For a New York Times bestselling author, Jonathan Evison has remained remarkably true to his origins. Those who are familiar with the literary scene in the Pacific Northwest – and particularly in Seattle and nearby Bainbridge Island, where Evison has made his home – will undoubtedly have crossed paths with him at some point. At times he seems to be the connective tissue that holds Seattle’s growing literary culture together, and it’s not unusual for Evison to appear unannounced at readings and events around the city. Speak to any author in the region, and you’ll almost certainly find that they know ‘Johnny’.

When it came to selling his novel West of Here overseas, however, Evison has encountered more resistance. The market for a sweeping, widescreen novel about the Pacific Northwest wasn’t immediately apparent, and publishers repeatedly shied away from committing to such a locally-rooted epic. Luckily Evison’s bold, energetic style of storytelling was enough to win them over, and West of Here is now – finally – heading east across the Atlantic.

You’ve just had a pretty incredible year, including the release of West of Here in the US and your first appearance on the New York Times bestseller lists. Has this brought any major changes with it, or is life pretty much the same as before?

This year was a dream come true. Life is the same but even better. In spite of all the touring and other public stuff, I’m dealing with less financial anxiety, so I have more time and energy to focus on my art, which is bliss. Also more time to chase my boy around. And a cabin in the mountains to inspire me.

But really, I’ve been living the dream all along. I’m simply grateful to have the work, the focus, the sense of purpose writing provides me. As odd as it sounds, I get a little wistful when I think of all those late nights in Kinko’s collating stories and packing them in envelopes, and sending them off like little packages of hope – even though they invariably came back as form rejections. I was perfectly happy living off pot pies and cheap beer. I just like being in the game, you know? Not that I wouldn’t be stoked to be so rich that I could finally buy that thirty foot inflatable duck in sunglasses I’ve always wanted. That would look badass in my yard.

You’ve been in a variety of ‘games’ over the years… radio host, comedian, punk rocker. Do you consider these to all be part of the same progression? Or is your career as a novelist totally different to what came before?

I’ll be honest, all the other stuff, besides the punk bands, was just stuff I did because nobody was publishing my novels. All I ever wanted to do was write novels. I wrote my first novel when I was 18 years old. Nobody published me until I was 40. And I’m still considered a “young” writer – ha! I learned a lot writing screenplays, writing comedy, doing talk radio – stuff that has informed and instructed my writing in various ways, but it was all vaguely dissatisfying. If it weren’t for my career in radio, I’d probably have a couple more unpublished novels sitting around.

West of Here has been a huge success in the US, but it’s taken a while for it to be accepted overseas. Why do you think this is? Did you always intend to write such a region-specific novel?

I’m perversely proud of the fact that every single non-English speaking European country dismissed West of Here as “too big and too American.” After all, I did set out to write a big American novel. If I would have written a big Chinese novel, I doubt this would be the case. America literature just isn’t considered as relevant as it used to be. Fine. Whatever. Neither is Bordeaux wine or German engineering. Or clogs. That said, the themes in West of Here are universal – personal destiny, national identity, reinvention. I’m a believer that if the themes are universal and the characters live and breathe, nationality shouldn’t get in the way.

Do you think American literature will have to change to remain relevant? Or is this, in fact, the time to turn back to the classics?

America is in the throes of a massive re-invention, and I think it will make for fascinating literature, and if the rest of the world is smart, they’ll pay attention. What is our national identity now that we’re no longer the world’s producer, that we’re no longer at the head of the world order? What is our new idealism? How will we adjust to a new standard of living? Politically, how will we restructure and reform from within? These are huge questions!

Whitman and Emerson used to talk about the “American Experiment” – and guess what? It’s still a big experiment! I think American Literature is poised for a big comeback, and I think the west, particularly the northwest, is going to be the nerve center. Between myself and Patrick DeWitt and Vanessa Veselka and Benjamin Percy and Jess Walter and Jim Lynch and Joshua Mohr and Jenny Shank, etc, etc, I think over the next decade the world is going to see an incredibly rich and dynamic body of work coming from the American west.

Did you purposefully set out to write a big Pacific Northwestern novel with West of Here? What was the original inspiration?

Oh yeah, I totally set out to write a northwest epic. The Olympic peninsula is a fascinating and rugged place. I wanted to write a story about how the land shaped the people, and how the people shaped the land. My goal was to write a sprawling egalitarian novel which would subvert many of our accepted notions about history, and to frustrate readers expectations about what we expect from “historical” fiction. I didn’t want to write historical fiction – I wanted to write a story about history and how it works.

And do you feel that you succeeded in achieving that? I know that I loved the book, and it dealt with many of those ideas – but I also know that the writing process is a complex one, and the end result isn’t always what you originally set out to achieve.

To be honest, I feel like I accomplished more than I set out achieve. That said, not everybody gets it – including some critics. Readers who lose sight of the big picture run the risk of getting lost in this novel. The first 175 pages might feel like one character introduction after another. But if you keep your eye on the big picture, you’ll begin to see all these characters and story lines converge and coalesce. In order to create the effect I was going for, I had to have 70 characters and 40-odd points-of-view – that was the whole point! History is not some linear progression peopled by a few great men, history is the sum of all the small vividly realized moments in each of our lives, and how they interact and relate to one another. History is connections and convergences and shared themes.

Can you talk us through your writing routine? Where do you write, when, how many drafts… and has this changed much as you’ve progressed and changed as a writer?

For me, discipline is the key. I approach writing like an athlete. Some mornings I don’t feel up to the task, but I strap on my trainers nonetheless and do my workout rain or shine. My optimum writing day begins at about 5am., that quiet hour when most of the world is still asleep and I don’t have any distractions. I’ll write until about noon. That time literally seems to pass in an instant. If I can write a page a day I’m feeling pretty good. I like to spend an hour in the evening going over the day’s work with a red pen – making notes in the margins and whatnot. I begin the next day by addressing these notes. That way I’m never stuck, I always have a starting point. I’m an obsessive revisionist. I must write 20 drafts of stuff. It’s never finished. At some point somebody just has to pry the manuscript out of my hands.

I know you’ve been working on edits of your next novel over the past few weeks. Has that process changed for you at all, now that you’re with a bigger publisher? Have you found that your approach towards edits and rewrites has changed over the years?

Nah, my approach is pretty much the same as always. I’ve been lucky to work with amazing editors, and also with an agent who gives great editorial. The key is to work with people who want to help you make the book that you want to write the best book it can be. I’ve heard horror stories from writers whose editors try to make the novel their own. I was fortunate enough with West of Here and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving to work with the editor of my choice, Chuck Adams. When I was entertaining offers, I talked with each of the editors at great length about WoH, and Chuck was the guy who best understood my vision for the novel and how to make it better.

You’ve used the places you’ve lived in as the settings for your two novels to date: the Pacific Northwest (West of Here) and California (All About Lulu). How important do you think it is for authors to draw upon the environments that have influenced them? Do you think you’ll stick with these settings, or do you have plans to write further afield?

I’m going to Alaska for research on my next novel, but part of the novel will still be set here in Washington. I’ve got a bunch of notes for a novel that takes place in Montana, too. I also want to write a novel that takes place in Baja. Mostly because I want to live down there for a year and get fat on fish and tequila.

