Gabriel Blackwell, The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised Men, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2013.

www.gabrielblackwell.com

“It’s difficult to know if Blackwell is a sharp editor, a stone-faced ventriloquist, someone possessed by the ghost of Lovecraft, or all three. The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Man is a startling investigation of the evanescence of the self. It’s not so much that it will leave you changed as that it will leave you nameless and wandering.”-Brian Evenson

“The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men is fiendishly clever, endlessly byzantine, and brilliantly tongue-in-cheek-in-cheek. In this book, Blackwell has essentially invented a new genre, the inverted quest: having started at the Holy Grail, the seeker works his way backward into mental and spiritual derailment. Gabriel Blackwell tips his hat not only to Lovecraft, but also to Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett, David Foster Wallace, and anyone who’s ever explored the dark horrors (and humor) in the suffocating inferno of the self’s banalities.”-Amber Sparks

Gabriel Blackwell channels H.P. Lovecraft in The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised Men, an epistolary metafiction that serves as part of a trilogy of works connected by his earlier Shadow Man and Critique of Pure Reason. In the introduction, Blackwell reveals that he has set out to Providence, Rhode Island, to find his girlfriend, Jessica, who disappeared while he was finishing the writing of Shadow Man. During that trek to Providence, he discovers the final letter of H.P. Lovecraft and that last message comprises most of the book in a footnoted poioumena intertwining his own desperate search with Lovecraft’s pestilential descent into madness. This isn’t just a pastiche of Lovecraft though, who died of intestinal cancer and whose last years were the most painfully productive. The mystery takes on a bizarre twist when he discovers the letter is addressed to another Gabriel Blackwell. Horror gets deconstructed and Lovecraft is retrofitted in a work that is less concerned with categorization than the ‘dissolution’ of existence. Experience itself becomes suspect as does the scholarship of pain. Blackwell, the meta character in the book versus the actual author, is typing out Lovecraft’s final letter. But as he does so, he is faced with a troubling revelation:

“That is, coming to the end of the particular sentence I was typing, I would look back over its analogue in the letter and would be unable to find even a third of what I had typed… This was undoubtedly made worse by the thicket of Lovecraft’s characters, by their lack of line breaks and paragraph breaks and even space between words, but it was also a quality of the prose. The events I was transcribing had not only not happened in life but not happened in the letter, either.”

It’s a setup for a mystery, a noir doused in elements of phantasmagoria with a magical lantern projecting Blackwell’s prose. The events described within are as gruesome and macabre as a Lovecraft story and in fact could be mistaken for one of his short stories. Horrible things are happening to the people in Lovecraft’s vicinity as in “this disgusting pile” that “was the remains of a man after he had been devoured and regurgitated by some horrid fungus or slime mold!” The grippe in his belly is devouring him from within and his mental state is corrupted into a decay and darkness that overwhelms his vision as much as his being:

“This thing in the basement was some sort of central node, a convergence of nerves. It was dowered with dark properties and obedient to dark laws; darkness was its element as air is the cloud’s, as water is the sea’s- the clashing, gnashing plates of its existence, in all of their horrifying splendor, were not so much dark as in aspect as of the dark…”

What adds a twist and requires a philological scalpel are the footnotes Blackwell uses to annotate his transcription of the letter. Much of the notes involves further elaboration of the plot details he outlines in his introduction. But there are disturbing intimations that require deciphering, a linguistic sonar to extrapolate from the echoes of meta-Blackwell’s journey. As his pursuit of Jessica becomes more desperate, his physical plight degenerates in a downward progression similar to Lovecraft’s. He is starving, cold, and suffering anemia. His body gets soaked with ink to the point where he does not recognize himself. With his impoverishment, things only get worse:

“I had a chronic inflammation around my anus- it itched all of the time and stung like a cut doused with hydrogen peroxide when wetted. I worried that I had soiled myself because of the wetness there, but always it was only blood.”

This is the hermeneutics of insanity with parallel tracks siphoning off one another. Two stories seem to be running concurrently between the letter and the footnotes. Together, the strands result in a mutation, a third form monstrously baring its fetid belly. Lovecraft dissolves into Blackwell, much like the fungus mysteriously consuming those around him. A 5th dimension is sucking both of them into an agonizing symbiosis that is as much about writing as it is a search for Jessica. Only the search never actually began and the writerly muses are discombobulated, decapitated, then vaporized into “fleeting-improvised men.” The craft of writing takes on a sinister epidemiology as the memory that Lovecraft wrote his best work under the threat of imminent death and intestinal cancer throbs uncomfortably. Meta-Blackwell quotes from Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness:

“I cannot say with certainty who does the writing down. As I cannot imagine God’s omnipotence lacks all intelligence, I presume that the writing-down is done by creatures given human shape on distant celestial bodies after the manner of the fleeting-improvised men…”

Who is the real Blackwell? Who is the real Lovecraft? Both questions are rendered moot when the definition of ‘real’ becomes suspect and the boundaries of fiction and metafiction dissolve. The dissolution only appears natural, when in fact, it has a more ominous etiology lodged somewhere within the maddening brilliance of Gabriel Blackwell’s mind.

