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Using
the Paris Review as our model for The Notebooks,
we decided to combine new fiction with interviews about the craft
of writing, how writers’ work intersects with who they are as
people, where the writers get their material, and how they work
from day to day. Because these writers are working in the twenty-first
century, we also chose to explore the influences of contemporary
culture and technology on emerging fiction. Whereas those first
Paris Reviews published internationally famous writers
well along in their careers, we wanted The Notebooks to
represent a new generation of writers.
In the late 1990s in Canada there was a great deal of press about
the sudden rise of new voices. Young authors were hitting the
international markets with their first and second books. They
were winning awards, being translated, getting agents, and making
connections around the globe. Our project, we realized, could
command a wide audience even with a list of authors who began
publishing only in the last decade.
Initially, we each came up with a long list of people that we
were interested in for the anthology. With our editor at Doubleday
Canada, Martha Kanya-Forstner, we culled our three lists into
one. There were some struggles, but no blood was shed. From this
list we decided once again to follow the Paris Review model
and showcase between fifteen and twenty authors. We chose those
who began publishing in the 1990s and had published at least two
books, allowing us to explore the development of their careers
and their lives as writers. The final list confirmed our convictions
about the wealth of successful and talented young writers in Canada.
The Paris Review interviewers worked in pairs “like FBI
agents,” using only notepad to record their conversations. In
our contemporary version of the interviews, the notepads were
replaced by computer notebooks, modems, tape recorders, voice-recognition
software, and e-mail. And because we adopted different strategies
for the project we each set out alone. Michelle approached her
writers with a standard list of questions, as well as a list of
questions specific to their work. She then compared differences
and similarities between the authors at the same time as addressing
each writer’s individual passions. Natalee interviewed each author
to produce a representative sample of each author’s concerns and
personality.
Writing in Canada is not centralized in one city, as it once was
in Paris, so we offered the authors options for communication,
including e-mail, in person, and by letter. Interviews conducted
in person most resemble the intense back and forth of conversation,
whereas interviews conducted by e-mail mimic the writers’ individual
writing styles. The one interview conducted via Canada Post preserves
the intimacy and decorum of letter correspondence, as well as
a sense of the weight of distance so often missing in our global
communication.
Riffs in contemporary culture became apparent in the preoccupations
of these young authors as they discussed their perspectives on
social and aesthetic issues in Canada. Hot issues included the
effect of technology on the individual; the difficult intimacy
of Canadian and American cultures; overlooked aspects of Canadian
culture and geography; the efforts of some writers to defy genre
and experiment with multiple modes of discourse; ethics in the
new society; and the continuing desire of young authors to remain
connected to a literary history and to the literal page.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century the proliferation
of cell-phones, Internet access, digital media, and televised
entertainment has become commonplace. In The Notebooks,
Hal Niedzviecki discusses reality and the virtual world in his
novel Ditch as well as the omnipresence of pop culture
in his zine Broken Pencil. Niedzviecki explores the failure
of therapy to cure contemporary ills in his short story “Soul
Work.” Russell Smith mines urban angst in his fiction. In The
Notebooks, his short story “Serotonin” recreates the hypnotic
rhythms of techno-music in language.
As technology spans international borders, Canadian writers with
strong connections abroad feel national ambivalences more acutely.
Esta Spalding, who was born in Hawaii and immigrated to Toronto,
discusses her double ties to Canada and America and the way that
international crises, like the Gulf War and the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon, make her feel split across
national and political borders. Her long poem/short story “Big
Trash Day” described crossing those borders. Eliza Clark, on the
other hand, was born and raised in Canada but set her last two
novels primarily in the southern U.S. She draws with pleasure
on idiosyncratic southern dialects and Americans’ tolerance of
eccentricity. The excerpt she has given us from her novel in progress
is her first fictional project set largely in Canada. Eden Robinson,
a First Nations writer who grew up in British Columbia, was inspired
and deeply influenced by American horror writer Stephen King.
Her story “Hesitation Marks” plays with the horror genre, yet
the eerie conclusion confounds any expectations we may have had.
Some of our writers take a cue from William Faulkner and look
more closely at home. Michael Winter “moodles” through Newfoundland,
describing the contradictions of East Coast life, friendly and
intimate one minute, exciting and worldly the next. Winter continues
exploring the life of his alter ego, Gabriel English, in his story
“Seamless,” which is about the time Gabriel’s brother killed a
neighbour. Lynn Coady discusses the influence of Catholicism on
life in Cape Breton. Her story “The Les Bird Era” is about the
contradictions inherent in fighting the “clean fight.” R.M. Vaughan
dismisses the myth of Maritime peasantry by writing about his
middle-class New Brunswick upbringing, living with a mentally
ill parent. Vaughan disturbs and delights with his story “Pumpkin.”
The reader will never relax around swimming carp again.
Some young writers seek to shatter the mould of national realism,
experimenting with form and content. Lynn Crosbie challenges our
nerves with books that defy genre while dissecting the scenes
of some of Canada’s most scandalous crimes. Crosbie shares her
“Radiant Boys” with us, a hybrid fiction about the criminal intensity
of adolescent passion. Michael Turner collapses high with low
art by bringing tropes of pornography to a literary audience.