Is it too early to ask about The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving? What was the inspiration for it, and when can we expect to see it on shelves?

Galleys for The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving are going to print any day, and the novel will be released in October 2012 in the States – not sure about UK. It’s a very different book than West of Here. While West of Here represented a huge technical challenge for me, TRFoCG was a huge emotional challenge. It’s a coming-of-middle-age about a male nurse in crisis. Without talking too much about the subject matter, I’ll just say that the novel really took a lot out of me emotionally. In the end, it’s probably my funniest book because it had to be. I’m really excited to get the novel in people’s hands because I feel like it’s one of those novels that’s going to be cathartic for a lot of readers.

Not that you asked, but I’m almost finished with another novel now called The Dreamlife of Huntington Sales, which is another departure in that it actually employs something of a thriller apparatus to frame 16 different limited points of view. I’m really excited about this one, too. I thrive on pushing myself into new and uncomfortable places as a artist.

Do you think it’s necessary for a writer (or any artist) to keep pushing the boundaries of their craft in that way? Or is that more of a personal decision to keep things fresh and interesting?

I don’t think it’s fair to make it some kind of general edict, but as an artist, that’s certainly what I’m after. I want to be developing tools as I go along, surprising myself, frustrating my own intentions, learning, facing new problems all the time. Otherwise I feel like I’m just going through the motions. Sometimes this can make novel-writing an excruciating exercise that leaves me totally exhausted, but I feel like it’s always worth the effort in the end. Especially for the reader. They say hard writing makes for easy reading and I believe that on every level. I do think there is a danger of alienating your readership at times, or at least those readers who have certain expectations for a specific artist. But I can’t worry about that. I just need to keep pushing myself.

I know that you’re constantly reading new writers, and you’re noticeably active in the writing community. Whose books have you particularly enjoyed over the last year?

I read two Ron Rash books this year which really impressed me: Serena, and the forthcoming The Cove. I also read two by Stewart O’Nan this year: Emily Alone, and the forthcoming The Odds. These two guys are among the best American novelists working in my mind. I’m also a big fan of Dan Chaon, along with Adam Ross.

And finally… you’ve interviewed a lot of authors yourself over the years, so what’s your favorite question to ask? And what would be your own answer?

Hmmm. I guess I don’t have a favorite question. I suppose if there was one question I’d ask every writer it would be: Why do you do it? Why do you endure all the heartache and frustration and financial duress and existential discomfort that comprises devoting your life to writing novels (which people may or may not ever read)? And I guess my answer would be that it makes me a bigger person – a more expansive person, a more understanding, thoughtful, empathetic person. A better problem solver, a better husband, a better dad, a better son, and a better friend.

For a debut novel, Alexi Zentner’s Touch has already earned a startling number of accolades, including nominations for the Giller Prize and the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Awards. These nominations are less surprising, however, once you open the pages of Touch. Zentner has managed to craft one of the most compelling stories of hardship and loss to hit bookshelves in recent years, coloured with mythical encounters that might have been lifted straight from the pages of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The combination of his characters’ bleak, hand-to-mouth existence and the fantastical events that underline their lives is both refreshingly new and shockingly traditional, and has led to the coining of an entire literary subgenre – mythical realism. Canadian by birth, but currently living in Ithaca, NY, Alexi Zentner has handcrafted a new literary landscape for the frosty wildernesses of the North.

How (and why) did you settle on the title Touch? The connection to the narrative isn’t immediately obvious, but it suits it so perfectly!

I usually know the titles of stories or books I’m working on early in the process, and the same was true of Touch. The impetus of the book was an image of a girl trapped under the ice. I was fascinated – terrified might be a better word – by the idea of having somebody you loved so close to you and yet to be unable to help them, unable to even touch them.

When I first started writing Touch, my daughters were younger, and though I think, as a father, the feeling never quite leaves you, I was acutely aware of just how dangerous the world can be, and how little, ultimately, I can do to keep my daughters safe. You never want your kids to get hurt in any way, but it’s almost worse when you can see it happening and can’t quite get there in time to stop it, and that is part of why that image stuck with me.

It’s interesting, because I have been asked about the title, and it was never something that I questioned. I had that title before I was more than a page into it. Almost everybody reacted positively to the title, although my French editors had to change the title to The Woods of Sawgamet, since Touch didn’t really translate well. I do think the title fits well, though. Aside from the image of the girl trapped under the ice – something that almost every reader has said stays with them – there are all of the different ways in which characters touch or fail to touch each other. Obviously, that’s in a physical sense, but also in the way that stories are passed down and changed from generation to generation, and the way that somebody who is long dead and gone can reach out and touch somebody else through myth and memory.

Do you find that your fiction tends to develop from single images in this way? Or do your stories generally spring from a different impetus?

My fiction always comes from an image, a first sentence, or a situation. Very, very quickly, that impetus is surrounded and shaped by characters and settings, but I’ve always had to have that spark to build the fire. I was given an assignment for the Canadian magazine The Walrus to write a story that had to follow five rules selected by another author, and it wasn’t until I had the first sentence that I had the rest of the story. I know that other writers can do it, can pick a theme or a character or even a place and just build a world, but I need something to hang it on to avoid ending up with a character study.

Weather and physical conditions affect a large aspect of what happens in Touch, from the first chapter onwards. Do you spend a lot of time outdoors? Is this an important theme for you?

I don’t spend as much time outdoors as I’d like. Part of it is a simple laziness. As much as I love hiking and camping and being outside of the city, I’m not particularly good at getting myself to do it in the first place. It’s usually my wife who suggests we take the dog and the kids for a hike, and after I grumble about it, I end up asking why we don’t do it more often.

Before I had kids, I used to spend a lot more time in outdoor pursuits. I actually met my wife because we both rock climbed, and there was a period of years where I lived in the American Midwest, and going rock climbing outside of a gym meant driving anywhere from three to seven hours. After work on a Friday we would pile into a car and drive to Kentucky. We’d set up camp at three in the morning, grab a couple of hours sleep, and then climb until we could barely lift our arms.

Now, we live in a smaller university town, and part of what I like about it is the ability to find spaces where I can still feel like I might be alone. I try to take trips to parts of North America where there is still wilderness – or, at least, the feeling of wilderness – but the city I live in has pockets that feel more untrammelled. As a writer, the appeal of locations that are more removed from big cities is that they strip things down for the characters. In Touch, and in the novel I just finished, The Lobster Kings, which is set in a lobster fishing village on a small island, the decisions that the characters make have real ramifications. If you are underdressed in a snowstorm in the city, you get cold. If you are underdressed in a snowstorm in the woods outside of Sawgamet, where Touch is set, you can die.

I would never argue that weather or landscape serve as characters in and of themselves, but they can have profound impacts on the decisions that characters make. In a story, setting is simply the stage upon which the characters play their lives, but if that stage is a place where the natural world has a certain dominion, it can amplify the actions of characters. In Touch, in particular, this is true, and I found that the world I created in Touch was one that I was very drawn to.

