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WORK TITLE: The Epiphany Machine
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.davidburrgerrard.com/
CITY: Queens
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.davidburrgerrard.com/about/ * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2145473/david-burr-gerrard * http://www.new-asian-writing.com/naw-interview-with-david-burr-gerrard/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| HEADING: | Gerrard, David Burr |
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PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has taught creative writing at New School, Manhattanville College, 92nd Street Y, and Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop.
WRITINGS
Contributor to print and online periodicals, including Awl, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bomb, and Guernica.
SIDELIGHTS
David Burr Gerrard is author of the novels Short Century and The Epiphany Machine, both of which mix social commentary with personal stories and have been praised for their creativity. “My journey is the same as a lot of writer’s journeys,” he told Tim Fredrick in an interview for the Newtown Literary Alliance’s website. “I really enjoyed reading books. In my case, my favorite books were Kafka and Philip Roth, and I tried writing stories. For a long time, they were really bad. And then they got less bad.” He “switched back and forth” between the two novels “for about ten years before I managed to finish one and then the other,” he added.
Short Century
The protagonist of Gerrard’s debut novel, Short Century, is American journalist Arthur Hunt, who was an activist against the Vietnam War in the 1960s but came to support warfare for what he considered humanitarian purposes and espoused that view in opinion pieces. Arthur’s account of his life, in which he addresses readers directly, is framed as a document found on his computer after his death, which occurred in a bomb attack on a funeral he was attending. A scandalous revelation had emerged shortly before Arthur wrote the autobiographical document—that he once had a sexual relationship with his sister, Emily. Arthur details his contentious interactions with Emily as well as with his wife, Miranda, and their children, in addition to his controversial endorsement of a U.S. war with a Muslim country, the name of which is redacted. He appeals to readers for sympathy, while his daughter, Sydney, reveals her contempt for him, plus her own questionable behavior, in an afterword.
“I was always immersed in Arthur’s perspective,” Gerrard told Tobias Carroll in an online interview for Vol. 1 Brooklyn. “While I was writing the book, he often convinced me of his positions. I consciously tried to make that happen. And it did happen, I think. Nothing is more boring than reading a book where you know that the author disagrees with the protagonist. … That being said, I would say that, as I wrote the book, I grew further and further to the left. By the time I finished the book, I really, really hated Arthur and everything that he stands for.”
Some critics deemed Short Century not at all boring but instead challenging and compelling. “The novel resonates boldly with modern, scandal-loving, witch-hunting society, and it gives a voice to the consequences of the Internet turning the public against a person (Arthur’s secret was revealed by an anonymous blogger),” related Melissa Wuske in ForeWord. It is also “a private story of a man and his family,” she noted, going on to pronounce it “well-written” and “vibrant.” In the online Los Angeles Review of Books, Matthew Daddona observed: “Gerrard takes the reader from discussions of war, journalism, and their agencies into a metaphysical, almost Nabokovian intrigue. In his elliptical way he makes us focus on characters who do not even take the stage in this story, on the known and unknown victims who have been scarred by Arthur’s politics and his life.” Short Century is a “masterfully woven debut novel,” Daddona concluded.
The Epiphany Machine
The machine of the title resembles a sewing machine, but it has the ability to discern the essence of a person’s nature and will sum up that nature in a pithy phrase to be tattooed on the user’s arm. It has played a major role in the life of protagonist Venter Lowood. His parents were acolytes of the Epiphany Machine’s operator, Adam Lyon, and Venter suspects that Lyon had something to do with his mother’s disappearance. He gets a tattoo from the machine—it reads “Dependent on the Opinion of Others”—and becomes Lyon’s assistant in order to investigate.
The novel details Adam’s quest for information as well as the experience of living through the 2001 terrorist attack on New York City and the paranoia and loss of privacy that followed. It also offers a history of the Epiphany Machine, which Lyon has possessed since the 1960s and is said to have inspired both John Lennon’s music and his murder. Over the years, some have derided the machine and questioned the legitimacy of its insights, some have believed in its powers, and others have considered a tattoo from it a status symbol.
Several reviewers praised The Epiphany Machine as unusual and inventive. The novel “is an absolute must-read for pretty much everyone,” remarked a contributor to the online magazine Odyssey. The critic continued: “Gerrard might be a language wizard. He keeps his words and sentences short and sweet and then shocks the reader with beautiful metaphors and sudden bursts of imagery and intricate language punctuated by vulgarity. … The short chapters keep you longing for more and the very realistic characters keep you wondering what to believe.” The premise, observed Steve Donoghue on the Open Letters Monthly website, could have been “self-serving or pointlessly topical,” but Gerrard “infuses the stylized opera of his proceedings with some humor and mercifully frequent touches of self-awareness.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the novel “a wildly charming, morally serious bildungsroman with the rare potential to change the way readers think,” while a Kirkus Reviews commentator termed it “a pleasurably speculative yarn about family and ethics.” In the Washington Post, Everdeen Mason described The Epiphany Machine as “a razor-sharp alternate history” that “emphasizes just how desperately people want confirmation of their place in the world.” Booklist critic Donna Seaman summed it up as “boldly imagined, droll, and righteously incisive.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2017, Donna Seaman, review of The Epiphany Machine, p. 63.
