2010-03-08 15:55:19

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Novelist James Hynes Talks Aliens, Autobiography, God and Horror

Filed under: Books, Featured, James Hynes, James Hynes, The Purple Interview
Posted by: John

Tomorrow is the publication day for the long-awaited new novel by James Hynes. The book is called Next, and it’s ostensibly a story about a guy looking for a job and a woman on a hot day in Austin, Texas, but that’s like saying that Loch Ness is a lake in Scotland. There’s other, wilder, stranger stuff swimming in the depths.

Rather than try to describe it any further, I thought I’d throw out a few of the early reviews, which are ecstatic.

Book Slut, always a lady in my opinion, had this to say: “Hynes is a rare writer. He is brilliant and humane, and he’s created a novel that’s as involving as it is dark, as compassionate as it is sad. It’s a shocking, original masterpiece, and it is deeply, painfully American, in every sense of the word — whatever that word has come to mean. Next is the kind of novel that leaves you reeling, almost speechless, frightened, scared to consider what it all means.”

Here’s Publishers Weekly, which made the book a Pick of the Week: “In this funny, surprising, and sobering novel, Hynes (Kings of Infinite Space) follows Kevin Quinn, who has flown to Austin, Tex., for a job interview at the height of a terrorism scare. Kevin, an editor at the University of Michigan, has grown as frustrated by academic politics as he is by his relationship with his shallow girlfriend. On the flight, he sits next to Kelly, a beautiful and enigmatic young woman who reminds him of a great lost love of his youth. With time to kill before his interview, Kevin spends the first half of the novel surreptitiously following Kelly around Austin while reminiscing about his misspent youth and failed relationships. The casual but persistent self-absorption of Kevin’s reveries is both funny and off-putting, and when contrasted with the threat of terrorism and his shadowing of the young woman, gives the novel a creepy energy…”

And finally, Book Page says simply: “Next may be Hynes’ best book—and one that reveals his gifts as a serious novelist.”

Jim’s an old friend, and last summer, I spoke to him about the new book, his adopted home of Austin, religion, horror and just about everything else in one of our first Purple Interviews.

For those who don’t know his previous novels, they’re not what you would call a well kept secret. Readers find them. As the name of his blog suggests, he’s a cult writer, but that doesn’t do him justice. His books go down like Snickers bars, but afterwards you feel irradiated. They are funny, scary and psychologically acute.

In Publish and Perish, a man goes to war with his girlfriend’s cat, and a smug cultural anthropologist finds himself in a community that doesn’t really want to be studied. In The Lecturer’s Tale, a freakish accident gives a struggling scholar a frightening power, and in Kings Of Infinite Space, a man gets a job in a place where his co-workers tend to disappear.

His first novel was a riveting thriller about the Irish Republican Army, The Wild Colonial Boy, published by Holiday House in 1990. Upon publication, that book promptly made the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Picador published the next three.

In form, Next is a bit of a departure from his earlier work, but I’ve read it, and it strikes me as a classic of terror and romance very much in a league of its own. Rather than yammer on, let me just recommend his blog Cultwriter, and with that, it’s on to the interview.

Since this is ostensibly a blog about religion and skepticism, let’s start out with a really broad philosophical question. You’ve described yourself to me both as a stone-cold atheist and a small-town Calvinist. I’ve always been intrigued by the combination. One would think it impossible, but you do appear to embody the contradiction. So what do you mean by that, and how exactly does it work?

I don’t think it’s all that much of a contradiction. When I say I’m a small-town Calvinist, all I mean by it is that I’m culturally and morally a Calvinist, simply because I grew up in that culture and was imprinted very early on with that small-town, Jimmy Stewart sense of fairness, right and wrong, and propriety. Some of it I still believe–that you should tell the truth, work hard, not cheat, etc. I certainly don’t mean that I’m a Calvinist in any doctrinal sense (whatever that would be, and I have no idea). I guess I mean it more colloquially than anything else.

