This is the second half of an interview with Toronto fiction writer, Matt Shaw, author of The Obvious Child, (Exile Editions). You can find the first half here. Matt discusses a range of topics related to his collection and fiction writing in general, including self-help books, storytelling, the absurd, the grotesque and the Financial Post.
When Saul, the protagonist of your story, “The Elevator,†finally manages to leave his job after several attempts, he takes with him his copy of The Thirteen Habits of Highly Effective People. There is a similarly sly critique of the philosophy of goal-attainment in “One Trick Pony,†when elementary students are told that their goals are “unequivocally attainable.†Have you read Steven R. Covey’s internationally best-seller The Seven Habits Highly Effective People, or his more recent follow-up, The Eighth Habit? What is your favourite habit?
My favourite habit: Put first things first. Chekhov’s gun on the wall. Always. Fundamentals. And take your time. Is there anything that feels slower or less urgent than a novel, than prose? Any artwork more cumbersome? Yet for a writer or passionate reader, is there anything more urgent? The principle’s good advice for writers. A golden rule. Use it in your writing habits and put first things first in the fiction. Habit five (understand, then be understood) is a close second.
I have a condescending attitude toward self-help books. Maybe that’s because I’ve never been helped by one. I find my questions only multiply when reading books. I’m probably not really interested in answers, or else I’d probably be a scientist. I do appreciate that self-help books seem to provide a certain measure of comfort for millions of people. Because of them, they think that books improve their lives. I like that point of view, even if people get to it ass-backwards. But if you look for first things first, you can find those lessons in a classic novel, too. And executed with considerable more beauty and skill.
In one sense, the title story of your collection is about the act of storytelling. At the conclusion of this story, Plektos Ersatz asks himself: “…where is the root in people’s souls…at what point does one say ‘Yes, there is the obvious cause, what eludes us, what might make our souls whole?’†What, in your opinion, is storytelling’s relation to this question?
Without lamenting it, writing stories is in every way an exercise in failure.
To a writer’s reality, it’s extraordinarily difficult to write well, to make a living doing it, to write a living, breathing work of art that is cohesive despite the fact it might have taken the writer most of a lifetime to finish. If you’ve got a timely idea you’d like to address, you better hurry, too: for most writers, writing is slow.
Technically, writing is the only art that doesn’t really use one (or more than one) of the five senses in any predominant way: painting and the eye; dancing and the body, touch; music and the ear. You can hear a story without seeing, read a story without hearing. You can even feel a story, if you can read Braille.
Writing is entirely representative. It relies on a very complex semiotic web of meanings that flicker back and forth on one another. It is entirely imaginative. And a story, if told in a sprawling novel, relies entirely on the memory of the reader to achieve any cumulative effect of power. Through imagination and memory, you can mix up the elements. You can willfully ignore pieces of text. Particular words. You can misremember stories. Change them. And, for me, there is always the nagging reminder that there is something that I could be doing that would be more constructive or productive. Grow a garden, work for Habitat for Humanity, achieve inner peace through meditation, and earn thirty million dollars a year.
My point is that storytelling for me, like detective work, is about uncovering motive. The writer’s, the reader’s, the characters’, the book’s, and probably more. That’s why I wrote about Dreschl. He’s a pretty lousy detective, but not for lack of effort. He is earnest to the extreme. He wants desperately to understand the man he is charged with finding: a man who isn’t actually missing at all. He takes the world in. He makes a lot of notes. He tries to articulate his ideas. He fails often. Even if he is incapable of understanding his own obsession, it drives him. And, when at last he thinks that he’s got an idea – he makes up a story that’s not the least bit rooted in any objective fact that led him there. He’s left wondering. Me too.
Leon Rooke has compared your stories to those of Donald Barthelme and Franz Kafka. Are there contemporary writers of absurd and sinister stories whose work you would recommend?
I’m drawn to writers that satisfy my version of “grotesque,†which is simply to take something that is ordinarily very human and twist around just enough so that it doesn’t look human anymore, even if it is. Or to make something look human that actually isn’t the least bit human. To make it strange in the classic sense.
A few that come to mind immediately in a sort of free association: Sheila Heti’s Middle Stories, Ticknor. Amy Hempel’s short shorts. Roald Dahl’s adult fiction is sly, twisted, flawed, outdated but overlooked; too bad, because there’s something there. Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space. Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon was huge for me. That book made an entire genre new and strange: the Great American Historical Novel. Lee Henderson’s The Man Game is a recent effort in the much smaller Canadian category. At the top of his game, Leon Rooke is great. Ben Marcus, an American, wrote two books that I have a love/hate relationship with: The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women. Roberto Bolaño. Georges Perec’s La Disparition (“A Void†in the English translation) is the greatest detective novel I’ve ever read, if not contemporary. Gaetan Soucy, Nicola Barker. Gyorgy Dragoman’s The White King. I had high hopes for Nathaniel Rich’s The Mayor’s Tongue that weren’t met, but another instructive book for young writers.
I’m drawn to Czech and Hungarian writing. Even the more realistic modes of some Central and Eastern European writers really create the aura of the grotesque because, in a westerner’s eyes, their 20th century existed in a weird alternate universe. Three collections of Hungarian short fiction that aren’t contemporary but are probably new to most people: Nothing’s Lost, The Kiss. Exile Editions put out the third, a book called Hungarian Short Stories, several years ago. I love that book. They’re all out of print, but Exile might still have some copies of Hungarian Short Stories lying around. Josef Skvorecky.
American fiction from the deep south and American Jewish writing have always had that effect on me too, whatever their mode, realism or not. For a Catholic Canadian born in the snow and raised on hockey, the subjects of writers like Faulkner and O’Connor or Singer and Malamud were completely new and exciting. Not always absurd or sinister, although Malamud’s The Tenants always strikes a chord. That was a major inspiration for my story “Dreschl & the Obvious Child.â€
These days, I find a lot of truly absurd material in the business section of the newspaper: the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, the Financial Post. The Economist is so dry and even-keeled that you can’t help but miss some of the sinister things that take place there that are worth a second look. Highly recommended.
Are you working on anything new? Would care to comment on your latest literary project?
I’ve always been fickle. In the past, I would stay on one project as long as it kept my attention. When that waned, I moved on, often never to return. Today, I embrace that attitude. I work on as many as half a dozen projects at once, constantly going back and forth, switching gears. One project I’m working on is a novel inspired by – but not the least bit faithful to – the life of Roald Dahl. Dahl was a beloved children’s author, Washington spy, married and divorced a movie star, was generally obnoxious and sometimes abusive, disliked by many, wrote disturbing (and sometimes terrible) adult fiction, was very tall, charismatic, lied often and had several affairs: a great foundation for a fictional character. The book is tentatively called The Lighthearted War. We’ll see what happens. –Matt Shaw
deliberately what Birkerts suggests all readers of fiction do, that is, “slip free from our most burdensome layer of contingent identity†in order to create new selves. I am interested protagonists who do this in a specifically existential context, who confront both anxiety and absurdity in an attempt to embrace their freedom, as well as their