By Howard Simmons
Lost Canyon, Nina Revoyr’s fifth novel, is an adventure story, a thriller, and a character-based investigation of how four middle-aged hikers and their risk-taking guide ultimately work as a team to survive. When the group – from a variety of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds – stumbles across an illegal drug operation, they suddenly find themselves evading a cold-blooded killer through unforgiving terrain where the wrong step could mean injury or death.
From the very first chapter, Revoyr delicately balances both character and plot, providing an in-depth look at each character’s internal struggles and the external elements from which those conflicts arise. Despite the propulsive plot, Revoyr never abandons her characters to mere action. A revolving door of perspectives ensure that as the story moves forward, so too does the growth of its characters.
Howard Simmons caught up with Nina Revoyr to discuss her process and how her personal experiences influenced Lost Canyon.
HOWARD SIMMONS: You work for an organization that provides support for children in low-income households, as does Gwen, one of the main characters in Lost Canyon. Are there other personal traits you find you’ve shared with Gwen or other characters, either consciously or unconsciously? How much of your personal life do you draw from?
NINA REVOYR: There’s a bit of me in all the characters. Gwen shares my concern for kids and community, but her personality and life story are very different than mine. I live in the same place that Oscar does, a formerly rough but rapidly gentrifying area of Northeast L.A. I share Tracy’s racial mix—Japanese and white—as well as her love for mountains, but hopefully not her recklessness. I’m probably the closest temperamentally to Todd—the guy with the blue collar Midwestern background who finds himself, by virtue of education and work, in a social context more fancy than he’s used to.
HS: How did Gwen, Todd, and Oscar come to be a part of this particular story? Did the plot elements come first, followed by the characters, or vice versa?
NR: I wanted to create a multiracial group of characters, of different class backgrounds, reflective of the Los Angeles I know. I also wanted to represent different parts of the city, some of which – like Watts and Northeast LA – don’t often appear in fiction, and almost never in a positive light. Although the four main characters are very different, they are all at a particular point in early middle age where they’re questioning the meaning of their lives, worrying about family and career, feeling their bodies begin to wear down. Then I just imagined what would happen if they stumbled into hairy situations. I wanted to explore how race and class, and the hikers’ different world views, would affect how they perceived and reacted to the things – and also how they were perceived.
HS: You chose to tell the story from Gwen, Oscar, and Todd’s perspectives, but not that of Tracy, who is the most experienced of the four. Why?
NR: Mostly because Tracy’s the least introspective of the bunch. She’s a person of action, the doer rather than the thinker, and I’m not sure her thoughts would extend much beyond how to get to the next peak. I also wanted to play a bit with the assumptions readers make about character and author. Tracy’s the one who seems most like me superficially – but is probably the furthest from me, or at least I hope so.
HS: In Lost Canyon, the main characters have to contend with two antagonists: the unforgiving wilderness and men using federal land to grow marijuana. There is always a tension in the story between which threat looms largest as the novel races toward its conclusion. Could you speak about how you found this balance during your writing process? Which threat is the greater of the two, in your own mind?
NR: People are the greater threat, in my mind. It’s people who can have bad intentions – who can purposely set out to do harm. Nature can obviously be dangerous, deadly, but there is no intentionality or feeling behind it. Nature is totally indifferent – and that’s part of what’s magic about it, but also part of what some people find profoundly discomfiting. There is something deeply humbling and freeing about being in a place that is so much bigger than you; about being in a setting that is fundamentally not about you. I have certainly been afraid when I’m out in the wilderness – of wildlife, of falling rock, of lightning – but I know that nature is not specifically targeting me. You have to go into the wilderness with a certain humility, an understanding of your size and power relative to nature’s – and if you respect that, you’ll generally be okay.
HS: The novel has such a command of the setting of the Sierra, with these incredibly visual passages of natural beauty; there’s an authority when it comes to sharing the land with the reader. Could you talk about the various types of research you did to allow such an assured approach?
NR: Thank you. The only research I did – if you can call it that – is spending many days, many weeks, over many years, in the mountains. I’m just mad in love with them; I observe every detail, as you do when you’re in love. It’s just a matter of being open to the experience, and to truly being present in, and observing, the world around you. The main challenge in trying to convey the beauty of the Sierra was not piling on extraneous detail. I tried to weave descriptions in so that readers could get a sense of what things look like and sound like – what it feels like to be out there – but not in a way that was distracting from the story.
HS: The structure of the novel reminded me of Benjamin Percy’s novel “The Wilding,” an adventure/suspense novel that also split up its narrative from the perspective of three of its main characters. Had you read Percy’s novel? And if so, was it an inspiration for Lost Canyon’s format? If not, how did you settle upon the structure, alternating each chapter’s perspective?
NR: The two books that influenced the structure of Lost Canyon were Deliverance and As I Lay Dying. Deliverance has the same set up of four urbanites in early middle-age, with a gung-ho leader, who start in the city and then go on a trip that gives them more than they bargained for. In As I Lay Dying, there are several narrative voices, and they always propel the story forward so you never lose the sense of narrative motion. It’s a straight shot, and that seemed appropriate for an adventure novel. Each of the chapters in my book builds exactly on the one that’s just passed.
HS: Your novels consistently address themes of class and race, and Lost Canyon does so with both forthrightness in its shifting perspectives, but also subtlety, in a way that speaks of optimism and hope. Were these themes and larger social issues part of the novel’s construct or did they find their way into the story as you wrote?
NR: They were always intertwined. By creating a group of characters that are representative of the Los Angeles I know, issues of race and class come up, just by virtue of who they are. And when they go into the wilderness, the differences become writ large. But as you rightly point out, for all the difficulty and tension, the book ultimately ends on a hopeful note, even a happy one. I am an optimistic person. I have many different influences personally—my Japanese family, my blue-collar white Midwestern family, the largely black and Latino social contexts in which I grew up. Because of this, I see the good that is possible, the opportunities for common ground, even as there are moments of misunderstanding and frustration.
HS: Could you offer any insight into your writing process? Do you begin with an outline or do you wander for a bit before you find the story? Any particular writing habits to which you adhere? What does your revision process look like?
NR: I generally have an idea or a question I can’t shake – something I have to write my way into finding the answer for. Usually those questions are along the lines of, “What would happen if?” In this case, it was a question of, what would happen if a group of different people, like the people I know, went on a backpacking trip and everything went wrong? I gave them all the misadventures I’ve had myself, and some I’ve only worried about having.
I don’t write with an outline – the one time I tried to, it was like writing in a straightjacket. But I do map out the next few steps ahead. And I revise and revise and revise – I take great joy in it, actually. That’s when a piece starts to feel really formed.
All that being said, this book was different than the others. I started it after I’d ditched another book I’d been struggling with for two years, and once I decided to abandon that project – during a hike in the Sierra – the new book flowed quickly. It kind of fell out of the sky. I hate to say that I was struck by inspiration on top of a mountain, but that’s basically what happened.