{"id":36080,"date":"2010-02-20T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-20T20:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36080"},"modified":"2025-02-18T09:55:10","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T17:55:10","slug":"issue-66-a-conversation-with-jess-walter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-66-a-conversation-with-jess-walter\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 66: A Conversation with Jess Walter"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Issue<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Interview in Willow Springs 66<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works in Willow Springs 67<\/em><\/a> and 58<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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February 20 & March 16 , 2010<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Gabe Ehrnwald, Samuel Ligon, Brendan Lynaugh, and Shawn Vestal<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH JESS WALTER<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"Jess<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit:\u00a0thelitupshow.com<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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JESS WALTER FOLLOWED A CONVOLUTED PATH <\/strong>into the literary mainstream: He was a newspaper reporter who became a nonfiction author who became a ghostwriter who became a mystery novelist who became a literary novelist who also writes screenplays. But no matter the genre,  Walter\u2019s work is stamped with vivid watermarks\u2014prose that blends rapid-fire rants with unerring rhythm, a dark humor that has been called \u201cstandup tragedy,\u201d an engagement with the political and social, and a devotion to storytelling. \u201cThe idea that plot is this ugly, brutish thing that we have to drape our beauty over is infuriating,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause to me, plot is this beautiful, elegant shape.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His essays, short fiction, criticism, and journalism have appeared in Details<\/em>, Playboy<\/em>, Willow Springs<\/em>, Newsweek<\/em>, the Washington Post<\/em>, the  Los Angeles Times<\/em>, the Boston Globe, <\/em>and elsewhere. His nonfiction book,  Every Knee Shall Bow, <\/em>was a finalist for the PEN Center West literary nonfiction award in 1996. His novel Citizen Vince <\/em>won a 2006 Edgar  Allan Poe award, and his following novel, The Zero<\/em>, was a finalist for the  2006 National Book Award. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walter started his career writing for his hometown newspaper, the Spokesman-Review<\/em>, where he helped cover the standoff between Randy  Weaver and federal agents at Ruby Ridge, in North Idaho\u2014work that eventually led to the publication of Every Knee Shall Bow <\/em>in 1996. His first novel, Over Tumbled Graves<\/em>, came out in 2001, followed by The Land of the Blind<\/em>, Citizen Vince<\/em>, The Zero<\/em>, and most recently, The Financial  Lives of the Poets<\/em>, which Time <\/em>magazine called \u201ca small masterpiece, a  Wodehouse-level comic performance. But it\u2019s also a deceptively amusing  survey of the post-Fannie-and-Freddie American landscape, with a mother lode of bitter truths lying right below its perfect, manicured  lawns.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We spoke with Walter over two meetings at Spokane\u2019s Davenport  Hotel, which features prominently in The Land of the Blind<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s taken  me a long time,\u201d Walter said, \u201cto arrive at a place where I feel like I\u2019m  doing the work I set out to do.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

SAMUEL LIGON <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How has your writing career evolved or developed since your start as a journalist? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

JESS WALTER <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s evolved accidentally, the way natural selection works in making platypuses. If you decided to become a literary writer by going into journalism and then ghostwriting and then writing mysteries, that\u2019s the worst path you could take. I like to say I\u2019ve taken the service entrance into literary fiction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started at the newspaper in 1986 as a junior in college. When Ruby Ridge happened in 1992, I started sending out proposals right away and I took sabbaticals from the newspaper to work on that book. Later, my publisher asked if I wanted to help write Chris Darden\u2019s book on the  O.J. Simpson trial. I was compelled by Darden\u2019s Shakespearean angst. I teased him about it later, and called him \u201cBlack Hamlet\u201d because I  didn\u2019t understand what he was so anxious about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 My publisher at the time said, \u201cWould you be interested in helping  him write his book?\u201d In my naivet\u00e9, I didn\u2019t even know there was such a thing as ghostwriting. I knew it existed, but I didn\u2019t realize it was an industry, so when she asked me to help him, I just assumed we were going to write it together. We sat down to negotiate, and I didn\u2019t have an agent at the time. I sat across from his agent, his lawyer, and Chris,  and they have this contract that says I\u2019m ghostwriting, and I said, \u201cI\u2019m not doing this if my name\u2019s not on the book.\u201d They were like, \u201cHow big  do you want your name?\u201d I said, \u201cI want my mom to see it from outside  a bookstore window.\u201d So that was the agreement, and then there was discussion about what the cover would say\u2014\u201cBy Christopher Darden,  as told to<\/em>,\u201d or \u201cBy Christopher Darden with<\/em>\u201d\u2014and I said, \u201cI don\u2019t care about that. I just think it\u2019s a lie to not have my name on the cover.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, when I would do ghostwriting projects\u2014I didn\u2019t want my name on a book once I realized the stigma, and once it became clear to me that ghostwriting was not what I wanted to do. But that was the first ghost job, the Darden book, and again, it wasn\u2019t strictly a ghost project,  because my name\u2019s on it. And also, this was a really intelligent guy, and I  said, \u201cWe\u2019re going to write this book together.\u201d So we had two laptops,  and we\u2019d write sentences back and forth. It was collaborative. I moved in with him. And I feel\u2026everything\u2019s accidental, nothing\u2019s planned,  but I look at that early part of my career, the ghostwriting, which began with Darden and ended with the Bernard Kerik situation placing me at Ground Zero. I\u2019ve got Ruby Ridge, the O.J. Simpson case, the terrorist attacks of September 11th. I kind of had a perfect fiction writer\u2019s vantage to these cases that, for someone who loves satire and writing about the culture, turned out to be perfect training. It\u2019s not the training I\u2019d advise someone to undertake, and I was miserable through much of it, but it turned out to be a great track to the kind of fiction I wanted to write. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How have your books changed from Every Knee Shall Bow <\/em>to The  Financial Lives of the Poets<\/em>? