David Crouse - The Man Back There and Other Stories

Interview

Your stories in The Man Back There often explore male experience, particularly violence. How do you maintain such realistic portraits without sacrificing a compassionate point of view?

As a writer I try hard to sympathize with my characters, no matter what their moral transgressions, and I hope the reader does too. I think fiction can offer something much greater than factual knowledge, which is the experience of interacting with a character, a person, unlike yourself, and yet being compelled to extend yourself into that character’s unique universe—to be them, in a way, for the duration of the story, and empathize with them despite those differences.

Despite their confusions and sins, my characters usually do possess a modicum of self-knowledge. They might try to suppress this knowledge, but it’s there; the stories usually explore how they’re dealing with this self-knowledge, and I think that hopefully makes them more empathetic to the reader—that possibility for, if not redemption, at least some kind of progression.

Ultimately, though, it’s an issue that’s out of my hands. There’s always the reader who equates sentimentality with sympathy. Mainly I’m just trying to create interesting personalities and problems. Given a choice between making a character interesting or sympathetic, I’d go with interesting.

In “What We Own,” you write, “stories, like people, are fragile things. Sometimes we think we have such a firm hold of them that we possess them, but they can slip away from us so easily.” Could you comment?

I think part of what I’m interested in as a writer is how people construct their own identities—and how people have their identities constructed for them by forces larger than themselves. Storytelling is obviously a big part of that process, but sometimes those stories don’t mean what we want them to mean anymore, despite the fact that they might be repeated around the family dinner table, or repeated in one’s own head.

It’s also a bit of a comment on the storytelling process. Once we say something, it’s out there in the world. It’s not ours anymore, not completely anyway, although often we think it still is.

On that same note, the characters in your stories are often confused, and sometimes oblivious. In “Torture Me,” for example, a man talks about acquiring a snuff film “not as a decision or even an impulse as much as a floating kind of randomness.” How do you find the right narrative distance that allows the reader to explore such subtle conflicts of the mind while still staying true to the stance of a character who may not understand why they act or feel the way they do?

I like to crawl inside my characters’ heads and live there for a while. If the details of the story are arranged properly, the reader is going to be able to construct an objective viewpoint out of the material of the story—the other characters, the setting, the circumstances of the person’s life. But I also want the reader to feel the character’s subjective point-of-view as intensely as possible.

It’s interesting that you chose “Torture Me” as an example for your question, because in my mind this is a character who does know himself. He just doesn’t want to know himself. He’s aware of the terrible things he’s done, and he’s constructed the rest of his life as wall between him and that knowledge. That’s why he tries to be such a good person in his professional life.

Many of your stories underscore the dangers of illusions, particularly the safety and comfort provided by our homes and the material things within them. Television, for example, is described as a way “to be part of the background,” to “hide in plain sight, right at the center of the house.” Could you talk about this?

Well, in the story you’re referencing the character uses television as a way to hide from his family. As long as he’s in communion with the TV, he doesn’t have to be in communion with any of them. And he’s busy doing something that’s socially acceptable.

But there’s obviously something a little bigger going on there that your question is getting at, which involves the manner in which people try to protect themselves from danger. In many of these stories the characters assume that the home is going to offer up some kind of refuge. What they often find, though, is that they bring the problem they’re trying to escape from into the home with them. Because they are the problem, at least to some extent and that problem is not going to be cured by the suburban dream of the nice house with the picket fence around it. I think most of the characters know this at some level, which is one of the reasons they’re so unmoored, but the illusion dies slowly, if at all.

I’m very interested in class, because it’s such a powerful and unspoken force in our culture. It’s at the root of a lot of my stories, and it probably goes so deep that I don’t really even understand its full importance. I just know that almost every time I write a new story, it’s in there somewhere.

“The Castle on the Hill” is an incredibly moving story of an animal patrolman who tries to contact his ex-wife on Thanksgiving after feeling badly when he hears of a local murder. He comes “to warn her. But he didn’t know about what exactly—possibly the simple fact that there was danger in the world.” But what he finds is that the danger is him, that his fear and self-hate are wrapped up in the same package. How did you come to this story? And could you talk about the dog?

I’m not sure how I came to this story or how it came to me, except that I was struck by several images—the animal officer shoveling, the castle on the hill, the boys holding sticks—and these images formed into a narrative. I often begin with a few images that are sort of mysterious to me and then work from there. The drafting process often involves pushing that narrative into new and hopefully unexpected places. For instance, I think the trip to his ex-wife’s house came much later.

I’m a dog lover, and so the book contains several dogs as characters, and hopefully they come across as realistically as the human characters. In “The Castle on the Hill” the dog is incredibly important, as it’s the emotional focus of the character. In a way, the dichotomy of this man’s relationship with this dog—is he going to save or destroy it—stands for all his other problems.

Also, I wanted to take his job and sort of elevate it by examining it as closely as possible, so that the reader sees something tragic and noble in what he has to do on a daily basis.

In “Posterity,” an aging Senator finds that “time slides by and your words harden around you until you’re stuck, for everyone to see.” What, if anything, do you think this character could have done to soften his last days?

He’s one of the more deluded characters in the collection, and more than anybody else, his choices are limited. But the story at least offers up the possibility for hope in the form of his son, his assistant, even the little girl at the end, who is, of course, the antithesis of everything he’s stood for his entire life.

In an interview with Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Forum in 2005, you talked about moving to Alaska to escape the urban experience and find “a secluded place” where you “could walk with dogs in the woods and write lots and lots of stories.” What has been your experience as a writer since living there?

Well, the world is a complex place, and it’s even complex in Fairbanks, Alaska. This is a way of saying that sometimes I don’t get as much serenity and seclusion as I would like, but probably more than if I were living in some other American cities. I wish I were a writer like James Baldwin, who used to write at the kitchen table in the middle of all the family buzz, but I’m not. On the other hand I’m certainly not sitting alone in a cabin up here typing away on a manual typewriter. I work at a University, and I drive by a Barnes and Noble and a Wal-Mart on the way to work everyday.

Your last collection, Copy Cats, won the Flannery O’Connor Prize in Fiction. How did that manuscript differ from this new one? How do you feel as if your writing has changed or grown?

I think of The Man Back There as being a cousin to Copy Cats, but there are some big differences as well. I think the last few stories I wrote for The Man Back There and the stories I’m writing now have grown slightly more experimental structurally and thematically, “Posterity,” “Dear,” and “Show & Tell” being three examples.

I’m becoming less interested in traditional notions of character—which is not saying that I’m not interested in character. If anything I’m more interested, but I’m trying to find slightly different ways to express that mystery.

What story do you like best in The Man Back There? Why?

Sometimes I prefer the stories that have the most difficult births, or the ones that nobody else seems to notice. The runts. So in that case I might like “The Observable Universe” or “The Forgotten Kingdom” best. Hopefully both of those stories are also quite funny—as funny as stories about mental illness and death can be, at least.

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