An Interview with Brian Kimberling and FREE BOOKS
I’ve already written elsewhere about Brian Kimberling’s SNAPPER and how I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long long time, but let me be quickly hyperbolic again: this thing’s just gloriously great. Tom Drury, years ago, came out with The End of Vandalism; Snapper is like a cousin to it. It’s a phenomenal book—I’ve already started reading it again and the thing’s barely out. Which brings us to this: I HAVE COPIES OF THIS BOOK TO GIVE AWAY–drop a line to wlcutter(at)hotmail.com by Friday night and I’ll do a drawing and send them out. Really, truly: you want this book. It’s all sorts of great. Below is an interview Kimberling and I did over email a month or so back (and here’s the op-ed he had in the NYTimes this past wknd).
WC: I know books, particularly debuts, have all sorts of lineage, and stretch back and back in the author, but I’m curious if there were any overt references or works which had particular impact on Snapper (here’s how much I like the book, by the by: you mention Peter Taylor [a writer I assume has played some role here], and I’ve never read him [don’t judge], but he’s next on my list now, just because of what this fictional character of yours said). If you want to be more general and address larger/broader questions of influence or whatever, that’s fine, too.
BK: I wrote several plays that were staged in England. Attendance was poor and reviews were terrible, but the casts and crews and most of the audiences and I all enjoyed it. Before I wrote the plays my prose style was the result of imitating Peter Taylor and Katherine Anne Porter and Frank O’Connor for many years, and it didn’t really work. After the plays I had this new sense of comic timing, and I enjoyed writing dialogue, and I could do scene sans exposition much more easily than before.. I think the ways other characters frequently put Nathan in check owes something to my experience writing for the stage. I don’t think Snapper looks anything like PT or KAP or any other influence (J.F. Powers, Eudora Welty, Gogol, Lorrie Moore…I have mostly old school short story vertebrae). I do see, in Snapper, some insight gathered over many rehearsal hours in a black box theater watching the same things go wrong over and over again.
You asked about overt references or works, and I cited my own. I’m sure that’s bad manners, but the plays were important preparation, though I didn’t know that at the time.
While writing Snapper I was enrolled on the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. I worked closely with Tessa Hadley, who has an encyclopedic mind. I got a strange kick out of driving my clever little German car down quaint English country lanes while blasting Southern Butt Rock, e.g. Lynnyrd Skynnrd. Then I’d hop out and talk to Tessa for a few hours about Henry James. Somehow I managed to write a book containing both Audubon and ZZ Top. This was probably inevitable but not really planned. There’s a line I pinched from Milton in the first story and there’s Shakespeare and Hemingway and the Kinks and – it’s very allusive, but I don’t think any of the allusions carry disproportionate weight.
Unless you want to count southern Indiana itself as an overt reference or work.
WC: This is a purely jealous thing on my part: how much work did it take to get that Nathan’s voice? This may end up opening weird doors regarding autobiography and such (like: I don’t know you, but your bio’s got overlap with Nathan’s, so the reader’s bound to wonder), but the voice is what sells this whole thing, to me. I suppose, though, tied into that is the question of structure, which (to me) has so much to do with Nathan’s voice—this very sort of plained voice (as if he’s smarter and more fun than he’s letting on—as if his voice has been ironed a bit, even)(I don’t mean that at all critically: it reads to me as remarkably similar to the sort of voice Tom Drury pulled off magically in End of Vandalism, which is all-time top 5 for me, so) that seems to just follow whatever comes up, but, in fact, ends with a phenomenal structure.
BK: Very often I write in a kind of free verse at first, starting a new line whenever, just to make myself pay attention to cadence and internal rhyme and so on. Later I smudge it up into paragraph form. I’m sort of terrified of reading the book out loud in public, actually – “chrome-trimmed diner open twenty-four hours” is a tongue-twister. The subtitle or strapline I put on the original MS was “Accidents and Incidents in an American Hinterland” but you had to be Peter O’Toole to say it convincingly. In other words, it was a lot of work to get Nathan’s voice. Though I should add that I’ve been doing this free verse thing for so long (I picked it up from Peter Taylor) that it may be second nature. I also revise endlessly.
The whole thing structured itself. I didn’t write it sequentially, by the way, and I didn’t have a plan, but I noticed that the stories I was writing had started talking to each other and I just tried to follow the conversation. I think the structure makes the reader work a little more. Do you let Dart off the hook? Well, do you? I feel that somehow a more linear narrative would require more instruction, reliable or otherwise, from Nathan, about how to interpret things. The structure I used allowed me to pass questions to the reader instead of answers.
