An Interview with Paul Maliszewski

It's been awhile since we've had the chance to run an interview this fun and in-depth in awhile, which makes this all the more satisfying: a long, interesting-as-hell interview with Paul Maliszewski, he of Prayer and Parable and Fakers, both of which I thought were excellent (reviews here and here). I'm not sure there's all that much critical info one needs to get into this, aside from this: this could've been much, much longer. Maybe this'll be some on-going thing, a Checking In With Paul feature on Corduroy. Regardless: enjoy the interview, but, obviously, more critically: go purchase the man's books and read them and pass them along. A formatting note: no, I don't know why the footnotes don't automatically jump you to the page's bottom, nor how to make them do so. 

Do you feel like there's anyone writing at present who's writing with any sort of similar aesthetic goals as you?

You're supposing I can know other people's aesthetic goals, when I can't reliably explain my own. But let me say this: two recent books that gave me strong feelings of recognition were Adam Gilders's Another Ventriloquist, a collection of stories, and Deb Unferth's novel Vacation. Our sentences aren't outwardly similar. Unferth's are more arresting, the syntax torqued, where mine are plainer on the surface, to the point of seeming flat. This business of recognition is tricky, though. It's a little like hearing a song on the radio and thinking, That sounds so much like my life! She must be singing for/about/to me! There's guesswork involved, and one finally has to make a great interpretive leap. Both Gilders and Unferth pay particular attention to the thoughts of their characters, and they do so in not-typical ways, i.e. not just saying, so-and-so thought, quote-unquote, I'm not happy at my job. I appreciate when characters are allowed to think, and at some length. I like when they're given access to sophisticated language, too, even literary language. I'm not a fan of the terse, uncommunicative school of character, where the author gets to be occasionally lyrical and the characters are all like, Hey, what's up? Not much. You? There's also some attempt in these books to capture the grammar of consciousness. This is not to say Unferth and Gilders are writing stream of consciousness. It's more an interest in people's logic, how people try to explain who they are and what they're about, and how they deceive themselves with their accounts, which can seem carefully constructed but are rarely complete.

I really like your work, and I really like Helen DeWitt's work—it seems like you two have this weird overlap, just in the reliance or utilization of something like rational rigor, or something like that: the worlds in which each of your works are set matter , the rules and orders of it. I don't see this lots of places. Do you?

DeWitt is near the top of a lengthy list of authors I really need to read already. I haven't even read The Last Samurai. I have been reading about the new one in reviews and interviews, so I think—operative word, think—I know what you mean. My book has some stories that are prayers and some that are parables. The parables are more like fables—things in them stand for other things, or hold out that possibility. The parables also often have some unrealistic premise that is dealt with initially and then just becomes the ground situation for the story. It is like you say, these worlds have different rules. In my stories, most of the rules are the same as in our world except for one significant thing, which is slightly off. It's like, okay, gravity, for this story, will be green—and then I just try to deal with that as part of the new world and develop it in fairly realistic ways.

I also like logic. Logic was one of my favorite classes in college. I tell people that sometimes, and they're always like, Really? Logic? But yes, I like logic. An old girlfriend once told me that if I were a Greek hero, my tragic flaw would be that I always think people can be convinced by a good argument, and I'm forever disappointed, of course, just crushed. I also think logic is funny, when it breaks down, or when people fall before logic and become frustrated by the terrific binds it puts them in. That drama is endlessly compelling.

You see a lot of attention to logic and what you're calling rational rigor in satire. Satire is an argument strapped like a bomb to the underside of a humor-delivery vehicle. And DeWitt's Lightning Rods seems (if I may) like a work of satire. That said, I don't think of the stories in my book as satiric. I like satire, and I doubtless have learned a lot from reading my way around the satiric canon, and I've even written satires at times, but these stories are not satires. They do have that attention to logic. It's just not my logic as the author/satirist trying to put forward some argument that unpacks, say, the hypocrisies of the human animal. What interests me is the characters' ways of thinking. Where do they get stuck? What do they keep circling around, trying to figure out?

You're right on DeWitt, and it's funny that you liked logic in college—I'm predisposed toward math[1], and I end up finding more and more writers whose work comes from a non-belletristic background (Blake Butler, for instance, went to GTech to study computers), and I think there's a wiring difference that obtains because of it (DeWitt studied classics at Oxford). Also: I don't think your work's satiric, either: that idea of people going to war with their own logic, that makes total sense—and the ultimate reveal is character , whereas satire's ultimate aim/reveal is a deflation of something external, or so it seems to this very non-scholarly person. Do you feel like your work's coming out of some specific tradition?

