Jess Walter's third novel, Citizen Vince, sat atop my “to be read” list for several months, vaulting the top spot thanks to rave reviews and mentions from many readers and writers whose opinions I respect. For whatever reason, I didn’t actually get around to reading the book until late last fall. I’m glad now that I did, because once I closed that book, I craved more of Walter’s work. Thanks to my procrastination, I could immediately start on The Zero, Walter’s National Book Award finalist novel about a New York police officer dealing with holes in his memory as he navigates the post 9/11 landscape.

That book is different enough from Citizen Vince, and that from the two novels that preceded it, that one could be forgiven for wondering it the same writer was at work. Sad but true, the idea of range in a novelist is somewhat foreign and unique. In Citizen Vince, which won the 2005 Edgar for best novel, Walter tells the tale of Vince, a con struggling to go straight as part of the Witness Protection Program in Spokane.

In The Zero, Brian Remy may or may not be on a secret government mission to track down a woman lost in the terrorist attacks on New York. Much as Remy’s Swiss cheese-like memory leaves him grasping to determine not only what happened that day, but what is happening to him in each waking moment, the story itself has intentional gaps. The attacks, the World Trade Center and other touchstones of our knowledge of the event are never mentioned, but Walter’s tale makes it clear that this is the setting of his novel.

The Zero was Walter’s fourth novel and fifth book. Before Citizen Vince, he wrote two crime novels -- Land Of The Blind and Over Tumbled Graves – as well as Every Knee Shall Bow, a non-fiction account of the siege at Ruby Ridge drawn from his work covering that event as a newspaper reporter.

TIRBD: For a BookReporter.com interview around the time of Citizen Vince, you described one of your projects in progress as “a social satire, very dark and funny and perhaps a bit inappropriate.” Assuming that was The Zero, do you think that still adequately describes the book?

JW: I guess that is a fair description of The Zero. The word “inappropriate” strikes me as funny now. Certainly at the time I was working on The Zero, I wondered if people would find its irreverence about terrorism and about our culture inappropriate, especially since the book also functions as an allegory about how we got into Iraq. As I was writing the book, to criticize our rush to war and to question why we were trading our freedoms and values for the illusion of security was to be seen as unpatriotic. When people used to ask what a certain book was about, I would answer, “It's about 300 pages.”

Did you get your start in non-fiction because it was an easier way into the business – both because of your work as a journalist and the ideal subject of Ruby Ridge for your first book – or was fiction something you just decided to try at some point?

I always wanted to be a novelist, but I was making my living as a reporter and was thrust into covering the standoff at Ruby Ridge. I could see right away that it had all of the elements that I was looking for in a book—fiction or nonfiction—pathos and suspense and, above all, a sense of the grayness of people and events. Everyone wants good guys and bad guys, black hats and white, but my belief has always been that the truth—the gray in us all—is far more interesting. Most of my books have circled around that idea. I like to write in all forms and genres and I recoil at being told I should only do one thing, so I’m constantly trying new things. I write poems and short stories and scripts. I’m even writing a children’s book. I think the market drives writers to repeat themselves and there’s nothing I like less than reading (or writing) the same book twice.

Do you think you write the kind of fiction that you do – with real events as a backdrop and plenty of period detail coloring the narrative – because of your background in journalism? Has that tendency hobbled you in any way in terms of exploring different kinds of storytelling?

My writing has been informed by my background as a journalist, but I certainly have never felt hobbled by it, or somehow chained to writing about real events. I like to do research and to immerse myself in real times and places, but for me, this only sets the work in a context, the way 9/11 allowed me to explore a surreal shadow of real events in The Zero. I don’t think it takes any less imagination to create characters against a real backdrop than it does to, say, create a world from scratch in science fiction.

And I write all sorts of fiction, not all of it tied to journalistic research. Most of my short stories, for example, are smaller stories, usually comic, about families. But I do think that, with most fiction writers coming out of MFA programs, former journalists who write fiction can use their research and interviewing skills to great advantage, and can maybe write larger, socially-driven novels as opposed to fiction with more prosaic or domestic concerns.

Richard Russo is working on a script for Citizen Vince, a book that began life as a screenplay. How do you suppose his take will differ from yours, and what are your thoughts about finally seeing these characters on screen?

I was thrilled to have Russo step up to write the script. I admire his writing so much. One of the reasons I scrapped the screenplay and wrote Citizen Vince as a novel was that I didn’t feel like I ever got to the core of the character in my script (which I started in the late 1990s.) But Russo’s script immediately nails Vince. Like most authors, I suppose I’ll have misgivings if I see those characters on screen. To me, they just are who they are; I never imagine actors as the characters I write and when I talk to Hollywood people, I always stumble on that question --“Who do you see as …” Because I see the character as clearly as I’d see myself or my brother.

Writers lumped into the “literary crime fiction” genre either seem to bristle at the term or embrace it wholeheartedly, but all seem to want to knock down the wall between it and respectability. Does it feel like you are part of a group of writers that can help to do that, particularly given your National Book Award nomination?

Bookstores and readers can call my work whatever they want, but I’m not a fan of any of the labels that are tacked onto fiction. I feel very fortunate to have my work taken seriously, but I don’t feel a part of any group. To me, I’m simply a novelist. I think one of the problems with fiction is this phony wall between commercial and literary. You end up with a dividing line between those stories with plots and those stories with rich characters and strong writing. Mystery writers are supposed to churn out a book a year, with recurring characters, implausible plots and template storylines while literary writers are supposed to eschew plot for poetical books that (no surprise) meander or fall apart at the end. To me, a book generally fails if it doesn’t have inventive language, strong characters and a driving story of some kind. Not only can those things coexist, for fiction to survive and thrive, I think they must. And dividing work into genres and subgenres only heightens the unfortunate division and Balkanizes readers.

You’ve mentioned that you gained some access after 9/11 because you were working on then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik’s memoirs; you also helped Christopher Darden write about the O.J. Simpson case. What is it like helping other people put their thoughts and experiences on the page, and how valuable are those projects in terms of giving you otherwise unobtainable fodder for your fiction?

The process of helping someone write a memoir is an interesting writing assignment, but it’s also exhausting. I really don’t like doing collaborations. But my children have this ugly habit of liking to eat, so occasionally I did let myself get lured into helping someone with their memoirs. In the end, these things provided great material for fiction, but I still don’t think I’ll do it again. It was always just a way to make money, the last choice I had before breaking down and taking—gasp—a real job.

Labels: books, Monday Interview