Good evening, and welcome to the Arts Hour on WKHS Grand Rapids. I’m your host, Chip Howser. This week our guest is a local boy. Author Jack Olsen was born in Detroit in 1974. After a peripatetic childhood he finally settled in the Philadelphia area, where he wrote and published his first collection of short stories, From the Horizon, in 2002. He spent much of the next decade living abroad, and the product of that traveling was the large, ambitious novel The Anonymous Dead, which followed a multitude of characters as they navigated the politics and dangers of the US-Mexico border as the drug war spiraled out of control. His second collection of stories, Cities of Fire, came out late last year to strong reviews. Jack, it’s a pleasure to have you here with us this weekend.

Thank you for having me.

Where do you want to start? I’ll leave it up to you.

Detroit, I think. Let’s start with Detroit.

Ok. Detroit. That makes sense. You grew up in Detroit?

Yes, or I at least partially grew up in Detroit, or around the city of Detroit. We moved a decent amount. My mom was a nurse then, and she was working some pretty obscene hours. And my father was a pastor and a high school English teacher. I think he was at Detroit Central Catholic.

Those were good years?

I remember them that way, yeah. A lot of it feels like a film strip, now. There’s a game of hide and seek in a crawl space. There’s my little brother carving the air with a sparkler, this luminous little boy. An old porcelain bathtub with these very ornate, copper legs. Helping my father put on his robes in a church’s antechamber. As I said, we moved a lot, so my memories are pretty scattered. The timeline is very confused. We had a lot of top floor apartments in seedy neighborhoods. The city was beginning to fall apart then, beginning to turn into the place people recognize today. I mean, even then, by the time I was old enough to sort of realize what was going on, there was quite a lot of devastation. I remember being twelve or thirteen, those first real autonomous years when you begin to think of yourself as an independent person, and I remember riding my bike around, and the city being pretty much in shambles. But it was a magical place to be a young boy. There were abandoned homes to explore, empty lots to camp out in. The abandoned factories seemed like something out of a great myth. They were just, in my eyes, completely enormous and fabulous. We snuck into a few of them during my last year or two there.

Really?

Yeah. Me and a few close friends, guys I’m still loosely in contact with, after all these years. There was an old steel mill along Fort Street, I think it was. The McLouth steel mill that closed down when I must have been, God, 8 or 9? I have vivid images of driving home from Tiger Stadium, half asleep, and seeing the incredible fires of the blast furnace going like mad in the night. Then, of course, I make up memories all the time. I’m always finding out that I’ve invented things. So maybe I’m inventing those fires. But I’m pretty confident I saw them. So the place hadn’t been closed many years when I was 12 or 13. The weeds hadn’t taken over yet, the building hadn’t completely fallen apart yet. And me and these friends from the neighborhood and my younger brother rode our bikes down one summer afternoon and just climbed the fence. Then we broke a couple of windows and were able to climb in.

Just like that?

Just like that. There wasn’t any security. They didn’t have the money for it. God knows the city and state didn’t have the money for it. So we just climbed in and spent the afternoon wandering around. Jesus, I remember the heat. It was scalding. They’d scrapped a lot of the stuff, but some of the huge vats were still there. All the walkways were still there. We spent the whole afternoon climbing into the huge tubs, walking along the walkways. We basically kept moving skyward until we found a way to the very top level. I was totally in awe of the place. It was the most incredible moment of my life, to that point. There’s just such a grandeur to Detroit, an almost Gothic grandeur. But honestly, there’s that same sense of scale, of ruined scale, to most of the Midwest. There were always ruined industrial buildings to sneak into. We used to spend a few weeks every summer with my grandparents in Wisconsin, up near Green Bay. And my brother and I loved to visit them because we were pretty much set loose for the week to explore the old farmland. It’s amazing to think about the freedom we had then, especially with how paranoid things are now. From the time I was eight or nine, and Luke must have been six, we were set completely free. It’s incredible how much that has changed in such a short time. How restrained kids are these days, and how sheltered. But you know, thinking back on it, it’s kind of remarkable we didn’t die or hurt ourselves very seriously. That farm was almost as much a wonderland as the city. There was an old barn, and it was still filled with all this ancient equipment. Old horse plows and scythes and tractors. We spent hours in there, screwing around in that oblivious, brash way of kids. We must have walked for miles along the creek, catching fish with our hands, swimming, skinny dipping. There were railroad tracks grown over with weeds, and one summer we followed them for what must have been hours and hours until we found this grand, ruined grain silo. The roof was partially caved in. There were pigeons roosting in the upper sections. And we spent the whole week coming back, exploring, climbing to the rafters. Our parents had no idea! How easy would it have been for one of us to fall? But we didn’t think about that then. It wasn’t even a consideration. I often wonder what happened to that fearlessness of mine, that lack of terror in the face of death. Mine has evaporated, but my brother retained his.

It’s remarkable how many of these images I’m recognizing from your first book, ‘From the Horizon.’

Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of biography in that one. I moved, of course, when I was fourteen, to Philadelphia. Or, to just outside of Philly. And that was really, really difficult, especially that first year.

How so?

Well, I was a really goofy kid. I was terribly undersized, had these huge honking glasses. I was introverted to an almost debilitating degree. It wasn’t that people didn’t like me, they just didn’t even notice me. It probably didn’t help that, looking back on it, I must have been an enormous hick. Obviously, I never thought of Detroit as being terribly Midwestern. But, you know, it really is. So that was a huge schism, going from the Midwest to the East coast. All the things that people talk about, the clichés, are true. The pace is different, faster. There’s also an individualism that I wasn’t accustomed to. It’s not that the same sense of fraternity and neighborliness didn’t exist, it just existed with more caution. People were a bit more suspicious. Especially if you looked like a total doofus, which I did. (Laughs). Now, all of this stuff I’ve only been able to identify and understand in hindsight. At the time I was just lonely and out of place and missed my friends. I cried a lot, which looking back on, I’m not proud of. But in hindsight, it was a pretty serious divide I’d leapt across. It’s all stuff that I dealt with in a pretty serious way in that first book: the displacement, the sense of rootlessness that developed. Because all my friends in Detroit just followed their trajectories, which led most of them, unfortunately, into bad marriages, into dead end jobs, into drinking problems. But there’s almost a pride about it that they’ve got. It’s a kind of insider’s, survivor pride. And you know, I can’t really tap into that. I got out. I severed those roots, even if I was severing them against my will, at the time. But I’m not entirely of the East coast, either. Because my friends out East grew up with one another. They’d played Little League together, explored the woods together, had sleepovers together and traded baseball cards. All those shared cultural experiences that under gird serious, lifelong friendships; I’d missed out on those. I love those guys, don’t get me wrong. But I’d missed something I couldn’t get back, and with my Detroit friends, I just continued to diverge. Look, I know this isn’t anything remarkable. It’s one man’s identity, but it’s something a lot of folks can recognize. What is it to be of a place? How do we define a place? That really haunted me for a while. Especially the Midwest. It’s such a vast region, but there is something of a hegemony there. Foster Wallace talked about this in some of his essays, which I’ve always thought were his best, least self conscious work. He talked about space, and how Midwesterners identify themselves with open spaces. How they’re almost defined by space. They’ve developed a placidness, a passivity, but also a stoicism that I admire. All that space can be daunting and imposing. Strong communities were so necessary just to overcome that vastness. It’s been very difficult to go back and to see what’s happening. To see the restaurants and bars we used to frequent run out of business by these dreadful chain restaurants. To see Wal-Marts and Targets and Buffalo Wild Wings and TGIFriday’s everywhere, to see the subdivisions multiplying like an invasive species, to see the office parks and strips malls.

That sense of cultural decay, as you call it, is really strong in your first stories. You liked to juxtapose it with personal decay, too.

It was something I had to get out of my system. It was something that really pissed me off, to see what was happening. At the same time, I didn’t want to be pedantic about it. I wasn’t a Midwesterner anymore. I’m not a Midwesterner anymore. And a lot of my friends and family are, and I really didn’t want to offend those people, people I still love a great deal. Those stories came out pretty quickly, and I really had no idea if they were any good. There wasn’t much care given to formal structures, or even really to style. I just wanted to write decent sentences. (Laughs). I think I even had a note on my wall at the time that said “Write clearly” in all capitals. I was really concerned with creating something visceral. I wanted to create these almost dreamscapes of devastation, and then destitute lives to match. I thought about the stories of my youth. I loved stories about Great Lakes’ ship wrecks. I loved to go down the Detroit River and watch the massive ore tankers lug their cargoes past. I thought living aboard one of those boats must be a fascinating life, especially as the Laking industry was being consolidated into the hands of a few companies and a few super ships. I thought about the early mornings with my father, when the two of us would drive out to some church in the farmland around Detroit, and I’d watch him preach in a small sanctuary to maybe twenty-five people. I thought about my cousins and uncles and aunts in Detroit, the folks who’d spent years in the steel mills and auto factories, who didn’t know any other kind of life. I was fascinated by the ways their personal devastation mirrored the physical devastation around them. And, of course, it wasn’t just happening in the Midwest. It was happening everywhere. In Central Asia, in the Amazon, in China, in the Yukon. And the one common denominator was you had these gigantic, faceless, multinational corporations. You had their greed and the devastation it wrought. So those stories weren’t just urgent on a personal level, they seemed urgent on a moral level, too. I wanted to kind of connect these threads. Not that other, better writers hadn’t done that, and haven’t continued to do that. But I needed to do that for myself.

There’s a remarkable sense of globe-trotting in those stories, too. Central Asia, as you said, the Yukon and China, but also the Caribbean and the South Pacific.

