Circus of the Grand Design (33 page)

This novel originally appeared in a hardcover edition from Prime Books in 2004.

The World of Clowns
by George Bishop provided much useful information; Angela Carter's
Nights at the Circus
gave inspiration. Apologies to William Shakespeare for adapting
Pericles Prince of Tyre
.

JV: Robert Freeman Wexler snuck onto the scene with his novella
In Springdale Town
(PS Publishing), which garnered well-deserved praise from John Clute and many others, including myself on
Locus Online
. In addition, the novella was taken for
The Best Short Novels of 2004
(SFBC). Prime Books published his first novel,
The Circus of the Grand Design
in 2004, and second novel
The Painting and the City
came out in 2009 from PS Publishing. In 2007, Spilt Milk Press published a short story chapbook,
Psychological Methods To Sell Should Be Destroyed
. A graduate of the Clarion West Writer's Workshop, Wexler lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with his wife, writer Rebecca Kuder, and daughter. I interviewed him via e-mail in November 2004 (with updates in April 2011).

Now that you've had a chance to sit back and reflect on
Circus of the Grand Design
, what do you think the book is about?

RW: It's a classic tale of good and evil, cleanliness and garbage, habit and spontaneity. And it's a straightforward story about a restless guy who doesn't have a lot of friends and joins a circus, not knowing that it's a fantasy circus and he's totally fucked. Which is probably a metaphor for something. Probably has to do with me, feeling like an outsider, wanting to find someplace where I'm not an outsider. But since I'm pretty sedentary, I sent Lewis out in my place, to have some adventures.

JV: You say Lewis is "totally fucked," and you mean that literally. Did you know from the beginning that there would be sex scenes in the novel, and were they difficult to write?

RW: I didn't plan them at the beginning. My original notes said: "Man meets woman in circus of course for romantic angle." Once I discovered that she was a fertility goddess, the sex followed of necessity. They weren't difficult to write, other than technical aspects of trying to keep them from being clichéd or boring. It's rare to find sex written in interesting or even erotic ways. And I suppose a good sex scene should arouse the writer a bit while writing.

JV: You get the sense that no matter how deep into the surreal world of the circus Lewis gets, and no matter how exasperated, he'd rather be there than in the more mundane world. Do you consider
Circus
to be an escapist fantasy? Is it about Lewis' inability to face his problems in the "real" world?

RW: It's escapist in the sense that he's left his world for another. The idea of a person going to an alternate world has been done (and overdone) a lot in fantasy. But escapist has more to do with people entering an alternate world and finding love and adventure, which they somehow couldn't do in the real world. Obviously I'm borrowing some of those tropes (Lewis finds a sword and uses it). I suppose I think of escapist as derogatory, a term for shallow entertainments, so I'm trying to distance myself from it. Maybe that's a dumb thing to do. There's nothing wrong with entertainment.

I like having the fantastic intrude on the real world and real-world characters. Lewis has to figure out what is going on around him. He's continuously doubting his place there, questioning his attitudes, the way he talks and interacts with the circus people. And when he finally feels that he's fully part of things, he gets kicked around. One problem with writing this kind of normal-person-encounters-the-fantastic is that I have to balance his worldview, in which the fantastic hadn't previously existed, with the expectations of the reader of fantastic fiction, who might become impatient with Lewis's slowness in figuring things out. Lewis has never seen this sort of thing, but the reader has.

JV: Is Lewis is a sympathetic character?

RW: Yes. Assuming by sympathetic you mean that he's someone the reader will care about. He's not exactly likeable (Faren Miller, in
Locus
, called him a "restless mundane jerk."), and to some readers (and writers) a character has to be likeable to be sympathetic.

JV: What does Lewis learn from his adventures? Or is it necessary that he learn anything at all?

RW: He'll probably be calmer. People like Are No won't bother him as much. I don't think he has to learn something. I don't like fiction in which you can see, as you read, where the character starts to go through "character change" in a textbook, writing manual way, then later the change increases, so that by then end it's obvious they've Changed.

