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“There came a point in my life … where I realized that almost every narrative, whatever it came from, that dealt with an African country was pretty much a rewriting of ‘Heart of Darkness.’”
The post A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto appeared first on Public Books.
Once in grad school, Anthony Paul Smith and I had the same temp job. It was a terrible job, doing tedious data entry to convert the Sunday circular coupons into a clickable webpage. Seldom has a temp job felt more purely pointless and degrading. And yet, a few months later, we caught ourselves fondly recalling those times, and Anthony suggested that we need to resist the urge to be nostalgic for something simply because it’s in the past.
I find myself thinking that about the pandemic lately. I am finally having a calm summer vacation at home, and especially now that My Esteemed Partner usually works from home, our routine is reminiscent of the pandemic. We followed stricter guidelines than most, for longer than most. For me, the “lockdown” lasted a year and a half, and even when I returned to teaching, our social life was very constricted.
I am a relatively healthy person, so I wasn’t especially worried about catching the novel coronavirus myself. It was more a matter of not wanting to accidentally harm others, since My Esteemed Partner was potentially more vulnerable, and I live in a building full of elderly people. The effect was much the same, though — the instinctive fear and avoidance of other people, who could all be a disease vector, the preference to huddle at home whenever possible. I remember once, the first pandemic summer, My Esteemed Partner wondered aloud if we could get a rental somewhere in Michigan, so that we could get out of the city but still be isolated. I always have some degree of travel anxiety, but this time around I was straight-up afraid — not just of the travel itself, but specifically of traveling to a place full of covid scofflaws. (Eventually, right-wing militants in Michigan would be arrested for plotting to kidnap the governor over covid restrictions.)
As I’ve written before, we had ideal circumstances — we lived in a very covid-compliant area, we both kept our jobs, we didn’t have childcare to worry about, and we even came out financially ahead. Ultimately we bought an apartment, something we wouldn’t have seen as a possibility just a couple years earlier. But I can tell it has lingering effects. My emotional equilibrium still feels “off.” I have less resilience, and I feel like my moods swing more than they should. Above all, my social muscles feel like they have atrophied. I have a friend who recently moved back to town, who has invited me out for last-minute drinks a few times, like back in grad school. I almost always turn him down, and though I can always think of some particular excuse, I am realizing that part of the problem is that I simply need more lead-time to build up my reserves and face a social situation.
Part of the issue is that I was never truly alone for any considerable amount of time. I know others who were single when the pandemic began who are dealing with a whole other level of difficulty, so I’m grateful that My Esteemed Partner was with me. Yet solitude has been a major part of my emotional equilibrium since I was a very young child, and I have been largely deprived of it for years. During the pandemic, my only time alone in the apartment would be when My Esteemed Partner was walking the dog. Eventually, doctors appointments or haircuts would provide longer windows. But I have had maybe 2-3 instance in the past few years where I had the house to myself for the better part of a working day, and that makes it hard for me to recenter. Thankfully My Esteemed Partner is doing a couple days in the office most weeks now, which seems to be helping.
Of course, I didn’t do myself a lot of favors with the transition to normal life. When I went back to teaching, I was so excited to be in-person again that I accepted a hugely undercompensated teaching overload — teaching more than I’d ever taught before in my life, two semesters in a row, complete with an extreme early-morning schedule. And this past year, I took on a faculty governance role that proved more time-consuming and otherwise stressful than I had anticipated. In other words, work has objectively been more stressful and demanding, so we would expect that my social and emotional resilience would be down from historic levels. And yet I feel like I was starting from a weaker baseline. These past couple years would have been hard no matter what, but would they have been this hard?
And ultimately, of course, I did get covid, and I did give it to My Esteemed Partner. We both had a very mild case, and she recovered faster than me. My main concern was not the physical discomfort, but rather the isolation. I also technically had long covid — though it manifested only in a persistent cough and a strange rash (verified by an actual doctor as a post-covid symptom!), rather than the scary symptoms we all picture when that dreaded, mysterious condition comes up.
None of this is to say that the disease isn’t serious for others, nor that we shouldn’t have taken more or different precautions as a society. I’m just suggesting that for me, and probably for many, the most enduring post-covid effects are due to the isolation itself rather than the disease.
And I wish that our public sphere were not structured so that bringing up those concerns automatically triggers the reaction of “OH! so you wish the elderly and immune-compromised would just die for your convenience, huh?!” No, I don’t. I sacrificed a not-inconsiderable percentage of my life to try to avoid harming others — primarily My Esteemed Partner, but also many people I barely know or have never met. That imposed a cost on me that is very real and that I am still dealing with. And it still seems like every day on social media I see a stray remark implying that “lockdowns never happened” or social isolation is easy and fun. Even the repeated refrain that “the pandemic isn’t over, by the way!” grates, because it seems to carry with it the assumption that we should return to that level of anxiety and restriction.
What is the point of this post? I’m not sure. Ultimately, this is my blog and I sometimes blog about personal things. If there’s a political point here, it might be the suggestion that maybe liberals don’t need to add a constant reminder of that terrible pandemic that ruined all our lives to their litany of smug truisms and that maybe it doesn’t need to be an article of faith that the side-effects of all pandemic restrictions are either non-existent or by definition swamped by their life-saving intentions. In any case, not seeing constant reminders of the pandemic or implicit accusations that I’m a bad person for feeling bad in its wake would help my mental health.
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Continuing on Dostoevsky's 1880 novel, we respond to some objections to the Christian arguments that the characters Alyosha and Zosima put forward to respond to Ivan's "Rebellion" and "Grand Inquisitor" arguments. Most of these objections come from the audience Q&A.
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The post Ep. 316: Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”: PEL Live in NYC (Part Two) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.On Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1880 existentialist novel, focusing mostly on the "Rebellion" and "Grand Inquisitor" chapters.
How can we reconcile ourselves to the existence of evil and suffering? The character Ivan argues that we can't, that children's suffering can't be justified by any alleged Divine Plan. Dostoevsky's answer to this challenge is practical, concrete love and service to others, but does this really address or merely sidestep Ivan's challenge?