It’s not a localized problem. The destruction is everywhere. But the soul of those stories is absolutely in the Midwest, in the towns and cities where I grew up. It was very difficult to judge the quality of those stories because they were just so personal. I had no objectivity. It’s like that well known Hemingway anecdote: how he loved his Michigan stories, and everyone else thought they were deeply flawed. It’s hard to write about something you’re that close to without delving into sentimentality. My main goal was really to create these very stark, affecting images. The writer in the Asian desert having lost his father. He’s surrounded by the bodies of ruined ships. The falling birds, the girl carving through the twilight storm. The graveyard behind the church, nestled into the Wisconsin hills. The fires of central China and the old woman discovering the younger man, who may or may not be her cousin, masturbating to the school girls. All of whom are about to be sold into sex slavery.

Which is never acknowledged.

Of course. There’s a lot of horror in these stories, too. Maybe too much. But a lot of the worst stuff is only implied, or hinted at. Or it’s revealed in a later story, obliquely.

There’s also a great deal of what I would call braiding in the collection. Characters and plots are all wrapped up, from one story to the next.

Yes. I think it gives the stories almost more power upon second reading. You realize that the Chinese girl Hector sleeps with in the brothel in Houston is from that village in China. You realize that the journalist stranded on the Russian roadside is the missing father of the poet in Greece.

That might have been my favorite story.

Which one?

The one with the journalist and his driver. They’re stranded on the side of this desolate road, about a hundred meters from a rest stop. There’s trash everywhere. The countryside, as the journalist puts it, is consumed by waste. And these two guys, who don’t speak each other’s language very well, are just sitting here smoking cigarettes. There’s the village in the distance, and they watch this procession coming out of the village, moving towards them very slowly. There’s this great sense of menace. They don’t know who these people are. As the driver tells him, these aren’t the most friendly parts of the country. A lot of thieves and bandits. But there’s nothing they can do but wait. And then it’s this wedding procession. They’re singing, and the song hits the two men first. So the wedding party stops by these men, gives them some vodka. And the bride, who is lovely, and young, barely a woman, gives the journalist a kiss. It’s this beautiful, surreal story. And then later, of course, we find out that this man, the journalist, is almost certainly marching towards his death.

It’s a sweet story, and very dreamy. Not much happens, of course. My tendency is towards small stories, towards stories about stasis and ambiance. I think this is a common trait amongst writers who grew up in the suburbs. There’s an almost mythic quality of stasis in the suburbs. The somnolent summer nights, barbecue smoke in the air, the sound of a lawnmower, televisions blinking sleepily in all the neighbors’ windows. The stoic old trees that sing in the autumn wind. The secret, furtive hiding spots we discover as kids: the copse of lilac bushes, the underbelly of a bridge spanning a little creek, the ruins of an old paper mill in the woods. These little discoveries that belie deeper mysteries, mysteries that the suburbs are constructed to eradicate. It’s impossible not to be impacted by so many years of that. And when I was in Paris the first time, I remember discovering a very similar milieu in Turgenev’s sketches about the Russian countryside. I found this magnificent little English language bookstore right near the Church of Saint-Severin. I was painfully lonely and dislocated, so I ended up spending dreary afternoon after dreary afternoon there. At some point I started reading Turgenev, mainly because I hadn’t read any Russians, and his books were the slimmest. (Laughs). His stories were subtle, wistful, delicate brushstrokes. They felt familiar. So that story about the journalist tries to connect those threads. The quiet menace that underlies the suburbs, the dreamy beauty, the moments of unexpected grace that cut straight to the heart of existence and its mystery. The journalist is very far from home. There’s this lovely, terrified girl, whose own life will probably never exist beyond these sad, littered hills. And this is their brief, miraculous intersection. Moments like that happen every day, everywhere, and it’s a wonder that we’re allowed such grace, I think.

You lived in Paris for two separate periods, right?

Yes, two very brief periods. I spent a winter there when I was twenty-four, a truncated winter. I went there because things with my brother, which had seemed to be improving, took a turn for the worse. I’d spent two years working dead end jobs. I’d been pursuing a girl from high school - actually, the girl who lent me The Unbearable Lightness of Being and sent me on my journey to writer-hood - and that had ended pretty catastrophically.

What happened?

Well I’d written a story. This very unsubtle, creepy story about latent longing, about two people fated to be together who’ve been ripped apart. It was a humiliating story, in hindsight. But of course, at the time, I thought I’d give this girl the story and she’d just swoon, and realize that, you know, we were cut from the same cloth and were supposed to spend our lives together. Her name was Rebecca, I should add. She wasn’t a knock out beauty or anything, but her intellect, God, it drove me nuts. We could talk each other dry. I tend to fall for women like that, women who aren’t classically beautiful, women who barricade themselves in books. So I gave her this shitty, pathetic, creepy story. And she was so gracious about it. She’s a remarkable woman, and she handled it as graciously and as compassionately as anyone could have. She was far gentler than I deserved. And that, mercifully, spared me the brunt of the humiliation that comes along with rejection; especially with monumental rejection. She told me, as kindly as possible, that, you know, I was living in the past, that I’d built up this image of her in my head, this projection that bore almost no resemblance to the real thing. I was pretty wrecked about it, obviously, but she actually nursed me back to health, in a sense, by continuing to be friends with me. By helping me to realize that there’s a lot of beauty just from contact with someone you love, even if it isn’t the contact you desire. She taught me the grace and splendor of unrequited love, really. But it’s a painful, devastating grace. The kind that, ultimately, you need to distance yourself from, or it will ruin your life. And this coincided with my brother taking a turn for the worse. I’d been delivering pizza for two years. I had this very visceral moment of utter failure, one night in October. It wasn’t monumental or anything. Nothing sparked it. I was driving around, listening to Fleetwood Mac, I think, and it just smacked me in the face how completely terrible my life was. So I thought: Paris. Why? No idea. Blatant, uneducated romanticism, I suppose. Desperation. It was ridiculous. My poor parents had to deal with me running off to Europe with no job, with no plan, knowing nobody there. And this was on top of my brother, who at that point had disappeared, and we didn’t know if he was alive or dead, or in jail or what. It was such a profoundly selfish thing of me to do. I should have been there to support them. But all I could think about was my own embarrassment. I think they let me go without a fight because they were just too tired to fight. So I left right after Thanksgiving. I’d found a room for rent in Montparnasse, right near the cemetery where Baudelaire’s buried. It was on the top floor of a really dilapidated building, and it was soul crushingly small. I remember it rained like the first thirteen days I was there.

So what did you do?

Nothing. I did literally nothing. I walked in the rain. I ate bread and cheese. I didn’t know anything about the city. I went to cafes and took up smoking. I’m sure I looked ridiculous, and sad. I was way too depressed and lonely to write. I realized, almost immediately, that it was a profound, enormous mistake. But my pride wouldn’t let me go home, of course. That would have been too humiliating, even for me, even at that point in my life. I had to stick it out for at least two months, I told myself. I started spending money pretty carelessly, just so that running out of money would give me an excuse to go home. (Laughs). I drank a lot. Eventually I met this Canadian girl. She was a photographer, doing effectively the same thing I was doing. She was much better at it than me, I should add. She actually had a few jobs. She actually spoke a little bit of French. She had the right constitution for wandering. She was totally fearless, and I really admired that about her. I suspect she took a great deal of pity on me. We spent a few weeks wandering the city together, going to the various museums and churches. We made love, too, but it was very disinterested, on her part, and very desperate and clumsy, on my part. It was all very beautiful, looking back on it. A cold, grey winter in Paris. A lovely young photographer. The two of us wandering the city, talking about art, philosophizing about the meaning of life, drinking wine on the streets, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee until two or three in the morning, fucking in my rooftop room, smoking cigarettes on the roof and looking at the clear winter stars. There have been many days since then when I’ve yearned to go back to those days. But at the time I was just so lonely and miserable and self pitying. (Laughs). I was such a petulant shit. Things with her eventually faded out. In truth, we just ran out of things to talk about. It was probably for the better. Despite that, when we drifted apart, it felt like the bottom had come out, like what little grip I had on the external world had fallen away. I think I lasted another three weeks before I came home. That was early in February. I was just so happy to be home that I didn’t even have the energy to be embarrassed.

What about the second stint?

It was pretty unremarkable. It was much milder than the first. My wife had some research she needed to do in Paris. She’d gotten a grant to spend three months there, and I was about halfway through ‘The Anonymous Dead.’ Again, I had a few romantic illusions about finding inspiration in Paris. They were dashed pretty quickly. (Laughs). We arrived, again, in November. I’ve never actually been to Paris when there are leaves on the trees. I’ve only seen the place in the cold, barren months. Which, somehow, seems appropriate. I honestly couldn’t tell you one definitive thing about those three months. I spent most of my time trying to write. I didn’t explore much, which I probably should have.

You’ve never written a word about your time there, though.

I’ve never written about Paris because, like New York, I feel it’s very easily superficialized. It’s so easy to write some half-assed movie or story that just skirts the surface of either place. I don’t know a thing about Paris. I don’t know a thing about New York. I’ve spent time in both places, but they aren’t in my blood. They didn’t cut me, so to speak, and I didn’t cut them. Now, I don’t know anything about Central Russia, or Kazakhstan, or Western China, or the US-Mexico border. But I’ve written about all those places. Why? I guess there’s so much literature about New York and Paris, so much legitimate literature, that I figured: why throw my hat into that ring? Other people will always write about New York and Paris. And they’ll do it far better than I could. I did write about the photographer, however. The girl I met there.

You did?

She showed up at a reading of mine, completely unannounced. I was in Detroit, so it was a bit of a homecoming. I had some family there, this very motley crew of working glass folks with beer guts and faded tattoos in jeans and Red Wings t-shirts. (Laughs). The novel had come out by then, so it was a pretty decent sized crowd. And there was this woman lingering at the back of the crowd. This very beautiful, familiar woman. It was like she’d stepped out of a dream. I knew her, intuitively, but I couldn’t immediately place her. She’d aged well, as I suspect photographers do. Cigarettes and coffee do wonders for middle age, but they take their toll later on. What tipped me off that it was her is that she asked a question. She had, or has, this stunning baritone voice. It doesn’t fit her at all. She’s this gaunt, gorgeous woman, and when she talks, it’s this deep, gravely, booming voice. I knew it was her immediately once she talked.

