INTERVIEW: James Boice, author of 'The Good and the Ghastly'

Photo by Michael Turek, courtesy of Scribner

I reviewed James Boice's new novel The Good and the Ghastly here a little while back, and he was so happy with me being happy with his book that he was happy to do this email interview, which made me happy. Happy.

A Walrus Darkly: When did you start writing and what do you feel formed your style and your outlook as a writer?

James Boice: I’ve been writing all my life. I started making a more concentrated effort at it after I dropped out of college to do it. I figured since I dropped out of college to do it, I should probably do it. And so I did it.

Some writers who I blame for putting it into my head at 13-18 years old to do something so stupid and absurd and futile as devoting my life in late 20^th- early 21^st-century USA to fucking writing fiction: Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, Jim Carroll, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, John Fante, Charles Bukowski. That’s who I was into as a teenager.

AWD: Your work is deeply tied to Northern Virginia, even if it's often a futuristic, crime-ravaged Northern Virginia. What's the significance of that part of America for you and why does it keep finding its way back into your work?

JB: Because I hate Northern Virginia. No I don’t. Yes I do. No I don’t. Yes I do.

In Northern Virginia is the quintessence of the United States of America: a carefully designed, affluent, soul-sucking, uber-convenient, super-striving, cut-throat, safe place in which nothing happens to you that you have not chosen to happen to you.

AWD: Critics have compared your writing to Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. What writers have influenced you most?

JB: I don’t know if critics have compared me to them. Critics—whatever that means today—have compared me to some of the most outlandish contradictory people, some of whom I have never heard of. Sometimes I wonder where the hell they get this stuff. My publisher, however, has made those comparisons and that is only because publishers spend a lot of time coming up with such comparisons and find them very important to make, no matter how true they are. I have a complicated relationship with both those two writers, as a reader. Then again I have a complicated relationship with everything and everyone except my wife, who is my number one partner in crime. Other influences: Faulkner, Shakespeare, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, Hemingway, Hubert Selby, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Bruce Wagner, Joyce Carol Oates, etc

AWD: What inspired The Good and the Ghastly?

JB: The life and 16-year-long search for Whitey Bulger which ended one week after the novel’s came out. Also George W. Bush's illegal, bloodthirsty, empirical “presidency.” I started the book in 2005. Whitey Bulger was free and, it turns out, living the high life on a beach Santa Monica, Osama bin Laden was living the high life in Pakistan, George W. Bush was living the high life in a big white house in Washington DC: A stink was in the air. Doom. Everywhere you looked there was some ghastly evil guy doing some horrible evil thing followed by a big cover-up to make sure he did not pay the price for it. WMDs, Tillman, Abu Ghraib, every word out of Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s mouth, and so on. The ghastly were ruling the earth. The good were pawns. It was a horrible fucking time. Just depressing as hell. I wanted to express everything I felt about the state of the world and the way the country had just become thoroughly fucking rotten after someone’s act of evil (9/11).

AWD: What was your process for writing this book? Does your working life vary from project to project or are you a more ritualistic writer?

JB: Process: Wrote it. Two years. Big, big crazy manuscript. Sprawling, weird. 1,200 pages. It sat around for two years. I edited it, rewrote it from top to bottom. Made it 288 pages.

Maybe .03% of what I write ever ends up published, in general. The process of how a book begins and how it ends up on a shelf is mystifying to me. So I have to say it varies from project to project. I have nothing figured out. Sometimes I think it’s all a fluke or a mistake that anything I’ve written has been published at all. I try to keep a regular schedule. If I don’t, I become unglued. “I write to keep myself from total madness.”

AWD: Your writing carries a great deal of brutality, both thematically and in terms of its depiction of violence. Is this something that comes naturally to you or is it a deliberate attempt to make some statement about violence, human cruelty or the corrupting influence of power?

JB: If I wanted to make a statement about anything, I’d write an essay or better yet just post something on Twitter—not write a novel. So I guess it’s something that comes naturally to me. It comes creeping out of my media-saturated upper-middle class pampered suburban crybaby white male American subconscious like a monster from a swamp.

