'I have been a proud advocate of literary scuff': Travis Jeppesen on messing around with style

Plus a new pick from our subscribers' submissions

Photo by Hoach Le Dinh

In today’s issue:

— ‘Perhaps I have a perverse sensibility, but I will very often preserve bad/awkward lines or passages or moments in the final draft, out of this intrinsic desire for depth of texture’: Travis Jeppesen on scuffed prose, and other stylistic matters. We recently chose his novel Settlers Landing from our subscribers’ submissions as one of the best-written recent releases in literary fiction.

—‘he was spooked by every face he saw in there, the bearded ladies, their piehole eyes, and he knew for sure that God had pulled the pin’: our next literary fiction pick, and also the next from our subscribers’ submissions.

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Photo by Jason Harrell

TRAVIS JEPPESEN ON PROSE STYLE

What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?

Kathy Acker's novels were a revelation to me when I was growing up in the 1990s. This embrace of intentional badness as a means of harnessing an individual style: run-on sentences, the purposeful and playful usage of plagiarism, muddled grammar. Suddenly I had permission to break all the rules I'd been taught, and in so doing, she helped me find my own voice. Gertrude Stein before her did much the same, albeit in her own distinct way. Stein's work was also an eye-opener to me. 

Then there were the more traditional Modernists, namely Joyce, Faulkner, and Proust, who each in their way unfurled miraculous, really near-impossible constructions of content and form. Highly musical writers who showed me that when you're at your heights in the game, you're not just crafting a narrative -- you're simultaneously composing a symphony.  

Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as this?

Fuck no.  

What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Settlers Landing?

Polyvocality -- finding the voices of the numerous characters that populate the narrative. Writing in the debased way people actually speak -- and, more often than not, think. 

Exaggeration and exacerbation -- knowing when to use them -- when to turn up the volume, as it were. This is a work of satire, which is fundamentally anti-realist, in that it is meant to expose the real while also going beyond it. At the same time, as one critic pointed out, much of the book is quite naturalistic, but naturalism is somewhat distinct from realism. 

I'm more or less a maximalist. Art is not a place where there is any real need to show restraint. 

How important is style to your characterisation? And to the reader’s immersion in your writing?

My earlier novels had very little dialogue in them. I'm a person of a somewhat restless disposition -- I really hate repeating myself -- so when I set out to write a new novel, I'll inevitably make up a bunch of little new rules for myself -- many of which get broken along the way, but still. So one thing I decided was that this book would be told largely through dialogue. Now, my earlier novels had very little dialogue, and at one point I feared that I had totally lost the facility for writing it. To prepare myself, as I was writing I went back to reading a lot of plays. I was a theatre kid while growing up, and when I first started getting serious about writing, it was writing plays. So in some ways, this was a circular journey for me. 

At some point, I stumbled upon this quote from David Mamet, where he says that character is nothing more than what people say. It's a compelling argument -- particularly for a playwright, where much of the plot must unfurl through dialogue alone. I've never been a fan of psychological realism in fiction. One of the things that I love about Cormac McCarthy's novels, or at least the early ones, is that he never presumes to go inside the characters' heads -- our only "read" of them is through what they say and what they do. (He is of course a fantastic stylist, but when you read his work, you find that he's actually all about surfaces -- that which we can readily observe. He observes it in a way that is superior to the banal, which is what makes him a great writer.)

Once I was able to find the way various characters in the book spoke, then it became one of those moments that writers always dream of, where the book starts writing itself -- I had to do very little besides move my pen across the page. The characters' voices, their dialogues began to direct the momentum of the beast, and suddenly I was speeding right along. Those voices became intrinsic to the style of the book -- that web of voices, that heteroglossia (pace Bakhtin), is what distinguishes the book's style. 

You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so?

Without style, then you're just conveying information. Or propagandizing.  

What do you understand by ‘voice’ in writing, and how much does this matter to your own?

That which rises above the hum of the humdrum.  

Books not picked for Auraist tend to lack appealing rhythms, and musicality more generally. Can musicality be taught? Do you have to work on this in your own sentences or does it come naturally?

I absolutely agree with you that writers with tin ears probably don't belong in the biz. Reason number 2,087 why I love Auraist: bringing up the topic of musicality in writing, in 99% of cases, falls on deaf ears (bad pun intended), so the mere thought that there is a single human being--or a single Substack, in this case--that would think to ask that question instills me with some small hope for the future of humanity. 

