Lennon: My ability to distance myself is primarily a result of my compulsory immersion in the lives of my wife (another writer) and children. I write in a little garden shed in my yard from 9am to 1pm, and for the other twenty hours a day I have to occupy the kids, cook meals, wash dishes, clean and repair things, and so on. I also have a fairly intense music hobby (see www.inverseroom.com ) that I'm able to absorb myself in, which helps recharge my brain for writing. In short, real life is the priority, and writing comes second--but of course without real life, there would be nothing to write about.

As a writer, husband, father, or friend, I have a fairly thick skin--I don't let a bad review or rejected story, or for that matter any kind of stressful household incident or personal slight, get me down for long. But as a citizen of the world, I am painfully sensitive. An altercation in line at the post office, a spate of cold weather, hearing the president's voice on the radio--these things can depress me for days. It is this part of my personality that is channeled most powerfully into my books--you’re right, my characters take everything to heart. I'm not, as a writer, into ennui. I like people to react, and I like observing the particular ways they do it. The book I'm writing now is about how ten characters respond when a wealthy woman attempts to buy their entire town--frankly, it's a bit over the top. I’m going to do something small and simple, after this.

Lieberman: Yes, I've noticed that you enjoy provoking confrontations between your characters. I'm thinking of the scene in Falling Stars where Lars, sweet, hurting Lars, walks into the coffee shop and asks Paul point blank if he has been spying on him. I really admire the way you did that; it was the last thing in the world I expected. Not only did it provide a comic moment (poor Paul couldn't lie his way out of a paper bag), but it set up the later encounter between Lars and Paul, culminating in the wonderfully poignant bowling night with Christine.

I'm wondering whether your characters ever put up resistance as you steer them into danger. You have Jean, in On the Night Plain, asking Grant, "Did you and my sister ever do it?" There they are in her bed, just having "done it," and suddenly the dead sister is in bed with them, and the next minute Max is there too. A page later, Grant is evoking his dead brothers. When I read these pages I was thinking, Can't Lennon allow those two lonely creatures a bit of solace? I'd have liked to see them obliterate their sorrows in some good, uncomplicated sex. Instead the sex just seemed to make them sadder, lonelier, more exposed. Was it hard, taking them there?

Lennon: I think that scenes like that are a lot harder to read than they are to write. Certainly I am emotionally invested in my characters, but, writing about their suffering, I feel sort of like a surgeon who has got to operate on someone in his own family-it’s hard to make the cut, but once you're in there, it's just another triple bypass. I've sometimes wondered about this myself. I am of course greatly moved by good books, and I hope that people are moved by my writing as well, but it isn't like I'm weeping at my desk every day. The process is actually rather clinical, especially in rewrites--and I spend a lot more hours revising than I do writing new things. I do feel the emotions my characters feel, but I feel them in my real life, or I empathize with people I know, or hear about, who are feeling them. When I write about these emotions, I'm describing them, in dramatic form.

So ultimately, my answer is no: it isn't emotionally difficult for me to depict people's pain. The pain I feel personally is the pain of living, which everyone feels; my work is a way of documenting it. As for good, uncomplicated sex--sex is often good, but it's never uncomplicated! And, at the risk of getting a little too personal, it has never obliterated any sorrows for me, either. What it does, I think, is to magnify and focus experience, to offer a brief moment of clarity, perhaps false clarity. If what is being made clear to you is your misery, then sex will not offer much solace. I'm afraid that a lot of us are probably already thinking about our taxes five minutes after coitus.

Lieberman: The heart surgery analogy is apt, although in the case of Mailman, it felt more like a colonoscopy. Afterward it was like the intestines were draining into a plastic bag. Albert's life and death seemed entirely plausible. His sex life (since we've been on the topic) would never be described as uncomplicated, but the details certainly rang true. Reading it might put a person off sex for a while! But the more I read, the more sorry I felt for the other characters in the book, all those people who seemed to exist, as far as Albert was concerned, simply to make his life miserable: don't they deserve more?

Lennon: To be blunt, no--they don't deserve anything, because they're completely fake. You can't be unfair to a person who doesn't exist, and though I am dedicated to treating all real people with respect, I don't feel any such obligation to invented characters. They were created exclusively to express my own observations and questions about human behavior; they are conduits for ideas.