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The post Ep. 316: Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”: PEL Live in NYC (Part One) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.“If you’re going to write in a worthwhile way about something, you have to really understand why you care.”
The post We Have This-ness Y’all! Ocean Vuong and Amy E. Elkins appeared first on Public Books.
Cory Doctorow just launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a self-produced audiobook of his new book, Red Team Blues. It's a high-tech heist novel — the first in a new trilogy — about a Marty Hench, a middle-aged forensic accountant on the hunt to find his buddy's missing cryptography key before any number of crime syndicates, shady Silicon Valley financiers, or Intelligence Community Alphabet Boys catch on. — Read the rest
As a gay reader (and gay writer, myself), I take special notice when I come across a deal announcement for a queer novel written by an openly queer person. There are few enough of these books that I often find myself reading books destinated to disappoint me—young adult coming out stories, romantic comedies, women in their twenties and thirties having their first queer experience while already married to a man. These books are all valuable, and are often quite good, but I’m not their best reader. I want the uncomfortable nuances of queer life we don’t often find in queer media—even media created by queer people—thanks at least in part to the parameters set by cisgender, heterosexual people. I want, as I eventually realized, exactly what Richard Mirabella delivers in his stunning debut, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest.
Mirabella, a civil servant in his forties who lives in upstate New York, is a brave writer. Adult literary debuts are no stranger to the “ambitious” descriptor, but Mirabella’s novel is quiet. His prose—which could be described as plain or simple by someone who doesn’t understand its power—is controlled. Mirabella’s sentences ache in their simplicity.
Why does this stylistic choice work so well? Mirabella’s novel could easily be high drama. We have a dual timeline story of siblings—Justin and Willa—whose adolescence in a quiet, wintery town is permanently marred by violence committed by Nick, Justin’s older boyfriend. Readers watch this origin story unfold juxtaposed against the siblings decades later as they try to navigate their relationship as well as new ones. Willa, a nurse, creates dioramas. Justin lives with addiction as best he can. Does the violence that haunts this family change it forever?
That’s not the question this text answers. It’s too simple. Mirabella delicately portrays the after effects of trauma, and one of those traumas is a disturbing act of violence that defines the plot. But Mirabella also goes to that brave place: He shows readers the trauma of a mother who is quiet, even patient, in her homophobia. Of classroom bullies who are still around today. Of building a chosen family that disappoints. Of remembering—and not.
I was lucky enough to chat on the phone with Mirabella about these themes and his craft. We spent a good hour talking about depictions of dating violence in queer media (and how our community responds to it), healing from homophobia experienced both inside and outside of the home, and how it feels to wrestle with these hurts while Republicans wage war against queer people from a new angle—one where the sort of relationship Mirabella writes could be misconstrued as evidence that all queer people are predatory monsters.
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The Rumpus: Would you like to start us off by sharing what you think your book is about?
Richard Mirabella: I would say my novel is about siblings; in this case, Willa and Justin, and their relationship in youth and adulthood. That relationship has been affected by violence that the brother, Justin, experienced as a teenager. I also think it’s about the failure of a family to care for their queer child whose pain is inconvenient to them.
Rumpus: We have chosen families in this book who both heal and disappoint us.
Mirabella: Yeah, I’m actually glad you said disappointing. Nothing in life is perfect and Justin has found kind of a lovely little family but . . .
Rumpus: But?
Mirabella: I’m gonna slow down a little bit and just say: I wanted to give them to him. It’s kind of a gift. [But] they’re not magical. They’re just people. There are lovely moments between all of them where they’re trying but failing.
Rumpus: Do you think straight people and queer people will have different reactions to these failures?
Mirabella: It really depends on the person. Justin’s gonna sink all of them—he’s taking them all down with him. Justin is a victim of heterosexist, homophobic abuse. The violence that happens to him is a direct reaction to that. He is failed by his chosen family too. I don’t know if straight people will get that. I want people to read it and get whatever they get from it, but I think queer people will immediately see and understand it.
Rumpus: Why do you think it works so well to have Nick [Justin’s older boyfriend] missing in the adult narrative?
Mirabella: I started writing this book and I thought, I’m gonna write like a Shirley Jackson novel. You know, the sort of literary novel that is haunted or has something unreal or supernatural about it. There were elements that I cut from it. But I think Nick is still a ghost and haunts the novel in a lot of ways. Maybe being haunted is just feeling something crooked nearby. In this book, that’s Nick. Justin doesn’t know what happened or where he is. To me, that’s so interesting, to have this spirit hovering over you.
Rumpus: Can you say more about your idea of it being a haunted literary novel?
Mirabella: I’m really fascinated by strange fiction, weird fiction. This novel was inspired by a Grimm’s fairytale, called “Brother and Sister” or “Little Brother and Little Sister,” where the brother is transformed into a fawn. And the sister vows to care for him.
It made me think a little bit about being transformed by something that happens to you, something that changes you in a way that is disruptive to you. Perhaps destructive even to other people in your life.
I think there are a few hauntings in this book. Nick is haunting Justin. Justin’s experiences of violence are haunting him. The feelings of fear. I think Willa is haunted by Justin in different ways—not knowing what to do or how to care for him. I think Justin is haunted by men in general. At one of my favorite moments in the book, Justin has this sort of surreal encounter in the middle of the night. That was a surprise when I wrote it, and it made me realize how haunted Justin is just by manhood.
Rumpus: Do you feel like men in this book are haunted by toxic masculinity?
Mirabella: I have to say yes because, I mean, we all are. We’re swimming in the ocean of patriarchy at all times. So yeah, absolutely.
Rumpus: Can you talk to me a little bit about your process of deciding to have dual timelines for adolescence and adulthood? Were you always hoping to use this method to show the aftermath of trauma?
Mirabella: That’s always what I wanted this book to be about, but I just didn’t know how it would play out. At first it was linear and then it sort of shattered and broke apart a little bit more. I wanted to write about a brother and sister, and so I started writing about them dealing with something in adulthood, but I wasn’t sure of what.
