Jennifer duBois, author of the acclaimed novels Cartwheel and A Partial History of Lost Causes, has a new novel that was published last week: The Spectators. LitHub lists it as one of the “Most Anticipated Books of 2019,” and Booklist calls is “brilliantly conceived” and “utterly unforgettable.” An excerpt from The Spectators was published in Issue 63 of American Short Fiction.
In this interview, we dig into the genesis of duBois’s latest novel, its structural challenges, and what nineties talk show culture can tell us about our current cultural moment.
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Stacey Swann: The Spectators is such a wonderfully expansive novel, burrowing inside not just three decades of New York City but also exploring the gay rights movement, the AIDS crisis, school shootings, and TV talk show culture. I’m always so curious to hear about how novels accrete their layers of subject matter. What sparked the initial genesis of the novel? And could you tell us a little about how those other layers found their way in?
Jennifer duBois: The initial genesis of the novel was a This American Life episode I first heard back in 2012, which explored the surprising backstory of Jerry Springer. He’d begun his career as a promising politician—he was a beloved city councilman in Cincinnati, and he drew regular comparisons to JFK and Reagan—and the early iterations of his show had actually been pretty substantive and serious-minded. I was especially interested in an episode that occurred mid-way through Springer’s political career—he was felled by public scandal (after being arrested for paying for a prostitute with a check!), endured a hell of a lot of public shaming and mockery, but ultimately triumphed and went on to run successfully for mayor. I was fascinated by this entire trajectory—how someone could seem to change so profoundly across a relatively short span of time—and especially by the ways in which having experienced both sides of spectacle would affect someone. Springer’s role on his show was as the ringleader of a circus act—but he’d been the act himself, not so long ago.
So that’s where the interest in nineties talk show culture came in, and that led to a whole host of cultural questions—some very unique to the nineties, and some incredibly relevant today. I was interested in exploring the sort of moral hysteria that arose from what was seen as a coarsening in the culture back then—the worries over video games, trash TV, death metal music—and of course I was thinking about Columbine, and the conversation about the cultural origins of that event (Marilyn Manson, etc). In some ways, the conversation about school shootings is very different today—I don’t think we look for overarching cultural explanations in our pop culture, per se—though in a lot of ways it’s exactly the same, i.e. there will always be people who want to talk about gun violence in terms of anything but guns.
I was interested in exploring Matthew/Mattie’s story through the prism of two characters with wildly divergent views of him: Semi, his lover, who goes from completely enamored to completely disillusioned; and Cel, his publicist, who begins by hating her boss and ultimately comes to a much more complicated and sympathetic view of him. It’s hard to remember for sure now, and so much of this stuff is unconscious anyway, but I think the origins of Matthew as gay probably came from contemplating that Springer scandal—the prostitute with a check—and imagining what it would be like if the scandal had been a real love story, and if the other person got to tell it. Dealing with the AIDS crisis was then just an inevitable outcome of creating gay characters who were alive during this particular period of history, although certainly a lot of thematic issues—about the act of witnessing, especially—arose pretty organically from that subject matter.
SS: The novel evokes a New York City that feels both specific and lovingly rendered, but also clear-eyed and honest. It’s easy to forget how different New York was just twenty years ago. What’s your own relationship to NYC?
JD: I’m just a fan. I’ve never lived there, though I always wanted to.
SS: The Spectators toggles between two different narrative through-lines, and Semi’s through-line covers many more years than Cel’s. Yet you always leave the reader feeling grounded, and the transitions are so smooth I easily slid from one character to the other without any resistance. Was it hard to find a structure that evoked that feeling of unity between the two stories?
JD: Oh my god, it was a total nightmare. I experimented with so many different structural strategies—at one point I had Cel’s backstory moving backward, crossing with Semi’s forward-moving present story around the occasion of Hallie’s comet—and really, I have no idea why. It was just this elegant idea I became attached to in an outline—it didn’t really mean anything to the characters, and it probably would have come across as a contrivance to any readers who noticed it all. I’ve always been drawn to structural complexity—I find it challenging and fun—but I think there’s always a risk of getting mired in top-down concerns like that, trying to create some fussy Nabokovian Rube-Goldberg machine when you’re better off just telling the damn story.