The three very short fictions included in The Notebooks
capture Turner’s Vancouver in three ways: in film, in dialogue,
and in a joke. Derek McCormack distills 1950s pop culture into
ultra-minimalist fiction, shocking and entertaining his readership
at the same time. In “The Haunted Hillbilly” an evil couturier
plots to win the heart (and body) of an alcoholic Grand Old Opry
star.
Contemporary ethics occupy the minds of such writers as Andrew
Pyper, Catherine Bush, and Yann Martel. In his interview, Andrew
Pyper questions whether “gentlemanliness” is now anachronistic.
The night watchman of his short story wonders at his own contentment.
Catherine Bush considers the sudden proliferation of different
styles of war and the impact of technology on morality. In an
excerpt from her new novel, The Pain Diaries, Bush introduces
the idea of physical pain as a contributing factor to personality.
And Yann Martel discusses religion and human nature as he attempts
to draw new faces for the old companions, good and evil. Martel
provides us with an extended sample of the prose notes to his
novel-in-progress. These notes give a rare look at the skeleton
of an unfleshed book.
Devotion to writing and a heavy investment in craft dominate the
lives and work of all of the writers in The Notebooks.
This is especially apparent in discussion with Marnie Woodrow,
Michael Redhill, and Steven Heighton. Marnie Woodrow credits her
success to the influence of great Canadian writers who have come
before her. Her tender story “Per Sempre” deals with an Italian
language teacher’s lost love. Michael Redhill operates in multiple
forms -- poetry, drama, fiction -- illustrating just how interpolated
media can be. “Cold” is a complex and multilayered story exploring
friendship and the past. And Steven Heighton, the only author
who corresponded for his interview via Canada Post, still relishes
the positive feeling when he grips the pen in his hand and begins
to mark the page. In “The Stages of J. Gordon Whitehead,” Heighton
imagines the life of a minor figure in Canadian history by writing
an ending for the man who killed Houdini.
We were often thrilled and surprised by how open these authors
were in their interviews. They talked to us about their childhoods,
losses in their families, fears of drowning and poverty, approaches
to writing sex, personal perspectives on foreign and domestic
politics, and tiny comforts that help them write. Although these
seventeen writers come from different backgrounds, different parts
of the country, have different lifestyles, and write very different
kinds of fiction, we discovered that the connections between them
are still plentiful. As a group they are highly engaged with the
world around them, politically sophisticated, intelligent, modest
about their potential success, and passionate about the act of
writing. We hope that The Notebooks inspires an ongoing
discussion with young writers at work and answers some of the
silent questions that readers have longed to ask.
Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple
An
Interview with Andrew Pyper, contributor to The Notebooks
Andrew Pyper's interview was conducted in person at the Epicure
Cafe on Queen Street in Toronto. Pyper is a natural conversationalist,
frequently turning the questions back on the interviewer and expressing
his permanent curiosity about everyone around him. Although this
interview took place months before the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, in retrospect, the prescience of some
of our musing about the future is unsettling.
Andrew
Pyper: Have you read Richard Ford's The Sportswriter?
NC:
No.
AP:
It's the same protagonist who is featured in Independence Day.
Anyway, it's about this guy, Frank Bascombe. He publishes a collection
of short stories that is highly acclaimed and even makes him some
money. He buys a house in the suburbs of New Jersey and starts
working on a novel, but he never finishes it. He takes up a job
at a sports magazine instead. So he becomes a journalist. And
he stays a journalist. The novel is about this guy's refusal to
accept the spiritual and personal challenges of remaining out
on a limb as a fiction writer. He goes for the good job. I feel
for the guy. Sometimes that's a tempting idea for me. Job security!
You can have a job writing that more or less interests you. Your
parents will be happy because you're living on a salary, not on
royalties.
NC:
As long as your parents are happy.
AP:
That's the Frank Bascombe temptation. The idea of flying around
with an expense account and knowing you will have your name in
print every month.
NC:
Tell me about the articles you've written for Gear magazine.
AP:
I've written two feature articles. As a consequence they slapped
my name on the contributing writers list, which is nice. When
Lost Girls came out, out of nowhere the managing editor
called me up and said, "I've read your novel and I really liked
it. We'd like to send you to India." I thought that was great,
although I don't know what the connection was.
NC:
"We read your book and we would like to get you as far away from
North America as possible."
AP:
Yes. "We consider you dangerous." So I did this story about Bollywood,
the entertainment industry in Bombay. There, actors and directors
are among the richest people in a devastatingly poor economy.
As a result they are targets for Mob kidnappings and killings.
The idea was to write a story about getting inside the Bollywood
scene to describe the mortal danger that these people endure.