“Is it possible to be in a fugue state within a fugue state? Is it possible to forget forgetting something without calling that thing to mind? My past “I”s have been erased from myself, replaced as 1s and 0s on a hard drive are, overlaid with new 1s and 0s that both supplant and destroy.” - Peter Tieryas Liu

Where Public Enemy, H.P. Lovecraft, and Sid Vicious Converge: A Between Books Interview With Gabriel Blackwell

By Tobias Carroll On May 28, 2013·

Gabriel Blackwell, Critique of Pure Reason, Noemi Press, 2013.

"Unique and compelling as the very souls they depict—from the unknown to the famous to the infamous—these stories are wildly inventive, sly, astute. There's a bit of Sir Thomas Browne (Borges, too) for the twenty-first century in these wizardly, magical narratives. The notion of 'pure reason' has rarely had a more subtle, comical, yet deeply humane alchemist at work in the great lab of fiction than Gabriel Blackwell."—Bradford Morrow

"In CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, Gabriel Blackwell bends found forms to story, repurposes history, sets mathematics and a programmer's logic to generating emotion and wonder. This is the work of a talented storyteller slyly taking the stance of a documentary filmmaker, or else of a first-rate bureaucrat, perhaps rising quickly through our Ministry of Imagination—and with each new diagram and footnote and well-made sentence the philosopher in Blackwell provides us another piece of that most illusive of proofs, a verification of our shared humanity, captured here in all its absurdity and horror and glory."—Matt Bell

"Critique of Pure Reason is an ark captained by a mad genius who has summoned—from the depths of his wild imagination—a vast and stunning species of fictional forms and set them adrift upon a relentless flood. Cerebral, lyrical, mischievous, and hypnotic, these stories pulse with the focused urgency of creatures who, having survived an event of apocalyptic proportions, are now determined to thrive."-Matthew Vollmer



Gabriel Blackwell, Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2012.

According to Dashiell Hammett, a shadow man is “meant to blend in, to disappear by being always there.” Hammett knew something about disappearing. Behind the shadows thrown by “Miles Archer,” his fictional detective, was a very real detective—his partner in San Francisco, Lewis Miles Archer, a private detective so private that, when he went missing in February of 1929, no one even thought to look for him. Shadow Man is the biography of the silhouette Hammett, as well as Raymond Chandler and even Ross Macdonald, eventually filled in, a man who was always there. Until he wasn’t.


“Shadow Man is a stylish, metaphysical romp through a noir labyrinth. It manages to do for the hardboiled classics what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead did for Hamlet.” —Jedediah Berry

“Shadow Man’s project is to unnerve biography’s careless assumptions about selfhood and historical knowledge. The real detective work involved in in this bright, complex, comic, melancholy critifiction about the epistemological static at the nexus of art and the rest reveals itself in the intriguing chess game the reader is asked to play on every page with the puckish meta-author.”—Lance Olsen

“Borges warns us of ‘the contamination of reality by dream,’ and with that in mind, Gabriel Blackwell’s infectious book drives us out of our minds, defying quarantine, plum crazy on Plum Island. The narrative genetics of this nonfiction fiction is masterfully mosaic. Rules are all busted and bested. Shadow Man is sicker than sick but in a good way, in the best way.” - Michael Martone

“In Shadow Man, Gabriel Blackwell stakes his claim as conductor and curator extraordinaire of shadows textual, characterological, and historical. Raising the language of noir to the nth power, and serving up a plot that might lead Ray Chandler to hang a white flag on his carriage return, Shadow Man rewards its reader richly in style, substance, and insubstance. Brace yourself to shadow Blackwell as he charts the fraught, frayed boundaries between fact and fiction, but also to lose yourself delightedly in the murky, twisting alleyways of this book.”  —Tim Horvath

