Its Impossible to Hate Anyone You Truly Know Andrew Holleran

Higher up: MICHAEL CARROLL AT BARRACUDA IN NEW YORK, JUNE 2014. Photo Past SHOJI VAN KUZUMI.

Michael Carroll was already living with Edmund White in Paris when I ran into him one afternoon in 1995 while I was talking to a flim-flam in a petty square. They walked by on their mode dwelling from lunch at the American Embassy. Wow, I call up thinking, nice life! Though Michael was never, I learned later on, enthralled with Paris; in fact, in one of the stories in his new collection, Picayune Reef, out this week from Terrace Books, the narrator says of the French, "In the realm of unhappiness, they gave the Americans a run for their money." A non-surprising comment, since the Michael I came to know is a supreme realist: a downwards-to-earth, level-headed observer who sees the humor and bullshit in things—particularly the literary life, which is the subject that binds these tales whose locales range from Cardinal West to Manhattan, from rural Maine to suburban Florida.

I always wondered how this child of Jacksonville (where Trivial Reef'due south showtime story is set) kept his head as an unpublished author living with the likes of Edmund White, and the famous writers among their friends; over the years Michael published a few stories in literary magazines, simply none of them are in this new collection, which he wrote in a single twelvemonth after his partner had a stroke that gave a new urgency to their lives. So what I wanted to know start off was: How did this book happen? —Andrew Holleran

ANDREW HOLLERAN: First of all, congratulations on the book. It's really wonderful and unlike anything else I've read. It'due south divided into two sections, the stories. Part I is "Afterwards Dallas," which refers to Kennedy's bump-off, and Part Ii is "Afterward Memphis," Martin Luther Male monarch. Let me actually cheat and enquire you most the epigraphs, which I loved.

CARROLL: [laughs] I knew that you of all people would inquire about that.

HOLLERAN: Aye! One of your epigraphs is a very long passage from Henry James'due south novel, The Bostonians, and I simply honey information technology. And the second epigraph is a tiny piffling thing from a Faulkner novel called Sanctuary, which runs, "'They're only Baptists,' Miss Jenny said. 'What virtually the money?'" [laughs]

CARROLL: [laughs]

HOLLERAN: Then what were you thinking? What are the epigraphs about?

CARROLL: Well, the perceived lesbian tension in The Bostonians, where a younger woman is taken under the fly of an older, established adult female. That book is so innocent merely to us, it just reads so much differently than it would've at the time. Don't y'all think?

HOLLERAN: You made me desire to read The Bostonians over again. It's not a novel I've read in a long fourth dimension. Only the dialogue is wonderful: "'Practise you live here all alone?' 'I shouldn't if yous would come and live with me.'" Prisoner of war! Okay, so what'due south, "'They're just Baptists. What about the coin?'"

CARROLL: That was merely something visceral. I was reading Sanctuary and since Faulkner is from well-nigh Memphis and there's and then much tension in my life that I put in the writing about religion, particularly Baptists. You know, you live downwardly in that location in north Florida, and the Baptists are like the Vatican of Northward Florida.

HOLLERAN: All of the stories in Footling Reef are brand new; they were written in the terminal year, after your partner, Ed White, had a stroke and, you've said, "Life and writing became more urgent." How did this book happen? How did yous make up one's mind to write all new stories? How did you lot resist the temptation to include other stories; and do y'all split your writing into two epics now?

CARROLL: The thing is that my writing changed. The writing itself, the manner I wrote became more urgent, not just the motivation or the motive, but the style I write. My old style was a lot more baroque. I remember you know what I'thou talking about.

HOLLERAN: You mean wordier? Or more literary?

CARROLL: Yeah, wordier, with more complex sentences. And I only got impatient with that because that's and then hard to edit. [laughs] It takes too long to edit and people never go to the end of the sentence. In skilled hands, like yours or Ed'south or, of grade, Proust or James, y'all tin write those not bad sentences.

HOLLERAN: You mean y'all were aspiring to too-beautiful sentences and they were getting in the way?