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each book I write is a kind of reaction to the last one. It\u2019s a constant leveling and adjustment to try to make each book complete and full in itself. When you\u2019re in a book, you\u2019re not thinking about the next one or the last one, you\u2019re only thinking about the one you\u2019re in, but you bring the way the last one felt. My starting point is often, The last one felt like this, now I need to do that. Especially Over Tumbled Graves\u2014<\/em>I  was stunned that everyone saw it as a mystery novel. I look back now and see that\u2019s because it was <\/em>a mystery novel. You put a serial killer in your book, people tend to treat it like a serial killer book. You eat one lousy foot, they call you a cannibal. But at the time I was writing it, I  thought I was writing this deep literary novel that happened to have serial killers and cops in it. And then when it came out, that wasn\u2019t the response. So, with Land of the Blind <\/em>I thought, Well, I\u2019ll nudge it over a little further. And with Citizen Vince, <\/em>I think I was a little aware of the way these books were landing, the way they were received, the way they were perceived, the way they were put into bookstores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are all sorts of indignities along the way that cause you to do certain things. I remember I was excited to have a reading at Powell\u2019s,  this amazing bookstore. I told some friends to meet me there. I didn\u2019t really think that two o\u2019clock in the afternoon was a funny time for a  reading at Powell\u2019s. So my friends show up and I walk to the desk and  say, \u201cI\u2019m Jess Walter, I have a reading here.\u201d The woman at the counter says, \u201cOh, that\u2019s a drop-in signing. What\u2019s your book about?\u201d And I said,  \u201cWell, it\u2019s a kind of literary crime novel about a serial killer\u2014\u201d I didn\u2019t  even finish and she grabs the microphone and says, \u201cGenre department.\u201d  This guy comes forward and my friends are standing right there and I\u2019m thinking, Oh, this sucks! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can you talk about the difference between \u201cliterary\u201d fiction and  \u201cgenre\u201d fiction? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve often felt frustrated at the divide between commercial and literary fiction, because to me, it hurts both. You can have this horrible writing in crime fiction because people only focus on plots, and they treat them like crossword puzzles. \u201cWell, I knew who the killer was on page eleven! I\u2019ve solved it! Why do I need to keep reading?\u201d And when people complain about literary fiction, they say there\u2019s not enough story.  So I\u2019ve always felt like there\u2019s got to be some sweet spot in the middle you can hit. With Land of the Blind<\/em>, I thought, Oh, I\u2019m writing a coming of age novel, and I\u2019m kind of melding it with this other thing, and it\u2019s also a novel of ideas! You have all the conventions of crime fiction that I  wasn\u2019t following. There was no murder. It starts with a confession instead of the body, which is where you start with a murder mystery. I wanted someone to come in and confess to a crime that hasn\u2019t actually been committed. And then it was a kind of twenty-five-year-long murder that began when they were children\u2014it\u2019s really about the way he treated this guy as a kid. So it was, in my mind, a coming-of-age novel disguised.  Again, you hit what you think is some sweet spot and no one wants it.  People really want crime fiction and they love those books. You mess with the conventions, they don\u2019t understand why. I was making Subaru  Brats\u2014you know those little Subarus that were a cross between a pickup and a car? Nobody wanted those or there would be a bunch of them around today. And I made a great Subaru Brat, but I was the only one who appreciated it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think anybody succeeds in that kind of hybrid? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think Richard Price comes closest. Once he established his literary bona fides he could write crime fiction. Pete Dexter, because he won the  National Book Award, can write a crime novel and have his position. John Banville wins a Booker Prize and can go write crime fiction. But it doesn\u2019t work the other way. You can\u2019t name someone who\u2019s made a career as a crime writer who is then respected as a literary novelist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHAWN VESTAL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But after you won the Edgar for Citizen Vince<\/em>, the next book, The  Zero<\/em>, was a finalist for the National Book Award. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I say no one\u2019s done it, I kind of think I\u2019m the only one.  [Laughs.] And I don\u2019t know that most people want to do that. It\u2019s one of those Guinness Book of World Records <\/em>things that no one else really wants to do. You stand on your head on a toilet for four years and you\u2019ve done it longer than anyone else. It\u2019s not a path a lot of people want to take. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRENDAN LYNAUGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Citizen Vince <\/em>felt like more than a crime novel. Were you aware that you were turning a corner? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It felt like the kind of novel I wanted to be writing. I get really excited about thematic elements, probably more than I should, and more than most writers. I kept thinking, This is really about voting. That was the sweet spot I had always imagined between crime fiction and literary fiction\u2014you know, that I could create characters that were hopefully deep and rich. There would be all these ideas swirling around, especially in the character Vince and in his monologues. I like ranting and riffing,  and Vince could do that in a voice I was pleased with, and yet, I could still drape it over the conventions of a crime novel. I think it was more the sort of novel I\u2019d imagined I would write all along. And it does feel like I turned a corner at that point. And then I moved on to The Zero <\/em>and Financial Lives of the Poets<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LYNAUGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve mentioned having to teach yourself how to write a novel.  Can you remember big moments in that process? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still feel like I\u2019m teaching myself all the time, learning things and in a constant conversation with myself about what it is. The emotions of writing a novel, the highs and lows, the ups and downs, the loathing for what you\u2019ve written\u2014I described it in my journal at one point as the diary of a man living on the ocean who has no idea what tides are. \u201cOh my God, the water\u2019s going out! It\u2019s a drought! Oh my God, the water\u2019s coming in! It\u2019s a flood!\u201d I couldn\u2019t believe how seriously I took this. With every book I would say, \u201cIf this is not the worst thing ever written\u2026 I need to just throw this away and start from scratch.\u201d And then the next day, I would say, \u201cI may be writing a new kind of literature here. There\u2019s a very good chance that my grandchildren will have to study this book. I should put a little note in there for them.