{"id":71407,"date":"2014-05-19T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2014-05-19T16:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=71407"},"modified":"2015-11-03T11:19:12","modified_gmt":"2015-11-03T16:19:12","slug":"an-interview-with-joshua-ferris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/19\/an-interview-with-joshua-ferris\/","title":{"rendered":"Always on Display: An Interview with Joshua Ferris"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"cth-joshua-ferris-jpg-20140508\"<\/a>

Photo: Beowulf Sheehan\/Hachette Brown Group<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe mouth is a weird place,\u201d says the dentist-narrator of Joshua Ferris\u2019s new novel, <\/em>To Rise Again at a Decent Hour<\/a>. \u201cNot quite inside and not quite out, not skin and not organ, but something in between: dark, wet, admitting access to an interior most people would rather not contemplate\u2014where cancer starts, where the heart is broken, where the soul may just fail to turn up.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just dentists who peer into dark spaces. Fear that the soul may fail to turn up is everywhere in Ferris\u2019s work. To date, he has explored the human search for soulfulness in the anonymizing ecosystem of an office (<\/em>Then We Came to the End); in the repercussions of an isolating, untreatable disease (<\/em>The Unnamed); and repeatedly in words themselves. A short story like \u201cThe Fragments,\u201d published in <\/em>The New Yorker last spring, is constructed from snippets of half-caught conversations. It takes as its subject the not-quite-bridgeable gap between overhearing and understanding, between the sound of a sentence and the meaning inside. <\/em>To Rise Again at a Decent Hour turns this artistic interest in misunderstandings into an impressive investigation of faith and doubt. It\u2019s a novel full of existential humor, and the laughs start before the book has even begun. Not many American writers, searching the Bible for an appropriate epigraph, would have found their eyes alighting on this one:<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Ha, ha<\/p>\n

\u2014Job 39:25. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I met Ferris on a Friday afternoon in Brooklyn. We talked about his desire to shift his writing away from what he calls \u201cthe over-manufacture of the imagined\u201d to a more \u201cface value\u201d approach. We also discussed the ways in which he envies the sense of belonging religion can offer, and why literary critics could afford to lighten up when it comes to funny fiction. \u201cWe don\u2019t exist in the world solely to grow goatees and stroke them,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe\u2019re here also to make one another laugh.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I heard that To Rise Again at a Decent Hour<\/em> started its life as a detective novel called The Third Bishop<\/em>. How did you find your way from that original idea into\u00a0a novel about baseball and religion, narrated by a dentist?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ten years ago, I was despairing of writing any book at all. I had about 250 pages of the novel that eventually became Then We Came to the End<\/em>, and those pages were wanting. So I put them away and eventually gave myself over to a very different manuscript. It was about a kid who had been thoroughly indoctrinated into a cult and was convinced that his strange view was the worldview. I was interested in the borderland that exists between a cult and a religion, and especially fascinated by Joseph Smith and the evolution of Mormonism.<\/p>\n

After Then We Came to the End<\/em> and The Unnamed<\/em> were published, I ended up coming back to that story of an indoctrinated kid. Slowly it evolved into the story of a private detective investigating a possibly ancient religion. In a way, the books you almost wrote on the way to finding the final novel will always be more interesting than the published version. They\u2019re a more colorful record of the writer\u2019s life. But with the help of my two editors I came to see that the private detective, who\u2019s inherently a kind of mediating narrator, or a cipher, wasn\u2019t working for me either. I needed a narrator right at the center of the novel, encountering the religion for himself. He eventually became a dentist because I need my characters to have jobs in order to feel real to me. People have to work. I thought, Why not make him a dentist? It doesn\u2019t get any more real world than that. You\u2019re getting in there every day and making shit bleed.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot in your novel about the private rituals of religions and of baseball, and the narrator has his own private language for some things\u2014like calling his cell phone his \u201cme-machine.\u201d His big regret is that his dental practice doesn\u2019t have a private office he can escape to.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Privacy is one of the book\u2019s big preoccupations. I\u2019m writing to figure out what I think about it. Without a private office in his dental practice, Paul is always on display. I think what I\u2019m interested in is this question of to what extent an obsessive perfectionist\u2014like Paul, like myself\u2014should let other people into their thoughts. They can be strange thoughts.<\/p>\n

