With an economy on the rocks and limited disposable income among music buyers, there’s good reason to favor individual brilliance in quick flashes over an album’s collective crescendo. In a generation of “Pointers,” the relationship between and among songs on an album—its narrative—is all but lost in favor of hit single after single.

But in Jennifer Egan’s latest book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, an array of stories mix into a cohesive novel, each chapter self-contained yet fluid as the grooves of an LP. Structurally, the book flashes forward in one section only to skip back in the next, shifting the protagonist’s point of view in each chapter. And yet, unlike the fragmented, seemingly unconnected world of the Shuffle, where randomization is celebrated over construction, A Visit from the Goon Squad reads as a whole, as tight as the pickup on a single-coil Fender, locked and loaded.

from Flickr

Most of the characters in these stories cross paths at one point or another with Bennie Salazar, whom we meet in the first chapter, “The Gold Cure.” Casting him as a fading music exec at first encounter, the narrative then rewinds to catch him as a young idealist through the eyes of a teenage female friend. As she views him, “Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.”

In subsequent chapters, we also inhabit the points of view of Bennie’s ex-wife, publicist, friend, mentor, assistant, employee, and the musicians themselves, whose careers interlock with his. Taken together, Bennie’s narrative personifies the rise and fall of rock’s industrial commodification, its glory days and highway to hell.

At the novel’s heart is the role of music as both an agent and subject of nostalgia. Rock acts as a bygone era and the conduit on which we may resurrect what has been lost:

He sensed Sasha listening closely and toyed with the idea that he was confessing to her his disillusionment—his hatred for the industry he’d given life to. He began weighing each musical choice, drawing out his argument through the songs themselves—Patti Smith’s ragged poetry (but why did she quit?), the jock hardcore of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks giving way to alternative, that great compromise, down down down to the singles he’d just today been petitioning radio stations to add, husks of music, lifeless and cold as the squares of office neon cutting the blue twilight.

Jennifer Egan / photo credit: Pieter M. Van Hattem/Vistalux

The struggle to recover some past ideal permeates the story lines of multiple characters, this need to recapture anything and everything; from the national consciousness before 9/11 to the name of a lover who has disappeared. Beauty, fame, fortune, family, physical health—these are the obsessions of protagonists desperately trying to retrieve something they hadn’t known they needed the first time around. A journalist replays his transgressions with a 19-year-old movie star from the confines of his prison cell. An ousted socialite scrambles for relevance at the risk of endangering her young daughter. A father takes his children and new girlfriend on a Safari in hopes of achieving previous nuclear harmony. An uncle sets out to find his missing niece and instead mines the museums of Naples for reflections of his estranged wife.

Each of these characters is poised for a reckoning, at the crossroads of something devilish. At times it is unclear whether music (and its hard-knock underworld) is at the price of or the ticket to the soul. Is music-as-a-kind-of-religion the spiritual destination, or the catalyst of decline? One middle-aged character wonders about the disintegration of wilder times into growing despondency: “Had they somehow brought it on?”

Egan raises these questions through sparkling wit and lyrical prose. As important as music becomes to the characters and the narrative, language itself (and music as language and language as music), emerges as the real main character. One particularly moving chapter, told in the voice of 12-year-old Alison Blake about her older brother Lincoln, is written entirely in power-point slides with Venn diagrams, flow charts, triangle graphs, etc.—effectively communicating how family members misinterpret each other, the cruel opacity of subtext. This type of writing through symbols might, in lesser hands, have become gimmicky, but in Egan’s case, there’s a frisson in piecing out her emotional geometries.

from Flickr

Lincoln is obsessed with Great Rock and Roll Pauses, or the seconds of rests within songs, little breathers, four beats, two beats, and where in the song they occur. These musical rests also mirror literary silences—white spaces, page divides, chapter breaks, section groupings— what goes unsaid. In a poignant irony, Lincoln’s cataloguing of these musical absences is actually the fullest expression of feeling he can convey. So that “Hey, Dad, there’s a partial silence at the end of ‘Fly Like an Eagle,’ with a sort of rushing sound in the background that I think is supposed to be the wind or maybe time rushing past!” actually is Lincoln’s attempt at “I love you, Dad” after seven layers of filtration.

