Interviews:
Ludlow Press
Interviews:
A TALK ABOUT WILL@epicqwest.com between Charles D'Ambrosio, author of The Point, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Tom Grimes, author of WILL@epicqwest.com. (D'Ambrosio and Grimes attended the Iowa Writers Workshop together, where they first met and became friends. They have shared the development of their work, and their thoughts about the writing life, ever since.)
D'Ambrosio: One of the great pleasures in life is to laugh out loud in private, when no one's around. Laughing is typically something we do in a social setting, I think — it's certainly more shareable than crying, which is either done in private or creates an isolation that feels like privacy. This novel is hilarious, and yet the act of writing or reading a novel is a private pleasure, something we do alone. Does the humor in this novel — which is fairly dark-have a social ambition?
Grimes: I don't know. Group crying is kind of fashionable. You know, TV talk shows and the like. But, to answer your question about the "social ambition" of the novel's humor, I'd have to say that really good comic novels are hard to find, and even harder to write. They're hard to write because for a comic novel to be really good, it can't be only about what the writer thinks is funny; it can't be personal or self-concerned. It has to open up into the social, the cultural, and ultimately the metaphysical. Comedy is generally about powerlessness, in one form or another. This is why it's classically been the form that has shadowed, or complemented, tragedy. Both visions, the comic and the tragic, lead us — if they're great incarnations of the forms — to a confrontation with our ultimate powerlessness before the universe, before simply being human. So, if WILL's humor has a "social ambition," it takes the shape of setting up a confrontation with all that's become completely beyond our control. But the comic response is, unlike the tragic, resilient. The hero just bounces back. He's like human silly putty. Tragedy takes one human life and ends it on a note of desolation to depict the human condition. Comedy takes one human life and regenerates it through laughter to depict the eternal rebirth of the human condition. You know, like the Woody Allen joke: life's horrible and miserable, and it's all over too quickly.
D'Ambrosio: I was thinking about the isolation of the novelist writing, the reader reading, and the ultimate outcome of the book, which produces laughter, generally a shared, social emotion. At times it seems like the book is about the predicament of the novelist in American culture. It seems to speak to your hope not only for this novel but all writing. What's so funny about that? Usually the discussion is dour and grim, but in WILL it's ridiculous; it's almost celebrating an undertaking that is comically doomed.
Grimes: Well, as the opening line says, "Granted, I've been wildly medicated……" So, there was my experience with Prozac insinuating itself into my creative imagination. You and I had talked about this. How anti-depressants can tend to flatten one's ability to think in and create metaphors. Then I began thinking of a medicated culture in artistic terms. Like, will we need art at all, in any form, if our melancholy and despair — not to mention our mania and paranoia and psychoses — were slowly medicated out of existence? If WILL celebrates an undertaking that's comically doomed, it's in part due to consciously returning to the roots of the novel in Don Quixote. The Don is romantically deluded; WILL is pharmacologically deluded. They both have sidekicks: the Don's is Sancho, WILL's is Spunk, his laptop. The so-called "socially engaged" novel has always been something of a fiction. Our greatest novels — MOBY DICK, THE SCARLET LETTER, GATSBY, WHITE NOISE, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, to name a few — are all deeply social, but they come at American society from a socially removed, almost transcendental plane of existence or perspective. They are all very immediate in terms of place and event, but the sensibility behind them is comically and cosmically bemused by the events unfolding. They're great novels precisely because they don't expect to change anything. Wittgenstein said: Philosophy leaves the world as it is. Great fiction does the same. What it alters forever is one's view of that world. Consequently, with nothing truly social at stake in a novel, we're free to be ridiculous in creating them. I'm very turned off by overly and overtly sincere works of fiction. Tragedy, comedy — they last. Sincerity, as a literary tone, style, and emotion, doesn't. Great fiction needs a bit of the ridiculous and a bit of the doomed in it to echo through time.
D'Ambrosio: WILL, as your narrator and main character, doesn't, in some fashion, have the equipment to write a story, and his potential audience might not have the equipment to read one. Again, this brings me to the strange social cohesion of laughter. It seems like a central triumph in a book where narrative — as a shared zone, a social model — is totally failed, so failed that it needs to be explored from the ground up.
