By Jael Montellano
If your life has been touched by violence, you know it is insidious like a weed—it winds itself into the cracks, rubbles foundations, roots across distances, and it requires sweat, it requires tears, it requires blood from your flagellated hands, to remove it. Mental health practitioners across the world have my deepest respect for their work to heal the harm violence perpetuates in our societies. It is seemingly never-ending.
While I count myself among the blessed few who have not had to encounter gun violence directly in America (though I wonder if somewhere fate holds a ticking watch that will chime my time), I am familiar with violence in smaller yet life-altering ways, and my own health vibrates with the aftershocks of strings long-past plucked by others.
Enter Michael Landweber’s The Damage Done, a novel about the ramifications of the miraculous but disorienting reality that occurs when physical violence becomes obsolete, a work that staggered me with its outlook and capacity. We corresponded over it and here present our conversation.
The Damage Done is a wide-scoped novel that defies easy categorization; we follow a boy who is bullied at school for presenting as queer pre-pubescence, a teenager who has lost his brother to gun violence, a woman held captive by domestic violence, a white supremacist attempting a mass shooting, and others, structured as interwoven narratives as they wake up to the sudden reality that physical violence against another human being is impossible. Bullets miss their targets, punches turn to caresses. How did the premise come to you as the angle for which you wanted to tackle the subject of violence?
A few years ago, I wrote a draft of a novel about people who were able to regenerate. They weren’t superheroes, even though they healed quickly from any injury. They were a minority group who faced widespread discrimination. Because they could grow back limbs or entire bodies after injuries that would have killed non-regenerative people, they were not considered victims. The premise of the book leant itself to some very graphic scenes that my intrepid first readers found hard to stomach.
The experience of writing and ultimately shelving that book made me think about violence in literature and particularly in my own writing. I began to wonder about the writer’s and the reader’s expectations. If you write a character who can regrow an arm, the expectation is that someone is going to chop it off. That is an extreme example, but it got me asking myself how I could challenge those expectations. That led to the idea of a world where violence was no longer possible. I want the reader to both experience what is on the page and their own anticipation of what would likely happen in the real world. I hope that readers will consider that contrast between violence and lack of violence.
Why was it important to tell this story from its multiple points of view, and why those particular ones? What were the challenges you encountered in doing so?
The implications of this premise were so broad that it seemed unrealistic to me to contain the story within a single point of view. There wasn’t one person whose experience could capture the breadth of the change that occurred. I needed to present a range of characters whose lives were affected by violence. As I started to develop this societal cross-section of characters, it was a sobering exercise. There are so many ways in which people are trapped by violence. I eventually settled on seven main characters, who are all coming to terms with their new realities during the first few days after the change. But there are so many other stories that could be told. I’ve thought that it might make an interesting companion anthology to ask other writers to imagine their own stories set in this world.
These characters’ stories occur in vastly different environments, and one of my challenges was to present them all with equal weight while also giving them each unique voices. Bullying and domestic abuse may feel like smaller scale stories than standing up to a despotic government, but for each of these characters their own experiences are personal and devastating. One other difficult decision was to include a white supremacist as one of the points of view. That was the hardest to write, but I feel it is an important aspect of the book, even though it was uncomfortable for me to get inside that character’s head.
Scattered in between the narrative chapters of the main characters, you have included excurses. Tell me about them and why you included these.
When I first had this idea, I realized that it would be something that would touch the lives of every person on Earth, even those who did not experience specific or systemic violence in their daily lives. This novel could have been written in a vastly different way with larger-than-life characters unraveling the mystery on a global scale. But that is not the type of novel I write. My interest is in the experience of the individual. That said, the novel felt incomplete without some nod to the geopolitical scale of the change. The inclusion of excurses seemed to be the best way to acknowledge the global realities without overshadowing the important individual stories. The result was a series very short asides – excurses – about extremely consequential moments, such as the President considering if the U.S. still has a viable military and the Pope pondering the value of the Thou Shalt Not Kill commandment.
One of the most fascinating viewpoints to me was The Empty Shell, the poet-dissident of The Nation whose works are routinely found scrunched into bullet casings by citizens at large, leading to freedom of thought. In the first section of the novel, The Nation is left unnamed, but through context clues we understand it’s a controlled totalitarian state, and The Empty Shell himself too remains unnamed. In the denouement, you change this, and give The Empty Shell a Korean name, as well as clues which point to North Korea. Tell me about these choices, the purpose behind the ambiguity, and why you made the later change?