I was in Bombay for eight days. I had never been to India. I did
not know what I was doing. It was hot. I had one connection, one
guy who I could call. He was a music producer. He recommended
another guy who was a carpenter building sets for the big-budget
movies. The movie he was working on at that time was called Mission
Kashmir. I went to the set, and we made a deal that he would
be my research assistant for a week and I would pay him about
$150 U.S. In Bombay that was about two months' rent. He was really
helpful. On my last night there he got me an interview with India's
Brad Pitt, Hrithik Roshan. I got into his apartment, which was
guarded by about eight or nine bodyguards with semi-automatic
weapons. There were girls all around this police line of bodyguards.
Two or three of them fainted spontaneously when he arrived. This
actor was a national problem of a kind because his popularity
was so great that something like ten thousand Calcutta schoolgirls
had run away from home to meet him.
NC:
Sort of a Nurse Betty in Bombay scenario.
AP:
Yes. He was very nice. He was the son of a director but he had
only released one movie at that time. It was an overnight smash.
His father had been shot a few months earlier by these kidnappers.
I forget the exact circumstances. But I think he had refused to
pay a ransom. The father was shot because he had repeatedly refused
to pay protection money. They shot him in the chest, but he survived.
So his son was understandably afraid. He had enjoyed this tremendous
success but he was living in a place where he or his family members
could be shot as part of the cost of his fame. We talk about the
cost of fame, but in Bombay the fear was palpable.
NC:
What are some of the social factors involved?
AP:
Let's take our own economy, where someone like Jim Carrey can
make $20 million on a movie. We permit such excess because much
of North America lives at an economic level where basic survival
isn't an issue. In other words, we can afford not only to pay
Jim Carrey but also to leave him alone.
NC:
And we can all imagine stepping into his place. He's not from
old wealth or royalty.
AP:
But in Bombay you can get a hitman to kill anyone for $100 U.S.
So when you have poverty, desperation, access to weapons, and
outrageous population density, you have the motivation, tools,
resources, and people you need to build a really good racketeering
business. In India, movie stars live like gods. They're the only
accessible examples of successful figures to most Indian people.
So if you're going to kidnap someone or rob someone, there are
not many people to choose from. You go to the stars.
NC:
That reminds me of what little I know about the height of Hollywood's
studio system and the coincidence of the American Mob.
AP:
It's a lot like that sort of corruption. Where there's money and
sex and drugs, so too go the Mob, and that's still Hollywood.
That was the first article I wrote. There's been only one other
since then. That was about bounty hunters. They call themselves
the Seekers. They are a group of hunters who work out of Newark,
New Jersey, which is an economically depressed, dangerous, imploded
American community just across the bridge from New York. So I
hung out for several days with these bounty hunters hunting down
people who had skipped bail. If they capture someone they receive
a commission of the total bail amount. Anyone can go to the United
States, get a gun and some handcuffs, and call themselves a bounty
hunter and chase criminals down.
NC:
There must be a great risk of the wrong people getting shot.
AP:
It's totally Wild West. I was driving around with these guys with
weaponry in the trunk of the car that was astounding. I'd never
seen anything like it before. These were small military arsenals.
Maybe if I was an American I'd be used to the occasional sighting
of firearms and I would not have been so terrified, but I grew
up in a small town in Southern Ontario. But after a few nights
of stakeouts it started to feel like I was part of an old seventies
movie, or an episode of Starsky and Hutch.
NC:
What were they like? What were their backgrounds?
AP:
One guy played half a season in the NFL. He had lived his whole
life wanting to play football. Then he breaks his knee and he's
out of the game. He still remembers every single play he participated
in throughout his brief professional football career. He recounted
them to me like this: "So I went up twenty yards, went right the
pass came through, bobbled it on my fingertips then pulled it
in!" That was his life. He could remember everything. He was this
big tough guy with a bum knee so he became a bounty hunter. They
were all pretty rough characters. You wouldn't want to provoke
them. They liked the idea of being written about and maybe becoming
famous. Their leader had written a book that was published around
that time.
They
call themselves the Seekers because they embrace a New Age spiritualist
ethic of a kind. It's a combination of ancient Egyptian stuff
and contemporary crystal rubbing. They try to marry spiritual
enlightenment with bounty hunting. They believe that in capturing
these men and bringing them back to justice, they assist in turning
them around. They believe that people are criminals not because
of economic circumstance or because of racial discrimination,
or any systemic problem. Criminals are criminals because they
have made personal choices and they need to address those choices
and turn their lives around. So by bringing them back to court
they are forcing criminals to take the first step in initiating
self-improvement.
NC:
They sound like armed Jehovah's Witnesses.
AP:
Kind of, yes. Dragging people back to the fold.
NC:
So, what do you take from that? Law-abiding Stratford boy that
you are.
AP:
I felt like I was conducting a terrifying sort of tourism. I got
to spend several nights in the streets of a very troubled urban
North American centre. The worst parts of Canadian cities would
not equal this.
NC:
No. We have crime, drugs, and prostitution but we don't have the
same kind of internal warfare.
