ALL LIT UP: Congratulations on your new book, Self Care! The novel navigates sex, love, power, contradictions within contemporary self care, and community (or lack thereof). What inspired you to tell this story?
RUSSELL SMITH: You know, I never know how to answer this question, for any book. I have no idea! I don’t remember when the idea came to me. It seems I have been living with these characters for many years now. All I can say is that I don’t set out to make any kind of point or to illuminate a side of an argument or anything like that. I am just looking all the time for situations – imaginary situations – that create drama. Two people who can’t admit to their friends that they are seeing someone considered to be the enemy is a very old idea for a drama (Shakespeare did it a while ago). And I am always much more interested in the story of the relationship than in any political commentary. The relationship is what drives the story forward; everything else is just setting. Now, admittedly, I have satirical instincts that I can’t resist and so my descriptions of certain contemporary things – the weepy arts scene that I am myself a part of, the idiotic web copy one has to write to support oneself as a freelance writer, the tendency of modern people to proudly consider themselves mentally ill, the dull bros who work for tech startups – these descriptions tend to exaggerate absurdities, for mostly humorous effect, and of course that is political. But it’s all just setting. I want the setting to be true to life, so I work hard at describing the noisy atmosphere we are all in all the time, from the baseball game blaring in a bar to overheard business conversations to the after-hours emails you get from your boss. All that is just what a fantasy writer would call “world building.”
by Russell Smith
ALU: What’s your approach to writing? When you sit down to write, what tends to come first for you: the image, the emotion, a combination, or something else?
RUSSELL: For me it’s place. A scene comes to me as a very concrete place, full of physical details: I have to see who is sitting or lying where, how the light is coming through the window, whether it smells like cigarette smoke or perfume or the neighbour’s cabbage. Once I can see it very clearly I feel that I am there and then the dialogue starts to come to me. And I will let the dialogue meander for a bit before I really know where it is going.
ALU: Your prose is notably direct, even when the material is emotionally charged. How did you arrive at this tone, and what does directness allow you to do as a novelist?
RUSSELL: I am so glad you asked that question. Style, or what I would rather call technique, is almost never touched on in the literary culture of this country and it is the one thing I would rather talk about more than anything. You are right that I am most inspired by what is usually called minimalism, that is an economy of words. Probably my biggest influence in this regard has always been Hemingway, but I would add Henry Green and from the more recent past Raymond Carver and his ilk. Recently I absolutely adored David Szalay’s Flesh for this reason.
Evelyn Waugh, who is an immense influence on my writing, once said, “I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me.” This is somewhat disingenuous – his characters can be quite psychologically complex – but I do adore the bravado of the prose. I love his insistence on writing not as moral direction but as “an exercise in the use of language.” The use of language is what I am most interested in too.
I am very much a follower of the “show don’t tell” school: I want my characters’ emotions to be telegraphed as much as possible by their actions and speech rather than by any internal monologue. You might say I try to write it so that it unfolds as much as possible the way a movie does. I try to resist explanations. I try to resist, as much as possible, tags such as “she thought”, “she wondered,” “it occurred to her that,” and so on. (Yes, there are a few of these still in the text where I really couldn’t help it.) So I use free indirect speech to blend in interiority with the narration. I also try to avoid poetry, especially similes (“he waddled away like an African tortoise just released from its cage,” etc.). Similes, to my palate, add nothing to a narration except an authorial flourish; they almost always simply pad out and slow down a scene. As a reader, I want to know what happens next, not how cleverly an author can find a parallel to something we have just seen.
ALU: What inspired you to write this novel from Gloria’s perspective?
RUSSELL: Gloria, c’est moi.
Seriously. I can relate much more closely to Gloria – I live in her world and have a similar education and have done exactly the job that she does – than I can to Daryn, who is from a completely foreign world that I don’t understand. He is the mystery.
ALU: The relationship between Gloria and Daryn is shaped by disparities in gender, desire, and social power, yet it’s also marked by moments of genuine tenderness. How did you navigate that balance without collapsing the relationship into protagonist / antagonist binaries?
RUSSELL: Well, I am personally not interested in novels, or in any art, with black-and-white good guys and bad guys. Stories of good people who are terribly oppressed and who resist that oppression by remaining good… I’m sure that’s inspiring but it’s not great drama to me. I’m much more interested in moral ambiguity, in difficult moral questions, and in the admission that we are none of us perfect and we all have a dark side.
ALU: The novel engages directly with incel culture, and to an extent, toxic masculinity, not only through Daryn, but through Gloria’s assumptive behaviours as well. What did you find most unsettling or most revealing about bringing this subculture to the forefront?
RUSSELL: I did research on incels by lurking on their web forums, by reading interviews with them, and by watching the very few video interviews that have been recorded with them. I still don’t understand much about it. The fundamental contradiction, for example, between longing for women’s attention and despising women, I still can’t explain. I was fascinated to see that many of them have a kind of body dysmorphia: they claim that they are too unattractive for women to take an interest in, but if you see their actual photos they are perfectly normal-looking guys. This surely comes from the culture of the image that social media such as Instagram plunge us into, and is not completely dissimilar to anorexia. I learned too that most of them are very open about their own self-loathing; suicide is a frequent subject of conversation on the forums. Perhaps what was most troubling was the belief – a line that Daryn himself takes – that nasty things one says on the internet shouldn’t be taken to mean what they say; they are just humour, or venting, and no one should take them seriously. This really exemplifies the idea we are all becoming more and more familiar with that very little of what is online is real or true, and that – worse – truth is a problematic or slippery concept anyway.
ALU: The characters in the novel seem to have a high level of awareness that many romantic, economic, and political social systems are failing them. What made you want to explore this disillusionment?
RUSSELL: Both Gloria and Daryn are disillusioned and unhappy, for pretty much the same reasons, yet they have come up with different answers to their angst. They both deplore economic inequity and precarity, for example, but Daryn blames immigrants for it where Gloria blames capitalism. But Gloria is growing dissatisfied with the progressive idealism that she was immersed in at university – it doesn’t seem to help her in the impoverished and precarious real world. She is also losing interest in the apparently sensitive men in her circle who know all the right progressive things to say to women and yet still can’t provide satisfying relationships.
ALU: Self Care depicts people who struggle to care for themselves because of the world around them. Do you see the novel as more of a cultural critique, a love story, or something that resists these labels altogether?
RUSSELL: Oh definitely it is a love story – a failed love story – more than anything else. I never set out to write anything as a cultural critique. I am much more interested in story than essay. These are just two imaginary people. I hope that they will be plausible – in other words that you will believe that they could possibly exist – but they are not meant to represent men or women or Youth Today or anything. I want you to care what happens to them, not what happens to “society”. I also wanted to depict someone freeing herself of an obsession. I even see the ending – which I won’t reveal here – as a happy ending.
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Russell Smith is one of Canada’s funniest and nastiest writers. His previous novels, including How Insensitive and Girl Crazy, are records of urban frenzy and exciting underworlds. His newest book, Confidence, was nominated for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize as well as the 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. He writes a provocative weekly column on the arts in the national Globe and Mail, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Guelph. Russell Smith lives and writes in Toronto.
Find a copy of Self Care here on All Lit Up.
