Fluxblog Interview With Bryan Charles!

Reading Bryan Charles‘ Grab On To Me Tightly As If I Knew The Way is like falling through a time warp back to 1992. Without seeming forced or remotely kitschy, he evokes minute details of life in the early 90s from the perspective of an aimless seventeen year old recent high school graduate in Kalamazoo, Michigan with poignancy, wit, and an unsentimental sort of poetry. It’s a remarkably confident debut novel, and one of my favorite fictional works from the year thus far. In this interview, we talk a bit about the book, his writing process, the appeal of the ’90s, and our favorite rock band, Pavement.

Matthew Perpetua: Is this your first novel? It’s know that it is your first published book, but is the first book you’ve completed?

Bryan Charles: Yeah, this is my first novel, the first book I ever tried to write. I never attempted to write anything longer than about six thousand words, that’s about longish short-story length, before that. And as far as novels go, Grab isn’t a particularly long one.

MP: How long were the characters and story ideas kicking around in your head before you got to actually write the book?

BC: Quite a while, actually. In the case of Helene, the main female character, as far back as the summer of 1992, which is when a meeting very much like the one in the early pages of the book took place. I was seventeen, I had just graduated high school and I went to band practice, where I happened to meet a girl with scars on her arms who was reading Naked Lunch and told me it was her Bible. Something about that meeting I never forgot, always kind of drifted back to, and in about 1998, I wrote a story about the encounter called “Scars.” It was very bare bones, just a few pages; neither of the characters even had names at that point. It was just a guy and a girl talking. Much later, in the summer of 2001, after having given that short piece more thought, I went back to it and expanded it and it blew up to about twenty pages. That’s when the characters of Vim and Helene really took shape. I was in grad school at the time and a teacher of mine said she really liked the characters and the voice of the story and encouraged me to try and take them further, and so I did.

MP: I was wondering how much of Helene was based on fact, because so much of that character is so well observed and specific, and she reminded me of two or three people I’ve actually known. How much of Vim is autobiographical for you?

BC: Well, Vim’s story is essentially my own and the book’s main plot points (inasmuch as there actually is a plot) are certainly true. My parents divorced when I was quite young and I grew up and got very into music and played in bands and was hung up a lot of the time on unattainable girls, etc. Beyond that, I invented many of the specific situations and various other peripheral characters. It’s funny you say that about Helene because she’s actually a composite of two or three people that I’ve known over the years. No one like that really existed for me at that time in my life, at least in the way that it’s described in the book.

MP: Was there any reason aside from actually growing up in the early 90s and the book being semi-autobiographical that the story takes place in that time? Your presentation of that era is pretty key to the character of the story, and you’re evoking a lot of concrete details that are easy to forget when you think of the period now, but really put you back in time when you read it. Are you nostalgic about the era?

BC: You know, I am farily nostalgic for that era. And maybe that’s typical, maybe it just goes with getting a little older and looking back and feeling a kind of romanticized fondness for a certain time, like someone who was my age in the mid-70s looking back on the 60s or something. But it really does feel to me like that was a special time, in a lot of ways perhaps more magical than much of what came after it, musically, culturally, politically, everything. There’s a reason Slanted and Enchanted still gets heavy play on my stereo, and it’s not because I’m so out of touch.

Pavement “Angel Carver Blues/Mellow Jazz Docent (Live)” (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

MP: You named the book after a Pavement lyric, right? From “Angel Carver Blues/Mellow Jazz Docent.” Was there any particular reason for that?

BC: Well, Pavement is my all-time favorite band in the history of music. And I’ve just always loved that line. For a while–for two whole years, actually–the book had a different title. It was called Stay Cool Forever. And as time wore on and I got deeper into the book and closer to the end and I saw how things were going to go down, Stay Cool Forever seemed somehow too jokey, too sarcastic. So I axed it and almost immediately that Pavement line came into my head and seemed to evoke precisely the mood I was going for in the book.

Dinosaur Jr. “Pond Song” (Click here to buy it from Merge Records.)

MP: Pavement doesn’t actually seem to get mentioned in the book nearly as much as Dinosaur Jr., who you have Vim openly immitating. Is that another big band for you, or did it just make more sense for that to be Vim’s thing?

BC: Dinosaur Jr. was a huge band for me then. I mean, I was obsessed. And the only reason Pavement didn’t get more play in the book is because I was trying to stay strictly true to the chronology, and I didn’t actually get into them until my freshman year of college, which would have been 92/93. I did eventually become fully obsessed with Pavement and I suppose the reason that love didn’t fade like with Dinosaur Jr.–or even Nirvana, for that matter–is because there’s more to work with in those songs, I think, there are more emotional dynamics. Dinosaur Jr. or Nirvana are terrific visceral experiences but Pavement–the whole Stephen Malkmus catalog, really–taps into something else.

MP: I agree. I’m constantly amazed by how much new I find in Pavement songs that I’ve known since I was 14, and how I’m either still getting the same thing out of them as I did when I first heard them (like, say, “Raft” and “Easily Fooled” which I just discovered are still wonderful ‘I’ve got a crush’ songs in spite of some pretty weird lyrics), or songs I wasn’t way into then have this whole new life for me now that I’m older, like with “Father To A Sister of Thought” or “We Dance.”

How much influence have musicians like Malkmus had on your writing style? I can detect a certain flair for unexpected language and similes.