CARROLL: Yes, and they weren't getting published. [laughs]

HOLLERAN: [laughs] That's getting in the way! Well, did you have a eureka moment? Were yous in the bathtub? What happened that led you lot to this incredibly fluid way—which I actually idea does capture life very well?

CARROLL: I gauge I merely got really tired of writing something new and making 20 copies and xx cover messages and sending them out to the 20 different places and getting completely rejected.

HOLLERAN: [laughs] In the old days nosotros were told never to write about writers—I always thought that was odd, since Proust'southward novel is basically about a author looking for his book. Merely a lot of these stories are about writers. And they're not but about writers and writing, simply some of them are about MFA programs. I of your good stories is almost the wife of an MFA instructor and her loneliness, which was wonderful. I idea, "How did Michael get into that?" Yous've written a lot nigh writing, and the other matter you lot've done is you have completely made a mosh pit of the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, autobiography and imaginative writing. So that in a single story, someone who knows a lilliputian scrap about y'all and Ed can find a paragraph and remember, "Oh, this is their life." And then y'all go away from that into something else. How did y'all come to dissolve all these boundaries?

CARROLL: I guess information technology'south because I didn't accept a whole lot of time, and and so I decided I wasn't going to refuse an idea because it was scary or because people say don't do it. I call back what happened was, for a long fourth dimension I really liked the auto-fiction mode, and stuff like John Irving, who does all different versions of his life. In fact, John Irving merely read the book and he said he thinks the critics will probably non like the fact that information technology's most writers, only I do.

[Carroll and Holleran's telephone transmission is cut off]

HOLLERAN: I heard those beeps, Michael. Did you hear the beeps?

CARROLL: Yeah, only I thought it was…

HOLLERAN: Some kind of applied science measuring us.

CARROLL: I thought it was the NSA.

HOLLERAN: [laughs] We will press on! We know where we were cut off and it was really one of the fundamental questions, then at the risk of making it seem tedious to y'all, I'm going to go back to where that was.

CARROLL: Delight.

HOLLERAN: But I too want to say: is this non a moment that Updike would use for a Bech story? [laughs]

CARROLL: [laughs]

HOLLERAN: Do you remember the Bech story where he goes to the island in the Caribbean to sign all those books?

CARROLL: Yeah.

HOLLERAN: Do yous remember the Bech story where he goes to the little boondocks in Pennsylvania where his fan has collected all of his work and his fan is horrified at meeting him?

CARROLL: Yeah. He'due south a Mennonite in a very sorted trivial business firm. It has a closet full of books by all of Bech's rivals.

HOLLERAN: [laughs] Right! Are you going to read the Updike biography?

CARROLL: I've read information technology. I read it in January.

HOLLERAN: Oh my god, you read information technology early. What did y'all call back?

CARROLL: I thought it was a little bland, to be honest.

HOLLERAN: Me too!

CARROLL: [laughs]

HOLLERAN: Very considerate simply nothing revelatory at all.

CARROLL: Right.

HOLLERAN: Except that he said the Lord's Prayer with his children every night at bed and that he changed the screens at his mother's house in the spring.

CARROLL: Oh aye, exactly. Once a year.

HOLLERAN: Just that was it! Oh, and as well, the sexual activity they had, which really made the St. Mark'southward Baths look tame.

CARROLL: [laughs] Well it was in the '50s, or at least the '60s, I guess.

HOLLERAN: In your volume, you lot have recurring characters, Scott and Perry: Scott, the young writer who's basically kind of the narrator in some stories and another third-person character. And you have a character named Josh who reoccurs. Sometimes I think he's the same person, and sometimes I'm non sure. You go into the mind of an elderly man in Primal W who'due south being interviewed about his married woman who left him. You go into the mind of the iii men in Pascagoula, Alabama. I detest to use the term—information technology's so barbarous and ugly—only there's a fag-hag story in which a young woman is in a bar with two gay boys. I thought that was wonderful. And so what I'm saying is, you lot are mixing and matching and Cuisinart-ing all these things within stories and among stories, and I wondered what gave you the…

CARROLL: Liberty? Bureau?

HOLLERAN: Yes.

