“We Need to Be Rigorous in Defending Our Experiences of Art.” Chris Knapp Talks to Andrew Martin

Chris Knapp’s States of Emergency was one of my favorite novels of 2024. In subtle, intricately crafted prose, it tells the story of a young married couple moving back and forth between Paris and US trying to conceive a child in the waning years of the Obama administration, a time that, though shot through with political conflict and unease, now looks like the calm before the autocratic storms of the following decade.

From heavy subject matter, Chris manages to create something funny and true, with warm portraits of partners, friends, and cities under terrible pressure from without and within. Chris and I met in Charlottesville, VA while he was in graduate school there, an experience he fictionalizes with wry wit in the novel. (I’m pretty sure I’m not in the book—believe me, I looked hard.) We corresponded over email from our respective homes in Paris and Brooklyn about this long-gestating work.

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Andrew Martin: Your novel captures the sense of ambient crisis that we experience from climate change, the news, the rise of autocracy, and more so accurately. It takes place in 2015-16, but it feels just as timely now, for many reasons. How did you think about the use of current events while you were writing? Was there a conscious effort or thought about capturing the specificity of the moment versus some ideal of “universality?”

Chris Knapp: In the airport the other day I overheard a young woman in a camel hair coat talking to her mom on the phone about her wedding in Lake Como, and later when the conversation shifted to general chitchat, I heard her say, “Yeah they found him… yeah, everyone’s supporting him.” She was talking, of course, about my man Luigi—notably, without choosing sides.

Public and private arguments about how the world should be and what we should do to make it that way (i.e. politics) add so much texture to the fabric of our daily lives, even if we have camel hair coats and think the world is basically fine as it is. In fiction, those conversations can concern made-up events or events drawn from the real world. So for example, my book opens at a moment when all anyone’s talking about in Europe is the Greek financial crisis, but if you’re not familiar with 2015 European politics it might as well be the Freedonian financial crisis (if you read Waiting for the Barbarians and think it’s set in a real historical empire, or if you read The Fraud and think the Tichborne case is the product of Zadie Smith’s imagination, what does that really change?). When people set specificity (historical, geographical) in opposition to universality, I think it shows maybe a lack of faith in the imaginations of readers.

As if not to recognize a reference to an event or a public figure or a local landmark will render the text completely opaque. You don’t need to know a ton about Napoleon’s campaign in Russia to recognize something “universal” (to borrow your scare quotes) about the experiences, emotions, entanglements and so on described in War and Peace. You don’t need to know who Charles Stewart Parnell was to have some idea how Dedalus feels as a child listening to adults argue about the news, and when, in a passage of “The Dead” where Gabriel tries to argue that “literature was above politics,” you don’t need to know Aston’s Quay or O’Clohissey’s in the by-street to appreciate the pleasure of wandering around and ducking into bookshops—you have your own private geography and you know how it feels to inventory it in your mind.

AM: I suppose this raises the question of what we even mean by universal, and why some writers and work are seen as such versus others.

CK: The poverty of the assumption that any reader can recognize themselves in the experiences of white men, but not everyone can recognize themselves in the experiences of nonwhite people or non-man people, has been described so comprehensively by so many writers in the past decade or so that to my mind it’s established fact. I’d only like to emphasize that to recognize oneself in literature is one goal of reading, but not for my money the highest goal.

Enlarging and transcending oneself is nearer to the top of the list; in the book, that’s one possibility I hope the real-world context gestures toward. When the narrator observes, for example, the hopelessness and desperation and frustration in the attitudes of refugees camped out in Paris, his response is to try to situate that experience on the far end of a spectrum that also includes on the nearer end his experience of waiting for a delayed flight on the floor of Laguardia. By trying to recognize himself, what is he failing to see?

That is, he experiences the world as a certain limited kind of reader. He knows he’s being dumb, but he has no idea what better response is possible, though he’s surrounded by examples of better possible responses. Which is why he’s a bad husband.

AM: Do you think he’s a bad husband? He seems quite caring to me!

