Interview: Dan Chaon
Susan Falco
Dan Chaon's work includes the short story collection Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the novel You Remind Me of Me, named one of the best books of 2004 by publications such as Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. His fiction has appeared in journals and anthologies including The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Chaon currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches creative writing at Oberlin College.
In his most recent novel, Await Your Reply, Chaon weaves a taught and tangled web from three separate-but-interconnected narratives. This genre-defying work eloquently sheds light on the nature of identity, transience and loss while simultaneously delving into a treasure-chest of references to horror, noir and suspense. We conducted the following interview, centered around Await Your Reply, via e-mail.
Susan Falco: The non-linear chronology of Await Your Reply left me with a dream-like feeling of infinite repetition, as if time were looping back on itself. This structure reminded me of some of your character Hayden's obsessions: reincarnation, "Strange Loops," and the Fibonacci sequence. What led you to make these choices?
Dan Chaon: I guess the structure itself came first. I work a lot with fragments, and small scenes that start out more or less disconnected, and part of the work of the first draft was figuring out the ways in which they tied up. Hayden's interest in the paranormal seemed to dovetail with the actual process of writing the book. Both of us were trying to discover some secret, mysterious way that all the characters and situations were connected.
I'd say a good three quarters of the writing process, for me, is given over to revision, and rethinking, and looping. Because I do so much layering and reimagining of individual narratives, my novels always seem to have many alternate universes—chapters and character threads that are sometimes radically different—that are coexisting for a long time before I finally get things put together in a final draft. So the idea of reincarnation and strange loops is almost a description of the way the novel came to be.
I thought a lot about the book I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. He says:
And yet when I say "strange loop," I have something else in mind—a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by "strange loop" is—here goes a first stab, anyway—not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out.
I feel like that's kind of a good description of my own writing process.
SF: Did the complexity of working with multiple interwoven narratives change your writing process in any interesting ways?
DC: The truth is, a lot of my work has been focused on multiple narratives, so it actually comes pretty naturally and easily to me. When I'm working on a short story, I usually start with a few images that seem connected to me, and I move from those images toward some kind of small (often mysterious) scene, and then I move from the scene toward the larger structure and character development and so forth.
When I'm working on a novel, I tend to do the same thing—extrapolate from small bits—so that individual moments begin to accrue like a collage and eventually take on some kind of shape and connection.
The real challenge for me, in both stories and novels, seems to be that I have difficulty working with straightforward chronological narrative. I very seldom write things that take place in long scenes, or that follow a single narrative arc toward a climax, and I feel kind of ashamed of that in a way. I promised myself that my next novel would be really focused on a single character, single time-frame, but honestly I don't know if I have the brain for that kind of story. It's embarrassing.
SF: Await Your Reply touched on some of the universal images and themes from horror: the ghostly hand, the evil twin. Were there any elements from pop culture that inspired or influenced this piece?
DC: I talk a little bit in the acknowledgements of the book about how Await Your Reply is a kind of love letter to the works of suspense and horror and dark fantasy that I loved as a kid, and I was definitely aware that I wanted to play around with images and archetypes from those genres—so there are nods throughout to Hitchcock, and Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury, and Ira Levin, and Thomas Tryon, and many other greats that I adored.
I knew from the beginning that part of the collage of the book was going to involve as many of these kinds of archetypes as I could work with. I'm an avid consumer of horror movies, comic books and scary stories, and I have a particular fondness for "True Tales" of the paranormal and supernatural and uncanny. There's a British magazine called Fortean Times: The World of Strange Phenomena that I have long subscribed to and that I think is incredibly awesome.
In a similar vein, I think I was definitely influenced by TV shows like "The X-Files" and "Lost" that have this underpinning of mysterious "uncanny" mythology. I was obsessed with both of those shows, the way that they introduced these compelling unanswered questions and strung us along with them, and I was also aware of how much smaller those shows began to seem when they were forced (by demanding fans) to begin to answer the questions that they'd posed.