CARROLL: [laughs] I said something before nigh not being self-conscious, just getting going. When I determine that something needs something else, that might exist the thoughts of the other character. Who says that when you're writing in the mind of one person, you tin't jump suddenly, even within the context of an independent short story, into the mind of another? Films do information technology all the time, either with voiceover or when we look at the expression of the histrion playing a grapheme that nobody else sees—in a way we're in the mind of that character. And we can bound around. I have a lot of friends who are slightly Nazi-ish about this event.

HOLLERAN: [laughs]

CARROLL: They'll say something like…you lot know like when you're a child and your mother says, "You don't need to exercise that." You lot're like, "I know I don't need to…" But they say, "You don't demand to change point of view." Only that'due south just a hang-up, and I don't have that hang-upwards anymore.

HOLLERAN: What are the rules you do observe? To brand it interesting?

CARROLL: Yeah, attempt to brand information technology interesting. Don't country in i place for too long. In other words, when you write those expositional paragraphs, they can be very psychological. It can be very hard to change paragraphs and go dorsum to base with the action and dialogue and the move, yous would call it. And aye, the psychology is office of the movement, but the further into it you go, the harder it is to find the return maneuver to get back.

HOLLERAN: You are aware of writing as a mechanism in a mode that I am not. I oft read interviews with writers who say they have withheld information from the reader until a certain bespeak, which yous've washed. Yous said in your interview that you lot take asked, "What tin can I go out out? What things have I left out?" I find this remarkable. I wish I were that rational about it. What's expert is that even though you have obviously thought extensively most all these things, that the stop result does not show any of that. It is non in whatever way laborious, or you're not aware of what'due south being done. Yous're just in this world in which life is on the page. You said, "I published in lots of magazines in that old way where I was trying to create a classical, climactic structure. And and then Ed had a stroke and was suddenly helpless. Once he started getting better in a few months, I would leave the apartment and simply write for iv hours a day." What do you mean, the classical structure?

CARROLL: The classical structure is the Freytag Pyramid: The ascent action, everything leading upwards to the climax, and then a denouement if you want that. I just begin, and it's like one hand washing the other. I just continue trying to get the elements to interact with each other. And then I wait for those moments of character thought, or some kind of weird activeness that happens—a stranger with a weirdly decorated bicycle, or something like that; observational stuff. But I no longer think in terms of, "What am I moving towards?" In a style that feels like yous're moving up, you know?

HOLLERAN: Considering at that place'due south no epiphany in your story.

CARROLL: Right.

HOLLERAN: But there is sometimes. Some of your stories, I felt, simply come to a stop, and others end with zingers. The last story, "Unsticking," which is a story in Key W virtually a middle-aged gay man who starts running into this young couple in the bars—a woman and a gay boy. It has an incredible wink-forward at the end and ends with this amazing zinger of a last line, which is very powerful. But that was the exception: More of the stories but just seem to cease. Is that again your rebellion confronting classical form, or what?

CARROLL: There'southward never a conscious rebellion. Information technology'south the refusal to feel cocky-witting about not hammering it into the shape that we've been taught for centuries information technology has to exist in. Information technology'south just that I'chiliad non very skillful at that. I can't do the same in every story, where Oedipus puts his eyes out.

HOLLERAN: [laughs] Skilful affair, too. How practise you lot regard the stories y'all wrote in the quondam mode at present?

CARROLL: Every once in a while I pick them off the shelf and I look at them and I get, "They're okay." Sometimes I cringe a little just considering they're so over the top, overwritten. I mean some of it's really baroque and then some of it'due south kind of interesting in a formational way. I'm actually very grateful—and first writers ofttimes say this and information technology'south usually true—I'1000 merely grateful that I didn't publish that earlier stuff in book grade.

HOLLERAN: You would've been embarrassed by it?

CARROLL: Either embarrassed, or information technology would've marked me out as a kind of mediocre. In other words, if I published the novel I wrote in my 20s—it's a perfectly proficient start novel for a immature person. But information technology'southward not the get-go volume for a 50-year-former. This, I idea, had a certain maturity in that it was daring, just also I don't feel that it's belabored. I don't feel that information technology works too difficult to make an impression.

