The Letters In Your Novel: An Interview with Brooks Sterritt, author of THE HISTORY OF AMERICA IN MY LIFETIME

Stuart: I think about our conversation in San Antonio after the Clementine Was Right show. We were talking about how realism can sometimes mean what people don’t do anymore. Tao Lin & etc. used g-chats in their writing when people were still g-chatting. Those writers were, in many ways, mocked for their realism. But by the time Sally Rooney & etc. write g-chats into their fictions, nobody uses g-chat anymore. Because it’s over, it somehow seems realer in the novel than when it was real in real life. Is Realism the future, or is Realism a memory?

But I really want to start with a personal incident. It happened after I finished your book. There are so many letters in your novel. So many glyphs. They are a source of comfort and anxiety for your Subject. They move the plot along. You write about the backward C, the Claudian letter. You write “again, a connection to previous symbols was apparent, though the logic of their transformation escaped me.” Or, “the shape of the driver’s name calmed me.” How does the shape of a name calm you…

Brooks: …speaking of letters, your title is great. Jenny in Corona. The four Ns. I’m sure you’ve thought about that.

Stuart: Your title is great, too. The History of America in My Lifetime. One of those titles where you feel like you had it early on.

Brooks: I had it early on. It was a working title for so long that I ended up keeping it.

Stuart: So I was walking in Andersonville thinking about the Wallace Stevens poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” I stopped at one of those Free Libraries. Inside the library was a book called Criticism of Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ and I was like, holy shit! I looked up. I looked around and over my shoulder. Who was watching me right then? Who is watching me right now? Am I, too, a Subject from Bevacqua’s film in Brooks’ book? Are we in the same film? I won’t soon forget that moment. Or answer these questions. And then I was thinking about how coincidence…

Brooks: …synchronicity…

Stuart: …exactly, yes. This is always happening to the Subject. Letters seem to cover him, in the sense they both cover for him and they are the raw materials of his impersonation. Like one of those old definitions of film. The film of death: “a layer of skin covering the eye and obscuring the vision of a dying person.” Used in Tristram Shandy: “The film forsook his eye for a moment.” So here’s my first question: are we being followed?

Brooks: The feeling of being monitored has been my experience for many years. Films like Gene Hackman’s The Conversation, or that moment in Enemy of the State, with Gene Hackman and Will Smith. The satellites that can read the language off a dime. That was made up at the time, but now it seems quaint. We’ve assumed for a long while our phones are being tapped. Not that anyone’s watching me specifically, which could happen at any time, of course. All of this seems negative, perhaps, but I like to think about the spiritual side to being watched, too. Encountering a book in a Free Library, like you did, or a person, at the right time. Maybe in that sense, we hope we’re being watched. We hope someone’s looking out for us.

This reminds me of the ending of Jenny in Corona. Your idea of “another person” who is just like me. You write, “remember that time I told you not to meet another me? I think I’m another me now.” Imagine yourself being watched. It turns you into another you.

Stuart: Did you ever think your Subject was anything but another him? As a reader, I sometimes felt like he didn’t have his own agency. “As a film subject he was one of the best I’ve ever seen.” He was ready to be in his film, ready for the novel’s structure, ready for the novel’s letters.

Brooks: Well, I don’t think anyone sets out to write a novel where the protagonist has no agency. I wanted it to be propulsive and if anything keeps him going it’s the search for truth, for mystery. In the end, he’s not just one guy. I’m not one guy. I mean, obviously I’m one person. But depending on the situation, we’re multiple and competing subject positions and desires. Why do you think he didn’t have agency? It feels like we must, right, otherwise we’d give up.

Stuart: The Subject starts off with friends, the relationship with Blanche, day-to-day stuff. But then his journey gets exponentially stranger. What does lived experience feel like today? We know multiple collapses are always already happening, but we still tweet, or boil water for tea. Climate change isn’t really happening anymore, it’s over. So climate change fiction is Realism. I think of this Elizabeth Bruenig-ish line when I’m on Zoom: everything will be OK, just worse and worse.

Brooks: I think that’s really perceptive. How the novel starts from real life, and then drifts. What happens to you, when you set out. How much of your life are you using. How bound do you think you are to yourself?

Stuart: Were you bound to yourself?

Brooks: Not really. There are memories I dig through. But then on the page I change it so it’s not mine. Reading your work, I think this is different for you. Like your setting, your Queens, you can’t have it start raining frogs. I mean, you could.

Stuart: They’ve rained a lot of stuff on Queens, so why not frogs. Makes me think of something Poirier said about Dreiser in A World Elsewhere, that no matter how much you write “Chicago” you can never really write down “Chicago.” As a writer deeply connected to place, I love that challenge, a pillar of failure to ascend. A History is different because you’re not in Queens, or Los Angeles, or Chicago; or you’re in all those places. You’re everywhere because they’re watching.

