For
the last several years Michigan’s Paul Toth has done our state
proud. A wonderfully clever writer, with a keen, unflinching eye,
Toth has published numerous short stories, was nominated for the
Pushcart Prize and a Best American Mystery Story, and this
July will release his second novel, Fishnet, from Bleak House Books
(Paul’s critically acclaimed first novel, Fizz, was
published in 2003, also by Bleak House.) Fishnet is
a mystical tale of love and longing set in the fictional city of
Mercy, California, where protagonist Maurice Melnick, hoping to
recapture his wife’s affection—and recall the reason
he first fell in love with her—sets out to paint her smile
as he remembers it from some 20 years ago. The process only
leads to further complications and revelations in Toth’s ingeniously
constructed novel.
Ann Arbor Paper: Let’s start with your most
recent project, Fishnet. The construct of the narrative
is a perfect progression from Fizz, a bit more post-modern
yet clearly Toth-esque. Why don’t you tell us a bit about
how you got into the novel, where the voice and idea for the book
came from.
Paul Toth: After Fizz, I knew I wasn’t
finished with the identity issue, the idea that the self is a watery
world that one can never grasp. In fact, I’m not sure I’ll
ever be finished with that theme, or it with me. Anyway, at
some point, I locked onto the image of a woman’s smile at
the exact moment before its transition from the middle to later
years. It could just as easily have been a man’s smile,
except I find a particular beauty in a woman’s smile when
it reaches that point. Let me provide two famous examples:
Patricia Heaton and Lorraine Bracco. They both possess this
smile.
I then imagined a man married to such a woman. He realizes
the smile’s significance: time is moving fast. Adding to his
dilemma, he swims low in his imagination, avoiding life’s
most difficult moments. His instinct is to continue swimming
low, but he knows his marriage is getting away from him. So
does his wife. Their younger selves tug their sleeves: “Hey,
remember me? You forgot I existed, but I’m still here,
and I’m not too thrilled at the moment.” Meanwhile,
the town in which they live is on the ghost march, too. Fishnet
is a folktale for adults. It’s short and, if read before
sleep, will induce pleasant dreams.
A2P: Give us a sense of what your wife thinks of the book,
insofar as the wife in Fishnet drives the story in many ways.
PT: Actually, it’s her favorite of my books. Luckily,
I aimed the autobiographical potshots at myself; I tend to swim
low. The only similarities between the Sheila of Fishnet
and my wife Kathryn are pointed reminders that something called
life exists and cannot always be edited, revised or reimagined. Still,
I think we must try to edit, revise and reimagine life. Otherwise,
I’m not sure it’s worth living. Kathy brings me
back to earth, and hopefully I occasionally take her for a spin
in the UFO.
A2P: You are a writer who composes in many genres—mystery,
literary fiction, fantasy. Does the genre come first or do
you come up with an idea and then see which genre works
best?
PT: I like to mix genres. It’s nothing new to
say, but I think of myself as a collagist, and so I beg, borrow
and steal, as necessary. Some stories end up in almost pure
genre form, most often a crime tale. Far and away, however,
stories end up somewhere in between, which can make life difficult. That
is, the lit crowd smells genre, the genre crowd smells lit, and
both lose their appetite. I’m looking for those with adventurous
taste buds. I really don’t see the point in repeating
recipes, unless you’re the Nabokov of cooks.
A2P: You are one of those serious writers who tapped in
early on to on-line journals where you’ve published a good
deal. Can you speak a little about on-line journals, their
strengths and stigmas and what role you see them playing in today’s
market.
PT: I find some of the best writing online. The
better online journals—and, of course, many should be avoided—are
as discriminating in the positive sense as prestigious print outlets,
yet remain more open to new voices. Incest in publishing is
unavoidable; we’ve all been on the Jerry Springer Show,
you might say. But the incest seems less rampant online. On
the other hand, with a few exceptions, the best of the literary
journals still give more of a career boost. On my third hand,
I really wouldn’t know; they seem to not only turn up but
throw their noses at me. I’ve got a collection of noses,
if you need one.
