Category: Literature

A Gordon Lish Sentence That Cracked Me Up

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Today, I listened to Iambik’s audiobook version of Collected Fictions, a selection of stories written and read by the inimitable Gordon Lish. Lish reads a few choice stories from four of his volumes in a wry, gruff tone; he’s got a wonderful rhythmic style, and he pauses to reflect on some of the selections before and after reading them. I’ll give the volume a proper review down the line, but I wanted to share a passage–a long sentence, really—that made me laugh out loud from the story “Mr. Goldbaum,” from the 1988 collection Mourner at the Door. I actually own Mourner at the Door, and had read “Mr. Goldbaum” sometime earlier this year or last year, but I don’t remember it being nearly as funny or touching. Must be Lish’s delivery. Anyway, the Lishness, which can be appreciated entirely out of context–

What if your father was the kind of father who was dying and he called you to him and you were his son and he said for you to come lie down on the bed with him so that he could hold you and so that you could hold him so that you both could be like that hugging with each other like that to say goodbye before you had to actually go leave each other and did it, you did it, you god down on the bed with your father and you got up close to your father and you got your arms around your father and your father was hugging you and you were hugging your father and there was one of you who could not stop it, who could not help it, but who just got a hard-on?

Or both did?

Picture that.

Not that I or my father ever hugged like that.

The AV Club Interviews Lynda Barry

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The AV Club’s Tasha Robinson interviews comix legend Lynda Barry. In the (rather lengthy) interview, Barry discusses teaching her craft–

It’s a really hard thing to teach students. The two things I always try to teach them is, one, you have to stay in motion. It doesn’t mean that you have to just write blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Write the alphabet. You have to stay in motion. And the other thing is, when you get stuck, don’t read over what you just wrote. Especially if you have a computer. Maybe by hand is not so bad, but with a computer, what happens is… My experience has always been that there is a point when the story just stops. Always. You know, it’s just like when you’re dancing. There’s a time when you’re fake-dancing, because the groove has stopped. Then you’re back in the groove. So if people understood that that’s a natural part of making something, and they knew what to do during that time… But what people will do if they’re writing on a computer is, when that time comes and it’s quiet for a minute, they panic and go back and start fixing stuff above it that was not even broken. You can’t start to fix something until you know what it’s for, you know? So I always try to get my students to just sustain the state of mind for a certain amount of time. Even though I use 24 panels for my students, they’ll have seven minutes to just sustain this open state of mind while they’re writing, keep their hand in motion. But it’s really tough to get them to believe me, to just to even give it a try. And then once they do, it’s really fun.

A Blood Meridian Christmas

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Cormac McCarthy’s seminal anti-Western Blood Meridian isn’t exactly known for visions of peace on earth and good will to man. Still, there’s a strange scene in the book’s final third that subtly recalls (and somehow inverts) the Christmas story. The scene takes place at the end of Chapter 15. The Kid, erstwhile protagonist of Blood Meridian, has just reunited with the rampaging Glanton gang after getting lost in the desert and, in a vision-quest of sorts, has witnessed “a lone tree burning on the desert” (a scene I argued earlier this year was the novel’s moral core).

Glanton’s marauders, tired and hungry, find temporary refuge from the winter cold in the town of Santa Cruz where they are fed by Mexicans and then permitted to stay the night in a barn. McCarthy offers a date at the beginning of the chapter — December 5th — and it’s reasonable to assume, based on the narrative action, that the night the gang spends in the manger is probably Christmas Eve. Here is the scene, which picks up as the gang — “they” — are led into the manger by a boy–

The shed held a mare with a suckling colt and the boy would would have put her out but they called to him to leave her. They carried straw from a stall and pitched it down and he held the lamp for them while they spread their bedding. The barn smelled of clay and straw and manure and in the soiled yellow light of the lamp their breath rolled smoking through the cold. When they had arranged their blankets the boy lowered the lamp and stepped into the yard and pulled the door shut behind, leaving them in profound and absolute darkness.