Part sophisticated pastiche: a hardboiled egg painted a pulpy purple; part metafictional play employing the supposed objectivities of historiography; Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer is both a generous homage to classic detective fiction and an incisive critique of same, employing the genre’s detached and cynical narratological tone and style to, yes, evoke tension and apprehension, but to also displace those affects and effects. Blackwell is an artful ventriloquist, demonstrating in this fake-biography a sharp and muscular command of the hip argot of the so-called golden age of Hollywood noir films and American pulp fiction, a lingo as invented as it was inventive, a hyper-mediated discourse of various African- and Jewish-American discourses. True to the genres it circumvents, the text explodes with rapid-fire repartee, double-entendres, and incredibly elastic metaphorizing. A tangled tale of moral ambiguity, of the muddle that is human agency, it questions and complicates the dialectic of good and evil, presents historicizing as an overdetermined act, an act vitiated by various ethical, political, philosophical, and psychological subjectivities.
I also read Shadow Man as a post-genre intervention in conversation with texts like Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy and Robert Coover’s Noir, as well as various texts by Brian Evenson and Alain Robbe-Grillet, which all engage with the tropes of crime and detective fiction in manners which foreground not only the artifice of the genre’s narrative architectonics but also deep investigations of epistemological and ontological dilemmas.
Actually, Shadow Man might be thought of as a post-post-genre text, that is, an open text that quietly takes textual fusion and indeterminate structures not for granted, but as a part of the history of literary discourse offering further opportunities for provocative, productive disruption. - John Madera

Is there a form called smart noir? There should be. In Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer, published by Civil Coping Mechanisms, Gabriel Blackwell both conducts and writes the story. As the meta-writer and the meta-detective, he’s inside what happens, and outside, all at the same time. Blackwell claims, rather coyly, to be the “editor” of Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer, and he is listed as such on the cover. But like a savvy gumshoe, Blackwell is too humble—and too sneaky—to list his skills upfront. His project is to blur lines between fiction and nonfiction; genre and form; noir and innovation.
We should consider ourselves forewarned meta-readers because Blackwell, as editor of this book, as author and researcher, is the ultimate shadow man. Blackwell disappears into the story and lets us know that he will be seen—and not seen:
We read to name that “pink elephant” in the room and, in the manner of noir, to find that missing femme fatale in the bar. The reader’s suspicious impulse might be to sit with the book and with Google, to search what is fiction, nonfiction, or imagination. We are inside the story as it unravels and outside the story as it is revealed. The story becomes confounding, like “a maze”:
I soon gave up the inter-textual Google approach to reading Blackwell and let myself be drawn into the cheeky editor’s devilish and impish fun. Those who are unseen and unknown are often the characters of literature that might reveal the most, were we to bother to ask. Blackwell bothers. He uses this knowledge, his questions, to great effect, illuminating a man who existed and didn’t exist, someone who disappeared with nary a backward glance.
Shadow Man takes as its cue Dashiell Hammett’s fictional detective Miles Archer, and jazz riffs off of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, too. Nevertheless, before you think you must be familiar with works by those three, consider that I’m not all that familiar with noir, and I found myself thoroughly, willfully engaged. Submerged.
The reader’s project might be similar to investigators who uncover eyewitnesses. The reader uncovers characters and characterizations. The book shadows (that word again!) the character Archer through different appearances. If we are all dicks (detectives, I mean), then our tracking is perpetual: Our reading goes on, detective-like, tracking femme fatales, missing falcons, and Archer.
Dashiell Hammett used a fictional detective, “Miles Archer,” but Blackwell illuminates the fictional with the real dick behind the story, Lewis Miles Archer, who was Hammett’s partner and a real detective. I’m a fan of union history, so the references to Pinkertons thrilled me (and seemed prescient to our times with the recent union-busting laws in Wisconsin and Michigan). Archer writes in his detective’s notebook, which is included in Shadow Man, and thus gives us more reading clues: “It’s all up front. Everything’s a front.”
Blackwell’s exhaustive noir knowledge of “no-name Joes, guys with names that mean bunk” means that we are in the hands of a gleeful guy. Blackwell is our leading private eye:
Again, one feels the impulse to fit the pieces together to follow this detective author, but even that impulse—to make sense of literature or to make literature make sense—is rightly questioned in Blackwell’s astute hands. To create Lewis Miles Archer, Blackwell borrows from Hammett. The momentum behind The Maltese Falcon forms the genesis of Shadow Man. Then Blackwell creates. He conflates. Blackwell borrows from Raymond Chandler, from Ross Macdonald.
Blackwell challenges our desire to build character through illumination, filling in the animus not by erasing the past but by including the past and adding to it. Recall one of the Latin quotes at the start of Shadow Man that tells us that “although changed, [he] shall arise again.” The story here, although changed, rises again. Built on narrative history, it’s also built on its own beginnings:
While creation arises from imagination, the source of imagination might be uncannily familiar. We are literary cannibals, all. The mystery forms the wicked fun of this meta-critical project—but Shadow Man stands on its own, aside from its meta-critical inquiry. After all, as Blackwell writes:
It’s noir, it’s your shadow, it’s Borges’s interweaving maze-like blindness. Let narrative loose under klieg lights and watch narrative lose its mystery. Keep narrative shrouded in a dusky haze, and let narrative reclaim its mystery—of form, of story, of meaning. - Renée E. D’Aoust



