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.

If Camus had been at all interested in the crime or noir genre, then you could imagine he might produce something vaguely comparable to James Sallis’ novel Drive. Trotting in at a similar duration to Camus’ classic The Fall, Sallis also plays with the unfolding napkin of time in this narrative, in what he might be hinting is the only time-signature we’ve come to understand, that of film – intercuts and reversals, flashbacks and action sequences. Cinematic, in a word, which seems understandable that it was made into “a major motion picture”, as my copy reminds (yes, I’m five years too late). But that word ‘cinematic’ wouldn’t really give enough of what is due when considering Sallis’ steady metronomic delivery. He is far less erratic than a camera-toting Hollywood director, or his subsequent intercut-loving editor.

The story follows a character known only as Driver. Driver works in the movies. He also works on the occasional heist or robbery, for all of which, it is made clear, he wants only to do that one thing that he is known for. We learn that following some severe familial disturbances, young Driver’s mother has been institutionalised. Then as a teenager, he goes out on his own, leaving his foster parents’ home, taking their car, moving to Los Angeles to find work. The plot opens in medias res, blood running on a bathroom floor, before weaving back and forth through the young man’s troublesome upbringing in Phoenix, then onto his successes amongst the movie crews, and his neighbourly relationship with a Latina and her four year old son, at a point in his life when he does the closest thing to ‘settle’ that he can manage.

In the movies, the stuntman is a stand-in for the actor and the actor is a stand-in for the person. Who the person is a stand-in for seems to be a question unanswerable but posed in Sallis’ Drive (the tenth of his thirteen books), the narrative can be read straight or taken as a mini-handbook for modern alienation. This double-removal from filmed reality, a removal in itself, is the ghostlike angle that Sallis works from when he assembles the body parts of his character, Driver. A kind of fleshy ghost haunting the LA landscape, he can only been seen by a few people. That word that has been attached to his work, “existential”, chimes on every page, possibly for good reason. There seems a kind of two-lane flow of traffic where the prose can be read either quickly as an entertainment or, if it is to be taken more seriously, as a darkly philosophical tract. Then the action takes on a meditative slant, the story of a man chased by time. We’re given a neo-Western gunslinger, just one that never uses a gun. Instead he’s reworked into a driver, a slick operative of that other of man’s modern machines.

Driver does not think, only acts. Always taciturn, he is attempting to reach the state of ‘grace’ where thought or meditation is transcended. In between he drinks, makes deals with presumptuous men, pays them back.

There is that feeling that Driver’s story is fabricating unplanned as it hums along. Intentional or not, this method does give the text a kind of wandering, unpredictable quality that is both intriguing and admirable. The form functions well with his theme; Sallis has a style akin to that of a Cormac McCarthy, or a printed-word Coen Brothers production; the familiar voice of a wizened cowboy sipping bourbon in the darkest recess of a grotty, empty saloon, whispering old-timer wisdom about the nature of existence, the slew of time. But Sallis writes as if in slow bursts of energy, with a feel for narrative and rhythm that stays fresh by returns, intervals and intersections.

And setting much of this in Hollywood, a place Sallis seems to agree is as vacant and empty, even nihilistic, as its fame-hunting inhabitants, a city of life-substitutes, full of avaricious death-ready hollow men, is no mistake. His hero too is suited to the wide-open highways of Los Angeles, the reliability of the streetlights leading irreversibly to an eventide of gunshots, throat-slices and getaways. The sheen that Sallis gives to his world’s reality wraps like aluminium foil over his prose. There seems to be an idea in his head that has formulated into the novel. What the message is, is hidden, but a story emerges.

Driver marvelled at the power of our collective dreams. Everything gone to hell, the two of them become running dogs, and what do they do? They sit there watching a movie.”

His Driver is involved and not involved in life, there and not there. And the sudden violence of Driver’s actions when they happen, often shocking in retrospect, read as if they are not happening at all, or happening too quickly to mean anything in the ‘grand scheme of things’. A blip. Everything is written in unceremonious and unrelenting measures, where one note is equally as important as another. Driver, like Sallis’ other creation, Lew Griffin, creates himself from nothing. He is meticulous and careful. Assembling his life as if assembling a gun. And when the violence is done with, the lessons follow:

Maybe he should turn around. Go back and tell them that’s what life was, a long series of things that didn’t go down the way you thought they would.

Hell with it. Either they’d figure it out or they wouldn’t. Most people never did.”

One short chapter after another, Sallis delivers the occasional asides on the Hollywood system, its producers, writers, and stars, with a cast of recidivist poor people that are the only real ones worth saving. No, it’s not revolutionary, but it is entertaining:

TV’d been turned on but blessedly you couldn’t hear it. Some brainless comedy where actors with perfect white teeth spoke their lines then froze in place to let the laugh track unwind.”

Drive reads as if it was a bit of fast fun in between other projects. Which makes it all the more impressive. This is genre-fiction elevated somewhat by a writer who is clearly familiar with the genre that he is subverting. Sallis doesn’t believe in the long manipulation to wrench out a little emotion from his characters. He achieves it quite smoothly without really showing you how. He dashes off a backstory of a character, and his future, in a single breath. Sallis doesn’t try to con you into believing there is more depth than there is. He lets you decide. And he’ll let you decide again when the sequel, Driven, arrives in 2012.

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.

In 1969, the Australian public would know Roger Ward’s face from TV shows like Skippy. Less than a year later, he would gain tabloid infamy thanks to Frank Brittain’s film based on his novel The Set. Originally a candid look at sexual revolution sweeping the country’s teens, the screenplay jettisoned much of the material to focus on the gay and lesbian aspects of the story. It became a sensation and a huge success. Ward later went on to appear in cult classics like Mad Max and has now published the full text of the novel

What were the defining staples of “the heady days of Australia’s sexual revolution”? How does The Set embody them?

The late 50s/early 60s was a time of abortion, unwanted pregnancy, and shotgun weddings. Where getting the birth control pill when it did arrive, meant a demeaning trip to one’s local doctor. It was a time when sex was never discussed in public and if a young man wished to buy a condom he went to a chemist or drug store, an experience that put them into a lather of perspiration. And even though the age of consent was 16, an unplanned pregnancy meant shame, humiliation, and estrangement from your family

I have tried to cover this humiliation, this shame, and have attempted to describe the terror felt by a teenager facing sex during the 50s and 60s. There was no birth control pill until 1961 and even then it was available only through prescription to married women and there was no words of wisdom or information from one’s parents; a situation that led to Tony’s inability to offer Carolyn a permanent and secure relationship and certainly no desire to go ‘all the way’ for neither one wanted pregnancy, a common fate during that time.

Common because the revolution had started.

It began through adventurous and oversexed teenagers such as the go getting Leah who was prepared to offer her body as a stepping stone to the top of her profession. By Louise, Paul’s first girl friend who was European and had an open mind toward all things sexual.

Sex was a constant with Peg, having been forced into wedlock at 16, she was frightened her daughter Carolyn may have inherited her genes, and her mind floated between a mother’s angst at her daughter enjoying the same pleasures of the flesh that she had at the same age and her dismay that she may be ‘doing it’ with Tony, the young man she also dreamt of seducing.

Later, because of his inability to rise to the occasion when he entered the trap she set, Peg feels free and at ease with the world because she now knows this callow youth could never initiate sex with her daughter. She moves on then to enjoy her more experienced partners.

Paul also experiments with sex, firstly with the provocative Louise and then with various men. His homosexual bent having come to the fore when the deed was forced upon him, but after overcoming the shock he enjoys the act and sets about procuring it.

Tony also disregards his initial fear and attempts to go ‘all the way’ with Carolyn but when her fear overcomes her desire, he drifts toward his latent interest in Paul.

I feel I have shown, in the attitude and actions of my characters, a gradual relaxation of the built in sexual fear, held by most, as the book moves from the late 50s into the early 60s.

Comparatively, how do the struggles of the GLBTQ community differ between Australia 1970 and Australia 2011?  What were the major struggles then and conversely, what are they now?

You’re talking 1970s because that was when the film was released. The film rights were actually sold in 1967 and the book that it was based upon was written in 1960 onward from notes and diaries created from 1954. So my observations were not from the 1970s but from the 50s through to the late 60s.

However I can still answer your question.

Historically the gay community has been hounded for an eternity. And a person of that persuasion was, at that time at least, considered to be some sort of freak, someone to be laughed at, to be ridiculed, derided, beaten up, ostracized, even put to death. And ironically, while I was in the French outpost of Tahiti writing the first pages of The Set, the National Assembly of France declared homosexuality a “social scourge” and urged the government to take action against it. Although a light did begin to glow at the end of the tunnel when in 1961, in a move possibly leading to the acceptance of my own material for film, a television station in San Francisco made and broadcast The Rejected – a documentary on homosexuals. So the change started to begin even then. It continued, in Australia and throughout the world to eventually cause the police department in New York City to change its policy of police entrapment of gay men, and rescinded its hiring practices designed to screen out gay people. And after the Stonewall riots in late June 1969 many within the emerging Gay Liberation movement in the US saw themselves as connected with the New Left rather than the established homophile groups of the time and the words “Gay Power” became a defiant answer to the rights-oriented homophile movement.

This power swept the world and those with homosexual tendencies began to gain a voice and threw off the cloak of shame that was traditionally worn and ‘came out’ as it were.

They were the true pioneers of the movement and have opened the flood gates of acceptance that have allowed the young people of today to kiss a same sex partner in the street, to hold hands, to cuddle in public, to hold highly esteemed positions in the corporate and public world and to marry their same sex partner. So, to my mind, the struggles of GLBTQ of today are minimal to what their forebears have been through.

