High Horse

Clocking in at well over 600 pages, the easy comparisons to Jim Gauer’s opus, Novel Explosives, are the Maximalists of yore–Pynchon, DFW, Joyce–but the truth is Novel Explosives is definitive of itself, and deservingly so, reminding us of the possibility of literary artifacts that possess the spontaneity of something well loved and fully realized, completely and fearlessly free. 

We reached out to Mr. Gauer with some questions about the provenance of the novel, and his own personal history. He was kind enough to answer all of our questions in great detail, even the dumb ones:

HH: Where were you born, where did you grow up? Was there a strong focus on reading in your household growing up? If so, who did this come from? Mom or Dad or some combination thereof?

JG: Even a partial explanation of my childhood would require a book, so permit me to briefly summarize.  I was born in Berkeley and grew up in what was then a small town called Solana Beach, north of San Diego.  The town was nearly all blue collar, second generation Polish immigrants, and rather thoroughly Catholic; the only wealthy person in the town was the doctor, who turned out to be a morphine dealer, and I suspect that a third of the town was addicted to morphine.  My dad was a particle physics engineer who built the Synchrotron at the Rad Lab at Berkeley; he was also an alcoholic who vanished when I was 4.  My mother then went to work as a cocktail waitress, and later became one of the great computer scientists in the early history of computing.  There was no focus at all on reading; there was a strong focus on violence and mayhem.  My first memory of any kind is of my mom cracking a beer stein over the top of my dad’s head and blood everywhere.  The most important thing I learned in childhood was to be self-reliant.  I taught myself to read, write, and sight-read piano music when I was 4, and read every book in the house, though the only books in the house were a twelve-volume encyclopedia, which I read from cover to cover, and two volumes of poetry, all of which I committed to memory.  At age 6, I discovered this marvelous thing called a Library, and read quite a lot of Robert Louis Stephenson and Jules Verne.  I wrote my first novel when I was 7, a sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, as I was thoroughly dissatisfied with the ending in the book, and thought it needed a different ending.  I suppose my childhood was full of beginnings and endings.

HH: Floating about on the internet is a collection of poetry attributed to you, Jim Gauer, called Belaboring the Obvious. Lines from one of the poems included in the digital collection, entitled “Lullaby,” is quoted near the back half of Novel Explosives, I believe (spoiler alert), after dear Alvaro realizes that he has a dog. And the fictional JG, or Douchebag, also known as Alvaro Campos, who is a heteronym for Fernando Pessoa, is himself described as being a poet in creative decline. 

Which leads me, after much wandering, to my inquiry–could you provide some background and history, some chronology, maybe, as to your career writing poetry, before your work on Novel Explosives? What got you started writing literature? Who were some of your early influences, and what’s the story behind the long break between the poems included in Belaboring the Obvious, and Novel Explosives?

JG: For reasons I’ll spare you, my study of mathematics in grad school ended when I was 20, and instead of writing my dissertation, I fell in love and went to work at Rand, or more specifically RDA, building math models of nuclear war.  One of the problems they gave me was to build a model of nuclear fallout, though they made the mistake of giving me all of the data against which the model would be tested, so instead of building a model, I reverse-engineered all of the data, and wrote it all out in one long equation with 24 variables.  I’d been given a year to build the model, and it took me two weeks to write the equation, and as this was done on a “cost-plus” contract, I wasn’t allowed to work on anything else for most of a year.  My solution to the problem of what the hell do I do now was to start writing poetry, for no particular reason other than that I’d memorized quite a lot of poetry.  My early influences were all the obvious ones, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, but more particularly Hart Crane, an absolute magician with language, but a very bad influence on a very young writer.  I proceeded to write truly awful poetry for 6 years, wrote my first good poem when I was 27, and then had 10 good years of writing and publishing poetry.  While Knopf might have published Belaboring the Obvious, I pulled the book since I knew that I didn’t have a single poem left in me, as I’d made the writing problem increasingly difficult to solve, to the point that I could no longer solve it; I spent close to three years on one poem that I failed to finish and then stopped writing altogether.  This was far worse than heroin withdrawal, as I couldn’t read anything creative or even listen to music, so I read nothing but history for 2 years.  I started writing again after my mother died, and spent ten years writing seven days a week in the late night early morning hours, as I was working full time running a venture capital fund, and ended up with two novels, the second of which was Novel Explosives, but neither of which I intended to publish.  A great many more beginnings and endings, including marriages, children, jobs, living in Paris, Portugal, Belgium, and briefly in Singapore and Malaysia, so many stops, starts, and restarts that I don’t remember even half of them.  The full catastrophe approach to living that I couldn’t have avoided even if I’d wanted to, which I most certainly did not.

