide in significant chunks of past action without, hopefully, slowing down the speed and momentum of the present-tense narrative. There’s one long flashback in the book, but otherwise I found myself going for bits and pieces of flashback, layering those fragments within the present narrative. So maybe I learned a little bit more about how to deal with time in the novel form.

Your relationship to language in Halftime differs from that in Che. It has a load of F-bombs, not only in the mouths of the soldiers but in the narrative voice as well. There’s a go for broke-ness to your language, a verging toward the edge of control. How did you arrive at that?

I arrived at it by the seat of my pants. With pretty much everything I write, the conception of the story seems to arrive with a sound in my head. It’s supposed to sound a certain way, and part of the challenge in writing the story is tuning into that sound, finding the words and rhythms that will get it on the page. It’s always very rough at first, trying to locate that signal, trying to find the right language, and for most of the time you’re flying blind, basically picking your way along.

To write Billy Lynn correctly it seemed I had to find this dense, rude, pummeling, in-your-face sound that maybe–and this is the rationale I arrived at in the course of writing the book—is the sound of the basic insanity of American culture.

From what I can tell of your biography, you don’t seem to have been in the military. But there are soldiers in Che, and Halftime is entirely immersed in the soldier’s world. How do these characters enter your imagination, and how did you inhabit their language and worldview?

You’re right, I was never in the military. So I did what writers always do to appropriate experience that’s not their own—I read everything I could get my hands on, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the soldiers and ex-soldiers who I came across, and generally tried to immerse myself in that world. In other words, research, but that’s just laying the foundation. Ultimately, if you’re to succeed in this type of endeavor, it takes an act—or maybe serial acts would be a better way to put it—of imagination, but you can’t launch unless you’ve done that sort of immersive research. And then you’re also bringing in pieces of your own experience, episodes that might be comparable with the experience you’re trying to imagine your way into. Say, the writing equivalent of method acting? I’m the kind of desperate writer who will use any and every thing that might help me write the story.

After the success of Che, you had a novel called The Texas Itch that never made it off the ground. What happened with that book, and what did you learn from the experience that you could bring to bear in writing Halftime?

The short answer to what happened to that book is that it wasn’t good enough. I’d started that book a long time ago, when I was a much different, and dare I say less able, writer, and despite all my lumbering efforts I couldn’t quite drag it up to whatever level I was operating on once Che was done. Too much backstory, maybe too much labyrinthine plot, and a voice that didn’t quite ring true, or at least fell short too much of the time. I spent a lot of years on that book, many more than I care to admit. The cliche about your greatest strength always being your greatest weakness? That seems to be true in my case—I’m stubborn as hell and find it hard to walk away from anything, but the same hard-headedness that kept me writing long enough that I seem to have arrived at some sort of “career” was also the trait that kept me at The Texas Itch long after I probably should have put it away.

What did I learn that I brought to bear on Billy Lynn? Well, maybe I learned something about compression, about economy of backstory and present narrative. And that I could take a hit like that—having a novel crash and burn in the most spectacular way—and move on to the next thing.

The midpoint sequence of the novel involves the Bravo Squad meeting Dallas Cowboys owner Norm Oglesby, who whips a room full of cheerleaders into a calculated frenzy for media types. You write “The bullshit part of it, isn’t that part of the story too? But not a word, not a murmur, not a peep from the press about how thoroughly they’ve been used this day.” It’s hard not to see this is a critique of American media. I suspect you don’t have a specific “message,” but I’m curious to hear what’s roiling around in your head about media and war.

Right. Well, so much of what passes for “news” in our culture is actually marketing of one form or another, these premeditatively staged public events or PR verbiage that are spoon-fed to and dutifully swallowed by the media, to be in turn shat out into the wider world. I remember something Hunter Thompson wrote about a Super Bowl he was covering, how with all the hundreds or thousands of reporters on hand, with all the tonnage of copy and video stories produced that week, there might be only a couple of stories in which the writer alluded to the actual story that was unfolding, namely, that it was a huge, carefully staged corporate PR event that happened to have a football game attached, and the media were serving as the tacit delivery system for the message that would generate the profits.

My question is, why shouldn’t that be part of the story that’s reported? The experience of the reporting itself, and the varying degrees in which it might be authentic or artificial? Do pay attention to that man behind the curtain.

As for including this line of thought in the book, it wasn’t so much that I have a “message” as that it’s part of the story. To write the story correctly, this needed to be a part of it.

One of your most intriguing characters is Sergeant Dime, who has a complex relationship to the war and to his men. On one hand, he berates his men for representing their country poorly. On the other, he’s an absolute scofflaw who ruins several takes of a publicity video by revealing the true level of violence behind the Iraq war. How did he come to you, and what is he all about?

I don’t think it’s so much that Dime is berating his men for representing the country poorly as it is he stays on their ass because he’s their sergeant, and that’s his job. And, face it, 20-year-old males probably need that kind of constant harassment to stay on task. Dime is part of the machine, but he also has an acute awareness of what the machine is about, and he doesn’t mind sharing that awareness with his men in his own, ah, unique way. I think Dime takes tremendous wicked pleasure in pointing out stupidity—the stupidity of particular individuals, and of the culture at large, and his main method of doing this is speaking the truth. Maybe it’s not so much that he’s on a mission for truth as it is that’s where he gets his pleasure and his energy, by rubbing our faces in it.

Let’s say you can give three bits of advice for short story writers who want to take on the novel. What would they be?

I’m probably the last person who should be giving advice on how to go about writing a novel, but since you asked:

First, and this is obvious but still worth saying, make a close study of the good writers and see how they do it. Read with a pen or pencil in your hand and mark the hell out of the page. Pay attention to the decisions the writers are making, what they decide to leave out just as much as what they put in, and where, and how much, with what degree of directness. Their “technique,” if you will.

