BT: You say you have difficulty with realism, yet your stories are bursting with that kind of banal and absurd language that we use everyday. It seems snatched right from contemporary American life.

GS: To me there's nothing emotionally realistic about describing a divorced couple, where the pattern on the couch is a metaphor for their lives. If you try to tell it like that, you're neglecting a flavor that's crept into American life. When I was trying to do Hemingway, it was almost inadvertently comic. You can't do Hemingway in the Wal-Mart. Realism is a funny thing, because it's just a collection of agreed upon attitudes. You can have a sentence like, "Frank and Jim sat in the nicely decorated midtown apartment." But who has ever lived that reality? There is some quest for truth in my work, but the truth is something weird, and the feelings that we actually have on a given day in America are pretty wild.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:03 PM  |