Ron Carlson’s The Signal is on-sale on June 1st. I had a chance to talk to Ron about the book. RC is awesome:
Dennis Haritou: Ron, you have written a novel without a roof. Your characters are almost always outdoors. Why make that creative choice?
Ron Carlson: I never ever thought of it that way – no roof! And I didn’t think of it when I was writing as an artistic choice. I worked to keep the story simple and each scene led me to the next – even if the next was in the past – and most of those scenes in Mack’s life are out of doors. I spend a lot of time indoors and I long for summer and camping have always cherished my time like that, so the book operates out of longing also, I expect. I wanted to camp, so I wrote one.
DH: The Signal is framed as a trek through the Wyoming mountains. How is it that a camping trip can be a journey of discovery? I’m a non-camper; so that’s where this question is coming from. What do your characters learn when they go camping?
RC: The thing that is not teachable or ever described very well in story or song (or film) about camping is that you never rest. You don’t fix up a campfire and sit around having coffee or whiskey or whatever. You are always gathering wood, stoking the fire, trying to drink your coffee while sitting for a second on a sharp rock or an uneven log before you get up to set up a clothes line or sort your gear for tomorrow or find the damn flashlight. The fire doesn’t cooperate; I’ve never seen a real campfire in a film – all those phony fires. They make me sick. However, camping is relentless and demanding and you get into a kind of flow dealing with all of the necessities. Want clean water: figure it out. It is a throwback life, a dear thing, a fresh new planet. You always surprise yourself with your capabilities. We need to get you out of the house.
DH: Your detailed descriptions of the expedition that Mack and Vonnie go on is like a syntax of the wilderness…with trailheads, meadows, forests and lakes as punctuation. For the reader, it’s as if this trek from Jackson Hole was real and The Signal could function as a map. I’d like to pack up my kit and take this specific hike right now…even though I’m a total city slicker. How close is your description of the route taken by Mack and Vonnie to being real geography and how much of it lives only in your imagination as a writer?
RC: Let me just say honestly that I’ve been to the Wind River Mountains four times for a week at a time and I’ve been camping in the Uinta Mountains of Utah dozens of times, and I conflated all of those trips, defaulting to the Winds, which are a much more rugged and vast range. But, I moved everything around and I omitted the need for one reservation permit (if you go to the real Cold Creek) and frankly I got carried away at moments in the rocks and in the trees. I did actually see my dear friend Blair Torrey catch a fish while he was standing on a glacier point over a lake in those mountains; I saw it rise to his fly through the clear water.
DH: Mack and Vonnie, are the couple, on the verge of separation, who decide to take one last anniversary hike into the mountains. Their relationship may be virtually unraveling as the reader watches but you can’t be sure. You put these two close partners together in the wilderness, by a lake and a campfire, and let them talk to each other. The reader has to wonder: What’s going to happen between them? As the writer, did you wonder about that too?
RC: Yes, I did. I wrote all of their scenes with care, by that I mean skill and affection. People part ways and still love each other, I know that as a fact. I wanted their relationship to be real, and I listened closely.
DH: Let’s talk about Mack a little more. He’s insular, not a people person, can’t be a phony…he doesn’t have the social skills for it. He’s loyal and courageous, even when he’s afraid…but he’s a petty criminal. He’s quite a mix…a great puzzle for the reader to try and figure out. Do you see his criminality as related to his lack of citified social skills. Is he a crook because he doesn’t fit in?
RC: When I saw how Mack was flawed, I wondered if I would have to put in the causes, the smoking gun. I think necessity pushed him to the edge of trouble and then wear and tear did the rest. He is quite a mix. He is a guy who made mistakes and knows it; it’s part of his muscle now.
DH: I admired how you mentioned on the first page of The Signal that Mack drives his dead father’s old Chevrolet. Of course, you could see it as a sign that Mack doesn’t have the dough to buy a new car. But the moving flashbacks with his dad on their guest ranch explain a lot about why you have to like Mack. Mack’s father seems like the light that may fail in Mack’s personality…the moral center. Later in his life, Vonnie seems to be his salvation from isolation and a new moral compass. Mack also finds himself in his relationship with nature. How do you see him?
DH: I admired how you mentioned on the first page of The Signal that Mack drives his dead father’s old Chevrolet. Of course, you could see it as a sign that Mack doesn’t have the dough to buy a new car. But the moving flashbacks with his dad on their guest ranch explain a lot about why you have to like Mack. Mack’s father seems like the light that may fail in Mack’s personality…the moral center. Later in his life, Vonnie seems to be his salvation from isolation and a new moral compass. Mack also finds himself in his relationship with nature. How do you see him?
RC: I appreciate that reading. It’s clear he reveres his father who was a scrupulous man. And it becomes clear that he has the talent and guts to measure just how far he falls short of his father’s standards. He would like to have Vonnie – for many reasons – but he knows too that he can’t base a life or dedicate a life or fix himself for her; it’s got to be for himself, rough a go as that may be.
DH: The Signal is a lean, mean story-telling machine…realistic but with a heart. The experience of reading it reminded me of reading Cormac McCarthy more than any other writer. I don’t know what you think of that comparison but what contemporary writers do you like?
RC: For the work I cherish, you’d have to work to outdo Mr. Tom McGuane and Cormac McCarthy and Bill Kittredge in his last novel in the way these writers evoke a world, even when they are being spare, the contours of the moments take life.
DH: Publishing these days seems rather compartmentalized. In my recent review of The Signal, I tried to break it out of any Western regional interest pigeon-hole. Do you visualize who your audience might be when you write a story? What kind of feedback, if any, are you hoping for and what kind of readers?
RC: I have no real sense of the marketplace. I certainly didn’t write it for region or envision any niche; I wanted to write a good working story. I’m not going to complain about being a western writer. I’ve already had the finest moment a novelist can know in that when my son Nick was staying with me last month he came in the kitchen and said he’d stayed up and read the book that he loved it and we talked about it over breakfast — along with our travel plans for the summer. This is the larger purpose of fiction.
DH: I could see Mack as a continuing character and could imagine other stories about him. Have you given any thought to writing a sequel or do you think of The Signal as a stand-alone work? Are you working on your next novel yet?
RC: Whoa. A sequel. I never even thought. The mountains are still there, and after an inquest or two, Mack would be free to give the ranch a good go again. And I know some good, original campfire stories. I’ll dream on it.
DH: Thanks very much, Ron. The Signal is close to near-perfect storytelling. No one should miss it.
RC: I enjoyed this. And I appreciate it.
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