Your latest novel, Castle, is about Eric Loesch, a military man who embodies America’s darkness during the Bush years. Did you begin to build his character with Abu Ghraib in mind, or did that come later?

I’d been working on a novel about an Iraq War vet that wasn’t going anywhere, and had more or less decided to shelve the project.  Then my wife shared an article she’d read about a guy who finds a castle in the woods, and suddenly I wanted to write a book about that, instead.  I started writing pretty much immediately, and had gotten a good 20 pages in before I was informed (by my wife, again) that Loesch WAS my Iraq War vet.  The book didn’t exactly write itself, but it went much more smoothly than my previous, more self-consciously political idea had.

You have said in previous interviews that you dislike Hemingway because of his notions of masculinity. In Castle, Eric Loesch seems to have a pretty Hemingwayesque conception of manhood, ie, that masculinity is forged in the crucible of cruelty. For example, his adolescent self says that lying to his mother, and pitying her for believing his lies, makes him feel like a man. What is your own definition of manhood, and to what extent do you think masculinity is political in the US?

Well, manhood is one of those things that’s whatever you say it is. Personally, I don’t think of it as something I possess or want to possess; the most interesting and useful aspects of being human, to me, do not fall along gender lines.  That is, the things that interest me about people rarely have anything to do with gender.  Masculinity is certainly political, like everything else, I suppose.  But I really am irritated by the conventional American notions of masculinity—concepts like honor and teamwork and courage and the like never seem to refer to what I think they ought to refer to, and as often as not seem to be employed in order to humiliate, degrade and destroy.  Loesch justifies his own sins to himself by hiding behind some masculine idea of duty. He never breaks free of his training to embrace any higher, or more universal, definition of it, by which I mean his duty to humanity, as opposed to his duty to his station.

This is not to say that I don’t empathize with the soldiers who were driven to this kind of behavior.  Like Loesch’s, their actions were often the result of desperation and the tacit approval of their commanding officers.  They seem to have been out of their depth, as pretty much anyone would in that situation, and it takes an extraordinary individual to break out of a pattern like that.  Loesch, in the end, is destined not to be such a person.

Your novel Happyland, which seems to be based very loosely on the life of American Girls dolls’ creator Pleasant Rowland, was dropped by its publisher, Norton, for fear of libel, only to be come the first novel that Harper’s magazine had serialized in 50 years. What does magazine serialization have to offer the novelist that book publishing doesn’t?  Did it give you a different relationship to your readers than you had, say, with your previous novel, Mailman?

It is not based in any sense on the life of Pleasant Rowland, a woman whom to this day I know nothing about whatsoever, other than that she did once form a doll company, and later bought a lot of property in a small upstate New York town.  That’s where the similarity ends.  I borrowed those two facts and used them as a starting point for my own character, who is otherwise entirely invented.  I have never spoken to Pleasant Rowland, asked anyone about Pleasant Rowland, or even Googled Pleasant Rowland.  Ever.  Just want to make this clear.

The Harper’s serialization was great!  The novel was on the cover four issues in a row, and more people read it than probably any other thing I’ve written.  Honestly, the crap I went through with Norton was worth it—not many writers ever get to have that kind of experience, and I remain grateful to Lewis Lapham and Roger Hodge for taking the plunge and helping me edit the book.   The only difference in reader relations from my other books is that I still get an email every couple of weeks asking me when the paperback’s coming out.  I wish I had an answer to that, but I remain delighted by the attention that book received.

Roger Hodge, the Harper’s editor responsible for the serialization, was recently fired, reportedly over falling newsstand sales and advertising revenue. What was Hodge like as an editor?

Roger is a terrific editor.  We worked very closely on the serialization, and he was consistently respectful, intelligent and insightful with his comments and suggestions.  The book had to be cut quite a lot, and he was masterful at trimming the fat—my other writing has felt kind of bloated ever since.  As for his firing, I was sad to hear it, but I have the feeling that he will not be the last magazine editor to suffer this fate in the coming years.  I do hope that Harper’s manages to bring revenues up without sacrificing the magazine’s
distinctive contrarian character.

You recently wrote in the Ward Six blog that you write with your wife, Rhian Ellis, “The best parts of my books, I think, have always been the things I’ve done with the least forethought. And the lion’s share of work on a novel consists of supporting these sections and making them work together—not making up new stuff that’s better than them.” To me, that sounds just exactly like the process of writing music. You’re a musician too, so I wondered whether you see writing fiction and writing music as different processes, or simply different iterations of the same process?

It’s funny, just a couple of weeks after I said that, I threw an entire finished novel away and started working on something else!  So I guess I contradict myself.  This is one of the joys of blogging—getting into a flame war with the you of two weeks ago.

There are similarities between writing and music for me, I suppose, when the initial work is done and the finish work begins.  The act of revising and mixing a song resembles the act of editing and rewriting a novel.  But the creative act itself feels very different—music is more serendipitous; I approach writing with greater forethought.  Of course, music is just a hobby for me—not many people are paying attention, and I feel more free to do whatever.  I am more conscious of writing as a public endeavor.

That said, maybe I ought to start writing more freely, and publicizing my music better!

Copyright Last Exit 2010