While Alison feels compelled to chart the spouting of her brother’s pause-trivia, Rebecca–the academic wife of a freelance buzz-creator in the music biz–undertakes a project of her own, studying the words that are suppose to carry meaning, and have, like so much else in her book, lost their impact:

from Flickr

Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words – “friend,” and “real” and “surge” and “change,” words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some like “identity” “search” and “space” had clearly been drained of their life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Egan’s prose never suffers from casings, and that’s a testament to her acute ear and keen perception, the cadence of how to make words sing.

Time plays as “a goon” in these stories, a dark angel, the algebraic unknown; how you get from a to b, xs and os. Proust’s epigraph highlights all the suggestiveness of the physical, sensual, and associative cues, and this canonical morsel echoes throughout the novel.

from Flickr

T.S. Eliot once observed, “you are the music while the music lasts.” The characters in A Visit From the Goon Squad, each in his or her own way, are trying to extend the melody, to shore off the fragments of an increasingly silent and tone-deaf world.

Throughout the book there persists a tension between wanting and not wanting to know what’s real—between wanting not to care, and wanting to get back that sense of caring too much. Of wanting to be an adult when you’re a kid, and a kid when you’re an adult. Similarly, in readers and listeners alike there resonates a certain desire for telepathy, to be at one with something larger.

Like a concert, a good book can draw you in and sweep you to a different place. And after it’s over, ears ringing, lyrics rolling through your mind on the way home, remembering the way the light poured out over the stage, you can say it—you were there.

Metallica at Rock Werchter 2009 / photo credit: www.christianholmer.com

Further Reading

photo credit: Pieter M. Van Hattem/Vistalux

- While exploring Egan’s inventively designed website, you can read an excerpt from Chapter 12 of A Visit from the Goon Squad. Look inside the book via Random House; the publisher’s site also offers a guide for readers.

- Then read about the story behind Egan’s website–including its “Gallery of a Writer’s Impulses”–on the New York Times Papercuts blog.

- Here are some recent interviews with Egan–at Mary: A Literary Quarterly; on Hits Daily Double; on NPR’s The Takeaway; on NPR’s Morning Edition; from the Paris Review Daily blog; and in Guernica–and here’s a profile of the author by Edan Lepucki at The Millions. Bonus: This Rumpus interview brings PowerPoint savvy into the game.

- Learn more about Egan’s previous novels: The Keep; Look at Me; and The Invisible Circus; and her collection, Emerald City and Other Stories.

- On 9/27/2001, Egan wrote this essay (for Slate) reflecting on the eerie experience–and aftermath–of writing a terrorist character in Look at Me, of “imagining the unthinkable.”

- Via the author’s website, read “The Bipolar Puzzle,” her cover story from the Sept. 14, 2008 issue of the New York Times Magazine.

- This video highlights Egan’s oral history project-in-progress about women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WWII, via WORKS IN PROGRESS, a new TV series in development from creator Ina Howard-Parker:

WORKS IN PROGRESS: Jennifer Egan from Ina Howard-Parker on Vimeo.

- Watch and listen to Egan read at UPenn’s Kelly Writers House in 2006:

Each story plays with this tension between a traveler’s joy at discovery and the distance she feels from her adopted home or partner. We see this theme first in “Envy,” with Toby, a young engineer sent in the late 1960s to Vietnam to find out why many of his company’s planes are going down. While in Bangkok, he falls deeply in love with the Thai nurse who dresses his leg wounds. After they marry, he soon realizes that her family expects more financial support than he can provide. In the second story, “Independence,” Toby’s high school girlfriend, Kit, moves with her young daughter to San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, to broaden her horizons. But even as she adopts local dress in an attempt to get closer to “something worth knowing,” she observes that the locals ridicule the earnest expats’ naïve desire to blend in. In “The Other Side of the World,” the final and most powerful story, a former tin prospector in Thailand returns to the U.S. a lonely man. Unable to commit to any woman, and unable to forget his lover in Thailand, he pays for long-term “relationships” with a succession of Asian prostitutes.

