INTERVIEWED BY CHRISTINE RICE
Recently long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal For Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, Joe Meno’s hauntingly lovely, richly detailed Marvel and a Wonder examines the contentious and, eventually, tender relationship between seventy-one-year-old widower Jim Falls and his teenage grandson Quentin. On the surface, the white Korean War veteran and his biracial grandson have little in common. But then:
The white mare appeared on a Monday. Neither the grandfather nor the grandson had any idea who’d sent it. At first there was only the violent agitation of the pickup as it rattled along the unmarked road, towing behind it a fancy silver trailer, all ten wheels upsetting the air with a cloud of dust high as a steeple.
And with that, the characters embark on an epic journey across a Midwest landscape made unfamiliar by plant closings, shuttered small towns, and unemployment.
A few weeks ago, Joe and I sat down in his office in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago to discuss life, writing, and Marvel and a Wonder.
CHRISTINE RICE: What have you been up to? How’s the family? Did you get some writing in this summer?
JOE MENO: First of all, thanks so much for taking the time and giving me the opportunity to talk about the book. This summer, my family and I moved into a single family home. It was kind of a momentous event for all of us. I feel like I am officially an adult now. I stand in the hallway at night and listen to my family sleep. I feel incredibly lucky to have a place for us to be together.
Other than that, I still manage to write about three hours a day, six days a week. The kids play in the other room; I can hear them using their imagination pretty much the same way I am. It’s very humbling and reminds me what the purpose of fiction is in the first place.
CR: Way back when, at your first Unabridged Books reading, you signed, “Thanks for being so nice,” on my copy of Tender as Hellfire. Do sign all your books that way?
JM: No way. I just signed yours like that. I think I felt so overwhelmed when my first book came out. I was twenty-four, still in grad school, and you were always so thoughtful and kind. I feel a pressure to come up with something meaningful, something witty to write in people’s books, and always, always fail. I did once say “Here’s to swimming with bow-legged women,” which is something my grandfather used to say.
CR: My Uncle used to say that. I haven’t heard that in a good long while.
Cars. Trucks. You seem to use them to say something about your characters. I’m from Flint, Michigan and a car tells me a lot about its owner. Jim drives a beat up Ford. Tell me how you choose a car for a character.
JM: Jim drives a nondescript blue Ford pick-up. My father-in-law, and my wife’s step-father both drove Fords. Jim, in a way, is based on these strong men I’ve known, men who served in the military, worked with their hands. For that character, I wanted something that felt familiar, functional, and not fussy.
CR: What’s your dream car?
JM: After I sold my first novel, I bought a used 1972 Chevelle. My brother-in-law and I rebuilt it. A few years later I ended up giving it to my younger brother when he turned sixteen. I once plowed head-on into a concrete overpass embankment in that car. The passenger and I climbed out and didn’t find a single scratch. The car was from a part of my life when I was sure I was invincible. I now drive a Volvo. The irony is not lost one me.
CR: You really heightened the sense of suspense throughout Marvel and a Wonder and yet it never seemed rushed or forced. The plot emerged so organically out of the characters’ situations.
JM: I went back and looked at a lot of canonical authors I admire while working on the book: Faulkner, Marquez, Toni Morrison, Steinbeck. I wanted to try and capture their sense of scale and ambition, as well as their amazing sense of character and place. But I also went back to crime writers I love: Chandler, Hammett, Charles Willeford, David Goodis. I wanted the book to be focus on the relationship between the grandfather and grandson, but feel like a high-stakes journey as well.
CR: There’s always a great sense of surprise in your writing, in your short stories and novels. Do you work off an outline? Or do you work off a more vague overall sense of plot?
JM: For this book, I worked paragraph by paragraph. I have never written like that before. Usually, I think of specific events, which fill specific chapters, but for this book, I wanted the basic unit of measurement to be the paragraph. So one paragraph could follow one character, and in the next move to another character, or one paragraph could have one tone, and move to another in the next.
I did have a sense of beginning with the grandfather and grandson at the beginning of the story, of them receiving the horse, and then the horse being stolen as one of the major beats. But the other characters, the other events, all developed as I was writing it. What this means is getting lost all of the time, or frequently writing scenes or chapters or entire sections that don’t make the final draft. I’ve become okay with that. I feel like I need to discover the book so the reader can have a similar experience.
CR: Your books – this book especially – are often dark but there’s always an overwhelming sense of hope. How do you manage that?
JM: I don’t know. I think the books that I love – Faulkner, Marquez, Morrison – they all share that same sensibility, that there is a darkness, but underneath that there are these small, sometimes impermanent moments of connection or hope. I think it’s largely manufactured by building scenes that feel suspenseful or dark or tragic and then looking for moments of a different nature or tone to intersperse within that structure. To me it’s almost like music; for the challenging moments, the dark ones to resonate there has to be these contrapuntal moments where something magical happens.
CR: I’ve heard you talk lovingly about your dad, about his work ethic. Was there ever a misunderstanding (like between Jim and Quentin) between you and your dad?
