Vacation (26 page)

deb olin unferth

vacation

Author Interview

Vacation

Seriously Funny: Interview with Deb Olin Unferth

By Mark Dotten

Both in this book and the last one, you’re very preoccupied with questions of travel. What is the fascination there, would you say? And do you like to travel?

The American tourist is a phenomenon that just begs for comic representation: those blond Californians roving around El Salvador with their surfboards, the pale Americans standing in the customs line in Costa Rica, tapping their passports and demanding an explanation.

There’s a long tradition of American and British writing that uses travel, tourism, and ex-patriotism as conceits for exploring human loneliness and estrangement. Malcolm Lowry’s
Under the Volcano
and Paul Bowles’s
The Sheltering Sky
are two of my favorites. These writers use travel to express that essential solitude of being. They isolate the characters and make them suddenly (and appallingly) aware of themselves, forcing them, in a Petri dish, to deal with difficult moral questions and situations. I’ve always loved and related to this tradition. I wanted to contribute to it. But with the Internet it isn’t easy to get Bowles-style “lost” anymore. The challenge for me was how to create estrangement alongside the humorous and familiar, to have plastic water bottles and e-mail and still bring my characters to a Kurtzian darkness.

How much work did you do on the book with the editors at McSweeney’s? Did you just e-mail it to them and that was it, or was there a lot of back and forth?

The publisher of McSweeney’s, Eli Horowitz, was my editor for
Vacation,
and he worked hard on the book. I often imagined him sitting on the floor and patiently picking apart a knotted mass of string for six months straight. He made the book much better. He focused mostly on big things, broad strokes—the characters of Claire and the wife, for example—but he also worked at the level of the line. “This makes no sense,” was one thing he said a lot. “Fix it.” Toward the end I was desperate to finish the damn thing. At one point he told me to rewrite a certain passage and I said I couldn’t do it. I said that I was too tired and that if he wanted it different, he should write it himself. And he did! He wrote it up and sent it to me and said, “Okay, now change all the words.” I remember it had something about the “birdies tangled up in the telephone wires.” I thought it was great and I didn’t want to change the words. But in the end we cut the scene.

I’ve been lucky with editors. Diane Williams, the editor of the literary journal
NOON
and an important writer in her own right, has been the other genius-editor in my life. She worked on several of the stories in my collection,
Minor Robberies
. Her editing style is completely different. It’s line-based, sound-based, word-based, as if sound were where the heart is, as if the story were a song.

I would call both kinds of editing inspired.

This book is in part about isolation in the face of the desire for connection, the breakdown of the human body, and suicide. It’s not unusual that such a book would be funny (see Beckett, Bernhard, etc.) butthis one moves past your standard pitch-black existential comedy to a tone that is at timeslight-hearted, even at times whimsical. How did you arrive at that?

I had a note over my desk that read: “You will have conflict on every page and you will have humor on every page.” I often lost the note because I was traveling quite a bit while writing the book. I had to rewrite the note several times, which hammered the idea of it into my head.

I love dark humor, especially sad, dark humor. I love it when people are funny about misfortune. So in writing
Vacation
I felt committed to being humorous about their afflictions, but I found the more I wrote, the more I moved beyond the blackness and irony of their situation. I felt as if I were writing through them and to the other side, to actual light-hearted, gentle humor, which felt akin to hope. And I liked that: hope in the face of, or even
because of
, grave adversity and ruin. To me that proved the validity of the misfortune, that I wasn’t just being ironic about it. It was as if I was saying, “Look, I’m serious here: This is funny.”

I’m curious about the dolphin. Have you always liked dolphins?

One summer I found myself on Corn Island, a small, nearly deserted island off the coast of Nicaragua. In much the way it’s described in the book, I met a man named Richard O’Barry, who had captured and trained the original Flipper and then later had had a change of heart. He became a dolphin activist, one who somewhat resembles the character of the untrainer in
Vacation
. I didn’t know anything about dolphins or sea animals. I told Richard and his wife, Helene, that I was a writer. “Sort of a journalist,” I said, which wasn’t very accurate, but I said it so that they would bring me with them on their adventure: They were about to release two wild dolphins into the sea. They had rescued these dolphins from a dolphin trainer, had shown up at the dolphin trainer’s pool with armed men and walkie-talkies and had taken the dolphins by force and brought them to this secret place on Corn Island.