JV: Maybe he just learns that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the world remains a mystery? Do you believe in revealing mysteries in your work, or in perpetuating mystery?

RW: Oh, both. I don't like explanations for mysteries, but sometimes they're necessary because the characters would want them. And sometimes they're not necessary. In
The Circus of Dr. Lao
there's a part describing the peep show. Here's a circus in a small, dusty Arizona town during the Depression; the peep show is in "a small tent off by itself," with a curtain that has holes for people to peer through. They see things like fat nymphs lounging on rocks by the ocean, and there's no questioning by the characters, or the authorial voice; the scene is presented as is, with the reader interpreting it however they might. That's the kind of fantasy intrusion on the real world that I like best.

JV: How did you come up with the character Are No?

RW: Are No (and his house full of crappy art) is based on someone from whom I rented a vacation house on Long Island. There's a clue about his real name in there somewhere, but I'm not saying. I reserved the house for four nights, two alone and two with my girlfriend at the time. I didn't much like it. The upstairs heat didn't work (though the guy swore it did), there wasn't enough firewood, the walls were covered with pretentious art. So I left after two nights (with the house intact). On the train ride home, I wrote. It was the first time I've fictionalized an experience immediately after it happened. Because of that, I now have trouble remembering what actually happened and what I made up. My brain never had time to absorb the experience. I do know some things. No locked cabinet full of fishing lures, though there was a locked closet upstairs. He didn't allow meat in the house, so my big revenge for the useless heater, etc., was to cook a pot of stewed beef tripe. I know that's not as exciting as burning the place. My purpose in going to the house was to come up with a new beginning for the novel, so it worked out. Before, I didn't have motivation for Lewis to join the circus.

JV: However, you can't offer definitive proof, since you're unsure what you made up and what actually happened, that you didn't burn the place down. Is it at all possible that "Are No" will read this interview and call you on your tripe revenge?

RW: It's possible. If he really exists, and it wasn't some fantasy house I found myself in, from which I was fortunate to escape before I really did burn it down and join Dillon's circus. What if that had happened? Then I could have written a circus memoir and made barrels of money, would have a huge print run from Bantam or some other giant conglomerate instead of a small press limited edition. Then the movie, with Ben Affleck as Are No, Liam Neeson as Dillon, Julia Roberts as Bodyssia, the giantess, and of course Matt Damon as Lewis.

JV: Do you plan to write about Are No in the future? He's a very compelling and unintentionally funny character.

RW: His artwork appears in
The Painting and the City
, which is about a sculptor named Jacob Lerner. Lerner's gallery also represents Are No, and when Lerner goes to visit the gallery owner (a man named Ventricle Savage):

In Savage's gallery, Lerner encountered an exhibit of Are No's iridescent flop.

"If you'd like to know more about the artist, we have information handouts at the desk."

The speaker was a thin, youngish man. Some new imp-hireling of Savage's. He smiled at Lerner, the measured smile of someone judging the likelihood of Lerner's being able to purchase art. He had obviously started working there sometime after Lerner's most recent show. When was that—September? Already nine months. Long enough for him to have gestated a new body of work. Savage likely wouldn't give him another solo exhibition so soon. His general rule was every other year. And if someone's work didn't sell adequately, even more time passed. Lerner was eager for his recent sculptures to be seen. Sometimes Savage would arrange a group show of one or two new pieces by his main artists. Lerner asked the young man to get Savage, and waited, focusing on an area of floor rather than Are No's rancid shapes.

An inescapable fact: he had to share the same gallery with mindless crap. Are No's pieces—made using spray cans of insulation foam, the kind that expanded and hardened in the air, which he then painted in neon colors—sold well, and sales drove any gallery's list. Fortunately, Lerner liked and respected most of Savage's other artists, Joyce Harkness, Scott Eagle, Jane Andrews, Olaf the Wise.

JV: What role does humor play in your fiction? Clearly, Are No and Ventricle Savage are not particularly serious names.

