Paul Maliszewski and Ryan Weil, The
Hypothetical Man, Trnsfr Books, 2019.
THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN
is a darkly humorous collection of stories featuring an assortment of
anonymous characters--A, B, and S--all with problems. They work
undercover at an amusement park in Illinois or else they work at a
secret government facility that would prefer not to be named. They
attend a freewheeling sales meeting with death masks on the wall.
Some raise pigs, others race goats. One lives in a suburban home
where he watches his wife with another man. They are, together,
misled, misunderstood, and mistaken often, but their pursuit of
answers never ends.
The collaboration of Maliszewski (Prayer and Parable) and Weil, a
pseudonym, yields an intellectually frothy collection of nine stories
laid out as a series of loopy dialogues between two colleagues known
as “A” and “B.” (There is also an “S,” but he makes a
single cameo appearance.) Each tale begins as an anecdote, but soon
detours into multiple digressions and philosophical musing of a high
order, with a peppering of both high and low culture. In “Caldera,”
for example, B begins by confessing to some embarrassing behavior
while he was in Ohio that A has probably heard about already. The
long and tangled explanation includes numerous detours, and
references to SpongeBob SquarePants, Nepalese violence, and
peripheral characters with odd names including Vlox, Quilch, and
Gyula. “Preplanning” begins as a meta discussion of the
redundancy of its title, then digresses into discussion of goats,
dead relatives, and the Breeders’ Cup, among other things. By far,
the title story is the strongest; it begins as a mystery surrounding
an envelope but expands to involve multiple envelopes, chair-making,
a dog, and an untrustworthy fellow named Shernfavler. The authors
display an almost palpable relish in their extended literary jousts.
Readers with a similar sensibility will blissfully wallow in these
elaborate yarns. - Publishers Weekly
In Buddhism, I have
heard them refer to this as “monkey mind”—that endless chatter
of what we are doing, what we are about, the way it goes, often
beyond us, in the background or the foreground, the parade of images,
and half-thoughts, noises, thoughts of smells, things that never
happened to us, but appearing so. Often I have wondered, Well, who’s
talking? You know? I mean, it’s in my own head, and yet it’s not
me, not all of the time.
—Maliszewski &
Weil
This book’s cover
is the title surrounded by two names. Unfamiliar with either author
listed, the first thing I wanted to know was who authored which part.
A quick leaf-through showed no explicit delineation in the text
itself. Google revealed Paul Maliszewski as the author of several
books but, quizzically, listed a 2012 version of The Hypothetical
Man. Was that different than the 2019 copyrighted version I held in
my hands? Or was it a simple typo? The secondary author on the 2012
version is listed as Ryan Weil, not the James Wagner I had on my
cover. A “Ryan Weil” search yielded little outside of his
official bio: “Ryan Weil lives in California.” I wondered if I
had encountered a LaFarge/Poissel situation that would send me into a
spiral of questioning identity and reality, ending in an existential
nervous breakdown. The answer is: Probably, but that was most likely
going to happen anyway.
All of this
foregrounding serves as an excellent preparation for reading this
novel. The Hypothetical Man is a collection of Pynchonesque short
stories, somewhat interconnected, that reveal just enough to make the
reader feel like they are on the verge of discovering the answer to
some great mystery. Or at least whatever it is that connects between
each story.
Most of the book
takes place as an interview between characters named A and B, or vice
versa. One could easily see it as being Maliszewski and Wagner/Weil’s
alternating dialogue; as them responding textually to each other.
That being said, it could also easily read as a schizophrenic having
a conversation with himselves. At any rate, the narrators, whomever
t(he)y may be, are obscured and anonymous. This interview/dialog
convention reinforces the theme of identity throughout the work—we
never really know the narrators (though there is some evidence that B
is an actual, not just hypothetical, man). These (largely)
disembodied voices reveal elements of themselves and their thinking
but often the other voice responds skeptically. It makes the reader
question what elements of a person are actually real, what pieces of
identity exist merely as performance, and whether or not something
becomes real simply because someone has said it. When we invent a
truth, what stops it from being so as long as one other person holds
it in some consideration?
The first story,
“Preplanning,” roots all future conversation in the absurdity of
language and the complexity of its logic. It establishes some
relationship between the narrators, though without too much
definition. From the very beginning, the reader is introduced to a
sense of foreboding, of mistrust and obfuscation. But one of the
narrators reminds us that “[o]ne shouldn’t interpret departures
from convention as lack of any plan.” The narrators seem to talk
without sight, as if on the phone or through their computers, which
makes the entirety of the narrative itself a created narrative or a
memory. This set-up further removes speaker from reality and allows
ample room for the reader to question everything that they read.
In “For Yama Is
the Lord of Death,” B tells A the story of a man in a boat angered
by another boat that keeps getting in his way, until he eventually
discovers that the other boat is empty:
His anger was
misplaced, was based on nothing. It was a misperception of reality.
Do you see the point here? Are you causing your own agony, your own
misfortune? Are we looking in the right direction? Should we look in
all directions at once? We know from our schoolwork that it was the
black sun that gave birth to us, and so we must go in search of this
black light always. In the black light, the answers will be. But they
may need deciphering.
So the author(s) are
telling the reader that interpretation can be flawed and that we
often read something into a situation or person that doesn’t really
exist. Instead of giving us understanding, the author(s) challenge
our conception of meaning-making by having A and B contradict and
disagree with each other. There is also a flood of seeming
non-sequiturs. It can be alternately intriguing and frustrating.
Because of this
flood, these details, the text can be meandering at times. There are
long sections of unbroken paragraphs that delve into
intricately-crafted thoughts, often presented as soliloquies, about
everything from Buddhism to county fairs to beastiality. Given its
postmodern philosophy, we never get concrete answers to the questions
posed or any justification from the author(s) for these intense
observations, other than some vague hope that they might elucidate
connections between each other.
In the gutter, the
reader will periodically find black swirly lines. At first, they seem
unintentional but, as they gather, the reader again realizes that
these departures are indeed part of a larger plan, another ensnaring
detail. The title story reveals their origin and they continue to
symbolically represent that “[e]verything else—this hair, these
words—is stuff floating by, wisps.” There is something revelatory
in this special type of bewilderment; we are surprised by the oracle
of our own confusion.
Intensely
philosophical in a hardboiled detective novel way, The Hypothetical
Man treats every element of life as a part of a larger investigation.
If you enjoy solving intricate puzzles or piecing together disparate
clues, then you will enjoy this novel. It resists easy
interpretation. In some ways, it seems like a book about two people
who are kind of talking to each other, and kind of talking to
themselves. These stories mirror the chaotic barrage of details,
images and memories in our lives and seem to imply that clues towards
Meaning exist everywhere in their/our world, though some only further
obscure a larger truth. In the end, the reader has to ask themselves:
The Hypothetical Man—what part of him is deceit? What part of him
exists even if he doesn’t? Answer: “Maybe the hairs mean nothing,
and we are chasing a dream.” - Jesi Buell
At a campground, a divorced father confronts a man he
believes hurt his daughter. A devoted student traces a winding path
through the snow, searching for the next most beautiful thing. Two
brothers watch their father tinker lovingly with his homemade robots. In
Paul Maliszewski’s debut story collection, men and women struggle to do
right. They argue. They think. They think again. They have odd dreams.
Often they fail at being good, and yet, on occasion, they realize
moments of true kindness. In language that is at once simple and supple,
plain-spoken and arresting, these twenty-eight stories describe
complete lives in sharp detail, lives we may recognize as not unlike our
own.
"You want me to tell you what sets Maliszewski apart? The answer is
probity. The answer also is decency. Here's another answer: modesty,
tact, exactitude, pertinence, reverence, wit. All told, Maliszewski has
all the graces, which is why I, in my old age, am renewed and schooled
by him. Oh, and another thing: Paul Maliszewski takes no crap."—
Gordon
Lish
Paul Maliszewski's Prayer and Parable, with its occasionally interwoven
stories of contemplative couples and surreal occurrences, is an
unassuming, minimalist tour de force. To be sure, the numerous
stories—told as alternating "prayers" and “parables”—in this collection
are quite unlike the muscular minimalism of Carver or Beattie, and share
more in common with the compact
interiors of Lydia Davis. Nevertheless, they render, even in their most
bizarre moments, a more concrete feel of contemporary life than Davis’s
consciousness-exploring abstractions. Whether exploring relationships
in stories in which narrators in relationships reflect on evenings spent
socializing with other idiosyncratic couples, or following the outcome
of a child’s decision to become a hermit in the wilderness, what
Maliszewski often achieves in these tales, penned in a clean, lucid
prose, is the precision of, not realistic detail exactly, but the
realistic detailing of thought itself when it comes up against the
blockages and ambiguities of everyday, and sometimes not-so-everyday,
life. Through his characters’ frank rationalizations and justifications
of their often dubious behavior and unpleasant thoughts, Maliszewski
sets up, via the prayer and parale structure, a kind of secular ethical
scaffolding from which to hang his characters’ desires, hopes, and
fears. Lest we feel like judging them too harshly, however, Maliszewski
is careful to show that these characters are attending to themselves and
the world, and actively seeking direction and understanding within it,
whatever their successes or failures. These stories, then, as with all
true prayers and parables, do not end with sudden realizations or
lightning epiphanies but with quiet resignations or moments of faith
shored against the uncertainty and ambiguity of the world. What peace is
attained may be only temporary, what hope always provisional.
- Ralph
Clare
Whether one page or twenty, Paul Maliszewski’s stories ask for a lot
of patience from the reader. His work exemplifies a kind of
minutiae-infused, hyperrealism–somewhere between the robotic delivery of
Tao Lin and the soulful Ken Sparling–that has become trendy in recent
years.
The trick with writing about the quotidian is finding the heart, the
meaning of what would otherwise be a bland accounting. Unfortunately,
often times Maliszewski doesn’t find the heart of his stories until the
last paragraph, if at all. Rarely have I read so many stories in a
collection that left me feeling empty until their last line.
In a collection where the stories are either “Prayers” or “Parables,”
the difference is ultimately negligible. A quick look at the list of
where these stories first appeared shows some of them even changed from
prayer to parable between the initial publication and the collection of
the pieces. Leaving one to wonder whether the titling is little more
than a gimmick.
The collection’s opening story, “Prayer Against the Force of Habit”
is an account of a fighting couple. For most of the story all that is
expressed is the male character’s distance and unaffected attitude in
regard to his surroundings. With simple descriptive statements,
Maliszewski portrays this to a T–so much so, in fact, that his
characters lose all dimension. When the main character’s girlfriend
persists in talking about another couple, he responds by saying, “Baby, I
don’t care. I already said I don’t care. I just can’t care about them”
Yet in the last paragraph Maliszewski deftly shows the character’s
blandness becoming his asset, and rounds out the seemingly flat
protagonist:
“He smelled the sheets and caught the perfume from the laundry
detergent. He inhaled deeply, and the force of his breath drew the
fabric into his mouth.”
Had Maliszweski made this simple character adjustment he could have kept the story engaging throughout.
In “Prayer for the Second Opinion” Maliszewski inverts this problem.
While the story begins with the perfect opportunity for a struggle with
the emotion and humanity of the characters, the struggle is not
portrayed until the character is removed from the direct conflict.
“Only later did my father mention the doctors,” the story begins.
From there the story gets mired in routine and when dialogue is used it
feels forced:
“They’re just two appointments my doctor wants me to go to.
For what?
I don’t know, he said. Something to do with my last CAT scan.
What CAT scan? I said.”
The heart, the devastation of the situation doesn’t hit until the son is left to contemplate, to stew in reality.
Similar to the revelation in “Force of Habit,” however, it’s the
simple adjustments here that make all the difference. The last paragraph
begins, “I looked around my apartment, trying to locate some sign that
would just tell me what to say. I could see all the rooms from where I
sat, all the rooms and all my stuff inside them.” There’s nothing magic
here, just introspection, an acknowledgment of the emotion that clouds
this story from the beginning. Even as one of the collection’s shorter
stories, only four pages, this lack of insight until the last moment
feels almost like a setup. As if it were written devoid of emotion
purely for the switch at the end.
In the end, Maliszewski’s collection becomes a parable itself. What
works best in Prayer and Parable is perhaps what has been restrained all
along, and in not letting loose Maliszewski has lost a bit of the
promise of his stories. It is easy enough to feel bewitched by the
stories that do end strongly, but the spell washes off as the next story
starts and repeats the same struggles.
What the strengths, the reflections of introspection and heart do
reveal is an abundance of promise. Just as the reader is asked
continually for patience in Maliszewski’s delivery, patience will likely
also be what delivers a stronger payoff in terms of a collection, both
for Maliszewski as a writer and for his readers. But when Maliszewski
finds that balance, the ability to allow some of the soul to leak from
his conclusions into the premises of his stories there’s going to be a
big reward in store for his readers.-
RYAN W. BRADLEY
An enigmatic book with a puzzling title,
Prayer and Parable
explores the lives and thoughts of ordinary people with the assumption
that we might learn something from their interactions and the spiritual
implications of those interactions. The 28 stories here deal with the
intimate, the personal, the simple, the sometimes unrealistic, and the
ordinary people that we know (and sometimes are).
One major challenge regarding the book lies in the title. What is a
prayer? What is a parable? Take the easy one first: Define a parable.
Those familiar with the New Testament will find that the parables of
Jesus come to mind. These short sayings deal with familiar situations
and make a spiritual application. For example, the parable of the sower
is found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The story deals with a common
activity: the planting of a crop. The outcomes of the acts of planting
and sowing are analogized with the types of people who hear God’s word
and respond (or not). The parable is effective because it takes an
everyday situation (sowing) encountered by ordinary people and uses it
to illustrate the possible of effect a less concrete event or issue.
Mr. Maliszewski offers up 11 parables in this collection. On the
surface, they are simple stories, often poignant; however, discerning
their spiritual truths is challenging.
For example, the last “parable” in the book is entitled “Parable of
the Birds.” The story is simple: a family with a young child encounters a
dead bird in the backyard. Wanting to protect the child from some of
the harsher realities of life, the father removes the bird and disposes
of it. Later, another bird appears, injured but alive. This bird
triggers memories of an earlier time before their son was born. Later,
husband and wife discuss memories and what they mean. It is a fuzzy
story, realistic in feel, but leaving us with the elusive sense of “is
there more to this that I must be missing?”
The prayer issue is much more difficult to get a handle on.
Dictionary definitions focus on some sort of communication with God or
other spiritual being. Mr. Maliszewski obviously has another idea in
mind. He quotes Simone Weil: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is
the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely
unmixed attention is prayer.” So there is no communication with some
deity or spiritual being, but deeper interaction among people and more
conscientious presence of mind.
Some of the prayer stories are off-putting. In “Prayer for Something
Seen But Briefly,” a father and his young daughter are camping. At the
campground caretaker’s place, the father becomes convinced that the
caretaker has exposed himself to the daughter. His confrontation with
the caretaker is ultimately ineffective, and he can only go back to his
tent and try to convince his daughter that everything is OK. Where is
the prayer? Is the father hoping/praying that the reality that he
suspects is all but a dream? Is he praying for his daughter’s continued
innocence? If he had paid more attention to her whereabouts would the
possibility of molestation not exist in the first place; is he praying
for forgiveness?
“Prayer for the Appearance of Something German” has a similarly
surrealistic feel to it. A girl is teaching German to her boyfriend
although she is not German and has never traveled to Germany. They are
speaking German in a store in America when the clerk asks them “Are you
from Germany?” They answer “Yes,” and he responds, “You had that whole
different look about you.” And we are left hanging; these are indeed
personal interactions, but where is the analogy to prayer?