ForeWord, Februar 27, 2014, Melissa Wuske, review of Short Century.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2017, review of The Epiphany Machine.
Publishers Weekly, May 8, 2017, review of The Epiphany Machine, p. 33.
Washington Post, July 7, 2017, Everdeen Mason, review of The Epiphany Machine.
ONLINE
Bomb Magazine, https://bombmagazine.org/ (August 7, 2017), Nicholas Mancusi, “The New Political Novel: An Interview with David Burr Gerrard.”
Brooklyn Rail, https://brooklynrail.org/ (May 6, 2014), Scott Cheshire, interview with David Burr Gerrard; (July 14, 2017), Chris Campanioni, “God in the Machine.”
Crime Fiction Lover, https://crimefictionlover.com/ (July 14, 2017), Philip Rafferty, review of The Epiphany Machine.
David Burr Gerrard Website, http://www.davidburrgerrard.com (February 21, 2018).
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (April 11, 2014), Matthew Daddona, “The Power of History,” review of Short Century.
New Asian Writing, http://www.new-asian-writing.com/ (October 7, 2014), interview with David Burr Gerrard.
Newtown Literary Alliance Website, https://www.newtownliterary.org/ (September 8, 2017), Tim Fredrick, interview with David Burr Gerrard.
Odyssey, https://www.theodysseyonline.com/ (February 21, 2018), review of The Epiphany Machine.
Open Letters Monthly, https://www.openlettersmonthly.com/ (July 18, 2017), Steve Donoghue, review of The Epiphany Machine.
Paste Magazine, https://www.pastemagazine.com/(July 19, 2017), B. David Zarley, “The Only Certainty Is Uncertainty: David Burr Gerrard Talks The Epiphany Machine.”
Penguin Random House Website, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/ (February 21, 2018), brief biography.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (July 27, 2017), Ryan Sartor, interview with David Burr Gerrard.
Signature, http://www.signature-reads.com/(July 21, 2014), David Burr Gerrard, “Embracing and Erasing Self-Doubt, Summer after Summer.”
Vol. 1 Brooklyn, http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/ (August 26, 2014), Tobias Carroll, “Good Intentions, Political Fiction, and Ongoing Debates: Talking ‘Short Century’ with David Burr Gerrard”; (November 2, 2016), “David Burr Gerrard’s Forthcoming ‘The Epiphany Machine’ Has a Cover.”
About the author
David Burr Gerrard is the author of THE EPIPHANY MACHINE (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017) and SHORT CENTURY (Rare Bird, 2014). He teaches creative writing at the 92nd Street Y, The New School, and the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop.
He lives in Queens, NY with his wife.
Photo by Albert Cheung
Photo: © Albert Cheung
About the Author
David Burr Gerrard is the author of The Epiphany Machine (Putnam, 2017). He received an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. His first novel, Short Century, was published by Rare Bird Books, and his work has appeared in The Awl, The LA Review of Books, BOMB, Guernica, and other publications. He teaches fiction writing at Manhattanville College, the 92nd Street Y, and the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop.
Quoted in Sidelights: “The novel resonates boldly with modern, scandal-loving, witch-hunting society, and it gives a voice to the consequences of the Internet turning the public against a person (Arthur’s secret was revealed by an anonymous blogger).” related Melissa Wuske in ForeWord. It is also “a private story of a man and his family,” she noted, going on to pronounce it “well-written” and “vibrant.”
Short Century
Melissa Wuske
ForeWord.
(Feb. 27, 2014): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
David Burr Gerrard (author); SHORT CENTURY; Rare Bird Lit (Fiction: Literary) 15.95 ISBN: 9781940207070
Byline: Melissa Wuske
Gerrard's novel is a well-written, vibrant look at the collision of past mistakes and the complexity of modern political life.
Short Century, by David Burr Gerrard, is a powerful novel about a father with a messy personal and political history.
The story opens with Arthur Hunt, an American journalist, speaking directly to readers, as he does throughout the book. The only context given is a fictional editor's note, written by an unnamed friend of Arthur, introducing the main body of the book as a document recovered from Arthur's computer. The note builds curiosity by sharing bits of critical information: Arthur was killed in a bombing at a funeral, in life he fought injustice, and he made a "vile mistake."
