At least over e-mail. I guess some people are cool over the internet but jerks in real life, especially after they’ve had a few at the bar and then say something like “After Rabbit Remembered, he should’ve changed his name to John Upyours!”.
But anyways, I think Garth is a nice guy all around, and he is also the author of the new fantastic novella A Field Guide to the North American Family. Without trying to explain the beautiful and insanely creative book/project, I’ll just repost the succinct PR description:

A Field Guide to the North American Family, an illustrated novella by Garth Risk Hallberg, tracks two families through the wilderness of modern life. Their stories unfold in 63 entries, each comprising a chapter of text and a visual artist’s response to the entry’s title: Adolescence, Boredom, Chemistry…. The novella can be read straight through; alphabetical headings and cross-referenced design also enable users to peruse the Field Guide as they would a nonfiction reference work, or to move through the fiction as they see fit.

The website, afieldguide.com, invites visitors to document their own encounters with the North American Family. The book’s 63 photographs were selected from over 700 images uploaded to the website in the spring of 2007. Those images, and all that follow, will form the basis of an ongoing, open-ended web resource.

See, I told you.

Garth is also one of the contributors for what I consider the hub of literature blogs, The Millions, and even though we’re cutthroat competitors, he was able to take some time out of his busy day to answer some questions about A Field Guide, the future of literature, and how much The Who rules.

Me: On the back, it says “explore the future of the book”. As a notable “blogger”, someone who is at odds with the traditional literature critic, is A Field Guide (and its website) your treatise on how you feel literature can or will evolve?

Garth: I actually try not to be at odds with the traditional literary critic. What we aim to do over at The Millions is to synthesize a traditional seriousness about literature with the kind of middlebrow esprit you might have seen in the early years of Harold Ross’ New Yorker, or farther back, in 18th Century publications like the Tattler and the Spectator. Honestly, I think that little bit of text on the book-jacket was put there so that Mark Batty of MBP can remind himself why his press is putting out this crazy novella, whenever he’s tempted to think “What the Hell Have We Wrought?”

Mark’s a hard-core bibliophile and lover of typography and design, and his eponymous publishing house has heretofore focused on design, visual art, and the like. This is MBP’s first foray into fiction (scoop: the next will be a Paul Auster book), and the design element was, I think, the big hook for Mark, as much as the literary end was the hook for my editor, the great Buzz Poole.

That said, I do think we’ve managed to point out an area (illustration) where creative use of the Internet can work to reinforce what we love about print culture - that strange and beautiful artifact, the Book. And I do think that the push toward wackier “futures,” like the execrable Sony Reader, or whatever it’s called, should drive writers to re-imagine the possibilities of good, old-fashioned ink and paper. I don’t think a work like A Field Guide to the North American Family could ever be replicated in digital form. It’s a book-lover’s book.

Me: The photo captions are the bridge between the story and the field guide motif. Was this part of your original idea or did you find the need for them later on?

Garth: E.L. Doctorow says that a book begins as “a private excitement of the mind.” That sounds about right to me. The first thing to come about this one was the title. Then I found myself writing little chapters about these two families. The kind of arch, ironic, pseudo-scientific photo-captions came very early on; I liked the way they contrasted with the general seriousness of the story I was spinning. In fact, many of them were written before the photos were selected…which may be hard to believe, when you look at something like Jason Lazarus’ image for the “Rebellion” entry.

Me: Was there any point where you thought “Wait a second, I’m Garth Risk (expletive) Hallberg. I’ll just take all the photos myself!”?

Garth: Photography is a new enthusiasm of mine, and I’ve learned a lot from the 45 amazing contributors to the book. I could never, never, have come up with anything half as beautiful as their work. Originally, I had conceived this as a one-illustrator project. Only now do I realize that, in order to get 63 photographs, someone like William Eggleston would probably shoot 1,000. Which could be years of work. I love the approach we settled on instead, using the website to attract submissions from leading young photographers. It seemed to fit with the variety of prose forms I was trying to explore in the novella.

Me: With the photos, cross referencing, etc. were there any initial worries that these would take away from the story?

Garth: I was terrified throughout the process that the use of photographs might overwhelm the story. I’m a fairly word-centric person myself (you’ll be shocked to learn) but I can imagine readers who are more visually oriented looking at the photos first, and only reading the story later. Which is fine, so long as they read the story!
A particular challenge for me was how to handle characters, photographically. I love illustrations, which appeared routinely in novels by Dickens and Thackeray and Fielding, and yet I hate the idea that the illustration of a character’s face might detract from the reader’s ability to imagine the character for him- or herself. And so the principle I tried to keep in mind, when I would go to the publisher’s office to sort through the hundreds and hundreds of photo-submissions we got through afieldguide.com, was to preserve a space for the reader.

