The Infinite Future by Tim Wirkus

With a feeling akin to falling into a Wikipedia hole, Tim Wirkus’ debut novel, The Infinite Future, dives headfirst into the many ways in which a story can affect the human condition. With a crass, yet self-reflective style, Wirkus depicts the constant changes that stories have on our everyday interactions by using characters that are constantly reflecting on their own personal histories and relationships throughout a story that revolves around a quest for the long lost novel by an elusive, could-be-crazy, pulp science fiction author.

Something like a reflection on Plato’s cave with a literary tilt, like Wirkus is playing a game of telephone with himself.

This book takes the meta-narrative to the next level. With a heavy nod towards obscure sci-fi, Wirkus creates the most elusive author possible to ignite a hilarious, yet insightful romp through Brazil, Idaho, and the universe, of course. Tim Wirkus wields a humor that rings of Vonnegut, but simultaneously digs at character like Joyce. This book is for the literary that isn’t afraid to classify Isaac Asimov or Philip K. Dick as Literature.

This epistolary journey begins in the author’s foreword as he depicts his encounter with an old colleague from his undergrad years at BYU that “looked like the (Orson) Welles at the end of The Lady from Shanghai, hollow-eyed and shaken.” The author’s initial antipathy towards Danny, someone unknown beyond his love for power pop, is soon overcome by curiosity when Danny hands him a manuscript of a mysterious Brazilian sci-fi author named Eduard Salgado-Mackenzie. Wirkus takes the translated version of the text (containing Danny’s own hefty translator’s note) with understandable reluctance (one in a line of many reluctant readers of Salgado-McKenzie). Patience eventually gets the better of him as he is eventually enchanted by the author’s strange and lasting impression.

From there the novel evolves into personal histories layered upon personal histories revolving around Danny, a hermit librarian, and an excommunicated Mormon scholar. Rife with farcical encounters, Danny’s self-deprecating voice sets an atmosphere that is skeptical, yet faithful all at once, making an impressionable and passive character that is drawn into a journey to look for a book and author that may or may not exist. This is where Wirkus really excels — in his ability to turn a book into the most active character of the novel. The novel’s tiny facets and the interactions that each of these characters have with the book leave you hanging in suspense while laughing at the misfortunes of their curse of knowledge. Their relationships with the Adventures of Captain Irena Sertorian constantly change and fold over on themselves as every discovery is made. This all culminates to the point where you actually get to read the novel by Eduard Salgado-McKenzie, a sci-fi story that becomes closer and closer to you as the story moves on, leaving you to search for some meaning that could be seen through the Translator’s Note, only to realize that the story within the translator’s note was the story all along.

The Mormon-heavy locations chosen by Tim Wirkus is something known to him — and it shows. Religion is a strong motif throughout Infinite Future; an identifiable sensibility that is obviously very near to him. This book is a clear investigation of the ways that we interact with stories and he portrays this via his own experiences with Mormonism. Danny’s character is a Mormon that defines himself as a “more laissez-faire [Mormon],” one that, “may be very devout, but they also compartmentalize their Mormonism to a much greater degree.” This sort of clear reflection can only come from his own experiences with religion and appear to argue for a story’s ability to inspire and move people.

The Infinite Future reads like a science fiction novel that, instead of relying on space and fantasy to propel the story’s wonder, has Wirkus tap into the absurdity of the world we already live in as the catalyst. In fact, when I finally got to read the interstellar sci-fi novel, I found the novel’s obscure laws and rituals oddly familiar. This novel succeeds in blurring the lines between literary and genre fiction, a trend that has been observed in books like Robin Sloan’s Sourdough and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan. The result brings together an intriguing narrative that tests the limits of our imagination and Tim Wirkus displays this with a wit and humor that forces our focus on the quotidian strangeness of our lives.

Tim Wirkus has written a novel that will make a lasting impression on our perception of language and the written word. By comparing the abstract world of science fiction with the inane world that we encounter every day, Wirkus has given literature new life. From the author’s fictitious preface, to Danny’s unexpected quest in search of an elusive author, to Captain Irena Sertorian’s quest across the universe, Tim Wirkus’s greatest accomplishment is making fiction feel more connected to reality than ever before.

The only fallback that I’ve come across is the sheer headiness of it all. Wirkus has provided a social commentary on the imbedded nature that stories have in our lives, and that is no easy feat, in that any critical dissection of the affect that story has on us, especially one that is done with a story, will be convoluted by nature. The result becomes a rabbit hole of stories within stories within stories, and this had me looking back to fact-check and remind myself of who was relaying whose monologue.

The Infinite Future is genre-bending, witty, and leaves the reader with a new lens on the absurdity that we confront every day. In one fell swoop, Wirkus has crafted an argument for every stories’ place in the universe, all while crafting a story that is page turning and hilariously human. By using a pulp genre as the glue that holds the story together, we receive a poignant reflection of the ways in which we craft and receive information. The Infinite Future holds the key to the next generation of fiction and, from here on, I’m never going to find a story without thinking about the endless connections that they create between us and the world we inhabit.

This Ark’s Not Going Down—Or Is It?