As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Arthur is controversial for two reasons: he supports US war efforts in an Islamic country (which, according to the editor's note is simply referred to as REDACTED for legal reasons) and he had a sexual relationship with his sister -- a long-buried fact that's been revealed shortly before Arthur writes the account that fills the book.
Arthur's voice is desperate, hurt, and defensive, allowing him to elicit compassion, despite his flaws. While his present lifestyle and past problems are unique, his sense of alienation and desire to be understood are universal. He explains his relationship with his sister not to declare his innocence but to ask for forgiveness. Arthur's earnest pain makes this unthinkable request feel possible.
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The supporting characters -- primarily Arthur's children; their mother, Miranda; and Arthur's sister, Emily -- are filtered compellingly through Arthur's point of view and, paradoxically, their opposition to him makes it feel natural to be on his side.
The book contains a lengthy afterword by Arthur's daughter, Sydney. Her sinister, sarcastic voice adds insight into the family's past and closure to the events of Arthur's death -- but the growing revelation of her sociopathic behavior leaves the ending with a disturbing sense of, "What next?"
Gerrard's narrative style is intense and fast paced. The author doesn't filter language or sexuality inherent in Arthur's life; it's not overly graphic, but since the story contains incest it will likely prompt squeamishness. Because Arthur composed the narrative as a manic communication rather than a cohesive book, there are no chapter breaks; line breaks between sections, however, do offer a chance to breathe in the midst of the action.
The novel resonates boldly with modern, scandal-loving, witch-hunting society, and it gives a voice to the consequences of the Internet turning the public against a person (Arthur's secret was revealed by an anonymous blogger). The back cover copy makes the book seem like it might be too issue-laden, inelegantly hitting hot button issues, but Gerrard weaves issues (such as fear of Islam and the role of violence in pursuing freedom) in through character dialogue, believable action, and the natural strain in family relationships.
But more than its political and societal commentary, it's a private story of a man and his family, and how secrets and lies fester in the hearts of individuals, creating a thirst that can only be quenched by reconciliation and forgiveness.
Gerrard's novel is a well-written, vibrant look at the collision of past mistakes and the complexity of modern political life.
Melissa Wuske
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wuske, Melissa. "Short Century." ForeWord, 27 Feb. 2014. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A360336325/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=62dfee87. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A360336325
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Quoted in Sidelights: “boldly imagined, droll, and righteously incisive.”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Epiphany Machine
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p63. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Epiphany Machine. By David Burr Gerrard. July 2017.432p. Putnam, $27 (9780399575433).
Venter Lowood never knew his mother because she cast her lot with Adam Lyon and his diabolical Epiphany Machine, and then disappeared. All kinds of people come to Adam's shabby New York apartment hoping for enlightenment via an "epiphany tattoo" brutally inked into their forearms by an odd contraption resembling a sewing machine. In this many-stranded, Kafkaesque, alternative-reality bildungsroman and satire of American dysfunction, private and political, Gerrard spins suspect tales about the origins and uses of the machine, involving an enslaved blacksmith during the American Revolution, John Lennon, and the Internet. Once viewed as the shameful marks of a cult, these oracular tattoos describing the true nature of their bearers become hip and desirable even as they do as much harm as good. After bumbling Venter follows his mother's path and becomes Adam's assistant, both he and his friend Ismail, aspiring writers, get tattoos. While Venter's is personally challenging, Ismail's is a dire liability in the wake of 9/11. A rampaging inquiry into questions of self, society, and justice, Gerrard's novel is boldly imagined, droll, and righteously incisive. --Donna Seaman
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "The Epiphany Machine." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 63. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495035100/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=59b1ecbe. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495035100
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Quoted in Sidelights: “a wildly charming, morally serious bildungsroman with the rare potential to change the way readers think,”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Epiphany Machine
Publishers Weekly.