AP:
Exactly. You can get in trouble in certain parts of Montreal and
Toronto but probably not arbitrarily shot. Which is the case in
Newark and Detroit, and probably dozens of other cities. So the
lesson for me lay in the experience of fear, and all that stuff
that you kind of forget, living in Canada. We go to America to
be glad to be Canadian. But we are not really in touch with what
that means.
NC:
I have a sense of many Canadians as innocent of the greater world
of poverty, the kind we see in Bombay. Innocent also of the domestic
terrorism and violence that we see in the States.
AP:
Two forks result from that observation. One is the unfortunate
Canadian superiority. We look at Americans and see the flaws in
their social systems and congratulate ourselves for not entirely
reproducing them here. We mock their cultural exports. We like
to sniff at summer Hollywood blockbusters.
NC:
After we've seen them.
AP:
And left with delighted grins on our faces. So there is a snobbish
hypocrisy about being Canadian and, on the other hand, in dwelling
on the same faults of our neighbours that we neglect ourselves.
We tend to gloat while failing to come up with solutions for our
own problems. Let's take the question of homelessness in Toronto.
I think a lot of otherwise well-educated, broad-minded Canadians
refuse to accept that there is a homelessness problem in Toronto
because they're confident that Toronto is a cleaner, better city
than Chicago. I think we have collectively hypnotized ourselves
into believing that there is a Canadian social safety net, therefore
there is no reason for anyone to be on the street, and therefore
the people who are on the street are there because of their own
masochistic choices.
NC:
The homeless person becomes the locus of terror for the working
person. The fear of becoming the person on the street reinforces
our own dedication to work. It reinforces our investment in the
traditional workplace, the retirement package, even the sixty-hour
workweek. And that reinforcement forces us to concentrate on things
outside the family, outside of our humanity.
AP:
The steps required to get there from where we are now are not
too many. You have a couple of professional setbacks. It's a very
thin membrane between my life and his. I'm constantly, constantly
amazed that there are institutions and individuals prepared to
pay me for what I love to do. But as happy as my circumstances
are, I recognize that ideas can change. Fashion, being what it
is, can change. A new style of writing may come into favour and
I may go out of favour.
NC:
Do you think your success was accidental or did you have some
sense of what you had to do?
AP:
I didn't anticipate the effect that Lost Girls would have.
I didn't have a plan.
NC:
You wrote a book of short stories before that which was published
with a small press. You received a lot of critical acclaim for
your stories. Certainly, that established you as a young writer.
But Lost Girls crossed over the market in a way that hardly
any other literary fiction does.
AP:
I guess so. And I'm certainly pleased with the way it turned out.
But I didn't foresee the stuff that happened subsequent
to the book's publication. When I'd finished the first draft and
reread it, and let [journalist] Leah [McLaren] read it, we both
looked at each other and I said, "Well, I'm pleased with whatever
this strange creature is. But I'm not sure that anyone is going
to publish it."
NC:
Because it's a ghost story, a police story, a literary novel .
. .
AP:
Yes. I thought that its mutant status would probably hurt it.
Not that I cared that much, because Lost Girls was the
book I wanted to write.
NC:
What made you decide to write a novel after the success of your
short stories?
AP:
The novel was a convenient excuse to step away from the law. At
that time I had trained to be a lawyer and I didn't want to be
one. I thought, if I'm going to walk away from this I have to
do something more substantial than drafting a few more short stories.
I wrote the short stories while I was in law school and over the
course of my twenties. I thought, if I'm going to move to Peterborough,
as I did, and live month to month, as I did, and wonder what the
hell I was doing, as I did, I might as well write a novel. The
story line was a convergence of a few disparate-seeming ideas.
One idea was to write about drownings. The previous summer, before
beginning the book, I nearly drowned in a lake in New Hampshire.
NC:
How did that happen?
AP:
I was there with Leah on summer vacation. She's a very good swimmer
and I'm an okay swimmer. We were at a phase in our relationship
where I was still very interested in impressing her at every opportunity.
We were at a lake and she told me that there was a mile swim from
the beach to a jetty. A mile! I thought, a mile is a long way.
But irrational masculinity prevailed. So off we went. When we
were equidistant to the shore and to the jetty, I started to get
anxious and tired. It hit me all at once. I started to freeze
up and go down. Even treading water was becoming an effort. I
called out to Leah and she swam back. She talked me down a bit
and we made our way to the nearest-looking shore. All was well.
But that terror -- that was the only time in my life that I had
ever thought, well, this could be it, I'm going to die here. Afterward,
this gave rise to certain dreams and nightmares and eventually
to the Lady in the Lake who appears in the novel, someone who
pulls you down from below. I kept thinking about the idea of danger
in the most banal, picturesque places. So that was strand one.
Strand
two was the tragically frequent disappearances of young women
that were happening all over Canada. I would find myself reading
the paper and seeing these pictures of girls who were the victims
of horrendous violence, and this had a cumulative effect on me.
I wanted to address how it is that in our supposedly advanced,
privileged, innocent society we still have functioning, employed,
taxpaying people who abduct and murder children. The third strand
was the notion of combining those elements within a nineteenth-century-style
ghost story. I wanted it to read like a Henry James tale, where
the ghost may or may not be real. I wanted the tension to lie
not just in the spookiness but in whether or not you want to accept
the unacceptable.