Imagine that it’s 2020, and you’re under the dim lights of your cozy multiplex with a bucket of the best butter-slathered popcorn that money can buy. It’s the premiere of Wes Anderson’s latest colorfully stylized masterpiece in comic absurdity. You’ve been watching carefully, and it’s already maybe scene ten, and amidst all the beautiful frames, you keep seeing a book in the background that is absolutely stunning. Anderson’s giving some major praise. The book’s cover is pink and baby blue. Maybe there are some Manhattan buildings in the background—yeah, that’s what it is. It has a thick, brush-like font written in white, bold letters. I’ll go ahead and tell you: the book is Julian Tepper’s Ark, and it, in all of its quirky eccentricities, is downright brilliant.

Set in the aforementioned city of Manhattan, Tepper’s sophomore novel, Ark, follows three generations of the Arkin family who have mostly lost at life. Ben is the (extremely) wealthy patriarch, and he’s a helpless and hilarious mess. His children—Sondra, Doris, and Oliver—run a record label, and they’ve never had any success. Ben has rescued them on countless occasions from shutting down. Tepper tells us that Ben “put at least two million into Shout!” The reason he gave them the money wasn’t that he actually believed in the business; no, it was because it was a way “just to keep the kids busy.”

Ben’s a lot of things, but mostly he identifies as a self-proclaimed artist. Tepper writes of Ben, “His art supplies alone were seven to eight thousand a month.” There’s a big problem with his expenses: he’s never sold any of his work.

For most artists not selling anything—literally nothing in a lifetime—would be emotionally defeating, but that’s not the case for Ben. He, with the help of his assistant Jerome, likes to create for the sake of creating: “You see this? These paintings? These sculptures? They are perfectly meaningless things. And yet in making them, I have felt what it feels like to be a king. And that stimulus to my brain, that knowledge of creation which I have gained… that, Jerome, is what all this making is about.”

Tepper never misses a beat throughout Ark. The pacing is quick, and the dialogue snaps. The fictional setting in which Tepper plants us feels as vibrant and alive as the New York that I know and love.

Where Tepper’s at his very best is in the novel’s early scenes with Ben, when the artist is at work. Tepper gives us a glimpse at how Ben creates:

He filled a pot with water and placed it on the stovetop. Once the water was boiling, he dropped the chicken carcass, as well as the bones that had been on his plate, into the pot. For just over eight minutes he stared into the pot, thinking. Then, he drained the water, cleaned the remaining meat off the bones and brought them into the studio, found a shallow wood box one foot wide by one foot long, took some short nails and a hammer from a drawer, and put everything on his desk, and began arranging the bones inside the box. The legs were along the edges, the breastbone was placed centrally, the wings stuck out from beneath the breastbone. He hammered the nails through the bones into the wood. After which he went into a back closet and found a bag of sand, and poured it over the bones until they were halfway submerged. Then he had Jerome cut a piece of glass, which the artist glued to the box, closing the bones and sand.

The description is almost breathtaking, both in the scope of artistry and in the level of strangeness in which Ben exists. The odd patriarch could come off as being aloof and unlikeable in other hands, but Tepper gives him a genuine, dynamic dimensionality that transcends any kind of flatness.

As Ark progresses, there’s more to savor. Rebecca, Oliver’s daughter and also the only ‘successful’ member of the Arkin family, enters the picture after a lawsuit involving the family’s record label. She struggles to understand her family, and she doubts that she ever will. Rebecca is a strong character and helps to ground the novel in its more far-reaching moments.

Tepper’s novel is about art, for sure, but it’s also about the bonds that tie families together. How deep can blood really run? And, even more importantly, how deep should it run?

Ark has it all. There is heartbreak: we wind up at a cemetery. There is laughter: we encounter a fight at the cemetery. There’s also a sense of hope. By Ark’s end, the Arkin family has endured about as much as any family could take. Still, however, they remain a family. They are the Arkins. They’ve always made it, and there’s no reason to give up on them now.

Exuberant and Engaging: Bob Proehl's A Hundred Thousand Worlds

Confession: I can’t get enough mother-son relationship books. I mean it, too. If every text I read contained some kind of mother-son crisis, friendship, or adventure, it wouldn’t get old. These stories are surely not unusual. Some of the most celebrated pieces of literature revolve around mother-son bonds. For example, Emma Donoghue’s Room, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and James McBride’s The Color of Water each celebrate motherhood and sonhood in special ways. Part of what makes these types of stories so appealing to me is that they create a rare, globally intersected reading experience. It’s with a glad heart that I announce the latest worthy addition to the mother-son canon: Bob Proehl’s smart and kindhearted A Hundred Thousand Worlds.

Proehl’s novel follows Alex Torrey, a moderately precocious and fully captivating nine-year-old boy, and his comic convention staple of a mother, Valerie, as they travel from the East Coast to Los Angeles with the (unfortunate) goal of meeting up with Alex’s absent father. To say why Val is taking Alex to see his dad would be too much of a spoiler, but it’s safe to point out that the dad isn’t someone you’ll be rooting for.

As A Hundred Thousand Worlds makes its central road trip, there are many comic convention stops along the way, where a host of fun and eccentric characters pop up. There’s an unlucky comic writer, a woman who’s tired of the male-dominated world she tries to inhabit, and illustrators and fans galore. Each adds a nice layer to the larger novel.

The world Proehl creates is exuberant and engaging. It’s impossible to deny that Proehl’s novel is an infectious read.

