{"id":180,"date":"2009-04-07T12:23:58","date_gmt":"2009-04-07T17:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2009\/04\/07\/jerry-stahl-interview\/"},"modified":"2009-04-07T21:33:04","modified_gmt":"2009-04-08T02:33:04","slug":"jerry-stahl-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2009\/04\/07\/jerry-stahl-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Jerry Stahl’s Weird, Dark American Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jerry Stahl wants to tell you about “the weird, dark palpitating heart of America,” as it appears in his new novel, Pain Killers<\/i><\/a>:<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

“I always loved writers like Celine or Terry Southern—in those ‘extremes’ you can really see the heart of the normal,” Stahl said when we met up for coffee recently. That appetite for literary extremes comes through loud and clear in Pain Killers<\/i>, the plot of which revolves around a private investigator (Manny Rubert, from Stahl’s earlier novel Plainclothes Naked<\/i>) who’s hired to go up to San Quentin and figure out if a 97-year-old inmate with the German accent could really be Josef Mengele, with a sharp detour into the world of fundamentalist Christian pornography. “It’s almost impossible to shock anybody these days,” Stahl reflected, noting that many of the most “outrageous” elments of his story are based in real-life stuff he uncovered during his research: “You can<\/i> find Mengele fan sites online if you look hard enough… Our reality is so skewed that the seething roiling madness underneath is leaking through a lot more.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Pain Killers<\/i> was not originally conceived as a sequel; Stahl started out wanting to deal with the legacy of the Holocaust in America, and was using Mengele as a character similar to the way he’d used silent film star Roscoe Arbuckle in I, Fatty<\/i>, “but I was writing Mengele’s deathbed scene in his voice,” he said, “and I realized it wasn’t going to work.” He hung on to the basic idea, and while he was trying to figure out how to write about what he learned while teaching juvenile offenders at San Quentin, inspiration struck. (“Every novel is in some ways a way to tilt your head sideways and empty it out,” Stahl said of the ‘competing’ influences.)<\/p>\n

(America’s current obsession with prisons (“the fastest growing segment of American industry”) fascinates Stahl, like the way that MSNBC, which makes every effort to present itself as a sober news network Monday through Friday, becomes “prison porn central” on the weekends. “I can’t figure out whether it’s that Americans need somebody that they can feel better than,” he half-joked, “or if it’s an excuse for red-blooded American men to watch a bunch of muscled, tattooed guys walking around the yard with their shirts off.”)<\/p>\n

One thing Stahl never expected when he was writing a novel about Josef Mengele sneering at the world after the collapse of the Third Reich was the possibility that he might be upstaged: “I didn’t know Pain Killers<\/i> would be coming out the same day as The Kindly Ones<\/i> and I’d be out here competing with anal sausage stories,” he laughed. Pain Killers<\/i> has gotten a bit lost in the American book media’s rush to tackle Jonathan Littell’s “more” “literary” take on the Nazi legacy (save, perhaps, for a thoughtful Tod Goldberg review<\/a> in the LA Times<\/i>), but he’s exploring this weird middle ground between Don DeLillo and Ross Thomas, between Terry Southern and William T. Vollmann, and I’d highly recommend taking his tour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jerry Stahl wants to tell you about “the weird, dark palpitating heart of America,” as it appears in his new novel, Pain Killers: “I always loved writers like Celine or Terry Southern—in those ‘extremes’ you can really see the heart of the normal,” Stahl said when we met up for coffee recently. That appetite for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}