HOLLERAN: How did you choose "Little Reef" equally the title story?

CARROLL: Process of elimination. Edmund didn't like Avenging Angel. He said it was too mid-century kind of melodrama.

HOLLERAN: It's different. Information technology's not like anything else, and you lot have no thought what it means until you learn when you read the story. You say that it'south a big relief to have a book published—that people suspected you equally a dilettante all the years that yous were writing just publishing in just piddling magazines; and that now yous accept accomplished something. You have produced something, you're a writer—a feeling that I sympathize totally. The prepublication life is really awful. Now that you have this new, quantum method of writing, is your whole life going to be from now on material for you? How do you experience now almost going forrad with your writing and your life?

CARROLL: I picked up a lot of steam once I had written through those sequences of stories. I would say that to the non-autobiographical and the more than autobiographical. I picked up steam and I drafted a novel last year, and so I revised it, and and so I'g going to revise it over again while at the same time writing new stories. There are a bunch of old stories that have never been published that are in a similar vein stylistically that is simpler and more rapidly evolving. I'm going to continue up with that, simply I as well take so many responsibilities. My parents are now in their 70s, and my husband is in his 70s. There's a lot of movement I have to practise.

HOLLERAN: Motion—you mean geographical? From New York to Primal Westward?

CARROLL: Yeah, I accept to go around and see people. Go to Memphis and stuff like that. And I'm trying to learn some kind of grace. Now that I work, I have a blocked out fourth dimension every solar day that I work. I can practise the other things I have to do as the housewife— the shopping and the going to the mail service office. And I'1000 relieved because I work more quickly and I don't feel similar I'm getting behind, the fashion I used to experience. Just to accept a book is a commencement and it can exist similar a stone that I tin start building. I desire to start teaching again. I taught for years.

HOLLERAN: You and Ed would take something called "plot walks."

CARROLL: Yeah, to talk most what he's planning on doing. He'll read to me so I'll say, "What's next in the story?" And then he'll say, "Well I was thinking of…" this or that. And we would talk well-nigh information technology. I recall information technology's a certified term.

HOLLERAN: Really? The only expression I've heard similar that is "perp walk."

CARROLL: [laughs] Catwalk.

HOLLERAN: [laughs] The two of you do fertilize each other; except as yous say, you keep your writing to yourself until information technology's done.

CARROLL: Well, he slowed down considerably subsequently his hospitalization, and he needed help. When he was writing Jack Holmes [and his Friend] he was just talking nigh means that he idea he should move forward in his work. But long earlier I ever met him, he did that with The Cute Room is Empty. Information technology'due south very curt, and the writing is very, very spare.

HOLLERAN: I more technical question: how important is plot to yous in your writing?

CARROLL: I'm not very good at plot. I call it sequencing. Information technology'southward cause and effect, the style plot is. Movement happens because of other movement, or counter-move. All plot is, is conflict plus complication, and as many complications as you want. And the more complications, the more farcical, probably, or tragic or any. Only I can't call back in terms of plot. And I think that nearly readers of what nosotros do, the and then-called literary fiction say, "I'one thousand more interested in character."

HOLLERAN: Let me ask you this in endmost: What is your dream at this point? Physically or geographically?

CARROLL: Um, I'm very middle-class in that mode. The dream is to have a 2d place to go to, to get away from New York, and then that I tin learn to take peace and quiet without having to create it artificially by sticking earplugs in my head and going to a night, smelly, deserted lounge.

HOLLERAN: [laughs]

CARROLL: I really, truly practise desire to teach, considering I really want to talk to students and encourage them. I'm very skillful virtually talking about things without it sounding too artificial or structured or circumscribed. It would be to stay in relative move, you know, to be instruction and to be going abroad for office of the summertime and part of the winter and to simply keep writing. To not allow besides much time get past that I haven't written or published.

MICHAEL CARROLL'Due south LITTLE REEF AND OTHER STORIES IS OUT At present.

ANDREW HOLLERAN IS AN AMERICAN ESSAYIST AND FICTION Author. HIS Almost Recent WORK IS GRIEF: A NOVEL.

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Source: https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/michael-carroll-little-reef

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