I chose to be ambiguous about place throughout much of the book. Although it is clear that many of the characters live in the Bay Area in California, I don’t give a name to the college where Richard works or the neighborhood where Marcus lives or Ann’s and Julian’s suburbs. But the lack of geographical certainty is more pronounced in Gabriela’s and The Empty Shell’s stories. There are two reasons for such ambiguity. First is the nature of the novel itself. The book employs elements that might be considered magical realism or urban fantasy. This is our world but with new rules and unexplained phenomena layered atop it. I want the reader to feel familiar and unfamiliar at once. Not being able to place oneself on a map is a way to convey this unease. The other goal was to feel the displacement and alienation caused by violence. For the U.S.-based characters, they are experiencing it within their own homes and schools, their neighborhoods and cities. It is more pronounced for Gabriela, who is fleeing violence in El Salvador, which is also not named until the final chapter, only to find the threat of it everywhere along her journey to the U.S.
But as you have noted, this lack of naming, this anonymous isolation, is most conspicuous in The Empty Shell’s chapters. No country in the world is as inscrutable as North Korea, which, as you figured, is where The Empty Shell is from. When I worked at the State Department on nonproliferation issues, North Korea was always a concern. But unlike other countries there was no reliable information available. Determining what was happening in North Korea was always speculative, even for the experts. What was known was that the isolation from the world was purposeful, a way to control the population along with the constant threat of violence. It is a place where I believe it is safer to be anonymous, known only by pseudonyms, which all the characters in those chapters are. It is not surprising to believe that someone loses a sense of themselves when their whole lives have been subsumed to the will of their country. At the end of the book, The Empty Shell has rediscovered his own name and that of his country. He and Gabriela overcome their alienation in nearly opposite ways – she returns home and he is able to leave his freely.
There is a bizarre oasis created within The Empty Shell’s prison when the guards are unable to perform any torture on them, and temporarily evacuate, leaving behind the prisoners. Some of the prisoners take this as an opportunity to start a new life and leave. The Empty Shell and a few others remain for some days and discover the depths of the violence carried out there, finding half-alive persons and caring for them and one another in small ways. They cook meals for them, bathe them, incinerate them when their bodies fail to survive. And they sit in the sun. Where did this difficult series of scenes come from and what was the process of writing it like for you?
Those scenes were hard to write. The miracle that occurs at the beginning of the novel, that people are no longer able to hurt each other, was most starkly defined in those opening prison scenes. The imbalance in power between the prisoners and their torturers was greater than any other dynamic in the novel. Those first moments when the jailers realized that they had lost their power were exhilarating. But The Empty Shell’s arc is also about the aftermath and trauma of violence. The prisoners who had not yet been tortured needed to care for those who had been brutalized to their breaking points. Balancing the horror of the past with the hope for the future was a difficult challenge. But it was important for the novel that I not only presented the relief of those emerging from the threat of violence, but also the solemn task of ministering to the damage that had already been done.
The novel moves toward a sense of hope, of building better penal systems, better nations and a better world. I am fascinated by this predominantly positive outlook, because I think this is the opposite choice I would make. Talk me through some of your process in coming to this conclusion and, for example, why The Nation’s generals flock to nominate The Empty Shell as a leader, as opposed to creating a violence of manipulation, such as the kind we see with Amy and her husband, and Gabriela and The Vulture, to maintain control?
That is an interesting question, particularly since I generally think of myself as more of a pessimist than an optimist. Particularly when I write the first draft of a novel, I take the story to a worst case scenario. It is often in rewrites when I start to look for hope in my novels. But in The Damage Done I made a conscious decision that I wanted to lean toward the optimistic outcome for humanity. There are many scenarios that ran through my head about how the end of violence could actually result in the end of civilization. The usual dystopia in literature is the product of the constant threat of violence. The pessimistic view here would be that the complete absence of violence would be equally destructive to society. At the end of the day, I don’t want to believe that is the case. I want to believe that we would see the gift we were given as an opportunity to build a more equitable world.
