Jesse Ball (Photo: Joe Lieske)

Jesse Ball is an absurdist writer. His latest work, The Divers’ Game, set in a world much like our own, examines what happens when the lives of others are seen as disposable and small measures of kindness are largely absent. In other words, The Divers’ Game is a meditation on violence, longing, cruelty, pageantry, and joy. It’s made up of four sections, and filled with despair and stark beauty, written by one of the finest writers and humans I’ve had the great fortune to encounter in this frequently calamitous world.

I first met Jesse in Chicago in 2010. I was beginning graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches, and I wanted to work with him. I remember we had meetings every other week in which we would sit in a conference room with corporate furniture. Each time, upon entering that sad little room, I felt as if I were visiting a wizened old monk at the top of an arduous hill. A couple months ago, when I proposed this conversation, I was hopeful we could meet to go bowling or gambling or shopping for artisanal hats, but owing to our different time zones, this interview was conducted by email.

INTERVIEWER

Where are you right now?

BALL

In Shanghai. I am in a hotel in the city center. I’m seated in the dining area. It’s six A.M. No one but me has yet come down for breakfast. All the breakfast attendants are here, but other than that, I’m alone. They are all very busy and I am answering your questions on a small sheet of paper.

A man in a paper chef’s hat is very rapidly making a great pile of fried eggs. I am not sure when or whether he’ll stop. I have on my plate two slices of watermelon, some tofu, bitter melon, and a red bean roll. I was drinking tea but it’s all gone.

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Kimberly King Parsons is a writer who lives in the wilderness. When we spoke on the phone, we were interrupted by the cawing of a large bird outside the window of her Oregon home, which sits on a hill surrounded by a forest populated with “loud squirrels, loud birds, and voles.” She grew up in Lubbock, Texas, with generations of ancestors rooted in the nearby cities of Quitaque and Turkey, where unsettled land stretches endlessly. She would pass the time by walking miles in any direction.

Wildness is in her fiction as well; the story “Fiddlebacks” begins with three children shaking out their shoes before putting them on, expelling poisonous insects hidden in the toes. There is also something untamed in her deeply flawed characters, who are constantly caught between reining themselves in and indulging their feral darkness. However, Parsons’s true gift is couching the savage in the great beauty of her prose. Her story “Foxes” appears in The Paris Review’s Summer 2019 issue, and her debut collection, Black Light, was published this month. Our conversation revealed her to be an exacting craftswoman, someone for whom the articulation of each sentence is an act of listening to the character and knowing just when to leave a story.

INTERVIEWER

Have you always known you would be a writer?

PARSONS

I grew up an only child, so I used to really love going to birthday parties or hanging out with groups, and at a certain point my role became designated scary-story teller. I don’t know why they chose me, but I loved it. There’s something about having a captive audience and having a room full of terrified people listening to you. I remember knowing that I wanted to be a storyteller or a writer in some way.

INTERVIEWER

Do you remember some of the scary stories you used to tell?

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Helen Phillips (left) and Laura Van Den berg (right)

When an early copy of Helen Phillips’s new novel, The Need, turned up at my apartment, I had not read a book in two months. I had been unable to read, in fact. My father had died recently and each time I tried to open a book, longing to slide into an alternate present, I instead hit a wall. The Need broke that wall for me. The novel concerns a woman named Molly, a paleobotanist who is home alone with her children when she thinks she hears an intruder in the house—and the events that follow upend her understanding of her world. The book is written in short and thrilling chapters, at once a cat-and-mouse tale of suspense and a profound exploration of identity and reality, of fate and time.

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Helen at the Harvard Bookstore recently and as we talked we discovered some intriguing overlap between our most recent projects. So we decided to keep talking. This conversation took place over email, over the course of several weeks in August. We discussed The Need, published by Simon & Schuster in July, and The Third Hotel, out in paperback from Picador this month, plus dislocated realities, genre, maternal love, and endings.

PHILLIPS

On the first page of The Third Hotel, your protagonist Clare admits, “I am experiencing a dislocation of reality,” a sentence that stayed with me as I read the book. The sands of reality do seem to be shifting under Clare’s feet in each scene, which brings me to a perhaps unanswerable question that arises for me in many of my favorite works of fiction. Do you consider your protagonist to be an unstable narrator in a stable world, or a stable narrator in an unstable world?