Second, don’t wait for that huge block of time to materialize, that chunk of days or weeks or months where you’ll have little or nothing to do besides work on your novel. Those big blocks of free time are hard to come by—harder to come by every year, it seems, the way the culture demands more and more of us. If all you can do is chip away at it for an hour or two a day, well, that’s what you have to do. Maybe it’s the interior equivalent of sailing a small boat by yourself around the world. It’s a long haul, and on any one particular day you aren’t going to make much progress, but if you can string together a bunch of days where you push the book along, after a while you start to see yourself getting somewhere.

Third, don’t make all the mistakes I made.

Further Links and Resources

If you have read Mrs. Dalloway (and what self-respecting fiction writer or fiction lover hasn’t?), you will likely recognize some similarities between An Unexpected Guest and Virginia Woolf’s famous novel even without the benefit of the jacket copy’s reminder. In fact, Korkeakivi’s novel could just as easily have been titled Mrs. Moorhouse (or perhaps Madame Moorhouse). Like Clarissa Dalloway, Clare Moorhouse spends the single day in which the novel unspools preparing for and hosting a dinner party. She’s quite fond of flowers, too.

Madame Moorhouse is the American-born wife of a high-ranking British diplomat based in Paris. We learn quickly that her husband desires a plum appointment to Dublin, and that this prize may well be in reach—if the evening’s dinner party proceeds smoothly. But her Irish ancestry notwithstanding (Madame Moorhouse was née Clare Siobhan Fennelly), our protagonist has reasons to worry about a transfer to Dublin. Those reasons—and a ghostly presence from her past—haunt her as she goes about her day in Paris.

An Unexpected Guest transpires in a rarefied world, and that may distance some readers. If scenes that unfold in gourmet supermarkets and museum gardens don’t appeal to you, this book might not either. I’m a Francophile, so the frequent inclusion of French dialogue pleases me. But, as I learned back as an MFA student, there are those who believe that “people who use ‘foreign’ words in their fiction are just showing off.” Again, if that’s your disposition, you might choose to steer clear of this book.

Which would be too bad, because you’d miss a satisfying reading experience and the chance to consider anew the ways in which earlier literature can influence new writerly generations. And, of course, you’d be missing an inexpensive, luggage- and logistics-free trip to Paris.

Extras

• Preview (and, if you like, purchase) Korkeakivi’s “Folding Paper,” an Atlantic Fiction for Kindle offering.
• If you haven’t (gasp) read Mrs. Dalloway, Project Gutenberg will make things right.
• If you’ll be in Paris anytime soon—or if you simply wish to imagine what your literary life might be like there—you’ll find Laurel Zuckerman’s Paris Writers News posts and updates most valuable.

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

Since finishing the MFA, he’s been busy. The paperback of Zentner’s debut novel, Touch, just came out. His next novel, The Lobster Kings, will be out in 2013.  Touch was shortlisted for The 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award, The Center for Fiction’s 2011 Flahery-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the 2011 Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Walrus, and many other publications. He is the winner of both the O. Henry Prize (jury favorite) and the Narrative Prize, and has been shortlisted for Best American and the Pushcart Prize. Alexi has taught creative writing at Cornell University, and held teaching fellowships at Bread Loaf and Wesleyan University. Born and raised in Kitchener, Ontario, he now lives in Ithaca with his wife and two daughters.

We recently caught up over the phone about fiction, food, jogging, guilty musical pleasures, and (blame) Canada’s influential writers who inspired him to take up the pen.

Interview:

Jackie Reitzes: It’s almost short story month. Where did the idea for your story “Touch” originate, and what was the writing like?

Alexi Zentner:  When I started “Touch,” I’d only been writing seriously for about a month, and I had an image stuck in my head of a girl trapped under the ice. I had always played at the idea of being a writer, which is different than actually writing. At the time my kids were really young—one and three. That image was really haunting—having someone you love so close to you and being unable to do anything to save them. I knew from the get-go I had something big and it could be something bigger. But I didn’t want to write Touch as a novel before I was ready for fear I would ruin it. Revision is incredibly important, but I also think that in that genesis of a story or a novel, you weave a certain DNA into it, and I was worried that in writing a novel too early in my writing career, with my abilities still unformed, that I would ruin what I had.

How did you transform “Touch” from story to novel?

The thing that’s really difficult is: a story is a finished thing. What you’re trying to do is figure out how to break it open, and how to distill it into its elements so you can make something else. Early on, I tried to just plug it in whole. I had this story, and I didn’t want to change it because I was so in love with the shape of it. But the shape of a short story is not the same as the shape of a novel. The novel came alive when I was really able to use the story as a springboard as opposed to a finished thing I was working toward.

With a perfect or near-perfect first chapter, you must wonder: where do I go next?

Right. In one of the first conceptions of the novel, the story “Touch” was what I worked up to. It was the end of the novel; but I think what’s really interesting in fiction is the way people recover from things, not what leads up to the incident. Because the issue is what happens after. If your entire novel is the prologue, that’s problematic.

Touch, all your writing really, shows an impressive depth of research.  For example, one passage describes a blueberry “stomp” – as it would have been called at the time – and not a blueberry “patch.” You’ve included actual recipes from Bon Appetit in a story. How do you incorporate research so it feels organic?

This question shows my obsession with food. The story you mention with the recipes is a story about a wife and a mistress who are friends, but the obsession is actually with the food and not the sex.  The thing with research is to do as little as possible. The glib answer is: I write fiction, so I make shit up. But I do research, too. I went to the library and pulled back issues of Bon Appetit and used those as signposts. It’s important to get the small details right so the larger world stays whole.

But spending hours researching the vernacular or dates of technological innovations can interrupt the writing process. Does that distract from your fiction?

Absolutely, and I’m pretty careful about that. Most of what I write comes whole cloth. I don’t tend to set things in real towns, which gives you a sort of freedom. If you imagine a town, and it’s a town you created, you don’t have to worry about whether it’s a stop sign or a stop light at an intersection. I’ll often take a town that I’ve seen and then create my own fictionalized version of it, so that I have the freedom to makes the facts as I want them. But I think certain facts are important. If you’re writing about a logging town in the 1870s and you write about the long stick with the hook on it that the loggers used, you can’t call it “the long stick with the hook on it.”

