For the past little bit, the proprietors of Tingle Alley and Rake’s Progress have been confabbing about Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper. Today we’re pleased to have the author and the book’s editor, Eli Horowitz , stop by. The Rake serves up the questions. Sal brings the discussion around to that Ben Marcus/J-Franz essay in Harper’s*, Eli talks about the tricks involved in transferring the book’s “typographical kookiness” to the page and then touches on a couple points in the past week’s conversation. (Catch up on the People of Paper dialogues here; scroll up from the bottom.)

Later today, probably late morning EST, we’ll be giving away three more copies of the novel — we’re the People of Complimentary Copies.

Giveaway-a-rama begins: All right, it’s 11:50 by my clock (you on the West Coast should have had your Peet’s by now). First three people to email caafrye at tinglealley dot com with “People of Paper” in the subject line will have a copy of the novel mailed to them. Also, please include your mailing address in the email.

Many thanks to PGW, the book’s distributor, for providing the bookish booty.Update: Wow, that was a little crazy. Y’all like the free stuff. The three copies go to Michelle L. of Brooklyn; Trevor J. of Iowa City; and Steve G. of “he forgot to send his mailing address”. Everyone else, head to the bookstore or library — it’s worth it. I swears.

* (Tingle Alley just secured a copy of the article at lunch today. More soon.)

“In my younger years I was obnoxiously militant about being anti-realism but all it took was one James Baldwin novel to make me feel pretty silly.”

The Rake asks:

I guess I’d like to keep the discussion open a little, but I would be curious to hear about the process of “selling” The People of Paper (TPoP) — that is, what the feedback was like as it went around to agents/publishers. (I suppose I might be fishing for crazy stories here, but I’m genuinely curious.) Also, along with that, I’d be interested to hear about your influences, and why, if it a reason can be isolated, you went the non-realistic route. (As a student I was almost always gently guided away from writing like that by my instructors, if only for crass commercial reasons, on occasion. Perhaps with books like this and, say, Kelly Link’s (or Aimee Bender’s), a few more people might see the fantastical as a more viable option–again, to be crass & commercial.) And along with that, did you fear at any point that you had something on his hands perceived to be a little too odd to publish (and/or lingering regrets at not just aping John Updike)?

Sal responds:

Rake, there’s nothing really crazy in the story of how TPoP got published, I would actually say it’s pretty typical for a book that is perceived as not market friendly. Every major publishing house that saw it turned it down, and an independent press came along and rescued it. I won’t provide an answer key, but you can see from the following the types of responses the manuscript generated:

Number to Letter Match Game

1) “While some edginess is attractive, this book is just too experimental to garner the sales necessary for us to publish.”

2) “too self-consciously experimental for me, I’m afraid.”

3) “Every editor has come back with the same comment …it is too experimental for them to publish successfully. If you’d like someone else to give it a try, I understand completely.”

4) “Hello Sal. I have some good news: We would be excited to publish your book, if you will allow us to do so.”

a. Agent
b. Viking Penguin
c. McSweeney’s
d. Random House

I was always struck by how “experimental” was always used derisively. In retrospect, I can see why PoP strikes many people as unusual and too weird, but at the time I was deep in the sentences of Márquez and Samuel Delany. I thought that my novel was pretty mild compared to the stuff that was sitting on my bookshelf.

As far as being dissuaded from the mode, I had nothing but encouragement from my teachers. As an undergrad I had this professor, Dr. Paddy, who fed us J.G. Ballard and Calvino before I even heard of Raymond Carver or Tobias Wolff. There’s no way I could emulate the Updike style, because I had no idea what Updike was about. And then in grad school I fell upon a pretty amazing line of teachers (Arthur Flowers, George Saunders, Mary Caponegro, Aimee Bender) who themselves where a pretty motley crew of fabulist.

And this is speaking strictly from my academic training not taking into account the fact that I was raised by a large family that lives in a town where everybody speaks in either hyperbole or deadpan surrealism. My grandfather won’t take a shower because he’s afraid water will leak into his heart; we quarantine our playboy halfback because we’re afraid he’ll impregnate us with a handshake. There is no denying that The People of Paper is informed by Márquez and Kafka, but it owes most of its energy to the mythologies and stories of El Monte.