This is a puzzling and perplexing set of stories, but they have a
certain charm about them. The challenge is to discern why they are
called prayers or parables—and then to ponder what they are attempting
to say to you.-
Donald F. Calbreath
Late in "Prayer for What They Said and What They Were Not Told," the
longest story in Paul Maliszewski's collection "Prayer and Parable", a character referred to only as "man"
thinks about himself and his friends: "They had mocked themselves, not
because they deserved a good deflating but because they were afraid,
more than anything else, of being criticized. They had begged -- begged
-- not to be taken seriously. And so now what?"
All of the characters in "Prayer and Parable" -- the
grown brothers dealing with their recently deceased father's robots in
"Prayer for the Long Life of Certain Inanimate Objects"; the electrician
who worked on a nightclub sound system in "Parable of Being Inside";
Claudius, Hamlet's brother-killing uncle, wandering a never-ending
hallway in the afterlife in a "Prayer" with a 31-word title -- are in
some way or another confronting that same question: Now what?
Of course, plenty of fiction deals with that question;
what makes Maliszewski's stories so fascinating are the settings, the
moments in which these characters find themselves confronting that
question. A man at a theater is asked by his neighbor, "Why don't you
put yourself in my shoes?" Maliszewski trades the cliché for fact: In
"Parable of Another's Shoes," everyone in the theater moves one seat to
the right, putting themselves in the shoes of their neighbor.
Even though there are fantastic elements in some of the
stories, the moments under consideration and examination are moments
it's easy to ignore, or to let pass unexamined: In "Prayer for the First
Balance," it is the moment of scrubbing a floor after a plant has
fallen and realizing that "doing something over is the real work of this
life." Maliszewski has a phenomenal, almost mathematical eye, able to
tease out even the smallest moment's fulcrum.
The book's title, "Prayer and Parable," is, like the rest
of Maliszewski's writing, direct and literal: Each story in the book is
either prayer or parable. Maliszewski's language is approachable,
common as speech, yet he uses it to describe some of life's most
inarticulate, wordless moments. In "Prayer for Some of What Was Lost,"
the story begins as a list: "One hundred fourteen ballpoint pens,
ninety-seven pencils, thirty-five felt-tips, and at least six special
pens, the expensive kind, gifts from behind locked counters." The man in
the story ages, the scope of his losses widens and, just before the
story's end, the reader is advised to "imagine losing the same thing
every day for the rest of your life. Now imagine that there's nothing
you can do about it." It's a brief, magic moment, in which the reader
might suddenly see all the stuff of his or her own life differently.
These are welcoming, accessible stories: The lack of
character names could be annoying, yet Maliszewski makes it work, makes
each story feel open, as if the reader could step into it -- or as if
the stories are describing the lives we each lead.-
Weston Cutter
The strongest stories in Maliszewski’s
Prayer and Parable
were terrific: precise and incisive. They reminded me a bit of David
Foster Wallace in their exacting detail and preoccupation with the
limitations of communication. Maliszewksi’s characters are frequently
aware that something they just said came out wrong, or that there’s a
“right” thing to say, which they can’t quite find. They reminded me of a
handful of moments of unusual clarity in my own life; times when I felt
like I could predict, if not necessarily alter, the course a discussion
would take, like some chess grandmaster seeing the shape of the board
many moves ahead.
In the weakest stories, Maliszewksi’s formalism verges on gimmickry:
almost none of his people have given names; most are referred to only as
“the man,” “the wife,” “the husband,” “the boy,” and so on.
Maliszewki’s titles almost all take the form of “Parable of . . .” or
“Prayer for . . .”; the reader is initially perhaps led to believe that
the “prayers” are more naturalistic and the “parables” are more
symbolic/fabulist or, well, parable-y, but Maliszewksi quickly subverts
that convention.
Although I thought
Prayer and Parable was uneven, its high points were more than enough to keep Maliszewski on the list of writers I’m eager to see more from.-
www.needsmoredemonsornot.com/
Paul Maliszewski on ‘Prayer and Parable’
Paul Maliszewski is a friend of mine. He recently published a short-story collection called Prayer and Parable.
Around the end of last summer, I asked him if I could interview him
about it. We exchanged questions by e-mail for a week. Several times I
said that I was incompetent—forget the whole thing—but Paul reassured me
I was doing fine. What I especially like about the book is that Paul
doesn’t compromise when it comes to portraying reality. He’s a little
like Fellini in 8 ½
: he preserves the confusion, meaninglessness, suddenness, and asa nisi masa of the everyday.
I have a question that might be a little bit unanswerable. I
know you think a lot about individual sentences, and I wondered what
makes a good sentence. Am I right in thinking that you give a lot of
time to them?
I do give a lot of attention to sentences, but mainly because they
don’t come out right for me on the first go-round, or the second, or the
eighth, or the thirtieth. Revising takes me a lot of time. I drive
myself crazy. I’ll just stare at lines. There are sentences in this book
where I had a page, back and front, of all the different versions I was
at one time trying. One sentence I’m thinking of was not particularly
long or complex, but it was at the end of a story, and I didn’t want it
to seem too ending-y, or pat. So there I was, scratching out, writing
something new, circling back.
Reading like that is a hard thing to turn off. I catch myself
revising e-mails and I think, What are you doing? When I’m working on a
story or essay, if I find something messed up, I make myself start over
and read it through again. If I find something else wrong, I start back
over, and I keep starting over until I can read it without stopping,
until I don’t suffer any doubts. That takes a long time, Worse,
sometimes revising one sentence throws things off further down the page.
It’s like I’m working on a pipeline and making a repair at one point,
and whatever fix I make feels right, but it twists things around so that
they get gummed up later.
Complicating all this is that what I want from a sentence has changed
over the years, even in the time I was working on this collection. When
I went back to the older stories, I found so much to cringe over. I
thought that was good? I read it how many times? And some magazine
accepted it? Good God, I’d look at these sentences and think, What
nonsense, what crap. Often there was too much flash. I’ve come to see
flash as self-regarding, as reflecting back on me, the super writer, and
that’s not where I want people’s attention. It was like there was some
element in the older sentences pleading, Praise me, pat me on the head.
I’d rather risk seeming flat just so long as it means an end to the arm
waving.
I’m much more interested now in sentences that contain a story
voice—the main narrative vehicle—as well as several character’s interior
voices, all of which drop in and out as needed, sometimes only for a
phrase. Creating a story that can indicate those slight shifts in the
language, and do it subtly and quickly, without tags or signals, so that
the words themselves indicate to the reader, Oh, this is the character
thinking now—that’s what’s important to me. That’s part of the reason I
decided not to use quotation marks. I want the words to do all the work.
If it’s speech, the words should sound like speech. I shouldn’t need a
little typographical hint. I think it’s worth taking this stuff on,
making it hard for yourself. Hugh Kenner, in one of his books about
Joyce, described how each character in
Ulysses has this field
of language, like a cloud around the character, and while there is
overlap—they do speak the same language, finally—certain words can only
be Bloom’s, say. I love that.
One of my favorite things about your writing is the humor. Is there some joke that comes up in your mind again and again?
We’re having work done on our house, in the basement. The other day, I
was down there with my son. He likes to see the men at work. That’s
what he says—“Can we go see the men at work, daddy?” We were down there,
talking to the contractor, and a plumber was there, too, about to cut a
piece of PVC pipe, and the contractor said to us, “Ooh, watch this.
This is a cool tool.” The plumber picked up this handheld saw with a
claw on it, and the claw grabbed the pipe and held it, and then a small
circular blade went right through the pipe. Am I losing you with the
technical talk, Barrodale? It was really fast, with almost no noise,
like that pipe was butter. Anyway, I said, “What’s
that
called?” because I thought my son would want to know, and frankly, I
wanted to know myself. The contractor said, “He used to have a guy
called Slim who all he did all day was cut pipe, just like that. But
then he got that saw, and he fired Slim, so now he calls the saw Slim.”
That made me laugh. It’s so mean and sad and funny and true.
For some reason, I also can’t shake this joke from
Zoolander.
You know the part where Will Ferrell’s character has just unveiled the
architectural model for the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t
Read Good? And Ben Stiller bends down to take it in, studying it, and
then he says, “What
is this? A center for ants?” I just found
the clip on YouTube
and watched it, and it still makes me laugh. Then I watched it again,
and I was laughing in anticipation of the line. He’s so indignant,
Stiller, like it’s an insult even to show him this thing. And Zoolander,
of course, is incredibly stupid—that’s the running joke—but it’s not
the stupidity that makes me laugh. It’s the certainty, the utter
conviction. Whenever his intelligence gets maxed out, the arrogance
kicks in. That’s not just Zoolander, though. It’s human nature. Flannery
O’Connor works the arrogance-intelligence sweet spot really well.
Maybe you could talk about what prompted the passage below, if something did:
The man tidied and picked up a little. He straightened a pile of
magazines and then looked around the living room to see was there
anything he was missing or something he should do. While he worked, he
thought over what he had said about this dream of his and what it might
mean, if mean was the correct word, even. He checked it for the fatal
false note. He’d had ideas like this before. Big thoughts, he called
them, which he meant disparagingly, because who was he kidding, really?
He would not, however, talk himself out of it, not this time. Even if it
wasn’t actually a big thought, it was his, and he refused to take it
back. Nor would he think, as he often did, But then what do I know?
There was no more point in self-deprecation. There simply was no time.
That was the problem—and here the man included all his friends, and all
the woman’s friends, everyone their age or thereabouts. The problem with
them all was they had done so much of that disingenuous shuffling
about, the aw-shucksing, the pay no attention to me, I’m crazy or drunk
or stupid routine, that they had precious little self left. And what had
they ever got in exchange? Anything? They had apologized when they
shouldn’t have, when they didn’t even mean it. They had mocked
themselves, not because they deserved a good deflating but because they
were afraid, more than anything else, of being criticized. They had
begged—begged—not to be taken seriously. And so now what? What next? The
man didn’t know. He wasn’t being disingenuous, he really didn’t know.
They just couldn’t go on as they’d been going on. That was the main
thing. The man did know that.
There wasn’t any one thing. It’s our predicament, at this time and at
our age, to avoid saying the grand thing—to be scared of it, or to say
it and then, in the very next moment, undercut ourselves, want to take
it all back, dial it down, turn it into a big joke. This habit of mind
started from a good place. You can trace it back to what we’re taught in
college: be skeptical of capital-
T Truth, look suspiciously at
all-encompassing explanations. But it’s gotten out of hand. You hear it
in conversation. Someone risks something, some idea they have,
something they’re struggling to give words to, and how do they follow it
up? They disassociate themselves from it. They say, But what do I know,
right? Even about stupid stuff, like an opinion of a new movie. You can
see it, too, in the profusion of phrases like
sort of and
kind of. People take shelter under words like
maybe and
probably
when they could, by rights, insist and declare. On sitcoms, the most
earnest character will always, immediately, be cut down in the next
moment. It’s the dance move of our time, that little two-step. I
struggle with it myself, all the time.
When I was working on this story, I had a shorter version of this
scene. The whole middle was gone. Over time, as I reread the story, that
passage started to seem thin, like I was avoiding saying something
because I didn’t want to go on too long. I was worried it might seem
speechy or preachy. The scene itself was a prime example of what I
wanted all along to explain and avoid.
There’s this side of your writing that I really like—we could
call it the puckish side of you. I wonder if you could tell some
stories about morons you have known. I love when a person irritates you.
Morons I have known? This could get long. Let me limit myself by
telling you about an agent whose orbit I briefly came into. I haven’t, I
should say, had great experiences with agents. One of my earliest
brushes came while I was editing writing for a Web site. A well-known
agent mailed me a package containing three short humor pieces. Also
included were a cover letter on creamy stock, a one-page bio for the
writer, and three pages (at least) of blurbs. All this material was
tucked inside the pockets of a folder so nice I kept it for years. The
writing itself was crap, and the folder and all the rest made it seem
like a turd wrapped up in silver paper. I remember thinking, This is
what agents do?
But I mean to tell you about another agent, the one I came to call
the cheerleader. Whenever I talked to her, she was always saying how
psyched she was. She was full of wild praise so beyond what I deserved
to receive that, when I heard it, I felt immediately bad for not living
up to her enthusiasm. I mean, I’m like the losingest team in high school
football here, and yet this agent was so unflappably perky, rooting for
me no matter how grim the game looked. It got so bad that I dreaded
hearing from her. If there was a message that she had called, I’d call
back after a few days. If there was an e-mail, I’d put off reading it.
Once, she went to a meeting with an editor and came back with this
book idea that the editor really wanted to do. It was, she felt, the
perfect idea for me. The book was to be about the future, I think, how
the past has imagined the future over the years, or maybe it was about
the moon, I can’t remember now. It was something I knew nothing about
and had expressed no interest in. She was so jazzed about this book
project, though, and all I could do was say, Uh, I have a lot of ideas
already and am working on so many different things as it is. She didn’t
even sound slightly deflated. It was just like, Okay!, and then onto the
next thing.
Another time she asked me about this book of letters to the president
I was writing, the thing I’m still working on ever so slowly, and she
said, “I know this is a crazy question, but ... ” And I thought, Here we
go. I mean, everything she said sounded a little bit crazy. “Have you,”
she asked, “ever thought about doing this as a graphic novel?” Graphic
novels were, I was given to understand, really hot just then. I stared
at that e-mail for a while. Did it really say what I think it said? It
did. I finally wrote her back and said, “Well, you know, that is a crazy
question.” And then: “No, I’ve never thought of making my novel into a
graphic novel.” I mean, I can’t draw.
Last story. I showed her
my essay about Michael Chabon
when I was still trying to get it published, and about a week later,
she wrote that she loved it, blah blah blah, but of course she loved
everything. Then she told me she had just watched this episode of
The Wire
where they say if you are going to hunt the king, you best not miss. I
think the wisdom of that was supposed to be apparent, or else I was to
allow it to sink in and then know just what to do with it. I was, she
assured me, hunting big game here. Anyway, the e-mail went on, asking me
questions I was pretty sure I had answered. And yet, in spite of
everything that had passed between us, I still thought she could help. I
was open to her guidance. I wanted her to identify some weakness in my
argument. The e-mail ended with further counsel: Wear your Seymour Hersh
hat, she said, and THEN wear your Edmund Wilson hat. “Does this sound
good to you?” she asked. It sounds confusing, I know it does, but the
sad thing was, at the time, I thought it sounded good. I was like,
“Okay, first the Hersh then the Wilson.” I thanked her for the advice.
Interview With Writer Paul Maliszewski
An introduction to Paul Maliszewski, author of the fiction collection
Prayer and Parable (Fence Books, 2011). The cover description for
Prayer and Parable
says the stories feature people who “struggle to do right. They argue.
They think. They think again. They have odd dreams. Often they fail at
being good, and yet, on occasion, they realize moments of true
kindness.” People much like any of us. These stories are about life and
the human condition. The artistry is in Maliszewski’s honest language,
and as he mentions, the best way to experience art, is to experience it
yourself. You’ll have to read the book to discover its beauties.
Quick Facts on Paul Maliszewski
- Home: Washington, DC
- Top reads: The list fluctuates, but some dependable favorites include William Gaddis’s J R and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.
For a while there, I bought every used copy I found of those novels and
passed them along to friends. Grace Paley’s short stories astound me,
for how effortless they seem. They’re so completely free of the usual
narrative mechanics. They just speak, like a voice in your ear. I love
Donald Barthelme’s stories, too. In college, when I first read them, I
remember taking them as a license and an invitation: he can do anything,
therefore so can I. As I continued to read them, though, I found so
much sadness and complication under the antic inventiveness. I could
just go on listing things here, but one new book I admire a whole lot is
Scott Bradfield’s novel The People Who Watched Her Pass By.
- Current reads: Adam Gilders’s collection of stories Another Ventriloquist. I’m writing a review for Bookforum.
