by David Lipsky
And the book is about fun.
So it’s supposed to be sort of fun and unfun. For instance, I like a joke that you laugh hard at, but then it’s sort of unsettling, and you think about it for a while. It’s not quite black humor, but it’s a kind of, a kind of creepy humor.
And there’s some stuff in the book that’s set up to be high camp. Like the corporately subsidized years. But it’s supposed to be plausible, it’s not out of line with the logic of the way subsidization of various things works. Or a way to satisfy voters who demand a high level of services without being willing to pay for ’em.
Or subsidizing national debt.
I think the things that stand against it are the things that stand against, for instance, legalization of certain kinds of drugs. Do we want to be the sort of society that allows our years to be sold to corporations? I think that if things got bad enough so that sort of thing would be necessary, um, the trouble and crisis would erupt in lots of other ways first.
Can you imagine your readers? And how do you imagine them?
I think I imagine them being, uh, young enough to kind of appreciate a contemporary argot or idiom: something being true to the way the language works now the same way Diner was true to certain types of language in the fifties. And I guess I imagine the reader either being pretty well educated, or being somebody with a lot of practice reading. Because there are parts of the book that I think you’ve gotta sort of know that, you’ve gotta have had some practice reading hard stuff and know that there’s a payoff for it.
[His sister Amy’s question, similar to Michael’s: How much reader irritation do you want here? Because you’re gonna need …]
I don’t think somebody whose only experience reading long stuff is Anne Rice or Stephen King will find this—I think they’ll find the demands on them just unacceptable, fairly early on. I don’t really have any aspirations for a truly mass audience.
Yet you have one at this moment?
Well. This thing’s, what? number fifteen on The New York Times bestseller list? I don’t know what that adds up to. I don’t think there’s more than like sixty thousand copies in print.
Ada went to number one …
There’s a system of sly allusions to it in DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star—it’s primarily about math, with an ending that doesn’t work. I think you would like DeLillo.
Image of reader is … College kid? A person who might suddenly get jazzed by it?
I think probably, what I’ve noticed at readings, is that the people who seem most enthusiastic and most moved by it are young men. Which I guess I can understand—I think it’s a fairly male book, and I think it’s a fairly nerdy book, about loneliness. And I remember in college, a lot of even the experimental stuff I was excited by, I was excited by because I found reproduced in the book certain feelings, or ways of thinking or perceptions that I had had, and the relief of knowing that I wasn’t the only one, you know? Who felt this way. Who had, you know, worried that perhaps the reverse of paranoia was true: that nothing was connected to anything else. I remember that early on in Gravity’s Rainbow, and really getting an enormous charge out of it.
And I think if there is sort of a sadness for people—I don’t know what, under forty-five or something?—it has to do with pleasure and achievement and entertainment. And a kind of emptiness at the heart of what they thought was going on, that maybe I can hope that parts of this book will speak to their nerve endings a little bit.
[Pauses a moment]
If you quote any of this, you’d do me a favor if you’d say that I’m talking about what I hope for the book, or what the book’s tryin’ to do. I don’t pretend to think that it has …
[Watch goes off again …]
Was it strange then to meet your audience? You’d never been on tour before, had you?
Nope. It was strange. But of course I was meeting those members of the audience who had the temerity to come up.
The most passionate?
Yeah. Um, it was, there’s an odd phenomenon where, I think, if you write stuff that’s intimate and weird, weird people tend to feel they’re intimate with you. You know? Or that to have people, I got very tired of having somebody say, “I really really really really loved this.” Which for one nanosecond makes you feel good. But then you really don’t know what to say else except, “Thank you.” I mean, you could sense that they expected you to say something else. To fall into the rhythm of an intimacy that they felt. And of course there wasn’t that there. And that, that was sad and unsettling. And, um …
It is weird, because they’d been adoring you from afar.
I don’t think it works that way with writers. I mean, I think we adore … maybe movie stars or record people.
[Jeeves whimpers, watching us eat: his dining audience, dogs rubbernecking. They may as well be watching tennis. Fries to mouth, burger to mouth, very attentive, as if tennis balls over net.]
I think with writing it’s really feeling that, their brain voice for a while becomes your brain voice. And that you feel—the Vulcan Mind Meld perhaps is a better analogy.
That just, they feel intimate with you, in a way. Or that you’d be, not just that you’d be somebody that it’d be great to be friends with, but that they are your friend. And, you know, one reason why I’ve got an unlisted number, and why I really try to hold down on the mail, is that, is that that stuff is difficult to deal with. Because I don’t wanna hurt anybody’s feelings. But it’s also a delusion, and it’s kind of an invasive one. But then I realize that I set it up by doing just what I did, and so it all gets very …
How long has the number been unlisted?