The understanding O’Barry had with me was that he would let me come on the release boat with the other journalists and filmmakers and that I would write an article about it. Well, I didn’t write an article about it. I’ve written very few articles in my life. But I remembered my promise. I was sorry that I’d led him to believe I was a journalist and that I hadn’t helped gain publicity for him. So the first scene of the book that I wrote is the last scene, where a dolphin is set free into the ocean. Now I have fulfilled my promise.

In the book I describe the dolphin release just like it happened—the hurricane, the ministers of the environment, the filmmakers and the brave walk, the sexy women in bikinis, the people running screaming from the dock, the waiters throwing cans of soda. The untrainer feels to me like the only character in the book who is clearly and uncomplicatedly a hero, just as O’Barry himself is undeniably a hero. There are very few persons like that, real or imaginary.

Recently a documentary film,
The Cove
, was made about O’Barry and his work.

I take the plight of animals seriously. While I was writing the book, I became a vegetarian. Now I’m a vegan.

The characters are quite often lost, confused, passive, and generally shuttled about by forces they can’t really seem to get their heads around. In contrast to that, the narrator sits way up above and seems to enjoy nudging the characters, asking questions about them, and generally provoking disruptions and digressions. For instance, Chapter Four begins, “Had Myers done anything wrong or was everything her fault?” and then the narrator engages in a Socratic-type dialog with him or herself. How did that evolve?

I talk to myself. I argue with myself, make fun of myself, accuse, pretend to be a smug outsider providing running commentary on my behavior. Doesn’t everyone do that? The page you’re referring to sounds more or less how I sound when I’m doing that. I tried in many ways in the book to represent thought and self-conscious observation. Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
was an influence: the way the narrator moves from mind to mind representing their thoughts with a lightly teasing hand, such as the scene when poor Mr. Dalloway would do anything to reach R while he thrashes his way around the garden.

This might be far fetched, but there’s a Carver story in
Cathedral
that begins, as does
Vacation
, with two people in a train compartment, one of them named Myers. It deals with similar themes of familial alienation. It struck me that in a book about following, this was maybe a conscious choice, a sort of literary pursuit. And I remembered that the same volume contains a Carver story called “The Train” that takes up and reexamines a Cheever story called “The Five-Forty-Eight”—so then we have a structure of you following Carver following Cheever, which mirrors Myers following his wife following Gray. That couldn’t be right, could it? But even if not, I wonder if you could talk a little about influence. It’s a question that’s particularly interesting to me in a book like yours, which is quite expansive and inclusive, voice-wise—so that there are moments when I think, “Ah, there’s Beckett,” and “OK, here’s Lydia Davis,” and “That’s Carver for sure!”—but it’s more slippery than that, isn’t it?

Wow, I am amazed and excited about the Carver and Cheever stories. I wasn’t thinking specifically of either of those stories but I have made many such connections in my life between stories and writers, and I am very happy to be the subject of such a connection. I love both Cheever and Carver. I was tremendously influenced by them when I began as a writer.

I had a lot of influences in writing this book. Some of them I’ve already mentioned. Also Chris Ware, Salvador Plascencia, Mary Robison, Julie Doucet, and David Ohle. The movie
Magnolia
by P.T. Anderson had a great effect on me, Anderson’s willingness to face hard emotions head on and his interest in collage in that film. The Cheever stories helped me form the character of Myers—a more hapless, hopeless version of the Cheever man. I internalized that character long ago. I also listened to many, many hours of Bach fugues played by Glenn Gould in hopes of learning something about structure and melody, how to weave connected but varying voices together.

As a side note on the subject of influence, this book is kind of a long letter to someone, someone who will not read the book in its finished form. In a sense the book is a one-sided discussion I’m having with this person about all these writers and it’s also a final calling-out to the person, a goodbye, a confession, an explanation—in much the same way Myers and his wife are still writing to each other even after they can no longer reach each other on e-mail.

Here’s a quote from the book: “This was so early in their marriage that they still had packing materials around, half-empty boxes, silver in sleeves, Styofoam noodles. The apartment felt huge when she wasn’t there, too white. It was so early in their marriage he still believed he knew her, that he could. He still believed in that—knowing.” Your book deals a lot with pretty fundamental epistemological and ontological questions. How do we know who we are? Where we are? Could I have made different choices? What’s the deal with death? Is it fair to call
Vacation
a philosophical novel?

I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate. And I do feel that my reasons for writing are personal and philosophical, which to me are the same thing. I like that the word “know” in that passage shifts meaning from its first instance to its second, from a specific question about an individual to a larger question about whether one can really know another—and to the even larger question: what can one know, if anything? I think this reflects thought patterns, or at least
my
thought patterns.