Gilders was a Canadian author who died of a brain tumor in 2007. The
stories are wonderful. Gilders writes about people at work, in office
settings, and pays attention to how they think. I did pick up Paradise Lost,
because Gilders did his PhD at the University of Toronto and wrote his
dissertation on Milton. But I’ve been trying lately not to have a
million books going at once, something I easily fall into.
What are you working on?
The big thing I’m doing is a much-delayed project about Joseph
Mitchell (much-delayed, I should say, by me). Over the years, Mitchell
collected stuff, for lack of a more inclusive word. He collected
doorknobs and escutcheons, bricks and chunks of floor tile, wires ripped
from walls and spikes pried from beams. No matter what he collected or
where he found an object, he almost always wrote down the place and
date, including brief notations about the object’s relationship to other
pieces in his collection. He tied these notes to the objects with
string and placed them in boxes or, if the object was small, he dropped
it into a plastic capsule or a jam jar or a baggie. I’m working on this
with my friend Steve Featherstone, who has done some great reporting for
Harper’s, among many other magazines. Steve has been
photographing the collection, and I’m writing an essay about it, with
the book to be published by Princeton Architectural Press. An earlier
incarnation of our project appeared in
Granta some years back.
What do you hope readers will take away from Prayer and Parable?
I hope I’ve made it so readers can’t take anything away from
Prayer and Parable.
I mean, I hope they like it. I hope they find something recognizable in
it, that deep chords are struck, even. But there’s no message, there’s
just the thing itself, the book itself, the stories themselves. I think
all art—writing, music, painting, what have you—should aspire to be
irreducible. We can try to boil it down, of course. We do that all the
time. We describe the play we saw to a friend, or say you’d really like
this song, because it sort of reminds me of something you were saying
the other night about x or y or z. But that’s just what we do to
communicate. We use shorthand, because it’s impossible to convey a piece
of sculpture, for example, in its entirety, using a few words. That’s
why, in those conversations, we often end up saying, “You just have to
see it.” You have to see it for yourself.
“There’s just the thing itself,
the book itself, the stories themselves.”
Where and when do you prefer to write?
I write when I can. My wife and I have a son, and I take care of him
during the day. I write during his naps, when he naps, and I write at
night, after he’s gone to bed, provided I have the energy. I’m not
particularly ritualistic about where I write. For a while, I did a lot
of writing in bed, laying across the bed. Lately, though, I’ve been
doing more writing downstairs during the day, in a chair by the window,
the reason being that if the mail comes or UPS or something, I need to
be able to get to the door before someone knocks and wakes up the boy.
The main habit I stick to is that I write my fiction longhand and
tend to write nonfiction on the computer. I focus better on the story
with pen and paper. There’s just some connection there, for me, with the
writing speed and the thinking speed. Maybe it’s that handwriting is
somewhat slower and it makes me slow down and be patient. Also, I don’t
want the computer’s editing tools standing by, when I’m just starting
out. It’s too easy to become mired in moving paragraphs around instead
of getting some forward momentum. Finally, the distraction of email can
prove too great at times. If I checked my email every time I need to
stop and think of some phrase or line of dialogue, I’d never get
anything done.
Do you listen to anything while you write?
I can’t listen to music while writing or editing. I wrote papers in
college while listening to music. I had a tape with Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue on one side and
In a Silent Way
on the other, and I just kept flipping that cassette while I wrote. Now
I need complete quiet. I have a pair of those noise-cancelling
headphones that I wear sometimes. My powers of concentration were much
greater, years ago. Once, I was sitting at my desk, writing, and my
girlfriend played the same song over and over on the stereo, just
hitting repeat on the CD player. This was a song I really didn’t like,
too, and she knew I didn’t like it, and was, I think, being funny. The
song was “Now Be Thankful,” from Richard Thompson’s otherwise brilliant
Watching the Dark
boxed set. “Now Be Thankful” is from his Fairport Convention days and,
really, if you wanted to create a parody of everything that is
ridiculous about 60s British folk, you could just play that song. It has
this just prancing, elfin feel to it. A few notes alone can put me in
mind of renaissance fairs and juggling jesters and tankards of mead.
Anyway, I was writing, and this song was playing, and finally, at some
point, I looked up and said, “This song is so annoying,” and my
girlfriend said, “I’ve only played it seven or eight times.” I had no
idea. I’d only just become aware of it being on. And it’s not a short
song. That said, for all my super concentration, my writing then was not
what I would call good. Also, and perhaps more curiously, I’ve started
to kind of like “Now Be Thankful.”
Do you have a philosophy for why you write?
I write because I have to write, because there’s something that needs
to be written, something that must be written, because I know if I
didn’t write it, nobody else would.
“I know if I didn’t write it, nobody else would.”
How do you balance content with form?
I think of the stories in this book as having forms. Some are prayers
and some are parables. Those forms might not mean much to anybody other
than me, but they have intrinsic rules and limits which I’ve abided.
I’ve also been working on a novel in the form of letters to former
President George W Bush. I think of the letter as a form, too. None of
these forms is like the villanelle, of course, or the sestina. They’re
much more forgiving, roomier, but still, over the years, when I’ve had
an idea, I’ll think, is this for the prayer thing, or is this a letter?
Sometimes it’s neither, but the times when the idea was right for a
prayer or a letter, it just felt like something fit, like the content
matched what I knew I could do in a particular form. And I knew it
instantly. I don’t recall deliberating or starting something as a
prayer, say, and then deciding, oh, no, actually, it should be a letter.
I guess what I’m saying is that there’s something in the idea
itself—the content isn’t even content yet, it’s embryonic, nothing is
even written down in note form—that insists on what form it will take.
Is there a quote about writing that inspires you?
This is going to seem odd, but there’s a quote from Jack Nicholson,
talking about acting, that I like a lot. I came across it one night
while watching the “making of” documentary that’s included on
The Shining
DVD, and took to it immediately, to the point that I got pen and paper
and wrote it down, starting and stopping the video, until I had it word
for word. In the documentary, Nicholson is just talking about working
with Kubrick, and he says:
“Anything you do as many
times as a successful actor—you can’t have one set of theories. You can
go for years saying, ‘I’m going to get this real, because they really
haven’t seen it real.’ They just keep seeing one fashion of unreal after
the other that passes as real, and you go mad with realism and then you
come up against someone like Stanley who says, ‘Yeah, it’s real, but
it’s not interesting.’”
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Max Apple, my creative writing teacher in college, told us that, if
we were serious about wanting to be writers, we would have to write a
dozen bad stories. I took him literally and so tried to write my awful
dozen as quickly as possible, to get them under my belt and, you know,
move into my golden period. I sometimes repeat that advice but inflate
the number to two dozen, because, frankly, I just think that’s more
realistic. It was for me. The other thing I say, which students never
like or maybe they just don’t believe me, is that they need to love
writing—the actual solitary work of it—and they need to keep publishing
in its place, ideally a small, separate place that doesn’t require a lot
of oxygen or occupy much of their attention, because publishing, just
taking all this writing and trying to find a home for the stuff, is a
fickle and, at times, frustrating business.
“Love writing—the actual solitary work of it.”
What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?
My friend Steve, with whom I’m working on the Joseph Mitchell
project, once observed that characters in fiction almost never make a
metaphor or get to think a line of more literary-type language. That
ability to speak and think, that power to find the higher registers of
expression, is kept from them and reserved instead for the narrator and
author. It’s as if the characters are these cavemen and -women, who
haven’t even invented fire yet. They’re just left to, in effect, grunt
and gesture dumbly at the sky. I think of this observation of Steve’s so
often, more than any piece of advice. It seems manifestly true. It also
seems like a current to work against. I like characters who reach for
some understanding. I like characters who try to articulate their lives.
I like books that don’t deny them that.
What do you find most challenging about writing?
Structure. I feel like I’m only now just getting a handle on the most fundamental aspects of structure.
When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?
Watch movies at home, be with my wife and son, go to the National Gallery.
About Paul Maliszewski
Paul Maliszewski has published essays in
Harper’s,
Granta, and
Bookforum, among other magazines. He is the author of
Fakers, a collection of essays published by The News Press. His stories have appeared in
The Paris Review,
Black Clock,
One Story,
BOMB, and elsewhere, and have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes.
Prayer and Parable is Maliszewski’s first collection of fiction. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and son. -
wordswithwriters.com/
An Interview with Paul Maliszewski
by Weston Cutter
It’s been awhile since we’ve had the chance to run an
interview this fun and in-depth in awhile, which makes this all the more
satisfying: a long, interesting-as-hell interview with Paul
Maliszewski, he of Prayer and Parable and Fakers, both of which I thought were excellent (reviews here and here).
I’m not sure there’s all that much critical info one needs to get into
this, aside from this: this could’ve been much, much longer. Maybe
this’ll be some on-going thing, a Checking In With Paul feature on
Corduroy. Regardless: enjoy the interview, but, obviously, more
critically: go purchase the man’s books and read them and pass them
along. A formatting note: no, I don’t know why the footnotes don’t
automatically jump you to the page’s bottom, nor how to make them do
so.
Do you feel like there’s anyone writing at present who’s writing with any sort of similar aesthetic goals as you?
You’re supposing I can know other people’s aesthetic goals, when I
can’t reliably explain my own. But let me say this: two recent books
that gave me strong feelings of recognition were Adam Gilders’s
Another Ventriloquist, a collection of stories, and Deb Unferth’s novel
Vacation.
Our sentences aren’t outwardly similar. Unferth’s are more arresting,
the syntax torqued, where mine are plainer on the surface, to the point
of seeming flat. This business of recognition is tricky, though. It’s a
little like hearing a song on the radio and thinking, That sounds so
much like my life! She must be singing for/about/to me! There’s
guesswork involved, and one finally has to make a great interpretive
leap. Both Gilders and Unferth pay particular attention to the thoughts
of their characters, and they do so in not-typical ways, i.e. not just
saying, so-and-so thought, quote-unquote, I’m not happy at my job. I
appreciate when characters are allowed to think, and at some length. I
like when they’re given access to sophisticated language, too, even
literary language. I’m not a fan of the terse, uncommunicative school of
character, where the author gets to be occasionally lyrical and the
characters are all like, Hey, what’s up? Not much. You? There’s also
some attempt in these books to capture the grammar of consciousness.
This is not to say Unferth and Gilders are writing stream of
consciousness. It’s more an interest in people’s logic, how people try
to explain who they are and what they’re about, and how they deceive
themselves with their accounts, which can seem carefully constructed but
are rarely complete.
I really like your work, and I really like Helen DeWitt’s
work—it seems like you two have this weird overlap, just in the reliance
or utilization of something like rational rigor, or something like
that: the worlds in which each of your works are set matter, the rules and orders of it. I don’t see this lots of places. Do you?
DeWitt is near the top of a lengthy list of authors I really need to read already. I haven’t even read
The Last Samurai.
I have been reading about the new one in reviews and interviews, so I
think—operative word, think—I know what you mean. My book has some
stories that are prayers and some that are parables. The parables are
more like fables—things in them stand for other things, or hold out that
possibility. The parables also often have some unrealistic premise that
is dealt with initially and then just becomes the ground situation for
the story. It is like you say, these worlds have different rules. In my
stories, most of the rules are the same as in our world except for one
significant thing, which is slightly off. It’s like, okay, gravity, for
this story, will be green—and then I just try to deal with that as part
of the new world and develop it in fairly realistic ways.
I also like logic. Logic was one of my favorite classes in college. I
tell people that sometimes, and they’re always like, Really? Logic? But
yes, I like logic. An old girlfriend once told me that if I were a
Greek hero, my tragic flaw would be that I always think people can be
convinced by a good argument, and I’m forever disappointed, of course,
just crushed. I also think logic is funny, when it breaks down, or when
people fall before logic and become frustrated by the terrific binds it
puts them in. That drama is endlessly compelling.
You see a lot of attention to logic and what you’re calling rational
rigor in satire. Satire is an argument strapped like a bomb to the
underside of a humor-delivery vehicle. And DeWitt’s
Lightning Rods
seems (if I may) like a work of satire. That said, I don’t think of the
stories in my book as satiric. I like satire, and I doubtless have
learned a lot from reading my way around the satiric canon, and I’ve
even written satires at times, but these stories are not satires. They
do have that attention to logic. It’s just not my logic as the
author/satirist trying to put forward some argument that unpacks, say,
the hypocrisies of the human animal. What interests me is the
characters’ ways of thinking. Where do they get stuck? What do they keep
circling around, trying to figure out?
You’re right on DeWitt, and it’s funny that you liked logic in college—I’m predisposed toward math[1],
and I end up finding more and more writers whose work comes from a
non-belletristic background (Blake Butler, for instance, went to GTech
to study computers), and I think there’s a wiring difference that
obtains because of it (DeWitt studied classics at Oxford). Also: I don’t
think your work’s satiric, either: that idea of people going to war
with their own logic, that makes total sense—and the ultimate reveal is character,
whereas satire’s ultimate aim/reveal is a deflation of something
external, or so it seems to this very non-scholarly person. Do you feel
like your work’s coming out of some specific tradition?
Well, you’d have to put Beckett on that list. People are always being
undone by logic in Beckett, and it’s a great source of humor, their
undoing, as well as empathy. I always feel, reading about them, close to
coming undone myself. Kafka’s important, too, for similar reasons, as
well as for his premises and the way he develops them: guy wakes up as a
bug; guy wakes up and is arrested; imagine an artist whose work is
starving himself; imagine an execution machine that inscribes on the
body of a condemned man the law that he violated; imagine the world in
which such a device exists; then imagine, and this is the most important
part, the mental landscape of the people who operate the execution
machine. There’s definitely a stronger European tradition for this sort
of work. I would also mention here Flann O’Brien, Thomas Bernhard, and
Robert Walser.
Years ago, I read Milan Kundera’s
Immortality, and there’s a
moment in that novel where two of his characters, two sisters, as I
recall, are used to illustrate some point he wants to make about people.
The sisters, you see, represent two types of people, and Kundera has a
character draw the sisters as simple diagrams. Kundera has this great
ability to treat his characters as characters—full-bodied,
three-dimensional, completely human, all a realist could want—as well as
illustrations, and he can move back and forth, with the illustration
not compromising the realistic work of character-building, but rather
enriching how we see his people. Thousands of students in thousands of
workshops might suppose differently, but so be it. You can find examples
of this fluidity of character throughout his work, especially
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
where he smoothly switches between realistic story and literary essay
and allegory and dream and history. The book hardly needs me to declare
it a masterpiece, but I will.
I don’t want to make it sound like your work’s somehow
radically different—it’s great—but it does seem like it’s fundamentally
doing other stuff than, say, Franzen’s, or Eugenides’, or whoever’s.[2]
No, that’s fine. I get it. I’m an odd bird, I know I am. I wanted to
say, though, despite all my European credential-flashing, there’s a part
of me—a big part of me—that loves Raymond Carver and Richard Yates and
Denis Johnson, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say I owe a lot to
their work as well. You know that old Dostoevsky quote, “We all came out
from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’”? Many of us were born and are still
standing in Carver’s “Cathedral,” mouths agape. There’s a lot of room
inside to hunker down and do our work. My point is, I don’t see my
writing as unrealistic or even—I dislike this word, but it’s so widely
used that it’s pointless to fight it—experimental. I’m writing realism.
It’s different from other people’s realism, but only because I attend to
different aspects of reality. It’s not, however, unrealistic.
Eugenides I can’t really speak about. I haven’t read any of his books. My wife read
The Virgin Suicides and recently started
The Marriage Plot.