I was also interested in the way that the Internet creates a second world, a second reality. I mainly go about my business unobserved. I don\u2019t engage with social media. But when I go online, I can type my name into Google and see pictures of myself. I have an existence online that is not mine. There is a version of me out there that I\u2019m not developing\u2014that other people are developing on my behalf. It\u2019s the same with my narrator. He\u2019s striving for a kind of sincerity. And the Internet\u2014the reflections of himself he sees online\u2014are part of the reason he can\u2019t find that sincerity, I think. He\u2019s too aware of himself as an actor in the world, and that stops him acting. He\u2019s an object rather than a subject. Paul\u2019s great fear\u2014and probably mine\u2014is that it\u2019s no longer possible to be authentic in the way it was before the social internet came along.<\/p>\n

I read a piece in The Daily Beast<\/em><\/a> suggesting that in 2010 a Twitter account in your name was set up, and posted anti-Semitic comments. The implication was that this might have inspired the religious identity theft plot in your novel. Is there any truth in that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, that didn\u2019t come from me. I\u2019m not aware of there having been a Twitter account purporting to be mine. Is it happening right now? Is Joshua Ferris tweeting as we speak?<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll have to check it out. But if that wasn\u2019t where the impulse to write about religion and identity theft came from, perhaps you can talk about where else it may have come from.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Growing up, I didn\u2019t belong to a religion, and that not belonging maybe bothered me at times. I was outside of the nurturing communities that religion can provide. Don\u2019t get me wrong\u2014I know religion can also be a show of horrors. But growing up I looked in on Catholicism as a non-Catholic, and I looked in on Judaism as a non-Jew.\u00a0I was an outsider, this mutt-y white kid who had no tradition or belief. I wanted a religious community for myself, probably because I didn\u2019t have one. If I\u2019d had one, I probably would have spurned it.<\/p>\n

To Rise Again At a Decent Hour<\/em> starts from the question of whether there\u2019s a kind of private language and intimacy to religion that the mutt-y white guys like me are missing out on. And to some extent, I\u2019m also thinking about the question of whether as a writer<\/em> there\u2019s something I\u2019ve missed out on. When you\u2019re an American novelist in 2014, at a point when Philip Roth has had a kind of apotheosis\u2014has ascended to heaven even though he\u2019s still on earth\u2014you realize the extraordinary richness he found in Judaism. I didn\u2019t grow up within that richness. I simply didn\u2019t have it. It cuts both ways, of course. There are writers who happen to be Jewish who get labeled as \u201cJewish writers\u201d and would much rather be just writers. And here I am, lamenting the fact that I\u2019m not a Jew! But religion offers a writer a tradition both to be nurtured in and to fight against, and that nurturing and that conflict can produce great literature. Roth was given a lifetime of material from the fights he picked with Judaism\u2014with the generation of Jews that he raised him, with the generation that excoriated him, and finally with the generation that celebrated him. Whereas I got a few potluck dinners and some basement training in Noah.<\/p>\n

The idea of the individual wanting to belong to a group\u2014that might be a through-line in your work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, I guess so. In Then We Came to the End<\/em>, there were those individuals in the office environment who wanted or had no choice but to become part of the collective \u201cwe.\u201d And there were those individuals who at all costs didn\u2019t want to be part of the \u201cwe.\u201d And in The Unnamed<\/em>, there\u2019s an almost mineral insistence on difference\u2014on the ways in which this strange disease marks a character as abnormal, and the sickness refuses to let him participate in life. I\u2019m interested in connectivity and inclusiveness, but also in what it means to be a real individual, what it requires, and how those two things might sometimes be at odds.<\/p>\n

