#gary fisketjon

Bret Easton Ellis, Gary Fisketjon, and Jay McInerney in June 1987

«Bisogna entrare in uno stato di trance. Perché un editor può solo appigliarsi ai riferimenti presenti nel libro. Non è come chiedersi: “Perché questo lavoro non può essere qualcos’altro?”. Non funziona così. Bisogna immergersi nella lingua particolare di un libro e vedere dove il libro non è all’altezza dei suoi punti di forza, più felici, e farli notare all’autore. [...] Attraverso la lettura minuziosa, l’editing permette di entrare in contatto con il Dna del libro, riuscendo a capire dove funziona meglio e dove può essere migliorato, ma soprattutto permette di comprendere cosa lo rende un buon prodotto».

- Gary Fisketjon, editor di Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Patricia Highsmith, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, Tobias Wolff.

We’re so pleased to share this intimate Q&A between Jim Shepard and his  editor, Gary Fisketjon. If you’re in NYC, you can see the two in conversation at mcnallyjackson tomorrow night at 7 pm.

Gary Fisketjon:  The Book of Aron appears on a poster celebrating some of the most notable books published by Knopf in the month of May over the past hundred years.  Are there any old books on this list that you happen to be particularly fond of?  And will you hang this framed poster in your guest bathroom or tack it up in the garage until you next make a garbage run?

 Jim Shepard:  Of course it’s thrilling and humbling to be a part of such a lineup.   (When I first looked at it, my initial response was, Jeez, which book doesn’t belong on this list?)  All of the old books on that list are ones I’m particularly fond of.    I wish I had enough narcissism to prominently hang a poster with my book cover on it; I get embarrassed, though, so my guess is that it’ll end up in the kids’ playroom in the basement, where ping pong balls will rocket off it every so often. 

 GF:  Your first two books were published by Knopf in the early Eighties, as have your last six since 1996 (including The Book of Aron but not Love and Hydrogen, a Vintage Original).  This makes you a Borzoi of longer standing than most people who still work here.  Do you have any tales from the crypt you'd care to share?

 JS:  Well, that’s a frightening thought: I’m the old guard?  One thing I used to like to do with old pals like Ed Hirsch was raid the book room.   Back in the Eighties there was a central windowless room where they kept lots of recently published hardcovers, and Ed and I would visit and then on our way out ask innocently, “Do you mind if we visit the book room?”  We made out like bandits.   We’d also hang around Gordon Lish, since he was so relentlessly outrageous.  He’d shout down the hall when he saw us coming that he wanted to marry Ed and have an affair with me.  Then we’d give him grief by reading aloud to him the flap copy he wrote for his authors.  I still remember the opening phrase he’d proposed for one of Jack Gilbert’s books of poetry: “Not since Homer…”   

 But most of my tales from the crypt would probably involve my first editor, Bob Gottlieb.  I hadn’t realized he was famous for his informality, and I think he was bemused that I was even more informal than he was.  When I first met him I’d just come from playing basketball downtown and was still pretty sweaty.   I sat on his floor because I felt so gross.  Then it turned out that Knopf publicity had been so horrified by the author photo I’d sent — I’d had my girlfriend take it while I stood out in the street, and I think the sun was even behind me — that they’d planned a photo-shoot during my visit, but here I was in a soaked basketball jersey.  So someone borrowed a dress shirt and they shot me from the waist up.  The collar was about twelve sizes too big.   Bob was a spectacularly good editor, and he had no patience whatsoever — at least with me — with what he considered to be grand syntactical or rhetorical flourishes.  He’d talked me into cutting one from the end of my first novel, and then when he wanted to do the same with my second, I resisted.   He patiently explained his thinking on the matter and then finally said that if I wanted to keep it, it was my funeral.   I kept it.   The first review that came in mentioned that flourish with great enthusiasm, and when Bob forwarded the clipping to me, next to that assertion he wrote, “I can’t agree with this.”    The next review that came in also mentioned the flourish with even more enthusiasm, and when Bob forwarded that clipping, he’d drawn a skull and crossbones over the quoted passage and had scrawled, in Kurtz’s handwriting, “This must stop!”  

 GF:  Did you ever meet Alfred himself?  Or hear anything about him?

 JS:  I never met Alfred himself.   And how’s this for disappointing: Bob did tell me a few stories about him, and I don’t remember a single one of them with any accuracy.   Oral historians, take note: there’s no point in bothering Jim with any questions. 

 GF:  Being fearful of children in books and movies and even -- in the case of those belonging to friends -- life itself, I marvel at your fearlessness about using a great variety of them throughout your career, catholic in terms of age and preoccupation and both where and when.  I started drawing up a list of my favorites but soon gave up because I have too many, each entirely independent of the others in every respect.  First, where do you get this courage and, better still, the skill to make each one (plus their pals) so damn convincing?  Second, do you have any special favorites?  Third, there of course is Aron, so I wonder:  Did creating this remarkable boy require something more than the youngsters you've already distinguished yourself with?

