Dennis Haritou: Jonathan generously took the time to answer some questions. The Three Guys seem to be developing a format where we do a close discussion of the text, an interview with the author, and post or link to a story with a brief review in an attempt to get a comprehensive snapshot of an artist’s work.
I have to say that Jonathan was a total blast. Someday the Three Guys will met him in person and tell him so.
DH: I was intrigued by your award-winning career in radio broadcasting and the passages in All About Lulu where William considers the magic of great public speech are among the freshest and most original remarks in the novel. I once tried to write a novel by speaking it into a recorder so that it would sound like oral literature. This proved impractical. But there are many sections of Lulu that sound like they are being spoken aloud. How do you think the art of speaking and the art of writing relate to each other in your work?
JE: Well, I do an awful lot of both–talking and writing, that is. With a voice story like Lulu, sometimes it’s difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. I don’t know that anyone would ever consider me a lyrical writer, or an eloquent speaker, for that matter, but I’m very aware of rhythm and cadence when I engage in either activity. Perhaps music has informed my writing to a large degree. When I compose, I will often go back and read the sentence aloud, or at the very least, try to hear them aloud. Sometimes, when I give public readings, and I’m reading material that is of yet unpublished, I will stop in the middle of the reading and pull my red pen from behind my ear, and make a notation right then and there, if something bugs me. People tend to get a kick out of it, so I figure why not kill two birds with one stone. Not that I’d ever kill a bird. I’m strictly a catch-and-release kind of guy.
DH: William grows up, rather haplessly, in a family of bodybuilders. When I first read a synopsis of All About Lulu and read about that I thought: “How weird. I guess the copywriter is trying to tell me that this novel is offbeat.” But it’s not offbeat if that’s what you are into. And you certainly seemed to know what you were talking about, for example, putting Big Bill, I believe, in a contest that actually took place. So why did you decide to put that subculture in your novel? Do you like to work out or are you drawing on your own family background? It certainly makes a nice contrast to William, who can seem over-intellectual at times, perhaps as a reaction to his family of boneheads.
JE: Well, my dad really was a bodybuilder, and I did grow up around gyms, and like William, I did develop something of an aversion to them—just look at me! But I also developed a keen understanding of them. I didn’t chose bodybuilding because it was offbeat, though. Not at all—okay, maybe a little bit. Really, I chose it for a number of reasons: For starters, I think it’s an apt vehicle for the idea of self-improvement, in particular, the sort of short-sighted, narrowly focused self-improvement that can go badly awry, with monstrous results. Which brings us to the second reason, that being the trapping of dualism, in the Cartesian sense. I mean, here is Will, this scrawny little thoughtful dude, growing up in a world where everything is measured in mounds of muscle and flesh—in a decidedly non-cerebral environment (aspects which only increase his sense of isolation and weakness)—who finally begins to find himself in a disembodied voice.
DH: One of the aspects of your portrayal of adolescence that I found so compelling was how kids could start out with ambitious dreams and end up doing something much more ordinary as they grew older and were forced to compromise. Lulu is a good example of this. I’d call William a hero because he finds a way to realize some of his dreams. I was also reminded of JR’s interview with Richard Price where Price talked about how you could be an aspiring “something” when you were younger but found that pose increasingly awkward as you grew older. Was this an important theme for you in Lulu? Did you want to show what it took to make it? I am also thinking of the hot dog stand that William and his friends try to make a success.
JE: Could we just make this one a ‘yes or no’ question? Yes. I mean, no. Hold on a sec. I’m not sure it was an important theme from the novel’s conception. I didn’t set out to write Ragged Dick, or anything. But I was most certainly interested in the possibilities of where a person might end up relative to where a person my start. The difference is quite compelling to me. If there’s heroism in Will, it’s not that he worked his ass off toward a goal and achieved it (his two biggest opportunities fell into his lap, after all). His heroism resides merely in getting out from beneath the shadow of what might have been his destiny—to be a meathead. I’m interested in people who break well-worn patterns to find something that suits them better. I grew up in a family of pessimists. I’m possibly the biggest optimist you will ever meet. Ask JR—I’ve got happy bugs in my pants.
DH: The Three Guys spent some time debating William’s obsession with Lulu. It was viewed alternately as a distraction or as a form of personal growth. Certainly the complexity of William’s relation to his half-sister is a chief asset the story. And William seems to care for Lulu on several different levels and also exploit her on several different levels. So is it love or pathology or both at once for both Lulu and William? Can you give some assessment of how you would approach these questions?
JE: Okay, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Lulu. Eventually, this will lead us back to shadows. Obviously, Will’s affection for Lulu is very specific (and yes, very romanticized), right down the scars, and the yellow socks, and the very certain way she does this and that. There is no doubt that he fully appreciates these things. But really, from the moment I conceived her, Lulu was intended to be the shadow of an even bigger shadow— that of William’s mother, the only person to whom William did not feel alien. When his mother dies, he’s alone in a world made of meat. In the wake of his mother’s death, Lulu is the first possibility to present herself to Will in terms of an ally. She goes so far as to join him in the meat resistance. As a traumatized kid, he latches onto this opportunity and refuses to let go. It is the one real testament to his tenacity as a ‘hero’. Knowing my own timorous heart at that age, I imagine I might’ve done the same thing. This is chiefly why I didn’t develop Lulu’s character more, why people are often vexed by Will’s obsession, and plagued by the question: What does he see in her? Well, he sees somebody who can fill a hole which he thinks might make him whole again.