I should add that, as a writer, I find the natural world is where I prefer to be. I’m not particularly precious in my writing habits – give me a laptop and a pair of headphones and I can write anywhere – but I envy the idea of having some sort of a cottage on the ocean or in the mountains, somewhere hard pressed against the natural world where I could write for part of the year.

A lot has already been made of your use of myth and fantasy in the book, and you’ve coined the term ‘mythical realism’. Can you explain what mythical realism means to you, and why it attracts you?

On a base level, when people hear magical realism, they think Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I admire Marquez – Love in the Time of Cholera is still one of my favourite books – but I’m not trying to ape him, and I use the term mythical realism at least partially to distinguish what I’m trying to do from his work. Magical realism is very strongly associated with the landscapes and traditions of central and South America and Europe, and I think that when you take those frameworks of magical realism and just map them over a different culture and landscape you end up with a work that is a palimpsest; the ghostly images of those other cultures and landscapes show through your own work.

There are plenty of writers who have created interesting work this way, but I’m trying to do something new. I’m trying to wrestle with the questions of myth and storytelling, trying to figure out how it is that in my cultures and landscapes – Canada and the USA – stories become myths, how the vastness of the North American landscape and immigrant experience shapes who we were, who we are, and who we will become. I actually think that in the past year there have been a number of books that are experimenting with mythical realism, fumbling with trying to figure out the role of myth in our cultures. I’d argue that as far as literary trends go, we went through a painful period of detached irony as the main driving force for writers, and that one of the things that I want to do is to try to reclaim the sense of wonder that I think all readers strive for.

Look, what I really want to do is to try to tell good stories, to give readers the chance to lose themselves in a book, to remember what it was like as a kid to hear a story and to believe in something greater than ourselves. Mythical realism is something that should be woven throughout a book, in the same way that myth and story are woven through our lives, not just dropped in like a parlour trick. I don’t want a reader to think, “oh, that’s beautiful.” I want them to feel it. And if that means that, as a writer, I need to risk being overly sentimental, I’d rather risk that than risk nothing at all.

Which books stood out to you as being in this vein? Are there any particular writers you admire right now?

I hesitate to speak for other writers, because I think that not all of them would agree with my assessment of their work as mythical realism, but there is a new generation of writers who are including myth and magic in their work in an unapologetic way that is completely different from the way it has been used in magical realism. As for writers who I admire right now, it’s kind of an endless list. One of the great things about writing a book is that it gives you a chance to meet other writers. Both Peter Mountford (A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism) and Alan Heathcock (Volt) had books come out around the same time as Touch, and I both admire their work and was glad to have brothers-in-arms to talk with as the publication process moved forward.

You’ve recently returned from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and while I know that many American writers rate it highly, I’m sure that readers elsewhere have no idea what it is. Can you explain Bread Loaf for us briefly, and give us some insight into what it’s done for you?

I love Bread Loaf. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a conference for writers that takes place near Middlebury, Vermont. The campus – and outpost of Middlebury College – is within sight of Bread Loaf Mountain, hence the name. The conference is about ten days, and consists of workshops in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, as well as readings, craft lectures, and other activities. The entire conference revolves around the written word. It’s a bucolic setting that’s in a part of the USA that I love, and it’s an incredibly intense period of focus on writing. I think, because the campus is sort of isolated, it’s a heightened experience.

I’ve been twice. The first time was as a work-study scholar. The work part of it is that you work as a waiter during the conference, which is pretty demanding on top of the packed schedule, but you become very close with your fellow waiters, all of whom are picked for their “promise” as writers. This past summer I went as a “fellow,” which meant that I assisted the faculty member in workshop, taught a craft lecture, and gave individual consultations. More than anything, what it’s done for me is help me to become close with other writers, so that no matter where I travel or what festivals I attend, there is usually somebody there that I know. It’s a way of making the writing world smaller and friendlier.

Do you think writers are naturally driven to seek each other out? Or are we more private, solitary creatures?

Reading teaches you how to be alone, and any successful writer is also a reader. I need a certain amount of time to myself, and find that when I have house guests or am staying with somebody else for an extended period that I end up hiding out in my room so that I can read or write.

That being said, I also love hanging out with friends and enjoy doing literary festivals. I like doing panels and am comfortable on stage, and I love teaching and being in front of a room. I need a balance of both. I love meeting other writers, because it’s such an odd profession and it’s nice to have other people who understand what it means to be alone at a desk. Part of it is that other writers are also readers, and I love talking about books and literature. I’m not sure that I necessarily seek out the company of other writers – because I have kids and don’t teach right now, I have a large group of friends who aren’t writers – but I do enjoy the company of fellow writers.

Still, after every trip, every conference, every festival, no matter how much I enjoy it, I’m always happy to get home again. To get to the point where people want you to come and talk about your book you have to spend a lot of time in a room by yourself.

You strike me as someone who loves telling a story. What’s the attraction to storytelling for you? Do you think the nature of storytelling is changing at all as we move further and further into the digital age?

I don’t think the digital age changes storytelling. That’s the short answer. That makes for boring columns, however, and it’s a lot easier to freak out and write about how the internet is changing everything, how storytelling is dying – but we are hardwired to respond to stories. I realise that the way that stories are conveyed is changing, but the human need for stories isn’t. Stories are how we figure out who we are as humans, both individually and in the aggregate. We seek out information so that we can know things, but we seek out stories so that we can feel things.

I love telling stories, but honestly, what I like even more than telling them is being told them. I think that most writers – most storytellers of whatever ilk – follow that path because at some point in their development they came across some sort of a book or a movie or even a piece of music that captured them, that made everything fall away. I’d argue that reading in particular is important. Aside from the idea that stories help us figure out who we are, reading teaches us how to be alone, how to be comfortable with ourselves.

For publishers, there are business model concerns. I can’t even pretend to understand the business model of publishing and making films. Speaking specifically about movies, it’s frustrating to me to see the amount of absolute shit that is produced, the number of films where the budget for fake blood has to be triple whatever they spent on writers. I’m personally quite happy to go see an action movie, but I’d say that about half of what I see could have been made a lot better if I’d been given the script and a weekend to rewrite it. Story comes first. Story comes last. True for books, true for movies. The movies and books that stay with us do so because they tap something inside of us. I don’t care how it’s delivered – though an e-reader, a real book, on a movie screen, on your phone – what matters is that there’s something that captures the reader/audience.

I know you’ve just finished writing The Lobster Kings… is it too early to ask for a preview? Will readers see similar themes to Touch, or is it a departure from your first book?

It’s set off the east coast of North America on an island that is actually contested territory, neither Canadian nor American. It’s told from the point of view of Cordelia Kings, a lobster fisherman (though she’s a woman), who is one of three daughters in a line that can trace itself back to the first white settler on the island, Brumfitt Kings, who was both a fisherman and a painter. There are Shakespearian undertones – which is probably evident from the name Cordelia, though this is certainly not a retelling of King Lear – and mythical realism: the Kings carry both a curse and a blessing through the generations. I think that The Lobster Kings is very different from Touch, and yet it will still feel familiar to readers. So it’s both a departure and similar.

