I’m Not Trying to Trick the Reader: Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson is the author of nine books of fiction, most recently the novel LAST DAYS and the story collection FUGUE STATE. His novel THE OPEN CURTAIN (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award and was one of Time Out New York’s top books of 2006. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program. Other books include THE WAVERING KNIFE (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), DARK PROPERTY, and THE BROTHERHOOD OF MUTILATION. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet and others. He has received an O. Henry Prize, as well as an NEA fellowship. A limited edition novella, BABY LEG, will be published by New York Tyrant Press in late 2009.

Michael Kimball: I’ve been reading your work for over 15 years now and there’s a story called “The Blank” in ALTMANN’S TONGUE that I have never been able to shake. I’m mentioning it because there is a storytelling effect that is created by a kind of irresolvable narrative in that piece. That same technique is used to especially great effect in THE OPEN CURTAIN. And you are working with it again in the first story in FUGUE STATE, “Younger.” The effect is different in each of these instances, but there is a thing that you do–writing a sentence that provides some kind of information and then destabilizing that information in the sentences that follow–that makes your fiction complex in a variety of ways. Could you talk about that a bit, whether you start out with that effect in mind, whether it is something that you do as you go (i.e., not quite knowing where the narrative will take the story), or whether it is something else entirely?

Brian Evenson: I think it happens a lot in my work. It starts happening without me knowing it will, but then once I notice it start to happen I encourage it. I guess largely it has to do with my being highly skeptical of the idea of objective truth and of our ability to know anything for certain. I think we can feel we know things enough to be more or less functional, if we’re lucky, but that for any thinking person there are always moments when the stability of ideas, forms of knowledge and even physical things around you begin to feel incredibly dubious, which in turn leads to a sense of oneself as dubious, as insubstantial, as dissolving. That’s something that can be exhilarating or terrifying or both, and it’s a moment I find myself trying to come back to again and again in my fiction-not so much in terms of trying to represent it as in terms of trying to make the reader (and myself as the writer) experience it, share in the vertiginous quality of it.

In something like “The Blank,” I think in addition to the destabilization of information from sentence to sentence there’s a destabilization of the narrative structure going on, one that sends the reader in three different but ambiguous directions with three different characters. That, coupled with the incompleteness of the narrative, does something. In “Younger” the whole story revolves around doubts about what happened, about what really happened, and so statements keep being made and are undercut, taken back, which, for me, leads to a much more terrifying experience than knowing what actually happened. With a story like that, I’m not withholding information: I really don’t know what happened or what to believe, don’t know in the context of the story what’s real and what isn’t. If the story has an impact I think that’s why: I’m not trying to fool or trick the reader, only trying to get the words and sounds and rhythms down on paper in such a way that the reader experiences the story as both I and the younger sister are experiencing it. With THE OPEN CURTAIN, it’s a great deal more complex, with that undercutting of the reality of the narrative occurring in a variety of ways and on a variety of levels, coming to a head in whatever is in the half-buried refrigerator, but then becoming something new and even more unsettled in the novel’s final section. That final section is something that it took me years to figure out.

Kimball: This effect works so well because, as you say, you’re not withholding information or trying to trick the reader. So how do you keep yourself from knowing what happens next, from thinking ahead of the writing?

Evenson: I try to stay focused on the dynamics of the writing itself, to think a lot about the hydraulics of the sentences and the rhythms and sounds. When I do that, I think it allows for things to be sorted out on a more visceral and unconscious level, one in which they still can end up surprising me. I do end up thinking ahead a little bit-I don’t think you can completely help doing that-but it’s less a kind of thinking my way down one narrative path and more an attempt to keep several different possibilities at once simultaneously in the air until the last possible moment. When I do that, often what happens is that I end up suddenly reaching a possibility I hadn’t been juggling, even if it quickly starts to feel necessary or inevitable, as if it were the only really satisfying solution.

Kimball: Since you mentioned the last section of THE OPEN CURTAIN, I have to ask: How did you figure out that ending?

Evenson: The ending of THE OPEN CURTAIN only came about after I’d written four or five other possible final sections, in part or in full. There were probably at least 400-500 pages that I threw out, partly because I had too much of a conscious idea of what I thought the novel should do. One version ended up moving the characters into the polygamist Mormon colonies in Mexico (all that is left of that was distilled into a story called “Moran’s Mexico”). Another ended with the characters trapped in a room in which the walls were covered with teeth (an idea that makes a brief appearance in my story “The Body Politic”). Another ended with one of the characters trapped in a subterranean passage (something I’d done before in other stories). All of them had their strengths; any of them were good enough, but none of them felt right. I almost abandoned the novel, and then-partly due to something sparking with things I’d been reading, partly due with the realization that the book needed to go to a New York that was not New York-stumbled onto the formal structure of repetition that starts that final section. As soon as I did that, I knew it was what I’d been trying to reach. But it took years of agony and frustration to get there.

