“Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room… I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick.”

For fans of The Mountain Goats, it’s not a terrible stretch to have guessed that one day frontman John Darnielle would try his hand at the craft of novel writing. Darnielle can, in fact, be seen as a natural writer at this point in his career—writing short stories in lyrical form—a novel appears a perfectly natural next step for the lyricist.

Wolf In White Van centers around Sean, who after what is often referred to as an accident at age seventeen, is left with an outward visage somewhat reminiscent of Project Façade—made ostensibly a modern iteration of Hugo’s Quasimodo or Leroux’s phantom (“I worry you’ll be lonely” says Sean’s mother, to which he responds “I was going to be lonely anyway”).

After his reconstruction, Sean understands that he will never truly be able to properly communicate again, and as a response, develops the Trace Italian: a world built and expressed through letters to its cooperative players. Through the world of the Trace, Sean is allowed a renewed communication with the outside world in a strange way. Through the Trace, Sean learns of the lives of the players in a sort of invisible and one-directional interaction.

This aspect of the narrative paints a beautifully dualistic picture of modern escapism, the likes of which any avid reader or moviegoer or video game player will be able to understand: it makes a lofty note on the promise and hope in escapism, but also speaks of its wounding, alienating, and even life-threatening potential. Sean’s life is given new meaning in creating the Trace Italian, but after the drastic alteration the world of the Trace enacts on two children, the reader is left questioning which force is at fault: is the blame Sean’s for making the Trace, or is it the kids’ fault for taking such haphazard stock in this fiction?

The Trace Italian’s influence at this point is less of a fantasy than it is a dangerous fact: it befits certain individuals more than it does others, and it is in the harsh and unpredictable nature of the Trace that the reader learns the ramifications of the reckless imagination. The world the kids so readily buy into proves more dangerous than that which they aimed to escape, and Sean is left with the responsibility of his creation—now such a long-ago phantasm he hardly sees it as his own (“There are games I’m prouder of than Trace Italian,” he regards, “but it doesn’t matter how I feel”).

Upon finishing this novel, something admittedly strange occurred. I sat at my desk, novel in hand, and looked at it for a minute or so, contemplating what exactly it was I had spent the past few weeks reading. This wasn’t a question aimed at the novel’s quality, but more of its topic and discussion. This book is an absolute sucker punch to the pathos: the reader will inevitably grow attached to Sean, and this attachment will inevitably result in some truly devastating moments as he backpedals through his memories. In the end, Sean and the reader both are left with that most poignant of quandaries: “what if”. The aftertaste of Sean’s story is a melancholic hope, though maybe more representative of the first qualifier than the second: it is impossible to ignore the dramatic alterations made to Sean’s life, but his ability to deal with these changes resonates strongly with something of a mantra in Darnielle’s more recent work—“just stay alive”. There are questions left unanswered, and the future is rendered terribly hazy and nebulous, but in the end this is seen as ultimately quotidian—it’s just the way things are now, and as Sean himself remarks, “you either go forward or you die”.

Wolf In White Van is not an easy novel to read. Dealing in controversial and driving philosophical discussions, the reader may well be prompted to step away for time to think. But if there is anything truly guaranteed about this novel, it is this: if the reader is to leave, they will not do so without returning. This is the highest testament to Darnielle’s mastery of storytelling: that he can portray such a visceral, stinging work, and to have the reader return and enjoy it in spite.

Branding is an essential part of the literary industry. Any published author knows the importance of marketing a novel as a specific genre, forced to pigeonhole plotlines into predetermined categories. Unfortunately, this results in bookstores filled with “cookie cutter” books. The practiced reader can infer the next plot twist or, at the very least, the general direction of the work. Rarely do we find novels that surprise us, when, halfway through, we can’t even determine what genre we are reading.

Facades, by Eric Lundgren, is just that rare enigma of a novel.

The book takes place in Trude, a city constructed by the radical—and quite possibly mad—architect, Klaus Bernard. Now long dead, the architect’s mind-bending landmarks have become the strange setting for a war between art and politics. The Mayor condemns the public libraries, the literati takes up arms to defend their precious volumes, the intellectual elders take refuge in an elitist retirement home, where one can only pay for room and board by producing harrowing memoirs, the darker the better.

In the midst of this bizarre landscape, the most common event unfolds: a man loses his wife, he mourns quietly, he fails to help his son do the same.