What did she ask?

I couldn’t tell you. Something erudite and allusive to our time in Paris, I’m pretty confident. Something only I would have understood. We talked afterwards. She was in town photographing some of the ruined buildings. Someone is always in town making art out of the ruins of Detroit. A friend had given her my book of stories, and she read the whole book without realizing it was me. I gave her the address of the place I was staying. It was some grotesque B and B out on Grosse Ile, something that just felt haunted. Like it’d stepped out of a bad Victorian novel. She was waiting for me when I pulled up. It was pretty late, and the only place open was this little bar down at the end of the island, across from the airport. It was right on the edge of the river. It’s the kind of derelict, sad place you imagine going to at midnight on a Thursday with an obscure woman from your past. There was this terrible band playing, a bunch of guys in cut off t-shirts who’d probably been roadies for Motley Crue or Metallica. They were balding but refused to cut off their mullets. That kind of guy. (Laughs). So we drank quite a bit and ordered a pizza, cause that was the only thing the kitchen made. And all the while, outside, this nasty storm started to kick up. If you’ve lived through a Midwestern storm, you know the type. There’s this static in the air, a foreboding stillness. Then the wind starts, and for a few minutes all you can hear is the wind. Then it’s the lightning. I’d forgotten what lightning was like in the Midwest. It’s got a dense, physical presence. It falls in sheets, just like rain. It’s horrifying and beautiful all at once. This was a particularly bad storm, because even the guys in the bar, guys who’d clearly weathered more than a few storms, were tittering a bit, looking over their shoulders and out the window. But the band kept playing and we all kept drinking. We ended up playing some cards with these guys at the bar, drinking even more. At some point we decided to dance, even though I don’t think it was the kind of place accustomed to dancing, nor the kind of band that played songs worth dancing to. We danced for a while, close together. The storm raged outside. It was the way old lovers dance in old movies. I felt a hell of a lot more moved by the experience than I expected to feel. I suppose the alcohol played a role in that.

That’s your story ‘The Storm.’

More or less. The story is, obviously, a bit more surrealist. The roof comes off in the story. It’s also set in the south and it’s an old blues band playing. The walls come down and in the story the band and the dancers are just out there in the storm, naked. The female character was also a bit of a synthesis.

Between the photographer and…

There was a woman who lived beneath us in one of our apartments in Detroit. It must have been the one in Wyandotte. This woman was a teacher at the elementary school. She wasn’t married. We never saw her have any friends over, or any men. And I mean, she must have had company, she must have gone out. I was a kid, so all of my perceptions of this have developed in hindsight. She was, looking back, not unattractive. She was very angular and rigid. I think a lot about what her life must have been like. A single woman in her late twenties or early thirties, living in the Detroit suburbs, teaching second grade. Was she devoutly religious? Was she a lesbian? Had she been spurned and hurt? It’s such a mystery to me. I think her life must have been impossibly lonely and sad, but I don’t know. And I think about it a lot, for some reason. I’d written this very straightforward, literal story where a young man visits his childhood neighborhood and encounters this woman who had been beautiful, but was now withered, middle aged, her life squandered. And they have this brief, strange encounter that, the young man decides, is full of grace. It was a nice encounter, one of those moments between two near strangers where, for whatever reason, they throw off their pretensions and their barriers and manage to stumble onto something that resembles honesty about the human condition. These moments are rare, even amongst lovers, and we tend to remember them when they happen. It wasn’t a bad story, just predictable. I thought it would be far more interesting to examine this woman and her life more abstractly. And this night with the photographer provided the setting, the background images, for that examination.

Your first published story is somewhat in that vein, a grace moment, if you will.

Yes, I think it was a short piece about a man running into his ex-girlfriend. (Laughs). I was mostly writing poems then, or writing un-finished stories. I wrote a lot of bad poetry before I realized that, you know, I just wasn’t cut out for it. There’s such a minute attention to detail, to rhythm and language, in poetry. I didn’t have the focus for that. But that first story actually began as a long form poem that I finally just broke into paragraphs. And it functioned much better as a story. (Laughs). I also had delusions of grandeur, an ego, really, that prohibited me from becoming a poet.

You were writing these at Vassar?

Yes, I started writing them at Vassar. I got it in my head that I wanted to be a writer because I read a book when I was sixteen that just absolutely spoke to me. I’m sure almost every writer has this experience. You read a book and you feel that it was written solely for you. That it was put into the world just for you to find. And that was totally exhilarating, to be that moved by a book. And I thought: that’s what I want to do with my life. I want to move some sixteen year old boy the same way I was just moved.

And this was ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ correct?

Yes, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’ Rebecca, who I was terribly, obsessively in love with, gave me that book. She told me it reminded her of me. So it wasn’t like I was coming into the book with a completely clean slate. (Laughs). I was predisposed to like it. I saw her in every sentence of the book. But, still, that was the moment I began to think of myself as a writer. And the funny thing about that is, most people just take you at your word when you tell them you’re a writer. They don’t read your work, or even want to read it. So I found out, pretty quickly, that if I just told everyone I was a writer, soon they treated me like I was one. Even though the stories I was writing at the time were God-awful and bad. But nobody knew that. Hell, I didn’t even know it. But then, you know, I left Vassar. I went home.

Why?

A girl dumped me. I got depressed. So much of my life has been dictated by women, I’m a bit ashamed to admit. I started to despise the rigidness of formal academia. But mostly, I was being a whiny kid. I thought: I’m a writer, why the fuck should I have to deal with things like Algebra class? I was being profoundly spoiled, and without any good reason. I’m not proud of it. But most of it stemmed from me getting dumped and being depressed. And things were just starting to get bad with my brother then, too. There were a lot of things pulling me home, or at the very least, pushing me out of Vassar.

And then what?

I dabbled more heavily in poetry. Those were a few pretty wasted years, to be honest. Though at the time I thought they were experimental and exhilarating. There was another girl, of course. There was a year of my life where I smoked a lot of pot. And, you know, if you smoke a lot of pot, you tend to meet a lot of people who smoke a lot of pot. And when they’re young, these people tend to be really interesting, creative people. People who smoke when they’re young tend to feel alienated by systems and structures. They tend to intuitively reject this linear model of life that we, as American kids, are subjected to. The model that says you go from high school to college, from college to a career. At some point you get married and at some point you have kids. You proceed from system to system, and then you bring children into those systems, and teach them the beliefs and rituals of those systems. Young pot smokers, in my experience, are not only aware of these structures, but they abhor them. And they spend a lot of time talking about how much they abhor those systems. I was one of those kids. Kids who think they’re remarkable because they recognize the facades of modern life, and want desperately to reach some kind of authentic level of existence. I met this lovely girl who felt the same way. We spent long, prospective nights talking about how we wanted to change the world. How I would write these immense, earth-shattering novels. How she was destined to do something special with her life, even though she never specified what that special thing was; she just felt, at her core, that she was supposed to do something remarkable. And of course neither one of us exhibited the motivation necessary to accomplish these grand things. Or, even, to accomplish very minor things, like holding down a job or raising a family or balancing a check book. (Laughs). But God did we talk about them, God did we dream. And one day this girl suggested I try writing poetry, probably because she’d read my prose and it wasn’t very good. (Laughs). So I tried. And initially, at least, it was easier. Or, it gave off the illusion of being easier. Because the form didn’t demand the same development as a novel. A poem can be a moment, or a vignette. Now, to be a good poet, or especially a great poet, there are so many other structures and developments that are just as daunting as the structures of a novel. But to be a 21 year old kid, and to feel like a good poet, it’s a much easier discipline. Because I could sit down and channel my angst and my anger and my sense of wonder, and in a few hours I could have a finished product. Maybe it wasn’t perfect or great, but it was finished and whole. So for a few years I thought of myself as a poet. But the problem, ultimately, is that I was cheating. I didn’t love poetry. I didn’t love the rhythms and structures. I wanted to write stories and novels, but I wasn’t talented enough or disciplined enough to write them. So I pretended. I pretended I was a poet. But to be honest, these years aren’t all that interesting to me. They were important, because they gave me the confidence to eventually come back to prose. But they weren’t anything more than that. I look back on those years and they feel very fraudulent to me.

How so?

