DH: Barcelona is a city I can imagine leaving…for the beach. If Barcelona is in the mind ofJames Salter, then the reader can be set down in the streets of the city, even if they’ve never been there. As for my friend JC, who recently set off for Berlin, Zurich and Vienna, he can have them.

Malcolm is asleep. His steel rim glasses, which he doesn’t need, lie on a table by the bed. He’s compared to the keel of a ship. What I’ve noticed right off in my first JS story is that the writer is a master of the suggestive fact…of facts that have vaporous ghosts of abstractions clingiing to them as if the facts could be haunted.

There are priorities in what Salter wants to talk about. I notice that JS goes on for about half a page, associating M with images of strength…steel glasses (one), he doesn’t need them (two), body parts like the keel of a ship (3).

It’s only after we’ve been though half a page of Malcolm asleep that we are introduced to Nico, his partner. She’s already awake and has gone out to the terrace after her bath. Since I’m myth-saturated, I associate Malcolm with the sleeping Eros…Eros is often depicted in art as sleeping. It’s very dangerous to wake him. It’s not necessary for Salter to have thought of this at all. But the myth helps me to see something…that Malcolm is being presented as a god and maybe, I’m wondering, to Nico he is one.

I’m indebted to Salter for the slow elevator approach to storytelling. Nico goes down the slow elevator of her building to get Malcolm a morning coffee from a restaurant. Can you guess that Malcolm likes it black? “Solo” he says. And that Nico is getting it for him and likes getting it for him?

There was a time in my life when I was on a slow elevator off Spring Street in Soho a great deal. Christ, that elevator took forever. It must have been a hundred years old. But I understand about slow elevators. JS has a great line: as the lift drifts down from floor to floor, it’s like Nico is passing through decades of her life. In my opinion, you have to be in midlife to appreciate a slow elevator.

The slow elevator approach to story telling…you see, we’ve passed down another floor in my post. You don’t discover how the reality of another person changes right away. It happens slowly, like a play, scene by scene. I’m paraphrasing Salter here. This is what Nico is thinking. Reminds me of that Boulez piece, Pli Selon Pli…fold after fold.

Salter goes on to introduce fold after fold of cognitive dissonance until “the story” can’t take it anymore and breaks up into a sputtering coda of non sequiturs. I’m a great fan of having the structure of a story buckle with the sense of what’s happening.

Let’s all go to the beach. Who doesn’t want to go to the beach? So JS sends his characters and his readers to the beach at Stiges. But S introduces a new character, Inge, Nico’s friend from when she was going solo, as the agent of dissonance.

It’s awesome how the great JM piles on pleat after pleat of disturbance, all of it MINOR, but the effect is to overwhelm.

First off, it’s genius to have Malcolm encounter Nico’s old girlfriend, Inge, from her unattached days. This excavates Nico’s old personal history…rarely a positive experience for anyone. Shows the boyfriend what you were like before he met you.

Here are some folds for you: They go to the beach in Inge’s car. She doesn’t realize it’s a piece of junk, Malcolm drives but Inge leans over to use the horn uselessly when they get stuck in traffic. Even though Inge owns a piece of shit, she talks about owning a Mercedes someday…several. She is overweight but wears a dress that’s too short. She talks about the boys in a bar not being able to buy you a dinner. She wants to run on the beach in front of expensive villas so she can be ogled. She berates her boyfriend who she called at 5 in the morning because he didn’t call her back the previous night. She dreams that every guy who lays her for one night may want to marry her.

It’s genius that Nico becomes emotionally exhausted and falls asleep on a couch in the restaurant she selects for the trio afterward. The real nightmare occurs when she wakes up, groggy I would think, and sees Inge in a tete a tete with her boyfriend.

I’ve mentioned just a few of the minor key measures that shadow this less than five page story. It’s called ‘Am Strande Von Tanger’ and it’s in Modern Library’s wonderful reissue in cloth of James Salter’s collection “Dusk and Other Stories”.

DH: I. The sentences are swift, declarative. Like Joseph Roth used to say about Vienna under the Emperor Franz Joseph, the then-famous “Vienna walk”. See The Radetzky March (1932) for the reference. But who gets to be New York? Who gets to be Vienna.? That changes. But there will always be one. Just like there will always be a Grand Hotel. Do you know that one?

