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.

A Decorous Way to Explode: An Interview with Avner Landes, author of Meiselman: The Lean Years

Control

Stuart: Martin Amis has this great line about early Roth, that he was “always looking for a decorous way to explode.” I don’t necessarily sense this in your meticulous writing but I do sense it in Meiselman himself. At one point he says, “Jews don’t believe in controlling emotions. Jews believe in controlling actions.” Meiselman might know this intellectually, even theologically, but it doesn’t always work out for him in that way. The novel deftly introduces this idea early on when you write: “After thirty-six years, Meiselman had reached a limit, a breaking point.”

Avner: Yes. Meiselman thinks the “breaking point” is that he’s done taking everyone’s abuse. In reality, the breaking point is that he’s done sublimating his emotions. Of course, this isn’t something someone simply decides to do, and, in Meiselman’s case, it swings too far the other way, where he suddenly can’t control his emotions or his actions. Most of us wrestle with this question of how do we know when to act on our emotions. We have to learn to hear what the world—people, situations—is telling us. It comes down to self-awareness, but even the most self-aware person will get it wrong some—or most—of the time, but we hope that awareness of getting it wrong will lead to a better outcome the next time. As the story progresses, Meiselman loses any ability to control his actions. Can he reverse this before the story comes to a close?

Fatalism

Stuart: There are so many strong observations in the novel about what I would call Meiselman’s fatalism; he’s doomed, he deserves it. When he has car trouble he thinks, “Meiselman would never pull over for Meiselman.” You counter this with a comical strain of American self-improvement: he’s reading Lee Iacocca and Sam Walton and Ray Kroc, he’s wondering what Colin Powell would do. Meiselman wants to change his luck, even though he thinks his “luck breaks even.” This is such a rich source of return throughout the novel. And in many ways it works for him. Toward the close of the book, he is playing to win. Where do you locate the origins of this, and how did you think about luck and self-improvement when writing the book?

Avner: Early on, when I thought about the book’s shape, I used Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern as a model. In the beginning of that book, Stern’s wife suffers an assault and humiliation at the hands of a neighbor, although we’re never fully sure what happened. Stern determines that he will eventually have to confront the neighbor and defend his wife’s “honor.” I was taken with this idea of Meiselman identifying a possible moment of redemption or liberation, which he does right after suffering his own humiliations at the story’s outset. When writing the book, I believed that this was a make-or-break week for Meiselman. Everything would change or he’d be doomed to a life of repeating the miserable patterns that had defined his lean years up until this point. But when I finished writing the book, it occurred to me that maybe this isn’t a unique week, a moment when the light bulb went off. Maybe this too is a pattern, where Meiselman identifies an upcoming moment that will act as a test, a moment when he can take an unexpected action and change his luck. Meiselman says at one point, “Every day, every waking moment, we torpedo potential paths to redemption…” Maybe for Meiselman every week is a week like this one.

Jewish writers

Stuart: Meiselman is an orthodox Jew from suburban Chicago who works in a library, so let’s start crankily with what it means to be a Jewish writer. I’m thinking of recent takes on this question by critics like Adam Kirsch and Joshua Cohen, who generally conclude that it’s the non-Jewish lions – Updike and Franzen come to mind – who long to play the Jew, while writers like Roth and Bellow wanted only to be Americans. What does identifying as a Jewish writer mean to you? What does it mean to write a ‘capital J’ Jewish book; Meiselman is not a Jew because he likes pickles and Crossing Delancey — he’s a believer. What are your hopes in publishing such a Jewish book, an American book?

