{"id":86191,"date":"2015-05-29T14:51:48","date_gmt":"2015-05-29T18:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=86191"},"modified":"2015-05-29T17:17:28","modified_gmt":"2015-05-29T21:17:28","slug":"ruthless-levity-an-interview-with-adam-thirlwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/29\/ruthless-levity-an-interview-with-adam-thirlwell\/","title":{"rendered":"Ruthless Levity: An Interview with Our London Editor, Adam Thirlwell"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"thirlwell\"<\/a>

Photo: Eamonn McCabe<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cAs usual the world was powdery and blue, like a rococo miniature. I was driving underneath the tree canopy and behind those trees were mansions and their many vehicles, gently arranged on the drive. It was the world as I had always known it, when being driven by my parents to music lessons or football practice or the first ever parties of my youth, the ones that ended at dawn with everyone staring at each other calmly in a field, feeling tired. That was how I always lived, out here on the outskirts of a giant city: the world occurred to me as a series of impressions seen from the windows of a car.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Adam Thirlwell\u2019s third novel, <\/em>Lurid & Cute<\/a>, is made up of such impressions\u2014charming, nostalgic, not quite tethered to reality. The unnamed narrator\u2014formerly a child prodigy, he tells us\u2014is a privileged young man who has quit his office job to pursue his art, and who now lives with his wife at the house of his adoring parents. His talent, as he puts it, is mostly for thinking. The observations above occur to him as he drives his bloodied, comatose best friend to the emergency room, having discovered her suffering some kind of hemorrhage in his hotel bed after a night of ketamine and sex. <\/em><\/p>\n

At thirty-six, Thirlwell dresses like a youngish teenager\u2014silver sneakers, jeans, T-shirts emblazoned with the Eiffel Tower\u2014and looks perpetually exhausted. In our Skype conversation, he had a way of speaking that, like one of his characters, \u201csometimes seemed like teasing and sometimes seemed like it wasn\u2019t and it wasn\u2019t always easy to be able to tell the two apart.\u201d \u201cMultiplicity! Levity! World History!\u201d he later wrote to me in an e-mail about what he seeks in his reading. \u201cThose kind of T-shirt slogans.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

Your dialogue is very funny. It seems very stylized but then, when you read it aloud, it\u2019s perfectly realistic. Do you have rules for dialogue? Whose do you admire? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe perversely, I love Henry James\u2019s The Awkward Age,<\/em> which is written almost entirely in dialogue and is therefore almost incomprehensible. Everyone is speaking in intimation and allusion\u2014which is so much like life that the reader has desperately to work out what the degrees of irony and lying are. That kind of flatness seems to me the ideal. There\u2019s a great moment in a Lampedusa essay where he praises the dialogue in Stendhal\u2019s novels, because none of it is celebrated, nothing is quotable. I wonder if in novels, rather than plays or screenplays, the dialogue can become this baroque surface thing, because it\u2019s free to be as close to audiotape as possible, without the burden of meaning anything, or conveying plot. Although I don\u2019t know if this is some kind of London problem\u2014how little is actually said in conversation. Okay, sure, there might be mutual understanding\u2014but the sentences are only nonsense, or nonsense poetry. <\/p>\n

One of my favorite conversations in the novel occurs when Candy, the narrator\u2019s wife, suggests that the narrator get a job, or make his movie, \u201ca movie about a massacre,\u201d to which he simply responds, \u201cI don\u2019t think you can show it\u2014\u201d. He\u2019s wearing a bloodstained T-shirt at the time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, for me, there\u2019s an unusual amount of violence in this novel\u2014hyperviolence. The narrator and his sidekick in crime, for instance, are very good at violence performed as if altruistically or gently\u2014and I think with that kind of paradox or joke I wanted to describe a certain way of thinking. In Lurid & Cute<\/em>, I wanted to remove world history from the picture. I had this idea of Debord\u2019s at the back of my mind, that a generation with no sense of history is a generation without a strategy. I was imagining the narrator as a colonizing power, or someone born into a colonizing power, and I wanted to find a form for the way absolute innocence becomes maniacal, the way mania so fervently can protest its innocence.<\/p>\n