In a literary landscape dominated by celebrity memoirs and vampire soft porn, Peter Mountford’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide To Late Capitalism, stands out like a shining nugget of gold. Telling the story of equities analyst Gabriel de Boya as he collects information on Bolivia for an unscrupulous hedge fund, it’s a novel that feels both steeped in tradition and undeniably of its time. As Gabriel wrangles with his conscience and falls in love, Mountford uses his plight to comment on the political situation in South America, the financial bubble of 2005 just as it was about to burst, and the ethical implications of our Western culture of greed.

It’s also a fantastically good read, and it’s little wonder that the literary world has taken note of Mountford’s achievement. Marrying thriller and romance aspects with unashamed political and financial commentary, A Young Man’s Guide To Late Capitalism is one of the most exciting novels to have come out of the current financial crisis to date–and it’s all the more remarkable for being a debut. Peter Mountford currently lives in Seattle, where he is writer-in-residence for the Seattle Arts and Lectures programme.

When and why did you decide to become a writer?

I started writing by accident. I was 11, I think, and I had this very ornate daydream, but I couldn’t keep track of it all, so I started writing it down. Next thing I knew, I had 50 pages, a novella. When I was 14 I outlined a fictional diary of Vlad Tepes, the medieval prince who was the model for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Needless to say, I was slightly out of my range with that one and it never came to be.

As an undergraduate, I studied economics and international affairs, and then I went and got a sensible job at a think tank writing about international economics. But I was already a writer, I just didn’t know it. I was sneaking off to write fiction, and the way I was looking at the world, the way I was cultivating and maybe even hoarding interesting life experiences–it was as if I was doing research, and I think I sort of knew it. So, after a couple interesting years being a policy wonk, I quit and started reading Nabokov, Annie Proulx, Milan Kundera–dozens of other great writers. And I started writing three to four hours a day, seven days a week. I haven’t stopped.

Now, mind you, that was 2002 and my ‘debut’ novel was published in 2011.

So what was your journey to publication like during that time?

After embarking on the writing life with lots of youthful vim and vigour in 2002, I began to encounter what’s known, in the business, as the real world. And it was humbling, if not to say crushing. I wrote huge volumes of fiction and got lavished with rejection. My first acceptance for a short story came in 2006, when I was 30 years old. On the plus side, it was an acceptance to the anthology Best New American Voices 2008, but still. By that point I’d collected about a thousand rejections (I keep them all). I’d written and abandoned two-and-a-half novels, and 20-some stories–at least a thousand pages of fiction that will never see the light of day.

In the summer of 2005, my writing turned a corner. I remember it vividly. I was in the middle of the MFA program at the University of Washington and I went to Ecuador for a few weeks, feeling very dejected. The first year at the UW had been a deep low-point. I got savaged with rejection and some very demoralizing critiques. It really broke me down. I began to realise how much higher I needed to aim, how much better I needed to be. At the end of that year I had a very revelatory class with David Shields, who said something to the effect of: ‘Do you really just want to be this dutiful craftsman, creating these quaint stories that are totally antique, totally separated from the world we actually inhabit?’ He said he couldn’t stand to even read that stuff, and I had to admit that I felt the same way.

That summer, Shields got me reading J.M. Coetzee. I went to Ecuador and wrote and wrote and wrote and read and read and read. And when I came back, I was a very different kind of writer and it was obvious, immediately. Within a year, I’d started winning some awards and fellowships and grants. I started publishing in some well-regarded literary journals. In fact, most of what I’ve written since then has been published.

A Young Man’s Guide… reminded me strongly of Graham Greene, specifically the combination of exotic setting, intrigue, and an underlying discussion of everyday morality. Did Greene influence you at all?

Yes, Graham Greene absolutely was a huge influence. In many ways, I more or less aspire to write like he did–both the so-called diversions and the weirder stuff. He was obsessed with God, seemed incapable of not writing about God. I think I’m similarly obsessed with money, how it operates in our planet and in our minds–I set out to write a story about my granny and I end up with a story about money. Other writers I adore include Deborah Eisenberg, Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee. Nabokov. And scores of others, of course. The list could go on for days. I’m reading Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists right now and it’s tremendous.

Money is one of those topics that great literature often deals with (like love, or religion) but it seems that modern writers are sometimes afraid to address it, or they wilfully avoid it. Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s a topic that should be addressed more often?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, recently. It seems that literary-minded people have quietly agreed that finance is somehow not central to the zeitgeist. Money is a deeply taboo subject, obviously, and all the more so among people who consider themselves to be artists. Finance and economics are complicated and often poorly understood, also, and they’re not thought of as sexy. A lot of writers I know are proudly dismissive of economics–they paint it boring–it’s either viewed as nerdy, in the unattractive way, or it’s associated with these cartoonish preppy monsters.

That is nonsense. A cursory glance at our recent history reveals that economics and money are not just the engines of our era, not just what defines virtually everything about our time, but they’re also spectacularly dramatic. It’s not an abstract subject. It’s not just a guy with a calculator. It’s very emotional and makes and breaks the lives of–well, everyone. So, yes, I think it’s a topic that should be addressed more often in literature.

The foreign location feels like a big part of A Young Man’s Guide… too; it’s hard to imagine it being set anywhere else. How early did you settle on Bolivia as your setting? Why that country in particular, and South America in general?

I’ve travelled a lot and most of my writing therefore concerns people living in or visiting foreign countries. It’s not a conscious thing, but I suppose I think that when you’re away from your comfort-zone, your home, you have a slightly heightened perception of things, and it casts your own community, your circumstances, in a radically new light, so it can be an awakening. I like having that space as a kind of foundation for a story. That change in perception is all the more true if the place is extremely different, like Bolivia, rather than, say, England.

Bolivia’s also the poorest country in South America, and it’s a bit intense, a bit too hardcore for most people. Not a big tourist destination. So I liked that. And it’s gorgeous, like you’re on the moon–the moon with shantytowns.

And, finally, and maybe most importantly, Bolivia’s history is a near perfect example for the overall experience of countries that were colonized and brutalized by the Europeans. Their history is heartbreaking. It’s occasionally bizarre beyond belief, too–they lost their coastline in a war with Chile over bat guano, which Bolivia wanted to tax (it contains a useful ingredient in gunpowder). There are countless other surreal milestones, like when someone traded a vast swath of oil-rich jungle with Brazil for a nice white stallion. But beneath it all there’s a harrowing history of Northern-hemisphere-dwelling people, mostly Spanish–although the US certainly did its part during the Cold War, in particular–siphoning natural resources from the land without properly compensating the Bolivian people. In Bolivia this aspect of their history it’s referred to ruefully as ‘El Saqueo’–the sacking.

Having spent so long writing about Bolivia (and talking about it in interviews!) do you feel a stronger bond with the country than you used to? How did writing about it change your relationship with it?

When I started writing the book, I was very interested in Bolivia, and I thought its history was gorgeously bizarre and also very apt, a kind of perfect model for the corrosive long-term effects of centuries of colonial pillaging. Now, I love the country and feel a very personal connection to its people. I have a Google alert on Bolivia and so I now read the news about the country daily. Also, I’ve been very heartened by the responses of Bolivians who’ve read the book, because it’s not the most flattering portrait of the country–but I’ve been contacted by a number of Bolivians who told me that they felt I’d captured La Paz perfectly.