                               EXCERPT:
Lewis Miles Archer, or anyhow the man known to creditors and clients as Lewis Miles Archer for just long enough to build up a respectable sheet of both, was born sometime between 1879 and 1888, somewhere in the shadow of Lake Michigan. That’s a hole wide enough for a boxcar full of babies to fall through, sure, but then the first time that that name, “Lewis Miles Archer,” rears its salt-and- pepper head in the public record isn’t until 1928, a full forty years later, and on the West Coast. Like a tramp holding two pieces of bread and praying for cheese, it would be nice to have something to put there in between, but the man’s history before 1928 is like wet tissue paper—try to pick it up and watch it disappear.
In those forty-odd years, this great nation was dragged into the Great War and then managed to drag itself into the Great Mistake, Prohibition. It’s hard to know which was worse; at least we could blame someone else for the war. We elected a Roosevelt twice, a Coolidge once, and a Debs not at all, which didn’t stop the man from trying four times. The Chicago White Sox dyed their footwear black for a season, the Bums from Brooklyn couldn’t buy a World Series, and the Red Sox sold the greatest player in the game for a box of cigars and a play called My Lady Friends. The boardwalks of America went from sawdust and nickelodeons to Al Jolson and Lights of New York, while the airstrips went from Wilbur and Orville to Charles and Amelia. Things changed from day to day, and people learned to keep up, or else they didn’t. The ones that didn’t were called “suckers.”
Lewis Miles Archer’s birth doesn’t feature in any of the history books, but sometimes the suckers write books, too. In 1879, a boy named John Macdonald Millar was born in Kitchener, Ontario to a family of Scots. Another boy, Raymond Thornton Chandler, was born just a few hours away, in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888. Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born a few years later still, in 1894, in Maryland. Somewhere in between, our boy, Archer, breathed his first; at least, that’s the best guess anybody’s come up with so far. All four men, Hammett, Millar, Chandler and Archer, would be in San Francisco by the time the lanterns got hung out on Market Street to celebrate the ringing in of 1928. Only Hammett would be left when those lanterns went back up to herald 1929.
In that year, “Archer Investigations” is listed in the San Francisco directory at 111 Sutter Street, the Hunter-Dulin Building. It would be gone before the year was up, replaced by an insurance outfit, “L.D. Walgreen’s Family Insurance Company.” The tea leaves of public documents from that single year, 1928, are the only solid evidence that the man existed at all, and even there, there aren’t that many clues as to the man he was. There is no “Archer, Lewis Miles” listed in any of the city directories from that year or any other, and Archer’s name appears only twice in the public record: once on a marriage certificate, and once on the business lease of the office space on Sutter. Back then, all you needed was a signature and ready cash, and you were in business. Archer had a signature and ready cash, and Archer Investigations was in business.