In my younger years I was obnoxiously militant about being anti-realism but all it took was one James Baldwin novel to make me feel pretty silly. At the same time I find the McEwan/Smith talk that champions realism over what we may call a Marquezian mode pretty monotonous. It’s an old and boring argument Realism vs. the Experimentalist. Realism doesn’t need to go on the offensive and bully the fabulist for dominance, it is already dominant. Are we not in the age of memoir and reality television? We don’t need to be told that the real is what rules. Along the same line, I just finished reading the Ben Marcus essay in Harper’s, and while I agree with much of what he says, the defensive gesture irks me a bit as well. Yes, experimentalists are marginalized – but that’s part of the point to exist outside of the dominant aesthetic.

“Then we worked on it til January, lots of drafts, lots of phone conversations with half-reasoned sentences: ‘Yeah, I dunno, I just think this part needs to be more awesome…’”

The Rake asks:

On the editing side, what’s it like to work on a book with unusual typography–was there difficulty in keeping the structure of the book together? Were there great concessions made? Deadly struggles? (You get the picture.) I would imagine a book like this needs a careful hand, given that the physical construction mirrors content in many ways….

Also, can you talk about the process of obtaining the manuscript. The SF Chronicle article mentions that you called Sal after running a piece in McSweeney’s, is that right?

Eli responds:

First, thanks to both of you for doing this; it’s really exciting to hear what actual people actually thought about the book. A rare treat — no one ever tells me anything. Here are some attempts at answering your questions:

We first heard of Sal when he submitted a story that we ended up publishing in Issue 12 of our quarterly. When he sent in his bio, we learned that the story was a chapter from a book he had just finished. So I asked to see that. I read it, knew it was something special, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it. So I agonized indecisively for some huge number of months. But what sold me, aside from the book itself, was talking to Sal, hearing how commited he was, how ready to work — there was no defensiveness about the book as it was written, just a dedication to making it as good as it could be.

That was in May, I think. Then we worked on it til January, lots of drafts, lots of phone conversations with half-reasoned sentences: “Yeah, I dunno, I just think this part needs to be more awesome…” It was pretty clear that neither of us really knew what we were doing, so we were able to skip any pretense and just dig in. It was fun.

Then I put it Quark. The typographical kookiness only got really tricky towards the end; the book depends on the words filling each physical page in kind of intricate formations, so Sal had to be conscious of both content and word count. Problem was, he wrote the book based on a 8.5 x 11 sheet of printer paper, in 10pt Times or whatever. This all got shaken up when we put it in the book layout, so there was actually a lot of back and forth between design and content — a couple characters reappear simply because the cacaphony required an additional voice. Practical concerns like this helped shape the book in several places, but that was part of the challenge — the physical limitations of the book are one of the foundations of the story, so it didn’t feel like we were compromising anything.

So we sorted out all the layout, then Rachell Sumpter did a great job with the cover art, then the books were printed and put on a boat. Then they were quarantined by the Bureau of Fish and Wildlife, because it turned out we were sharing a container with someone who was smuggling dead animals. Then Sal and I (and often Paul La Farge) drove around the country doing “readings” (there was as little actual reading as possible).

(I think the Rake’s question of what is at stake is a good one. That’s something I always try to ask, and I can get bored if everything feels too loosey-goosey. But that’s one of the reasons I was so excited about this book: it’s experimental and free-wheeling and fun, but you can’t doubt that the writer cares, that everything matters. As many have noted, the debate between realism and made-up-ism is mostly a false one; as in the Barthelme quote, the imaginary is often its own realism, and “realism” is still hardly anything like normal boring life anyway, even if people drive realistic Toyotas and listen to realistic Radiohead or whatever.

A similar point could be made about the metafictional and typographical features of The People of Paper and other books — they often inspire a knee-jerk reaction (for or against) that isn’t necessarily very responsive to the book itself. But that’s probably a digression. Unless you want a digression?)

(Regarding the Pale Fire discussion: I think Nabokov really resisted those one-to-one matchups: red means anger, the waxwing represents the soul, that type of thing. “Texture, not text,” I think he (or Shade) said, and I think it had something to do with all that. For The People of Paper, I kept getting surprised in both directions; whenever I asked what, say, the mechanical tortoises were, Sal would chide me for reading a novel too literally, but then later we’d be talking about girls and it’d turn out that this person was Ida or whoever. So I’m still sorting out what’s what.)

