‘Layer After Layer of Delusion’

An interview with Sean O’Beirne

Sean O’Beirne: I know you’ve been asked about Rejection – a lot – since it was published, and so I didn’t want to ask you the usual questions about the book, what it says in particular about internet culture or identity politics. Instead, I wanted to ask more generally about reading fiction, writing fiction and what fiction might be for.

So, first, on reading fiction: one definition of a writer might be, ‘someone who was once a kid who read too much’. It can be strange and quite moving to remember what you read when you were a kid, because it’s not literary – it can take you a long time to get to literature. And yet the way in which this reading forms you is very important. Did you read too much as a kid, and what did you read?

Tony Tulathimutte: This actually explains a lot about my literary values. I don’t know how much I read relative to other people, but I did spend huge amounts of time by myself. I didn’t consider myself a reader at all; I did it purely for enjoyment, and not nearly as much as I played video games. Games were my first passion, books were something to do when I got tired of gaming. And my parents – to their credit – did the sneaking-the-vegetables-into-the-mashed-potatoes trick. They were like, ‘We’ll get you any video game guide or magazine subscription you want,’ and I would spend all my time reading them. Then when it came to writing, my first major project was an AOL fanzine about Magic: The Gathering.

SO: How old were you?

TT: I was probably eleven or twelve years old. It was a .wri file on my Windows 3.1 computer, and I would upload it to the AOL community forum. It actually did pretty well. The issues would be somewhere in the 80, 90, 100-page range. So I was never really plugged into the idea of prestige being connected to literature. It wasn’t even about seeing the truth or understanding the experiences of others or anything like that. It was just a way to entertain myself to deal with solitude.

Later on, when I got to college and started taking writing classes, I had this false epiphany about what literature was really for, which was like, ‘Oh good literature is engaged with history and with traditions of literature in a self-conscious way, and it’s mostly about white people, or white people writing about people of colour…and it’s really, really depressing.’ And I did a pretty good imitation of that for about seven years, at least for a student.

SO: What literature were you set in college? What authors are we talking about – Steinbeck?

TT: The first name that pops into my mind is Robert Olen Butler. I was assigned A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which was mostly about Vietnamese people. Butler was a white guy who fought in the war in Vietnam. The stories were all pretty treacly: there’s one where a Vietnamese woman is thinking in broken English to her unborn child, stuff like that. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was held up as a sort of masterwork of empathy. But complicating the matter is the fact that some of the books I was assigned along those lines of empathy were actually good. I do like Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore.

SO: I thought that earlier, in adolescence, there might have been some intense reading of science fiction or fantasy – but no?

TT: I was into sci-fi for a while, but specifically dystopian. Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World. I was really into Anthony Burgess; I did an entire school project on one of his lesser-known books called The Wanting Seed. I was kind of goth and have always been depressed and cynical, and those books did it for me. But again it wasn’t really part of my identity at all, just something I was interested in.

SO: Do you think, as a kid, you were an outlier, being attached so intensely to games and so intensely interested in books as well? There is a depressing quote in an interview David Remnick did with Philip Roth for The New Yorker back in the 2000s, where Roth says that the literary era is coming to an end, we’re losing readers to screens, every year seventy readers die and only two are replaced.

TT: I think Jonathan Franzen said – I don’t want to misquote him, but it was something like – ‘Philip Roth thought that literature began and ended with him, so of course Roth’s going to say, “Now that I’m nearly done, it’s all over.”’ And Franzen himself was known as a kind of doomer curmudgeon when he wrote the ‘Why Bother?’ essay for Harper’s in the nineties. I got to talk to Franzen about it when he visited my writing class, out of the kindness of his heart, and I asked him how he felt about it twenty-five years on. He said, ‘It turns out when I achieved some success, a lot of those feelings went away. And I’m a lot more sanguine and optimistic about the prospects of literature.’ He said it in a funny and self-effacing way, but I do think that a lot of the doomerism about fiction is an externalised version of people’s frustration with their own work; either making the work itself, or having it find its place. Whenever you press people on this and say, ‘Aren’t book sales fine?’, they’ll start moving the goalposts and say, ‘Well, I mean serious readers, or readers of these books’.