I’m really interested in what happens after something bad. So yeah, it was important for me to show the far reaching effects of trauma and of violence in people’s lives. I think it’s less interesting to me to just focus on one person. So I started writing about Willa and Justin coming back into her life. It kind of grew out of going back to their childhood to work towards whatever it was that happened to them.
Rumpus: What went into your decision to have this specific age gap in this book? Did their ages or the degree of the age gap ever change while writing?
Mirabella: My drafts are all hugely different from each other. So in earlier drafts, Nick was a side character associated with an older person that both Nick and Justin were sort of in a relationship with—like a friendship and a sexual relationship. And I just realized the other person wasn’t very interesting.
I liked Nick more. I thought Nick was more interesting, and I also thought he was frightening, a little bit. In then the next draft he became the focus rather than this other character, who eventually just went away.
Rumpus: Why do you think it’s valuable or interesting to write a character that’s a little scary to the writer?
Mirabella: It’s more interesting to write about that. Nick represents something that I’ve always struggled with, which is masculinity. You know, he’s toxic. And you know, he’s a gay person. He won’t accept that about himself. When I think about him I think of somebody who cannot accept himself. He also criticizes what he sees as signals of Justin’s queerness; the way he holds himself, the music he chooses when they go to the CD store. He’s always telling Justin: The world’s gonna eat you up, basically.
I’ve tried writing Nick for a long time. The muscle dude I would have avoided in my youth, who may have approached me in my youth, and who I was attracted to, but terrified of. I think my early fear of men comes out in writing Nick.
Rumpus: When I think about Justin’s teenage years, I think about him being bullied by his peers, and I think about him on the internet. A lot of readers today will relate to both the bullying and going online—including meeting people online—as the escape. What made you include the internet in this way? Do you feel the presence of the internet establishes readers in a very contemporary sort of narrative?
Mirabella: You know, the internet was pretty new when I when I was a teenager. But at this point, in the book? It’s not much later on. And I was thinking about how even if at that point I knew someone else was gay in my high school, we couldn’t speak to each other about it. That would have been dangerous.
I haven’t been in high school in an extremely long time, so I don’t know what it’s like now. I feel it’s probably a lot more open. But I wanted to include a situation where Justin had seen Nick in school, knew who he was, but they never spoke to each other. What created the opportunity for them to speak to each other was the internet. Here was this website where Justin could see: Oh, this person is gay. I didn’t know that! And could reach out to him.
Rumpus: That’s so interesting. It feels notable to me that while there isn’t a significant age difference between Justin and Nick, their lives feel so different because Nick is out of high school.
Mirabella: Nick has the freedom that Justin doesn’t yet possess. Nick sort of gives Justin a hard time about that too: Oh, why do you have to listen to your mother? They’re only a couple of years apart in age and I like the idea that Nick has a freedom that Justin doesn’t.
Rumpus: Do you feel the story would be very different if Justin and Nick had met when they were the same age? Or if their age difference was larger, as tends to be how age gap couples are portrayed in media?
Mirabella: In an earlier draft, Nick was older. What worried me was that the book would become about that topic; a young queer person being [in a relationship with] an older queer person. But the book is not really about that.
I have to say, I struggled with that for a little while. Honestly, when I started writing more about Nick, I liked his sort of youthful toughness. Justin is kind of a punk kid, but he’s also very soft.
Rumpus: Justin faces violence and harm from a number of people in this book, including, eventually, Nick. What went into the decision to have Justin’s partner be the one to ultimately hurt him, versus, say, a stranger or even a hate crime?
Mirabella: It’s very bleak, isn’t it? I think because it broke my heart, I had to write it. It wasn’t an intellectual choice. It was more about somebody feeling like they could trust a person and then slowly realizing they actually don’t have what they thought they had. They don’t have protection.
Maybe it’s trying to say we have ourselves and we have to find strength in ourselves. We have to do the best we can to love ourselves. I think, in youth, especially at Justin’s age—sixteen, seventeen—it’s very hard to feel that self-love. I think especially as a queer teen, it was hard for me to find that love inside for myself. I absolutely was looking for it outside.
Rumpus: Did you ever have concerns that queer people would read the depictions of same-sex abuse and violence in this book and see it as hurting the “cause” or ruin some sanitized version of queer people?
Mirabella: I lost sleep over that honestly. I think what’s important to me as a writer is to tell the truth about the world as best as I can. And that includes allowing queer people to be imperfect, like all other human beings. You know, writing shining examples of queerness is not gonna change the minds of people who already hate us. I think the realities of our lives don’t matter at all to those people who want to erase and criminalize us.
As far as other queer people, I understand that some queer people may be angry if they read something like this, about a queer person enacting violence on another queer person. But that just goes back to what I said. It’s a reality of our world. And I think there are other more nurturing relationships in the novel. So I think it shows a spectrum, but it is a worry of mine, of course.
Rumpus: Justin and Willa’s mother Grace embodies a sort of quiet homophobia we don’t often see portrayed in media. Do you think some readers, who might see themselves as accepting or even as allies, might recognize themselves in Grace? Like “Oh, I’m not actually as supportive or understanding as I thought I was?”
Mirabella: You know, I didn’t set out to write this novel with that in mind, but while I was writing the novel, I read the book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and its Consequences by Sarah Schulman. It affected me so deeply (as does most of her work) and it really helped me shape the novel in a lot of ways.
In retrospect, I would hope somebody who perhaps has a queer child and doesn’t necessarily know how to handle that would read this and see the character of Grace—who I think is just unsure about Justin, she doesn’t understand him, doesn’t know what to do with him—and understand that perhaps if she showed some understanding, things would have gone differently for him.
Grace feels she has to do something, where [instead] she could just love and accept him. His troubles in his teen years were brought on by a society that doesn’t accept who Justin is, even though he accepts himself.
Rumpus: Grace fails Justin (and Willa) both when they’re adolescents and when they’re adults, though in different ways. Do you feel that if she was a more accepting or more nurturing parent, the whole plot of the book would be different?