Well, you'd have to put Beckett on that list. People are always being undone by logic in Beckett, and it's a great source of humor, their undoing, as well as empathy. I always feel, reading about them, close to coming undone myself. Kafka's important, too, for similar reasons, as well as for his premises and the way he develops them: guy wakes up as a bug; guy wakes up and is arrested; imagine an artist whose work is starving himself; imagine an execution machine that inscribes on the body of a condemned man the law that he violated; imagine the world in which such a device exists; then imagine, and this is the most important part, the mental landscape of the people who operate the execution machine. There's definitely a stronger European tradition for this sort of work. I would also mention here Flann O'Brien, Thomas Bernhard, and Robert Walser.

Years ago, I read Milan Kundera's Immortality, and there's a moment in that novel where two of his characters, two sisters, as I recall, are used to illustrate some point he wants to make about people. The sisters, you see, represent two types of people, and Kundera has a character draw the sisters as simple diagrams. Kundera has this great ability to treat his characters as characters—full-bodied, three-dimensional, completely human, all a realist could want—as well as illustrations, and he can move back and forth, with the illustration not compromising the realistic work of character-building, but rather enriching how we see his people. Thousands of students in thousands of workshops might suppose differently, but so be it. You can find examples of this fluidity of character throughout his work, especially The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where he smoothly switches between realistic story and literary essay and allegory and dream and history. The book hardly needs me to declare it a masterpiece, but I will.

I don't want to make it sound like your work's somehow radically different—it's great—but it does seem like it's fundamentally doing other stuff than, say, Franzen's, or Eugenides', or whoever's.[2]

No, that's fine. I get it. I'm an odd bird, I know I am. I wanted to say, though, despite all my European credential-flashing, there's a part of me—a big part of me—that loves Raymond Carver and Richard Yates and Denis Johnson, and I don't think it's a stretch to say I owe a lot to their work as well. You know that old Dostoevsky quote, "We all came out from under Gogol's 'Overcoat'"? Many of us were born and are still standing in Carver's "Cathedral," mouths agape. There's a lot of room inside to hunker down and do our work. My point is, I don't see my writing as unrealistic or even—I dislike this word, but it's so widely used that it's pointless to fight it—experimental. I'm writing realism. It's different from other people's realism, but only because I attend to different aspects of reality. It's not, however, unrealistic.

Eugenides I can't really speak about. I haven't read any of his books. My wife read The Virgin Suicides and recently started The Marriage Plot. The other night I asked her, Why do you think people like his stuff? I was curious. Maybe I'll read it someday, you know. She thought about it for a second and said, The writing's good but it's not off-putting. It doesn't make you work. And then she said: also, he's describing things people already know. I asked what she meant. Well, she said, he describes, for instance, what it's like to wake up with a hangover after graduation. It's all familiar.

As for Franzen, I read Freedom like everyone else, and I liked parts of it a lot, the beginning especially. When I read that opening section, I thought, This is our Revolutionary Road. I don't think he sustains that, unfortunately, but that opening held so much promise. It was so sure and had such depth. The novel as a whole is deeply flawed, though. Structurally, it lurches from story to story, beginning things but not always digging in and developing them. It's like Franzen would rather start something new rather than finish something in the works. But what I liked and what I was impressed by are his psychological insights. He has complicated insights into his characters—into people. He's good on the nasty interpersonal stuff that people do, especially smart people, as they're trying to get the upper-hand or figure out where they stand in relation to one another. I haven't seen him praised for that, which is a shame, because I think it's better writing, ultimately, than the big-picture, ripped-from-the-headlines, portrait-of-the-culture-as-a-whole stuff that people fawn over.

I agree with that last bit—he does that well—but I think he chooses awfully easy characters to do this sort of work on—he chooses, basically, iterations of him… which is fine, okay, but he really doesn't stretch, I don't think.

Iterations of him, yes, I get that. Maybe we know Franzen too well, though. He's put so much of himself out there, not just in his personal essays, but also in his appearances as a bonafide media figure, which he has been—he may like it or not—since the days of The Corrections and that whole mess with Oprah. Reading Franzen is like seeing George Clooney in a movie. The essential and unalterable Clooney-ness never completely disappears.