Because I was lying to myself. Because I was unwilling to work at what, deep down, I knew I loved. I was willing, and eager, to take short cuts. I didn’t want to sit down every night, especially those nights when I was tired and bored, to slog through writing a page or two of a novel. I wanted the quick fix, right? I wanted that instant satisfaction that our culture is so good at conditioning us to want. I get very scared because this is something that has dogged me my whole life: this desire to be easily entertained and rewarded. I wonder, sometimes, if the way our society is presently organized dissuades great artistic achievement. Because our patience has been whittled away and whittled away, right? It’s the three minute pop-song instead of the symphony. It’s email instead of a letter. Then it’s a text instead of email. Then it’s twitter instead of a text. We’re slowly refining things down to their most efficient. But efficient isn’t even the right word. It’s like we’re all addicted to, to what? Not to information. Not to actually learning things. But to the semblance of importance, of a new cause, of a new story. Michael Jackson dies, Whitney Houston dies, and for a week it‘s all anyone can talk about. The debt ceiling is going to shut down the government, health care is going to be the end of society as we know it. It’s hysterical! Internet memes are born, burn red hot, and are then totally forgotten, all within a week. We just consume and consume and consume. There can’t possibly be enough provender to satiate our appetites. It’s the horrible, unrelenting cacophony of modern life. When can we rest? Even if you despise all the noise, it’s impossible to avoid; impossible, even, to avoid being seduced by it, at times. It’s like cultural Stockholm Syndrome. (Laughs). It’s just so easy to occupy every waking moment with stimuli. The internet is like this horrible wormhole of useless information. And every other medium, in a lot of ways, has had to adapt to that, to how quickly the internet can satisfy our urges for information, for breaking news, for sex or for sports. And that affects all of us. It affects how we think, how we process information, how we work. And, obviously, we’re only beginning to understand how this will impact humanity. How does it affect artists? Are our attention spans too short not just to read great novels, but to write them? It’s a very scary world out there for young artists, for young people trying to do very serious work. Because to write a truly great book, or a truly great album - to create any mature, thoughtful piece of art - you need time and you need space. And our culture is very, very bad at giving people those two things. From a purely practical standpoint, the cost of living, nowadays, is through the roof. The imbalance between the cost of living and wages grows every year. And just think about the responsibilities we have now as opposed to say twenty, thirty, forty years ago. Rent is more expensive. Cell phone bills and internet bills. Health insurance. Car insurance and gas. And the awful paradox is, if you want to live someplace where you don’t need a car, you’ll pay for it in rent. Good luck finding a place in New York or San Fran that isn’t at least fifteen hundred bucks a month. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d say that our cities have developed in a way that necessitates owning a car. (Laughs). The problem becomes: how do we afford living and still have time to create art? Because a crappy job, the kind of job that artists have a long, proud tradition of working, doesn’t pay the bills anymore. And a career, a real career, just doesn’t leave the time or energy to create art. And I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, like a Ludite. Because I realize a lot of good is coming from this progress, which is I guess the only word for it. We’re saving lives. We’re connecting people in remarkable ways. People in Juarez, Mexico, are using twitter to alert neighbors and police to drug shoot outs. People all over the Arab world use twitter and Facebook to organize against and subvert oppressive regimes. But this progress comes at a cost, too. And it’s possible that that cost is our ability to think critically about long form narratives, or great art, or philosophy. I realize there are people still creating stuff. And I hate to say this, because it makes me sound like a dismissive asshole, but so much of the art I see out there today - the performance stuff, the slam poetry, the ‘micro-story’ - seems to be of the times, of the zeitgeist. It strikes me as fast food art, the kind of thing that skitters along the surface and looks very sharp, but ultimately gets subsumed beneath the massive weight of our cultural apparatus. Devoured is probably a better word.

Is this something that you think is a reversible trend, or is it an irrevocable movement, to use your language, towards the elimination of serious art as we know it?

Define serious art for me.

Well the novel, for starters. And symphonies, operas. Big, ambitious projects that take years of devotion and dedication to create and perhaps just as long to be understood.

I like that, that’s good. Do I think this is a reversible trend? I don’t, no. I think that society as a whole, the mass of human motion, is headed in a very scary direction. I think we’re moving towards economic calamity, towards ecological calamity, towards biological calamity. I think if you extrapolate these trends, the population trends and the climate trends and the economic trends, pretty soon you’re looking at a catastrophic corrective event, or a series of catastrophic corrective events. But that’s separate from art, of course. (He pauses for a long while here). I think the size of the world, the size of our species, but also the closeness of our species - nearly seven billion people, most of them capable of communicating with anyone else in the world - is driving us towards calamity, and it’s also driving what you define as ‘serious art’ towards extinction or marginalization. And I think that these two things are absolutely connected. Now, look, I don’t think that the novel is going to disappear, or even the symphony or opera. There will still be people out there creating them. But the days of novels, or symphonies, becoming seminal, universal events have passed. The days of anything becoming seminal or transcendent has likely passed. We’re just too diffracted, too distracted. Novels will continue to have a home within a small segment of the populace, just as symphonies will. But will they be any different than the various art forms that currently, or recently, represented the margins of society? Anime art and comic books, things like that. I’d say pornography, but the great irony is, porn has probably become the most widely distributed art form, albeit one that no one ever likes to discuss. It’s been the one medium that’s been consistently able to, for at least a few moments, make wide swaths of humanity forget their loneliness, forget their mortality. And in a sad way, that’s pretty remarkable. It’s difficult, because I think, as people, we yearn for some form of convergence, something that unites us, be it art or sports or religion. And to me, it just seems like the one convergent event that might be out there, is calamity of a global scale, be it pandemic or natural disaster or something. (He pauses for a while, breathless). I’m sorry. That was completely digressive. You wanted to know about my wasted years. (Laughs). I don’t know. I wrote bad poetry, I worked some pretty dreadful jobs. I worked at a shoe store at the mall. I worked as a landscaper. All my money was going to weed, and to alcohol. And my writing, you know, totally stagnated. It was just one bad, immature, incoherent poem after another. I’ve had many periods of dishonesty in my life, but this was perhaps the worst period of dishonesty.

And you think the smoking play a role in that?

Probably. You know, in a lot of ways, I really think pot is the perfect drug for our times. It’s the perfect consumer drug. You hear more about meth or heroin or prescription pills. And with good reason, cause those are actually dangerous drugs. Those are drugs that ruin neighborhoods and lives. I know firsthand how those drugs can ruin families. But I think pot has kind of been forgotten, namely because most of us have decided it’s not actually a gateway drug. It’s certainly not dangerous, at least in a classical sense. But it’s so nefarious in a lot of really subtle ways. I’ve seen multiple friends of mine completely squander their lives because of pot. Not squander in the typical go to jail, have kids out of wedlock sense. But these were bright, curious, ambitious folks. These were people I’d sit around and talk about literature and film with, people I’d drink coffee with and smoke cigarettes with until four or five in the morning. These were exhilarating nights. And I’ve watched these dear friends of mine slowly waste their intelligence and their curiosity because they’ve totally blunted themselves with pot. It works in this very methodical, slow way. It turns serious users into kind of perfect consumers. All you want to do, if you smoke pot for a really long time, and in a habitual way, is to smoke more pot, is to find some form of easy entertainment, is to find some easy meal to satiate the hunger you’ve piqued. It piques hungers, that’s a good way to describe what pot does. And when you’re a 16, 17 year old kid, that can be fun and valuable. When you’re 21, or 22, when you should be learning how to exist in the world, it can totally stunt you. But, you know, I’m really grateful I got stoned a good amount in high school. It was illicit and fun, it made life exciting, it helped me to take things less seriously and question the firmly entrenched systems of meaning that were all around me. But the problem occurs when you stop using pot to get fucked up, and start using it out of ritual. You start using it because it’s the only way to trigger those hunger mechanisms. I know people who can’t eat or sleep without being stoned. And they’re totally functional human beings. They work at tech firms, they’re school teachers. But these were insanely intelligent, prodigiously gifted folks. They could have been novelists or musicians, they could have created some really meaningful art with their lives. Pot ruined the curiosity, the ambition, that you need to create something truly worthwhile with your life. But it also turned them into really pacified, genteel consumers. Ideal consumers, even. People who watch tons upon tons of television and who eat massive amounts of heavily processed food.

You talk about art in reverential terms. You seem to dismiss people who work at tech firms, or as teachers, as having wasted their lives.

I don’t mean to. Look, that’s a fine, good life. What more can we ask for than to lead a fine life? A life of decency, of compassion, of empathy and selflessness? But, at the same time, a life like that reinforces the power structures that are in place. An unquestioned life of consumerism reinforces consumerism as a viable system moving forward. And I don’t think it is a viable system going forward. I think that if we don’t seriously alter the way we live, we’re going to do real damage to this planet; we’re going to kill millions, billions, of our fellow men because we’re too lazy and too stubborn to live differently. Maybe that’s pious. It probably is. But I like people who live off the grid. I like people, and characters, who fight doggedly for a lifestyle that has been marginalized and isolated. What’s more marginal than a life of poverty and asceticism in a world that values wealth and decadence?

And yet you’ve written a big novel, an ambitious novel, even an excessive novel, despite claiming to abhor this climate of excess and ease.

Sure, that’s a fair point.

How’d that come about?

What? The novel? (Laughs.).

Yes, the novel.

Oh, fuck that’s a tough question. How does any idea come about? A line, here or there, floating in the wind. A woman you see on the street who’s reading a book on a bench. An article in the New York Times. I don’t know, honestly. It’s so long ago now that I forget.

But why Mexico? Why this story?

Probably because I’d been reading a lot of Bolano. And I thought, wow, what a shame that he isn’t around to write about the drug war? I was 29 when I started the book. Everything with my brother had happened, with my father. I was in a very dangerous place, dangerous in the sense that I was moving very rapidly towards wasting my life. And I decided the one thing that could save me was a big novel, an epic. Why? I don’t know. I suppose it’s the challenge. The novel has, to me, always seemed the finest artistic form in the world. The novel or the symphony. It takes such an enormous sacrifice from the artist, such an enormous wealth of energy and vitality, and owes such a debt to its predecessors…it just struck me as the biggest thing I could pursue as a writer.

And how long did it take to write?

Oh, God. Forever. (Laughs). I think the first draft took 6 years to write. But I wasn’t writing non-stop. I’d spend a few months writing, then I’d get to be way, way too poor, impoverished to the brink of homelessness, and I’d have to find a job. I worked odd jobs those days. I’ve worked odd jobs most of my life. (Laughs). They were low stress jobs that would allow me the clarity to write at least a little bit. I was a gardener, I worked at a golf course, I cooked at a diner. I delivered a lot of pizza. I was living mostly around Philly at the time, in the burbs. So I’d work a bit, but then I’d get restless and feel like I was wasting my life and quit whatever job I was working. I flirted with a few careers, too. I spent 6 months writing for a magazine before quitting.

Why’d you quit?

I think if I’d have spent another two weeks sitting in a lonely cubicle in an office that was half empty due to budget cutbacks, writing articles that were geared toward house wives and idiots, I really might have hung myself. It’s tough, though. Walking out was so tough. I remember my heart ached for the two weeks before I quit. My blood pressure was through the roof. I couldn’t sleep. I had very foreboding dreams. There’s such social pressure to be productive, and I’m a pretty weak person, so I’ve caved to that pressure many times. We waste so many years trying to live the lives that we think everyone else wants for us. And, of course, my brother, my father, my nephew…all that was still fresh. But, look, we all suffer. I hate to use that as an excuse. Suffering is not unique, but I don’t handle it well, unfortunately. But I finally got serious about writing the fucking thing, about writing in general, when I met Maria.