 JS:  It helps to have not completely grown up myself, I suppose.   I think as a kid I got in the habit of observing kids — I was always a passionately interested outsider, but not such a pariah that I’d be chased away — and that meant that I was always recording what made various kids tick, how they operated, what they loved.  I’m not sure I was particularly unusual in that regard.  And even as a little kid I loved doing voices, and my Italian relatives loved doing voices, too.    And since I’ve always been interested in the relative powerlessness of children, as well as the weird double-binds that certain forms of precocity generate for kids, I’ve been continually drawn to writing about them.   Do I have any favorites?   I suppose the two boys I’ve spent the most time with: Hanratty, the miserable schmo at the heart of Project X, and Aron.  As for the special difficulties involved in imagining Aron, many of them are what you’d expect: the distances in time and place from my own childhood, etc.   And although he seems in recognizable ways to have lots in common with a kid like Hanratty, there was also that problem of how to render someone who’d experienced such extremities of loss and deprivation.   

  GF:  An impertinent question, for sure:  Do you think, in your heart of hearts and your deepest thoughts, that Aron somehow managed to escape the fate of Treblinka that was suffered by Janusz Korczak and the other children from the ghetto? Clearly the good doctor thought Aron might well be able to pull this off, but what are your thoughts about all that?  Or is this something you'd like each reader to decide for him- or herself?

 JS:  It is something that every reader will decide for him- or herself.  I love thinking he might have.   But escape from Treblinka meant escape from the trains themselves — you didn’t get out once you reached the camp — so for Aron that would have meant leaving Korczak and the rest of the children on the train.   He might have.  He’s given a blueprint for how to do it towards the end.   

 GF:  Are there any writers you find particularly adept or inspirational (in not the sappy sense but the literary one) when it comes to writing about children?

 JS:  Off the top of my head I can immediately cite Jona Oberski’s Childhood — speaking of children who’ve experienced extremities of loss and deprivation — and Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster.  I’ve always loved the tenderness with which Nabokov’s children are rendered, and Flannery O’Connor’s flinty-eyed lack of sentimentality when it comes to the subject of children.   I love the portraits of the non-saintly children in Dickens’ novels, though even the saintly ones are affecting.  Charlie Baxter and Aimee Bender and Margot Livesey and Deborah Eisenberg do great kids.   Then there are all of those books about adolescents, like Charles Portis’ True Grit.  I’m sure I’m forgetting three hundred others.   

 GF:  I've often said that you do more research for certain short stories than some writers of would-be epics might dream of undertaking.  Is there any truth to that claim?  

 JS:  Ha!   My general rule of thumb is that there's some truth to all of your claims.   To back you up, though, Ron Hansen, an old friend, has always scolded me for how little bang I get for the buck when it comes to research.   He took appalled notice of the thickness of my research folders for a story about the executioner who presided over the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution and said, "Jeez.   I could get a trilogy out of the amount of stuff that you use for a short story."   I reminded him that I'd always aspired to be crappy provider, when it came to my kids.  

 GF:  And in the case of prodigious investigations, historical or otherwise, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff, and how many of your discoveries inform your understanding of the story's background without ever appearing in the story itself? 

 JS:  It isn't just a matter of which are the most amazing details, I've finally figured out; the wheat turns out to be all of that stuff that bears on the central emotional arc that I'm starting to develop -- those details that seem to illuminate it, or resonate with it -- and the chaff turns out to be all of that stuff that seems to simply provide Atmosphere.  As you might expect -- or maybe you wouldn't -- the great majority of details that I think are incredibly great don't get in, since it turns out that they often seem to be doing the same emotional work.   A big percentage of those details that didn't get in then of course inform my understanding of the world, and the story.   In the case of that story about the executioner, for example, I learned a huge amount about the history of the protagonist's family, a family that passed down through its generations the title of Executioner of Paris.   That information was crucially helpful in terms of my construction of the protagonist's psyche, but almost none of it got into the story.   

 GF:  Here's a question I've always wanted to ask, but maybe haven't yet had the cheek to actually do so.  Is there any chance that The Book of Aron started out as a story that soon, or at some point, started turning into a novel?

 JS:  No.  Forget what I said about there being some truth to all of your claims.  I've had that happen once -- with Nosferatu, which went from a story I'd thought I'd finished to a novel -- but not with any of the other novels.  In the case of Aron, as I began to think about it and imagine its shape in my head, I estimated that it had to be at least eighty to a hundred pages, and since that's no man's land in terms of a publishable length (what gets a publisher more excited than the news that someone's working on a novella?), I thought, Oh, this is going to be a novel.  Which for me is always good news, since lately it hasn't happened that often.

 GF:  How do you see the future of writing (or publishing, for that matter) in this increasingly digitalized age?  What, or how much, are you and your friends saying about this?  What are you telling your writing students?

Editor Gary Fisketjon -- owner of a heroically sparse Tumblr -- curated the Vintage Contemporaries imprint in the 1980s. Many authors and books published under this banner became literary stars in the ensuing years. 

I buy these VC editions whenever I find them second-hand, even if it's a title or writer I'm not familiar with. Here's today's harvest.

It's like discovering a good record label. The quality of the product is consistent and the directorial force behind it creates a sense of the cultural "there and then" but isn't too insistent or exclusive.

Those late '80s covers are hard to miss. They remind me of the Skybox cards I collected as a kid -- they were a cheaper, shittier rival to Topps, Fleer, etc. This was the design era of Pastel + Neon + Stuff. I mean, this card could easily be a Vintage Contemporaries cover itself.