BC: That’s a good

question and I’m sure the influence is there. I mean, in terms of sheer language I do like to keep things either charged-up or slightly off-kilter or just interesting in some way, as interesting as I can make it. I had one early review of the book, a not particularly complimentary review, say that I obviously spent a lot of time fussing around with my prose. Which seems to me to be the only way to do it. Because I’m very much against the novel as merely a vessel for information, some kind of perfectly true, perfectly bland realistic experience. As far as the Malkmus influence, it’s strange and maybe has worked on me in ways I don’t even realize. One of my favorite periods in literature is the New York School in the 50s, poets like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, whom I particularly like, to the extent that I’d call him one of my favorite poets. Now, I got into Ashbery in an undergrad workshop. We weren’t talking too much indie rock there. And years later I read some article about Stephen Malkmus and one of the things he mentions is an interest in John Ashbery. So everything feeds off everything else, I guess.

MP: You mentioned that you’ve been in bands, and you’ve written music. How is the experience of writing prose different for you? Were there ever points in writing the book where you felt like “oh man, this feeling would be so much easier to express with a guitar”?

BC: Oh yeah, all the time. Because there are places that music can reach that literature will simply never be able to. I love Jimi Hendrix, he’s one of my favorites, and I will never, ever find the feeling I get listening to “Little Wing” in some book. As far as comfort level goes, I’m more comfortable with prose these days, but only because I feel out of practice with songwriting. I still play guitar pretty much every day but not really to write anything and songwriting is like any kind of writing, you’ve got to do it a lot to get good. That said, there are times even now that I wish I could throw the draft of the novel I’ve been working on out the window and pick up my guitar and try and write something really good that, at the very most, stretching my abilities to their very limits, would take up no more than four minutes of your time.

“All the Young Hessians” is a song I wrote with a band I was in called So This is Outer Space and I included in the book sort of for my and my bandmates’ amusement, but also because I felt at the time that it was a pretty good effort, a pretty solid three-to-four-minute pop song. Now, obviously, I have some issues with it, the biggest one being my voice, which I’ve never been totally comfortable with.

The back story here is that I’d never planned on singing anything. I learned how to play guitar and thought I’d try and join a band and then finally, my senior year of high school, a guy came up to me and asked if I knew how to play the Dinosaur Jr version of “Just Like Heaven.” I told him I did and he asked if I’d come over and show the guys in his band how to play it, since they were thinking of covering it. So I did, I went and showed them. But then none of those guys wanted to sing it so they asked if I’d do that too. I said okay and thought it’d be just a one-shot deal but that’s how I joined the band that became the basis for the Judy Lumpers.

But Vim was supposed to be fumbling his way toward some more accomplished songwriting and that’s what I always thought “Hessians” represented for me, a leap of some kind. Maybe not a huge one, but a leap. Obviously there’s a heavy Weezer influence. It was eight years ago now so bear that in mind.

MP: Are you working on another novel now?

BC: Yeah, I’ve been working on a new novel for about the last seven months. And I’d been thinking about it and making notes for about six months before that. Writing Grab felt at times pretty anxious and aimless and so far this new project is a much more focused, slightly easier effort. The key word being “slightly.”

MP: Is it odd to have to revisit this book so much now that it’s actually coming out and you have to promote it? I’ve always wondered what it must be like for artists who have to go out and work a book or an album or a movie when they’re invested in another project.

BC: It’s very odd. I finished this book in August of 2004 and I’d been hammering away at it for three years, through what felt like twenty different incarnations of my emotional self, to put it in slightly new-agey terms. There was a period during the copyediting process when I never wanted to lay eyes on it again. But it gets fun again and you get jazzed about certain things like when the galleys come in and then you finally see the finished book and realize that other people being will be seeing it with new eyes, they’ll be approaching it with a new energy, and I’ve tried to tap into that.

MP: Ha, and then you’ll have to go through an even weirder process if it gets turned into a movie! Have you thought about how the book would translate as a movie? It’s definitely not the sort of book that seems like a modified screenplay. So much of the appeal is based on an interior monologue that’s pretty much unfilmable, but I can definitely see someone wanting to adapt it.

BC: Just after it sold, about a year ago now, there was a flurry of interest from film people. It was all very abstract. I never knew exactly who these people where or how they found out about my book, but it fizzled after a pretty intense two weeks or so. Which is just as well, to be honest with you, because all that stuff sent me into tailspins of anxiety–selling the book and hearing from my agent about movie people–and I was constantly sweating and borderline hyperventilating. But I’d be flat-out lying if I said I never thought about how the book would look as a movie or didn’t have daydreams about who would be on the soundtrack. I agree with you that parts of it might be trickier to film, but if someone wanted to try I’d be pretty ecstatic.

MP: It’s odd how film adaptation is this major (and sometimes strangely legitimizing) thing for people in books, whereas it’s really hard to imagine anyone who works in music or fine art thinking about their work being a source material for a completely different artform that’s higher up in a hierarchy of public interest and profitability.

BC: I seem to remember Paul Thomas Anderson talking about how he wrote Magnolia to be a kind of visual Aimee Mann mixtape, something about how he listened to her music and wrote that movie. And her stock shot through the roof when that movie came out and she did achieve a kind of “legitmacy” as a songwriter that she hadn’t had before that. And that’s certainly true in the book world, as you point out. It’s like instant cred and if you’re lucky, a lot of dough. I was working in this office when I sold my book and, you know, some people there were pretty excited. “Oh, congratulations, that’s great.” But when I told them about movie people calling they were instantly like, “Wow, this is it, you’re going to be famous. Please remember the little people.” Their interest jumped to a whole other level. But here I am, still unfamous, and I remember their names.

NYC readers should note that Bryan Charles will be reading selections from the book at the The Reader’s Room on Monday, June 12, 7 PM @ Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction, Second Floor 34 Avenue A, between 2nd & 3rd Streets.