Luke Brown on Writing Politics and Bad Reviews
illustration by Kendra Allenby
Paul, the protagonist of Luke Brown’s new novel Theft, works in a bookshop and writes for a tiny culture magazine called White Jesus, which primarily takes interest in a column of Paul’s entitled the London Review of Haircuts. Over the course of the novel, Paul negotiates a Britain that is simultaneously modern and timeless, encountering the landed rich and the disaffected poor, falling into romantic entanglements with friends and lovers of friends, and trying to make sense of the current political moment. Theft is, in short, a compelling and realistic portrait of modern London.
Zack Graham, former Epiphanic Contributor, interviews Luke Brown for the publication of his most recent novel, Theft, published by & Other Stories. This interview has been edited lightly for our Epiphany 10 interview series and newly illustrated by Kendra Allenby.
Zack Graham: It’s difficult to write fiction about contemporary political phenomena. Theft is quite Brexit-oriented—the referendum, for example, occurs during the novel—but those facets of the book never feel heavy-handed and always add to the fabric of your fiction. Can you take us through the process of smoothly working something like Brexit into into your novel, Theft?
Luke Brown: I started writing Theft before Brexit happened, or I even knew there would be a referendum, so I had already conceived the book about a man trying to stake his place in a society fragmenting on antagonisms based on age and class and gender and region without having it tied to the specific misery of the referendum and after. This fragmenting which was both a cause of Brexit and why it came as such a shock to all the people who didn’t know that the country was full of people who didn’t think like them. When the leave vote happened it fed organically into the book, which is narrated by a man from a deprived fishing town trying to break into London literary society while seething with secret resentment of the people he wants to impress. In my book Brexit is very much background – something for people to argue about in flirtatious competition in parties, and when it happens it provides a lens to view two different places (his hometown and gentrified London) though their responses to it. But mostly the book is about a man wanting a woman he can’t have, who comes to symbolise a lot of things he can’t have. The first line of the novel is, ‘What I did to them was terrible, but you have to understand the context.’ My agent pointed out that the ‘terrible’ thing my narrator tells you he is going to do in the first line works as a metaphor for the leave vote, though this wasn’t at all conscious when I was writing the book. If I were going to offer advice about writing about current events, it would be not to make them the foreground of your narrative.
ZG: Theft’s inciting incident revolves around an interview between our narrator and a famously reclusive novelist. What kinds of interviews do you find interesting? What makes for a good interview?
LB: I wish I had enough experience of being interviewed to tell you! I’ve had experience of chairing events badly on stage through over-preparation. I find it very hard to listen to whoever I’m talking to if I’m thinking about what I’ll ask them next. You do much better if you just listen and then trust yourself to think of something on the spot. Though what if you can’t think of anything? You have to find a delicate balance between improvisation and preparation. It’s best not to be hungover. Perhaps this is a good metaphor for writing a novel too.
ZG: In your approach to crafting dialogue, do you try to recreate real-life conversations, or is your dialogue a language all its own?
LB: Realistic dialogue is artificial compared to real speech. You have to condense and exaggerate to bring out the funniest parts. The boring parts of the way we speak might as well be summarized; unless the boringness is funny or illuminating in some way about the characters speaking. The dialogue in my novel isn’t entirely artificial though. I lack moral seriousness, so I have quite a store of funny conversations to draw upon from real life.
ZG: Your ability to inhabit your main character’s, Paul, frame of mind when on various drugs—even alcohol—is remarkable. Is there a particular way you think about inhabiting a character’s state of mind when it comes to substances?
LB: I don’t think I’ve ever thought about this before but I can do now. Some drugs just give you more energy, so if you’re writing about booze and cocaine, for example, you might make your character a bit more belligerent, describe the absurd as though it’s normal. David Foster Wallace was a really good cocaine writer, there’s an extended and very funny cocaine rant over several sections in which a character describes losing a finger and it growing back lizard-like, confounding medical experts. I haven’t done hallucinogens for a sad amount of time but remember how they used to make me feel anarchic, and a bit evil, so when he’s on a strange trip I emphazised the darkness of the imagery, the inappropriateness of his thoughts. Hunter S. Thompson was good at that. Again, the absurd as normal. With ecstasy you just write breathless romantic exuberance. And use ellipses to throw him somewhere else suddenly where he can’t remember how he got to. That’s mimetic and in service of storytelling brevity. What other drugs does he do? I think I might have covered them all. My characters don’t get stoned much.
ZG: The interactions between the narrator Paul and his psychiatrist are narrated using direct address which is a departure from both of your novels, both narrated in first person. Can you speak a little bit about how you think about the proper perspective from which to tell a story?
LB: I wrote two unpublished novels in the third person in my twenties, when I was too intimidated by the idea of telling a story all from one perspective, and wanted to switch between different characters as a way of keeping the narrative lively. Then the two I have had published are in first-person, which I like for its chattiness, its unashamed opinionated partiality. Portnoy’s Complaint was a favorite book when I was young, and I stole the idea of the narrative framed as a confession to a therapist (in the second part of my novel) from there. What’s interesting in first person is not just who’s speaking but who’s listening. It’s not just the reader, and if you think about who the character is trying to persuade of the truth then you have good reason to doubt the truth of his account. My first novel [My Biggest Lie, published by Cannongate in 2013] is framed as a long apology and plea for forgiveness to a woman, a beautiful act of romantic atonement, which should make you distrust everything about the narrator’s honesty.
ZG: Do you feel, as a writer, you are representing (and I quote) “white males from the North of England, small town, moribund, working class-cum-middle class?” Is that the voice you seek to represent in your books?