In which Tingle Alley concludes a dialogue with Rake’s Progress on Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper. Catch up on the conversation here (scroll up from the bottom).

Giveaway: First person to email me with People of Paper in the subject line will also get a copy of the novel to call their own. Please include your mailing address in the email. Update: The copy goes to Laura S. of Anapolis.

Well, my friend, I am back from salty, sulfurous Charleston — there’s a paper mill somewhere outside the city and the sulfur smell drifts in over the ocean; also a strong musky scent of carriage-horse urine hangs in places in the streets; peculiar twitching but comforting smells all … they should have me write the brochures! — and just reread your note and am glad to find that you are as clear and slightly impatient with the obvious as always, although I don’t think you admired my cracking of the • | | | • • • glyph nearly enough.

You ask what sense I make of McEwan’s formulation of the novel as Local. I saw what he was getting at there, though it’s more problematic than he seems to be allowing (insert obligatory proviso that he’s speaking the extemp. and shorthand of a verbal interview here). I read the comment as a criticism of the fallout from pan-magic-realism; that is, writers working in the shadow of people like García Márquez and Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter (to name a few), and adopting and emulating techniques from their books, regardless of locale and fittingness. So if you love these writers not wisely but too well, so to speak, you might get a little antic in your prose, you might make a spare character ascend into heaven, or present a mélange of languages or high & low cultural reference points. All of these techniques probably a false overlay to the story of, say, a cashier in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Where he (McEwan) was talking about the “top-down process,” I’d put it another way, in that, the problem with this type of writing can be that it’s based on other authors’ literary worlds, not life, not your own perceptions — you’re wearing your influences too prominently on your sleeve.

What’s odd is that McEwan fingers García Márquez himself as guilty of this whereas I’d say that García Márquez is about as local a writer as one could hope for. It’s his imitators that can be suspect — that is, they can pick up his techniques and plonk them down in any old locale. (My working title for a mess of a novel I wrote back in my 20s was SOMBFABLAMR — Some of My Best Friends Are Bad Latin American Magic Realists; it was set in Wisconsin and a cock-eyed stillbirth it was.)

Two tricks McEwan and Smith’s exchange doesn’t account for:
• What do you do with a writer like Rushdie whose work is predicated on a (realistic) conception of the world as ménage, as migration, as melting pot? How does one write a local novel in a globalized world?

(See Pankaj Mishra’s critique of Shalimar The Clown in The New York Review of Books for an excellent, thought-provoking amplification of what I’m trying to get at here; via James Tata.)

• Also, as you allude to with the gritty longshoremen, a “realistic novel” can be as false as anything else. It too can work “from the top down,” instead of up from the genuine impulse. If I’d written my novel in my 20s in pale imitation of Kent Haruf, say, instead of García Márquez — taciturn, decent characters dredging out the barn, solitary figures laboring under gray skies, gum wrappers at the edge of the parking lot, blah blah — it may have been harder to spot, but it would have been just as false. So when one writes “locally” one struggles to get past the received opinion of one’s own locality. If you’re a Midwesterner: The Lake Wobegon woes. If you’re a Southerner: Dead mules.

To bring this back to Salvador Plascencia, I was corresponding with a reader about the book, and he said that he objected to Nathaniel Rich’s review of People of Paper, in The New York Times, which he (my correspondent) felt came at the novel from what amounts to “a top down” reading, that is with a preconceived idea of what he (the reviewer) would find in a novel by a Latino writer — and so expecting grittiness (it’s the SoCal Latino experience!), the reviewer treated the novel’s experimentation as a sort of external contrivance to the grittiness, instead of as the bones of the book. Rereading the review, I’m not sure I agree — the bulk of the review’s jammed in a tight two grafs so it’s hard to tell if Rich is saying that the novel’s experimentation just doesn’t pay off (a reviewer’s right to object) or if he finds the experimentation extraneous (and so is at odds with the book at its core) or if he just finds experimentation in general a bore (so shouldn’t probably be reviewing an experimental novel, no matter how much the Times loves to lump reviews of novels written by authors of the same ethnicities together). I don’t know — Rich should start a blog with an unlimited word count to discuss the issue.