\"riseagaincover\"<\/a>All writers are interested in systems of naming, of labeling, but perhaps you more than most. It seems to me that you spend a lot of time thinking about the limitations of language and, on the other hand, the ripples of resonance it\u2019s possible to squeeze from a single word. I particularly enjoyed Googling the surname of the ex-girlfriend, Connie Plotz, and finding out that it was a Yiddish word meaning \u201cto collapse or faint, as from surprise, excitement, or exhaustion.\u201d And there was a Mr. Santacroce, or holy cross. And there\u2019s a Mr. Belisle. When I looked up \u201cBelisle\u201d on my me-machine, I found a pitcher for the Colorado Rockies, and then an online dictionary asked if I\u2019d meant \u201cBelial, a Hebrew term for the Devil.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Names are a way of playing games with the reader. I choose my names with great care, you\u2019re right about that. With Nabokov, names are always full of allusions, they always exist on some level as references\u2014they\u2019re places for him to play. With Pynchon, names are a great place for metaphors to be recognized, and for the reader to realize that basically everything he\u2019s writing is metaphorical on some level.<\/p>\n

Names generate meaning in a short amount of space\u2014they provoke thoughts, questions. That\u2019s something I like doing. Of course, you have to be careful. Sometimes it can alienate the reader, it can be another level of mediation, to make a character carry the great burden of a metaphoric name. The character can be a device before he or she becomes a person, and that can be a bad thing for a writer who wants to offer up a kind of emotional proximity in the work. It\u2019s a constant struggle, the desire to be playful and the desire to communicate on some very stark emotional level.<\/p>\n

The desire to be funny and the desire to be serious?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know that I would ever want to separate humor out from the serious, or characterize it like that. The best kind of humor isn\u2019t topical, it doesn\u2019t have an expiration date, and it doesn\u2019t come out of nowhere. The best kind of literary humor is contextual, situational, and is a matter of timing and carefully generating the opportunity to provide what\u2019s funny\u2014that kind of humor is serious.<\/p>\n

And yet people often make the \u201cfunny versus serious\u201d distinction in your work. Even the critics who loved your first novel sometimes felt the need to point out that, in addition to the office-based jokes, there was a serious cancer narrative, as if that somehow gave legitimacy to what might otherwise have been a frivolous project.<\/p>\n

Disparagement of comedy\u2019s role in literature is deeply misguided. Sometimes people fail to recognize the extraordinary amount of craft that can go into what looks, on the surface, like a mere punch-line. In my writing, I\u2019m trying to use different registers, and those registers are a reflection of the world. We don\u2019t exist in the world solely to grow goatees and stroke them. We\u2019re here also to make one another laugh, and to use humor to mitigate some of the shit and misery that goes on. I think the best advice I could give a young writer would be \u201cDon\u2019t forget about the funny.\u201d Humor is a part of life, so make it a part of your fiction.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem\u2014part of the reason people sometimes think that comedic literature isn\u2019t real<\/em> literature\u2014is that comedy can seem to date a piece of work. I don\u2019t mean with a specific year. When you have a funny line, you hope to make the reader laugh. But if they reread the book, they\u2019re unlikely to laugh at that line again. It\u2019s hard to return the reader to the first reaction you elicited in him or her, especially with humor. The reader has already heard and absorbed the joke, and has laughed, and that\u2019s it. Whereas with, say, a resonant, poetic line, sometimes a reader can come back to it again and again and it retains its power. People want lasting literature to have a feel of permanency, and sometimes comedy can seem disposable because you only laugh hard that first time.<\/p>\n

To pick up on the idea of the disposable, did you worry at all about the references to Facebook and Twitter in To Rise Again at a Decent Hour<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I did, but not for long. If we\u2019re going to talk about social media, we have to talk about it. You can\u2019t write for the ages\u2014there\u2019s such pretense in that. It\u2019s a mistake. At the start of Bartleby, the Scrivener<\/em>, there are these mentions of [John Jacob] Astor meant to convey the high-level business the narrator is conducting, and then there are long descriptions of what it means to be a scrivener. No one\u2019s interested in Astor anymore, and the role of a scrivener is no longer relevant to us. The references have no currency in the contemporary world at all. But Melville is a product of his time, and he didn\u2019t worry about what would date and what wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

When I write a novel today that involves Facebook or Twitter, I simply have to hope that either Facebook and Twitter will make a significant enough impression on the world that they will outlast their usefulness and be remembered, or that\u2014if they go the way of the dodo\u2014a reader will accept what these things are doing in the story, and not be bothered by them. One man\u2019s future is another man\u2019s past.<\/p>\n

