In his beautiful debut novel, The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves, James Han Mattson explores the fallout from an act of violence that will seem all too familiar to American readers. Using multiple first-person narrators, Mattson deftly orbits the book’s central tragedy, allowing readers a broad view of the event that does much more than explore a killer’s motivations. Mattson’s characters struggle to make sense of what’s taken place in their town, and through multiple voices, multiple lines of reasoning and argument, and multiple accounts of guilt and regret, a detailed portrait of loss and bewilderment emerges. We recently asked Mattson about the novel via email.
—
Nate Brown: First off, congratulations on the novel’s success! It’s been really well reviewed and well received, and I’m wondering, since it’s your debut novel, how you’re feeling. What’s it like having the book out in the world? How long were you working on it, from start to publication?
James Han Mattson: Thank you! And yes, I’m very humbled and honored by the reception. It’s interesting that you ask how I feel about my Ricky Graves pre-pub vs. post-pub life (all in all, a total of seven years) because I was just assessing this the other day. I mostly determined that not much had changed—I was just a little busier—but after more thought, I concluded that perhaps my overall societal usefulness had risen a bit. I’ve received some really wonderful, heartwarming messages from readers, and these messages make me feel like writing and publishing this novel was an okay thing to do.
NB: I’ve heard other writers express ambivalence about their work upon publication, mostly because once it’s in print, they can’t change it. Is that part of it for you? As you’ve given readings, do you find yourself tempted to continue making changes to the text?
JHM: I think this is a pretty common problem for most writers—even in its published form, we continue to see ways we could’ve improved upon the work. When I give readings, I focus on cadence, inflection, and rhythm: I essentially try to mimic the characters’ voices out loud. This performative reading method often draws my attention to inefficient prose, and yes, that can be a bit aggravating.
NB: You’ve divided the book into three sections, and within those, you have chapters that are told from different first-person perspectives. We hear from Alyssa, Jeremy, Corky, Claire, and Mark, but we also get correspondence and chat transcripts, including emails from Ricky Graves’s mother. Which voice or perspective came to you first? And what led you to write from these various perspectives?
JHM: Alyssa’s voice has always sat somewhere in the back of my mind, and as soon as I started writing her, it was difficult to stop. The others voices were simply a product of cutting. The original manuscript had about twenty-five different characters, told through a third-person omniscient voice. The process of revision, then, was a process of purging. I’d always had Ricky, a prank, a shooting, and a town in the novel, so the challenge was deciding which characters in the town would elevate and reinforce the themes of the story. I wanted Ricky’s life and crime to be discussed through multiple lenses, so after the third draft, after I’d whittled the town down a bit, I decided to switch to alternating first person chapters and include Ricky’s sister, his camp counselor, a “sort-of” friend (Claire), and one of his victims. I also wanted to include someone whom Ricky had only talked to online (Jeremy). Harriet (Ricky’s mother) didn’t actually come to life on the page until after numerous chats with my agent.
NB: Jeremy and Claire are particularly interesting to me because they provide examples of how the fallout from a tragedy can be incredibly and unexpectedly far-reaching. I’m curious to know if you think our digital connectedness helps us empathize with the victims of violence or if the deluge of violent stories numbs us to the reality of violent acts?
JHM: I don’t think our digital connectedness helps us empathize with victims per se; screens serve as effective distancers. What I think social media does is magnify a given problem. Before, we’d hear about acts of violence in the news, and after we’d finished reading or watching or listening we’d go on with our day. Social media, however, doesn’t allow us to go on with our day because it follows us everywhere. What might’ve been easier to dismiss before is now completely overwhelming, and this, I think, can be both good and bad. For good, I think of the Black Lives Matter movement. The killing of unarmed black men is most likely not a new phenomenon—I think it’s been going on for ages—but the Internet has—through video, message boards, and social media—unearthed these injustices in a very efficient manner, allowing for some rigorous national discourse on a very important topic. Conversely, however, constant media bombardment can make us think the country—and the world—is a much more violent place than it actually is. And while this deluge could have a numbing effect, I think combined with fewer in-person interactions it often results in the opposite: heightened anxiety and paranoia.