The other night I asked her, Why do you think people like his stuff? I
was curious. Maybe I’ll read it someday, you know. She thought about it
for a second and said, The writing’s good but it’s not off-putting. It
doesn’t make you work. And then she said: also, he’s describing things
people already know. I asked what she meant. Well, she said, he
describes, for instance, what it’s like to wake up with a hangover after
graduation. It’s all familiar.
As for Franzen, I read
Freedom like everyone else, and I
liked parts of it a lot, the beginning especially. When I read that
opening section, I thought, This is our
Revolutionary Road. I
don’t think he sustains that, unfortunately, but that opening held so
much promise. It was so sure and had such depth. The novel as a whole is
deeply flawed, though. Structurally, it lurches from story to story,
beginning things but not always digging in and developing them. It’s
like Franzen would rather start something new rather than finish
something in the works. But what I liked and what I was impressed by are
his psychological insights. He has complicated insights into his
characters—into people. He’s good on the nasty interpersonal stuff that
people do, especially smart people, as they’re trying to get the
upper-hand or figure out where they stand in relation to one another. I
haven’t seen him praised for that, which is a shame, because I think
it’s better writing, ultimately, than the big-picture,
ripped-from-the-headlines, portrait-of-the-culture-as-a-whole stuff that
people fawn over.
I agree with that last bit—he does that well—but I think he
chooses awfully easy characters to do this sort of work on—he chooses,
basically, iterations of him… which is fine, okay, but he really doesn’t
stretch, I don’t think.
Iterations of him, yes, I get that. Maybe we know Franzen too well,
though. He’s put so much of himself out there, not just in his personal
essays, but also in his appearances as a bonafide media figure, which he
has been—he may like it or not—since the days of
The Corrections
and that whole mess with Oprah. Reading Franzen is like seeing George
Clooney in a movie. The essential and unalterable Clooney-ness never
completely disappears.
Maybe this is awful of me to think this way, but there’s a… I don’t know how to say it. Look, we’ve both read Freedom:
by the end of that novel, we know these characters by
significations—the who-gives-a-shit musician guy, the mom, the spineless
dad, whatever. But we don’t actually get lots of their insides—it’s the
same thing with the shitful new Eugenides as well.[3]
I don’t want to sound too mean, but those books and the
hundreds/thousands that do that thing don’t ultimately seem to be trying
to do the stuff you’re doing (or DeWitt, or Unferth, or Diane Williams,
or Barthelme, or Kelly Link, or whoever). Someone who maybe straddles
that line’s Lorrie Moore. I’m young, too—I’m 32 and freshfaced and all.
Maybe I just don’t know a secret lineage of stuff like this work, but it
does seem like there are books I get—yours, stuff by J. Robert Lennon,
etc.—that feel fundamentally different, start to finish, than other
fiction.[4]
Freedom was a disappointment. It’s easy (but not inaccurate)
to summarize the characters. Pious liberal environmentalist who gets
his comeuppance. Young, idealistic intern whom the liberal, of course,
has an affair with. And yet, I still thought there were human insights.
I’d have to get my book down and hunt for examples—don’t make me get my
Freedom
out, Cutter!—but I think I appreciated his character-making more than
you. I was still frustrated by the novel, but there were times when I
thought, I haven’t seen a fictional human think like that before. There
were just complexities that the summaries don’t contain. A lot of the
complexity comes when Franzen writes about the rivalry between his two
male leads, but I also thought the stuff between Patty and her mother
was great. Still, those summary versions are so handy that it’s
difficult not to think of a Franzen character as a big box with a crude
label on the top: Long-Suffering Wife being the most obvious.
One thing to say is that you’re talking about art on two different
scales here. It’s not apples and oranges, but it is, on one hand, a
variety of apple that has proven to be enticing/wonderful/delicious to
millions and, on the other hand, an apple that is more of an acquired
taste, oddly bitter perhaps. To put this in other terms: Franzen is like
network TV, a program that is both the most popular and the most
acclaimed. If he were a late-night talk-show host, he would have great
ratings and the critics, even the hardest-to-please ones, would adore
him. Whereas I—I can’t speak for anyone else on your list—I’m like this
scruffy comedian who erratically shows up on random street corners, does
his little performance, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for just
a single joke, nobody ever knows in advance, and then he moves on,
having probably alienated or insulted as many people as he’s
entertained. My point is not to run Franzen down or aggrandize myself.
My point is to say: Jay Leno doesn’t want to be that street comedian.
Moreover, if you asked him to comment on the work, I’m not sure he would
have much to say. Would you trust his reading? Would you bother asking
him for a quote? At the same time, the street comedian doesn’t want to
be on TV and perhaps can’t readily understand what Leno’s up to either.
As for the secret lineage, what differentiates the writers you
mention from Franzen, say, is the difference between society books and
individual books. Franzen wants to capture the whole society. It’s a
white society, predominantly, middle- to upper-class, but let’s leave
that alone for now. Franzen wants to get at “the way we live now,” to
quote that awful name for a column in the
New York Times Magazine,
a column which has been discontinued, though its guiding spirit lives
on. At times, Franzen’s canvas is so large that chunks of the novel read
like articles in the
Times or
New Yorker features.
I’m thinking of that unwieldy fact download about mountaintop removal
that Franzen tries, absurdly, to smuggle in as dialogue. The writing’s
very newsy. I wondered as I read how it will age. Will it become dated
quickly? At times, it gets hamstrung by its relentless pursuit of
currency. There was a scene where an older man—the father of that woman
(Jenna) that Patty’s son (Joey, I’m having to look this up, the names
are already fading from the picture) falls in love with—uses the term
app figuratively. He’s talking about Judaism and is saying that the good
thing about it is “You can choose your very own apps and features, so
to speak.” That line stopped me. Is that believable from this guy? Was
app even in the language at this point? If it was, had the word bled
into non-technical, figurative uses? Had app trickled up to the
generally-out-of-touch set? What year is this supposed to be, anyway?
All these niggling questions, but the reality of the book—of any
book—can be shook by the slightest tremor of doubt.
Every now and then there was some bit of language that struck me as
anachronistic, which is, at one level, crazy, because can something from
2007 be
that out of place in 2004? Were the times really so
different? But that’s the steep downside with these of-the-moment books:
you get mired in the incidental reality. As I did when I found myself
asking, Would
Pirates of the Caribbean be an in-flight movie at
this time? Would it be shown on a flight from the Caribbean? Even if
that’s all true in the fact-checker sense, my attention has wandered.
It’s like I was watching a movie but ignored the actors in order to
scrutinize the furniture. And this was a book I was reading for
pleasure. Maybe the passage of time will iron out these problems. I
should have waited twenty years to read
Freedom.
Individual books don’t get bogged down in set dressing. Often they
just leave it out. These are books more concerned with a person, or
maybe two people, or a family, though not a family in any sociological
fashion. These books are much less worried about depicting “the times.”
What is the society in
Molloy or
Murphy or, for that
matter, any Beckett? You can get a sense of the world, I suppose, but
it’s not the point. It’s not even a tertiary point.
Waiting for Godot
is not a play about what a mess the world has become. It’s not a
warning to heed. It’s not some environmentalist tract about the peril we
face in a world without trees. It’s about the individual, the world
just happens to be barren to focus our attention. And it’s about the
mind of the individual, and the language that remains. Nobody comes out
of
Godot and asks, But how did the world get wrecked? You accept the premise and just listen to Vladimir and Estragon.
Here’s a question for you, if I may. You described my work as being
“fundamentally driven by non-character engines.” Since this seems like
an insight that could explain myself to me, I have to ask: What are
these engines? You mentioned the scenario and the world of the story.
Are those the same? Are there other engines, either in my work or
others? Are you interested in non-character engines as a writer as well?
This is a really good question, which sucks for me, because
I’m lazy. How about this: two of the stories I most enjoy teaching are
Saunders’ “Sea Oak” and John Leary’s “Scenarios for Lee’s Forgiveness.”
Both stories feature massive enginery in terms of scenario/world of
story (“Sea Oak”‘s got the grandma coming back to life, “Scenarios”
features a list of feasible ways for this couple to forgive each other,
all set at a birthday party [this story’s been, from my finding, totally
underloved: it was in One Story]), but the
characteristics of Saunders’ characters are much more critical than
those of Leary’s. I think the first person I read who knocked me
sideways in terms of this stuff is Millhauser: his stuff’s got
characters, but the situation of the story, the unfolding of plot, the
uniqueness of the situation: these fundamentally drive the story and
keep the reader going.
I really, really like stories that harness this sort of
energy—I don’t know how accurate the comparison might be, but the
feeling’s akin to a microphone which picks up the sound of the whole
room vs. one that just picks up the voice singing into it.[5] I really liked, say, Harbach’s Fielding,
and I loved the characters and miss them etc., but I’m also really,
really interested in and enjoy hugely stories from folks like Kelly Link
and Aimee Bender—stories where the situation of the story dominates,
and the characters are there and all, that’s fine, but who they are, the
memories of them skinning their knees, age nine, etc.—this stuff
doesn’t ultimately drive the story the way other works by other folks
demand.
Millhauser is a maker of some great, well-wrought worlds. I like
Martin Dressler,
a William Dean Howells novel except with more lyrical and imaginative
flights about the development and evolution of a department store. I see
what you mean about scenario-based fiction. With Millhauser, I get this
image of a jeweler bent over an intricate box, like something by
Fabergé but more elaborate and larger. He’s setting tiny bits of wire
into his beloved box, soldering them into place, and then moving onto
the next piece of filigree. There are characters, like you say, but
they’re figures inside the jeweled box, among many other figures. It’s
hard not to appreciate the box as a box as much as one does the figures
inside. It’s all so ultimately crafted.
I’m curious, too, in what the difference is, for you, between
the prayers and parables in your book. I’m a shittily unfocused reader
sometime—I don’t remember the names of characters, for instance—and I
rarely track titles, so I know I didn’t pay all that much attention to
the differences between Prayers and Parables for you. How’s the
distinction shake out?
That distinction came late to me. For quite a while, they were all
prayers, but what happened is I got into a lazy habit with the titles
and just thought, Oh, another prayer, okay, the title will go “Prayer
for…” or “Prayer against…,” and that was that. I stopped thinking about
it, which was a blessing at the time, because I find it hard to come up
with titles. When the manuscript was starting to feel complete, though, I
stepped back and thought again and realized that some of the stories
were different and, too, maybe there should be some way to distinguish
them. I didn’t want to have a book divided into two sections, like
halves. So that’s how the parables came into it. It was just a way to
acknowledge a difference that I’d been denying with my uniform titles.
As for the distinction itself, basically, the prayer stories are more
realistic (I think), and the parables operate on a metaphorical level.
To use your terms, the parables are more scenario-based.
What do you think fiction should do? I know this gets dicey,
all sorts of moral/Gardner-esque stuff, but I think the above does a
fair job of acknowledging that there’s a different lineage, or at least another
lineage of “realist fiction”—stuff which takes as its focus different
aspects of reality, or at least different tastes/feels of reality.
This makes me think of two Robert Coover quotes, only one of which I’ve been able to track down, sorry. He recently told a
Guardian
reporter who asked about realism: “I learned my realism from guys like
Kafka.” I’ve also seen him say somewhere, I swear, that as far as he’s
concerned, he’s been writing realism all along. People may call it
postmodern or black humor or magical realism or whatever they want, but
to him it has always just felt real. So is “The Babysitter” unrealistic
because it’s broken into many parts, parts that sometimes backtrack and
revise or contradict one another? Or does it, with its twisting
variations and its fractured quality, get at some real psychological
stuff, the interplay and repetitions of fantasies, stuff deep in the
brain, deeper certainly than well-put details about the cut of a
character’s pants?
Or take Barth, for instance. In his early stuff, he has these great
anxious characters, just incredibly worried people. I’m thinking of the
narrator in
The End of the Road and the title story in
Lost in the Funhouse.
You can’t have that very real anxiousness without what’s innovative
or—I should really stop using this word—experimental. The anxiousness is
actually heightened by the experimental form, making what’s real more
palpable, more felt.
As for what fiction should do, I’ve hinted around about this
somewhat, but I’ll spell it out here: fiction should be mapping the
reality of the inner landscape. To me, that’s the strength of fiction,
what it can manage that other art forms can’t, or at least not as well.
That said, our outer reality, the reality we share—call it the world—is
still always interesting, worth describing and narrating. As I’ve said,
there’s as much Carver in me as Beckett. I just happen to believe that
outer reality cannot be the end point of art.
How’d you end up writing the ways you write? I know little
about your background other than Syracuse, so I’ve got nothing. But
certainly this strain of realism that you work within—that’s an overt
choice against some other competing dogmas or whatever.
If I stop and think about it, I guess I prefer x over y, but I don’t
sit down and think, Time to work against the major dogmas of the day.
Really, I think it’s more like that TV comedian/street clown analogy.
I’m always going to be the street clown. I woke up this way. I can only
do what I do, finally. I don’t know how I ended up writing this way. We
read Carver in college, but we read him alongside Barthelme,
Where Are You Calling from? and
Sixty Stories,
back to back. That was the contemporary American story as I was taught
it. Barthelme and company weren’t some misguided detour taken during the
60s and 70s. They were a still vital part of literature. This was at
Rice University, in Houston. Barthelme was still teaching across town,
at U of H, when I started there. After his death,
Gulf Coast,
the U of H literary magazine, published an issue of reminiscences and
had a reading at Brazos Bookstore. I went to that. I received strong
doses of the moderns (Pound’s
Cantos in a poetry class) and the postmoderns. We read
Gravity’s Rainbow in seventy-six page chunks, discussing it over, I think, five weeks of class.
Our creative writing teacher then was Max Apple, who in his work
finds a sweet spot between formal innovation and telling a human story.
See for instance “An Offering,” from his collection
Free Agents,
which reads like a corporate report announcing the sale of twenty
thousand class-B shares in Max Apple Inc. It’s a story that works as a
satire of commodification—everything stickered, everything with its
price—as well as an earnest offer to the unknown reader. It’s a story
about a writer that manages to be clever and sympathetic.
The English department then was distinctly pre-theory. There was one
young professor, basically, who did theory. So we weren’t, you know,
reading Barthelme in light of the poststructuralists. We read him as
literature. Friends and I would talk about Barthelme stories the way
people talk about movies. You know: Remember that part where the guy
says… Just recounting favorite bits, quoting lines, laughing. “Some of
Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” was a monument to us. We
gathered around it. Not that I understood what I read. Initially I read
Barthelme as this license to do anything—you want to put pictures in
your story, put pictures in your story—which I guess is encouraging to a
novice. It took years for me to grasp that there was a structure
underlying the inventiveness. It wasn’t just page after page of antic
carrying-on. When he writes, in “Rebecca,” that “one should never cease
considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no
matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page,” it’s not just a
bunch of lovely, striking words strung together. And yet I stared and
can still stare at that final phrase, that warm tympanic page, repeating
it, listening to it, wondering where in the world it came from. It took
me a while to realize that when Barthelme says one should never cease
considering human love, he actually means that one should never cease
considering human love. Sometimes he says just what he means. Eventually
I learned that lesson.
When I got to grad school, I realized pretty quickly that I’d read a
different set of books than some of the other students, who were more of
what you’d call traditional realists. For the first workshop, Michael
Martone asked us to bring in copies of a story that meant a lot to us, a
story by another writer. I brought in “The Distance of the Moon,” by
Italo Calvino, from
Cosmicomics. Other students brought in
Steinbeck, Carver, John Knowles, Cheever, and Stuart Dybek. One student,
I think, knew Calvino, and he’d lived and taught in Italy. Most of the
students had never heard of him. I remember Michael talked to me after
class about how great it was to see Calvino, because, as he said, it’s
what you’d expect someone to bring up in the 1970s. My Calvino photocopy
got passed around outside of class. Weeks later, a poet told me how
much he liked it. That Calvino story, he said. Man.