No one moved. In that cold stable the shutting of the door may have evoked in some hearts other hostels and not of their choosing. The mare sniffed uneasily and the young colt stepped about. Then one by one they began to divest themselves of their outer clothes, the hide slickers and raw wool serapes and vests, and one by one they propagated about themselves a great crackling of sparks and each man was seen to wear a shroud of palest fire. Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were luminous and each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so. The mare at the far end of the stable snorted and shied at this luminosity in beings so endarkened and the little horse turned and hid his face in the web of his dam’s flank.

The “shroud of palest fire” made of sparks is a strange image that seems almost supernatural upon first reading. The phenomena that McCarthy is describing is simply visible static electricity, which is not uncommon in a cold, dry atmosphere–particularly if one is removing wool clothing. Still, the imagery invests the men with a kind of profound, bizarre significance that is not easily explainable. It is almost as if these savage men, naked in the dark, are forced to wear something of their soul on the outside. Tellingly, this spectacle upsets both the mare and her colt, substitutions for Mary and Christ child, which makes sense. After all, these brutes are not wise men.

Santa Claus Rape in Ellison’s Invisible Man

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I’m finishing up Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and I came to this shocking, weird, gross, Christmasy reference near the end of the book. The context is that, in 1950s America, Sibyl, a white woman, wants the narrator, a black man, to fulfill her rape fantasy. Page 522 of my edition–

(An Incomplete List of) Writers Who Died in 2010

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J. D. Salinger, 91, American author

Howard Zinn, 87, American historian

Barry Hannah, 67, American novelist and short story writer

David Markson, 82, American writer

Harvey Pekar, 70, American comic book writer (American Splendor)

Tuli Kupferberg, 86, American poet, cartoonist and musician (The Fugs)

David Mills, 48, American author, journalist and television writer (NYPD Blue, The Corner, Kingpin)

Dick Giordano, 77, American comic book artist and editor (Batman, Green Lantern)

José Saramago, 87, Portuguese novelist, playwright and journalist, Nobel Prize winner for literature

Lucille Clifton, 73, American poet (Blessing the Boats), Poet Laureate of Maryland

Robert Dana, 80, American poet, Iowa poet laureate

Rajendra Keshavlal Shah, 96, Indian poet

Tibet, 78, French comics artist

Mary Daly, 81, American radical feminist philosopher

Knox Burger, 87, American editor, writer, and literary agent

George Leonard, 86, American writer, editor and educator, pioneer of the Human Potential Movement

Robert B. Parker, 77, American detective writer

Laura Chapman Hruska, 74, American writer, co-founder and editor in chief of Soho Press

Stephen Morse, 65, American poet

P. K. Page, 93, Canadian poet

Bingo Gazingo, 85, American performance poet

Kage Baker, 57, American science fiction and fantasy author

Ralph McInerny, 80, American philosopher (University of Notre Dame) and mystery author

Erich Segal, 72, American professor, author (Love Story), and screenwriter (Yellow Submarine)

Carlos Montemayor, 62, Mexican writer

Violet Barclay, 87, American comic book artist

David Severn, 91, British author

Colin Ward, 85, British anarchist writer

William Tenn, 89, American science fiction writer

Liz Carpenter, 89, American feminist author, press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson (1963–1969)

John Eric Holmes, 80, American science fiction and fantasy author

Ai Ogawa, 62, American poet, breast cancer

Patricia Wrightson, 88, Australian children’s writer

Matilde Elena López, 91, Salvadoran poet, essayist and playwright

Elena Schwarz, 61, Russian poet

Ella Mae Johnson, 106, American social worker and author

Miguel Delibes, 89, Spanish author, journalist and scholar

Sid Fleischman, 90, American children’s writer

Bill DuBay, 62, American comic book editor, writer, and artist

Henry Scarpelli, 79, American comic book artist (Archie)

Alan Sillitoe, 82, British writer (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)

