Read Devil Sent the Rain Online
Authors: Tom Piazza
I miss him, badly, and I miss him every day.
From
The Mailer Review,
Volume 2, Fall 2008
Sometime in 2010 I was asked to contribute something of my own devising to an anthology titled
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books.
After the gracious invitation I took a couple of running jumps at the topic, but everything I wrote felt very talky and stale and I got busy with other things. Then, months later, with the deadline approaching, a call from editor Jeff Martin reminded me that I had promised a piece. I took one more shot at a conventional essay, scrapped it, and then found myself engaged in this little dramatic scenario, which pretty much accurately reflects how I was feeling at the time. Not that I mess around with guns or anything like that, y'unnerstand . . .
An Interview with Tom Piazza on the Future of the Book
T
he Questioner arrives at room 204 of the London Lodge, on the outskirts of New Orleans, the motel room where he is scheduled to meet with Tom Piazza, author of the novels
City of Refuge
and
My Cold War
and the nonfiction collection
Devil Sent the Rain
, and a writer for the HBO series
Treme
, to discuss the future of the book. Knocking once, twice, he receives no answer. The Questioner tries the door and finds it unlocked. Walking into the room he finds Piazza asleep in his street clothes on an unmade bed, with books stacked on the floor, on the couch, on the coffee table, and a small child's record player emitting a ticking sound as the needle goes around the inner spiral of a long-finished LP. The Questioner replaces the record player's tone arm on its perch and shuts the machine off. Pulling the desk chair up to the side of the bed, the Questioner tentatively reaches out to shake the sleeping figure by the shoulder.
Tom Piazza:
[
still asleep; shifting slightly in bed
] Three bucks's too much . . .
Questioner:
Mr. Piazza . . .
TP:
[
shifts more, frowns, groans
]
Q:
We're here to talk about the future of the book.
TP:
[
waking up
] . . . huh?
Q:
The future of the book . . . your thoughts . . . ?
TP:
What the fuck are you talking about?
Q:
Uh . . . we discussed this . . . ? You were going to . . .
TP:
What do you mean by “book”? Where are my glasses . . . ?
Q:
We can come back some other time, if this . . .
TP:
Here they are. How did my glasses get on the floor? [
picks up an envelope from the nightstand, shakes it slightly, plucks out two small pieces of what appears to be rock candy, and places them under his tongue
] Okayâwhich book are you talking about, now?
Q:
You were going to give us a few words about the future of the book. For a . . . book.
TP:
Right, right. [
sits up; opens nightstand drawer; pulls out a .38 pistol
] I assume I can define the word “book” any way I want to, since you won't define it for me?
Q:
[
alarmed, staring at gun
] Yes, certainly . . .
TP:
Okay. [
significantly more alert
] I'll skip all the usual drainage about electronic books and the death of publishing and how many cookbooks get published and how hard it is to sell midlist fiction. And how important literature is, and how we tell ourselves stories to make sense of our lives, or how in the future we'll all be able to write our own endings to books, as if we can't do that already, or whether backlit screens will replace regular LCDs on the new Zorro e-reader . . . You don't need me for that crap. I really don't care anyway. I'm old-school.
Q:
[
still staring at the .38
] Meaning . . . ?
TP:
Meaning first of all that I like books that I can hold in my hand. Made of paper. I don't need to plug them in, and I don't have to buy batteries for them. They look different from each other, and I like that. I like looking at
Bleak House
and being able to tell that it embodies a different sense of life than
Jesus' Son
does. I like carrying the fuckers around with me. One weighs more than the other. If you like to read your books on an Etch A Sketch, that's fine with me. Especially if you're reading my books. But it's like looking at a book of paintings where
Guernica
is the same size as a Holbein portrait. You get no sense of the scale of things, of the nature of the artist's ambition.
Q:
Isn't ambition a little . . . corny?
TP:
[
raises .38; cocks hammer
] I'm sorry; would you care to repeat that?
Q:
I said, “Ambition makes me horny.”
TP:
[
lowering .38
] Yeah, me too. Listen, I want to talk about novels right now, because that's what I write.
Q:
You're also writing for TV, aren't you?
TP:
[
angrily;
defensively
] Yeahâso what? Besidesâit's not TV; it's HBO . . .
Q:
[
holding up hands
] Nothing wrong with that. Just checking.
TP:
Computers and e-books and smartphones all basically look alike. They are strictly vehicles; you pick them up to step through them into some consensus reality; you're wired in. Everything is leveled out. When everything has equal weight, everything is weightless. The world they offer is one of infinitely diverse information with a common denominatorâthe screen. The computer is neutral in that it gives you access to limitless amounts of information, but the one requirement is that you have to get it on the computer. The information has no smell, no weight, no texture. Nothing that seriously impinges on your reality. People think it represents some kind of democratizing of information because everything's the same size. But democracy is when things of different sizes get a chance to mix it up and work it out, measure themselves in their respective strengths. If everything is the same size, there's no perspective. Perspective, as in, you know, painting. Everything becomes two-dimensional, flat . . .
Q:
Isn't perspective an illusion? A person's face looming close to the viewer might appear larger than a skyscraper in the distance . . .
TP:
Exactly. But that tells you something about reality. Whereas if you had a little chart where you could see everything rendered in exact relative scale but boiled down to a fifteen-inch frame, it might tell you something factual, but you wouldn't have an experience. You wouldn't learn something about the reality that something small near at hand can have a much larger impact than something large far away . . .
Q:
Well . . . whatever . . . So what about the novel?
TP:
I'm coming to that. A novel makes a world from one writer's perspective. It offers point of view, in the specialized literary sense, which is to say that it places point of view in a contrasting context. The writer makes the point of view, maybe multiple points of view, and also makes the context for those points of view. You make a world. A computer is a competing kind of world; it's an anti-world. The computer's ambition is to transcend point of view entirely.
Q:
[
gaining confidence
] But what about all the chat rooms and discussion boards and social networking sites? There are a lot of points of view offered there.
TP:
There are a lot of points of view being offered right now down in a dozen bars outside on Airline Highway, but very little perspective. Their dynamic is about letting off steam. If you want to cook something you have to keep the oven closed for a while, otherwise it will be half-baked. Nobody really works anything out at the corner bar. They just confirm their own assumptions. They think they have a point of view because they're arguing with somebody. But perspective means arguing with yourself. Two eyes, set in different locations on your face, make 3-D. Thelonious Monk used to say, “Two is one.” That's what he meant.
Q:
I'm having trouble following you.
TP:
Yeah . . . right . . . well . . . I guess it boils down to some people like books and some people don't.
Q:
But you're making a case for one over the other.
TP:
I'm not, really. I'm just saying they're different.
Q:
I mean, why is that important? Why is it important whether you get your information from a computer of some sort or from a physical book?
TP:
[
regarding the questioner appraisingly
] The information is qualitatively different, isn't it? Isn't there some sort of meta-information in the weight of a book, in the effort and time it takes to produce it, as opposed to just hitting a button and sending your latest notion off into the Internet? There's a resonance. Somebody else might have held the book, and valued it. Maybe they made notes in the margin, and kept it and handed it down to their children . . . I mean, you can give somebody a book; it has weight, it's a gesture of faith in the future. The message of the Internet is that the moment is what matters; the closer you can get to that virtual moment, the closer you are to reality. But a novel offers perspective; it says time curves and things change, and what looks big now might really be small, and vice-versa, and here's a model of how that works . . . I mean, if there's no future for books, there's no future. People who are interested in time, and have a taste for the individual consciousness up against mass consensus, will always have a taste for books.
Q:
So that's your prediction about the future of books?
TP:
[
annoyed
] Look, I don't know about the fucking future. Nobody knows what's going to happen in ten seconds.
Q:
[
exasperated
] Oh, that is ridiculous; everybody is obsessed with it. There are tens of thousands of websites dedicated to making guesses about the future . . . [
gasping
] Dear God . . . what are you doing?
TP:
[
points the .38 at the questioner and tightens his index finger on the trigger
] I've just about had it with this conversation.
Q:
Please . . . Don't shoot . . .
TP:
[
pulls trigger; flame sprouts from the tip of the gun. It is a gag-store cigarette lighter
]
Q:
[
shaking, wiping forehead with a kerchief
] Jesus . . . What is wrong with you?
TP:
Oh, come on . . . You saw that coming, didn't you?
From
The Late American Novel: Writers on the
Future of Books,
Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee, editors
Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath changed everything for me. It knocked over the tables, emptied the drawers, and changed the locks. For five years it became the gravitational center of my life, as I dug out, and as New Orleans dug out. Like most other New Orleanians, by the time the five-year anniversary rolled around, I was ready for a new chapter.
After
City of Refuge
was completed, in 2008, I began work on a new novel, set before Katrina and having nothing to do with New Orleans. It was a relief to be thinking about something else. As I worked, though, I found that I wasn't the same writer I was before the disaster. A lot of new informationânot just socioeconomic, but emotional and spiritualâhad entered the picture, and I needed to sift through it and do some thinking about what mattered to me in my writing as I went ahead with the new novel. The essay that follows is one gesture in the direction of that stock-takingâby no means the final word.
Before writing the essay, I went back to read, or reread, some of the recent and semi-recent manifestos dealing with the question of how writers should write and readers should read, and I found myself getting more and more depressed the more I read. Tom Wolfe's 1989
Harper's
piece “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto forNew Social Novel”; B. R. Myers's grouchy 2001
Atlantic
diatribe “A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose”; Jonathan Franzen's 1996
Harper's
piece “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels” and his subsequent
New Yorker
article “Mr. Difficult,” an anxiety-of-influence manifesto against novelist William Gaddis and literary difficulty in general; Ben Marcus's
Harper's
attack on Franzen's perceived attack on William Gaddis (“Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It: A Correction”); Cynthia Ozick's 2007
Harper's
attack on Franzen's and Marcus's attacks on one another (“Literary Entrails: The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel's Ghostly Twin”); and David Shields's 2010 book
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
, as well as essays and letters and rants by Zola, Flaubert, Nabokov, Proust, and a dim torchlight procession of other axe-grinders. The process of reading all this advocacy for one or another approach to an activity that can really only be worthwhile if you figure out your own approach was so oppressive that I put the essay aside for nine months. I almost gouged out my own eyeballs with a rusty melon-ball scoop I found in William Dean Howells's attic. I mean, look at this paragraph. It made you tired just to read it, right?
Anyway. The net effect was to make me sick at even the suggestion that there was a right or wrong way to write or read. In a 1990 lecture at Iowa, asked about the Tom Wolfe
Harper's
essay, which had only recently been published, Norman Mailer said that when writers talk about how other writers should write, what they are usually really saying is, “This is how
I
can write.” Words of wisdom.
So the following essay is my little farewell to all that manifestology. It is followed by one last column from the
Oxford American
. It's about record collecting, but it's also about grace, in the theological sense. And that is it for this collection. If you want to find me, I'll be working on my next novel.