VAN DEN BERG

I am inclined to claim both, if I may. Clare is wild with grief of various sorts, which creates instability in her own perspective. At the same time, I do think the world—her world, our world—is inherently volatile. To make an obvious point, there is just so much we don’t know and can’t explain. I was just reading about the physicist Leah Broussard’s work on mirror matter, which is bananas, and a concept that is certainly relevant to The Need. After my father died, I thought on several occasions that he was speaking to me through my sister’s dog. I know how that sounds, and yet after a series of deeply uncanny occurrences, such a thought not only seemed possible but also like the obvious and logical conclusion. Was that instability coming from my own grief-deranged self or from some other cosmic force or a collaboration between us? Who can say?

I would love to ask the same question of your protagonist, Molly. The novel opens with a dawning awareness that there is an intruder in her home—and, without veering into spoilers, the intruder’s identity introduces major questions about Molly’s grasp on reality. The intruding force is a wholly real element in the book, it’s not a dream or a fantasy, and at the same time, the novel could also accommodate a reading more grounded in psychological realism—that Molly unconsciously conjured this threat. Do you see the instability as rising from the world around Molly or more from Molly herself? Or both?

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Jia Tolentino. Photo: © Elena Mudd.

Is there any topic Jia Tolentino can’t tackle? Since becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2016, she’s written features about the electronic cigarette brand Juul and the culty athleisure company Outdoor Voices; commentaries on the disastrous Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the violent rise of incels; and examinations of the “large adult son” meme and the YouTube phenomenon of remixing popular songs so they sound like they’re echoing in abandoned malls. In the early years of her professional writing career, she conducted a series of funny yet deeply sympathetic interviews with adult virgins at The Hairpin, and her work as deputy editor at Jezebel helped shape online feminist discourse as we now know it. She also has an M.F.A. in fiction, and the first short story she ever submitted won Carve magazine’s Raymond Carver Contest. “If I got fired tomorrow,” she told me, “I would probably go to the woods and try to write a novel.” Even her tweets are good; for what it’s worth, my introduction to her work came via the occasional dog photos and thoughts on music she posts, which are often the bright spots in my feed.

What unites these wildly disparate threads is Tolentino herself. Although she’s been called the voice of her generation, her writing is sharp, clear, and utterly her own. Tolentino’s first book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, vibrates with her presence. Over the course of nine long original essays, she turns inside out the fast-casual restaurants, pricey exercise classes, and dubiously simple narratives we use to propel ourselves through our overmediated lives. The result is a sort of revision of Joan Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” for the late-capitalist horror show that is the twenty-first century. Read More

Rebecca Godfrey (photo: Brigitte Lacombe); Leslie Jamison (photo: Beowulf Sheehan)

I came to Rebecca Godfrey’s Under the Bridge as a woman who has had a long-term love affair with sadness and a fraught relationship to anger, as a guilty wielder of weaponized vulnerability, and as a writer fascinated by the ways we try to represent the suffering of others. Which is to say, I came to this extraordinary book with all sorts of personal and creative baggage. But part of its importance, I think, stems from the fact that very few readers could possibly approach this book without baggage. Under the Bridge directs itself toward questions that cut to the core for all of us: How does sadness transmute into rage? Where does violence come from, and how should we expect to find any sort of meaning in it? What do we do with acts of aggression that seem to defy understanding or explanation?

Under the Bridge explores the life and death of fourteen-year-old Reena Virk, a Canadian high school student beaten and murdered in 1997 by a group of teenagers, some of them classmates. Godfrey’s book tells a shocking story, but the most searing impressions it left on me weren’t the stuff of Law and Order reruns, but rather quieter moments of humanity and heartbreak: the rusty car of a grieving uncle, the meticulous beauty regime of a girl in foster care, the Gandhi quote a boy decides to include in one of his letters from prison—how he writes it down to fill up space, then second-guesses himself and erases it, then ultimately decides to write it again.

