Chekhov’s Mistess

Questions for Laird Hunt, Author of The Exquisite

I read Lance Olsen’s review of The Exquisite in Rain Taxi and felt like I had missed something in my reading because I didn’t really feel the novel in a post-9/11 context, and Lance’s reading made me curious. I’ve generally approached post-9/11 novels with some feeling of resentment, but not this one, mostly because it could have, in my mind, just as easily been set in the East Village of ten or twenty years ago, in that neighborhood’s formerly seedy timelessness that in some ways I’m sure people are fond of as it gentrifies. With that unsettled feeling, I thought I’d shoot out some questions to Laird and once I got started, it was hard to stop. So here are those questions:

1) I was thinking about what I wrote about your book and my lack of a literary comparisons. Although I think I could conjure up a few names, who would you say are your literary forebears specifically in regards to The Exquisite?

It’s interesting that you had that sense of things—one early trade review was pretty snarky about how I needed to “murder” my mentors—meaning, I think, Auster, Sebald and other creators of unusual structures I was borrowing too heavily from.  I’ve found that reaction is fairly common—the non-realist writer needs to get over metafiction, etc., if he/she is to move forward (one rarely hears, I note, trade reviewers calling for realist writers to get over realism, the biggest bag of tricks in the biz)—as if in the natural order of things one creates slant fiction in one’s youth and solid (realist) fiction in one’s maturity or something wildly reductive like that.  No doubt it was the tone of the review, a here-is-the-anonymous-word-from-on-high kind of thing, that bugged me about that remark.  I’m very happy then that the majority of other readers have had a hard time coming up with suitable analogues.  At any rate, books that impacted (and I’ll read your question about forebears in that way) The Exquisite include, in no particular order,




The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien


The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley


Dark Property by Brian Evenson


The Pink Institution by Selah Saterstrom


The Book of Jon by Eleni Sikelianos


Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino


Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace


Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link


The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson


Jesus Son by Denis Johnson


The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead


Oracle Night by Paul Auster


Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem


Berg by Ann Quin

2) I noticed in Lance Olsen’s Rain Taxi review of The Exquisite, he made your book seem very much like a post-9/11 novel. I felt quite differently and other than making a time-marker, I didn’t feel that it needed that backdrop. Without getting into a who’s right or wrong, can you say whether or not your novel should speak to a pre- or post-9/11 world?

Maybe that’s (your reaction) because in a sense the book is trying to have it both ways, at least as far as temporal issues are concerned—on the one hand the book sits just slightly outside of time: there are two narrative strands, neither of which is allowed to dominate (so that one can’t ever quite say—ah ha, that’s what’s going on here); and on the other hand part of it is very clearly set around the time of deliberately unnamed events that, nevertheless, just about anyone (including my publisher, who did make more than one specific reference to “9-11” on the book’s jacket) would equate with the events that took place on September 11th, 2001.  For me though (and I’ll avoid saying who is right and who is wrong—the book belongs to its readers now, and I am only one of them), the specificity of what Henry and Mr. Kindt and Cornelius et al are doing (conducting mock murders—a modern variation, they think, of the “danse macabre” of plague times) is in large part a product of what lower Manhattan was like to live in those early weeks after the planes slammed into the towers and the air one breathed was full of bone and burnt plastic, etc.  Henry talks about people going around like “deaths heads” in their gas masks in those days, and the premise of the mock murders is offering people a ritualized version of their deaths, on their own terms.  Then of course there was the exodus phenomenon associated with 9-11.  A lot of people left the city as a direct or indirect result of that day.  And they didn’t all leave physically—becoming unhinged by the events wasn’t all that uncommon.  Henry’s memories and hallucinations are heavily tinged by post-building-collapse imagery, etc.  In fact, when I think about it, not too many pages go by without some evocation of that horrible day…

3) As a follow up to that, I’ll mention that I’m a New Yorker and know many of the places you took us in the book. Without necessarily comparing a New Yorker to a non-New Yorker (i.e. clearly a NYr will appreciate certain elements through familiarity), do you think someone who has never been to New York will “see” what Henry [the main character] does? Is that important to the success (readerly, not market) of the book?

It’s certainly true that I took a particular pleasure in moving my characters through certain parts of the city and that I am not unhappy when I hear from New Yorkers (I’ve had a lot of comments about this) that I got it right or at least wasn’t too off in my descriptions.  At the same time, everything we get comes through the filter of Henry’s voice, which means that when we walk (with the book) through Tompkins Square or along Avenue B or into some restaurant, we are principally negotiating (as readers) Henry’s feelings, memories, imaginings, etc. about that place.  So in that sense no one is particularly privileged as they experience the text—we are all strangers in Henry’s strange land, so to speak, even if we regularly have drinks at the Horse Shoe bar (which does serve a pretty mean Cape Cod, btw) or frequent Veselka or shop at Russ and Daughter’s.