What were the risks you faced in releasing the film The Set in 1970? Is there any risk in releasing the novel version of The Set today? Do you anticipate any societal scrutiny or backlash?

I felt no risk when I sold the film rights because the book is of a sociological nature, covering every aspect of life, adventure, the seeking of a career, family relationships, social behaviour, heterosexuality, nymphomania, older woman attracted to a younger man, and of course… homosexuality. It was only when the producer indicated the book was too large to be filmed in its entirety and that he would have to cut it that I had reservations. And it was not because of the demand, “I want you to lift every homosexual reference from the book and write a screen play on that”. It was the fact that my baby, the book I had spent almost ten years creating was to be cut to the bone. That my years of work would be relegated to a 130-page script, that was the thing what worried me. I was worried further when, upon arriving on set for the first day of filming, I discovered that the script that I had diligently written had been re-written and toyed with by not only the producer, but by his 24-year-old third wife and also Elizabeth Kata who had written the book A Patch of Blue. I was devastated to see the ruination of a previously polished and highly tuned script and spent my short time on set leaping in front of the camera’s yelling, “Cut! That is not the dialogue”. It got to the stage that the actors were ignoring the director and coming to me in a clandestine manner to ask for interpretations and the correct lines to say. Understandably the director was angered by this and I was packed up and sent out of town on a phony publicity tour so a lot of the film went through without my input or salvaging and ended up in what I thought at the time was a ‘cringeworthy state’. So the risks I faced at that time, and they were real risks and they did eventuate, was one of being a laughing stock, of being embarrassed for creating such a badly written script.

Understandably, but in a way, viciously, the film was slaughtered by the press. Although thankfully, and through the loads of publicity we had received during the making of the film, the general public were keen to see it and it became one of the highest earning Australian films of that time. Ironically, it has now become a cult film and enjoys Film Festival Showings through out the world to hand clapping and cheering young gays.

I now look forward to redeeming myself with the book. I certainly do not fear any backlash and would in fact welcome it if it came because the book is a true diary of the 50s and 60s, written at that time with the thought processes and mentality of one who lived them. So the only scrutiny I may receive will be from the ‘Literary Set’ who may think my raw descriptions of sexual intercourse, particularly the male-on-male and the female-on-female, although delicately done, may be pushing the boundaries. But I wrote the book to entertain, to inform and to illuminate. And I used the thread of both homosexuality and of the life saving movement, although poles apart in terms of subject matter, as a manner of education. Only a few know of the intricacies of the homosexual mind or of what they do behind closed doors, and only a few know of the fears and the dangers faced by the Australian Surf Life Saver and having had experience, either practical or by observation and research of both, I used them as a thread for the narration of the book.

I am pleased too, to have waited this long to publish, for had I taken the poorly paid offers to do so during the 70s, the book would have gone out as a contemporary novel. Now it is released as an historical, true diary of the 60s and gives an insight to the young readers of today how youth lived in that day, and to those of my own age, it will bring back so many memories of the way we lived and of what we thought.

What affect do you believe the film The Set has had on Australian GLBTQ culture? What affect do you believe the novel The Set will have on today’s Australian GLBTQ culture?

I know the film liberated a lot of young men, particularly when it was released. I know because I receive letters and emails even to this day from people who are now established businessmen, and even one from a New York lawyer, who thank me for allowing them to know that their feelings and instinct was not abnormal and that there were others out there like them. The film, they tell me, was a release, an opening of a door to lead a liberated life.

And in these later years, I notice young girls are coming to view the film as well, even though there is only a fleeting reference to lesbianism in the film they cheer and clap every time it is mentioned. They tell me, after the showing, that they absolutely love the film. So it has given many young men and possibly a few girls, a look at the sort of life they previously only fantasized about. It has given them the courage to come out of their shells and seek what they want. During these later screenings, I’m talking from 2000 onward, both males and females come to me to express their dismay at the manner the homosexuals of the day were treated.

The film has also been used as research by Ricardo Peach for his thesis that gained him his Doctor of Philosophy. Ricardo compared the homosexual life in Australia to that of their counterparts in Africa and commented that The Set was the first film to depict homosexuals as everyday people with regular jobs and an accepted appearance without the usual mincing outrageousness usually depicted.

And a Harley Street Psychiatrist asked to view the The Set by a censorship body in the UK came back with the reply, “Normal people acting in a normal manner”.

The book, on the other hand, can be enjoyed by all. It is not, I hasten to add, a gay and lesbian work. Although, I am happy to note that the gay and lesbian brigade in both the UK and Australia have taken it on as their own. It is also a general read for everyone who enjoys a page-turning yarn. Although I do surmise the younger generation of gays who now roam freely and without fear of prosecution or violence, will be appalled by the treatment of homosexuals in the book and of the clandestine efforts they resort to in an effort to protect themselves.

I really want the book of The Set to be taken as a work of entertainment, not as a drum-beating Gay Liberation scribe but, on the other hand, I want the gay reader to enjoy the work and to revel in the fact that their gender is being used as an everyday part of life, which it is, and has been, since man began.

What do you mean by: “The big screen adaptation of The Set could only ever hope to be a shadow of the real story”? In what ways does the novel adaptation expand on the real story that the film version could not?

No film, adapted from a large novel, can ever depict that story as the writer envisaged it. Disregarding the budget, no film can realistically be longer than two hours and it is obvious that if one squeezes a 500-page novel into a 150-page script, something has to give. And surmising we could do a 500-page script and shoot it as well (we’re getting into the mini series here), the thought processes, and the innuendos described by the author for his characters cannot be depicted on the screen, perhaps the actor may try to convey it, but it is not the same as having it spelt out in black and white print. But having said that, I do want the film to be remade and by God I’m having offers coming out of the woodwork, but this time I am being ultra careful as I will not allow the film to be made with the same embarrassment I experienced in 1970. As I mentioned before, I am leaning closer to doing a mini series because I do wish to cover every aspect of the content that is explored in the book.

You’re celebrated for playing ‘tough guys’ in action films such as Mad Max – acting work that has inspired Quentin Tarantino to call you “a legend”.  Ironically, most of your films appeal to a predominantly heterosexual male demographic. Has being an ‘out’ gay male actor made it difficult for you to land these roles? What bearing has your homosexuality had on your acting career?

The procurement of my acting work has always been based on my appearance and my ability to do the job. Fortunately I started acting at a very young age and because no matter what one does, be it cooking, needle work, performing operations, or pulling teeth, one is surely going to improve with experience, so by the time television came to Australia and with it the feature film, I had cut my teeth on stage work from the age of twelve, standup comedy from 14, educational radio drama from 16 and interspersed this with training from an off-shoot of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, weight training and martial arts. So by the time I was asked to audition for film and television, I was highly trained and experienced.

One’s sexual preference should not affect his ability to play the role he is offered. After all, gay or not, one is first and foremost an actor. And, in my own case, I have now performed in more than 80 feature films and over 2000 television roles, plus probably 50 stage plays in which I have played the gamut of hero, monster, womanizer, drag queen, boxer, wrestler, incestuous father, stroke victim, truck drivers, policemen, cowboys, bikers, and a serial killer. I have performed comedy, horror, drama and Shakespeare and never once was my sexual preference ever raised.

What do you say to other ‘tough guy’ gay actors who are contemplating staying in the closet to ‘protect’ their acting careers?

That has never been a problem in Australia, although I do believe it is an issue, or at least it was during the 50s and 60s and into the 70s in America. And I know of a number of actors over there who were forced to hide their preference during that time. Although I do believe it doesn’t matter now. Homosexuality is widely accepted in the streets, in the home by fellow family members and by big business, so why shouldn’t it be accepted in the world of make belief. In fact it appears to be a trend and a social high if one, particularly in the entertainment world, is supposedly gay.

There are a lot of tough guys out there, some in the film business others in areas of entertainment such as wrestling, boxing, martial arts, football, who happen to be gay so a sexual preference “does not maketh the man”. So I have no comment to make to anyone who wishes to hide their sexual preference, actors or not. I do remember though, when I first came to Sydney from my home town of Adelaide to break into the ‘big time’ and was called to see a well known producer. He greeted me warmly enough but after he had eyed up my rather attractive female companion whom I had chosen to take with me, he commented, “I do admire you Mister Ward, coming here, as a man, to try and break into films”.

So maybe being gay may have well been the way to go.

But I did pretty well anyway. Eighty films, 2000 television shows… That producer by the way, I think he’s forgotten it was me that he insulted that morning, because he’s now one of my biggest fans and a constant employer.

Do you plan on writing any other GLBTQ-focused films and/or novels? What projects are next on the horizon for Roger Ward?

Yes, I am working on a sequel to The Set, it will revolve around the five protagonists again but this time they’ll be in their 20s and it will be set in the USA, based around the film world.

I also have a trilogy based on two brothers who are war correspondents, and right now I’m looking for a suitable publisher or agent. They contain high action, romance and comedy. The first of them opens in Iraq and moves to New Zealand. While the second features New Zealand and Tahiti, and the third is set in New York and Iraq.

My other writing credits, films, documentaries, mini-series and TV specials are little known, hidden as they have been behind a pseudonym, as it was discovered long ago that despite the establishment not objecting to a gay actor playing the heavy, they did draw the line when that same actor dared to write a novel or film.

So I’m coming out now!

The book of The Set is now available in book shops throughout the UK and Australia and can be purchased from Amazon. It is also available as an ebook.

Superman is an ideal. Superman is perfect – there’s nothing that he can’t do; he will always overcome any challenge (he even managed to come back from the dead in the 1990s) and this is why people love him. But it’s also why writers have struggled to create new ‘interesting’ stories about the character over the years; how do you write an engaging story about a character that can literally achieve anything? This is the difficulty that faces J Michael Straczynski in trying to present a different take on a Superman story for a new generation of readers.