While A Hundred Thousand Worlds possesses a tonal lightness, there’s also something deeper at work in the novel’s heart. There’s the obvious symbolism of Proehl having his protagonist venture westward. There’s a death. Don’t worry; I’m being metaphorical here. Alex loses his innocence. He grows up. Proehl writes of Alex’s changing mannerisms: “He becomes more adult when she’s not there. His gestures are broader, more sure. He is taller, maybe, or stands up straighter.” Also, Alex wants to go on trips into the nearby cities to buy books and explore with a friend–not his mother. He desires to understand adult complexities. Why can’t all relationships be as simple as he sees them? Why don’t his mother and his father have a relationship?

The most riveting sections, as you might suspect from my opening, are the moments in which Proehl shows the full workings of the mother-son pair. One of the supporting comic-con regulars notes, “It’s a basic rule of nature: you don’t come between a mama bear and her cub.” The love Val shows toward her son makes this statement particularly resonant. Proehl’s prose highlights the intense bond the two have together:

Any time they spent apart was always defined by place and duration. I’m going to the store, I’ll be back in twenty minutes. I’m going downstairs for a drink, I’ll be back in an hour. It seems impossible to think that soon he will not know where she is all the time, and she won’t know where he is, either. His position in space has always been in relation to hers and now, without that, he wonders if he’ll be like a boat on the whole ocean, where you can’t see land in any direction, and the sun cycles over you day after day.

The love Alex has for his mother is just as intense. In one of the book’s best lines, Alex says, “Stories can be true even if they’re not real.” He frequently asks his mother to tell him a story, knowing fully that the truth isn’t always what he gets from her. But what she tells him is what he needs to hear, and he, in turn, finds comfort in her words.

As I was reading, I found myself feeling amazed that the novel is a debut. Proehl’s fine craftsmanship is as evident on the first page as it is on the last one. The dialogue pops; the prose is fresh; the pacing is quick.

Bob Proehl’s A Hundred Thousand Worlds, with its pitch-perfect ending, might just be the best road trip that I’ve taken all summer.

A Hollywood Playboy Meets Frankenstein's Creature: A Review of Liz Kay's Monsters

Let me make this clear: I’ve never reviewed a book before. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve reviewed hundreds of books. I’ve reviewed them in my head while I read them. I’ve reviewed them, most hastily and judgmentally, the moment I read the last line, unfairly comparing them to the first book I ever loved – Voltaire’s Candide and its last line, “We must cultivate our garden,” which is a really shitty thing to do, right, because it’s Voltaire and it’s Candide.

It’s just uncool to compare last lines of every book I read to the last line of Candide, a classic, sarcastically brilliant book that has the ability to mess with your head for decades to come, change meaning as you grow older, and keep you thinking about how you might live with just one butt cheek.

I do realize, however, that it wasn’t the last line of Candide that I really loved; it was the last line of a book made of up of thousands of lines that moved perfectly toward that last line. If Voltaire hadn’t written thousands of great sentences that made a wonderful book up to that last line, it would have been a bad book, even if the last line was freaking perfect.

When I read the last line of Liz Kay’s Monsters: A Love Story, I judged it, immediately, of course, throwing it up against the Candide wall and seeing if anything stuck, and, I will tell you, it did.

At first, I was angry with the protagonist and the author.

In her debut novel, Liz Kay sends a widowed, Nebraskan poet into the arms of a big-time Hollywood movie star via a movie adaptation of the poet’s novel in verse about a female Frankenstein’s creature.

The poet had recently lost her husband, and before fully dealing with the grief, she is volleyed between the lavish lifestyle of Hollywood and the day-to-day living of her Nebraskan home with her children who, very understandably, are lost. First, their father died, and right after that, their mother enters into a relationship with a Hollywood playboy. (Did I just use the word playboy?)

Kay writes monsters well. She writes them really well. The two main characters in the book, Stacey the poet and Tommy the playboy (again?), can be complete assholes, especially to each other (and to others). But they’re not the only monsters in the book, and Kay writes these little assholes just as well as she writes the big ones. The author uses dialogue to pinpoint the little things that people say in everyday life that are just nasty, but they get away with it.

Monsters delves precisely into the intricacies of human behavior, examining how awful people can really be to each other on a day-to-day basis by only using two or three words to do so.

Throughout the book, I found myself underlining truisms in speech, the places where the tiniest words could inflict the deepest pain, where loved ones who know the protagonist, Stacy, use their knowledge to dig little needles into her eyeballs.

Kay is an expert at portraying the human experience, as we all sadly know it.

But I was still angry with her at the end. When I closed the book, I grumbled aloud for two full days, digesting the ending that Kay had given me in the world that she created, a mashup between a middle American small-world view and the heavy drinking, stab-you-in-the-back Hollywood, and after another full day of thinking about it, the anger started to leave me.

I had to admit to myself that even though I didn’t want the ending that I was given, it was the only possible ending for the Monsters that Kay had written. It wouldn’t have been true to the people I had followed for hundreds of pages and thousands of sentences to get to the last line.

If the last line were different, the whole book with all of its precise, snarky, mean, and genuine dialogue that honestly showed the human experience would have fallen apart. The characters did what they had to do because Kay had written such a cohesive world that they could do nothing else without falling into being disingenuous.

