TUE., OCTOBER 13, 2009
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eMusic Audiobooks Q&A: Ron Currie
by Elizabeth Isadora Gold
For a purveyor of doom and gloom, Ron Currie Jr. is an awfully nice guy. That's not to say that the author of the apocalyptic novels Everything Matters! and God Is Dead — a third end-of-the-world volume is in progress — doesn't mean to freak you out. He's perfectly fine with a little hair-raising and a lot of What's-the-Meaning-of-Life rumination. But, like the best horror-movie auteur, he still wants you to have fun.
Everything Matters! spans three decades in the life of a man who's born knowing that the world will end when he's 36 without hitting any sour notes. Which is quite a feat for a book that juggles terrorist attacks, high-school lovers who break each other's hearts, a coke-sniffing pre-teen turned baseball superstar, and several potential ends-of-the-world. Here, Maine scion (though not in a George H. W. Bush way) Currie chats about influences and inspirations ranging from Shaft to Saul Bellow to Regina Spektor.
What draws you to the apocalypse?
Well the simple and probably most honest answer is that I've had a lifelong fascination with end times, stemming in more or less equal measure from the pop culture of the '80s, preoccupied as it was with apocalypse — mostly of the nuclear variety — and my Catholic upbringing, from which I've retained nothing but my obsession with death and destruction. And certainly it's a handy premise to work from in terms of dramatic potential, although of course one has to be careful not to overdo it. And depending on who you talk to, I either did or did not succeed in stepping back from the "overdoing it" line. By the way, speaking of apocalyptic pop culture of the 80s, I think the people responsible for the remake of Red Dawn ought to be lined up and shot by a Cuban firing squad commanded by the dude from Superfly, who was absolutely brilliant in the original.
Here's another old chestnut question: can you talk a bit about influences? Especially anything pre-60s? Or the stranger nooks and crannies?
Influence is such a tricky thing, because in my experience one isn't necessarily influenced by the books one loves, and vice versa. I've learned at least as much from reading really terrible fiction as I have from the best stuff. Plus, I tend to be influenced just as much by other forms of storytelling — in particular, film, television and pop music — as literature.
Certainly Hemingway and Fitzgerald are kicking around somewhere in my head, as is Thomas Wolfe (I read You Can't Go Home Again on a trip across Europe years ago and it completely reconfigured my sense of what constitutes real ambition in the composition of a novel, and how aiming high can more than compensate for minor flaws in a work). Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow really blew my hair back, too, especially since at the time I read it I was going through a mild obsession with Delmore Schwartz and the guys he ran with, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell et al. I guess listing these guys is a roundabout way of saying that I learned from reading them how to be ambitious and not settle for a workaday narrative, but also to always keep my focus on the importance of genuine human emotion, and not be ashamed of that focus, not sully it with irony as so many do these days out of this reflexive, pervasive fear of earnestness.
How much of a researching writer are you? I was curious as to how much you delved into the scientific material around your subject, and how much you wanted to stay in the world of your imagination.
Well if you're asking about the theory of the multiverse, for example, that itself is really just a huge work of imagination, and certainly there are plenty in the scientific community who think it's bunk. As far as Junior's cancer-curing elixir, many of the ingredients have been shown, in one study or another, to have effective therapeutic properties in treating tumors. Research can be a real rabbit hole for me, since I primarily do it online, and there's always some weird and endlessly interesting alleyway you can go down when researching a particular subject. You start off reading about biodomes and end up, two hours later, mired in someone's thesis about pre-revolutionary Russia, with no idea how you got there.
You don't have an MFA/degree in writing. Do you think your work reflects that? Particularly in how you seem to have (very successfully) broken a lot of structural rules.
Well thank you. I never studied writing formally, it's true, although I have a feeling I would have ended up becoming the same sort of writer no matter what form my apprenticeship took. There is the long-running debate about the merits of writing programs, and whether or not they churn out paint-by-number writers — which is probably a topic for someone who knows more about it than I do. I will say, though, anecdotally, that a handful of recent books by writers out of the Columbia MFA program have been breaking a lot of rules in really interesting ways. But you really can't win either way, sometimes -- if you write staid, hyperrealistic stuff you're accused of being derivative, and if you get all whacked out like I do certain people will call your work gimmicky. So the key is to ignore that and write whatever you have to write, in whatever way you have to write it, listening only to your own creative conscience regarding whether or not you're getting cute or otherwise out of control.
Speaking of structure, how did Everything Matters! come to be, as far as form? Did you start with the voices and just go with them? Did you ever consider telling the story in a more traditionally linear way?
Nah, in order to cover the temporal ground that the novel encompasses, it pretty much had to be written the way it was. Originally I'd conceived of it as a sort of spoof on old etiquette books — you know, the ones that instructed us on how to throw a proper cocktail party, or when it's appropriate to send a thank-you card. So at first the idea was that the whole book would be written in the second-person, but I realized quickly that, although it might be fun for me to write such a book, it would be a chore to read. So in fairness to readers I decided to let some of the characters speak for themselves, which turned out to be the correct decision for a whole bunch of reasons. In particular it let us get to know John Sr., the novel's patriarch, in a way we never would have otherwise, because he simply doesn't talk. The only way to know him intimately, in the way we expect with characters in a novel, was to eavesdrop on his internal monologue.