How’d that happen?

Delivering pizza, of course. (Laughs). She was babysitting, and the kids gave her the wrong address. So I had to call her cell phone to ask for directions. Which meant that she had my phone number. She texted me the next day and asked me for coffee. (Laughs). It was very brave of her, braver than I would have been. I think about all the contingencies that went into us meeting, the incidental occurrences. I had to be working that night, as did she. She had to order from my pizza shop, not one of the other two in town. The kids had to give her the wrong address and she had to be gullible enough to trust them. (Laughs). Of course, look, everyone of us has stories like that. Stories of fate or chance. I pass women on the street every day and think, you know, how minor the chain of events are that could lead us to becoming lovers. It’s funny, those little contingencies are so telling. One kind of person sees them as proof of chance, chaos, an incidental world. Others as proof of the divine, predestination, etcetera. I’m just grateful they happened, whatever the reason, fate or chance. Because suddenly I had someone else in my life and she made me want to be better than I was. I didn’t want her to look at me and think I was some lazy, blathering idiot. So I finally got a little more serious about writing and viewed it more as a discipline than a whim of inspiration. Most people, I think, have this very distorted view of writing where they think you’re drinking and wandering and fucking, all in the name of inspiration or something akin to that, and then when it arrives you sit down in a fugue or trance and just create, pure creation, until you’ve spent yourself. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve drank too much, I’ve wandered some and fucked a lot. But mostly that leaves you empty. Writing is what fills you up, or at least what fills me up. Sitting down and building a sentence or a paragraph or a narrative. And I probably realized this just because I wanted to impress a girl. (Laughs). It worked out. She married me, after all.

You two have had a peripatetic life together.

We have. Paris, for that second lonely winter. Granada, Siena. All of those places because she is a marvelous, brilliant scholar of post-modern literature. The book, The Anonymous Dead, finally started to emerge from the ether of my imagination in those cities. It’s funny, people think, ‘Oh, it must be amazing going to all these places! The inspiration!’ But, you know, Maria was teaching and doing research. So I was very much alone in these foreign cities where I didn’t speak the language. There were some profoundly difficult weeks and months where she’d be gone and I’d be walking alone through these places, and I’d feel so fucking isolated and desperate for any form of human contact. And then, of course, I’d feel selfish: to be surrounded by such beauty and to feel nothing but loneliness. How American, right? Those were the conditions under which I finally finished that goddamned book. It was the loneliness that finished it, not the beauty.

Can I ask you about the ending?

Sure.

It’s a tough ending, huh?

Yes. Yes. I realize it’s tough. It’s a difficult ending. A lot of people have trouble with the ending, and have asked me about it. Because, of course, it cuts to the heart of that question we’re all trying to answer, which is, you know, what’s the purpose of fiction? Because look, as far as I see it, the baseline position of most novelists, of most people, is that life is shit, or at the very least that life is meaningless. Maybe it’s got some beauty - there’s fucking and love and dancing and poetry and music, there’s natural splendor - but the general stance, the status quo, is that all this beauty is for naught, is nullified by death. It’s all just a shout of grace into the void. And, you know, it’s easy for art to fulfill this status quo, to reinforce life as nihilistic, that it ends in an abyss, that all our structures are constructed solely to combat the utter chaos of death. This is why fiction, even bad fiction, resonates: convergence, form, symmetry, all those pleasing resolutions that death, probably, denies us. But good fiction has to do more than just reinforce the status quo, of life being shit. It has to ignore the status quo, and deny death. Good fiction has to find a way through the storm of shit and get to meaning. It has to justify not just its own existence, as a piece of art, but our existence. To make an argument that existing, that fucking and loving and dancing and art and good food and natural beauty, even if it all ultimately tumbles into the abyss, is still preferable to non-existence. And that’s hard work, right? It’s gotta’ be hard work, because all the evidence is working against you. And beyond fiction, I think that the only way to lead an important life is to grapple with that question. To find a way through the shit to something resembling an answer. Is it possible to reach a definitive answer about this question? I don’t know. But you have to engage it. Because there are so many ways to cheat and to work your way to an easy, superficial answer: many religions, materialism, consumerism, sex without reflection. All those things are cheating, right? Religion says, ‘this life isn’t what matters, it’s the next one!’ Or, you know, you accumulate wealth, or you have easy sex. Both things are symptoms of unbridled desire, of unexamined desire. You’re trying to build enough of a façade that you can just ignore the shit of existence. But the shit is important, man. It’s necessary. But it’s also necessary, probably more necessary, to get past the shit, to somehow find a path through. You have to wade in the shit, and then get to something more than the shit. (He pauses). I shouldn’t be so dismissive of religion. My father worked very hard at his faith, he chiseled away at it and at its heart he found something solid, something sublime that sustained him. He had a very rigorous faith. He read everything. Kierkegaard and Calvin and Kant and Camus. He spent hours thinking and praying. God, he would spend days in prayer. Music was also a kind of prayer for him, too. And he took his sermons very seriously, even though he never had his own congregation. It devastates me, honestly, that he never had his own congregation just because he never finished seminary. He was a damn fine preacher, a vessel of God, to use the vernacular. But he never let it show if it frustrated him. I should be more generous about religion. His faith was so deeply considered. It’s difficult, because faith, by its definition, isn’t really a matter of choice. It’s there, or it’s not. From a very young age, the concept of God just seemed absurd to me. But I’ll readily admit my faith, or lack thereof, is far more reductive and facile than my father’s faith.

Is it ok if we digress, back to the idea of working through shit, as you call it, to an answer?

Sure, yeah. That’s fine.

You believe that it’s an artist’s responsibility to reach that answer.

No. It’s the responsibility to at least make an honest effort. To truly grapple with the question and to try, desperately, to reach something resembling an answer. It doesn’t have to be coherent. Hell, maybe it can’t be coherent. Maybe, if I’m being honest, it can only be a shadow, or a silhouette. The faint outline of maybe something down there in the depths. Maybe that’s the best we can do.

Yet the ending of your novel: it seems to me, to a lot of people, to end by wallowing in shit, if you will. It’s hard to see that presence you talk about, that silhouette. It’s hard to feel it.

See, it’s there though. Or at least I think it’s there. I hate to resort to subjectivity here, but each reader will feel it or they won’t. I hate subjectivity as much as the next writer. It’s a tough thing to accept. If someone doesn’t like your book, or isn’t deeply moved by it, you want to assume that they ‘don’t get it,’ that maybe they’re stupid or lazy. But sometimes a person just isn’t meant for a certain book. And when it’s your book they aren’t meant for, it’s tough. But it’s almost as tough when you fall in love with a book, or a movie or a song even, and you recommend it to someone and they just kind of shrug and say, ‘yeah, it’s ok.’ You want to scream, right, or slap them? But then, we’re not only subjective when it comes to art. We’re subjective about everything. Some people don’t like steak, and it’s not like the cows are getting offended about this.

…

(Laughs). I don’t think it’s that outlandish of an analogy, ok? Think about it. Taste, general taste, has developed because of evolution, right? Certain foods taste better than others, we can surmise, because our bodies have developed preferences for them because, in the long run, they’re beneficial to the survival of the species. Narratives, languages: what’s more important to human society than our ability to communicate? It’s why we tell stories. It’s how we construct systems of meaning, and systems of belief, and how we build cities and empires and computers. You could argue, as Borges has, pretty convincingly, that the entire universe is nothing more than a construct of language. That we don’t know anything that extends beyond the reach of language. So it would make sense, then, that certain kinds of stories have survived, have endured. Stories that are generally popular must have some trait, some characteristic, that, as a species, is beneficial to our continued prosperity and survival. Maybe it’s that they give us hope, or they help us to feel camaraderie. Maybe they teach us empathy, or inspire us to action. Certain kinds of stories endure for reasons that go beyond simple subjectivity and taste. I think that’s an absolute fact. But, just like any other facet of evolution, there are exceptions to the rule. And thank God, right? Because otherwise certain stories wouldn’t mean as much, those pieces that we discover and feel they were created solely for our consumption. But I’ve digressed, I guess. Look, the ending of the book had to be difficult. It wouldn’t be honest if it weren’t. But I think the characters reach a sort of moral threshold, you know, beyond which they accept death as a reasonable, legitimate sacrifice. They don‘t die for vanity or ego. Maybe they aren’t big, satisfying deaths. But they’re deaths of passion and, I think, moral strength.

And the final image?

Yes, I suppose that’s as much of an answer as I could reach. You know, by this point, the three major protagonists have failed us or died. The American has sold herself to the black market out of greed. The journalist, who is finally at the threshold of solving the mystery he’s spent the whole novel trying to solve, chooses certain death instead of getting that answer at the cost of his conscience. And the final march, the peace march led by the poet who has lost his son, falls apart when the poet is killed. Most of the others flee, fearing their own lives. And what remains is a fractured, beaten group. But the last image is of a grieving mother, still waiting for justice, for an answer, still enduring. That very human perseverance for truth in a world that seems devoid of it. The very fact that we still have hope, hope of being saved. That’s what the mother at the end is, the mother who has lost everything and yet still fights. That’s probably trite, very trite. It’s all I could resolve.

Well one of the major themes of the book is the notion of salvation: men seeking it in God, in sex, in art.

And they don’t find it. But they keep looking, of course. Like all of us, right? I feel like that’s the evolution of passion, right? As kids we’re usually brought up in some religion, told that God is watching over us and will save us. Then we realize that the world is inexplicably violent and cruel, and our faith fails. Then we get a little older and we’re taught love will save us, so we fall in love, and it fails. So then what? Writing, for me. I thought maybe writing would save me. And just like sex, those first few forays get you so close, right? So close to something complete and pure.