If I have a life philosophy, it is that human existence is short and cruel and extremely funny. My fiction reflects this view. Happiness is something that we are able to feel in spite of, not because of, the facts: that it's cold outside and we're all gonna die. I am one of the happiest people you'll ever meet, but my own mortality, and that of the people I love the best, is never far from my mind. This contradiction is my subject, and I'll venture to say that it's the subject of every great writer I'm trying to emulate. Dostoyevsky, Sterne, Balzac, Joyce, Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth, Alice Munro: none of these people ever cut their characters a break, yet those characters find reasons to continue living.

As for the authenticity of the secondary characters in Mailman--this is of course the problem with the first person or third-limited, everything you get is through the main character's eyes, and if you don't trust him, then you can't trust anything. Mailman is poisoned by his own world view, but then again, he also derives his humanity from it. I can understand a reader finding it difficult (or maybe just annoying) to swim in his particular emotional swamp for 450 pages, but that's the kind of book I wanted to write. The past few years of paranoia, duplicity, and arrogance, beginning with the Clinton impeachment, have taken their toll on me, as they have on all thinking people; and in my case Mailman, a somewhat frustrating book, was the result.

At the moment, I'm too tired to do something like that again, and so my next book is omniscient, and of its ten or so endings, about half are provisionally happy. Let me add, by the way, that I actually LIKE Albert Lippincott. He's highly functional in the face of insurmountable problems, but he faces those problems, and he cares about things. I might have let him be happier, but in order to be happy, he would have had to not care so much about everything--and in order for me to write that sort of book, I would have had to stop caring so much, and I can't do that.

Lieberman: Okay, I can appreciate Mailman as having been idea-driven, and it sounds as if the novel you're currently writing is idea-driven as well. Is this true of your earlier work? I can see Dostoyevsky (and Philip Roth, now that you mention him) as shadow presences behind Mailman, but On the Night Plain made me think of Cormac McCarthy and Jim Harrison, neither of whom strikes me as quite so philosophically minded.

Lennon: I didn't mean to suggest that my fiction is entirely idea-driven. Occasionally a story or novel might be inspired by a concept or theme, but ultimately the story is driven by character and event--and the two are inseparable; characters create events, and events change character. The novel I'm writing is certainly inspired by an idea, but it is populated and driven by characters. Mailman, on the other hand was inspired entirely by the character, and I had to think up stuff to happen to him, and for him to do. This wasn't hard; the character suggested certain problems that it would be interesting to throw at him.

While writing, I do think of my characters as "real" people. I do my best to make them behave the way real people would. But they are inevitably the product of my own world view, expressing, in one way or another, those things I am preoccupied with. Grant Person, in On the Night Plain, is entirely unlike me, but he served as an expression of my own fears about the fragility of my life, and those of my children. Albert Lippincott is a bit more like me--I used him to explore the pitfalls of my own personality. I don't initially conceive of characters as conduits for ideas, but inevitably, during the writing process, ideas pour into and out of them. I actually started and abandoned a quasi-science-fictional novel after finishing Mailman. I gave up because, though the concept of the book fascinated me, the main character never really came together. She existed only to serve the plot, and so remained flat. The new book has several characters strong enough to support the conceptual framework around them, and so I was able to get all the way to the end.

Lieberman: We keep coming back to your tragic world view: your allusion to Hobbes's description of life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (I'm not sure he'd have gone along with the "funny" part; the guy wasn't known for his sense of humor.) But there's also a strong moral current running through all your work, a preoccupation with basic human decency in the face of the world's indifference. This comes across most clearly in The Funnies, a novel that features ordinary people who try to do the right thing. The central character of the book is Tim, the artist who inherits the family business, but the moral center of the dysfunctional Mix family, I think, is Pierce, its least functional member. His way of living on such a small scale--just getting out of bed in the morning, trying not to hurt people--was not conventionally heroic, but you portrayed him with such dignity! By the end, he had achieved a kind of heroism. Tim recognized it, certainly. So maybe there's hope after all?

Lennon: Sure, there's hope! I am personally a very happy person, after all. What I think my entire aesthetic comes down to is that I don't happen to believe in any sort of life beyond this one, and therefore think that the way people treat one another in this life is of enormous importance. Common civility, moral rigor, and appreciation of the bewildering complexity of the world are, to me, the greatest of virtues, and they are the things my characters tend to grapple with. Being an asshole is, on the other hand, a heinous crime--the asshole is a person who poisons what little time other people have on this earth--and striving not to be one is a noble aim, and often very difficult. I like Pierce, too. I think his suffering has forced him to narrow his goals down to only the most vital things, to which he has attached himself with great intensity. He's achieved a sort of tired purity--he’s like a chain-smoking angel.

