Ed Lynskey’s new novel Lake Charles (new this month from Wildside Press) explores the seamy underbelly of a rural Tennessee community. The book balances traditional crime fiction tropes (fast plotting, hairpin turns, terse dialog, and good old-fashioned violence) with a strong evocation of setting. Lynskey’s novel should make a nice addition to anyone’s summer beach reading schedule. He was kind enough to talk to us over a series of emails about Lake Charles, archetypes vs. stereotypes, violence, and more.
Biblioklept: Your new novel Lake Charles is a crime thriller set in the backwoods of Tennessee in 1979, which you paint as a criminal hotbed riddled with police corruption, a huge marijuana operation, a young lady mysteriously disappeared, and all other sorts of dark intrigue. The setting seems intrinsic to the plot—did the novel originate as an evocation of place, or did the story come first? Or perhaps a mixture of both?
Ed Lynskey: The setting came first. I’ve carried the place inside me since I was a teenager visiting the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. The real Lake Charles is a manmade body of water, not a natural one and that genesis alone corrupts it. The lake had enjoyed a glorious past when it was used for recreation and pleasure, but now the earthen dam is leaky, and the water is scummy, stagnant, and brackish. That’s how I pictured the unsavory setting, and then I molded the criminal elements around Lake Charles. The manmade lake used in James Dickey’s novel Deliverance was in the back of my mind though I’d only seen the film and didn’t read his novel until after Lake Charles got published. Reviewers have cited the native characters as “rednecks” and “hillbillies.” I view those handy labels as a shallow stereotypes. It’s true wild things go on in the boonies. On the other hand, I live in Washington, D.C., and every night on the local news I can see a galore of murders, mayhem, corruption, drug rings, and kidnappings. So the major crimes thrive and seethe everywhere.
B: I’m from the South, and I often find myself feeling offended at certain portrayals of Southerners, which, if done incorrectly, tend to skew to the grotesque. I imagine that a writer never wants to produce a stereotype, but at the same time, certain genres necessitate particular archetypal figures to fulfill reader expectations (not to mention basic plot functions). When crafting a crime noir piece like Lake Charles, do you feel any tension between what is stereotypical and what is archetypal?
EL: The characters in Lake Charles hail from a small mountain town in Tennessee. Though they’re a little rough around the edges and turn violent if pushed enough, I don’t choose to view them as a stereotype. The challenge for the writer, as I see it, is to make the characters familiar enough to the readers but to also keep the characters’ personalities distinct and original. Stereotypes are here to stay. Rick Bragg tells the funny anecdote how his New York City editor wrote in the comment “doublewide what?” on his manuscript. Try hard as they might, they just don’t get it. But getting back to Lake Charles, I wanted a young protagonist, and an older guy who’s a war vet to serve as his mentor because the plot needed that dynamic to be set up. I believe the war vet is probably a flatter character, but the protagonist is coming of age, so I hope he’s a more complex character.
B: I like the relationship between Mr. Kuzawa, the archetypal wise (but gruff) older man, and Brendan Fishback, the protagonist who narrates Lake Charles. Brendan is definitely in over his head, but there’s a certain relief in his having Kuzawa as a mentor. Still, you put Brendan in a lot of trouble. When you were drafting the novel, did you have a clear trajectory for Brendan’s finding a way out of the mess he’s in? Or was it part of your writing process to ensnare your protagonist and see how he might extricate himself?
EL: Lake Charles has gone through numerous revisions, and I don’t recall what my original strategy was for creating Brendan as the protagonist. I knew he was in a heap of trouble, as they like to say down South, but I didn’t think he had the right savvy to find a way out of his sticky jam. If he figured it all out on his own, he’d come off as seeming unbelievable and less credible as the narrator. I’m not sure if Kuzawa is too much of a James Bondian know-it-all who steers Brendan through the wickets. He’s a bit larger-than-life. Sometimes you meet people who seem to suck all the air out of a room with their forceful personality.
B: Switching gears for a moment, Lake Charles isn’t your only novel being published this year, right? Can you tell us a little about your other new books?
EL: You bet. Thank you for asking, too. Quiet Anchorage coming out this spring is a small town cozy mystery featuring two senior amateur sleuths who’re sisters. Their favorite niece is falsely arrested for the murder of her boyfriend, and of course her aunts flew to her defense. I wrote QA to take a break from the noir and hardboiled arena and to have a little fun. The reviews have been generally upbeat and favorable. So, I hope I can publish the second title as a new series next year. The third book, The Zinc Zoo, is the next title in my PI Frank Johnson mystery series. Frank has moved to the suburbs but still manages to get into difficult cases with prickly clients. I’m not sure when TZZ will be out. The publisher has been dealing with a serious family illness since the start of the year. The snazzy front cover art has been finished, so hopefully things will pick up again soon.