\u201d The grandiosity was stunning, and the lows were stunning, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of it as this engine, these pistons going up and down. The process that I fool myself with is that I write the last sentence last, and so  I\u2019ll comb over the beginning so many times, but I can\u2019t finish if I feel like there\u2019s something wrong early on. I always have to go back and rewrite things. The moment I finish a novel, I always feel the same incredible high. My finishes are phony at first. I always have to go back through dozens of times, but that sense, when I write the last sentence and pull my hands away or clap my hands like a Vegas dealer, it\u2019s thrilling. And then maybe a week later, or two days later, the crashing doubt comes back. I\u2019ve learned now that I love almost every part of that journey. I even love the self-loathing. I think to separate the hypercritical self-loathing writer from the one who dreams of doing something beyond his ability is impossible and probably not even worthwhile. I don\u2019t think you could have one without the other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I just read David Shields\u2019 new book Reality Hunger <\/em>and now my debate and argument with myself is also with him. I\u2019m constantly walking  around, saying, \u201cWell, take that, David Shields!\u201d or \u201cWhat about this<\/em>,  David Shields?\u201d Which is great\u2014to have a foil. But that book was remarkable and vexing in so many ways. I found myself walking around arguing with him, which is such a pointless thing to do. It reminded me of some drunk guy on the dorm floor you\u2019re trying to argue with and he just keeps quoting Pink Floyd. You can\u2019t win that argument. And other times, it reminded me of arguing with a girlfriend, because you say, \u201cWell, clearly this, this, and this,\u201d and she says, \u201cBut that\u2019s just how I feel.\u201d You can\u2019t win that, either. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it makes me want to debate those points, because I think it\u2019s a really compelling case, a great read, and really powerful work. Because it\u2019s a manifesto, it wants to make a case, and it\u2019s a case I would certainly argue with. First, that narrative is dead, and that there\u2019s some supplanting of it by a desire for reality. I think the reality that we\u2019re really desiring is far more narrative-driven than he\u2019s letting on. We don\u2019t really want reality. We want reality set in a certain narrative frame. What we really want is the Elephant Man. We want freak show. Reality tv is not like the lyric essay, which is the thing he\u2019s arguing for. It\u2019s like the Elephant  Man. It\u2019s the freakiest stuff you can imagine. That\u2019s what we want to see on YouTube\u2014glimpses of the freakish. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I find it illustrative that A Million Little Pieces <\/em>was rejected as a novel, because you couldn\u2019t get away with that shit in fiction, but you can, oddly enough, in this kind of hybrid nonfiction thing. So there\u2019s the idea that fiction and nonfiction have blended in a way. That because history is subjective, that because memoirs only come from memory,  because journalism has been proven to be imperfect, there should be no filter between fiction and nonfiction, which I find to be almost insane, almost a kind of academic trick in which you point to a swamp and say, \u201cLook, therefore there is no land, nor water. They are only the same thing.\u201d And you get there through some sort of \u201cif or then\u201d dialogue with yourself, and pretty soon, you\u2019re trying to drive a boat through the desert. You can\u2019t do that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just because there are places where there\u2019s swampland doesn\u2019t mean that there isn\u2019t a desire and need and higher form for nonfiction and fiction. So that\u2019s the argument I walk around having. Zadie Smith wrote about Reality Hunger<\/em>\u2014something like, \u201cAll right, Mr. Shields, read better fiction. You\u2019re right. There\u2019s a lot that\u2019s dead with fiction. Now go read the good stuff, because those manipulations and tired conventions are exactly what good fiction tries to overcome and subvert and not fall victim to.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You suggested that nonfiction can get away with stuff that fiction can\u2019t. Like what? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was Tom Wolfe\u2019s famous pronouncement? That fiction can\u2019t keep up with the real world? I think fiction has the responsibility of a kind of universality that nonfiction doesn\u2019t. A good example is Jonathan Lethem\u2019s Motherless Brooklyn. <\/em>His portrayal of Tourette\u2019s is\u2014to anyone who has nervous habits or tics or things\u2014so real that it immediately takes you inside that condition. It\u2019s brilliant for that. It isn\u2019t just someone with Tourette\u2019s spouting dirty words, which is what the reality television version would be. It\u2019s a human portrayal of this thing that may be freakish to people who don\u2019t have it, but through Lethem\u2019s telling is a fully realized and human condition that we relate to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned two North Korean pieces the other day, one fiction, one nonfiction. What could the nonfiction deliver that the fiction couldn\u2019t? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first thing that pops into my head that the nonfiction delivered was context. Both pieces had to do with the period of starvation in North Korea. Both had people making this sort of paste from tree bark that they would eat. In some ways, the nonfiction was more harrowing for its authority, for its truth, I guess. It provided context. I found out how many people starved to death during this period. And the nonfiction piece was structured almost like a short story, which is really interesting, because it was not a big societal piece. It was focused on one woman who had been a party believer and whose husband and mother and one of her children had starved to death. She\u2019d finally made her way into South Korea. And it was a narrative of these people starving to death, with the context that this was happening to the entire nation, the politics behind it, the seamless way in which those externalities could be brought in and not break you out of the illusion of the piece. You could come in and out of narrative and pure informative reporting, and I think when fiction does that\u2014one good example is The Known World\u2014<\/em>it can be thrilling, but it\u2019s also a really tricky thing. It\u2019s an innovation of voice that when I see it, I\u2019m kind of thrilled. That\u2019s what this nonfiction piece was able to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The great thing about it, the thing I would probably agree with  David Shields about, is that it did not require a movement at the end. It did not require some artful ending. It just ended. The woman went to South Korea. She lived with her daughter and she put on a bunch of weight. There didn\u2019t need to be one last scene in which she goes out to the woods and strips some tree bark and takes it home because she\u2019s acquired a taste for it. It was able to sort of just play itself out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The short story (which hasn\u2019t been published yet but is forthcoming in Playboy<\/em>) by Adam Johnson was about an orphan in the same time period, who kidnaps Japanese tourists and brings them back to North  Korea\u2014kind of sanctioned by the army. The story is full of starvations, full of all this stuff, and the movement of it, the artful movement is really pleasing and yet you\u2019re aware that that\u2019s where it\u2019s going. When it finishes, you have the sense of release of a story. You\u2019ve been taken to this world and then released from it. And you\u2019ve seen a full movement of character. You\u2019ve seen something that wasn\u2019t required in the nonfiction piece, a reckoning or a surprise or some other narrative turn; the stone was carved into a figure. And I think we know those effects and we know those feelings that we expect to get from both, and maybe that\u2019s what  Shields finds so thrilling about the hybrid style that he\u2019s working in. To confuse those effects, to fire off these <\/em>neurons when you expected those <\/em>to be fired off, that\u2019s what every fiction writer hopes to do\u2014to not give you what you expect, but something that\u2019s satisfying in some way and which you didn\u2019t see coming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think that the nonfiction was about a phenomenon that occurred in North Korea and something systemic to North Korea, and the fiction was about a person?