GUEST INTERVIEW: JOHN McNALLY
John McNally is a writer who's been popping up on the radar of late. He'll be appearing tomorrow night at Dutton's Brentwood to read and sign his new novel America's Report Card, so what could be more fortuitous than this guest interview by novelist/TEV guest blogger Karen Palmer?
Writer John McNally lives and teaches in North Carolina, but he recently spent a year in Los Angeles as a Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project fellow (sponsored by Paramount), subletting an apartment on the west side and dividing his writing time between fiction and screenplays. The fellowship was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make contacts and hone his screenwriting craft, but meanwhile McNally owed his publisher a second book. Not to worry. The author of a story collection, Troublemakers, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and a previous novel, The Book of Ralph — which Richard Russo called “a serious joy” — McNally’s second, America’s Report Card, published this month by Simon and Schuster/Free Press, has already garnered praise. From Booklist: “high-voltage, culturally discerning, agilely comedic." From Kirkus Reviews: "Totally charming whacked-out politics." From Irvine Welch: "At last — a post 9/11 novel with imagination, guts and integrity.” From Dan Chaon: “A brilliant, laugh-out-loud satire with a tender, angry heart and enormous compassion.”
Set in Iowa City and Chicago just before the 2004 Presidential election, the story skewers life under George W. Bush, from the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of standardized testing for the “No Child Left Behind” program to the increased surveillance of American citizens under the Patriot Act. The pacing is brisk, the characters lively. Charlie Wolf, a film major, epitomizes the contemporary overeducated underpaid worker; Petra Petrovich is his cynical Russian ice queen; teenaged Jainey O’Sullivan, a green-and-purple-haired charmer, refers to her ex-boyfriend Alex as “Mr. Licks” and authors a subversive comic called “The Freakazoid”; Ned, Jainey’s brother and Charlie’s dark counterpoint, lives in his parents’ attic and studies the Bible while blasting heavy metal; Mariah owns a Chicago wig store stocked with literature excoriating the government for Ruby Ridge, Wounded Knee, Waco and Watergate. From the start, McNally wears his political heart on his sleeve. The book is dedicated to Ann Coulter: “America’s Iago — for rewriting history to suit her own nefarious purposes.”
Q: About that dedication — you’re either savvy about publicity or so pissed-off you couldn’t help yourself. Which?
A: I’d like to think that I’m savvy, but the truth is that being pissed-off fueled the dedication to Ms. Coulter. Thirty years ago, Ann Coulter would have been the crackpot with her own two a.m. cable-access show, and people would have called in to make fun of her. Now, she’s a celebrity. At some point, the train for what passes for intelligent discourse in this country has derailed.
Q: At first blush, standardized testing doesn’t feel like a subject with dramatic possibilities. You worked for a while as a test-scorer in Iowa City — what was it about the experience that later surfaced as the novelist’s “aha”?
A: You’re absolutely right. There’s nothing sexy about standardized testing. However, the job itself was truly Kafkaesque — the way the bureaucracy functioned, the way the test-scorers would lose sight of the original question after scoring tens of thousands of quasi-literate answers, the way forklifts would arrive with boxes the size of small automobiles to deliver thousands of more tests for us to score. I first tried writing an essay about it, but there was too much craziness for twenty pages. Six years later, I finally had enough distance to try it as a novel.
Q: In the novel, the test given annually to students is called “America’s Report Card.” Jainey O’Sullivan’s senior-year essay, which Charlie scores, is both a plea for help — she believes her third-grade art teacher was murdered by the government — and a challenge to the bureaucrats. When you worked as a scorer, did you ever run across essays that made you sit up and take note?
A: A lot of the test answers were more along the lines of “You suck!” or “You must be pathetic, whoever you are!” I don’t remember any that prompted an emergency response, but there were a few that alluded to more personal things in the student’s life.
Q: In literary circles, comic novels sometimes “don’t get no respect.” What do you think is the rightful place of humor in art? What can it accomplish that a “straight” novel can’t?
A: I couldn’t have written a straight political novel while living through the mess we’re presently in. I was — and am — too angry. That’s where satire comes in handy. I suspect most satirists are angry people prone to aneurisms and strokes. I have to say, though, that I don’t try to be funny when I’m writing, and I’m never sure whether something is actually funny until someone tells me it is. It just happens to be my worldview, a part of the DNA. That said, I love “straight” novels. Two of my favorite novels are Continental Drift by Russell Banks and House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III, and there’s probably not a single funny line in either of them, so I’m not sure that what can be accomplished in one versus the other is an either/or proposition.