Jan Balabán, 49, Czech writer, recipient of the Magnesia Litera award

William Neill, 88, British poet

Carolyn Rodgers, 69, American poet

Peter Orlovsky, 76, American poet

Leslie Scalapino, 65, American poet, publisher and playwright

Peter Seaton, 67, American poet

Judson Crews, 92, American poet

Hoàng Cầm, 88, Vietnamese poet and playwright

Donald Windham, 89, American novelist

Bree O’Mara, 42, South African novelist

Robert Tralins, 84, American author

Ruth Chew, 90, American children’s author

Randolph Stow, 74, Australian writer

Arthur Herzog, 83, American writer

Peter O’Donnell, 90, British writer

T. M. Aluko, 91, Nigerian writer

Kovilan, 86, Indian novelist

F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, 62, Welsh science fiction author

Allen Hoey, 57, American poet

José Albi, 88, Spanish poet

Andrei Voznesensky, 77, Russian poet and writer

Vladimír Bystrov, 74, Czech writer and translator

Suso Cecchi d’Amico, 96, Italian screenwriter (Bicycle Thieves)

Tom Mankiewicz, 68, American screenwriter (James Bond, Superman)

Iris Gower, 75, Welsh novelist

Jon Cleary, 92, Australian novelist (The Sundowners, High Road to China)

James P. Hogan, 69, British science fiction author

Michèle Causse, 74, French lesbian theorist, author and translator

Vance Bourjaily, 87, American novelist

Patrick Cauvin, 77, French novelist

Sir Frank Kermode, 90, British literary critic and writer

Ludvík Kundera, 90, Czech writer and translator

George Hitchcock, 96, American poet and publisher

Jennifer Rardin, 45, American author

Edwin Charles Tubb, 90, British science fiction author

Micky Burn, 97, British writer and poet

Belva Plain, 95, American novelist (Evergreen)

Bärbel Mohr, 46, German author

George Cain, 66, American author

Claire Rayner, 79, British author

Alí Chumacero, 92, Mexican writer and poet

Monica Johnson, 54, American novelist and screenwriter (Lost in America, Modern Romance)

Philip Carlo, 61, American crime author

Adrian Păunescu, 67, Romanian author, poet and politician

Dmitry Gorchev, 47, Russian writer

Richard Stanley “Dick” Francis, 79, a British jockey who later wrote crime novels about horse racing

Huxley vs. Orwell: The Webcomic

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Stuart McMillen’s webcomic does a marvelous job of adapting (and updating!) Neil Postman’s famous book-length essay, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argues that Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World was ultimately more accurate than the one proposed by George Orwell in 1984. (Via).

“Idea for a Short Documentary Film” — Lydia Davis

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“Idea for a Short Documentary Film,” a very short story by Lydia Davis, from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis –

Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.

“Escape from Spiderhead” — George Saunders

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The New Yorker has published a new George Saunders short story,“Escape from Spiderhead.” Read it here. A sample–

“Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.

“What’s in it?” I said.

“Hilarious,” he said.

“Acknowledge,” I said.

Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak™ whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.

I said out loud, as I was supposed to, what I was feeling.

“Garden looks nice,” I said. “Super-clear.”

Abnesti said, “Jeff, how about we pep up those language centers?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Drip on?” he said.

“Acknowledge,” I said.

He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. The garden still looked nice. It was like the bushes were so tight-seeming and the sun made everything stand out? It was like any moment you expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea. It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams forever intrinsic to human consciousness. It was as if I could suddenly discern, in this contemporary vignette, the ancient corollary through which Plato and some of his contemporaries might have strolled; to wit, I was sensing the eternal in the ephemeral.

I sat, pleasantly engaged in these thoughts, until the Verbaluce™ began to wane. At which point the garden just looked nice again. It was something about the bushes and whatnot? It made you just want to lay out there and catch rays and think your happy thoughts. If you get what I mean.