AWD: Junior Alvarez, your protagonist in TGATG, is inspired by Alexander the Great to carry out his own conquests. Did you see this story as a timeless sort of parable for all conquerors or did that grow organically during the writing?

JB: Grew organically.

AWD: Much of Junior's life eventually becomes about paranoia, and he lives in a futuristic world dominated by corporate control. Why was paranoia an important theme for you to explore with this book?

JB: Probably because I am paranoid and the world we live in is corporately controlled.

AWD: What are you working on now?

JB: I have two novels finished since The Good and the Ghastly. Will they ever see the light of day? I don’t know. My agent situation is a little confusing and unclear at the moment, so I should probably get that resolved. I’ve been writing short stories recently. My head has been in about 1000 directions, 999 of them not good ones.

AWD: Any advice for aspiring writers?

JB: Read, write, and keep your balls to the wall.

AWD: If you had to sell TGATG to a reader in 140 characters or less, what would you say?

It’s about gangsters and vigilantes and the future and evil. It’s funny and warped and fucked up and good.

The Good and the Ghastly is in bookstores now.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Revenger' by Rory Clements

Revenger is billed as a “novel of Tudor intrigue,” a cloak and dagger crime story set in the back corridors of power in Elizabethan England. Its star is John Shakespeare, the fictional brother of William Shakespeare and noted intelligencer to Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s legendary spymaster. It’s a foundation that carries immense historical charm, and though Revenger is not a perfect thriller, its charms go a good deal deeper than a conceptual hook.

Following up his acclaimed debut Martyr, which also stars John Shakespeare, Rory Clements begins Revenger by taking a classic thriller plot device and reframing it in Tudor England. After saving the crown in his last adventure, Shakespeare has left the spy game. He’s attempting to live a quiet life as a schoolmaster, spending his days with his students, his wife Catherine and their infant daughter.

The “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” hook comes when Shakespeare is almost simultaneously invited to the homes of two powerful nobles at once. The Earl of Essex, a dashing young lord who has won Elizabeth’s favor, wants Shakespeare back in the intelligence business, and enlists him to solve the mystery of the lost colony of Roanoke. Shakespeare is then summoned by Sir Robert Cecil, one of the queen’s highest councilors, who tells Shakespeare of what he believes to be a plot by Essex to take the crown for himself.

Shakespeare takes both jobs, working on the Roanoke mystery for Essex while simultaneously spying on him for Cecil. To add to his worries, threats from Spain are still rampant in the kingdom, his fervently Catholic wife may be secretly harboring a priest in the midst of Protestant England, and Shakespeare comes to realize his own family might be a target of the intertwining conspiracies at work in the kingdom.

Clements sets the tone for Revenger through deft attention to detail. His Tudor England is not just a vague historical veil achieved through name dropping and descriptions of clothing. City streets, weapons and manor houses all come to life under his pen. Every page is a chance at a new discovery, even in the thick of tension.

At first glance it might seem that Clements’ prose is an odd, even arcane, way to approach a thriller. But as you read Revenger you realize that might have been the point. Here is a writer with the guts to take his time, to make the reader be patient as he brings the world to life. Revenger feels like it might have been written as a fanciful Victorian adventure. It’s a fascinating combination of elegant language and shadowy machinations, and that makes it a rare find.

Clements’ courage to refuse to rush his book does make it suffer at times. There are sections of Revenger that drag for pages, and long pauses in the action as Shakespeare and his friends or enemies or accomplices take the time to converse about the goings on. The chats are still interesting, but at times the novel slows down to an almost unreasonable pace.

But if you are patient, the rewards of Revenger are great. It might take its time getting there, but it delivers the thriller goods and even takes the time to set up more adventures for John Shakespeare. For history buffs with an eye for palace intrigue, the next volume won’t arrive soon enough.

Revenger is available now from Random House.

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Good and the Ghastly' by James Boice

The future James Boice imagines in The Good and The Ghastly is a sterile, uniform world in the full force grip of corporate whitewashing. It's 1,400 years in the future, and a nuclear war in the distant past (our present) hit the reset button on civilization. The world has returned to a modern existence, but now Visa owns everything, companies have generic names (Expensive Car Company, Expensive Hotel, and so on) and the past is seen only through a muddy, chaotic lens colored by the devastation that came before.