SS: As a reader, I always love multi-POV novels and how they show the impacts of perspective on how we view the events of a novel. All your novels excel at this: the four third-person perspectives of Cartwheel, and the dual point of views of both your first novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, as well as The Spectators. Could you elaborate on why multi-perspective novels appeal to you as a form?
JD: I’ve always been interested in how different people can look at the same person or situation and come to radically different conclusions; that’s pretty explicitly the premise of Cartwheel. This novel is similar in that there are two perspectives on the same person, although they don’t permanently diverge as much as evolve in different directions; ultimately, it’s a novel about two people who look at someone else and change their minds. I’ve always thought that I was drawn to multiple perspectives in part because I get bored pretty easily; I can tire of writing a certain character but find the wherewithal to write a little more if I change perspectives, and this was a natural strategy back when I was teaching part-time and had time to write. Now that I don’t have any time, multiple points of view has become a real headache (ditto the structural bells-and-whistles), which is part of why my next project is one timeline, one point of view, and unfolds entirely linearly.
SS: I found the conversations around the TV talk show culture of the eighties and nineties in the novel surprisingly relevant. Instead of spectating as guests relate their oddities, we have first row seats to their actual actions via reality TV. Instead of passing judgements in our heads, we now pass judgement for an audience via Twitter. (Not to mention the escalation of school shootings.) Do you worry about our trajectory, as a culture, with these forms of spectating and passing judgement?
JD: Yikes. Yes. To such an extent that I fear venturing anything further, for fear of being judged on Twitter. In a lot of ways, obviously, we’re evolving in a more humane, empathetic, inclusive direction. It’s encouraging to think that some of the kinds of characters who were presented as objects of ridicule on shows like Springer would be understood in entirely different terms today; we are a lot more onboard with the idea that there are many, many ways to live a life. On the other hand, we’re also in an era of transparent moral posturing, ludicrous snap judgments, and sadistic public pile-ons; I’m terrified every day by how certain everyone on the internet seems about absolutely everything. (And obviously given the political moment we’re in, that stuff is among the least of our problems.) But I don’t think the impulses behind any of that stuff is actually new; the technology is new, and has its own particular implications, and the cultural moment we’re in has its own unique incentives for certain kinds of shittiness—but ultimately I suspect a lot of that ugliness is pretty baked into human nature.
SS: The Spectators is also full of humor. Here’s an example from one of Cel’s chapters: “They are Wall Street types, mostly, wearing suits, giving off vibes that are by varying degrees restless, sexual, cocaine-y, or straightforwardly murderous.” Also, Cel herself mentions having taking improv classes and likes to go to the Comedy Cellar. It’s such a pleasure, and a rarity, to read a novel that is both heartbreaking and can still make you laugh, again and again. I’m curious as to which authors make you laugh?
JD: I love George Saunders, especially Lincoln in the Bardo. I love Zadie Smith and Jennifer Egan and Grace Paley. I love Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Heinrich Böll’s The Clown—I’m a sucker for a curmudgeonly first-person.
SS: Through Semi and his circle of friends, we witness a community that is blasted apart by the AIDS crisis of the eighties. What sort of research did you do to achieve such an effective evoking of that time?
JD: I read a lot of the classics—And The Band Played On, Andrew Holleran’s Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited, Fenton Johnson’s gorgeous memoir Geography of the Heart—and watched many, many documentaries. I also read a bunch of somewhat adjacent books. I read a book about Ed Koch’s mayorship—I’ve forgotten more about the possibilities and limitations of municipal governance than anyone should ever know—and a book about the Stonewall riots. Most of the stuff about Stonewall got cut from The Spectators, ultimately, but it informed my sense of Semi and his milieu.
SS: I am very inspired by your productivity as a writer, this being your third novel to come out in the past seven years. Can you tell us a bit about your next project yet?
JD: It’s got some of the same DNA as my last two books—it’s interested in ways different individuals arrive at different ideas about truth—but it’s entirely different in terms of structure and scope. It’s going to be one perspective and one timeline, thank god. It will also be extremely short.
JENNIFER DUBOIS’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was the winner of the Housatonic Book Award fiction and was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. The recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, duBois teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University. Her third novel, The Spectators, is available now.
STACEY SWANN’s debut novel, Olympus, TX, is forthcoming from Doubleday in 2020. Her short fiction has appeared in Epoch, Memorious, Versal, and other journals.