264.19 (May 8, 2017): p33. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Epiphany Machine
David Burr Gerrard. Putnam, $27 (432p) ISBN 978-0-399-57543-3
Gerrard's (Short Century) superb second novel has an exhilarating premise: what if there were a machine that could reveal your deepest secret--the uncomfortable truth about yourself you choose to overlook--by tattooing it on your forearm? The novel is composed of rules about the machine, testimonials, descriptions of quasiprophetic operator Adam Lyons, and excerpts from books by the mysterious Steven Merdula about the machine--but primarily the book is Venter Lowood's memoir about coming of age in New York at the turn of the 21st century. Lowood contemplates and discusses American political history from the American Revolution to the War on Terror, raising questions about privacy, destiny, responsibility, and truth. Gerrard's deft command of character, humor, and metaphor keep this intricate, philosophical novel fast-moving, poignant, and fun. In snarky banter, Venter and his best friend Ismail Ahmed communicate their deep affection and their playful rivalry, and in Venter's tense conversations with his father (whose forearm reads "SHOULD NEVER BECOME A FATHER") readers can see the painful legacy of the Lowoods' encounters with Lyons and the machine. The figurative language is inventive and insightful: "Life is an extended freefall. * An epiphany may help you see better.... Rather than a meaningless blur, you will see rocks and trees and lizards. An epiphany is not a parachute." This is a wildly charming, morally serious bildungsroman with the rare potential to change the way readers think. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Epiphany Machine." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 33. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949048/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=cb5caa87. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491949048
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Quoted in Sidelights: “a pleasurably speculative yarn about family and ethics.”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gerrard, David Burr: THE EPIPHANY MACHINE
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gerrard, David Burr THE EPIPHANY MACHINE Putnam (Adult Fiction) $27.00 7, 18 ISBN: 978-0-399-57543-3
A young man's life is upended by a device that purports to tattoo a description of your true self on your arm.Venter, the narrator of Gerrard's second novel (Short Century, 2014), has an unfortunate judgment tattooed on his arm: "Dependent on the Opinion of Others." That message has been delivered via the epiphany machine, a sewing machine-like device that its cryptic, charismatic, oft-stoned owner, Adam, has been deploying in a Manhattan apartment since the 1960s. The machine has been alternately embraced for its soothsaying (John Lennon got a tattoo) and mocked as cultic snake oil, but Venter has personal reasons to take it seriously. After all, is he wrong to read meanings in his father's tattoo ("Should Never Become a Father") or his vanished mother's ("Abandons What Matters Most")? To investigate mom's disappearance, Venter becomes an assistant to Adam, gathering personal testimonials from tattoo recipients while he finishes high school and starts college. As the plot enters the 21st century, Gerrard picks up storylines involving 9/11, the war on terror, and online algorithms that seem to know a little too much about us. That range makes the novel feel somewhat uncentered, a problem exacerbated by Gerrard's multitude of storytelling modes (testimonials, news reports, book excerpts). When it sticks to Venter's perspective, though, it's an affecting exploration of fate and the clash of our private and public selves. How doomed is he to be acquiescent because of his tattoo? Are our lives improved by knowing our essence clearly, even if it's not exactly positive? Does that essence predict criminality? (A "Does Not Understand Boundaries" tattoo correlates to pedophilia.) How much trust do we put in one person's (or machine's) judgment? Gerrard goes about this a little messily, but he's ambitiously wrestling in the muck of big questions. A pleasurably speculative yarn about family and ethics.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gerrard, David Burr: THE EPIPHANY MACHINE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934267/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=621ad228. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934267
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NAW Interview with David Burr Gerrard
10/07/2014
david gerrard
David Burr Gerrard’s debut novel, Short Century, has just been published by Rare Bird Books. His work has appeared in The Awl, The Millions and the Specter. He teaches creative writing at Manhattanville College. Visit him here.
NAW- Ummm David, I think it’s best if you can tell our readers about your book, Short Century and what it is all about because you’re the best person to tell us how to interpret the book and what’s the message that you want readers to take away from it. For my part, I must confess, I was simply blown away after I read it and couldn’t shake off the experience for some days.
The book is about Arthur Hunt, a pro-war pundit and former ‘60s student radical, furiously writing a defense of his life after a blogger reveals a secret about his past, namely that in 1969 Arthur had sex with his own sister. I disagree that I’m the best person to interpret my book; in many ways, I’m the worst. Ideally, literature shouldn’t tell you what to think or even what to feel. You as the reader should decide. That said, what I hope readers will take away from this is not any particular message but perhaps an uneasy feeling about the ideologies that so often take us to war under the guise of spreading freedom and/or feeling empathy.
NAW- Why did you write such a dark book? Not that I am complaining, I loved it but the lead character comes across as seriously screwed up- I mean an incestuous relationship, anti-Vietnam war and pro Iraq war. I mean did you not feel that you perhaps went a bit overboard in exploring Arthur’s negative side or maybe concentrating only on his negative side?
I’ve always been attracted to dark fiction; for me, exploring darkness is what fiction is for. In boring places like social media and real life, you generally have to pretend that things are better than they really are. What makes fiction exciting is that, paradoxically, it’s a place where you don’t have to pretend. You can express any dark impulse you’re feeling, albeit through an invented story and invented characters. (I do not, in case you’re wondering, have a sister.)
You’re a better judge than I am of whether I focus only on Arthur’s negative side. I like to think that I portray multiple sides of his personality. Many readers have told me that they found Arthur seductive and even sympathetic, because he often seems to be doing the right thing, or at least he makes a convincing argument that he is doing the right thing.
