Eric Puchner on Humor, Craft, and Creating “Perfect Ambivalence” on the Page

AuthorRVA is a a series of author conversations at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond Virginia, presented by Lit Hub senior editor and novelist Jessie Gaynor, author and NPR host Mary Childs, and CMC Director Chioke I’Anson. The next conversation will take place on October 14 at 6 PM, with Mary Childs talking with Gary Shteyngart.

The following is a condensed and edited transcript of Jessie Gaynor’s conversation with Eric Puchner about his novel Dream State.

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Eric Puchner is the author of the story collection Music Through the Floor, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award; the novel Model Home, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction; and a second short story collection, Last Day on Earth. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in GQ, Granta, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and more. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with his wife, the novelist Katharine Noel, and their two children.

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Jessie Gaynor: Could you start by giving us the brief bio of the book?

Eric Puchner: Oh, the elevator pitch of the book.

JG: Well, where its life began. Where it went to college.

EP: It’s so hard to talk about what a book is about. Just as an aside, because as you know, as we all know, reading a novel is about the experience of reading it. It’s about the aesthetic and emotional experience of reading it. So whenever somebody says, what’s your book about? I have no idea what to say. You have to just read the book.

So in terms of the genesis of the book, the book is set in Montana, and it’s entirely fictional except for the fact that the house in the book is entirely based on a house that I have been visiting for the past 25 years, spending, half of my summer there with my wife and now my two kids as well because it’s a house that’s been in my wife’s family for many, many years. It was built by my wife’s great-grandfather who was a Lithuanian immigrant. He was a Jewish Lithuanian guy who ended up immigrating to Montana. He was so destitute, he lived in a packing crate for a while. He had to survive the winter because a train came through. He was living in Glasgow, Montana. A train came through and threw coal to him so he could burn it to keep himself alive in the winter. If you’ve been to Montana in the winter, it’s extremely cold. And he ended up becoming a self-made middle class man. Because he started a dry goods shop in the back of a saloon and he built this house on Flathead Lake.

And it’s the house that we have been going to, that my family’s been going to, where my father-in-law spent his summers as a boy. The guy who built it was apparently a total drunk, and it took four or five years to build. So whenever someone comes over to work on the house, the first thing they say is like, oh my God, who built this place? There isn’t a single right angle in the entire house. So I am kind of madly in love with this house. It was out of the family for a long time and then Gordon, my father-in-law, saw that this house where he spent his youth was for sale. So he went there and it had been on the market for a little while, and he took one step in and said, I’ll take it. And the real estate agent was completely astonished. Sold it. And then the guy who was selling it tried to back out of the deal when he found out it had all this emotional significance. He tried to break the contract and make more money off of it. He’s a local Christian.

So this house means a lot to me and I had always wanted to write about it. It’s also just that this part of Montana, which is Northwestern Montana, not far from Glacier Park, is probably my most favorite place on earth. It is just devastatingly beautiful up there. So I wanted to write about that setting.

I knew that, but I don’t write autobiographical fiction in that I don’t write about myself. I don’t do autofiction. So I always have to find proxy characters and find some sort of emotional connection with them.

The other thing that happened in the book that actually happened to me was that about a hundred pages into the book, there’s a disastrous wedding in which—it’s a 430-page book, so this isn’t really a spoiler—but there’s a wedding in which half the wedding party has Norovirus. I dunno if you’ve gotten Norovirus before, but it’s probably the worst, like, two or three days of your life. You feel completely fine and then you just throw up without any warning whatsoever. And so I was actually officiating a wedding in Montana at this house, by the lake. Somebody had come from Australia to attend the wedding, the father of the groom had taken a train across America and I guess something was in the ice, but everybody on that train got Norovirus and he brought it to the Montana house and infected everybody.

So everyone was sick. It was actually worse than it is in the book. The flower girl threw up on her way down the aisle. Then the groom was so, so sick he had to sit down in the middle of his vows. And just like in the book, there was a square dance band, so after the wedding was over, during the reception, the Norovirus was evenly distributed among all the guests so that everybody got it because they were dosey-doing with each other. Those are the two things that are autobiographical.

