Bob Hazy

 THIRD-RAIL Book Chat

               SPOILER ALERT

From dark rooms illuminated dimly by flickering laptop screen light, late into the night, we join this fictional interview in progess.  Neal Wagner, Prof. of Computer Science and recent author of WWW: The End of Time, probes Hazy while the two look over the lip of the South Rim....

 
Wagner:  Do you ever worry about getting sued – for using real people in your novel McGhee in the Gloaming?  (I promise I won’t sue you…)  Did you change any other names along the way because you were worried about what they might think?   The novelist Thomas Wolfe (not Tom Wolfe, a different novelist) famously put everything about the people in his hometown into his first novel "Look homeward, Angel".  Later he wrote a novel "you can't go home again" -- a literal truth, since the people he knew were so pissed about his telling all their secrets. 

Hazy:  Ha!  That’s pretty good. And useful. I don’t really expect to get sued. The only thing that would precipitate that is great lucrative success, and I’m not counting on that, either. I didn’t figure you’d be upset about your appearance as the “Math Idiot,” and secretly hoped you’d find it flattering and fun. I think you’ll be remembered (if people ever read it) as a great character of literature. Most of all I wanted YOU to know how much I appreciated those bull sessions in your office, and your friendship over the years. 

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As for the others in the novel, I still wonder if some may be offended. Particularly George (Hector) – one reason I changed the name was to argue to George that I had to exaggerate the tension for dramatic purposes. That section is a bit campy and hyperbolic, mostly because I wanted to show McGhee’s propensity for delusions of grandeur, and what better way than to see himself as Achilles at Troy. It’s the clearest allusion to The Iliad (and Odyssey) in the novel, which supports the overall trope of Ulysses. Oddly, I didn’t quite see it at the time I initially wrote it until my editor pointed out the language modulated there and became hyperbolic. She was suggesting a fix there, but I went the other way and made it more hyperbolic. In the end, she liked it and I did, too. It was a great lesson of revision and the tool it can be. I’d previously seen it as drudgery, to “fix mistakes”, but soon learned it was an opportunity to tune the machine and accentuate themes that were emergent. That sounds like literary crap – sorry – but it did feel that way.  I got lucky that way A LOT throughout the story, BTW. My editor kept pointing out symbolism I was tapping into that was quite simply fortuitous. Case in point: McGhee goes back to Ruby 40 years after his initial visit. Turns out the 40th wedding anniversary is Ruby.  Funny, huh? Not a big thing, but a nice trinket. There are lots of those things throughout, and I think they constellate into the overall trope of the book of ‘constructed life’ and the role of coincidence. 

Wagner:   So when I started into your book, I noticed the chapter order is quite unique. (I know -- not supposed to matter.)  "On the Margin" – your first chapter - from what I understand, came later when you originally wrote it.   Why the change?  What role did revision play in these decisions about chapter order and other aspects of the work? 

Hazy:   Well. As I mentioned, revision became my friend. A few test readers suggested OTM become the first chapter. Drift was written first and had de facto primacy for that reason, but after some debate, I saw the sense of it. The problem was, when I wrote OTM, it was around CH19 or so. In the writing of it, I relied on the precedent of other chapters to make it make sense. Upon replacement as CH 1, I realized that created some issues. Most notably, it didn’t feel like the start of a novel. I added some material to create more “introduction” to the context and characters. In the course of that, I happened to take a nap, and in that nap had that dream: “the blood takes the handle”. I really liked it, and had no idea what it meant, so I added it to OTM. The irony (if that’s what it is) is that I really didn’t know what most of it all meant until around writing the 10th chapter. It was a big leap of faith.  The best part is that the Epilogue really makes OTM make sense (I hope readers have the patience to ever see that). You’ll notice the first line of OTM (and the novel, not counting the Preface and Prologue) is a statement about death. It seems innocuous upon first reading (perhaps), but in the context of the Epilogue makes a lot of sense. I was proud of that.

 

So there were lots of revisions along the way – most chapters, esp. the early ones, needed attention and/or full rewrite. Overall, you’ll find the story the same but there are more connectors between the chapters. There’s less distance between opened questions and resolving answers in subsequent chapters. Generally this worked to my advantage in the new ordering, but this explains much of the chapter reordering. I went through an exercise with my editor trying out alternate orderings. I generally wanted to preserve the writing order (to avoid unforeseen temporal issues). In the end I think about 5 chapters moved much distance, with a few other swaps. Oh, and “the blood takes the handle” does show up again later, briefly. I hope you don’t mind the spoiler.