HH: You’ve mentioned several people as being important mentors or teachers to you in past interviews and correspondence. Could you talk about your time working with Hugh Kenner? Who is Howard Stein, how did you come to know him, and what did you learn or take away from him? And is there anybody else who I failed to mention, who was an important mentor to your development as a fiction writer, and should be named?

So first keep in mind that I’ve been working full time jobs since I was 14, first as a dishwasher, next at a 7-11, next as a truly good bill collector, and then as a very poor computer programmer, so anything done beyond this was out of a love of writing, reading, and learning.  I first went to grad school in literature at U. Mass when I was 22, and then at Johns Hopkins, where I studied under Hugh Kenner.  Kenner was a truly odd human, massively erudite and close to unapproachable, and a very bad teacher, as he was thoroughly bored with teaching the Modernists.  He taught Ulysses, for example, by handing us copies of the 1904 Dublin tram schedule, and having us track every movement in the book against the tram schedule.  The one thing I learned from him, after he discovered my poetry, was to get out of academia and “go live a life worth writing about,” a lesson that’s no doubt evident, for better or worse, in Novel Explosives.  Howard Stein was a writing teacher who was among the founders of the Iowa School, and started the writing schools at U. of Texas, Yale, and Columbia, where he was my wife’s mentor for her MFA.  I first met him at a lunch at Grand Central Station, and we bonded instantly over ideas about poetry and its relationship to stand-up comedy, as both depend on rhythm, timing, and sticking the landing.  As no one would be stupid enough to write a book like Novel Explosives for publication, it was in fact written to entertain Howard while he was slowly dying of pulmonary issues, and I sent him the book chapter by chapter for years, though he died shortly before I finished the book, so an ending without quite a finished ending.  My most important mentor was Jacques Derrida, who guided me through 30 years of reading and writing philosophy, about which the less said the better.  Derrida was a rather formidable philosopher and a truly generous human being; why he took any notice of me is beyond me, but we had a 40-year relationship that started with letters, continued with lunches near Norm Sup and the Pantheon in Paris, and ended with his death on October 9, 2004.  I’ve done exactly one work of art in my entire life, and this was done to honor Derrida. 

HH: I was struck by the formatting and style of the dialogue in Novel Explosives. What was the thinking or strategy behind bracketing certain portions of dialogue in quotation marks, and blending large sections of dialogue with the omniscient narrator of the novel?

JG: All of the conventions used to produce dialogue strike me as odd, strange, and rather funny, so I used all of them in Novel Explosives, though the choices in convention were fairly specific to the characters involved, and which of the language worlds they were involved in.  You’ll have to explain this to yourself, as I most certainly cannot.

HH: Most reviews of Novel Explosives focus on its being a paragon of maximalist, postmodern literature. However, there are certain elements to your writing that allow access to the kind of reader who doesn’t think Pynchon or DFW hung the moon. In particular, your detail and description of place came off to me as being very realistic and immersive, and something that separates Novel Explosives from other quite long, maximalist works of fiction. 

What was your process in conceiving of the many different places depicted in Novel Explosives? Did you have to physically explore Juarez and El Paso and Guanajuato in order to write about them convincingly? 

JG: I started writing Novel Explosives, the day after I’d finished my first novel, with little more than a first sentence and a sort of tune in my head that likely had some of the rhythms of the book.  Since my first novel ends with smoke from a Malibu fire drifting off in the direction of Guanajuato, Guanajuato was handed to me by the first book.  I then wrote a maybe 100-page blast of prose, at the end of which the characters Raymond and Eugene appeared out of nowhere, in the parking lot of a motel in El Paso, which in turn handed me Cuidad Juárez.  I didn’t have a clue as to who they were or why they were in El Paso, and continued writing only because I wanted to know more about them.  While I wrote continuously throughout the process, I visited every location in the book, including Grainfield, Kansas, which turned out to be Eugene’s home town, and read around 70 books regarding the Juárez feminicides, money laundering, the histories of Guanajuato, El Paso, and Juárez, the Mexican drug cartels, the CIA’s involvement in cocaine importation, and so on, and ended up with a shoebox full of notes on index cards that I never once looked at.  At some point in the process, the structure of the book occurred to me spontaneously, and I then started over on the writing, keeping nothing but the first sentence, and since I had the entire structure in my head, my outline of the book is on one side of an index card.