Then whatever else was in the drip wore off, and I didn’t feel much about the garden one way or the other. My mouth was dry, though, and my gut had that post-Verbaluce™ feel to it.

“What’s going to be cool about that one?” Abnesti said. “Is, say a guy has to stay up late guarding a perimeter. Or is at school waiting for his kid and gets bored. But there’s some nature nearby? Or say a park ranger has to work a double shift?”

“That will be cool,” I said.

“That’s ED763,” he said. “We’re thinking of calling it NatuGlide. Or maybe ErthAdmire.”

“Those are both good,” I said.

“Thanks for your help, Jeff,” he said.

Which was what he always said.

“Only a million years to go,” I said.

Which was what I always said.

Then he said, “Exit the Interior Garden now, Jeff, head over to Small Workroom 2.”

How Roberto Bolaño Handled Criticism

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From Roberto Bolaño’s July, 2003 interview with Mexican Playboy, collected in The Last Interview and Other Conversations—

Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry, I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the edge of the sea, which by the way is less than 30 meters from my house, and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: Why me? Why? I’ve done you no harm.

 

Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will — David Foster Wallace

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Sometime last year, during a rare visit to a big chain bookstore, I was disgusted to see what had happened to David Foster Wallace’s amazing Kenyon College commencement speech, “This Is Water.” Wallace’s speech, about 3,815 words, give or take (maybe twelve standard typed pages), was being sold as a 144 page hardback volume with only a sentence or two printed per page. The book was (and is) a nakedly commercial attempt to turn a text that is widely available on the web into the sort of thing that well-meaning uncles give to their nephews or nieces as graduation gifts. Of course, hardcore Wallace fans might want such a book — and I’d never begrudge them that — but it’s hard to imagine that Wallace would have been comfortable with how his book was marketed.

Which brings us to Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, new from Columbia University Press this week. The book publishes the 1985 honors thesis that Wallace submitted to the Amherst College’s Department of Philosophy, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality.” The essay’s title alone signals a prohibitive level of academic specialization. In his introductory essay to the volume, “A Head That Throbbed Heartlike,” New York Times Magazine editor James Ryerson points out, “Its obscurity is easy to appreciate. A highly specialized, seventy-six page work of logic, semantics, and metaphysics, it is not for the philosophically faint of heart.” Ryerson then warns his reader to “Brace yourself for a sample sentence,” before offering a sample from Wallace’s essay that I do not have the patience or fortitude to type out (it would take me too long to locate all the diacritical marks and special logic symbols). Ryerson concludes the paragraph with this wry remark: “There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a cruise ship.”

Fortunately, the editors of Fate, Time, and Language make every effort to contextualize Wallace’s essay in a way that explains its aims, strengths, and even shortcomings. There’s Ryerson’s lengthy introduction, which provides an overview to Wallace’s life in philosophy. Then there’s Taylor’s “Fatalism” of course, a short, provocative argument combining six presuppositions that led Taylor to declare that humans have no control — none, whatsoever — over any future event. The volume collects four other essays by Taylor on fatalism, as well as eight other essays responding to his arguments, before delivering Wallace’s essay (the longest in the collection). Here’s Wallace—

So Taylor’s central claim, the Taylor problem, is that just a few basic logical and semantic presuppositions, regarded as uncontroversially true by most philosophers, lead directly to the metaphysical conclusion that human beings, agents, have no control over what is going to happen.

I ain’t even gonna front–pretty much everything that Wallace says after this was lost on me; if you want to read and comprehend the details of his argument you will need to have a grasp on the basics of Montague grammar and tensed modal logic. If you lack these skills, there will be skimming. Lots and lots of skimming. So, in short, I have no ideawhether Wallace’s logic is sound, although I find his conclusion (minus all the modal evidence) quite compelling—

This essay’s semantic analysis has shown that Taylor’s proof doesn’t “force” fatalism on us at all. We should now recall that Taylor was offering a very curious sort of argument: a semantic argument for ametaphysical conclusion. In light of what we’ve seen about the semantics of physical modality, I hold that Taylor’s semantic argument does not in fact yield his metaphysical conclusion.