Maybe this is awful of me to think this way, but there's a… I don't know how to say it. Look, we've both read Freedom : by the end of that novel, we know these characters by significations—the who-gives-a-shit musician guy, the mom, the spineless dad, whatever. But we don't actually get lots of their insides—it's the same thing with the shitful new Eugenides as well.[3] I don't want to sound too mean, but those books and the hundreds/thousands that do that thing don't ultimately seem to be trying to do the stuff you're doing (or DeWitt, or Unferth, or Diane Williams, or Barthelme, or Kelly Link, or whoever). Someone who maybe straddles that line's Lorrie Moore. I'm young, too—I'm 32 and freshfaced and all. Maybe I just don't know a secret lineage of stuff like this work, but it does seem like there are books I get—yours, stuff by J. Robert Lennon, etc.—that feel fundamentally different, start to finish, than other fiction.[4]

Freedom was a disappointment. It's easy (but not inaccurate) to summarize the characters. Pious liberal environmentalist who gets his comeuppance. Young, idealistic intern whom the liberal, of course, has an affair with. And yet, I still thought there were human insights. I'd have to get my book down and hunt for examples—don't make me get my Freedom out, Cutter!—but I think I appreciated his character-making more than you. I was still frustrated by the novel, but there were times when I thought, I haven't seen a fictional human think like that before. There were just complexities that the summaries don't contain. A lot of the complexity comes when Franzen writes about the rivalry between his two male leads, but I also thought the stuff between Patty and her mother was great. Still, those summary versions are so handy that it's difficult not to think of a Franzen character as a big box with a crude label on the top: Long-Suffering Wife being the most obvious.

One thing to say is that you're talking about art on two different scales here. It's not apples and oranges, but it is, on one hand, a variety of apple that has proven to be enticing/wonderful/delicious to millions and, on the other hand, an apple that is more of an acquired taste, oddly bitter perhaps. To put this in other terms: Franzen is like network TV, a program that is both the most popular and the most acclaimed. If he were a late-night talk-show host, he would have great ratings and the critics, even the hardest-to-please ones, would adore him. Whereas I—I can't speak for anyone else on your list—I'm like this scruffy comedian who erratically shows up on random street corners, does his little performance, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for just a single joke, nobody ever knows in advance, and then he moves on, having probably alienated or insulted as many people as he's entertained. My point is not to run Franzen down or aggrandize myself. My point is to say: Jay Leno doesn't want to be that street comedian. Moreover, if you asked him to comment on the work, I'm not sure he would have much to say. Would you trust his reading? Would you bother asking him for a quote? At the same time, the street comedian doesn't want to be on TV and perhaps can't readily understand what Leno's up to either.

As for the secret lineage, what differentiates the writers you mention from Franzen, say, is the difference between society books and individual books. Franzen wants to capture the whole society. It's a white society, predominantly, middle- to upper-class, but let's leave that alone for now. Franzen wants to get at "the way we live now," to quote that awful name for a column in the New York Times Magazine, a column which has been discontinued, though its guiding spirit lives on. At times, Franzen's canvas is so large that chunks of the novel read like articles in the Times or New Yorker features. I'm thinking of that unwieldy fact download about mountaintop removal that Franzen tries, absurdly, to smuggle in as dialogue. The writing's very newsy. I wondered as I read how it will age. Will it become dated quickly? At times, it gets hamstrung by its relentless pursuit of currency. There was a scene where an older man—the father of that woman (Jenna) that Patty's son (Joey, I'm having to look this up, the names are already fading from the picture) falls in love with—uses the term app figuratively. He's talking about Judaism and is saying that the good thing about it is "You can choose your very own apps and features, so to speak." That line stopped me. Is that believable from this guy? Was app even in the language at this point? If it was, had the word bled into non-technical, figurative uses? Had app trickled up to the generally-out-of-touch set? What year is this supposed to be, anyway? All these niggling questions, but the reality of the book—of any book—can be shook by the slightest tremor of doubt.

Every now and then there was some bit of language that struck me as anachronistic, which is, at one level, crazy, because can something from 2007 be that out of place in 2004? Were the times really so different? But that's the steep downside with these of-the-moment books: you get mired in the incidental reality. As I did when I found myself asking, Would Pirates of the Caribbean be an in-flight movie at this time? Would it be shown on a flight from the Caribbean? Even if that's all true in the fact-checker sense, my attention has wandered. It's like I was watching a movie but ignored the actors in order to scrutinize the furniture. And this was a book I was reading for pleasure. Maybe the passage of time will iron out these problems. I should have waited twenty years to read Freedom.