But I certainly don’t think you need to believe in god to be a good person. I come from a long line of Midwestern skeptics: my grandfather, a Michigan farmer, stopped attending church after he saw one of the lay preachers–a real fire-and-brimstone teetotaler–sharing a flask out behind the barn with a bunch of other church members one Sunday evening. My dad went even further and walked away from religion entirely, majoring in philosophy on the GI Bill at Michigan State University. Now, I didn’t know my grandfather well (he died when I was 7 or 8), but the way my dad told that story about him, the point was he hated the hypocrisy of his fellow church members, so he stopped going. My father was more or less an atheist (or at least a hard agnostic) for his entire adult life, and he was also one of the most decent men I ever knew, and in the sense I talked about above, he was even more of a Calvinist than I am. Some things were just wrong, as far as he was concerned, and I feel the same way (though we probably don’t think the same things are wrong). But, at the same time, the other thing we have in common is that, as atheists, we don’t think the good are rewarded or that the bad are punished.

I would describe your new novel, Next, as Miss Dalloway in the age of sacred terror, or something along those lines, by which I mean that it has a sort of literary pedigree in modernism, but it is definitely of its own time and place. What can you tell us about it?

It’s a tricky book to talk about, because not much happens in it, but everything does, if you catch my drift. I’ve also described it as being like Mrs. Dalloway, only funnier–though given that Virginia Woolf wasn’t much of a laffmeister, that may not be saying much. I also think of it as my midlife crisis book. Or maybe the book itself actually is my midlife crisis, in which case I gypped myself. Where’s my sports car? My hair plugs? My leggy supermodel?

Part of the inspiration for the book seems to lie in your love affair with the city of Austin. Or is it love-hate? Can you tell us a bit about your feelings for the city? Also, best meal there?

It’s mostly love, though I’ve lived here long enough by now to be one of those dreary, aging Boomers who doesn’t like the way the city is changing. All the enormous condo towers sprouting up downtown have changed the skyline so much since I finished Next that it will be a historical novel by the time it comes out. Suffice it to say I don’t like all the traffic, or the ugly, bunkerish McMansions with windows like gunslits sprouting up in my neighborhood, or the unsavory element drawn by the condo towers and the McMansions, namely, rich, heedless young people with too much money and no real appreciation of aging midlist novelists. But I still love the Hike and Bike trail and the movie culture here and all the great restaurants. I used to say that I’d finally gotten used to the heat, but this summer we’ve already had 30 days over 100 degrees, and it’s not even August yet, so I’m backpedaling on that.

Best meal? I’d say the Sunday brunch at Fonda San Miguel, except that’s what everybody says, so I’ll say it’s a combination of the tacos al pastor at Maria’s Taco Xpress, the masman curry at Madam Mam’s, and the cheeseburgers at the Burger Tex on Guadalupe. Oh, and the salads at Central Market Café, since I’m trying to lose 20 pounds.

Your novel is really a tale of two cities, isn’t it? There’s another city looming behind Austin, and that’s Ann Arbor. How autobiographical is the story, as a whole?

As a whole, not very. Probably a little more than I’m willing to admit, but certainly much less than people are liable to think. I once wrote a short story about a kid whose older brother had died in the Vietnam War, and a number of people told me they were surprised to know I’d had an older brother, only to be really annoyed when I told them that I never had an older brother, and that I never personally knew anyone who died in Vietnam. I suppose I should have taken it as a compliment to my artistic powers, but ever since then I’ve always resisted the idea of fiction as autobiography, and not just my fiction, but anybody else’s. I think it’s the least interesting way to read a novel.

It’s true that in Next I have a lot in common with my main character, Kevin–we’re roughly the same age, we’re both from Michigan, he’s held a job for many years that I once had for a year and a half, etc. But even when I’ve given Kevin experiences or memories from my own life, I’ve lifted them out of their original context and put them in an entirely new one, with the result that they mean something entirely different in Kevin’s life than they do in mine. And the impulse behind using them is not me wanting to reveal parts of my life to the world so much as it’s just laziness, a craftsman using the parts within easy reach to put together the finished product. Borges once said that if you put all the works of an artist together, you get a portrait of his face, and while I think that’s true, in the sense that we all reveal more than we think we do in our work, anybody who reads Next thinking they’re getting my life story is badly mistaken.