CK: Maybe I’m being a bit glib, but I think it you asked Ella, she’d say something like, “It’s very nice that he’s so interested in my pain, but this is happening to both of us and it would be nice to know that irrespective of how I feel he’s feeling his own pain, even if it’s different in nature than my own.” (Which maybe gets at something frustrating in the way ally-ship is so often practiced, in that you should care about this stuff because it harms you personally, however indirectly or abstractly.)

AM: One of my favorite aspects of the novel is how you write about the central relationship of the story, between the narrator and his wife Ella. It’s one of the most realistic descriptions of a modern relationship I’ve read. How did you think about how to create that kind of intimacy on the page? Were there any literary models that you had in mind while you were working? To me, this is a rare first-person novel in which the narrator’s partner fully comes alive on the page, which seems very hard to achieve.

CK: I’m so delighted to hear you feel this way, and I wish I had a better answer for you. I will say that it was my central preoccupation in my revisions of the original draft—bringing Ella into sharper relief. As a matter of craft, we obviously hear a lot of talk about the importance of character, that character is a more vital aspect of storytelling than plot. I’d sign that letter, but more important still, in my mind, are the relationships between characters. As readers, we know how precious and mysterious genuine connections with other people are, and how fragile, and so to see them on the page awakens some terrified instinct in us, there’s a kind of narrative tension built into it, like watching people dance on a slackline eighty stories high.

But so if an important tool for building character is being attentive to what they like and dislike about being alive, then an important tool for building relationships between characters is being attentive to what they like and dislike about each other. In the first draft, it was very obvious what the narrator liked about Ella, and it was very obvious what she disliked about him. Rewriting, I tried to think about the inverse questions: what does he dislike about her/what does she like about him. Those were harder to answer, but to me at least, they made the intimacy between them feel more genuine.

I wouldn’t say they were models exactly, but the works that brought all this stuff about relationships most clearly into focus for me were Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan cycle, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Michaela Coel’s miniseries I May Destroy You. I don’t think you can reach adulthood without becoming painfully aware how much power you give someone over you by caring about them. But the central relationships in these stories—between Lenù and Lila; between Edie and Rebecca and also between Edie and Akila; and between Arabella, Terry, and Kwame—taught me something about how exhilarating but also almost intolerably fraught it can be in fiction to watch characters cultivate or submit to and wield or relinquish this power. I couldn’t say exactly how but I tried to let that lesson guide my thinking about the narrator and Ella.

AM: You deftly use elements of your life in the narrative, drawing on for example, the life you lived moving back and forth between Virginia and France when you were in graduate school. I don’t know if you want to get into the question of “autofiction,” but I wondered if you felt any angst about drawing on your experience, or how you thought about the question of what would make good fiction and how to transform that material.

CK: One reason, of course, authors tend to bristle at the label of autofiction is that autofiction just sounds so easy to accuse of solipsism. But I think it’s a pretty useful way to distinguish fiction that’s recognizably autobiographical from fiction that tries to generate some kind of tension or propulsion by blurring the line between author and narrator. The angst comes from the fact that, on the one hand, a lot of intimate details of your life are also intimate details of other people’s lives, and on the other that readers will assume that whatever’s true in the lives of your characters is true in the lives of the corresponding figures in the real world. The narrator makes a big show out of navigating the ethics of telling other people’s stories, with a crucial exception in the case of his wife—and for readers who think that this betrayal belongs to the author (moi) and not a fictional character, the stakes of that betrayal are heightened, and the readers themselves are implicated in whatever harm is being done.

In the real-world period the book describes, the idea was in the air that fiction writing was fatuous at best, and at worst exploitative, and in the book the narrator definitely shares those concerns. Stories have this way of making us feel ennobled by other people’s pain, and so that author/narrator fuzziness and all the resulting ambiguity, together with the narrator’s own queasiness about the whole endeavor, ask you to at least consider the possibility that the fullness you feel in your heart when you read a story about the Trail of Tears or something is actually just vanity—that you’re actually a fucking vampire. I’m not saying you are, I’m just saying we need to be rigorous in defending our experiences of art; aesthetic experiences, and experiences of empathy, aren’t moral in and of themselves, though they can be important, inciting events in our moral lives.