Something we haven’t jawed about is Plascencia’s style, which is idiosyncratic and lovely. The sentences of the novel are fairly declarative and clean, and they’re concerned a lot with describing physical action and the sensations of the physical world. A lot about this novel is disorienting, and I think this style is essential to the reader’s overcoming that disorientation and the novel’s eventual success: The physical keeps the reader rooted in the landscape, in the locality of the novel, even as that landscape — with the flower chewers, and lead turtles – seems at first completely unfamiliar.

As an ode to the author’s hometown, El Monte, it strikes me that the book’s a wonderfully perverse evocation of McEwan’s construction of the novel as Local.

Well, thanks, T. Rakewell. It’s been fun. A friend wrote me to say she’d picked up the novel; her email said “wow.” And over here I see “hrm.” Which just about sums it up, doesn’t it?

In which the proprietors of Rake’s Progress and Tingle Alley begin to wind up their discussion of Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper. Catch up on the conversation here (start at the bottom and scroll up).

Giveaway: The first person to email with “People of Paper” in the subject line gets a copy of the novel mailed to them. Please include your mailing address in the email. Update: The book goes to Richard C. of Baltimore. We’ll be giving away a couple more copies, so if you haven’t won yet, you’ll get another chance.

Yes, let’s be pell-mell. (Frankly, the fact that I tore myself away from Missoula is a feat in itself, but more about that later. Or not.)

Anyway, I’m taking your word for it on the dots ‘n’ dashes and so forth. I made a point of charging past the glyphs without thinking about them too much; I figure that’s what re-reading is for. (I have some reservations about whether a complete understanding of what’s going on with the glyphs would enrich my experience of TpoP, but I have no doubt that Mr. Plascencia somehow has it thoroughly worked through for himself. In other words, I’ll bet there’s some method to the madness. With your cautionary example of overanalyzing in pocket, though, I figure I’ll just defer to better—or more patient—minds.)

I think it is a coincidence that Bret and Sal—as they like me to call them—are working with out-of-control characters, but I agree they’re both teasing the reader by playing with certain expectations (or inanities—“the characters really wrote this novel,” and so on). Of course, Ellis is doing something quite different—and savvy, in my opinion—by working with and against his bad boy writer persona, but I think both writers are skirting extreme self-involvement by invoking themselves as they do. (I find that they both carry it off, more or less, although I also find that some of the most sluggish moments of Plascencia’s novel come in the “Sal” sections. I think Bee Sting Girl is my least favorite character.)

And, yeah, I think both fellows are “expressing anxieties about the meaning and use of the modern novel” but that’s nothing new, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone. But then again, perhaps we still need to put questions to the so-called realistic method of writing a novel, since some of the practitioners seem so smug. For example, there’s this bit, from the McEwan/Smith exchange [from the August ’05 Believer]:

IM: …The real, the actual, they place heavy demands on a writer—how to invent it, how to confront it or pass it through the sieve of your own consciousness. So I was never a great Márquez person, I admired the Tin Drum but never really admired it the way I did Kundera, say. And it seems to me now that that style has become a bit like the international style in furniture, this sort of lingua franca that really defies the central notion of the novel which is that the novel is local. It’s regional, it’s a bottom-up process, and somehow these international styles seem to have a top-down process. They are too similar to each other.

ZS: They have trademarks. One of the trademarks is a kind of kinetic energy. Energy at the expense of everything else.

IM: Yeah. It’s tennis without the net. There’s no fun.

ZS: Nothing at stake.

Now, I don’t want to get into a pissing contest about the realistic novel, because I happen to like it and enjoy it. But, for me, a novel like TPoP really challenges the above argument; to wit: Would you say that nothing’s at stake in TPoP, even if its mode—to again paraphrase Donald Barthelme—is “wacky”? (Hell no!) And would you say that our author here has ducked the “heavy demands” of the writer by working in this mode?

Well, I wouldn’t. I would guess that most—if not all—literary novels are produced when a writer invents, confronts, and passes the real or actual through her consciousness. Still, some, like McEwan (and James Wood) seem to suggest that there’s a right and wrong way to do this, or, at least, a preferred product that emerges from the process. This is kind of a restatement of 8-foot Chicken, where it’s fine if one invents a bunch of gritty longshoremen living lives of quiet desperation—they’re real—but lazy if one invents an 8-foot Chicken who quotes Rilke, or whatever. To me, it’s a matter of execution. If the execution is fine, then the writing speaks. It can’t just be a matter of who cleaves to The Real the best (or how else explain the enduring quality of Greek mythology, or folk tales, or even cartoons, for that matter?).