NAW- How long did you take to write the book and how did you come up with the title?
The title came very easily; the book took ten years to write. Short century, long decade.
NAW- Short century also explores political themes, how significant is fiction an instrument in exploring and driving political ideas? I mean if you go overboard then the actual story gets overshadowed and if you explore too little then people won’t get the message. So how do you decide the mix?
See above: it took me ten years! I just kept rewriting until I had a story that I was confident would make readers turn the pages, and enough worthwhile ideas (not only about politics) that readers would keep thinking about the book after they turned the last page.
NAW- Tell us about your other works. How difficult (or easy) was it getting Short Century published?
Getting literary fiction published is always very difficult. When I finished Short Century I had never published anything, so I had no track record at all. (I’ve since published essays, interviews, and short fiction.) But I got lucky in that, after a great deal of rejection, an author I know read my book and loved it, then gave to his publisher. His publisher loved it and became my publisher. So getting it published was very difficult and then suddenly very easy.
NAW- How have readers responded to the book? Have you received any hate mail as yet?
No hate mail as yet! But there’s always tomorrow. The feedback I’ve received has been quite enthusiastic; many readers have said that the book is a page-turner and a great deal of fun to read. Naturally I find this gratifying. Maybe I’ll also find hate mail gratifying, since my favorite books are always the ones that you either love or hate. Maybe this interview will inspire some hate mail. To quote George W. Bush, a character in my novel: Bring it on!
NAW- Tell us about yourself. What do you do when you are not writing?
Beat myself up for not writing. Even when I’m doing essential research I feel like I should be writing.
I also really like to run. Every once in a while running feels good enough that I stop worrying for a few minutes that I’m not writing. But that doesn’t happen often.
NAW- Who are your favourite writers?
Philip Roth is the writer I have the most intense, sustained argument with. I also love Vladimir Nabokov, J.M. Coetzee, Thomas Bernhard, Milan Kundera, Muriel Spark, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Yates—writers who have the highest standards for prose and an eye for human self-deception.
NAW- How do you write, planning the complete plot beforehand or do you let the book take its course? Take us through your writing process.
I do a lot of planning, and that doesn’t work, and then I let the book take its course, and that doesn’t work. I basically fail every possible way until I run out of ways to fail.
NAW-What are you currently reading?
I just reread a lot of George Orwell’s work. Orwell fandom can lead to terrible intellectual complacency—most of the war supporters on whom I modeled Arthur Hunt were big Orwell fans. Orwell’s ideal of paying close attention to language only works if you apply it to your own language as well as that of others. And I was surprised at the sophisticated narrative style and emotional vitality of Animal Farm, a book I hadn’t re-read since high school. It transcends its allegorical origins.
NAW- What’s next for you? And will you be exploring similar darker themes?
I’m working on a novel called The Epiphany Machine, about a mysterious device that tattoos epiphanies on the forearms of its users. It’s about self-knowledge, which is the darkest theme there is.
Quoted in Sidelights: “I was always immersed in Arthur’s perspective,” Gerrard told Tobias Carroll in an online interview for Vol. 1 Brooklyn. “While I was writing the book, he often convinced me of his positions. I consciously tried to make that happen. And it did happen, I think. Nothing is more boring than reading a book where you know that the author disagrees with the protagonist. … That being said, I would say that, as I wrote the book, I grew further and further to the left. By the time I finished the book, I really, really hated Arthur and everything that he stands for.”
Good Intentions, Political Fiction, and Ongoing Debates: Talking “Short Century” With David Burr Gerrard
By Tobias Carroll On August 26, 2014 · 0 Comments · In Conversations, Featured, Lit.
david-gerrard
David Burr Gerrard‘s debut novel, Short Century, is a politically resonant work, revisiting national debates on war and morality that are never too far removed. At the center of the novel is Arthur Hunt, a liberal journalist whose politics prompted him to support the Iraq War. From the novel’s first page, we know that Hunt has been killed, and we know that we’re reading a kind of memoir, written after something scandalous has come to light. Through this narrative, a host of complex personal and political relationships are discussed, and it’s one in which few easy answers emerge. I met with Gerrard at Greenpoint’s Eagle Trading Company last week for lunch, where discussed the novel’s origins, his other works in progress, and the role of politics in fiction.
In the essay that went up recently on Biographile, you wrote about how your own political evolution shaped where you were coming from in the novel. Did you find that the process of writing the novel also caused your views to evolve in certain ways?
