"It's a big one," was how my friend Ryan Boudinot used to talk about the novel he was working on, and when I saw it stacked up in front of him at the cafe where he used to write on his lunch hours when we worked together at Amazon.com, I believed him. When I saw, though, how that heap of manuscript pages had been turned into an actual book, Blueprints of the Afterlife (with a gorgeous cover designed by Ryan's friend and former bandmate Nate Manny), it almost seemed tidy and manageable: just (just?) 430 pages and no DFW/Neal Stephenson/1Q84 backpack-breaker.
But that was only until I started reading it, when it expanded into a parallel world that seemed more or less the size and complexity of this one. He's imagined a post-apocalyptic future that resembles our own times in many ways, and even seems to be trying to resemble our times, particularly in the meticulous reconstruction of pre-apocalypse Manhattan that's taking place on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound. It's pleasantly disorienting to try to understand the conditions and the history of this newish society, but you are no less disoriented than the characters within the book, who all feel as if they have had a rug pulled out from under them. But as a reader you have the advantage of Ryan's blistering humor to guide you, as well as his human empathy for his creations, both the hapless ones and the ones who think, incorrectly, that they have this new world under their control.
I was itchy to talk to Ryan about the book, and we organized a reunion of sorts to do so, going back to our old stomping grounds at Amazon to record an interview for their books blog, Omnivoracious. You can listen to our three-part recording over there, and read the full transcript of the interview below, in which we talk about the value of weirdness (and the particularly Northwest varieties thereof), and how you put narrative boundaries on a world in which anything is possible.
Q: How are you with being called "weird"?
A: I take that as high praise. I always have.
Q: Personally, or for your writing? Do you separate the two?
A: Both. No, I remember being called "weird" by a girl in kindergarten and I honestly didn't realize she was insulting me. I thought she was paying me a compliment, so I've always held that word aloft with pride.
Q: One of the blurbs on the book, from Robert Olen Butler, has a bit of a different spin: he says the book is "weirdly compassionate," which actually does describe you pretty well, but if you unpack that phrase, it's kind of an odd phrase. I'm not sure what's weird about compassion.
Q: Or compassionate toward the weird. One thing I like about you as a writer is that to all these crazy characters you're compassionate to each one, even the most extreme, even the ones that would be a bad guy in some sense.
A: Yeah, that's really important to me too, when I have a character who would be set up as an antagonist, to always stop myself and try to let them have the floor for a while, and let them state their case narratively, and get to know them a little better, and unpack why it is that they're doing what it is they're doing. And I kind of don't believe in bad guys at all in my work. As soon as I start to feel like I'm setting someone up to be the scapegoat in a story or in a novel, my immediate impulse is to go 180 degrees different and start telling the story from their point of view. So yeah, that's something I really try to do.
Q: Well the first time I encountered this book was when I met you at a cafe a few years ago, at the old Elliott Bay Books cafe, where I knew you used to like to work. And you were sitting at a table behind this giant stack of manuscript pages, and you seemed very pleased with the stack. Was this always a big book for you? As soon as you thought of this story did it seem like it was going to be big?
A: Yeah, I wanted to stretch my ambition and write something that was longer and more complex than Misconception, but that also picked up some of the aesthetic threads that I started with Littlest Hitler. Misconception was really a realist novel in a lot of ways, even though it had kind of a metafiction framework, but this I just wanted to go crazy with. I wanted to see how far I could take it, and how far I could push the weirdness and still manage to make a story that held together.
Q: That's something I thought about the whole way through the book and I think your characters are conscious of it and you seem conscious of it in telling the story. There's this sense of possibility, both because you as a storyteller, you've blown up the world and recreated it as you like, and even the characters, there's a technological possibility that they can rebuild New York in northwest Washington, the Bionet, one of the ideas behind the book, creates all these possibilities for people, and it seems like there's this tension between infinite possibility and then the world that you actually live in, and I think as a storyteller there's also that sense of--did you find yourself fighting against too much freedom or too much possibility as a storyteller? Did you have to rein yourself in?
A: I think what happens, at least in the first draft, is you dump out a lot of stuff on the table, so to speak. You know, I had the Bionet, I had these things called "qputers," which are like these quantum computers, and various little inventions and things. And you sort of spread everything out and you reach a point, though, in revision, when you kind of have to work with what you have. You start to see the boundaries of the work, you start to see the parameters. And so revision I think is all about setting your parameters around the novel and then working within them.
