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The Physiology of Marriage

This man could save your marriage—or ruin it. A portrait of Balzac, based on an 1842 daguerreotype

It’s Honoré de Balzac’s birthday, making this as good an occasion as any to investigate one of his stranger works, 1829’s The Physiology of Marriage—an extraordinary kind of precursor to the self-help manual. Balzac was thirty when it was published, and already he felt he knew enough about the institution of marriage to advise others on the matter. And maybe he was: though he hadn’t married yet, he’d already perfected the art of the aphorism. This book is full of them: “To saunter is a science; it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.” “A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected at least one woman.” And “Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.”

The Physiology of Marriage is a series of meditations on the more quotidian aspects of loving and living with another—many of which arrive at the rather contemporary conclusion that marriage is an exceedingly difficult arrangement, liable to end in adultery. The book has moments of surprising candor about men and women, and Balzac clearly knows a thing or two about, you know, the Human Comedy. But he’s also full of lousy counsel, and he loves playing power games. Here, for instance, are some excerpts from Meditation XII, “On the Hygiene of Marriage”:

The aim of this Meditation is to call to your attention a new method of defence, by which you may reduce the will of your new wife to a condition of utter and abject submission. This is brought about by the reaction upon her moral nature of physical changes, and the wise lowering of her physical condition by a diet skillfully controlled.

You should let your wife recline all day long on soft armchairs, in which she sinks into a veritable bath of eiderdown or feathers; you should encourage in every way that does no violence to your conscience, the inclination which women have to breathe no other air but the scented atmosphere of a chamber seldom opened, where daylight can scarcely enter through the soft, transparent curtains … Praise the skill with which some women, renowned for their beauty, have been able to preserve it by bathing themselves in milk, several times a day, or in water compounded of substances likely to render the skin softer and to lower the nervous tension.

Advise her above all things to refrain from washing herself in cold water; because water warm or tepid is the proper thing for all kinds of ablutions.

Let Broussais be your idol. At the least indisposition of your wife, and on the slightest pretext, order the application of leeches; do not even shrink from applying from time to time a few dozen on yourself, in order to establish the system of that celebrated doctor in your household. You will constantly be called upon from your position as husband to discover that your wife is too ruddy; try even sometimes to bring the blood to her head, in order to have the right to introduce into the house at certain intervals a squad of leeches.

Your wife ought to drink water, lightly tinged with a Burgundy wine agreeable to her taste, but destitute of any tonic properties; every other kind of wine would be bad for her. Never allow her to drink water alone; if you do, you are lost…

Find some means by which her sum of force which inconveniences you may be carried off, by some occupation which shall entirely absorb her strength. Without setting your wife to work the crank of a machine, there are a thousand ways of tiring her out under the load of constant work.

It’s not all so heinous, though. In a chapter called “The Theory of the Bed,” Balzac lets loose with a clever piece of invective for any buffoon who installs two twin beds in the master bedroom:

If the most brilliant, the best-looking, the cleverest of husbands wishes to find himself minotaurized just as the first year of his married life ends, he will infallibly attain that end if he is unwise enough to place two beds side by side, under the voluptuous dome of the same alcove.

The argument in support of this may be briefly stated. The following are its main lines:

The first husband who invented the twin beds was doubtless an obstetrician, who feared that in the involuntary struggles of some dream he might kick the child borne by his wife.

But no, he was rather some predestined one who distrusted his power of checking a snore.

Perhaps it was some young man who, fearing the excess of his own tenderness, found himself always lying at the edge of the bed and in danger of tumbling off, or so near to a charming wife that he disturbed her slumber …

Unknown author of this Jesuitical method, whoever thou art, in the devil's name, we hail thee as a brother! Thou hast been the cause of many disasters. What good is it to have instituted law, morals and religion, if the invention of an upholsterer [for probably it was an upholsterer who invented the twin beds] robs our love of all its illusions, strips it bare of the majestic company of its delights and gives it in their stead nothing but what is ugliest and most odious? For this is the whole history of the two bed system.

If it be shared, our love is sublime; but should you sleep in twin beds, your love will always be grotesque. The absurdities which this half separation occasions may be comprised in either one of two situations, which will give us occasion to reveal the causes of very many marital misfortunes.

You can read all of The Physiology of Marriage here. Do so at your own peril—and at the peril of your loved one.

Wildlife, or Nor Woman Neither

A Chihuahua with a member of ordinary size. Photo: Abuk Sabuk, via Wikimedia Commons

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

The text came up on my phone at 5:34 P.M.

“Just saw chihuahua with human-sized penis :( ”

I tried to think of something comforting to say.

“Don’t worry,” I wrote back. “He can mate with bigger dogs!!”

“:( ” came the response.

In conference with another friend, Dan, later the same day, I mentioned this anomaly.