That’s why I like Donald Barthelme’s quote: “You exist for me in my perception of you (and, in some rough, Raggedy Andy way, for yourself, of course). That’s what’s curious when people say, of writers, this one’s a realist, this one’s a surrealist, this one’s a super-realist, and so forth. In fact, everyone’s a realist offering true accounts of the activity of the mind. There are only realists.”

It almost seems unassailable. Almost.

At any rate, I’m glad to have encountered the true account of Plascencia’s mind. Anything else to add, my friend? (Also: Is the Novel local, as McEwan suggests? Can you make sense of that formulation? Do you want to?)

In which the proprietors of Rake’s Progress and Tingle Alley show no signs of shutting up about Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper. To read the previous installments, click here (first entry is at the bottom, then scroll up).

Giveaway: It’s been brought to my attention that the early posting of the book giveaway has been discriminating against West Coast readers, who wake up and find the contest already over. So today we’re posting a little later. Same drill as before: First person to email caafrye at tinglealleydotcom from the time this post goes up with “People of Paper” in the subject line gets a copy of the book mailed to them. Also include your mailing address in the email. (Please note: If you email between times, your entry won’t be counted.) Update: The copy goes to Lindsay R. of Denver.

SEZ CAAF:

Alas, my friend, this is going to be a pell-mell disquisition. I’m on the run today and so present you with a spattering of thoughts with very little fact-checking or straightening of cushions and corners. You will be the victim of a drive-by analysis. My apologies.

Your last note got me thinking about the mountains of scholarship surrounding Nabokov’s Pale Fire. I am, as I think you are, a passionate admirer of the novel. It’s a tricksy book – and it’s enjoyable to find out how other people interpret its puzzles. For the record, I’m an adherent of the school that sees Kinbote as a death figure (that is, close to Michael Wood’s view laid out in The Magician’s Doubts) — this is what most affects me in rereading the novel, this presence lurking around and shadowing the poet in his last months (you can see this through Sybil’s reactions to Kinbote, which read — if you look — like a woman who is seeing her husband looking pale and weakened, and who gives death a warning to back off). And for the artist, the book seems to say, there is a second death of sorts (or more accurately, an extension of death) that happens to your reputation, as the madman comes and paws over your work, distorting its meaning, and ascribing motives not your own for posterity. (And as one accrues a perverse sympathy for Kinbote and his chronic halitosis, that is, for death, that madman, the novel becomes that much more devastating and hurtfully beautiful.) This is a flatfooted accounting of an emotional arc so moving yet controlled that it pretty much blows the top of my head off — but there it is.

And then I read Brian Boyd’s worthwhile Nabokov’s Pale Fire and he has a completely different interpretation. And if you go online there are hundreds more opinions. Shade = Kinbote. Kinbote = Shade = the dead daughter = a martian. It goes on like this, with everyone ferreting out clues and applying meanings of their own to the novel, providing such an unintentionally hilarious mirror of the novel’s own depiction of the foolishness of over-interpretation that you know good old Vlad is going “Ha! Ha! Ha!” from the butterfly-littered Elysian fields where I picture him tall and tanned and standing in kneesocks.

All of which is to say: I look forward to the many papers and scholarly talks that will one day be devoted to ascribing meaning to: • | | | • • • (with the inevitable later revelation that the writer chose this configuration because “it looked cool”).

Let us be in the first wave. I saw the symbols as basically translating this way:
• = Saturn (that is the authorial eye)
| | | = The layers of lead that the residents of El Monte shelter under to shield their lives and thoughts from Saturn, i.e., a barrier
• • • = The people of El Monte

I have no f• • •ing idea what the dominos mean, though.

On the persistent presence of • • •
Speaking of • • •, it’s interesting to me that there are three dots, which can also stand in as a sort of love triangle that the author is observing. And it strikes me how many love triangles are portrayed in this book, even among the minor characters, and how these are used to enlarge and echo the emotional reverbations from the emotional epicenter of the book, which is the central triangle of Salvador, Liz and her new lover. So that • • • comes to be some trinity of heartbreak?