Music was my first love as a child, and my parents were kind enough to indulge this passion by providing me with piano lessons from the age of five or six. This love of music continued throughout my teenage years -- I played cello and then bass in the school orchestra, learned guitar and electric bass and played in punk bands. So I was writing songs at the same time that I first started getting serious about writing fiction and poetry and plays as an adolescent and teenager. In this, I feel rather blessed, because musicality and rhythmicality, I think, have always been present in my writing -- even the worst examples of it. This begs the question as to whether some sort of musical training might actually be useful for young or aspiring writers. My answer to this would be unequivocally yes. A close second to this would be just a strong love and appreciation for music -- there is, after all, such a phenomenon as the self-taught musician. Thirdly, I think you can train your ear by immersing yourself in the work of those writers -- and here, I think it's important to include the work of poets, as well -- for whom musicality and rhythmicality play a more apparent role. 

Do you read your work out loud, and if so, how important is this to your style?

I never really felt any strong need to. If the writing is good, then I can hear it very clearly without reading it out loud.  

George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Do you agree with this? 

Not necessarily. This is perhaps true for Saunders himself, but for a lot of voice-y writers, it's there in the first draft. It's intimately tied to issues already touched on (rhythm and musicality), but also personality -- which, by the way, is never a unified thing. We all contain multiple selves. How you disperse and splatter that self-matter across the page through your characters -- that's kind of the essence of voice and style. 

How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the miniscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?

I've never experienced this kind of negativity when writing. If something isn't working, I tend to put it aside for a while, maybe forever. I think as you go along, while the work certainly doesn't become easier, the challenges it presents are the funnest part. That's how it should be, at least. And if you don't have that sensibility, maybe writing isn't the thing for you. 

Is this headbutting business why so few writers obsessively polish their writing?

I mean, I don't feel like I'm in a position to critique how other writers go about their job. I happen to revise a lot -- Settlers Landing went through numerous drafts before it was published, I've lost count of how many. But then there are writers who, through sheer daily practice of their craft, barely have to revise at all. A lot of poets, for example -- I've heard that John Ashbery rarely wrote more than a first draft, and he's really one of the greatest poets, great stylists of the past century, if you ask me. There's a discipline required by writing, and so if you do write every single day, some people can really get to that point, I believe. 

There's also the case where people polish their writing too obsessively, and in so doing, deprive it of any verve, make it bland and boring. I fear that might be the case more often than not.  

Do you see published prose adapting to the writing people read online, much of it written in the characterless bloggy style established twenty years ago? Has published prose adapted to the reduced attention spans that apparently result from heavy internet use?

Yes, I think you see this in so-called autofiction, a trend that is now so tired that I hope someone, somewhere will soon put it to sleep permanently. It does fit nicely with the embrace of pathological narcissism that has come to define the entire culture, and that social media is built on promoting. The optimist in me believes that these things are cyclical, and that there will soon be a rebellion against it, and that the imagination will one day be allowed to flourish once again. Until then, writers have to live with the expectation that their work features characters who are "relatable" and boringly PC, producing work that borders on propaganda -- if they want to be published, of course. 

The 21^st century appears to have killed off the supercilious, top-down tone that once infected many publications, especially in the UK. Your own tone seems to us the opposite, and is in fact an example of a style we've described and praised as 'scuffed'. Is this accurate, and if so could you describe the ethos and technique behind this approach?

As the person who literally wrote the book on bad writing, I have been a proud advocate of literary scuff for some time. The issue at stake here is texturality, which you only attain through the interweaving of quite varied tonalities. Anything with a too-smooth polish fundamentally lacks depth, and that which lacks depth is by definition boring. I encourage my students to write as badly as possible -- at least in their early drafts. Once you give yourself that kind of freedom, you might churn out a lot of garbage; but the chances are high that you will also "accidentally" come up with something highly original that can be preserved in later drafts. Perhaps I have a perverse sensibility, but I will very often preserve bad/awkward lines or passages or moments in the final draft, out of this intrinsic desire for depth of texture. This is especially the case in a book like Settlers Landing, where, anyway, I have the excuse that different chapters are narrated by or written from the perspective of different characters -- most of whom are quite terrible people -- so the opportunity for "bad" writing arises. But my most radical gesture in this line would probably be The Suiciders, a novel wholly comprised of (intentionally) badly written sentences. Which is also one of the best books ever written. 

Mark Fisher railed for years about the demise of what he called ‘popular modernism’. Adele Bertei and Rob Doyle have spoken in Auraist of the increased conservatism across our century’s mainstream arts, while the corollary in contemporary prose is, we believe, the Replicant Voice. Does mainstream published prose now tend towards insipid conservatism and even automatism?