A2P: Your writing, regardless of which genre you
are in, reveals—at least to me—flashes of Italo Calvino
with a mix of early T.C. Boyle. Who are some of your influences
and who are you reading now?
PT: Last thing I read was DeLillo’s
White Noise. A little late, I realize, but my reading
is all over the place. Calvino is certainly in the mix of influences,
along with J.G. Ballard, Stanley Elkin. I usually fall for an original
voice and a new vision, something that allows me to go back to the
world with a different perspective. In other words, writing
that reflects the world rather than reimagines it tends to bore
me. If you can reflect the world and reimagine it, well, then, you’ll
hear me saying your name all the time. Here’s one: Stephen
Wright. Not the comedian.
A2P: I know you are quite prolific. As I understand
you write some 20 stories and a novel a year—a mind-boggling
amount to me—how do you do it?
PT: Well, I’ve slowed, and, I’m sure,
wisely so. I felt pushed to make up for lost time, but then
I realized one can lose time by rushing unfinished parts off the
assembly line. There’s a Flint, Michigan, reference for
you. I tend to write about 500 words a day, sometimes more,
rarely less, especially while working on a novel. I also used
to write stories while at work on a novel, but that’s fallen
off a bit. A result of age. I still have energy, but I have to direct
it in one direction. These days, I can’t splatter like
Jackson Pollack. Sometimes more paint sticks if you throw less.
A2P: Kafka, or so they say, was loathe to rewriting.
When you finish a piece, do you simply move on to the next or are
you ever drawn back in order to reconstruct a story?
PT: Fishnet went through more revisions
than I care to remember. Fizz was fast because it was mainly
a matter of getting into Ray’s character. Once I had his voice
down, I just went with it, though there was still extensive
editing in getting that voice to the right cartoon pitch. Sometimes
the stories flow, sometimes not. I’m revising more these
days, but I’ve never gone the Kerouac route. I might
use an “automatic writing” technique to get going on
a particularly cold day, but that all gets deleted once I find a
direction out of the scribble. I’m too much of a control
freak to get that Zen about writing.
A2P: Since this issue of the Ann Arbor Paper focuses on Michigan,
why don’t you tell us a bit about how being from Michigan
affects your writing.
PT: I would say, especially being from Flint, that I’ve always
had a class consciousness, not necessarily in a polemical way, but
just the odd confrontations between different viewpoints. I
find a lot of humor in those juxtaposed viewpoints, their utter
incongruity, and that certainly stems from growing up in Flint.
Here’s one example. I once worked a day in a screw factory
(that’s about all they could stand of me), and a woman told
me, “You’ll learn more here than you will in four years
of college.” Well, she had a point, one I learned when
the foreman showed up with a bucket of my useless screws. Also,
northern Michigan, seen on family trips or less-innocent treks with
friends, played into my love for rivers. Many of my favorite
novels involve rivers. There’s something about a river;
obviously, it’s nothing unique to me, but something that I’m
sure was amplified by growing up in this state.
A2P: Tell us a bit as well about growing up in
Michigan, what city you’re from and how you wound up where
you are now.
PT: As mentioned, I grew up in Flint, on the north
end. When I was young, that was Leave it to Beaver territory,
but then came white flight, and we were amongst the last to leave. This,
no doubt, plays into some of the racial elements of Fizz
and many of my stories. My family ended up in a suburb on the
other side of town, now undergoing the same transition. In
my twenties, I moved to Los Angeles, then later to D.C. and Denver.
I returned to Flint by mistake, actually, after finding out New
York cost a bit more to inhabit than I had in my pocket. I
met my wife, got down to working—for want of anything better
to do—and came to tolerate if not love life in Flint. Don’t
get me wrong; some great people live here, and they’re always
trying. But the pull of economic transformation is, I’m afraid,
stronger than the will of those left behind by it. It’s
a story you can see all over America. Later, when one third-world
nation’s labor force is abandoned for another’s cheaper
labor force, I suppose we’ll see it keep moving. And
white flight won’t end until the penguins have been chased
off the Arctic even as all the air conditioning brings the temperature
back down to penguin standards.