In The Damage Done, it is nearly impossible to act on any violent impulse successfully. There are people who go to great lengths to try and subvert the new rules. They largely fail. And, as you mention, characters like Amy’s husband and The Vulture, attempt to maintain their power through manipulation. But that only works as long as their victims believe they are in danger. Once they are freed of that belief, their tormentors have no power. In the case of a dictatorial government that has maintained rule through force and media control, the new world would require a charismatic leader who could convince people that the rules had not changed. If The Empty Shell had decided to play that role, his country might not have changed at all. The most pessimistic option I could have written would have been to have a population convinced by propaganda that in fact there was still violence and they were still under threat. Again, that was a dystopian bent I consciously did not want to pursue. Maybe I’m actually a pessimistic optimist; I want to believe in humanity, even if that is not always easy.
Towards the end of the book, Marcus, who is the so-called Last-Victim-of-Gun-Violence’s brother, describes the bullets that remain in his apartment building congealed in the air, unable to be removed because that’s when this earth-shattering change occurred. And it’s a vulnerable moment because he’s facing the man he attempted to kill, is walking past the evidence of his failure, yet neighbors have tied ribbons around the bullets so that people don’t walk into them. It’s a gorgeous visual, these many-colored ribbons “like the tail plumage of tropical birds, the tentacles of a jellyfish,” hanging off bullets. To me, this appeared as a microcosm for the novel. What was your goal in writing this novel?
I’m glad you like that image. It is one of my favorites in the book as well. And I was thrilled when my publisher designed a book cover that played with the same idea of frozen bullets transformed into something beautiful.
I always have the same goal when I write a novel. I want readers to get lost in the story and invested in the characters. I want to entertain and transport and hopefully slightly shift each reader’s perspective. But that describes every writer’s goals, I suppose. Specific to this novel, I wanted to make readers question their assumptions about violence, both in literature and in the real world. Is it necessary? Is it inevitable? Does it define us as a species? I hope that by creating a construct where violence is absent, it will lead to discussions about why it is such a stubborn presence in our lives. And, of course, as we have talked about already, my goal was to fight my own instincts and approach the subject with some sense of optimism.
You live in D.C. and have a range of experience working in bureaucracy. The Damage Done was written pre-Capitol attack. Do you think if you had written this novel at a later point in time, you might have written the novel differently, with these events in mind? What do you think you might have changed or included?
That is an interesting question. I may have a different perspective on January 6 than those who don’t live in D.C. This happened in my city. While I don’t live particularly close to the Capitol, it was unsettling that it was unfolding on a terrain that I am so familiar with. But I don’t think it would have changed the way I wrote the novel. This book did not stem from any particular act of violence. Unfortunately, like all of us, there have been countless such violent events that have occurred during my lifetime. I was in the D.C. newsroom of the Associated Press when the Oklahoma City bombing happened. Years later, I was working at the State Department on 9/11. I had friends at the Pentagon who lived through that attack. I remember working my own way home while desperately trying to get in touch with my pregnant wife. Those days, like January 6, are seared in our minds because of the unique nature of their horror. But in between those days, there are mass shootings and terrorist attacks and war atrocities that capture our attention for shorter periods of time. And simmering beneath all of that are the daily occurrences of violence, so widespread and mundane that they never make the news at all. This book was not a response to any one of those events, but in my own small way a reaction, maybe even a counter-proposal, to the amalgamation of them.
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The Damage Done is a captivating look at a world where violent acts both large and small have ceased to have meaning, and an examination of the ways in which human beings react when they no longer have it at their disposal. Just because violence is a thing of the past, the instinct for it remains, and those who would use it to achieve their ends must find new ways to exert their will. A timely, mind-bending novel that pushes the limits of fiction, The Damage Done will make readers question everything they think they know about violence and its place is our world.
Michael Landweber is the author of three previous novels, We, Thursday, 1:17 PM, and The In Between. His short stories have appeared in Gargoyle, Fourteen Hills, Fugue, Barrelhouse, and American Literary Review. He is an associate editor at Potomac Review and a contributor for the Washington Independent Review of Books. He lives and writes in Washington, D.C.
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Raised in Mexico City and the Midwest United States, Jael Montellano is a writer and editor based in Chicago. Her fiction, which explores horror and queer life, features in The Selkie, the Columbia Journal, Hypertext Magazine, Camera Obscura Journal, among others. She holds a BA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Find her on Twitter @gathcreator.