Individual books don't get bogged down in set dressing. Often they just leave it out. These are books more concerned with a person, or maybe two people, or a family, though not a family in any sociological fashion. These books are much less worried about depicting "the times." What is the society in Molloy or Murphy or, for that matter, any Beckett? You can get a sense of the world, I suppose, but it's not the point. It's not even a tertiary point. Waiting for Godot is not a play about what a mess the world has become. It's not a warning to heed. It's not some environmentalist tract about the peril we face in a world without trees. It's about the individual, the world just happens to be barren to focus our attention. And it's about the mind of the individual, and the language that remains. Nobody comes out of Godot and asks, But how did the world get wrecked? You accept the premise and just listen to Vladimir and Estragon.

Here's a question for you, if I may. You described my work as being "fundamentally driven by non-character engines." Since this seems like an insight that could explain myself to me, I have to ask: What are these engines? You mentioned the scenario and the world of the story. Are those the same? Are there other engines, either in my work or others? Are you interested in non-character engines as a writer as well?

This is a really good question, which sucks for me, because I'm lazy. How about this: two of the stories I most enjoy teaching are Saunders' "Sea Oak" and John Leary's "Scenarios for Lee's Forgiveness." Both stories feature massive enginery in terms of scenario/world of story ("Sea Oak"'s got the grandma coming back to life, "Scenarios" features a list of feasible ways for this couple to forgive each other, all set at a birthday party [this story's been, from my finding, totally underloved: it was in One Story ]), but the characteristics of Saunders' characters are much more critical than those of Leary's. I think the first person I read who knocked me sideways in terms of this stuff is Millhauser: his stuff's got characters, but the situation of the story, the unfolding of plot, the uniqueness of the situation: these fundamentally drive the story and keep the reader going.

I really, really like stories that harness this sort of energy—I don't know how accurate the comparison might be, but the feeling's akin to a microphone which picks up the sound of the whole room vs. one that just picks up the voice singing into it.[5] I really liked, say, Harbach's Fielding , and I loved the characters and miss them etc., but I'm also really, really interested in and enjoy hugely stories from folks like Kelly Link and Aimee Bender—stories where the situation of the story dominates, and the characters are there and all, that's fine, but who they are, the memories of them skinning their knees, age nine, etc.—this stuff doesn't ultimately drive the story the way other works by other folks demand.

Millhauser is a maker of some great, well-wrought worlds. I like Martin Dressler, a William Dean Howells novel except with more lyrical and imaginative flights about the development and evolution of a department store. I see what you mean about scenario-based fiction. With Millhauser, I get this image of a jeweler bent over an intricate box, like something by Fabergé but more elaborate and larger. He's setting tiny bits of wire into his beloved box, soldering them into place, and then moving onto the next piece of filigree. There are characters, like you say, but they're figures inside the jeweled box, among many other figures. It's hard not to appreciate the box as a box as much as one does the figures inside. It's all so ultimately crafted.

I'm curious, too, in what the difference is, for you, between the prayers and parables in your book. I'm a shittily unfocused reader sometime—I don't remember the names of characters, for instance—and I rarely track titles, so I know I didn't pay all that much attention to the differences between Prayers and Parables for you. How's the distinction shake out?

That distinction came late to me. For quite a while, they were all prayers, but what happened is I got into a lazy habit with the titles and just thought, Oh, another prayer, okay, the title will go "Prayer for…" or "Prayer against…," and that was that. I stopped thinking about it, which was a blessing at the time, because I find it hard to come up with titles. When the manuscript was starting to feel complete, though, I stepped back and thought again and realized that some of the stories were different and, too, maybe there should be some way to distinguish them. I didn't want to have a book divided into two sections, like halves. So that's how the parables came into it. It was just a way to acknowledge a difference that I'd been denying with my uniform titles. As for the distinction itself, basically, the prayer stories are more realistic (I think), and the parables operate on a metaphorical level. To use your terms, the parables are more scenario-based.

What do you think fiction should do? I know this gets dicey, all sorts of moral/Gardner-esque stuff, but I think the above does a fair job of acknowledging that there's a different lineage, or at least another lineage of "realist fiction"—stuff which takes as its focus different aspects of reality, or at least different tastes/feels of reality.