Every one of these six stories could stand on its own, but Silber’s arrangement enhances their impact. The narrators’ lives often overlap, as do their realizations about place and self. We are more invested in Annunziata’s story in “Loyalty” because we have already met her daughter from Mike’s point of view in “Allegiance.” And we feel a small pleasure upon realizing that Corinna’s husband was Kit and Toby’s high school science teacher. While not a novel in the expected sense, the book feels novelistic. In place of a typical arc, we have the satisfying—if sometimes tentative—connections between characters and the recurring theme of displacement and love. And there’s more: Toby’s story introduces a sliver of a larger narrative thread—the mystery of the planes’ failure in Vietnam. While the thread does not appear in each story, the solution to the mystery in Owen’s telling of “The Other Side of the World,” provides the kind of resolution many readers expect from a novel.

the hardcover edition

The stories, too, are novelistic. Each one spans decades in a character’s lifetime, and we follow these expansive arcs fluidly, even cinematically. In “Paradise,” we watch Corinna, a dreamy teenage flapper, move from hurricane-stricken 1920s Florida to humid, lush Thailand—then called Siam. Liberated and eager, she joins her tin-prospecting brother, Owen, in her absolute love of the place and people. Ultimately, she returns to the United States, and Silber takes us gently into the character’s later years, her deep homesickness for Thailand and for the man there who has become, in Owen’s words, “a metaphor for the attachment she couldn’t fix to a whole country.” Corinna maintains her nostalgic distance: “We had loved Siam, but we were pretending to a higher level of Siameseness than we had. The pretending was a great joy to us.”

Each of Silber’s six narrators does his or her share of pretending. But they do so with the best intentions. They pretend because they can’t help themselves; they want to belong to the places and the people they have set their sights on. Like E.M. Forster’s George, in A Room with a View, each character tries to “choose a place where [they] won’t do very much harm.” They have a progressive awareness about their impact when abroad, a sensibility that seems particularly relevant and desirable given the U.S.’s role during the years when this book was written. While in Vietnam, Toby develops an uncomfortable awareness of his place in the country: “Why was I there if I was only going to walk along in my towering foreign fatness, my oblivious overfed height?” Even when they begin their journeys as naïve or even willfully ignorant, these characters eventually learn to look beyond themselves and their desires.

This sort of moral insight is both a strength of the book and its one significant failing. We like these characters; they are intelligent and conscientious, the kind of travelers we would hope to be. The opposite of the ugly American stereotype, they make us feel good about ourselves and humanity. And yet except for Owen–the tin prospector who can only commit to prostitutes–they become too uniformly good, too equally concerned and self-aware, lacking complex views about race and culture and America’s role in foreign affairs. The result is a flattening of tone, a sort of implausible wish-fulfillment journey. Even Owen is disarmingly aware of his flaws. In his final years, he discovers his and his company’s role in the planes’ failure, and, taking the high road, he reveals the reason. After he is fired, Owen begins a slow, redeeming descent into poverty. In his old age, he makes something of a real relationship with Pearl, a prostitute he has been seeing for years.

But even with their uniformly—and sometimes frustratingly—good intentions, the characters of The Size of the World manage to enchant. Silber’s stories beguile; the world opens outward in each. Her prose is crystalline, and her art is pleasingly buried in the simplicity of the sentences. When Annunziata travels to Thailand to care for her estranged daughter in a Bangkok hospital, she realizes her husband’s and her own former destructive xenophobia in one clear sentence: listening to the sounds of the city beyond the hospital walls, she notes, “It humbled me, this noise that had nothing to do with us.” Reading, we are humbled, too. And we experience that bit of magic that one feels in a new and mesmerizing bit of earth, the same sensation Toby experiences as he begins to fall in love with his future wife: “I had the traveler’s idea that something fleeting was blessing me.”

Further Resources

Joan Silber / photo from http://nationalbookawards.org/

- Via the Washington Post, read an excerpt from The Size of the World.

- At Largehearted Boy, Silber devises a playlist to complement the characters’ lives in The Size of the World.

- Read a short story by Silber: “The High Road” (from the Fall 2002 issue of Ploughshares).

- In this interview for Publisher’s Weekly, Silber talks about how she supported herself before her first publication and between books. Here are more conversations with Silber: at The Millions, at B&N.com, with Otium, and as a guest on Charlie Rose.

- Scroll down on the North Country Public Radio (Canton, NY) site to listen to this audio interview on North Country Public Radio (Canton, NY).

- If you’re looking for a copy of The Size of the World (for yourself, or to wrap in holiday paper), shop your local indie bookseller.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Nami grew up there and in the Bronx. She has worked as an Avon lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator. After earning a GED, she went on to get a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her stories, several of which appear as chapters in Miles from Nowhere, have appeared or are forthcoming in Granta, Iowa Review, Evergreen Review, Witness, Bat City Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Chicago and teaches at Columbia College.