How big was Prayer and Parable? How’d you come to understand
and perceive of its shape? Were there prayers or parables you cut? Were
there ones you were missing that you, on putting the thing together as a
collection, realized you needed to write? The book’s awesome for lots
of reasons, not least that it feels cohesive, and of course I’m curious
about how that shook out for the organizer of the thing.
There were two or maybe three pieces that I cut. Mostly that was an
issue of the stories feeling to me like they no longer worked. My
writing changed over the time I worked on these stories. I worked on
them for a while, and I revised the old ones—I had to in almost every
case, sometimes heavily—but a few just refused to be revised. I couldn’t
make them work. Really, I just couldn’t find any urgency in them, or
any energy. They didn’t feel like what I was at that point calling
stories. I didn’t believe them any longer and, worse, I couldn’t get my
head back into them. I assume at the time they excited me and felt
vital, all that, but something had expired in them, an important
ingredient had turned sour.
I did want to write some new stories. I had scribbled notes for a
bunch of new things, but as I read them over, they seemed either no
longer necessary—already covered by an earlier story—or just
unintelligible. Only a few ideas were really asking to be written, and
those were ones I didn’t need to remind myself about. I’d been thinking
about them off and on for years and knew the book wouldn’t be complete
until I turned to them. Coincidentally (or not), they’re the last three
stories in the book. The collection is not chronological in terms of how
I wrote them (there are newer and older stories mixed together); it
just worked out that the newest stories appear last. I do think of the
collection as having a rough chronology in terms of what the characters
go through. It’s like the book is a partial biography of the central
characters. It begins with a boyfriend-girlfriend story and then, in the
second-to-last story, a couple is talking about having a baby, the
woman of the couple thinks she might be pregnant but isn’t sure. In the
final story, another couple has the baby. It’s not perfect, this
chronology, just like how the division between parables and prayers is
far from tidy, but the arrangement meant something to me. There’s an arc
there, and I make a gesture of tracing it in the air. Not that any of
this was apparent to me all along. I didn’t have a grand plan. I usually
don’t. I just try to finish one story.
[1] How so? And how has math influenced your writing?
WC: I’m naturally better at math than writing or
English—tested well, excitedly/voluntarily captained the HS math team,
was a class away from accidentally minoring in math in college simply
because I’d taken classes I liked which were math. I know my
mathematical needs and urges get more obviously manifest in structural
ways—I put poetry on the page with something like an arithmetic ear
toward balance involved. I’m pretty taken with systems—prose to me
ultimately works or doesn’t by the gorgeousness of its system as much as
by its characters (DeWitt in an interview talked about this—the thrill
of
what if—that might be the way to talk about math, too: a
story which ultimately functions as a postulation). My writing’s not
quite as math focused as it used to be, but my early stories didn’t
feature much character; mostly I was taken with structural questions. By
and large, Barthelme and Mark Danielewski did this to me. I think the
impulse has faded, but it’s not too far beneath the surface.
[2] What is this other stuff? Or, to put it another way, what’s missing for you in Franzen?
WC: All this should be read in the context of me having had a shitty fall in terms of reading fiction—aside from Harbach’s
Fielding, I was massively disappointed in novels (Eugenides + Whitehead at the top of the list)—and my recollection of
Freedom
has dimmed significantly since I read it (I loved it when I read it—was
100% enraptured—but I’m not at all sure it holds up; it feels awfully
of its exact moment, calendrically inert). What’s also weird: I really
didn’t like
Reality Hunger when it hit, but I fundamentally
agree with (what I took to be) one of its big arguments—that Dickensian,
linear fiction fixated on verisimilitude doesn’t obtain at present. I
agree with this. I don’t think fiction’s made great strides (or poetry,
for that matter) in challenging itself and allowing its form to shift in
significant ways. Wallace did it, Danielewski did it, I think DOUnferth
does it in
Vacation, and Orner’s
Love and Shame and Love
is great and pushes well into a new form for a contemporary novel, but
overall I don’t think fiction’s done that great a job of finding organic
forms which’ll allow it to more closely and well map the reality of
contemporary experience. So there’s that: I think Franzen’s form is just
sort of eh—I thought the journal in the novel was old fashioned and
easy, more of a neat trick than a character-based necessity.
I think your work, unlike Franzen’s, is fundamentally exploring
characters on the page—exploring real people, getting in heads. I think
Franzen’s work, and Eugenides, and lots of folks’s work, is
fundamentally getting into
types of characters’ heads. By way
of example: I’m an early-30’s white MFA guy, professor at a college. I
believe in buying a Prius, though I haven’t; I purchase and use Apple
products; I have certain hopes for not destroying the earth. However:
I’m also aware and alive enough to occasionally find it odd that I lie
in bed and tap imaginary buttons on the glass screen of my phone, and my
thoughts don’t follow overt paths based on who I am or how I’d appear
on a page. If I were to be written as what I am in pretty obvious ways, I
think it’d be a terrible robbery of the interior I possess. I think
there are writers who are okay with the level of chaos that comes from
truly opening someone wide, as a person instead of a type, and writers
who are not. I think those who are not write fiction that’s more
comfortable, and those who are write fiction that’s a bit weirder. I
think Wallace was a genius who could somehow do both those
things—balance perfectly the surprise and expectations of the reader.
Franzen, ultimately, is someone who gives too much to expectations.
[3] Shitful how? I was leaning toward skipping it, but now you have me curious.
WC: The ways in which the Eugenides novel fails are
too numerous to count. Ultimately, I didn’t remotely care about the
characters or story. There’s a moment in the book which both my wife and
I paused at (I asked her to read it because I was reviewing the book
for a newspaper and was doubting my intensely negative reaction), a line
about a book which plods on for pages but then feels like it’s finally
working—this is a horrible cobbling of whatever it was he said—but that
tiny part of the book felt very knowing—like Eugenides was aware of how
ploddingly bad the thing was. Ed Champion blasted the thing on Good
Reads, and the review in the NYTimes is on the right track as well. I’ll
also say that Eugenides’s “not true at all” response to the inarguable
fact that he’s got a DFWallace character in there is sad and stupid.
Dude in the book
literally uses Wallace’s words—sad that a writer won’t at least cop to it. A really crap read. For real.
[4]
We’re circling something. It’s important, but it’s hard to articulate.
What is the difference? I’m not convinced I’ve come close to putting my
finger on it.
WC: I’ve now been thinking about this for close to
five days. I think you’re accurate on Franzen approximating broadcast
television and other voices being distinct, farther afield. What I’ve
ended up being fairly confident feeling is that Franzen and Eugenides
and that range of writers (KGessen of
n+1 is certainly part of
that group; there’s plenty—would be nitpicky, exhausting fun to create a
thorough taxonomy of it) are ultimately creating characters they depend
on the reader recognizing. What I’m sure of—and I’m not about to run
upstairs to pull books and prove it, but I’m nearly certain—is that
Franzen/Eugenidies/etc. are creating characters that depend on the
reader recognizing stuff,
types. That’s a broad way to put it.
But there is, in reading certain fictions, a feeling the reader gets of
the author either anticipating us recognizing something and letting us—
needing us to—fill in certain blanks, and that gets awful and exhausting. Easy example: of
course Walter and Patty drive a Prius at the end of
Freedom.
Of course they do. Is that a) a smart detail on Franzen’s part, a
recognition of who these characters are and a supply of what the reader
wants/needs or b) a bit of an obvious sham, given that there’s
no other car
they could possibly drive? I think that q’s hard to say, and I’ll admit
it’s a tiny point, but shit like that, at that level, is where Franzen
fails, for me: it’s in the details, and they add up. These tiny,
cellular-level decisions which make the books bigger and realer or not,
realer meaning ultimately able to surprise the reader.
Freedom offered lots of satisfactions but not much surprise. For the record: I think Eugenides in
Virgin Suicides totally does this, and well and gorgeously—that novel’s a masterpiece—but his latest one misses in exactly these ways.
[5]
What do you think about the overlapping sound and dialogue in an Altman
movie versus some more traditional and highly filtered or edited
handling of sound? Is that a useful comparison or am I muddling things?
WC: I don’t know if you’re muddling, but I don’t
know enough Altman to comment with any decency. I think, though, that
the binary being attempted here’s part of the problem: it’s not just
that one microphone picks up the specific voice and one mic picks up the
sound of the room; it’s a difference in how we understand what makes a
song (using the mic example). What’s created by capturing the sound of a
song being made vs. what’s created by capturing what we believe to be
the discrete bits which we understand to make up the song? You talked
about this in the
One Story interview—said it was Martone’s
line—how you can never have too much peripheral detail; ultimately the
thing we may be trying to talk about is what constitutes
peripheral;
the folks I like seem more willing to engage in stuff that’s not
overtly in service to the obvious plot machinations of the story at
every second; there’s just cool stuff, all over.
PRAYER FOR THE SAFETY OF THE PUBLIC SCREAMER
From my window, I can see the bus shelter. A woman is walking away from
it, and there’s a man underneath, standing. Both are dressed in the
clothes of the season, and both are angry.
The man I have seen before. I call him Screamer. I hear him before I
see him. In this way he is not like a jet fighter. Today, Screamer has a
splint on his nose, making it longer and more pointed. When he screams,
his splint quivers. Much of what he screams is profane, curses and
swears. He often screams, Asshole fall off the fucking earth.
In the mornings, I hear him coming from the west, walking toward
downtown. Later, in the evenings, he returns, walking toward the
suburbs. He keeps a fairly tight schedule, Screamer does. In this way he
is not unlike people who work at jobs downtown. Always he is angry.
Always he is screaming.
I have seen Screamer look over his shoulder, back at the suburbs in the
morning or back downtown in the evening, and I wonder what to make of
that looking back. My first thought was that he was being followed.
Someone was after him. He had made someone angry. My second thought was
that he just believes he’s being followed. Whatever the case, Screamer
is always yelling at the place he leaves, yelling at what he leaves
behind. In this way he is not unlike you, or us, those, say, who have
ever felt disappointed by the most recently passed experience, the last
big letdown, that time we let ourselves think we were lucky, blessed,
made from gold and promises. Precious stones never did rain on us.
Which brings me again to what I see from my window. The bus shelter. The woman walking away. Screamer standing underneath.
The woman is angry. Screamer, she thinks, screams at her. And why
shouldn’t she take Screamer personally? Perhaps he told her, Asshole
fall off the fucking earth. The woman bends down to pick something up,
and I think she’s going to throw something. I think, She’s going to hit
Screamer. But it’s just snow, and the snow is so powdery and dry, it
scatters immediately after leaving her hand. She might as well have
hurled a handful of dust.
And Screamer still screams. The woman’s hair has come undone under her
scarf, and she pauses a second to fix it. Screamer curses her, more
loudly this time. Asshole, he says. Fall off the fucking earth.
The woman walks away, and then the woman comes back.
She walks to the corner, and then she comes back. This time, the woman spits at Screamer. And still, Screamer screams.
Once more the woman walks away and comes back. And once more she spits at Screamer.
As she walks away, I hear her say, I could kill you.
From my window, I see the woman crossing the street and walking along
the hillside. Screamer is still at the bus shelter and still cursing.
Maybe this will be the last time I see him. Maybe someone will kill him.
Maybe some people will return for him and do what, I do not know. Fuck
him up good.
I wish I could intervene. I want to manifest myself on the ground,
between Screamer and the woman. I want to move between them. I want to
say, Wait, please, you don’t understand. Hold back your blows, OK? Stay,
for a second, the stones you’ve selected for this man’s skull.
And what if the woman then came upstairs to my apartment? What if she
could see what I see? Look, from my window. I’m asking you. Perhaps
something would come of it: me, on the ground, meeting Screamer, while
she sits upstairs. With the woman may come the hundreds, maybe the
thousands, of people who will ever meet Screamer outside, on the streets
and on the sidewalks. They all can crowd into my apartment, jostling
for a view, a seat, a spot by the window.
But can I say, really, that I wouldn’t feel insulted?
Asshole fall off the fucking earth.
There is spit, and then there is the anger, like fingertips gripping my scalp.
PARABLE OF A MERCIFUL END TO DREAMS OF FIGHTING UNDERWATER
My opponent always announces himself the same way. He says, I have a
bum. Warning. I know he means bomb, but he pronounces it in the pinched
way of the British. Bum. Warning. I have a bum. Yet he is not British.
He has, in fact, never ventured outside the States. He does, however,
have a bomb. That is why he’s my opponent, my dear enemy.
The city is our battlefield. Streets and avenues have, for me,
pugilistic significance, a long history of beatings and many losses. You
may walk past these sites without knowing it. I have met my opponent in
fields, in parks, in city squares. He has met me on board buses,
subways, and monorails. We have fought under overpasses and over rivers.
I have struggled against him amidst the carnivals of summer. He has
found me cowering in the beverage aisle of a grocery store, hiding in
the shadow of a pyramid of Coca-Cola. In tropical restaurants, cool
rooms, windy vistas, on snowy heights, there is, we believe, no place we
haven’t already fought. Were you unwittingly in attendance at some of
our more celebrated bouts? We have wrestled atop buildings, decorating
the skyline like two feisty hood ornaments. Always the game is simple,
as my opponent takes pains to point out: one fall, mano a mano, me or
the man with the bomb.
When I fight, however, I am at an immediate disadvantage. When I try to
punch him, there’s no force behind it. I draw back my arm, but that’s
it; that’s all I have time for. When I try to run, I escape from
nothing. I am always caught in midturn, pivoting and pushing off with my
strong foot, but no more. Caught and then hit and then hit again, I
fall. There is something in me that works against the punch, against my
flight; it subverts each of my attempts. It is like misdirection. It is
like the fact that water is at its thickest, its most dense, seconds
before freezing. It, I say, because it hasn’t any name. It is all effect
and no identity. In my most productive moments I come up with
descriptions of it; I test them against my experience, comparing them
against my bruises, measuring them alongside my memories of the man
standing over me and laying into my body with whatever happened to be
handy—a socket wrench, a golf club, a tire iron, a stick. It is like
second-guessing raised to the power of ten. It is like an interior
monologue as loud as a rock concert. It is like the flashlights of a
hundred righteous accusers. Everything I do, anything I try, whatever I
can manage, it is in double slo-mo. This is the cruelty of fighting
underwater.
Do I even need to tell you that my opponent is not similarly afflicted?
Other opponents trade in casual menace. They like to say, I’ve been
watching you, or, I know where you live. My opponent says, I know what
you feel. He describes my small, daily failures to me. As if I didn’t
know. His assessments are pinches that leave marks on the inside of my
skin. He tells me, You are the Neville Chamberlain of your extended
family. Or he says, Your love is like the plastic cups left over from a
party. My body serves up for him a set of ready metaphors. Your stomach
is a growing pit, he says, down which fall the snakes of your seven
indiscretions. They are like arrows, their heads like arrowheads, and
they move, constantly, one over another. Are you feeling that? he says.
When I don’t answer, he asks, Don’t you understand?
I’m not sure, I say. Then, after some thought, No, not really, I guess.
I’m talking about your insignificance, he says, as if it could all be so plain.
I get what you’re saying, I tell him. In general, I mean, but you lose me on the specifics most of the time.
My opponent actually looks sort of hurt. Should I be less gnomic or something? he says.
I shrug. It would, I guess, be a start.
Consider arrows, he says, speaking more slowly this time. Arrows in an empty stomach.
Now do you see why I fight him? Even though my moves are slow? My
efforts futile? I fight him because I must. I have no other choice, I
think.
