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Published on 5/7/08
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You’re best known as a critic, but on Thursday at the Highline Ballroom, you’re going to read from your debut novel, Downtown Owl [out September 2008]. How did writing fiction compare with writing criticism?
When you write criticism, you try to pack as many relevant, interesting ideas as you can into the smallest possible space. You want to explain everything. With fiction, it’s almost the opposite: You just want a character to act or behave in a certain way that suggests they hold certain beliefs about the world, even though those sentiments are almost never directly outlined. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how certain ideas would tangibly manifest themselves through imaginary people, which was extremely difficult.
Downtown Owl is set in small-town North Dakota in 1983–84, and it’s relatively free of the pop culture you usually write about. Your characters have high-school football, game shows, Dallas—but by today’s standards their options are pretty limited. Any reason you chose this time and place?
I picked North Dakota in 1983 for three reasons. The obvious reason is that the narrative is built around an actual murder from early 1983 and a real meteorological event that happened in ’84. The secondary reason is that 1983 is the first year of my life that I feel like I can remember in detail—I was 11—so I thought I would be able to manufacture a sense of semi-realism. But the core motive is that I wanted the book to happen during the era just before the last rapid technological acceleration—I didn’t want there to be any cell phones or Internet or mainstream alternative culture. I wanted the story to happen in a place that almost had cable television, but not quite.
Is the Highline event going to be more than a reading? Are you going to DJ or anything?
After I read and talk I will take questions from the audience about whatever they want to ask about. I believe inexpensive alcoholic drinks will be available, as well as rock music. Brawling is allowed. At some point in the evening, I will kill a pregnant moose onstage with nunchucks. The entire floor of the Highline Ballroom is going to covered with two inches of Colombian cocaine, so that should be interesting. Oh, and the Replacements are going to reunite.
The high school football team in your novel has changed its name from the Owl Eagles to the Owl Screaming Satans to the Owl Screaming Lobos. If you were asked to come up with the best high-school football team name ever, what would it be?
The Moorhead Spuds.
—Michael Miller
Klosterman reads Thu 6.
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