JM: I do not have the time to document all the misunderstandings between my father and me; I love him deeply but we are two men from two very different generations. I was interested in books and music pretty early on and as a former Army Ranger, my dad had a hard time seeing a fundamental value in that. When I told him I was going to be a writer – I put myself through college so it was ultimately my decision – he nodded and said, “That’s fine but you need to find a way to support yourself.” He said it without acrimony and in the end, he was totally right. I worked a variety of odd, low-paying jobs, went to grad school, became a teacher. Being a teacher has allowed me to write the kinds of books I want to write, without worrying about the marketplace, how each book will sell. I think about my father a lot as I work. I approach the writing as if it is a job, whether I’m feeling inspired or not. It’s forced me to develop a discipline which I think is essential for any kind of artist.
CR: What was your worst job?
JM: Hands down, working at the Solo plastics factory in Urbana, Illinois. It was otherworldly – these gigantic presses that pumped out plastic cups one after the other, hundreds at a time. The noise – so loud I could sing at the top of my voice and someone three feet away couldn’t hear me. The men – people my father’s age who would do cocaine or meth in the bathroom to get through another shift. That single job changed my entire outlook on work in America.
CR: The relationship between Jim and his grandson Quentin developed so beautifully. And you really mined that inter-generational lack of understanding between the ages. Can you talk about how these characters developed? How their relationship developed? Did you originally think that the story might include the absent mother more than it did?
JM: For me, everything begins with a short story. I wrote a twenty pager about this grandfather and grandson setting coyote traps. There was something about the characters, a Korean War vet and his biracial grandson, that felt unique. I hadn’t read anything or seen any film about that particular kind of relationship before even though there has been some pretty seismic shifts when it comes to these generational and racial patterns in the Midwest. So I knew from the beginning the book would be about them, and that it would be about the two of them trying to negotiate who they were, and their differences. The boy’s mother was only ever a character that existed at the beginning. Her absence, her decision to leave forces Jim to take an interest in Quentin in a way that wouldn’t work if she was still around. Mechanically, she leaves and there’s this huge sense of loss and then the next chapter, the horse appears, again almost like musical figures, one instrument followed by another, a kind of call and response.
CR: I loved the magical and yet wholly believable arrival of the white mare.
JM: Even though the book is concerned with the grandfather and grandson, and I would have been content to write three hundred pages about that, I knew for the book to work certain dramatic events had to happen. I also knew these two characters were in desperate need of some kind of miracle, almost on a Biblical or mythical level. So I began to experiment with the idea of the horse – which as an image in the Bible and myths and popular American culture has always suggested change, motion, the presence of God or the unknown. I wanted the book to skirt that place between a kind of gritty realism and the mythic and the horse is the element that helped bridge those worlds.
CR: I loved the way you used light to shift moods throughout Marvel and a Wonder.
Dawn that morning was a cold one, the fields dewy. The sound of boots on the slick green, brown, yellow grass. The smell of coffee in an old metal thermos. The chickens noisy, their voices the primitive racket of daylight arriving. The horse silent in its stall. The sun like some mythical animal already beginning its western run.
Faulkner plays a lot with light, too. Is this something you picked up from your theater experience? Is it just something you are drawn to?
JM: No, it was definitely Faulkner, and John Huston. The book has several Western elements and there are these very brief sections – I think of them as landscapes or establishing shots where the light, the land, nature is described to help transition between scenes, the way in a Western there are these distant, establishing shots. The quality of light was also something I could draw on to comment on the stakes, or what’s changing for the characters, a kind of way to build suspense through a slightly abstract physical detail.
CR: This is your seventh novel, you also write short stories, and plays. When do you know what form a story will take?
JM: I never know. At this point, almost everything starts as a short story. For me, a short story focuses on a single relationship, and usually follows a few, limited beats. If the relationship seems interesting enough or novel or unique enough, then I might try it out as a novel or a play. It really depends on the quality of the relationship. MAAW wouldn’t really work as play – it’s very physical and there’s a lot of movement from place to place – but there are definitely scenes where I wanted it to feel like a stage play or moment from a film. I want my books to be in conversation with these other narrative media, to involve what works in other forms of storytelling, novelistic or not.
CR: Can you talk a little bit about the themes in this book?
JM: I’m wary of discussing this too deeply; I feel like a reader should be able to come to a book and find what he or she needs without the writer telling them what to think, but for me the book is about this grandfather and grandson struggling to come to an understanding in a moment of large-scale change in the Midwest, and America more generally. It’s about identity and the ongoing, never-ending struggle between greed and sacrifice, and how these two characters experience that change.
CR: You’re a big supporter of indie publishers, bookstores, and writers. There are so many amazing indie publishers now. You’ve been published by both indies and the “Big 5.“ What have you noticed about the industry – overall – since publishing your first book?
JM: I am astounded and deeply encouraged by how open, how democratic, the publishing industry has been forced to become. Fifteen years ago there were a handful of great indie presses – Akashic, Softskull, Coffeehouse, Graywolf – and to see how these publishers have led the way to building a new kind of literature, distinct but in communication with the established publishing apparatus, is so gratifying. It’s very similar to what happened in the ’80s with the rise of independent labels, or the ’70s with the birth of independent film. I think it’s important to see the spectrum of different kinds of publishing opportunities and to try and find the publisher that’s the best fit for the kind of book you’re producing. I do feel there is a narrowness that exists right now – and always has – with the literary conversation in the country when it comes to class and race, and even style and form – but the internet and the rise of some many great new indies – like Curbside Splendor, Two Dollar Radio – is already forcing that conversation to open up in many strange, interesting new ways.