In a way, I was taking a page from W.G. Sebald, whose use of photographs in his novels enriches, rather than reduces, the mysteries of story and character. I also looked at old issues of the New Yorker, where one of the book’s artists, Gus Powell, used to be a photo-editor. I’ve always enjoyed the way they curate the illustrations that introduce the short stories. I can still remember the remarkable two-page spread for the Denis Johnson excerpt that ran this spring.

But this was a four-man photo-editing process. In making the final choices for the book, we tried to avoid showing faces in a way that might suggest, “This face equals this character.” The notable exception is Jon Gitelson’s portrait of the old man, which gets paired toward the end of the book with a minor character. The portraits Jon submitted for the book were so vivid and rich - so literary - that I couldn’t resist using one.

Me: For a few entries, you give a different visual style to the left-handed text (a misspelled, handwritten story by Jackie; Thomas’ lies breaking apart on the page). What inspired these few digressions?

Garth: These were largely the inspiration of the book’s designer, Christopher D Salyers. We wanted to keep the design of the book from settling too much into a static thing: words, picture, caption; words, picture caption… I liked the idea of jarring the reader’s expectations, keeping her guessing. And I liked the loose conceit that this old “Field Guide” had been passed through many hands, each of which had left its mark (a coffee-stain here, a handwritten story there). We cribbed a bit from some of William H. Gass‘ experiments of the ’70s, like his novella, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. (His daughter Catherine Gass contributed a photo to the book). I really hope A Field Guide to the North American Family rewards repeated readings; too often, I think, we’re urged to buy books that lose all their flavor by the end of the first reading.

Me: With all of the freedom you give the reader what, if any, were your concerns about losing the traditional story arc? Were these concerns addressed from the beginning?

Garth: I really liked Julio Cortazar’s Hop-Scotch when I read it in college. It’s a book whose chapters can be arranged in a variety of ways. The story’s always the same, but the sequence of scenes can change. Kind of like Choose Your Own Adventure, only more Argentine and more serious. And I felt that the Field Guide, in order to resemble a real reference book, had to have this open structure, where you can read the entries in any order.

It was incredibly difficult to put together. I knew from the start that most people would just read them straight through, but also I had to test-drive the various different paths you can make by following the cross-references. I think the biggest danger, still, with any kind of fragmented narrative, is that the reader will sample two short chapters and say, “I don’t see how this connects. I’m outta here.” Unlike a movie like the preposterous 21 Grams nothing about a book is keeping you in your seat. I guess this connects with my belief that the reader is an active participant in making meaning, and I’m taking a leap of faith here that readers of this book will have the patience to read ten chapters before all of the connections are clear.

Me: The book seems very cinematic at times. Do you find that films influence your writing in any way?

Garth: Believe it or not, I’m not a big film buff. I’d like to learn more about film. But I’m very interested in the way that cameras have taught us to see like cameras, and then have convinced us that that’s a natural way of seeing. My story in Best New American Voices is about a Hollywood agent; my first novel imagines the story of the first family to commit to having their lives filmed, around the clock (in 1972, no less). One character in A Field Guide to the North American Family keeps a “video journal” of her days, as part of a school assignment, and the reader gets a little taste of that. And I guess in my ambition to have some kind of descriptive power, I’m pretty visual, in my own weird way. Which may read as “cinematic.” But I emphatically don’t want literature to be a kind of transcribed version of televisual experience.

That’s not to say that The Wire isn’t the greatest thing ever to happen to Western civilization.

Me: Yet you don’t shy away from pop culture references (Gamecube, Lion King, etc.). While I’d argue they’re a necessity for A Field Guide, there is still the school of thought that is against dating a story. What do you have to say to those stuffed shirts?

Garth: David Foster Wallace talks about this in an essay I love, E Unibus Pluram. I’m largely in agreement with him; if you go back and read Victorian novels, you’ll find countless references to newspapers, performers, chancery court, and so on. Maybe Gamecube is just the chancery court of our time.