Gabriel Blackwell is the author of Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2012), Critique of Pure Reason (Noemi, 2013), and Neverland, a chapbook with video/audio/illustrations. He is the reviews editor of The Collagist and a contributor to Big Other.
Wonderfully, you have two books coming out back to back–Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer (CCM) and Critique of Pure Reason (Noemi)–what’s going on behind the scenes? Is it hectic managing the release of two books?
It’s maybe appropriate that these two books are both coming out at roughly the same time; I wrote them more or less in parallel. Still, that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with them now that they’re almost here. I really have no one but myself to blame. I make my own work—nothing that I’m doing now is “required,” and I could probably just be taking it easy and letting things play out the way they’re going to anyway. But I can’t bear leaving things entirely up to chance. I don’t know if there is an ideal reader for either book, but if there is, I want the book to find her, somehow. I only know how I find books to read, so I’m trying to do the kind of things that would get my own attention; presumably, I’ll find other readers like myself. You can see the problem—doing things in this myopic kind of way is very limiting. Fortunately, I’ve had a number of really kind, really generous people help me out and offer opportunities that I wouldn’t have thought to ask for, and maybe together we’ll get the books into people’s hands.
Did you find any similar obstacles while working on both of these books? Was one harder to write than the other? What were the differences or similarities in the experiences of working on one book compared to the other?
Critique of Pure Reason seems the easier of the two now because it was mostly done by the time that I realized that it was an it. At that point, I had been working on what it would be for four years, and all but three of the pieces had been published or accepted for publication. My work on it last spring leading up to me sending it to Mike Meginnis at Noemi was a matter of putting the various parts together in a way that made meaning out of the whole. But thinking about it in that way discounts the four years of work that went into its components. It’s deceptive, I mean, but when I think about Critique as a book, that’s usually what I think about—the process of ordering it, rather than the process of composing it.
Shadow Man was very different. It felt difficult throughout because of how complex it ended up being, and because of how concentrated my work on it had been by comparison with Critique. By the end of my revision process, I was reading through the entire book each time I changed a line, just to make sure what I was changing wouldn’t disturb something earlier on. I sat at my desk for ten, eleven hours at a stretch. I gave myself acid reflux. I had to sleep sitting up for weeks. It was not something I would do again, except that I probably would.
While writing, editing, and revising–what did you learn about the process? What stuck out to you that you hadn’t thought about before?
I learned as much in the two years I worked on Shadow Man as I did in the two years I spent in graduate school. Maybe more. There’s no substitute for creating and revising something so sustained. It is its own pedagogy. But, because I finished it very early in 2011, and because I’ve since finished another book (The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men), I’m not sure that I can remember specifically what I learned while writing Shadow Man. I learned how to write Shadow Man, and I would guess that all of what I learned is on its pages somehow. Very little of that learning carried over to NDFIM. Even the processes of composition were radically different—I wrote my first draft of Shadow Man in three weeks or so; it took me more than a year to complete a draft of NDFIM.
Just by reading the excerpts of your upcoming works, it looks like there was some heavy research being done (in particular, Shadow Man)–how did this play a role in your works?
I’m not a big fan of hermetic stories or novels, honestly. I prefer work that has something to say to the world around it, that acknowledges that it will never really get its readers’ undivided attentions. I try to create parasitic works, building on others’ creations—not just acknowledging the reader’s life outside of the book but (so I hope) pointing in fruitful directions for his or her distraction. Obviously, I have to know something of those other creations if that’s going to be successful, so I do research.
You have so much going on–your own writing, teaching, being the reviews editor for The Collagist, writing for Big Other, and you do so much more–how do you manage your time? What is your schedule like when you’re writing?
This isn’t a life that I would have wished on my younger self, but it seems fine for now. I learned late how dedicated I needed to be to be a writer I’d want to read, and I feel like I’ve been trying to catch up ever since. There is no substitute for working with language on a daily basis, even if it isn’t your own; honestly, it seems better to me that it isn’t my own, often. I don’t need to be more prolific (though there are plenty of writers who are, and who are fine writers), so, even though my work for The Collagist or Big Other takes away from my typing time, I don’t necessarily think of that as a bad thing. I think I’d prefer that I was different from story to story, and that seems to me to require that time passes. If I can spend that time working with language, all the better.
As for my schedule, it varies a little. When I’m typing something, I usually get up early and write before work so that I can spend the late afternoon/evening taking care of my other responsibilities. If I put those off for too long, they take over my schedule and it becomes difficult to find time to write. So I have to be very disciplined. I very rarely take a day off, but I don’t think that makes me different from most of the writers I know—like I said, it seems necessary to be working with language in some way every single day. The few times I’ve tried to “do nothing” for a day have been disasters.
What’s it like being a reviews editor?
There are substantial rewards—I get to work with some really smart writers, find out about books and publishers I never would have known about otherwise, and help get the word out about some really great books. I don’t know if it’s perfect for me or if I’ve perfectly adapted myself to it, but either way, it feels completely natural now, two years into it.
Do you have any book recommendations? What have you been reading lately? What are you looking forward to checking out?
I’ve been so pressed for time lately that I read while walking the dog—I read Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, Amber Sparks’s May We Shed These Human Bodies, and Brian Carr’s Vampire Conditions walking around my neighborhood—and I’m doing research for a new book, so most of what I read at home isn’t exactly by choice. But I’m trying to make time for Michele Disler’s [Bond, James], Mike Kitchell’s Variations on the Sun, Kellie Wells’s Fat Girl, Terrestrial, Elena Passarello’s Let Me Clear My Throat, and Matthew Vollmer’s Inscriptions for Headstones.
Who are some authors you find yourself admiring? Why? What is it about them or their works that appeal to you?
This seems like a question whose answer would get out of hand in less than a sentence, so I’ll just say that I seem to have totems for each book I write, and for this latest one, those totems are David Markson and Christopher Priest. I’m not sure what that means or if it means anything at all.
What about journals? Which ones do you find yourself reading regularly?
I read Conjunctions cover to cover. I also look forward to new issues of DIAGRAM, [out of nothing], Puerto del Sol, Tin House, Black Clock,and Artifice. And I’m really looking forward to the second issues of two new magazines, Uncanny Valley and Unstuck. I’m sure I’m forgetting dozens of others. - Interview by Shome Dasgupta