You know, a number of things were jettisoned during that process, too, things that just seemed to not serve a purpose in the novel beyond being interesting in and of themselves. And I found where I'd have maybe ten pages, some riff on something, and if I removed it nothing else was damaged. And when I found that that was the case, that that thing, even though I might really enjoy it, had to go.
Q: So you're kind of playing Jenga with your story.
A: Yeah, a little bit.
Q: Everything you can tap out without collapsing the tower.
A: Yeah, it's like Jonathan Lethem once said something along the lines of, in his first draft he indulges himself, and then he works against himself in the final draft. And I think, yeah, the more you start subtracting, the closer you are to the end. And that was certainly the case with this book.
Q: Were there entire characters and storylines that got subtracted?
A: Well, there were a couple things that got taken out. There was one thing, a whole bit about Ted Williams being thawed out.
Q: [Laughter] I was glad he stayed in the novel. He has a little cameo.
A: Yeah, he has a little cameo, but there was a much larger part where it was all about him showing up at Cooperstown and everyone cheering and he was having this folksy speech. I thought it was pretty funny, but it slowed down the momentum of a particular chapter. And then there was another part where Michael Jackson appeared as a character in a few places, and that started to slow things down as well. So yeah, you have to pull back some things in revision, and you can't completely indulge yourself.
And you have to think about--or I try to think about--the reader's experience of the book. It's weird because once you get to that point in the revision, you have to do this little mental trick and read it as though you don't know anything about it, which is hard, but once you try to put yourself in a reader's shoes and try to experience the book--that's something I try to shoot for and I hardly ever succeed in that, because you know so much about the book as you're writing it. But yeah, even though it's a longer book for me, I wanted it to move quickly for a reader.
Q: Well, let's set it up a little bit, and maybe do it geographically. We're talking in Seattle, where most of it's set, or in the environs. We're in South Lake Union, which actually has transformed itself since you wrote this book, I would say, which is kind of thematically appropriate. So what would we see for the present time of most of this book? What does Seattle look like? What does the United States look like? What does Bainbridge Island look like?
A: Okay, so there's two eras in the novel that sort of go back and forth. One is more or less contemporary time, the 2000s. Then there's this period that happens after an apocalyptic era, that is so traumatizing to everybody that the survivors don't really have a handle on exactly what went down. And in that future world a lot of things are the same. Boeing Field is still around. Georgetown is still a neighborhood in south Seattle. But in Puget Sound they are erecting an exact replica of Manhattan on Bainbridge Island.
Q: The real Manhattan having been destroyed.
A: Right. The real Manhattan was wiped off the face of the earth and so they decided to rebuild it in Puget Sound.
Q: That's one thing I really like, and I'm not sure I even recognized it until you just said that: the way that memory works in the book is that you would think that the people at the most future spot in the book would have the best sense of what had happened, but that's not the case at all.
A: No. Memory's very faulty in this novel. And in fact there's a character who takes advantage of a particular technology that allows him to offload his memories. He went through some real bad traumas during this apocalyptic era and ended up having to offload some of those memories and get rid of them. And then you go through the process of offloading them, and then you offload the memory of offloading it, and you keep going down a rabbit hole with it.
Q: There's a nice effect--that's Al Skinner, he's a former mercenary, and he carries some of those memories around with him. So memory becomes a very conscious thing: do I want to remember? Do you get rid of it? Some of it you keep around--I love the way that becomes a very self-conscious--
A: They're actually like a thumb drive or a card that he carries around of war memories, and so he is obsessed with revisiting them, and there's a part of the book where he does.
Q: So this is a very Northwest novel, both geographically and I think--I think when people think of a "Northwest novel" they think of something pretty realist like David Guterson, but the Northwest has a pretty strong tradition of weird stuff: I know you were a big Tom Robbins fan when you were young, Neal Stephenson, Charles Burns, the comics guy, he seems like he has a pretty similar sensibility to you. You've always seemed like someone who is thinking very consciously about where you grew up, where you live. Has that tradition been important you, of weird Northwest writers?