Grimes: WILL is 19, on lots of medication, and comes from a culture in which "reality TV" — you know, people deciding who to date or kick out of the shared house — passes for narrative. In the novel, Will turns to movie and screenplay manuals in order to structure his story. WILL has a life, he has experience, but the culture hasn't provided any meaningful narrative for him to fit them into. This is essentially the purpose of myth, of story, and it's what WILL lacks. If there's a cohesion generated by laughing at what's funny in the book, it's a cohesion based on the recognition of what we've lost, what we no longer have — myth, a myth for the age we live in. Pynchon's great myth in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is Rocket Man. WILL picks up the mythic quest a few decades down the line. If you laugh while you're reading the book it's because WILL is so good-heartedly clueless, so haphazardly heroic. He knows he's supposed to be the epic hero, but he just can't pick up the trail. His wiring's all wrong. He's lost the story. And because we know the story, dimly, in memory, it's funny to see how completely he — and the rest of us — have fallen from it.
D'Ambrosio: WILL is meta-fictional, but it seems, not post-modern, but post-post-post modern. It's a few iterations down the road. It's not Conrad, it's not Joyce, it's not Beckett, it's not Coover, but a book that's absorbed these writers and undermined their undermining. Will's voice is sweet; he has the innocence of Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield, in a way. Yet, the energy around him is self-aware and highly literate. For Huck or Holden the complexity of society invades their innocence, but in WILL the point of departure doesn't seem to be innocence, but complexity — the invasion has already occurred. And the obvious question in a quest is, what is the character seeking? I'd like to turn ask: what is the writer seeking? In literary terms. What kind of freedom, what kind of innocence, as a writer?
Grimes: Hm. As a writer, I guess was looking for several kinds of freedom. I think there's a pretty dominant and overused American style, an American realism. Done well, it's great. Done by everybody, it's terminal. It isn't the only expressive response to our culture. In fact, it's restrictive. It doesn't allow for a sufficient number of levels of play. It's straightforward and sincere, and our culture, our world — of criss-cross cause and effect as Nabokov described it — is anything but straightforward and sincere. I was also seeking an innocence in terms of audience, starting with myself. I don't like post-modern game playing. Fiction is not a game. I kind of took up where Beckett, who is a deeply humane writer, left off. If we're crippled and living absurdly in garbage cans waiting for God, fine. God didn't show. And, hey, we left the garbage can for a condominium. And we're feeling pretty good now, too, because of all these mood-boosting meds they've invented. So WILL is sort of a new stage of literary and, to an extent, socially human infancy. His world isn't the dream babble nightworld of FINNEGAN'S WAKE. WILL's world is very bright, and the babble in it is a produce of the culture. WILL wakes up into this world and the innocence I found while writing the book was in saying Yes to this comfortably meaningless American world. Yes, let it be. It is. In the classic Enlightenment sense of things, it's a hopeless world, but we have to let the dream and vision of that vanished world go. It's already gone, in fact, but we haven't admitted this yet. In literary terms, we're still clinging to it — epiphanies and romantic notions of the self, etc. Dead. So, WILL isn't happy about his new circumstances — he's depressed as hell — but the eternal comic sensibility we all possess is pointing him toward a new incarnation, a new way of being in the world. Freed from his recent literary and psychological past.
D'Ambrosio: There's a certain American-ness to the meta-fictional ambitions of the book. It's vaudevillian instead of serious, or its seriousness has to be tested or challenged by a lack of seriousness. There's no high culture to support it, to isolate it, so it's got to be tough or durable to withstand a lot of knocking around. Perhaps we're back to the humor question again, but here I'm interested more in tone as the register of the cultural attitude of the writer toward writing.
Grimes: It's tough to take yourself seriously on Prozac. And, my sense of American-ness has always been that I can make myself up, or reinvent myself, over and over again. Like the Energizer Bunny, with a new pair of shades.
D'Ambrosio: This book has the streamlined feel of a novella — ample in the way a novel can be, yet intimate and direct like a short-story. Was this the way WILL was conceived from the get-go? The length feels just right. Why couldn't it be longer, or why isn't it a short story?