“It’s at times like this one wonders how self-aware dogs are,” he wrote. Then:

“I hope he knows”

Then:

“He must know.”

Something about this sighting made me sad. Had the owners chosen this particular dog as an act of charity? Or maybe because they thought it was funny—maybe the dog was a conversation piece, and was called Ron Jeremy, or Dirk Diggler, or maybe Dillinger. Was that better, or worse? Did the dog have medical trouble? Was he too big to breed with his own kind? Did they give him a codpiece in the winter, to go with his little Chihuahua coat?

I woke up at two A.M. and thought about it for far too long. Then I did a very ill-advised Internet search, which, in the spirit of public service, I urge you not to do.

Modern civilization is constantly coping with the frank, exuberant sexuality of dogs. We snicker, or we blush, or we ogle, and some of us pretend to be very matter-of-fact, which is the silliest of all. Putting a dog in a little outfit does nothing to neuter it. Although I guess neutering probably does.

On the Disney Wiki, “Man”—the killer of Bambi’s mother and, later, the cause of the fire that devastates the forest—is described thusly: “Being a mere hunter, Man is not truly evil by human standards, but from the perspective of the animals whom the film follows, he might as well be the Devil.” Incidentally, “Man” was ranked twentieth on the American Film Institute’s list of the top fifty film villains of all time. And he wasn’t even exploiting an animal’s deformity, that we know of.

Of course, that Chihuahua’s owners probably aren’t, either. They probably love him, and care for him, and chose him, and, if they laugh a little now and then, it is with affection and in any case, he has no idea. “The dog seemed totally at ease,” my friend said, when I questioned him later. “Back pain notwithstanding.”

Catch the Bus

BUS:STOP, Sou Fujimoto; Image © Adolf Bereuter; via DesignBoom

Krumbach is an Austrian market town with a population of about one thousand—it has a handsome eleventh-century castle and, as of this year, seven of the most arresting bus stops in the world. As part of a new project, BUS:STOP, seven international architects have designed Buswartehüsle—small shelters—“in a dialogue with the people, landscape, and local culture, building upon the traditions of skilled trade in the area.”

Sou Fujimoto calls his stop, pictured above, “a transparent forest of columns,” and emphasizes its variousness as a public space: “Both bus passengers and non–bus users can use this bus stop as a meeting point,” he writes, and though maybe no human alive has ever actively identified as a “non–bus user,” his larger point rings true: “Everyone may climb the tower-like bus stop to enjoy panoramic views of Krumbach.”

The other contributing architects hail from Belgium, Chile, Russia, Norway, Spain, and China, and given the impressive designs they’ve brought, it’s hard to fault Krumbach’s official culture site for a bit of characteristically Teutonic rhetoric: “People from the Bregenzerwald are generally seen as proud of their roots and open to new ideas. This has shaped our region down to the present day: the collaboration between humankind and nature, tradition and modernism, handcraft and the culture of building.”

DesignBoom has a gallery of photographs worth viewing in full. One might object to the primacy of form over function here. It’s hard to picture someone comfortably waiting at Fujiomoto’s shelter, for instance, especially if it’s raining. But none of these stops are entirely without utility: they are all, however tenuously, places where you go to catch a bus. I’ve tried in vain to find statistics on public transit in Krumbach—how many of its thousand citizens use the bus system, anyway?—but even if these shelters are seldom used, it’s still a pleasure to imagine them out there, flecking the Austrian countryside. Greyhound: take notes.

BUS:STOP, Ensamble Studio; Image © Adolf Bereuter; via DesignBoom.

 

Reminder: Subscribe Now, Get a Vintage Issue from 1959

To celebrate American Masters’s Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself—a documentary about our late, great founder George Plimpton—The Paris Review is giving all new subscribers a copy of our twenty-first issue, published in the spring of 1959. This remarkable issue includes an interview with T. S. Eliot, the very first in our Art of Poetry series; fiction from Plimpton pals Alexander Trocchi and Terry Southern; poems by Ted Hughes, Robert Bly, and Louis Simpson; and a special portfolio of “Artists on Long Island” including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Larry Rivers.

Subscribe now and we’ll send you a copy of your own—but hurry, because this offer only lasts through Friday.

U.S. residents can watch Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself in its entirety online, courtesy of PBS.

 

Without Compunction

Doing verbal battle at the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships.

An illustration from the Tacuinum Sanitatis, from the late fourteenth century. (No pun included.)

The only thing harder than crafting a good pun is finding someone to appreciate it. It’s not that puns are universally reviled—though their critics make it seem that way. It’s just that for every person who loves a clever play on words, there exists another who absolutely despises them; in mixed company, puns are, along with politics and religion, best left alone. If only there were an app that could match people by their senses of humor. Tinder? I barely know ’er!