Is there something inherently English in that combination of niceness and gore? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I guess so. I\u2019ve always been interested in that tradition\u2014De Quincey, say, or Charles Lamb\u2014where the essay becomes this weird, almost infected thing, aesthetically and ethically. One of the essays I was reading was De Quincey\u2019s \u201cOn Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts<\/a>.\u201d With De Quincey, the irony is always so extreme that it defeats any summary, but the rough argument entertained by the essay is essentially, Why can\u2019t we aestheticize murder? There\u2019s this lovely line where he writes, \u201cMurders have their little differences and shades of merit as well as statues, pictures, oratorios, cameos, intaglios, or what not.\u201d It\u2019s that idea that actually anything can be aestheticized if you only look at it in the right way, which may not be the moral way.<\/p>\n

Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn, interviewing you at a recent reading in New York, said that when he first read an early essay of yours about Sebald, he thought you were a malicious little prick. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I guess I did enjoy a certain lightness of tone for subjects whose seriousness was everywhere approved but which I doubted. There was a kind of sprezzatura narrative voice I developed, in both the fiction and the essays\u2014a ruthless levity. One thing I love about the Central European and Latin American traditions\u2014writers like Gombrowicz or Kundera or Borges\u2014is the way the essayistic and the fictional are merged forms of each other. That\u2019s the experimental area that most interests me. So I\u2019ve always been interested in making criticism artful, allowing it a range of tones it isn\u2019t usually allowed. I wonder if that\u2019s why I like this essayistic form. It allows the inclusion of what seems off, inappropriate. An essay, like a novel, is a small collage, really.<\/p>\n

I was struck by the number of \u201cminiature\u201d things in the novel\u2014paintings, butterflies, blueberry cakes, even pets (\u201cnot quite possums or small lemurs but almost\u201d). Where do they come from?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My private terrors? The sweet landscape around me?
<\/strong><\/p>\n

The setting constantly draws attention to itself as a kind of absurdity\u2014like that moment when the narrator tells us that \u201cabove us koalas or pigeons were playing in the jacaranda trees.\u201d How did it develop on the page?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Definitely it was intended as a non- or impossible place. I had in mind this trick of Nabokov\u2019s in Speak, Memory<\/em>, where he goes butterfly hunting in Russia and emerges looking at ponderosa pines, which are only American. The locale kept getting stranger as I wrote and rewrote it, inserting more and more of those crazy juxtapositions. I think partly it was an homage to that Latin American tradition, in particular the way the Tropic\u00e1lia<\/em> artists came up with this idea of \u201ccannibal art\u201d\u2014that if you grew up on the so-called periphery of a world system, then you had to stop worrying about what was yours and what was other people\u2019s, that you should just steal whatever you can. I liked the idea that London, which now feels to me like this broken-down, peripheral place, was essentially S\u00e3o Paulo fifty years ago. It\u2019s in the language, too\u2014the narrator is constantly stealing phrases, Hispanic or Russian or Chinese. He\u2019s taking anything he can to describe his hallucinatory situation. Like sentences from his many \u201cgurus\u201d and \u201choly men,\u201d who are really Proust, or Kafka.<\/p>\n

The narrator describes marriage as <\/strong>\u201cthe largest urban sprawl in the world, so that whenever you think you have left it you are just in another concentric garden suburb.\u201d <\/strong>Could the idea of suburbia also apply to the novel\u2019s structure, as well as to its relationships?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think you\u2019re right\u2014the novel\u2019s decentered structure was a way of trying to replicate this suburban kind of foliage, or spread. Early on, I was reading and thinking about that brilliant book Learning from Las Vegas<\/em>, with its defense of the sprawl, or strip. But I also think I associate suburbia with my childhood, and a sense that there\u2019s just too much time there, that time is endless\u2014and especially for our generation, so many of whom are unemployed or only partially employed. Also that the usual family units or sexual boundaries might ever so slightly disperse, in a way that might seem either utopian or frightening, depending on your perspective. As a way of organizing space and time, the suburbs seem to me like an almost metaphysical state, one that isn\u2019t represented fully in what we think of as the suburban novel, which is brilliantly precise and all about social placing. I was interested in a novelistic structure that was suburban in a revised way, like a kind of cloud that would coalesce for a moment and then disperse\u2014I guess because that felt more truthful to experience. There are so few scenes in everyday life! Why else would we go to parties? They\u2019re desperate attempts to create the idea of a scene.
<\/em><\/p>\n