There's a lot of addiction and mental illness in the book, which makes the characters' choices (or lack thereof) even more heartbreaking as the End approaches. Could you speak a bit about blending fantastical and "real" life-and-death choices and moments?
Well I think one of the things that makes good surrealist fiction effective and emotionally resonant, is that it allows for the innate, ineffable weirdness of real life to be expressed. That's why people respond to it. I think we all have a sense of how truly whacked our lives, the very fact of our existence, is, but we don't have a vocabulary for it. As far as addiction is concerned, and the way that it can warp one's perception, there's something that happens to the brain when one is engaged in protracted chemical self-abuse that is way beyond the fogginess of an amateur's hangover. You're thinking crooked, as it were, even in the rare moments when you're sober. This is described at length (probably ad nauseam) in the "Chicago" chapter, where Junior is brought by grief and pharmaceutical excess to a point where he nearly participates in murder.
I notice you're also a "Junior," and the relationship between fathers, sons, and brothers is a huge part of the novel. What does it mean to be a Junior?
Well in my case what being a Junior meant was having a tough act to follow, and also being immensely proud of my namesake. My old man was a combat-decorated sailor and a firefighter/EMT responsible, over the years, for saving many lives and much property. Me, I just write books. That's the best answer I can give to that question, and let you read between the many lines I didn't write.
Did you have any input into the audiobook, as far as choosing to have multiple narrators? How do you think the experience of listening to the book will differ from reading it?
Actually I had a lot more input into the audiobook for God is Dead, in terms of choosing the actor I thought best suited to narrate. This time around the audiobook just showed up, unannounced, at my front door. I think, though, that the actors did a brilliant job evoking the characters, in particular the man who narrates John Sr.'s chapters — he really nailed the strength and sorrow of the man.
What are you working on now?
Apocalypse again. We're three for three. This time the book is much more heavily steeped in horror tropes, though, and it's been a lot of fun to write. I hope that fun will be transmitted to the reader. After this, though, I think I may let the world go on spinning for a change in whatever I do next.
As eMusic is primarily a music site, I always like to ask authors about their listening choices for a particular work. I particularly wanted to know if you switch soundtracks for the different characters?
Not particular soundtracks for the characters, but while writing the book I was listening to a lot of Radiohead, as always, as well as developing what have now become full-blown obsessions with newer artists like Cold War Kids, Bon Iver, Kings of Leon. And because I can never resist a girl and her piano, Regina Spektor has taken up residence in my heart and on my playlist.
Is the comet really coming?
It's not if, it's when.
Everything Matters! spans three decades in the life of a man who's born knowing that the world will end when he's 36 without hitting any sour notes. Which is quite a feat for a book that juggles terrorist attacks, high-school lovers who break each other's hearts, a coke-sniffing pre-teen turned baseball superstar, and several potential ends-of-the-world. Here, Maine scion (though not in a George H. W. Bush way) Currie chats about influences and inspirations ranging from Shaft to Saul Bellow to Regina Spektor.
What draws you to the apocalypse?
Well the simple and probably most honest answer is that I've had a lifelong fascination with end times, stemming in more or less equal measure from the pop culture of the '80s, preoccupied as it was with apocalypse — mostly of the nuclear variety — and my Catholic upbringing, from which I've retained nothing but my obsession with death and destruction. And certainly it's a handy premise to work from in terms of dramatic potential, although of course one has to be careful not to overdo it. And depending on who you talk to, I either did or did not succeed in stepping back from the "overdoing it" line. By the way, speaking of apocalyptic pop culture of the 80s, I think the people responsible for the remake of Red Dawn ought to be lined up and shot by a Cuban firing squad commanded by the dude from Superfly, who was absolutely brilliant in the original.
Here's another old chestnut question: can you talk a bit about influences? Especially anything pre-60s? Or the stranger nooks and crannies?
Influence is such a tricky thing, because in my experience one isn't necessarily influenced by the books one loves, and vice versa. I've learned at least as much from reading really terrible fiction as I have from the best stuff. Plus, I tend to be influenced just as much by other forms of storytelling — in particular, film, television and pop music — as literature.
Certainly Hemingway and Fitzgerald are kicking around somewhere in my head, as is Thomas Wolfe (I read You Can't Go Home Again on a trip across Europe years ago and it completely reconfigured my sense of what constitutes real ambition in the composition of a novel, and how aiming high can more than compensate for minor flaws in a work). Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow really blew my hair back, too, especially since at the time I read it I was going through a mild obsession with Delmore Schwartz and the guys he ran with, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell et al. I guess listing these guys is a roundabout way of saying that I learned from reading them how to be ambitious and not settle for a workaday narrative, but also to always keep my focus on the importance of genuine human emotion, and not be ashamed of that focus, not sully it with irony as so many do these days out of this reflexive, pervasive fear of earnestness.