Mirabella: To be honest, no, because it’s not just Grace. It’s the world. I hate to be so black and white about it, but . . . Obviously Grace is homophobic. But I don’t think she is nakedly homophobic. I think it’s a matter of ignorance on her part. What Justin faces in life, and even in school is a lot more intense and naked on the surface. And I think that is a catalyst for what happens later in the novel. I think even aside from Grace, he would be on that path.
Rumpus: We know book bans and censorship are bad. Why do you think it’s important that all young people have access to books by and about queer people?
Mirabella: We’re part of humanity, number one. I think it’s important, not just for queer children to read about themselves, but for other children to read about the spectrum of experience. It’s a part of life. And we want children to understand the world. That’s why they’re in school.
Rumpus: What do you think about the ongoing Republican rallying cries trying to paint queer people as predatory, manipulative, or somehow inherently obscene or inappropriate?
Mirabella: Republicans are always talking about personal freedom. And yet. You know, if they really believed in that freedom, they would allow people’s families to make these decisions. If a family is like, No, I don’t want you to read this, you’re too young, then that’s that family. They can do that (and I believe they’re stifling their children).
I grew up in a house where [the thinking was], You want to read this? Okay, go ahead, read it and we’ll talk about it. Parents don’t want to talk to their children, they’re uncomfortable talking to their children about the realities of the world. They wanna ban books so that other people can’t read them. It’s infuriating. I think a lot of it is that they have a particular vision of the world—which I think is largely white cis and hetero—and so anything that doesn’t fit into that mold is dangerous. Period.
***
Author photo by Danielle Stephens
When I first came across Idra Novey’s Take What You Need, I was interested firstly by the title and, then, by the cover. There was something mysterious and inviting about the call to action paired with the pinks and blues of a sunset. Wandering into the novel, I took an immediate sense of comfort in the voices of our two protagonists, Leah and Jean. Both mothers, both artists, neither completely self-assured.
Take What You Need is a book about perspective. The narrative is shaped by the parallel lives of Jean—welder, artist, ex step-mother to Leah—and Leah—a wife and mother who has chosen to leave her past behind. Jean lives alone, erecting metal sculptures in her living room, battling the overt sense that her relationship with Leah refuses to ever be what it once was, and determined to reunite with her daughter. Jean seeks redemption in a relationship with the boy-next-door, a gangly kid named Elliot. Their neighborhood provides the landscape for the novel, weaving the overwhelming sense of displacement provoked by class and cultural conflict into the relationship between two women divided by a critical moment in the past. We begin our story in medias res: Jean has died and willed her sculptures to Leah who makes her skeptical journey homeward.
When reading Novey’s writing, you are likely to forget that what transpires on the page is not in fact transpiring in reality. I looked up occasionally to glimpse a hand-wrought sculpture by Jean and was met with the whiteness of my wall. Similarly, having recently become familiar with the Southern landscape myself, I could easily imagine the roads and the gas stations, the natural scenery that made me let out a long breath and the neighborhoods that could make me hold the next in tightly, wanting to call the least amount of attention to myself. Novey straddles the fine line between depicting the world we live in and finely illustrating her own.
Novey is the writer of six additional books, three of which are poetry collections including, Exit, Civilian, chosen for 2011 National Poetry Series. She is a recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and Poets & Writers Magazine, among others.
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The Rumpus: Let’s talk first about how much research went into this novel. It’s heavily laced with references to artists—specifically sculptors. How much of your personal knowledge were you bringing to the page versus how much research did you have to do, and what was that process like for you?
Idra Novey: I learned to weld boxes in order to get a lived sense of Jean’s choices as an artist. Over several years, I welded boxes with various metal artists, Julia Murray, Norm Ed, and also with Dan Denville at the Center for Metal Arts in Pennsylvania. I visited various scrap yards to get metal for the boxes, including the Novey scrap yard that has been passed down among the men in my maternal family for over a century. I have no material connection to the Novey century in recycling but I feel a strong connection artistically to my namesake, Ida Novey, who started the scrapyard in 1906.
Louise Bourgeois entered the novel after I found a beat-up book of her writing at Bull Creek, the flea market that Jean goes to in the novel. Bourgeois’s insights on sexuality and power, on her father, aligned potently with how I imagined Jean’s artistic drive. Bourgeois recognized the libidinal forces that compelled her to keep experimenting and taking new risks with her art. Agnes Martin’s writing aligned with Jean’s process in other aspects. Martin, like Jean, felt a strong need to retreat and work in complete solitude.
While writing Jean’s chapters, I immersed myself in the writing of Anne Truitt, Celia Paul, Hilma af Klint, and many other women artists, too. They were all repeatedly dismissed and written off, and yet somehow still found the conviction to keep taking their art seriously. One of the most deeply joyful and rewarding processes of my writing life has been figuring out how to convey Jean’s nerve, creating the scenes with her on the ladder, stacking her Manglements [sculptures] as high as the ceiling of her living room allowed.
Rumpus: There are two female protagonists presented in your novel. We meet Leah first. The stepdaughter/mother relationship is a very specific breed entirely its own and is often only understood by those engaged in it. We learn that Jean abandons Leah at ten-years-old. Why does Jean choose not to leave a note? Is the burden of abandonment what compels Jean to become so fixated by Elliot (her next-door neighbor turned pseudo-mentee)?
Novey: I agree the stepdaughter/mother relationship is a specific dynamic that people frequently misunderstand who haven’t experienced it. I’m close to both my stepmother and my mother and talk to them both often. I haven’t come across many novels about adult women relating to their stepmothers, and as so often happens, I ended up writing the scenes I longed to read and couldn’t find.
What happens to Jean when she leaves Leah’s father, the loss Jean has to assume of her role as Leah’s stepmother, is a loss I’ve seen a number of women consider, and take. Whether the stepdaughter/mother relationship will last is never certain, and in Leah’s case, at ten years old, she’s beholden to the good will of her father. I’d like to leave it up to readers to intuit why Jean doesn’t leave a note for Leah. Your insight is quite astute about Jean bringing some of her truncated experience of mothering to her relationship with Elliott, and yet she also brings to Elliott her truncated experience of marriage and sexual self. All that messy chemistry is there at once.