If it’s difficult to pun profitably in the United States, it’s all but impossible in Mexico, where I’ve been living for the past year. Here I’m limited somewhat by my imperfect Spanish, but also by a lack of fellow punning linguists. There’s not even a word for pun in Spanish, which made it difficult to explain to friends here that after ten months of wasting my presumably hilarious wordplay on their apparently deaf ears, I’d bought myself a ticket to Austin, Texas, to compete in the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships. Despite its grandiose name, there is no qualifying round ahead of this “championship,” and, with the exception of a lanky Englishman in a chicken suit, all the participants were American.

“So a pun is like a play on words?” a Mexican friend asked before I set out, using the Spanish phrase juego de palabras, that most dictionaries list as the translation for “pun.”

Well, yes, I said, but it’s a specific kind of play on words. I tried to find an example, but I hadn’t realized until that moment just how difficult it is to come up with puns on the spot. The example I offered, which defined the exchange of sex for spaghetti as pasta-tution, didn’t translate as well as I’d hoped.

But punning off the cuff is exactly what’s required to succeed in the Pun-Off’s marquee event. Contestants in the “Punslingers” bracket, facing off in pairs onstage, are given a theme—Disney, weather, et cetera—and forced to make thematically relevant puns every ten seconds or so until one contestant runs out of ideas.

The result, of course, is a series of mostly terrible puns, the sort that elicit the classic weary groan with which puns are so unfortunately associated. “There’s a hook made specially for grabbing people named Ling,” to name one of countless examples. “The GrappLing hook!”

Just as a slam dunk in basketball earns the same number of points as a layup, this portion of the Pun-Off rewards a contestant for the quantity of her puns rather than their quality. As the moderators explained several times, in a refrain later echoed by desperate contestants defending their ripostes, “It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be a pun.” The Punslingers event may be the only sport on Earth in which the highest level of play is the most painful to watch.

Herein lies the Pun-Off’s ontological dilemma. In real life, the best puns tend to be spontaneous: many are funny in the moment but fail to rise to the higher standard to which we hold jokes that are given time to grow and improve in the course of being committed to paper. And yet the sustained, absolute spontaneity that comes of scraping out pun after pun onstage quickly pulls every contestant down to the bottom of the barrel—a low stratum I think of as “[blank]er, I barely know her” territory.

The closest I’ve come to finding a resolution to this dilemma is in the work of the early twentieth-century humorist Stephen Leacock, to which I was introduced by this year’s Punniest of Show winner Alexandra Petri, who also happens to write a pun-heavy column for the Washington Post. “The inveterate punster,” Leacock wrote, “follows conversation as a shark follows a ship.” What is missing from the Pun-Off, then, is this conversation; onstage, we inveterate punsters are forced to play only with the words we can find inside ourselves, rather than lying in wait for a punworthy moment in the course of normal dialogue. Hence the excess of gimmes like “philosophers Kant hold their liquor,” as opposed to a more organic, transcendent play on words, as when I misremembered the color of a friend’s car years ago and he told me that “it must have been a pigment of my imagination.” Or when a friend interning for a congressman confessed that he snuck a glance at John Boehner’s crotch in a Capitol restroom and I declared him the Peeker of the House. Such turns of phrase are unlikely to appear in any serious writing I attempt down the road, and yet the elation they produce is among my favorite feelings: a credit to their author and a gift to anyone with the wit and good sense to enjoy them.

When it was my turn to take the stage in Austin, however, all that wit and good sense promptly left me—boiled away, perhaps, as the scant shade migrated from my picnic blanket to the lawn chairs and their foresighted occupants behind me. A good two hundred people came to watch us sculpt and mangle the English language in the yard behind the O. Henry Museum, a modest old house wedged between towering hotels in downtown Austin. From under a tent just left of the small stage, a panel of judges doled out their points, but the real power lay with the moderators onstage, whose task it was to confirm that each new volley was indeed a pun, and not a mere cliché or, worse still, the kind of double entendre whose second meaning is derived from suggestive inflection rather than a legitimate play on words. And while, between rounds, the moderators showed themselves to be talented punsters in their own right, the stronger competitors’ deep vocabularies occasionally extended beyond those of anyone else on stage. Playing on the theme of art, for example, one contestant said he’d come up with a better pun if he weren’t so groggy—which, besides describing a state of exhaustion, apparently also names a kind of crushed clay used in pottery. Dictionaries being too unwieldy for a fast-paced live competition, in such moments the moderators have little choice but to take a contestant at her wordplay.