About the autobiographical element – it’s more like a strange dream I had than a reliable account of my life. I was a research assistant on a major songbird study, that’s true. I wasn’t very good at it, owing to a hearing impairment. But I was very envious of the people who were good at it; so much so I crafted my own little fantasy career in book form 17 years later.
This isn’t to say it’s not autobiographical. I grew up in Evansville, went to IU, and my dad is a math professor. I went to jail in much the manner described. There is a square mile. I didn’t travel around as Nathan does. I found a wood thrush nest out there a couple of years ago; it’s now in my parents’ garage (because how do you get something like that through Customs?) with a couple of red-eyed vireo nests (all collected in October, no longer in use). I could tell you which trees those birds’ great-great-great grandparents nested in and describe their morning routines. But the further I get from my square mile the less I know. I can’t ID British birds at all.
WC: Here’s a meatball of a Midwest question: the book reads very much as a love letter to Indiana, obviously. It also reads, specifically, as a love letter to a place one’s left—this couldn’t have been the story of someone who’d never left. I don’t know how to ask this but to just ask it: is the book what it feels like? Depending on Q2 this might lead right back into aspects of autobiography or whatever, but I’m curious.
It is a love letter to Indiana. They keep cleaning the place up (and knocking down forests) but when I was growing up all the crumbling infrastructure and desolate empty landscape – well, it was romantic. Evansville is the sort of place people leave – to get an education, a job, or a view of some hills. My friends from Evansville are now dispersed far and wide, bar one. And I think when we still lived there we all griped about it endlessly, but now we all agree it was a great place to grow up.
I suppose that autobiographically speaking I was partly wondering what it would have been like if I had stayed. Of course there are thousands of good people who don’t leave, who are still in southern Indiana or any other relative backwater. My parents, for example. That there are good people everywhere is one of the book’s main assumptions. That they can never get along together is another. A bunch of them are in prison.
I had to be in Britain to write it. I can take note of, say, US political dysfunction now and find it deeply fascinating, without getting irritated. If I lived there…
BK: I’m curious if you feel like this book has a recognizable home in the current literary fiction world. That probably sounds brutal or dumb; I don’t intend it to be. What I mean is it’s got stuff going on that make it, to me, harder to peg, to be able to say if-this-then-SNAPPER, you know? If someone likes Keillor, I might think this’d make them happy, but also if they liked Kelly Link, who I’d argue is wildly different from Keillor. It’s curious. Sorry to keep coming back to notions of background or whatever on it—I just, as a reader, felt like I was being given something very very new when I read this, or, if not new, at least something that’s not done terribly regularly, in the best ways.
I ask everybody this question myself – whether Snapper reminds them of anything else. The answer is almost always no, though “early Richard Russo” has come up more than once. I don’t know what sets it apart, and I’m probably not the best person to ask. I’ll take a crack anyway. A couple of cracks. First, there may be a genealogy starting with Winesburg, Ohio, that takes in Keillor’s Lake Wobegon and Donald Ray Pollack’s Knockemstiff – comical (sometimes) Midwestern novels-in-stories, cross-sections of distinct heartland communities.
Snapper is full of jokes, and it’s in a completely different time and culture, and nobody is going to read it and say, Henry James! But is it crazy to say that a highly digressive semi-reliable narrator who rarely comes to a point probably springs from some Jamesian tradition?
I am so thrilled by the cover, all those photoshopped Audubon birds. It suggests a historical continuity that is rare in the era of self-replicating media, or post-post-human studies, or whatever we’re in now. And, again, I didn’t plan this – the local history scattered throughout Snapper, right down to a paragraph in the middle about the unknown people who lived there 4000 years ago – that strikes me as different. The sense that the history of the area is actively informing the experience of the main character now – that’s a Southern influence, I think. I was very interested in the Agrarians at one point. The last line is downright pre-industrial. I wouldn’t call myself a Southern writer or Snapper a Southern book, but perhaps it’s a bit like Evansville as described in the book – subject to a unique combination of cultural and economic and geological influences that in subtle ways set it apart.
[By the way, a Presbyterian minister in Richmond, Virginia gave me In The Miro District by Peter Taylor when I was 17 to read on the flight back to Indiana. I tried the first story and found it extremely boring. I stared out the window for a while and found that even more boring. I tried another story called “Her Need” and it took the top of my head off. That book is where I’d start. Although In The Tennessee Country made me drop out of college. You can’t go wrong starting anywhere].