NC:
What about the law-story side of it?
AP:
The lawyer, Barth, was my vehicle through the book. He got the
whole thing moving. His voice arrived in my head one day and refused
to leave. I was still angry at the time. I was rejecting a profession.
Someone said to me after the book was published that Barth is
not me but he is the man I might have been had I stayed on my
original course.
NC:
He's the man you refused to become. Many of your characters are
unsympathetic in the beginning. In your book of short stories
you have a character who is badly burned and ruins his intimate
relationship out of self-pity. However, in your novel the protagonist
redeems himself. By failing the world's expectations and going
another course, Barth gets on track and shakes away his indifference.
AP:
I hadn't really thought of this, but that might be true in the
short stories as well. Barth is a very contemporary character
insofar as he sees the world and other people in the world as
little more than walking phantoms. He divides them into those
who can be manipulated, those who can pay your retainer, and those
he must push through to get to the front of the line. To him,
people are not only secondary but also immaterial. This allows
him to operate in the world according to a highly flexible morality.
As a lawyer he has been dealing in rhetoric for so long. I wondered
what it would be like for him to deal exclusively in the world
of words and to treat their meaning as immaterial. A world like
the one that Barth occupies enables the individual to do anything
he wants. Barth comes back to the world of the living, the moral
world, only after he goes through Laird's envelope of souvenirs
and picks up the girls' hair, and sees the trinkets left over
from their lives.
NC:
He's confronted by the physical ephemera of physical life.
AP:
That's right. Getting back to what we were saying about the homeless,
it's easy to believe that problems don't exist when you refuse
to see them. It's very easy. NC: It's the reinforcement of social
strata through the deflection of guilt. AP: But if you smell the
alley behind the house where I live, for example, you know that
people live there. When Barth smells the strands of hair from
Krystal and Ashley he is forced to confront the fact that they
were living human beings, real as himself.
NC:
What is the relationship between Barth and the girls' killer all
about?
AP:
I think Barth sees Tripp as a mirror of the way that I see Barth.
Where Barth is a hypothetical man that I might have avoided becoming,
I think Tripp for Barth is his own worst-case scenario. Not that
Barth necessarily has the same potential for violence. But with
Tripp, a history of trauma and loss has caused him to fully enter
the world of the imagination. His skill at storytelling is what
drew the girls to him. Barth, as a practitioner of the law defending
Tripp, stood the risk of being encompassed by his client's imagination.
We all talk about the imagination as if it is a benign faculty
that assists us in play. But it is also a tremendously dangerous
aspect of being human.
NC:
We can all see aspects of ourselves that we wouldn't confess.
We can imagine ourselves as pathetic or cruel. I have often found
myself thinking, God, I can't believe I even thought that. And
it seems to happen at the times when you are most powerful, when
you are most confronted by someone else's vulnerability.
AP:
Absolutely. And once you conceive of a thing, the doing of it
simply requires the activation of a trigger. On the other hand,
if you fail to conceive of something, you are very unlikely to
do it. I suspect that serial killers, in addition to all of the
psychological things that are undoubtedly wrong with them, probably
have very capable imaginations.
NC:
One of the most sickening things about violence is that you can,
in fact, imagine participating in it. Getting away with murder.
AP:
It's interesting that you confess to that.
NC:
I confess to nothing.
AP:
Well, I heard it. When I see people, self-righteous legislators
or advocates for reform of some kind, on the news saying, "I can't
imagine how these people do these things," I think they don't
really mean that. The horror really comes from what you can
imagine.
NC:
How do you think access to mass media affects our personal reactions
to events?
AP:
TV is an especially dangerous medium in that it is so reliant
on the visual. Even though there always seem to be people talking,
very few words are actually used. One or two ideas or suggestions
are repeated over and over, mantra-like. For example, the current
media interest in the economy's health makes it seem like we've
all adopted this view that the interest rate, and the inflation
rate, and other bogey-things are more important than visible social
problems. People start to gauge their lives according to the abstractions
that were meant to divert our attention from materiality. The
economists have developed a language that applies in some ways
to reality, but the language itself is divorced from anything
that we commonly recognize in real experience.
NC:
The economy is pure language. Currencies, like words, are made
up of units that are ultimately available to meaning. We use the
language of the economy to direct people's actions.
AP:
Inevitably, all of us participate to some degree in these abstractions.
For example, in the hockey season when I see the Leafs win on
TV, I cheer. In the summer, when I see the Canadian dollar go
up on TV, I cheer. "Yay for us!" In both cases my cheerleading
is meaningless. The arrow goes up. The arrow goes down. We smile.
We frown. But Peter, the guy who lives behind my backyard fence,
still sleeps on the ground in front of a stinking garage. Interest
rates being delicately manipulated by smart guys in Ottawa have
no impact on his life at all.
NC:
What's it like to have a senior citizen living in the alley behind
your house who refuses to accept money?
