Describe the opening premise of Antoine Wilson's debut novel, The Interloper, in a sentence or two, and you get the feel of a great short story: Relative newlywed Owen Patterson is frustrated at his wife's inability to deal with the grief she feels after the murder of her brother. Paging John Updike, right?

Wrong, for Wilson uses that as a springboard into a compelling, disturbing novel that finds him deftly walking a tightrope as he keeps Owen on an internal even keel at the same time the reactions of those around him reveal that he might be the one who is listing dangerously.

Owen decides that the best way to help his wife and her parents deal with the murder of their brother and son, C.J., is to inflict pain on the man who killed him, Henry Raven. He decides the best way to do this is to create a fictional lonely woman to write letters to Raven in prison. Thus, Lily Hazelton is born. Wilson allows all of this to unfold methodically, dropping in details as needed to expand our understanding of Owen at the same time Owen is trying to flesh out Lily. Things spiral out of control, as one might expect, but not in predictable ways. The result is a strange psychological ride that blends the typical suburban strife novel that the outset promised with some near crime/thriller elements to create an interesting, highly readable hybrid. Wilson earned a blurb from Jess Walter, whose novels -- particularly the great Citizen Vince and The Zero -- traverse similar ground.

Wilson is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and currently teaches creative writing from time to time at the UCLA Extension Writing Program. He has a diverse background, though has called California home more often than not. In an interview/reading done at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City in September, he said three books made him want to be a writer: ' Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, James Baldwin's Another Country and V by Thomas Pynchon. Hear the interview here. Meanwhile, Wilson was kind enough to answer a few of my questions for the Monday Interview, which follow.

TIRBD: I could see this starting as either an idea of a husband avenging his brother-in-law's death or one that involves corresponding with a killer in prison. Was that the case, with the story then evolving to include both strands, or did you have the full idea from the outset?

AW: Actually, the idea for Owen’s plan, writing to the murderer in order to avenge the brother-in-law’s death, pretty much came to me as it does to Owen in the book. It dropped into my head whole and egg-like. At first I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I recognized in it the potential for engaging questions about how we obtain justice, not to mention an opportunity to create a character who would create a character of his own. I wasn’t 100 percent confident about the idea at first. I called a writer friend of mine to ask whether he thought Owen’s cockamamie scheme would make a better novel, short story, paragraph or doodle. He said “novel,” so I set about trying to find a voice, a situation, etc., that would take what seemed to me like a fairly high-concept idea and bring it to life.

You've mentioned elsewhere that your older half-brother was murdered, which gave you an interesting perspective on the grief of others. That's obviously an important undercurrent of this book. Could you have written this without that experience? If so, how might it have been different?

I wouldn’t have written the book without that experience, but for the sake of argument, I’d guess that had my half-brother not been murdered, I would have been more conventionally minded about the ways in which tragedy and humor aren’t supposed to mix.

In the story, you must balance the reality of your protagonist as related to the way he perceives everyone else reacting to him, conveying others' points of view through his interpretations. That's tricky business – practically fighting against your own unreliable narrator – that you handle very deftly. Was it difficult to pull that off or as easy as you make it look?

I made it look easy? That’s nice to hear. It was as difficult as anything else. Mainly it had to do with taking stabs at things, stepping back to look at them, panicking, mulling, and revising – the same old story. There’s an old saw, attributed to everyone from Hemingway to Dick Francis: “I don’t like writing, I like having written.” That’s not my point of view per se, I mean I like writing well enough. But let’s just say that some days… I appreciate the sentiment.

You're living proof that not everyone comes out of the Iowa Writers' Workshop with the same style of prose. Is that because you approached things differently, or is that notion just sour grapes from those who didn't get in?