My time on stage challenged no one’s vocabulary, unless someone simply couldn’t find the words to express how quickly I was knocked out of contention. My opponent and I were given the theme of horses, a subject about which I know almost nothing; I opened with a weak joke about “stallion” for time, and before I caught my breath it was my turn again. I mumbled something about a quarter horse that was not quite a pun; the moderators gave me a chance to come up with something better, and after emitting the same faux-contemplative ums and ahs that used to escape me when caught off-guard in a job interview, I threw up my hands and admitted defeat. Despite a lifetime of making and loving puns, not to mention crossing an international border to demonstrate what until recently I called my skills, I’m almost certain I gave the weakest performance of the day.

My poor performance was a predictable result of my inexperience with the relevant kind of pun. Like Leacock’s shark, I follow conversations waiting for a good moment to strike. The constraints of the Punslingers tournament make for something more like a SeaWorld show: a performer can do great things if he’s comfortable with the walls placed around him.

Indeed, my favorite moment of the day occurred during a round in which players had to pun on the theme of “Groups (human and animal)”—e.g., flock, herd, choir, and the like. The two men on stage had exhausted most of the obvious words in the category, and were beginning to butt heads with the moderators as they strayed from proper groups into things like the spaces that hold groups (a stadium, a toolbox) and the plural form of any noun that came to mind (fans, otters), which would have allowed the round to run on indefinitely. After a healthy volley one of the contestants offered an invalid answer, and then another, courting disqualification. And then he rebounded with the perfect pun—not the most clever, not the most original, but one that managed to both keep the round going and poke fun at the increasingly strict moderators: “Next year,” he said, “this topic ought to be band.” Despite the limits on both time and topic, this contestant delivered a pun in the heat of the moment that, against all odds, actually made sense. The crowd went wild, perhaps forgetting for a moment that on Monday they would have to return to a world where words mean just one thing at a time.

Ted Trautman has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, Wired, and others. He lives in Puebla, Mexico.

Live in Dracula’s Castle, and Other News

Bran Castle—go on, buy it! Photo: Myrabella, via Wikimedia Commons

Dracula’s castle is for sale. It dates to the twelfth century, it sits on a hill in Romania, and it costs eighty million dollars, purportedly. It is probably not air-conditioned.
Remembering Nellie Bly, a journalist from the late nineteenth century: “Her name was, at one time, on the tip of every literate and tabloid-loving person’s tongue. Her work changed public policy, her outfits influenced fashion trends, and her adventures inspired board games.”
Achieving Godzilla’s roar: “They tried to use recordings of animal sounds to get the beast’s distinctive shriek; Godzilla is more than a mere animal, though, and nothing quite captured the shriek they wanted to achieve … So they coated a leather glove in tar resin and then rubbed it along the string of a double bass.”
Say it’s the fifties and you’re hanging out in Nevada, photographing the mushroom clouds from atom-bomb test sites. How do you make sure your photos end up in the newspapers, rather than some other schmuck’s? Simple: put a ballet dancer in the foreground.
“Who destroys books? Cities, churches, dictators and fanatics. Their fingers itch to build a pyre and strike the match … And I, too, have committed murder in my library. I have killed my books.”

 

Prince of Darkness

Willis, left, on the set of Annie Hall with Woody Allen.

Gordon Willis, the cinematographer Entertainment Weekly has called “the closest thing Hollywood had to a Rembrandt,” died yesterday at eighty-two. Over the course of his remarkable career, Willis photographed Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather—parts one, two, and three—and many of Woody Allen’s most enduring films, such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, and The Purple Rose of Cairo. The A.V. Club writes, “His expressive use of warm-toned light and deep shadows—which led fellow cinematographer Conrad L. Hall to nickname him ‘The Prince of Darkness’—left an indelible mark on cinema.” And Variety quotes Roger Ebert’s astute observations on Manhattan:

All of these locations and all of these songs would not have the effect they do without the widescreen black and white cinematography of Gordon Willis. This is one of the best-photographed movies ever made … Some of the scenes are famous just because of Willis’ lighting. For example, the way Isaac and Mary walk through the observatory as if they’re strolling among the stars or on the surface of the moon. Later, as their conversation gets a little lost, Willis daringly lets them disappear into darkness, and then finds them again with just a sliver of side-lighting.

“People don’t understand the elegance of simplicity,” Willis said once. “If you take a sophisticated idea, reduce it to the simplest possible terms so that it’s accessible to everybody, and don’t get simple mixed up with simplistic, it’s how you mount and present something that makes it engaging.”

Here are Manhattan’s iconic bridge scene and an hour-long interview with Willis.

Whistle While You Work

William Paxton, The Figurine, 1921

“Many people tolerate squalor,” a friend once said to me. “But you’re the only person I know who seems to have a positive preference for it.”

Evidence to the contrary, I don’t, in fact, enjoy filth and chaos. But I do have a high threshold for it. I seem to lack a certain fastidiousness gene, and I’m guilty of what the British call, terrifically, “sluttish housekeeping.” I am not someone who will ever derive pleasure or satisfaction from cleaning—like running, it is a taste I doubt I will ever acquire. There is always a heap of clothing in my bedroom, generally schmutz on my mirrors, and invariably a mysterious profusion of change on the floor, everywhere. These are the sorts of things suitors think are cute and quirky, and that actual boyfriends come to understand are in fact heavy crosses to be borne.