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s funny, because the nonfiction was about a person, and this person was used to illustrate a condition within North Korea. And so the person was almost a way of viewing the larger context, whereas in the short story, the context was backdrop at most, or was a way to sort of narrow down on that person. You know the world you\u2019re in. You\u2019re in North Korea. It\u2019s this period of hardship and starvation and that telescopes down on the individual, whereas the other one opens up the world that way. I do think those are both intriguing shapes and that they do very different things. Thank God for both. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LYNAUGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often in your books, the main character has some sort of disability\u2014 the blindness in The Zero, <\/em>and various characters in other books who can\u2019t sleep the entire story. What does disability do for your novels? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think everybody has some disability. I think that\u2019s the condition of being human. What happens when they\u2019re more visible, more on the surface? You\u2019re definitely putting pressure on. That\u2019s what I like about crime in fiction. I like conflict that\u2019s sharper and higher-pitched. And I like that within\u2014I think it\u2019s another kind of conflict, a conflict within the character, and the way in which the world deals with these people and they deal with the world. I guess it\u2019s heightening that stuff. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got a stick in my eye when I was five and had to train myself to look people in the eye, because when I was a kid I would constantly look down so that other kids wouldn\u2019t make fun of me\u2014so to me, disability is a very real state of humanity that I think we all have in some way. I  think I use the vision and eyesight issues because that\u2019s such an elemental and key way in which we deal with each other. I also think it\u2019s probably an autobiographical desire of mine to try to explore this in fiction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Land of the Blind, <\/em>Clark lost an eye as a kid. In The Zero, <\/em>Remy has a problem with detached retinas. How does your experience of getting a stick in the eye when you were a kid move away from autobiography in your work and take on a fictional quality? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Autobiography is a tool of the fiction writer. I think that Land of the  Blind <\/em>is all about vision, about how Clark sees himself, how the world sees him. And the gaps within there. You become interested in those things in a really personal way, and then I think the thing to do with fiction is refine that interest, refine that sort of thematic push that you have in something until it takes on some meaning you weren\u2019t aware of. I think you arrive at levels of meaning in fiction that you don\u2019t always reach with memoir, that you might not reach with any other kind of writing because of the process, which forces you to go possibly deeper into character than you would with nonfiction or memoir. I think it forces you to create themes that are even more alive than a memoir would be. We\u2019ve all read those autobiographies by generals or politicians, in which you think, \u201cWere they even around for their own life?\u201d They seem to be describing it as this series of achievements that have no motivations connected to them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

VESTAL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You write about the newspaper industry in The Financial Lives of the  Poets<\/em>. Do you think the decline of journalism\u2019s had an impact on fiction? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hard to not focus on the ancillary effects, where the review is going to come from and things like that. I\u2019ve always thought that journalism has been a great training ground for novelists. I would make twenty-seven percent of our novelists go work at a newspaper, because you learn to navigate these systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You cover any sort of politics, you cover crime. You begin to see the difference between public and private, the way people show themselves in public and the way they really are. You learn the mechanisms of a culture, how a courtroom works, how a police department works, how an election works. One of the ghost jobs I did involved a political campaign and these political operatives\u2026. I\u2019ve got these characters stowed away. They\u2019re such great characters because they have insight into the hypocrisies that we know are there, but we don\u2019t exactly know how they work. That precision, that journalistic precision, is something.  Like Richard Price. He\u2019s very much like a documentarian in that style. He\u2019s in there, in those cop cars, in those projects. He\u2019s working with those social workers, and to hear anyone describe his process, it sounds exactly like immersion journalism. So in that way, I think journalists can be outward-looking in their fiction; I think they can get beyond the limits of their own experience and imagination more freely because of their training. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, you write every day. You lose fear of publication. You know how to work on deadlines. But you also get out of yourself as a writer.  You write something that is very utilitarian\u2014people use it. It\u2019s sort of disposable. I remember being in MFA workshops and people bringing their stories in and the angst of that room was almost too much for me to bear. They had so much invested and I never felt that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a newspaper someone is going to handle your stuff. They\u2019re going to edit it, they\u2019re going to change things. You learn to keep your stories separate from yourself. That\u2019s valuable for a new writer because the fear of publication stops a lot of people from working, the idea that it\u2019s got to be perfect. No journalist goes in thinking that they know everything at the beginning, and yet, today, as a fiction writer, you almost get more attention for your debut novel than the ones after. You\u2019re expected to kind of arrive as this fully formed artist, and I know I wasn\u2019t. It\u2019s taken me a long time to arrive at a place where I feel like I\u2019m doing the work I set out to do. I used to have an editor at the newspaper who would say,  \u201cAll right, this is beautiful writing here, but you have three adjectives.  We\u2019re going to pick one. What\u2019s the best one?\u201d I was constantly pruning and looking for the telling detail. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, because of the constraints on space, I think journalists often write better-paced fiction, which is the reason people love crime fiction and other potboilers. It\u2019s not that people have bloodlust. It\u2019s about pacing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