I’m glad you brought up the cuts, because if I didn’t know better, I would assume you grew up logging. Did you read up a lot on that sort of thing?

Growing up in Canada, logging towns have some of the same mythic quality to them as the American cowboy, and there’s a certain amount of osmosis. We forget that in fiction the facts are not as important as the feeling of it being true. When I do a lot research, I end up writing a book report. And there are a lot of authors who get caught in the trap of, Well I’ve done this research. I have to use it. But I think that as a writer it’s important to give yourself the authority to say, This is the way it is.

Does what you’re writing influence what you’re reading, or the other way around?

I deliberately don’t read work similar to what I’m working on because, if I do, I will find myself writing in that voice. There have been a couple books that Touch has been compared to that I’ve read since, but I resisted reading them earlier because I wanted to create something new and different that was mine. I believe in influence. I read widely. Any writer who tells you they don’t read is either lying or not very good.

You listen to music when you write, right?

For years, I used to listen to the same band over and over again as white noise. It’s kind of embarrassing.

Tell me!

Okay, it’s Counting Crows.

(Groans)

Over and over again. I couldn’t listen to music that I liked because it distracted me. Recently, for The Lobster Kings, one of the main characters has a Johnny Cash tape stuck in the cassette player in his truck, so I listened to Johnny Cash.

You can trick yourself with music into writing a slightly different way.

Absolutely. One question I get a lot is something I call “The Magic Pen Question.” What I mean by that is a variant of What type of pen do you use?

And can I have it?

Exactly: If I have that pen then I can write a novel. Everybody’s writing process is different, but I’m a big believer that you write a novel one word at a time. You get your ass in a chair, and you work.  You work everyday. You privilege writing a novel over other things in life. But the things that I do—they’re patterns, they’re rituals, and music is one of them. Having the same music signals to me, Oh this is writing.

Writing day after day, week after week – ass in the chair – do you ever hit a roadblock?

I usually know the beginning, one or two things about the middle, and the end. So it’s like driving from New York to Los Angeles knowing you’re going to stop in Chicago and Denver, but you don’t have a map. When I get stuck, I go back, read through what I have, revise. And I know that I write better when I exercise. Part of that is because I hate running so much that I can’t think about writing, so it forces my brain to shut off, and that’s usually when whatever the solution is comes to me.

Sometimes you can’t focus. I used to be more brutal on myself. Now, if I’m having a bad day, I give myself permission to go see a matinee, or I’ll watch a TV show for an hour. It’s important to be generous and forgive yourself when you have a bad day. The worst thing you can do is insist that everything you write be perfect, because it just doesn’t work like that.

In revision, you need to be a little more disciplined about saying: this can be better. In a first draft, there’s something so important about getting a draft down, and then fixing it. The problem is when you read a novel and think This is what a novel should be. And even if you intellectually know that a writer worked and worked and worked on it, when you’re sitting at home, it’s harder to actually feel that what you’re doing is going to someday be this finished piece.

In a revision stage or in a first draft stage, what is your craft answer for achieving beautiful sentences?

Growing up, I read like crazy. I read two books a day. I still read a ton. It’s like a baseball player taking a swing. When you’re taking batting practice, you think: where do I put my foot, my hand, the bat. But when you’re in the box facing a pitcher, you need to just be able to swing. When I’m writing, it’s the same intuition, and when that’s not the case, it’s like there’s a light shining on that particular word saying that it’s wrong, and I know what it should be.

Has teaching changed the way you write?

Teaching makes you say out loud the things you don’t articulate to yourself. Even as a grad student, the most important thing about workshop was not having my work looked at, but talking about other people’s work. It was important for me to articulate my aesthetic. I love teaching. I could talk about writing all day, every day. I get so much energy out of it. You learn new things, because for me as a teacher, I try to treat every student differently. The dream for most writers is to write full time, and for me, now that I have that, I actually wish I was teaching, too.

You mentioned reading two books a day as a teenager. Which writers made you want to write?

There were three writers I read as a teenager where I thought—Oh, okay, I get literary fiction—where the language was beautiful and the stories still interesting and exciting: Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Michael Ondaatje.

All Canadians…

Which is funny, because I didn’t think of it like that. They’re all Canadians, but they’re also all international. Their reach has certainly exceeded the scope of the country. Those writers opened up the world of literary fiction. Also, typical for a young nerdy boy, I read a lot of science fiction. Because I read widely, I learned the importance of plot and pacing, which is not always one of the strengths of literary fiction.

Writers forget that people read our work. And I like great sentences, but they have to be there for a reason, and everything should be subordinate to the work. It’s hard because we’ve all had sentences or paragraphs or chapters where we thought, I am God’s gift to writing, but they don’t fit the story, and they really should go. We don’t want to get rid of them because we’re thinking about how wonderful we are.

Did your relationship to your novel change after it published? Did it change you as a writer?

When you’re writing a novel, your characters don’t tell you what to do or make you do anything. If your characters make you do stuff, it’s because you’re being lazy as a writer. My characters cross the street because I make them cross the street, and if I don’t want them to cross the street, I’ll rewrite it so they don’t. As an artist you should be in complete control of the world you create.

The problem is, at some point that book goes out in the world, and there are things you can’t control. I try really hard when I’m writing to have it only be about the writing.

Touch flirts with fantasy – mythical realism, it’s been called. I believe your current project, another novel, is genre. How does writing literary and genre fiction differ?

The book I’m working on now is straight genre. It’s fun and, I think, smart and literary, but it probably falls into literary fiction in the same way that Justin Cronin’s The Passage might. I had just finished The Lobster Kings when I started writing this, and I wasn’t ready to embark on literary fiction. Literary fiction is a little bit like having a meal. You get to have dessert, but you also have vegetables and a balanced diet. And what I’m writing now is basically a giant bag of cotton candy.