If it’s not giving away too much, your central character, Kevin, has at least three major preoccupations in the course of the book. Finding a job, meeting a woman, and terrorism. Is that safe to say? It seems to me that somewhere in the nexus of those three preoccupations, you found the universal core of a lot of heterosexual men in America. Can you talk at all about the effort to bring this guy to life on the page?

Well, given that it’s mostly autobiographical, it was like rolling off a log. Whoops! Kidding! Not autobiography! But I will say this: since the book is set in the city where I live, the research was really easy. I wasn’t working a day job for most of the time I worked on it, so I’d just roll out of bed, basically, and go walk the part of the city that Kevin was at in the story, and whatever I happened to see or come across that day on that stretch of Sixth Street or South Lamar, that’s what I put in the book. Then I just applied the principle of WWKD (What Would Kevin Do?) and put whatever I’d seen or experienced that day through his microprocessor. I realize this doesn’t really answer your thematic question, but I really don’t think that way when I’m writing. I just basically concoct a character and turn him loose in a world, and see what happens, and then I write it down. I’m usually not thinking of anything more abstract than that; I just let him put one foot in front of the other and see where he goes.

Before this book, you wrote three fantastic satires about modern American life, two of them set in academe, one in the workplace. But there was an added twist. They are each, in their own way, horror novels. Can you talk at all about your early influences in that genre? What did you read or see that made an impression on you? And at the satirical end of the spectrum, any clear and obvious influences?

The horror influences are pretty obvious. I started reading anthologies of ghost stories at an early age, and I ended up reading most, if not all, of the supernatural fiction of a lot of late Victorian/Edwardian/early 20th century writers like M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft. I always like to make the point that writers too often speak as if their only influences are literary, and that not enough credit is given to the movies, television, comic books, pop music, etc., but in the case of horror movies, I didn’t see a lot of them as a kid, since I grew up in the mid-60s in a small, mid-Michigan town, long before the VCR or cable TV. It was only when I got to college that I started seeing films on a regular basis, but by that time, I think my horror sensibility was already fixed.

It’s different with satire, though. My main influences there are probably Mad magazine, National Lampoon, Monty Python, and the music of Randy Newman, all of which I was exposed to before I graduated from high school. Along the way I also read Catch-22 and Waugh’s The Loved One, among others, and when you and I were grad students at Iowa, I read a couple of David Lodge’s academic satires, years before I ever considered writing my own. But most of my satirical influences are probably non or extra-literary.

Inspiration is a funny thing, but can you talk at all about how you came to splice together the horror with the satirical element. It’s a highly original and completely successful combination, so you must have had a moment when you leaned back and said to yourself: hey, this works!

Actually, it was more a feeling of relief, as in, “Hey, this doesn’t suck!” It was an accident, anyway: I’d set out originally, with the novellas in Publish and Perish, to write straight horror, but the academic stuff just kind of crept in unbidden, probably because I was pissed off at the way my academic career was going at the time, i.e., straight to the bottom with all hands. Plus, I’d always known I could be funny on paper, but my first novel, The Wild Colonial Boy, was much more serious, with the result that when Publish and Perish came out, some friends of mine said it sounded more like me than my first book did.

Your first two satires, Publish and Perish and The Lecturer’s Tale are classics of the academic satire genre. What do you hear from the academic world about them? Are people offended or do they enjoy the send-up? Has much changed in that world, existentially or ideologically, since you wrote those books?

Back when I used to Google myself (which I don’t do anymore, believe it or not) (seriously, I really don’t), I used to come across a fair number of references to the books in academic discussions. As for people contacting me personally, that’s hardly ever happened. I could probably count the instances on one hand, and at least a couple of them were people looking for my help getting their own academic satires published. As for people being offended, who knows? I’ve never been able to get a permanent academic job, despite all my academic friends telling me that everybody they know loves my books. But it may be one thing to enjoy a satirist’s work, but it’s another thing to have him hanging around the faculty lounge listening to your conversations.

As for what’s changed in academia, I’m the wrong guy to ask. Like I said, I’ve never gotten a permanent job in a university. I’ve been in the working world now for almost 35 years, and out of that time, I was only ever employed as an academic for six and a half years. I don’t keep up with it much anymore, and to the extent that I do, it seems to me that academics are like everybody else these days: they’re just trying to hang onto their jobs and pensions. Given everything else we have to worry about these days, the academic culture wars seem pretty silly now.

