Drawing by Sarah Tillman from page 111 of The People of Paper (McSweeney’s Books, 2005). Courtesy of the artist.

Salvador Plascencia met with me in July at my home in South Pasadena, a suburb just beyond the sprawl called the city of Los Angeles, to talk about our favorite writers and the loss of myth in our post-everything world. He has an easy-going Southern California neo-Latino vibe quite unexpected from the author of The People of Paper, his dazzling first novel of hyperfiction. TPoP ’s vivid chorus of characters—a heartbroken man who creatively sears his skin to relieve his pain; a brilliant origami surgeon who creates paper women of desire; a tattooed gang-banger named Froggy who leads a war against the planet-god Saturn—inhabit pages designed with clever die-cuts, gang graffiti, text-obscuring black boxes, and Mexican lotería cards. As we talked, I could see the bright green eyes behind Plascencia’s glasses; they give away the intelligent imagination that created that miraculous world.

Toward the end of TPoP, Plascencia writes that Merced de Papel, the surgeon’s supreme creation, dies in a car accident on a rainy street in Los Angeles. While her soul takes the form of an origami swan, her paper body dissolves into pulpy shreds that flow down the street “into the anonymity of gutters.” Plascencia’s plural textuality is symbolized by the watery dissolution of a character, because buried deep in TPoP ’s intricate signification is the fact of life’s sheer transience. As we read along, we know we are witnessing the conscious creation of a novel, yet we allow ourselves to be pulled into the ruse because the ruse is so beautiful, so true, and so fleeting.

After I turned the tape recorder off, Plascencia and I talked for a bit about being Latino in a world that seems to become more Latino by the day, and about the toxic effect of immigration politics, and then, as he got up to leave, Plascencia said, “Sometimes I wonder if all I’ll ever have in me is this one book.” I replied, “It’ll be hard to top, but then we’re always trying to outdo our own best work, aren’t we?” He gave me an enigmatic smile, we exchanged goodbyes, and then he was off into the summer evening of another smoggy Los Angeles day.

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BOMB 98/Winter 2007