The homogenization bugbear is alive and well, I see. All I can say is that while I was at the workshop, I saw lots of different kinds of writing. Of course, there was a while there when a bunch of people were peeing their pants over Alice Munro (and justifiably so). That resulted in a few Munro-ish stories on the worksheet. But imitation is part of a writer’s apprenticeship anywhere; Iowa’s no different in that respect. Proust was a master at pastiche before he was a master at being Proust. As far as my approach went, let’s just say I knew I was a young writer with a lot to learn. I set out to make each story different from the previous one, in technique, tone, approach, etc. I wanted to stretch my muscles, get some chops. It served me well enough, but I didn’t exactly leave the program with a collection to sell.

You teach and help edit A Public Space. Do these endeavors have any impact on your own writing in terms of seeing things to either try or avoid? Does your own writing provide you with fodder for teaching?

A Public Space is based in Brooklyn, and I’m out in L.A., so I’m not involved in the day-to-day running of it. In other words, I’m not reading manuscripts out of the slush pile. It’s been rewarding in the opportunity to help publish a few writers I really admire. (In the past, I have read slush piles, contest entries and fellowship applications – a practice I highly recommend to anyone interested in writing short fiction. You quickly see what works and what doesn’t, what turns you on and what turns you off. If you’re lucky, it can turn into a crash course in your own nascent aesthetics.)

Balancing teaching and writing is a tricky – there’s always a subtle pressure pushing the two apart. I’m constantly trying to bridge the gap between my daily experience as a writer and what I can impart to my students about “Creative Writing.” My first semester at Iowa I took a seminar with Stuart Dybek, who was visiting at the time, and he seemed to be able to teach stuff he was currently thinking about – it kind of blew all of our minds. Of course, that was at the MFA level. It’s different when you’re teaching an intro to fiction writing course at the local university extension. Still, I try to connect the teaching and the writing. Otherwise, you end up spouting a bunch of guidelines and rules that you yourself have long ago abandoned. It turns into a kind of fake thing, a hackneyed version of teaching. Beginning writers deserve better than that, especially if they’re motivated enough to show up and talk fiction for three hours after being at work all day… and pay for the privilege, no less.

You've now published short stories and a novel. Do you prefer one form over the other, or find one more satisfying than the other? Now that you know you can write a novel-length work, does that change your willingness to spend the time and ideas on short fiction?

I love writing short stories, but since switching over to novels, I can’t seem to remember how to write them. I’ve always wanted to write novels, and at the outset, at least, I considered short story writing a way to practice as I geared up for longer forms. Now I’m in love with short stories. I’d like nothing more than to stop writing this novel I’m working on and go back to stories for a while. Plus, since The Interloper came out, people have been asking me for stories. But I can’t seem to find my way back in to the short form right now. I don’t tend to work on a bunch of different things at the same time. I like writing one thing at a time. Reading is the opposite. Twenty books is not out of the question. I read them all as if they’re part of the same big book. It’s a problem.

You mention on your web site that you are "deep in the woods of a new novel." Any more hints than that? Has your experience with The Interloper, both in terms of bringing it to completion and the reaction to it once it went out into the world, affected the writing of this second work?

I’d love to give more hints, but that’s the thing about being deep in the woods – you have no idea where you are. It’s cold, it’s uncomfortable, night is falling and when you walk you tend to walk in circles. So all I can say with any certainty is that I’m surrounded by trees. Also, first person, ostensibly comic, no magic realism. My experience with The Interloper has for the most part been fantastic. Other Press has been very supportive about the book, and the publicity squad over there has done wonders. I threw parties in L.A. and New York, and returned to Iowa and Wisconsin for readings. Lots of good reviews. What more could I ask for, other than a healthier environment for literary fiction and for independent bookstores? It’s funny, some days I’ll be obsessing over my Amazon.com ranking and thinking numbers, numbers, numbers, and then I’ll get a random e-mail from a random reader about how much they enjoyed the book. I’m reminded that it’s not a numbers game at all, but a secret little connection between my words and other people’s brains. Which makes me want to retreat back under my rock and get to work.

Labels: books, Monday Interview