Into this semi-dystopian landscape Boice paints two figures whose primitive ambitions color their world like bloodstains. Junior Alvarez is a young criminal fresh out of juvenile detention. Inspired by his readings on Alexander the Great (Alejandro el Grande, he calls him), Junior makes a vow to conquer his own world, and to do it by any means necessary. In his first street-fight since his return to his Northern Virginia neighborhood, Junior critically injures another young man, leaving him brain damaged. The boy's mother, Josefina, is a dutiful landlady and parent until she learns the fate of her son. Then, without even knowing the name of his attacker, she becomes something else: a huntress. 

The Good and the Ghastly is a dual portrait of Junior and Josefina as their lives rise and fall and swirl around each other. Both have an ultimate goal in mind, both have a kind of bloodlust coloring their every move, and both are somehow doomed by their respective quests. It's not an unfamiliar concept, but in Boice's hands it becomes new and gripping.

Boice's prose carries the kind of energy that you always want in good crime fiction. It's fast without being hasty, smart without being pretentious and brutal without being overwrought. His scenes and characters have power in themselves, but it's the prose that gives them weight, from Junior's post-empire paranoia to Josefina's desperate, violent hunt for the man who wrecked her family.

There's nothing more this book really needs, but Boice's rebuilt future is so fun to walk around in that you almost wish for more of it. His characters discuss the works of Bob Dylan (including ones he didn't actually write, like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"), visit a giant statue of Garfield in the Midwest (historians postulate that it was used for religious purposes) and even see a kind of post-apocalyptic Pompeii, a whole town frozen in time by a nuclear blast filled with, well...us. It's a shame there's not more darkly comic moments of futuristic imagining, but in a way any more would cheapen what Boice is really writing about.

The Good and the Ghastly is not a book about the future, nor is it really a book about crime. It's a book about the brutality of the human spirit, the desperate, clawing side that will always lurk in us no matter what era we live in. It's a book about violence and power and revenge and what they do to us, packaged in a compelling crime story artfully told by one of the most magnetic voices in modern fiction.

The Good and the Ghastly is available June 14 from Scribner.

Advance Reading Copy courtesy of Scribner

'Super 8': Don't call it a throwback.

At least they don't have to deal with Matthew Fox and a giant smoke monster...

There’s no doubting the nostalgic appeal of J. J. Abrams’ Super 8. Whole swaths of the film play like a dual love letter to Stand by Me and E.T., and with Steven Spielberg in his corner as producer, Abrams no doubt had plenty of material for crafting an admiring tribute to the sci-fi icons of his youth.

Prominent and entertaining though it is, honing in on the familiar, homage-laden elements of Abrams’ film is a mistake. The nostalgia is there, and it’s deliberately prominent, but Super 8 is more than just an effort to recreate the Spielberg glory days of fearless boys and misunderstood creatures. It’s also a film filled with thoroughly original, energetically new things, and one of the best science fiction movies of the last decade.

Summer has begun in the small town of Lillian, Ohio, and five friends are borrowing their parents’ camera to make a zombie movie. Abrams hones in on 13-year-old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), a boy still struggling to live a carefree life after losing his mother months earlier in an industrial accident. Joe isn’t close to his father, Sheriff’s Deputy Jack Lamb (Kyle Chandler), so he immerses himself in sneaking out to make a movie with a cheap Super 8 camera.

The movie is the brainchild of Joe’s best friend Charles (Riley Griffiths), an ambitious chubby geek who inspires his friends to meet at an empty train station outside of town at midnight to shoot a key scene. When Joe finds out that his crush, Alice (Elle Fanning), is along for the ride, the trip becomes about more than the movie.

As they set up to film, a train rumbles in from the distance. Charles, anxious to get the free production value of the train in his shot, rolls camera. As his film plays out, Abrams’ film makes its leap from boyhood romance to creature feature. Joe watches in horror as a pickup truck swerves out onto the train tracks and crashes into the engine, derailing the train in a mass of twisted metal and explosions. The small band of filmmakers barely survives, and when the chaos ends, Joe glimpses something strange seeming to escape from one of the cars…a car bearing a United States Air Force logo.