DH: I very much enjoyed the depiction of faded sixties glory in your story between Big Bill as the former hippie and his more skeptical son. The scene where William and his father end up in the desert contemplating the failed dreams of a utopian commune was quite moving as an attempt of a new generation to understand and form a rapprochement with the outdated aspirations of an older generation. It was also a great way to show father and son trying to make peace with one another. As a person who grew up in the sixties, I can tell you that you did a good job depicting that era from a younger generation’s point of view. Was that important to you? Do you find that era interesting? What relevance does it have for your story?
JE: I’m glad you liked that chapter. You know, I must’ve placed a half-dozen excerpts or more in various journals, and nobody ever bit on that particular chapter, which I saw as one of the better stand-alones. Take heart, rejected writers of the world! As to what significance this historical earmark has on the story, I guess the biggest significance is a sort of—you might cringe, here—loss of innocence, both Big Bill and Willow’s, as well as America’s. The dividends of free love, the implications of America’s shifting role globally. There is a short passage from late in the novel that might express this best (possible spoiler warning in effect—let’s call it a code orange):
I listened without comment as my father began meandering somewhere between regret and nostalgia, recalling his lower Haight Days; before the Fall of Love, before Grace Slick was giving drunken blowjobs to microphones and puking on stage, before the Hell’s Angels were working security, before the junkies were epidemic, before the ad moguls cashed in with their VW buses and Coca Cola, and suddenly love was not free anymore, and hippies were a demographic. He explained how Willow met Annie, and Annie met Not-So-Big Bill, and how soon everything was a little more complex. Yet in spite of all its complexities, life was simple because it seemed you had forever to sort it out, or awhile, anyway. And even as darkness set in, and the whole world—from Viet Nam to Buena Vista Park—seemed like a great big Maybe, and the word We suddenly meant a lot of different things, and the word Me started popping up a lot more in everybody’s vocabulary . . . blah blah blah. . .
As a sort of counterpoint to the 60s, I put Lulu in Seattle during the—get ready to cringe, again—“grunge revolution” of the early 90s, which I experienced firsthand, quite intimately, and would liken to the summer of love only in that it represented the end of something that was actually exciting and fertile much earlier. The hippies I talk to almost invariably say it was over at Newport, if not earlier. Grunge, yet another post-punk permutation, as any kind of exciting cultural scene, was over during the Reagan era, around 1984, when the bourgeoning all-ages club scene was killed by the po-lice—or more accurately, the fire department. Codes, and whatnot. It didn’t help that kids were packing a hundred plus into basements the size of cube trucks, or that they were lighting bonfires in the streets and riding through them on skateboards. A pale shadow to the youth movements of the 60s, to be sure, but without a doubt a welcome diversion from Reagan’s America, and a great venue for frustrated suburban kids to blow off steam and look for an alternative to jellybeans, conformity, and the inequities of Keynesian economics.
DH: JR made some great comments in our discussion about voice in Lulu. He raised the question of balancing writing as “Evison” or writing as “William” and how he felt that the character led the story as the novel developed. Perhaps it takes a writer to best ask another writer such an inside track question. Certainly, in some aspects, William is you although he certainly is not you. But maybe I can say that William became more fully realized as an achievement of the novel. You seemed to have invested a lot of yourself in William. What did you think of the guy?
JE: First, to JR’s astute comments. While I’m very cognizant and familiar with the process of a willful protagonist wresting control of a narrative (this happened to me with an earlier unpublished coming-of-age novel I wrote (among my five other unpublished novels) when I was in my 20s. Believe it or not, I really had somewhat of a handle on Will from the start, though Will didn’t have a handle on himself from the start, and I guess that was sort of the point. Certainly, though, I became increasingly familiar with Will, and was able to more fully inhabit him as the novel progressed, and also with successive drafts. In my experience, change comes in leaps. When Will left home and got an apartment, and found a whole new context for himself, he made one of those leaps, and I suspect that is why the narrative’s shift in tone may seem somewhat abrupt.
DH: Now that your debut novel has been so well received, are you planning or working on a new novel?
JE: I’ve got two finished. That’s how slow the wheels of publishing can turn. Or maybe I drink too much coffee. One of them is a real beast—nearly six hundred pages, four dozen characters, and twelve decades in breadth. Colonel Sanders is in it. The other one is probably the most straight-ahead comedic thing I’ve written. Both of them are departures from Lulu, both third person with many points-of-view, and both of them were harder to write than Lulu. I’m ready to write another voice novel that doesn’t require a butt-load of research, I’ll tell you that much. Got one in gestation, now. I’m gonna’ give myself a few months off to get fat on beer and catch up on my reading, and maybe go back to Ecuador, or something and chill, or try to anyway. Beer’s pretty cheap down there.
DH: My last question: The Three Guys try to offer a close reading of the text. We are not interested in gossip or in grandstanding for ourselves. We want to try to understand a work of art. Are there any issues that we didn’t raise that you think should have come up in a discussion of your book? Is there something that you are surprised we didn’t notice? Do you think we did a good job in discussing All About Lulu?
JE: Are you kidding? I think all three of you guys are amazing readers—dream readers, really. And even when you found my novel lacking in some way, I was totally swept up in the discourse, and tickled pink to be the subject of it. The fact that your readings diverged only made it all the more fascinating. I think what you’re doing here is the kind of thing that books (and the book industry) sorely needs in this day and age— a vertical platform, or whatever (can you tell I’m a total business dummy?) for readers to extrapolate, to de-isolate reading, to interact with other readers, and when possible, interface with authors. That’s why I started the Fiction Files. You guys ought to add a discussion forum which branches off of your discourse, because you are all so adept at distilling meaning out of text. This was a pleasure, thanks.
DH: Jonathan, the pleasure was all ours, believe me. Thanks very much for sharing your art and ideas with us.
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