Grimes: I started with one idea only — be funny at least once on every page. Length is kind of dictated by two things. One, to quote Woody Allen again, you can't put on two comics in a row — the audience is laughed out. So, in novel terms, keep it short. What's funny is, in part, due to speed, lightness. What's funny on page 70 will not continue to be funny on page 700. In a way, comedy is like tragedy, in terms of structure. Move from point A to point B as quickly as possible. That's how you achieve the greatest impact. It's all form. The second reason, which is also the reason it couldn't be a short story, is information. The novel is sort of encyclopedic. But, this doesn't mean the novel should read like an encyclopedia. Too many "smart" novels these days mistake dispensing knowledge as an adequate substitute for telling a story. Knowledge has to fold into a story. And to make WILL comic, the knowledge had to fold in at light-speed. Incomprehension on WILL's part is, quite often, the grace and humor of the book.
D'Ambrosio: From the very beginning of your published work you've written dialogue that's as funny as anything going in American lit — stuff as antic as Roth, as witty and intelligent as DeLillo. Can you talk a little about how you write dialogue, what it feels like as it comes to you and gets scratched out on the page? How is it that you write such great dialogue, what's the secret ingredient? Is it that fundamentally in your vision of the world no one understands anybody else? Your dialogue feels like slapstick in that respect — the equivalent of bodies crashing into each other, as if they occupied separate spaces — or, re: dialogue, separate conversations.
Grimes: The secret ingredient is in all that's left out. There's a slight but critical difference between comedy and humor. Humor is gregarious, gentle. Comedy is distilled, and kind of wicked. Roth's soliloquies are long, but discrete. They bite, sentence by sentence. Delillo's dialogue plays off of context perfectly. Take a couple of lines from WHITE NOISE: "Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom." He leaves out all but the essentials — Californians, concept, life-style. Soft words. Then he contrasts them immediately with warrants and doom. Words with an edge to them. The context he leaves to the reader to fill in. The US treats California as its New Age stepchild, its idiot national spawn. So he uses that cultural context and gets to the pith of our feelings about California as quickly as possible. Comic dialogue is the swiftest way to illuminate the distance between the ideal and the actual. Context is what things should ideally be; what's spoken is how things actually are. As for how it feels to write comic dialogue, well, it's surprising. If the dialogue is funny, it's because I didn't see it coming. The distance between the ideal and the actual is illuminated in a flash. You can't logically produce a comic line. A bit of satori is required. It's why those Zen stories about monk's asking imponderable questions, like where's the bus stop for the Way. You know, like there's a bus line, and you can get off at Nirvana or Dhamadi. Or, yeah, hey, drop me at Satori and Chi! And so the monk, who's of course powerless, asks the Zen master, where's the bus, and the Zen master whacks him with a stale rice noodle and the monk is like, oh, right, thank you. You have to let go of intelligence to achieve enlightenment. The same holds for comedy. If you permit yourself to be stupid, there's nothing you can't know.
D'Ambrosio: Very often the book feels aphoristic or epigrammatic. For instance, "Disgrace is a politician's only entertainment value." That line could launch a thousand pages. The epigrammatic quality helps the novel achieve density in very few pages. Can you talk about this? It seems to imply an audience with a certain awareness, and intelligence. Is it a counterpart to wit and humor? Is it part parody of the sound-bite?
Grimes: The book is about "Information Sickness," so the aphoristic quality lends the book a style and compression that gives the reader a sense of what this sickness might be like. Intelligent readers will feel a sense of elation — the unbearable lightness of being — while skimming over this super-compressed universe of information. But the comedy comes from the way this universe continually resists Will efforts to fit himself into it in any sort of rational way. This is a universe of information that's so compressed it approaches the density of a black hole. And, actually, this is where I think our new myths need to come from, or how they'll arise — through an acknowledgement of our universe's newly rediscovered incomprehensibility. Organized religion and particle physics both end in a confrontation with mystery. We just don't know what happened beyond the first 1/10,000th of a second of creation. The telescopes can't see that closely. The heat is so intense that gravity vanishes or breaks down. A mystery. We just don't know. But, we have traced this through 15 billion light years of visible universal existence. Given these physical insights into the irrational order of the universe, the rhetoric of persuasion, or lengthy disquisition in fiction, is kind of 19th century, I think. An aphoristic style is style through which, maybe, our new myths can be born. And I do look at WILL as a myth, a quest, one that's suited to its culture. In fact, given the world we live in, I think WILL is pure realism. So the aphoristic style works for the novel just as the aphoristic style worked for Nietzsche in his later philosophical works. It's a style that says that there are new ways to think, and new myths to give birth to, once we jettison the old style. God is dead means our language for God is dead, not that the divine is dead. It's a style that elevates the sound bite to a Zen koan. Hence, brevity. It's all about compression and depth.