SO: ‘We can’t sell enough Henry James anymore.’

TT: Exactly. But part of this is inevitable, because in terms of long-form narrative there’s more competition now and that’s good, I think. And if the people who aren’t reading are saying, ‘I only care about books insofar as they can deliver me the same experience as a Netflix original series,’ I’m like, ‘Good riddance.’ I don’t care. I don’t know why people are so bedevilled by the question of numbers, of whether literature is a truly mass medium or not, or a dominant one. Like, people are still writing poetry, you know.

SO: I think it’s partly people just fretting, but it is also people having real concerns about attention. Because games teach you to pay attention in a different way: games are so exciting, like the iPhone is so exciting, so colourful, therefore the book becomes too boring.

TT: Yeah, but if there’s anybody whose brain should have been scrambled by that, it would be me. And I don’t think I have any special immunity, my attention is as fractured as anybody else’s. But I think that books are still fun, and are a way of satisfying curiosity that you just don’t get in other media.

SO: Rereading your first book, Private Citizens, the thing that really got me was the sheer amount of mimetic ambition you had for the prose. I know that there were earlier stories, in college and after, and that you finished a whole book and put it away, didn’t try to get to published—

TT: A collection of short stories, yeah.

SO: —but I was so struck by how much you were going for, descriptively, sentence to sentence; capturing things that are momentary, distant, close, external, internal; how the bones in people’s legs feel to them, but then also the way an ‘emblem’ of light is ‘jiggling’ on the top of a car roof. And I wonder what it was like to set that standard for yourself, and achieve that standard?

TT: The project for Private Citizens – I’ve never got to talk about this before – was mainly that I wanted to see if I could write about things I knew nothing about, to apply myself to the task of research. So for example Henrik is a grad student in biomechanical engineering – all I knew about that was that I would walk by the building on campus sometimes and be like ‘It’s so weird to see the phrase Soft Tissue on a building,’ and I got curious about it. So I did my research about that. They wouldn’t let me in, but I lucked out because when I got into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop that’s where the other big orthopaedics research lab in the country is. I came in more prepared and bribed everyone in the lab with pizza, so I was able to go in and look at all the weird severed arms and legs. That was all residue from the training that I’d gotten in undergrad – that writing is about empathy and understanding the other.

SO: How self-conscious were you about packing details into every sentence? Because, again, it strikes me that you got to a standard of controlled, specific detail that people don’t often reach.

TT: Well, you could argue that I overdid it. When I revisit a lot of those sentences I do feel like they could use some untangling.

SO: The detail is a pleasure in itself. But I know David Foster Wallace talked about the problem of ‘stunt piloting’, where the phrase-making ambition outruns the narrative ambition, or the characterological ambition.

TT: He said that with Infinite Jest he used the reader like gymnastics equipment. People can look at prose like his and erroneously call it overwritten; actually I think that there is no such thing as overwriting, what is lacking is an additional streamlining pass, so actually what we call overwriting is underwritten. For me, it was mostly that I didn’t have a strong grasp on the physics of reading, that all words have sounds connected to them and these need to flow. Even though I read the entire book aloud to myself five times, you can slip into a mechanical recitation where you’re not catching what it really sounds like anymore. I don’t know why I’m only criticising that book. I do still like it.

SO: I like it a lot. But I can see that Rejection is a kind of purging. All kinds of detail are removed. I think of Private Citizens as a bright book, in that even though its subject matter can seem pessimistic, it’s filled with an achieved ambition to see and to know the world. Whereas Rejection is a dark book, in that it doesn’t have the same faith in external description, it stays much closer to what is in people’s heads, closer to what’s in the psyche, and how little we can really know from within there. Though you don’t make a kind of thick, almost suffocating sense of interiority, like Thomas Bernhard’s. You still keep a fidelity to the incident; your characters have something happening right now in front of them and you still give us plenty of smaller details about how people are reacting to each other.