B: Three books in a year (plus several novels in the past five or six years)—-that’s fairly prolific. Are you composing these novels simultaneously?
EL: Is it prolific? I never really thought of it that way, but I can see your point, sure. I can’t work on two books at the same time. The plots and characters cross-talk in my brain, and I get things mixed up. I just work steady on one project at a time. I usually woodshed a project for several months before I go back to revise it for presentation. For instance, Lake Charles took me ten years to write from a short story into a published novel. Plus when the economy first went (and still lags) south, I didn’t publish any books for over 18 months. Stuff was just in the pipeline waiting to come out. The erratic schedule makes it more difficult to promote the project because it means I drop whatever I’m working on and shift to do the marketing bit.
B: Clearly you’re having to do some marketing now—but what future projects do you have cooking?
EL: The two large projects looming immediately ahead for me are the second title in the small town cozy mystery series and the large mob novel set in Washington, D.C. But that’s how I envision things today. It’s a fluid situation not because so much is happening as I’m hustling the new projects here and there.
(Via the nice people of Open Culture).
Bloomsday blah blah blah — (all links lead to Biblioklept posts (yeah, we’re solipsists around here))—
William Faulkner’s Joyce anxiety
Biblioklept’s lousy review (the review is lousy, not the book) of Dubliners
Joyce’s entry on the 1901 Irish Census
Biblioklept’s review (not so lousy, the review) of a superior full-cast audio recording of Ulysses
James Joyce explains why Odysseus is the most “complete man’ in literature
Leopold’s Bloom’s recipe for burnt kidney breakfast
James Joyce’s death mask—
Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial novel American Psycho turns 20 this year. The folks at Vintage were kind enough to send me a copy of the book to promote the anniversary, and despite a mounding stack of review copies, I took a few hours to re-read parts of Ellis’s third novel.
I’ve only read two Ellis books and I remember the reading of them distinctly, precisely; I remember how I picked them up and where I was and what I was doing and all that jazz. The first was Ellis’s début Less Than Zero, a slim, ugly little novel that I read in one night. I was fifteen, spending a summer with my aunt and uncle, living in my cousin’s old bedroom. Less Than Zero was part of a cache of books that included Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan biography, some Hemingway and Fitzgerald novels, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and a Kurt Vonnegut starter kit. In short, a life changing library, and most of it went home with me in my Jansport (somewhat surreptitiously, although I’m sure if I had asked I would have received). Only I didn’t take Less Than Zero, despite reading it all in one sick night, and then reading it again in pieces over the summer. The book hurt my stomach. The drugs were not the Looney Tunes business in HST’s book—they were the symptom of a blank nihilism I simply couldn’t identify with. The scene where the kids casually watch a snuff film horrified me. And the rape scene. Well. It was the first time I read something that genuinely disturbed me in a non-child, non-Grimm’s way — in a way where I felt moral outrage from an adult-psyche-type-position (whatever that means). The book genuinely concerned me; I was afraid such people existed.
I read American Psycho in 2002. I was traveling through Thailand for a month, trading books at guest houses and shops as I went, and the only book I remember being more ubiquitous than American Psycho was Alex Garland’s The Beach (which, yes, I also read there). I had seen and quite enjoyed Mary Harron’s 2000 film adaptation of American Psycho, which had the good sense to treat the whole matter as a piece of cartoonish black comedy. In Harron’s hands, the hyperbolic exploits of Patrick Bateman are considerably less ambiguous than the book’s depiction; Harron clearly marks the narrative violence as Bateman’s internal fantasies. Of course, one of literature’s greatest tools is ambiguity, and Ellis’s American Psycho revels in it. In a sense, this is the book’s defining nihilism: its total unwillingness to make a definitive judgment about its protagonist’s violence. Instead, American Psycho’s claims to satire rely on the implicit force of the reader’s sense of humanity and morality; like Less Than Zero before it, we have a flat narrative, an utter lack of self-reflection or internal psychology. Ellis gives us only concrete contours, cocaine, hydrochloric acid, chainsaws, and a laundry list of brand names. These are novels without interiors.