Best advice you’ve ever been given about writing?

Start your next book the day after you finish your first one. The process of publication, no matter what happens, is disorienting. It’s important to remember that you want to write. And if you can get started on the next project, it gives you something that keeps you grounded and that you can return to.

What comes next?

The funny thing is my goals haven’t changed. They were always to essentially win a Nobel Prize [laughing]. And what I mean by that is, and you can hear me laughing, I’m not going to win a Nobel Prize, and I know that. But I want to write the kind of books that are read for generations, and, whether or not I can do that, what’s important is that I’m trying. Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize and then famously said he was upset because he couldn’t win it again. Nobody’s ever written a perfect book. And I certainly won’t, so there’s never going to be a moment where I think, Oh, I’ve done it! Now, it’s on to pottery.

I’m kind of earnest about this, but I really do believe that art elevates humanity. I say that line a lot, because I think literature is inherently important. What we are doing as writers is important. It changes people’s lives. And the thing you try and do is write a book so that one person reads it and thinks, My God, I wish I’d come across this book earlier. Somebody said that reading teaches us to be alone, and I think that’s wrong. Reading teaches us so that we’re not alone.

Further Links and Resources

In his recent interview with the author, Contributor Brad Wetherell speaks with Cash about such things as finding his way back to his roots as a writer, the role of mentors in both his work and life, and the long road to finishing a first novel. When asked how he might define “Southern Literature,” Cash had this to say:

That’s a difficult question to answer because just as there are many “Souths,” there are also many types of “Southern Literature.” But I think one thing that defines the South broadly and Southern literature in general is the idea of struggle and all the forms it takes. Because of its historically agrarian economy, Southerners have always struggled with the land and tried to figure out the best way to reap the most from it. Unfortunately, that led to centuries of slavery, and there was a long struggle to end that and an even longer, on-going struggle to stamp out the racial prejudice that accompanied it. You can see both the struggles with land and the struggles with racial prejudice in the work of writers like Jean Toomer, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest J. Gaines.

Also, because of the South’s agrarian economy, people tended to live on large swaths of land and relied on their family members for everything from labor to emotional support. I believe this is why family struggle has so long been a hallmark of Southern literature; here I’m thinking of writers like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Alice Walker. On the other hand, the tight cohesiveness of the Southern family can quickly turn those who aren’t related into real outsiders. So much of Southern literature, especially its local color, revolves around the mysterious and sometimes evil outsider who attempts to plunder something from those on the inside. Ron Rash, Flannery O’Connor, and several of Kate Chopin’s stories come to mind.

• To read the rest of this interview, click here.
• For more on this novel, tour dates, or to read an excerpt from this novel, please visit the author’s Website.
• You can also win one of three, signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.
• To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

The novel is narrated by three distinct first person voices: Adelaide Lyle, a midwife who has welcomed generation after generation into the mountain cloistered world of Marshall, North Carolina; Clem Barefield, a streetwise sheriff who thought he’d seen everything this town had to throw at him, including his own son’s premature death; and Jess Hall, a curious young boy caught up in a clash of beliefs and deceits more complex and sinister than he can comprehend. Together, these characters tell the story of an entire community, as their hopes and fears are prayed upon by the stranger come to town, Carson Chambliss, a fiery and mysterious preacher with his own troubling interpretation of God’s word.

Wiley Cash’s stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review and The Carolina Quarterly. He holds a B.A. in Literature from the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He has received grants and fellowships from the Asheville Area Arts Council, the Thomas Wolfe Society, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. He and his wife currently live in West Virginia where he teaches fiction writing and American literature at Bethany College. He also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing at Southern New Hampshire University.

Clearly a very busy man, Wiley took the time to correspond with me via email, as we discussed his inspiration, his methods, and what it means to him to be a “southern writer.”

Brad Wetherell: What was the initial germ of this novel for you?

Wiley Cash: I got the idea for the story of the novel when I was in graduate school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in the fall of 2003. I was taking a course in African American literature, and one day my professor, Reggie Scott Young, brought in a news story about a young African American boy with autism who was smothered during a church healing service in a storefront church on Chicago’s South Side. Although I was raised in an evangelical Southern Baptist church, I was familiar enough with charismatic belief to understand its power, and I was particularly drawn to the Pentecostal tradition, especially the Holiness movement that takes the Bible as the literal word of God, particularly Mark 16: 17-18:

And these signs will follow those who believe: In my name they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will place their hands on the sick, and they will get well.

The story of the young boy’s smothering was clearly tragic, but given my interest in the Holiness movement, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by it, and given my own memories of growing up in the evangelical church, I couldn’t help but be compelled to write about it.

But when I thought about sitting down at my desk to begin the story, I knew I’d immediately face several insurmountable problems: as interested as I was in this story, I’d never been to Chicago’s South Side, and I knew nothing about the experience of growing up in the city’s African American neighborhoods. It was impossible for me to attempt to speak for a cultural experience that existed so far outside my own.

But then I imagined the same tragedy unfolding in western North Carolina. In my mind, I saw a church sitting on the riverbank in Marshall, a small town in Madison County only a short drive from Asheville, where I’d spent countless days and nights driving back roads, taking photographs, camping, and swimming in the French Broad River. I gave the autistic boy a younger brother named Jess whose doubts about the church only intensify once he loses his brother inside its walls. The more I wrote, the more the community around Jess flourished in my mind: a church matriarch who struggles to protect the children, a local sheriff who must deal with his own tragic past to solve the mystery of the boy’s death, a mother who’s torn between her faith and her loss, and a father whose pain portends only tragedy. In creating these people and the place they live I got to live in both Louisiana and North Carolina, and it was wonderful.

At what point did you know you had a novel worth writing?

I figured I might be onto something when my friends, who were also great writers, began to take an interest in the project. I was incredibly fortunate in Lafayette to have three best friends and fellow students who were dynamic and talented fiction writers; they were also very different writers with very different strengths and interests, and when they read excerpts of the novel-in-progress they brought their diverse strengths and interests with them. Their feedback was invaluable, and so was their support.