That father is Sven Norberg, who spends his nights driving the convoluted streets of Trude. He’s looking for his wife, the famous opera singer, Molly Norberg. Months before, she popped across the street for an egg to sooth her throat, never to be seen again. Norberg is convinced she’d been taken, possibly by the overenthusiastic fan who leaves paintings on their doorstep: artwork spotlighting his wife beside a strange, faceless man in gray, always watching from the corner.

Obsessed with finding this “gray man,” Norberg turns to the detectives assigned to his wife’s case. They encourage his conspiracy theories, thrusting him into the mysterious underground of Trude. Guided by Bernard’s bizarre buildings, Norberg finds himself battling gun-toting librarians, art critics who embed clues in their columns, and a religious super church, strangely interested in “adopting” Norberg’s teenage son.

As these two elements—the surreal landscape and the familiar tragedy—slowly intertwine, the reader is carried into unexpected territory. Just like the city of Trude, Facades creates a landscape of surprising twists and turns. The reader is never quite sure where the path will lead them, if the street will suddenly open up to a fantastical marvel or the most human of conclusions.

By balancing these contradicting motifs, Facades disarms the reader, courageously telling the story of a man’s heartbreak, of how destructive our flaws can become, and how our intentions, no matter how noble, can destroy the things we love most.

Lundgren on Facades

As I sat down to interview Lundgren, I first inquired about the landscape of the novel, the strange city of Trude. “In 2004, I came to Saint Louis to study at Washington University,” Lundgren explained, “and at the same time, I was reading Calvino’s Invisible Cities” Describing how this reading influenced his trip, Lundgren told me that he knew almost nothing about Saint Lois before he arrived, and what he did know was mostly negative—all the crime and urban decay. However, he ended up finding the landscape fascinating. “That, together with reading Calvino, really got me thinking about this idea of invisibility and seeing the potential for transforming a certain kind of drag American city into something that’s compelling and a place a reader would love to visit.”

With the inspiration for Trude already brewing in his mind, Lundgren unearthed old subplots that had been bouncing around in his brain for some time. “For years, I’d been interested in writing a conflict with a father and son about religion, but reversing the way that is usually done, with the son becoming devout and alienating his more secular father.” Thus the struggle between Norberg and his son came to life, but Lundgren still needed the catalyst.

That’s when the noir detective plotline surfaced. “That was the last thing that came together,” Lundgren confessed, noting the strangeness of this primary plot element coming to him so late in the construction of the novel. One of the reasons for that is Lundgren has never been fond of traditional mystery plots. “I don’t like the part of the mystery story where you get tangled up in the elements, the sort of forensics and that sort of stuff. I read those books for the atmosphere, that sort of the weirdness.”

Thus Lundgren let the landscape and the internal character development evolve to almost overshadow the mystery of Norberg’s missing wife, contributing to Facades ability to keep the reader guessing. “A lot of that I credit to Kathryn Davis,” he said, “who I worked at Washington University. Her book, Duplex, came out around the same time my book came out. It was a good convergence because she was the one who emboldened me to go out there into that other worldly landscape.”

Both Davis and Lundgren were passionate about stories that made it difficult for the reader to ascertain what was going on. “We love those novels, where you can’t quite come down on an interpretation or certainty in terms of what’s real, what’s the correct reading.”

By allowing the surreal and real elements to intertwine, Lundgren sought to write a book that would always leave the reader guessing. “For me, I asked myself: is there a book out there that I want to read, that hasn’t been written yet.” When he considered the plot of Facades, he realized there was. However, that sort of book turned out to be an extremely difficult project—consisting of almost a decade of writing, rewriting, and marketing—but Lundgren is proud of what he produced: “As much as it has first novel flaws to it, I can look back and think that I left it all on the field. I shot high and was ambitious.”

Lundgren on Writing and Publishing

Lundgren started work on Facades during his MFA studies in 2005. Because he’d never written a large project like this before, he wasn’t quite sure how to progress. Although he’d only written about seventy pages, he brought in half of the novel to his writing workshop. He was hesitant to do so at first: “I was really worried that if I was openly criticized in workshop, that it would kill my momentum, that I wouldn’t be able to finish it.” However, much to his surprise, everyone had a very positive reaction to his work. “They were all very encouraging and that really helped me when I went out on my own.”

Lundgren was still working on the novel when he left the MFA program, and after four more years, in 2009, he finally had a workable draft. At that point, he began looking for representation. When I asked him how he found his first agent, he explained that he had a good friend who helped him along the way: “Teddy Wayne, who’s published a few novels himself, was kind enough to introduce me to his agent, Rosalie Siegel.” She ended up loving the novel and began submitting it to publishing houses. “We got real close, lots of editors liked it, but because of the issue of tying it all up into a marketable package, we ended up not finding a place for it.” Lundgrend paused, shaking his head. “Then Rosalie ended up retiring. I might have driven her into retirement,” he added with a laugh.