When I’m not fighting my opponent, I see other people whom I imagine
are fighting their opponents, on other nights, in distant parts of a
darkened globe. Between dinner and dawn, the city is turned over to
these fights. A long fight card every night. Many matches and many
falls. Who are these people? How can you recognize them? They are those
who misbutton an article of clothing. They are those who react last and
late to a joke. We are the people whom you find always looking down and
seemingly in. Eye contact is for the foolish when it is night and an
opponent is about. We stumble frequently, unfazed. We step into traffic,
neither surprised nor frightened when we realize our mistake. Not a day
goes by that we do not find ourselves stopping people like you and
asking for directions in the city of our birth.
PARABLE OF BEING INSIDE
The new nightclub opened last week, and now everyone is trying to get
inside. The new nightclub is fabulous, according to every indication,
offering entertainment beyond measure, joy and conviviality in
unparalleled quantities. Consider the new nightclub’s stereo. Its sound
system, speakers, mixing board, and turntables are together larger, more
expensive, and more powerful than the stereos of the top five most
popular nightclubs combined. The stereo’s wiring would, if stretched end
to end, run for seventy-seven miles, connecting cities to their
suburbs. It loops underground, beneath the glass dance floor, and then
circles overhead, in the rafters and around the exposed beams of the
building, which, once upon a time, was a warehouse or a tannery, a
potato-chip company or dress-shoe factory, something, in any case, that
did something for someone, back when. Nobody can remember now. The new
nightclub’s wire is bound together in thick, menacing coils, blue wires
and black wires all feeding into intricately webbed nodes and impressive
muscular bunches. It is as if the club powered itself off the flayed
body of a giant. The new nightclub’s blue wire is the blue of 4 AM seen
before sleep; its black wire is truly black indeed.
I haven’t yet been inside the new nightclub when it’s turned on, when
the lights are up and people pack the open spaces and drinks are being
drunk. During the day, I worked on the second auxiliary electrical crew,
brought on board by one of the subcontractors, this guy I know who used
to date my sister. I wired up a set of lights mounted on these robotic
arms, metal appendages, starved in appearance, that supported these
other things that someone else, hired by another subcontractor, worked
on.
The DJ booth in the new nightclub can unleash various special effects,
the sort that would not seem out of place in large-budget movies. I’ve
heard talk of lasers and holograms, even green screens. Supposedly parts
of the club can be rear-projected into whole other areas, like scenery.
Also, the bar is actually three bars, three bars each on three separate
levels, each decorated according to a unique style or mood. The owner
of the new nightclub is a stickler for details, so the moods of the bars
are very much like the moods of people, very lifelike.
The new nightclub is where the old nightclub used to be, before the old
owner closed its doors, boarded the windows, and sold off all the
furniture and stereo equipment in an auction sparsely attended by
bargain hunters and just some curious lookers-on who felt they had some
connection to the place. Nothing from the old nightclub survives in the
new one.
People who have never even given a thought to going to a nightclub feel
the inkling or perhaps pressure of having to go to this one, of needing
to go, if only to see it, maybe just once. To see what it’s like, they
say. For something to do, they say. They all have their reasons, and
their reasons are the same three or four.
It’s a childish wish, this desire to be inside the new nightclub.
Childish not in the sense of being simple, but rather because it reminds
me of times I overheard my parents and their friends at parties. It was
usually someone’s birthday or anniversary, the occasion was never all
that clear or important. What mattered was that I could hear their
voices, the sound of their voices, but I could not discern the words
themselves. I would hear laughter and I would think, Someone just told a
joke. Who told a joke? Who was it? What was the joke, exactly? How did
it go? The laughter went on. Laughter carried, words did not. I could
hear nothing except sounds of what I knew to be conversation. It was
incredibly frustrating, this feeling.
Inside the new nightclub there is another, smaller, more exclusive
nightclub, and inside that smaller, more exclusive nightclub, there is a
smaller nightclub still. Five nightclubs at least are nested inside one
another like so. After work one day, a few days before we finished and
the foreman, as they say, let us go, I was talking to a guy who worked
alongside me, this guy who put the things on the ends of the metal
appendages I was working on. Anyway, this guy swore that there are at
least nine nested nightclubs inside one another. He personally knew of
at least nine, and he suspected there could be even more, each smaller,
each more exclusive, each located inside the other. And at the center of
it all, at the center of this series of clubs within clubs, there is a
room, supposedly no bigger than a large box, like the sort of box a
refrigerator comes packaged in. The owner of the new nightclub has had
this room decorated sparsely, with a table and a chair and a candle on
the table and a pillow on the chair. The table is not larger than a pad
of paper. The candle is the size of a dime. The chair is plain. The
pillow is more suggestion and gesture than pillow. What’s more, the
walls around the table are not in fact walls. On closer inspection, they
reveal themselves to be speakers that look and feel like walls. Solid
speakers. From the floor to the ceiling of the room, nothing but
speakers. When the stereo is on, and the music is going, a person
admitted to the room that lies at the center of the series of clubs
within clubs can hear nothing else, nothing to indicate that there’s
anything else anywhere else outside or inside the room, nothing other
than the room itself and the person inside it.
Paul Maliszewski, Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders, New Press, 2009.
For anyone who has ever lied—or been lied
to—True-life tales about faking, from Clifford Irving to Stephen Glass,
by an award-winning writer.
Fakers are
believed—and, at least for a time, celebrated—because they each promise
us, screen-gazing and experience-starved, something real and
authentic, a view, however fleeting, of a great thing rarely glimpsed. —from Fakers
From
James Frey and his fake memories of drug-addled dissolution to
Stephen Glass and his fake dispatches from the fringes of politics to
the author formerly known as JT LeRoy and his fake rural tough talk, we
are beset by real-seeming fiction masquerading as truth. We are living
in the era of the fake.
Fakers is a fascinating
exploration of the varieties of faking, from its historical roots in
satire and con artistry to its current boom. Paul Maliszewski journeys
into the heart of our fake world, telling tales of the New York Sun's
1835 moon hoax, the invented poet Ern Malley (the inspiration for Peter
Carey's novel My Life as a Fake), and Maliszewski's own satiric letters to the editor of the Business Journal of Central New York
(written, unbeknownst to the editor, while he worked there as a
reporter). Through these stories, he explains why fakers almost always
find believers and often flourish.
Since 1997, the author
has been on the trail of fakers and believers, asking the tricksters
why they dissembled and the believers why they were ever fooled.
Fakers tells us much about what we believe and want, why we trust, and
why we still get duped.
The essays in Fakers explore:
• Jayson Blair's faked New York Times stories, about Jessica Lynch and much else
• Early American con artists
• Oscar Hartzell and the long-running Drake's fortune scam
• Internet hoaxes about man-eating bears
• Han van Meegeren's forged Vermeers
• Clifford Irving's fake autobiography of Howard Hughes
• Michael Chabon's fictionalized version of his early years
• Binjamin Wilkomirski's fabricated Holocaust memoir
• In-depth interviews with three fakers: journalist Michael Finkel, painter Sandow Birk, and performance artist Joey Skaggs
In this detailed if uneven meditation, Maliszewski explores the
complicated world of deception and those who practice it. The book
begins with the author defending his own habit of publishing letters to
the editor under pseudonyms while working as a reporter in upstate New
York. He describes his actions as satire, although his lengthy,
sometimes bitter mea culpa drags by the end. However, his analysis of
literary and journalistic deception—a sampling that includes Stephen
Glass, James Frey and JT LeRoy—finds nuanced differences between the
hoaxes, cons and outright lies while connecting them to universal
themes. The book abounds with interviews and anecdotes about con men,
art forgers and historical fakes, leading Maliszewski to conclude,
Writing, after all, needn't be a mirror in which authors discover only
themselves looking back and grinning. The author could stand to take a
bit of his own advice, although the book as a whole does provide some
interesting insights into the nature of deception.
- Publishers Weeklya
This fascinating survey of fakers and fabulists begins with a
confession from the author that he, too, has been a faker: while he was
employed as a writer for a business magazine, he wrote the occasional
column under a variety of false identities. But he considered his fakes
to be satires, not frauds. On the other hand, there are Stephen Glass
and Jayson Blair, journalists who invented magazine and newspaper
stories. There’s Clifford Irving, who famously faked an autobiography of
Howard Hughes, and James Frey, who faked his own autobiography. There’s
the story of a newspaper that announced the discovery of life on the
moon, and much more. Maliszewski does not confine himself to simple
recitations of the facts. He explores why these fakers undertook their
often complex schemes and how they found audiences who would eagerly
believe them, even when the schemes themselves would fall apart under
close scrutiny. The book is not only about the fakers but also the faked
and about our natural desire to believe the unbelievable—as long as the
tale is told convincingly. --David Pitt
| According to filmmaker
Werner Herzog, people in the twenty-first century face an “onslaught on
reality” comparable to medieval knights confronting foes with guns and
cannons for the first time. Pointing to mislabeled reality television,
computer generated imagery in films, virtual reality and Wrestlemania –
those actually-occurring events consisting of scripted, choreographed
activity enacted by people with entirely unnatural physiques – he sees
no direct and easy route to the truth. A maker of documentary films
concerned about this problem might insist on a firm commitment to the
facts in the pursuit of verifiable truth. |
|
|
That is not Herzog’s method. He distinguishes between “fact” and
“truth,” believing he should not strictly adhere to the former and
instead penetrate deeply into the latter. In
Herzog on Herzog, a
collection of interviews edited by Paul Cronin, the director says his
“documentaries” – he puts the word in quotation marks – show that “there
is a much more profound level of truth than everyday reality.” For
Herzog, making such films means doing more than presenting a
straightforward factual chronicle.
Sometimes getting to the truth demands invention. In
Little Dieter Needs to Fly,
Herzog shows a German-born, Vietnam-era U.S. Navy pilot, repeatedly
opening and closing the door to his home. Dieter Dengler did not
actually develop this tic. Herzog devised the ritual for him, believing
it visually expressed the former prisoner of war’s appreciation of his
formerly-denied freedom.
Encounters at the End of the World,
Herzog’s 2008 documentary about Antarctica, contains several examples of
his bid for something of greater significance than banal images of snow
and ice. He interviews scientists studying seals and includes the sound
of the marine mammals’ distinctive calls. He stages a scene in which a
trio of investigators prostate themselves on the ice to listen,
something Herzog, in person but not on screen, readily admits they would
not normally do. Speaking in New York City a year before the film’s
release, he conceded that there is nothing inherently compelling about a
man holding a frozen fish. However, he presents the discovery of one in
a man-made tunnel under the South Pole and crafts a scenario to make it
meaningful. He imagines archeologists from the future trying to surmise
what human beings were trying to do when they constructed their
subterranean shrine to a sturgeon.
Herzog, who believes filmmakers should know how to pick locks and
forge documents, repurposed actual events in science-fiction scenarios
several times before making
Encounters. In
Lessons of Darkness,
he imagines aliens trying to comprehend the destruction of human
civilization, which he sees in the flaming Kuwaiti oil fields after the
Gulf War of the early 1990s. In The
Wild Blue Yonder, he
combines footage shot in outer space and under the Antarctic Ocean with
still more scientists speaking and an actor portraying yet another
alien.
Paul Maliszewski doesn’t write about Herzog in
Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders,
but what he says about others suggests he wouldn’t be pleased with
Herzog’s pursuit of an “ecstatic truth.” Indeed, he favors what Herzog
contemptuously dismisses as the “accountant’s truth,” the
literal-minded, unbending commitment to definite facts, which in
Maliszewski’s case could be renamed the earnest journalist’s truth.
Maliszewski concentrates on writers of purported nonfiction,
including such exposed fabricators as Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, James
Frey and “JT LeRoy.” He concludes his survey of deceptive scribes with
an essay about novelist Michael Chabon, who disappoints Maliszewski with
an autobiographical lecture that strays from the checkable facts.
Writing in Bookforum, where the essay on Chabon first appeared, Hua Hsu
says the piece perfectly ends Fakers because Maliszewski’s doubts about
Chabon’s talk did not emerge from cynicism or skepticism but from a
conviction that real life stories do not need artificial
intensification. Maliszewski’s investigation of Chabon does encapsulate
his certainty about a discernable separation between the real and the
fake, as if the dilemma concealed at the core of the hoaxes he finds so
fascinating were easily resolvable. For him, the “onslaught on reality”
Herzog identified can be dealt with, not through artifice, but with
careful fact-checking. Everyday reality is sufficiently profound for
Maliszewski.
| Having previously written about writer-hoaxers, and done
some falsifying himself, Maliszewski intends to reveal Chabon as an
unreliable narrator of his own life story. He twice heard Chabon give a
talk entitled “Golems I Have Known, or, Why My Eldest Son’s Middle Name
Is Napoleon,” in which Chabon describes his evolving identity as a
writer and a Jew. Chabon recalls growing up near the author of Strangely Enough!,
a collection of fantastic tales. Chabon tells his audience that he
eventually mustered the courage to introduce himself to his esteemed
neighbor, who dismissed that pseudonymous work and announced that he was
actually a Holocaust survivor writing a memoir to be called The Book of Hell.
Chabon says the slippery character turned out to have had still another
identity, that of a Nazi who lifted a Jewish man’s identity after the
war, married a Jewish woman (who provided him with the bogus numbers
tattooed on his arm), and concocted an account of life in concentration
camps. |
|
|
Wondering why he did not remember
The Book of Hell or the
scandal Chabon said followed its author’s unmasking, Maliszewski looked
into the matter and determined that “Chabon had fabricated a Holocaust
fraud.” He says a quick Internet search satisfied him that the book
Chabon named did not exist. He goes to hear Chabon give the talk again
in order to watch a “magic trick disguised as memoir” and receive a
“lesson in the art of audience manipulation.” Chabon, both in his
lecture and in subsequent conversation about it with Maliszewski,
identifies himself as a teller of lies and told an easily disprovable
one in “Golems I Have Known.”
Maliszewski sternly disapproves. He contends that Chabon does a
disservice to fiction by inserting some of it into his personal history.
In an addendum to the essay (a defensive response to critics of the
original piece), he reiterates his view that Chabon either resorted to
an unnecessary cheap trick or conducted a “failed experiment” resulting
in “bad art.”
Choosing an inapt example to make his point, Maliszewski contrasts
Chabon with Philip Roth, who in Nathan Zuckerman developed a character
with a biography similar to Roth’s own in order to “understand how
experience mixed with imagination to create art.” Maliszewski does not
object to Roth’s blend of fiction and nonfiction, including his use of
the Holocaust for a “moral beard” to hide behind, because
The Ghost Writer,
the first of several Zuckerman books, is clearly identified as a novel.
He ignores Roth’s playful disregard for genre integrity in other works.
Roth opens
The Facts with a letter to Zuckerman and ends it
with a response from what Maliszewski calls Roth’s “fictional alter
ego.” (When will writers finally stop using that tired tag for
Zuckerman?) In a remark Herzog might endorse, the character tells his
creator that he can be “much more truthful” writing fiction than
autobiography, which is what
The Facts is labeled as being. Another novel,
Operation Shylock, includes both a “Philip Roth” and a Philip Roth imposter.
In Maliszewski’s forgiving assessment, Chabon might not live up to the standard Roth followed (with
The Ghost Writer
at least), but he does not belong on the wall of shame with other
embarrassed fakers and counterfeiters. Maliszewski obviously shares
Chabon’s awareness of a “long-standing connection between the idea of
the con and the confidence man and the storyteller and the writer.” In
Fakers, Maliszewski relays the acts of Stephen Glass, who concocted
stories for
The New Republic; Jayson Blair, who pretended to report for
The New York Times;
James Frey, who exaggerated his experience of drug addition and
recovery in a memoir; and Laura Albert, who invented JT LeRoy, a former
male child prostitute turned writer (who found an endorser in Chabon).
Albert enlisted the half-sister of a boyfriend to play the role of LeRoy
in public appearances.