And you know me; I judge everything by the last line (and every other line that leads up to it).

Lives in the Wake of Loss: An Interview with Hannah Gersen

The first I read of Hannah Gersen’s writing was her non-fiction for The Millions, an online books and culture magazine where Gersen is a staff writer. Her elegant prose and unique critical insights made me a fan instantly. I was also drawn to Gersen’s work because, well, her sensibility was so similar to mine. She seemed to have a special appreciation for fiction that takes its characters seriously, no matter how small or ordinary their lives may be—Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, Stephanie Vaughn. I wasn’t surprised, then, to discover that Gersen’s short fiction is marked by a deep sincerity that reminded me of those writers. Several of her short stories—which appear in publications like Granta, The Carolina Review, and The Chattahoochee Review—are linked, focusing on a family in small-town Maryland. In one story, nineteen-year-old Louisa, home from college for the summer, plots to sneak off and visit her boyfriend in Martha’s Vineyard. In another, told from the point of view of Louisa’s adolescent sister, Annabel, the family visits the girls’ grandparents in North Carolina, and while tension builds between Louisa and her mother, Annabel wonders where she fits into her family, and what kind of independent identity she can claim. These are deeply felt stories that astonished me with their ability to capture the indelibility of certain life moments. And there was a cleverness about them: how was Gersen able to make everyday small-town life seem so high-stakes? And what made these seemingly quiet stories resonate so powerfully?

But if Gersen’s stories are quiet, Home Field (William Morrow 2016), her debut novel due out on July 26th, begins loudly, with the unexpected death of Nicole Renner, wife to high school football coach Dean and mother to soon-to-be Swarthmore freshman Stephanie. We spend much of the novel watching Dean and Stephanie try to regain control over their lives in the wake of loss: Dean struggles to handle the demands of his job and battles loneliness while trying to help his increasingly aloof son, eleven-year-old Robbie; Stephanie, meanwhile, tries to adjust to college while balancing her new independent life with family obligations. Gersen writes Dean’s and Stephanie’s perspectives equally convincingly, letting us experience their complex, messy inner lives as they find their way in a suddenly very different-seeming world.

Gersen and I spent a few weeks e-mailing back and forth. We talked about Home Field, her short stories, writing small-town life, and the relationship between her fiction and non-fiction.

Steven Williams: Did you have specific goals for Home Field when you began working on it, e.g., certain subjects or ideas you knew you wanted to wrestle with?

Hannah Gersen: I wanted to tell a story about small town life, and a family coming together after tragedy, though I guess those are somewhat vague goals. The most specific goal I had was to show girls playing sports and to have it be a part of their emerging identities rather than a point of conflict. That’s not a very literary goal or especially dramatic, but thinking back on books I’ve read and TV shows and movies I’ve watched, I realized how rare it is for female characters to participate in sports in a casual way, as part of their daily lives, whereas it’s fairly common for male characters. So I just wanted to show that aspect of girls’ lives.

SW: Can you talk about your decision to have the novel’s point of view alternate (for most of the novel, anyway) between Dean and Stephanie? Specifically, I’m interested in your decision to switch between their perspectives within chapters, rather than alternating chapters or dividing the book into sections. Something about that narrative style made me feel like I was watching a TV show. Was that effect intentional?

HG: Originally the novel was going to be from Dean’s perspective, but after a few chapters, I felt it was unfair to Stephanie because when I was in Dean’s point of view, I could only show her sullen teenage actions and couldn’t give a sense of how she was really feeling. Once I brought in Stephanie’s voice, I realized that she had knowledge of the family, and of the community, that Dean didn’t have and that could help fill in some of the holes in the story. It was also an easy way to pick up the pace of the novel because I could just jump ahead in time when I was in Stephanie’s point of view. Early in the book, I stayed in either Dean or Stephanie’s voices for a relatively long periods of time, but I knew that once the reader got to know them I would have more license to switch between them.

This dramatic structure was probably influenced by television, because TV scenes, especially dramas, are often written and shot from the perspective of one particular character. In a show like Mad Men, for example, you’ll have a scene with Don Draper, then you’ll check in with Joan, and then maybe Peggy and one or two other characters, depending on the plot lines. Time passes as you switch points of view. Only occasionally do you get an ensemble scene with the entire cast that gives a more objective view of the characters and setting. I can’t really claim that I borrowed this structure intentionally, but I was watching a lot of TV when I wrote this book! I also like to write in close third person and that’s the perspective that a good actor can give you.

SW: Why did you decide to make Dean Stephanie’s stepfather, rather than have them be blood relatives?

HG: That idea was in place from the start, and much of the backstory grew from it. I’m not sure why I made the choice, except that I thought it would be an interesting dynamic to have a father and daughter who, in a way, chose each other.

SW: How did you come to title the novel “Home Field”? Does titling your work come naturally for you or is it a struggle?

HG: Funny you should ask this because I’m in the middle of an essay on this topic. The original title of this book was actually “Count It All Joy”, not “Home Field”, and coming up with a new name was an interesting process. In general I don’t have a strong feeling about what my titles should be, so I just try to pick something that arises naturally. “Count It All Joy” comes from the Bible, James 1:2: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.” Once upon a time, there was a scene in church where the minister quotes this verse, but I cut that scene because it wasn’t working. I liked the verse, though, and decided it would be a good epigraph. And then I eventually thought it could make a good title, too. My editor liked the title and other people seemed to like it, too, but I noticed that people had difficulty remembering it. Even worse, a lot of people could not get it upon first or second hearing, which was really awkward. My editor noticed the same thing. We decided we had to go back to the drawing board because book titles are often passed by word of mouth.