This makes me think of two Robert Coover quotes, only one of which I've been able to track down, sorry. He recently told a Guardian reporter who asked about realism: "I learned my realism from guys like Kafka." I've also seen him say somewhere, I swear, that as far as he's concerned, he's been writing realism all along. People may call it postmodern or black humor or magical realism or whatever they want, but to him it has always just felt real. So is "The Babysitter" unrealistic because it's broken into many parts, parts that sometimes backtrack and revise or contradict one another? Or does it, with its twisting variations and its fractured quality, get at some real psychological stuff, the interplay and repetitions of fantasies, stuff deep in the brain, deeper certainly than well-put details about the cut of a character's pants?

Or take Barth, for instance. In his early stuff, he has these great anxious characters, just incredibly worried people. I'm thinking of the narrator in The End of the Road and the title story in Lost in the Funhouse. You can't have that very real anxiousness without what's innovative or—I should really stop using this word—experimental. The anxiousness is actually heightened by the experimental form, making what's real more palpable, more felt.

As for what fiction should do, I've hinted around about this somewhat, but I'll spell it out here: fiction should be mapping the reality of the inner landscape. To me, that's the strength of fiction, what it can manage that other art forms can't, or at least not as well. That said, our outer reality, the reality we share—call it the world—is still always interesting, worth describing and narrating. As I've said, there's as much Carver in me as Beckett. I just happen to believe that outer reality cannot be the end point of art.

How'd you end up writing the ways you write? I know little about your background other than Syracuse, so I've got nothing. But certainly this strain of realism that you work within—that's an overt choice against some other competing dogmas or whatever.

If I stop and think about it, I guess I prefer x over y, but I don't sit down and think, Time to work against the major dogmas of the day. Really, I think it's more like that TV comedian/street clown analogy. I'm always going to be the street clown. I woke up this way. I can only do what I do, finally. I don't know how I ended up writing this way. We read Carver in college, but we read him alongside Barthelme, Where Are You Calling from? and Sixty Stories, back to back. That was the contemporary American story as I was taught it. Barthelme and company weren't some misguided detour taken during the 60s and 70s. They were a still vital part of literature. This was at Rice University, in Houston. Barthelme was still teaching across town, at U of H, when I started there. After his death, Gulf Coast, the U of H literary magazine, published an issue of reminiscences and had a reading at Brazos Bookstore. I went to that. I received strong doses of the moderns (Pound's Cantos in a poetry class) and the postmoderns. We read Gravity's Rainbow in seventy-six page chunks, discussing it over, I think, five weeks of class.

Our creative writing teacher then was Max Apple, who in his work finds a sweet spot between formal innovation and telling a human story. See for instance "An Offering," from his collection Free Agents, which reads like a corporate report announcing the sale of twenty thousand class-B shares in Max Apple Inc. It's a story that works as a satire of commodification—everything stickered, everything with its price—as well as an earnest offer to the unknown reader. It's a story about a writer that manages to be clever and sympathetic.

The English department then was distinctly pre-theory. There was one young professor, basically, who did theory. So we weren't, you know, reading Barthelme in light of the poststructuralists. We read him as literature. Friends and I would talk about Barthelme stories the way people talk about movies. You know: Remember that part where the guy says… Just recounting favorite bits, quoting lines, laughing. "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby" was a monument to us. We gathered around it. Not that I understood what I read. Initially I read Barthelme as this license to do anything—you want to put pictures in your story, put pictures in your story—which I guess is encouraging to a novice. It took years for me to grasp that there was a structure underlying the inventiveness. It wasn't just page after page of antic carrying-on. When he writes, in "Rebecca," that "one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page," it's not just a bunch of lovely, striking words strung together. And yet I stared and can still stare at that final phrase, that warm tympanic page, repeating it, listening to it, wondering where in the world it came from. It took me a while to realize that when Barthelme says one should never cease considering human love, he actually means that one should never cease considering human love. Sometimes he says just what he means. Eventually I learned that lesson.