VESTAL <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of your books have humorous elements. What makes something funny? And how do you use that toward a serious purpose? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the tics I\u2019m trying to get away from is tending toward things only because they\u2019re funny. A few times, I\u2019ll find myself so in love with something I thought was funny that it takes away from the narrative or it introduces something that strains credulity. Some of the humor in Citizen Vince <\/em>I\u2019m proudest of is the really quiet stuff. It doesn\u2019t come out of absurdity. It just comes out of small character moments. I guess some of it is absurd, two guys in a witness protection program debating the pizza in town, but that\u2019s also a complaint I\u2019ve heard from every New Yorker who ever moved to Spokane, so it seems weirdly grounded, too. You don\u2019t want anything to be a crutch. Plot has been a crutch for me,  suspense has been a crutch for me, and sometimes I think humor is a  crutch for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plot seems to be one of the hardest things to talk about, and people  often ask writers, \u201cDo you know the plot before you go in?\u201d What do you know of the story before you start actually writing words? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a fallacy that the story starts when you\u2019re writing words. I  walk around with the idea, with the characters, with all of that stuff,  until I think I may have a clear sense of what that story is\u2014before I  start writing it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m going to digress a little bit. One of the frustrations I have with  Shields\u2019 book is that he keeps saying narrative is clearly dead, that clearly no one likes narrative. And it\u2019s like, No! People are reading Dan Brown not because he\u2019s a great prose stylist, but because of the narrative. Story is alive and well. People love it. And it doesn\u2019t even have to be a new story. It can be the same old story. That central premise is totally wrong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I loved reading Charles Baxter\u2019s essay on rhyming action, because  to me, there\u2019s an artistic elegance in plot and story. There\u2019s a sense among some people that there\u2019s been an academic movement away from storytelling. There was a great essay\u2014and I call it great because it was infuriating to me in so many ways\u2014that blamed the Cult of the  Sentence for the death of literary fiction, the much talked about death of literary fiction, the idea being that somehow, writers focusing only on the sentence as a unit of beauty and on the writing itself, have divorced themselves from what readers want. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s necessarily the case, but I have heard writers say, \u201cI don\u2019t want any story at all. I just  want beautiful language.\u201d And I think, first of all, Bullshit. But second of all, the idea that plot is this ugly, brutish thing that we have to drape our beauty over is infuriating, because to me, plot is this beautiful, elegant shape. And that\u2019s what I get so thrilled about in writing. That\u2019s what I got excited about with Citizen Vince, <\/em>when I began to see this kind of movement of the character and the way the language and everything would reveal this movement that would take you to this place where you would have a feeling of completion. The plot of that story is inseparable from a kind of motion in which Vince lives in this town. He\u2019s afraid someone has been sent to kill him from New York. So he goes to New York, where he\u2019s assigned to kill the guy he thinks came to kill him. I love that movement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LYNAUGH <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the plot of Citizen Vince<\/em>, toward the end, there\u2019s a withholding of Vince\u2019s plan. Did you worry about that being too \u201cdevicey\u201d? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love device. When that comes about is when we go in Reagan and  Carter\u2019s heads, the day that Vince comes home. If I\u2019m showing those scenes, he\u2019s on an airplane, he\u2019s thinking, Holy crap, now I gotta go kill this guy. Or maybe I won\u2019t. I\u2019ve got a big decision. It would have been so static. The book is third person and there are plenty of other times in which you don\u2019t exactly know what Vince is up to. You don\u2019t exactly know what he\u2019s doing at that card game until he tells Gotti why he\u2019s there. So if it was the first time it had come up, it would have felt far more \u201cdevicey\u201d and I probably would have been too embarrassed to do it. But instead, we\u2019re looking at Carter and Reagan, who are doing a sort of thematic dance around what this novel is about, the idea of shadows following each other, and when we get back to Vince, he\u2019s taking action and his thoughts are in the moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

GABE EHRNWALD <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some readers might feel there\u2019s a kind of withholding in terms of the vote. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who he votes for? Maybe because I initially saw this as a screenplay,  I thought of that scene as a camera shot, like the famous tracking shot in Citizen Kane <\/em>in which the camera rises and rises and rises. It\u2019s one of the longest shots in history. It rises completely out of where Kane is speaking. And so I imagined that same shot when Vince is voting, that you\u2019d be centered over him and you\u2019d be seeing the ballot the way he does and then all of a sudden, the camera rises and rises and rises so you could see the act of voting but you could never see who he voted for. I  really did imagine that I turned my head when Vince voted and gave him the same privacy we all get. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does it do for the novel that the reader doesn\u2019t know? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If it was just a novel about a guy who became a Republican or Democrat, what would that be worth? It\u2019s about a guy who chooses as his point of redemption, his symbolic redemption, the process of voting,  which is a really corny thing, and I knew it was corny the minute I thought of it. Am I really going to write a civic thriller? That\u2019s what it is, a kind of civic thriller, but no one else gets to choose what our own symbols of redemption are. And for Vince, voting is meaningful. On the most basic level, not telling the reader who he votes for connects with a theme of the book, that it\u2019s about this person choosing this thing we all take for granted and maybe see as empty or corny or whatever it is, and around that creating a new identity and allowing himself to change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LYNAUGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can you talk about other devices you\u2019ve used? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fiction writing can feel kind of meek sometimes, and if we\u2019re going to run from device, if we\u2019re going to run from things like that, it\u2019s going to stay meek. Your job is to engage the reader. Sometimes to fool them awhile, sometimes to suspend something that you don\u2019t want them to know for a while. Sometimes it\u2019s to have the action interrupted by an end dash and not tell the reader what happened. Sometimes it\u2019s to write something in the first person. There are all different kinds of tools and techniques and I don\u2019t know what makes them devices. But I like to be playful, and I like inventive styles of writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book that nailed me the hardest in the last few years was David  Mitchell\u2019s Cloud Atlas, <\/em>which is a Russian nesting doll of a book. It\u2019s a  device at its very genetic core and I was thrilled reading it. I loved to see what could be accomplished. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t have some bag of devices. But I certainly am constantly looking for something inventive to do with structure, with voice, with all of those elemental pieces of writing that combine to make the whole. So it might be a large structural thing. It might be a voice thing. It might be something that feels as \u201cdevicey\u201d as having the action break at midpoint in The Zero <\/em>and then having the character discover alongside the reader what\u2019s missing. Which feels more blatantly \u201cdevicey,\u201d but opens up the thing in a way that you wouldn\u2019t have gotten if you\u2019d written the novel straight. I think those kinds of formal inventions and devices and gimmicks can sometimes lead you to a place to discover not only what\u2019s possible with the language and the sentences and paragraphs, but also what your story is about, what brought you to this. For me, when it works the way it did in The Zero<\/em>, there\u2019s not a lot of distance between the formal playfulness and the thematic drive that made me want to do it in the first place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is withholding important to fiction? Can withholding ever become cheap? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of times, what makes something work is what isn\u2019t there. We know that with language, we know that with character, so why wouldn\u2019t it be the same with story? Why wouldn\u2019t the things that you choose not to put in be those things that kind of open the piece up? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When is it cheap? When you\u2019re honestly assessing your own work and you worry about things, what I worry about is that I\u2019ll sell the farm for a cheap gimmick. One of my favorite novels is Martin Amis\u2019  Time\u2019s Arrow<\/em>, which occurs in reverse. It\u2019s all gimmick. Does it work?  Depends on the reader, but I love the inventiveness of it. And Martin  Amis referred to that book in The Information<\/em>, which is another great novel. In The Information<\/em>, the novel that the protagonist has just written makes people nauseous and causes them to have strokes. Amis is writing about Time\u2019s Arrow <\/em>and people\u2019s reaction to it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You know your weaknesses and strengths as a writer, so I\u2019m probably the worst person in the world to ask when a device becomes cheap, when it overwhelms the thing it\u2019s working on, because I tend to like those.  Maybe it\u2019s because I read a great deal and I\u2019m looking for something new and different. But I also think it goes back to the fact that I\u2019m most interested in the elemental things, finding out what exactly makes voice,  and then the large things, almost like a scientist. Science is interested in the very tiny and the huge, the universe and the subatomic. So I think that my concern with structure, with the fullness of things, makes me more prone to like those sorts of innovations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

VESTAL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are the similarities or differences between the Spokane in your books and the real one? Or have you set out to capture the \u201creal\u201d Spokane? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know if William Kennedy said, \u201cI\u2019m going to capture  Albany.\u201d You just tell those handful of stories that strike you, and then later, if they end up creating a full sense of a place, I can\u2019t imagine it being anything more than accidental at best, because I never set out to create Spokane. I was a crime reporter, so I think I\u2019ve probably created a much more downtrodden, crime-ridden, nasty-ass place than really exists, and yet, I think it\u2019s a very real version of some of those places,  too. The Financial Lives of the Poets <\/em>is set anywhere, and yet to me, it\u2019s so clearly Spokane. People write to me and say, \u201cI think that 7-11 is right by my house! I live in Santa Monica.\u201d \u201cI think that 7-11 is right across  the street, except it\u2019s a Piggly Wiggly here.\u201d So I think there\u2019s probably something universal in what I\u2019m envisioning as Spokane in that book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

VESTAL <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vince makes a brief cameo\u2014uncredited as Vince\u2014in The Financial  Lives of the Poets<\/em>, and it made me wonder if you had a sort of vision of a kind of world behind the immediately present world. Or a kind of network. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think I do, and I think every author kind of does. I don\u2019t mind those things overlapping a little, but in no way do I think of that as some definitive portrait of the city. It\u2019s just the terrain that I happen to be writing about. Usually when I\u2019m done with a book\u2014I don\u2019t, for instance,  wonder if anything else happened to Brian Remy from The Zero<\/em>. Maybe  Carolyn Mabry from my first two novels, I think there might be more to talk about there, but for the most part, I don\u2019t feel like characters deserve a second novel. And though some of my characters have reoccurred,  they\u2019ve been fringe characters. I think it\u2019s another kind of playfulness that made me sneak Vince in there. And the fact that I don\u2019t call him  Vince\u2014because at the end of Citizen Vince <\/em>he\u2019s sort of gone back and claimed his early identity, which is Marty. But I also liked the wink at myself that ninety-nine percent of readers won\u2019t get. When people do  discover it, though\u2014again, we talked about withholding\u2014there\u2019s a kind  of withholding. I could have easily made it Vince and made it clear, but  when people get it, it\u2019s like this special thing between me and the couple of readers who have noticed it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does your fiction get anything from the place\u2014Spokane\u2014that it wouldn\u2019t get from a different town, like Tallahassee or Des Moines or  Providence? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think Spokane is one of the most isolated cities of its size in the  United States, and that its isolation casts a lot of different shadows. I  think there\u2019s a sense of isolation here that\u2019s great for fiction. And yet the place doesn\u2019t have an accent. It doesn\u2019t have a special ethnicity. It\u2019s a really general place, but hours from anywhere, which gives it a kind of lab quality. As if you could have any kind of experiment here that you wanted. There\u2019s a lot of film work here now because it has that quality\u2014it could be anywhere. So I think yes and no. Spokane could be  Des Moines. It could be Providence. It could be the Lower East Side in certain ways, and yet, I think its isolation allows a lot of different things to happen. In thrillers, you\u2019re constantly trying to get your hero alone,  and if you think about it, cops always travel in at least twos, sometimes twelves, and yet, you\u2019ve got to get to a point where your protagonist is alone facing whatever he or she is facing. I think that the isolation from the rest of the world that Spokane has creates story possibilities. You can have guys from the Witness Protection Program show up here and have everything they need. It\u2019s kind of self-contained. Most cities of two or three hundred thousand are not self-contained. Most are outside bigger cities and this is like Pluto. I guess Pluto isn\u2019t a planet anymore.  