TT: I would say that’s more of a vice than a virtue, honestly, because to write like Bernhard – and a lot of people try – you need so much stylistic juice and pressure in the rhetorical performance. I would love to try to do that kind of pure fiction-of-consciousness writing but I find that it doesn’t work for me without a dramatic context. When I teach, I’m always saying to my students that it’s tempting to get into these rants, get up on a soapbox to talk in abstract terms about something you care about, something that probably got you into writing in the first place. But it often feels as if you’re using your character as a ventriloquist’s puppet, and a dramatic context is what starts making it work as a fiction. It’s the difference between going on a rant about the anti-humanism of AI, and going on that AI rant on a first date.

SO: The interiority and the situations that you make in Rejection – Craig repeatedly emailing the friend who has rejected him, Alison getting rejected and thinking it would be a good idea to buy a pet raven – really do show what our psyche is like, it’s actual incoherence and incompetence.

TT: I wanted to show something even more dangerous than that. It’s not just the fog of confusion, it’s seeing a false truth, and being swayed from objectivity because you’ve dived so far into yourself. One of the main things about Private Citizens and Rejection is that they’re both, I guess, about the curse of knowledge, what happens when the formal education outstrips the sentimental education. These are people who are intelligent and capable of articulating their own experiences, but they’re getting it wrong. Their ability to put things precisely sways them into believing they can see the truth and that they’re being objective.

SO: One of the things that I loved so much in Rejection were those moments where the narrative sort of clears away and a character makes a statement of mad, concentrated egoism. Like Craig in ‘The Feminist’ when he writes a very long, deranged reply to someone online, then ‘examines it with an unsparing eye’ and ‘finds no error’. In Private Citizens, no one, not even Henrik at his worst – when he has a manic episode – is as egoistically demented as the people in Rejection. How did you get to this? Did it happen by increments, or did you start out wanting to show some of the worst of the self?

TT: Developing a story and developing as a writer are both processes of peeling back layer after layer of delusion. It’s really difficult to distinguish between what you actually think and feel – and what you have internalised as ‘the truth’. This goes back to what I was saying before about the idea of getting plugged into those discourses of prestige in college and being like ‘this is what real literature looks like’. I still responded to those books emotionally, but what I wasn’t fully aware of at the time was that feelings are social. There are laugh-tracks in sitcoms for a reason: just hearing other people laugh at something will, subjectively, make it feel funnier to you. I’ve thought about this bandwagon effect a great deal, because being able to have these moments where you can say, ‘Oh, that’s actually just me responding to other people’s responses, and it’s a vicarious response to this art rather than my direct one’ is how you end up growing as a writer, I mean on top of all of the craft stuff. Ultimately everything’s over-determined by ego. The more you insist on how you’re seen as a writer or what people think of you as a person through your writing, the more it’s going to blind you to that de-delusioning process.

SO: One thing that was pretty confronting in Rejection was the idea that it would be better to have no ego, none at all. Bee in ‘Main Character’ says this, ‘I stopped believing in the self’, and Alison says at the end of ‘Pics’ that the only way for her to exist is to ‘be and feel nothing’. How did you come across this idea? Is it an idea you got explicitly from other books?

TT: It didn’t come from any single place but from a lot of completely dissonant streams of my life, or whatever, that became confluent the older I got. My parents are Buddhists for example, but they’re not strongly into any practice. I didn’t even know that they were at all serious about it. But there would be self-help books lying around by like, the Dalai Lama, that I would pick up and read. And then in college – I write about this a bit in ‘Main Character’ – my major was something called ‘symbolic systems’, effectively a sort of charm school for tech bros. But it included a lot of cognitive neuroscience that emphasised the modularity of the brain, and the smallness of consciousness – the Daniel Dennett idea that if you can take out parts of the brain and still be ‘you’, then where’s the ‘you’?

SO: There’s this Martin Amis phrase, he said that when he read Ballard’s Crash he felt ‘a flurry of nervous dismay’. When I read the parts of Rejection that are about not wanting a self, I felt a flurry of nervous dismay.