A: Yeah, there's a particular kind of Northwest weirdness that I always think of as being kind of the intersection between Gary Larson's The Far Side and the band Mudhoney. In the mid/late-80s, before the dotcom money started flowing in, the Northwest, and Seattle in particular, was sort of comfortable with its weirdness. I mean the Northwest also gave us David Lynch, although he was in eastern Washington, but still... But yeah, when I was a kid, when I was about 14, I first started reading Tom Robbins, and I was really blown away. I read Another Roadside Attraction, which takes place largely within five miles of the home I grew up in. And all the references in it were things I rode my bike past and stuff. There was some line about a bunch of characters jumping off the Fir-Conway Bridge, which was the bridge that my bus went over every morning. And so to me to have something that was both extremely geographically familiar but also went nuts, and had such things as a talking watermelon, I felt like that book, and Tom Robbins in general, gave me permission to pursue a particular kind of aesthetic path, and to understand that I could potentially contribute to literature from this little place in the upper left-hand corner of the United States that no one really seemed to know about.
Q: The way you were talking about moving from your last, realist novel to this let-yourself-be-as-weird-as-you-can novel, did you feel like you had to get permission to let things go like that?
A: No, it was very easy. With Misconception I was really concentrating on narrative craft, and really making sure that all the gears in the story were working together and that everything was well-oiled. And in this one I decided to just go running, screaming down a street naked. That's sort of the spirit I wanted to inhabit with this book. And have fun. That was the thing--I really had a lot of fun writing this book, and I hope that translates into the reading experience, because there were parts where I was just writing things to amuse myself and even though it's the longest thing I've written, in a lot of ways it's been the easiest.
Q: I'm curious what kind of world-builder you are, and I'll put this in D&D terms. Are you a dungeon master, who has everything mapped out ahead of time? Or are you more like one of the players, who doesn't know what's going to be behind the next door until you open it?
A: That's a great question. Yes, I'm more of a half-elf thief, right, with my bag of holding and plus-one broadsword. No, you know, I walk around, during the time that I'm writing a novel, going over and over and over the world. I like to be surprised, but I also am balancing certain things. Like I find that my thoughts about a particular world or setting over time develop a well-worn groove, where it starts to feel like a given, like certain things are going to happen in the novel. And I do that for a few years before I write something.
Like right now I'm starting another novel, but I'm having thoughts about the one that comes after this one, just very fleeting, distant thoughts, like I know where it's going to take place, and I think about, oh, it might have some kind of character like this. And do a lot of plotting in my head--I don't make an outline or anything--and then when I get to the page, when I'm actually sitting down to write, I'll have an idea of where I want to go but I find that there are always surprises around every corner, which is really exciting to me.
So it's kind of like plotting a trip to a city you've never been to. And you have an idea of how it's going to play out once you get to the airport and once you get the cab and you go into the city and get to the hotel, but then once you actually get there, there are things you see on the street that you didn't expect, or you run into someone that you didn't expect. And I like to have both those elements, the element of surprise but also an element of givenness to the world that I'm working with.
Q: Did you write it pretty chronologically within the book--you started with Woo-jin?
A: Yeah, pretty much. I didn't jump around very much, except in revision. The first few drafts I just went right through.
Q: I liked--as a reader, and I'm curious how you felt about him as a narrative tool--I think I liked the Luke Piper sections the best. Part of that is they made so much sense comparatively. I found them very--I liked the way that tension worked between especially Abby, who has no idea what's going on around her, and then you get to Luke, that section is structure in a backwards way, where he's working back and he does a lot of the exposition for you. Did you feel like you had gotten to that point in the writing that you needed to--
A: Well, I looked at the Luke Piper sections as being kind of the spine of the book. It was the glass of water that you would need to cleanse the palate after the freaky chapters. And I like this idea of this guy going through his life leading up to this impending apocalypse, interspersed with chapters of people who are trying to figure out what happened. So the actual events of this era are largely a mystery in the novel.
Q: Yeah, you come at it from both sides, but that middle section--I don't feel like I knew much more about it by the end of the book than I did from the beginning. I liked that effect. You talked about where you're going with the novel you're working on now, and I'm wondering if you feel like, oh, I found my voice in this book and this is the level of weirdness--do you want to keep working in this voice? I know from The Littlest Hitler you work in many registers. You're capable of doing a lot of things, and you seem interested in doing a lot of things. Do you feel like this is something you want to keep doing?
A: No, I want to do something different every time. My perverse idea here is that this book, it's starting to get some attention from the science fiction community, and so the next book I really want to disappoint those people. [Laughter]. Right? I want to write something that'll be like, oh, but I thought you were a science fiction writer. And I'm like, No, no, this is what I'm doing now. And so I'll have a whole new group of people to disappoint.
Q: And what do your publisher and agent think about that?
A: They're happy with the book so, yeah...
Stellar interview, fellas.
Posted by: BTP | 02/15/2012 at 08:35 AM