Wagner:  When Homer told his Odyssey, he didn't make it a story with a straight linear timeline, but interpolated in the various adventures.  The first thing I learned was that stories should rarely be told linearly. If someone were trapped for the winter with McGhee or whomever, he wouldn't tell about his life sequentially.  Each new story would remind him of other stuff, out of sequence.  Random order is a post-modern technique. 

Hazy:   I’ve been noticing that, though it happened organically and of necessity. I had no outline (which pissed off one of my other test readers, who quit, but that’s another story). And I agree about how stories get told. Your insight about being trapped with McGhee is spot on.  People relate their stories as circumstance dictates. And in the context of the Epilogue, it makes even more sense. I also like that the storyline is incomplete. Life is like that. Some might argue readers don’t appreciate that, but I fall back on the notion that McGhee is assembling the best or most significant moments of inflection – the rest doesn’t matter, or is best left to imagination (like a radio play). Ultimately, I think the quilt of it really does support my intended portrait of McGhee as aloof and “in between” the words and events of his tale. He remains elusive. I’m rather surprised it worked as well as it did (not to be immodest). I fear that if I tried to write directly at the subject, it would fall flat. Much like McGhee says of The Great Nebula, you can’t see it if you look straight at it.  Somehow I managed to do that.  I’d also liken it to tacking into the wind. Enough metaphors.

The Preface and Prologue, were late additions, too. The first attempt I had (at both) were not received well by my editor and a few other test readers. They were a bit cryptic and over the top. Late in the game I began introducing the notion of “buffoonery” which I really liked, but my editor had trouble with it. I toned it down, but it remains. There was more of it in the Epilogue, too, though I sanded the edges. Dostoevsky used it with Fyodor in The Bros K and I always loved that. I think of myself as something of a buffoon, but not in the strictly comic sense. I both love and hate humanity in the same instant, and I have an itch when it comes to causing trouble to see what happens. That was Fyodor in a nutshell.  I was also playing with the unreliable narrator trope which Cervantes used to such good effect, so that one never gets a full bead on Hospice McGhee (that’s how I distinguish the book narrator and the Epi narrator). I didn’t mention Cervantes on the book cover, but his is really the broadest envelope of the novel, even circumscribing Joyce. BTW, there’s direct discussion of DQ in Remember the Sea, which reinforces this broad trope in the novel. In Don Quixote, there are several preamble chapters in which the narrator lays out the “definitive” context for the story, only to be repudiated in the subsequent preface, so that the reader is left entirely un-moored to trustworthy narrative. In the end, the whole thing is manufactured (the Preface and Prologue are by McGhee).  I’d also point out, that in plain sight, the chapters are set far into the future from 1991. I’m guessing most readers won’t notice that until the Epilogue where it suddenly makes sense.

My read of that is as follows: given the Epi divulges McGhee’s “true” plight, the reader is likely to feel sorry for him (at first reading), allowing the reader to hold some superiority over the narrative as a survivor (unlike McGhee who is trapped in his impending mortality). By doing this, McGhee is able to maintain perspective OVER his readers, thus stealing their primacy in his narrative. That may seem like crap, but I like it. His game is true immortality, and by virtue of this shell game I think he achieves it.

Wagner:  NPR recently reviewed the novel Dear Mr. M, by Herman Koch which supposedly has your layers on top of layers, where nobody's account can be trusted. It’s about a novelist who wrote a famous novel, mostly inspired by true events. But how true are they?

Hazy:  I love that concept. It has a long literary tradition.  I just hope someone discovers my novel and it’s not lost to time. We’ll see, but it reminds me, despite its uncertain future as a commercial venture, that I wrote the book I was meant to write, and did it justice. I can hardly believe it. So like that salmon, I can flop ashore and know I did the part I could.

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Bob Hazy and Neal Wagner are both newly published fiction writers.  Bob Hazy’s McGhee in the Gloaming , self-published on June 16, 2016, and Neal Wagner’s WWW: The End of Time, self-published on June 22, 2016 are both available on Amazon.com or CreateSpace.com, Kindle versions, too.

To read more about McGhee in the Gloaming, see Bob’s website:  http://bobhazy.wixsite.com/mitg

To read more about Neal’s novel, check it out here.