Nami and I were classmates at the University of Michigan, where I had the pleasure not only of reading several sections of Miles from Nowhere in workshop, but also of sitting down in Nami’s living room every so often for a cost-effective and stylish haircut. We live in different parts of the country these days, so the following conversation took place over a series of e-mails.

Interview

GREG SCHUTZ: Miles from Nowhere is narrated by Joon, a teenaged Korean girl, a runaway. Meanwhile, you’re Korean-American, and your dust-jacket bio reveals that you’ve worked as an Avon lady and a dance hostess—jobs that Joon herself holds at certain points in the novel. Customer reviews on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, show some speculation about this book being autobiographical. I know this is something that’s come up for you in other interviews as well, so maybe we should begin by setting the record straight: what is the relationship between Joon’s experiences in Miles from Nowhere and your own life?

NAMI MUN: Considering that I also left home for good at an early age, and that I’ve held some of the jobs Joon does in the book, I think it’s very fair for readers to wonder if the book is autobiographical. Emotionally speaking, the book definitely expresses some of the feelings I have felt in my life, but the actual scenes, dialogue, events, etc. portrayed in the book are very much fiction. To put it in numbers, 99% of Miles from Nowhere is pure fabrication. The remaining one percent represents what I think of as kernels of real life that provided the spark for that 99%.

Of course, many writers use real life or real emotions as starting points. Bruno Schulz comes to mind. As does Kafka. If you read Kafka’s journals and letters, you can see how his strained relationship with his father gets played out in his dreams, and then later on in his fiction. Hemingway is also a good example because he often chose not to write about the actual events of his life, but used the knowledge of them to strengthen his story. Omission is a big part of my fiction writing process. I keep real-life events in a basement-reserve of sorts and hope that their fumes will rise above the floorboards and infuse my narrative.

What do you make of the urge to read fiction as if it were memoir?

I think readers have a tendency to read fiction as memoir because they understand that writing doesn’t occur in a vacuum—that a writer’s imagination often begins in real life and real experiences.

So, why did you choose to write fiction instead of a memoir?

Fiction is my default writing mode. Whenever I witness something odd on the streets or hear intriguing dialogue on the trains, my first impulse is to drop these things into my fiction bank. I don’t have a memoir bank. Fiction, to me, is running through the woods rather than running on a treadmill. It’s freedom to make up characters, setting, situations, etc.—and through this freedom I feel better equipped to express and explore my ideas. Writing about “true” events feels constricting. My hours on the planet are already filled with so many constraints, why add one more? And in case you haven’t guessed it already, I also don’t like following cooking recipes; I hate reading instructional manuals; and my ideal meal is something that contains numerous varieties and options (also known as Korean food). I also prefer writing about things without writing about them directly. Finally, I am also somewhat of a private person, which means I need the veil fiction provides in order to unveil deeper truths about what I’m trying to express.

Why (and when) did you begin writing, and what did your early efforts look like?

My early efforts looked like a clown—a cheap, drunk, whorish clown with smeared makeup, who drove around the country in his banged-up clown car. The emotions relayed were garish and obvious, the writing was strained, and my story ideas meandered all over the place—one day I was writing detective noir, another day a Korean-gothic tale about a girl being tortured by everyone in her hometown (think Blair Witch meets “The Lottery”). And still another day, a magical-realism story about a woman suffering from Sjögren’s syndrome, also known as dried-up tear ducts. But with every single horrific page, I was learning something new—the most important being how to detect an ill-fated story.

One of the things that impresses me most about Miles from Nowhere is the voice of its narrator, Joon. She’s capable of a deadpan accuracy that verges on reportage, but this is a deadpan that sometimes rises to moments of startling, poetic clarity: Joon is a great noticer of details. How did you find her voice?