You describe it in the novel as ‘being adrift in a seemingly infinite sea. Then one night there’s a storm, a cataclysmic storm, and by the brightness of the lightning you think you can make out the silhouette of an island. You’re moving towards this shape. But then the storm passes, and the island is nowhere to be seen come dawn. After that, you spend all your days trying to get back to that island, searching the endless sea.’

I’d forgotten I’d written that. I like that a lot. It’s probably the best I could do.

‘While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure.’ That’s your epigraph, from Bolano.

Yes, always Bolano. I would have never written this book without Bolano. I worried at times that I was treading too heavily on his terrain, the old anxiousness. But, look, reading Bolano showed me what writing could do. I’m not ashamed that I borrow very heavily, stylistically, from him. Just as I’m not ashamed that I occasionally borrow from Carver or Robinson or Joyce. Who was it that said, in another quote, that everything is synthesis? I learned to write by reading Updike, my first stories mimic him almost exactly. Then I tried to synthesize he and Carver. Jack Gilbert taught me the clarity of the heart, that importance, the fallacy of form, if you will. Every book or poem, every good book or poem, is teaching me something I didn’t know. How does one write after Melville? someone asked. How does one write after Shakespeare, or Borges, or Bolano, or Garcia Marquez, or Pynchon, or Foster Wallace? Probably because we’re brash and narcissistic and idiotic. But also, because, what would we do? We all have to try and fail just so that every decade the whole lot of us might give birth to another Bolano.

You have been an ex-pat now for nearly a decade. How has this affected your work?

Oh, hardly at all, but also, I’m sure, in myriad ways I’m oblivious to. I have a larger catalogue of images to pull from, so that’s good. I am a big believer in the image, that all we really remember from a story is its images, those glittering moments. If you can create a beautiful, striking image that is somehow tonally consistent with your themes, you’ve got a good story. So Europe has given me a lot of images to use. But people always ask about inspiration, ask if I came over here to soul search, or to find myself. I did that when I was 24 because I was naïve and an idiot. I came this time because my wife got a job over here and has continued to work over here. Don’t get me wrong. I like Europe. I like that people stay up late in Spain, and I love the coffee in Italy. I once had an absolutely earth shattering lunch of veal and pasta while passing through Florence. I love that there are still sacred places here, and that some of them haven’t been completely commercialized. There are still churches in Italy where you can sit and the frescoes haven’t been re-done, and you can feel an intimation of continuity, of a quiet place that has provided comfort to dozens of generations. Where people sat 500 years ago and listened to the same purl of water, the same quiet, and tried to unravel what it means to exist. That’s a profound thing, and important. There’s poetry in that. But so much has been compromised. Capitalism, you know, is so homogenous and pervasive. You can’t escape the products or the crassness, that uneasy feeling that everyone is trying to get over on you in some way. And that’s, you know, the price of tourism, modernism. More people can experience Rome, the Alhambra, Paris. But the cost of that is a crassness, a superficiality: the nagging sense that what you’re witnessing has been manipulated for maximum effect. It’s no longer experiencing grace. It’s experiencing what some multinational think tank believes grace to resemble. I mean, fuck, the Louvre is surrounded by tourist claptrap. Outside the Vatican is an army of North African immigrants selling trinkets. We’re all walking commodities, right? Untapped markets. I wanted to capture that in The Anonymous Dead, this idea of sacred spaces being corrupted by outside systems. Namely, capitalism, in all its off forms. The maquiladoras and the drug cartels of Mexico are both by-products of American desire. The private sacred spaces of the world are being co-opted, being turned into systems of commerce. Our desire for salvation and deliverance and transcendence is being used against us, to the profit of a select few folks. I hate to tie all this to one moment, because you can’t. Because the systems and politics and industries that have led us to this point have been moving and evolving and expanding for decades, for centuries even. We look for answers, for cultural fulcrums, but things are never that neat. We only add context with the bias of history; only attach meaning to singular moments that, at the time, weren’t singular but were just one moment in a long progression of moments that moved us closer to the irrevocable present. But there’s no doubt that a lot of this is tied to the cultural and political shifts that came about after September 11^th. The hysteria, the constant vigilance, the spectacle. In some senses, looking back, our culture - the music, the films, the burgeoning internet - presaged the events of 9/11. Presaged is perhaps the wrong word. The groundwork for a whole society predicated on hysteria and hunger and constant deliverance had already been laid. September 11^th, with its film quality horror, with is sheer size, codified these traits, helped to make them societal. Entertainment, with all its desires and expectations, ceased being just an aspect of our society, and it became our society.

You haven’t written explicitly about September 11^th.

No. Why would I? There’s no need to.

In what sense?

It’s the seminal cultural event of my lifetime. It’s the aperture through which every cultural item, major or minor, kitsch or melodrama, abstract or middle brow, gets filtered. It so deeply affected the course of American identity, American politics, American economics, etcetera, etcetera. If you write a novel or a story or a poem in the United States, it’s going to be, inevitably, imbued with that post-September 11^th worldview, if that’s what I’d call it. And that’s such a cop out, because what was September 11^th if not the climax of decades upon decades of policy decisions, major and minor, by multiple administrations, by the Soviets, by warlords and chieftains in Afghanistan. There were a million million things that could have stopped September 11^th, just as there were a billion little decisions that led to it happening. If one FBI agent does his job a little better, it never happens. If one of those 19 or 20 men, I can’t remember how many, falls in love with an American woman, maybe his conscience gets the better of him. You know, if Reagan doesn’t arm bin Laden to fight the Soviets, maybe bin Laden’s dead in the eighties. If our policies shifted a little bit away from Israel, if the Six-Day war doesn’t happen…And conversely, there’s probably a thousand other September 11^th’s that were stopped by some act of contingency or chance. But you know, this is stupid, talking like this. I can’t help doing it though, because it is such a pervasive event, such a communal wound. But I still really struggle to even quantify how it has concretely changed us, because we’re now so many cycles away from the event itself. It becomes more and more difficult to concretely trace what is happening now back to that Tuesday morning. But you can, you absolutely can. And I think there were distinct periods, and the initial ones were, of course, very clearly reactionary to the event itself: the immediate aftermath when everyone rallied together, when there was this, in hindsight, kind of embarrassing level of patriotism and jingoism, this outpouring of emotion that, again, looking back, seems almost shameful. At least to me. It’s like remembering that time you opened yourself up a little too much to a stranger. Then there was that period of deep fear. That period where, you know, we were really O.K. with giving up some of our liberties because we were so petrified of being ripped open again. We were very vulnerable then, and I don’t know if the policies that were enacted were intentionally exploitative, or just a symptom of that universal fear, but we’re still suffering the consequences of that militarism, that police state mentality. Then there was the reaction against those policies, and the inevitable divide. Now that divide has gone through about five different versions. And the partisans that, at the time, were clamoring for the government to intervene excessively in our lives to keep us safe are now railing against the government intervening in our lives to keep us healthy and financially solvent. And the partisans who, at the time, were championing personal liberties and peace and restraint, are supporting a President that has, more or less, continued the invasive, shoot-first, ask-later policies of his predecessor. It’s all very convoluted, but all, inextricably, linked to the day itself. And art, of course, is no different. Because art, especially now, isn’t some separate entity, objective and removed.

But a lot of other artists, and writers, have really directly engaged with September 11^th, and you haven’t. DeLillo, and Safron Foer. Foster Wallace wrote that marvelous essay. Oliver Stone and Paul Greengrass made films.

To me, the best post 9-11 novels are probably some of DeLillo’s novels from the late 80’s and early 90’s. Mao II and Underworld, in particular. White Noise to a lesser extent. (He pauses for a long time). Look, I’ve considered it. DeLillo has talked about the Kennedy assassination, and how it was such a crystalline, clarifying event. You remembered every moment of it. And September 11^th is the same way. The details are still so acute. Which is funny, because there was that profound sense of misinformation, that confusion, on the day itself. I was walking home from getting coffee, and a casual acquaintance, this guy whose name I never knew but who I happened to see on the streets a lot, stopped me and asked if I heard about the train that had hit the World Trade Towers. The train? It didn’t make much sense, so I kind of brushed it off. Then I remember walking into the house I was living in at the time, this dreary, atrocious row home on Green St. in Philadelphia. And I stopped in the open doorway of this girl‘s room, and on the television the second tower was coming down, right then. It had just fallen. The cloud of ash and smoke and crushed steel and crushed bone. All of it collapsing, me standing in the doorway of this girl named Sam who had dark hair and pale skin and who I once fucked when the two of us were feeling particularly lonely and drunk. We were all very poor, we were stealing cable if we had any at all. And my initial question, swear to God, was: what movie are you watching? She looked at me like I was a sociopath, of course. And then of course I sat down, and then other people sat down, my house mates, all of us derelicts or artists - the same thing, really - and all day we drifted about in a fog, from one room to the next, watching, riveted, unable to look away. My experience was, actually, pretty common I think. I experienced the detached curiosity that, I think most of us did. We are, as a culture and a species, simultaneously riven and repulsed by random death. On one hand, we saw the falling man, to steal a famous image, and were grateful that the tragic, totally contingent circumstances of random death did not befall us. On the other hand, and this is perhaps the strongest hand, though we’d never admit it, we envied the falling man. We wanted to be the falling man. We wanted to know what it was like to be a part of that historical spectacle, and we wanted to know what it was like to stand on that threshold between life and death, that literal and metaphorical precipice, of knowing that the void is waiting, and having no choice but to step into it. The reason we empathized so strongly with those who jumped, I think, isn’t just because of the horrible circumstances, the remarkable courage they showed. The strange dignity. It’s the power of that image: staring into the void, with no choice but to jump headlong into it. A part of each of us wants to know that experience. (He’s silent for a long while). I’ll assume you remember where you were?