4) I wrote that anyone who liked the films “Open Your Eyes” or “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” would like your book. That’s a guidepost for me because I think a person’s sensibilities carry over through any art form. I’ll add that The Exquisite is a very visual book full of imagery. This leads me to two questions:

a) One, if you were of unlimited talent but had to express the ideas in The Exquisite through another art from other than writing, what would it be and what would it look like?

I definitely had David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive much on my mind in the latter stages of writing The Exquisite.  I like the mix of the goofy (the hired killer who badly bungles his hit, the espresso sipping fiasco, the ridiculously snooty young director) with the creepy and flat-out terrifying (that cowboy is a piece of work), and I greatly admire how handsome the film is.  Most important to my thoughts about The Exquisite though was the split narrative mechanism—the two versions of the story, with neither one necessarily being the real one (we’d like, perhaps, to think that the second, much shorter, much darker version is the “real” story, but Lynch never confirms this for us).  I permute this structure in The Exquisite: two narrative threads that inform but don’t explain each other.  Which is a long-winded way of saying I’d like to see The Exquisite as a film, made by David Lynch, or maybe some younger director, someone just getting started and ready for something wild.

b) Do you think The Exquisite would work well as a movie? Do you think Ben Kingsley could be Mr. Kindt?

In the previous answer I assert that I’d like to see the thing as a film, but the truth is I don’t know if it would do it any good to shift over.  Very, very few “translations” of books into film do the book they’ve come out of justice.  Still, if the write person took it on… You don’t do feature films do you?  Your one minute short plunges right to the heart of the matter… What about Omar Sharif as Mr. Kindt?

5) This is a biographical question. Your book jacket bio is spare, but gives us a picture of a young man in a potentially fruitful career in international affairs, giving that up for a life of writing, and the type of literary writing that will never really appeal to a mass audience and thus the riches of authorship. Are you crazy, or do you feel like you’re a part of something important or is there an interesting piece of your biography that we’re missing?

I’m crazy.  That’s for sure.  But it’s the gentle madness thing.  The kind you can work with for years.  I was writing all through my UN time and never, even at its most interesting (I got to cover Castro, Chavez, Mia Farrow, etc.) considered it more than an elaborate and consuming day-job to support my literary proclivities.  I’ve never given more than a minute or two’s thought to garnering literary riches off the kinds of books I’m interested in writing.  There’s just not enough time to spend pipe-dreaming about hitting the jackpot.  There isn’t much jackpot to go around.

6) I understand you once wrote poetry and I noticed your clear enjoyment of the sound of words in the book and also your prose-poetics on your blog are pretty good at making a banal little story of your day into something more interesting. I think there’s something there. Could you talk about how poetry informs your novel writing, whether or not you write poetry, particularly for publication, and lastly if you read poetry, who do you read?

My first published work was haiku (I was living in Japan and reading a lot of Basho), and I have always thought of what I am doing as building slowly out from that extraordinary sense of resonance available in that most compact of forms.  For a long time I was stuck and couldn’t write past the need to attend to the sentence, and even the phrase, rather than larger units like paragraphs and chapters, but little by little I’ve been able to move into longer, larger, more relaxed narrative spaces, even as I try to stay vigilant about how I’m crafting things.  I live with a poet (Eleni Sikelianos) and many of my closest friends (Dan Machlin, Garrett Kalleberg, Brenda Coultas, Jo Ann Wasserman, Marcella Durand) are poets, and I have no doubt that continuing to read poetry, as I do, helps me immensely, for example in constantly reminding me that language is not just something we look through, but also at—poetry shows us that over and over again.

7) The Exquisite owes a great debt to another book – which I won’t mention because you only do in the back of your book – Would The Exquisite have happened without that other book?

Something like The Exquisite would have happened.  Something with its energy, possibly its tone, maybe even its structure.  But the irritants, goads, pressures or confronting that particular text, The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, shaped it considerably.

8) You wrote the Exquisite some time ago, so I imagine you have something new that you’re working on. Care to give us a hint? Is it a departure of or carrying on of this work?

I have two late-draft novels sitting on my hard drive looking for a little love.  I like both projects, but am also considering starting something new, some kind of departure… We’ll see.  The thought of starting something new right now is kind of exciting but also extremely daunting.  Novels take forever and half the time I have no idea where they’re going.  Talk about the narrow road to the deep north!

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: October 02, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Laird Hunt

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