And then we get “the last rank in the armies of law” below the clever junior partners who are below the full partners who dined at the Century Club. August seniors who couldn’t urinate and those who couldn’t stop. I’ve only paraphrased Salter’s sentences. But notice how the last sentence, even in paraphrase, stops at “stop”. And we get not “the law” which would put us in a cable police procedural, but just “law” which means it’s your crowd. We also get that they were living in apartments with funny furniture and sleeping until noon on Sundays. Hierarchy, irony, swiftness, secularism, style, power, money, stacked vertically: New York. Just one paragraph.

II. Frank and Alan catalog the available girls at the firm and the girls that they wish were. It’s a catalog like they are petty Don Giovanni’s. JS is always providing us with poetic sequences in the form of these lists. It’s like the modulating chords in a Mozart symphony. The listings transition you.

The period in this list of “girls”…and I’m using the word in the text…is Brenda. And the guys end up at her apartment, too late for a party. Knock out image: rolling around the walls kissing as the dusk settles in. The sense of New York apartment light: for most diffuse, bouncing off a thousand buildings and two rivers before it gets to you. Brenda has the same kind of furniture her mother had, sits in the same kind of chair, only she does everything her mother wouldn’t. Exchange of office news: “Jane Harrah got fired.” Brenda said. “That’s too bad. Who is she?”

III. Frank and Alan jump-start to the next level by being more unscrupulous than their own management. They form a partnership and steal a lucrative client away from their own firm. The case settles out of court and their fee is a percentage of the deal, millions. They don’t get prosecuted for this. I don’t know if that’s possible. But Salter implies that the dumb shits got lucky and got away with it. It’s like they stumbled into a fortune at Las Vegas. It’s unethical but now they are rich.

This third part of the story transitions to the continent where the guys seem to be giving the worse kind of imitation of eurotrash. It’s always Frank in the lead with Alan as the follower. I appreciated how well JS sets up this relationship, this tacky friendship, so the reader sees a dynamic…not just two guys blowing away thousands on credit cards in Europe, spending themselves into boredom. Buying people too, in this case a young woman, a student they pick up, throwing thousands in gifts at her as if it were just so much shit.

The uselessness of inappropriate wealth. The waste. They are still the guys from the office. On the make for the girls. They haven’t learned anything. And they are even stupider than they were before. But here’s a great throwaway line from Venice: “On the curtained upper floors the legs of countesses uncoiled, slithering on the sheets like serpents.”

You’ll find pleasures both sacred and profane in the short stories of James Salter. But you are encouraged to be a connoisseur of the word if you want to appreciate them. This is a discussion of ‘American Express’ from James Salter’s collection, “Dusk and other stories”.

JC: Yesterday, 3G1B posted JR’s review of Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s book Mad Men Unbuttoned, which, along with her fantastic blog (seriously…check out the supercool archive on The Footnotes of Mad Men), details the characters, themes, and societal shifts as depicted in the series. JR recently had the opportunity to ask her a few questions.

Jason Rice: So. Mad Men. It covers an incredibly fertile period, not only advertising but of human evolution. Right? Not to mention the microscope it puts over fashion, human habits, good and bad, never mind advertising.  Do these men make the times they live in, or does time shape them?

Natasha Vargas-Cooper: Ooo, you almost tricked me into using the word ‘symbiotic’ but I’ll resist! I think there is something eternal in watching men push against the established margins when the right historical moment presents itself (Hello, Russia!). Though this is a precise moment when culture, commerce, sex, power, money all converge in a uniquely American way and these guys really took the moment by the balls.

JR: This is a great looking book, Mad Men Unbuttoned.  Can you tell me what got you interested in bringing this out into the world?

NVC: It’s like, someone made a TV show about your favorite band and you know or want to know the story behind the songs. That’s what it was like when I saw Mad Men. But the band was called, ‘MIDCENTURY AMERCAN HISTORY’ Each reference was like a note I couldn’t get out of my head. People were also really excited to talk about the show and so I was like, HEY! Let’s dance!

JR: I love how your voice isn’t just a tour guide through the advertising campaigns used on the show, but has a kind of therapist’s tone, especially when Betty Draper uses “lesbian”, you try to understand her upbringing, and where she went to school, and how it wasn’t a mistake by the show’s creators to introduce that term in her vernacular.  Striking this tone must have been hard, how much did you pull back, push, and massage this book into its current state?

NVC: I aim to be engaging! I did make it a point to never be flip or condescending towards a topic. I cut anything I felt neutral about, it was either transcribe the thoughtfulness and intensity of the show on to paper or don’t bother.

