The Elegant Variation: A TEV EXCLUSIVE

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March 08, 2004

A TEV EXCLUSIVE - Q&A WITH DAN RHODES

When Dan Rhodes came through L.A. on his shared reading tour with DBC Pierre, we didn't have time to sit and have a chat. But Dan graciously agreed to conduct this e-mail conversation, which took places in bits and pieces over the subsequent months. It's been cut and pasted together to approach some form of coherence, and we offer it it herewith without further ado.

TEV: I've read through a bunch of your interviews online and they all seemed pretty eager to tag you with the Angry Young Man label. I was pretty surprised when I finally saw you in person - the whole angry thing was entirely absent and you seemed quite good-humored and good-natured.

DR: Well, I was on holiday... I'm a lot more comfortable in the biz that I used to be too. And besides, it would be pretty tedious for the audience if I just stood there and frothed at the mouth for fifteen minutes.

TEV: A book tour was a holiday? You seemed to be doing an awful lot of running around, from one reading to the next ... doesn't seem too terribly restful?

DR: It wasn't at all restful, but it was a great experience. I couldn't afford a real holiday last year, so I counted work travel as holiday. It's a major perk of the job. How else would I ever have got to Bellingham, WA?

TEV: So, did you get anointed "angry" out of some infantile need interviewers have to label?

DR: No, I've been pretty damn furious

TEV: But there’s been a mellowing? (I recall you also suggested that tales of your retirement may, in fact, be exaggerated. "Resting," was how I believe you modified it.)

DR: Yes, because I have a nice new publisher, and the thought of writing more stuff has become a lot less daunting. In fact with my old publisher continuing would have been impossible.

TEV: Is that something you're comfortable talking a bit more about? (Or is it yesterday's news? It's just interesting in that the suggestion appears to be that you were a reasonably happy fella before hooking up with the Publisher in question.)

DR: To tell the truth, I think I've said enough about that. I've got a great publisher now, and it looks as though I'm going to be getting my books back from the old lot, so it's under the bridge. I just read something by Patrick Hamilton (author of 20,000 Streets Under The Sky, one of my all time favourite books) where he said that 'Having an unenthusiastic and damping publisher is rather like being a carpenter compelled to use a hopelessly blunt saw. You begin to lose interest in your work, and consequently you do it badly.' Having the right people around you is so much more important than I thought it would be, and is a sadly rare thing for a writer.

TEV: So I'm finally past the point where I'm too embarrassed to admit I don't know a work - I don't know this one, and it's not so easy to track down. Amazon UK has it but Amazon US comes up empty. I have located a copy on Half.com, so it's en route. What will I find when it arrives?

DR: You'll find an authentic lost classic. I've just written an article on it, which I'm hoping the Guardian will run. 2500 words about how great it is, and how everyone should read it. It's really funny and an excruciating study of infatuation. It's a crying shame it's fallen out of print just in time for his 100th birthday. Let me know what you think...

TEV: Will do. At any rate, your readers who I know will be pleased to hear that writing more stuff is something you're more comfortable contemplating.

DR: That's good to hear.

TEV: Also - I gotta ask: did you absolutely catch hell from the animal rights nuts over "Timoleon"?

DR: Not at all. I'm an animal rights nut myself. It seems to be meat-eaters who complain about the dog's misfortunes. They seem to be more concerned about the plight of an imaginary dog than they are about real-life animals.

TEV: Agreed! It just seems that activists (at least in this country) don't always keep perspective or humor. (Mind you, I'm both a meat eater and dog lover and was troubled and saddened by T's violent end - without forgetting that it was a character. But I wonder if you presented us with such lovely eyes to make that ending all the more ... what ... disturbing? Moving? Upsetting?)

DR: More honest. Horrible things happen around us every day, to real people not just imaginary mutts.

TEV: That seems to be something of a thread for you - I wouldn't say you're obsessed with the horrible but it's certainly a familiar motif for you, no?

DR: I suppose so. But there's more stuff going on too. … I don't write intellectually. I just write the stories that appear in my head. I suppose I see sad and bad things, and that's how come my writing contains sad people and bad stuff. For a writer, I don't think much.

TEV: To what extent do you suppose your preceding body of work of short and short-short fiction determined the shape of Timoleon Vieta Come Home?

DR: --I just write whatever's in my head, really. I enjoy writing short fiction, so I suppose that had some bearing on the book's episodic structure. It just seemed the natural way to write it.