When I got to grad school, I realized pretty quickly that I'd read a different set of books than some of the other students, who were more of what you'd call traditional realists. For the first workshop, Michael Martone asked us to bring in copies of a story that meant a lot to us, a story by another writer. I brought in "The Distance of the Moon," by Italo Calvino, from Cosmicomics. Other students brought in Steinbeck, Carver, John Knowles, Cheever, and Stuart Dybek. One student, I think, knew Calvino, and he'd lived and taught in Italy. Most of the students had never heard of him. I remember Michael talked to me after class about how great it was to see Calvino, because, as he said, it's what you'd expect someone to bring up in the 1970s. My Calvino photocopy got passed around outside of class. Weeks later, a poet told me how much he liked it. That Calvino story, he said. Man.

How big was Prayer and Parable? How'd you come to understand and perceive of its shape? Were there prayers or parables you cut? Were there ones you were missing that you, on putting the thing together as a collection, realized you needed to write? The book's awesome for lots of reasons, not least that it feels cohesive, and of course I'm curious about how that shook out for the organizer of the thing.

There were two or maybe three pieces that I cut. Mostly that was an issue of the stories feeling to me like they no longer worked. My writing changed over the time I worked on these stories. I worked on them for a while, and I revised the old ones—I had to in almost every case, sometimes heavily—but a few just refused to be revised. I couldn't make them work. Really, I just couldn't find any urgency in them, or any energy. They didn't feel like what I was at that point calling stories. I didn't believe them any longer and, worse, I couldn't get my head back into them. I assume at the time they excited me and felt vital, all that, but something had expired in them, an important ingredient had turned sour.

I did want to write some new stories. I had scribbled notes for a bunch of new things, but as I read them over, they seemed either no longer necessary—already covered by an earlier story—or just unintelligible. Only a few ideas were really asking to be written, and those were ones I didn't need to remind myself about. I'd been thinking about them off and on for years and knew the book wouldn't be complete until I turned to them. Coincidentally (or not), they're the last three stories in the book. The collection is not chronological in terms of how I wrote them (there are newer and older stories mixed together); it just worked out that the newest stories appear last. I do think of the collection as having a rough chronology in terms of what the characters go through. It's like the book is a partial biography of the central characters. It begins with a boyfriend-girlfriend story and then, in the second-to-last story, a couple is talking about having a baby, the woman of the couple thinks she might be pregnant but isn't sure. In the final story, another couple has the baby. It's not perfect, this chronology, just like how the division between parables and prayers is far from tidy, but the arrangement meant something to me. There's an arc there, and I make a gesture of tracing it in the air. Not that any of this was apparent to me all along. I didn't have a grand plan. I usually don't. I just try to finish one story.

[1] How so? And how has math influenced your writing?

WC: I'm naturally better at math than writing or English—tested well, excitedly/voluntarily captained the HS math team, was a class away from accidentally minoring in math in college simply because I'd taken classes I liked which were math. I know my mathematical needs and urges get more obviously manifest in structural ways—I put poetry on the page with something like an arithmetic ear toward balance involved. I'm pretty taken with systems—prose to me ultimately works or doesn't by the gorgeousness of its system as much as by its characters (DeWitt in an interview talked about this—the thrill of what if—that might be the way to talk about math, too: a story which ultimately functions as a postulation). My writing's not quite as math focused as it used to be, but my early stories didn't feature much character; mostly I was taken with structural questions. By and large, Barthelme and Mark Danielewski did this to me. I think the impulse has faded, but it's not too far beneath the surface.

[2] What is this other stuff? Or, to put it another way, what's missing for you in Franzen?

WC: All this should be read in the context of me having had a shitty fall in terms of reading fiction—aside from Harbach's Fielding, I was massively disappointed in novels (Eugenides + Whitehead at the top of the list)—and my recollection of Freedom has dimmed significantly since I read it (I loved it when I read it—was 100% enraptured—but I'm not at all sure it holds up; it feels awfully of its exact moment, calendrically inert). What's also weird: I really didn't like Reality Hunger when it hit, but I fundamentally agree with (what I took to be) one of its big arguments—that Dickensian, linear fiction fixated on verisimilitude doesn't obtain at present. I agree with this. I don't think fiction's made great strides (or poetry, for that matter) in challenging itself and allowing its form to shift in significant ways. Wallace did it, Danielewski did it, I think DOUnferth does it in Vacation, and Orner's Love and Shame and Love is great and pushes well into a new form for a contemporary novel, but overall I don't think fiction's done that great a job of finding organic forms which'll allow it to more closely and well map the reality of contemporary experience. So there's that: I think Franzen's form is just sort of eh—I thought the journal in the novel was old fashioned and easy, more of a neat trick than a character-based necessity.