The most direct parallel, of course, to the central triangle is the departure of Federico de la Fe’s wife and her taking of a new husband — and it is because Federico de la Fe sickens of having his heartbreak watched and determined that he decides to wage a war on Saturn, who is, in effect, the author of his sadness.

Then there are Froggy and his girlfrend Sandra who fight and she moves out, and he takes a new girlfriend. Theirs is a little bit of the larger story of what’s going on in El Monte, but it led to what was for me one of the more powerful passages of the novel (page 85), Sandra is out walking and says:

I passed by Froggy’s house, the house where I used to live. His doors and windows were shut. I wanted to at lease see his silhouette moving behind the curtains, but I saw nothing, and heard only a faint chirping coming from the house.

Froggy’s truck was parked in the driveway, washed and waxed, the white walls of its tires slightly muddy. I felt as if I could walk into the house and lay on the bed, and everything would be as it had before. And Froggy would be happy and I would be happy too. But there are forces that don’t let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don’t own.

If I could walk into the house and say, “Froggy, I’m sorry I left.” If I could hug him and unbutton his shirt and pick the petals from his hair. If I could do that, there would be no reason for me to fight this war.”

Where Lunar Park fits in
You asked me about what I meant about that the book “subverts some of the most tired clichés about writing.” It could very well be that “subvert” is one of those words, like “transgress,” that I love to overuse. We will have to ask DFW to “unpack” that, and Michiko to “limn” the whole.

But but but I would also argue that there is a pro forma thing where authors talk about their characters “getting out of control” and “taking over,” and to the extent that their expressions of this phenom are presented in an earnest (and at times, fatuous) way, and insofar as Plascencia is not playing it completely straight (that there is humor in his construct, in the extreme that the story goes in presenting characters who “take over”), he is subverting the cliché.

Something else: I have just about read Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park as I know you have too. There are some striking similarities to TpoP: The author enters the novel as “Bret Easton Ellis,” and a couple characters from his previous novels, most notably Patrick Bateman, the serial killer from American Psycho, are loose in the novel and clearly out of the control of their creator.

What do you make of this: Coincidence? Or are these authorial intrusions and character rebellions expressing anxieties about the meaning and use of the modern novel? (I feel like you could probably get a lecture or article out of the last, if you didn’t mind the occasional spray of bullshit.) Or are we all just getting too meta by half?

I have now read the offending Zadie Smith interview of Ian McEwan in The Believer and look forward to hearing what irritated you. Then I can tell you what annoyed me about the James Wood realism piece — and we can generally carry on like Statler and Waldorf .

In which the proprietors of Rake’s Progress and Tingle Alley continue to write back and forth about Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper. Yesterday’s installment is here.

This post will remain in pole position today, with new posts appearing below (probably much later in the day).

SEZ THE RAKE:

Well, first, I think you’ve done well to summarize the book, insofar as it can be summarized. I suppose I haven’t read very many reviews of TPoP—were there very many?—but I have been struck that I haven’t noted any comparisons to Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, another novel in which the characters rebel against their Creator. (Plascencia plays it way straighter and cooler than O’Brien, who’s on somewhat of a word bender the whole time, drunk on a little bit of everything, honest-to-God booze included.) But whatever. I’m not angling for bad copy; you know: McSweeney’s Presents An At Swim-Two-Birds for Our Generation! or It’s-Flann-O’Brien-meets-Marquez-in-the-barrio!

Now, my arc: I was pretty excited for this book after reading some advance notice, but not exactly prepared for how deeply idiosyncratic the opening section is. Specifically I mean that not only is Plascencia very rigid in establishing this world where, literally, people are made of paper—a world that is not so much explained as it is jumped into in medias res—but that built into this world is some distinct unpleasantness. There’s some justifiable prejudice against (so-called) magical realism—or pomo, or metafiction, or whatever you’d care to categorize this as—for being too glib, too whimsical. That’s where we get the 8-foot Chicken Rule, I think; rankled readers just figure the author is fucking with them, in an adolescent, going-nowhere sort of way that is singularly unsatisfying in a work of fiction.