In spite of—or perhaps because of—my own messiness, I enjoy depictions of cleaning to an unusual degree. Specifically, I love any montage in which order is imposed on chaos. Desirable elements include energetic sweeping, fresh coats of paint, clouds of dust, windows being thrown open. Is this because I somehow crave order, or just that Snow White was the second film I ever saw on the big screen? (War Games was the first.) I don’t know, but either way, I love to watch them while lounging in my unmade bed, generally surrounded by crumbs.

Even better than movie montages are written descriptions of such industry. Even though historical romance is not my thing, I have been known to pick up a paperback set in the Middle Ages purely on the off chance that a new bride will have to set her husband’s moldering castle to rights. This tends to involve the replacement of rotting reeds with fresh ones on the floor of a keep; often herbs are employed. Sometimes there are bonus scenes in which larders are scoured. But the residence in question need not be a castle. The epic airing to which Flora Poste subjects Cold Comfort Farm is arguably the high point of that novel. (The film depiction is equally satisfying.)

Now the house looked dirty and miserable and depressing no longer. Its windows flung back the gold of the sunset. The yard was swept clean of straws and paper. Check curtains hung crisply at most of the windows, and someone had been digging and trimming up the garden, and there were already rows of beans in red flower.

In the category of nonfiction, there are two books I particularly recommend if you enjoy setting-to-rights: the first is Julia Reed’s The House on First Street, which chronicles her move to New Orleans and becomes a story of Katrina. Of course, the story is a much larger one, and a tragic one: petty, necessary acts of cleaning and repairing and fixing are presented as battles in a much larger and more serious war. The tiny, gallant increments of survival—clearing out refrigerators of rotting food, repairing windows, fixing wiring—take on a larger than usual significance. As Reed writes, “what we are really doing is celebrating our very existence … We are still alive, we are saying to one another, and more than that, we are still here, in New Orleans, because we choose to be.”

The other book is very different. Castles in the Air: The Restoration Adventures of Two Young Optimists, by Judy Corbett, came across my desk many years ago, when I was an editorial assistant at a publishing house. I have never seen or heard of this book elsewhere—I don’t think it ever came out in America—but I loved it. The titular optimists are a British couple in their twenties—Corbett, a restorer of antique books, and her boyfriend, an art historian—who, despite having no money, quixotically buy a crumbling, fourteenth-century castle in North Wales. There is nothing instant or easy or movie-montagey about this story, but it remains one of the most satisfying cleaning accounts—and truest, most inspiring love stories—I have ever read.

I do understand that the vast majority of things I have mentioned feature a woman sweeping in and imposing order on a space—and, by extension, a life. In my own case, things have never looked like that. I could be flippant and say this is some kind of “[insert cleaning word here] porn” for me—scrub porn?—but in fact reading about these things neither excites me nor makes me feel inadequate. These tales offer the comforts of a bedtime story, as if order and orderliness were part of a fairy-tale realm, as improbable as it is magical.

The Other Yellow Pages

Last week, the British Library launched Discovering Literature, an online collection of more than 1,200 items from the Romantic and Victorian periods, all of it meant to arouse interest in classic English lit. There are manuscript pages and juvenilia from Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake, among others, but the diligent forager will find Charles H. Bennett’s vivid illustrations to Aesop’s Fables; more than twenty-five drawings from Gustave Doré’s London: A Pilgrimage; nineteenth-century gynecological gaffes (“the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind”); and early vampire stories.

There’s also this: The Yellow Book. Not to be confused with the Yellow Pages or Redbook, The Yellow Book was an illustrated quarterly magazine with a provocative name; it came

from the notorious covering into which controversial French novels were placed at the time. It is, in fact, a “yellow book” which corrupts Dorian in Wilde’s original novel; this generally thought to be Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884).

The founding principles were that literature and art should be treated independently and given equal status, and Aubrey Beardsley, illustrator of Wilde’s Salomé was appointed art editor.

Indeed, when Wilde was arrested in 1895, there were rumours he had been carrying a yellow-bound book. Though this was actually Pierre Louÿs’s French novel Aphrodite, a confused crowd thought it was a copy of this magazine, and gathered to throw stones at the publishers’ offices.

Those were the days, when the mere sight of a literary quarterly, or even something resembling a literary quarterly, could move a crowd to violence. The Yellow Book was published for only a few years, from 1894 to 1897, but it loomed large; nearly a century later, the scholar Linda Dowling called it “commercially the most ambitious and typographically the most important of the 1890s periodicals. [It] gave the fullest expression to the double resistance of graphic artists against literature, and Art against commerce, the double struggle symbolized by the paired words on the contents-pages of the Yellow Books: Letterpress and Pictures, Literature and Art.”