Kimball: I admire the discipline. How did you know that none of the other endings were right and the one that we all read was right?

Evenson: I don’t know if it’s something that should be admired. I think if I’d approached the book a little differently or been a little more trusting of the novel as a form, I wouldn’t have had so many failed attempts at the ending. I went into the book thinking of each part as a novella, since that seemed more manageable to me. That worked great for the first two sections, but when I got to the third, suddenly I realized that it had to work not only as a novella but also as a way of concluding the work as a whole. I wrote several perfectly good novellas, but they didn’t do enough for the book as a whole. After writing the final section that I ended up with, I went back and reread the first two parts and could see how things had been set up subconsciously for just that ending. The other endings felt forced and incomplete; this one, despite its strangeness, seemed to develop organically from what I’d written before.

Kimball: Why weren’t you more trusting of the novel as a form?

Evenson: I actually still think the novel as a form is not to be trusted. Individual novels, yes, but not the form as a whole, which I think can encourage a kind of slackness of thought. When I’m working on a novel, I feel like I end up making a temporary truce with the form, but it’s a somewhat uneasy truce. For shorter forms, even shorter novels, I don’t feel like I have to do that-you can bring a different kind of attention as a reader to such forms, and as a writer you can keep the surface of the prose taut and precise without the reader becoming exhausted. For THE OPEN CURTAIN, I feel like each of the individual sections do that in a different way, but that I had to teach myself how to do that and still wrap things together in the final section.

Kimball: So what was it about the novella as a form that seemed more manageable?

Evenson: For me the novella is a kind of ideal form. It can have, if it’s done in a certain way, all the style, tautness, and focus of a good story, can really develop without a word being wasted. At the same time, it can manage at least some of the scope and reach of the novel. And in addition, it strikes me as a form very suited to exploring certain sorts of philosophical problems. I think it’s a very underrated form, at least in this country.

Kimball: I started this interview with the idea that the first question would be a kind of wide opening question and that then we’d get into some things about your new collection, FUGUE STATE. So here’s my attempt to bring us back to that as a way to end this interview: Could you talk about the short story collection as a form?

Evenson: I think it’s a form that can be taken very seriously and have a great, interesting texture to it, though I think the majority of story collections don’t think all that carefully about themselves as a form-beyond putting what they think is the best story up front, trying to end with a strong story and hiding a bunch of stuff in the middle. What I try to do when I’m putting together a collection is to spend a lot of time thinking about juxtaposition, formal similarities and differences, and the way a carefully arranged collection can build to something. That’s not to say that it can’t be read in a different order, but I do hope there’s something to be gained by reading it in the order I’ve put it together. So, with FUGUE STATE, I didn’t simply gather all the stories written within a given period and arrange them chronologically. The earliest story in the collection was written almost ten years ago and the latest was written just before the book went to press. I chose to leave out at least as many stories as I chose to include, which may find their way into other books later, or may simply be published in magazines and not in books. I started with a story, “Younger,” that I felt captured a number of the motifs of the collection, but that did so in a way that would draw readers in (despite the difficulties of the story itself). The second story, “A Pursuit,” represents a shift, both in terms of voice and setting, but it does actually keep some of the same thematics in play. So we move from a story about the relationship between two sisters to one about a man and his multiple wives, but a similar sort of imaginative game is being played, one that destabilizes the world of the story. “Mudder Tongue” complicates the thematic cluster further and does something that will be inverted later in “Life Without Father.” And so on. Each story tries to take a constellation of thematic and stylistic concerns that run through the book and expose a new facet of it, and I try to do that in such a way that even when we return to a similar narrative or structure that it will reveal its differences. So, there’s something significant about having “Dread” and the spare loneliness of that story and its illustrations come directly before “Girls in Tents.” The title story comes late in the collection because I feel like all the other stories are preparing for a particular reading of it. And for me the final story, “The Adjudicator,” both serves as a way of shutting down the collection and points to where I see my work going after it. There are, of course, lots of other possible arrangements and some might be as good or even better than what I have, but I do hope that what I’ve done is more than the sum of its parts.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, is now out in the US, UK, and Canada. The Believer calls it “a curatorial masterpiece.” Time Out New York calls the writing “stunning.” And the Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” His first two novels are THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY (2000) and HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS (2005), both of which have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. He is also responsible for the ongoing art project-Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)-and the documentary films, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).