I was visiting my parents in Boston at the time. It was such a beautiful day. I was on their back porch, sitting shirtless and reading. I remember sitting out there all day and watching the television with my mom, and then my dad.

It’s incredible how vivid the memories are, right? Sam and I went up to the roof at dusk to smoke a cigarette together. We weren’t close, by any means, despite the fact of our having once fucked. And we’re smoking on our roof, and Philadelphia is empty and quiet as a ghost town, everyone at home, everyone watching. It was that late, velvet hour when all the skyscrapers in the city glow like blue ice. And we sat there in silence smoking our cigarettes, and she put her head on my shoulder and we just stood there for a very, very long time, looking at the quiet city, the gorgeous buildings, the stars slowly taking over the night sky. I’ll remember that for the rest of my life, won’t I?

Did you call your parents?

Of course. Of course I did. I called them, and we spoke in platitudes for a few minutes, and then I told them I loved them. It helped, I think, just to hear their voices, and them to hear mine. Luke was, you know Luke was probably near his worst at this point. They were being very tested and tried. I moved back in with them not long after September 11^th, and that began the process of saving my brother, so to speak.

Is that something you’ll talk about?

No.

Really? You’ve been asked before. It’s something there are rumors about. You haven’t written about it at all.

There are some things you can’t write about. Men, for instance, struggle to write about their fathers. Or, to write cogently about their fathers.

Your dad was a pastor, as you mentioned earlier.

He was.

But you’re not religious at all.

Dad wasn’t dogmatic. He wasn’t a fire and brimstone preacher. And, technically, he wasn’t even a pastor. He was never ordained. He was a high school English teacher in Detroit who’d failed out of seminary and was too embarrassed to tell anyone, so for a while he lied and said he’d graduated. And because he knew a few people, some friends, he was able to get jobs filling in when other pastors were sick, or when they went on vacations. These weren’t, they weren’t glamorous jobs. They were jobs in small, sad Lutheran churches out in the middle of nowhere in Michigan or Wisconsin. And I’d drive out there with my father. We’d usually be up before dawn and we’d stop to get coffee and orange juice. I’ve always connected the smell of burnt coffee to those mornings. I’d help dad change into his robes and vestments, and then I’d sit in the front pew. The congregations were almost always old and sleepy, just these small, forgotten backwaters. When I got older, Dad would talk about all the incest that went on in these places, about all the genetic problems and mutations, about how sordid life was in these places. I never noticed, of course. I was enthralled. Dad would preach his ass off, too. God, he’d preach like his life depended on it. It’s, you know, it’s how I learned how to tell stories. He didn’t just preach, he told stories. They were always small stories, about forgiveness and redemption, about the grace of small, anonymous lives. He always talked about this thing called ‘flow’ in his sermons, which was, as he saw it, how God manifested himself on earth. He said you could see ‘flow’ in small things, like those days when you couldn’t miss in basketball, or when you heard a favorite song unexpectedly on the radio, or when you were dancing with the woman you loved and suddenly felt like you were 18 again ‘cause you were so nervous and full of excitement. I’ve always…writing. Writing, you know. That’s, for me. That’s flow. (He stops for a minute to compose himself). I learned how to write on those trips, listening to those sermons. I learned how to be empathetic but also clear headed. I learned the importance of metaphysics and mystery. I learned all that because of my father. And, look, it’s dangerous business, sons writing the hagiographies of their dads. Because they’re only ordinary men, after all. He, he had a temper. A bad temper. And he had an extraordinary weakness for women, one that I’ve inherited, unfortunately. It was a weakness for women that destroyed a lot of lives. But it wasn’t something malicious. I suspect he saw ‘flow’ in those encounters. (He laughs, and it’s a light laugh, mostly free of tears, completely free of anger). When I was 17, Luke and I spent a summer with our grandparents in Wisconsin. This was after one of Dad’s spells, if you will, and he and my mother were trying to sort things out. Whether Dad would ever change, whether Mom could live with him if he didn’t. I was 17, and Luke was 14, and we were so miserable that summer. It felt like being trapped, way out on the farm. We were into those horrid teenage years when magic just isn’t in your vocabulary, when everything is deeply tangible. And my poor grandparents were probably too old for us then, but they took us anyway. They tried to take us to the drive-in, to minor league baseball games. They tried so hard to connect with us. It was difficult, for everyone. And near the end of the summer, my grandfather finally sat down with me one night. I was living in their basement. And he sat on the edge of my bed, and he said, “You know, your father isn’t a bad man. He’s a very good man, in so many ways. But, well, he has his weaknesses and his flaws. We all do. Your father, well, he likes women.” (He bursts into laughter). He said it in this amazing, exaggerated voice, like it pained him to say it. Which I’m sure it did. This was a man who worked on farms or in paper mills his whole life. He was as no non-sense as they came. And here he is trying to rationalize his son’s marital failings to his grandson. “He likes women,” he repeated. “Hell, we all do, right? How can you hold that against a man? If that’s the worst thing you can say about someone, they’ve done all right.” God, it was awful to hear at the time. But it’s true. He was right. My father was a decent man in so many ways, he just really liked women. But that’s a problem when you’re married, isn’t it? Or it can be. Because my brother, my poor brother, when we first found out about things, he was just too young. He was both too young and too old. He was 11 at the time of the first affair. So he understood what sex was, and he understood what it meant to cheat on your wife. But he couldn’t begin to rationalize it, to understand that good people sometimes do profoundly selfish and stupid things. That an act of selfishness doesn’t mean your father doesn’t love you, or doesn’t love your mother. He understood the transgression, but he couldn’t work his way to forgiveness. I don’t know if he ever did. And that anger, it just built in him. It seethed. As he got older, it grew and grew. He wielded it like a shield against the world. He hated my father for what he did, for screwing around. He hated me for forgiving him and for still being friends with him. He hated my mother for staying with him. He intentionally severed himself from our family. And we saw it, all of us. We should have done more to stop it. Dad should have stopped screwing around. Mom should have talked to Luke, should have been stricter instead of letting him lash out, instead of insisting that he was just trying to ‘find himself.‘ And I should have been a better, more supportive older brother. But I wasn’t. I ran, I fled, I hid behind my own selfish endeavors. He was all alone. (He pauses here for almost a whole minute). Luke got arrested for the first time when he was 17. I was away at Vassar still. He got arrested at a party, and he had some pot on him. It wasn’t a serious deal. I came home the next weekend, and Mom and Dad were arguing about how to punish him. My father had gone ballistic, of course. Just gone off the rails, said that things had to change, that all this nonsense was coming to an end. It was directed more at Mom than at Luke. But Mom defended Luke. She understood why he was so angry. She sympathized with him. How could she punish him when Dad had hurt him so thoroughly, when he’d been completely defenseless and young? So things didn’t really change. And then, a year later, he crashed their car while out drinking. He narrowly escaped jail there. But by that point it was clear he was into some more serious things. I would come home and things would be missing from my room, pieces of jewelry, or old coins I’d collected as a boy. I’d leave a pair of pants around with a hundred dollars in my pocket, and then a day later, I’d only have seventy five. It was this kind of disappearing that made you question your sanity. Because of course, deep down, you suspected Luke. But he was my brother, he was their son. You didn’t think he’d actually do it. Maybe I’d just misplaced the jewelry. Maybe I had less money in my pocket than I thought. It was this weird revisionism that I imagine Alzheimer’s patients find themselves doing, altering the past to make it fit more neatly into the present. But then more and more money started to disappear. More and more pieces of jewelry. Soon it became impossible to ignore. It was torture on my parents, of course. They didn’t know how to confront him. Dad would fly into fits of fury, but then Mom would coddle Luke. She was worried about alienating him further, worried that confronting him might only deepen the sense of isolation he felt.

What did you do?

(He smiles very sadly). Nothing. I did nothing. I called him names, I called him an addict. I berated him. I ignored him. We didn’t speak for weeks on end. I was home by this point, delivering pizza, dropped out of Vassar. I completely failed. I failed so thoroughly, so thoroughly. I was so angry at him. He couldn’t see clearly what he was doing, how he was devastating our parents, how he was violating me. And I hated my parents for allowing it to happen. We couldn’t talk about it. It was so horrifying and shameful, you know? How do you talk about something like that? It would come out in bursts. Luke showed up to Thanksgiving dinner one year, after we’d already finished eating in silence, and he was stoned out of his gourd, on another planet. I lost it. I screamed, I shouted, I berated. I berated everyone there. How could they let this happen under their roof? How could he do this to me, his own brother? How could he treat the people who loved him most like this? He looked at me, his eyes glazed over, like two dead stones, and he said, “You don’t love me. You don’t even talk to me. You aren’t my brother.” I ranted and raved. I threatened to call the cops. I told my parents to kick him out. No one said anything, and then Luke just left. Just disappeared into the night, going God knows where. My father looked at me like I was the shameful one, like I was the disappointment. “What would you have me do? What would you have me do? He’s my son. I will not kick my son out of my house. Never.” A week later Luke took their car and after he’d been gone a week it was clear that he wasn’t coming back. They refused to call the cops and report the car stolen. Why didn’t I do it myself? I don’t know. Deference, I guess. Fear of retribution. Ten days later I fled for Paris, leaving Mom and Dad alone in their house. (He stares for a long time into the middle distance). I already told you about that. I already told you I came home in February. By that point, Luke still wasn’t back. There was no word from him. Mom was on the verge of losing her mind. Dad was preoccupied, throwing himself into work and into preaching. It was so painful and sad to watch, the way he desperately kept up appearances. They still invited friends over for dinner. He still served good wine and fine cheese, he still smiled and made small talk. But when everyone left, it was like the place was haunted. And then in June we got word that they’d found Luke’s best friend in a car outside of Camden, New Jersey. He was dead, he’d overdosed.

And you were writing still?