An Interview with Joshua Ferris

“Playing games is part of the fictional endeavor.”

Photo: Beowulf Sheehan/Hachette Brown Group

“The mouth is a weird place,” says the dentist-narrator of Joshua Ferris’s new novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour . “Not quite inside and not quite out, not skin and not organ, but something in between: dark, wet, admitting access to an interior most people would rather not contemplate—where cancer starts, where the heart is broken, where the soul may just fail to turn up.”

It’s not just dentists who peer into dark spaces. Fear that the soul may fail to turn up is everywhere in Ferris’s work. To date, he has explored the human search for soulfulness in the anonymizing ecosystem of an office (Then We Came to the End); in the repercussions of an isolating, untreatable disease (The Unnamed); and repeatedly in words themselves. A short story like “The Fragments,” published in The New Yorker last spring, is constructed from snippets of half-caught conversations. It takes as its subject the not-quite-bridgeable gap between overhearing and understanding, between the sound of a sentence and the meaning inside. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour turns this artistic interest in misunderstandings into an impressive investigation of faith and doubt. It’s a novel full of existential humor, and the laughs start before the book has even begun. Not many American writers, searching the Bible for an appropriate epigraph, would have found their eyes alighting on this one:

Ha, ha

—Job 39:25.

I met Ferris on a Friday afternoon in Brooklyn. We talked about his desire to shift his writing away from what he calls “the over-manufacture of the imagined” to a more “face value” approach. We also discussed the ways in which he envies the sense of belonging religion can offer, and why literary critics could afford to lighten up when it comes to funny fiction. “We don’t exist in the world solely to grow goatees and stroke them,” he told me. “We’re here also to make one another laugh.”

I heard that To Rise Again At A Decent Hour started its life as a detective novel called The Third Bishop. How did you find your way from that original idea into a novel about baseball and religion, narrated by a dentist?

Ten years ago, I was despairing of writing any book at all. I had about 250 pages of the novel that eventually became Then We Came to the End, and those pages were wanting. So I put them away and eventually gave myself over to a very different manuscript. It was about a kid who had been thoroughly indoctrinated into a cult and was convinced that his strange view was the worldview. I was interested in the borderland that exists between a cult and a religion, and especially fascinated by Joseph Smith and the evolution of Mormonism.

After Then We Came to the End and The Unnamed were published, I ended up coming back to that story of an indoctrinated kid. Slowly it evolved into the story of a private detective investigating a possibly ancient religion. In a way, the books you almost wrote on the way to finding the final novel will always be more interesting than the published version. They’re a more colorful record of the writer’s life. But with the help of my two editors I came to see that the private detective, who’s inherently a kind of mediating narrator, or a cipher, wasn’t working for me either. I needed a narrator right at the center of the novel, encountering the religion for himself. He eventually became a dentist because I need my characters to have jobs in order to feel real to me. People have to work. I thought, Why not make him a dentist? It doesn’t get any more real world than that. You’re getting in there every day and making shit bleed.

There’s a lot in your novel about the private rituals of religions and of baseball, and the narrator has his own private language for some things—like calling his cell phone his “me-machine.” His big regret is that his dental practice doesn’t have a private office he can escape to.

Privacy is one of the book’s big preoccupations. I’m writing to figure out what I think about it. Without a private office in his dental practice, Paul is always on display. I think what I’m interested in is this question of to what extent an obsessive perfectionist—like Paul, like myself—should let other people into their thoughts. They can be strange thoughts.

I was also interested in the way that the Internet creates a second world, a second reality. I mainly go about my business unobserved. I don’t engage with social media. But when I go online, I can type my name into Google and see pictures of myself. I have an existence online that is not mine. There is a version of me out there that I’m not developing—that other people are developing on my behalf. It’s the same with my narrator. He’s striving for a kind of sincerity. And the Internet—the reflections of himself he sees online—are part of the reason he can’t find that sincerity, I think. He’s too aware of himself as an actor in the world, and that stops him acting. He’s an object rather than a subject. Paul’s great fear—and probably mine—is that it’s no longer possible to be authentic in the way it was before the social internet came along.

I read a piece in The Daily Beast suggesting that in 2010 a Twitter account in your name was set up, and posted anti-Semitic comments. The implication was that this might have inspired the religious identity theft plot in your novel. Is there any truth in that?

No, that didn’t come from me. I’m not aware of there having been a Twitter account purporting to be mine. Is it happening right now? Is Joshua Ferris tweeting as we speak?

We’ll have to check it out. But if that wasn’t where the impulse to write about religion and identity theft came from, perhaps you can talk about where else it may have come from.