NB: You’ve come up with an inventive and dramatic way of telling a story, and as I moved forward from section to section some elements of the plot became clearer while others were surprisingly subverted. In that way, the novel’s a sort of Rashomon that asks really tough questions about the nature of victimhood, of violence, and regret. But I imagine constructing it was tricky. In a novel with so many voices—and in which you use other forms of communications to advance the plot—how did you know what to reveal when and how much revision did it take to get the book into its final form?
JHM: Lots and lots of revision. As you said, the construction was tricky, and playing with time in the novel at first presented a whole lot of problems. I grounded myself by having the events of the present story span only one week. The major conflict in that week was Jeremy’s presence in the town and his relationship with Alyssa. While writing that, I constantly reminded myself of three things: a) what the reader knew, b) what Alyssa knew, and c) what Jeremy knew. Once I hammered those things into my head, the writing of that week-long story went quite smoothly. Corky came about as further conflict and complication, but as long as I kept thinking about a, b, and c, his presence amplified the main tension instead of obfuscating it.
The Mark and Claire section also followed a single-week timespan, and since most of this story only tangentially involved Alyssa, Jeremy, and Corky, I had the freedom to develop an entirely different narrative, and since Mark was the only person actually present during Ricky’s rampage, I used him to briefly discuss the specifics of both the prank and the crime.
As far as backstory, the Ricky-Jeremy chats and the Harriet-Victoria emails were the trickiest. Though they didn’t span a huge amount of time, they weren’t as easily contained as the present story, so I had to construct a bunch of different timelines so that each digital communication would crescendo and converge into something emotionally potent. At the same time, Jeremy’s sections spanned years, and I had to ensure that his narration and his chats with Ricky fell in line with the actual events leading up to the crime. It was tough, but I’m glad it turned out the way it did.
NB: I suppose it’s not giving too much away to mention that a shooting is at the very center of this book. Each year, even as the violent crime rate edges down nationally, we see these truly horrific mass shootings take place. They occupy our minds for a little while, there’s talk of reforming gun laws, politicians send thoughts and prayers, and then we seem to forget about it until there’s another shooting. What kind of research, if any, did you do in order to write about such an event?
JHM: Horrifyingly, because shootings are so commonplace, I didn’t need to research the topic a whole lot—all I needed to do was turn on the news. Also, because shootings are so commonplace, I never really had a chance to sit with one shooting for very long, so that’s what I did here: sit with the aftermath, explore culpability, guilt, and grief. There are families and friends behind every massacre, and there are significant emotional and cognitive transformations that occur in their wake. I wanted to investigate those emotions and those transformations away from all the media bluster.
NB: It’s probably worth noting that while we’ve been conducting this interview over email, another horrifying school shooting has taken place, this time at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In the seven years that you spent writing this book and thinking about young people and these massively destructive shootings, did you come to any conclusions of your own about how artists and writers should respond? Should they respond at all? Did you feel any pressure or responsibility to depict this in a particular way given the weight of your subject?
JHM: Not responding would be akin to pretending it wasn’t happening, so yes, I believe artists and writers should respond, as should educators and physicians and scientists and corporate lawyers and waiters and engineers and everyone else. Mass shootings are so decidedly American that as citizens of this country—artists or otherwise—it’s become our civic duty to do everything we can to promote public safety, particularly in our schools. What infuriates me is the politicization of human tragedy, the inability for us to come together and simply say, “Children have been slaughtered. We cannot let this happen.” Instead, people worry about their personal freedoms, of being stripped of their lethal possessions; they become cruel and callous without even knowing it, putting weaponry above people. So I don’t feel responsibility as a writer to respond to this, but more as a person, as an American, as a teacher. This isn’t something to be debated. This is something to rage against.
James Han Mattson was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in North Dakota. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Cape Town, the University of Maryland, the George Washington University, and the University of California–Berkeley. He has worked as a staff writer and editor for Pagoda Foreign Language Institute, the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, and Logogog–South Africa. In 2009, he traveled to Korea and reunited with his birth family after 30 years of separation. His first novel, The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves, was an Amazon Literature and Fiction Pick, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, a Publishers Lunch Bookseller Pick, a Kindle First Pick, and a New York Post Required Reading. He currently lives in Maryland.