emusic q&a: dan chaon

One of the best books of 2009 is a meditation on identity and reality and how the Internet enables us to alter our perceptions of both. Dan Chaon is a National Book Award nominated writer who has crafted an unputdownable literary thriller called Await Your Reply, a book that seamlessly weaves together three separate storylines to create a web of intrigue and angst. eMusic’s Jess Sauer spoke to the author about The Net, Friday the 13th, Philip Pullman, Chris Brown and the mysteries of the multiverse. Read the full interview after the jump!

It wasn’t so long ago that we were impressed by phones that doubled as cameras, satisfied with mp3 players that only played mp3s, and content to share the mundane details of our days with one person instead of thousands. Given the speed with which technology evolves, it’s reasonable for writers to worry that today’s breakthrough devices will seem as quaint as Tomogatchis a few years — or even months — down the line. The anxiety of depicting a world moving so much faster than a manuscript can capture might account for the recent preponderance of post-apocalyptic fiction: when we can no longer pretend that technological innovation has plateaued, nor ignore technology’s integral role in our lives, it’s natural for a sort of literary Luddism to emerge.

When handled properly, though, the complex relationships between humans and machines makes extraordinarily fertile grounds for psychological inquiry. Dan Chaon — a former National Book Award nominee for 2001′s Among the Missing — proves as much in his latest novel, Await Your Reply. Through three distinct storylines, each focused on a pair of characters engaged in some form of fraud, Chaon explores the slippage of identity in the Internet age. Lucy’s boyfriend, George, leads her to a lighthouse motel by a long-drained lake, where he’s stashed a suspiciously secured nest egg. Ryan criss-crosses the country under assumed names, aiding his father, Jay, in a spree of identity theft. Miles ventures into Canada’s Northwest Territories, trailing the discarded personas of his twin, Hayden, who’s either mentally ill, a criminal genius, or both. Chaon’s characters are refugees from reality, their desire for new identities an amplification of everyday escapism.

Await Your Reply has been called “the first great novel about the Internet.” It made me think about the distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction, in terms of their respective willingness to embrace technology. There were thrillers about the Internet in the ’90s.

Right, like The Net, with Sandra Bullock.
Exactly. Since then, the Internet has become such a fixture in our lives, and yet literary fiction writers still seem tentative about dipping their toes in.
I’ll tell you, one of the things I dreaded most was reading a review that compared my book to The Net. That actually hasn’t happened yet, but I know for a fact why people are tentative about it: technology changes so fast that it’s really hard to write about it without it seeming historical and kind of old hat. That was one of the things I really struggled with as I was writing, and I think I tended to elide a little bit after I got done, because I didn’t want it to seem too dated. There were a lot of things about credit card theft and fraud and so on that I did research on, and I ended up leaving a lot of the details out. I think the thing that was interesting to me had to do more with the way that technology has changed our lives, both made it easier to become a different person, and also made the process more complicated. I was writing this while my kids were growing up, and I felt like there was an aspect of their lives that was really public in a way that was much different than my life was ever public. There was this kind of freedom that they had to move around, but that freedom also makes it harder to feel grounded.
Place is really important in this book. All of the characters seem unmoored from their homes and unable to return. To me, it felt like they’d departed, but were sort of in holding patterns where they’d left one home but hadn’t created a new one, or at least hadn’t become the people they’d need to be to inhabit that home.
One of the things that I actually started with in the book wasn’t the Internet or anything like that. It was place, and I was particularly thinking of these kinds of almost post-apocalyptic landscapes, like the lighthouse, and the Arctic and, you know, Las Vegas. These places that feel like they’re really unnatural and inhospitable and unhomelike, I guess. That was what I started with, placing characters in these landscapes that felt unmoored in some way. As I was working on the book, there was a kind of weird, almost Norman Rockwell aspect to it, in that I feel like the characters wouldn’t be in the situations they were if they’d had this kind of grounding to a community or to a place. I guess there’s a Wizard of Oz quality to what happens to all of them, except there’s no Kansas to go back to. Hayden’s solution to taking care of himself is to abandon one life and move on to the next one, which has always been my fantasy temptation. When things start getting hard, I always think, “Oh well, I could just give up and start a new life.” At least, you have those moments where it feels like it’s too rough to go on, and you want to just drop everything and leave. And I guess Hayden plays out that fantasy that I think most people have.
I think the interesting thing about that fantasy is that it usually does sort of end at the leaving part. You don’t really follow through. You think, “I could just get on a bus and no one would know,” but you never think, “Then what would I do?” Your book sort of deals with the then-what: once you’ve been severed from your home and shed this identity, then what do you do?
Right. There’s a point where Jay is talking about that Robert Frost poem, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and he has this line about how he wishes that he didn’t have to make just one choice. That’s another aspect of the fantasy. Whatever choice you make in your life, there’s this feeling that there were other possibilities that you had, and that even if you’ve made good choices, you’re still stuck with them. I suppose there’s a part of all of us that wonders, “What if I had done something else?”
That reminds me of multiverse theory. In a way, the Internet can provide that.
The multiverse, yeah. When that idea was first proposed, it seemed really almost mindbendingly impossible to grasp, and I think the Internet has actually helped us to understand the concept. For young people who’ve grown up with the Internet, it’s sort of an intuitive idea. It doesn’t seem radical at all.
I think everyone has asked you about the acknowledgments in the end of the book, where you list all of the writers you felt you’d borrowed from, but I wanted to ask about Tolkien especially, and I think you also mentioned Philip Pullman in one of your interviews. How did fantasy novels and the sort of world-building that occurs in them influence you in making characters that build their own worlds, and in building the world of the book?
One of the things that inspired me in the last few years was having kids and going back to the kind of high YA fantasy that I loved when I was a kid and had gotten away from. When I started reading it again with my kids, I realized how incredibly awesome it is to have these worlds and these spaces that take on a life of their own. I love Pullman, I loved the Garth Nix Abhorsen trilogy, which was almost equally amazing. Going through that with my kids really inspired me to kind of think about the way that I could play around with that idea in a literary, sort of adult way, while still sort of remaining true to the spirit of what those guys are doing. I guess it’s kind of the spirit of world-building that remains in the book. There is the alternate world that exists in Hayden’s mind, that I think is probably the closest correlative, although I guess most of the spaces in the book also feel like they’re not quite real, even though they are.
They almost do feel multidimensional. Ryan and Jay’s cabin in the woods feels almost like a hidden space you would access through some portal.
Right, it could really be a cabin in the woods, or it could be the kind of place that Little Red Riding Hood visits on the way to Grandma’s house. That was kind of the thing that I wanted, was to create these places that felt like they had both an actual reality and that they existed in this kind of other dimension, this sort of archetypal, iconic dimension. I was definitely drawing on the architecture of amusement parks, or the set design of Hollywood. Probably the most obvious is [George's] house behind the [lighthouse] motel, which is pretty clearly Psycho, you know, the Bates Motel house. I remember visiting Universal Studios amusement park and just being so excited to see that house. Like, “Oh my God!” In some ways, I suppose the cabin in the woods is drawing a little bit on one of my favorite horror movies from childhood, which is Friday the 13th. Those cabins at Camp Crystal Lake. So all of those places have that quality to them, and that was really one of the most fun things about writing the book, making up those places and figuring out how to make them both real and archetypal.
It’s true with the characters too, especially Hayden. He’s a character that seems both real and archetypal, the “evil genius” type.
At least part of the character of Hayden was drawing on a lot of news stories about various hackers and hacker communities, but at the same time I was really drawing on the seductive character that you always want to be friends with, even though you know it’s probably going to be bad for you to be friends with that person. You see that character in movies a lot, but I think you always kind of hope to meet that person in real life in some ways too. I was thinking a lot about the kind of gothic stuff that Daphne Dumarier wrote, or Shirley Jackson wrote, where there’s always these characters who seem slightly larger than life, and they’re romantic, but also have this aura of danger about them. I’ve always really loved that dichotomy. There’s something really attractive about that.
It’s special to be on their good side, because so few people are.
Right, yeah. It’s a good engine to drive suspense. One of the things I was trying to teach myself as I was writing this book was about all of those suspense engines, and how they work, the kind of old ones that always work. As a literary writer, you tend to be afraid of them, because they always have a great potential to be corny.
Even very serious readers of literary fiction are susceptible to all of those devices. I think those things are so ingrained in the human story that we really react to them, but there seems to be a contract between writers and readers of literary fiction not to use them.
Yeah, we’re too cool. It’s a sort of hipster thing. Like, you think you like Animal Collective, but secretly Chris Brown comes on the radio and you turn it up. Those hooks, you can’t resist. The other hooks, they may be interesting intellectually, but perhaps not as immediate.
There’s something that can be really moving about earnestness that borders on corniness.
I think that one of the issues that comes up with students in creative writing, and the thing that I’m always the most worried about, is that you can get too cautious. You can get to the point where you’re unwilling to take the risks that you need to take because you’re afraid of being corny, or you’re afraid of being sentimental, or you don’t want anybody to laugh at you. I think that’s true with both fiction and poetry. In order to get to those places that really sing or really move people, you have to take these risks. I think that we live in an age where we could probably use more earnestness. If you lived in the 19th century, earnestness might get a little tiresome, but now it’s kind of rare.