After Wallace’s honors thesis, there’s a wonderful little memoir essay by his adviser on the project, Jay L. Garfield, who offers up this nugget—

I knew at the time, as I mention above, that David was also writing a novel as a thesis in English. But I never took that seriously. I though of David as a very talented young philosopher with a writing hobby, and did not realize that he was instead one of the most talented fiction writers of his generation who had a philosophy hobby.

These little pockets of insight appeal to me most in Fate, Time, and Language, and as such, Ryerson’s essay “A Head That Throbbed Heartlike” is the highpoint of the book. It weaves together Wallace’s personal life, writing career, and academic pursuits into a moving elegy of sorts, although one more rooted in ideas than feelings. He also spells out the book’s mission quite clearly—

For all its seeming inscrutability, though, the thesis is lucidly argued and–with some patience and industry on the part of the lay reader–ultimately accessible, which is welcome news for those looking to deepen their understanding of Wallace. The paper offers a point of entry into an overlooked aspect of his intellectual life: a serious early engagement with philosophy that would play a lasting role in his work and thought, including his ideas about the purpose and possibilities of fiction.

Many of us might shudder at the idea of our college essays being published posthumously. Of course, most of us aren’t Wallace, but there are undoubtedly critics out there who will cry foul at this publication. Fortunately, the team behind Fate, Time, and Language has produced a book of remarkable integrity, one that understands why it exists, readily acknowledges its obscurity without trying to gloss over that obscurity, and makes every effort to communicate with and engage its readers without sacrificing erudition. To return to my opening anecdote, this is not the naked commercialism that motivated a gimmicky edition This Is Water; rather, this is a book delivered by people who genuinely care about Wallace and his ideas. Make no mistake–it’s very dry and very specialized, but fanatics will no doubt want it.

The Savage Detectives — Roberto Bolaño

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Roberto Bolaño’s “other” masterwork The Savage Detectives has been previously reviewed on this website, but my view is that the previous writeup was unfair and premature.  Perhaps those of us who love this book are not “serious” readers.

The plot was accurately diagrammed in the earlier post. The Savage Detectives is made up of three sections. The first section consists of the diary of seventeen year-old Visceral Realist poet Juan Garcia Madero, his record of his literary ambition and dawning appreciation of beauty and words. The second, lengthy section is a series of interviews, seemingly conducted by a single, unknown interviewer in an attempt to uncover the history of the Visceral Realist movement, a group of iconoclastic poets that lived in Mexico City in the early part of the 1970s. The third section revisits Garcia Madero’s diary as he and Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, the nominal leaders of the Visceral Realists, scour the unforgiving Sonora desert in search of their own lost heroes.

Bolaño revisits familiar themes in this novel by asking what drives people to create, and what happens to those people when the things they create are pushed, like themselves, to the margins of society.  Garcia Madero’s drive to write forces him to confront his everyday existence as he attempts to shed his innocence.  He loses friends, quits school, moves in with a waitress, falls in love, has his heart broken.  He writes when he eats, he writes when he should be doing something else, he writes about writing.  He assumes that he and his comrades are on the verge of fame and that others are aware that everything the Visceral Realists do is bold and profound.  Why then, Bolaño asks, is Garcia Madero satisfied with reading his poems to others when he dreams of placing his work in well-regarded anthologies?  What happens when we realize that immortality is ultimately an illusion?  Where does the spirit go when the ghost leaves only a sheet behind?