\"9780374292256\"<\/a>I\u2019m reminded of my favorite \u201cscene\u201d in Politics<\/em>, which begins with the warning that it will contain sex, then proceeds with much emotional analysis, and then ends\u2014<\/strong>\u201cBut why was this a sex scene? Because while I have been explaining what Moshe and Anjali were feeling, they have been touching each other, quietly.\u201d Are you aware of doing two things at once, of writing this essayistic, digressive voice, and then, underneath it, the action?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think for me, plot is always spectacle. It\u2019s a form of gravity, to give weight to the otherwise endless thinking. I suppose the link between that moment in Politics<\/em> and Lurid & Cute<\/em> is this obsessive wish to notate consciousness or to investigate how much thought spills over. Somewhere in Lurid & Cute<\/em> the narrator talks about trying to accommodate the miniature outside to his giant inside, and I think that\u2019s an everyday problem of arithmetic. There is something incommensurable with living about thinking. It melts all over the picture. Which is, after all, the original Kafka problem. \u201cThe outside world is too small, too clear-cut, too truthful, to contain everything that a person has room for inside.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s why the orgy scene is so good\u2014it\u2019s more thinking than doing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My poor narrator! And his desperate attempt to make an orgy look normal.<\/em> He has to pretend that he has never had sex with his best friend, with whom he has been having an affair, in front of his wife. It takes an infinite amount of minute self-consciousness. Which I suppose is not the ideal orgiastic state. Those moments where suddenly the internal clock of the narrative has to match the imagined exterior of time always fascinate me. It happens in the interior artists I love, like James or Proust or Gertrude Stein. But also some of the films I most enjoy become actions in real time\u2014like that old French movie\u00a0Rififi<\/em><\/a>, which includes twenty minutes, if I remember this right, of just a gang trying to open a safe.<\/p>\n

The narrator tells us at one point that \u201c<\/strong>More and more I was convinced that the most urgent task, in every megalopolis, was how to use your time\u2014how, in other words, will you reveal it as grander than it seems.\u201d<\/strong> How do you feel about your own time while you\u2019re writing? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh, it\u2019s constant fidgeting. With the momentary relief of total absorption. I suppose, sadly, my other main occupation is reading. This time it was a mixture of architecture books\u2014Learning from Las Vegas<\/em>, or books on LA\u2019s ecology\u2014and a miniseries I developed of narrative voices\u2014Machado de Assis, Hamsun, Hrabal, Svevo, and especially Proust. I only began to read him properly while I was writing Lurid & Cute<\/em>. I think I\u2019m still trying to ingest him. But that worry of my narrator, that\u2019s a wider worry. Where is seriousness located? Is there more of it elsewhere? I think I share that worry\u2014metaphysically, politically, you name it.<\/p>\n

The narrator shares other things in common with you\u2014he has the same elfin look, he\u2019s Jewish, interested in charm, interested in drugs, gifted. Why did you do that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In an earlier draft of this novel, the narrator had a name\u2014because I very much didn\u2019t want him to be identified as me, given some of his less alluring moments\u2014and then I remember quite far into the writing having a conversation with two writer friends in which I triumphantly announced that at last I\u2019d got the voice, and then they both said, Now you need to drop the name. Their basic reasoning being that the name gave me the shield to write wildly, and now the further requirement to keep the wildness going was to drop that name, to risk that kind of identification. So I did that and made him small with big eyes and spiky hair.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting for me isn\u2019t that surface similarity, it\u2019s what that similarity allows for\u2014because the more you reduce the gap between the narrator and the novelist, the more you also reduce the gap between the novel and the reader. I\u2019ve often wondered why I\u2019m so drawn to the novel as stand-up, and I think it\u2019s because it flaunts the fact of its performance\u2014and yet at the same time flaunts its possibility as truth. The dream is to inhabit the voice entirely, but also use the character as a form of evasion\u2014at the same time. Again, the model is Proust.<\/p>\n

Your narrator eventually writes the novel we\u2019re reading, having almost persuaded us that he could never do such a thing. You recently almost persuaded me that you wouldn\u2019t write another novel. Would you ever try to make a different kind of art?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wonder if I am trying to think myself into a different kind of mode. As if a novel could become performance art. Some kind of pure literal experience. But most of all, I perhaps have this dream of a film.<\/em> Something where the real could take over even more thoroughly. But maybe that\u2019s just the power madness of the woebegone powerless novelist talking. I mean, who wouldn\u2019t want to do something where everyone has to sit in the dark and be forced to watch continuously whatever you put in front of them?<\/p>\n

Emily Stokes is a senior features editor at <\/em>The New York Times Style Magazine: T.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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