After that roadblock, Lundgren resigned himself to the fact that Facades would likely end up in a drawer for the rest of his life. However, unbeknownst to him, his friend Teddy Wayne never gave up. “Teddy had shown it to an editor friend of his, Liese Mayer, at Overlook. I didn’t even know she was reading it.” Lundgren had all but put his first novel out of his mind—moving onto another project all together—when he got a call out of the blue, saying that Overlook was interested in picking Facades up for publication. “It was crazy,” he confessed, “the whole publication process has always been like an extension of the book. Just as surreal.”

Lundgren’s Advice for New Writers

Before our interview came to a close, I asked Lundgren if he had any advice for new writers who were trying to get published. Immediately, he started talking about his MFA program. “Getting involved with Washington University was a big thing for me. I grew a lot as a writer, and I was really encouraged to go out on a limb and take risks.” Even more important was the connections he made during his time there. “That little handful of people was really helpful when I started out on my own.”

For those writers out there who didn’t study for an MFA, Lundgren had other suggestions on how to make these essential connections: “Be a good literary citizen,” he declared. “I’m not living in a center of publishing. I’m kinda away for the Brookline scene, so I try to go to as many readings as I can when authors come into town.” From his own book signing tour, Lundgren knows that some nights, only a handful of people show up. “If you go to talk to the writers afterwards, they might be really appreciative.”

Excerpt from Facades

I used to drive downtown every night, looking for my wife. The rush hour traffic was across the median and I traveled the westbound lane of I-99 without delay or impediment, sure I was going the wrong way. The city assembled itself, scattered lights in the old skyscrapers meandering the night sky like notes on a staff. What could I have hoped to find there? People didn’t just disappear, I thought at the time. They left fingerprints, notes, receipts, echoes. If Molly had walked from her opera rehearsal to the corner deli and had not materialized there or returned, she must have left a residue behind. I expressed this view to the authorities after filing the missing person report at Trude’s tenth precinct station. “It’s not always a Hansel and Gretel type situation, you know,” said the detective, a fellow named McCready who was apparently on the late shift alone, surrounded by dim idling computers. Crew-cutted and monobrowed, he looking like a man who repaired machinery with his bare hands. He listened to my story and took notes in his pocket pad, a mere scribe. On his desk, instead of a family picture, was a grainy photograph of Wittgenstein. The matte frame was inscribed with a misquotation: THE CASE IS EVERYTHING THAT IS THE WORLD. McCready promised to call if anything turned up, but I was in no mood to wait. I set out on my own through the streets, my pockets jammed with plastic evidence bags. I was a student of sidewalks. Tracing Molly’s possible steps in widening circles, I returned each night to the Opera House empty-handed, the watchman nodding me in.

This night watchman had been the last to see Molly and became the de facto authority on her disappearance, even though he was “not that perceptive,” as he admitted later in interviews. He seemed hardly to notice me as I went in and out. His good eye browsed in my direction, then slumped back into the couch of his cheek.

She was projected outward from my mind, a wavering image across the city. I began the nights as a stalker, then faded to a stumbled, a somnambulist. I rounded every corner with the conviction that she was near, but what I found in those deceptive and winding streets was only a series of dispersed apparitions. The curve of her spine in the shadow of a lightpost. The pattern of her freckles in a smattering of plaster dust. In the winking of a broken tragic signal, the green of her eyes…

Oftentimes, avid readers develop an aversion to short story collections, finding the brief dips in and out of characters’ lives too jarring. They miss the deep emotional impact and lasting relationships they develop with novels, accustomed to connecting with the characters through hundreds of pages of prose. These flaws, however, cannot be applied to Bruce Machart’s collection, Men in the Making. United by strong characters and fearless content, Machart has created a moving, powerful, and deeply honest collection about ten blue-collar guys struggling to be the men they believe they should be, even when their definitions of gender have become outdated.

Men in the MakingFrom the dangerous lumber mills in “The Last One Left in Arkansas” to the burn trauma ward in “The Only Good Thing I’ve Heard,” Machart transports his reader into an array of fascinating settings, showing us men at their breaking points, when their characters are challenged and the lives they’ve come to know threatened. Men lose lovers, fathers, friends. They are forced to question their choices, reflect on what they have fought to protect and what they have lost. Some are broken in spirit, while others are only broken in body, having lost everything they loved before they could even grasp what they had. Some crumble, some fail, but others muster the strength to keep going, to cling desperately onto what they love and protect it against the world.