D'Ambrosio: Why didn't a mainstream publisher snatch this book up? I'm not so much interested in a diatribe on the state of contemporary publishing as I am on the value of small presses and the need for various outlets for writing and perhaps too the relationship of this novel to an audience of particular readers. The book is adventurous, and the publisher is adventurous. Is there an adventurous audience out there?
Grimes: One editor who actually runs a big press in NY told me in his office that WILL was the most "original" manuscript he'd seen in four to five years. We discussed how to sell it. I always felt that it was a book that needed to be published as a paperback, no hardcover. Its audience — college students, graduate students, 20 and 30somethings who aren't necessarily upper middle class — this audience is not necessarily in the position to lay down $25.00 for a novel, and $25.00 hardcover novels are how big mainstream presses make their overhead and profit margins. They have concerns and demands that an independent publisher doesn't have in quite the same way. So, it was economic, to a large extent, in the States. Gallimard, the huge, although independent, French publisher of Camus, Proust and others, actually bought the book first. Then I hooked up with Jun Da, the founder of Ludlow. His vision and mine were perfectly in synch. He's smart, dedicated, and passionate about publishing good fiction — literary novels, essentially. He has a terrific budget for advertising, the book's cover is great, and we agreed to price the book at $12.95 to reach the audience we know is there for it. I'm deeply impressed by Jun, and I feel that what he's doing — publishing literary fiction — is a noble thing these days. And he knows his stuff; he's totally professional. So I felt that by publishing with him and Ludlow Press, I could help — or try to help — bring something new, something good, into being. You and I have talked about the writing life. You know that I long ago made the decision to set up my life in a way that didn't require my writing to pay all my bills. I wanted that freedom in order to keep the work itself free. Luckily, I'm in that position, so the chance to go with a new press and maybe open up another terrific home for other novelists is a good thing to do. You can pursue a career as a writer, or you can live your a life as a writer and see what comes. You and I have chosen the life.
Other acclaimed books from Tom Grimes...
Now this!— His most provocative novel!
WILL@epicqwest.com by Tom Grimes
{ISBN: 0-9713415-7-5 200 pages/Fiction}
Kirkus Reviews
Dystopian satire on the Information Age and medicated students that may well charm its way intravenously into the hearts of younger readers. Its sublime dialogue certainly will appeal to youths pondering the vacuity of modern life. Ludlow Press opens this spring with a pair of manic original trade paperbacks (see Perez, below). WILL is a psychopharmacologically medicated post-post-post-post-modern college student who can't adjust to the notion of homework and is failing all courses, his GPA now sunk to 1.55. His mother isn't much help ("I just don't feel I can give you any advice I can honestly say I subscribe to"), and there's also the problem of Information Sickness (IS). WILL, at 19, is a Virology major: he studies viruses, the ultimate information systems that leave you sick or dying. And IS is an "overload of information. A disease so insidious that its spread was relentless, detection nearly impossible, and the infection rate potentially universal." "Like maybe, information has a half-life or something. It accretes in your system until there's some kind of mega-overload. Or maybe if everything's absurd, and true, and instantly contradicted and meaningless, existential fusion occurs. You're hit with a metaphysical hydrogen bomb composed of the world's bullshit and beauty." The smart disease for a wired world kills 47 on campus ["CAUSE ALLUDES AUTHORITIES"], with Hollywood dickering for movie rights, while the university claims all rights to the virus. Like Don Quixote, WILL gears up his wonder computer, Spunk, and sets out on a superclueless epicqwest of memoir-therapy toward a world-saving myth amid the hopeless culturebabble. Whether conversing with doctors, student counselor, the brainy Naomi (his Dulcinea), he's fabulously talkative.
The unwitting laughter he steadily evokes, page by page, makes Grimes (City of God, 1995) a joyous dark humorist.
Remember: "Gold has no value if it remains inside the mountain."
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