Page 83 - Sharp Spring 2021
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   knew how to draw and capture per- spective. They rejected that in service of a style that mirrored how it was they wanted to see the work that they were doing. What you heard from critics contemporaneous to the development of modern art or abstract art was, “Oh, well, this is just child’s scribble.” That’s not what it is. It’s an active rejection of something in search of something else.
It’s style. I think that’s a really simple word for it. I think that your book [Happy Hour] is very stylish; it’s a very stylized book. It’s describing a contem- porary urban youth that doesn’t have access to richness and money and polish but insists on it nevertheless. There’s something funny about that. To write about a contemporary young woman stumbling through contemporary life, but to treat her the way that Edith Wharton would have treated her, it’s a stylish endeavour. It’s fine if you don’t like it. That’s fine, but to not understand that feels like a mistake to me.
A lot of the films I love were once plays. What helps those films is the fact that they’re stuck in one setting, which your novel also is. There’s the feeling that you’re trapped. Whenever the reader is let in on some information that the characters aren’t, it releases some of that suffocation. I feel like knowing that information made me feel much less generous towards the outbursts of the characters. Like with the mother, Aman- da, especially. I kept thinking, “I can’t handle her. She doesn’t know what’s going on.”
She doesn’t know. You either pity her for her not knowing or you’re frustrated because you’re like, “Well, don’t you see what’s happening?” Then there’s no way in which they could really see what’s happening. That, to me, is what this moment has been like, politically
in [America]. If you think about the ways in which we dithered over the last pres- ident’s violations of political norms, we spent so much time fighting about this dumb stuff while we were taking infants from their parents.
It was like we were totally distracted. With the remove of history, people will be like, “Didn’t they know? Why wer- en’t they marching on the streets? Why weren’t they doing anything?” I don’t know how we answer that. It’s like, well, we did know and we still didn’t really do anything.
That’s what’s interesting about reading your novel right now too. Humans have an instinct to continue living in whatever form. Even when we are currently in lock- down, in a pandemic, somehow we have to continue working and doing all the normal tasks. We still have to do these things while we’re under extreme stress from a worldwide disaster.
People don’t necessarily care. It’s a very strange condition of living right now where it’s like, we’re really connected to the entire universe. Like, if the Prime Minister of India was assassinated right now while we are on this phone call, we would both get an alert on our cellphones telling us that. Would it mean anything to us? Would it feel earth-shattering or would it feel re- moved and abstract?
All this information is always coming at us and we can’t really process any
of it. We just continue doing the same things we’ve always done, which is make dinner and, I don’t know, try and work out on your bedroom floor, or whatever it is you do to get through. That seems to me what we’re all doing, is muddling along.
There was this one line where someone thinks, “People drop dead, but you still need to eat dinner.” It felt so true. Towards the end of the novel, I kept thinking that that line is the all-encom- passing idea of what life is like and how we are currently living right now. In what ways do you think it’s dangerous to be tethered to technology?
That’s what the book is fundamentally about. It’s not a book that’s describing our reality, but it’s a book that hopefully is getting at what it feels like right now, emotionally [and] intellectually. I’ve had
Leave the World Behind, $35
a cellphone for 19 years, but it was only in the last seven or so that the cellphone supplanted the camera that I have. I remember a time when we had a GPS for the car that was not my phone, but now that’s just the phone, so everybody uses that. We don’t know what it’s doing to our brains. We don’t know what it’s do- ing to our evolutionary progress.
There are struggles with masculinity too. Especially with the character Clay. There’s this deep urge from the men
of the book to want to be seen as strong, as leaders of a household.
When we talk about World War 2, we love to tell the stories about the everyday heroes. The people who hid their neigh- bours in their basement. It’s very hard to talk about the people who were like, “Oh, well. They’re taking my neighbours away. Life goes on.”
I didn’t go to the airport and demand that they let people from Yemen into the country. I didn’t go to the border. I didn’t do anything. Most people I know didn’t do anything. That’s how people react. We think we’re all heroes, but I’m not sure that we really are.
It takes such a specific type of person.
I remember once, I was sitting in a park in London, and a fight broke out. It was this hot summer afternoon, and there were so many people in the park that day — think McCarren Park in the summer. The man I was with got up and ran towards the fight to intervene.
I remember being so shocked by this.
Yes. It’s a very specific response, and also a very masculine response. I’m going to take care of this situation. I’ll roll my sleeves up and take care of this situation.
The novel is really asking us, when
it comes down to it, who are you in times of catastrophe? How can you really guarantee what your response would be?
We just live through it, because we’re living through a catastrophe right now. Most of us, what we did is we went grocery shopping and bought new gym clothes on Amazon, and free weights, and decided to work out at home instead of going to the gym. That’s what we did. To talk about that character as being unlikeable or likeable misses the point entirely. It’s like we’re not living to be likable or unlikeable. We’re just trapped being ourselves.
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