LB: There’s a real danger in presuming to speak for the white working class that you’re forgetting about all the people of color who are working class too, and probably disproportionately so – as a nation. But I am trying to write about the wrongness of trying to claim the place where you live as the nation, which is something Londoners do all the time. When I’m writing about my hometown, I am writing about the white working class – it’s out on a limb at the end of a peninsula, a fishing town with no fishing industry, and 98 per cent white. The idea of ‘white male’ has become toxic by association with the worst examples of white men. As those given time and money to write are often from affluent or elite educational backgrounds ‘white male’ often becomes synonymous with the affluent while males found there in large numbers, some of whom no doubt are entitled arseholes. There is of course a privilege in being a white man, but there is also a privilege in being a privately educated woman in London that might make your life much better than being a person of any color or gender in a town of low employment, mobility and aspriation. All of this is blindingly obvious, and yet you don’t see many of the ‘deplorable’ people put alongside the educated, liberal metropolitan characters that dominate literary fiction. They do need representing, because the neoliberal mode of life – leave to succeed – that has allowed people in cities the freedom to have liberal educated views has been won to some extent through the cost of abandoning these places to ruin. What I’m really trying to do is to put these people who don’t often meet next to each other in the space of this book and look at the contradictions this gives rise to, and where they might take a narrative.
ZG: You hilariously tweeted a Goodreads review of Theft in which someone described it as “a very well-written book of no value.” Do you read your Goodreads / Amazon user reviews? Do you put any stock in them? How do you approach the more mainstream / professional reviews of your work?
LB: I looked at those sort of reviews in the first week of publication when I was overexcited but I haven’t been back since. I think they’re a nice mix of positive and negative. Nothing too vexing, though I don’t want to know if there is. I read the professional reviews, yeah, and have been pretty lucky this time – very positive reviews in the newspapers. The thing that has surprised me this time is how, because my novel mentions Philip Roth and John Updike one time each, this has provided a lens to view my work as somehow in thrall to problematic old white men, and a sign of the narrator’s own privilege. Even some of the positive reviews have to point this out. This has become the worst thing about reviewing culture: a fear that if we don’t point to potential thought crimes we’ll be thought guilty of them ourselves. I write reviews myself and think that judging characters on their ethics or the correctness of their reading is a very boring way of appreciating a work of art.
ZG: What five books are on your nightstand right now?
LB: I’ve been writing a long essay about how men write or don’t write about sex in contemporary literary fiction, so it’s uncharacteristically male. I have Houellebecq, Knausgaard, Szalay for that purpose. A superb collection of stories by Frances Leviston, A Voice in My Ear. My favorite book this year has been Threshold by Rob Doyle, a wonderfully provocative, intellectual and druggy account of nihilistic adventures and plangent hedonism. It’s very funny too.
ZG: What writers do you think of yourself as writing in the spirit or tradition of?
LB: When I was younger Roth gave me ideas about what I could do with my anger, my desire to provoke, to mislead, to play with the reader while making them laugh. I get Martin and Kingsley Amis comparisons frequently in my reviews, and I read a lot of Martin when I was young, but it was more the Rothian and Bellovian comic confession that I really wanted to emulate. Martin Amis is hilarious, but he’s a lot more distanced from his protagonists than Roth and Bellow, and I like a more sympathetic, less obviously monstrous protagonist. And I’ve not read Kingsley except for Lucky Jim. These are all great writers of the energetic first person, and so they were certainly useful to My Biggest Lie and Theft.
My favorite story writers are probably Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro and Mary Gaitskill. I got into Munro through Moore, and saw how much Moore had taken from Munro in the long timeframe of her stories, how she’d turned up the antic voice submerged in those stories. Moore sinuously comic sentences appeal to my desire to show off. All three of these writers have the knack for pulling the floor from under your feet with a sudden swooping insight. I was scared of Mary Gaitskill for a long time after reading ‘A Romantic Weekend’ as my first introduction to her, which is as bleak a picture of the possibility of love as you will ever read. But this isn’t really representative; she’s optimistic about people in spite of all the pain and loneliness in her fiction. She’s forgiving.
My favorite British writer is Gwendoline Riley, who possesses many of the qualities I’ve ascribed to these North Americans – the startling insights, the uncompromising, unpalatable truthfulness, the bone-dry humor. She has a beautifully wry and restrained style all of her own.
ZG: Is there a single most useful piece of advice you give to your students at University of Manchester?
LB: It’s hard to give advice to student writers that hasn’t been formalized in all the creative writing textbooks. I teach a lot of undergraduates and spend a lot of time telling them to stop trying to write well and instead try to write clearly; that they are the same thing. The classes are 90 per cent women and so I give them a lot of fiction to read written by women who were close to their age. I like to tell them that Gwendoline Riley wrote her first novel as an undergrad in Manchester and that it’s set in a bar where the cool kids will have gone to see bands. I try to work out who would appreciate reading who and make recommendations. And I tell them to think of the reader, to be kind to the reader – by which of course I mean be kind to me.
Luke Brown is the author of the novels My Biggest Lie and Theft . His writing has appeared in the Financial Times, the TLS, London Review of Books, the Guardian, New Statesman and The White Review. He works as a book editor and is a lecturer at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.
Zack Graham has had criticism appear in or is forthcoming in Rolling Stone, GQ, Electric Literature, and The National Book Review, among other publications, and his short stories have appeared in Seven Scribes, the Cobalt Review, Liars’ League NYC, and elsewhere. A native of Chicago, Zack graduated from Yale University and currently lives in New York, where he makes films in addition to writing fiction and criticism.