Avner: Roth, Bellow, and Malamud definitely influenced my writing early on, but I took the wrong lessons from them when it came to the question of being a Jewish writer. I appreciated that they wrote stories that were heavy with Jewish content and populated with Jews because this was their world. Even if one can argue that Roth, especially, does end up saying a lot about Jews and the Jewish experience in America —you and I have been discussing The Counterlife, to pick one huge example —it would be presumptuous to assume that this was his goal. Well, I made this assumption when I started writing. And I strived to do similar things with my own work. I wrote a story called "My Trip to Poland," about a formerly religious guy who goes on a JCC heritage trip to Poland with a bunch of retirees. He ends up getting drunk every night in the hotel bar with one of the Polish hotel workers, and too hungover to ever join the group for the tour of Auschwitz. Is that funny? Hell, yeah. But the story bothered me as I developed as a writer, because it had nothing to say about people and why they do what they do. The humor felt cheap and obvious. To paraphrase something David Bezmozgis once said, irreverence implies that something is revered, his point being, I guess, that irreverence isn't something a nihilist can pull off, and if we can't access a character's soul then it's tough to know what he or she reveres. Eventually, I grew as a writer and became more interested in the characters themselves, as opposed to using them as vehicles to deliver a message, Jewish or otherwise. Readers can feel free to identify me as such but they shouldn't expect any grand or guiding statements. I don't speak for Jews. I don't even speak for me when I write. I speak for the characters I'm writing.

Fertility

Stuart: Meiselman and Deena’s fertility struggles are a source of humor and pathos throughout the novel. This made for some colorful passages. “Deena ate mandrakes, drank willow water blessed by an Israeli seer, recited Psalm 145 daily, and visited the graves of rabbis. Deena’s barrenness, though, could not be cured, and frustration ended this routine.” Talk about what this plot line meant to you and what you were trying to accomplish.

Avner: It came from my reluctance to give Meiselman and Deena a kid. At the time I started writing the book, I didn’t have a child and wasn’t confident I could pull it off. But here was an Orthodox couple that had been married for four years, and, in that world, fertility issues are one of the only reasons why a couple like that wouldn’t have a child. In the end, this plot line did a lot of work of manifesting Meiselman’s delusions, starting with his blaming their difficulty conceiving on “Deena’s barrenness,” when it is his own sperm count issue that is the problem. Then there is his reluctance to consider adoption, his belief that genes are all that matter, and not because he believes in nature over nurture, but because he assumes adoption will paint him as a sterile, and, therefore, unmanly man. But the real question I hope readers will ask is, “Is Meiselman prepared in any way to parent a child?” On some deeper level, is this why he can’t impregnate his wife? The thought does eventually occur to him. 

Food

Stuart: When Meiselman acts out, it is often through eating. I would say he has a borderline eating disorder in these, his lean years. How did you think about using food (and candy) in the novel?

Avner: Meiselman eats the same bowl of oatmeal at breakfast every morning and the same peanut butter and jelly sandwich, bag of chips, and apple juice box for lunch. Every Friday night, Meiselman and his wife eat dinner at his parents. Mealtimes in Meiselman’s life, in other words, are ritualized, providing him with the order he strives for in every other area of his life. How else will he keep his impulses at bay? He has even come to expect certain types of conversations at each meal. Breakfast is lighthearted, he and his wife sharing news stories from the papers. Sunday lunch is for serious matters. As his wife, Deena, remarks at one point, “It’s fun watching you with your parents at Shabbat dinner. Everyone giving rundowns of their week.” In Deena’s mind, mealtimes are about connecting. In the book, however, mealtime usually ends up exposing the frayed lines of communication between the people sitting at the table. Because food can only occupy people for five, ten minutes. Then they are full. Then they need to do something with their traps, which usually results in talking and saying the wrong things. At one point Meiselman comes across the name of the actress Christina Ricci and we get the line, “Meiselman rented one of the actress’s movies thinking it was about football. Turned out it was about a miserable family sitting around a dining room table spewing bottled up grievances at one another.” This is a more accurate description of how mealtimes unfold in the novel. The movie is Buffalo ’66.

Our entire discussion could have been about food in the novel! But I’ll just add something about candy, or, more specifically, non-kosher food in the novel. When you grow up Jewish Orthodox, you are surrounded by people from your community and you have little awareness that most of the world doesn’t share your lifestyle. Food plays an outsized role in those moments when you make contact with the “outside world” and its divergence from how you live; ballgame hotdogs; commercials for candy; the bar and bat mitzvahs of cousins who don’t keep the laws of kosher. Through a child’s eyes, food, more than anything else, becomes the symbol for how the other half lives. So, yes, he acts out and briefly breaks free from his confinement through eating. But these forbidden foods he eats are also about his appetite for exploring new tastes. Change isn’t easy for any of us, and it usually does look juvenile.