In his introduction to Superman: Earth One, JMS shares his feelings on what the Superman symbol has come to represent. For him, the iconic ‘S’ means that all things are possible, and he is right – the Superman symbol stands for inspiration. Superman should motivate, be an ideal to which we should all aim towards and create a sense of hope and wonder. And not just because he is faster than a speeding bullet or able to leap a building in a single bound, but because he knows what the right thing is to do and always overcomes. People should like Superman, because there simply shouldn’t be anything unlikeable about him. Superman isn’t like the rest of us – the clue is in the name – he is a Super Man.

And yet, despite all the incredible things Superman can do that we can’t, he doesn’t remain distant or unknowable, but remains a character we warm to. This alien visitor from Krypton is arguably the most human super-hero there is. He is not fighting the good fight because his parents were gunned down in front of him when he was a child, or is on a single-minded mission of justice; he is being a hero because he can and because of the caring, loving virtues installed in him by his adoptive parents. Superman has never been ‘alone’ à la Bruce Wayne; he had an ideal family environment surrounded by friends and family; a perfectly ‘normal’ upbringing that most readers can relate to. We all want to be Superman’s ‘pal’.

Unfortunately, in trying to find a new modern take on the Superman mythos, JMS has removed all that makes Superman so unique in the first place. This young Superman is full of doubt and insecurities, and comes across as not a little selfish and petty, just like us mere mortals. There he is, on the cover of the graphic novel, looking all mean and moody, eyes glowing an angry red beneath his hoodie (his hoodie for god’s sake…) not reassuring us, but carrying on like a sulky Kevin the Teenager type who just happens to have the ability to fly and the power to level mountains – could there be anything more terrifying??

In his effort to make this current day Superman relevant, JMS has forgotten what makes Superman super in the first place and decided instead to make him grim and gritty. If I want this then I’ll read a Batman comic. We even have Clark Kent brooding over his father’s grave at one point and are later told that Clark’s mission on Earth is to “avenge the murder of his homeworld”. Seriously? Superman’s task is to avenge the destruction of Krypton? So he isn’t being Superman because he knows this is the right thing to do, he’s only being Superman out of vengeance? This alone was enough to make me want to put this book down and never look at it again.

I essentially spent the whole time reading this graphic novel simply waiting for Superman to behave like Superman and not like a tortured emo brat who sees his powers as a curse. This is not the reason why this character has been so enduring for almost 80 years!

I understand the need to make a character with a long, convoluted history accessible to new readers and to have a stand-alone story that anyone can read, but not at the expense of what made the character so popular in the first place.

Marvel Comics successfully modernised a lot of their heroes ten years ago, with their Ultimate line, starting with Spider-Man. Yes, a lot of the Spider-Man story was brought up to date, but the basic building blocks of the character were kept in place. They didn’t need to change what made this character already great, they just needed to start again without the clutter of a convoluted history that would put off the casual reader.

And this is what makes Superman: Earth One feels like such a missed opportunity; to show new readers what made Superman so awe-inspiring in the first place, to give new readers that sense of excitement that JMS talks about when see the Superman symbol. After reading this graphic novel I just can’t imagine any kid being inspired to throw a bed sheet around his shoulders and leap about pretending to be Superman which is a real shame.

A final word about the art – this is a graphic novel after all. Shane Davis’s pencil work is serviceable, if not a little dull. Metropolis itself looks quite striking, although there are times at night it resembles more of a dangerous Gotham (“it gets kinda dicey around here some nights”… sigh…), and I wish we got to see more of Davis’s take on Krypton which looked suitably impressive. The real problem lies with the lack of energy and motion in the action scenes – everything looks too static and pedestrian. When I had finished reading this I couldn’t remember a single stand-out splash-page, or an iconic Superman image. And is too much to ask to see Superman smile, just the once?

With monthly comic sales in decline I sincerely welcome any attempt to draw new readers towards the medium. The fact that this graphic novel has been a best-seller will hopefully mean that more people will go into comic shops. But for accessible, told-in-one stories then please consider Superman: Secret Origin by Geoff Johns or the astonishing All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison, both of which retain the joy and wonder of Superman without resorting to angst-ridden clichés and an uninspiring, un-super Superman.

Working out of the Burley area of Leeds, Peepal Tree Press has been a vital hub of independent publishing for just over 25 years. Founded by Jeremy Poynting to specialise in Caribbean writing, the company has expanded to include a significant amount of Black British titles: “Our focus is on what George Lamming calls the Caribbean nation, wherever it is in the world”. Poynting’s interest in Caribbean writing was kindled through a friendship with Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiongo at Leeds University in the mid-60s. Doctoral research in Caribbean literature led to his first visit a decade later. According to Poynting’s account on their website (see below), the Peepal Tree was seeded in 1984, when Guyanese author Rooplall Monar needed a book printing and there was no paper to be had: “I volunteered to organise the printing of a small run (400 I think) back in England… Backdam People became the first Peepal Tree publication, ‘typeset’ on a daisywheel printer and printed in the evenings in the college where I worked… Sadly the Guyana dollar was devalued from about $8 to the £1 sterling to over $100 to the pound just after these were sold. There was another lesson about the intricacies of export, one that was reinforced later when our former US distributors went bust, and when a certain Trinidadian bookseller skipped off the island with her new American husband, leaving her large debts behind”. But Peepal Tree survived and Backdam People is still in print.

Since then, the press has continued to bring new authors and poets to a wider audience, in addition to relevant memoirs, historical studies and literary criticism. They publish over 30 titles a year. I first came across them with Karen King-Aribisala’s tricksy, beguiling novel The Hangman’s Game but the range of titles is broad. In fact, Peepal Tree is as much an act of curation as publication. Along with Backdam People, they are dedicated to keeping more than 250 titles in print. As the poetically-named Hannah Bannister told Caribbean Book Blog: “Someone once said that being a publisher is a bit like being a midwife and I think that’s true, but I also have the privilege of supporting the books right through to their old age”. In 2009, this policy led to an ambitious and generous proposition: The Caribbean Modern Classics Series. The idea was to restore missing items to the Caribbean library, as Poynting explained on its inauguration: “Anyone looking for important Caribbean novels on Amazon will know that much of the writing published from the 1950s through to the 1980s is out of print… Over the next three or four years we plan a series of at least 60 titles, and then we will add to it as other key titles disappear from print”.

The piece goes on to make some crucial points about how books (and records) are the repositories of individual and collective cultural memory. It reminds me of Island’s commitment to keep Nick Drake’s records in print, despite poor early sales. Peepal Tree is investing in the future of their books:

these are the books that first captured me for Caribbean writing almost forty years ago. Then it was still possible to find nicely jacketed first editions of virtually everything for the fifties onwards for a couple of pounds, or buy new copies of Wilson Harrises or Andrew Salkeys from New Beacon Books or, if not originals, reprints from the old pre-Pearson Heinemann and Longman days, (before the accountants got in). Rereading those books carried me back to those times: memories of Orlando Patterson as a fiery young orator in the occupation of the LSE in London in 1967; treks to 2 Albert Road (before New Beacon moved) and long discussions with John La Rose in the kitchen upstairs; books read to a soundtrack of Don Drummond on horribly but atmospherically crackly Studio One LPs (and Toots, Desmond, Max, and a not yet global Bob Marley).

Peepal Tree Press receives financial support from Arts Council England. The following interview with Jeremy Poynting took place just as the latest funding announcements were being made. The company has been included in the National Portfolio with a financial increase for 2012. This will allow them to expand projects such as Inscribe, a creative and development programme for Black and Asian writers. The e-newsletters sent out by Adam Lowe (a novelist himself) are a valuable digest of book-related news. Taken together, Peepal’s contribution is immense and it would be impossible to replace 25 years of growth, roots and branches. The tree is an apt metaphor. It remains to be seen how the loss of funding will affect less fortunate organisations.

I read the excellent interview with you last year at the Caribbean Review of Books site, so I know how you Peepal Tree is approaching its Modern Classics series. I wondered how the process of finding contemporary writers works?

In the earliest days this was mainly through contacts, writers I knew who I thought were good, who had unpublished novels or collections of poems. Now we get more submissions than we can almost cope with in terms of finding the time to read them. There are always some (in addition to what we commit to) that if we had more editorial resources we might take on, though in truth we’re pretty much always at full stretch in terms of our schedules. So we don’t have to find writers, they find us, though I keep monitoring what is appearing in Caribbean literary journals, and we get recommendations from established writers regarding their protégés. In the earliest days our output was almost wholly Caribbean (including writers who were based in the UK or North America but who wrote as Caribbeans), but in more recent years we’ve also built a Black British segment of the list.

This has grown further since we took on a writer development role funded by the Arts Council, called Inscribe, developed initially by Kadija George and now also involving Dorothea Smarrt. Inscribe has become an imprint where we focus on chapbooks for writers who are heading towards full collections. Our poetry editor, Kwame Dawes, who is based in the USA, is also heavily involved in running writer development workshops in Jamaica, and several poets have come to us through this process. The other fact I’d note is that over the past half-dozen years we’ve had writers submit to us who have had publishing contracts with the big multinationals but obviously did not sell enough copies and were dropped. So there’s a mixture of building a reputation for high quality work that attracts writers, and the negative push from mainstream publishers who are only interested in anything Caribbean or Black British if they can sell it to a predominantly white, mainstream readership. Just recently, for instance, a number of novels came to us when MacMillan Caribbean dropped adult literary titles they’d already contracted.