I'm not sure that I understand what you mean by automatism, but insipid conservativism, very much so. This has a lot to do with the dumbing down of the culture, and the bottom-line mentality of the culture industry--here I mean publishing. Now, whenever a manuscript is submitted, the first thing they check is how many followers you have on social media. Often the decision to publish is based wholly on that. Or else they're just chasing what they think will sell because of what sold before -- and so a certain same-iness is allowed to perpetuate itself ad nauseam. The result of all this is that I don't read a whole lot of contemporary fiction. There's enough work left behind by dead people to keep me occupied until I myself am in the grave. 

Which publishers put out the most stylish writing?

Here I have to give a shout-out to two of my publishers, ITNA and Twisted Spoon. At ITNA, I'm proud to be published alongside writers like Bruce Benderson, who was one of my mentors as a young writer, and is one of my closest friends today. Twisted Spoon, who published my second novel Wolf at the Door back when they also published expat writers, focuses on translations of lesser known writers from Central and Eastern Europe, including a lot of the Czech surrealists. Dalkey Archive has always been of utmost importance here. New Directions, as well. The New York Review of Books. Schism and Neuronics, edited by the great Gary Shipley. 

TRAVIS JEPPESEN is the author of ten books, including The Suiciders, Victims, and See You Again in Pyongyang. He has contributed articles to The New York Times Magazine, Artforum, Mousse, Wall Street Journal, The Believer, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and other media. An accomplished art critic, he is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. His calligraphic and text-based artwork has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wilkinson Gallery (London), Exile (Berlin), and Rupert (Vilnius), and featured in group exhibitions internationally. Jeppesen curates a living archive of his work at travisjeppesen.substack.com.

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1

He had tattoos up and down his arms that this morning, getting up, in the seconds before pride arose seemed very stupid to him. Aces, shamrocks. Lurid glyphs. A crouching panther on his shoulder, ’cause why not. A hula girl he might’ve gotten on a naval ship in Polynesia, when he’d hardly ever left the tristate. Some Latin phrases on his wrists—Honoris et Virtus et Something-or-Other, which . . . honor? Virtue? Whose? His? At least he’d stopped himself before that Stephanie Forever bit.

Rudy turned on Broadway. He was due to open at the bar. There was Christmas crap in windows, bells ringing—not for him, though. ’Twas the season to be robbed, dumped, jumped, kicked out of love. Threatened eviction by his landlady, a Russian ogress in Bulgari shades, paid for with a blind old tenant’s stolen disability checks. It was the season to be sick with drink, and bursting with regrets, no less real and wretched for how fictional the world seemed. This pasteboard town, its codes and quotas, madly ticking clocks. . . . Maybe that was it. Maybe the city was the problem.

New York. He was sick of it. He was fed up with the myth of it. Everybody always telling him how great it was . . . helluva town, New York! So vibrant. . . . He thought of some talking head in a PBS doc they’d shown in school once, years ago, some midlife virgin in a bowtie and suspenders losing his shit over Walt Whitman. The Bridge, ooh! Central Park! The park was the least Manhattan could do to keep you from despair. To him it was all fin de siècle, like Rome before the sack. Weimar Berlin. Glitter and doom, not even—Pret and doom. It was scaffolding and pigeon shit and when he’d walked just now into the soup ’n’ sandwich place near Macy’s for his egg-and-cheese, no bacon— you had to try and be good, some days, keep the death away—he was spooked by every face he saw in there, the bearded ladies, their piehole eyes, and he knew for sure that God had pulled the pin. Never had the city felt so tuneless to him, so jagged, so uncharmed. The palimpsest so worn and muddled. . . . Lotto shops and lash extensions, gleaming plazas out of Dallas. It’s not that it was ugly—though there was plenty of that—it’s that he didn’t even know what he was looking at no more. What was it? Whose idea was it?

He opened the metal gates. Just the sight of Liffey’s empty in the daytime gave him heavy, deep-in-childhood creeps. It was filthy in here. It stank like rum and dirty pants. He checked the register and changed the kegs and filled the ice and put the TVs on. There was memorabilia caked to the rafters. It would bury you alive. They wouldn’t find you ’til the spring. Corncob pipes and top hats from Tammany Hall days, and Jimmy Coonan’s holster, and Dean Martin’s fedora, and some mangled rebar from Ground Zero, and keepsakes left behind on loan by soldiers shipping out—to France, Korea, Vietnam—hankies and harmonicas like collateral to fate. On the walls were signed glamour shots of random-ass celebrities, and pictures of his dad—he owned the place—with Bono and The Edge, and with Connie Chung, for some reason, and one photo Rudy liked of his cousins once removed, known hatchet men for the IRA: deep in the ’70s, groovy-shirted, mutton-chopped, smoking away on some farty-looking mustard couch in County Clare, their eyes abrim with murder. All this New Yawk–Irish crap, the stuff that pinned his world to space, and today he didn’t know whether to retch or weep or tear it down. It was all just so . . . so over. It was junk. Bone dust. A bum replacement for a life.