Rumpus: Jean is an artist through and through and driven by the compulsion she feels to weld with a freedom her father never allowed himself to have. How does Jean parse the freedom she finds in art with the ever-growing complexity of the world around her?
Novey: I think this is the driving question of the novel, how any of us make art given the ever-growing contradictions of the world around us, and also the complex past we inherit. The epigraph from Louise Bourgeois at the start of the novel addresses this question head on, and how art in itself can be a way to answer it, as it was for me, through the process of writing this novel: Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.
Rumpus: We get a sense of the current political fever within the first few pages of the book, however it’s evasive—Leah sees flags while driving through town, multiple people garbed in camo, a red hat on a woman’s head. Why did you choose to keep these things unnamed until the end of the book? The environment gives you the sense that this could be a town anywhere at any point in time: a town divided by those who are diverse and those who fight against diversity instead of for it.
Novey: In early drafts, I was ambivalent about how explicit to be about the slogans on the signs and flags. The deeper I got into the novel, though, the less necessary it seemed to name the slogans. I’m glad to hear it evoked to you a time of political polarization that transcended our particular moment. That was my hope and any reader living now will know what the signs and slogans say. Leaving the words unnamed added that timeless quality you described, and the novel is a fairy tale—as I suspect any novel attempting to dissolve even the smallest aspect of our current cultural divides, is a fairy tale.
Rumpus: Elliot is a character who got under my skin. He consistently demonstrates a quiet, but seething undertone: a man caught inside his own head, young only in age. I got infuriated with him a few times wanting him to do the right thing instead of being a passive bystander. Why did you make Elliot such a quiet character?
Novey: I heard Jennifer Egan speak once about attempting to take a new kind of risk with each work of fiction, and part of that risk-taking is creating a character who subverts stereotypes in a way she hasn’t written about before. With Elliott’s character, I wanted to subvert prevailing stereotypes about young rural men, who are often portrayed in reductive, demeaning caricatures. It isn’t in Elliott’s nature to be confrontational, and when he does finally speak up, he gets kicked in the face.
In all three of my novels, I’ve been drawn to write about power imbalances and how often people make choices based on the likelihood of retaliation. What causes people to resign themselves to inaction is a question that really fascinates me. Sevlick, the town in the novel, is an amalgam of various towns in the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia where I grew up, and where parts of my family have lived for over a hundred years. I’ve known many quiet young men like Elliott, who have limited options and who work in situations where they don’t have the luxury of being able to speak their minds.
Rumpus: Take What You Need—the title felt illuminated by the end of my first reading. I read it as a plea—take what you need, but leave the rest (an oft-repeated quote in twelve-step rooms)—but also a reminder that the world will take, leaving very little for those who need it most.
Novey: It’s wondrous to hear you read the title as a plea. Over many drafts, I came to think of it as a plea as well, although my original reason for choosing it was the biblical proverb about binging on honey: If you find honey, eat just what you need, lest you have too much and vomit it up. We are a species prone to indulgences. When we find honey, it’s hard to resist taking just what we need, even knowing the likelihood that a lack of self-control will leave us hunched over, hurling, and feeling ill. In the beginning of the novel, when Jean tells Elliott’s mother to draw as much water from the spigot as they need, they both know there will be implications to this offer. It is about far more than just water.
Rumpus: The sculptures that Jean erected in her living room shrouds the story that is told by the two women, interlaced by both Jean’s favorite artists’ quotes and the fairy tales Jean told Leah and that Leah now interprets as an adult. Are the sculptures extensions of Jean herself? Dreams coerced in metal, balanced between found objects, and haphazardly perfected?
Novey: Thank you, that is a beautiful way to describe Jean’s sculptures, and the allure of art for many people, to coerce their dreams into forms that can be experienced in waking life. When art lacks that haphazard pursuit you describe, it feels overdetermined, a cultural “project” rather than an artwork that involved moral risk and getting uneasy and uncertain, following all sorts of murky impulses that lead to failure and maybe, after various years, to something worth sharing with others.
Rumpus: Storytelling is an ancient art, sharing stories to recall those things—events, adventures, people—passed down throughout the ages. What is Leah’s fascination with turning her relationship with Jean into a fairy tale?
Novey: The allure of revisiting a fairy tale, the writer Helen Oyeyemi says, is to shift “time and location, and see what holds true, and why or why not.” I wanted to revisit all the depictions we’ve passed down about stepmothers, about Appalachia, about women artists and rural artists. What doesn’t hold true and why those depictions have endured were questions that took on new light when viewed through fairy tales.
Rumpus: Can all of the characters in your novel be assigned a character in folklore? How deep do the ancient roots run in the town of Sevlick?
Novey: Sevlick is an invented town and only exists in my imagination. It’s an amalgam of various Allegheny Mountain towns in the area where I grew up. The characters in the novel are composites of people I interviewed over many years. I listened to their voices every day before working on the novel to keep the vibrancy and singularity of each character present in each scene.
Rumpus: One of my favorite parts of your book was your ending. I don’t want to spoil it for any readers, so all I will say is that it presents the idea of “what could” in an alluring enough way to believe the truth of “what is.” How do we differentiate between the two in art? In building characters from the ground up and a book from the pages?
Novey: Belief is a shifting, fluid endeavor. I found it quite daunting to sit down each day and write about cultural divides and familial estrangement. It’s a painful subject and my sense of “what is” kept changing depending on which character’s perspective I was inhabiting. This novel challenged me in ways that felt different from the novels and books of poetry and translation that came before it. I couldn’t have written this novel without living through other books first. Until I reached the middle of my life, I wasn’t quite ready to listen—with a genuinely open mind—to artists in the region I left about what compelled them to stay.
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Author photo by Jesse Ditmar
“Throughout Franzen’s life in public, he has figured himself as embattled, enemy-beset.”
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Brian Michael Bendis is one of the biggest names in comic books, having launched the original Ultimate Spider-Man run back in 2000, as well as revitalizing the Avengers franchise for the new millennium. Prior to that, Bendis had made his mark writing and illustrating crime comics. — Read the rest
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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"He regarded with skepticism and clarity the temptations to make racial identity the foundation of our humanity."
