Stefanie Freele interviews Roy Kesey

In May, LAR’s Fiction Editor Stefanie Freele interviewed Roy Kesey, Issue 9 contributor and author of the new novel Pacazo.

SF: You live in Peru now after having grown up in Northern California; the book takes place in Peru. I can’t help but wonder what real-life experiences may have shown up in the book.

RK: Perfect timing—I was just reading an old interview with Bernard Malamud, and when he gets the same question, he says, “Source questions are piddling, but you’re my friend, so I’ll tell you.” I like that, but I also think they’re fun, and basically harmless. So. Lots of bits from my life and the lives of people I’ve known found homes in Pacazo, but of course they were always de- and then re-contextualized, or, maybe better, each pitted as if an olive, so that I could then stuff in the proper stuffing, chestnut or pimento or serial killer as the scene required.

Let’s see, off the top of my head: I did once lead a choir in a song I’d just made up called “Happy Verbena To You.” The turkey ‘n’ machete scene is something that kind of happened in Guatemala back in 1994. “Arantxa” and “Reynaldo” are the names of actual friends of mine—the characters have nothing at all to do with the real people, but I loved the sound of those names too much not to ask for a loan. What else. I did plenty of book-ferrying when the Language Center I was running got flooded during the ’98 Niño storms. Is that enough for a start?

SF: Pacazo is a heavy book, both deliriously intelligent and heavy in weight: 531 pages, equaling 1.8 lbs on my scale. Lately, it seems there is a boom of flash fiction, yet you deliver a wonderful, long journey. This is against what we hear at writing conferences –that agents and publishers aren’t interested in the longer book, readers don’t have time for length, short books are cheaper, etc. Did you run into any of these roadblocks? When you began this book, did you head out to write a long novel? What seed began this book and how did it sprout? How did the novel evolve? Did you know the plot before you wrote? Did you outline?

RK: Thank you, and sorry about the weight—just remember, lift with your legs, not with your back.

As far as the waves of literary fashion go, I’ve always been a pretty crap surfer. And these days it’s even worse, or, I guess, better. Living in Peru gives me the luxury of not knowing what’s booming or bottoming out, the luxury of bearing no responsibility except to the narrative itself. That’s overstating the case, of course—I could always find out if I wanted to—but it’s not some constant slight smell filling the room, the way it seems to be in some places.

I’m sure there’s some limited truth to the current wisdom regarding biases against longer work on the part of some people in all parts of the industry, but there are also so many counter-examples (2666, Against the Day, The Lacuna, Wolf Hall, Tree of Smoke and on and on and on and that’s just recent literary fiction…) that I’m not sure it’s something to lose sleep over. The manuscript sold at half its current length—more on that below—so my agent never had to worry about it. Much to their credit, even when my final pre-edited draft came in at twice the length they were expecting, my publishers never gave me any grief at all, though they must have winced at the thought of the printing costs. And from there, my editor helped slim it down by forty pages or so, but that was just polishing—we didn’t cut any scenes.

As far as your other questions go, when I started writing it, I wasn’t looking to write any sort of book at all, and I knew nothing whatsoever about the plot. I was just following a voice that interested me, poking it now and then with a sharp stick to get it to show its fangs. At the beginning I was working on it as a short story, and McSweeney’s published it that way a few years later, though by then I already had a whole first (or second?) draft of the novel. It had become clear to me really quickly that everything was coming together for a longer project—the voice first and foremost, but also the amount of event that was accruing to it, the other characters appearing in the vortex, the pleasure of painting with local colors, etc.

And yes, I did do quite a detailed outline, but not until I’d been working on the book for several months, just following the voice wherever it wanted to go. I’m sure that in the short term, that helped me to stay focused and clean, plot- and character-wise. In the long term, though, it may have been a problem, or at least set the scene for one, in the sense that having used such a complete outline gave me a sense of completeness that the manuscript itself (at that point, Year 8, Draft 9, a measly 350 pages long) didn’t merit. That was less an issue of length, though, than of density—or rather, of its lack. Not linguistic density, but maybe thematic? It was missing a certain aboutness, is how I would unhelpfully put it. That was a problem that took me a few years to fix. And by the time I did, the manuscript was almost 600 pages long—but at least now they all counted for something.

