By Christine Rice
Brian Costello’s second novel, Losing in Gainesville (Curbside Splendor), packs every bit of that town’s drug-addled, alcohol-soaked 1990s glamour into one neat War and Peace-size novel. Stumbling through Gainesville (and pre-adulthood) is a motley crew of waiters, musicians, hangers-on, clerks, and artists of all ilks and Costello defines them by their indulgences: rock & roll, drugs, alcohol, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Replacements (with a little Bukowski thrown in for good measure). The novel’s triple-album narrative structure spins and twists through Gainesville’s finer absurdities including (but by no means limited to) mind-numbing dead-end jobs, super-slackers, Hare Krishnas, and college professors gone bad.
CHRISTINE RICE: Altamont was the tragedy-marred 1969 concert featuring Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with the prime movers and shakers behind the concert – the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones – scheduled to take the stage at the concert’s end. After the Hell’s Angels tragically murdered concertgoer Meredith Hunter, events quickly spun out of control. In LIG, Ronnie Altamont, your main character, plans nothing and, like Altamont, his life descends into a big, chaotic mess.
In your first novel, The Enchanters vs. Sprawlburg Springs, I recall a scene where one of the characters imitates Mick Jagger. If Mick wrote the back cover blurb for LIG, what would he write?
Brian Costello: You’re the first interviewer to get that reference regarding Ronnie’s last name!
As for Mick…I don’t know. I should know, seeing how I spend far too much time imitating him through dance and stage banter. I liked when he said, “Financially dissatisfied, philosophically trying,” in the press conference in “Gimme Shelter,” but also in that movie, you see him watching himself say that and he mutters “Rubbish.”
I imagine Bill Wyman saying, “There’s a lot of losing in this one, innit?”
On a similar note, the greatest rock & roll book ever written is The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth. In that book, there’s a scene in which they’re starting to plan Altamont, and Charlie Watts’ wife Shirley says, “And it’s just a tour after all, just a group of people going around getting up on stages and playing music for kids to dance.” Charlie turns to Booth and says, “If you don’t put that in your book, I’ll kill you.”
CR: You’re a rabid Celine Dion fan. What is it about her music that speaks to you?
BC: She’s quite successful. Her music really doesn’t speak to me at all, but I haven’t heard that much, so I don’t really know too much about it. I like the album cover where she’s totally naked with her arms behind her back. Oh wait, that’s the cover of Virgin Killer by The Scorpions. Whoops!
CR: Nicely played.
The scene in the record store is so mind-numbing but so familiar. I think that most of us (if we were so lucky) have had jobs like that. What was your worst job ever?
BC: Most of the “worst jobs ever” found their way into the novel in direct and indirect ways.
CR: The Losing in Gainesville clothing line is coming out. What will it feature?
BC: Hahahaha! Not exactly sure. All I know is that they will be pre-unwashed.
CR: What’s the best thing about Gainesville?
BC: The pace. I liked how days and nights had their own adventures and you didn’t have to try too hard to make that happen. It was also very easy to meet a lot of people at once, and they become your friends, and have turned into friends for life. It was a real honest-to-God community, and I was glad to be a part of it in some small way.
CR: Worst thing?
BC: The cops, maaaaaaan.
CR: If LIG had an anthem, I thought that the following lyrics might apply:
And that’s the fucking problem…it never stays the same — not when you’re in the womb, not when you’re in your house the morning of your first day of school, graduations, college, after college, and on and on until death. This moment is everything, so who gives a fuck about five years? It’s another perfect night in a town I never want to leave.
Yes or no?
BC: Yup. Everyone is in transition, between who they were and who they are going to be.
CR: What novel or music most influenced LIG?
BC: Two nights ago, I did a reading in Nashville, and some of the audience thought I was influenced by A Confederacy of Dunces. I could see that, but that book wasn’t on my radar as I wrote this. Really, I was thinking of the idea of a “triple album,” where each side has a different mood to it. Also, that laugh riot Moby Dick was very much on my mind. Infinite Jest. The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Exile on Main St. Trout Mask Replica.