Maliszewski also describes such classic historical hoaxes as the New
York Sun’s nineteenth-century report of life discovered on the moon,
Clifford Irving’s phony
Autobiography of Howard Hughes, and a
pair of poets who aimed to mock modernist poetry by producing nonsense
work that, instead registering as devastating parody, ended up hailed as
the next new literary thing. He interviews a painter who depicts a war
that never happened (which does not really qualify as a hoax). He also
writes of another “artist” who creates fake businesses equipped with
elaborate websites and odd gimmicks, such as cemeteries modeled on theme
parks, and bemusedly observes the press coverage that foolishly
follows.
Maliszewski has special interest in that last area; he claims to have
invented unreal businessmen and imaginary businesses when working as a
journalist for the
Business Journal of Central New York. Since
Maliszewski confesses his background as a liar, I’ll make my own modest
disclosure. I do not have a résumé of writerly deception as long or
distinguished as either Maliszewski or Chabon. It does not extend much
beyond replying, “P.T. Barnum’s autobiography,” once when asked what
book most influenced me. At the time I had not read it. Indeed, then I
did not even know whether Barnum had written an autobiography. This
might leave me open to the accusation Maliszewski flings at Chabon. By
casually taking liberties with the truth, did I, too, assume that
reality is insufficient, “too pale and thin” and in need of improvement?
Did I lack confidence that the true answer (Evel Knievel’s
autobiography) was inferior to the fabrication? I readily acknowledge
that it was a silly crack, and in retrospect a too obvious one. But as
far as lies go, mine can’t be considered very serious. Regardless,
Maliszewski offers me another, loftier defense: a literary
justification. He accepts mendacity in the name of satire. If I claimed
to be mocking vapid dinner-party conversation-starters with my dishonest
answer, then I would have crossed no line.
Maliszewski wants his nonfiction strictly nonfictional – with this
one exception. He thinks the confections of reporters like Glass and
Blair show how journalism depends on narrative “forms” that can be
easily followed in dishonest articles giving the appearance of truth.
Glass, he says, showed neither imagination nor originality in his fake
reporting; instead, he merely wrote stories that confirmed the
assumptions of editors and readers. Others may make up stories in order
to reach bestseller lists or, in the case of phony Holocaust memoirists
Binjamin Wilkomirski and Misha Defonseca, because of mental
disturbances. He complains that Glass’s articles, including those on the
First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ and about a phenomenal
young computer hacker, betray a sarcastic attitude but have no satiric
intent. His own fake business columns and letters to the editor, on the
other hand, bravely extended the tradition of Jonathan Swift.
Maliszewski says he used irony and pseudonyms to satirize the ideas and
conventions of journalism and reporters’ regular practice of presenting
corporate press releases and other marketing material as actual news.
Even when considering other categories of fraud, Maliszewski circles
back to those who write about them. He wonders if journalist Frank Wynne
fabricates dialogue in his biography of Han van Meegeren, who
concocted fake Johannes Vermeer paintings,
for instance. In an omnibus essay on several con-men, he describes a
scam that promised investors shares of Sir Francis Drake’s fortune by
discussing a biography of one of the scheme’s twentieth-century
practitioners, Oscar Hartzell. Maliszewski makes the obligatory mention
of Barnum by commenting on another biography. Turning to William
Thompson, who stopped “genteel” appearing strangers on the street and
asked, “Have you confidence in me to trust me with our watch until
to-morrow?,” Maliszewski quotes a
New York Herald article
credited with the first printed use of the term “confidence man.”
(Maliszewski gives the story’s date as 1848; other sources list July
1849. My own research into the matter convinces me that the 1849 date is
correct. Is this a simple error, or does Maliszewski intend subtle
satire of publishers’ shoddy fact-checking?)
In an aside about the 2002 off-Broadway show Ricky Jay: On the Stem,
he names one of the star’s colorfully and precisely titled books on
“conjuring, unusual entertainments, confidence games, [and] the
biographies of eccentric characters,” as Jay describes the contents of
Jay’s
Journal of Anomalies: Conjurers, Cheats, Hustlers, Hoaxsters,
Pranksters, Jokesters, Imposters, Pretenders, Sideshow Showmen, Armless
Calligraphers, Mechanical Marvels, Popular Entertainments.
Maliszewski doesn’t document a delightful bit of trickster trivia
involving On the Stem. A few years after the David Mamet-directed show
closed, another performer, Eric Walton, mounted one with some of the
same tricks Jay used. In “The Knight’s Tour,” Jay called out numbers to
guide the knight through single stops on each square on a large, lighted
chessboard, at which Jay never looked. He did this while also
calculating cube roots, reciting Shakespeare and singing. In his version
of the mental feat, Walton named state capitals. After seeing Walton’s
Esoterica,
Jay quipped, “I paid for a ticket and I sat through the show, and I
would very much like my money and my material back.” Although Jay did
not invent the bit, or claim to have done so, a friend of Jay’s said
Walton’s act “border[ed] on plagiarism,” according to a
New York Times account of the dispute between professional liars over ownership of someone else’s effect.
Jay wittily combined card tricks and vaudevillian acts with humorous
stories about show business, but Maliszewski seeks a serious moral
lesson from the show. After intermission, Jay sold boxes of candy, some
of which he said contained prizes like a gold watch and a hundred dollar
bill in addition to potency-boosting sweets. Seeing many eager buyers
of Ricky Jay’s Chocolates, Maliszewski muses: “Has no one learned a
single lesson from Thompson, Barnum, and Hartzell?”
Some people have, including an author who studied precisely some of
those con-men Maliszewski names. The story of original con-man William
Thompson almost certainly provided Melville with raw material for his
1857 novel
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, which also
refers to Barnum’s exhibits. (Although he writes of Edgar Allan Poe,
Mark Twain and other literary figures drawn to confidence games and
humbug, Maliszewski ignores Melville and his novel.)
Melville dramatizes the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of capturing the elusive, cunning truth.
The Confidence-Man
contains multiple tricksters (or serial manifestations by an
appearance-altering demon) playing various scams: a crippled beggar, a
man down on his luck seeking a loan, a doctor selling cures, a charity
agent soliciting donations and the like. “Melville’s book now seems a
prophetically postmodern work in which swindler cannot be distinguished
from swindled and the confidence man tells truth and lies
simultaneously,” Andrew Delbanco writes in
Melville: His World and Work.
The biographer cites a passage describing misanthropy as a lack of
confidence in kindness that, for all its “right and wise” praise of
love, is spoken by a con-man trying to win a doubter’s trust. While it
satirizes Christians’ susceptibility to hatred of sinners as well as
sin,
The Confidence-Man ultimately provides no firm
philosophical place to stand, setting characters teetering between
heart-hardening cynicism and foolish faith. The trusting can be
gullible, but the skeptics can also be conned. The indeterminate nature
of Melville’s title character underlines the unlikelihood of arriving at
certainty. Hershel Parker summarizes Melville’s novel as “a book in
which the Devil comes aboard the world-ship to preach Christianity as an
April Fool’s joke.” But it can also be read as following a human master
of disguises. “Is he, or is he not, what he seems to be?” a character
asks. Melville does not offer a simple answer.
Confidence games trade on the conundrum of never surely knowing how
to distinguish between appearance and reality. Yet Maliszewski prides
himself on being able to spot fakes (like Chabon’s tale of his former
neighbor) and suggests that even elaborate schemes that fooled others
can be easily seen through with the passage of time. Those forged
Vermeers strike him as crude, for instance. It is easy to separate the
legitimate from the fraudulent after all! He reduces a real dilemma to a
mere matter of paying closer attention. “Looks are one thing, and facts
are another,” he might say, as someone does in
The Confidence-Man,
which also has a con-man disingenuously reflect on the confusion that
accompanies having god’s revealed truth and apocrypha bound up together
in one volume.
Melville, who may have based a character in
The Confidence-Man
on a barber the showman describes in his 1855 autobiography, ponders
the trustworthiness of taxidermy in a manner that resembles Barnum’s
reflections on one of his renowned artifacts. Melville writes that
“experience is the only guide here; but as no man can be coextensive
with what is, it may be unwise in every case to rest upon it.” For
illustration, he points to the Australian duck-billed beaver.
Naturalists, he says, declared “that there was, in reality, no such
creature; the bill in the specimen must needs be, in some way,
artificially stuck on.” Scientists relying on their experience to grasp
what is can mistake their classifications for reality and dismiss
something unfamiliar as phony. Then again, sometimes such things are
faked. In
The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself, the
author recounts an episode that would fit seamlessly in Melville’s
novel. Considering whether to purchase the body of a purported mermaid,
Barnum seeks an expert’s verdict, or as he puts it:
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Not trusting my own acuteness on such matters, I requested my naturalist’s opinion on the genuineness
of the animal. He replied that he could not conceive how it was
manufactured; for he never knew a monkey with such peculiar teeth, arms,
hands, etc., nor had he knowledge of a fish with such peculiar fins.
“Then why do you suppose it is manufactured?” I enquired.
“Because I don’t believe in mermaids,” replied the naturalist.
“That is no reason at all,” said I, “and therefore I’ll believe in the mermaid, and hire it.”
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Of course, what Barnum chose to believe had nothing to do with the
animal authenticity of the “Feejee Mermaid.” After confidently stating
that those paying customers who examined it became convinced of its
reality, Barnum declares it a fake, but one that deserved to be
considered a real work of art. “Assuming, what is no doubt true, that
the mermaid was manufactured, it was a most remarkable specimen of
ingenuity and untiring patience.” Even if the thing is not an actual
mermaid, the object reveals something of human nature and the creative
impulse, the quest for ecstatic, if not literal, truth.
Just as Melville suggests preconceptions can keep people from
recognizing reality, Maliszewski believes hoaxes highlight unquestioned
assumptions. One that has survived since the label “confidence man”
first appeared – one that Maliszewski does not challenge – is that
confidence games reveal something about the American soul. The
description of passengers of diverse national and professional
backgrounds aboard the
Fidèle makes Melville’s Mississippi
steamboat a microcosm of American society, as if it were especially
accommodating of confidence-men. A century and a half later, in
Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam,
Pope Brock explicitly claims that America has a “special genius for
swindle” and that “there has probably never been a more quack-prone and
quack-infested country than the United States.” He says this even though
he writes of European counterparts to the con-man of his title, a
self-designated doctor who claimed to restore men’s virility via
implantation of goat testicles.
Although in
Fakers he covers a few hoaxes occurring outside
the United States, Maliszewski returns to the notion of an especially
American susceptibility to and propensity for them. The Dutch forger van
Meegeren and the European writers of false Holocaust memoirs he
discusses did not fool only Americans. Nonetheless, Maliszewski believes
cons “expose inherent gaping contradictions in the American character,”
such as “our boundless optimism married to our blind ambition; our
insatiable greed matched by our lack of rigorous business sense; our
belief in hard work coexisting with our dream of never having to work
again; our insistence on high returns despite our being too risk-averse
to ever realize them.” Confidence men everywhere rely on and exploit
such contradictions.
And believers collaborate with liars, as Maliszewski knows. As he
says of the Feejee Mermaid, audiences did not necessarily fall for
Barnum’s tricks; instead, “they were delighted by the chance, for a
modest monetary consideration, to wonder whether or not they were being
fooled and, if so, how they could tell.” He gives essentially the same
reason for attending Chabon’s lecture a second time without registering
his own resemblance to Barnum’s ticket-buyers.
Even so, he insists that people do not like to be fooled, which does
challenge a convention of confidence-game-related writing. Brock, for
instance, contends that Americans have always “joyously embraced”
fakers. According to Barnum, “the public appears disposed to be amused
even when they are conscious of being deceived.” Chabon describes his
audience as the “willing-to-be-hoodwinked.” Magicians like Jay, writers
like Roth, and directors such as Herzog and Mamet count on audiences’
openness to illusion and their enjoyment of misdirection.
Maliszewski underestimates the human desire to be deceived.
Admiration for “artists of the fraudulent” endures, as does confounded
perception of reality. (“The grand points of human nature are the same
to day they were a thousand years ago,” Melville writes in
The Confidence-Man.
“The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature.”)
Describing one of the fake news analysts he invented, Maliszewski says
he created the embodiment of the money-making dreams of business
newspaper readers. Successful con-men function the same way. As David W.
Maurer in
The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man says of the commonplace wish to get something for nothing:
“Larceny,” or thieves’ blood, runs not only in the veins
of professional thieves; it would appear that humanity at large has just
a dash of it – and sometimes more. And the con man has learned that he
can exploit this human trait to his own ends; if he builds it up
carefully and expertly, it flares from simple latent dishonesty to an
all-consuming lust which drives the victim to secure funds for
speculation by any means at his command.
(Anyone who thinks money-manager/pyramid-builder Bernard Madoff
pulled off something new with his investment scheme should consult
Maurer’s 1940 handbook.) What Americans don’t care for is failures, like
the exposed frauds Maliszewski writes about. “Fakers,” he explains, “by
their nature, remain elusive,” but this is a talent Stephen Glass,
Jayson Blair, Laura Albert and James Frey did not have.
Maliszewski misreads the challenge implicit in true con artists’
mixing, blurring and faking. Despite the complicating efforts of clever
pretenders, he writes as if truth and untruth resided in clearly
demarcated zones. Some wily characters may try to misrepresent untruth
as truth. Such trickery is permissible, he allows, when hoaxers want to
draw attention to unquestioned assumptions or journalistic laziness.
Otherwise it amounts to moral laxity. While he thinks Chabon demotes
real life in favor of fiction, Maliszewski underappreciates art’s
ability to reveal truth through fakery. He implies that the truth of
accountants (or upright journalists) can be the whole truth. The tricks
he finds so entertaining ought to undermine such confidence. -
John G. Rodwan, Jr
It’s only a matter of time before a scam is revealed. And in recent
years, stories revealing the discovery of fraudulent behavior have made
some of the biggest headlines, dominating page space in print and online
articles, in addition to consuming airtime on news broadcasts. There
was the MySpace Mom who posed as a teenage boy on the social networking
site, in an attempt to monitor what a thirteen-year-old girl was saying
about her daughter. Three men from California preserved a gorilla suit
in their freezer, claiming it was Bigfoot. And late last year, Bernie
Madoff was arrested and charged for running the largest Ponzi scheme in
U.S. history. The media searched for reasons why these people trick
scammed both their neighbors and the public. Power, vengeance, fame,
money. What compels people to deceive others?
Paul Maliszewski’s insightful first book,
Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders,
concentrates on cases of fraud in the worlds of art and media. Part
memoir, part investigative report, Maliszewski explores the reasons
fakers do what they do, and why people tend to believe them. The book
opens with a confessional essay titled, “I, Faker.” While working as a
staff writer for the
Business Journal of Central New York,
Maliszewski felt the stories he covered lacked depth and insight. The
real stories were lost behind facts and figures. He couldn’t tap into a
creative outlet on the job, so he adopted several personas and began
writing satirical letters to the editor of this publication. Right away
the reader is aware of his stake in answering the whys of fakery. This
personal investment drives Maliszewski on a thorough quest to make
connections to and draw distinctions from other pretenders.
Fakers looks at such recent well-known writers/hoaxers as
Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Margaret B. Jones. The book covers the
widely distributed email about the world’s largest man-eating bear and
the origins of the Con Man. It also includes hoaxes that might be
lesser known to the general public. In 1835, the
New York Sun ran a series of stories, proclaiming there was life on the moon. In 2002, the
New York Times Magazine
fired Michael Finkel for creating a composite character from multiple
personal accounts, then passing this character off as a real person.
And in 2004, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Michael Chabon, delivered a
speech that contained fictional elements, but presented it as
nonfiction.
