The Hypertext Interview with Geoff Hyatt
HT: What’s your idea of a good Valentine’s Day?
GH: I don’t think you can print that.
HT: Are you a romantic? Not in the 18th century European sense. More like a modern-day romantic?
GH: I don’t know, maybe, probably not. I don’t believe in love at first sight, or love conquers all, or any of that business. But I do value open and rational emotional expression in a country that’s becoming more exhibitionist but less genuine. I do think learning how to give and receive love is one of life’s only worthwhile goals.
It infuriates me when people toss around the word “love” as some shortcut to intimacy, like some coke-blitzed rock star hollering “We love you all!” to a crowd. Love, “real” love, is always dangerous. Love can be the most beautiful thing in the world, or the most rotten. Some of the best and worst things in this world are done out of love.
HT: At the beginning of their relationship (when things were going well), would Josh spring for a box of chocolates or make a hand-made Valentine’s Day card for Lindsay?
GH: Lindsay is pretty anti-romantic, and Josh is crazy about love even though it’s pretty new to him. It’s not a comfortable combination, and it surfaces a few times in the novel. If I had to choose between the two, I’d say he’d probably make her a Valentine’s Day card presented as a joke about how lame Valentine’s Day is to protect himself with that wonderful shield of irony. He’d find the safest way to say what he wanted to without giving himself over to the dangers of unchecked sincerity.
HT: I have to admit that, before I read the book I asked myself, ‘Why would a forty-something want to read this book?’ I mean, high school boys didn’t interest me when I was in high school so why would they now? But then I started reading and changed my mind. And, although I said I wouldn’t ‘fawn’ I have to say that the writing was so sharp, Josh was so endearing (earnest and funny), the dialogue spot-on, and the plot so tight, that I couldn’t put it down.
GH: I appreciate your evaluation, thanks, I’m glad it was a good time for you. You know, I’m not particularly interested in Red Lobster managers, butlers, farm wives, or sex offenders, but I could appreciate a story about any of these. Novels aren’t cocktail parties in which I seek out only the most intriguing and attractive people in the room. I’m drawn to fiction because of the empathy it fosters through the entertainment it provides. I know it can do many other things but that simple dynamic is what I find more attractive than anything else, and it can be done with any sort of character.
HT: I recall a story I read of yours — and this was years ago — where a kid picks up a magazine in the school library and sees a photograph of his dad, as a Vietnam War infantryman, with his foot on a dead Vietnamese soldier. That scene made it into BH@WE. As a more mature reader (yeah, you can say old), I responded to a few things in the book. No matter how long we’ve known them, we really don’t know our parents. And for all of Josh’s missteps, he’s wise beyond his years. He’s the kid all the moms and teachers kinda like.
GH: The interplay between the known and the secret lives of characters is a pretty rich source of story, and few things are more of a mystery to us than our parents’ lives outside of our own existence—there’s a necessary distance to that relationship. As for Josh, he seems wise primarily because he’s kind and thoughtful (not stereotypical adolescent qualities), which makes him appealing. He’s quite disturbed by some of life’s troubling realities and lacks the experience to properly respond to them, though. He’s pretty passive. When he does get it together to take action, it rarely works out.
HT: For a time, I lived in a town outside Flint, Michigan that is disturbingly similar to Birch Hills. You grew up in Michigan. Birch Hills is as much a character as Josh or Erik. Was your experience similar to Erik’s and Josh’s? Or nothing like it? Where does your personal experience intersect with the characters’ experience in Birch Hills?
GH: My experience of course colored the novel, perhaps more than I might like to admit. Some of the left-field weirdness is drawn from things I encountered years ago, mostly from when I was around seventeen to right out of high school. But it was very important for me to make sure neither Josh nor Erik became an author proxy. I had to first see Josh and Erik separate from myself, and different from each other, before I could get anywhere. I guess I split my teenage personality into opposing halves, and then exaggerated those characteristics while blending them with those of other people I knew. I needed to work with characters and story, not just my own renamed and shoddily polished memories.