Here, though, the tone seems to be consistently melancholy. This is grim stuff, by and large. Sure, there are mechanical tortoises and so forth, but the characters who people the book aren’t clapping their hands over the wonder of it all. Rather the opposite; they need the tortoise shells for a practical, albeit non-obvious, reason: so they can hide in them from an angry god. Or, for example, there’s Little Merced’s potentially cutesy compulsive lime-eating habit, which turns out to be not cute at all, first because it’s a constant reminder of her lost mother, and then because it starts to rot her teeth and give her sores. And then, eventually, it causes her to…well, you get the idea.

In short, I’m impressed because it seems to me that Plascencia’s not just rolling out weirdness for the sake of weirdness—it’s almost as if he needs to dislocate the reader, and himself (as the Saturn character if not as author) to, in his own way, get to dealing with, as you say, “love gone sour.” (A phrase that really seems to understate things—this is, like, earth-shattering heartbreak we’re dealing with, break-ups with not only literary but great cosmological implications.) It does my heart good to have the idea of what’s possible in the novel form expanded.

To answer one question, but for one exception, the unusual layout of TPoP didn’t bother or excite me—I was a tad unimpressed with the “holes,” where our author has ostensibly cut out the name of his girl’s new lover. Yawn. There seems to be a method to the madness of three columns of text, however; Federico de la Fe draws those mysterious little hieroglyphs of three thick, vertical and parallel lines as a way of explaining his war plan against Saturn:

•| | | •••

He circles the vertical lines and says, “Here is where we attack.” (Whatever that means.)

The columns would seem to mirror that element, although I’m not sure I ever made much sense of what the little glyph seemed to represent. (At one point, plans change, as represented by horizontally set dominoes. Then, later, the text really begins to fragment. And the single and three dot symbols reappear over and over. What gives? Any ideas?)

But enough about me. I’m interested to hear what you have on how this book “subverts some of the most tired clichés about writing.” I don’t know if I saw a subversion as much as I saw an exploration, but I’m willing to be won over.

I also want to get to James Wood eventually, and, related to that, an exchange in The Believer between Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan that set my teeth on edge.

In which Our Pal The Rake and your friend CAAF write back and forth about Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, published by McSweeney’s. We expect to be going on like this all week, bringing in such topics as that James Wood realism essay in The New Republic, Zadie Smith’s interview of Ian McEwan in The Believer, Lunar Park and anything else that suggests itself.

Other critical viewpoints: Nathaniel Rich reviews for The New York Times; at the Onion A.V. Club, Andy Battalgia acknowledges some “beguiling” points, but finds the book “impenetrable”; Daniel Olivas delivers a rave over at The Elegant Variation.

Giveaway: Thanks to PGW, McSweeney’s distributor, we’ll be giving away copies of The People of Paper throughout the week. Today’s copy goes to the first person to email me with “People of Paper” in the subject line: caafrye at tinglealley.com Update: The copy has gone to reader Whit C.

SEZ THE RAKE:

So:

Here’s the first thing I want to ask you about The People of Paper.

First of all, I liked the book quite a bit. So much so that I fear raving about it too much. (It couldn’t have been *that* good.) But I guess I’m in line with what Saunders said in his blurb:

“A stunning debut by a once-in-a generation talent. I don’t know of a young American writer more original, innovative, or intense than Salvador Plascencia. The People of Paper is harrowing and gorgeous, experimental in the truest sense: it creates new means to explore essential and timeless emotional subjects.”

(OK, I’m not going on record as agreeing with “a once-in-a generation talent,” and all that, but bear with me.)

Now, I have a pretty high tolerance for what some people would call mere cleverness–I would often argue that certain things are more than just clever, and if they’re not…well, what’s wrong with clever?

On the other hand, there’s one of my old writing instructors, a writer in the gritty-realist tradition–though he seemed to be down with Angela Carter and Bruno Schulz and Max Frisch and the like–who had what I’m going to call the 8-foot Chicken Rule when I came to metafiction (or magical realism or anything not in the gritty-realist tradition). His argument was that such literature could be somewhat cheap in that, if the writer gets in a bind, instead of developing character or cleaving to the psychological/emotional, he can just have an 8-foot tall chicken walk though the door. He felt cheated by that sort of sleight-of-hand.