There were many nights when I had to go home early because I was usually up and writing by 7 a.m. I got teased a good bit about acting like an old man for going to bed so early, but after my friends saw how serious I was they began to understand those early nights and early mornings. They’re still some of my best friends, and they’re still some of the most talented writers I know.

Can you describe your writing process during the creation of your book? Were there particular stumbling blocks?

One of the most difficult challenges I faced was in writing about North Carolina while living in Louisiana. First of all, I was desperately homesick, and every time I tried to write about North Carolina, especially western North Carolina, the page was colored by my misty-eyed, romantic memories of life there. My exaltation of the place was a serious roadblock in portraying the region realistically. Second, in Louisiana I immersed myself in a culture that was very foreign to me, and being surrounded by such distinct dialect and music sometimes made it difficult to hear the dialect and the music I’d left behind.

I accidentally stumbled upon the solution by rededicating myself to the literature and music of North Carolina. I poured over work by authors like Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Fred Chappell, and Thomas Wolfe, and I listened to music by Malcolm Holcombe, Sons of Ralph, the Biscuit Burners, and David Holt. I began to hear and see North Carolina again.

As I mentioned, I was in graduate school when I began writing the novel, and, like most graduate students, I was teaching two classes and taking three. Making the necessary time to write became a challenge, but I solved it by getting up incredibly early in the morning, sometimes as early as 5 a.m. I liked the feeling that the world was quiet and I was the only person awake at that time; I knew something about the day that no one yet knew. Of course this wasn’t true, but it helped to cut out the noise of life if I thought I was the only one awake in those hours. I maintained this early morning schedule for years; it used to drive my wife crazy when I’d get up at dawn on the weekends.

You say that you maintained the early morning schedule “for years.” How long did it take you to write the novel?

In the spring of 2004, I wrote a short story from the perspective of a grandfather whose autistic grandson is smothered during a healing service one Sunday morning. The grandfather and the autistic boy’s father find out the terrible news after the local sheriff comes out to the farm to tell them. The story was about twenty-five pages, but it wasn’t really a story; it was more of an event. I sat on it for over a year before I went back to it and tried to reimagine the scene. I realized that the story was much larger than one person’s perspective. In 2005, I decided to attempt to write a novel with the autistic boy’s death at the center. I experimented with several different narrators, and, as a result, the grandfather’s narration was cut even though he remained a very important character.

By the fall of 2008 I’d landed a great agent who represents several authors whose style and regional focus are very similar to mine. This agent submitted the manuscript to a few houses, but it was rejected by all of them. We worked on the manuscript for about a year and a half, and, eventually, it seemed like there was nowhere else to go in terms of revising it. We agreed to go our separate ways in January of 2010.

I turned to Nat Sobel of Sobel Weber. He’d contacted me after reading an excerpt of the novel that had been published in Crab Orchard Review in the fall of 2008, right after I’d agreed to work with my former agent. I called Nat’s office late on a Friday afternoon, and I was very surprised that he remembered my story. He agreed to consider the manuscript, but he made clear that I’d follow the same process everyone else followed, from submitting the query letter, to submitting the first fifty pages, to finally submitting the full manuscript. I was ready to give up on the novel at this point, and I probably would have if my wife hadn’t encouraged me to give it one more shot with Nat.

I submitted the full manuscript to him in February 2010. He read it and offered some comments toward revision. At this point, I had to decide whether or not I wanted to go back and revisit a manuscript that I’d thought was complete months and months earlier. Maybe it was hope, or maybe it was desperation, but I sat down at my desk and considered Nat’s comments. I worked on the novel the entire summer of 2010. Nat started submitting the novel in the fall, and the first editor who saw it purchased it in a two-book deal. Roughly five years passed from the time I decided to write the novel until the time it was accepted for publication.

Let’s now talk a bit about the book itself. Why did you choose to tell the story with multiple first person narrators?

I think I relied on a multi-voice narrative for two reasons. One, I come from a place where every member of my family and every good friend I have tells wonderful stories. Over the years, I’ve found that when something happens that involves a number of my family members or several of my friends, everyone has their own perspective of the event and narrates their version of it based on their individual perspective. I suspect this is the same with other people’s family and friends, but hearing that chorus of voices narrate separate stories that coalesce around a single event always stuck with me. Two, this is a pretty popular model with Southern novels and stories; I’m thinking of Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, and Thomas Wolfe’s novella The Lost Boy. Each of these works is focused around a single event, but the authors rely on the community or the family to fully communicate that event’s importance.

What was the biggest challenge of structuring the novel in this way? I can imagine that it might complicate how you manage the narrative time.

The biggest challenge was staying clear on what each narrator knows at each point in the story, a problem amplified by the fact that the novel takes place over six days. This tight schedule didn’t allow for a lot of summary or exposition. Aside from the opening scene, the novel is pretty linear, so that made it a little easier to keep the narrators’ stories and their knowledge of events chronological. Toward the end of the revision process, I actually found myself making calendars to track the development of the story over those six days. I really wish I’d done that earlier. Structuring a novel is a lot like solving an equation, and it helped to see all the values and integers in the visual equation instead of trying to keep them straight in my head.

Authors often say that the beginning and ending of novels are the hardest to write. Was this true for you? Also, why begin and end with Adelaide in particular?

Beginnings and endings are important in just about every process, from writing novels to romantic relationships to basketball games. I don’t know if creating the events that transpired at the beginning and the ending of A Land More Kind Than Home were any more difficult to create than any other section of the novel, but it was difficult to decide who would be responsible for narrating those events and the tone that narration would take.