I was always immersed in Arthur’s perspective. While I was writing the book, he often convinced me of his positions. I consciously tried to make that happen. And it did happen, I think. Nothing is more boring than reading a book where you know that the author disagrees with the protagonist. I find that very dull, because you’re making up what the character is saying, and so you can make up any lame argument that you want to, or any lame perspective that you want to. That grows tiresome very quickly.
That being said, I would say that, as I wrote the book, I grew further and further to the left. By the time I finished the book, I really, really hated Arthur and everything that he stands for. I think that if I was to start the book now, the process would be more difficult, because I have less sympathy for Arthur than I did when I was writing the book. That makes me very glad that the book is done, because–like I said, I’m not interested in reading books by writers who have no sympathy for their characters. I’m glad that I had sympathy for Arthur while I was writing it.
For all that Arthur has views that could be called neoconservative, he also seems pretty idiosyncratic about certain things. There are characters who are much more pro-war than he is over the course of the book, and there’s the scene of the drone strike in the beginning, which shows where he draws a certain line…
I wouldn’t be interested in writing about a character who’s simply pro-war. Arthur’s attraction to war comes from humanitarian concerns, which continue to be occasionally attractive to me. When I read about what ISIS is doing in Iraq, I don’t immediately say, “No; America should have no involvement whatsoever.” We all want to save innocent refugees from what could be fairly reasonably described as evil terrorists. I don’t think you need to be a right-winger to use that term in this case. Nonetheless, if you step back and look at the course of history over the last several decades, you see that these good intentions that America professes constantly result in more and more bombing, more and more war. There was a piece in the New York Times a couple of days ago about the head of ISIS, and the way in which his imprisonment by America really would up radicalizing him.
There’s definitely the Samantha Power argument for humanitarian intervention–though that also ends up calling to mind the debate a few months ago, with Reihan Salam’s essay about why he considers himself a neoconservative and Tom Scocca’s rebuttal to it. Watching that debate unfold on Twitter, there were questions asked about where someone like Power would fit on that scale…
And, to a certain extent, these labels of “neoconservative,” or “left,” they serve some kind of purpose, as far as figuring out where people are. But there are also a lot of cultural reasons of why you’d prefer one label over another. I remember, in 2003 and 2004, a lot of people like The New Republic would call it “neo-liberal,” mostly because they didn’t like the term neoconservative. They wanted to think of themselves as liberal, rather than conservative. Trying to figure out how to engage with the world as a human being, certainly, you’re always going to have those labels.
There certainly seems to be a lot of Christopher Hitchens in Arthur Hunt’s DNA, but there are huge differences in his background. Were there specific writers and thinkers you were looking to for this?
Hitchens was a very big one. The other biggest one was Paul Berman. And then there were a number of other writers who had been 60s radicals who supported the war, not because they said, “We were wrong in the 60s and we’re both right-wing and correct now.” They saw the war as the fulfillment of 60s ideals: “This is a war for freedom. We’re liberating Iraq.” I was very interested in that idea.
In terms of how I married that to Arthur’s background… The genesis of the book is that I was working as an intern on the Howard Dean campaign. This was right after college. My job, which really seems ancient now, was to get up at four in the morning and cut out news clippings. Now, I’m sure, this is all done online. I would cut and paste news clippings related to the campaign. There were a lot of things on the candidates’ backgrounds, and a number of them had been at Yale in the 60s. Bush, of course, had been at Yale in the 60s. Howard Dean was at Yale in the 60s, Joe Lieberman was at Yale in the 60s (he was a little older), John Kerry was at Yale in the 60s. It occurred to me that this was incestuous. It was that pun that gave rise, in many ways, to the book. I wouldn’t recommend using a pun in general to start writing a novel, but in any case, that’s how it happened for me.
When I was interested in was: on the one hand, you have the Iraq War. People who were arguing for the war on humanitarian reasons were saying, “We’re transcending race. We care about the Iraqi people as much as we care about our own people.” On the other hand, it seems like there’s a certain strain of white supremacism in American culture, which you’re seeing very much on display right now with Ferguson. And the tension there was something that really interested me, and made me want to explore this theme of incest and ideas of militarism.
Has the feedback you’ve gotten regarding the novel, has it been more political or more literary?
I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from both angles. A lot of the people who have read it have been more interested in the literary side, but literature is always a little more difficult to talk about than politics. I’m certainly very happy to talk about the literary side as well.
In terms of Hunt’s history, you have parts of the novel set in the present day, focusing on Iraq and what comes next, and you also have him dealing with questions of his past. How did you find the balance between those two? Were there things that were cut out, or did you have a sense of what the proportions should be?
There was a huge amount that was cut out. The book took me, essentially, ten years. That’s a little misleading. What happened was, I finished–or thought I had finished–in 2008, just as Obama was getting elected. I had conceived of it as a response to the Bush administration, and I thought, “Oh, okay–Obama has been elected, and now all of this is irrelevant.” In retrospect, I was too pessimistic about my career and much too optimistic about the country.