American Psycho, utterly concrete, deeply ironic, and occasionally funny, is a strange beach read, but a beach read nonetheless (although all that gristle and blood (and oh the rat!) won’t go down easy for many folks). When I read it in 2002 I found it neither shocking or enlightening, just precise and ugly and grotesque, a numbing progression of concrete descriptions of clothes and restaurants punctuated by ridiculous violence. Its one-note satire would find a better home in a short story. A short short story. I’ve spent the past few days reading through its sections again, trying to reassess it against the backdrop of my current literary estimations of Bret Easton Ellis, which I hate to admit are largely informed not only by his own acerbic personality, but also by (or perhaps more accurately against) his agon with David Foster Wallace.
BEE vs. DFW is not exactly news. Ellis (b. 1964) and Wallace (b. 1962) both published their first novels in the mid-eighties. Less Than Zero made 21-year-old Ellis a star, a likely “voice of his generation.” The Broom of the System didn’t exactly go gangbusters for Wallace, but its voluminous scope, Pynchonian silliness, and its willingness to pick up the postmodern games that Ellis and the other new minimalists seemed to reject announced a major new talent who was willing to both think and feel—to go beyond the surfaces. Indeed, Wallace’s entire project might be defined as setting himself apart from the cool, detached irony that characterizes Ellis’s ethos. In a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery,Wallace decries fiction that devotes
“a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s American Psycho: it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.” I think this is an apt criticism. American Psycho is torture porn encased in a thin veneer of social satire with no interior substance. Here’s Wallace at length—
I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend Psycho as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.
Four years before the interview—and two years before the publication of American Psycho—Wallace mocked Ellis’s void, vacuous characters in “Girl with Curious Hair,” a story about a yuppie on LSD at a Keith Jarrett concert. With no affective life, Sick Puppy (as his low life punk rock friends call him) feels nothing. He cannot enjoy his wealth, his position—not even his acid trip. He can’t even enjoy sex unless he can burn his partner as he’s being fellated. As Marshall Boswell points out in his study Understanding David Foster Wallace, “the story eerily forecasts . . . American Psycho . . . in a grisly and hilarious pastiche of Ellis’ preposterously benumbed prose.”
Perhaps Wallace’s greatest critique of nihilism — greatest in that it escapes the confines of Ellis and his ilk’s literary purview — is Don Gately, erstwhile hero of Infinite Jest, a recovering Demerol addict and small time thief whose painful day-to-day existence figures as the existential struggle against bleak, overwhelming nothingness. Gately is the heart and spirit of IJ, a big sad throbbing heart that, to quote Wallace out of context (from above), is the writer’s way “to depict this [dark] world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”
Ellis perhaps perceives a character like Gately and his illuminating possibilities as simply too affected. Last summer, at a reading in Hackney, England, Easton offered the following—
Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?Answer: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well I don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Midwestern faux-sentimentality, and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching . . .
Then there was this cryptic tweet a few months ago—
I’m not sure what Ellis’s tweet meant, and attendees of the Hackney reading claim that he was more considered and measured in his tone than the actual words of his response seem to entail. His end of the agon with Wallace is also rife with its own set of problems—his contemporary is dead, horribly dead, a suicide, (the kind of death that makes an essay like this one, an essay that claims to find affirmation of life in DFW and empty nihilism BEE, particularly hard to swallow, I suppose)—making it all the harder to respond. I read his “too soon” remark from the Hackney reading to be in earnest.
