Nick Laird is a wonderful writer. I reviewed this great book a while back...go here for the review. I'm pleased to present this interview.Jason Rice: Before you wrote your first book, Utterly Monkey, you were well known for your poetry. What was the jump like from writing in that form to a large canvas like a novel?
Nick Laird: Well, the first two books only came out a few months apart in Britain and Ireland, but yes, the poetry came first. They’re very different beasts. The baggage restrictions are different, and I can’t really write them close together, in the same week or whatever. Poetry tends to be about one’s relation with oneself or with the world, and fiction’s more of a social forum, different characters glancing off each other. I find you need a bit of decompression between them or else the poetry starts to explicate too much and become narrative, and too much poetry infects the fiction, makes the sentences too plangent, everything too heightened and ambiguous. All those rules can be broken of course, but that’s the gist of it for me.
JR: Utterly Monkey sounded like it was inspired by the time you spent working in an office. Have you spent much time in the art world, either here in New York City or in London where the action for Glover’s Mistake takes place?
NL: Not really. I have a friend who runs a gallery in Rome and I’ve watched him in action with artists and buyers. And I do like to look at art. I live in Chelsea in New York at the moment, and I drop in at art galleries pretty frequently. I went round a few yesterday in fact. I just moved here from Italy, where I was living for a couple of years, and I spent a lot of time there visiting palazzos and sunless churches looking at classical and renaissance art, at altar pieces and religious paintings. My tastes are pretty catholic; I like a wide variety of stuff, though a great deal of modern work misses the mark for me. I was looking at Chuck Close’s tapestries yesterday (he has a massive one of Brad Pitt, for example) and I just think it’s all a bit hackneyed and weak. All wink-wink irony that does nothing, goes nowhere, and is complicit in whatever it’s meant to be satirizing. But it’s only the good stuff survives anyway. I’m sure if you were wandering around looking at hundreds of Rembrandt’s contemporaries most of the stuff would seem pretty feeble too.
JR: There is a definite change in the voice you write in from your first novel to the second, can you explain the difference? What were your intentions when you sat down to write each? They say that people have their entire lives to write their first novel, and the second can sometimes be a disappointment. This is not the case with you, but there is a very bold maturity and a sense that you are moving into a serious intellectual character examination with Glover’s Mistake.
NL: I suppose your second book is dictated in some senses by your first. It’s a correction of it or a steering away from it. I felt the first book was fast, masculine, raucous, a little slapstick in some ways, optimistic, light, and I wanted the second to be more feminine, darker, and to have room for characters to think. I wanted there to be less action. I think it’s common enough in debut novels for the writer to overdo the plot, as they’re scared of boring the reader. I wanted GM to be a smaller thing, a three-hander that was a little creepy, a little insidious.
JR: I loved David, the anti-hero of Glover’s Mistake. Not only is he unappealing in almost every way, but he isn’t likeable at all. Zoë Heller talks about writing characters that are not likeable. In all three of her novels there isn’t a day that goes by without some heavy cloud cover. Do you think writers today are trying to catch an audience and sell a book with characters that are likeable? Is it possible to write fiction with characters that are just like everyone else…essentially flawed on the outside and strangled by a low self-image?
NL: Well, I think when a reader says they didn’t like a book because they didn’t like the characters, they actually mean that they couldn’t recognize anything of themselves. At least I hope that’s the case. The alternative is just silly. You don’t have to have dinner with the characters. Maybe they mean they didn’t care what happened to them, but you don’t have to like a character to feel interest in them or have some emotional response to them. I’m not interested in writing “likeable” characters per se. That kind of thing’s a red herring. I wanted them to be believable, I suppose, and interesting. And I wanted to write nice sentences. Anyway, my favorite characters in fiction are not exactly likeable. Raskolnikov. Humbert Humbert. Ignatius J. Reilly. Keith Talent.
JR: In the book David is a teacher. I know that you’re also teaching creative writing at Columbia. Without boiling the water around the subject, what’s that like? Do you sometimes find yourself looking at the fiction presented to you by your students and thinking about their storytelling ups and downs, as they might mirror your own? What kind of things do you hope to impart on your students?
NL: I was teaching Irish Poetry. I wanted to widen their ideas about what poetry was and could do, but I’m not sure whether I succeeded.
JR: Glover’s Mistake is a love triangle. For a long time it’s two sided, Ruth, a successful artist and James Glover, a bartender and a man of faith, who seem to be as perfect together as Oranges and Peanut Butter. I thought the relationship was off to a rocky start with nothing more than passion holding it together, but it seemed to go to another level. How did you come to these characters, what pushed you to write them?
NL: Not sure really. I knew I wanted to write about a young man and an older woman, which is a dynamic not really covered that often in fiction. It’s only in recent history that women have been independent enough (which means having their own money) to be able to form relationships with younger men, and I wanted to write a bit about that. I wanted to try to write a classic set-up that had shifted in some way, that could only be written now, at this moment in history – hence the internet stuff and the slightly odd nature of the roles.
JR: David is a true cynic. A man that seems hobbled by his insecurities and filled with a kind of rage that only comes out at odd times. His voice is very cutting and unforgiving, but he sees the forest through the trees essentially a larger picture that will result from his actions. Was this hard to accomplish while trying to write a love story?
NL: Yeah, David is a bit torn. He ends up hating what he wants because he can’t have it. Aesop’s fox and the grapes. I wanted him to be aware of himself but not entirely. It’s David’s story really: a kind of lack-of-love story.
JR: There is a wonderful sense of the ridiculous, when you describe the London art world and the cultural side of their lives. Especially when Ruth, James and David go to a piano concert. David sees it for what it is, and James and Ruth see it another way. It’s almost as if you think there is a kind of pompous arrogance to those worlds. Maybe outside the walls of a gallery or museum “art” would just be something else, like car dealerships, or video game parlors.
NL: Don’t take my view to be the same as David’s. I like modern music. There’s pomposity and arrogance everywhere of course, but David is always watching his own reaction to things and trying to have “the right one”.
JR: Ruth seems to be aligned with a feminist ideal that David finds woefully unattractive and he even makes quiet remarks to himself that she’s not as intellectual as she thinks she is. Is this David’s insecurity you’re playing on or your feelings about artists in general?
NL: No, no, David’s insecurity, and Ruth’s. I don’t have any feelings about artists “in general”.
JR: I was wondering whom your favorite living contemporary writers are? And when you sat down to write either Utterly Monkey or Glover’s Mistake was there a book that you kept at your elbow for inspiration? I know Jonathan Franzen keeps novels he admires nearby while he writes.
NL: No book in particular. I know some writers refuse to read anyone else when they write in case it “infects” them or whatever but I’m not worried about that. If I get stuck, occasionally I’ll open someone’s book and remind myself how to make a sentence, but mostly I’d get up and go for a walk. I like lots of writers. The list is endless really.
JR: Mr. Laird, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for taking the time. Do you really write with earplugs in your ears?
NL: I do, yes. I wear earplugs for about 22 hours out of the 24. Especially in this cacophonous city. And at the minute I’ve a perforated eardrum (something to do with having a cold on a flight from Pisa to New York last week) so now I’ve got to do weird things with cotton wool and Vaseline.
-JR
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