The answers to the questions posed in the first book are addressed in the second, but there is no sense that the unknown interviewer is close to mythologizing the Visceral Realists in the same manner as the scholars who made a hero of Hans Reiter in the first book of 2666.  At least at the time the interviews were conducted, the Visceral Realists’ body of work is unknown to most, but to those with knowledge of their oeuvre, the Visceral Realists are remembered as hacks or kids from the wrong side of the tracks who preferred the commission of petty misdemeanors to dedication to their craft.  The reality, as usual, is located somewhere in the middle. The Visceral Realists are shown to be like any other group of talented, excitable and intelligent young people because they’re bound to be disappointed.  Their failure of their movement can be blamed on their own choices as well as on barriers erected by those ensconced in the Mexican literary establishment whose notions of where ideas ought to come from are not easily refuted.  Especially by those demanding entry to their small but exclusive club.

Mr. Biblioklept’s first review was essentially right when he stated that The Savage Detectives “is an epic about the banal, ordinary things that fill our lives: jobs and eating and getting to places and having one’s friendships sour and being disappointed and so on.”  Yes, sadness pervades the book.  The Visceral Realists put down their pens, or they move to America, or they run and hide from the things that they cannot control at home.  The Visceral Realists succumb to disease, lose their minds, attempt to cope, and they die.  An early friend of Arturo Belano’s recounts–

I imagined him lost in a white space, a virgin space that kept getting dirtier and more soiled despite his best efforts, and even the face I remembered grew distorted, as if while I was talking to his sister his features melded into what she was describing, ridiculous feats of strength, terrifying, pointless rites of passage into adulthood so distant from what I thought would become of him.

Although the young poets suffer defeat, they enjoy small but significant triumphs, the most important of which is the existence of the book being argued about in this space.  For Bolaño, whose business is the veneration of creators and their creation, the perseverance of the questions raised by the mere existence of the Visceral Realists and their permanent embodiment in a physical object capable of transmission in perpetuity is the ultimate victory. If the author is right that “the search for a place to live and a place to work [is] the common fate of all humanity,” then the young poets transitioning to adulthood don’t fare so poorly.  Most of them, despite their backgrounds, become citizens with some stake in the places they live.  They find work, they have children, they find adventure.  Some, like Arturo Belano, continue to write at an immense personal cost.  A man without a country, he’s the shadow who forms the substance of the book and allows his alter ego to demonstrate his remarkable narrative powers.

But what makes The Savage Detectives a complete work is that, like the characters of Borges and Cortazar, who so many in this novel profess to admire, the poets realize, sometimes too late, that brief and startling connections between people are always possible and love may be found anywhere.  La Maga and Oliviera meet on strange bridges in Paris, condemned men revisit their lives in the moment between gunshot and blackness, and poor, unlettered poets will continue to read, and despite derision and hardship, will continue to express their own vision of hope and possibility.

Roberto Bolaño Explains the Good Thing About Stealing Books

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From Roberto Bolaño’s July, 2003 interview with Mexican Playboy, collected in The Last Interview and Other Conversations—

The good thing about stealing books–unlike safes–is that one can carefully examine their contents before perpetrating the crime.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, Origin of a Penis Euphemism

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In his forthcoming cultural history of euphemisms, Euphemania, Ralph Keyes offers the following (seemingly apocryphal) origin of the euphemism “Johnson” (for “penis,” of course) —

Johnson is the last name most often used for the male sex organ. According to one theory, this slangy euphemism originated with the name of a large railroad brake lever. Lexicographer Eric Partridge thought it was more likely an abbreviated version of Dr. Johnson, a onetime synonym for “penis” that Partridge said might be based on the assumption that ‘there was no one Dr. [Samuel] Johnson was not prepared to stand up to.’ Working under the verbal restraints of his times, Partridge said this synonym was for the ‘membrum virile.’

Why Cormac McCarthy Doesn’t Write Short Stories

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I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

(Via).

“Honoring the Subjunctive” — Lydia Davis

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“Honoring the Subjunctive,” a very short story by Lydia Davis, from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis —

It invariably precedes, even if it do not altogether supersede, the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just.