I test drove numerous voices and characters before I found Joon. But one sentence into Joon’s story, I knew I was onto something; it was that immediate. To me, Joon sounds both frightened and curious, intelligent and naïve, strong and vulnerable. And funny. She also displays stoicism—a quality I admire in her but one that ultimately signifies her repressed emotions. These emotions are there inside, gurgling in her throat. And her deadpan, reportorial voice is a way for her to temper these internal struggles so they don’t bubble to the surface. But then, sometimes, the world is too unbearable for her, and that’s when her voice cracks. That’s when she is forced to see her surroundings with a certain poetic beauty. She needs to see the beautiful, almost as much as the reader needs for her to see it. In the final image of “Club Orchid,” Joon needs to see that 99-cent store. She needs to see those crayon colors, those bottles and boxes of soaps, the shiny floor, and, more importantly, that unbelievable light. No one saved her that night, so she finds a way to save herself by creating light from dark, if only so she can last another day.

What was the earliest impetus for Miles from Nowhere? Did you begin by writing a single short story, or did you know from the beginning that there was an entire book here?

The first story I wrote for the book was “Club Orchid.” In that story, Joon is both vulnerable and strong, and I suppose I liked the tension this dichotomy created on the page, especially when she tries to describe the very adult setting and situations. I went on to write several more stories about her, and maybe a year or two later I noticed how all of the stories revolved around Joon trying to make money to survive. (For example, she works as a dance hostess in one story, sells Avon in another, sells newspaper on subways, etc.) That’s when I realized that these stories, while self-contained, could also be cogs working toward a larger narrative arc.

I also made a crucial decision right then—to keep the episodic structure, primarily because I felt it gave a truer, more visceral reflection of Joon’s fractured mindset.

How long did it take you to write Miles from Nowhere?

It took eight years. During those years I worked a total of six different jobs and earned my MFA. My life was in flux but the book remained my constant. I wrote before work, after work, during lunch, and if possible, during work. I wrote on weekends and holidays. Luckily, my partner of ten years (Augustus Rose) is also a writer, so writing during vacations was never frowned upon. I wrote during vacations.

You must have encountered moments of self-doubt along the way. How did you overcome them?

I am a person who is both plagued with and fueled by self-doubt. This might explain why the book took so long to complete. But my self-doubt was also the force behind the ridiculous number of revisions each chapter went through, which in the end gave me a certain confidence about what I had written. I think the trick is to not “overcome” self-doubt but to learn how to ride it. .

Miles from Nowhere is set in New York (mostly the Bronx) during the 1980s. What influenced your choice of milieu? Was it a challenge for you as a writer, having not only to capture in prose an iconic city about which so much has already been written, but also to capture that city as it was during a particular decade?

Generally speaking, setting is always a challenge—I try to keep it in the background and yet let it breathe and flex its muscles throughout the story. Many stories/novels do this successfully—Paul Bowles’ “How Many Midnights” comes to mind, as does Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Both authors treat New York as an entity that dramatically or subtly carries the weight of character wants and fears. And in this way, the setting works as a guide, communicating to the reader when the characters cannot.

For these reasons (and many more) New York was the perfect backdrop to reflect the mercurial nature of Joon’s inner and outer life. And while writing the book, I tried not to think of New York as belonging to Woody Allen, Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell, Paul Auster, E.L. Doctorow, Hubert Selby, Jr., Richard Price (I could go on)—but as the city I grew up in, took shelter in, went to the movies in, had my first kiss in. And I focused on Joon’s New York, how small and dark and cold it would feel to her, especially in the 1980s, the decade of self-serving.

photo by Tony the Misfit (flickr cc)

photo by mk B (flickr cc)

You surround Joon with something like an ensemble cast—these characters who cross her path for a few chapters or a few pages or even just a few lines. I still remember (without going into too much detail here) the man who tells Joon the story about falling from a tree, or the old man carrying the dog in the grocery basket. Where do minor characters like these come from? Do you conceive of them in advance, and then find ways to work them into your narrative, or is it the other way around—does the sensed need for a particular sort of encounter determine the kind of person you have Joon meet?

I don’t know where they come from, but I hope they keep coming. How they work within a narrative differs with every story, and trying to talk about them feels like trying to describe magic or spirituality. What I do know is that they are minor folks who play a major role. They might facilitate an important change within a character, or they might provide a final push toward the all-important climax. And even if I conceive of them in advance, they only make their way onto the page if and when the story needs them to. The minute I try to “work them into a narrative,” I can feel the strain, and the story suffers.

I’m thinking about this passage on characterization from James Wood’s How Fiction Works:

Your prose possesses this same facility for quickly “getting in” your characters. (For example, the medical assistant at the abortion clinic whose “voice was too loud for the size of the room,” and who shortly thereafter “clicked her pen into action” to record Joon’s responses to her questions.) How do you find these details—ones that can immediately vivify a minor character?

