When you read 85A by Kyle Smith, you are likely to feel as I did: "This guy is fully committed!" There's not a lot of smoothing out the edges to please the masses. And yet, the book reads as a fully polished piece. Not an easy task for this first-time novelist. Below, my interview with Kyle.
Jill Dearman: Seamus is such a bold, brash character—a true original. How did you create this guy? Or did he find you?
Kyle Thomas Smith: I suppose you could say that what Henry Chinaski was to Charles Bukowski, Seamus is to me: a much bolder, much brasher alter-ego. Only, Seamus is only 15 years old, a whole 20 years younger than me! I created Seamus one lazy Sunday morning in January 2008. I’d been wanting to write a novel for many years but I couldn’t figure out what to write about. My partner Julius and I were lying around in bed discussing my quandary when he said, “Kyle, why don’t you write about what it was like to grow up middle class in Chicago in the Eighties? Write about what it was like to be gay in a strict Irish Catholic household. Write about what it was like to encounter a whole spectrum of taboo paradigms in the inner city. Not everybody knows what it’s like to have that experience.” And I knew he was right. Not everyone knows what that’s like. I meet lots of other gay people and lots of other liberals who come from families whose response to everything was always tolerance, “live and let live.” These people are fortunate indeed. There are many others out there who are like Seamus, who have to bear up under a firestorm of bullying, rejection and intolerance. In the process, they often develop the kind of scabby edge that you find in figures like Johnny Rotten, Bob Mould, Eminem, and Charles Bukowski. But scratch those scabs and you’ll often find a full-to-bursting, bleeding heart that fears that it won’t survive exposure in its immediate environment. So until these rebels can repair to safe havens, they’re going to keep their tongues sharp and their fists clenched. I wanted Seamus to embody that conflict, all the while keeping his sights set on England, an eccentric kingdom where he’s sure his true self will flourish.
JD: There is a strong, strong energy in your writing. Most writers have to struggle through early drafts in which their books feel a little dead. Did you go through that, or did the punk sensibility fire up your prose from the get-go?
KTS: I had started writing 85A after being unfairly and unceremoniously fired from a job. The experience devastated me. The way it was handled, all the skullduggery involved, it was one of the worst experiences of my life. Fortunately, I used the lather I’d worked up as creative fuel. For the most part, the book was easy to write. It had a built-in structure: Seamus takes the L from the northwest side to the south side. Along the way, he conveys stories related to the various Chicago neighborhoods he passes through. With that simple plan in mind, characters came to life and the chapters wrote themselves. That’s the only way to put it. Seamus was like a living, breathing, fulminating spirit that I was channeling. That is, until about two-thirds of the way through the novel, where I hit a major snag. From there, for months on end, Seamus would stammer, mutter or snore at best. I wrote all sorts of dead-tired chapters that I didn’t believe in. It felt like a long, drawn-out game of exquisite corpse, a pointless, protracted ramble. All the energy of the previous chapters had dissipated and I was dogging it, dogging it, dogging it. For a long time, I didn’t know if I’d finish 85A or if I’d just end up pitching it in the recycling bin like so many other failed efforts.
JD: What was your editing process like? Did the book change a lot in revision?
KTS: So this gets back to that snag I was talking about. Like I said, I’d written about two-thirds of 85A and I also knew what the final chapters would be. But in between there was a gap, which I tried bridging with over 200 additional pages of labored, stultifying prose. I showed it to an editor and she mercilessly slammed the 200 and some odd pages. For days afterwards, I moped around, thinking I was done for. Then I had a burst of insight: just cut those 200-plus pages. Just cut ’em out! So I excised all the whale blubber and succeeded in bridging the story gap with only four paragraphs. With that, I had myself a lean, mean novel. The other sections only ended up requiring cosmetic changes. For example, the publisher requested that I take out more than half of the f-words in the first few chapters, to inure the reader to Seamus’ over-the-top profanity.
JD: How much does music influence your writing? And what are the books that have affected you most?
KTS: Music has incalculable influence over my writing. Although, in writing 85A, I wasn’t listening to old hardcore tapes and albums to get me in the spirit. In fact, I was mostly playing John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, a minimalist masterpiece where he’s reenacting the primal-scream therapy that he was undergoing with Yoko after the Beatles breakup. Enormously helpful to my process. I also love how Black Francis screams and pounds out such sweet riffs, so I played The Pixies’ Doolittle a lot. Then there was Bowie’s Aladdin Sane and my all-time favorite album, The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, which is the essence of liberation, the central theme of 85A. I had those on continuous play, especially for the West Town chapters.
In literature, I love the throbbing passion and depth psychology of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Jazz; Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps; and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In conjuring Seamus’ character, Alan Silitoe’s The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia were indispensable. Flannery O’Connor helped me with weaving in grisly Catholic imagery. Murakami, Marguerite Duras and Raymond Carver, one of my literary heroes, taught me how to temper Seamus’ overstatements with economy and understatement. My favorite play is Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams. Obviously, I have great affinity for hard-bitten individualists and Williams had that archetype down to a science with Orpheus, as did Bob Dylan with his Chronicles One, whose pages I wore out throughout the writing of 85A. And I should also mention writing teacher Natalie Goldberg. If she hadn’t instructed writers to learn their craft by just filling up notebooks with discursive free-writing for years on end, which I did, I might have given up on writing long ago and never written 85A.
JD: What are you working on now?
KTS: I’m trying to write a second novel, set in Brooklyn. It’s about a right-brain writer guy who inherits a pre-war apartment building from an elderly friend who has died. He doesn’t have the first clue how to manage the building, much less his love life and the lawsuits coming from the friend’s relatives. Unlike 85A, it’s coming along slowly. Sign me up for your workshop, Jill!
JD: Ha! Will do. For more on Kyle's brash new book, check out the site: http://www.85Anovel.com For more on the craft of writing check out my book, Bang the Keys and website, http://www.bangthekeys.com.
And until next time I leave you with this question: What can you and only YOU write about?