Author Conversation: Gabriel Blackwell and Robert Kloss

In this new series, we’re going to pair authors together and have them discuss anything and everything that authors discuss. In this inaugural conversation, Gabriel Blackwell and Robert Kloss discuss the similarities between their books, historical nonfiction, blurbing, and more.
 
Gabriel Blackwell:“Historical fiction” seems naïve to me even as a concept, and I’m allergic to categorization. But if there is anything in Amazon’s sales algorithm to connect our books, it would have to be that, right? That we’re both exploring/appropriating history in our fictions? So, why bother with the historical? I mean, the Greely expedition happened. The Civil War happened. Lincoln’s assassination happened. Why write about them or around them? Why not just make something up out of whole cloth, set it in the present, set it in the future, Middle Earth?
Robert Kloss: I always liked books like Reed’s Flight into Canada and Coover’s The Public Burning—historical satires. But that’s not the kind of novel I set out to write. And, in most ways, it’s not the kind of book I did write, although I think that’s the most obvious part of my book. It kind of just happened. I set out to write about a man’s fear of mortality and his extreme grief and that led my to Lincoln’s morbid grief over his son’s death. The Civil War then seemed like a natural subject—it allowed me to dig into personal griefs in an epic way, while also letting me make a kind of broad comment about American past and present. But the historical side of the novel emerged very organically out of the more imaginative side of the story. I began with alligators.
And then it becomes a kind of game, doesn’t it? The process of inspiration, of blurring the lines between imagination and historical record, between fact and Truth?
So let me throw it back at you a little bit, because you’re maybe even playing with the form a little more than I do—you’re not just manipulating biography and historical record, but you’re also playing maybe the two most important and famous novels of their genre, The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. So the question then is: Why rework the texts? And also, where was your starting point? What was your process on this?
GB: It seems to me that Shadow Man is a book about creation or a book about the failure to create. Why rework the texts? Because Shadow Man’s a book about creation and the failure to create.
The men who wrote The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep were terribly confused men, men who made mysteries out of their lives while writing books about men whose jobs were to solve mysteries. It’s not their work I’ve appropriated—or not only their work I’ve appropriated—but their position, their predicament. But it is/was my position, too, where I found/find myself.
What I’m trying to say is that this wasn’t a book that could have been written from a zero point. I don’t believe that such books exist. But that’s another subject for another time—this was a book that needed a father or fathers, a heritage that was both obvious and mysterious. The book is a paternity suit.
Which brings us (back) to fatherhood, something I found particularly important to The Alligators of Abraham. The you of the novel is a son with a very strong father, but it’s a you, not a he, not an I. Why is that? Why the second person? David Ohle described your book as being “led along dark alleys of American history by an all-seeing voice-over narrative,” but, as “all-seeing” as it is, it is also, oddly, intimate, perhaps by virtue of that you.
RK: I would like to never again write about the feelings or thoughts of any of my characters, especially when writing about the bizarre. I would rather focus on physicality—defining through action. The second person allows for that kind of distance, while also creating the kind of intimacy that you mention. There is also something about the second person that lends to a voice and language driven narrative, while at the same time limiting the kinds of character-related concerns that a first person narrative may have. Finally, second person allows for a sort of sweeping vastness—Ohle’s all-seeing narrator—that I find necessary to writing the kind of book that interests me.
At different points in the writing of Alligators, I did toy with making the second person into a kind of first person. And then for a while I toyed with writing the book as a dialogue between Robert Lincoln and the “you” character. The structure of the first few drafts was much less straightforward. And I found those experiments very frustrating and limiting and dull. The more and more I moved away from characterizing the narrator in anyway, while also retaining the qualities of a narrated story, the more liberated I felt. There is just something very sweeping and from the clouds or burning bush about writing this way.
I think in many ways my goal is to show everything while telling nothing. I think mystery is a very important element in all great writing. I would rather not have things explained away. And, of course, you use multiple perspectives in Shadow to deepen the mystery, rather than solve it.
So, in my mind, our books may be more closely linked by our use of language and perspective than our use of history. Your book is maybe even more driven by language and voice than mine. And you certainly use more perspectives than I do. I’m hoping you’ll comment on your use of language—I find it impressive. In particular, I’m curious about how you constructed the voice—your influences, your method in writing it, and so on.