As publishers like Heinemann, Longman and Faber have dropped a lot of their catalogue, has Peepal Tree become the global authority on Caribbean literature now or are there other publishers performing a similar role?

Yes, we are the major publishers of Caribbean literature. There are a few publishers in the USA who have dipped their toes in, but almost always with a focus on American-based writers, publishers such as Akashic, Red Hen Press, and Greyhound Press, but with only a handful of titles each. There are two serious publishers in the Caribbean – the University of the West Indies Press and Ian Randle Publishers – who publish roughly the same number of books a year that we do, but both concentrate on the academic market and scarcely touch fiction or poetry. Obviously the mainstream hangs onto a few big names – Faber with Walcott and Earl Lovelace, and our colleagues at fellow independent presses Bloodaxe and Carcanet have a few good poets on their lists.

There has been a long relationship between Britain and the Caribbean. Has this relationship changed much recently? How could we nurture this relationship more in Britain? Part of Peepal’s mission is to keep books in print. Do you have a reasonably clear idea of print run in advance? Do you tend to print in bulk or wait for more frequent reprints?

I think the truth is that the relationship between Britain and the Caribbean is a pretty defunct, amnesiac one. The killing off of the BBC’s Caribbean service is a symptom. Since the end of the Cold War the Caribbean has not even had the dwindling strategic importance that prompted a degree of interference and access to some fairly slender resources. The ending of preferential duties on sugar and other agricultural produce at the behest of US global free trade strategies is another symptom. Occasionally bad things come out of the Caribbean such as hurricanes and earthquakes, the occasional threat to tourism such as the Dudus affair, but as a region it is of virtually no economic significance except for tourism and the scandals of off-shore banking. Reggae obviously made powerful connections, (since there was an active Black British reggae scene as well), but recent musical exports such as Rihanna bring little by way of regional culture with them. This is obviously not how it should be and it is something that concerns us. There are important institutions such as the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, but I’d certainly hope that slavery wasn’t the only point of remembrance. There’s an absence of cultural flow from the Caribbean that’s in marked distinction to the flow from India, and I think because of that and the generally negative reporting of the Caribbean, there’s a younger generation of Caribbean heritage people who don’t really feel any great sense of connection. There are obviously exceptions, but I think the absence of cultural flow denies a potential enrichment of the lives of both Caribbean heritage people. The Caribbean classics series was in part inspired by that absence. We don’t really have the resources to do more, but we do what we can to raise profile, but principally to try and build a community of interest via our website and e-newsletters.

We used to make our own books, but now use a really good digital printers. This helps us keep books in print without tying up capital in stock. Our initial print runs are not usually more than the 500 mark, but then we may get reprints at a 100 a time as often as needed. It’s not POD, but it really helps cashflow, schedules and minimum stock maintenance. We still have stock from 20 years ago – before we realised that lower unit costs were worth nothing if stock wasn’t turning over.

Although I’m sure are asked this all the time, I couldn’t find an account of why you called the press Peepal Tree? There are many stories around the plant, I wondered which had appealed to the most?

The peepal tree (ficus religiosa) was brought from India to the Caribbean by indentured labourers and nativised there. In Indian villages it was often the tree at the centre of the village where people hung out, stories were told and that pattern was repeated in the Caribbean. So the idea was something that symbolized a transplanted culture, the connection with story-telling and the obvious pun. At the time I established Peepal Tree I was also making the point that the Indian presence was very much part of the Caribbean at a time when that was sometimes denied. At the beginning of our publishing, there was an more of an emphasis on the Indo-Caribbean, but always with the intention of diversifying in the way we have.

I read your comments regarding ACE in November. Is the funding landscape any clearer for publishers like Peepal now? With cuts to areas like the World Service, do you think Britain is beginning to squander the richness of its relationship with other cultures?

I’ve just learnt that our own funding has been increased, but there are some very regrettable rejections of other’s funding bids. I think as a group, regularly funded publishers were able to get across our case for our position in the literature ecology, and at least air the case for fiction as well as poetry. What happens will, I suspect, depend on who wins the argument that will almost certainly take place between the regions and head-office/London. I think that the Greater North regions (Yorkshire, Northwest and NorthEast, which contains a significant independent publishing sector) will fight for what they have against a degree of London-centrism (though one important Yorkshire publisher, Arc, has been abandoned). The context is that there isn’t currently a fair spread of literature organisations and there are new organisations applying for portfolio inclusion. Undoubtedly some funded independent publishers will be cut, though they will still have access to lottery funding. ACE is understandably nervous at the minute, so whilst there is still some support for what they called “international work”, the emphasis is currently very much on “public benefit” and that is very closely restricted to England. In terms of the BBC, British Council and I fear increasingly the Arts Council, relationships with other cultures tends to follow economic opportunity. Brazil, India and China are hot; the Caribbean is not!

You might want to come back to me on this later when the dust has settled a bit more…

Many major publishers are in trouble at the moment. What do you think they could learn from Peepal’s way of doing business?

Not a lot, I suspect in terms of the huge divergence of purpose. We try to operate in as efficient a way as possible in terms of maximising sales and holding down costs, but our basic model is about doing books that we believe will have a long shelf-life, so that whilst we can’t promote books to the level that the mainstream does, we don’t suffer huge returns. The commercial model is a speculative, gambling one. The one success will pay for the failed speculations. We depend heavily on the contribution of our backlist to contribute to our sales income. For us books are never just commodities, though we try to make them as desirable objects as possible.

Peepal is involved in projects such as Inscribe, does it help to meet your public (and future authors) face to face?

Very much so. Meeting our readers at launches and readings is almost always encouraging and we get quite a bit of response from the e-newsletters Adam sends out. Though we are never market-led, we do take the trouble to find out what our core readers think. For instance, recently we have been surveying our e-mailing list on their feelings about e-books and paper-books.

The Modern Classics series is the perfect statement for Peepal Tree and an inspiring act of curatorship. Do you have any other ambitions?

Yes. I plan to launch a shameless crib of the old Penguin modern poets idea – a generous selection of three poets in one 120-page uniform collection – but ranging across the Caribbean and Black Britain, with one current established poet, one recuperated, and one emerging. My other ambition is to do something about the gulf that exists between academia and the wider Caribbean reading public – wherever they are. Our readers are people who read for more than just diversion, but to explore themselves and their world. Too much critical writing has lost touch with such concerns and become impenetrably self-regarding.

The Caribbean Modern Classics Series:

• Wayne Brown On the Coast & Other Poems
• Jan Carew Black Midas / The Wild Coast
• Austin C. Clarke Amongst Thistles & Thorns
• Neville Dawes The Last Enchantment
• Wilson Harris Heartland
• George Lamming Of Age & Innocence
• Roger Mais The Hills Were Joyful Together
• Edgar Mittelholzer A Morning at the Office / Corentyne Thunder / Shadows Move Among Them / The Life and Death of Sylvia
• Elma Napier A Flying Fish Whispered
• Orlando Patterson The Children of Sisyphus
• V.S. Reid New Day
• Garth St. Omer A Room on the Hill
• Andrew Salkey Escape to an Autumn Pavement
• Denis Williams Other Leopards / The Third Temptation

New and Forthcoming Titles:

• Jamaican author Andrew Salkey’s 60s quartet for children: Drought / Earthquake / Hurricane / Riot
• Alecia McKenzie Sweetheart
• Una Marson: Selected Poems (edited and introduced by Alison Donnell)

Further Reading:
Peepal Tree Press website and online shop
Interview with Jeremy Poynting at The Caribbean Review of Books
Adam Lowe’s website
New Beacon Books
Creative Caribbean Network

Where does creative work originate? Anybody who has worked collaboratively can tell you about the mysterious processes at play. The excitement and flow of a creative project appears psychic at times. When things are going well, serendipity seems predestined. Participants will remember events in a different way, a different order, with different emphases and agencies at work. Even with clear notes and documentary evidence, there will be gaps in recall and it is not always clear who thought of what. It is a sobering lesson in the partiality of human cognition. During such periods of concentration, individual differences give way to something ‘other’ – a product of distinctive input but catalysed into an utterly new synthesis.

In 1977, Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs collaborated on a book called The Third Mind. This series of essays and experiments explores this idea of a shared consciousness, riffing off T.S. Eliot’s line “Who is the third who walks always beside you?’ (and citing Ezra Pound’s editorial influence on ‘The Waste Land’). For Gysin and Burroughs, collaboration introduces mutually unpredictable elements, taking each individual to a creative territory they would not have reached alone.

Whilst such collaboration is central to certain art forms, musical improv, for example, there is an economy of scale at work here. Larger creative communities can coalesce and even catalyse at particular points and in particular places. The Italian Renaissance in Florence, Paris in the 1920s or the Weimar Republic are obvious examples. Matt Ridley explains this in terms of exchange. Ridley is a controversial figure, trained as a zoologist and non-executive chairman of Northern Rock bank in the period leading to its collapse, he is also the author of The Rational Optimist and his engaging talk ‘Deep Optimism’ outlines his argument that exchange allows ideas to ‘have sex’: “The effect this had on cultural evolution was exactly the same as the effect the invention of sex on biological evolution. Because the invention of sex accelerated and made cumulative for the first time genetic mutation and evolution… What sex does is it allows the species to draw upon the genetic inventiveness of the whole species, not just its own lineage. And exchange has the same impact on human culture”.