She had a life. Allison. She was moving west to go to law school, out in Colorado, and he was not invited anymore. She had canceled the party on him—at nine—when he’d just arrived, with bells on his boots, ready for love. They’d been playing “Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun in the Duane Reade earlier and he’d had to leave. Just left his basket with his milk and Preparation H and shit he really needed and vamoosed. That beautiful song, it—stop it. Not now with the tears again. He would not cry today. He had his shift to get through. Saturday night. There was a UFC fight on down the street at MSG, plus some basketball games he had more than casual money riding on. It was the longest night of the year, the solstice—big spenders coming out. Something would get shaken loose before the night was through. He should fix himself a nip, get in the spirit of things. That’d help.

Why was he in such a tizzy? Why these vicious, hopeless, nogood thoughts? It was Christmastime—he loved Christmas— and he was still young and healthy, kind of, with a steady job. And friends. Friends, friends . . .

He’d gone to see one friend from high school last week, Matt Galapo, trying to get back out there from his love hole, reconnect with people. All nervous on the subway to go see him. Nervous to go get a drink with Matty Galapo, the least intimidating biggest goober individual on the face of planet Earth. Rudy thinking he was gonna have a heart attack just walking in the restaurant, and his voice all weird and shaky saying hi, and then pretending he had to take a piss just to go to the bathroom and catch his breath a second—what the fuck was that about?

He used to be the most sociable, most natural guy around. Life of the party. Leader of the pack. But it was one thing to just listen to folks talk, like behind the bar—Rudy had no problem with that, he liked it sometimes, even—but friends, friends had to put you on the spot. To be polite. “Enough about me, I’ll shut up now! What about you? What’s new with you, man?” And then, oh . . . then you saw it. That dull look in their eyes as you trotted out your little spiels, your crackpot plans, your stupidass ideas for start-ups. Walking home fifty bucks poorer on some crappy tapas, running back the tapes of conversation like a crazy person, feeling so . . . so trapped in their perception of you, like you’d just let some ersatz self out of the bottle for them, some holographic undead Tupac-at-Coachella self out and now it was just . . . out there with them, unauthorized, doing God knows what, and when mutual friends asked Matt Galapo, “Oh, you saw Rudy? How’s he doing?” Matt Galapo would say, “Well, you know . . . he’s . . . weelll, let’s just say he’s Rudy. He’s still Rudy.” Meaning what? Meaning who?! Your life, your blood, your dreams, your name, the chambers of your beating heart, just another bit of chump change in another nothing conversation.

Were other people . . . worth it? Rudy wasn’t sure today.

“Atta Boy is a truly great NYC novel. A very perceptive, accurate, and imaginative take on our times. Fiedorek has a brilliant ear for dialogue and her characters are richly drawn and specific. It’s moving, funny, suspenseful, and heartbreaking. I turned these pages compulsively.”—Michael Imperioli

In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner’s son from Flushing, Queens, in the throes of a major quarter-life crisis. Cut out of the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens.

Jacob “Jake” Cohen, the fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of financiers who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the cutthroat taxi medallion industry in the early 2000s, largely by preying on the hopes and dreams of impoverished immigrant drivers. As Jake tries to stop the bleed from the debt crisis now plaguing his company, clawing back his assets from an increasingly dangerous coterie of Russian American associates, Rudy gets promoted from doorman to errand boy to bodyguard to something like Jake’s right-hand man.

By turns a gripping portrait of corruption and a tender family dramedy, Atta Boy combines the urban cool of Richard Price with the glossy, uptown charm of Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Here is a novel richly attuned to its time and place, but with something for everyone—high-wire prose and a story wedding ripped from the headlines, social realism with the warmth, angst, and humor of its indelible voices.

“Cally Fiedorek’s Atta Boy is a Bonfire of the Vanities for the twenty-first century—a propulsive, unforgettable journey through a deeply stratified New York. From brawling barrooms to the glittering co-ops of Park Avenue, this is a fearless chronicle of the way we live and where we are headed. Fiedorek is an urgent writer for these times, with an unstinting eye for the class divisions that define who we are. I couldn’t put Atta Boy down.”—Ross Barkan, author of The Night Burns Bright