And then the other linked question I have, is about the use of Gabriel Blackwell as a character at the very end. What was your thinking in using what is essentially an aspect of meta-fiction to deepen the mystery? Usually the entrance of the author diminishes the mystery—at least in my experience.
GB: Maybe it’s a question of genre. I guess I’m okay with the publisher calling Shadow Man a novel (even though I did ask that it be called a biography on the cover, to be internally consistent; that doesn’t seem to have stuck), but only because I recognize the novel as novel, as being one of the most pliable literary forms. I’d feel just as comfortable talking about it as an essay (or even a memoir), though, as that’s how I see my role with regards to this material—as an essayist. I was as careful with facts as I was with fictions, and the material, after all, already existed. I just shaped it. Given that relationship, I don’t really see it as a metanarrative, though I will concede that it probably is, in a Schrödinger’s cat kind of way.
I love “something very sweeping and from the clouds or burning bush”; I think you’re better at describing your style than I am at mine. I can see your you effacing the narrator; that’s an interesting aspect of your use of the second person, maybe of the second person in general.
My natural inclination is to move in an opposite direction—to focus as intently as I’m capable on that entity, whatever/whoever it might be, to inhabit it. I’m always thinking in terms of how the teller should be telling the story, what story it is, what form it should take, and what that all means for the resulting language. It’s the only way I’ve found to get the language right. It’s slightly puritan, I think, or maybe just functional, but I tend to lose patience early with writing that doesn’t exercise some care and consideration there. Voice is all there is.
Voice is paramount to Alligators, too: weeks after finishing it, I can’t shake that drumming “And. . . . And. . . . And. . . . And.” There’s something seductive in it, as a reader, something pulling, even commanding at times. Coupled with that reticence to write internality you mention above, I felt close to the narrator as a storyteller, but not necessarily as a character. Seduction relies on mystery, right? The books that I took the most from for Shadow Man, too, play on that kind of mood—Hammett, in particular, was wholly action-focused, unwilling to grant access to his characters’ heads, something he’d stolen from Hemingway (who’d learned his drumming from Gertrude Stein). [And since I’ve mentioned Hemingway, I see a strain of In Our Time’s interchapters in Alligators—am I way off base?]
So, around the time that I was having to think about who to ask to blurb Shadow Man, Matt Bell posted something about blurbs on Facebook that made complete sense to me. It was something like: “Choose the company you want your book to keep.” Less aphoristic, probably. Maybe this was no part of your thinking, but can I ask why you chose Adam Braver and David Ohle for your blurbs? I’m a huge fan of Ohle’s work, but I don’t think I would have thought of him while reading Alligators. As for Braver, I have his latest novel, Misfit, and I’m eager to read it, but it will be my first Braver.
RK: Well, first, that’s an interesting comment about In Our Time. I hadn’t thought about that book—I read it years and years go, in college, I think—but I can see where the devices are slightly similar. Actually, I was watching a lot of Malick films when I was finishing the later stages of the manuscripts, and I think that’s where the idea of the italicized sections came from, like whispering over the gunfire and slaughter. On the page it becomes something else, of course.
As for blurbs: it’s funny you mention Matt, because I actually consulted him early on—and he gave me much the same advice as you mention. So I wanted to use authors who wrote about the Civil War or the post-apocalyptic. We actually toyed with getting Civil War historians to blurb the book or fake Civil War historians or even use Lincoln’s words, somehow.
Finally we settled on these two.
Ohle’s novels were early inspirations for Alligators—Ohle’s books taught me to free up my imagination and to be fearless, and I think those ideas, plus the dystopian elements—are apparent in Alligators. So it was natural to try for him. Adam Braver was actually Matt’s suggestion. I was aware of his JFK book, but not Mr. Lincoln’s Wars. I picked up that book and enjoyed it—the lyricism, the way he wrote history as literature. And I liked the idea of someone like Braver—who has a completely different approach to lyricism and historical fiction—taking a look at the book.
The blurbing process is kind of strange, I think. I’m uncomfortable with all of these parts of selling the book, because they boil the novel down into little understandable parts. Little nuggets of wisdom. I think it’s unfair to The Alligators of Abraham to call it a “post-apocalyptic Civil War novel” but that’s evidently what I tried to reduce it to when choosing those two authors to blurb the book.