The last of three, The Kings Of Infinite Space, seems prescient of our current moment, a cross between H. G. Wells and the latest jobs report.

The most prescient thing about it was that it features zombies! These days, zombies are all the rage in pop fiction, and there I was, five years ahead of the curve. The funny thing is, it’s the one title I get the most comments about from readers, but according to my royalty statements, nobody ever bought it, so either everybody took it out of the library, or one guy bought a copy and passed it around to thousands of his friends. At any rate, I’m a little bitter at all the zombies-come-lately who are cashing in on my pioneering work without giving me any credit. It makes me mad enough to want to eat brains.

As anyone who reads your blog, Cultwriter, knows, you are an avid and well-versed consumer of movies and television, as well as books. You and I have talked before about the Golden Age of Television, beginning sometime around the first episodes of The Sopranos and ending–when? Are we still in it? If not, when did it end? If you had to pick three series that exemplify the best of the Golden Age, what would they be?

Actually, I think the Golden Age started long before The Sopranos; I’d go as far back as Hill Street Blues and thirtysomething. And I don’t think it’s over yet: every time one of my favorite shows ends, and I think I have my life back, I get hooked on something new like Mad Men or Damages, both of which are really, really good. I hear Breaking Bad is pretty terrific, too, and I will probably catch up to it on DVD, the way I did with Mad Men.

The greatest three? That’s tough, because there really is an embarrassment of riches, but if you were holding a gun to my head, I’d say The Wire, Buffy, and Battlestar Galactica. No surprises there, in other words; I sound like every other TV critic in America.

You were the first person to tip me off to the immense pleasures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and also the first to urge me to watch The Wire. On the surface, the two shows couldn’t be more different. But do they share certain fundamental qualities?

I’m tempted to work up a point-for-point comparision–Spike is the Omar of Buffy (which is another way of saying that Omar is the Fonz of The Wire)–but I think the only, really meaningful comparison is that both shows are the product of a single sensibility. Yeah, I know, the auteur theory is pretty much shot in film these days, when even big name directors are basically making corporate amusement park rides, but I think it still holds true in TV. Certainly you have to credit the contributions of all the other writers on each show, as well as the actors and production staff, but in the end, Buffy is Joss Whedon, and The Wire is David Simon and Ed Burns (I’m counting them as a single auteur). Plus each of these shows has a very distinct worldview. They represent personal visions, and say what you want about the corporate, collaborative nature of Hollywood, or even the hive mind of YouTube and the blogosphere, in the end, art is all about one individual consciousness communicating with another.

But enough about television, what about the state of good books? Is great fiction still being written? How much harder is it now to publish ambitious work than, say, twenty years ago? Is there ever an ideal moment to be an ambitious writer of fiction?

Publishing good work has always been hard, and except for maybe the mid-19th century, I don’t think there’s ever been ideal moment to be a good writer. Most of the kvetching about the current state of publishing (which, I’ll admit, is pretty dire) and about the fate of literature in the digital age doesn’t take into account the historical context: namely that fiction has been a minority art form ever since, say, Birth of a Nation. Fiction may have been at the center of the zeitgeist in the mid-19th century, but ever since the movies became a mass medium, it’s lost its primacy in the culture. So, looked at in that context, things aren’t that much worse than they’ve ever been. Hardly any of us makes a living off of writing fiction, but when did we ever? Doesn’t anybody read New Grub Street anymore?

Of course great fiction is still being written, but if you want to know what it is, I am, again, probably the wrong person to ask. I’m a slow reader with a short attention span, and most of my reading these days is taken up with research for a historical novel I’ve started. Plus, I’m about to turn 54, and the sad truth is, I’m like an old junkie who needs purer and purer stuff to get a high. I wasn’t always a slow reader, and I’ve read a lot of fiction in my day, and it’s harder to surprise me or thrill me or engage me than it used to be. When I do read fiction, I tend to go back to books I already know I like, or to canonical classics I never got to when I was younger. The older I get, the less interested I am in what’s new, and the more interested I am in what endures.

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