After that, I spent the next three years starting my second novel, which I’ve since come back to, and reading unhappily about drone strikes and so forth. It was only in 2011 that I came back and finished it. I added the section that begins the book and the section that ends the book, and a number of other things. In terms of balancing the personal and political, that was very much a matter or trial and error. Mostly error. I wrote many scenes involving Arthur’s personal life that I jettisoned. He had a cousin, at one point, who was very prominent, who’s now not in the book at all. It would be interesting to do a survey of characters in drafts of novels who did not make it to the final cut. The balancing was very tricky. There was also a lot about politics that isn’t in the book. I didn’t want to write straight-up political essays. The scenes of people discussing politics, I knew, were going to be a major part of the book, but I also wanted to integrate them better into the story. I didn’t want to stop the action for a debate. Ayn Rand is a much more influential writer than I’ll ever be, unfortunately. I get bored with her books very quickly; I haven’t even finished any of them. And there are a lot of writers who I agree with, whose books I get bored with because the action always stops. I wanted the politics and the personal story to always go together.
When you wrote the introduction and the final section, how did you get the idea that Arthur’s story would be presented as a found manuscript, rather than simply a first-person narrative?
I always liked books that step out of their main perspective and shine a different light on what I’ve been reading. Even though I wanted to convince you of Arthur, and wanted to convince myself of Arthur, and wanted to immerse you in Arthur’s perspective, it’s also a very claustrophobic perspective. What happens with claustrophobic perspectives is that the reader can simply revert to the opposite pole, and think, “Everything this narrator says is false,” and that’s it. There’s one other character whose perspective is much closer to mine, but at the same time, I don’t agree with this perspective. I want you to wrestle with the perspective that you get at the end of the book, just as you wrestle with the perspective that you get throughout most of the book.
There’s an ongoing element in the book where a specific nation’s name cannot appear in print, and is only referred to as “REDACTED.” Did that come at the same time as the rest of the narrative, or was that written later?
That was what came in 2011. That and the blogger character, who’s hounding Arthur. That arose from a sense that we keep getting involved in these wars that we hear about, for a week or six months, and we never hear about these countries again. I wanted to evoke that on the page. One of the reasons why that country is referred to as “REDACTED”–in one way, it’s that country’s way of shielding itself from a Western gaze. Which seems to not necessarily be the worst idea in the world. We’re very much at war with Yemen and Pakistan via drones, and yet Obama keeps being referred to as a President who’s reluctant to take military action. He’s taking military action all the time, but we don’t have a sense of what’s happening in those countries. There are these long military campaigns; there are these flare-ups in various countries with various groups. We hear a lot about the Yazidis right now. How many people know who they were two weeks ago? How many people will remember who they were two weeks from now?
You were talking about your second novel earlier–is that also rooted in politics?
That novel is called The Epiphany Machine. It’s about a machine that tattoos epiphanies on the forearms of its users. That is my attempt to question and honor one of the major ideas of fiction, which is that fiction should lead up to an epiphany. That leads very easily to cliche; at the same time, I’m not very comfortable with total rejection of the idea of an epiphany. If fiction doesn’t force its characters into a realization of some kind of truth, if you don’t force the reader into a realization of some kind of truth, then what is fiction really for? My conflicting feelings about epiphanies drive that novel, just as my conflicted feelings about the Iraq War drove Short Century.
As to whether it’s about politics, it very much is. We are adrift in terms of what to value, and we’re very susceptible to arguments like, “This is the way that we should live right now.” The ideas of self-help have a lot of very complicated political ramifications that I’m using this book to explore.
You mentioned that you had cut a lot of things out of Short Century–do you see any of that returning as a short story down the line?
Last night, I was looking through some discarded material for The Epiphany Machine that was dated 2007. I didn’t even remember that I had started this book in 2007. It was a document that was 25,000 words long that I had simply forgotten about, and there was a lot of stuff in there that I could use. I have no plans right now to use the discarded material from Short Century, but: never say never.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “My journey is the same as a lot of writer’s journeys,” he told Tim Fredrick in an interview for the Newtown Literary Alliance’s Web site. “I really enjoyed reading books. In my case, my favorite books were Kafka and Philip Roth, and I tried writing stories. For a long time, they were really bad. And then they got less bad.” He “switched back and forth” between the two novels “for about ten years before I managed to finish one and then the other,” he added.
Spotlight on Queens writers
Interview with author David Burr Gerrard
September 8, 2017
David Burr Gerrard is the author of the just-released The Epiphany Machine (Putnam) and the 2014 debut Short Century (Rare Bird Books) and lives in Sunnyside. He sat down with Executive Director Tim Fredrick to talk about writing and his new novel.