Brooks: Surveillance is a social problem, but it’s also now just part of our place. There are novels by some chance that manage to cause social change, which is great. There are novels which expose evil, which is great. There are novels that through their perfect form reveal how messy the world is by contrast. I try to connect the strands and deliver an experience. I believe in truth. I think it exists. But in the novel it’s pretty hard to find it. What do you find yourself driving toward. Epiphany, conclusion, growth, change?

Stuart: To me, Jenny has a very ambiguous ending. Some readers told me otherwise, even took other sides, which I found so inspiring. I’ve always been interested in human relationships being endless. You’re never going to get resolution, or if you do, the other person might not. Why would a novelist be interested in resolution. In The History, the movie is over, in some way, but also not resolved. You feel like the Subject could star in this film again. Have you seen Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere? He’s riding the sports car around in circles. He’s made it. I thought about that at the end of your book.

Brooks: You might be on to something with Somewhere. Or in Even Dwarfs Started Small…

Stuart: …now that’s a title…

Brooks: …this early Werner Herzog film. They tie the steering wheel of this old jalopy to one side and a bunch of people are chasing it and it goes round and round, makes a rut in the dirt. Do you believe in Realism?

Stuart: I do. I don’t know about raining frogs. Which I think is a pretty good benchmark. I can’t write a traditional magic realism sentence. I don’t think you can either.

Brooks: You just write: It’s raining frogs.

Stuart: But what about your second sentence. You know that Didion thing. “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. By the second sentence, it’s all over.”

Brooks: Do you want it to be over after raining frogs? Or does something happen next. Before I could define magical realism, I’d have to know what realism is.

Stuart: Realism is getting a turkey from the bank on Christmas.

Brooks: I think you’re more magically realistic than you’re admitting to. You wouldn’t make it rain frogs, okay, but what about in Kafka’s Amerika. The Statue of Liberty holds not a torch, but a sword. Taking liberties with the Statue of Liberty. That’s Realism. What are you bound to? What are you willing to shake up?

Stuart: I can’t start with a straight world. To me raining frogs is a straight world. I must start in the wrong world, where it rains rain. I hold close this idea attributed to Hemingway or Stein, that after the horrors of the First World War words like truth and beauty and honor and especially hope didn’t mean anything as words anymore, as concepts. And I feel that way, right now, I think most of us do. Hope is for the prizewinners, and more executive power to them, but leave me in the ruins of legislative gridlock.

Brooks: Your book conveys a sense of love and hope and truth, without using those words. There’s emotional heft. I think you’re tied up in all these things you think you’re refusing. A lot of writers I love, Lydia Davis or Don DeLillo come to mind, are accused of lack of emotions. Wry! Arch! Cerebral! Cold! I don’t find them cold. There are certain emotions we think we’re avoiding in contemporary writing, but our devotion to the writing means they come through whether we want them to or not.

Stuart: I want to quote a block of text from your novel.

“Bevacqua’s words produced the effect of a puzzle piece fitting into place. Not the final piece, not the penultimate, not even close, but the puzzle piece whose arrival suggested what part of the final image might look like. A single vast, expanding text, consisting of all language produced in America—this text, in a sense, was America itself. America, its history, its language would be unreadable, at least to an individual.”

That’s very moving. Whitmanesque. And it reminded me of the spiritual exit available, what you hinted at earlier, from the doomsday message effortlessly rerunning in our brains. It also reminded me of something we once talked about at the Hopleaf, how Twitter is an endless scroll that can never have the same two eyes on it at the same time.

Brooks: Bulk data collection.

Stuart: I got this hopeful feeling from the block text.

Brooks: I hope so. If it’s all there, there’s possibility there. Call me crazy but we could use data for helping people instead of exploiting them, not only to sell stuff but to deliver what’s actually needed. There’s this line of Francis Bacon’s I find fascinating: at one point he claimed his goal was to capture “the history of Europe in his lifetime” in a single image. Impossible, obviously.

Speaking of raining frogs, I have to ask you about the DeNiro passages in Jenny in Corona. Here is the line: “A co-worker who is obsessed with the 200 movies DeNiro may or may not have filmed between 1974-1976.” Please elaborate.

Stuart: Maybe that’s my theory of Realism.

Brooks: It’s the kind of Realism I can get behind. It sort of reminded me of Steve Erickson’s Zeroville, featuring a guy in Hollywood who discovers something hidden in every film. Or earlier in your book, when the grandmother says, “this is the oldest church in America,” and Ty says, “she was wrong, but I still believe her.” That’s Realism. The 200 films he may or may not have filmed, that’s realism. So why DeNiro?

Stuart: Why not?

Brooks: What resonates?

Stuart: Someone said to me once, “you remind me a lot of a young Bobby D” and that person went on to do a series of horrible things to me. But I still love them. They were always surprised I thought they were hurting me so much.

Brooks: They’re always surprised, aren’t they. I’m reading Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, and the first half is a lightly fictionalized account of her relationship with Philip Roth. It’s neutrally delivered—she’s going along with it—and there’s a moment where she says, “I don’t know if this is good for me.” And the Roth character says, “do you think down the line this is going to damage you?” Love and pain are obviously concerns of yours, and I like the way they’re handled. It’s emotionally hard to read some of your stories. They’re really well rendered. But DeNiro…

Stuart: Bobby D.

