An excerpt of Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math was published in The Paris Review’s Fall 2018 issue.

Mitchell Jackson (Photo: John Ricard)

Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and it was the winner of both the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and a Whiting Writers’ Award winner. He is arguably one of America’s most important contemporary voices. For years, readers like myself have been awaiting his next proclamation. His new memoir, Survival Math, arrives not a day too soon amid the political turmoil of 2019. In his second masterpiece, Mitchell has cast aside the fictive cover and turned the lens deeply inward. He delves headlong into issues of race, class, masculinity, love, addiction, and redemption, which unfold into an urgent American odyssey that sweeps history, time, register, and place. His writing is searingly beautiful, self-abnegating, clairvoyant, and brave. Celebratory and confessional, deeply researched and fully realized, he speaks from the gut about the dissolution of family, the disquiet of a country still steeped in deep racial prejudice, and what it means to survive everything, from prison to his mother’s addiction. Survival Math is at once risky and immaculately conceived.

Mitchell is the only person who has invited me to an event so fancy the invitation was flown to my home overnight express. When we attended the awards ceremony, Joy Williams wore her signature cowboy boots and sunglasses onstage. Don DeLillo stared, stone-like, straight ahead. “Hey,” I leaned over to Mitch and asked, “Isn’t that woman handing out awards with her back to us a famous actress?” “You mean Meryl Streep?” he said. We both laughed. This, it seemed, was already his milieu. It was my honor to interview him about his craft.

INTERVIEWER

Survival Math opens with a quote by Baldwin: “That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and indeed no church—can teach.” If you could boil it down to one edict, what is it that you most want to teach readers with this book?

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Halle Butler (Photo: Jerzy Rose)

I, a novelist, met novelist Halle Butler in Chicago in May 2017. My girlfriend, also a novelist, was reading with Butler at a café in Logan Square. Halle was standing outside with her friend, a novelist, and they were smoking cigarettes. Butler had on a wrinkled button-down shirt from a thrift store, dirty sneakers, and jeans with holes in them. She seemed wry and friendly. At the time, I don’t think she was aware I was a novelist, but as we talked, I couldn’t stop myself from referring to my debut novel, which had come out a couple months earlier. She smiled in a conspiratorial way, then told me she would have trouble remembering the title because she was already drunk. My girlfriend and I were hungry, so we went inside and ordered gumbo. Halle got up to read an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, The New Me (Penguin). She burped a few times, then announced she was a Granta Best Young American Novelist. Everyone laughed when her narrator admits she is “afraid of the taste of water.” I wondered, who is this Halle Butler person?

I wanted to become her friend immediately. This would be a good place for me to describe, in summary, Butler’s new novel, The New Me, but I hesitate to say that it’s about loneliness, alienation, depression, and friendship. I will say that I experienced waves of empathy for her narrator and her narrator’s anxiety sweat. The New Me is a bold and absurd work of comic genius that dissects social mores, neoliberalism, and consumerism disguised as self-improvement. In other words, Butler and I are kindred spirits and I’m so grateful to have become her friend (when she’s not making fun of me).

INTERVIEWER

First of all, thank you for writing such a beautiful, enraged treatise on living alone in an apartment in Chicago in the winter with one quasi friend and a terrible job. Where did this book begin for you?

BUTLER

I assure you the pleasure was all mine.

I wrote the first few chapters specifically to perform aloud—the intro/overture part, the train scene, the Tom Jordan part. I really like doing readings, but I felt like I’d never totally cracked the code for how to keep people from glazing over, which is definitely a common thing at a reading—getting and keeping people’s attention is really hard, unless they already know you—which, in my case, is often. So I tried first person, lots of potshots, language that would allow me to read in my “irate idiot” party voice. I like it when you feel like you’re witnessing someone interacting with their work in front of you, rather than some kind of self-conscious performance of a reading, if that makes sense. I read the first handful of pages of The New Me at Cafe Mustache in Chicago, in 2016.

