Dylan Landis knows how to unnerve a reader, even as she's appreciating being unnerved. Rainey Royal thrums with sex and power. A brave, exquisite book.
In a family, you take on each other's problems and joys differently, and more intensely. The amplitude - and the undulation of the family - is different from the people you just generally bump into on the street, because you're chained together. And what happens if you break that chain? In almost every family that I know, someone has escaped, set themselves free, tried to run away - whatever what you want to call it. And often, they are made more conspicuous by their absence.
I tried the line out on some people on the street, like, "What do you think of this: 'the art of family life is to not take it personally'?" And they would laugh. But you know, everybody's got something going on in their families, and then once you have kids, that of course exponentially rises.
The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.
Now, as a reader, you shouldn't feel the decisions the writer makes about this DNA, or it would be boring beyond belief. But, as a writer, you're struggling to make these decisions. What should the title be? What's the first line? The point of view? And the struggle with the decisions is because you're trying to figure out WHAT IS THE NOVEL, WHAT IS THE NOVEL?
I realized early on in writing the book that it needed to be from a family point of view, and that nobody outside the family would weigh in. And then well into writing it, the question became how to balance the perspectives; how to switch between chapters.
In fictional families - in sitcoms, in dramas - the members are sharing huge amounts of their interior lives. And that has not been my real-life experience. In fictional families - in sitcoms, in dramas - the members are sharing huge amounts of their interior lives. And that has not been my real-life experience.
Math-thinking, I would say, encourages flipping and substituting letters in words (in the novel, one of the boys double-majors in math and myth, for example, and his twin cracks a joke about the father's handwriting that morphs "cacography" into "dadography").
I can be really silly when I'm not actually writing silliness, and I have to rein that in. Pynchon, in my opinion, sometimes tells elaborate shaggy dog stories just to work up to a pun or punch line. My challenge is to use humor and wordplay to reinforce the emotional core of the novel.