Lieberman: Your next book, Pieces for the Left Hand, represents yet another departure. It’s a collection of micro fiction--one hundred stories--and you’re composing and performing one hundred songs to go along with them.

Lennon: The short-short collection was an effort to make some productive use of the time during which my older son took his naps--this was a few years ago--and I’ve been tweaking the stories ever since. I think I’m more or less finished with it now. The songs are a stylistically diverse collection of aural haikus. It occurred to me that other genres of artistic endeavor have an "extra-brief" category, but not popular music, so why not see if I could record a hundred by the time the book comes out? I was also inspired by the band They Might Be Giants, who once tried a similar thing, recording fifteen or so super-brief songs and putting them at the end of an album. Twenty are finished so far with twenty more on the way . . . at this rate I should be able to do it. A new one is posted on the web site every week at: http://members.authorsguild.net/jlennon/files/Songoftheweek.mp3

Finally, a friend of mine, the filmmaker Joe Romano, will be filming a movie based on some of the stories over the summer. We're hoping to be able to unleash everything at the same time in 2005, songs and stories and maybe a DVD. More J. Robert Lennon than anyone needs, probably.

Lieberman: Would you be willing to give Web Del Sol readers a preview of Pieces for the Left Hand?

Lennon: You bet!

Meteorite

     For some weeks, talk in our town focused on a meteorite that plunged to earth one morning, interrupting the prayers of the devoutly religious family into whose yard it fell. The meteorite was nearly fourteen inches in diameter, making it an unusually large specimen to have been found intact, and immediately drew the attention of our university's astronomy department.
     One scientist in particular, who specialized in meteors and asteroids, seemed especially eager to examine the meteorite, and began negotiations with the family to acquire it for the university. But the family was unwilling to relinquish the object, despite the small fortune the university was offering to pay for it. It seemed that they assigned to the meteorite some religious significance, and had begun to incorporate it into their devotional activities. Through it, they claimed, they were better able to speak to God.
     At last the university gave up, and for days, little was heard about the meteorite. But a week later, upon returning from church, the family called the police to report it missing. Within hours the meteorite was found in the scientist's lab, where he had begun to subject it to numerous tests. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to a short prison term.
     Remarkably, the scientist's defense consisted of his contention that, despite legal precedents to the contrary, the family did not own the meteorite, that in fact it was in the public domain and had been stolen from the town by the family. Furthermore, he argued, the meteorite was being unfairly subjected to religious beliefs it did not itself hold; it was inherently an object of scientific inquiry, and its belief system was that of science alone. This defense was presented without the assistance of a lawyer.
     The university, appalled by the scientist's actions and his assignation of a belief system to a meteorite, did not renew his contract for the following academic year. The family, on the other hand, has abandoned their faith and begun a new religion based on the meteorite's status as a religious artifact given to them by God. They have moved to the country and are said to have attracted several hundred worshipers to their compound.

Spell

     A woman with whom I sometimes work raised two small children, whose curiosity and perceptiveness made private conversation in their presence difficult, if not impossible. Since she was rarely apart from them, she developed the habit of spelling out certain words, such as d-o-c-t-o-r or c-a-n-d-y, to prevent them from becoming anxious or excited at inconvenient times. Eventually the children grew older and learned to spell, but my colleague continued her spelling habit, now employing it as an educational tool. She subjected the children to impromptu quizzes, asking them to point to the h-o-u-s-e or the s-t-o-p-s-i-g-n, and soon much of her speech around the children consisted of spelling.
     Unfortunately, this habit spread to her speech at the office as well, and persisted long after her children had grown up and moved away. For some years she avoided any speech at all during the workday, or spoke slowly and carefully to prevent lapses. But the habit proved too strong for her, and today she spells with great frequency, presenting a new p-r-o-p-o-s-a-l or buying lunch for a c-l-i-e-n-t. The habit intensifies when she is under stress, and at these times she will occasionally grab a pen and paper and write out what she wishes to say. This compromise does seem to satisfy her urge to spell, and is easier for the listener to comprehend.
     It is not unusual for her business associates to spell back at her, or even, after a long workday, to spell a word or two at home to our spouses, regardless or whether or not we have, or have ever had, children of our own.

Lieberman: Thank you, John. It has been a pleasure talking with you. I’m looking forward to reading Pieces for the Left Hand, and to seeing how you look in the author photo!

Lennon: Thanks, I'll try to surprise you!