As with The Third Mind, this collaboration takes invention into some surprising places: “Every technology we use is a combination of other technologies, other ideas. The pill camera is my favourite example. It takes a picture of your insides as it goes through. It came about after a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer”. A parallel in the arts would be the Siobhan Davies’ 2006 dance work In Plain Clothes, choreographed in collaboration with an architect, a linguist, landscape designer, and a heart surgeon. In fact, Ridley’s notion of exchange is quite radical, and demonstrates how many acts are unconsciously engaged in a giant collaborative effort. To illustrate, he compares two objects sitting on his desk: an ancient axe he keeps as a memento and the mouse he uses for work.

The axe was made by someone for himself. The mouse was made by a team of people for me. They got together one day and said ‘Matt Ridley needs a computer mouse, let’s make him one’. How many of them were in that team? There were hundreds, thousands, I think there were probably millions. Because you’ve got to include the man who was growing coffee in Brazil to feed the man on the oil rig who was drilling for oil, whose oil would be used for the plastic, etc, etc. They were all involved in this cooperative enterprise to make me a computer mouse. They were all working for me. In the old days, you got rich by having people work for you, quite literally. Louis XIV – it’s a fair bet he didn’t make that silly outfit for himself. Louis XIV had 498 people to prepare his dinner every night. But here’s a bunch of tourists going round his palace in Versailles. And each of them, when you think about it, has 498 people preparing his dinner for him tonight. They’re working in bistros and cafés and restaurants and shops all over Paris, but they’re ready at an hour’s notice to drop everything and prepare a meal for one of these people. They’re working for him in just the sense that people were working for Louis XIV.

This resonates with Brian Eno’s idea of the creative potential of the collective, which he has dubbed ‘scenius’: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of genius”. The brilliant loner is inserted back into the cultural context that made their work possible. Shakespeare is the conduit for England’s expanding wealth and horizons in the late 16th century, whilst Beethoven’s exhaustive exploration of form was made possible by the patronage of the Austrian Empire. As Kevin Kelly says (in a short essay ‘Scenius, or Communal Genius’): “Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work”. Kelly cites literary examples like The Bloomsbury Group, but also the mountaineering ‘hackers’ Camp 4 and the MIT engineering lab Building 20. He concludes that such environments share four nurturing factors:

• Mutual appreciation – Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques – As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success – When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties – The local ‘outside’ does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.”

In spite of these discernible trends, collective collaboration remains a fragile and mysterious chemistry, on a larger scale, perhaps, but still reminiscent of Romantic theories of inspiration: “The serendipitous ingredients for scenius are hard to control. They depend on the presence of the right early pioneers… What Camp 4 illustrated is that the best you can do is NOT KILL IT. When it pops up, don’t crush it. When it starts rolling don’t formalize it. When it sparks, fan it. But don’t move the scenius to better quarters. Try to keep the accountants and architects and police and do-gooders away from it. Let it remain inefficient, wasteful, edgy, marginal, in the basement…”

I’m reminded of Talk Talk at work in the studio, as recalled in Phill Brown’s book Are We Still Rolling? With sufficient finances from previous sales, the band locked themselves into the studio for months at a time: “At this stage only Mark appeared to know exactly what the desired result was. As with Spirit of Eden, we worked in almost complete darkness, with an oil projector in the control room and the odd red light in the studio… Also, as nothing was planned and we were playing by the rules of chance, accident and coincidence, we needed to try out almost every idea and combination of sounds before we knew we had the right part or texture”. Record companies were kept at bay with the inevitable backlash once the albums were finished: “Much later in 1997, we discovered that the album Laughing Stock had been deleted in the UK a few months after its initial release”.

However elusive creative communities may be, it hasn’t stopped people trying to establish and plan them. There was more to ‘Cool Britannia’ than embarrassing photo opportunities. It signalled New Labour’s commitment to creative industries in the UK and a recognition that British culture was a hugely successful export. In fact, successful post-punk record labels like Rough Trade had been the very epitome of the Thatcherist small business revolution – an irony gleefully explored in the quasi-corporate image of PiL, BEF, Scritti Politti and other bands of the early 80s. By 2007, UK creativity had become the model for how the entrepreneurial business should operate, something local governments were keen to encourage. The question became ‘how do you turn a city into a creative hub?’ In my home town of Brighton and Hove, 1 in 5 of local business was involved in the creative sector, as a slew of reports testified. Richard Florida began to talk about a ‘creative class’ that migrated to where the action was.

The business of culture and the culture of business were beginning to blur. Venture capitalist Paul Graham was also in search of that magical collaborative community in his 2009 essay ‘Can you buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe’. A startup hub, it seems, shares much of the same traits as its cultural counterpart and Graham’s guidelines are similar to Kelly’s. Invest but don’t impose too many rules: “If you want to encourage startups in a particular city, you have to fund startups that won’t leave. There are two ways to do that: have rules preventing them from leaving, or fund them at the point in their life when they naturally take root. The first approach is a mistake, because it becomes a filter for selecting bad startups. If your terms force startups to do things they don’t want to, only the desperate ones will take your money”. Attract talent to your city to seed and influence subsequent generations: “Don’t try to do it on the cheap and pick only 10 for the initial experiment. If you do this on too small a scale you’ll just guarantee failure. Startups need to be around other startups. 30 would be enough to feel like a community”. Encourage the free exchange of ideas. “For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world… Interestingly, the 30-startup experiment could be done by any sufficiently rich private citizen. And what pressure it would put on the city if it worked.” Graham also emphasises the necessity of a good university as the incubator of collaborative culture. We might think of key art institutions such as the Bauhaus or Black Mountain College and their enormous influence on culture as a whole.

However, despite the focus on the creative industries over the last 15 years, reports repeat the same problems with investment. Business models break down because art is not subject to the same economics as other products and services. Whilst Warhol’s Factory was an efficient production line, creative output is rarely so functional and cannot guarantee a sufficient rate of return. Investors and producers are completely at odds with one another. In fact, art is often precisely antagonistic to wider economic values, being a space to question and examine them. The appeal of Berlin or Leipzig or Warsaw as creative communities is the inverse of investment, it is cheap accommodation and empty spaces to colonise, just as it was in the New York of the 70s. Commercial and cultural hubs can look very different.

If exchange of ideas is equivalent to the invention of sex, coming online means we’re at it like rabbits, cross-fertilising like the last days of Rome. However, some habits are yet to change. Certain art forms are more inherently collaborative than others but novels are still a somewhat onanistic activity. Gysin again: “While the history of painting and the plastic arts shows them generally to have been a collective affair in their conception and their realization — even after the notion of the artist-paradigm came to dominate every other mode of representation — literature has been a solitary practice, an ascesis, a withdrawal, a prison of words. Collaborations in this domain were rare. If we except certain accidental associations, the value of which is open to question, we find that few works have been composed as the result of a joint effort”. Furthermore, whilst authors see the internet as a brave new platform for marketing, the loss of editors and the whole network that previously contributed to the writing of a book makes it perhaps even less collaborative than before. Although widely criticised as a crude and exploitative exercise in branding, I’m rather intrigued by the James Patterson franchise. It may have broken the norm of the individual author. Things change in unpredictable ways.

It is often said that we live in a golden age of television. The attraction and potency of writing for HBO, AMC, even The Simpsons could be exactly down to the collective experience of working around the table with the very best, the scenius. As Deadwood reached its final series, you could practically sense the writers urging each other to greater daring, to push television dialogue into places it had never been before. I’m convinced that the poor state of cinema this year (overwhelmingly remakes, sequels, and spin-offs – production-led scripts) is the result of this. Hollywood’s loss is TV’s gain.

Communal creativity is neither as sublime nor as elusive as Kevin Kelly implies, but pimping ideas online and through meet-ups is not collaboration either. It’s gossip. The time of heavy investment in the arts may be behind us (at least in the UK) but the creatively curious owe it to themselves to seek out and connect with others. With pooled resources and in shared studios, collaboration is simple and it is everywhere. Three heads are better than one.

Explore Further:
Matt Ridley’s ‘Deep Optimism’ talk at The Long Now
Kevin Kelly’s ‘Scenius’ essay
Paul Graham’s essay ‘Can you buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe’
A literature review around the culture and creative industries by Justin O’Connor

On a recent trip to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, I had the pleasure of visiting one of my all time favorite bookstores. I have been visiting that wonderful store for 23 years. The place has thousands of books: hardcover, rare, and first-editions that the average reader who only reads best sellers cannot even suspect exist.

I always get excited when I climb the movable ladders that hook around the shelves in this marvelous bookstore. I feel great anticipation of what I will discover this time around. This is a place where patience is highly rewarded. In old bookstores one encounters the feel and smell of old volumes, but also a living history of where we have been as people. 

Opening books that I may not intend to purchase, but which are alluring nonetheless, I begin to feel my heart pulsating faster. There is nothing more boring for this reader and book collector than the sterile and predictable shelves of bookstores that only sell new books.

Whenever I visit a bookstore that specializes in old volumes, I always look for books and authors that I have been after for a long time. I am also excited by the sight of books, editions, and authors that I have never encountered. I welcome this positive tension. I often feel pity for those lost souls who today easily get turned on by those nonsensical, electronic-book gadgets, and other such aberrations, which are strictly designed for non-readers. 

I find the idea that books and their authors show come to us to be one of the great fallacies of our age. This is a rather laughable and lazy notion. Imagine people who think they are entitled to be loved; the day-to-day tortured existence of those pathetic people who demand that love should come to them.

People who actively seek knowledge, those who are not intimidated by the often unsavory backbone of truth, and who cherish making connections between this-and-that aspect of human existence, such people never expect knowledge to come to them. Reading is no different. Knowledge is not a right that is conferred on us by nature or the managers of bureaucratic utopias. 