It is without hesitation that Tethered by Letters recommends this astounding collection. Each of Machart’s stories not only resonates with incredible emotional depth, but taken together, these stories combine to form a beautiful critique on the men of today’s world, men with soft hearts and calloused hands. Told through fascinating narrative structures and differing world-views, Men in the Making revolutionizes our conception of what a short story collection could be, delivering with each tale not only the emotional connection we crave in novels, but also the themes and experiences that have us turning the last page, simultaneously hollowed out by the trials of the characters and filled again with the hope of their perseverance.

Machart on Men in the Making

One of the most striking features of Machart’s collection is that each of his stories, regardless of how short, creates a potent emotional impact. When I asked Machart how he managed to achieve this, he told me that his work condenses naturally due to the way he writes. “All through grad school,” he explained, “I envied people who could sit down and write a whole first draft. They know the sentences aren’t great but they get it all down in a short period of time. I can’t do that. If I spend three hours writing a day, two and half of those hours are used revising the sentences or things I came up with a couple days before.” Although Machart only adds 250 to 300 words to his works each time he sits down to write, he believes that the progressive revision cycle lends itself to a kind of “compression of sentence,” removing everything that is not completely necessary to the story. This process allows him to express deep emotional crises in so few words, condensing a much longer reading experience into a short sitting. “I think that’s what a short story does,” he added, “it compresses and there shouldn’t be anything there only because it happened in the draft. Every word, every phrase, every image, every impulse, in a short story, much like a poem, must be reconsidered by the writer along the way.”

Perhaps more astounding than each story’s emotional depth is the thematic overlapping that connects each of Machart’s stories. Fascinated by the way each tale questions traditional gender roles, I was eager to ask Machart where his inspiration for the collection’s themes originated. Machart began by stating that his best ideas always came from his subconscious, but the themes that surface in his stories were certainly on his waking mind. When be began writing the stories that make up Men in the Making, he was at the traditional point in life when a boy becomes a man. As he undertook these first benchmarks—first financial independence, first marriage, first child—the full realization of his responsibilities began to settle in. Ideas about how a man supports his family and how this defines him weighed heavily on Machart’s mind. As he worked himself through school, his job as a conveyor-belt salesman only added to this curiosity. During the day, he would drive around to rural towns, meeting an array of men in odd working-class jobs—many of which appear in his stories. “I was just surrounded all day long with these blue-collar guys from the generation before mine,” Machart explained, “and then I’d go to school at night and read Milton and Shakespeare. I think the fact that I started making stories featuring those kinds of guys really melded the kind of two lives I was living and it come out in my stories.”

Despite the close connection to Machart’s own concerns and those found in his stories, he told me that nothing he writes is autobiographical. Rather surprised to hear this—having interviewed countless authors who pour themselves into their characters—I asked Marchart to elaborate: “Don’t get me wrong,” he began, “I’m all over my work, but I’ve never written a character that was a slight fictionalization of someone or myself. My characters, they come to me out of the subconscious, where all the good stuff comes from.” Quoting Ron Carlson, Machart said that when he’s writing, he is like a bus driver, stopping to pick up characters for a while and, if they don’t work, he drops them back off. Placing himself in the mind of the characters that do work, he starts with an interesting experience or setting—”something I don’t know about”—and then he follows them as they try to deal with it.

As Machart and I began discussing his characters, we quickly transitioned to the portrayal of the men in his collection. Each of the protagonists in his stories has dark thoughts and actions that make them all the more real to the reader, creating honest characters that are all but impossible to resist and believe in. Although Machart agreed with author Ethan Canin that making protagonists “likable” is a top priority, he suggested that, as artists, our propensity is “to go one way or the other…Either we want them to be better than we are—who we would like to be, kinder, less fallible, less insecure, moral, compassionate—or we want them to be worse.” In constructing the characters in Men in the Making, Machart fought this tendency to fall on either side of the hero-villain dichotomy and reminded himself that his characters, like him, are simply human. “Don’t put a black or white cap on them,” he concluded, “when they’re living in a world of gray hats.”

Machart on Writing and Publishing:

While many believe that Machart began his writing career with his critically acclaimed novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, he in fact wrote and published the majority of the stories in Men in the Making before he even completed the novel. Originally, he proposed the short story collection to publishing houses, adding that he had a novel in progress. “It was frustrating at first,” he explained, “because the publishing houses knew I had about fifty pages of my novel and they wanted both [the short story collection and the novel], but they wanted the novel first.”