Growing up, I didn’t belong to a religion, and that not belonging maybe bothered me at times. I was outside of the nurturing communities that religion can provide. Don’t get me wrong—I know religion can also be a show of horrors. But growing up I looked in on Catholicism as a non-Catholic, and I looked in on Judaism as a non-Jew. I was an outsider, this mutt-y white kid who had no tradition or belief. I wanted a religious community for myself, probably because I didn’t have one. If I’d had one, I probably would have spurned it.

To Rise Again At a Decent Hour starts from the question of whether there’s a kind of private language and intimacy to religion that the mutt-y white guys like me are missing out on. And to some extent, I’m also thinking about the question of whether as a writer there’s something I’ve missed out on. When you’re an American novelist in 2014, at a point when Philip Roth has had a kind of apotheosis—has ascended to heaven even though he’s still on earth—you realize the extraordinary richness he found in Judaism. I didn’t grow up within that richness. I simply didn’t have it. It cuts both ways, of course. There are writers who happen to be Jewish who get labeled as “Jewish writers” and would much rather be just writers. And here I am, lamenting the fact that I’m not a Jew! But religion offers a writer a tradition both to be nurtured in and to fight against, and that nurturing and that conflict can produce great literature. Roth was given a lifetime of material from the fights he picked with Judaism—with the generation of Jews that he raised him, with the generation that excoriated him, and finally with the generation that celebrated him. Whereas I got a few potluck dinners and some basement training in Noah.

The idea of the individual wanting to belong to a group—that might be a through-line in your work.

Yeah, I guess so. In Then We Came to the End, there were those individuals in the office environment who wanted or had no choice but to become part of the collective “we.” And there were those individuals who at all costs didn’t want to be part of the “we.” And in The Unnamed, there’s an almost mineral insistence on difference—on the ways in which this strange disease marks a character as abnormal, and the sickness refuses to let him participate in life. I’m interested in connectivity and inclusiveness, but also in what it means to be a real individual, what it requires, and how those two things might sometimes be at odds.

All writers are interested in systems of naming, of labeling, but perhaps you more than most. It seems to me that you spend a lot of time thinking about the limitations of language and, on the other hand, the ripples of resonance it’s possible to squeeze from a single word. I particularly enjoyed Googling the surname of the ex-girlfriend, Connie Plotz, and finding out that it was a Yiddish word meaning “to collapse or faint, as from surprise, excitement, or exhaustion.” And there was a Mr. Santacroce, or holy cross. And there’s a Mr. Belisle. When I looked up “Belisle” on my me-machine, I found a pitcher for the Colorado Rockies, and then an online dictionary asked if I’d meant “Belial, a Hebrew term for the Devil.”

Names are a way of playing games with the reader. I choose my names with great care, you’re right about that. With Nabokov, names are always full of allusions, they always exist on some level as references—they’re places for him to play. With Pynchon, names are a great place for metaphors to be recognized, and for the reader to realize that basically everything he’s writing is metaphorical on some level.

Names generate meaning in a short amount of space—they provoke thoughts, questions. That’s something I like doing. Of course, you have to be careful. Sometimes it can alienate the reader, it can be another level of mediation, to make a character carry the great burden of a metaphoric name. The character can be a device before he or she becomes a person, and that can be a bad thing for a writer who wants to offer up a kind of emotional proximity in the work. It’s a constant struggle, the desire to be playful and the desire to communicate on some very stark emotional level.

The desire to be funny and the desire to be serious?

I don’t know that I would ever want to separate humor out from the serious, or characterize it like that. The best kind of humor isn’t topical, it doesn’t have an expiration date, and it doesn’t come out of nowhere. The best kind of literary humor is contextual, situational, and is a matter of timing and carefully generating the opportunity to provide what’s funny—that kind of humor is serious.

And yet people often make the “funny versus serious” distinction in your work. Even the critics who loved your first novel sometimes felt the need to point out that, in addition to the office-based jokes, there was a serious cancer narrative, as if that somehow gave legitimacy to what might otherwise have been a frivolous project.

Disparagement of comedy’s role in literature is deeply misguided. Sometimes people fail to recognize the extraordinary amount of craft that can go into what looks, on the surface, like a mere punch-line. In my writing, I’m trying to use different registers, and those registers are a reflection of the world. We don’t exist in the world solely to grow goatees and stroke them. We’re here also to make one another laugh, and to use humor to mitigate some of the shit and misery that goes on. I think the best advice I could give a young writer would be “Don’t forget about the funny.” Humor is a part of life, so make it a part of your fiction.