AP:
You end up giving him things instead. You give him a coat in the
winter. You give him sandwiches in the summer. He is very proud.
In a strange way he makes me think of my own parents. They live
in the same house where all their kids grew up. They are now of
advanced years. It's a big house, hard to maintain. But the idea
of suggesting to them, "Perhaps you would like to move to a smaller
home," is unspeakable. They make their own decisions.
NC:
I worry about other writers, certainly some of the poets. It's
this nagging fear thinking, what will happen to you? On my worst
days I think that about myself.
AP:
Do you think that expectations have changed? When I first started
writing I thought it would be fantastic to be able to do it for
a living, but I assumed it to be extremely unlikely. But I teach
creative writing from time to time and my students are twenty-two
or twenty-three years old, asking about book deals and agents,
with unshakeable expectations of material success. This shift
in confidence -- even if it is unsubstantiated -- seems to have
occurred in the last ten years.
NC:
My experience was different. I thought that everyone who was famous
made money, so I had an idea that maybe becoming a writer was
a completely reasonable thing to do. There was an interim period
of actually becoming a writer and realizing that it was a completely
questionable activity. But I was confronted almost simultaneously
by my success and by the limits of my success. The more I knew
about writing and the world of publishing, the more I realized
what a huge leap of faith I had made. But at that point I had
already leapt. I could see such freedom ahead of me that I couldn't
turn back.
AP:
There comes a point where there is no turning back.
NC:
What was that point for you?
AP:
I think I have always had an internal commitment to the life of
the imagination. From a professional standpoint I made the leap
when I was called to the bar and I walked away.
NC:
Why did you think about becoming a lawyer in the first place?
AP:
That's what people with more or less useless M.A.s do. I thought
at first I would go on and get a Ph.D. I thought I would teach.
But I realized that I was more of a generalist in my thinking.
My successful academic colleagues felt more pleasure at burrowing
into one topic, while I preferred a more freewheeling overview
perspective. Law school was and is a convenient reservoir for
my kind of talent.
NC:
Lawyers and doctors symbolize success for the middle class. We
learn that from our parents in childhood.
AP:
Yes. When I'm really anxious I still say I'm a lawyer. In social
situations when I don't want to talk to people, when I'm among
people who don't know me and they ask me what I do, I just say
I'm a lawyer, and it shuts the conversation down right away. If
I were to say, "I am a novelist," oh my God. You can hear anything
after that. The old, "Oh yes, I always thought I would write a
novel in my free time."
NC:
I say I'm a student or a secretary. Saying secretary ends all
conversation.
AP:
Perfect. The other half of the equation about going to law school
was that my girlfriend at the time was studying law. So we were
going to be lawyers together. I thought we would live happily
ever after and of course that didn't happen. She dumped me in
the middle of first year. I thought, oh great, I guess I have
to finish this thing now. I bear the ridiculous Protestant refusal
to quit one thing and start another. Once I start something I
must finish it.
NC:
How do you respond to those critics and journalists who accuse
contemporary young writers of shallowness?
AP:
I think that the conventional wisdom among many people born in
the early to mid-fifties is that because of the saturation of
American consumerism, and the babble of multimedia, and the press
of the economy, and the inauthenticity of our technologized, virtualized
world, new writing amounts to a dumbed-down interpretation of
what used to be "real life."
NC:
Our lives are saturated with so many different influences that
it is as likely for Martin Scorsese to be an early influence on
writers as it is for Thomas Mann to be have been an early influence.
It would be false for us to represent the world otherwise. The
country lifestyle of Alice Munro is interesting to me, but it
is also completely foreign to me.
AP:
I would add that the hand-wringing and lament for loss of authenticity
largely exhibits a prejudice against the sources of our inspiration,
as if a work of art can only be as good as its original source.
If your inspiration comes from pop culture then your art will
necessarily be inferior. That makes me bristle. This is the world
today, complain about it if you like, offer suggestions for its
improvement if you have any, but it must be admitted that this
is the world. Not the world of young people but the world that
we all inhabit. Just as Alice Munro writes about the people that
she sees in the county grocery store, Russell Smith writes about
the waitresses he sees in nightclubs on Adelaide Street. To privilege
one world over the other is foolish and predjudicial.
NC:
Both of those writers exemplify the way that our surroundings
trigger our own introspection. The writer is always a satellite
to their world.
AP:
The alternative is to write romanticized versions of the world
in historically removed novels about a time when people were real
and they really felt their feelings.
NC:
That would be a constructed history. It would be an idealized
history. Contemporary culture relies heavily on observation.
AP:
I resent the drift that contemporary life is cheap and so contemporary
writing is cheapened by writing about it. From a historic perspective
it may be that the Gulf War does not have the dramatic ingredients
of Pearl Harbor or Dieppe. It certainly does not have the nobility
or romance that time has endowed Pearl Harbor or Dieppe with.
Or the sense of corruption and error that Vietnam invokes. But
the Gulf War is a new kind of war story. It's a story of technological
imperialism.