In any case, this was the process used to write the book, and it was written sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph and chapter by chapter, more the way a poem might be written than the way a novel would be written using rough drafts.  I suppose I learned to do description by reading other writers, particularly Dickens, Proust, and early Hemingway.  The purpose of description is to give the reader a sense of the book as a lived experience, as if they’ve not only read the book but lived it.  Good description helps the reader feel as if they’re living in the language world of the book, and it should almost always been done in the narrative flow of the book.  If you stop the narrative to describe something, the reader may feel as if they’re outside the book looking in, and you want the reader to remain inside the world of the book if at all possible.  Dickens might do a paragraph of static description to open a chapter, but once the narrative resumes, his description is all done in the narrative flow.  Since good description has a sort of emotional hue or resonance, the best way to do description is to stay inside the mind of the narrator in first person or the character used in free indirect in third person, and let the character do the description for you, as they live inside the world of the book, and can see, hear, and smell their surroundings.  I know this sounds odd, but a fully imagined character knows their world better than you do, and they can help you give the description an emotional hue, meaning anything from a sense of menace to a sense of sadness and grief to a sense of joy and wonder.  Good writers are like good actors, as both can stay inside the mind of their characters, and both give us a sense of truth under imaginary circumstances.  And while visiting locations helps add richness to the detail, truly vivid description comes from inside the mind of a fully imagined character, so even in third person narrative, you might think of your narrator as a sort of character in the book, and write from inside the mind of this character.  In any case, enough, or always already too much.   

HH: Are you at work on anything new, and if so, could you provide some details?

JG: I started a third novel after I finished Novel Explosives, but I didn’t care at all about the characters, and you can’t write a good novel unless you love your characters.  I suppose if I wake up one morning with a first sentence and a sort of tune in my head, I’ll write another novel. 

HH: Are there any books you’ve read recently, and highly recommend?

JG: Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai, Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams, and Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright are recent books by three of our greatest living writers.  If you’ll permit me to recommend one book that I’ve recently reread, I highly recommend Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz, a masterpiece of the uncanny.

HH: You are a man who seemingly moves between many more discourse worlds, as you call them, than your average joe. Which discourse world does Jim Gauer identify most strongly with?

JG: The most important discourse world for all of us is that of the financial system, as we’re nearly all financial illiterates, and the system takes advantage of our ignorance by burying us beneath a vast pile of financial jargon.  Can you tell the difference between and synthetic derivative and an organic derivative?  Can you define a credit default swap, and explain why these brought down our entire financial system?  Yeah, me neither.  While I put a great many discourse worlds into Novel Explosives, the one I most identity with is that of family, friends, and generosity to others, all of which is likely to vanish if we aren’t careful to preserve them from the discourse world of grievance. 

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“In the Evening of the Dream”

By Jim Gauer

This evening I feel at last an overwhelming capacity
To fail and be done with it. At last I can fail.
If I don’t now have hopes, because I for one have failed them,
Because I’ve lived just to a point, which is clearly beside the point,
Well I still have what I have, a quiet sense
Of my enormous failure, and a gathering sense of night
That is hopelessly dark, but merely night.
The sun sets as it sets, and if we somehow hoped otherwise,
Then let’s just call it a day in which
We somehow hoped otherwise; when the day ends
Our hopes, it does not end what we hoped.
The stars rise as they rise, and if our wish is to change this,
That simply makes these the stars on which
To wish we could change this; should they grant us
One wish, these stars are all we could wish.
Having failed my own dreams, which clearly makes me a failure,
Which means in all that I hoped, there was never any hope,
I know I’ve lost what I’ve lost, but I’ll never lose
My failure, and if the dark takes
My dreams, it can’t take back what I’ve dreamed.
At last I am truly lost, and none of the loss is wasted.
When the clear sweet light is gone, there is the sweetness of what is gone.
In the evening of the dream, watching the dream become a failure,
Watching the meaning of the hope become the meaninglessness of hope,
None of the loss is lost on me: the light dies,
The stars shine, and I know
Just what I’ve wasted, precious hours
Made precious, because I’ve lost them
And gained their loss.