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Mariana Dimópulos

Mariana Dimópulos’s novel All My Goodbyes, translated by Alice Whitmore, is a tale of murder in Patagonia and of wanderlust, or rather, a lust for an arrival that never quite happens. In crisp prose that is often as catchy as a pop song, the narrator jumps between Buenos Aires, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Málaga, and between maturity and youth, lovers and friends. The novel is written in bursts varying in length from a paragraph to a few pages, moving through time and place. These vignettes, or snapshots, or ruminations, or lines of dialogue, are linked not by chronology or geography but by theme—sometimes obliquely. The result is a powerfully propulsive journey that is both circular and suspenseful. I read the whole (admittedly slim) book without putting it down, on a flight from New York to Los Angeles.

I got in touch with Dimópulos over email in order to ask her some questions about her work. We did the preliminaries in Spanish and agreed to do the rest in English; Mariana is an accomplished translator from German and evidently something of a polyglot.

INTERVIEWER

In this book, you write: “My freedom always implies the slavery of another. So, my heart asks (and at heart I’m no good): if I enslave myself, does that mean someone else is set free?” Can you talk a little bit about what this means?

DIMÓPULOS

Since my early years, I’ve been interested in how people live and how the social differences between people come to be. The world is far from being a fair place. The sentence you are pointing at is an intended fallacy, and its answer is no. There is no perfect balance between two constants—free people and enslaved people—and there is no personal, isolated solution to the problem of inequality. But if you are young, like the protagonist, and you have a critical vision about how our world is built, with its contradictions and conformism, then you may think in this way.

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Esmé Weijun Wang’s first book was a novel, The Border of Paradise. It was a multifaceted epic about family, migration, language, and mental illness, for which she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2017. Her second book, out this week, is a collection of essays. The Collected Schizophrenias (read an excerpt here) examines schizophrenia from historical, medical, social, and emotional perspectives, and looks at the myriad ways it is misunderstood, including by the psychiatric community and schizophrenics themselves.

This nonfiction project has been acclaimed since long before publication: in 2016 the manuscript-in-progress won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and in 2018 Wang was awarded a Whiting Award for nonfiction, the committee noting that she “sends out revelatory dispatches from an under-mapped land, shot like arrows in all directions from a taut bow of a mind.” Her prose is precise and lyrical at the same time. She is equally comfortable in the realms of science and spirituality. She provides personal documentation of experiences that, almost by definition, seem to erase the possibility of doing so.

Wang was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder eight years after experiencing her first hallucinations. She recounts those intervening eight years of confusion in the first essay in the book, laying out the changes in the DSM. (“Changes in the bible of psychiatry continue to affect people’s lives,” she writes.) But an accurate diagnosis is just a small shard of clarity in a universe of pain.

In the essay “On the Ward,” Wang offers a harrowing account of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization; in “Yale Will Not Save You,” she tells of how the university essentially forced her to leave after two hospitalizations that did little to help her. For an overachieving child, Wang writes, “ ‘I went to Yale’ [was] shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I’m not worthless.” She went on to complete her undergraduate degree at Stanford and, later, received an M.F.A. at the University of Michigan.

Other essays discuss the intersection of PTSD and psychosis, the performative power of fashion and self-presentation, and schizophrenias in pop culture and the collective consciousness (for example, The Exorcist, or the true story of the twelve-year-old girls who stabbed their friend nineteen times after becoming absorbed by an internet meme, depicted in the HBO documentary Beware the Slenderman).

When we spoke on the phone, it was morning in San Francisco. It was raining very hard there, and she was lying on the bed she has in her office. Wang has created that configuration out of necessity—she suffers from late-stage Lyme disease, a debilitating chronic illness that means that she often has to write by tapping one finger on her phone or small tablet. She has written entire essays that way. “It gets done; slowly, but it gets done,” she told me.  

INTERVIEWER

In your novel, The Border of Paradise, you set out to write about mental illness and certain psychological and psychiatric experiences—for example hallucinations—in ways that were new, moving away from the Beautiful Mind narrative. For example, there’s a scene in which the protagonist, who is a Polish American man in rural California in the fifties, sees a deer in the woods. What does nonfiction, and the essay form in particular, give you that’s different from what fiction gives when it comes to writing about those experiences?

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