"My first book, Martin and John, wasn't autobiographical,"
Dale Peck says as we sit down to lunch, "but it was about stuff that I knew,
domestic situations a twenty-one year-old is familiar with, and set in places
where I'd lived." The followup novel, The Law of Enclosures, contained
explicitly autobiographical passages about his parents, while the fictionalized
part took an almost claustrophobic perspective on one couple and their forty-
year marriage. By the time he'd completed that book, Peck was feeling so
constrained by his self-imposed limits that for his next project, he wanted to
go all over the place. "Now It's Time to Say Goodbye was originally a
much smaller idea, basically a story I had written for Martin and John
but ended up taking out. Now it became this huge thing. I wanted to have a lot
of characters. I wanted the sort of freedom to invent any particular situation
that came into my head, to flesh it out and realize it and then include it or not
include it as I saw fit."
It's a huge, sprawling thriller set in two Kansas communities that occupy the
land where an entire town burned to the ground. Galatea is all-white, while
Galatia is all-black. When writer Colin Nieman and his lover, Justin Time,
arrive from New York, they set off a chain reaction of events in which the
darkest secrets of Galatea/Galatia--and of Colin and Justin--are shoved into the
light.
RH: Was it hard for you to juggle a dozen or so different
character perspectives?
DP: I was actually surprised at how easy it was. I figured out pretty
early on I wasn't going to be able to write the book as it would finally appear,
with all the chunks narrated by different voices, and still be able to move
between them fairly easily. So I would work on one character for a couple
weeks and then stop. Then I'd read something that would clear my head,
something with a really distinct voice, like Joan Didion or Raymond Carver, to
beat out what I had just been working on, and then I would start again on a
new character.
RH: How much does the Kansas of the novel draw upon the
Kansas where you grew up?
DP: There is an all-black town in Kansas--called Nicodemus, not
Galatia--but as far as I know, it's never been overrun by white people. There's
at least one town that really did burn down as a result of a grain elevator
explosion, which was about two miles away from the town we lived in when my
family first moved to Kansas, when I was seven. We lived in a little town of
about 2,000 people, and two miles away there was just this burnt-out skeleton
of a town. When I was a kid, I could never understand how wheat would
explode, but basically, the grain elevator had caught fire. It exploded and the
town was just wiped out in a flash fire.
So I drew on some history, but I didn't want this to be an historical work. And I
didn't want it to be a realist work, because I was afraid that would turn it into a
protest novel, or some simple allegory about what's right and what's wrong.
You know, a 30-year-old white boy's opinions about race relations in the U.S. I
don't know that I have any really deep or really important contributions to
make to that discussion. I just wanted to present a story that was so compelling
that it couldn't be ignored and yet so unbelievable that it couldn't be accepted,
and see what people would do with that.
RH: There seems to be a very strong gothic element propelling
the story forward.
DP: I wouldn't have ever thought that the word 'gothic' would be used
to describe this book, though in retrospect it now seems totally obvious. I read
lots of gothic fiction growing up and liked it, but I never thought about it
when I was writing the book. I just thought of the book as being a little bit
over the top, maybe as a fairy tale in a lot of ways.
I've never been a fan of the tepid, measured, Anita Brookner kind of novel.
I've always had a bit of a grand guignol sensibility. I like things that are
flashy and razmatazzy. Even my earlier books, which draw on a very quiet
palette, are about sensational, over the top events. Fathers beating their sons
nearly to death, kids trying to commit suicide by getting people to fuck them
with shotguns, things like that. That's just where my mind tends to go. My
boyfriend says I like to make people think about things that they don't want to
think about...but I think it's just things that I naturally think about.
RH: Although the novel has a very outwardly queer gay couple
at the center, critical reaction mostly positioned you as an avant-
garde or experimental writer, rather than labelling you as a gay
writer.
DP: Well, I'm very lucky that mainstream critics have always liked me.