I know you teach creative writing in addition to producing your own work. How do you find that it feeds back into your own writing? Is it an integral part of being a professional writer today?

Richard Ford was in Seattle the other day for an event and an audience member asked him what he liked most about teaching, and he replied, ‘The money.’ So, yeah, it’s an integral part of being a professional writer, especially if you’re not writing bodice-rippers. If you’re writing books that take years to write, the kinds of books that don’t sell very well because they’re ‘difficult,’ then teaching is probably how you pay the rent.

There’s another reply to this question, of course, one that talks about how inspired one gets by one’s students, but that’s nonsense. Or, if someone says it sincerely, they’re probably not much of a writer. I like what David Foster Wallace said about this in a Charlie Rose interview, he said something to the effect of, ‘The first couple years it’s really revelatory, you learn a lot from your students and it’s a very hard experience. Then, once you’ve seen a few thousand undergraduate stories, it becomes just another day job and you no longer learn anything at all from it.’

I like teaching because it gets me out of the house, and it generates some income, and I like the act of talking about writing–that’s why I’m friends with a lot of writers, and when I teach I get paid to have those kinds of conversations. Also, it’s very fun to discover a writer who is fucking amazing and doesn’t know it yet. Some woman, say, who does data entry at a medical supplies company, and I get to inform her that she’s ready to get published, and that she should get in touch with a top-shelf literary agent in New York City at her earliest convenience. That’s fun, but it doesn’t happen that often.

If you were given a time machine that allowed you to go back and tutor your younger self, what advice would you give to the younger you? Or are there any particular skills that you’d tell yourself to work on?

I’d tell myself to aim higher, stylistically, intellectually–in every way. Like so much fiction by beginners, mine felt like the writing of a person who just wasn’t working hard enough, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. If a sentence isn’t doing several jobs at once, it’s probably dead weight. I’ve heard that there’s only one rule with writing: never be boring. I like that, the writing needs to be fucking riveting, one way or another. I’d add that authenticity is very important–if you’re not writing about something that really matters to you, deeply matters to you, it’s probably going to feel a little trite.

Crossing into similar territory to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, The Terror of Living offers more than just plot twists and cliff-hangers–although there plenty of those. It also explores the lengths that people will go to when thrust into unfamiliar circumstances, and the unlikely heroism that can emerge from pain and suffering. If it’s starting to sound more like a literary novel than a genre thriller, that’s no coincidence–The Terror of Living is one of those rare books that transcends its genre with every page. Stephen King recently called it “one of those books you start at one in the afternoon and put down, winded, after midnight”.

Its author isn’t exactly what you’d expect, either. For a young man who’s written about organized crime, shootouts and extreme physical torture, Urban Waite is surprisingly laid back and amiable. You’d never guess that his calm, smiling exterior hides the gloomy depths that he sometimes reveals on the page. Currently living in Seattle, the setting for The Terror of Living, Waite has given the city–and the entire Pacific Northwest–a new voice for its dark places and hidden secrets.

Given that The Terror of Living is your debut, can you tell us a little about how you got to this point? What path led you to publication?

For about a third of my life I’ve been working to become a writer. I never thought it would turn out the way it has. I never thought I’d have a novel, or even a job that centred on putting words to paper. It was always just a hope, a sort of dream to aspire to. For the most part I really did think that my life would continue the way it had for so many years, working nights to pay my mortgage, while keeping up my hobby of writing during the day.

A few years ago that all changed. I’d been out of school for several years when things just started to click. The stories I wrote before heading off to work were starting to get picked up in small literary publications. As a result I started receiving summer fellowships, grants, and residencies, while the publications started to become larger and larger. All this attention soon led me to an agent. And while I was still so engrossed in publishing stories, I didn’t see that the opportunity to write a book had simply appeared as if from nowhere.

Perhaps that’s just how blinded I was at the time, not even able to see that everything I had been doing, publishing short stories, taking these fellowships and residencies, had led me to the perfect place. Where everything I needed to strike out, as an author, was right there in front of me. I never thought I’d publish a novel. The idea seemed too bold, but there it was in front of me, an opportunity to do just that.

Did you set out to write a crime thriller when you started The Terror of Living? Or did the characters lead you in that direction?

I started out with the character of Phil Hunt. At the time there was a lot I didn’t know about him that I wanted to know, while also there was a lot that I knew already. He was an ex con, released twenty years before, and in those twenty years he’d never really forgiven himself for the crimes he committed. In this way, as I was writing out his first few scenes, I was very much interested in trying to understand why a man like him was working such a ruinous living in order to get by.

Part of what I loved about writing Terror, was that as I went on I began to understand the characters better, the situations they inhabited and the circumstances that had brought them there. They opened up for me, revealing more and more as the pages went by. In this way, and with characters like these, I found much of what I was writing about did have to do with crime. Though I certainly didn’t intend to write a crime thriller, the characters began to lead me in that direction. The truth of it was that as I got deeper into the novel, the more I enjoyed what I was writing.

I know The Terror of Living has been published in several countries, and some seem to treat it as a genre crime novel, while others have given it a more literary treatment. How do you feel about the industry’s need to divide their ‘product’ into genres like this? Is there a point when a crime novel becomes so good that it transcends its genre, and becomes a literary work?

I really try not to pay much attention to things like this. I don’t really care all that much if my novels are placed in the genre category or the literary category. All I care about is if people will read them and, if they do, what their reactions to my work will be. I put my all into everything I do and I hope that comes across whether I’m waiting tables, writing books, or building a deck. Good writing is just good writing and it doesn’t matter what genre it comes in.

The title strikes me as interesting too. It perfectly conveys the thriller elements of the story, but at the same time it avoids the clichés, nursery rhymes and cheap puns of most crime fiction. Was this a conscious decision on your part?

Thanks for the compliment about the title. Sometimes I love it; sometimes I think I just went overboard. I don’t mean to throw myself under the bus here, but I also want to tell you that it was a very tough decision to go ahead with The Terror of Living as the title. At the time I had about 320 pages or so and I needed to present the manuscript to my agent. I didn’t have a title and I didn’t want to send him a nameless manuscript. While I felt the story and the characters within were well polished, I also felt I needed to present the novel in as finished a way as I possibly could.

The title, The Terror of Living, was a mix of a few things. It needed, at least for me, to be something that would link all the characters within. It needed to be strong and to infer the inherent danger of the lifestyles I was trying to convey. It also needed to be something that would catch the attention of a prospective reader, as the novel sat facing out at them from the shelf.

It was about a week or so before I was due to present the manuscript to my agent when by chance I happened to go to a poetry lecture. I was sitting in the audience listening as the speaker began to talk about the pain of the terminally ill, especially those that would die young. I listened, hanging on every word, wondering what I might have done in a similar situation. How I would react if someone were to tell me something like this, to give me the news that I would die of a disease that could not be averted. This moment haunted me for a time, and though I don’t like to dwell on it too much, it certainly stuck with me. Of course the thought that we all die is always there, it was the suddenness of that lecture and the ideas it stirred in me which truly led me to my title. Every character in The Terror of Living was running from that same inevitable problem. One we simply cannot outrun.

