Why we Read; an Interview with Philipp Meyer

When I first read Philipp Meyer’s American Rust I was struck by the poetry of it and exhilarated by the issues the author brought to light. It was the first novel I’d read by a contemporary that excited my sensibilities for language as well as meaning. It’s a courageous and deeply sensitive piece of fiction and to me it heralded the beginning of a new kind of writing and possibly a new kind of masculinity—something less solipsistic, less bent on traditional expressions of power, and steeped in an understanding of the current economic decline and demoralization of men’s characters. As these are issues I’m interested in; family, gender, economic decline, the transformation of the rural landscape, and the momentum of real life events that can sink the lives of exceptional people; I was more than a little curious about Meyer’s thinking when he wrote the book—whether there was an overt political idea he was trying to impart to his readers.

I wondered if he was responding to the trends that preceded American Rust, the so called works of “Dick-Lit” and “Chick-Lit” that have categorized and infantilized readers as handily as if they were five-year-old shoppers in the “Toys-R-Us” gun or doll aisles. I wondered if he began with a political conception for the book.

Last week I stopped waiting for the man to release a statement on the subject from his ranch or gun range or hunting camp in Texas, and just flat out asked him. What was going on behind the scenes when he was writing about Billy Poe and Isaac English?

“As far as I can tell, my work comes from a million different places in my subconscious,” Meyer said. “And even when I typed the last word of American Rust, I did not think of it as a political novel. But of course you cannot write about people without giving them a context.”

“Probably like most people, I tend to draw a distinction between books written as entertainment and books written as art. “Chick Lit” is entertainment, which is fine. I think the majority of books printed have always been this type of book—if you look at the bestseller lists from 50 years ago, you probably haven’t heard of any of the authors, but they sold millions and millions of copies.”

But Meyer said for him the bigger issue was writing amidst today’s prevailing literary context: postmodernism “It’s been the dominant literary movement of the past sixty or so years. And while there are certainly good postmodern novels, overall we're talking about a literature that has the most narrow tonal and expressive range of any movement I can think of, worse than the Victorians.”

“So if there was a sort of novel I consciously did not want to write,” he said, “it was the social novel as conceived by the average postmodernist, in which the characters speak things straight from the mind of the author—sociology theories from a textbook, economics theories from a few issues of the Wall Street Journal, maybe some organic chemistry. The reason those novels work, when they do work, is they generally enlist the reader as a sort of accomplice, by giving her/him the sense that ‘you are very smart if you understand this.’ Most postmodern lit doesn’t create worlds so much as massage the reader’s ego. You read the novel, you feel smart. You feel like you belong to a club. The genius of it being that while you're pretending to appeal to the reader's intellect, you're actually just telling them how smart and good-looking they are.”

“But of course when you finish those books, you have not seen anything differently, you have not lived inside another person’s head. And that to me is why we read novels, is why we are drawn to art in general. It helps us understand other people, it helps us make sense of the world, maybe” he said, “it helps us understand ourselves.”