Originally, Jess narrated both the opening and closing sections of the novel, but something never felt quite right about that, even though I liked the symmetry of it. I kicked around all kinds of ideas about how to grab the reader in the opening scene, but nothing seemed to work. One night, my wife was proofreading some of the manuscript pages when she read the scene of Adelaide and Carson Chambliss in the church. She looked up at me and said, “You should put this at the beginning; it’s a great hook.” I made the revision and it worked; my agent used those opening twenty pages to sell the novel to William Morrow.

With this cast of narrators, I wonder: whose story do you think this is?

If I had to assign ownership of this story to one particular character, I suppose I would say this is Jess’s story. He’s the one who carries the largest burden for the tragedy that befalls the family; he’s the one who sees something he shouldn’t have seen; he’s the one who keeps the secret until the very end when divulging it can only lead to disaster.

But I really feel like this is the community’s story. I tried to make it as rich and all-encompassing as possible. There are a lot of lives wound up in what happens to the Hall family. Only a community can tell this story; because of that it just seems right for a community to own it as well.

Can you speak about the role of place in the novel?

A sense of place is really important to me in general. I’m one of those readers who opens new books in the same manner I enter my dreams at night: I immediately want to know where I am. So much about us—our motivations, reactions, fears, and hopes—emanate from the places we’re from. There’s no escaping the fact that home, as both a physical locale and a remembered idea, are either restrictive or emboldening or sometimes both, and characters who bear the mark of their place are simply more believable to me.

That’s what I loved about living in Lafayette, Louisiana, for five years during graduate school. The language, food, and landscape were different from any other place I’d ever visited, and while I lived there I took every opportunity to immerse myself in it. I think it made me a better writer because it made me more curious about North Carolina, the place I call home.

Speaking of place, how would you define “Southern Literature”?

That’s a difficult question to answer because just as there are many “Souths,” there are also many types of “Southern Literature.” But I think one thing that defines the South broadly and Southern literature in general is the idea of struggle and all the forms it takes. Because of its historically agrarian economy, Southerners have always struggled with the land and tried to figure out the best way to reap the most from it. Unfortunately, that led to centuries of slavery, and there was a long struggle to end that and an even longer, on-going struggle to stamp out the racial prejudice that accompanied it. You can see both the struggles with land and the struggles with racial prejudice in the work of writers like Jean Toomer, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest J. Gaines.

Also, because of the South’s agrarian economy, people tended to live on large swaths of land and relied on their family members for everything from labor to emotional support. I believe this is why family struggle has so long been a hallmark of Southern literature; here I’m thinking of writers like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Alice Walker. On the other hand, the tight cohesiveness of the Southern family can quickly turn those who aren’t related into real outsiders. So much of Southern literature, especially its local color, revolves around the mysterious and sometimes evil outsider who attempts to plunder something from those on the inside. Ron Rash, Flannery O’Connor, and several of Kate Chopin’s stories come to mind.

Do you consider yourself a “southern writer”?

Absolutely, but I can’t really explain why, and I don’t know why it’s so important to me. The first time I visited West Virginia, where my wife and I now live, I asked someone if West Virginia considered itself a northern state or a southern state. The woman thought about my question for a second, and then she said, “I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.” It mattered to me, but I couldn’t explain why; I still can’t. Perhaps it’s something about my wanting to feel at home. That’s why I started writing about the South in the first place—to feel at home.

I know you worked with Ernest J Gaines. Can you speak to his influence on your work? Also, what other authors have influenced your writing the most?

The effect that Ernest J. Gaines has had on my writing life and my life in general are immeasurable. I chose to attend graduate school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette because it gave me the chance to study fiction writing under him. Before I left North Carolina, I didn’t have any idea of what kind of writer I was or what kind writer I wanted to be, and then I got to know Ernest J. Gaines, and I learned his own story of leaving home and becoming a writer.

He was born and raised in the quarters on a plantation just west of Baton Rouge where his ancestors had spent generations working as slaves and later as sharecroppers. In 1948, at the age of fifteen, he’d had to leave Louisiana and join family in California because of the lack of education available to African American children living in Pointe Coupee Parish. But, once he arrived in Vallejo, he realized that he ached for the sugar cane fields and the twisted oak trees he’d left behind. Because he couldn’t afford to return home, he decided to read about it, but after discovering that he couldn’t find any books about the lives of rural, African Americans in the South, he decided to write about them.

This was never clearer to me than the first time I visited Gaines and his wife Dianne where they’d built a new home next door to the land where he was born and raised. It was All Saints Day, and a group of us were working to beautify the old slave cemetery that sits about a half-mile behind the still-standing master’s house. In North Carolina and other parts of the South, these events are known as Decoration Days. Gaines and I had paused in our work, and we were talking about his memories of growing up on the land and the stories of the people buried in the cemetery. At one point, he looked at me and then gestured toward a grave. “Do you know Snookum from A Gathering of Old Men?” he asked. “He’s buried right over there.”

In our workshop back at the university, Gaines had helped me learn to write better stories, but that day, standing in the cemetery with the master’s house barely visible through the trees and the ghostly sound of the wind rustling the sugarcane, he showed me what my stories would be about. Later that evening, while driving home in the fading light through the flat farmland of Louisiana, I saw the clouds sitting low on the horizon, and I realized that if I squinted my eyes I could make them look like mountains. I started A Land More Kind Than Home not long after.

As we wrap up, I wonder if you had any advice for aspiring writers who hope to publish a novel of their own someday.

My advice is simple: write a book. A lot of people want to talk about writing a book, especially when they find out that you’re a writer, but very few people are actually willing to give it a real shot. Writing a book is hard. It requires a lot of time alone, and there will be many times when friends and family won’t understand why you can’t have another beer or watch the game or go out of town for the weekend. There will be a million reasons not to sit down and work, but you have to dedicate yourself to your work to finish a novel.

But don’t simply write a book; write the best book you can. Only then should you be concerned with getting an agent or finding a publisher. Don’t put your book out there before you’re certain it’s ready. Don’t query agents with an unfinished manuscript; don’t pitch ideas about a book you haven’t yet written.

Finally, what a name! Wiley Cash. Tell me it’s real.