HT: Except for the characters at The Farm, it seems like everyone is trying to do the right thing or trying to figure out what the right thing is: parents, teachers, the media, friends. Why does it amaze kids that adults make so many completely idiotic gaffes? How did this realization frame the narrative?
GH: Part of has to do with the era of the novel. The idea of conspiracy, of far-reaching government and police control, is almost a 1990s pop-culture phenomenon. The X-Files and so forth. That illusion of control and stability is about to come crashing down a couple years later, when a few assholes with box cutters deeply wound our global standing, our economy, and our nation with an atrocity that inspires a decade of aimless warfare. The kids in the novel are getting a taste of how severely a situation can be mishandled by good people with bad information, because this is the first time it hits them directly.
HT: Columbine infected us so deeply and manifested itself in so many weird ways. Did you ever consider framing the narrative around the kids who actually did the shooting? Or did you always see it as a device to which the characters would respond?
GH: Mass murder is a mere aberration and I don’t think there’s any way to adequately explain that type of monstrosity. Attempts to do so are reductive and tend to offer comfort that is inaccurate and undeserved. The way people respond to trauma is more interesting to me than the thing itself. A car crash is just a car crash; a murder is just a murder. These are events, not stories. It’s the human response to these things that makes them significant. And often times, it is our response to these things that prolongs the event’s destructive ripple: look at the Robin Hood Hills Murders, or the Columbine Massacre, or September 11th. Moral panic destroys more people than the brutality of individuals or small groups could ever hope to, and its reality is much more pervasive than the random abominations that inspire it.
HT: The dialogue was spot on. And the situations that the characters found themselves watching or participating in were just really absurd. For sure, Erik is an absurdist. Josh is trying to figure out if it’s worth wasting time being as jaded as Erik. You have some good company, there, in the absurdist camp. Who influenced your writing?
GH: In terms of the absurd, I still love Hunter S. Thompson, a mean, angry, terror of a writer who is much funnier and more insightful than I think he is credited. Absurdity inspires the best, most healing laughter, the kind you get from Candide or The Stranger. (Yes, I think The Stranger is funny.) And from Vonnegut, whose humanist compassion wins out over the freakish nihilism that can come with that sort of humor.
HT: Lindsay could have been the cliché high school slut but, by the end of the book, you developed her into an interesting character. How did Lindsay’s character develop over the course of writing the book?
GH: Lindsay is in many ways a fantasy for Josh at the beginning, but as their relationship develops she steps out of the image she’s cultivated (and the one forced onto her) and becomes more of her own entity. It just came out of them talking. When I write dialogue, Ioften don’t know what characters are going to say until it happens. Conversations happen on the page and relationships develop out of them.
HT: There are all of these sub-cultures in the book (bikers, druggies, religious freaks, etc.). What was the draw there? There are also these themes that, as a writer, you really chomp down on (alienation, religion, distance, misunderstanding, lies, etc.). Can you talk a little bit about how you kept all of these balls in the air?
GH: The subcultures are inherent to the place, and the themes came out of the characters’ experiences there. I remember starting off years ago, writing all of these banter-heavy Tarantino-style handgun stories infused with what I felt to be this very writerly use of theme and metaphor. I’d leaned in high school that theme and metaphor were very important to a Good Story, you see. A professor of mine tried to get me away from what I felt was the “literary” aspect of what I was doing—all my precious, pre-conceived symbols, subtexts, and so on. I, being nineteen or so, wanted to argue, and he just said, “Listen, Geoff. Metaphor and theme rise up out of stuff. Not the other way around. I don’t know what more to tell you.” He was right. They come from patterns I might identify and maybe heighten in revision, but if I start out with them I end up with a puppet show. I have to hope the underlying things I’m trying to express will surface through the telling, will rise up out of the story-stuff.
HT: There’s a lot of weed being smoked by your characters, Geoff. Any comment?
GH: Stay in school and don’t do drugs.
Geoff Hyatt is spending entirely too much time with your wife, and you might want to keep an eye on that.