An Outtake from BOMB 103, Spring 2008…

In the Spring 2008 print edition of BOMB, Lazar and Sorrentino discuss Sway, Lazar’s second novel. It interlaces fictional accounts of some of the ’60s most iconic headliners: the Rolling Stones, Charles Manson, and Kenneth Anger. In this outtake they discuss the historical novel, not so fictional characters, and art’s dwindling ability to shock.

 

Film still from Invocation of My Demon Brother, directed by Kenneth Anger, 1969. Courtesy of Fantoma Films.

Christopher Sorrentino What are your feelings concerning the nature of the so-called historical novel as a form, about the pitfalls of drawing upon the lives of actual people for fictional material? One thing I noticed while writing Trance was that the research gradually became irrelevant—at some point the models for the people and things in the book became obstacles to writing from an imaginative standpoint. The seductive authority of “the record” became a burdensome invitation to write schematically.

Zachary Lazar I had never done anything like this before, so it was a seat-of-the-pants kind of experience. I discovered that there are so many versions of every story that have nothing to do with each other, that don’t mesh at all. So you first of all end up making these arbitrary choices about which version to believe. Then, on the level of intimate detail, you intuitively make up how a scene might unfold moment by moment. I found it helpful, though, to use the facts as much as I could as a set of rules or limitations to be confined by, just like some people who write poetry in formal ways say that it makes them more, not less creative, if they are hemmed in by a bunch of rules.

CS I respond to what you’re saying about making things up. Having the facts is like having a black-and-white photo of a box that you’re told to interpret: is the box made of wood or cardboard, is it painted three colors or just gray? Inventiveness extends to the level of the individual sentences—

ZL —and that’s the level that matters to me. There’s no point whatsoever for me to do historical fiction, if I’m not going to do the fiction part, making up the sensory details that bring it to life.

CS Do you fool yourself? Was there a time when you were beginning the book and thinking, Well, this’ll be easy; I’ll just draw the connections between all these people, and of course the facts are here at my fingertips to refer to?

ZL Yeah, I fooled myself that way in the very beginning. There was a period of six to nine months where I had no idea what the structure of the thing was going to be. At one point it was going to be set up as a set of oral interviews—

CS Some of that’s retained.

ZL Did you ever read Jean Stein’s book Edie? I love that book and was fascinated by the way it was put together. But trying out different approaches like that led me back to something more traditional, where I could play more to my strengths. You were talking about the different possibilities for what the box itself could look like. To me a portrait is an analogy of the historical novel, a painted portrait that has much to do with the distortions that you bring to it. It’s not about getting a perfect likeness, but a particular kind of likeness.

 

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Somebody’s gotta learn), 1985, pen and ink on paper, 12×9”. Courtesy of Regen Projects.

CS There’s a tendency to fall in love with your research. You find the exact wording of the old commercial, the colors of the major appliances. You want it all. Sway gets that likeness of the ’60s without fetishizing its minutiae. It reads with such a lack of self-consciousness of its setting that it could have been written in the ’60s.

ZL It’s become an obsession of mine to be as concise as I can. I cut a lot of the stuff that gives me the most pleasure in writing, the atmospheric details, the production design. I have pages and pages on clothes and furniture that were cut.

CS You manage to inhabit each character using that close third-person perspective. There are very distinct voices for each, but an overarching tone bind it all together, a conversational quality that smoothes the transitions from the colloquial to the “literary,” from one character to another.

ZL That describes how contemporary American writers are doing literary fiction now. You’re trying to use language that takes some note of the way language is used in ordinary life, but also trying to retain the range of expression and precision you get with more elevated language.

CS Spoken language, high language, the degraded language of advertisements…. We have a vocabulary, a system of references that transcends region, even class. We saw the same shows, listened to the same songs and watched the same news reports.

ZL I remember coming to New York for the first time when I was in college and having a very romantic idea of what I would find here. In fact my friends in college who’d grown up in New York had done the same things that we did in Denver.

CS Well, DeLillo did a lot to rip the quotation marks off all those references to the popular.

ZL He is, for our generation of writers, huge. I was late in getting there because when I went to Iowa we were looking at straight middle-of-the-road kinds of models such as Raymond Carver. I came across DeLillo almost at random and it made an immediate impression, but I didn’t understand how important it was at the time.

CS You suddenly see that there are all sorts of ways to put together a sentence that’s absolutely mandarin in its design, but totally incorrect. And I think it’s beautiful, you know.

ZL I read a lot of Allen Ginsberg when I was writing Sway. I hadn’t looked at Ginsberg in a long time, but he does that too, the broken English that’s used beautifully.

CS A lot of that charged sense of language does generally come from poetry. Williams used language that’s just lying there waiting. Not too many prose writers are interested in taking up that challenge.

ZL Doing something interesting with language is crucial because it’s the one thing you can’t get anywhere else. I love The Sopranos, The Wire and all that. You get amazing stories there, and amazing dialogue. But the interest in language is something that I hope keeps people coming to writing.

CS We were talking earlier about the ability of a work of art to shock—the Stones and their scruffy, androgynous musical miscegenation, about the formally evasive but sometimes campy homoerotica of Kenneth Anger, and—again, with qualifications—the murderous enactments of Charles Manson. Do you think we’ve arrived at the point where even the most provocative, way-out art has a spectator in mind and is aimed at a sophisticated audience with access to a critical vocabulary that nearly always precludes a reaction of shock or revulsion? Nowadays there’s only a critical distance, an inherent irony that has nothing to do with the Bart Simpson brand of irony.

ZL Yeah, the danger of having that armor of irony is that you don’t allow yourself to experience anything before you begin to process it.

 

 

Read the print edition interview of Zachary Lazar by Christopher Sorrentino in BOMB 103, Spring 2008, now available on newsstands everywhere. Subscribe today and receive your FREE copy!