TT: [laughs]

SO: Because the book is saying, at least sometimes, that it’s not even worth making an oppositional self, a rebel self, against a group’s bad idea of self. Bee, the anonymous troll in ‘Main Character’, basically says: don’t even answer their dumb idea of self with another self, just quit the field – any possible self will be a mistake. It’s a frightening idea. It’s taken me a while to bend my head towards it and understand the sort of benefits and the freedom that might come with imagining ‘no self’. But is that kind of difficulty interesting to you?

TT: Yes, and I know, of course, it’s not a trade-off most people would make. Very few people are willing to say: I’m nobody, or what I am is not in any way fixed from moment to moment. It’s a very stressful idea. Because what you sacrifice is any groundedness in yourself, an idea of a security or understanding of who you are. I’ve said this before, but I think that most people are driven not by the pursuit of happiness but the desire for certainty.

SO: And this maybe connects to things you’ve said in the past about autofiction. You’ve argued that autofiction is smuggling too much ego back into fiction. I thought that was such an interesting thing to say, given, for example, the success of Knausgaard. My Struggle seemed to promise us that a writer could still appear as themselves, and report the sort of very difficult or embarrassing things that writers can usually only include in fiction. And the world went, ‘Yes please, let’s have that.’ I think your sense of it is that the ego will always lead us into believing we have a secure, coherent identity. And fiction is a better form for guaranteeing that we’ll be more honest about how psychically disorganised we are.

TT: I think it was Benjamin who said every great artist either creates or destroys a genre. Your ambition, whenever you’re writing, should be to come to the end of something, to do the ne plus ultra of whatever it is you’re attempting – and Knausgaard did that. The funny thing about Knausgaard is that it is an illusion, he’s successfully created an illusion that he has left nothing out, just because that book is very long and because it gets into picayune matters that are usually beneath the notice of fiction.

SO: But it’s essentially a fiction?

TT: It is, but there’s nothing besides illusion in fiction: you are trying to make something feel the way that it is in real life. For example, in dialogue: you never have characters saying ‘um’ or ‘like’ or ‘you know’ as much as they would. The artificial version feels realer than a transcription.

SO: But, again, I take Rejection as saying that fiction, even with its artificiality, still allows us to be freer and more truthful about our actual incompetence than any other kind of narrative. Because in fiction we do pretend to be other people and so, for a while, the demands of our ego, the construction of our ego, is in some way set aside. I think the last story in the book, ‘Re: Rejection’ – where you get a rejection letter from some publishers, rejecting the whole book – is about our resistance to fiction, how much we object to it. That story incorporates so many of the arguments often made against fiction; the publishers keep demanding that you, Tony Tulathimutte, step forward, show more of your actual self, be more ‘transparent’ in your fiction writing. It’s the nightmare reading every fiction author dreads, because they know that they are hiding themselves, or refusing to present a lot of themselves, and they get a certain freedom by doing it.

TT: Absolutely. A sort of nightmare reading – that’s exactly how I phrased it when I was talking about the book a few days ago. The story is easy to misread as, ‘Oh, Tony’s satirising his own book, snake eating its own tail’, all that. But it is more taking the same satirical approach I take elsewhere, which is that satire is not impressive unless you make the thing you’re satirising a worthy adversary. So it is a kind of author’s nightmare, where there is this invidious biographical read, but it’s also not entirely wrong to accuse a fiction writer of hiding too much.

SO: We do this to fiction writers though, we so often want them to ‘de-fiction’ themselves. In reviews and interviews we say to the writer, ‘Thanks for the fiction, but now tell me “the truth”’. You stand up for fiction as something that can only deliver its truth if it stays as fiction. Which is, of course, very frustrating for us.

TT: [laughs] Any worthwhile writer is going to have an allergy to reduction, to putting a definite name or a label on things, hanging a singular meaning on all of their own work. And yeah, my own personal strategy has been, in my writing, to be extremely evasive. If the idea is that there’s going to be some kind of unveiling, I think the line in ‘Re: Rejection’ is that instead you’ll get ‘a dump truck of veils’. And what that does, in a way, is empower the reader. To have them make sense of it themselves, out of a multitude of possibilities – and the sense that they make out of it will be reflective of them, not me.

Sean O’Beirne is a bookseller and critic, and the author of the short fiction collection A Couple of Things Before the End.