I suppose that’s what we’re doing here, and probably each of us resisting in our own way, right? Reviews, jacket copy, blurbs, . . . and whatever else is out there, it’s all about finding a way of reducing something hopefully complex and, in a way, kind of inexplicable into something that will sell the public on our work. So, I think I coined “post-apocalyptic Civil War novel” just now, which is what I’m going to call Alligators whenever I’m approached about it, at parties or on the street (ha). So, now it’s your turn. What were you trying to boil your novel into when you chose your blurbers? How do you go about presenting your book in easy to swallow pills?
GB: I think the italicized sections of Alligators do come across as oral, as vocalized. And, again, I like the way you describe it: “whispering over . . . gunfire” captures it perfectly. (Though I thought of Herzog rather than Malick; hope you don’t take that as an insult. Herzog describing Even Dwarfs Started Small: “an attempt to make inner states transparent . . . realized in a kind of nightmarish horror vision.” ANYway.) I think I am, in general, much less successful in describing anything having to do with me or what I’ve done in a way that makes any kind of sense or seems at all appealing. It’s less a matter of resisting—though I’ve done plenty of that with this book—than of incompetence. I plead awkwardness. I plead stupidity.
The only way I could be of any help with Shadow Man’s jacket copy/description was to think of that piece of writing as part of the book, part of and consistent with one of its narrators. Instead of trying to compress everything into some sort of capsule, I tried to think of it as a knob or a handle. I still got totally frustrated and hated doing it, but I hated it much less than my earlier attempts to encompass the whole of the thing. It seems to me that any successful novel is at least a little shaggy and messy, necessarily. If it is something that could effectively be communicated in a paragraph, the natural question is, why hasn’t it been? I mean, why write more than that paragraph, right? Obviously, this kind of thinking explains why I will never write a bestseller.
With my exceptionally kind blurbers, I was attempting to make up for my own inadequacies. I tried to triangulate the thing I had written, to at least plot the craft and the spirit behind it, if not the subject. I did start out thinking in terms of subject(s), and I debated whether to ask someone like John T. Irwin, who has written a couple of great books about mystery and noir, or Richard Layman, whose work on Hammett was tremendously helpful to me. But I had trouble keeping up the pretense, maybe, or maybe I just couldn’t resist one good wink at the reader.
Speaking of readers, even though I tend to be shark-like in my reading, but I can’t see not rereading The Alligators of Abraham. The excesses of language, the indelible imagery, the cadences, the bizarre and intriguing characters—it was tremendously satisfying, a rare book. Aside from that rereading, though, when can I read more from you? What’s next? I think you said that you’d completed another novel, yes?
RK: The novel you mention is titled Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. It’s in the style of Alligators, but it shows a natural growth from Alligators. It takes it’s time a little more than Alligators—it lingers more. And it focuses more on their characters, their relationship and fears and atrocities, a little more. I am more proud of it than anything else I’ve to this point done. The novel does not yet have a publisher, so we’ll see what yet happens with it.
I do have a shorter work appearing in 2013—a chapbook co-written with Amber Sparks called The Desert Places. It’s a series of linked flash pieces that traces the evolution of a monster from the beginning of humanity through the end. Matt Kish will be illustrating and Curbside Splendor will be publishing, in October I believe.
And what about you? I know you have another book that is now available for pre-order. What’s that one about? Is there anything else on the horizon?
GB: I have a collection of fictions and essays that’s just come out, Critique of Pure Reason. And then I’ve “edited” another book called The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men: The Last Letter of H. P. Lovecraft, that will be out in October. It feels very strange to have three books come out in just under a year—strange, and a little tiring. I hope any readers I might have aren’t as sick of me as I’ve become.
I don’t think of myself as a particularly fast or productive writer, despite this anomalous year. I started work on the next book after finishing Natural Dissolution this summer and handing it over to the publisher, and I’ve been adding to it bit by tiny bit, but it still hasn’t achieved that point where its momentum determines my schedule—you know that point? It just feels like something one does right now, like a habit one isn’t very proud of. I’m probably not supposed to say that, huh? In all honesty, I don’t believe in anything I’ve written until it has a complete shape, until I can really get started on the revision. I think of myself as a reviser, not really a composer.

RK: I can relate to this idea. There are times when I’m holding out buckets to catch the words, to paraphrase Saul Bellow, but more often now I find it necessary to slowly throttle the thing to life. I think that’s very natural, for growth to come through an uncomfortable struggle.