If true crime as a literary genre often gets a bad rap—dismissed as intrinsically voyeuristic, as if violence were the sworn enemy of profundity—then Under the Bridge is a brilliant illustration of what that knee-jerk dismissal ignores. If we bring rigorous, unflinching attention to acts of unthinkable cruelty, to our rage and our betrayals—we can find difficult and important truths lurking inside sensational stories: truths about trauma and its afterlife, varieties of claustrophobia, and the dark alchemies by which sadness or longing turn to anger.

Perhaps true crime has been dismissed because too many stories about crime have been told with too much fidelity to formula, and too little fidelity to nuance. Under the Bridge runs against the grain in both senses: it pays close attention to the complexity of human life—its ordinary days, as well as its moments of extremity—and refuses the standard tropes and narrative formulas of the genre.

The book is structured as a kaleidoscope of closely observed narrative fragments—drawn from more than three hundred interviews—that toggle between the perspectives of a large cast. In this prism, the book observes the lives of its subjects so closely that they slough off all the familiar snakeskins of archetype: The Evil Villain, the Innocent Victim, the Slut or the Savior or the Bad Girl or the Saint. Godfrey brings the granular gaze of a novelist to the kind of material often flattened into moralizing argument, and her characters emerge as mysterious, contradictory, heartbreaking, and plural—in short, as human. She lets them hum and shimmer and confound us. Her illumination leaves room for the persistence of mystery in a way that feels aesthetically ambitious and also humble, and ethically useful in that humility.  Read More

Emily Nussbaum has always been an engaging thinker, from her creation of The Approval Matrix for New York Magazine to her truly thoughtful television criticism for The New Yorker. After twenty years of writing about television, Nussbaum remains curious about the ways in which it’s shifting, and how that impacts our culture. Her criticism often places each show in historical context, and considers what it is bringing to us that is new or different. At times in defiance of popular opinion, she will find new prisms through which to appreciate unpopular shows, or make trenchant critiques of beloved but pretentious ones. This ability won her the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2016, and it’s what makes her new book, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way through the TV Revolution, so singular and captivating. We spoke by phone about Netflix, the legacy of The Sopranos, and how she manages to stay interested in TV.

INTERVIEWER

You were in a doctoral program, and then found your way to television criticism. Did you finish the doctorate?

NUSSBAUM

No, I did not. One of the things that I write about in the book is how when I was in graduate school, I watched Buffy and my incendiary fandom sparked a kind of intellectual change in me, and a deep interest in television as a medium. I think that a lot of TV critics have that kind of conversion story. I happened to start getting interested in television right around a moment that TV was changing. There was already an enormous and rich conversation going on about television critically online. There’s really no way to separate the changes in television from changes in technology. I think this is true of a lot of artistic mediums, but it’s strikingly true of TV that the explosion of the internet, and the subsequent radical changes in the way TV was created and distributed, altered what it was capable of, and changed the way people talked about it. In the late nineties and early aughts, I was writing on anonymous discussion boards, and it was a model of criticism that was more about joyful debate and conversation, not about opinions from on high. That’s still very much a model for me.

INTERVIEWER

How has television criticism changed over time?

INTERVIEWER

It’s changed significantly. Around the time that I watched Buffy, The Sopranos was considered the greatest show on television. I absolutely love The Sopranos, and I have a piece in the book about it that I’m very proud of. However, I was really struck by the difference in critical reception to the two shows. It’s not that I didn’t think The Sopranos should get praise, but there was this top-ten-list approach that was not merely about The Sopranos being a great television show, but about it not being a television show at all. Being better than television as a medium. Being more like a movie or book. I think a lot of this had to do with the status anxiety that TV had as a medium and industry. I was very passionate about Buffy, which is also a very ambitious, powerful, and interesting show. But there’s nobody who would describe Buffy as being like a novel or movie. So I basically went around having arguments with people about the fact that they should really be watching it. In the process, I developed this sense of wanting to talk about TV as TV, as worth celebrating in itself. When I started writing about the subject, TV was considered a junk medium that had to prove its worth. As I’ve been writing about it, it’s drifted closer and closer to the center of the culture.

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