What followed were several weeks when my editor, my agent, and I were all brainstorming titles. I remember my editor asked me what the working title was because sometimes the working title—i.e. the file name—is great. But my working title was “Sports Novel”. (In general, my working titles are incredibly generic.) My editor ended up making a list of football words and “Home Field” was on that list. I was uncertain about it, at first, because it reminded me of baseball and I thought it sounded too much like a movie title. But then it grew on me. I like that it is simple, but has multiple meanings, and I also think it gives the reader a good sense of the setting and themes. One thing I learned from the process is that titling a book is completely different from titling a short story. People don’t need to remember short story titles, so they can be pretty fanciful and/or obscure. They can even be a part of the story, or a part of the puzzle of the story. But a book needs a title that is solid and can be attached to something outside of the world of the book. Now I understand why there are so many one word titles!

SW: Before publishing Home Field, your debut novel, you published several short stories, and a lot of these stories are linked, featuring the same characters at different points in their lives, which gives them something of a novel’s feel. I’m wondering if you feel more at home writing in the longer form. Is it your preference spend a lot of time and space with a given character or world, rather than writing stand-alone stories?

HG: Yes, I prefer the form of the novel because you can write a little each day and slowly build a world and create characters in a more detailed way, showing them in different situations and moods. Once I’ve done the imaginative work of creating a setting and a character, or a family of characters, I want to stick with the material for a while and see where it takes me. That said, some of my most formative reading experiences were short stories. I love fairy tales, the stories of Roald Dahl, and above all, John Cheever’s short stories.

SW: I’m not sure whether I’ve mentioned this to you before, but the thing that made me want to find your fiction was that essay you wrote for The Millions about Friday Night Lights (a show I’m a huge fan of) and its influence on your writing. You write about the show:

I always find myself thinking, these people live such big lives in such a small place! But then when I think about what feels “big” about their lives I realize that the plot points […] are quite ordinary. No one on Friday Night Lights has a secret identity. No one is working for the mafia. […] Instead, they’re drinking too much. They’re sleeping around. They’re saying stupid things and trying to make extra money in stupid ways. They’re founding Christian rock bands.

Now, when I read your stories and your novel, I think to myself that one could say the same thing about your work. In your stories, your characters do mostly everyday things, and while I’d have a hard time pointing to what makes it feel like the stakes are so high, the outcome always feels important. I also found that in your novel, though it begins with an extraordinary tragedy, your characters again are doing mostly things like coaching high school track, trying to find their crowd at school, etc. Can you talk about how you’re able to sustain drama through a 400-page novel while writing about everyday small town life?

HG: First, I’m so glad that my essay had that effect! And I’m beyond flattered that you tracked down my short stories, since they aren’t especially easy to find.

In my short stories, I am often thinking about memory and identity and trying to home in on moments in characters’ lives when something fundamentally changed for them or maybe tilted them in a slightly different direction—but it’s not a moment they are necessarily aware of as being important. When I look back on my own life, it’s like that: the experiences etched in my memory aren’t the big milestones. The Richard Linklater movie, Boyhood, does a really good job of showing that. The plot of that film (and most Linklater films) is quite mellow, but by the end of it you see how the boy’s life has been profoundly shaped by relatively simple experiences: his relationship with his parents and sister, obviously, but also exposure to certain ideas, landscapes, cultural events, and the people outside of his family who come in and out of his life.

I think for the characters in Home Field, the stakes are high because of what they’ve lost. They’re in a lot of pain and trying not to fall into despair. Their identities are at stake, especially Dean and Stephanie, because they’ve defined themselves so much in terms of their relationship to Nicole. Still, when I was writing the book I worried that these concerns were too internal. I did what I could to ground their struggles in specific actions even if those actions seemed laughably minor—like, for example, Stephanie dropping a class. Big deal, she dropped a class! But for her it’s a big deal because she’s never really given herself a break. That’s the beginning of her being able to make some space for herself in the world. Another small moment like that is when Dean gets back from his first cross country meet and decides to go to his office to check his files for track workouts. It’s a big gesture because it shows that he’s thinking about investing himself in this new team, and a new version of his life. He’s found his lifeline even if he’s not totally conscious of it.

SW: You’re a writer I associate very strongly with a place—small town Maryland. Did you know right away when you started writing fiction that this was what you wanted to write about, or did it take you time to find your subject matter?

HG: I actually did know right away that I wanted to write about small town Maryland and some of my first short stories took place in that setting. But I was so disappointed with my first efforts that I shied away from the material for a long time. I finally came back to it in my late twenties, after one of the women in my writing group observed that whenever I wrote descriptions of Maryland or Pennsylvania, my writing came to life. Around the same time, I edited a column, Dispatches, for the literary magazine, The Common, which has a particular focus on place. Editing those pieces—which ran the gamut from reported essays to personal essays to poetry—got me thinking about place again, and how to write about it.