And there’s certainly a lot of emotional autobiography. But when I’m thinking about ideas for short stories or novels. I often think about something that is funny that happened to me. My fiction is kind of funny, but it’s also not funny at all. I don’t find those two things to be mutually exclusive at all. In fact, I think comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin. They’re both about the very same thing, which is the absurdity of existence. But there is something about comedy that just makes for good fiction because it’s about there being a disconnect between expectation and actuality. And that’s where comedy comes from. But that’s also where good fiction comes from. It’s where plot comes from.

JG: You wrote an essay for Lit Hub about writing a funny novel. I loved the way you talked about humor needing to come from a universe with rules. You likened it to telling a dream, which is always boring to listen to. I wonder if you can talk about where humor comes in your drafting process. Are you coming back and refining to punch it up or does it feel like it flows from the beginning?

EP: A lot of my first attempts at humor, particularly through dialogue, fail because they’re not subtle enough. I mean, you go right for the joke, you go right for the jugular, and it’s a mistake. I think there have to be a couple layers of deadpan remove for something to be funny.

But I’ve found just with all my books—it’s really funny in the first draft, you have to go back and, ironically, make things less funny. You have to tone down your attempted humor so it doesn’t seem like you’re being funny. And then the total effect is funnier.

JG: This is a book that takes place over a lifetime, really. I have read a lot of books lately— and a lot of think pieces lately—about the Divorce Book. And this is very much a book about endurance, both in friendship and in the face of climate change and also in a marriage. It felt like a constant in the book, never really a question. I wonder if you could talk about writing that kind of relationship.

EP: The endurance marriage, everyone’s dream!

A couple things: I wanted to write a book about male friendship, because I just don’t read enough books about male friendship. But also I love books that span large swaths of time and the marriage books that I had read that span large swaths of time, like Light Years, by James Salter, which is one of my favorite novels, were about divorce. And I was interested in a marriage that is not about divorce, a marriage that’s troubled like all marriages are, but that survives, and what that might be like. Just ambivalence inherent in the whole project of marriage. Particularly because the book does begin with a kind of love triangle and there’s a huge betrayal and what it might be like to live through that betrayal and then survive it, for the next 50 years or 40 years, 45 years. So that was always the impetus for the book.

I was really interested in it and I was hoping to achieve a state of sort of like perfect negative capability or something. Perfect ambivalence, negative capability was Keats’ idea of two things that are in perfect opposition that can never resolve. That was the highest form of intelligence was the ability to hold two opposite things in our head at the same time without trying to resolve them. So I wanted that, that state. One of the things about Cece is that she’s filled with regret over the possibility of not staying with the original man that she was meant to marry. But it’s kind of a false regret. It’s not that she’d be more happy if she had stayed with the original man she was meant to marry—she would just be differently unhappy and happy at the same time. It’s so seductive to think, life is elsewhere. If only I had done this and not this, I would have a happier life. No, you’d just have a different life.

JG: I felt that so much throughout the book. It almost sounds when you’re describing it as pessimistic, but I actually found it very hopeful.

EP: Oh, good.

JG: But I also found there’s another zeitgeisty fiction conversation that I’ve read about, the idea of the trauma plot. That characters are defined by a singular trauma in the book that is often withheld. In Dream State, there is a trauma that you talk about early on in the novel, the death of Charlie and Garrett’s friend. But we learn what it is much earlier than we would in a book that made it their whole personality. And then there are more traumas, because it’s a life. I really liked that aspect of the book—I thought that it was a really interesting way, or a more complete way, to write about trauma.

EP: Yeah, I’m very suspicious of the trauma plot. I mean, trauma is real. I’m not suspicious of trauma, but I’m very suspicious of the trauma plot. It’s very reductive. As if this one thing defines someone’s entire life, I just don’t believe that’s the way that life works. Life is long and rich and complicated for most of us. So thank you for saying that.

The trick about writing a novel is that you have to write something and make something shapely and beautiful. But you also have to make something that resembles life. And life really doesn’t have much shape. We get older. That’s really the defining aspect of life. That’s what shapes it. But there isn’t a narrative. There isn’t a story. So to create a story out of that story is really tricky. And you have to do it, I think, in ways that feel honest. So you have to be inventive about how to craft the random elements of life into something that scratches the story itch in your brain.