JR: You break this book into nine parts, and eviscerate each detail of the show as they are reflected by the ads and the time the show is set. When you wrestle a period piece like Mad Men, is it possible to look around at certain things, like sex, or drugs, even the hippies of the 60’s and wonder how do I figure out what to talk about? Draper and Co, are about to drift into that time period, drugs sex, and free love, and all that comes with it. JFK is already in the pine box, so to speak, what’s next for them to experience? And how far can the show really go? I’d watch it until 1980.

NVC:1968 is going to dropkick these guys! Nevertheless, it’s not the aesthetics that hook people or necessarily the era (though they help) but the richness of the characters and all their muted dramas. I think they’ve shown in the first two episodes of the new season that the culture is moving too fast for these guys to keep up with. Only the young like Pete and Peggy could stay afloat and even they will face a reckoning. I’d imagine they’re going to stay in the decade because it’s such a fundamental time in our development as country. It’s the starting point for our modern ethos and culture, it’s when we became full-time consumers!

JR: Could a Mad Men-like show exist now? What advertising campaigns would you pick, say, if you made a show set in Seattle, Washington, right now? Would the Draper role be played by a woman? How would you handle Internet marketing, Twitter, Facebook, cell phones, downloads of music, is it impossible to cover everything now?

NVC: Mad Men would be really boring if Don Draper was played by a woman! Women can’t go around finger banging ladies in restaurants then telling their wives they look like a whore in a bikini! Part of Mad Men’s appeal is that it’s pre-sexual revolution, the gender roles are oppressive, sure, but they are also sharply defined. It’s such unapologetic masculinity that gives the show such vitality. It also could not take place today because the stakes are not nearly as high seeing as how fractionalized consumer markets are, additionally, no product brand or outlet has the authority that these guys did 40 years ago.

JR: I love the shape and design of this book.  It’s images and colors are carved with great care.  I feel like nothing is over looked, from the Marlboro Man advertisement campaign to the paintings on Bert Cooper’s walls. The creator Rubicon called Mad Men “John Cheever on television”. Is that accurate?

NVC: I buy that! It’s certainly a visual novel. No question that Mad Men is high-art –and it’s accessible. Also, it seems so obvious now, but of course, 12 part serialized dramas seem like a perfect way to delve into characters and tease out all the pathos – why didn’t we do this before the Sopranos?! Mad Men fulfills the full potential of the medium.

JR: There seem to be a million times more distractions for the average person today. Where do people get their ideas to buy things? Amazon.com? TMZ? What their starlets wear to the gym? What kind of special Yoga classes Brad Pitt takes when he’s on location? How do trends form today? From where? Or, where do you think they come from?

NVC: If I knew why people bought things I would not be in the publishing industry. But I do think consumers get a bad name! American consumers are a most sophisticated and savvy lot.  Empires do have the benefit of breeding discerning shoppers.

JR: I love this book. I take it with me everywhere. It helps that I love the show. What are your favorite and least favorite parts of Mad Men?

NVC: My favorite part of the show is watching Don Draper try to navigate through all the moral morass. The self-indulgence and consequent emotional wreckage he creates for himself and the people close to him. I think the compulsion to assert individuality against history, family, work is compelling. My least favorite part is that I know that the writers are pulling all the right levers and presenting us with this very attractive package called Don Draper but that he has a rotted core. When you identify with Don, which I find myself doing often, you’re identifying with a monster so that’s (exquisite) torture!

JR: Thank you Natasha.

NVC: My pleasure!

JC: I was lucky enough to learn about Tatjana Soli’s new novel The Lotus Eaters through JE. All I can say is if you like your war novels with a heavy dose of influence by Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway, then you shouldn’t miss this. It’s an astoundingly good book with cinematic flair and a gutsy recasting of the last days of Vietnam. More on The Lotus Eaters later. Here’s her WWFIL:

Loneliness, Love, and Hemingway

by Tatjana Soli

I’m sure that I was exposed to Hemingway in school, as a necessary and dreaded English assignment, but reading him left no impression other than he was a chore to be gotten through. Then I turned seventeen, fell in love and promptly got my heart broken (big time), and suddenly Ernest Hemingway became my best and closest friend. I have a theory that after thinking in childhood that we will never be alone, in adolescence we suddenly see that we are alone (big time), and then along comes First Love, and we jump, thinking maybe we don’t have to go it alone after all. This is the primal reason why we become readers — to have that deep companionship of a good book. But at seventeen, nothing — not loving parents, or sympathetic girlfriends, or any of the usual remedies — worked, at all.