SW: You say that editing this particular column helped you think through ideas about place. Does writing non-fiction—such as the reviews, criticism, and personal essays you write as a staff writer for The Millions—also help you explore or work out some of the ideas that you then go on to write about in your fiction?

HG: Yes, though when I’m really deep in a draft and making up a lot of stuff on a daily basis it’s a bit hard to switch back to nonfiction mode, where I have to be analytical. But when I get stuck, it helps to do come critical reading and writing. I read almost all of Andrew Solomon’s nonfiction while I was writing Home Field, because he writes so well about illness, depression, and parent-child relationships, subjects that all come up in my novel. When Solomon’s first (and only) novel, A Stone Boat, was reissued, I used it as a springboard to write about the relationship between his nonfiction and his fiction. I ended up doing a lot more research than I expected for that particular essay but I think it probably helped me think about my book. I was also drawn to some books that deal with trauma and/or mental illness and wrote about them for the site: Irritable Hearts by Mac McClelland, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimar McBride, and Loitering, by Charles D’Ambrosio. But The Millions is also a place where I can take a break and write about books that I find interesting for other reasons.

SW: Have you been working on any new fiction? Would you care to describe your current project(s)?

HG: Yes, I’m working on another novel. It’s set in contemporary times and follows three women over several years as they navigate issues of friendship, work, love, marriage, money, motherhood, etc. I also have a couple of short stories on the back burner that I’d like to return to one day.

SW: Can you describe Home Field’s path to publication?

HG: Before I wrote Home Field, I put together a collection of short stories—the linked stories you mentioned earlier. Those stories are what led me to my agent, Emma Patterson. We tried to sell those stories and came close at a couple of places. Several editors said they might be interested if there was a novel attached. At that point I was already working on Home Field. I was also feeling really discouraged because it seemed like such a long shot to write a whole book in the hopes of selling a short story collection. When I finished Home Field, we sent it out to a small group of editors, mostly ones who were waiting on the novel or had asked to see more of my work. I got several rejections within a week or two. I was surprised by how quick those responses were, because as you probably know, when you send short stories to magazines, you wait for months for an answer. The early rejections hit me hard and I started to panic. But my agent remained calm and soon we had interest from Margaux Weisman at William Morrow, who really seemed to get the story. She suggested that I add some new scenes, and some of the scenes she suggested were ones I had written but left on the cutting room floor for fear of writing a book that was too long. Margaux was not among the editors who had previously read my stories—and I wonder if that worked in my favor because she didn’t come to my novel with any particular expectation—but it felt good to be in Margaux’s hands.

In retrospect, it was actually a pretty quick sale, but during those few weeks of waiting and early rejection, I was unbelievably anxious. It felt like my career was in the balance and I wasn’t sure how I would keep going after two book rejections. I’ve seen writers deal with this at all stages of their careers so I know it’s just part of the experience but it’s still tough. There is just no way to predict how editors will respond to a book and how you will feel about it.

SW: Can you describe your process and habits as a writer? Do aim for a certain number of words each day?

HG: For writing nonfiction, my process is pretty straightforward because it’s dictated by other people’s deadlines and expectations. Once I get an assignment, I will schedule time to work on it and sometimes, if I’m procrastinating, force myself to write a certain number of words. (Or I’ll procrastinate by working on a different nonfiction project.) I need a certain amount of outside pressure for nonfiction because otherwise I wouldn’t do it. Fiction is different. I would do it no matter what and don’t really need deadlines—which is not to say I don’t drag my feet! I do. But for fiction, deadlines and word counts don’t motivate me. Over the years I’ve found that I just need to make space for writing fiction and the stories will arrive. The first step is turning down nonfiction assignments or at least spacing them properly. The second is turning off the internet! Ideally I turn on Freedom and don’t go online until the afternoon, maybe an hour before I have to pick up my son from school. That gives me a chance to check in with email, blogs, news, etc. But when I’m really working hard on a draft, I try to schedule my time so that I go for a day or two without the internet or email. In general, I don’t do social media because it’s way too addictive for me. Even Instagram is a problem and lately I’ve been deleting it off my phone until the weekend.

The other thing that helps to make space for writing fiction is reading fiction. Recently, I’ve been scheduling an hour or two first thing in the morning, or after lunch. It felt decadent when I first started doing it but I’ve noticed that it calms my mind to an extraordinary degree, almost like meditation or taking a walk. The internet becomes less alluring because I get into a mellower headspace and it’s easier for me to shrug my shoulders and not give into temptation.

SW: What have you been reading lately?

HG: If you’ve been following my Proust Book Club on The Millions, you’ll know I’ve been working my way through In Search of Lost Time. Right now I’m just finishing up volume III, The Guermantes Way. I’m also reading Oliver Sacks’s memoir, On The Move. In addition, I’ve been hoarding books for an upcoming vacation: Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, and Light in August by William Faulkner. I’ll probably end up reading at least one title before vacation, because I can never wait, and then when I get to the beach I inevitably read something someone left behind in the beach house.

Punk Rock Precision: An Interview with Lavinia Ludlow

Lavinia Ludlow is a breath of fresh air. Her writing often mirrors the punk rock she likes so much; rough around the edges, frustrated, fully human, and full of heart, speaking to the experience of people who have every reason to give up on themselves—poverty, drugs, toxic relationships, uncaring parents—and yet never do. Her second novel, Single Stroke Seven, came out in April 2016, and follows a literally-starving artist/musician named Lilith (or Lil) as she tries to make music and a living as a low-income resident of the notoriously expensive Bay Area.

