Dennis Haritou: Thanks for taking our questions, Mr. Lynch. There was some talk around the Random House office comparing Border Songs to aspects of Steinbeck and Of Mice and Men. Of course, the writer that you expressly quote in your story is not Steinbeck but the Fitzgerald of The Great Gatsby. The association that I had in Border Songs was of another writer in the American canon, the late Hemingway of The Old Man and the Sea.
The situation of your hero Brandon’s father, Norm Vanderkool, reminded me of The Old Man and the Sea. Norm is a flawed character and the management of his farm reflects those flaws. He is fighting for the welfare of his farm as if he were fighting for his own soul. The scene where Norm struggles to save his cow and her birthing calf was the most visceral and one of the most effective in the book and that’s a statement from a city guy who thinks that milk comes from stores.
How would you assess Norm’s struggles as a farmer and how it reflects his personality?
JL: Norm’s desperate and imperfect handling of his farm is an extension of his clumsy, well-intentioned, day-dreaming approach to life. Thanks for thinking of “The Old Man and the Sea.” It’s been too long since I’ve re-read it to adequately compare Norm to Santiago, but they are two suffering snake-bit men striving for redemption at similar junctures in life. Norm, for me, is an everyman taking inventory now that he can see the end — an essentially good man, yet vulnerable to swings of self-pity, egotism and self-loathing, open to delusions and temptation.
DH: The Canadian character Wayne Rousseau tries to re-experience creative genius by reinventing the light bulb and “creating” The Great Gatsby by copying it out. It’s very funny but I also associate Wayne with Norm and several other characters in the book who seem to be making false moves in contrast to our hero, Brandon, who seems incapable of making false moves. Did you see your characters that way? That they are all dysfunctional Brandons while the real article, who seems dysfunctional to everyone else, rings true.
JL: I did enjoy and cultivate the contrast between characters desperately trying to squeeze more out of life and Brandon who is simply doing it without contrivance or desire for recognition. Outcasts and loners often have the advantage of independent vision. They’re less susceptible to group think. They often can’t help but be more original. It took me a long time to figure out exactly how Brandon ticks, but you’ve described what I was shooting for — a seemingly dysfunctional young man with unusual gifts who is incapable of a false move.
DH: I found the borderland where your novel takes place to be intriguing as a state of mind. The metaphors can run wild here as characters can be in “borderline” states even with respect to being good or being evil. I think Madeline is in that situation since she is tempted into drug smuggling but seems to be a good person who ends up as a criminal almost by an accident of geography. Your characters seem “tempted” by the border, as if it were a moral condition in itself. What does the border mean to you?
JL: The border strikes me as a great example of the silly and symbolic fences we erect between ourselves. This border and the agents patrolling it create this illusion of security when a casual tour along the invisible line makes it obvious that any terrorist or criminal competent enough to inflict harm would have no problem crossing it. There’s also just this Monty Python absurdity to the western end of the boundary, the way it attempts to follow this nonsensical 49th parallel from the Great Lakes to the Pacific, the way we have to keep chain-sawing and weed-whacking it to know where the hell it is. You don’t have to stop when you’re driving from France into Germany, but you need to be interrogated on your way back to Seattle from Vancouver? But yes, the border also, by its economic and legal significance, creates temptation and intrigue and outlawry. And I like the undertow it has on my character’s moralities and sensibilities.
DH: Brandon seems to have fallen out of the sky…an unearthly child. Yet no one is more rooted in the earth than Brandon who can even sense earthquakes that his neighbors can’t feel. He seems genetically incapable of lying. His father finds him an embarrassment and his friends just think he’s weird. He is like an early 21st century Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed plunked down right at the center of your realistic novel. Where does Brandon come from?
JL: I will no doubt develop a more polished answer over time, but at this point I have to laugh and say I’m not exactly sure where he came from. I believe he started as somewhat of a dare to myself to create a dramatically different protagonist than the tiny 4-foot-8, 13-year-old, speed-reading star of my first novel, “The Highest Tide.” Super tall and severely dyslexic seemed like a good start, but soon I couldn’t imagine him any other way. As for his mental workings, I was helped by books on dyslexia and autism, particularly Temple Grandin’s books detailing how her autistim makes it impossible to understand human behavior yet makes it easy to tune into animals. Along the way, as I got distracted by the astonishing variety of birds in the borderland and Andy Goldsworthy’s landscape art, Brandon’s character began to gel. As I said above, it took a long time to figure out how to write him, but once I did, the novel began to rise up.
DH:I have to admit that Brandon Vanderkool has cast a spell over me that I would love to exorcize. That’s just me, but I tend to recoil from any hint of sentimentality in literature or film. It’s as if someone is trying to methodically push my emotional buttons. It’s like a cheap shot and it’s not art. But I can’t shake off Brandon, no matter how hard I try. Imagine that, a novel with a lead character that you just have to love.
I think that Brandon is going to burn celluloid someday, He is practically walking out on to the big screen right now. Border Songs would make a great movie or even a winning television
series. Is there any chance of that happening?
JL: There has been some early interest in a possible TV series, but who knows. These things are impossible to predict. If it does happen I would love to be there for the auditions for Brandon’s role — a long line of extremely tall men stepping in front of the camera and trying to talk in bungled sentences. So many characters fall flat on the screen without their inner monologues, but Brandon’s world is so visual I would hope the right actor could enjoy and excel at bringing him to life.
DH: Most of the people who will read your novel live in cities or suburbs. They are removed from both nature and the agrarian life depicted and, in effect, praised in Border Songs. I am reminded also that the ancient tradition of the pastoral in literature, of which we might consider your novel a 21st century example, was created by over-stressed city dwellers who were seeking a different outlook for their minds and spirits. So I am thinking that all our over-stressed urban types will love your novel because it is escapist. Like it’s something for me to read while I am standing up in my sardine can-like Long Island Rail Road train. But I’d like to think your novel is more than just escapist. What do you hope readers will get out of it? This is my last question so thanks, Mr. Lynch, for both Brandon and Border Songs.
JL: I’m not a big fan of suggesting what readers should get out of anything. Perhaps that got burned out of me by too many pedantic lit professors bullying me into parroting their assessments. I was drawn to this setting, this brain-bending strip of North America that most people don’t know about. Once I got up there and saw the rapidly growing Border Patrol presence in these previously serene family farmlands, I saw comic potential and a collision of American eras. The story and characters grew out of this setting. So if I did my work well, I would hope the landscape and this bizarre and awkward moment in time sticks with readers. If they like the story for its escapist entertainment, or find it provocative about our so-called wars on drugs and terror, that’s cool too. I would hope that the characters linger with them, particularly Brandon and his ability to see what everyone else is missing. Thanks a lot for the careful read, the kind words and the good questions.
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