Therapy

Stuart: I really enjoyed the resistance and acceptance of therapy in the novel. I'm curious how you see therapy functioning in Meiselman’s Orthodox community? You write that he doesn’t like people who think of God as your pal. Is a therapist your pal?

Avner: This book is a subtle love letter to therapy. Sure it engages in all of the stereotypes about therapy but only because they are all true and funny. Meiselman, we can all agree, is a prime candidate for therapy, the three-days-a-week variety. We learn he went in his twenties for a year, but, for an inexplicable reason, his mother took him out of therapy. From Meiselman’s memories of his time with Dr. Lin, we detect regret over his not having had more time with the doctor. It was having some type of impact on him, however small. Later, when it’s decided that he’ll return to therapy after an eight years absence, we sense his excitement but also his anxiety. He knows it’s what he needs to finally let go of certain things. But who will he be once he lets go of those things?

Now to answer your question about whether a therapist is a pal: It takes years and years of therapy to understand that the answer is no, a therapist isn’t a pal because what friend would put up with so much complaining; a therapist is a therapist.

Losers

Stuart: The Capitol Riots have gotten me thinking a lot about the history of losers. I read this provocative idea about losers recently, in an essay about how the Hebrew bible could be historical fiction to soothe a nation that lost. I was reading your novel at the same time and I couldn’t help seeing this “history of the loser” in Meiselman. I’m curious what you think about this idea in relation to Meiselman: “History may in the short term be made by the victors, but historical wisdom is in the long run enriched more by the vanquished  . . . Being defeated appears to be an inexhaustible well- spring of intellectual progress.”

Avner: “Soothe a nation that lost” seems to indicate a sugar-coating of history, which wouldn’t be enriching but impoverishing. But maybe a people, or a person, need both things along the way. We first need to feed ourselves a soothing explanation, something to get our breathing under control. Then, one day, we’re ready to confront what happened and deal with the cold, hard truth of it. That’s how I see Meiselman’s processing the history of his loserdom. So many books treat traumas as if their interpretations are clear-cut to the victims and readers. That they unlock a deeper mystery, explain motivations. (I want to be clear that I’m not talking about violent, severe traumas. We’re talking garden-variety traumas.) I’ve tried to treat the interpretation of the traumas in Meiselman’s past as something ongoing. At age forty, we’ll look at something from our childhood in a much different way than when we were twenty. We’ve identified other patterns. We’ve learned more about our own tendencies and the tendencies of others. Or maybe we’re not more enlightened and we’ve sunk even deeper into our own delusions.  

Subtitles

Stuart: Finally, the full title of the novel is Meiselman: The Lean Years. What made you decide on a subtitle? Was the book ever just called Meiselman?

Avner: There was a point late in the game when I considered dropping one of the titles, but my publisher, Jerry Brennan, urged me to keep both of them, and I’m glad I took his advice. The subtitle? I always thought calling a 420-page doorstopper The Lean Years was a solid joke, one that was even funnier when it was 550 pages. I also like the idea that we can look at this one week in Meiselman’s life and know that all of his years until this point have been lean. It does prompt the question whether fat years are on the horizon for poor Meiselman, a thought Meiselman has at one point in the book, although he can’t recall the biblical story and is unsure of what precedes what. But the book takes place in 2004, and Meiselman’s beloved, long-suffering White Sox haven’t won the World Series in 86 years, a streak that will end the next season. Why the Meiselman part of the title? Because this is not a parable. I want to make clear to the reader from the get-go that no matter what you may think of him, I’m here writing this book, standing up for him, when nobody else in the world will.  

Other People Are Necessary, But They Are Also Hell To Put Up With: A Review of Darrin Doyle's The Dark Will End the Dark

When I graduated, I couldn’t wait to climb onto a greyhound bus and put all that college stuff behind me. I debarked in a small Midwestern town and was roomed with a guy who was three weeks away from sentencing for holding up a convenience store. I went to the local music club by myself to see the bands and to be around the people that I was sure I was meant to belong to. I ate the same limp, greasy pizza the club bought for the bands, and sometimes I even sat at the table with them as we ate it. I had arrived at the most authentic version of myself. But of course, there were problems: employment was one of them. I worked as a dishwasher in college, when no shame accrued to that position. But after college, all I could find to do for money was to wash more dishes. And my emotional life sucked: I’d early on fallen hard for a girl whose bipolar disorder kept pushing me into the friend zone. A year after graduation, I was living the post-collegiate life I thought I wanted. Did I learn anything? It’s hard to know; those five years marked me, for sure, but I can’t say they improved me.

