“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.