How much of a researching writer are you? I was curious as to how much you delved into the scientific material around your subject, and how much you wanted to stay in the world of your imagination.
Well if you're asking about the theory of the multiverse, for example, that itself is really just a huge work of imagination, and certainly there are plenty in the scientific community who think it's bunk. As far as Junior's cancer-curing elixir, many of the ingredients have been shown, in one study or another, to have effective therapeutic properties in treating tumors. Research can be a real rabbit hole for me, since I primarily do it online, and there's always some weird and endlessly interesting alleyway you can go down when researching a particular subject. You start off reading about biodomes and end up, two hours later, mired in someone's thesis about pre-revolutionary Russia, with no idea how you got there.
You don't have an MFA/degree in writing. Do you think your work reflects that? Particularly in how you seem to have (very successfully) broken a lot of structural rules.
Well thank you. I never studied writing formally, it's true, although I have a feeling I would have ended up becoming the same sort of writer no matter what form my apprenticeship took. There is the long-running debate about the merits of writing programs, and whether or not they churn out paint-by-number writers — which is probably a topic for someone who knows more about it than I do. I will say, though, anecdotally, that a handful of recent books by writers out of the Columbia MFA program have been breaking a lot of rules in really interesting ways. But you really can't win either way, sometimes -- if you write staid, hyperrealistic stuff you're accused of being derivative, and if you get all whacked out like I do certain people will call your work gimmicky. So the key is to ignore that and write whatever you have to write, in whatever way you have to write it, listening only to your own creative conscience regarding whether or not you're getting cute or otherwise out of control.
Speaking of structure, how did Everything Matters! come to be, as far as form? Did you start with the voices and just go with them? Did you ever consider telling the story in a more traditionally linear way?
Nah, in order to cover the temporal ground that the novel encompasses, it pretty much had to be written the way it was. Originally I'd conceived of it as a sort of spoof on old etiquette books — you know, the ones that instructed us on how to throw a proper cocktail party, or when it's appropriate to send a thank-you card. So at first the idea was that the whole book would be written in the second-person, but I realized quickly that, although it might be fun for me to write such a book, it would be a chore to read. So in fairness to readers I decided to let some of the characters speak for themselves, which turned out to be the correct decision for a whole bunch of reasons. In particular it let us get to know John Sr., the novel's patriarch, in a way we never would have otherwise, because he simply doesn't talk. The only way to know him intimately, in the way we expect with characters in a novel, was to eavesdrop on his internal monologue.
There's a lot of addiction and mental illness in the book, which makes the characters' choices (or lack thereof) even more heartbreaking as the End approaches. Could you speak a bit about blending fantastical and "real" life-and-death choices and moments?
Well I think one of the things that makes good surrealist fiction effective and emotionally resonant, is that it allows for the innate, ineffable weirdness of real life to be expressed. That's why people respond to it. I think we all have a sense of how truly whacked our lives, the very fact of our existence, is, but we don't have a vocabulary for it. As far as addiction is concerned, and the way that it can warp one's perception, there's something that happens to the brain when one is engaged in protracted chemical self-abuse that is way beyond the fogginess of an amateur's hangover. You're thinking crooked, as it were, even in the rare moments when you're sober. This is described at length (probably ad nauseam) in the "Chicago" chapter, where Junior is brought by grief and pharmaceutical excess to a point where he nearly participates in murder.
I notice you're also a "Junior," and the relationship between fathers, sons, and brothers is a huge part of the novel. What does it mean to be a Junior?
Well in my case what being a Junior meant was having a tough act to follow, and also being immensely proud of my namesake. My old man was a combat-decorated sailor and a firefighter/EMT responsible, over the years, for saving many lives and much property. Me, I just write books. That's the best answer I can give to that question, and let you read between the many lines I didn't write.
Did you have any input into the audiobook, as far as choosing to have multiple narrators? How do you think the experience of listening to the book will differ from reading it?
Actually I had a lot more input into the audiobook for God is Dead, in terms of choosing the actor I thought best suited to narrate. This time around the audiobook just showed up, unannounced, at my front door. I think, though, that the actors did a brilliant job evoking the characters, in particular the man who narrates John Sr.'s chapters — he really nailed the strength and sorrow of the man.
What are you working on now?
Apocalypse again. We're three for three. This time the book is much more heavily steeped in horror tropes, though, and it's been a lot of fun to write. I hope that fun will be transmitted to the reader. After this, though, I think I may let the world go on spinning for a change in whatever I do next.
As eMusic is primarily a music site, I always like to ask authors about their listening choices for a particular work. I particularly wanted to know if you switch soundtracks for the different characters?
Not particular soundtracks for the characters, but while writing the book I was listening to a lot of Radiohead, as always, as well as developing what have now become full-blown obsessions with newer artists like Cold War Kids, Bon Iver, Kings of Leon. And because I can never resist a girl and her piano, Regina Spektor has taken up residence in my heart and on my playlist.
Is the comet really coming?
It's not if, it's when.
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