(Photo: Teddy Wolff, via Guernica)
Victor LaValle is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, & The Changeling, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. Below is a 2014 interview with Publisher Andrew Keating, published in Cobalt: Volume Two. Read on, especially if you love monsters and hip-hop.
Victor LaValle
Andrew Keating: Your latest novel, The Devil in Silver, seems rife with opportunities for hyperbole, but you do keep your characters relatable, and the mental hospital setting both realistic and simple. How do you restrain yourself?
Victor LaValle: I’m so happy you feel the characters and setting were “relatable,” “realistic and simple.” I might have to steal that for a blurb on a later edition of the book. In all seriousness, I find that one of the biggest challenges for me, as a writer, is to make my characters and settings feel relatable. I tend to write about people and places that might normally be pretty marginalized if not downright invisible to society. The mentally ill, the religiously extreme, the poor and working class, the petty criminals. These are not folks that people necessarily want to spend lots of time with. And yet they’re the folks I find most interesting and rich with dramatic potential. So, if I want people to spend time with them, I have to do some work to make them interesting company. This often means that I have to want to spend time with them first. I have to relate to them. Once I find my affection for them, it’s easier to generate that feeling in the reader. If I can make you feel warmth or concern or just interest in the characters, then I think you’ll forgive quite a bit. I mean the characters in the book certainly do get out of hand sometimes, they do act outrageously, but because you’ve come to care for them you’ll go along with them. That’s the hope anyway.
AK: You mention Cuckoo’s Nest in other interviews, as well as in the novel itself; and when I bring up the realistic setting, I suppose I’m referring to the typical (as opposed to stereotypical) mental hospital setting that Devil in Silver and Cuckoo’s Nest have in common. The story emerges from the characters stuck inside those walls, and those characters, too, are pretty typical for where they are. The fiction I am drawn to forces a central character out of his/her status quo, and what better way to do throw someone off balance than to stick them (regardless of innocence) in a mental hospital for 72 hours?
VL: That was my thinking exactly. I had a feeling that outside of something like Cuckoo’s Nest, or that Shutter Island movie, most of my readers would have no real feeling for a mental hospital. Now the former is closer to real life while the latter is definitely fun but wildly over the top and not at all realistic anymore (if ever). I figured the average reader would be pretty shaken by the idea of being thrown in with all these troubled people, locked up in a madhouse, and that would get them tense. Then I wanted to upend at least some of their expectations. The patients aren’t monsters but then neither is the staff. Everyone is trapped in a terrible space that warps even the best of people. I thought that was a fine description of real life on a psychiatric unit and, in a broader way, of real life in a country going through the kind of current turmoil that makes even decent people start acting insane.
AK: One of my favorite moments in the novel is when Scotch Tape (“’Cause I see right through you”) explains how Pepper came to be in the mental hospital. It’s a frightening thought. I mean, yeah, there’s this bison-headed monster roaming the corridors, but the idea that I could get into a scuffle at a bar one night and be thrown in a dangerous mental hospital for three days because the cops are off-duty and don’t feel like doing the paperwork? Were you actively prodding that this as a social issue?
VL: One of the things people find most troubling is the idea of random-ness and chaos. Human beings find ways to make even the smallest bit of good luck, or bad luck, into some larger plan. We crave explanations. This comes through clearly in most fiction. Crimes are solved, motivations are discovered, usually answers are given or at least inferred. It’s terrifying, I agree, to think you might get in that bar fight and end up in a mental hospital. But in my experience there’s a great deal of free-floating peril in the world. You get a cop on a good day and he lets you go without writing that speeding ticket. You get a doctor on a bad day and he leaves a gauze pad inside you during an operation and you die from septic shock. I was definitely trying to prod at the issue of abuse of power but I included the explanation—that the city wasn’t paying anymore overtime just then because of budget concerns—because I wanted the reader to understand the cops weren’t really evil they were underpaid. I don’t teach for free so why would the cops do their jobs for free? And yet this simple budget reality causes Pepper’s entire life to change. That’s how easily lives on the precipice can be decided. AK: I read somewhere that you wrote The Devil in Silver at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Queens. Is this a standard writing spot? If so, what does this particular DD offer that other locations might not?