The group escapes from the crash site just as military personnel arrive, and they make a pact to tell no one about what they saw. But it’s not as simple as just ignoring what happened, because soon things start disappearing in Lillian. Power lines vanish, car engines are lifted from their vehicles, dogs run away and people start to vanish in violent ways.

As their secret knowledge eats at them, the kids keep working on their movie even as the terror (and the military) creeps into the town. And all the while a roll of film is being developed, the film from their camera that night, film that holds a secret.

The magic of Super 8 is its ability to be so familiar, so reminiscent of its great forebears, and so filled with energy at the same time. It moves with the kinetic power of a completely unpredictable film, and yet it’s filled with things we’ve seen before: a father and son divided by tragedy, a boy nervously battling for the heart of a pretty girl, a monster on the loose in the night, a group of friends who are hurled into a world of danger. The difference is in the telling of the tale.

Abrams assembles his story, visually and otherwise, with the kind of slick drive of the glossiest modern blockbuster, but he packs it with enough heart to make it bigger than 10 of those blockbusters. It’s a labor of love, but it’s also a labor of intense filmmaking craft, and that makes all the difference.

None of this works, though, without a cast of kids that can carry a film with very few grownups running around, and every member of this little ensemble shines. Courtney and Fanning have the makings of genuine stars, Griffiths has the energy and presence of an actor twice his age, and the remainder of the quintet of boys (including Ryan Lee, Zach Mills and Gabriel Basso), give the kind of comic relief that these films are made for.

Super 8 is brilliant not just because it’s a well-crafted popcorn flick with lots of big budget pop, but because it’s got the kind of depth that allows it to work for nearly any viewer. It’s got the buzz of a childhood adventure story, the sizzle of a government conspiracy tale and the terror of a damn good monster movie, all in a tight, clean and sophisticated sci-fi package. Super 8’s nostalgic elements might be its chief selling point, but they’re only a small part of a very big picture.

'Bobby Fischer Against the World,' a Bit Like 'Rocky IV' with Chess Boards

Bobby Fischer in one of his epic clashes with Boris Spassky in 1972. No, epic is not used sarcastically.

Bobby Fischer's mystique is not unique among the world of tortured, eccentric geniuses. It is unique in the world of chess. Fischer almost single-handedly focused international interest on the sport in the early 70s when he took part in a highly-anticipated, epic-scale match for the World Chess Championship with Russian champion Boris Spassky. It was billed as a Cold War battle of minds for the ages, the hopes and dreams and ambitions of superpowers hanging in the balance. In those tense moments of two men from two different worlds seated across from each other, a board between them, the world watched, and Fischer became a star.

But beyond the brilliant chess master, beyond the boy who could play like a man and the man who could play like no man had ever played before, was a troubled soul teeming with neuroses and fears. When the world turned their cameras on his narrow, intense face, Bobby Fischer became something more than a chess genius. He became a man battling with his own psyche, struggling to land the ultimate check-mate.

It is with this understanding of the Fischer's puzzling and often disturbing duality that Liz Garbus crafts her documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World. Her portrait of Fischer is at once flattering and condemning, embracing both his mastery of his chosen obsession and his consuming paranoia, fear and ultimate alienation of everyone and everything around him, even the country he once competed for.

Like most films about brilliant but ultimately doomed personalities, Garbus' contains both the meteoric rise and the inevitable downward spiral, documenting Fischer's self-imposed 20 year exile from chess, his forced exile from the United States and, finally, his degeneration into a raving, often frightening man who cares more about political conspiracy than chess.

In what is perhaps the film's most telling moment, an aging Fischer (shortly before his death in 2008) tells the camera that he never thought of himself as a chess-playing genius, but rather as a genius who plays chess. He talks about his fleeting dream of becoming a songwriter, and his confession to a successful songwriter that he can't ever seem to come up with anything. The songwriter replies "because you haven't lived." Fischer cackles and says "he was right."

Bobby Fischer Against the World is a portrait of a life dominated by a game that ultimately became consumed by it. For all his ravings, all his controversies, all his idiosyncracies, one thing is never in doubt in this beautifully done film: for Bobby Fischer, the chess pieces in his head never stopped moving.