As to artistic integrity, I make no claims. I am as hungry for recognition and reward as the next person and probably keener than most. But what no one can ever criticize me for is a lack of devotion to the writers who have given me hope, enjoyment and a glimpse of the larger possibilities in life.
There will always be a perversity inherent in the pursuit of art. Why else confront such loneliness, rejection, and misinterpretation? Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and so many others were not contented people. Yet their achievements live on. That’s the contradiction that all of us who want to write must face, whether our talents are but a shadow or a reflection of theirs.
AC: Who are some of the writers to whom you are devoted, who represent this wild, more visionary approach, or who gave you that sense of the possibilities in life?
KS: In terms of the gods, I continue to return to Cervantes, Sterne, and Swift. Melville heads my American list. The single most important writer of the last century I rate as Kafka. The single most enjoyable, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Moving from gods to authors, for distinctness of vision and “pushing the envelope,” I think of Celine, Mishima, Djuna Barnes, Borges, Günter Grass, Henry Miller, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Angela Carter.
There are a host of writers I value who came to prominence in the wake of the ‘60s. Gaddis, Nabokov, Vonnegut, DeLillo, Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Tom Robbins, Hunter S. Thompson and Ursula K. Le Guin, to name just a few. I think they would find it very tough going getting started today.
In my view some of the best creative work in America in the last twenty years has been in television, comic books, and graphic novels -- and this has influenced my move toward more popular formats.
AC: Do you think that other countries or literary traditions are more open to this kind of ambitious literature than the U.S. is right now?
KS: There is no doubt in my mind that Europe and South America remain cultural crossroads where experimentation informs fiction without the burden of pretension often found in America and the UK. This may be changing now, but the rewards have been great. I can’t imagine writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet or Julio Cortázar originating from Brooklyn or the Iowa MFA program. And if they did, I can’t believe that they would have been given the level of immediate recognition and widespread discussion they enjoyed.
The greatest satisfaction and the greatest hope for American fiction that I see lies in the direction of “speculative” fiction -- works that tend toward science fiction and fantasy. Or said another way, works that both respect and subvert genre conventions to create mutant, hybrid forms.
AC: You've received some heat from feminists about "Zanesville" and defended your choices, saying that you are addressing through your novel the fact that America is at once one of the most morally corrupt countries and the most Puritanical. There are a number of women figures in the novel that disturbed me: Wilton's mom and Kokomo, for instance, are both portrayed as at once extremely out-of-it and incredibly horny. The Nourisher is disturbing on another level, as she's clearly meant to be. How do these images serve to critique American culture? What alternative does the novel suggest, particularly for your women readers?