NC:
I think we're still processing those events. It's interesting
to talk about the recent past and the present because later on
we will be able to look back at our initial impressions.
AP:
When we turn fifty maybe we will be asking each other over Grand
Marniers, "Where were you when they first started bombing Baghdad?"
NC:
Or, "Did you see it coming when the Taliban started bombing the
statues?" The present always has a sense of the science-fictional
to it. We're always both at the end and at the beginning of history.
AP:
It does, doesn't it? Do you think it always has? Obviously, if
you were a child growing up in London during the Blitz you might
have romanticized it as even being fun, like in the movie Hope
and Glory. But it was also palpably real.
NC:
You might also have found ways, as they did in Bosnia and Sarajevo,
to make adjustments to live a life that simulated normalcy. After
all, you would still have to get the groceries even if you didn't
know whether or not your house would be there when you arrived
home with the bags. How then do you see the state of morality
in contemporary society?
AP:
That particular question figures largely in the book that I have
been working on. I think it's a particular challenge to "think
rightly" today. People living in Canada have been fortunate enough
to grow up without even the threat of being drafted and sent to
some task that may cost us our lives. You and I have lived in
a largely warless, economically flush time. My question is, Have
we as a consequence undergone a moral softening? In particular,
has moral softening been encouraged by having our lives made virtual
in the media?
NC:
You've said that in your new novel you address the way in which
an ordinary person reacts in extraordinary circumstances to rise
to those circumstances.
AP:
Yes. Without going into detail, the basic structure is that I
take a group of people and put them into a situation of extreme
adverse physical challenge. Following that I introduce them to
a series of questions: Will you act this way or that? How would
you make your decision? Will it be according to moral principles
or will it be more instinctive? If it is instinctual does someone
who was brought up on Hollywood and video games have the equipment
to take the appropriate instinctive position? Or are we, in fact,
the amoral monsters we sometimes imagine we are? Those are the
questions. The answers are in the novel.
NC:
When you went to the Amazon to research your novel, were you shocked
by the way you found yourself comparing the actual world to media
representations of it? Do you think that reality is now constructed
for us a priori?
AP:
Yes. It might not have been that way if I had been brought up
by wolves and had never seen a TV, but for me the Amazon seemed
like a particularly remarkable National Geographic documentary
without the editing. That was my first impression. The longer
I was there the more I began to lose those alienated impressions
because the physical nature of the place just brings you out.
The heat, the unusual bugs on your skin, the unusual infections
that result all make you think, well, you don't get that at home!
The more those things happen the more you are forced to recognize
that there is a real world. The characters in my book go through
a similar process. In the physical world you can only fictionalize
yourself for so long.
NC:
What are some of the differences between the instinctive humans
that you mentioned and more civilized humans?
AP:
I think our instincts are still there. We have a strong instinct
to survive. Or at least to not be the first one to die. I think
the more pertinent question is, Is the civilized training that
we now suppose to be genetically built in to our psyches, is it
more disposable than we presume? Honour and duty, do they fall
away? Is it possible to be a twenty-four-year-old gentleman in
this day and age without being a laughable anachronism?
NC:
How do you see yourself in relation to that question?
AP:
This may sound fussy or something, but I do aspire to gentlemanliness.
For me the concept embodies important values of general conduct.
It's not about etiquette as such, it's not about table manners.
For me being a gentleman means working toward selflessness, a
generosity, a daily sense of charity. I confess that I worry about
sounding like a throwback, but I think these things are important.
Particularly for someone like myself who enjoys outrageous personal
privilege.
NC:
Why do you think your personal privilege is outrageous?
AP:
In global terms it just is. Being born in Canada, male, white,
of upper-middle-class parents, and then going on to have a relatively
successful professional life, puts me within the category of the
most fortunate. For me not to concede that would be foolishness.
NC:
You enjoy the process of writing. Tell me a little bit more about
the process. You showed me how you break down scene by scene the
procedure of the novel before you embark on it. You put the outline
up on your wall and look at it while you are writing. What made
you decide to work for that kind of breakdown?
AP:
I didn't know how to write a novel when I wrote the first novel.
So I thought, be prepared!
NC:
You were a Boy Scout.
AP:
I am a Boy Scout at heart although I never actually was one. I
just thought it was a reasonable place to start. Lost Girls
turned out to be a fairly plotted novel.
NC:
Did you plot it all before you started?
AP:
I outlined it and wrote a first draft in which I thought I had
answered my questions satisfactorily. It turned out I was wrong.
I underestimated the complexity of constructing a sophisticated
plot. I thought the hard part would be producing interesting sentences
and believable and provocative characters. But on top of that,
I was learning to string together events that would produce in
the reader a compulsion to go on. Plot is the science of asking
and answering questions in a way that produces a desired rhetorical
result. While it's a simple enough sounding challenge, it is actually
very tricky. I had to go through a number of drafts and revise
the outline several times. Once I started moving things around
I realized that, just as you affect a power grid by moving one
wire from a negative to a positive, you could similarly change
the charge in a novel by arranging the sequence of events. At
first this was tedious and frustrating. But I learned to love
it. It was an acquired taste. I did it again for the second novel
and this time I tried to anticipate the mistakes I made the first
time around. It turns out that I made many of the same mistakes
anyway.