The characters in Darrin Doyle’s stories mostly inhabit the same emotional terrain, order olive patties from the same drive-thru burger joints, and sometimes even drink in the same bar, the Green Top, where I went with some friends to celebrate getting back a clean HIV test report. The Green Top is a funny place—a bar a couple doors down from the club and pizza place, it kept a coterie of townies comfortably numb but probably would’ve never survived if slumming alternative kids didn’t keep turning up there. But along the way, a rudimentary kind of role reversal happened: I remember looking around and thinking, this is what my life is like now, and it wasn’t the kind of feeling you left behind when you walked out the door and back onto the street. If you belonged at the Green Top, it means you brought it with you when you left.

In one of the longer stories in this collection, “Happy Turkey Day,” two of Doyle’s characters face a similar moment of recognition at the Green Top. Jonathan Turkey, high school basketball star and scion to a dwindling fortune and his classmate and lower rung dweller Claude Peuptic (pronounced, unfortunately, Poopdick) are drawn to the Green Top to make a relational swap: Turkey will give some of his prestige and ease in the world to Poopdick in exchange for some recognition that Turkey, too, has struggled, some.

This need for other people to know who you are, to be there beside you, animates almost all the stories in this collection. So, in “The Hiccup King,” the protagonist concedes, “He longed for a comrade. He wanted a companion for his unremarkable misery.” And in the story “Barney Hester,” this need for a companion takes a predictably sad formulation: “three is a good number. In a group of three, you’re always next to someone.”

In Doyle’s funny and disturbing stories, these anxious, all-important connections, hard to admit even when you’re drunk and loquacious, have a way of going wrong. Other people are necessary, but they are also hell to put up with. And so in “Happy Turkey Day,” this moment of incipient drunken bliss and bonhomie leads inevitably to shots fired and unlikely heroic sacrifice, as Poopdick steps in front of a shotgun blast meant for Jonathan. It’s not the death that should concern us, Doyle suggests, but the muck Peuptic crawled through on his way there, the way it didn’t redeem him.

It’s this same muck, this muddy bog beaten down by history and brainless struggle borne of apathy and momentum where most of Doyle’s characters live. So in another long story here, “Ha-Ha Shirt,” three man-children circle the drain of their long friendship, sexually abusing one another and emotionally abusing everyone they else, carrying with them a cloud of toxic emotional fallout. These same guys, they rented a house across the street from where I lived: the lawn was stripped of most of its green; glass forties rested in crook of a tree, and a sex doll held herself up on the front railing. They’d get loud, sometimes, but if you called the police, they didn’t come because guys like Shirt, Ha-Ha, and the narrator take care of themselves, if you just leave them to it. These are not beautiful losers, just losers.

The Dark Will End the Dark alternates between these longer, mostly realistic if cringe-comic stories and short, punctuated bursts of irreality, stories usually titled after body parts, like “Foot,” “Penis,” and “Mouth.” So, in “Foot,” a mommy, trying to find the limit of what it would take to satiate her infant, cuts off her own foot as a chew toy. When the baby isn’t satisfied, the daddy retaliates, taking off baby’s foot, which the mommy discovers isn’t quite what she wanted, either. In another body-horrifying flash, “Face,” a normcore father looks in the mirror to discover his features have slipped out of place, so his eye is embedded in his cheek, his nose and mouth have reversed positions. At first, he wonders if his family will recognize him, but then decides, this is the new normal, and proceeds to get on with it. In the longer stories, Doyle is patient enough to let the characters to do themselves in. The shorter stories, though, are characterized by swifter comeuppances. Characters don’t just have names that are more like job titles or org chart designations, but the stories themselves end so quickly, it’s like Doyle has pulled the trigger so we won’t need to see where it goes next. I like that decisiveness, the cruel shape that Doyle forces onto these stories. If only I’d had Doyle scripting my life. I might have reached a crisis point and moved out of that Midwestern purgatory sooner and saved myself a few years.