Brooks: What would it take. The 200 films.

Stuart: I want to see those movies.

Brooks: It reminds me of Fassbender, who did 40 films in 40 whatever, drug-fueled years. He died young. It’s an alternate history. The lost films reveal something about the films DeNiro could have made.

Stuart: We have nothing. But at least we also don’t have the lost films.

Brooks: It’s something, isn’t it? Lost films have always interested me.

Stuart: They’re so important in The History…

Brooks: Maybe those 200 films gain their potency from the mere fact of being lost.

Stuart: Blanche leaves the Subject, but she also leaves him Glenn Gould’s recording of Brahms’ late piano pieces. They had a kind of one-night-stand, the Brahms was playing, and that’s what he was able to hold on to. He wasn’t able to hold on to her.

Brooks: Your reading makes me see that section in a more positive light. He takes the record away.

Stuart: In other places you write:

“a fragment isn’t merely something that appears unfinished. The very idea presumes the existence of some sort of whole. Choosing to stop therefore meant the work had arrived at completion.”

And this related moment, about paper shredding:

“The next time I fed a piece of paper into the shredder, it hit me. Shredding felt nearly as good as watching a Bevacqua fragment. What I did was mindless, but it accomplished what I was sure the creation of art accomplished: it allowed me to stop thinking.”

How many films did Bevacuqa make?

Brooks: More than the lost films of DeNiro?

Stuart: I don’t feel like fragments are having a very good run right now. Lauren Oyler picks on this really well in Fake Accounts. Anything can be a fragment, sugar! Just type something half-baked, hit return a few times and, voila, fragmentary writing. But that’s not what a fragment is.

Brooks: No, it’s not. Really, it’s the opposite of that. That’s like a whole and taking pieces out. For me fragments go back to German Romanticism and ruin obsession. Making a “whole” fragment is a cool thing. Like the Brahms pieces. Intermezzos. Ten in-between things. I mean, if you found an arm at the bottom of the ocean, yeah, there’s your fragment. But you have to be dedicated to the form. You have to sink that low.

Stuart: I want this popular idea right now to go away: the world is screwed, therefore my work is a fragment.

Brooks: In that sense fragment is just a synonym for choppy. Which is not the same. For me it comes down to being pro-form or anti-form. Formlessness has to be patterned and arranged. Even chaos is ordered.

Stuart: I wanted to read one more passage, keeping in mind your “single vast expanding text that would be unreadable.”

“Things must circulate—the interstate highway system, the blood in Eisenhower’s failing body—circulation, but no conclusion: once you’re a star of a Bevaqua film, there’s no way out.”

Circulation, the circle, the record on the turntable…

Brooks: …I’m fascinated with those movements. The highway system is tied to surveillance, and of course the circulation of capital. It must flow. A Cosmopolis thing. After 9/11 there was a huge panic and Bush came on TV and said, please go shopping. In the pandemic Trump and Biden said, please go shopping.

Stuart: And there’s no way out. You can’t square the circle, unless you’re on television.

Brooks: We’ve talked about Lauren Binet’s book HHhH. He calls it an infranovel, infared meaning “having a wavelength just greater than the red end of the spectrum.” He says he uses all of the resources of the novel except for one: fiction.

Stuart: That feels like exactly where I want to go.

Brooks: When you use your life as material, is it material, or is it different?

Stuart: Paul Valéry’s confession that he couldn’t write a novel because he couldn’t write the sentence: “The Marquee went out at 5.” Do you want to write, “Last year, they went out for an hour,” or does it get better if you delete last year, if you delete an hour, and you just write, They went out.

Brooks: IRL, deleting last year would be a great idea. 

Stuart: Everything becomes exact when you forget about time.

Brooks: In fiction there’s an obsession with giving information. Why not 4:58? Why not 5:02. Blue eyes, green eyes, 5’8, 6’3.

Stuart: It needs to be said that “taking all of the fiction out of your fiction” takes time. It took me a long time to write Jenny in Corona, it took me a long time to finish my new book.

Brooks: Took me too long to write mine.

Stuart: The next one will be faster.

Brooks: Let’s tell ourselves that.

Stuart: You write, “I never had a master plan, or any other kind of plan, really. I had merely embarked upon a course of action whose every contour pushed me forward in a way I couldn’t control.”

Brooks: When I hear you read that, it sounds like it’s about writing.

Stuart: Usually true of true sentences.

Brooks: For sure.

Stuart: I’ve noticed this funny yet profound thing that as I get older, I must write more about the lived experience of writing, because I’ve just spent so much time living the experience of writing.

Brooks: There are authors who write about being a writer, but then others who write about the process of creation. I’m interested in the latter.

Stuart: Roth feared, or maybe he was happy about it in his retirement, that the novel would become more and more specialized. So why not write about being a writer. Do it for the other writers. There aren’t a lot of them out there. Contrary to the received opinion there are more writers than ever.