Lilith plays drums for a couple of different bands, none of whom are terribly functional, and her relationships with her mother, her various bandmates, and her sort-of-boyfriend Duncan are acrimonious at best. Her job isn’t much better, offering crappy wages and an abusive atmosphere that leaves her with no respite from her other problems, nor the energy to do much about them.

Lavinia’s writing isn’t as clean or poetic as a lot of contemporary small press work, and the language is a great deal more exaggerated, but that’s what I like about it; it’s messy and weird and fun, cathartic in its own way, and never loses momentum or the reader’s attention. Single Stroke Seven, like much of Lavinia’s work, is a welcome antidote to the modern cult-of-the-perfect-sentence style that, for all its precision, can be kind of bloodless sometimes.

Plus, Joan’s Town (a riot grrl band that Lilith plays drums for) is an awesome band name and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone steals it.

I had a chance to chat with Lavinia via email about her book and its complimentary relationship to her first novel, alt.punk, and she is as smart and generous with her answers as ever.

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Dave K.: The economy is one of this book’s main characters, and is as present in the story as Lilith and her bandmates. What led you to make this choice? What impact do you want it to have on the reader?

Lavinia Ludlow: The Bay Area is notably booming with tech-fueled affluence, but such glory is within reach of a select few. The rest of us are losing the battle against the escalating cost of living, rampant gentrification, and mass evictions. Throw in lack of access to basic necessities such as healthy food and medical care, and the masses are left treading water against a brutal economic current.

Over the decades, I’ve personally experienced, and witnessed my friends, family, and local community fight to survive in this financial climate. Setting Single Stroke Seven in the heart of the Silicon Valley, there was no way to prevent this economic backdrop from taking center stage. I used the resulting challenges as a literary tool, to deepen the notion of the “starving musician,” while simultaneously presenting the reader with a realistic image of the San Francisco tech scene. I hope this makes people question where their smart phone, social media application, or other notable tech gadget was designed and engineered, and what the industry’s hyper growth is doing to Northern California’s local economy, culture, and people.

DK: How should modern fiction, literary or otherwise, consider poverty?

LL: The stress, adversity, and humiliation associated with living (behind) paycheck-to-paycheck, teetering on the the cusp of eviction because one can’t make rent, on the brink of termination because of obligations outside of work, or on the edge of emergency hospitalization because one can’t afford a doctor irreparably fucks with a person. Consistently snared in “survival mode” should shape character personality, outlook, and interactions with the world.

Contemporary fiction should also view the problem as existing beyond just an adjective, beyond the petty and superficial examples such as, “maybe we can’t take that tropical vacation” or “this restaurant is expensive, next time let’s Yelp a 2-dollar sign business.” There’s also the greater issue of diversity in literature, where voices of the working class aren’t as prevalent for one reason or another, which warrants a larger discussion…

DK: The book’s observations of Lil’s local music scene (and the politics/conflicting personalities therein) are very specific – were they informed by research, personal experience, or a mix of both?

LL: Personal experience. For years, I vividly recall being in bands with multiple alpha personalities and their inflated egos. We spent more time arguing over style, image, to the equipment we should be using than we did rehearsing. I remember being a part of a scene that was also very indie-elitist, and everyone was so focused on calling each other out for not being hardcore enough, not suffering enough, not listening to the right avant-garde band. It was a senseless, hypocritical rodeo, and no one ever won, not even in their own game. I wanted to highlight this conflict in a humorous and ironic manner because it is often a plague in an artistic scene.

DK: The dialogue in this book is a mix of the hyperspeed pop culture references you’d hear in Kevin Smith films and the drunken, boasting witticism of Withnail & I. My take is that it reflects their economic circumstances; for all their education and bluster, there’s no clear path for any of them to establish themselves, and that poverty can happen to anyone, even people who grew up being told they deserved better. Would you say that’s accurate?

LL: None of the main characters grew up being told that they deserved better, but they exhibit signs of Generation Y’s raging sense of entitlement, and they were also raised middle class and college-bound, so there’s that unspoken pressure (especially in the Silicon Valley), to amount to something great. Like many millennials, come graduation day, they found it difficult if not impossible to find meaningful work, and if they did, they couldn’t hang onto their jobs in the throes of the economic collapse and recession (yes, it hit the Valley too).

For the last decade, these characters haven’t had the bandwidth to worry about anything other than keeping themselves fed, housed, and healthy, and as late twenty-somethings, early thirty-somethings, they can’t help but wonder where it is they’ve gone wrong. At the end of a brutal day at the factory, in food or janitorial servicing, they come home with displaced rage that they direct at each other. When there’s no energy or patience left to work out a smarter or more thoughtful solution to the issues at hand, the default is to bitch and moan, and blame each other.

DK: In both this book and alt.punk, the protagonists have cruel, emotionally distant mothers. Was this by design? What aspect of mother/daughter relationships is being explored here? And, to paraphrase a question posed by John Waters, can bad parents produce exceptional/resilient children?

