James Hynes: The Monday Interview

As with many people whose work wouldn’t normally pop onto my radar, I first read James Hynes as an assignment. The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate was in town to read from his latest novel, Kings of Infinite Space, so I read the book to prepare for an interview.

I was glad I did. Though I don’t usually go in for supernatural fiction, the book was a riotous satire of the working world, and a sign that I had a lot of catching up to do. It was Hynes’ fourth book, after the straightforward Wild Colonial Boy and two books dubbed “academic horror,” Publish or Perish and The Lecturer’s Tale.

Now, after a long six-year wait, comes Hynes’ latest: Next. As Hynes mentions below, there are no ghost cats or other supernatural elements like those used in other books; this is the straight-ahead story of Kevin Quinn, a 50-something academic editor from Michigan who decides to fly to Austin, Texas, to interview for a new job.

The book takes place on the day of Quinn’s trip. The airline flight sparks near-paralyzing fears about terrorism, and that is just one big notion that populates Quinn’s thoughts throughout the day — mortality and sex being the other parts of the main triumvirate.

Much of Quinn’s time is spent in pursuit of  women. The woman he sits next to on the plane reminds him of past lovers, and he stumbles into following her around Austin as the day’s blistering sun takes its toll on him. Other women cross his path, both in his mind as he reflects on his life and in person, leading to many flights of introspection.

The spectre of terrorism is never far from Quinn’s thoughts, however, as he deals with living in the post-9/11 world. What could seem mundane is rich and deep, and when this ruminative narrative leaps into action toward the end, everything that came before seems brought to bear on these few pages.

It is a masterful tale that shows Hynes need not rely on any gimmick or genre to be successful; he is a purely talented storyteller who can excel not matter the tools at his disposal.

This seems like a return to the straight-ahead storytelling of Wild Colonial Boy, eschewing the elements of science fiction and horror that have colored your other novels. Was that a conscious decision, to attempt something more straightforward, or was it a function of how the story unfolded?

A little of both, if that makes any sense. I didn’t decide to write a straight, mainstream novel and then look for an idea; rather, the idea came to me, and I realized that it didn’t require my usual genre touches–ghost cats, zombies, etc. That realization was something of a relief, because, while I’m proud of all my books (and I think all of them are fundamentally serious), I have to admit that part of me wanted to see if I could pull off a novel with no genre elements. My worst fear was that it would end up like Jerry Lewis’s infamous Holocaust movie–the clown tries to be serious, and ends up making an ass of himself. Actually, in the end, I think Next actually has more in common with my earlier books, especially the last two, than it doesn’t.

Living in Austin, did you walk where Kevin walked to see how this would work in real time? Was there any notion of balancing a need for accuracy with the desire to not offer so much specificity that it might turn off those who have never been to Austin?

I wasn’t too concerned with painting an accurate portrait of Austin. I moved some places around and made up some others, to suit the story. In early drafts of each scene, there did tend to be rather more detail than was necessary, and I pared a lot of it back while rewriting. But that’s okay, because as I used to tell my writing students, it’s easier to write too much and have to cut than to write too little and have to shoehorn more in later on.

The main problem with writing about Austin, though, was how much it changed while I was working on the book. Periodically, I’d have to go back to earlier scenes and add more skyscrapers, or cut out something that no longer existed. After a certain point, though, you resign yourself to the fact that every novel set in a real place is, in some sense, a historical novel. My long description of Kevin’s ride up South Lamar Avenue, for example, which becomes an extended metaphor for the changes he’s facing in his life, is no longer particularly accurate. What used to be a street of small auto repair shops, convenience stores, and propane dealers is now getting grown over with trendy little boutiques, fancy restaurants, and upscale condo developments. Developers have even given the South Lamar neighborhood an obnoxiously precious nickname–SoLa, like Soho.

Without giving too much away, the pace of the action shifts dramatically right at the end. Did you have that ending in mind when you started? If so, was it a challenge to keep the first section of the book grounded in Kevin’s actions knowing what was to come?