TPoP seems to have a bunch of stuff to object to, in that vein, but frankly (unsurprisingly?), I thought that Plascencia comes through with enough originality that I was just kinda carried along instead of objecting to this weirdness and that implausibility. Sure, some of this seemed a little secondhand–Federico de la Fe’s urination problem could well be considered to be lifted mutatis mutandis from Love in the Time of Cholera–but then you’d get, say, these mechanical tortoises, which I thought were wonderful. This is not to mention Merced de Papel…and the complete self-referential twist, which can talk about later.

Anyway: How did the book strike you? And did any of the strangeness in the world of book rankle? I would argue that the wacky mode—to paraphase Barthelme—here is essential to making the book work in an emotional sense, and therefore none of that got in my way. But what say you?

SEZ CAAF:

Hola, my pal. I hope your ardor for the book hasn’t cooled in the more-than-a-week since you sent your dispatch. I just now finished reading and have replaced People of Paper with my laptop as I sit folded on the couch.

This is what’s on my mind:

A while back, people were talking about the books being talked up for this year’s Booker, with a couple of our blogging brethren noting that all the titles being ballyhooed this year are, in essence, pretty formally conservative examples of (neo-) realism. I was especially struck by this quote from BS Johnson — found over at Bookish and taken from Jonathan Coe’s biography of Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant — which describes the tradition as “the nineteenth-century narrative novel, an exercise which [must be regarded] in a post-Joycean universe, as the literary equivalent of traveling by horse and cart where there [are] cars and trains available.”

Now in the interest of full disclosure of critical sensibilities, I don’t mind a nice horse-drawn buggy ride. But reading People of Paper I felt a little like I was standing out on the lawn, regarding my horse-drawn Nova (I drive a hybrid), and Salvador Plascencia dropped by in the sweetest-little metal spaceship. (I am picturing this with his head winking out a window, wearing these glasses .) So if we are both going to walk around waving our hands about People of Paper — and that looks to be the case —it must be said that it is, in part, because the book is such an original contraption. So yes, like you I could quibble with a point here or there, but I’m also disarmed and all, “Motherf**ker built a spaceship!!!”

It is a strange book, isn’t it? Structurally, with those rows of skinny vertical columns of text, each standing for a different character’s p. o. v. in a scene. And then there are the black boxes and circles of inked-out text; or the place where the story slowly fades from black to gray to white; or the holes, like tiny rectangular windows, where certain words have been cut out (here B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo springs to mind). It must have been an incredibly difficult book to print and produce, and hats off to McSweeney’s for pulling it off.

And then there is the narrative itself, which uses a very personal, idiosyncratic mythology to tell a story of — what? Love gone sour? How would you summarize the plot, Rake, what is the book “about”? I’d say it’s about the residents of a small, agrarian, largely Latino town in Southern California who gradually come to (imperfectly) realize that they are characters in a novel and stage a war on the omniscient eye of Saturn that is always glaring down on them. Saturn being the alias of a writer named Salvador Plascencia, a guy living in snowy New York who just lost his girlfriend and who is as occupied with thinking about her and her new lover as he is with writing a book about the small Southern California town where he grew up.

Will this do? It sounds wonderfully straightforward set out like that, which of course it isn’t.

In your note you raise the good point: When does strangeness become a cheap way to get out of a tight place? Are there any eight-foot-tall chickens in this book? I don’t think so. But to the extent that the book’s mythology is unique to the inner world of Plascencia, it can become obscure at points. It’s one of the more thoroughly metamorphized books I’ve read, by which I mean, everything in it — I believe — began as something else “in real life”, and was compressed and reformed and folded to some new shape. (All books do this to some extent — the act of writing transforms even the “truest” story; but People of Paper takes this idea farther than most.) So you have characters chewing flowers and mechanical turtles and wrestling saints. It’s a figurative terrain … and so we rely on the author to imbue these figures with emotional meaning.

This is why the book was, for me, slow going in the beginning. I admired the prose and the oddness of the vision but I also felt detached from the proceedings. It wasn’t until pages 50 or so (?) that the mythology of the place began to have resonance for me — and it wasn’t until page 83 that I felt genuinely excited and moved by the book, could feel that all this strangeness was getting at, as you allude to, some emotional truth that couldn’t be gotten at any other way.

What was your arc of relationship with the book? Were you raving from the beginning? And shall we talk about the great ways this book subverts some of the most tired clichés about writing, such as that characters are hard to control, and that writers betray those around them.

Or is there something else to talk about?