So at the same time that I like the pop culture versions and archetypes, I'm also really interested in the way things can be left unresolved as well—the way that clues and hints can lead into more mysteries—and so I was drawn to the work of people like Cortazar and Borges, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, etc. Stuff that played with elements of horror and SF and yet didn't get entrapped by the conventions of the more traditional aspects of those narratives. For that reason, one of my favorite horror movies is "The Blair Witch Project." I even have the faux Blair Witch "non-fiction" book.
SF: Hayden's philosophy, which he refers to as "The Ruin Lifestyle," seems to center around the transience of identity as well as identity theft, hacking and fraud. What first sparked your interest in identity theft?
DC: I wasn't really that interested in identity theft, per se. I did a lot of research on the various major cases and techniques of identity thieves, but I actually found the mechanics of it to be pretty boring.
Hackers themselves, on the other hand, are really interesting to me. I spent a lot of time lurking on various hacker message boards, and that was where the term "ruin lifestyle" first came up.
There's a point near the end of the book when Ryan thinks: "you could be anyone."
That statement has, on the one hand, a kind of American Dream hopefulness: if you try hard enough, you can make yourself into whatever kind of person you want to be! You're free to become whatever makes you happy.
And on the other hand, there's a kind of nihilistic aspect to it, too. "You" are just a construct, and the idea of a self is just a costume that you can slip on and off.
A lot of hackers are excited by this—by the spirit of mischievous destruction, by the sometimes cruelly hilarious ways that "trolls" can disrupt solemn discussions and cause chaos, more or less without having to face any personal consequences. By the idea that the old ideas of identity are being dissolved by virtual reality.
And yet, at the same time, there are still, for most of them, some kind of code of honor. They aren't merely sociopaths. (Or not for the most part.) The desire for anarchy has some kind of moral underpinning, as well, in a lot of cases, and so while they are reveling in the freedom that one can get from these transient identities, they are also very much engaged in this old-fashioned version of "self-discovery." What do I believe? What makes me an individual? What makes me unique? I don't feel like many of them are willing to cast that off entirely.
I find myself really moved by the weirdly utopian aspects of "The Ruin Lifestyle"—complete freedom from responsibility, from self, from attachment to place or persona or community—which is a kind of Wild Wild West fantasy, like Huck Finn "lighting out for the territories."
At the same time, because we're mortal, because we're trapped in a finite stream of time, that kind of freedom is a chimera. We have to make choices, and most of those choices are irrevocable. We don't get to start over, they way you can in a video game. No matter how much we struggle, however much we want to be free from the chains, each of our actions binds us more and more firmly to a single self. We become the sum of what we do.
SF: I heard that you worked as a DJ for a while before you got your MFA. Are there any ways in which music influences the way you think about writing?
DC: I was working as a DJ in the early days of sampling and mash-up and remix, and I was really fascinated by the way that elements of a song could be recombined to recreate a completely new experience. The more layers and contrasts you could get, the better. These days, the technology has advanced to the point that the old method of a couple of turntables and mixing board seems hopelessly primitive, but the idea artists like Girl Talk and DJ Earworm are working with is still the same: that individual songs are building blocks that can be deconstructed and rebuilt to create a new creature, separate from the sum of its parts.
I think that my interest in collage and editing really started with my work as DJ, and that I've tried to bring some of that aesthetic to my fiction—with mixed results, of course, but I still like the idea.
SF: Do you have any new projects in the works that you'd like to tell us about?
DC: I have a new short story collection pretty much completed, but first I am contractually obliged to publish another novel, so that's what I've been focused on recently. I have a lot of things I'm playing around with, but nothing I'm ready to talk about.
I've also been working on a television pilot—which is kind of about zombies. And I've been working with a producer and director on a film version of You Remind Me of Me, which I hope will be filming in the next few months. We'll see.