RW: I like humor. I like the absurd. In the past, I've had a tendency toward trying to be funnier. I try to be careful with it. I'll take some stuff out in revision because I don't want humor to overwhelm the rest of the story.

There's a North Carolina folk artist named Mary Paulsen. Behind her house/studio/yard gallery are piles of junk that goes into her art, or rots. A sign in the driveway says "Savage." I assume it means "Salvage." I thought, what if someone from that background ends up as a gallery owner in Manhattan. His re-invention of self (everyone who goes to New York re-invents themselves) would take something from his background, hence Savage. Ventricle probably has to do with gallery owners being heartless bastards.

JV: Changing direction for a moment: Have you been to many circuses?

RW: Not really. Maybe three in my life. The sister of my college girlfriend had been in Ringling Brothers and was married to a Hungarian teeter-boarder. I spent some time with them, the teeter-boarders' teeter-boarder brother, other teeter-boarders here and there. At some point before I came along, a whole camper full of teeter-boarders and who knows what else spent a winter at my girlfriend's parent's house, which I heard stories about.

JV: What is a teeter-boarder, for those who, like me, won't know?

RW: It's the big seesaw thing that acrobat types use, jumping on one end to send the other person into the air so they can somersault, back-flip, land on another acrobat to make human pyramids, etc.

JV: Have you ever performed in a circus?

RW: Not yet.

JV: Would you like to? What type of circus performer would you be?

RW: A zebra rider, but it wouldn't be possible at my age. Zebras riders are trained from infancy. The first thing they're allowed to do with a zebra is polish the fangs of young zebras. Becoming accustomed to a zebra's fangs is, obviously, important. And the activity helps determine who has the ability to advance into the zebra training academies, because a zebra rider must have two hands.

JV: Do you have any favorite circus short stories or novels?

RW: Including carnivals too, Angela Carter's
Nights at the Circus
.
The Circus of Dr. Lao
, Bradbury's
Something Wicked This Way Comes
. Katherine Dunn's
Geek Love
. There's an amazing book. I'd love to be able to tell a story like that.
Quin's Shanghai Circus
, which isn't really about a circus although there is one in the book.

JV: What, in particular, did you like about
Nights at the Circus
?

RW: The freedom of it. The barely-restrained chaos. The fully-imagined characters, the story, the stories within stories, the lustiness. I consider it my inspiration, but I wasn't trying to emulate it. I don't think I'd be capable of emulating it. Though Lewis is based somewhat on Jack Walser. Walser the reporter/Lewis the publicist, both wanderers, but somewhat blank, waiting to be filled. I read
Nights at the Circus
and Mark Helprin's
Winter's Tale
about the same time, and they exploded my ideas of the fantastic.

JV: Out of curiosity — what did Helprin's novel explode for you, specifically?

RW: Style, for one thing. Slow, descriptive passages, fantasy that builds layer by layer, including landscape and city that feel familiar but aren't quite real. Style that differed from the more plot-oriented genre books I had been reading. Also, the timing of when I read it was important. Soon after college I got a job at a Waldenbooks, but because it was a small store in an old, '50s era shopping plaza, it didn't have that plastic, shopping mall chain store feel, and everyone who worked there was into books (which I doubt is true in the shopping mall stores). We could get away with a lot of special ordering of books that the store wouldn't normally carry. So if I heard about a particular book, or writer, I could order books for the store and read them myself. During this period I also got into J.G. Ballard, Robert Coover, things with fantasy elements but published outside of the genre (aside from Ballard of course, though at the time his books were being repackaged as literary rather than genre).

I started working there in the summer of 1984.
Neuromancer
came out that year, as did
Nights at the Circus
and
Empire of the Sun
.
Winter's Tale
came out in 1983, with the paperback in 1984. I loved
Neuromancer
, but stylistically, it wasn't my kind of thing. Unfortunately, reading all this non-genre literature of the fantastic led me to believe that literary journals would be open to my style of writing, which turned out not to be true.