One afternoon, moping through our family bookshelves, I opened The Sun Also Rises (thankfully the publisher changed it from the original proposed title, Fiesta, which I would probably have been skipped over) and came upon Robert Cohn’s line: “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it?” Yes! That book became as much a guidebook for life to me at seventeen as The Purple Land became a guidebook for the deluded Cohn. No, I never did make it (yet) to Pamplona for the running of the bulls, but I understood Cohn’s unrealistic longing for South America, as well as Jake Barnes longing for Lady Brett Ashley. I always found the vague war-injury excuse to undercut Jake’s understanding that no one is going to keep Lady Brett happy for long, injury or no.

As I blazed — indiscriminately, promiscuously — through the rest of the novels, then the short stories, then the non-fiction, I didn’t care about the story line or the subject matter. I felt at home in Hemingway’s prose, and the only thing I really dreaded was coming to the end of all of his books (this was before I discovered the prolonging of joy called rereading). What did I fall in love with? Place is a big one: a bygone Paris, the small towns in France, Italy, and Spain, the old-movie version of African safaris. But I fell in love, too, with his sense of time. There is a magic to his arrangement of words in a sentence, sentences in a paragraph, paragraphs on a page, that feels as true as your own breath. For me, Hemingway is as much an artist of the way time passes as Proust, as in this short passage from A Moveable Feast:

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife — second class — and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.

The big revelation for me in Hemingway is that his subject matter was beside the point. I hate bullfighting, safaris, and even fly-fishing seems kind of boring, but in Hemingway’s hands I understood that he was writing both about the subject matter and through it about life. In all of his best work — The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, “Indian Camp,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “ The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Big Two-Hearted River,” “In Another Country,” and A Moveable Feast — the common theme follows Faulkner’s dictum that the best writing is always about “the human heart in conflict with itself.” I wasn’t seduced by the machismo of bullfights or deep-sea fishing, but I was seduced by Hemingway’s deeper quest of living an authentic life. Forgive me, but I never got Fitzgerald. Gorgeous sentences, and the ending of Gatsby is indeed one of the most beautiful and profound passages in American literature, but in general it frustrates me how dazzled he is by surfaces. The famous exchange (true or not) with Hemingway is telling:

Fitzgerald: “The rich are different than us.”

Hemingway: “Yes. They have more money.”

For a period of about a dozen years during and after college, I purposely stayed away from Hemingway, the influence of his style simply too seductive and overwhelming. Now, I return like the prodigal daughter, curious what I might find changed. One is always a little wary that what thrilled you at seventeen won’t quite pack the same punch at twenty-seven, much less thirty-seven. I’m happy to report that unlike that first false love that led me to Hemingway, my love for his work has stayed and matured. A clean, well-lighted place, indeed. Someday I intend to go to Pamplona, sit in a café, and raise a glass of wine to Papa.

JC: Last week JR reviewed David Goodwillie’s new novel, American Subversive, saying that it picked up where Trance left off, and reminded him of Eat the Document, both of which are good enough to get my attention. Here he is again with a fine interview with the author himself.

Jason Rice: Where did the idea for American Subversive come from? Up to this point you’d written a memoir, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.  The first novel, was it looming?

It was at least in part because of the memoir that I started writing about two characters completely different from myself (unless you’re David Sedaris, one memoir at a relatively young age is more than enough).  Paige Roderick is an idealistic young woman from the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina.  She’s from a military family, and when her older brother dies in Iraq, she turns to radicalism as a way to avenge his death.  The book’s other main character, Aidan Cole, is a failed journalist-turned-gossip-blogger, who starts investigating Paige’s group after a bomb goes off in New York.  I saw them as two sides of my generation—a woman who cares too much about the world, and a guy who’s apathetic and barely cares at all (at least in the beginning).  I guess I fall somewhere in the middle.  The book had been evolving in my mind for some time. I wanted to write about serious and often controversial themes—politics and media, apathy and activism, the way people should react to events in the larger world—and do so in a thriller-ish way.

The state of America right now seems perfect for these kinds of characters to spring forward and grab the spotlight.  Do you see someone like Paige or Aidan surfacing, or a Weatherman group forming?  With the past eight years — terrible at best — behind us, isn’t it ripe for something like you describe in American Subversive?