VL: I wrote The Devil in Silver in a Dunkin’ Donuts in Washington Heights, where we live now, not in Queens, where I grew up. I’ll grant you that this is a distinction that no one outside of New York City could give a damn about. I just wanted to clarify. The Dunkin’ Donuts is about three blocks from our apartment. It was the only place close enough to our place that had space for me to sit and write for a while. There was a Starbucks even closer but the place was full of people writing! My wife had just given birth to our son in May and I was writing the novel over that summer. I needed to be close enough that I could get back home quickly. Also, there was no Wi-Fi in the store, no open networks nearby, so it was also a good place to disconnect from the Internet and just write. No bathroom though. That part sucked.
AK: I completely understand the urge to clarify in New York City. I went to college at Wagner on Staten Island, where everyone referred to Manhattan as the City, as more than just another borough. Do you think Queens (which you describe as “the most ethnically diverse region” and “in this borough there were probably five hundred countries to choose from”) has that same isolation/distinction from the rest of the City?
VL: I know Wagner. My cousin went there decades ago. I have a memory, from childhood, of visiting the campus for his graduation. I certainly think Queens has the same sense of distance. We called Manhattan the City too. In many ways I didn’t think of myself as a New Yorker be-cause we didn’t visit anyplace outside Queens too often. I said I was from Queens, not New York. My mother worked as a secretary in Manhattan but it was just a name to me. I really only came to know Manhattan when I was a young adult, about thirteen. At that age I started making trips, alone, into Manhattan, to Times Square. This was about 1985 when it was still seedy but headed toward the end of that period. I spent a lot of time sneaking into the old porn shops and walking the streets around the Port Authority and seeing way more than I should have at that age. I’m so grateful for that particular “city” education but I also don’t miss that era in the slightest. It was pretty wooly. I don’t think I really appreciated that until much later. At the time I just found it exciting and dangerous.
AK: Where else do you typically work? Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits?
VL: I don’t write in that Dunkin’ Donuts anymore. It was the right place for the last book, but not for my new one. Now, since our kids go to daycare, I write in the kid’s room. These days I stand when I write so the kid’s changing table is actually a great height. I plop my laptop down and type away amidst my son’s toy trains and my daughter’s chew toys. Since the new book is about parenting and children in danger I feel inspired by working in that space. I used to play a little mood music depending on the kind of scene I needed to write, to get myself into the emotional state of the scene, but these days I really don’t have the same amount of time. I’ve got two hours each weekday–which is still a lot compared to most other people try-ing to write–so even a few minutes for a song or two seems like an indulgence. Usually, as I’m going to bed, I’m planning what the next day’s scene/moment will be like so I go into the writing time with a lot more preparation than I used to do. If I do put in the two hours, though, I reward myself with a nice glass of bourbon or Scotch at the end of the night. It’s something to look forward to and makes me feel all writerly.
AK: As writers, our stack of failures typically exceeds our successes. You have no shortage of successes, so I’m curious: Do you have a drawer where you keep the unfinished/failed projects that haunt you in the minutes before you fall asleep, and what might that drawer contain?
VL: When I was younger, just out of grad school, I shared an apartment with my best friend and fellow writer, Mat Johnson. We had a railroad apartment in Harlem. When my agent sent my first book, a collection of stories, out to publishers we received about a dozen rejections, maybe more. Some were nice, making note of talent but still saying the books weren’t for them. Others were simply not interested. And one or two said ridiculously ignorant things. I remember taking all those rejections and taping them to one wall in my bedroom. When posted this way they were like one giant billboard advertising my failure. Me and Mat called this my “Wall of Shame.” I put it up because I felt inspired to keep writing, to keep submitting, just to spite these twelve motherfuckers who were too stupid to recognize a good thing. That’s the way I motivated myself back then and it’s still the way I do it. I don’t keep a wall of shame anymore because if I did my daughter would tear the papers down and chew them. (She’s teething.) Also, I’m 41–not 26–and that kind of self-pity isn’t so charming at this stage. Nevertheless, I do keep a running log of the shitty reviews and backhanded bullshit in my head. (I’m not less self-pitying, just less will-ing to externalize the self-pity.) These things do haunt me but I try to use them as fuel. The only remedy for failure is another attempt at success.
AK: I interviewed Mat a little over a year ago, and he intimated that he was once part of a “horrible” rap group called Mosaic Blac. Were you involved in this? (You’ll have to forgive me. I can’t help but imagine a rap group composed of eventual rock-star-status novelists.)