On the other hand, the argument of the “stuffed shirts” has been caricatured a bit. I used to talk about this with my students at NYU. I think there’s a tendency among beginning writers to use brand-names as shorthand for characters. “Here she comes in her baby-blue Gap ringer tee.” But not only are the connotations of brand-names fairly limited - I don’t know what kind of person wears a Gap tee-shirt - they’re also constantly shifting. Personally, I tend to keep pop-culture references that are in and of themselves funny or weird-sounding . E.g., I mention Montel Williams in the short-story alluded to above - but the scene should still work if you plug in “TV personality” for “Montel.” Knowledge of who Montel is isn’t a load-bearing element of the story. It’s just that “Montel”, like so many artifacts of our culture - Aquavelva, the Electrolux, Corn Nuts - sounds incredibly cool.

I also like to make up brand-names. George Saunders has a great ear for this stuff. If there really was a Slap-a-Whack bar, I’d be eating one right now.

Me: Joni Mitchell or The Who?

Garth: The Who, hands down. It’s like asking, Superego or Id? I admire and appreciate the Superego, but my Id gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Or is that my Ego I’m thinking of?

Me: How much of this book is autobiographical? Did you ever have a backpack filled with graphing calculators?

Garth: I suppose all writing is in some way autobiographical, but as I look back on this book, I realize that I’ve kind of split my high-school experience in half here and apportioned part of it to one character, Gabe, and the other part to another character, Lying Tommy. I should say that I was a scrupulously honest kid, as I think Gabe is, but like him I had a self-destructive streak a mile wide…and probably still do.

And then my own experiences are all mixed up with others I’ve heard about. My parents are divorced, like Gabe’s, but the horrible accident that befalls him in the trainyard actually happened to a friend, Sean (whom I would call a walking miracle if he were walking, and if his physical rehabilitation wasn’t largely the product of his own iron will). That accident, and the way it brought together people who might otherwise have moved apart, was very much in my mind as I wrote this.

And no, I never had a backpack filled with graphing calculators, although some kids at a high school I didn’t go to accused me once of being “the graphing calculator thief” who had robbed their lockers. What I want to know is, who wants a graphing calculator that bad? I mean, what’s the resale value on those puppies?

Me: Who in the book did you have the easiest time writing in the voice of? The hardest?

Garth: The easiest, I think, were Jack and his daughter Jackie. Weirdly, my “inner voice” seems to be that of an eight-year-old girl. And I have a soft spot for woebegone dads. I did some first-person entries, some third-person-limited entries, and some omniscient entries. The two hardest for me to write were Gabe - I think because he’s the closest to my own memories - and Frank, the investment banker. I wanted to give Frank a fair shake, but for the longest time he seemed like such an ass. I started to tell myself that there must be some people who just are asses. Period. But in the entry called “Tenderness,” I started to glimpse the heart of Frank. Which is his kids.

Me: If read in sequential order, you essentially start with death and end with youth. Was this your intention from the outset? Are you lamenting the crises of adult responsibilities or adulthood itself? Or am I way off the mark?

Garth: Wow. That’s really interesting. I guess that patterning was kind of unconscious. I’m a big fan of adulthood in general, though it does have its responsibilities as well as its freedoms. The problem is that the adults in this book seem to have lost touch with the dreams that propelled them into their families and jobs and homes, which leaves only the kids as the repositories of faith and hope - the note I wanted to end on. But ideally, I think, you’d have both: responsibilities and dreams. They should be aspects of the same phenomenon.

Then again, if these adults didn’t have problems, they wouldn’t be in the book. Happiness is the hardest thing to write well about.

Me: You have mentioned your hope that the pictures and ephemera of A Field Guide enhance the reading experience. What is your opinion on graphic novelizations of classic literature?

Garth: You mean like Classics Illustrated? I can still hear the commercials for those - “Thar she blows…a hump like a snowhill!” - with the 800-number at the end. I’m not sure I’m qualified to render an opinion on more recent developments. I’m not really up on my graphic novels, but I know I prefer to read a text in the form in which it was conceived by the author. If that makes sense.

Me: Name one extremely well-respected author that you can’t stand, and one book you can’t stand by an author you love.

Garth: The second one’s easy. I thought Cosmopolis was lousy, and I love DeLillo. For the first: “can’t stand” is strong, but I really don’t like what I’ve read by Bret Easton Ellis, one of the brand-name-droppers I mentioned above. But I guess he already has detractors. Hmm…

Me: Have you ever run across a scenario where you’ve been able to say “Risk is my middle name” like you’re some sort of international spy?

Garth: I’ve actually always wished that my middle name was “Danger.” Wouldn’t “Garth Danger Hallberg” look good on a cover? But my Grandma, alas, was of the Risk clan, so I’m stuck with this boring name and a longing for the highlands.

Posted Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:41:31 and filed under Literature. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.