It’s a real name, for better or worse. It’s actually a family name: the middle name of my grandfather, Odus Wiley Cash, and my father, Roger Wiley Cash, Sr. I’m Jr., but my parents decided to call me Wiley. As far as my last name goes, I’ve always heard that we’re distantly related to Johnny Cash’s people, but I never received a Christmas present or a birthday card from him or June, so I can’t really vouch for it.

My name used to drive me crazy when I waited tables, a job I’ve held at too many restaurants to name. I’d say, “Hello, my name is Wiley and I’ll be your server.” The people at the table would ask me to repeat my name, and then they’d make the usual Wile E. Coyote joke. I’d smile along, waiting to get their drink orders. Then they’d ask about my last name and make the usual joke about Johnny Cash. I probably would’ve made more tips if I hadn’t been standing around listening to the same jokes every night.

Further Links and Resources

Or watch a conversation with Ernest J. Gaines as part of The Big Read:

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/many-souths-an-interview-with-wiley-cash/feed 2 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/first-looks-april-2012-goliath-and-hhhh http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/first-looks-april-2012-goliath-and-hhhh#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:00:33 +0000 Erika Dreifus http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=35025 Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the third installment of our new blog series,  “First Looks,” which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. Please drop me a line anytime: erika(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com, and thanks in advance.

---

Susan Woodring and I are graduates of the same low-residency MFA program. Although we overlapped for a couple of semesters, we were never assigned to the same workshop. Still, I’ve been expecting her to become a “big name” in the literary world for about a decade now, since a long-ago evening when a group of us students gathered in the dorm living room for an informal reading. It was the first time I encountered Susan’s writing. I knew instantly that her fiction was already at a level different from—superior to—almost everything the rest of us were doing. Some things you just can’t explain.

So I wasn’t surprised to watch from afar as Susan’s excellent stories showed up in journals, won contests, and were gathered in a collection (which was, incidentally, one of my very first e-book purchases). And I’m not surprised that on April 24, St. Martin’s Press is releasing Susan’s second novel: Goliath.

I’d be eager to read this novel even without Bret Lott’s endorsement: “Goliath is a beautiful and quietly moving story of love, grief, forgiveness and redemption—heady themes handled here with a big heart and a deft hand. In prose exquisitely clear and with details that will make your heart ache, Susan Woodring has written a meaningful portrait of small town life, and what it means to move through grief toward love.” Which reminds me that I should also recommend Susan’s wonderful blog posts, where I first read of Bret Lott’s influence on her work.

I’d love to tell you all about another new book scheduled for imminent release—but I’ve already reviewed it for another publication, and until that review is published, I shouldn’t spill too many beans. But I will say that I can’t wait to see the other reviews that will be published about HHhH, a debut novel by Laurent Binet (translated by Sam Taylor), simply because I’m eager to see how other readers respond to it. And I’ll say this, too: If I ever teach historical fiction again, I’ll be assigning this novel, which blends historical fiction and metafiction as it reconstructs Operation Anthropoid, the plot to assassinate Nazi Reinhard Heydrich.

Until next month…

---

Further Reading

• You can read the first chapter of Susan Woodring’s Goliath online.
• You can also find some of Susan’s short stories online, in journals including Ruminate and turnrow.
• If you’d like to learn more about HHhH, you can read its starred review from Publishers Weekly.

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/first-looks-april-2012-goliath-and-hhhh/feed 2 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-the-book-of-madness-and-cures-by-regina-omelveny http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-the-book-of-madness-and-cures-by-regina-omelveny#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:00:15 +0000 Lauren Hall http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=34658 Regina O’Melveny credits many inspirations for her debut novel, The Book of Madness and Cures: Paintings by Bernardino Campi and Vittore Carpaccio; an engraving of the human anatomy by Andreas Vesalius; Dante’s Divine Comedy; the antiquarian market of Campo San Maurizio; and Homer’s Hymn to Demeter, among others. No doubt they fueled the author’s imagination—one feels their echoes throughout. However, one name seems to be conspicuously absent from O’Melveny’s list: William Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s greatest riffs play out within O’Melveny’s story. A perilous journey. A woman disguised in men’s clothing. A pair of quip-tossing peasants. Love won and lost. A great man’s decent into madness. A daughter’s enduring loyalty. Letters that lose their way. For those who love the Bard, O’Melveny’s rich and adventurous tale will evoke some welcome associations. Like Shakespeare, O’Melveny reaches high and wide for an epic story. Enter Gabriella Mondini, a female (gasp!) physician in 16th century Venice. When her father disappears, taking his vast medical knowledge – and professional patronage – with him, Gabriella becomes obsessed with his safe return. She embarks on a dangerous journey that takes her through Renaissance Europe and eventually to Morocco, with only her wits, trusted servants, and father’s cryptic letters to guide her. Threaded through the story is a book within a book, as Gabriella works to complete the final entries in a medical encyclopedia, The Book of Diseases, her father’s life work. O’Melveny often employs entries as a mirroring device for plot; thus, Gabriella moves from an entry on “Melancholia” to “Notes Toward Manifestations of Solar Madness, Correlative to Lunacy.” As a framework, The Book of Diseases makes logical sense. However, these medical case studies often feel extraneous, as they don’t often advance the story or reveal character. And further character development would have been welcome. As Gabriella travels, dozens of new faces and names join the story. After the first few countries, it becomes difficult to sort one physician from another. The prose, especially the dialogue, is partly to blame. Characters frequently alternate between overwritten, stilted language (presumably indicative of time period) and casual, contemporary conversation—sometimes within a paragraph. This inconsistency jars the ear, and does a disservice to the narrative, not to mention the characters. Without unique voices, they stand in for ideas, not human beings. What does feel authentic is the world they inhabit. O’Melveny’s vast knowledge shows, and many Renaissance details feel tangible and true. This is a journey story, after all, and O’Melveny keeps the reader hand in hand with Gabriella as she explores unfamiliar landscapes. A voyage tale should allow armchair travel, and this one does. We explore the Schwarzwald, where the braches blow “like skirts trailing across an immense Persian carpet,” brave the wind in Leiden, where it “advance[s] windmill by windmill … setting up a slow shudder,” and jostle via caravan to Taradante, with “the camels snorting, belching and grunting like dyspeptic old men.” These luxurious details bring Gabriella’s story – and O’Melveny’s prose – to life.