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Ayize Jama-Everett interviews Pulitzer Prize finalist and Booker Prize-shortlisted author Percival Everett on what training horses has taught him about writing novels, his rules for writing, and the work schedule that’s helped him produce everything from novels and poetry collections to short stories and paintings over his 40-year artistic career.
What does training horses teach you about writing a novel?
Patience. Not to get stressed out. It never pays to get excited around a half-ton animal. It’s not going to calm the animal down, and it’s not going to do you any good. With novels, it is the same thing. Why get stressed about it? And even after you publish it. What if nobody likes it? What are you going to do? Maybe somebody will enjoy the next one.
Are there any rules that you follow in terms of writing? A road map for success or knowing that the project is going where you want it to go?
No, not really. I try to be honest in terms of my vision. I never think about readers — not to say I don’t want to be read. But there’s no profit in imagining some ideal reader when everyone is different. So, I’m the reader I’m trying to appeal to. Which, sadly, explains my book sales. [Laughs.]
What’s the writing routine, the schedule?
I work all the time but only sometimes. It comes from ranching and training horses. I wake up, feed, fix stuff, write for about 20 minutes, train an animal, fix stuff, and write for 20 minutes. Constitutionally, I’m lucky, because when I sit down, I’m immediately working. I don’t have to clear the deck, and I don’t go online, surf the web, or anything like that. I don’t sleep a lot.
Funeral, the first collaborative novella between Daisuke Shen and Vi Khi Nao, is overwhelming in the best way: dizzying and ecstatic to such a degree that a basic summary feels impossible. One could say it is a book about Hell, but a Hell so similar to Earth in its mundanities that it might be indistinguishable (within the text, some suggest that Hell may be preferable). It would also be fair to say that Funeral centers around a tumultuous romance that blooms within Hell, between Eddie—protagonist of the 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses—and Xing Jin, who portrayed the antagonist in the Thai martial arts film The Protector.
However, any such basic summary would be a disservice to Shen and Nao’s breathtaking and often hilarious work of metaphysical realism. Most importantly, despite its strangeness, Funeral offers some of the most realistic depictions of love and friendship I’ve encountered. It’s a brilliant and moving work that demands experience, not summary. I had the pleasure of sharing a Google Doc with Shen and Nao, where we discussed the nature of their collaboration, existence as performance, and the characteristics of Hell and death.
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The Rumpus: What was the seed of this book? What was the seed of your collaboration?
Daisuke Shen: Before there was Daisuke, there was Vi. Vi Khi Nao was born in 1979 and wrote and produced art, all sorts of art, for many years, without ever knowing or predicting Daisuke Shen’s birth in 1994. Daisuke Shen made art haphazardly for a couple of years on and off, and then they met Vi Khi Nao and things started to make sense. Writing started feeling interesting again, like it was worth it after all, and not just a boring thing that ate ham sandwiches on white bread for every meal and whose favorite book from last year was [Redacted] by [Famous Author], which remained on the NYT Bestsellers List for what felt like forever. When Vi asked Daisuke what film they should watch to base the novella around after Daisuke won a grant from the NYFA [New York Foundation for the Arts], Daisuke suggested Funeral Parade of Roses, which Daisuke’s friend Jesi Gaston recommended to them many months beforehand and eventually became Daisuke’s favorite film. At this current point in time, Daisuke does not remember what year Jesi was born.
Vi Khi Nao: I was told or I read somewhere that durians (the wonderful smelling fruit that should be at all airports and hotels and taxi cabs) tend to fall nocturnally. The seed of Funeral did not fall like oranges, but like that of a jackfruit/durian/underwear-tofu tree. In the tenebrous darkness of the pandemic. And in its earliest birth, we don’t recommend anyone to roam under us, in the midst of our respective, alternating creative production, as our falling fruit (manuscript) could give sleepwalkers concussions. Funeral must have waited for the weather severity prevailing within the hypothermic clarity of our mutual existence to emerge. Meaning Daisuke floated on a Bed-Stuy mattress of frozen chè trôi nước for months and years and I must have been at a point in my life where I can’t climb stairs anymore.
Rumpus: I’m not familiar with Funeral Parade of Roses. What about it resonated so much with you?
Shen: A fake documentary centering around the bara zoku [a term for gay men in Japan] of the ‘60s that slowly merges and becomes a “real” documentary that makes up the film. I feel like people in the US are sometimes very surprised to learn that Japan had and continues to have a very large and flourishing LGBTQ community. [Director Toshio] Matsumoto’s usage of the mockumentary as a device makes the other parts of the film feel more emotionally intimate, meant for our eyes alone—and yet we are still voyeurs and active participants just like everyone else (SPOILER ALERT: The film ends with Eddie walking out onto the street in Tokyo with people simply watching her stumble around as blood pools out of her eyes). And then there is, of course, a lot of drugs, a lot of sex, a lot of trauma, a lot of stuff concerning the political turmoil happening in the ‘60s. We see throughout the film a schism being created between “traditional” Japan and the new, emerging culture that young people are creating. Leda [a madame] is growing old, she is losing clients, losing her lover: she’s always shown wearing a kimono and has a lot of traditional Japanese art and furnishings in her home, whereas Eddie [a transgender sex worker] is this beautiful young girl who represents the “new.” It’s a darkly humorous and emotionally gutting masterpiece.
Autobiographically speaking, I feel connected to the film in many ways. Eddie is Eddie and Leda is Leda and I am myself, for better or worse. And all of us have had issues with men.
Nao: In 2021, and not lately, sad films do not move me anymore, but the melancholy in Funeral Parade of Roses echoes something [like] Yasujirō Ozu with embodied Western mythologies, but the film still retains its Japanese cultural impulses.