Part of the problem—part of the reason people sometimes think that comedic literature isn’t real literature—is that comedy can seem to date a piece of work. I don’t mean with a specific year. When you have a funny line, you hope to make the reader laugh. But if they reread the book, they’re unlikely to laugh at that line again. It’s hard to return the reader to the first reaction you elicited in him or her, especially with humor. The reader has already heard and absorbed the joke, and has laughed, and that’s it. Whereas with, say, a resonant, poetic line, sometimes a reader can come back to it again and again and it retains its power. People want lasting literature to have a feel of permanency, and sometimes comedy can seem disposable because you only laugh hard that first time.

To pick up on the idea of the disposable, did you worry at all about the references to Facebook and Twitter in To Rise Again At a Decent Hour?

I did, but not for long. If we’re going to talk about social media, we have to talk about it. You can’t write for the ages—there’s such pretense in that. It’s a mistake. At the start of Bartleby, the Scrivener, there are these mentions of [John Jacob] Astor meant to convey the high-level business the narrator is conducting, and then there are long descriptions of what it means to be a scrivener. No one’s interested in Astor anymore, and the role of a scrivener is no longer relevant to us. The references have no currency in the contemporary world at all. But Melville is a product of his time, and he didn’t worry about what would date and what wouldn’t.

When I write a novel today that involves Facebook or Twitter, I simply have to hope that either Facebook and Twitter will make a significant enough impression on the world that they will outlast their usefulness and be remembered, or that—if they go the way of the dodo—a reader will accept what these things are doing in the story, and not be bothered by them. One man’s future is another man’s past.

What formed your writing, early on?

I wrote, as an undergrad. And when I got out of school I was making a little scratch translating badly written scientific papers into English. There were many different layers of translation. Usually the students who’d written these papers were incredibly brilliant scientists but often without much knowledge of English. I would take their writing and improve it, and at the same time I was taking this complex science and trying to make it communicable. That job conveyed to me very strongly that for every piece of writing, there is a reader, and clarity is important.

Then I went into advertising in 1998. There’s never been a word written in the history of advertising that hasn’t had, as its core objective, the domination of the entire world. Every sentence put forth is intended to maximize the client’s market share. You want to win over not just a reader, but every reader; the biggest possible group. I started to realize the real power of a simple sentence. In college I had acquired these ideals of literature with a capital L, but my real-life work—the work of simplifying ideas—produced a writer willing to slum it with simple sentences if it meant reeling a reader in. The combination of that academic study and that real-world advertising experience really formed my voice.

There will be some reviewers of To Rise Again At a Decent Hour who will read the whole book as a kind of allegory, in the same way they did with the non-stop walking in The Unnamed. Is that bothersome to you? Do you consider yourself to be a realist writer, or does that label hold no meaning for you?

I wouldn’t be able to write anything at all if I didn’t believe I was writing about the real world. All my books are about the world I inhabit. We talked about how I abandoned a private detective novel and turned it into one about a dentist. I think that was ultimately because there was too much unreality to that original conceit—to the mediated narrator—for me to really believe in my own book.

I’d make an argument that, on the metaphysical level, Samuel Beckett was a realist. But if I gave Beckett to, say, my father, who’s a good reader but an unschooled one, he would not call it realism. He would call it some strange abstraction. But as I read the trilogy, what I see is the deep human concerns of those books, and how pressing and relevant and real they feel. Hopefully whatever feels imagined or affected in my novels nonetheless has some connection to the real world. I hope I’m conveying a seriousness in relation to the world, not a flippancy. More and more as a writer, I’m interested in taking things at face value rather than relying, as I maybe did when I was younger, on the over-manufacture of the imagined.

And yet you made up a disease in The Unnamed, and a whole religion in this novel. Why not just pick a religion off the peg—choose one that already exists?

It goes back to the idea of the distinction between a religion and a cult. Often it’s tempting to dismiss a religious movement as a cult, and I felt it was necessary to make up a religion of my own devising so that people didn’t come at it with a certain set of assumptions, or expectations. It’s very easy to say, “Oh, I know what Mormonism is.” I wanted to create a religion that seemed strange in some ways and believable in others, so that the reader thinks, I have to Google this to see if it’s real.

If I’m getting someone to Google Ulmism, the religion in the book, to see if it’s real, then on some level I have managed to make Ulmism a real religion, haven’t I? It’s real in the pages of the novel, and it’s real enough to be Googled. To take this one step further, if you Google Ulmism and find no reference to it, does that mean it’s not a real religion? If something doesn’t show up on Google, does that make it untrue? And if all true things show up on the Internet, does that mean that everything on the Internet is true? Might there be some false things on the Internet, too? How do you categorize something that is Googleable and false? Or true and un-Googleable? Before you know it, you have no firm grip whatsoever on what is true and what isn’t true, or even what that distinction means. Playing games is part of the fictional endeavor. It’s part of my attempt to take the world seriously.

Jonathan Lee is a British writer. His new novel, Brighton Heights, will be published by Knopf in 2015.