I want to ask you about your influences, as it seems that they’d be an unusual mix for someone who’s been published as a genre writer, but I don’t want to resort to the typical “which writers influenced you” question. So… which five people would you want to invite to a dinner party? Living or dead, writers or otherwise, the choice is yours.

I feel like I’m going to disappoint you on this one. I doubt very much there would be a single writer at this dinner party. The people I write about are not writers but people who usually are working some sort of blue-collar job, living pay check to pay check. Those are the types of people who influence what I write. And while I certainly learn a great deal from the books I read, I learn so much more from sitting back and having a conversation with someone about a subject I know nothing about.

I know you’ve been touring a lot with The Terror of Living. How daunting is this for a debut novelist? And how relevant is it in this age of blogging and online interviews?

Most of the promotional process I really don’t understand. There are authors who live for this sort of thing, for touring and shaking hands and telling jokes. Sometimes I wonder if those guys, the ones that almost seem like politicians, are even in the business of writing.

I guess what I mean to say is that I’m no socialite. I like having a beer every once in a while or telling some stories, but the whole business side of things is something I never even considered when writing Terror. The months leading up to publication and the touring that followed seemed more to me like work than anything I’d ever done before. It put me outside of what I was interested in, which in my case was writing.

I don’t mean to be so blunt about the business, but I do think that writers are artists and making art a commodity becomes tricky. It’s the reason why people like me have agents and publicists and people who know what they’re doing. Whose jobs centre on helping bungling shut-ins like myself get back to doing what we love.

To make a long answer short here, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing when it comes to touring, or blogging, or interviewing. I just try to make it up as I go along, and in that way it’s somewhat like writing. I’m just trying to make it up as I go, all the while hoping it all turns out okay.

Any crazy stories from your time on the road, promoting the book? Or has it all been cheap hotel rooms and early nights?

In Boston I worked in a restaurant waiting tables. I did it for five years and a few months after I left the restaurant went under. All of those people I worked with lost their jobs and a lot of them moved, some to other restaurants, some went back to school, or others still decided to go on and move into something else. Now, in every city I turn up in, there is an old friend I used to work with waiting to take me out for drinks, show me the city, and catch up.

A lot of them can’t believe this is what I do for a living now. Writing was always kind of a hobby, it was something I did with my alone time before I went to work. It wasn’t exactly who I was. I’d say it would be hard to define me by it. And so when I go to these cities on tour, I do my reading, I talk about books for a little, then I get back to life as I know it. A life where there aren’t readings or book discussions. There’s just a few old friends, a few drinks, and maybe some food. Pretty simple, but it seems to work out every time.

You have to give Jessica Anthony credit: in this current climate of MFA-educated clones it’s unusual to come across a truly unique narrator. We’ve all read plenty of Holden Caulfield rip-offs, or various takes on the Kerouac drifter-philosopher, the William Burroughs educated-junky, or the Paul Bowles traveller-adventurer. There haven’t been too many Hungarian meat-selling dwarves who live in an abandoned bus in a Pennsylvanian field, though.

In case that makes Anthony’s The Convalescent sound like a freakish novelty, we should point out that she’s an outstanding young talent, and was the inaugural winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award in 2004. While there will undoubtedly be plenty of copies of her debut novel sold on the basis of its eccentric subject matter, it has far more going for it than simply cheap laughs and a handful of meat anecdotes. There are echoes of Grass and Gogol in its embracing of the ridiculous and the sublime in equal measure, and you can’t help feeling that Jessica Anthony must have lived in Eastern Europe in a previous life.

The convalescent of the title is Rovar Pfleigman, a mute dwarf descended from a peculiar line of Hungarian misfits and failures. Interspersed with his story is an imagined history of the Pfleigmans, stretching back centuries to the particularly dark ages of expansion and conflict in Europe. Rovar’s ancestors aren’t the heroes, though: they’re the outcasts, the unclean minority who live on the fringe of the new settlements, surviving on scraps and eking out the most sorry, meagre existence imaginable. As is befitting of their low status, they also perform that most disgusting of tasks: the cutting up of meat.

Rovar has more specific problems on his plate, though. The land that his bus-home stands on is being claimed by a developer, who seems determined to eject their eccentric squatter, by force if necessary. Meanwhile his host of physical illnesses and deformities, which include a disturbing tendency for his skin to peel off in long strips, mean that he’s become a figure of ridicule and disgust in the nearby town. Local paediatrician Dr. Monica takes an unlikely interest in his condition, providing Rovar with a friend and supporter, as well as an unpleasantly graphic crush, but there’s clearly something going on that extends beyond the purely physical. Given the peculiar nature of his existence there will be no easy solutions to Rovar’s problems.

The Convalescent does suffer slightly from a few narrative holes, as Anthony struggles to develop a story around her unique, deformed hero. The subplot surrounding the land developer is never fully resolved, and while the Kafkaesque conclusion to the novel makes thematic sense it’s unlikely to satisfy the majority of readers. Explanations are few, and you may put the book down wondering quite what it was all about.

Where it succeeds, though, is in its narrative voice, and it’s this that pulls The Convalescent out of every sticky situation with our interest intact. Rovar Pfleigman is one of the most amusing and poignant anti-heroes since Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, and his constant railing against a world that has cast him and his kind aside for generations manages to encompass both the ridiculous and the curiously touching. He’s a true character in every sense of the word, pulling the novel’s narrative along behind him like Oskar Matzerath’s battered old drum.

It’s possible to pick holes in The Convalescent’s final act, but for a debut novel it’s still a remarkable act of creation. By the time you come to leave Anthony’s curiously warped world of grumpy mute dwarves, medieval giants and packaged meat, you’ll find yourself wishing that real life was actually this vibrant and colourful. And when you find yourself being envious of a Hungarian dwarf with a rare skin condition, you know that the author has pulled off a very remarkable feat indeed.

There’s something to be said for the contemporary novelist having a background in psychology. While the mass-market thrillers and romance novels that pack the supermarket shelves are happy to remain plot-driven page-turners, the modern literary novel prides itself on its ability to unravel the thoughts and emotions of its characters rather than relying on narrative thrills, to show us what Barton Fink memorably termed ‘the life of the mind’. One need only look at the works of Ian McEwan or Paul Auster to see that contemporary fiction is as much about internal ponderings as it is about external events.

Patrick McGrath’s novels have always been distinguished by his ability to work his way into damaged and abnormal psyches, and, as you may have guessed from the title, Trauma is no exception. The story of Charlie Weir, a psychiatrist specialising in trauma victims in New York City, it shows that even those who analyse people for a living can’t always see inside their own heads. Charlie could use a few sessions on his own couch.

Admittedly his life is more chaotic than most, although it’s not so far removed from reality that we can’t identify with him. Charlie’s marriage has fallen apart following the death of his brother-in-law, a war veteran who Charlie was treating for post-traumatic stress syndrome. Charlie’s ex-wife Agnes blames him for her brother’s suicide, and he is now abandoned to a life of solitude and self-recrimination. Following the death of his mother he reopens an ill-advised fling with Agnes, but at the same time he is introduced to Nora, a friend of his brother’s who he begins to date. Nora has issues of her own, and she often wakes up in the middle of the night suffering from horrific nightmares; naturally, it isn’t long before Charlie offers to treat her for what he diagnoses as an underlying trauma.