If we want a drink, we go to the banks of a river or we look for a well. This is quite simple. Otherwise, we perish. This is all part of the fundamental understanding that reality is nothing other than resistance to our every whim, passion, desire, and aspiration. This is also what makes life so enjoyable for those who understand and cherish the nature of this all too human resistance. Ours is an age replete with pointless ironies, isn’t it? 

Finding other readers to converse with today is a rare thing. Genuine readers are actually rare gems. They are as rare as the mythical white buffalo, unicorns, or sirens. Often, when I come across another reader, I get the strange sensation that I am starring into an opaque mirror, or that I am in the presence of a ghost. 

Rummaging through the shelves of the Toronto bookstore that is replete with old hardcover books; I came across some very interesting first editions that I had been searching for: Hemingway, Dos Passos, O’Hara, and several books by James Gould Cozzens that I didn’t own. 

I have always been a consumer of works of literature. I find Polish writers to be some of the best exponents of genuine ideas, writers who can achieve this with much beauty, and who do so without recourse to pedantry.

English literature, especially the romantic and metaphysical writers, has excited me since I was a young boy. In addition, American literature, particularly the era pertaining to the “lost generation,” that group of writers that was virtually invented by F. Scott Fitzgerald, showcases a great deal of sincerity and truth that stands as a testament to the dignity of the individual – in any future age. 

Writers, like the aforementioned, have much to offer us today that remain valuable in helping us to understand ourselves as free and autonomous individuals. I find such writers to be the must interesting. These writers navigate the intersection of philosophical reflection and literature like very few others in modern literature. It is in this same bookstore that I first encountered Kingsley Amis and his letter-writing friend, Philip Larkin.

 Imagine my delight to find Cozzens’ novel Morning Noon and Night. This is a 1968 first edition that has an impeccable dust jacket and pristine pages. The book has been kept in a virtual time capsule. 

Beyond the physical appearance of this lovely edition, this novel is highly desirable to me, because it is a superbly original work. This is a rather intricate work: a novel posing as memoir, a philosophical essay that asks, “Is it all worthwhile?” or an anti-novel, as some critics have referred to it. Morning Noon and Night, is anything but conventional.

By the time Morning Noon and Night was published, in 1968, those who embraced radical ideology were seen by some as having reached the zenith of cool. Cozzens and his books certainty did not exude coolness, if we are to believe his critics, the denizens of social mayhem and revolution. Cozzens was savagely attacked by ill-willed, partisan critics. He was crucified as an Eisenhower-era traditionalist writer by politically-charged and lazy critics who cared little to actually read his books.
Henry Worthington, the protagonist, is the founder of a consulting firm. He narrates how he came to be the man that he is, what understanding he extracted from human reality as a young boy, his experiences with other people as an adult, and just what it means to live and die.

I dare say that Cozzens is a more engaging philosopher than the vast majority of those who possess advanced degrees today in that noble discipline. Reading Cozzens carefully sends me reeling with excitement. He reminds me of the lofty possibilities that literature can attain to. I rejoice in witnessing that philosophical reflection is alive and well. Cozzens is not tainted by the shameless sterilization and moral/spiritual castration that institutions of higher learning subject philosophical vocation today. 

Worthington relates to the reader what life is like for him, what it has been, and the realization that he has lived, as if in a dream. The novel begins: “I have been young and now I am old”. Henry Worthington then goes on to say that old age does not necessarily deliver one to wisdom, but he assures the reader that, in his case, this indeed is the case. Worthington and Cozzens are both that rare example of men who know their own mind. This is as difficult an undertaking as it is a solitary task.

 In many respects, Cozzens enlightens us about an age that has not been our own for a long time now, and which, regrettably, will likely never return.

There is tremendous pathos in Morning Noon and Night. However, this is not the cheap, gratuitous, and fashionable sadness that socially/politically motivated individuals promote in our own time.

This novel reminds me of Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream. Both works display profound courage in getting down to the nitty-gritty, those difficult to swallow moments of human existence, which no popular appeals to utopia can assuage. 

Cozzens does not give us soothing pills to alleviate our spiritual emptiness. On the contrary, he seems to say: “If you are willing to ride along with me, let us then take a walk through fields of natural resistance to all our sophomoric whims.” 

How many of us are sincerely willing to embrace this challenge?

What a pity that men of honor, those few souls who can deliver us to truth, must perish. What a shame that fewer and fewer men today are capable of taking their place.

Pedro Blas Gonzalez is a writer and philosopher who holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy. He has written Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega y Gasset’s Philosophy of Subjectivity; Fragments: Essays in Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy; Unamuno: A Lyrical Essay; Dreaming in the Cathedral and Ortega’s ‘The Revolt of the Masses’ and the Triumph of the New Man.

The title of Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld alludes both to living under the canopy of the bomb and to a world beneath us, more specifically a hell. DeLillo has publicly stated that he wanted to write about the ‘secret’ history of the Cold War: ‘… people have developed a sense that history has been secretly manipulated. Documents lost and destroyed. … I think we’ve developed a much more deeply unsettled feeling about our grip on reality’. As Peter Knight states (in Everything is Connected: Underworld’s Secret History of Paranoia): ‘Underworld creates a sense that there are larger forces in our lives over which we have no control, but which refuse to coalesce for more than a moment’. In one sense, this is the underworld of the title, a subterranean history, which is of hellish consequence; a narrative that shapes us but remains out of reach. Yet, the name also punningly compacts numerous meanings, which are ready to flare up and collide like fissile atoms. Whilst we might immediately pull out references to the book’s content – black market gangsterism as underbelly of capitalism, Eisestein’s ‘lost’ masterpiece as symbol of Cold War dialectics, the god Pluto’s connection to plutonium and the bomb, to name just a few – it is primarily in the connection of these themes that the name functions. That the title can be so loaded with references, which interact within the novel, is itself maddeningly complex. A clear sense of what the title refers to begins to break down. As Underworld obsessively demonstrates, everything connects in the end, and this absurd extension of Forster’s dictum is also hellish, in that the book is rhizomatically structured to the point of overdetermination. The meaning of the novel seems to be that meaning breaks down under the weight of infinite connection. This sense of a secret history and the overdetermination of meaning collide in the title to further complicate the equation. The underworld, then, is a place of impossibly complex interrelations over which we can have no clear grasp.

However, Underworld is a very long novel, particularly for an economical writer like DeLillo, whose previous work Mao II checked in at a quarter of this length. The premise that meaning has lost its meaning would be an indulgent one for the 800-odd pages of the work. It is the contention of this essay that DeLillo has started with the widespread sense of this premise (according to the quote above) and that the novel is an attempt to work through this idea. It is ironic that the sheer size of the book, amongst other things, promises a meaning, or a statement, which DeLillo intends to problematise. In fact, notions of the spatial are thematised within the novel, as we shall see, and it is typical of Underworld that the structure should interact with content in this way. Again, it is significant that the title also refers to location.

In a Rolling Stone interview of 1988, DeLillo outlined the controlling paradigm of his fiction:

It is … my sense that we live in a kind of circular or near-circular system and that there are an increasing number of rings which keep intersecting at some point, whether you’re using a plastic card to draw money out of your account at an automatic teller machine or thinking about the movement of planetary bodies. I mean, these systems all seem to interact to me. … The secrets within systems, I suppose, are things that have informed my work.

But they’re almost secrets of consciousness, or the ways in which consciousness is replicated in the natural world.

Although this statement is two decades old, it is a pretty clear description of a principle which organises Underworld. There is, however, a very important proviso. The quote promotes a reading of the work in terms of historical linearity. That the rings of intersection are increasing indicates an evolution that might tempt us to equate this change with the waning of the Cold War. Peter Knight differentiates between secure and our contemporary insecure paranoia. To some extent, this is borne out by the text, but it does not take into account the particular treatment of time and history in the book. By Underworld, history itself is caught in the circularity; looping, spinning backwards, connecting at dislocated points. It begins in a present tense 1952, switches to a past tense 1992, and rewinds through the decades to finish in an unspecified cyberspace. What, we might ask, is the present location in time? Furthermore, the novel itself loops, echoing jokes, images, and figures of speech in its epilogue and introduction. The text works to undermine any clear sense of historical linearity or progression.

On the other hand, we might see this as evidence of an ontological rupture between ‘our’ world and the Cold one, the lack of resemblance between the teenage Nick Shay and his middle-aged characterisation seen as further proof of this. Yet we come back to the over-abundance of connections between the two eras: the passage of the baseball through the years, for example, or the fact that the novel is bound together by the 1950′s ‘Manx Martin’ interludes.

For Brian McHale (in Postmodernist Fiction), the postmodernist novel is characterised by the foregrounding of ontological dilemmas. For example, inconsistencies between the ‘real’ world of the reader (or the material status of the book) and the ‘text continuum’ (or ‘imagined geography’) of the work are exploited to produce a kind of restless ‘flickering’, which calls into question issues of ontology around the fictional process. McHale uses the metaphor of ‘worlds’, which might impinge on one another, but cannot ultimately make sense when they come into contact. Clearly, McHale’s metaphorical war of the ‘worlds’ begs a comparison with the locational nature of DeLillo’s underworld, particularly when considering the two ideological ‘locations’ of the Cold War. Here, surely, are worlds that fail to ‘add up’? Yet, DeLillo chooses not only to emphasise the connections between East and West, but also to complicate them entirely. The dialectic, for example, a defining model for the Soviet system is played through the very construction of the Cold War binary, reaching a synthesis whereby East and West collaborate on a waste disposal method using underground nuclear blasts. The bomb that symbolised Cold War disjunction survives its historical context and alters its meaning. Furthermore, Eisenstein’s aesthetic use of dialectics is turned against the Soviet state in Eisenstein’s Unterwelt, the 1970s screening of which twists its Cold War iconography into a bizarre spectacle of American pop culture that actually manages to reinforce the politics of the film. Interpretation becomes rapidly hazardous as connections multiply and the core strand of argument is compromised by possible, competing routes.