TEV: Yes, when I read it I did think a bit of Oscar & Lucinda - not that they're particularly similar except for the fact that Peter Carey had come from a background of working with a lot of short stories at that time, and it showed in the episodic nature of the short chapters. Is the short form what most engages you in terms of your own reading? Who would you consider your "exemplars"?

DR: I read short and long fiction, but I almost always wish novels were one third shorter, even ones I quite like. Almost every book I've read so far this year (OK, I know it's still January) could have been pruned. Short stuff wise, I like the usual suspects - Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Chekhov, Gogol, Maupassant. I also love Rhapsody by Dorothy Edwards, a Welsh writer who died at 31, after just two books. It's a magical book, and another one you can only find battered copies of. And I also enjoy a lot of Barry Yourgrau's stuff, which many years ago got me writing short love stories.

TEV: Both Edwards have been located and ordered. You certainly got quite a lot of attention over the Granta list - congratulations (albeit quite belatedly) by the way - and my sense is that they do pay a bit more attention to literary matters in the UK. What was your sense touring America and meeting American audiences? Do we have much to answer for? Can you compare a typical American reading to one over there?

DR: Book reading crowds seem to be pretty much the same kind of thing wherever you go. They're really friendly, enjoyable gigs to do - there always seems to be a sense of goodwill. They're bigger in continental Europe. I've read to 1000 people in Belgium (I wasn't headlining, I should add). As far as I can tell books are just as big a deal in the US as they are in the UK, and the same difficulties apply, with enormous publishers and chains trying to squeeze out small presses and homogenise stock. But I really think that book lovers will only let this go so far.

TEV: That's a very interesting point - what sort of recourse do you suppose we'll have? What's going to be the way to stem that tide? (Especially with all the closures of independent bookstores we're reading about these days.)

DR: We gotta shop independent, at places that give their staff the opportunity to push books for the love of it. I don't know about America, but over here the chains are the same in every town. And it's up to book lovers to seek things out, and not just go to the big displays. Maybe I'm overoptimistic and in ten years time there will just be one big publisher and one big retailer.

TEV:> This question comes out of left field but it's something I think a lot about and have wrestled with. How - if at all - do you think the novel (or lit fiction in general) can recover and retain a meaningful place in the cultural dialogue? In the face of internet, TV and the rest, it seems the audience for so-called "serious" fiction is smaller than ever - along with a corresponding loss of cultural muscle. How to become relevant again? (And I do believe it can be done - I do not think the novel is inherently a "dying" form but I'm curious to know if you have any thoughts.)

DR: That's a big question. I'm not sold on notions of the death of the novel. I see people reading all over the place, and talking about books. And loving them. … I think fiction that thinks of itself as 'serious' is on dodgy ground. More often than not writing that self-consciously wrestles with Grand Themes is interminably dull. It's as if in entertaining the reader the writer is somehow selling out, which is cobblers. Some 'serious' writers lose track of the fact that they should be telling a good story, and if you don't tell a decent story all is lost. I doubt many people got the point of 'Fury' by Salman Rushdie because it's so unentertaining I doubt many people finished it. I certainly didn't. I just got angry with him for wasting my time with a load of tedious tripe. He's a clever bloke, but not quite clever enough to realise that he should have written a readable book. There's too much of that about.

I hope this vaguely helps.

***

And so do we. Please comment or drop a line and let us know if you'd like to see more features like this.

Posted at 12:30 AM in Interviews | Permalink

Comments

'Timoleon Vieta' was a complete joy, easily one of the best novels of the past few years. Thank goodness Mr Rhodes is continuing to write!

Posted by: Emma | March 08, 2004 at 09:21 PM

Loved the interview. I haven't read 'Timolean Vieta', but now I want to grab a copy. And copies of the other books he mentioned as well. I would love to see more features like this on your site.

Posted by: Megan | March 09, 2004 at 12:13 PM

Timoleon Vieta is a wonderful novel, full of contemporaneam issues: the pleasures of solitude, the joyness of love and the 'mèlange'of cultures.

Posted by: Eugenia | May 03, 2004 at 12:50 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

March 08, 2004

A TEV EXCLUSIVE - Q&A WITH DAN RHODES

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

March 08, 2004

A TEV EXCLUSIVE - Q&A WITH DAN RHODES

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism