Ginny
has moved away from her Indiana home to marry Linus Lancaster, her mother’s
second cousin and a man of many promises. When they arrive at his Kentucky
farm, she sees that he has exaggerated his circumstances. Ginny tries to make
the best of it, taking up her role as “Mother” to Cleome and Zinnia, Linus’
slaves, but things quickly turn for the worse. Linus is harsh and abusive, and
their “Paradise” becomes a living hell. Strangely, as violence changes hands
and methods, as the timeline is fractured and the narrators shift, the novel’s
larger themes of retribution, fate, and the persistence of pain overcome the
plot, and even the characters themselves.
“Comes
a day when everything you thought you had put behind you sets up its tent in
the middle of what you were still hoping you could call tomorrow and yells out,
‘Right this way.’
Well, here I come.”
Kind One’s symbolism of the
indelibility of slavery is there, immediately visible, but the novel is not
aimed at moral soapboxing. Nevermind the technical beauty of the structure, the
subtle use of repetition. The work soars because of Hunt’s intensely human
characters which are displayed with complex compassion. The hands which are
heavy may change over time, as may the victims, but pain and guilt, and, more
precisely, the residual effects of pain and guilt, do not. Kind One is
complicated and rich, but deceptively easy to read. The obscurity of blame and
culpability, and several spine-chillingly portentous micro-stories are all
delivered in a simple narrative approach, making the nearly two hundred pages
fly by.
I was recently able
to interview Laird Hunt about his process with Kind One.
###
Joe Trinkle: You've published
five novels. Was there anything you set out to accomplish — stylistically,
thematically, personally, etc. — when you began working on Kind One?
Laird Hunt: Each book has
come with its own concerns, its own challenges. Though I’ve never been
particularly against realism (I'm just as wary of received experimentalism as I
am of received traditionalism), I've long been happily associated with the more
exploratory inclinations in American fiction, in large part, I think, because
each book has gone in a slightly different direction, so there was always a
good chance that Kind One would take its own direction too. And although in the
end Kind One was much more of an exercise in voice channeling than in any
particularly mechanistic endeavor (say in the vein of my last novel Ray of the
Star in which each chapter is a single, sometimes very long sentence), the idea
of taking on realism as a kind of constraint has been in the back of my mind
for a while. Something else worth mentioning is that novels generally take so
long to write that by the time I’m nearing the end of one, maybe years after I
have started, I can barely remember what it is I originally set out to do. Like
most people who undertake this kind of crazy enterprise, I project everything
I’m thinking and feeling over time onto my novels, and hope I’m not ruining
them as I do so.
What do you mean
exactly when you say "taking on realism as a kind of constraint"?
I’ve been intrigued by constraint
since I first stumbled on the Oulipians — going on 20 years ago now — whose
primary goal as a movement was to come up with ways to write rather than actual
pieces of writing. These ways of writing
often involve “constraints” (write a book without the letter e, write a sonnet,
a sestina, etc.). It struck me after a decade of various types of largely
non-realist experimentation that I could use significant parts of realism’s
mind-numbingly familiar recipe — rotating passages of description, dialogue,
action and so forth — as the guideline I had to adhere to in writing
something. Kind One resisted the
constraint, took its own course, came out as a kind of fever dream, but I was trying
my best through much of the writing to “do” realism. I should say that I am aware of the evolution
realism has undergone since Flaubert arguably took it to its heights in the 19th
century and that it has grown ever larger and more flexible and you know, so
on, with the many, many, many decades it has been in use, but my sense of what
would be interesting and maybe even useful to take on as constraint, and that
I’ve just admitted I failed at, is that older, Flaubertian realism.
The language of the
characters in Kind One is quite distinct. How did you develop, or
perhaps discover, these voices?
Finding the first voice, Ginny's,
was key to the whole thing: without it there would have been no Kind One. I
lived in rural Indiana with my grandmother for a number of important, formative
years, and while Ginny doesn’t sound like her, the way she speaks is certainly
informed by that beloved voice I heard every day and at different volumes,
depending on whether we were sitting together at the dinner table or she was
hollering at me to come in from whatever chore she had set me or whatever
fooling around I was up to. Of course part of finding a voice for a character
is knowing what it wants to say, and once you get some sense of that things get
easier. I knew from the start that Ginny had a dark and difficult story to
tell. After I understood, early on, that
she was going to be both forthcoming and reticent in her telling of it, I had a
handle on how to proceed. The other voices grew out of this first one. Zinnia's
was written after Ginny’s and it posed certain challenges because I didn't want
this voice of an escaped slave who moved North to Chicago where she eventually
worked as a teacher’s aid to sound like it was poured out of the same
vernacular bottle as Ginny's. I got a great deal of help with it when I read
certain slave narratives — Harriet Jacobs stunning chronicle in particular —
that had been very carefully and elegantly crafted and that were carried by
frank but understated voices. The other voices in the book have smaller
portions of the story to tell, but there too it was important to me that they
not all sound the same, even over those few pages they were accorded and even
if their differences in speaking are relatively slight.