Four or five years ago. I had three or four people—I think what happened was, I had forgotten to tell my parents not to give my number out. So it was people who tracked my parents down, and um—yeah, and they were all very nice. But a lot of them were troubled and upset, and wanted to talk about, in great detail, their problems. The way for instance I talk to really good friends about it. And I just have this terrible problem of … um, I just really hate to hurt people’s feelings. And so I did something kinda cowardly. I mean, I kinda changed my number and just got my phone disconnected, so these folks couldn’t find me anymore.
Same people again and again?
There were five or six who called, who began to call a whole lot.
Once a week, once a month?
Somewhere between those two.
College kids, adults?
It ran the gamut. There was one guy who was a computer operator in Vancouver, he lived in a basement. Um, who I found really moving. He was in terrible, terrible pain. But it wasn’t clear what he wanted from me, and when I would sort of ask him, he’d get angry, and it got scary.
He was a sort of involuntary psychic friend?
I think so a little bit. I think one, I think one thing about probably, you can expect that somebody who’s willing to read and read hard a thousand-page book is gonna be somebody with some loneliness issues. Or somebody who’s looking, somebody like me or perhaps like you, who isn’t always able to get the sense of intimacy they need. You know, in regular day-to-day intercourse. And is going to this. So that, I think it was really more that they were lookin’ for a friend, and I don’t mind bein’ somebody’s friend. Although there’s an upper limit to that. But the weird thing was that, their, they come to you on an unequal basis.
They already feel as if they know you—which of course they don’t. They know the you in the book, and it’s really impossible. Julie in Minneapolis is one of the very few people I ever became friends with because she’d written me a fan letter. Y’know? As this City Pages editor. But Julie has also worked with a whole lot of writers and knows a whole lot about the differences. And she and I discovered that we genuinely did kind of like each other as people, with the book not being involved.
But you’d never toured like that. You had fans.
Right.
Big line of people; some want to impress themsel
ves on you; you can tell by how they’re looking at you, or by how they’re shambling back and forth. How does that feel?
[Pause] It’s very complicated. In one way it’s nice and gratifying. In another way it’s very tense, because you feel simultaneously the obligation to have an exchange with each person, but that other people are waiting. Or somebody wants four books signed, but that means keeping other people waiting. Do you piss that person off or the other people off? And one of my complaints is that the bookstores aren’t very helpful about it. They don’t really give you advice about how to do it, you’re kind of thrown in, and you have to make a lot of it up.
And it wasn’t unpleasant, it was fatiguing.
[I leave for bathroom.]
Now it’s just me and the tape recorder sittin’ here, Drone’s lookin’ at the floor, I’m smokin’. Having said I wasn’t going to smoke, I’m smoking. I’m just talking to your tape recorder.
You had done readings before where there wasn’t enough audience to hold the reading even, and the reading was called. What was it like to go to readings where people were fighting to get in?
I’m trying to condense it into something you can use.
In a certain way it was very satisfying. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it was very satisfying. The thing about it is, I get very scared about reading. Because I get self-absorbed and worry about me. And so I remember, the two times, the two times that the reading wasn’t held, I remember I felt an enormous relief, you know?
What’s weird about the process is there’s terrible dread beforehand, and then uh—Jeeves, shut up! And then the time that it’s most fun is during. Starting with actually halfway through the reading.
All right, come on, come on. Crate. Crate. [Finally wields this threat and locks Jeeves in his crate.]
I know you’re settin’ me up for a nice line, and I can’t think of a condensed, cool way to say it.
What was the fun part of the tour; everyone read the book, waiting to hear you read?
[He seems a man determined not to enjoy these extras, like a man attending a party with a wife he secretly plans to leave. He is determined not to enjoy the process of being celebritified.]
Except the tour started on February 18, the pub date was February 19. It was, dollars to donuts will get you, that 90 percent of the people in that room weren’t there because they had read the book, they were there because of this weird sort of hype thing. Which, um, so that any kind of excitement is undercut by this awareness that there’s mechanisms going on that really don’t have anything to do with me.
But I’ll tell you—I mean, having an audience with really really pretty girls in it, who are paying attention to you, and like what you’re sayin’? Is gratifying on a fairly I think simple mammal level.
Why?
Oh, because I think pretty girls are what you most sort of dream and despair of ever having, of ever paying attention to you.
Trying to find my list of your tour stops. Can’t find it. You didn’t—
You caught me. [He laughs. Points to wall, by kitchen and wall-mount phone.]
I’ve got the list up there.
Mind if I take it down for a second?
Please do. I think I would take it down if you didn’t.
[Loud tape-detaching sound]
When you heard how many cities it was gonna be, how’d you feel?
It’s more complicated than that. I had called actually Mark and Nan to find out—I didn’t want to be an asshole to Little, Brown, but I also didn’t want to do this really long tour. And I found out that a small tour was eight to ten cities, and told them that I would do that.
How many did they want?
It didn’t even get to that stage.