What else could I do but write? It was the only thing I was holding onto. It was the only thing saving me. I wrote furiously, furiously. I had nothing else. I moved into that apartment in Philadelphia because I thought, well, Camden’s just across the river. Maybe Luke is in Philly. I walked the streets at night, dangerous streets in North Philly, and I looked into the face of everyone I saw there because I thought, you know, maybe I’ll find my brother. It was absurd, it was so childish and half baked of me. I’ll move into the ghetto and find my brother, even though I’d barely said a word to him when we lived under the same roof. I wrote and I walked the streets and I smoked cigarettes and I made a little bit of money working as a gardener that year, taking care of properties out in Germantown and Mt. Airy, riding the bus out there and writing poems in my notebook, working in the miserable summer humidity. I think I probably contemplated suicide a lot. Not in a maudlin sense, not in a way where I told everybody, ‘Hey, dying sounds good right now.’ Just in a sense of, I’d walk past a bridge and spend way too long looking over the edge. Or I’d see a bus speeding down the street and I’d stand perched a little too close to the edge of the sidewalk. I couldn’t imagine feeling lonelier. I couldn’t imagine death, nullity, could be any lonelier than I felt. (He stares again, for longer than a minute). And then Luke called my parents from a rehab facility in Harrisburg. This was about ten days after September 11^th. I was home again, sleeping in my childhood room. Or, my adolescent room. Sleeping for hours and hours on end, and my parents didn’t ask any questions. I was, miraculously, close to finishing ‘From the Horizon.’ And we got that call, and I remember my mother breaking down into sobs because he was alive, just because her son was alive. We all drove out there on a cold Saturday in early October, and we found Luke sitting there at a picnic table smoking cigarettes, his head shaved. He was so pale and emaciated. He barely looked alive, but he was, God he was, right? My Dad hugged him so hard that I worried he might snap him in half. My brother, that is. He smoked diffidently and barely answered our questions. Not that we asked much. We still, to this day, haven’t found out what happened to the car. Nor did it matter, of course. It was just a car. It was just money. It was just jewelry. There he was, my brother, my brother alive. (He begins to cry, and then stops). He came home a month later. We launched into this concerted effort to save him. He had a girlfriend, one he’d met on the streets somewhere, and she’d gotten him into rehab. We took all kinds of family trips, the five of us. Horrible, forced trips. We went to every museum in the fucking city, I swear. We went skiing together. My parents let his girlfriend move in with us, no questions asked. But, you know, it’s hard. It’s so hard if you’ve spent that long living a lifestyle, being addicted. His eyes took on the glazed look again. Money started to disappear again, in small increments. The kind that were small enough that, even after everything, you started to tell yourself the same old lies. You tricked yourself into believing. Luke has never been loquacious, but in those first months home, he talked a bit more. But then he started to clam up again, to grow brusque. I was not optimistic. My father was tired. This had taken a toll on him, physically. He looked old all of a sudden. He looked very old, and my mother had lost so much weight. (He takes a very deep breath). I’m sorry. I’m sorry. (He covers his face for nearly a minute).

Ok?

Ok. Yes, ok. (He draws another deep breath). Look, I haven’t written about any of this. How could I? How could I begin to make sense of it, or to make it remotely cogent? It’s too close, you know? It’s just, there’s too much there. I tried, back then. I tried then, I’ve tried now. Luke, his girlfriend, Alex. She got pregnant. Right as it looked like things were beginning to fall apart, the two of them sit down with us one night at dinner and tell us that Alex is pregnant and that they’re planning on keeping the baby. It was, you know, I thought it was a disaster, an absolute disaster. Neither of them had held a job, ever. How the fuck could they raise a child? I don’t remember what I said. I was flabbergasted. I told my parents later that they had to stop this, that they had to put an end to this, somehow. There was no way they could bring a child into the world. But, you know. But. (He stops and tries to compose himself). But they did, right? They did. A boy, a beautiful boy. And God, I hate how dramatic people get about kids. It’s so easy to be solipsistic about kids nowadays with the internet, with all the outlets. Everyone’s kid is the most special, the smartest, the cutest. But this boy, this little boy. He’s so beautiful. He laughs, and he kisses you, and my brother looks at this boy and holds him and sings to him, and, and…I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. That boy, he saved my brother’s life. Absolutely. There’s no doubt in my mind. That boy saved my brother’s life, and we all know it. And it’s so unfair to him, to that little boy. Because he’s grown up and he’s been lavished with so much love, such an incredible amount of love. He’s 9 now, somehow. And he’s just beginning to realize how much love he’s constantly surrounded with, and I’m so scared for him sometimes. Because that’s such a weight, right? To have saved your father’s life. How do you possibly live with that? How can you possibly live after that? He’s just beginning to notice that things are a little off, that he gets a little more love than everyone else. And I’m so afraid about what will happen to him, but I can’t help it. None of us can help it. I see him, and I would step in front of a bullet for that little boy. All of us would. I see my brother with him, my brother who looks so much like my father now, now that his eyes are clear again. And the two of them will stand in the backyard and throw a baseball together. And I think: there’s my brother, he’s alive.

But, of course, your father…

Yes. (A very long pause). Yes. (Another long pause). And, you know, well…(More silence). I’m sorry. Give me a moment.

Ok?

Ok. Yes, ok. Ok. I read this interview recently with Richard Ford, who is an author I like and respect. And his father died when he was sixteen, and he talked at length about how, far from being a crippling or devastating experience, his father’s death - though tragic - was actually freeing for him. I’ve thought a lot about that, because God does the specter of a man’s father loom over his decisions, right? And I thought, well, if my Dad had died when I was sixteen, when I was barely even a person, it probably would have been freeing for me, too. But, of course, my Dad didn’t die until I was twenty-nine. By that point, so much of what I wanted from my life was entwined in what I wanted for him. Maybe that’s not healthy, or maybe it’s not mature. I don’t know. But look, I guess I want to be as honest as possible about this: when I wrote, I wrote for him. I wrote because I wanted, more than anything, for him to see that he had been a good father, that he had been a good and honest man and that his life had been spent well. Things with Luke were so difficult, especially for him. The sense, the sense of failure, it was visible. It cloaked him. And what was I doing? I was being a coward, an absent brother and a wandering son. I thought if I could just write one good book, one great book, then, well, Dad wouldn’t have to bear this weight anymore. That I could hand him a copy of my book and say, “This is because of you. This is because of how you raised me, and how you raised Luke, and how you and Mom loved one another.” That’s such a small, selfish thing, isn’t it? That’s all I wanted, though.

How long before the book was finished did he die?

He read the first draft, so there’s some consolation in that. He had a heart attack on a beautiful day in October. It’s funny, to be in the midst of tragedy on such a gorgeous day. The rest of the world bathed in splendor, and all you can think is that things are coming down around you.

Were you home when this happened?

I was. I was out driving. I was editing From the Horizon, and I’d actually come home for a few months to kind of shut out any distractions. I was out driving around, smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee, letting the air into the car, smelling that lovely, acute smell of decay. Then my phone rang and I don’t remember much. I pulled over by a soccer field somewhere, where some kids were playing a pick up game. I watched them playing, going back and forth. Then, you know, I collapsed into sobs. I looked like a madman. Which I was. I was hysterical. I thought, all my life I’ve been preparing for this moment, preparing to have the strength to endure this moment, and all I could do was lie down and sob.

And when did the book come out?

It came out in December.

…

But he got to see my nephew, his grandson. He got to see him. He got nearly two years with his grandson. (He smiles very sadly). He was, quite honestly, an ordinary man. I grew up thinking my father was exceptional, but every occurrence of my life has proved otherwise. He was an intelligent, mostly compassionate, occasionally selfish, relatively ambitious man. Unremarkable in every respect. I’m no different. He was a good man. I hope to be a good man. But to be a good man is the best us ordinary men can hope for. In some respects, my brother, the one who seemed least capable of it, is the only one to have accomplished something extraordinary amongst us. Granted, the obstacles he overcame were of his own making. But maybe that makes the accomplishment all the more impressive. He was the one, in the end, who saved my father. Who showed him, finally, how good of a man he’d been, how good of a father he’d been. I…it’s hard to explain. I’m more proud of my brother than I am of any person in this world. And of course, I’ve never been able to tell him that. If you have a brother, you’ll understand. How could you ever actually tell your brother that? Especially someone like Luke, someone who’s so internal. He doesn’t communicate well through language, and I communicate almost entirely through language. Which is almost funny, right? So I haven’t told him that, probably because I’m a coward. Because I should. I really should tell him that, before it’s too late. I suppose if I can’t tell him, I can tell you. And then people can see this, can know that I’m more proud of my brother than I am of anyone in this whole world. That the books don’t really mean much. That the women don’t mean a thing, not even Maria, who has been such an extraordinary partner. That at the end of the day, the only story that has mattered, in my whole life, is my brother’s.

…

What?

You said you weren’t going to talk about it.

(Laughs). Well, there you have it. There it is. That’s all there is to say, isn’t it?

Maybe. Perhaps. Do you feel finished?

Do you have any other questions?

Yes, plenty. But this seems to be a natural stopping point.

You’re probably right. Every story has its limits. You can’t cram everything in. Something’s always left out.

Let me ask: do you want children of your own?

(Smiles). You know, I didn’t want kids. For a very long time. But having watched Luke be a father, such a good father, and seeing the way it’s filled him up, and given him purpose, I’ve softened on that. Maybe it’s just raising a kid into a world that’s falling apart, raising a kid into these failing systems, raising a kid to be consume, and to enter into these flawed institutions. But there’s a joy in it. A joy there aren’t words for. It’s more than just biology, right? More than just perpetuating your genes, propagating the survival of the species. It’s deeper than that. But I can’t explain how. All I could say is, go out there and watch my brother throwing a baseball with his son. Watch the two of them, the love that’s there, the ease. And I remember being a kid, wandering through the ruins of Detroit, or the ruins of the Midwest. All that history, all those contingencies, and they’ve left us here, the two of them throwing a baseball… I’d like to feel that for myself someday, I think.