Author Interview: Matt Bell
The author of A Tree or a Person or a Wall on “the acoustic properties of prose” and more
Some nights when our sleep is broken we wake up to the black-grayness of a temporarily unfamiliar room. In these moments, our solitude is punctuated, and we might perceive a magnet falling off the fridge, a book slipping off a pile of other books, or headlights hitting the overhead fan as something frightening, unreal. The normal is augmented and then abnormal. Is what I’m witnessing what woke me up? But, I’m experiencing it, now.
Matt Bell’s fiction resides in this thin film between the dream and the real. Fiction often asks us to “suspend” something, but Bell’s work is suspended. His debut novel, In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, was met with critical praise and attempts to categorize Bell’s writing — is it dreamlike myth-making, fable, speculative genre stuff, or just “Beyond Measurable Time and Space”?
Whatever else it is, it is moving — emotionally moving, yes, but also conceptually and at the sentence level in motion. The in-between worlds of Bell’s short fiction — recently collected in A Tree or a Person or a Wall, or his stunning second novel Scrapper, released the year prior, do not have a single seed of easy wisdom to give us. Instead, they open up an instructive, unsettling abyss.
I spoke with Matt Bell about story assemblage, language, and more, below. He reads at Literati on November 2nd, at 7pm.
A Tree or a Person or a Wall collects over ten years’ worth of short fiction, and includes revised work from the previously published collection How They Were Found and the novella Cataclysm Baby, as well as seven new stories. Aside from (certainly, rightfully!) reissuing your early, harder-to-come-by publications, was there some forethought in having this collection follow your first two novels on Soho? Did it feel like time to revisit these shorter works?
Cataclysm Baby went out of print (because its publisher quit the business) just as In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods was coming out, and so those first two books and what to do with them sort of naturally became part of my discussion with my editor at Soho about what was coming next. I think initially we discussed some other plans, like possibly rereleasing those stories as they were or as ebook-only volumes, but in the end they became bundled in a two-book deal with Scrapper, with the idea that I would write new stories to accompany them in a new volume. I’m really glad that’s the direction we went, as in many ways by then I felt like the “project” of How They Were Found and Cataclysm Baby was continuing to expand, and that new stories I was writing were in conversation with those earlier works. A Tree or a Person or a Wall ends up collecting about ten years of stories, and I think they hang together as a sustained project written over that time, even though they’re all meant to stand alone as well.
Though the collection culls from a substantial body of work, it is not ordered as a ‘retrospective’ or as a simple re-issuing. The table of contents isn’t a rote chronology of publication up to the new work, or assembled by any other extra-textual consideration. And much like the stories themselves, there aren’t ready-made guideposts for the reader, signaling the internal logic behind each section’s suite of stories. The first section seems to deal exclusively with traumas of childhood and young adulthood, and yet the progression through the remaining sections doesn’t then, say, linearly follow the age of the protagonists. Each section seems thematically self-contained but not obvious, each builds on and progress from the last. I worry readers sometimes forget that there is a deliberate and deeply considered order to short story collections, just as there is with poetry collections. But in revising and cataloging past work (and, notably, leaving some stories out) while also creating a singular collection, I’m curious — what did that process look like?
I really appreciate how much time you spent considering the structure of the book, which was really important to me. One guiding idea was to be sure to mix in the new and the old together: most of the sections are a mix of previously uncollected stories and stories from How They Were Found, where I wanted to make the older stories fresh in part by arranging them beside new work, in the same way that a museum might change the way you see a painting by moving it to a new place in the gallery. That seemed like one way to prize the experience of readers who might have read the previous books.
I also firmly believe that a collection of stories should have an arc of some kind, creating an emotional or intellectual or moral journey through the book, even though the pieces might not be linked in any more obvious way. One way to create that is to first create smaller arcs between stories, and then to arrange those mini-arcs into a whole. But I do think that there are “gaps” between the sections, and I hope that those are reasonable too: when a reader asks, “How does this flow from that?”, they’re also doing some of the logical work of putting together the whole. How they answer that question — even if it’s only subconsciously asked — will be part of how they own the experience of the book. It’s a thrill to have readers find their own way through the experience, and I’m happy to give up some control to create that chance.
Allow me this weird aside: I often listen to a single album or artist or composer while reading, which for whatever reason I find greatly increases my ability to focus and resist distraction. Occasionally, it leads to the two things — book and particular musical accompaniment — becoming indelibly and sometimes hauntingly linked. Last year, while reading your novel Scrapper, I would listen to — on repeat — the album Love From Dust by Donnacha Costello, an Irish electronic music producer.