NC:
But with your short stories you start somewhere in the middle.
So writing novels is an entirely different process for you.
AP:
I've never outlined a short story. I don't necessarily mean the
literal middle. The middle is a moment. The middle is an image
or a character that sets an idea in motion. In the story "Kiss
Me" I related to the character's desire to pour lighter fluid
onto already going fires, for fun. I have often been warned that
I will burn myself doing just that. So the story is a "what if?"
What if I became disfigured as the result of a stupid accident?
What would be the implications for the life that I had at the
time? I chose an event and I built this story around it.
NC:
What is your writing schedule like?
AP:
I work Monday to Friday every morning, and then leave the afternoon
for returning calls and correspondence. I find the morning best
for the initial spewing. Then I have lunch, make my calls, pay
the bills, and then take another look at what I've written in
the morning. I fix the most glaring screw-ups right away so that
the next morning when I look at where I am I can proceed right
away.
NC:
Do you write scene by scene? Do you start at the beginning?
AP:
No, I don't. The beauty of the detailed outline is that I can
pick and choose what I feel like. I go shopping in the morning
for what I feel like writing that day. I can say, sequentially
I'm here but I don't feel like that today. Today I'll write the
scene where they all kill each other.
NC:
So you know your ending when you begin. Does it change at all?
AP:
It hasn't so far, no. Basically my day goes like this: Get up.
Take dog out. Turn on computer. Go to current file . . .
NC:
Begin thinking in complete sentences.
AP:
Yes. So I'm usually in my housecoat, which is bloody cold when
it's winter. I always mean to have breakfast first, take a shower,
and put on real clothes, but I usually write first. I have that
Christmas-morning eagerness about getting to work.
NC:
Your writing patterns must have radically changed with the novel.
Certainly when you were in school you would have had your time
much more prescribed for you.
AP:
Yes, this is a new development. Before, there were always jobs,
or school, or hangovers to tend to. I used to find time between
classes, sometimes during classes, to write. Sometimes I wrote
really late at night.
NC:
Where did you get the structure for your outline?
AP:
I don't know. I've never studied writing in school. I think I
absorbed it from reading Shakespeare and going to movies.
NC:
But you even wrote down on what page a person would confess to
something. How did you know what page it would happen on?
AP:
I think I need to know how long I can keep a question open before
the reader will tire of it being asked. I wanted to squeeze out
the greatest amount of dramatic tension that I could from each
question. Then I wanted events to create a kind of release. It
was like designing a roller-coaster.
NC:
That's interesting. Because many authors have commented that,
had they known the length and ending of their novels before they
started to write, they would never have continued.
AP:
Another good thing about the outline is it disciplines you. It
keeps you from getting carried away with passages that don't really
contribute to the story. It also rewards you because you know
exactly how much you have accomplished.
NC:
I know that you love the work of writing, but some people have
responded to you as if you don't deserve the economic success
it has led to. Someone once came up to you at a bar and said,
"You're Andrew Pyper. Give me twenty bucks." There are obvious
benefits to your success. What are some of the weirder things
that have come with it?
AP: It's a paradox because
while I do a kind of personal grappling with it, what does all
this mean? How do I give back? Will it continue? The same kind
of anxieties that everyone deals with. My success has not manifested
any real emotional pathologies. But it sometimes seems to make
other people behave strangely around me. All of us will encounter,
at some point in our lives, people who are inexplicably angry
at everything. Or people who are especially angry when good fortune
is visited on others. I am sensitive to my own desire to not be
the person that they want me to be.
NC:
It's a funny situation to be in as a writer. You make a decision
to do something that terrifies your parents and makes everyone
think that you're unproductive and you're going to be leeching
off of society, and then you have to confront the opposite response
of envy.
AP:
I learned early on to accept my own helplessness in the face of
other people's reactions. Whether it's book reviews or somebody's
strange remarks to me at a party, or on the street. Whether it's
praise or hostility, all of it is utterly beyond my control. I
also think that most of the writers I know who approach this work
seriously understand that a certain amount of vulnerability is
in the contract.
NC:
Do you think you would have had that confidence if you had become
a lawyer, or does it have something to do with knowing that you're
doing something that you really want to do?
AP:
I have a tremendous passion for what I do. The doing of it is
a tremendous pleasure for me. I don't suffer to do what I do and
I don't feel ambivalent about it. I don't live for my vacations.
I work on my vacations. The occasional jab at me from a stranger,
or moment of anxiety, is a very, very small price to pay.
Have
you ever wondered what an author's notes look like......?
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| ..
A notebook page from Andrew Pyper |
Excerpted
from The
Notebooks by Michelle Berry Natalee Caple Copyright 2002
by Michelle Berry Natalee Caple. Excerpted by permission of Anchor
Books Canada, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
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