Truman Capote’s Caviar-Smothered Baked Potatoes with 80-Proof Russian Vodka (and Other Literary Recipes)

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Cool post over at Flavorwire on authors’ favorite foods — we like Truman Capote’s baked potato lunch the best:

Though Truman Capote’s writing was mostly occupied with social dealings, he managed to find time to write a forward to Myrna Davis’ The Potato Book, a cookbook penned to raise funds for a Long Island day school. In his brief contribution, Capote offers a recipe for what he describes as “my one and only most delicious ever potato lunch.” In a tribute to the then existing potato fields of Long Island, the recipe called for a baked potato smothered in sour cream and caviar, then paired with a chilled bottle of 80-proof Russian vodka.

Read our list of literary recipes here.

“Without Any Jiggery-Pokery” — David Mitchell on Writing His Novel Black Swan Green

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David Mitchell talks about writing his novel Black Swan Green in his 2010 Paris Review interview—

MITCHELL

I’d actually started Black Swan Green years earlier. In 2003, while I was finishing Cloud Atlas, Granta asked for an unpublished story, and all I had were a few sketches about the world I grew up in. I didn’t want to be overly distracted from the end of Cloud Atlas, so I decided to knock one of the sketches into a publishable story. In doing so, I began my next novel.

INTERVIEWER

Did you, like Jason, write poetry under a pseudonym for the parish newsletter?

MITCHELL

I did.

INTERVIEWER

Was your pseudonym the same as Jason’s: Eliot Bolivar?

MITCHELL

James Bolivar—after a character created by an American science-fiction writer, Harry Harrison. I’ve never told anyone that before. You can see why.

INTERVIEWER

And, like Jason, did you go see a speech therapist?

MITCHELL

Just the same, aged about thirteen. Like Jason, I would go, and my stammer would vanish in the presence of the therapist, but come the next day, I’d be stammering again. One very pleasing result of Black Swan Green is that the book now appears on course syllabi for speech therapists in the UK. I hope that the book is useful for anyone wanting to understand an insider’s account of disfluency. For most of my life, the subject was a source of paralyzing shame, scrupulously avoided by family and friends. They were being kind, but to do something about a problem it must be named, discussed, and thought about. After writing the second chapter of Black Swan Green I realized, This is true, real, and liberating. I felt a little like how I imagine a gay man feels when he comes out. Thank God—well, thank me actually—that I don’t have to pretend anymore. Now I’m more able to feel that if people have a problem with my stammer, that problem is theirs and not mine. Almost a militancy. If Jason comes back in a future book, he’ll be an adult speech therapist.

INTERVIEWER

When you were creating Jason Taylor, did you ask yourself, What was David Mitchell like at that age?

MITCHELL

It was largely that, yes. Arguably, the act of memory is an act of fiction—and much in the act of fiction draws on acts of memory. Despite the fact that Jason’s and my pubescent voices are close, his wasn’t the easiest to crack because it had to be both plausible and interesting for adult readers.

INTERVIEWER

It was perverse of you to write a first novel after having written three others.

MITCHELL

When I started out on this head-banging vocation, my own background simply didn’t attract me enough to write about it. An island boy looking for his father in Tokyo; sarin-gas attackers; decayed future civilizations in the middle of the Pacific—these were what attracted me. It took me three books to realize that any subject under the sun is interesting, so long as the writing is good. Chekhov makes muddy, disappointed tedium utterly beguiling.

INTERVIEWER

Black Swan Green is very carefully structured.

MITCHELL

Get the structure wrong and you blow up shortly after takeoff. Get it right and you save yourself an aborted manuscript and months and months of wasted writing. Make your structure original and you may end up with a novel that looks unlike any other. So yes, Black Swan Green is carefully structured—like all halfway decent books—but simply structured too, with one story per month for thirteen months. After Cloud Atlas I wanted a holiday from complexity. I was reading Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Alice Munro—all three great No Tricks merchants. After doing a half Chinese-box, half Russian-doll sort of a novel, I wanted to see if I could write a compelling book about an outwardly unremarkable boy stuck in an outwardly unremarkable time and place without any jiggery-pokery, without fireworks—just old-school.