It\u2019s like Neptune, a small, distant planet. It doesn\u2019t have moons. It\u2019s in its own orbit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EHRNWALD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s the difference between writing a screenplay and writing a  novel? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Screenwriting is so collaborative. It\u2019s not the writer\u2019s medium. It\u2019s a director\u2019s medium and an actor\u2019s medium. So that\u2019s the first thing,  the collaboration. Also, form is so important and so is economy. Form and economy are the two things you\u2019re constantly battling, and I sort of equate the formal restrictions to poetry, not that I\u2019m much of a poet myself. But I\u2019ll start writing a poem and it\u2019ll turn into prose because I can\u2019t master the economy or the form. I\u2019ve said before that scripts tend to be more external, more action-driven. They don\u2019t have to be. You can have a voice-driven script. You can have My Dinner with Andre, <\/em>all dialogue.  So it doesn\u2019t have to have action. You could have 110 pages of voice-over. It could all be internal. Didn\u2019t they make Johnny Got His Gun <\/em>into a movie? I think they did, which takes place entirely inside the mind of someone who has been maimed in battle and is unable to communicate with the outside world. Then it\u2019s done through flashback; you still have to show something on the screen. But practically, they couldn\u2019t be more different forms. I like both. Screenwriting I just don\u2019t take as seriously. I  don\u2019t think it\u2019s as hard. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s as interesting. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s as rewarding. I think because it takes someone to animate it and make it live that it is beyond my understanding. I can\u2019t imagine ever being fully satisfied with a screenplay. I like fiction better, as a reader and a  writer. I like the process of reading a novel far more than seeing a film. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because my own fiction has flirted with being adapted and made,  I\u2019ve had to kind of come up with a mental divorce between a film and the source material\u2014because they are totally different things. One Flew  Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest <\/em>is one of my favorite novels and one of my favorite films, and they are not the same thing at all. You can\u2019t get that paranoia from the book in the movie. You can\u2019t get the walls, the machinery behind the walls from the novel into the film. You couldn\u2019t get Jack Nicholson into the novel and you shouldn\u2019t try. You couldn\u2019t get Danny DeVito as Martini. Those things are animated by actors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

VESTAL <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Were there any trends that you noticed as a judge for the 2008  National Book Award? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another judge told me, \u201cYou\u2019ll be stunned by how many good  books you read and how few great ones.\u201d And I think that\u2019s probably true of any year you judge. There\u2019s a ton of very good fiction out there,  but I finished most of the books with some sense of their failing. And their failing was not necessarily the author\u2019s fault. The thing that comes to every writer as they start to finish something is that they\u2019ve begun an imperfect journey. I don\u2019t think any book is perfect and sometimes things are more interesting because of the imperfections. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other thing you\u2019ll hear people say sometimes: \u201cWhy isn\u2019t anyone  writing realism?\u201d or, \u201cWhy did postmodernism die?\u201d or, \u201cWhy isn\u2019t  anyone doing this or that?\u201d And the thing I realized is that everyone is doing everything. I found examples of every literary trend you could imagine. Are we finding our way to those books? Are publishers getting behind those books? Are those books reaching wider audiences? No. But someone was trying almost everything. There were some small things that I noticed, like books with titled chapters. There were a lot of linked story collections. It\u2019s hard to tell what\u2019s driven by the writers and what\u2019s driven by the marketplace, such as it exists. It may be publishers saying,  \u201cWe need more linked stories.\u201d The collections that I thought worked best, though, often weren\u2019t linked. Those collections that were linked  felt like bland novels or you\u2019d make a game of saying, \u201cAll right, which  story did they write to try to link this together?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

VESTAL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of your work involves an individual with some kind of fraught relationship with a system. Did your work on Ruby Ridge in any way set that course?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think my whole life as a reporter was geared toward seeing how systems fail us. You look at the systems we love\u2014just the people at this table\u2014we love universities and they\u2019re in a kind of spiral of failure right now that is epic in scale. We love newspapers and they\u2019re dying out from under us. We love literature and it\u2019s not healthy at all. I love movies and that system\u2019s falling apart. It isn\u2019t just the criminal justice system, it isn\u2019t just the government. The kind of systems that we create to take care of us and to take care of the things we care about and love always break down and fail, almost inevitably. You build the machine and the machine is going to fall apart. The thing I always go back to in my fiction is that these systems, in a way, don\u2019t even exist. They\u2019re powered by people\u2019s insecurities, emotions, greed. One example is New  York politics. It\u2019s a huge interworking system of all of these different elements, and yet my experience of it was Rudolph Giuliani, who had a  kind of Mussolini-like desire for power and acclaim, and Bernard Kerik,  who was a figure destined to implode because of his own appetites,  weaknesses, and frailties. And the O.J. Simpson murder case, which  I saw kind of secondhand, coming into the wreckage afterward, was all about the failings of people, or the way human frailty causes these systems to break down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a relationship between a jury and the judge and lawyers that approaches Stockholm Syndrome or one of those syndromes. Gerry  Spence, in Ruby Ridge, was brilliant at playing juries. He would do everything but crawl in the box with them. \u201cYou and I all know that this  case is insane\u2026.\u201d The most brilliant thing that he did in that case\u2014the prosecution put up all of these rifles. All the Weavers\u2019 guns were on this  big pegboard. It was daunting, all these guns. At one point, Spence just strode up there and yanked a gun off and sighted it and then handed it through the jury box. The prosecution objected, and Spence said,  \u201cYour Honor, they put them up here. I just wanted the jury to get a  closer look.\u201d Knowing that an Idaho jury\u2014everyone\u2019s sighted a rifle at some point. So now these rifles aren\u2019t things on a wall. You\u2019d see jurors  looking around the courtroom with rifles, and the prosecution going,  \u201cOh shit, we just lost the case.\u201d That was the kind of thing that went on in the Simpson case, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I find the anti-government furor today fascinating in so many ways.  Because there is no government. It\u2019s us. And in Every Knee Shall Bow<\/em>,  that was the thing I sort of tried to pull back the curtain from. White separatism was another kind of system. Systems don\u2019t battle. It\u2019s the people within them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you see common attributes in your characters? Can you look at  your characters and say, \u201cI recognize this character as having this kind of  moral code or that set of beliefs, or being stuck in this system?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s one of those things that can freeze you up if you spend too much time thinking about it. My characters can be wiseasses. They can be a  little lost, a little out of step with everything going on around them.  But that also allows them to be more observant of paradoxes and ironies and of those moments in which the things that we strive for, and the things that we do, don\u2019t connect. Or, to go back to systems, the things that the system\u2019s supposed to do and what it actually does don\u2019t align. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the kind of character I\u2019m drawn to is someone who sees the cracks that other people don\u2019t see, Brian Remy in The Zero <\/em>being one example\u2014he\u2019s the only one aware of his own condition, which he comes to believe the rest of the world shares but just doesn\u2019t recognize.  I think the characters\u2019 awareness of the absurdities around them is the main thing. And then there are obviously some surface things\u2014that they don\u2019t sleep, they\u2019ve all lost an eye, they probably order the same drinks.  They riff the way I like to riff. I love Marilynne Robinson\u2019s answer when  someone asked her if any of her characters were her and she said, \u201cOh,  yes, all of them.\u201d I think there\u2019s that sense when you create these people that they\u2019re extensions, hopefully not only of you, but partly of you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You talked about fragmentation in Over Tumbled Graves<\/em>, but there was a different kind of fragmentation in The Zero<\/em>. Did that fragmentation come early for you in the writing? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had written a short story years ago called \u201cFlashers, Floaters, and  Vitreous Detachment.\u201d In that story, there was an insane person who saw streaks and lines and believed the streaks and lines were connecting people and buildings and ideas and things. I had that piece just sitting there forever. When I was at Ground Zero, we kept not finding bodies.  We kept thinking we were going to find more bodies and we kept not finding them. The idea that these people were just gone, that they had been atomized, was hard to get your mind around. I kept thinking about that Maltese Falcon idea of disappearing and starting your life over. So I  started mulling a novel about someone who disappears and starts life over. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than any of the other books, that was a thematic book. There were all these things I wanted to say about the culture, about the way we reacted to September 11th, about the leadership at Ground Zero, about all those things that were bubbling around, and yet I couldn\u2019t quite ever complete those thoughts. I couldn\u2019t get my mind around what it was  I was trying to say to myself. And I thought, If I wait for this, I will never get there. I sort of transferred my own confusion and inability to track and process to the character. And that felt right. I can\u2019t remember the first time I wrote one of those sentences where I just ended it with a dash, but oh my God, it was the most freeing thing, realizing that you don\u2019t have to write those transitions. Transitions suck. Transitions are almost always forced. Or if they\u2019re not, then they take you\u2014they transition\u2014to a place you don\u2019t want to go. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had done some screenwriting at that point, and there\u2019s an old saw in screenwriting that you want to begin a scene as late as possible and end it as soon as possible. And I thought, What if I end the scene way before anyone even knows what the scene is about? The freedom of that was a great discovery once I realized I could just bail out of scenes any time I wanted. Sometimes, the scene would accomplish what I thought it was going to, and other times, it would just hang there, a complete fragment. I was aware, all along, of the larger story I was telling, but the fragmentation kept it so fresh for me, because I was never sure how  much of it I was going to reveal. I had almost two versions of the story.  I had the full story, and I had this fragmented version I was telling. It made me a little crazy as a writer to be walking around with this kind of insane story that I\u2019m telling myself in my head. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIGON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that book was also about systems\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WALTER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of it is that I\u2019m writing in 2003 and we\u2019re all gung ho to get into  Iraq, and I\u2019m writing a book that when I showed my wife, she said, \u201cI  think you\u2019ll go to jail for this.\u201d And my agent said, \u201cI don\u2019t think I can  represent this book.\u201d But I couldn\u2019t stop working on it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went back to Kafka and kept drawing in my mind these lines between Kafka\u2019s systems and the kind of overarching sense in Kafka\u2019s work that the state is bearing down on him, on the individual. And in  my mind, this was worse, because we were culpable. We were the system that was bearing down on us. We had a part in it by our inaction, by the fact that we kept electing George W. Bush. We were culpable in the surreal nature of our response to this action. We all knew that we weren\u2019t really going to war because Iraq had gotten yellowcake uranium. We  knew that wasn\u2019t the reason. We just wanted to kick some ass. Maybe some of us put little \u201cno war\u201d signs in our windows. And I felt a little  bit…I felt as if we\u2019d all gone insane, as if the whole culture had gone  a little bit insane. Maybe some of us were only a little insane, but it felt like such a big, important thing to be working on and writing and saying. And from a writer\u2019s standpoint, it was thrilling to be dangling  these scenes, and to be sort of nakedly saying things that I, as a younger  writer, would not have had the courage to even try to say.<\/p>\n\n

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JESS WALTER FOLLOWED A CONVOLUTED PATH into the literary mainstream: He was a newspaper reporter who became a nonfiction author who became a ghostwriter who became a mystery novelist who became a literary novelist who also writes screenplays. But no matter the genre,  Walter\u2019s work is stamped with vivid watermarks\u2014prose that blends rapid-fire rants with unerring rhythm, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36080"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36080"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36748,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36080\/revisions\/36748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}