Maupassant’s detail is very telling of M. Cimme’s pitiless and haughty attitude toward the people around him, which foreshadows and perhaps partially explains his insensitivity toward the dying woman later in the story. In a short story (especially one as short as “La Reine Hortense”) every detail must be specific and yet all-encompassing. With the details I wrote for the medical assistant, the goal was to describe her and Joon’s state of mind simultaneously. Hopefully the reader senses that the Medical Assistant is a taskmaster, a person of confidence, a person in complete control of her actions. Basically, she is the opposite of Joon, who in that scene is floating in a haze of heroin. So it seems right to have Joon notice and be annoyed by the sounds, as well as any fast movements, such as the clicking of the pen. I think once I truly entered Joon’s perspective, insignificant details fell by the wayside.

Much has been made of the criticism that MFA workshops somehow flatten the fiction of their participants, forcing stories and novels into predictable, “safe” forms. But a book like Miles from Nowhere, by being both excellent and daring, seems to me the perfect counterexample. What effect did your time in the M.F.A. program on the University of Michigan have on Miles from Nowhere? Is there truth to the concept of the “workshop story” or of “MFA fiction”?

The University of Michigan’s MFA program gave me everything a writer could want: time and money to work on my manuscript; brilliant mentors (Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, and Michael Byers, to name a few) who guided me toward the end of the book; crucial teaching experience; and an extremely keen group of workshop mates who came to class with an open mind as well as a critical eye. During those two years of workshops, I never saw a single story that was “flat,” “predictable,” or “safe.” Maybe I got lucky. Or maybe my mates were mature enough as writers that nothing in the universe could have flattened their work. That was certainly the case with Uwem [Akpan]’s stories about child trafficking in Africa (Say You’re One of Them), Preeta [Samarasan]’s writing about family and politics (Evening is the Whole Day), and Michael [Shilling]’s novel, Rock Bottom, about a band on the last day of its tour. All of these novels are so vastly different from one another, but they are all powerful in voice, and in story. So when people talk about flat “workshop” stories, I thank God that I’ve never personally experienced this phenomenon.

But to answer your question about whether workshops churn out flat writing, I have to say that flat writing makes flat stories, and no one or thing could be blamed except the writer.

I know, both from having participated in MFA workshops with you and from reading literary journals, that some chapters of Miles from Nowhere had their geneses as short stories. So, as an avid reader and writer of short stories, I hoped we could talk about the form for a moment. What was it that initially drew you to the short story as a vehicle for your material?

I love the speed the form allows, as well as the depth. I love how one day, or one moment, can speak for a lifetime the way it does in the best of stories, like “A&P” and “Bullet in the Brain.” And how the form also allows a writer to cover years and years of a character’s life within a mere few pages, as in “Grippes and Poche” by Gallant, “Miserere” by Stone, or “The Store” by Edward P. Jones. I also love the language, how absolutely precise it needs to be, how no word is wasted. And I love how the form is conducive to multiple revisions, my favorite part of writing.

Speaking of revisions, how do you know when a story is finished?

I think it’s akin to falling in love; you know it when you know it. Or maybe it’s like recognizing pornography?

You won’t want to hear me say this, but I remember that, while you were studying here at Michigan, your work ethic was near-legendary. You were willing (or so the legend goes) to sit at your desk for eight hours straight, working on a single sentence—getting the words right, the voice, the rhythm. Any truth to these rumors? What does your day-to-day writing process look like?

Well, I’m not sure if this is something I’m proud of, but yes, I do often write for eight to ten hours a day when I’m working on a piece. But that only proves that I don’t exercise, and that I don’t have much of a social life. I don’t know about working on single sentence that entire time—that really does sound apocryphal—but yes, I sometimes have only a paragraph to show for my hours of work. Again, it’s not something I’m necessarily proud of because it only proves how slow my brain works.

Would you say that this kind of tenacity is necessary for a writer of literary fiction (he asked leadingly)?

Many folks tend to romanticize the life of the writer. I think that’s because they see us after we’ve written the book or the story. They don’t see us sitting in at our desk for weeks, months, years on end—losing weight, losing muscle mass, feeling depressed, not showering. (This is why they have reality TV shows about dancers, chefs, and models, and never about writers.) Yes, tenacity is a requirement, for all writers and not just writers of literary fiction. Tenacity, thick skin, the ability to sit still and focus—these are more than necessary.