I think your work, unlike Franzen's, is fundamentally exploring characters on the page—exploring real people, getting in heads. I think Franzen's work, and Eugenides, and lots of folks's work, is fundamentally getting into types of characters' heads. By way of example: I'm an early-30's white MFA guy, professor at a college. I believe in buying a Prius, though I haven't; I purchase and use Apple products; I have certain hopes for not destroying the earth. However: I'm also aware and alive enough to occasionally find it odd that I lie in bed and tap imaginary buttons on the glass screen of my phone, and my thoughts don't follow overt paths based on who I am or how I'd appear on a page. If I were to be written as what I am in pretty obvious ways, I think it'd be a terrible robbery of the interior I possess. I think there are writers who are okay with the level of chaos that comes from truly opening someone wide, as a person instead of a type, and writers who are not. I think those who are not write fiction that's more comfortable, and those who are write fiction that's a bit weirder. I think Wallace was a genius who could somehow do both those things—balance perfectly the surprise and expectations of the reader. Franzen, ultimately, is someone who gives too much to expectations.

[3] Shitful how? I was leaning toward skipping it, but now you have me curious.

WC: The ways in which the Eugenides novel fails are too numerous to count. Ultimately, I didn't remotely care about the characters or story. There's a moment in the book which both my wife and I paused at (I asked her to read it because I was reviewing the book for a newspaper and was doubting my intensely negative reaction), a line about a book which plods on for pages but then feels like it's finally working—this is a horrible cobbling of whatever it was he said—but that tiny part of the book felt very knowing—like Eugenides was aware of how ploddingly bad the thing was. Ed Champion blasted the thing on Good Reads, and the review in the NYTimes is on the right track as well. I'll also say that Eugenides's "not true at all" response to the inarguable fact that he's got a DFWallace character in there is sad and stupid. Dude in the book literally uses Wallace's words—sad that a writer won't at least cop to it. A really crap read. For real.

[4] We're circling something. It's important, but it's hard to articulate. What is the difference? I'm not convinced I've come close to putting my finger on it.

WC: I've now been thinking about this for close to five days. I think you're accurate on Franzen approximating broadcast television and other voices being distinct, farther afield. What I've ended up being fairly confident feeling is that Franzen and Eugenides and that range of writers (KGessen of n+1 is certainly part of that group; there's plenty—would be nitpicky, exhausting fun to create a thorough taxonomy of it) are ultimately creating characters they depend on the reader recognizing. What I'm sure of—and I'm not about to run upstairs to pull books and prove it, but I'm nearly certain—is that Franzen/Eugenidies/etc. are creating characters that depend on the reader recognizing stuff, types. That's a broad way to put it. But there is, in reading certain fictions, a feeling the reader gets of the author either anticipating us recognizing something and letting us—needing us to—fill in certain blanks, and that gets awful and exhausting. Easy example: of course Walter and Patty drive a Prius at the end of Freedom. Of course they do. Is that a) a smart detail on Franzen's part, a recognition of who these characters are and a supply of what the reader wants/needs or b) a bit of an obvious sham, given that there's no other car they could possibly drive? I think that q's hard to say, and I'll admit it's a tiny point, but shit like that, at that level, is where Franzen fails, for me: it's in the details, and they add up. These tiny, cellular-level decisions which make the books bigger and realer or not, realer meaning ultimately able to surprise the reader. Freedom offered lots of satisfactions but not much surprise. For the record: I think Eugenides in Virgin Suicides totally does this, and well and gorgeously—that novel's a masterpiece—but his latest one misses in exactly these ways.

[5] What do you think about the overlapping sound and dialogue in an Altman movie versus some more traditional and highly filtered or edited handling of sound? Is that a useful comparison or am I muddling things?

WC: I don't know if you're muddling, but I don't know enough Altman to comment with any decency. I think, though, that the binary being attempted here's part of the problem: it's not just that one microphone picks up the specific voice and one mic picks up the sound of the room; it's a difference in how we understand what makes a song (using the mic example). What's created by capturing the sound of a song being made vs. what's created by capturing what we believe to be the discrete bits which we understand to make up the song? You talked about this in the One Story interview—said it was Martone's line—how you can never have too much peripheral detail; ultimately the thing we may be trying to talk about is what constitutes peripheral; the folks I like seem more willing to engage in stuff that's not overtly in service to the obvious plot machinations of the story at every second; there's just cool stuff, all over.