But Ellis’s tweets are not part of his literary corpus (even though they can be entertaining), and Wallace’s suicide is not part of his text. So, I return to those texts—
Wallace’s last effort, The Pale King, contrasts strongly with American Psycho. Wallace’s novel is fractured, heteroglossic, crammed with ideas, and at times purposefully taxing on its reader’s attention. American Psycho is concise (even if its plot is messy and episodic), imagistic, lacks even the pretense of allowing a controlling voice other than Bateman’s into the narrative, and, in its fetishistic, sexualized violence, is a work designed to lock its reader’s attention in a sensationalized vice grip. It’s id-bait par excellence, seductive and stylish. Its greatest achievement may be to fool some readers into believing that its violence is simply part and parcel of its intention of being a scathing satire. The book then relies heavily — too heavily — on an exterior morality system to weigh its flat, static characters, characters who face incredible trauma and yet never process it (or even attempt to process it). And I am not just speaking of Bateman. Consider the dry cleaner who repeatedly removes bloodstains, or the maid who mops up brain bits without a single question. Then there are the faceless, indistinguishable alpha males who populate Bateman’s yuppie corporate world, and their requisite fiancées and mistresses, weak watery women the narrative repeatedly condemns. These characters lack meaning or depth; they are essentially probable replicants of Bateman, the implication being that psychopathic tendencies lurk everywhere, that the modern condition preempts empathy or human understanding or plain old common decency. The savvy reader is supposed to admire Ellis’s satire of capitalist vacuity, and admittedly, there are some very funny riffs (Bateman’s bits on popular music like Huey Lewis and the News and Whitney Houston, replicated in the film version, still hold up well). But I think Wallace is correct when he asserts that the real violence is ultimately inflicted on the reader. Ellis’s violence is not the same as Flannery O’Connor’s, who used the shock of murder in her stories to explore the possibility of awe, transcendence, and revelation in a desacralized world. Wallace’s The Pale King tries to sanctify the costs of life (death and taxes and the deep existential crisis these costs entail) in a world that has largely abandoned the sacred, in a society where many people are incapable or unwilling to think empathetically about their relation to (via taxes and social institutions) other humans whom they do not personally know. Ellis’s American Psycho is a cartoonish, lopsided distortion of a descralized world. Its affective power is purely externalized, generated from the reader’s moral core. It replaces feeling with violence; it replaces ideas with the illusion of ideas. Its closest claim to art is its satirical power, which is ultimately puddle-shallow (did we really need Ellis to tell us that yuppies are uncaring, shallow and materialistic?) Writers need not be morally instructive, but good books are guided by a vision. Ellis’s vision is pure, bleak nihilism, abyssal and unreflecting, asking little from its reader other than to play voyeur to murder and giving back nothing in return.
In a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, William Vollmann explains why he doesn’t worry about book sales—
LM: You Bright and Risen Angels is a long, difficult, obsessive work. Were you aware when you were writing it that it was going to be difficult for this book to attract a large audience? In other words, is audience much of a consideration for you when you’re starting out with something, or do you just write the book you feel compelled to write?
WV: I just make the best book that I can and try to not worry about audience or if it will sell. The odds are against you, so why abuse your talent for the sake of a chimera? The only real pleasure for me in writing comes from pleasing myself. What readers think is interesting and illuminating (and it may even be correct), but that is nothing compared to the excitement of seeing a world develop. Besides, even though I like most individuals I meet, I have a pretty low opinion of people in general. So if I were to write for people in general, I would have to drastically lower my estimation of the intelligence of my reader. Rather than doing that, I write the way it seems the book has to appear. I don’t think that’s egotistic. There are often things I would like to include in my books—things about me personally and other materials—that I feel I have to leave out because they aren’t relevant to the book. I’m fairly ruthless along those lines, because I try to let nothing come in the way of what’s best for the book. If that means that the book won’t sell or that a publisher won’t buy it, then that’s my problem. I’ll suffer for that, but I won’t let the book suffer for it.
The AV Club interviews Biblioklept fave Joe Sacco, whose books Palestine and Safe Area Goražde should be required reading for any thinking person. Sacco explores some of the messiest, ugliest terrains in the world, plumbing disaster and war with heart, wit, and insight (read our post on Sacco for more, including links to shorter works). From the interview—
AVC: You got out of journalism school in 1981, so in addition to the shift in public perception about comics as an adult medium, your career has also spanned a profound shift in the journalism industry. Do you think in some ways you’ve been the beneficiary of that?
JS: As many problems as I have with the mainstream media and the way it goes about its business, I’d say at least journalists were, for the most part, trained in discrimination. I have my problems, mostly with editorial decisions in bigger cities, in editorial offices as opposed to with columnists or reporters. I realize that, as time’s gone by with the new media—I’m talking about the electronic media—you could see a shift to emphasis on visuals and on shorter attention spans. I’m sorry, in a way, if my work is a beneficiary of that. I would hope my work has other attributes that have led to a success. But I can’t know for sure, you know? I think the comics market is the only growing part of the publishing industry, of the book-publishing trade. It’s increasing its share as time goes by. I think it also has to do with the sheer weight of good work that’s out there now—obviously not just my work. There are many other great cartoonists working in fiction and other fields that are just really doing work that has to be looked at, that you cannot ignore.
“Diplomacy” by Lafcadio Hearn—
IT HAD BEEN ORDERED that the execution should take place in the garden of the yashiki. So the man was taken there, and made to kneel down in a wide sanded space crossed by a line of tobi-ishi, or stepping stones, such as you may still see in Japanese landscape-gardens. His arms were bound behind him. Retainers brought water in buckets, and rice-bags filled with pebbles; and they packed the rice-bags round the kneeling man–so wedging him in that he could not move. The master came, and observed the arrangements. He found them satisfactory, and made no remarks.