CR: I thought I was the only one who found Moby Dick a laugh riot.
This novel felt like a Neal Peart drum solo. You never knew where it was going in its absurd extremes. In my marching band experience, drummers were always causing trouble — sandwiching the skinny little flute players’ heads between cymbals, dropping the bass drum. Care to defend the career choice?
BC: One time at marching band practice, my snare kept falling off my harness and I got so frustrated I flung it across the football field. Our band teacher, Miss Cynthia Berry — the best teacher I ever had — blew the whistle and started screaming at me, but everyone in the drumline came to my rescue and said that “it slipped.” I was constantly getting into trouble like that. When I was a freshman, the thing to do was to take the gong mallet during symphonic band practice and hit another drummer in the nuts with it and hope they’d be writhing in pain while Miss Berry called on them. During football games, I’d perform for everyone a version of “Tommy’s Holiday Camp” by The Who that the tri-tom players played while I sang. The rest of the band seemed to like it, even though, at the end of the day, the brass, woodwinds, and flag corps were united in dismissing us as the dumb jocks of the marching band.
I can’t defend the “career choice” in financial terms. I can’t defend anything I do in financial terms. But the adventure of it has been worth it. It’s still an incredible experience to sit behind the drums when on tour and think, “Wow, here I am in Seattle…or El Centro, California…or Athens, Ohio.” The Florida kid in me who sat in his room listening to the Buzzcocks and reading Kerouac always thrills at these moments. Still, no matter how shitty the gig might be, it beats the cubicle every time.
CR: This is the size of Moby Dick. Or War and Peace. How did you keep the tone consistent throughout?
BC: I read it aloud. Cover to cover. Did that quite a few times, actually. I was really happy to write a mostly third-person novel, with some forays into first and second person. I’m sick of first person, sick of narrators yelling all the time. Sick of performance. Sick of the idea of “voice” being equated with screaming and swearing in a public reading setting. Sick of public readings where the writers always seem to start their stories with, “So there I was…”
CR: Julianna and Ronnie share,
“…a weariness with everything and everyone around them — for Ronnie, the culture of the South, and for Julianna, youth culture.”
Everything is fair game in this novel. Nothing is sacred — skater punks, bands, performance art, religion, moms with strollers, writers, college professors, Nascar fans, bosses, Hare Krishnas, chain restaurants, illiteracy, alcoholism, abuse, parties where people defecate on others who have passed out…to name a few. How did you keep up that detailed level of disdain (or finely-tuned observation) for the entire 90s youth culture?
BC: Most of the characters are in their early twenties and they’re trying to figure out who they are and what they want to do now. They’re losing in obvious ways (not winning), but also losing their youth, their ideals, their dreams…ambitions. My favorite character is Portland Patty. There’s a lot more despair with her rather than disdain…lost without roots anymore.
It’s not all like dumping on the nineties and the world-at-large at that time. The very last page of the book is a mixtape Portland Patty made for herself filled with songs I associate with that time that people don’t talk about so much anymore, songs I personally like. It wasn’t a conscious plan, but I find that writing books (and even some short stories) turns into me saying goodbye to something or someplace. In part, this book was me saying goodbye to the nineties, and to Florida.
Brian Costello is a writer, musician, and performer. He co-hosts “Shame That Tune,” America’s favorite musical comedy game show, plays drums in the band Outer Minds, and is a frequent contributor to the “Chicago Reader.”
Christine Maul Rice’s award-winning novel, Swarm Theory, was called “a gripping work of Midwest Gothic” by Michigan Public Radio and earned an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award (finalist), and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup: The Best Books of 2016 So Far. In 2019, Christine was included in New City’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago’s Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk*, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of the literary nonprofit Hypertext Magazine & Studio and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University.