What formed your writing, early on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wrote, as an undergrad. And when I got out of school I was making a little scratch translating badly written scientific papers into English. There were many different layers of translation. Usually the students who\u2019d written these papers were incredibly brilliant scientists but often without much knowledge of English. I would take their writing and improve it, and at the same time I was taking this complex science and trying to make it communicable. That job conveyed to me very strongly that for every piece of writing, there is a reader, and clarity is important.<\/p>\n

Then I went into advertising in 1998. There\u2019s never been a word written in the history of advertising that hasn\u2019t had, as its core objective, the domination of the entire world. Every sentence put forth is intended to maximize the client\u2019s market share. You want to win over not just a reader, but\u00a0every reader; the biggest possible group. I started to realize the real power of a simple sentence. In college I had acquired these ideals of literature with a capital L, but my real-life work\u2014the work of simplifying ideas\u2014produced a writer willing to slum it with simple sentences if it meant reeling a reader in. The combination of that academic study and that real-world advertising experience really formed my voice.<\/p>\n

There will be some reviewers of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour<\/em> who will read the whole book as a kind of allegory, in the same way they did with the non-stop walking in The Unnamed. Is that bothersome to you? Do you consider yourself to be a realist writer, or does that label hold no meaning for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t be able to write anything at all if I didn\u2019t believe I was writing about the real world. All my books are about the world I inhabit. We talked about how I abandoned a private detective novel and turned it into one about a dentist. I think that was ultimately because there was too much unreality to that original conceit\u2014to the mediated narrator\u2014for me to really believe in my own book.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d make an argument that, on the metaphysical level, Samuel Beckett was a realist. But if I gave Beckett to, say, my father, who\u2019s a good reader but an unschooled one, he would not call it realism. He would call it some strange abstraction. But as I read the trilogy, what I see is the deep human concerns of those books, and how pressing and relevant and real they feel. Hopefully whatever feels imagined or affected in my novels nonetheless has some connection to the real world. I hope I\u2019m conveying a seriousness in relation to the world, not a flippancy. More and more as a writer, I\u2019m interested in taking things at face value rather than relying, as I maybe did when I was younger, on the over-manufacture of the imagined.<\/p>\n

And yet you made up a disease in The Unnamed<\/em>, and a whole religion in this novel. Why not just pick a religion off the peg\u2014choose one that already exists?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It goes back to the idea of the distinction between a religion and a cult. Often it\u2019s tempting to dismiss a religious movement as a cult, and I felt it was necessary to make up a religion of my own devising so that people didn\u2019t come at it with a certain set of assumptions, or expectations. It\u2019s very easy to say, \u201cOh, I know what Mormonism is.\u201d I wanted to create a religion that seemed strange in some ways and believable in others, so that the reader thinks, I have to Google this to see if it\u2019s real.<\/p>\n

If I\u2019m getting someone to Google Ulmism, the religion in the book, to see if it\u2019s real, then on some level I have managed to make Ulmism a real religion, haven\u2019t I? It\u2019s\u00a0real in the pages of the novel, and it\u2019s real enough to be Googled. To take this one step further, if you Google Ulmism and find no reference to it, does that mean it\u2019s not a real religion? If something doesn\u2019t show up on Google, does that make it untrue? And if all true things show up on the Internet, does that mean that everything on the Internet is true? Might there be some false things on the Internet, too? How do you categorize something that is Googleable and false? Or true and un-Googleable? Before you know it, you have no firm grip whatsoever on what is true and what isn\u2019t true, or even what that distinction means. Playing games is part of the fictional endeavor. It\u2019s part of my attempt to take the world seriously.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Lee is a British writer. His new novel, <\/em>High Dive, will be published in the U.S. in March.
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\u201cThe mouth is a weird place,\u201d says the dentist-narrator of Joshua Ferris\u2019s new novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. \u201cNot quite inside and not quite out, not skin and not organ, but something in between: dark, wet, admitting access to an interior most people would rather not contemplate\u2014where cancer starts, where the heart […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":616,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[71,411,1132,286,1786,7479,12543,12735,13953,13952,13947],"class_list":["post-71407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-fiction","tag-humor","tag-interviews","tag-joshua-ferris","tag-religion","tag-satire","tag-social-media","tag-the-internet","tag-the-unnamed","tag-then-we-came-to-the-end","tag-to-rise-again-at-a-decent-hour"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAn Interview 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