AM: Speaking of our moral lives, much of this book is about the experience of attempting to conceive a child, and all of the complicated medical and emotional terrain that such a process entails. What were some of the difficulties of dramatizing this? And how did you solve those problems, formally and, perhaps, emotionally?

CK: This question is almost the central drama of the book, in the sense that the narrator is trying to discover how to both live in and process the experience, and his only real tool for doing that is by narrativizing. People who have been through this experience will tell you that it’s a difficult thing to account for to the uninitiated because it’s hard to convey how real, and beloved, a thing becomes in your mind that we all agree as a matter of good politics is just a clump of cells and some electricity. They will also tell you, the people who’ve been through this stuff, how hard it is to convey both the physical and emotional toll it takes—the needles, the chemicals, and the vast gulf between one partner’s experience, whose bodily commitment is total and all-consuming, and the other’s whose only bodily implication in the process is literally having an orgasm.

And I guess the answer I arrived at is just laying it all out in clear prose and hoping that for at least some readers, the drama inherent in all this, the various ways it makes Ella on the one hand the narrator and on the other vulnerable, how much space it opens up for misunderstanding and insensitivity and even cruelty, is worth investing in because whether they fuck it up and fall apart or somehow come through it intact, it will be a worthwhile occasion to reflect on the challenges and responsibilities inherent in being human. Which is a priority for the kind of readers I hope to reach.

AM: I know this novel took shape over a long period of time, both in the writing and publication process. How did it evolve and change in the time that you worked on it? Were there aspects of earlier drafts that ended up on the cutting room floor? Did the time between beginning the book and its publication change your relationship to the novel in particular ways?

CK: Yeah, so I finished the first draft at the end of 2018, and did the rewrites in the summer of 2020, after France’s first covid lockdown. I did cut a lot—like maybe twenty-five thousand words. Five thousand of which being, for example, a short biography of Theodor Adorno, things like that. Woof. But the main preoccupation, in addition to what I mentioned about trying to make Ella more lifelike and bring the personal drama of the book forward a bit more, was to change the frame: in the original draft, the moment of narration was the narrator by Ella’s bedside in the hospital, going through his notes from that year; now he’s going through his notes during the pandemic, and the crucial difference is that in the first version, when his plane lands back in the US in the final scene of the book, we know, but he doesn’t, what’s about to happen on the planet he’s returning to; in the second version, he doesn’t have that innocence, which means that when he relates details such as, say, comments his mother made about how Trump’s candidacy would spawn a genre of alternate histories in which he won the election, it’s him winking at the reader instead of me winking at the reader over his shoulder. But then when he relates sparse details of his present, just before the murder of George Floyd, it’s me winking again about how his world is about to go up in smoke yet again.

AM: I wonder, too, about the development of your particular aesthetic as a writer. Your style has a density and precision to it that I’ve always admired—long, multi-clausal sentences, long paragraphs—but it’s also very readable and colloquial. How do you balance those competing imperatives? What’s your process like on a line to line level?

CK: I do like long sentences, and long paragraphs, mostly because of a very literal-minded and wrongheaded way I think about how to organize information: if I merely put two things side-by-side with a period between them, the connection I want to establish becomes invisible to me, and what I see is chaos. I’m being serious. They need to be grammatically intertwined, preferably by subordinating rather than coordinating conjunctions, for me to hold in my head whatever I think is worth comparing about them. I know this is incorrect but if I tried to do it another way it wouldn’t be much fun.

AM: You’ve been an American writer living in Paris now for many years. Besides the subject matter it provides you with, how do you think working outside of your native country changes your work? Is it generative? Is it lonely? Both?

CK: It’s definitely helpful to be able to see just how fucking weird the US looks from an external point of view, but I mean it when I say that the most salient difference is that I have health insurance.