While the stories profiled contain clear arguments as to why people
fake, Maliszewski explores all angles of his subjects to get a better
understanding of the people involved. He shows compassion toward fakers
whose intentions weren’t malicious and, at times, comes to their
defense. Passionate about the art of great fakery, Maliszewski wants to
make clear the distinction between satire and scam. He does go after
individuals who intentionally twist the truth and soil real people’s
reputations for the sake of a good story.
But the underlying message seems to be one of hope. That’s why
Maliszewski wants to separate the satirists from the scammers. All
fakery isn’t created to harm others. When carried out successfully,
satire contains a message behind the hoax. It’s about pointing out
absurdities and revealing truths. People can miss the emotional truth
of a story when they discover that on the surface, it’s not 100%
empirically true. Why do people buy into these hoaxes? Maliszewski
presents several answers for this question. One being that good writing
makes a story more believable—the fakery goes unnoticed when the
narrative seems flawless. But most hoaxes are short lived. Eventually
the faker is exposed. And what causes uproar in a lot of these cases is
another reason why people initially buy into the hoax. They want to
believe the stories are true. Social issues surrounding a hoax can make
people suspend their disbelief or blind them to the possibility that
the story could be fabricated.
Maliszewski writes these essays with smooth prose and structures them
in a way that creates the kind of dramatic tension found in any good
story. These profiles are both informative and entertaining. Blending
research and interviews with his desire to find answers, Maliszewski
avoids dry reporting. His in-depth analysis of each case, the attention
he pays to them, makes the reader want him to succeed on this
comprehensive journey.
- livenudebooks.wordpress.com/
An Interview with Paul Maliszewski
Honesty
and authenticity are qualities that are highly esteemed in our
culture. However, there have always been charlatans who have enchanted
the populace, whether it is through mass media or more subversive
methods of communication. Once these masqueraders are defrocked they
frequently become convenient scapegoats for all stripes of cultural
criticism. While the public outrage is vociferous and often legitimate,
such screed rarely does justice to the complex factors behind these
hoaxes and the personas involved. Paul Maliszewski’s
Fakers: Hoaxers,
Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders,
published by The New Press, analyzes hoaxes both contemporary and
historical; it also recaps Maliszewski’s own career as a faker and the
motivations behind his and others satirical creations.
In addition to
Fakers Paul also edited
McSweeney’s #8,
which was thematically structured around the concepts of fact versus
fiction, and the various shades of truth; as well as two issues of
The Denver Quarterly
dedicated to writing about locales real and speculative. He was a
co-creator, along with Amie Barrodale, of The Allen Pearl Files, a
satiric literary gossip column and his short fiction and criticism has
been published in a wide array of literary journals and magazines.
This interview was conducted via e-mail in mid-February.
Fakers is your first book but you have been writing
extensively on the subject of hoaxes and frauds for several years. What
was the initial inspiration behind your fascination with these
tricksters in our midsts?
I have two answers for you. In 1997, I started submitting satiric
letters to the editor at a business newspaper where I worked as a
reporter. A year later, I published the first part of my exploits in
The Baffler. Around that time, Stephen Glass was discovered faking at
The New Republic.
I’ve often thought that coincidence, of Glass doing what he was doing
and me doing what I was doing, motivated me to keep studying hoaxes and
frauds. I wanted to understand the difference between my satires and
Glass’s fakes, and yet I also wanted to get at what made our writing
credible enough to pass as fact.
The other answer is that when I started to collect all these essays
together for my book, I wrote a new piece about Internet hoaxes, which
includes a short section I came to think of as my autobiography in
pseudonyms. Writing that reminded me I’d really been faking and
adopting made-up names much longer than I’d realized. In fact, the
earliest episode goes back to when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. I
told my brother that a neighbor, a talent scout for the Houston
Astros, was so bowled over by my baseball-playing skills that he wrote
me a letter to urge me to keep the Astros in mind and look him up when I
was a bit older. Of course, I forged that letter.
The opening essay, “I, Faker” details your own satirical
creations for an upstate New York business journal while you were
employed as a staff writer. Some of your characters such as Carl Grimm
and Gary Pike seem to border on the edge of sanity. Did you think that
some of their jargon filled statements and stances were a way of subtly
indicating that they were in fact fabrications? Did you think that the
newspaper readers ever took their suggestions seriously?
It’s funny, one journalist I recently talked with about the book
wanted me to understand that while the newspaper I wrote for published
my satiric letters and opinion pieces and even two news articles, at
his paper, that stuff never would have been accepted. Another
journalist, however, who formerly worked as a writer at a trade journal
for the insurance industry, said my satires seemed almost reasonable
compared to some of the fulminations they regularly published. When you
get beneath the radar of the trusted business publications -- the
Financial Times, the
Wall Street Journal,
and so forth -- and you start to get into the smaller venues, you find
that businesspeople, some of them, routinely say some crazy things, and
they publish them, and what’s more those crazy things pass for
thoughtfulness in that world. The foot soldiers of free enterprise and
the market economy hold as true and dear some strange ideas, ideas
ripe, I thought, for satire.
As for taking the satires seriously, as fact, there’s always, with
satire, an audience that’s in on the joke and another group of people
who not only don’t get the joke, they don’t even register that they’re
in the presence of humor. The joke’s not just on them, the joke, in
some sense, is they. And while satirists do sometimes wink to readers
and nudge them in the ribs, I didn’t think I needed to indicate or
signal much to the people who are in on the joke. What tips them off,
really, are their values. If they value, say, people and their labor as
something more than a mere commodity, to be priced out as cheaply as
it can be found, regardless of the consequences and the toll that
philosophy takes on the society, then they’ll see those satires for the
jokes they are.
In the same essay you also discuss a more elaborate
construction of a fictional company, Teloperators Rex, Inc., that
involved all of the accoutrements of an actual business but was in fact
a satire on the types of companies that proliferated during the dot
com era. The scope of your project caused an investigation by the New
York State Attorney General’s office. Despite the harrowing experience
how satisfying was it as a writer to see this creation enter the three
dimensional world and the havoc that a fictional entity can cause?
Once I’d managed to publish a number of the letters to the editor, I
figured I was ready to try an opinion column, as those seemed more a
part of the newspaper. Letters to the editor appear in the paper, but
they’re not exactly of the paper, you know; they’re more like voices
from outside. I knew I eventually wanted to write a news article. That
was the Holy Grail, to get my satires accepted as news.
It was harrowing in the end. I shouldn’t downplay that. It really
was not pleasant to be questioned by detectives for several hours,
despite the fact I knew -- and was confident -- I’d done nothing wrong.
I mean, as they let me go, they told me they were planning to continue
their investigation. They also said I shouldn’t leave the state, and
that I still might be arrested at a later date. Weeks later, I was still
wondering if the other foot was going to fall. When would they scoop
me up? Would they come in the early morning or at night? That sort of
thing. But yes, over time, it became less harrowing and quite a bit
more satisfying.
I wanted all along to create fictions that would, as you say, enter
the world. I’ve written about how dissatisfied I was as a reporter, and
how my disgruntlement led me to write satires. But at the same time, I
was discontented with literary publication. I wanted to write stories
about business, but I didn’t want them to be framed as literary
artifacts and read exclusively by the literary world. I didn’t see that
world as my audience, ultimately. Or, at least, it wasn’t my ideal
audience, namely because the vast majority of literary readers are
already in on the joke. Most of them share the same political beliefs.
So literary publication of these satires would just belike facing the
choir and singing a few of their favorite tunes.
There has been much public hand wringing over
the revelation of false or “embellished” memoirs such as those by James
Frey, Margaret Jones and most recently Herman Rosenblat. Why do you
think that the reading public is so drawn to the memoir, a deeply
flawed form at best? Does their appetite for the amazing but true
contribute to the memoirist’s tendency to exaggerate and fabricate in
order to attract and subsequently placate such an audience?
You’re inviting me to generalize, which I try to avoid, and
speculate, which I have no talent for, but let me dive in anyway, okay?
I think the memoir is an ideal form for our self-help culture. If you
had to invent a new type of written expression, one that would best
capture the ideas and themes juggled on an average week of
Oprah,
the memoir would be your vehicle. Memoirs are first-person accounts,
which makes them well-suited for both the it’s-all-about-me culture and
the woe-is-me culture. Sometimes memoirs are broad-minded and
far-seeing enough to offer a look at a nuclear family, but even those
tend to be stories about an individual struggling and surviving within
the household. And for all their gritty details, these books are still,
at heart, uplifting. The memoir itself -- the fact that you can hold in
your hands this pile of paper and glue -- testifies to the triumph of
the individual. And that’s a comfort to the reader. As Chris Lehmann
observed in an article for
The Nation about
Love and Consequences,
the Margaret Jones/Margaret Seltzer production, memoirs provide us
with both “extremity in suffering and the quiet grace of
self-deliverance.” You get the bad times and, by the end, the good.
You used the word “appetite” to describe the reading public. I can’t
say whether readers’ appetites led or motivated any of those writers
to fake or embellish their life stories, but I like the word
“appetite,” because it draws attention to the role of readers. That is,
there are the fakers, whom we hear all about when they’re discovered,
and there are the legions of those who are fooled, about whom we learn
much less. The fooled aren’t wholly innocent. They’re not accomplices,
but they are part of the transaction. Another way of looking at it is
to say that there are suppliers of memoirs, some true, some few
made-up, and there is, on the other side, great demand for those works.
The demand, the appetite -- whatever you want to call it -- cannot be
ignored. I tried in my book to look as much at the fakers as the
believers.
And if I may add, there are excellent memoirs. I’ve read some. I’m not laying waste to the whole enterprise here.
In the book you discuss historical hoaxes, i.e. The New York Sun’s
infamous lunar man-bat story in 1835, as well as the sort of deceptions
that have arisen in the digital age. How do hoaxes represent their era
of creation and how do they continue to adapt and still be effective
tools of satire?
Art historians have a much better grasp on fakes and fakers than
journalists. Art historians actually study fakes. One museum I wrote
about was fooled by a forger, but later started collecting fakes,
because the director believed they were an important tool for teaching
students how to look at art. In addition, there have been exhibitions
of fakes and catalogs written about infamous fakers. Journalists, by
contrast, generally employ the bad-apple defense. They circle their
wagons. Maybe they publish a few searching op-eds about the erosion of
the public’s trust in newspapers, but they pretty much go about their
work exactly as before.
Art historians use fakes to understand how a particular era looked
at, say, the medieval period. If you have a fake medieval stein and you
determine it was fabricated in the early twentieth-century, it can
tell you a lot about how people of that period looked at medieval
metalwork, and what they knew then about medieval culture, because
presumably the fake must have looked medieval enough to someone.
Every fake contains the fingerprints of the age in which it was
created. But those fingerprints can be hard for contemporaries to
detect. That museum director I mentioned said the effective lifespan of
a forgery is a single generation. After that, our sensibility changes.
Our eyes change. What fooled our fathers doesn’t seem remotely
plausible to us. Take the moon hoax story you mentioned. How ridiculous
it seems to us now, the idea that anyone ever believed life --
man-bats and fire-wielding beavers, among much else -- was discovered
on the moon. And yet we are fooled plenty, and often, by other things.
We’re certainly not immune to fakes. We’re not even necessarily smarter
about detecting them. Anyone who doesn’t think we have blindspots need
only recall Herman Rosenblat’s touching Holocaust love story or Misha
DeFonseca’s tales of living in the woods during World War II -- as a
child, mind you -- and being befriended by wolves. We’re only smarter
about a few select things. But at least we’ll never fall for the
man-bats again.
As for how fakes adapt and stay effective, I would just say that the
fakers are adapting. Fakers are as much a part and product of their
time as you and I. But their fakes are flattering creations. Unlike
true art, fakes don’t tax or challenge or arrest the eye. They feel
comfortable. They fit in with what we already know, maybe they subtly
congratulate us for knowing it, maybe they’re just similar to something
else we read or saw. Think of Stephen Glass’s fictional articles for
The New Republic.
For all that was colorful and hilarious in them, at heart they were
quite plain, bland even, just repackaged versions of the conventional
wisdom.
Journalism has been rife with embellishment and fabrication
since the inception of the form. Why do the structures of newspaper
and magazine journalism so easily lend themselves to duplicity?
I’m not sure journalism is rife with fabrication. I’ve remained
optimistic, even after writing these essays. So I still believe
fictionalized articles are the exception; I just happen also to think
that those exceptions can tell us something about honest journalism.
Much of the fake work that has been discovered is what I’d call
narrative journalism. The writers are trying to balance the
news-gathering and truth-telling objectives of the journalist with the
storyteller’s ambitions to entertain, entrance, amaze, move, and so
forth. Now, the storyteller is not necessarily at odds with the
journalist; we’ve all read and appreciated great narrative journalism,
but those objectives are exceedingly hard to balance. It’s easy to let
the storyteller take over. I wonder, too, if the storyteller is so
important to us -- if we like stories so well -- what does that mean for
subjects that don’t lend themselves to narrative, that don’t, say,
have a main character we can follow through some real-life drama?
The essay “Lie, Memory” details the fictions involved in a
predominantly autobiographical lecture delivered by Michael Chabon and
the subsequent “literary dustup” that ensued. Do you think that the
elements of fantasy made the “biographical” portion more concrete and
subsequently believable? It sort of reminded me of the three stages,
turn, pledge and prestige, of an illusion.
When I interviewed Chabon, he talked quite a bit about magic. He
likes the parallels between the magician and the novelist. Both, I
suppose, are trying to create the impossible right in front of our
eyes. He also likened his lecture to “close-up card-handling” and said,
“There’s such a long-standing connection between the idea of the con
and the confidence man and the storyteller or the writer.”
I’ve never been comfortable with the old saw that a writer is
nothing more than a great liar, except the lies the writer tells
somehow get at the truth. I think that’s too tidy. It manages to be
both self-effacing (I’m just a liar, folks) and self-congratulatory in
that oh-but-what-a-rake-I-am way. I do think there’s a relationship
between the clearly fantastic portion of Chabon’s lecture and the part
that’s more about his childhood. One does feed and even substantiate the
other. Things can appear to readers -- or listeners -- true and real
by comparison. What’s more, because the lecture moves back and forth
between fantasy and biography (a biography that skates at times on the
edge of tragedy), the tragic passages have the feel of someone saying
to you, “All right, no more monkeying around now with golems, this part
is serious.” People respond to those cues. They listen differently. I
do think that’s why everybody I interviewed from the audiences at those
lectures believed not just the biography but the parts where Chabon
details his supposed brush with a Nazi who is passing himself off as a
Holocaust survivor.
You have taught creative writing at George Washington University and have published stories in One Story, Bomb, The Paris Review and
The Pushcart Prize anthologies. Will we see a story collection from
you in the near future? How has your study of fakers informed your
fiction writing? What other projects are you working on?
I’m not sure the study of fakers informed my fiction writing, but
those satires I submitted to the business newspaper have. I wrote them
at a time when I felt uneasy about traditional stories. It’s hard to
explain, but I wanted in those satires not just to tell a story but to
make something happen. So instead of relating a story about, say, a
machine, I wanted to create the new machine, turn it on, and show
everybody. After writing more than a dozen satires though, I either got
that out of my system or came to peace with stories that look, well,
exactly like stories. They’re not disguised. They’re not pretending to
be something else. They’re not appearing somewhere you don’t expect
stories to pop up. They’re just stories.
My story collection
Prayer and Parable is forthcoming from Fence Books. And my friend Steve Featherstone and I are collaborating on a book about
Joseph Mitchell,
which will be published by Princeton Architectural Press. Otherwise,
I’ve been reading back issues of a 1950s satirical magazine called
Humbug, founded by some of the principals behind
Mad magazine. This is for a review I’m writing for
Harper’s about the problems and challenges of satire, something I think I’ve been writing in my head for a very long time.
- Interview by Sean P. Carroll