With the push from his publishing house, Machart began working diligently on his first novel. Coming from a strong short-story writing background, this transition was difficult for him. “I write a story and if it’s not working out in three or four or five weeks, I set it aside and move onto the next thing. And I’m okay with that. I can live with a certain amount of failure and hope that that failure just needs some gestation, but with a novel, it takes three, hour, five years to write a book, I’m a little too fragile for that amount of work to just be put away. I can’t just stick it in a drawer. That’s like saying my four year old still wets the bed, let’s stick him in a drawer.”

After discussing the evolution of stories that he had, in fact, stuck in the drawer—like “The Last One Left in Arkansas,” which he began during his undergraduate degree—we jumped around, chatting about the themes and characters in his work. Every few minutes, Machart would quote literary critics and professors from his writing MFA, seamlessly incorporating their teachings into his points. Since many of our TBL members inquire about whether or not a young writer should pursue academic venues for perfecting their craft, I was curious why Machart chose to not only acquire a BA, but also an MFA, in creative writing. “I needed my MFA program,” he eagerly explained. Although he wasn’t ready to begin publishing or even writing seriously when he made the decision to apply for the program, he reflected that, ultimately, continuing his academics was an excellent decision. “No three years have been more fruitful. We lived, breathed, ate, and talked about writing. It was in every part of my life. We were in between plays of football and would say, ‘Hey did you read that new Tobias Wolff story?’ It was really nicely saturated in every aspect of my writing life.” Machart also loved the teaching aspect of his degree, enjoying the both the theatrical features as well as being able to directly see the result of his work as students gained understanding and insight about the literature he taught. “That’s really gratifying to me as a balance to writing stories and novels. You go a long time before knowing if your writing works. You don’t necessarily get any feedback while it’s out there until years and years…and I’m not getting royalty checks big enough to live on.” After musing about what possible profession he would be doing aside from teaching to support his writing, he added with a laugh, “The only marketable skill I have is conveyor-belting. And I’m kind of done with that.”

As our interview drew to a close, I was sure to inquire if Machart had any advice for our many writers at TBL. Of course, given his background as both a student and teacher of literature, he had good deal to say. He began by recounting a lecture by Lee K. Abbott—”the best teacher of narrative craft in America”—when, on the discussion of round verse flat characters, Dr. Abbott declared that all round characters should be fat. Machart’s was caught thinking, “Wait! My dad’s overweight! Enough with the fat jokes!” But Abbott quickly explained that he was using a pneumonic device: “FAT not round: Feelings Actions Thought.” In addition, Machart declared that there should also be an “E” for Exposition, the actual telling of the story. When you add in the importance of description, FATE is essential for the creation of truly moving and three-dimensional characters. Machart also added, as we lingered over “feeling,” that sensory description is vital for creating a reality that a reader can believe in. “If you were to read a novel and there was never a single image that evoked the sense of smell, you might not know why you didn’t believe in the world of that novel, but I honestly believe that you wouldn’t.”

Excerpt from Men in the Making, “The Last One Left in Arkansas”

Usually, when I leave the sawmill for the night, I roll the trucks windows down and breath in deep through my nose. I take some of it home that way, some of the smell, some of the life that even a felled tree keeps holed up inside. It means something to me, makes clear the persistence, or maybe resistance, of the organic. Something dies—even a tree—it rarely goes willingly. It wants you to smell what it was in life, or what it could have been if you’d had the sense to let it go on living. It wants you to remember. Trees, like angry husbands and wives, always want the last word.

When I was ten, my father held me in front of him at Uncle Weldon’s processing house in Odessa. After Dad had me choose the calf, my cousin Frank loaded a bullet into a special sledgehammer, and when he sung there was a dead, dull sound—no resonance—like maybe he’d dropped a wrecking ball in quicksand. Later, with the calf hanging from a hook inside, my uncle pulled a knife up through the smooth hide of the animal’s underside and stepped back as the bulge of intestines slumped forward with a sucking sound and plopped onto the slick cement floor. What I remember most was Dad’s breathing, the way his chapped lips clamped shut below his wiry mustache, the way his nostrils flared as he inhaled, sucking the smell of the animal into his lungs, keeping it alive awhile longer inside him.

Usually, for me, it’s the same with trees, but lately it doesn’t matter. The rain is freezing in midair and the stripped logs in the mill yard are sealed with skins of ice. It’s winter in Logan County, Arkansas, and you can’t smell a damn thing.