A2P: Fizz was set in the Midwest while Fishnet could not be further
removed. Was this a conscious decision or did you simply accommodate
what the story required?
PT: A bit of both. The city in Fizz wasn’t directly based
on Flint, but I did have a run-down industrial town in mind. I imagined
the kind of place in which a graphic comic artist would plop the
world’s most forgotten boy. I suppose Fishnet moved to California
because I have good memories of the place, hazy with sunlight, things
like riots and incredibly botched relationships filtered out. I
went back there, in my mind, and swam, this time with a boy who
had forgotten the world.
A2P: Give us some insight into your routine as
a writer.
PT: Typically, I wake up, slam Diet Coke and coffee,
read the headlines, catch up on e-mail, and then, when the fuzz
clears, get to work on the next passage. I usually write until I
have a faint but not complete idea of what will come next, and then
stop. I may type some notes about the next day’s work or developments
farther down the line. I then go back and edit the current chapter,
back and forth, every day, until that chapter is nearly complete.
Then I try to decide if everything is in place, or if perhaps that
chapter needs to be moved up or back, or preceded or proceeded by
something I hadn’t planned. Then I reread the day’s
passage. That’s it, except any ideas that occur throughout
the rest of the day are planted on my beloved index cards, consulted
as necessary. I’m also in school, so the remainder of my time
is divided between reading and a few freelance activities. The
current novel, I should mention, is part of my study. Barring
readings and that kind of thing, my schedule is reasonable, though
it will eventually give way to certain realities.
A2P: Knowing as we do that few of us are able to
make a dollar writing, what do you do to pay the rent?
PT: L-O-A-N-S. School was in part, but only in
part, a way to finance a few more years of complete devotion to
writing. When this process is complete, and I’m again employed,
I’m sure the word “gainfully” will only apply
to the banks now providing those loans.
A2P: I know you have an interest in film.
Any thoughts to ever turn one of your stories or novels into a movie?
PT: I’m certainly open to the idea..
I’ve toyed with screenplays, but I would have to be approached
first, having learned enough about the odds. The spec screenplay
is beyond my capacity for hopefulness. I do occasionally write
short scripts, and a couple have been made into films, one based
on the first chapter of Fizz, the other on a short story.
That’s a labor of love, and the labor is so much briefer than
the term of a full-length film that I can bear it without charging
whatever a surrogate mother gets these days.
A2P: You are working now on a third novel. Without
giving away more than you are comfortable discussing, will this
novel also be published by Bleak House and why don’t you tell
us about Bleak House and how your relationship came about.
PT: The third novel is done, except for minor revisions.
It features yet another one-word title, so I will keep that to myself,
hoping no one else gets to it first. The deal isn’t sealed
yet, since Fishnet hasn’t hit the market yet. However,
the third one will be a kind of noir parody, with blood and sweat
involved; that is, the reader will laugh along the way, but there’s
a hard punch coming.
As far as Bleak House, that was a chance submission, and a lucky
one. They loved Fizz, got what I was doing, and have offered
a level of commitment surpassing anything I could have expected. Since
the Fizz days, they’ve built the company, and it
continues to expand, as has my personal relationship with the staff. There’s
a lot in the works, and plenty of room for hope in what everybody
calls a tough publishing climate. Sure, I hope for the big
paycheck one of these days, for knocks on the door from strangers
with fascinatingly modern eyeglasses, but if that day never comes,
I’ll still say I was lucky.
The release party for Fishnet is on Thursday, July
28. at 7:00 p.m. at Shaman Drum Bookshop, 311-315 S. State Street,
Ann Arbor. 662-7407. shamandrum.com.
Steven Gillis is the author of the novels Walter Falls and The
Weight of Nothing and the founder of 826 Michigan, a nonprofit reading
and writing program for students 1-12 grade located on 2245 S. State
Street. www.826michigan.org
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