Q: A large part of the novel’s plot centers on the government’s use of decades of standardized testing to construct psychological profiles of American citizens, their future political affiliation, employment and potential for criminal activity. You seem to be making the case that this misuse stems directly from policies such as the Patriot Act. But you’ve also included an official evaluation of President Bush, which theoretically would have been recorded during the Kennedy administration. Is there some way in which the desire to collect data on its citizens is integral to the American system?
A: On the one hand, my book isn’t solely critical of Bush and the Republicans. The disasters of Ruby Ridge and Waco happened under Clinton’s watch. Every administration is culpable for a certain percentage of serious missteps. But everything Bush does is a misstep, one serious screw-up after the other, and ones that are going to cost this country for generations. He is the Uber Fuck-up, as it were. He takes screwing up to new, Olympian heights.
Q: Jainey O’Sullivan’s third-grade art teacher says of George Bush: “He’s trying to kill me.” She turns up dead, ostensibly a suicide, but bequeaths her artwork to Jainey. This includes a piece called “The Lycanthrope,” a huge sculpture of Osama bin Laden that with the removal of beard and headpiece turns into George Bush. What were you after with “The Lycanthrope”?
A: As I was writing the novel, I kept thinking of Bush’s whole “You’re either with us or against us” philosophy, and how bin Laden and George Bush are more alike than they would ever be willing to admit. Bin Laden is never going to win his war, but neither will Bush. It takes a certain mindset to think that if you just keep killing the enemy, you’ll be victorious. Neither bin Laden nor Bush thinks through cause-and-effect. Bin Laden probably doesn’t see any connection between 9/11 and the simple-headed patriotism that it’s spawned, much as Bush can’t see that he’s spawning insurgents (i.e., patriots) with the war in Iraq. These are not men who embrace — or try to understand — the role of ambiguity. They live in an “I’m-right-you’re-wrong” world. And that, sadly, is why we’re in the mess we’re in.
Q: Your family background is working-class suburban Chicago. What has this meant for your writing?
A: I have a good work ethic. Growing up in a working-class environment also helped put my life into perspective. My father was a roofer. He’d get up at four a.m. to drive across the city to some job and wouldn’t get home until past dinnertime. I’m a lucky s.o.b. I roll out of bed whenever I want and then sit in front of a computer most of the day, taking long breaks with no one looking over my shoulder. I know better than to complain about the difficulty of writing. Yes, writing a novel is hard, but it sure as hell beats standing on a roof on a day when it’s over a hundred degrees and breathing in fumes from hot tar. A few days of that kind of work would cure any writer who whines about his job.
Q: Was America’s Report Card begun during your screenwriting fellowship in LA? What did that experience bring to the book?
A: I was already well into a draft when I had the fellowship, so I’m not sure that it affected this novel all that much. I’m curious, however, how the screenwriting experience is going to affect my next novel. I can already tell that I’m more aware of what I’m doing plotwise. The great advantage to writing a novel, however, is that you don’t have to use a template, which you really do need to use in the typical three-act screenplay. I could write a 900-page picaresque novel next if I want to; I couldn’t write a 900-page picaresque screenplay. Well, I could — but no one would ever look at it.
Q: People who read novels often talk about how a film adaptation can never live up to the book. Do you think this is true?
A: I would much rather watch a Tom Clancy movie than read a Tom Clancy novel. In fact, I wouldn’t read a Tom Clancy novel. So, I think certain kinds of books inspire movies that are better than their source material. But literary novels, by writers like Philip Roth or John Updike, often don’t work well as adaptations because they’re usually more about the internal world of the protagonist, unlike a Clancy novel, which is all about the external world. The best literary adaptations tend to be books that balance both the internal and external worlds of the story. Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool is a good example. Good book, good movie.
Q: North Carolina is a long way from LA. Do you miss anything in particular about the city?
A: I miss something about LA every day. I miss the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market — the fresh pluots, [apricot-plums] in particular. I miss the limitless selection of movies. I miss the ArcLight. I miss the Reel Inn in Malibu. I miss the ocean. I miss the political bent. Most of all, I miss the energy that LA has. North Carolina is a different planet. It’s where my job is. But I would move back to LA in a heartbeat.
John McNally will be reading from America’s Report Card at Dutton’s in Brentwood on July 25.
AMERICA’S REPORT CARD By JOHN McNALLY
Free Press
266 pages
$24 hardcover
Great interview! Wish I could make the reading but will check out the book.
Posted by: Jim Ruland | July 24, 2006 at 12:03 PM
John McNally's reading in Iowa City was recorded and should be available here before the end of the week (I hope): http://wsui.uiowa.edu/prairie_lights.htm.
McNally is an excellent reader -- he can work a library, bookstore or a bar.
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