It’s not immediately obvious where McGrath is heading with Trauma, as Charlie’s life meanders between these various threads, and even once the narrative has finished you may be left wondering what it was all about. Fortunately McGrath’s prose style makes for easy and engaging reading, and in Charlie Weir he has created an intriguing and troubled central character, rebounding from a lifetime of failures, poor choices and traumatic events. Even if you can’t see the point in this expose of a fictional psyche, you can’t helped being dragged into Charlie’s own particular circle of hell.

In fact Trauma works far better as a thesis than it does as a novel, as Patrick McGrath seems determined to push the modern novel’s obsession with psychological realism further than any of his peers. Conventional plotting is largely sacrificed in favour of the complex puzzle that is Charlie Weir’s brain: Trauma doesn’t unfold as a series of events so much as a sequence of revelations concerning its narrator’s mental state. For some of you this will be an infuriating diversion from the more conventional approaches to plot and narrative, but you have to admire McGrath’s ability to dissect the psyche of his central character so acutely that we feel we know him better than he knows himself.

As for those mass-market thrillers, Trauma is as far from them as Freud’s The Interpretation Of Dreams is from this year’s latest John Grisham paperback. And that can only be a good thing.

Over the last few years Chuck Palahniuk has revelled in the sordid, the grotesque, and the downright dirty like a particularly literate pig in shit, and for many readers his decision to set a novel within the pornography industry must have seemed like a marriage made in Heaven, or at least the more carnal parts of Hell. He seemed to have reached his high (or low) point with the short story ‘Guts’, which also made a gruesome appearance at the start of his pseudo-horror novel Haunted, but Snuff threatened to eclipse even that snippet of filth when it came to bodily fluids, disgusting urban myths and the deviant imagination.

Unfortunately Snuff comes as something of a disappointment after all that expectation, a few muffled grunts in a dimly lit room when we were hoping for a glorious pop-shot. There’s still plenty to keep the Palahniuk fans happy, including a vast number of his trademark factual asides and fictionalised urban mythology, but somewhere in the mix the story goes missing. If you strip out the non-fiction snippets and deviations from the main narrative, you’re actually left with a story that could have been told in a handful of pages. Snuff would make a great short story, but as a novel it feels thin and drawn-out.

We should attempt at least a brief description of the book’s events, although it’s hard to summarise the minimal plot without revealing everything in one ill-judged full-frontal shot. Legendary porn actress Cassie Wright is intending to make history with a 600-man gang-bang, and the event is to be captured on film with the explicit intention of reviving her flagging career. The narrative flits between four characters in the waiting room, where the 600 prospective porn stars stand around in their jockey shorts awaiting their thirty seconds of fame: there’s Sheila, Cassie’s assistant and right-hand woman; Mr. 600, also known as Branch Bacardi, a veteran porn star; Mr. 137, also known as disgraced TV presenter Dan Banyan; and Mr. 72, a young unknown who claims to be Wright’s abandoned child.

As events unfold there are a few surprises thrown in, particularly when it comes to the relationship between Cassie Wright and Branch Bacardi, but these are largely secondary to the constant stream of anecdotes and factoids about the porn industry, Hollywood starlets, and the history of human sexuality in general. There are even parallels drawn to Valeria Messalina, the wife of Roman Emperor Claudius, but there’s no disguising the fact that most of Snuff exists as a vehicle for a potted history of the sex industry as seen through Palahniuk’s distorting eye, along with an entertaining list of fictional porn movie adaptations in the margins (Chitty Chitty Gang Bang is a personal favourite).

As such Snuff is entertaining enough, but on the strength of Palahniuk’s other work you’d have to say that he could do better. The fragmentary narrative device doesn’t always work, especially when the characters’ voices all start to bleed into one, and as the plot races along to its premature conclusion you can’t help wondering if you’ve missed something along the way. While Fight Club and Survivor treated us to a wonderfully skewed version of the world, driven by a sense of anger and injustice, Snuff often feels like nothing more than a collection of dirty schoolboy stories.

Of course, Chuck Palahniuk is such a master of the English language that he manages to make the most sordid sex act or human degradation resonate with a warped minimalist poetry, but it’s not quite enough to hide the hollowness at Snuff‘s core. Even at his worst Palahniuk is still more interesting than the vast majority of contemporary novelists, but Snuff falls a long way short of the pornographic masterwork that we’d all hoped for. Like every porn movie ever made, this is a novel that eschews plot in favour of titillation and plenty of naked flesh – and ultimately it pays the price.

Mr. Sebastian And The Negro Magician – Daniel Wallace

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Thanks to Tim Burton’s movie adaptation, Daniel Wallace has become best known for his novel Big Fish – but his latest book, Mr. Sebastian And The Negro Magician, shows us that he’s still a wordsmith at heart. Despite the title, this is largely the story of Henry Walker. Or maybe that should be ‘stories’, as Wallace presents us with more than one account of events, and, eventually, more than one truth. Just as Henry Walker bases his career on his ability to sustain an illusion, so Wallace can make reality disappear with a wave of his pen.

Henry Walker is the Negro Magician of the title, a down-on-his-luck attraction in Musgrove’s Chinese Circus (which, incidentally, has never included a single Chinese person – already the layers of illusion are starting to pile up). Appearing alongside the likes of Rudy, the Strongest Man in the Entire World, and the tragic Ossified Girl, Henry peddles some poorly executed card tricks for his paying audience. The only thing that makes him stand out from the crowd is the fact that he’s dark-skinned – and that brings with it some problems of its own.

When three bigoted young men take an interest in Henry, it seems that his days are numbered, and even an intervention from his strongman friend Rudy can’t deter them (Rudy may be strong, but he’s also a hopeless alcoholic). The young men kidnap Henry and drive him out to a deserted field, where they proceed to deliver a ferocious beating, one of the few moments when Wallace reigns in his literary flourishes in favour of a brutal realism. It’s only when they go to wipe his face that they discover Henry’s secret – for the darkness wipes away easily, revealing his light skin beneath. The Negro Magician is not a Negro at all.

This is only the first of Wallace’s many sleights of hand, as he weaves together the story of Henry’s life from the testimony of a variety of different characters. We see Henry growing up in a hotel where his father was the janitor, and his apprenticeship to the mysterious man in room 702, the pale-faced magician known as Mr. Sebastian. Henry believes that Mr. Sebastian may be the devil, especially when he disappears on the same day that Henry’s sister Hannah vanishes. Encumbered with the knowledge that he may have contributed to his sister’s kidnapping, Henry’s life takes a turn for the worse – and for the weirder.

Given his subject matter it’s natural that Daniel Wallace should attempt some authorly tricks, and his multiple points of view allow him to play with the concepts of truth and illusion. By the end you’ll be uncertain whether Mr. Sebastian was the devil, whether he was actually several different people – or even if he existed at all. Despite the kaleidoscope of different perspectives, however, Wallace can’t help coming back to his own distinctive authorial voice, and at times it’s difficult to distinguish one narrator from another. When you have a voice that’s as witty as Wallace’s that’s no great complaint, but it can’t help weakening the believability of his narrators – and here, as in all illusions, believability is everything.