I mean, they talked about setting up a tour originally—PR departments are like anybody else: they have first drafts of things. Their first idea was that I and some of my grad students would go around in the Midwest in a van, talking to bookstore owners, trying to convince them to buy the book. And I had to have Bonnie call them and explain that I was perhaps the very last person on the list of residents of planet Earth who would make a good salesman for their own stuff.
OK: what happened in Boston? [It’s the first city of his list.] Anything funny? Anything interesting, color?
Tch-tch-tch-tch-tch. Boston was interesting because a lot of the people I knew, including some of the folks at Open Meeting—you know, who’d helped me—were there. My best friend’s parents were there, who’ve been very close friends of mine, but were absolutely beside themselves with joy because of the Time magazine picture. The Time magazine picture had to them signaled some kind of arrival.
It would to anybody.
You think? I don’t know. I just remember Mark’s mom, her eyes were moist. And that meant a lot to me. And my friend Gina had come down from Providence.
I’m tryin’ to think: the coolest thing was, um, what started like a disaster. Because I went to Boston and I had to come back. And everything was fogged in. So they hired a car to drive me down—which was striking to me, because to me, in any other situation, I would’ve had to grab a bus. And the Boston to New York bus, I’ve done that before and it’s just, it’s not a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. They hire this car that shows up in like five minutes. With the squealing brakes. And it’s Ash Wednesday, and it’s this old Irish Catholic guy who drives me down, while, like, lecturing about Catholic lapsology the whole time. And it was real interesting.
That kind of luxe surprised you?
About landing that guy. It wudn’t a limo. It wasn’t one of those things with the boomerang antenna on the back, it’s what’s called a car service.
A Lincoln.
It made me feel important, ’cause I had to get back for the book party. And like, that I was important enough to them to spend—it was probably a few hundred dollars—it made me feel important.
Have you stayed in that many hotels before this?
No.
How was that?
That was OK—although it was a little bit like the cruise experience. I noticed how quickly I became accustomed to the luxury, and how quickly the minibar went from a wild extravagance to just kinda part of the … and I notice even now I’m pissed that I have to go out grocery shopping. And I got used to makin’ a mess and knowing that other people would clean it up. [At the Whitney, before going out, I saw him actually straightening up for the maid.] And there was also something—it wasn’t a regular hotel experience, Little, Brown paid for the hotel ahead of time, and pretty much all I had to do was make sure I didn’t, you know, run up extreme charges.
I was talking with Betsy about this, and I don’t mind telling you about it for the essays: I had this big paranoia of like, um, trying to figure out whether to watch a soft-core porn movie, on Spectravision. But being incredibly worried that the rating or the title would appear on the bill to Little, Brown. It’d be like: “Hot and Wet, $8.95” would appear on the room charges. And I would have some prim spinster in the expense department of Little, Brown knowing that I had watched Hot and Wet. So I chickened out of doing that.
Could have paid separately.
You’re right, I could’ve—but then you’ve gotta make really sure they wiped it off the computer. And that means dealing with the person at the desk, who would very quickly figure out why you were so upset. The mortification versus fun of watching it was clearly not even. [Smokes my Marlboros; he’s out of American Spirit.]
New York?
New York was very interesting because my friend Erin, who’s the wife of a good friend of mine here, who’s a forty-eight-year-old Mennonite lady, came with me the first two days. So it was—I mean, she came with me to the reading at KGB and she’d never been to a reading before. And she, I think, had this idea that they really were sort of like MTV Unplugged concerts, and there were lines, you know, out the door and stuff.
So I sort of got to experience it through her eyes. And like, she stayed with me in the hotel. It w
as funny, we got a crazy cabbie. You know, a guy who was schizophrenic and weaving all over the road, so we had to get out of the cab. I just said, “This is close enough, this is fine”—I mean, the guy was crazy. His license was also expiring the next day. Clearly, there was just all kinds of bad karma.
And she almost got chain-snatched. You know: a guy came out, started the you-better-watch-that-chain-somebody’ll-grab-it shit. And I got to like seem like I was a New Yorker, and y’know do this quick smooth move between her and him. Like without ever meetin’ his eye and ever breakin’ stride. My point is I think I felt cool about it, because having somebody even more inexperienced than me along made me …
Read in New York before?
Yes.
How’d it go?
It’s run the gamut. I’ve given readings where nobody showed up. I’ve given readings—first reading I ever gave—at the Ninety-second Street Y, with T. C. Boyle and Frank Conroy. When I was twenty-four. And then I’ve given, y’know, Cafe Limbo readings, that are OK, but also people are eatin’ and talkin’ while you’re reading.
KGB. You arrive there at what time?
We got there fairly late. We got there about ten minutes before the reading was supposed to start.
What’d you see?
Lisa Singer—who’s about five two and ninety pounds—and Erin and I all pulled up. And we thought maybe it was a building that also had a bar in it, because there were people waitin’ on the street. And Lisa freaked.
See, this is the nice thing: you have them with you, they freak for you, you know what I mean? It’s what the escorts are for too, so you can just be detached, because they’ll do the worrying.