After a series of well-received albums of ambient electronic music, Costello mysteriously sold off everything in his studio and ceased making music. Five years later, a rare custom-built analog synthesizer Costello had spent a decade on a waiting list for became available to him. He raised funds online, but not enough — so he settled on a backup, another quite rare and uniquely named piece, the Buchla Music Easel. Love From Dust is composed entirely from Costello’s return to music through this single, briefcase-sized piece of equipment — he “played” and looped it live, and little warts and cracks creep into the subtle melodic repetitions as they build, shift, and then dissipate.
What I want to say — aside from this story being a strange cousin to something that might occur in one of your stories — is that in the fortuitous way these experiences often go, the music was an astounding parallel to your sentence-craft.
Reviewers so often remark upon your sentences. To say that they are deployed identically in every story or novel would be to misread your work, but there are often recognizable hallmarks: a brickwork quality of many simple clausal units, building slowly together, repeating, and gradually shifting. That is — something in the prose is always being built, or built towards, whereas often a writer’s prose has no need to account for itself, or is otherwise presented as a complete, static, and sufficiently maximal language. In Scrapper, even though the world it depicts is the contemporary world, it felt as though Kelly — scavenging an already post-collapse community, was having to reform and rebuild language along with his understanding of his own past trauma, his lost community’s collective memory, and his own morality. The novel’s prose, in close third, is in many ways mimetic of this progression.
What draws you not only to this deployment of language but the worlds it so often oddly refracts — irreal ones, broken ones, our own worlds re-written into myth? You noted that in revising this book “it became clear to me how truly Midwestern even many of the most experimental or non-realist stories were.” I realize it’s difficult to ask an author to account for what might otherwise come natural to them, but there seems to be both a deliberateness to the language and to the place that informs it.
I love that story about Costello, and I’ll have to look into his music: there’s something so productive about working with a constraint like that single piece of equipment, and there’s something truly beautiful about doing it, as he did, on a piece of equipment that is, thanks to his insufficient funding, something of a letdown. How do you make something beautiful out of disappointment or failure? It’s a good question, and one we’re all going to have to answer, sooner or later.
I’m so grateful for your reading of how my prose works, and I love the description of it as something searching, seeking, scrapping. Virginia Tufte talks about “syntactical symbolism” in her great book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, where the shape of a sentence mirrors the action or event or emotion depicted (what my friend Joe Scapellato calls enacting instead of imparting), and I think that’s something I’m drawn to, in a slightly different form: how does the prose of a book mirror or enhance or subvert the content of a book? I also am obviously drawn to the acoustic properties of prose, to play at the level of the sentence and the paragraph.
One perhaps example of the modest Midwesternness of some of my goals here: I had a speech impediment when I was young, and I decided in grad school that I would strike from my writer’s vocabulary most words that I couldn’t say clearly or pronounce confidently. That means that I’m often trying to make lyric language out of fairly ordinary words, and I think that lends it a sort of plain-spokenness even as the language often reaches for a certain kind of poetic effect. The words in my books are mostly the words of my life, even if the voices are exaggerated or invented. Figuring that out was a great help to doing the kind of work I most wanted to be doing.
What are you reading right now, and what do you wish was being written?
This semester, my grad workshop is reading five new novels (and, thanks to the generosity of writers, Skyping with all their authors for a Q&A), so I’m reading and rereading Alexis Smith’s Marrow Island, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special, Anne Valente’s Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, and Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You, on top of many other books. It’s a lucky thing to get to have some interesting and varied work in the classroom. At home, I recently started Anne Carson’s new project Float, which is entrancing so far, as always.
As for what I wish was being written: I’m looking hard for more and better novels about the environment, about the world of animals, about climate change, and also for books that are attempting to deal with complexity well, without reducing it to make story work more easily. I think J.M Ledgard’s Submergence is a great example of the latter, and his Giraffe of the former. I think Tania James’ The Tusk That Did the Damage and Kate Wyer’s Land Beast and the work of Lydia Millet is all doing interesting things in the animal space, and Smith’s Marrow Island is a fascinating book about human response to natural disaster. I think Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island is another excellent model of complexity in fiction, and I’m studying it and these others for what they’re doing. There’s something in their DNA that’s helping point me toward the work I want and need to be doing, and as always I’m so grateful for the brave example of other writers as I try to do my own work, on the page and off.