Synopsis: Toshio Matsumoto, the Japanese New Wave chef, inserted Oedipus Rex, Peter, Osamu Ogasawara, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Emiko Azuma into his anachronistic blender with the pre-peeled, pre-washed fruits of suicide, childhood sexual abuses, masks, gay bar, some transgender women, roses, and the soymilk of inky marijuanaesque characters Eddie, Leda, and Gonda into it, and then he blended three or four times until this arthouse smoothie is softer than Buddha’s butt cheeks. And when you drink this cinematic potion by watching, it is capable of curing suicide, patricide, acne, and preventing sex with one’s mother.
Rumpus: Despite Funeral being a collaboration, it feels like the product of a single voice. Could you discuss the collaborative process a bit? Are you each able to pick apart your individual contributions, or are they so interwoven as to be indistinguishable?
Shen: One very funny moment I’d like to share: While we were driving to Iowa City for ten hours from Louisiana, I gave Vi our manuscript to look over and double-check for any copyediting errors. When Vi got to the ending that she wrote, she suddenly exclaimed from the back of the car, “Oh my God. This is so wild. Which one of us wrote this!?” I feel that I can recognize my own voice very well, and recognize Vi’s voice very well, but I found that very flattering. In the manuscript, things are pretty calm for a while before suddenly moving in a more campy direction, which is all Vi. She is by far one of the best writers I know, and the best at what she does: a mathematician who can think of formulas for any and every possible solution, ones which others would have thought impossible.
Nao: The collaborative effort/process is similar to being in a kitchen in a Google Doc. Daisuke and I are the molecular gastronomy head chefs. Daisuke prepared the first literary dish: a deconstructed smoked almond, and then I made something numerically gelatin and extremely thinly sliced, alphabetic radishes with hell rhubarb and bullet-trained catfish, and then Daisuke added to the literary buffet table by making something Tony Leung with seafoam and “emulsification, gelification, and spherification” —we do this for over three months straight until we have a language gallimaufry of everything.
Daisuke is an awesome, intuitive chef, always knowing what ingredients to add to offer the best flavor/tongue/palate combo. They always bring a large sharpened butcher knife the size of an air fryer. And, they are very efficient at chopping the radishes into very thin slices. And, they inspired me to always want to make a dish that no one ever wanted to try to make before. They are also good at food preservation by air-freezing them with a few clacks of hands. Daisuke always electronically turned to me and said, “Vi! This dental floss will hold all the slabs of beef meat and pork sirloin and cauliflowers into one stack so they won’t fall apart in the oven!” Daisuke is a life saver.
Rumpus: What was your mode or ritual for communication between one another throughout Funeral’s writing? Did rules need to be established? Or were the boundaries of what is/is not the novella more fluid?
Shen: Just like with this interview, Vi and I created a Google Doc. Neither of us knew where the other was going beforehand, we would simply tell each other when we had completed a section and move on from there. I think that it was perhaps the first time I’d ever felt truly free in making art. Having Vi to collaborate with—someone who loves making mistakes in art, who does not have time to worry about how things will turn out in the end—has been an incredible teacher.
The only rule that I know of is that Vi does not enjoy lateness, another quality I admire in her. She can “chop chop” the hell out of anyone and will, because she believes in creating constantly, in thinking about art as something you can do with immediacy so long as you have passion and commitment. There is a voice recording from her that I have on my phone (which I requested) that goes like this: “Chop chop, Daisuke! Chop chop, Daisuke! Chop chop! Chop chop.”
Nao: Regarding ritual-engaged, ongoing dialogue and exchange, I echo what Daisuke said above. But, Daisuke left one thing out: Daisuke had a canoe docked on the Pacific ocean and whenever they needed to tell me something important about the plot of our manuscript, they emailed it to a corn detasseling wolf who inserted the message into a corn cob and dropped that corn cob into the canoe for it to be transported to Denver, Colorado. The canoe sat on top of a water buffalo. By the time it arrived, a flock of migrating birds had eaten all of the corn and Daisuke’s message and I was left to make unpopcornable popcorn with my partner in our Denver loft.
Rumpus: I sensed a theatricality throughout the text, with certain passages structured like dialogue within a play, others like character descriptions preceding a play. Are either of you from a theater background?
Shen: In high school, I played one of the ugly stepsisters in an adaptation of Cinderella, perhaps my biggest role. Otherwise, I am not an actor, though I am a big fan of watching films and reading plays. Vi is a filmmaker, and I am an aspiring one (currently working on a project with dear friend Mara Iskander, former editor of Homintern). Tony Leung decided he wanted to make an appearance. He saw what we were writing and said, “Okay, I need this role.” Others also started auditioning and though some were worse than others (Machine Gun Kelly passed out drunk and naked on the floor; Awkwafina demanded that we give her one hundred thousand dollars more in payment but settled for two small appearances instead), I think that our cast worked together pretty well despite the bumps along the way.
Nao: I struggle to read stories or books written in the traditional dialogue formatting. I always get confused as to who is speaking and to whom. Because Funeral is quasi-Funeral Parade of Roses influenced, it makes sense to script part of the manuscript in a playful, play-like structure. It can even echo the language of screenwriting.
Rumpus: A finished book often looks completely different from the process that birthed it. Funeral, to me, feels like a work of incredible imaginative freedom. It feels like the product of a creatively unbridled state. Is there any truth to this? Or is it the result of disguised constraints?
Nao: If a dog introduces itself as a boar and ours introduces itself as a rhinoceros turned cauliflower, I think the birth of our book has a bi-product of creative autonomy and chaos. And, at times, is it merely an artifact of opportunity materializing itself as measured impulse.
Rumpus: Life and death, heaven and hell—are these just variations of a soul’s performance?
Shen: Yes. Our souls (even those who are seemingly emotionally stable and secure in their relationships) are melodramatic and have attachment issues. They can’t stick in one place for too long. Maybe my soul will be more active once I’m dead, who can say? Maybe it will learn how to do all of the things I wanted to do in this life but didn’t: for example, master an instrument or be really good at math.