---

Extra

Amelia Gray’s debut novel Threats (FSG Originals) follows her two story collections AM/PM and Museum of the Weird. (Doesn’t count in a title, people.) Gray excels at evoking mood. But like the ground in an earthquake, you can’t rely on past experience to dictate expectations. You get this from the stories, but here Gray’s larger canvas allows for curious resonances and even further distortions. The facts seem clear: David, a failed dentist, loses his wife, Franny, a cosmetologist. He doesn’t so much lose her as witness her death, one that remains mysterious and unexplained for the entire book.

She was standing at the bottom of the stairs. She held the rail and tipped her head back to look at her husband. They held the same rail. “You’ve been tromping berries,” he said.

“It’s blood.” She held the stair’s rail …

Gray creates an unsettling physical presence with that rail, the narrative eye drawn to it like a magnet, even with a blood-soaked Franny the most important thing in the room. Anyone who has encountered violence can attest to the randomness of what details remain: the color of your attacker’s shoelaces, the pigeon with a French fry in its beak just before the window shattered.

Throughout the book, David listens to the final message Franny left on the home answering machine (there’s one for the time capsule). Through repetition it transforms into a cipher.

Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.

The things we leave behind: the ghosts of unexecuted intent, best laid plans.

Threats meanders. David begins finding typed, handwritten, scribbled threats hidden in the crevices of his and Franny’s shared life. Tucked behind picture frames, sitting on counters where they hadn’t been before, among Franny’s things from the beauty parlor – they appear everywhere.

I WILL CROSS-STITCH AN IMAGE OF YOUR FUTURE HOME BURNING. I WILL HANG THIS IMAGE OVER YOUR BED WHILE YOU SLEEP.

Both vague and terrifying, Gray’s capacity for evoking menace remains unflagging throughout:

I WILL LOCK YOU IN A ROOM MUCH LIKE YOUR OWN UNTIL IT BEGINS TO FILL WITH WATER.

Has Franny been stalked for years, or could these threats somehow be from her, albeit requiring a bit of supernatural finagling? Has the universe learned how to type? These threats are artful, fascinating, and unexplained.

Curious interludes ensue: a woman who appears to live at the Laundromat; a detective, Chico, as hapless as Clouseau; a therapist, Marie, who squats in David’s garage, continually stung by resident wasps; David’s doppelganger loose in the neighborhood. These are but a few phenomenon in Ms. Gray’s phantasmagoria. It creates a level of discomfort in the reader, amid characters who themselves undergo no small level of bafflement.

This novel gives a litmus test to its audience: will you revel in the cross-currents of David’s strange trip, or will you tense up and refuse to fall under the hypnotic qualities of Gray’s work? There is no right answer, but like sitting in the dentist’s chair: it helps if you relax. As Marie, the interloping mental health professional, says, “If you release yourself to the potential of help, anyone can be helpful.” Do you enjoy the ride or fault it for not being as expected? Then again, how did you form that expectation? Damn, but Amelia Gray is brave. Not many young authors debut with a long, hard gaze into the void.

David puts many things into his mouth, as though consumption equaled control, comprehension, and comfort. An infant’s approach to the world: curiosity expressed through taste. The novel subverts its own repetitions, in a way that allies us with David’s oral fixation—it sounds quite nice to find solace in the familiar, warm, and confined space of a mouth. Yet even this image becomes strange, when one encounters this description of a kiss:

She pressed her face down with the idea of crushing him and kissed his tongue and teeth, sucking the fluids there, tasting bitter coffee and mouthwash, internalizing his mouth, pressing his face harder and licking the strangely flat surface of his back teeth, wishing for a moment that she could take his teeth in her mouth and chew on them, feel the foreign against familiar, his teeth embedding in her cheeks like cloves in an orange.

Patently disgusting, yet transfixing, and if the reader steps back a moment to think of the romantic kisses of literature, it begins to dawn that they are, in fact, romanticized. Gray’s wholly grotesque description may be closer to the truth, but it also begs the question of why we were so concerned with accuracy in the first place, when the un-gilded lily can be, well, revolting.

Like a kaleidoscope, shift your perspective one degree and the entire horizon line of Threats cants wildly. A tale of justified paranoia, shift a bit and the novel resolves into a case study of mental breakdown, then again, and it becomes a tactile wedding of squalor and grief. Even the act of reviewing—attempting to describe the work—feels uncomfortably revelatory: for me the book captured the anguish of losing the one person who kept chaos at bay. David’s life may have been eroding slowly before, but Franny’s death sends the flood roiling, black and ominous, to the rafters. It’s a book of loose ends, frustrations, non sequiturs, Winchester Mansion stairways that end in a blank wall. In short, welcome to life.

Grief is a whirlpool drawing matter and debris unto itself: behold the wreckage. But Gray’s novel implies a larger darkness, too. Death is a black hole pulling meaning, coherence, and plot toward the event horizon, never to be heard from again. That’s a threat any mortal can understand.

Further Links & Resources

• Featherproof Books (whose designer makes us want to pick up everything they put out) published Gray’s collection AM/PM, and they have an excerpt on their site, featherproof.com
• Interested in other mind-expanding work? (Not that kind of mind-expansion, we’re a family show.) Check out Bizarro Fiction, our interview with flash fiction writer Meg Pokrass, and our continued fascination with gaming and lit – here, here, and here, oh, yes – here, too.
• Watch Gray read at the The FSG Reading Series, below:

The FSG Reading Series with Amelia Gray from Farrar, Straus and Giroux on Vimeo.