I recently had a
conversation with another writer about referencing history and other forms of
art in contemporary literature. These connections help us link our stories into
the larger fabric of narrative that people have been weaving since the
beginning, but they also do something else, something that ties us back to the
past, almost limiting us.
In Kind One you
punctuate the narrative with lines from The Tempest, and you make some
allusions to Hellenic mythology and drama (the Furies, Charon, Greek tragedy
motifs, etc.). How do you approach referencing classical literature/ideas
within your own work?
I have always, if not exclusively,
been attracted to writing that seems to take time past, present and future into
itself like a kind of vortex, books like The Recognitions by Gaddis or the Making
of Americans by Stein or even, maybe I should say especially,
Shakespeare’s plays. I tend, in general, to think of the very great works,
whenever they were made, as sitting just outside of time, so that Herodotus or
Sappho don’t seem very much less contemporary than the latest important writing
being done in our particular moment, which is not, I think, just a question of
the updating work that translation and/or reframing (Kafka wasn’t doing
psychology he was doing mysticism!) can do. I once had someone suggest to me,
after reading an early chapbook that proposed new versions of old myths (the
way, was my hope at least, Kafka, since we are speaking of him in parantheses
already, does in his Parables), that I ought to be writing about pop culture: toast
and Twinkies and comics and Hotwheels and sports and beer and tv shows and
divorce. In other words, I ought to be writing like everyone, or close enough
to everyone, else, but in my own way. Probably it was good advice and I
should have taken it. Although as I think of it maybe it helped me avoid
hoping/trying to do it like Dave [Wallace], as so many of the people making
lotsa noise as I came up as a writer seemed to be going for. With seriously
varying, let’s face it, degrees of success. Regardless, and with nothing but
respect for the too sadly departed author of Infinite Jest, it is definitely
the case that many of my characters have been drawn to the wisdom of the ages,
in all its guises, and that I have been happy to let them wrestle with it.
Kind One is
unequivocally a somber novel. Sexual abuse, violence against women and people
of color, slavery—the novel is very much a meditation on sadness and suffering.
What draws you to write about sadness, and why do you think it's important to
do so?
For years I wrote
with the title to one of Yasunari Kawabata’s novels — Beauty and Sadness, in
its English translation — printed on a postcard above my desk. I have only
stopped writing with it nearby because I had to store it away at some point and
can’t find it and that’s the way it goes. If you have read other of my books
you will have registered that I’m no stranger to hilarity and sadness either,
but it is very much the case that melancholy and/or sadness are often if not
quite always present in my work. What I seem really always to be writing about
is loss — from someone taken by institutionalization to departed children to
the smoking rubble piles at ground zero — so it is maybe not too hard to see
attraction to the many hues of sadness as a kind of symptom of a desire to fill
or bridge the holes that my psyche, no doubt irrevocably marked early on by my
own circumstances, has found no other adequate way to address. This doesn’t mean that I think I wrote about
the unpunctuated evil of antebellum slavery in Kind One because my parents
split up when I was a kid and I was sent alone to live on a farm in rural
Indiana with my grandmother. But it probably does speak to a certain
predisposition that a look around the world — from Bangladesh to Oklahoma City to
Cleveland — at any given time does nothing to assuage.
You translate
fiction, as well. Who are some contemporary international authors who've made
an impact on you?
I can’t stress enough how important
it is to me to read good writing from as far afield as the limitations of
general lack of interest in translation and even in books written in English
outside the US makes possible. Most of the classes I teach have as many or more
books on the syllabus that were written abroad as they do domestic titles. W.G.
Sebald, Ann Quin, Marie Redonnet, Magdalena Tully, Michael Ondaatje, Roberto
Bolaño, Arno Bertina, Oliver Rohe, Alain Mabanckou and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
are just a few of the non-American writers who have amplified my sense of the
possible within the bounds of fiction. I hope you will forgive me if I slipped
the name of a deceased writer or two onto that list.
Kind One was a finalist for the
2013 Pen/Faulkner award and the winner of a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for
Fiction. Does the success of a novel change your personal relationship with it?
I took a few stabs at this question
and erased them. I’ve never had even this kind of relative award-related
success with a novel before so the best answer probably is I don’t know. The
book comes out in France and Spain and maybe elsewhere in the next year so it
still feels very much like it’s in play. I may have a better answer to this
question in a couple of years. The book
is still burning for me, it is still alive.
You're doing a
Lannan residency this summer. What will you be working on?
Right this second I’m battling with
a sci-fi story of sorts, but don’t yet know if it will have the legs to still
be in progress in August when I’m at Marfa. I’m sure to be revising a couple of
mss. that I recently completed advanced drafts of. One of them is a Civil War
book. I should probably say a Civil War book of sorts. Or kind of a Civil War
book. It’s all kind of with me.
###
Purchase Kind One HERE.
Interviewer bio: Joe Trinkle lives in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Necessary Fiction, Pear Noir!, Atticus Review, HTMLGIANT, and elsewhere. He is the author of White on White, a collection of short stories due out this fall. You can find him on the Internet.