LL: Thematically, I wrote alt.punk and Single Stroke Seven as polar opposite tales meant to complement each other. Here are two different protagonists beginning their journeys on opposite ends of the spectrum: Hazel starving to break free of her mundane job and life to pursue her art, and Lilith killing herself in her job and life to support her art. Their upbringings were very similar, both raised by ice queens in the Bay Area’s middle class suburbs, and they end their journeys somewhere in the middle, realizing that the feat of living life and pursuing art should never be an “all or nothing” quest.

Neither protagonists in these books are exceptional citizens or model examples of emotional intelligence, but both are independent, bold, and resilient women who play the hands they were dealt with the best of their abilities, always seeking to contribute positively to society and culture versus any decay.

DK: Your fiction spares no unpleasant details, in the sense that there’s a lot of blood, snot, and other bodily fluids/functions in it. In that sense, your characters are often seen at their most human. What draws you as a writer to these details, and what do you want them to reveal about your characters?

LL: As readers, we have only our eyeballs to interact with a book, but as humans, we experience the world with four other senses. I seek to liven characters and scenes with details many other writers gloss over, and to ultimately create a stronger reading experience.

Life is messy. The human body is disgusting. The world is crawling with organic matter and microorganisms that “go bump” in the night (or under microscope). I craft characters and scenes to align with the reality of our everyday world. Too often, contemporary writing, especially fiction, is effortlessly and unrealistically clean. We are not androids floating through a stainless steel vacuum. We ooze, sweat, bleed, and the world throws it back at us with equal prejudice.

Single Stroke Seven features Lilith, a tough-as-nails female drummer, who grew up with an all-male cast, and she turned out unapologetically tougher and more badass than her counterparts (my intent was to write her opposite of alt.punk’s germ-fearing Hazel, again, as a complement). Lilith is going to eat off the ground (or out of the dumpster), she is going to let wounds bleed, and she won’t let grit and grime deter her from getting the (or any) job done so long as it supports her end goal of musical success. Whether she succeeds or not, her glory and notoriety shine through in her perseverance, her ability to not take any crap, and if she does, she never allows it to deter or distract from her vision of becoming a rock star.

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Many thanks to Lavinia for her time, her insights, and her great work. Keep up with her (if you can) via her website, and pick up a copy of Single Stroke Seven directly from the publisher, Casperian Books.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Talking to Squirrels: On Elizabeth McKenzie's The Portable Veblen

The Portable Veblen is like it sounds, which is to say you don’t know what it is until you get to know it better. Because The Portable Veblen is near impossible to say with grace, and your mother will ask you to repeat it, “The Por-what the what?” although it will come to make sense with a sort of twisted logic: the novel’s protagonist, Veblen, is a thirty-year-old Alice in the Wonderland of Northern California who dares to ask of you, “Do you think wishful thinking is a psychiatric condition?”

Elizabeth McKenzie’s third book (and second novel) follows the eponymous Veblen as she hurtles toward marriage on a sort of whim. Her fiancé, Paul, is a neurologist with a flashy new invention—the Pneumatic Turbo Skull Punch (how Vonnegut-ian)—that lands him a government contract. But the device is rushed to market when there’s profit to be made, and ethics are challenged, and commitments are challenged, and maybe Veblen and Paul have rushed things after all because how much do they really know about each other?

It’s true, Veblen talks to a squirrel: an ally nesting in the attic of her house and Paul’s near-comic nemesis. And to Veblen, the squirrel talks back (sort of).

McKenzie is unparalleled in making her characters’ neuroses palpably real and ultimately important, angling a keen eye to the role of mental health in life. Veblen, who can empathize with the last lima bean on the plate that gets scraped into the trash, is forever “living in a state of wistful anticipation for life to become as wonderful as she was sure, someday, it would.”

Beneath its rom-com surface, The Portable Veblen exploits the hypocrisy of health and healthcare when economics is involved. As satirical as Vonnegut, McKenzie’s touch is light and effective, hinting at class clashes and culture clashes and morality clashes (oh my).

But most of all this is a story of love and family, chosen and otherwise. Veblen’s mother is a brilliant yet hypochondriacal loon, an irrepressible intervener, a woman who named her daughter after an obscure (but actually not so obscure) Norwegian-American economist, Thorstein Veblen—Thorstein coined the term “conspicuous consumption.” While (our) Veblen’s father is an institutionalized burden of a man, an absent yet still undeniable presence in Veblen’s life and legend to her mental health.

Then there’s Paul family. Paul’s mother and father are weed farmers, loving hippies but, in Paul’s eyes, unreliable parents. His developmentally-disabled brother has overshadowed Paul’s own independence, an unwitting saboteur since childhood, and since childhood Paul has done his best to extricate himself from it all.

McKenzie’s prose dances in those spaces where these repressed and dysfunctional emotions are dancing apart:

[Veblen] formed this estimation in faith that it would be so, because that was what she wanted, a family at ease, a family free from the heat of a central beast, traveling through vents to cook you in every room.

The sensitive and nuanced handling of the intersections of family and love and disability is nothing short of brilliant.

The Portable Veblen is not just one thing: not just a satire, not just a rom-com, not just a novel about talking to squirrels. It is all these things at once. But at its heart is love, the bleakest and most optimistic and strangest thing there is, the most squirreliest nut to crack. And isn’t that what we talk about when we talk about love?