I knew two things right from the start — that I wanted to write a book about a day in a man’s life, and how the book ended. Neither aspect of the book would have worked without the other; right from the start, they felt to me like an integrated whole. So, no, the ending didn’t make writing the rest of it any more challenging than it already was.

When you began writing this in 2004, terrorism was still very much on people’s minds. It seems today that, while it is still an issue of concern, most people have taken an almost desensitized view of it (or maybe that’s just those of us here in the relative safety of the Midwest). Do you see the world in which Next was released as being fundamentally different from the one in which it was conceived?

No. I don’t think the Midwest is any more desensitized the rest of the country; rather, I think that most American probably think, subconsciously, at least, that because there hasn’t been a successful attack since 9/11, terrorism isn’t that big a threat anymore. But if you take a more global view, terrorism hasn’t stopped, it just hasn’t happened here. But it has continued to happen in Bali, Madrid, London, etc., and it happens almost on a daily basis in Iraq, a place most Americans simply don’t take note of anymore. And it’s not as if people haven’t tried to do something terrible here — it’s just that they’ve been caught before they could do it, or they’ve been incompetent, like the underwear bomber or that guy in Times Square. I’m no expert, and I hope I’m wrong, but it seems to me it’s only a matter of time before one of these jokers gets it right.
Given Kevin’s preoccupations and/or worries about sex, death, work and terror, this feels like a quintessentially American novel. Were these large themes or ideas you hoped to explore with the book, or did they naturally evolve from the telling of Kevin’s story? I guess the question is, which came first?

The story came first. I knew this was going to be a serious and fairly ambitious book when I started, but most of the ambition at the time seemed technical — how can I keep a novel about a guy wandering around a strange city interesting? — rather than thematic. I think the book certainly does address larger themes, and even capture something of the zeitgeist, but I really, truly wasn’t thinking about that stuff as I wrote; I never do. I was just trying to get Kevin from one place to another, step by step, and hoping that any matters of larger significance would simply take care of themselves. I know other writers who consciously layer thematic concerns into a story, but I’m not one of them. I just plod along and hope for the best.

Given your age, location and experience and how they relate to those of Kevin, I wonder if you came to any personal revelations while writing this book. It feels in a way like a chronicle of the onset of a mid-life crisis for Kevin. Did you exorcise your own mid-life crisis by writing this book as opposed to buying a sports car?

Well, it’s a funny thing, but when you’re a young writer, you’re often susceptible to two powerful illusions: that you can work out issues in your personal life through your writing, and that when you finally publish a book, all your problems will be solved. I’m here to tell you, boys and girls, not only are these propositions untrue, they’re laughably untrue. Luckily, at this point in my life, I already knew that, so in writing Next, even though I gave Kevin a few things from my own history and experience, I was keenly aware it was a work of fiction, and that Kevin was a fictional character whose fate I could arbitrarily shape at will. Some of Kevin’s preoccupations are mine, but most of them aren’t, so writing about him didn’t necessarily do me any good. And again, take it from me, there’s no exorcising your midlife crisis, you just ride it out, like a bad case of the flu. My own super slo-mo midlife crisis proceeds apace, and writing Next hasn’t changed it one iota.
What is the connection between Mrs. Dalloway and Next? Was it the primary model for what you were attempting to do narratively?

Dalloway absolutely was a model, especially the way Woolf hews closely to each character’s consciousness, and the way she switches from memory to the present moment and back again, sometimes in mid-sentence. That said, I didn’t study Dalloway in any rigorous way, or keep it on my desk while I wrote, or anything like that. I just read it a couple times, along with some other influential books — in particular, Updike’s Rabbit novels and Italo Svevo’s The Conscience of Zeno. And to hark back to your first question, while I did want to write a mainstream novel, I also wanted it to be comic, at least in parts, like my three previous books. So there is that difference from Dalloway, which is a vastly superior novel to mine, but, perhaps, not as funny.