Mr. Sebastian And The Negro Magician provides a playful tour de force that leads us up one blind alley after another, but in the end it’s this very playfulness that undermines some of its effects. While Henry Walker’s life is undoubtedly intriguing, and the multiple points of view allow Wallace to toy with our perceptions and expectations, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe in any kind of reality. The reader is left with little more than a series of outlandishly tall stories. Daniel Wallace may have pulled off one of the greatest conjuring tricks in the history of modern literature, but ultimately it’s just a little too fantastical to look like anything other than a large-scale illusion – which is a shame, as there are some valid insights into the concept of self-image buried among the card tricks and vanishing rabbits. A little more reality and a little less smoke and mirrors wouldn’t have gone amiss.

On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan

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There’s something rather disappointing about Ian McEwan’s latest book. It’s not the quality of the writing – that, after all, is rarely a worry when it comes to McEwan. It’s not the accessibility of the characters either, or the setting, or even the way in which his story ends. In fact, apart from this one failing On Chesil Beach is a startling achievement: it engages us from the outset, pulls us into its narrative, then wraps it up neatly at the end without any sense of triteness or heavy-handedness.

So what is this fault? Well, put simply, On Chesil Beach is too short. Why is it that publishers feel the need to wrap up novellas as if they were novels? (I’m looking for an answer other than the obvious ‘to make more money’.) McEwan’s latest is padded out with thick paper, large print, wide margins… and it still only just stretches to a halfway respectable length.

It’s hard to imagine any debut writer having a story this short published as a stand-alone novel, yet because McEwan is one of the literary world’s big earners the public are expected to pay more than twice as much for his work as any other book on the New Releases shelves. He’s good, but he’s not that good. His publisher could at least have done the decent thing and packaged this as a novella with a handful of short stories. As it is, however, we’re left with this slight but thickly padded volume, and a story that’s short enough to devour in one sitting (I’d suggest reading it in your local bookstore one afternoon, and keeping your money firmly in your pocket).

As with much of Ian McEwan’s work, the narrative revolves around one incident, examining its repercussions as they spread out like ripples through a pond. In this instance the incident is one of inaction rather than action, as newlyweds Edward and Florence come together on their wedding night. The year is 1962, and as the world slowly blossoms into the Summer Of Love they find themselves tied to the past, hopelessly old fashioned, and inadequately equipped to deal with the subject of sex. Of course, until now they’ve managed to sidestep the issue entirely: but once the ceremonies are over and they retire to their room, there’s no choice but to face it head on.

The core of their problem isn’t that Florence is repulsed by the very idea of sex, or that Edward is inexperienced and clumsy, but rather that neither of them has the necessary vocabulary, or the freedom, to be able to express these feelings to one another. Instead the encounter goes horribly wrong, and as events spiral out of control they seem to take on a life of their own. The aftermath on the nearby beach is both remarkably simple and perfectly executed, displaying McEwan’s writing skills at their very sharpest.

Once again, however, we’re brought back to the abrupt length of On Chesil Beach. In the final few pages we race through the following years, as if someone has pressed the fast forward button and forgotten to resume play again. In fact the final pages feel more like an epilogue than a true ending to the story, and you can’t help feeling that it may even have been labelled as one if the book weren’t already so short. As the keystone of a short story collection, On Chesil Beach could have impressed us with its economy and insight; but as a stand-alone novel it can’t help feeling like a minor work. Still, I guess the publishers have kept their options open, and they could still include it in a collection at a later date – along with another hefty price tag, of course.

The Pesthouse – Jim Crace

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Maybe it’s natural, in the early years of a new millennium, for our writers and artists to turn their thoughts toward what the future could hold. After all, we’re in the 21^st century now: the future’s already here. While Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance looked at the near future, however, and predicted where we might end up if the current political climate continues, Jim Crace takes us several centuries further into this brave new world. Except it’s not so brave, and not even so new. In fact, it’s positively medieval.

The Pesthouse is set in America at an indeterminate point in the future, although all the hints suggest that it may not be quite as far away as we would like to imagine. Rather than being a sparkling, technological dream – or even the tarnished urban sprawl of Bladerunner – America has lapsed back to a pre-technological state, where metal objects are rare and valuable, and ancient metal vehicles rust by the remains of cracked highways. Not only has scientific thought regressed, but society itself has reverted back to a feudal state. Matters aren’t helped by a viral epidemic that’s sweeping the country: known only as the Flux, it carries echoes of the bubonic plague in the stories of pus-filled sores and agonising death. The only known defence is to shave all your hair from your body, and isolate yourself in a smoke-filled hut.

Into this brutal world Crace introduces his two protagonists. Franklin Lopez is travelling with his brother Jackson to the eastern shoreline, hoping to join the crowds there buying, cheating and sneaking their way onto the ships bound for Europe. In this time of decay escape is the best that anyone can hope for. His knee won’t stand up to much walking, however, and Jackson goes ahead to Ferrytown, leaving Franklin behind. Margaret, one of the residents of Ferrytown, is showing all the early signs of the Flux, so her family shave off her bright red hair and send her up to the pesthouse, an isolated cabin in the woods. When Franklin and Margaret meet there by chance, it feels like destiny. When it emerges that the rest of the population of Ferrytown have died inexplicably overnight, they have little choice but to become travelling companions.

In many ways The Pesthouse sits comfortably within a well-trodden genre. After all, there have already been countless stories of dystopian futures where man has regressed, including childhood classics like John Christopher’s Prince In Waiting trilogy or Peter Dickinson’s The Changes trilogy. All of them depict a return to medieval values as society goes into decline, whether that decline be due to disease, war, or plain old climactic change. Crace does nothing more than hint at how his fictional world came about, but it fits neatly into the pre-existing genre mould. There are even surviving artefacts from more advanced times (in this case a pair of binoculars) to remind us that this could be our fate if we don’t heed the warning.

This novel is far more than a simple, moralistic warning of things to come, however. Yes, its starting point is the implied failure and collapse of modern society, but Crace is careful not to dwell upon the issue, or to theorise too closely on how it might come about. This crude, brutal future is taken for granted, and then he moves on. The Pesthouse’s main concern is not how the world it depicts came about, but – as in all good fiction – is instead the drama that unfolds between its protagonists. It soon becomes clear that Franklin and Margaret are falling in love, but the world they inhabit is not an easy one for would-be lovers. Their own survival is frequently at risk as they join the stream of travellers heading for the coast, and the ghost of a chance at freedom, security and a better way of life.

Anyone who knows Jim Crace’s work will already be aware of his considerable writing talents, and this novel feels like a major work in every sense. It may not be the most accessible of his books – you have to buy into a whole new view of the world before you can begin to appreciate the story, after all – but once things get going it becomes almost impossible to put down. The fact that he reveals the details of this projected future with such a delicate hand quickly enables the human story to take centre stage, and in Franklin and Margaret’s tale there rests something more than a dystopian fable – there are more lessons here about the nature of human wants and needs than any futuristic story has given us since Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The future may not be bright, but Crace shows us that while there’s still human life, there will always be a spark of hope.