In this way, the dialectic is raised to the level of the novel’s structure, appearing to offer clear paths of argument that cannot be sustained. Thus, the competing paradigms of the Cold War states become organising elements of the book, literalising these ideological themes. However, not only are these models locked in an incompatible competition, they also merge into one another, and even swap places. The very construction of the Cold War is shown to be connected in secret, minute ways. The novel is punning on an atomic level of connection. Not only are the Cold War nations linked, but the Cold War itself is hard to disentangle from the post-Cold War era.

The ontological dilemma that McHale illustrates is an ‘impossible’ one. Two necessarily discreet worlds exist in the same space. DeLillo’s Cold War worlds are doubly impossible. They are both independent and identical, defined and so merged that they cannot be prised apart. This certainly does not contradict McHale’s model, but his is founded on the idea of disjunction as the contemporary paradigm, whereas, according to DeLillo, the defining modern phenomena all demonstrate connectivity, whether they be the ecology, the internet or globalised capitalism. The epilogue, ‘Das Kapital,’ works with each of these examples and Underworld, as a whole, takes this connective paradigm at its word and fashions the new novel from it.

Critical reactions to Underworld have been contradictory. What each account shares is a common sense of anxiety, a tentativeness or general haziness about what it is that DeLillo has written. Philip Nel asks: ‘… is DeLillo’s work modern? Is it postmodern? Or would a term like “twentieth-century literature” suffice? For Timothy L Parrish, ‘DeLillo has surrendered to film the power once attributed to the novel’, despite the fact that the novel can rescue history from its confusions. Whilst we can confidently state that the novel is ‘about’ Cold War paranoia, what exactly does that mean? DeLillo’s language seems to offer a reading of society, his characters are very articulate theorists. When Nick and Donna discuss sex, for example, both present abstract ‘meanings’ which take in religion and fiction. DeLillo’s style is constructed around a series of apparently clear statements. Yet, critics seem to have a difficulty in constructing a satisfying account of the book.

Furthermore, interpretations seem to proceed with the assumption that Underworld is DeLillo’s stab at a ‘big statement’, thereby encouraging the search for a coherent reading. Even critics who have branded the novel a failure, have done so under the tacit agreement that Underworld attempts to embark on such a mission, even to the extent of reintroducing the unfashionable idea of the grand narrative. In keeping with the Cold War theme of secrecy, the ‘meaning’ of Underworld has been treated as a puzzle to be pieced together from scraps of information.

The publication of the book, on the cusp of 1997/98, has its fictional counterpart in the novel itself. A lost Eisenstein film, Unterwelt, has surfaced and is re-premiered at Radio City Music Hall:

It became the movie people had to see. A nice tight hysteria began to build and there were tickets going for shocking sums and people rushing back from the Vineyard and the Pines and the Cape to engineer a seat.

Just a movie for godsake and a silent movie at that and a movie you probably never heard of until the Times did a Sunday piece. But this is how the behavioural aberration, once begun, grows to lavish panic.

“But will we actually be able to sit through it?” Esther said. “Or is it one of those things where we have to be reverent because we’re in the presence of greatness but we’re really all sitting there determined to be the first ones out the door so we can get a taxi.”

With an irony typical of DeLillo’s writing, Underworld became a similar media event, a ‘must-see’ zone of something resembling desperation. ‘Lavish panic’ was certainly on display at the author’s London reading in January ’98, where a large celebrity headcount packed into the TUC Headquarters and the evening became vertiginous due to the confusing sensation of being present within one of the author’s own fictional scenarios. The tone of the audience replicated the reverence of Radio City Music Hall and the whole affair was charged with a palpable yet indefinable ‘importance’.

The novel’s publishers hitched Underworld to the millennial Zeitgeist, such as it was, simultaneously pitching the book as contender for the Great Novel of the American Century, as a summation of the Cold War, and as a sneak preview of the New World Order. Advertising, as DeLillo’s books tirelessly iterate, fuels ‘panic’ with a highly- charged vocabulary such as this. The Times did a Sunday piece, of course. Underworld‘s timing, on the threshold of two world orders, its dense structure, its overarching subject matter, its sheer size, all conspire to give the novel an aura of gravitas. It came packaged as a big statement and has consequently been read as such. Such disquiet is indicated by the ironic subtitle of John N. Duvall’s 1999 essay: ‘DeLillo and the moment of canonization.’

For some critics, the ‘reverse’ mimesis of DeLillo’s novel, the fact that life imitated the work, is seen as evidence that the book has no critical distance from that which it critiques. Yet, DeLillo has already fully documented such processes in Mao II, in which the novelist Bill Gray is lost behind a public reproduction of himself. As a ‘sequel’ to Mao II, Underworld is unlikely to replicate the problematics already discussed in the former novel, particularly as DeLillo has often spoken out in defence of the novel, such as when he told DeCurtis (in the Rolling Stone interview) that history needs fiction as an organising influence. Instead, the question becomes one of what DeLillo is offering in the act of writing, what is the novel there for, if not a necessarily absorbed social critique?

It is worth noting how DeLillo’s narrative style is almost entirely imitative of the characters’ speech patterns. Third person accounts describe in interior monologue. Thus, as the narrative voice roams around the ballgame, it shifts from character to character. The descriptions of J Edgar Hoover, for example, employ the FBI Director’s anxieties about himself. Even the affirmative statement that ‘capital burns off the nuance of a culture’ can be attributed to Nick Shay (although where the voice is located once the narrative moves into cyberspace is more difficult to ascertain). However, what we can draw from this, is that each statement is filtered, once removed from any ‘pure’ statement DeLillo might make. Consequently, we should be wary of even the clearest statement in the book. Most critics, however, have pulled their interpretation from what the character’s say, assuming that we are left with little else. Each has then tried to differentiate between ‘true’ and ‘false’ statements with regards to what DeLillo himself has said or the structure of the book. When Parrish, for example, aligns DeLillo with J Edgar Hoover or Nel argues that ‘Klara’s longing for a Cold World Order seems requited by the book’s intricate structure’, each foregrounds the words and actions of the characters, as if each were a moral personification in a didactic theatre, all at the expense of the novel’s more intricate framework.

We have already noted, however, that Underworld is overdetermined, connected to a circular infinity. Each statement is somewhere countered by its opposite, destabilising any argument we might wish to make from the content of the book. Again, the Eisenstein episode is archetypal, in that it seems increasingly to dissemble, the more it is studied. In addition to Unterwelt being twinned with DeLillo’s novel, we are also offered a 1930s Hollywood film called Underworld, a typical noir thriller about the Mob. Thus, we have the product of communist aesthetics turned against the Soviet state (Unterwelt), twinned with a capitalist movie dramatising the underworld of the free-market economy. These filmic contradictions are later dramatised within the novel. Nick Shay and Brian Glassic are flown to a Khazakhstan (where Eisenstein has possibly shot Unterwelt). The date is unspecified, but the narrative implies that this is the near future. The bomb is now being employed in a capitalist venture to dispose of the waste generated by capitalism. Elements in the novel collapse: a joke from the 1950s of the prologue is retold here; Shay, who has an affair with the married Klara, confronts Glassic over his affair with Marian. In fact, the novel dramatises the complications inherent in an apparently straightforward model of A versus B. Charles Wainwright, an advertising executive on Madison Avenue retells a story about one of their campaigns:

The agency was still in shock over the Equinox Oil campaign. … Fill up two cars with premium gasoline. One with Equinox, the other with a leading competitive brand. … White car versus black car. Clear implication. U.S. versus USSR. … We thought the Soviet embassy might lodge a complaint. We looked forward to it. Free publicity. What happens? We get complaints all right. But not from foreign governments. We hear from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. We hear from the Urban League. We hear from the Congress of Racial Equality. Because the white car beat the black car.

DeLillo takes this theme of black and white and literalises it. It appears everywhere, from the texture of the Eisenstein film to demarcation of ethnic zones in New York. In the prologue, Cotter is aware of his blackness in streets around the ballpark, it influences his behaviour; he is followed by Bill Waterson, who suddenly becomes aware of his whiteness in Cotter’s black neighbourhood. The black and white theme is played through the image of the chessboard, which Matt Shay is learning to play and is, of course, a major battlefield for Cold War supremacy. Furthermore, the black and white theme is taken to the structural level of the book itself. Whilst critics have noted the importance of the images which punctuate Mao II, the design of Underworld has so far gone unremarked. The front cover, in black and white, is shown in negative on the back. The six main parts of the book are broken up with a succession of full and half-black pages. Each of the three ‘intermezzo’ sections, concerning the black Manx family, are bracketed by black pages.

Underworld is a novel that complicates ideas of causality, built from the detritus of culture, where no element is too minute or too unconnected to be included. Critics who try to construct a causal argument from the text, fall prey to this web of connectivity, and can only advance by employing a massive repression of such minutae. In short, critics of Underworld interpret the book by denying the very secret history the novel seeks to reveal. Critics are left with the kind of faux choices invoked by the characters in response to Unterwelt: ‘Was Eisenstein being prescient about nuclear menace or about Japanese cinema?” It is the preconception, based on a received trope, that Eisenstein must be prescient about something that conditions the response to the film. At one point, Esther, whose critical faculties are thoroughly mediated in this way, claims: ‘”I don’t need to see the movie. I already love it’” Similarly, the aura of significance around DeLillo’s novel conditions the expectation of a statement about the times we live in.