I’ve always been fascinated by American extremist movements—especially The Weather Underground.  Imagining something like that occurring today—an organized group of middle- and upper-middle class students (most of them liberal arts kids or Ivy Leaguers) using violent means in an attempt to stir revolt, and end a misguided war—might be hard to do.  But that’s exactly the problem.  We’ve been so conditioned as a nation—and this dates back to Joe McCarthy and the early rhetoric of the Cold War—to worship at the alter of untethered capitalism, that a dangerous close-mindedness—a bunker-like us-against-them mentality—has come to define our politics.  I’m reminded of a great line from the New Yorker writer, Ian Frazier:  “Capitalism, having defeated communism, now seems to be about to do the same to democracy.”  Well, I’m not saying there’s a better answer than capitalism—indeed I haven’t found one.  Certainly, The Weather Underground (misguided as they were) didn’t provide one.  But the seeds of their struggle, their idealistic conviction that taking some form of action could not just jumpstart wide reform but change the face of a nation…well, we could use a bit more of that these days.  You can look at what happens to the characters in American Subversive to understand that violent extremism is no cure for what ails us, but neither is burying our heads in the sand.  Collective apathy, silent terrorism (if you will), may be the deadliest form of all.

To achieve the “what happens next” quality of this book, you do two things: keep your action in one or two places, and never tell us anything we don’t need to know.  Do you think that’s accurate? And was that hard to achieve or involve great discipline?

Writing American Subversive was certainly a learning experience.  I was trying to toe that very thin line between literature and suspense (so many books, it seems, fall into one camp or the other).  I wanted to write the best book I could write in terms of language, but I was also quite aware of keeping the story moving, of building momentum.  It was hard at times, especially since the novel is told in (more or less) alternating voices and styles, and flips back and forth in time.  Once or twice I wrote myself into a corner, but I always got myself out (with an occasional assist from my editor).   Now, I think the plot may be the strongest part of the whole thing.

You said you did a lot of research to write this novel, but the book doesn’t seem “fact heavy,” you release details slowly, and make them grow organically.  Where did your research start for this book?

I’m a stickler for facts, even in fiction. It was important that American Subversive “feel” real, that the reader could envision these events actually occurring.  In researching the book, I read dozens of novels and memoirs, from political thrillers to extremist tell-alls–even bomb-making manuals.  I also ended up speaking with all kinds of experts, including an FBI ordnance specialist, and a former member of the Weather Underground.   I wanted, as much as possible, to understand what living underground was really like—not just the issues of movement, technology and assimilation, but the minute-to-minute pressures and anxieties.  Most were helpful, some were wary.  One former Weatherman told me, via email, to stop dredging up the past, and he actually got pretty angry.  When I told my agent, she laughed and asked me what, exactly, I’d expected.  These people blew up buildings for real.  Some of them might not be the most stable members of society.

You mention 9/11 in this book, and you really nail the mood in Manhattan after that awful day.  Do you think it was a watershed moment for our generation? (I’m 41.)  Can things ever be like they once were? There seems to be a level of paranoia in my own life that I just can’t shake, like the government got away with something in the last 10 years. Do you feel the same thing?

I didn’t want American Subversive to be a “9/11 book”—for one, it takes place in 2010—but of course it’s impossible to write about politics and terror without 9/11 looming over the story.  The events that precipitate the narrative—the Iraq war, the mood in New York City—can certainly be traced back to 9/11, and yet most New Yorkers I know feel pretty divorced—or at least separated from that awful day.  Many of us lived through it first or second hand, but we’ve moved on—or should I say pretended to.  We’re aware, of course, that we’re still target number one on most terrorist hit lists, but it’s not something you can think about too much without going a little crazy.

I like to ask writers I interview who they’re reading right now, and who shaped them as writers, asking something silly like what are your influences.  What’s on your nightstand?

I never took many writing classes—I thought being surrounded by so many other (no doubt better) writers would scare me off.  Instead I learned to write by reading voraciously—all kind of stuff, from serious literature to whodunits.   I write about books quite a lot now (for The Daily Beast and other places) so my reading is a mix of books I pick out and stuff that’s picked out for me.  A few recent favorites include Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, (absolutely hilarious), Donald Ray Pollack’s Knockemstiff (absolutely devastating), and—to throw in a little nonfiction—Ian Frazier’s On The Rez (absolutely perfect).

Are you working on another novel?

Yes.  And they don’t get any easier.

Thank you for taking the time to talk to me, David.

My pleasure, Jason.  Thanks so much.