Any other advice for young writers, or for anyone coming to the craft of fiction?

Write about things that actually matter to you. If your story is founded on some “clever” premise or “quirky” characters who experience “idiosyncratic” situations, write until you find in your story something that matters to you. Aimee Bender, George Saunders, and Donald Barthelme (just to name a few) are masters at combining ingenuity with empathy, cleverness with compassion. If you don’t feel anything for your story, no one else will.

Now that Miles from Nowhere is on bookstore shelves, where do you go from here? What are you working on these days?

Since my criminal defense investigator days, I’ve always been interested in crime—not so much the “whodunnit” aspect, but more the philosophical stance of defining a person based on one single action. So I’m working on a novel about crime. I’m also writing a story about a boxer.

Further Resources

- In this video (via Amazon’s Omnivoracious), Nami talks at BookExpo about Miles from Nowhere.

- Find more interviews (print and radio) with Nami…in the Chicagoist, on San Francisco Metblogs, in the Independent, on K-Popped, on APA Compass Radio, on Minnesota Public Radio, and on Chicago Public Radio (interviewed by Eight Forty-Eight’s book critic Donna Seaman).

- Join the Miles from Nowhere Facebook group.

- Connecticut-based writers, Nami is giving a reading next Thursday, November 19 at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. Part of the A.K. Smith Reading Series, it will be held in the Reese Room in Smith House at 4:30 PM.

- If you’re shopping for a copy of Miles from Nowhere, visit your local independent bookstore.

In an age of books built from blogs, tweets, and text messages, Mitch Wieland’s new novel-in-stories feels as though it were made of wood. It is regional, elemental, and bears the marks of its maker: the careful grooves of his chisel, the smooth surfaces from the author’s finest sandpaper, even rough-hewn gouges by what might have been teeth or fingernails.

God’s Dogs (Southern Methodist UP, 2009) follows Ferrell Swan, a man in his early sixties who considers himself a failure in all the roles that matter: son, husband, father. He’s retired early and headed off to the barren landscape of southern Idaho, a self-imposed exile to prevent him from screwing anything else up. For a while, he fills his days with hikes, naps, and half-hearted forays into shepherding. But it isn’t long before his old life—in the form of ex-wife Rilla and stepson Levon—catches up with him.

This book focuses remarkably, relentlessly on the main character. With a small supporting cast and a plot as sparse and unadorned as the sagebrush desert, God’s Dogs becomes a kind of meditation. Ultimately, Ferrell’s dilemma boils down to a question of suffering alone versus suffering with others—which is more bearable, and which is nobler.

Other reviewers have rightly discussed the book as an exploration of solitude. Certainly, its hermit-in-wilderness motif follows in the tradition of Walden, Desert Solitaire and others. However, I’d argue that Wieland’s unsung genius is his rendering of family. While much of this novel could be set a century ago, the depiction of marriage and fatherhood feels up-to-the-second contemporary. Ferrell and Rilla are only able to love each other in divorce, and then only up to a point. Levon—legally an adult, biologically not Ferrell’s son, technically a parent himself—needs more fathering now than ever.

The questions this novel raises about family seem to me the most interesting and the most urgent–questions that may well define our age: Which aspects of marriage should endure and which are outdated? Where do we draw the line between parent and fellow screw-up? How do obligations to kin dovetail with obligations to one’s own happiness?

Over the passionately carved and carefully polished course of God’s Dogs, the love of family is revealed to be not so much unconditional as it is inescapable.

Further Resources

- Over at the Emerging Writers Network, read an excerpt from (and Dan Wickett’s discussion of) “The Mistress of the Horse God,” a story/section from God’s Dogs.

- Mitch Wieland is the founding editor of The Idaho Review. Consider submitting your own work to this journal, or subscribing to it. And find out more about the Boise State University MFA in creative writing program, where Wieland teaches.

- Here is a recent profile of Wieland and review of God’s Dogs from the Boise Weekly.

- Learn more about the author’s first novel, the critically acclaimed Willy Slater’s Lane (Southern Methodist UP, 1996).

- If you’re interested in one of Wieland’s books, try your local independent bookstore.