Martin and John was published at just about exactly the right time. I was
twenty-five years old with a book about the pains and tribulations of a young
kid with AIDS, precisely at a moment when AIDS activism and gay activism
were probably at their most powerful. The mainstream press was ready to
bend over backwards to demonstrate their willingness to embrace and accept
gayness, plus I had the literary credentials of having been to Columbia and
being published by FSG, and I think the book itself was pretty good, which
helped some. So that book was reviewed probably more than any of my other
books. Everyone was willing to talk about it, to say that whole, "This young
writer will show you things you've never seen before..." spiel. And at the end
of the day, it sold 10,000 copies, which is very lovely for a literary debut.
But in The Law of Enclosures, I left gay characters out completely, apart
from a reference to the couple being the parents of John from Martin and
John, though John never actually shows up, and reviewers started asking
"What's he up to here? Is he demonstrating his breadth as a writer? Or is he
trying to play some trick on us and write a book about heterosexuality? And
secretly condemning it, because these people sure are unhappy." The book
ultimately got better reviews than Martin and John, but it was reviewed
less widely, and sold fewer copies. Part of that, of course, is because it's
infinitely more depressing, but it's also because readers didn't know what to do
with it. Gay readers were unwilling to pick it up in as many numbers because
it wasn't about them, and like most identity groups, gay readers like to read
about themselves. And straight readers were unwilling to pick it up because, I
think, that they thought that there was something at stake there, that I ws
going to challenge their heterosexuality in some way that they didn't want to
experience.
So when this book came along--basically my way of saying that I can write
about whatever I want to write about--the critics were impressed by my
audacity, whether they liked or hated the actual book, but it didn't translate
into sales, in part because I'd made the mistake of being published by the
company that was also publishing Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full that season,
so all their resources were given over to him. I'm talked about in all the right
places, which is very, very nice, and it's gratifying that I'm not completely
pigeonholed, but it doesn't translate into the kinds of sales that a lot of my
peers see. I think Michael Cunningham gets to be the big exception--you
know, the gay writer who gets both the critical and the popular sales
attention. It's fabulous for him, and maybe it will trickle down to the rest of
us.
RH: It's a tight line for many gay writers to walk. You can
stand out in the "Gay and Lesbian" section, but sometimes you just
want to be filed under "Literature and Fiction."
DP: And you're actually liable to move more copies of your book if it's
in the gay section because it will still have the word "gay" somewhere on the
jacket copy, whereas you can only use the word "universal" to pitch a gay
book to a mainstream audience so many times. And I don't even believe in the
universal, anyway; I believe in the very particular.
But gay fiction is so awful right now. For every Michael Cunningham or
Edmund White, every Matthew Stadtler or Rebecca Brown, there are five
thousand books that are basically, "I'm gay. I'm really gay. I'm really, really
gay. And it's okay. It's okay with me and I hope it's okay with you." Lord save
us from it, but the fact is people still buy it to some degree or other. I mean,
how big is the gay inferiority complex? Is it that these are the only books that
are being bought and the only films being funded? I really don't think so. It
would be very nice if one could blame big business for this, but I really think
that it's some ingrained inferiority complex on the part of gay narrative
artists. It's just, enough already. YWe're grown up. Life is hard. It's hard for
everyone. Maybe it's hard for gay people in different ways. Write about it
that way. Don't ask the world to love you, because the world won't.
RH: Who are some of your favorite writers?
DP: I don't have any favorite writers right now except perhaps Joan
Didion, who's my idol, and Rebecca Brown. I adore everything she's done. But
don't really read writers anymore. There's no one I'm dying to pick up the
way I once read nothing but Henry James for a year., then, nothing but Didion
for a year. Now I pick up stuff and I don't really finish much of anything
anymore. I'm more or less completely over identity fiction, but I'm also over
fiction generally. I think fiction's in a really bad place right now. Novels are
at best competent, and more ofthen that not they're just derivative and
repetitive and badly done. I think it has a whole lot to do with the idea that
normal life is no longer good enough, but that the alternative to that still has
to somehow be within the realm of the possible. So what you get is, well, fiction
about freaks, for want of a better term. "Freaks" simply being anyone that's
not quite like you and me. So if you start with a straight, white male norm and
then slowly move away from that... I don't know, maybe Gore Vidal was right
and the novel's time really is over and we should just accept the fact that
there's no reason to write them anymore.
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