Nao: On earth, the human soul has many opportunities to close its door to life. If it sticks to life, it suffers. And, as if it has a choice, if it chooses death, it’s no longer in conversation with itself. And, its relationship to death is always constant, uninterrupted, and sempiternal. To access hell, its doors are the [human] mouths and eyes and ears. To access heaven, the [human] genitals. My soul has exited and entered these corporeal gates, these material orifices a million different times, in a million different ways. It has walked across the forest of my pubic hair, the lake of my belly button, the desert of my belly, the mountains of my nipples, the valley of my heartbeats. Are these performances or just pantomimes pretending to possess a soul? “I am soulless, but I still write. I don’t have a body, but I still eat”—are these the quotidian dialogue/statements of a soul? If I had volition, I wouldn’t be here. I was pushed out of another heaven’s/hell’s gate into the sea without a life jacket.
Rumpus: Is hell primarily a matter of social class?
Shen: This reminds me a bit of questions concerning morality or ethicality. I wrote this down from a phone call I had with Vi just the other day: “Everything is ethical when you spend so much time horizontal.” I won’t speak to Vi’s pain, that is her story. As for myself, my pain demanded perfection from me for many years. And I demanded perfection from others. Then it becomes very apparent that your pain does not love you and does not want what is best for you. Fear and shame create indignation and sanctimony, so the opposite of that would be to allow for people to present themselves in imperfect lights, and to allow that for yourself as well. At the end of the day, you’re going to hate who you hate and like who you like depending on your beliefs, but you don’t get to be the judge of where they end up. Everyone has strong beliefs—if someone claims to lack them, they’re just telling on themselves. Heaven is for the elite, the famous, the polite and long-suffering and well-beloved whose shit could be sold for millions of dollars. These people may, like hell-dwellers, be badly-behaved and short-tempered, but in a way that is boring. They are protected by way of money and scenes and what have you. Hell is for the people whose shit is not very valuable, and it stinks, but at least it’s the real thing.
Nao: Hell doesn’t have a social class. Unlike a laundromat, it is not coin- nor hierarchy-operated. Some say if one is wealthy and healthy, one may visit hell less. Others say everyone visits hell and hell visits them. It’s a very reciprocal relationship. My life gives my soul a stopwatch, pain. When I am in pain, my life stops. Everything stops. But, why does the soul measure how long it has been walking? Where is the race? Hell must be a race and it rewards the winner pain when the soul arrives there first.
Rumpus: Death seems to be much like childhood. Why do you think this is?
Shen: Inès Cagnati, who wrote the book Free Day, says in an interview something along these lines: “No one cares about children. Or crazy people.” There is a way to die even if the body is still, in all appearances, present. In Naoki Urusawa’s 20th Century Boys, there is a point where one of the characters—a charismatic, manipulative kid who uses weaker, lonely kids as ways to provide him with attention and power—tells another that he died, that he no longer exists. And so he comes to embody that belief. That nothing he does matters, that no one is there to care about him, that he is invisible to everyone around him, and it affects him for the rest of his life.
Depending on the type of childhood you have, the types of death that you can experience are very different. Everyone is affected or traumatized by something at some point, but perhaps the death is the kind where there was some kind of hope to grasp onto afterward. And then there is the type of childhood death where you can never trust what will happen next, where everywhere you turn is just another type of hell. None of the living can see you or hear you, or maybe even worse, they can and simply choose to pretend otherwise. But at the end of the day, you decide whether or not to make your way out of it.
Nao: Death has no childhood. It comes into being as a precocial entity: fully formed/fully dressed. I have not seen death flicking a marble ball with its fat thumb into a hole nor snap a Barbie doll’s head into two. I have only seen death’s front teeth and its excellent jawline and, speaking from experience, I have flossed death’s teeth and it’s super easy to.
Rumpus: There’s a notion throughout the text that as much as humanity tries to understand and interpret the gods, they are inherently unknowable. The same could be said of all humans. Is this what connects humanity to the gods—an inability to understand one another?
Shen: I might actually say that it’s the opposite. We understand too much about the gods, and there is danger in too much knowing. The same goes for humans, I think. People are afraid of “crazy people”—people with too much emotion, whether that be fear or anger or sadness or anxiety—not because they do not understand, but because they understand all too well these so-called sicknesses of the soul. We are supposed to keep our private parts hidden and in exposing them, know the concept of shame. But what to make of people who display things in excess, who are bold in their presentation of brokenness? For this reason we see Eddie, in the film, plunging the knife into her eyes after witnessing the aftermath of her desire. And her desire for her father was Eddie simply trying to understand too much of herself, of her father.
Nao: I asked God a couple of times if it’s okay to die and he said, “No.” Apparently, he doesn’t know me very well and is a bit unreasonable. The best way to exist, to have an exemplary, infallible understanding, a magnificent connection with God(s), is to never ask such an entity for anything. It is like learning martial arts or certain life-saving military techniques such as strangling an enemy with one’s thighs, but never to use it or take it upon oneself to apply it empirically.
Rumpus: That’s extremely interesting. Is that one of the reasons creating and publishing art is so appealing, that it is one of the only socially acceptable ways to reveal oneself when they are experiencing too many emotions?
Shen: Yes, I think so. I’ve always been an anxious, emotional person. I trip over words and have trouble finishing or continuing a thought. People have referred to me all my life as “intense.” It’s something I used to really hate, but then I feel better because the two writers I love the most—Osamu Dazai, Qiu Miaojin—were deemed by their contemporaries and lovers as intense, pathetic people. And really, they’re anything but. When you read their work, it’s just a collection of raw nerves pulsing on the page. The willingness to admit themselves as addicts or sick or obsessive or vindictive or unstable or selfish or antisocial or sensitive or cowardly, coupled with their determination to better these parts of themselves, is exactly what makes them such fantastic artists. And admirable humans at that.
Nao: Speaking from the standpoint of successfully revealing oneself, the commerce of confession in publishing is a needle-in-a-haystack ordeal. To use/exploit the art form to help people accept who we are. When we want to retain our privacy, we want the needle to be a hay straw, not pretending to be one. There is no rhyme and reason to why we think we can clothe ourselves with a few needles and a few hay straws when we are completely and utterly naked. People judge. That is what they do. We can’t pretend to hide ourselves in anything. Let alone art.
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Author photos courtesy of author and by Scott Indermaur
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