SF: Occasionally in Pacazo there is this very unusual sentence structure I came to love and look for, where you string the current action in with the thoughts of John Segovia all in one breathless sentence: “I nibble at the last crouton and read Inge Schjellerup and the murder cannot have had anything to do with Pilar, simply cannot.” What do you call this and why does it work so well, when we know it goes against all our grammatical upbringings?

RK: I’m glad you like it, and dang, you’re right, it needs a name. How about Wolverining? Sugar Pounding? Build-a-bear? Shave the Uncle?

Ahem.

I guess that what interests me about this structure is that it’s vaguely analogous to how certain strings-of-experience actually feel as they occur in our brains. Not all brains, maybe, but most, or so I hope. And not all the time, certainly. But even during relatively straightforward mental progressions, I think that most of our thoughts don’t need to be fully instantiated—fully thought—for them to do the necessary work. They only need to be begun. We get the first few words into thought-language, parenthesize the rest, and already we’re at the beginning of the next needed thought.

All of which is hard to do clearly on the page, of course. But I don’t think it’s necessary to do it fully every time in order for a reader to hear it happening throughout the book. I think it might work a little the way dialect does. We don’t have to drop every ‘g’ in the book; if we drop one or two in the first paragraph (or even just imply that they’ve been dropped,) then the reader will hear them dropped for the rest of the book, without all the irritating apostrophes.

The other thing I’ll say is that even brains disposed to work this way, skittering from one subject (or one century or one country) to the next in the space of a single sentence, are not like this under all circumstances. It happens more, I suspect, when we’re under stress of certain sorts. Which is to say, there was sadness and violence and skitteryness in my narrator’s voice even before I knew that anything bad had happened to him. It was his voice, in fact, that taught me what had happened.

SF: There is a juxtaposition in the novel between the high standards set for John Segovia by the university –he is expected to behave professorially even off-campus, and all his odd behavior seems to be reported – and the corruption around him. He seems to be paying corrupt (yet usually pleasant) officials left and right. This is very different than in the U.S. Is this the type of scenario an American faces living in South America?

RK: I think that every given setting is just a new conceit: a particular and particularizing context, a new set of challenges and pressures, ones that will require new defense strategies on the part of each character. I wanted to get John in a lot of different kinds of trouble, and see which ones cowed him, and which ones made him rise up.

The university, for example, serves as an oasis of sorts in some respects. It’s the one place in the city that’s relatively free of trash, of graffiti, of the kind of corruption you mention. You don’t have to bribe anyone to make photocopies for you, or to water the flowers. But the place has its own ridiculousnesses, its own extremes, and thus creates new tensions in John’s brain, ones that couldn’t have been caused elsewhere, and that are important in terms of how his life in Piura has become what it is, and also, of course, what it will turn into in the future.

As for the realism question, I think you’re right—basic human corruption manifests itself differently in different places. You’re more likely to run into the extremely low-level “problem-solving” sort of corruption you reference in some parts of Latin America than in the U.S. or Europe, for example, where the corruption tends to be on a much larger scale, and to happen farther up the food chain—the scandal there not being what’s illegal, but what’s legal, as the Bogle quote less confusingly has it.

SF: The editing process between you and Matt Bell: how did that work?

RK: Like gangbusters. Literally, we went out, found a bunch of gangs, and just totally busted the shit out of them. This was possible because he Got the Book. Partly because he’s read and thought well about a ton of good books, and partly because he put the work in on this particular book. He’s just very, very good at the job.

It was an incredibly dense, intense process, mostly because we were up against it, time-wise, but also because that’s just how the two of us are geared, I think. I knew exactly what I wanted of/from the book, and there weren’t any major issues with the text—I’d been working on it very hard for a very long time—but all the same, getting everything right to the best of our abilities meant hours and hours every day for six weeks, thinking about very little else.

I was fairly useless to my family during this period. I am not proud of that. But I’m glad of the book that came of it, and very grateful to Matt in particular for making sure that my own obsessions never came to work against the book at any point, and thus for bringing Pacazo to a place of far greater pacasification than I ever could have on my own.