Suddenly the condemned man cried out to him:
“Honored sir, the fault for which I have been doomed I did not wittingly commit. It was only my very great stupidity which caused the fault. Having been born stupid, by reason of my karma, I could not always help making mistakes. But to kill a man for being stupid is wrong–and that wrong will be repaid. So surely as you kill me, so surely shall I be avenged;–out of the resentment that you provoke will come the vengeance; and evil will be rendered for evil.”
If any person be killed while feeling strong resentment, the ghost of that person will be able to take vengeance upon the killer. This the samurai knew. He replied very gently–almost caressingly:
“We shall allow you to frighten us as much as you please–after you are dead. But it is difficult to believe that you mean what you say. Will you try to give us some sign of your great resentment–after your head has been cut off?”
“Assuredly I will,” answered the man.
“Very well,” said the samurai, drawing his long sword;–“I am now going to cut off your head. Directly in front of you there is a stepping-stone. After your head has been cut off, try to bite the stepping-stone. If your angry ghost can help you to do that, some of us may be frightened. . . . Will you try to bite the stone?”
“I will bite it!” cried the man, in great anger–“I will bite it!–I will bite–”
There was a flash, a swish, a crunching thud: the bound body bowed over the rice sacks–two long blood-jets pumping from the shorn neck;–and the head rolled upon the sand. Heavily toward the stepping-stone it rolled: then, suddenly bounding, it caught the upper edge of the stone between its teeth, clung desperately for a moment, and dropped inert.
None spoke; but the retainers stared in horror at their master. He seemed to be quite unconcerned. He merely held out his sword to the nearest attendant, who, with a wooden dipper, poured water over the blade from haft to point, and then carefully wiped the steel several times with sheets of soft paper. .. . And thus ended the ceremonial part of the incident.
For months thereafter, the retainers and the domestics lived in ceaseless fear of ghostly visitation. None of them doubted that the promised vengeance would come; and their constant terror caused them to hear and to see much that did not exist. They became afraid of the sound of the wind in the bamboos–afraid even of the stirring of shadows in the garden. At last, after taking counsel together, they decided to petition their master to have a Ségaki-service performed on behalf of the vengeful spirit.
“Quite unnecessary,” the samurai said, when his chief retainer had uttered the general wish. . . . “I understand that the desire of a dying man for revenge may be a cause for fear. But in this case there is nothing to fear.”
The retainer looked at his master beseechingly, but hesitated to ask the reason of this alarming confidence.
“Oh, the reason is simple enough,” declared the samurai, divining the unspoken doubt. “Only the very last intention of that fellow could have been dangerous; and when I challenged him to give me the sign, I diverted his mind from the desire of revenge. He died with the set purpose of biting the stepping-stone; and that purpose he was able to accomplish, but nothing else. All the rest he must have forgotten. . . So you need not feel any further anxiety about the matter.”
And indeed the dead man gave no more trouble. Nothing at all happened.
A passage from Herman Melville’s appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Hawthorne and His Mosses”—
Now it is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me. It may be, nevertheless, that it is too largely developed in him. Perhaps he does not give us a ray of his light for every shade of his dark. But however this may be, this blackness it is that furnishes the infinite obscure of his background,–that background, against which Shakespeare plays his grandest conceits, the things that have made for Shakespeare his loftiest, but most circumscribed renown, as the profoundest of thinkers. For by philosophers Shakespeare is not adored as the great man of tragedy and comedy.–“Off with his head! so much for Buckingham!” this sort of rant, interlined by another hand, brings down the house,–those mistaken souls, who dream of Shakespeare as a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and Macbeth daggers. But it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality:–these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them. Tormented into desperation, Lear the frantic King tears off the mask, and speaks the sane madness of vital truth. But, as I before said, it is the least part of genius that attracts admiration. And so, much of the blind, unbridled admiration that has been heaped upon Shakespeare, has been lavished upon the least part of him. And few of his endless commentators and critics seem to have remembered, or even perceived, that the immediate products of a great mind are not so great, as that undeveloped, (and sometimes undevelopable) yet dimly-discernible greatness, to which these immediate products are but the infallible indices. In Shakespeare’s tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote. And if I magnify Shakespeare, it is not so much for what he did do, as for what he did not do, or refrained from doing. For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,–even though it be covertly, and by
Biblioklept 