JG: Can you talk a little bit about sort of your relationship to the editorial process and being edited?

EP: I love being edited. I mean, the opportunity to have someone who’s super smart look carefully at every single one of your words and say like, actually, this isn’t working that well. Even if you don’t agree with them, that’s incredibly valuable intel.

That’s very hard to find once you leave the structure of school, and maybe you have some old grad school friends who will look at your work for you and all that stuff, but it’s hard to convince somebody to read a four 50 page novel at all, let alone look at every sentence and really interrogate it. So I find it incredibly valuable.

JG: So you also write short stories, and I don’t know that I’ve ever read a short story that I would call uplifting. What your relationship to writing short stories as opposed to writing fiction? Especially because you talk about wanting to capture the full range of human life and that is more difficult in a condensed period of time. So how do you approach a story as opposed to a novel?

EP: Yeah, that’s a good question. I approach them completely differently and sometimes people ask, have asked me if I’ve ever started a short story that turned into a novel, and that’s never happened to me even once because my approach is just completely different, like a short story. I think one of the reasons that short stories have small but passionate readerships is that they do very different things than the novel does. The sort of cliche about short stories is that they have more in common with poems than they do with novels. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but um, it does speak, it has a larger kind of emotional truth, which is that short stories have to be perfectly economical. And they traffic in irresolution, so that the end of a short story, that idea, that sort of Chekhovian idea, that the end of a short story will just go off into eternity and not resolve itself. I think novels don’t always do that. And there is, I think, a greater tendency for novelists to tie up loose ends. And I think that if there’s any way that my short story writing cells manifest itself as a novelist, it’s that like I don’t like to tie things up at the end, much to some readers’ chagrin.

There’s this wonderful quote by Randall Jarrell about the novel. Someone asked him to define what the novel is, and he said that a novel is a prose narrative of a certain length with something wrong with it. Which I love, and that’s what I love about writing novels is they don’t have to be perfect. Whereas if you shake a short story, not even a semicolon can fall out. Shake your favorite novel—Moby Dick—several chapters fall out. War and Peace, hopefully all those really boring chapters about the philosophy of war would fall out and leave you with all the wonderful stories, chapters about the characters. Going big in a novel is an excuse to do some things wrong.

JG: So, Dream State was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. And this is your fourth book. You have one previous novel and two short story collections, and they had a lot of critical acclaim—but I think most people understand that Oprah’s Book Club catapults you into a wider level of audience exposure.

EP: Are you trying to say in a nice way that no one read my first three books?

JG: Ha! I did! But I think we don’t hear as much about writers who get this major bump in readership after having already written a number of books, and I’m curious about what that’s like.

EP: I had resigned myself to having a small readership. People would email me, I definitely had some fans who would email me occasionally, someone would email me about finding email was, I think it was about, my last story collection. It was like, I found your story collection in the gutter and I loved it. I was like, that’s so… I have such complicated feelings right now.

I’ve been writing all my life, so to have been toiling all my life and to have this come out of the blue—it really felt like it was out of the blue—to me was just totally astonishing and so much more than I had expected. It was a New York Times bestseller for two weeks. I had never imagined in my wildest dreams that that would happen.

Before any of this happened, I had just finished an essay “Astonishment of Requiem,” about creating literary astonishment on the page, but also how astonishment in general has sort of been kind of debased or something, watered down because of the internet. One of the things that I talk about in that essay is that I had to sort of reckon with the fact that I had been writing for so long and didn’t have a huge readership and, as a thought experiment in the essay I think about this, like imagine that there was some something like Snapchat but for writers called Snap Lit or something. As soon as you get a sentence perfect, it vanishes forever. And the question I ask is: would you still write your novel? If you knew that as soon as you finished each sentence and got it perfect, it would disappear forever and you couldn’t get it back. And my answer was yes, because really it’s just about writing the sentences. I really love writing sentences and that makes me happier than anything else. I’m certainly not sort of complaining or about having a bigger readership—it’s all wonderful. But it’s really about the act of creation itself.