So, is Underworld a postmodern statement about the impossibility of interpretation, the massive structure merely an ironic comment on novels which would promise a social critique of narrative certainty? Furthermore, is Underworld a failure? A novel made up from the detritus of culture and destined to become part of that same build up of garbage. For Parrish, ‘the very success of his narrative mimicry leads readers to worry that he is an impersonator co-opted by the narrative forms that he replays’ and ‘suggests how difficult it is for DeLillo to succeed in being both innovative and in control of his fiction’. Parrish’s DeLillo uses postmodernism to deconstruct itself in order to restore the status of the artist and seek transcendence in technology. According to Philip Nel, ‘In its richly layered language and careful structure, Underworld is DeLillo’s most “high modernist” novel to date; however, it also draws on avant-garde techniques in a more subtly effective way than his previous work’. For Paul Malty (in ‘The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo’) ‘to postmodernize DeLillo is to risk losing sight of the (conspicuously unpostmodern) metaphysical impulse that animates his work’.

The confusion of responses towards Underworld is a faultline in comprehension that DeLillo mirrors in the Unterwelt passage. That we are intended to draw a parallel between the fictional film and the fiction itself is clear, not only in their shared nomenclature. Both novel and movie share certain stylistic techniques, although DeLillo uses the comparison ironically to deflate his own ‘masterpiece’:

Overcomposed close-ups, momentous gesturing, actors trailing their immense bended shadows and there was something to study in every frame, the camera placement, the shapes and planes and then the juxtaposed shots, the sense of rhythmic contradiction, it was all spaces and volumes, it was tempo, mass and stress.

In Eisenstein you note that the camera angle is a kind of dialectic. Arguments are raised and made, theories drift across the screen and instantly shatter – there’s a lot of opposition and conflict.

It is in this ‘opposition and conflict’ perhaps that the critical difficulty lies. DeLillo has said of an earlier novel: ‘It seems to me that Ratner’s Star is a book that is almost all structure. The structure of the book is the book’. Similarly, Unterwelt is to be interpreted formally, its subject matter is incomprehensible otherwise – ‘… the film was embedded so completely in the viewpoint of the prisoners that Klara was beginning to squirm’ and ‘The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot’. We have already encountered both problems with regards to Underworld. Although very different in treatment and effect, both novel and film employ some kind of dialectical form rather than the straightforward ‘statement’ which appears to be on offer. In fact, as with Ratner’s Star, the subject matter and the form co-exist more or less equally. The montage described on the screen is not only worked into the very language that DeLillo uses to describe this event, but throughout the very structure of the book itself, which employs a broad collage of voices, modes of discourse, locations, ideas, forms of address, narrative styles.

Such a conflation of both narrative content and technique is the overriding organisational principle of Underworld. At the simplest level, the novel tells us that ‘everything connects in the end’ and this becomes part of its organisational system. In this sense, we cannot divorce the novel’s contents from its formal context. Everything in Underworld co-exists on two interconnected axes. It is as if the content of the book is a dramatisation of its formal principles, rather than the structure of the novel supporting the content as we might otherwise expect. Underworld obsessively refers to its own structure. Its collage style is echoed not only in the Eisenstein film, but also in the rain of torn paper that showers J Edgar Hoover at the baseball stadium. This in turn suggests the bric-a-brac nature of Hoover’s secret files and the invisible history they contain. The complex interplay of themes derived from black and white point to the design of the book itself, which uses an arrangement of black and white pages to organise the material. Reading as a postmodernist, we might expect such techniques to foreground the books own fictionality, its status as a material text and not a window to the world, but Underworld‘s narrative tone does not support this. The book displays none of the textual tricks and slippage that would accompany such a self-undermining work. In fact, DeLillo works at a kind of sharpened mimesis and is known for the way in which his works seem to actually ‘frame’ reality, how public events can come to seem like a ‘Don DeLillo moment.’ Ryan Simmons, for example, has noted the uncanny appearance of the Unabomber several years after DeLillo drew parallels between terrorism and authorship.

The content of Underworld relinquishes its primacy to structure. This is where the ‘meaning’ of the novel might be located. That there can be structure in this field of overdetermination, undermines the sense that we began with, the sense of a hellish underworld which offers us nothing stable. We might even go so far as to say that as content is an echo of the structural elements in the novel, which the characters are shaped by such structures. Analogously, the secret forces that shape the inhabitants of a Cold War culture are both structured and recoverable. In this sense, Underworld is indeed engaged, as Knight states, in the process of cognitive mapping offered by Fredric Jameson as a means to work through postmodern paralysis. We have already noted a spatial and historical dimension to DeLillo’s work. These are the two fields that Jameson claims are in need of ‘recovery’.

However, the notion that DeLillo’s writing offers a template for existence, in the manner of Baudelaire’s aesthetic argument that art justifies the world, supports the claim that Underworld is a work of modernism. The use of montage in Underworld, for example, has been interpreted as evidence of this. Philip Nel effectively differentiates between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ modernism:

DeLillo’s recent work, and especially Underworld, should be considered part of that “revolt” against “domesticated” modernism. But because his artistic development has roots in both “avantgarde movements” and “high modernism,” we can see in a work like Underworld a bridge between “modern” and “postmodern.” I would go as far as to say that, by relying on a modernist avant-garde (such as Surrealism and Dada) to engage the politics of postmodernity, DeLillo’s recent fiction in general challenges the validity of the modern-postmodern binarism.

The problem is that the opposition to binarism, whether it be represented by black and white or as a challenge to modernism versus postmodernism, itself functions within a dialectic framework. To oppose binarism reinscribes the dialectic under opposition.

As we have seen, however, by playing Unterwelt against Underworld, the novel does employs modernist techniques ironically only to foreground its own structural architecture. Part of this organisation is ‘the sense of rhythmic contradiction.’ Here, DeLillo does not simply tell us that ‘theories drift across the screen and instantly shatter,’ he also demonstrates it in the very act of comparison. Underworld both engages in dialectics and problematises the dialectical procedure. The equation is not one of simple opposition to binarism. In fact the novel places binarism and anti-binarism in dialectical opposition. Furthermore, each dialectic offered in the book is connected to every other, so that something resembling a rhizome of dialectics is constantly at work. Underworld is an unusually active text.

Despite the range of narrative voices, DeLillo’s style often employs the indirect internal voicing familiar from early modernist experiments in fictional consciousness. All the same, it is highly questionable as to whether any of DeLillo’s novels are interested in the dramatisation of psychological motivation. Characterisation, in the traditional sense, seems barely to be an issue at all. The population of Underworld is made up of theoretical speculative discourses, each with a worldview, a tone of voice and a proper name. Amongst the polyvocality of Underworld, however, there is a modernist voice. Indeed, the structure of the book also, at times, appears particularly to imitate Joyce. The book has something of a circularity with images of children playing in the street both opening and closing it. Sentences are echoed (‘He speaks in your voice’). The final aerial narrative echoes the final passage of The Dubliners in ‘The Dead,’ whilst this novel begins with ‘The Triumph of Death.’ Nel has noted how the final word ‘Peace’ may imitate The Wasteland – never mind the preoccupation with garbage and waste in Underworld.

We have noted Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping. Underworld is literally an attempt to map a shifting geography. The novel abounds with maps of white spaces, of territories that are neither one thing or the other, that have changed name, changed nationality, changed ideology. Nostalgia for the apparently monolithic stability of the Cold War is demonstrated as the result of a mythic memory. We cannot hope to fix the boundaries on the map because borders melt under capitalism. But, we can map the movement of capitalism and, in doing so, diminish the hellish sense that history is out of control. Thus, the mapping process is not so much one of space, but of movement in space. Underworld begins with a boy running into a baseball ground, a restless narration that shifts from person to person, a ball that travels from the pitcher, to the bat, into the bleachers and out into the world over time and space. Movement in space. Thus, one of the novel’s organisational paradigms is the theory of relativity, Einstein’s connection to the bomb. DeLillo foregrounds structure, to undermine the notion that structure is now impossible but, like the internet, this structure is not static. DeLillo’s cognitive map is in motion.

In More Brilliant Than The Sun, Kodwo Eshun, employs the analogy of Motion Capture:

… in films like Jurassic Park and all the big animatronic films, Motion Capture is the device by which they synthesize and virtualize the human body. They have a guy that’s dancing slowly, and each of his joints are fixed to lights and they map that onto an interface, and then you’ve got it. You’ve literally captured the motion of a human; now you can proceed to virtualize it.

Underworld makes a similar move to capture the subatomics of history in motion. It is an attempt to sweep up the detritus of the (post)modern era with a literary technology that can begin to frame it. DeLillo has commented on the relation of fiction to history. Underworld is a historical novel, in the lineage of War and Peace. But, rather than employing the realist methods of this novel, it employs the emerging paradigms of the contemporary, documenting history not only in content but in the very application of these techniques.

In short, Underworld is a work of contemporary ‘history’ which does not offer ‘meaning’ in the ‘traditional’ sense of the word. It is not so much an ‘argument’ or a dialectic that demands synthesis. Talking to DeCurtis about the Kennedy assassination, DeLillo has stated: ‘I think we’ve come to feel that what’s been missing over these past twenty-five years is a sense of manageable reality. Much of that feeling can be traced to that one moment in Dallas. We seem much more aware of elements like randomness and ambiguity and chaos since then’. DeLillo cannot offer a manageable reality, but he can offer a sense of it, in structure.

Links:
Sources can be found at Literary Criticism of Don DeLillo and at the Don DeLillo Society.
Gary Marshall’s review of ‘Underworld‘.
Chris Mitchell’s review of Kodwo Eshun’s ‘More Brilliant Than The Sun‘.