VL: No, Mat’s horrible rap group was his own entity. We didn’t become friends until we were both in grad school, in 1996 or so, and that group predated our friendship. If you ever interview him again you should ask him about his first, and still unpublished, novel though. I won’t tell you the name of it because it’s ridiculous and hilarious, but if you prod him I bet he’ll share.*
AK: While we’re on the topic, your novel The Ecstatic shares its name with a Mos Def album [he also blurbed Big Machine (confession time: my first experience with your work was Big Machine, and the fact that Mos Def endorsed it was the reason that book came home with me)], and you allude to his song “Ms Fat Booty” in The Devil in Silver (“ass so fat you can see it from the front”).
VL: My editor passed The Ecstatic on to Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey) when it was first published. One day I got a call that Mos wanted to meet and hang out. One of the coolest phone calls I’ve ever received, of course. He picked me up. (And Mat Johnson was with me, by the way. There was no way he was going to skip hanging out either!) We ended up hanging out at a few different spots until well into the night. It was just a great evening and the beginning of a friendship that has lasted. One day he wrote me from London, while he was filming Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and said he was working on some new songs and that he felt inspired by my novel to go into some interesting directions. That was the last I heard of it until, maybe a year or two later, he told me he was naming the new album after the book. If you want to talk about the honors I’ve received in my career that has to be about the best.
AK: I imagine that a lasting friendship with Mos has its advantages, and I’ve always thought of him as one of the most well-rounded performers/artists out there. Has any of his work inspired you similarly?
VL: Long before we’d ever met I was already a fan of his first album, Black on Both Sides and, of course, the album he made with Talib Kweli, Black Star. I also loved The New Danger and still play it often. What I like about him is that no album—and no acting part—really ever seems exactly like the ones that came before. While they’re all clearly his creations they’re never clones. I take inspiration from that always.
AK: The Devil in Silver’s protagonist, Pepper, like you, is a metal head. How does metal influence you when writing?
VL: I definitely grew up a metal head. I came up during the thrash era so my favorites were the Big Four: Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth. Also bands like Testament and Death Angel, Exodus and Venom. The music taught me two things. The first was that it introduced me to writers and books I might not have known yet. It was Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” that led me to Ernest Hemingway and another song, “The Thing that Should not Be,” that led me to H.P. Lovecraft. Anthrax wrote a number of songs inspired by Stephen King books and stories. And Iron Maiden, a slightly older group, introduced me to Samuel Taylor Coleridge through their song “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I didn’t grow up in a bookish household so I didn’t have anyone pointing out worthwhile writers to study. And yet I was drawn to reading, to books. With time my interests and influences broadened, but it was absolutely because of those early influences that I started down that path.
The other thing thrash metal taught me was a sense of rhythm and rage. The two coexisting together. The idea that your work could channel all your emotions—the grimmer the better!—but folks still better be able to thrash their heads to a beat. While I don’t think anyone’s thrashing to my novels I do hope a sense of pacing, of rhythm, is there in the best of the stuff.
AK: We haven’t really talked about monsters, but they show up allegorically in a lot of your writing. Do you now, perhaps as a side effect of writing about them so often, see monsters everywhere you go? What do they look, sound and smell like?
VL: I’ve been in love with monsters long before I ever began to write. I loved the Wendigo in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and these salamander like creatures in the brilliant, if under read “Children of the Kingdom,” a novella by TED Klein. I loved the shape changing alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing and many more. My first beloved monster is the wolf from Peter and the Wolf. I know most kids want to see Peter and his animal friends triumph but I always felt sad when that wolf got strung up and carried into town. All those monsters, and however many thousands more, are stewing in my brain all the time. What to make of them? And how to make some new ones? Those are the questions I keep mulling.
AK: You’ve been given the key to Jamaica, Queens, right? What doors has that opened for you? This is something I’ve always wondered.
VL: The key itself is big, the size of a stapler, but it’s fused onto a plaque. For that reason I’ve never been able to use it to open any locked doors, but it is always the honor people want to talk about most so, in that sense, it’s opened up many great conversations.
AK: Upcoming projects?
VL: My upcoming project will have a monster in it, at least it does right now. The book is about how posting photos of your kids on the internet is like a kind of invitation to those ugly things of the world, welcoming hem into your home where they might do who knows what to the little people you love most. I’m hoping it’s disturbing as shit. My wife and I have posted untold numbers of photos of our kids online. I’m guessing most parents have to by now. The idea that I’ve, in a sense, offered my children up on a kind of altar is unbelievably disturbing. So of course I had to write about it. This has been a hell of a lot of fun, Andrew. Thanks for inviting me in.
* Mat Johnson responds: White Chocolate Melts. It was the greatest book on that shelf.