Tim: What was your personal journey as a writer?
David: My journey is the same as a lot of writer's journeys. I really enjoyed reading books. In my case, my favorite books were Kafka and Philip Roth, and I tried writing stories. For a long time, they were really bad. And then they got less bad. And now here we are.
And how long from bad to less bad to where you are right now?
A very, very long time. I really decided that I wanted to become a writer when I was in high school, and I'm now 36. My first book, Short Century, came out three years ago. I switched back and forth between that novel and The Epiphany Machine for about ten years before I managed to finish one and then the other.
So you were writing them simultaneously?
I was writing them simultaneously, which I definitely don't recommend. I would hit a wall with one and then go back to the other. I experienced that as sort of an extended failure. I would often think, “Oh, I'm never going to get either of the books published. I'm just wasting my time.” But, in retrospect, even though I said I wouldn't recommend it, it was probably better than just sitting with one manuscript and getting stuck.
My advice to aspiring writers is that, if you have two projects and you think, “I need to finish one before I have the other,” maybe you're right, maybe you should finish that first book. But if you're really stuck, maybe try something else.
You said that was like an extended period of failure. What helped you get through that?
I knew I wanted to be a writer and I had a lack of other useful skills. I was working as a copy editor at a research firm for much of that time. Then I taught the GMAT for a while. Those were both fine jobs, and the people I worked with were great, but in order to feel fulfilled, I had to work reasonably diligently on my fiction. And I knew that I had to get these books out and I knew that there was a lot that was valuable in these books.
I knew that both books were good, but what I doubted was my ability to really get them to where they needed to be. That was why I felt it was an extended period of failure. But I think that before you're published, all writers feel like they're kidding themselves and it's hard not to feel that way. And, I would say that that feeling doesn't totally go away, even after you're published. That’s a thought I occasionally have now, "Oh, you're not a real writer, you're just kidding yourself," rather than a thought that I have all the time.
David’s latest, The Epiphany Machine, centers on the titular machine, which tattoos epiphanies (e.g., TAKES TOO LONG TO NOTICE WHAT’S IMPORTANT) on the forearms of those who visit an apartment on the Upper West Side. The main character, Venter Lowood, is searching for his mother, a devotee of the machine and its operator, Adam, and winds up working with Adam, taking testimonials from those who’ve used the machine.
Tim: How did this book come to be? How did the idea start?
David: So it started when I was in grad school, and I had observed the idea that short stories were supposed to end in some kind of epiphany. Really, my teachers never told me that, but that was just something I picked up on. I found it very frustrating, because on the one hand I thought, “Why should I wrap up everything in a neat little epiphany. Life is more complex than that?” On the other hand, I thought, “Well, if I really have no bit of wisdom in which my story can culminate, is it really a story? Do I really have anything to say?” That got me thinking, “I just wish I had some kind of machine that would dispense epiphanies,” and then I thought, “Instead of wishing for that, I could just write about it.” And that's what I did.
You were working on it for a while. Can you give a sense of how long you were drafting, how long you revised, how you got feedback during that process?
I wrote many hundreds of pages, taking many different approaches, and none of it was really working. There were a lot of individual pages, a lot of individual ideas that I liked a lot. I got in touch with some friends from grad school and for a while, I was getting feedback from them. But really, I knew what the problem with the book was, which was that there just wasn't enough there. I wasn't taking the ideas as far as they needed to go. To a certain extent, I was just taking the wrong approach. I was focusing more on the person who found the epiphany machine, rather than on the characters who were affected by it.
So, at that point, what did the book look like?
It focused on a character named Adam who had found the epiphany machine. But, none of what I wrote from 2006 to 2013 is in the book. Maybe a handful of sentences, a handful of a minor storylines survived in some way or another. But, after I finished Short Century, I thought, "Do you I want to go back to The Epiphany Machine or do I want to start something new?" I was worried about getting stuck in the same kind of morass that I had been stuck in for years already. I thought, "Why don't I just write bits of flash fiction in the voices of people who used the machine. And I'll write one every day for the month of August." I did that and I liked what I had. Those became the testimonials.
For a while I thought it was going to be a collection of flash fiction, just involving the testimonials, nothing else. Then I think I got interested in who was taking these testimonials and that's how Venter arose. Once I had Venter, the novel came fairly quickly. The only missing piece was the character of Adam. At that point, I knew I wanted some towering figure, but I also knew that I did not want some kind of cliched cult figure in robes and touchy-feely language.
At the same time, I was becoming very good friends with Michael Seidenberg, who runs a secret book store on the Upper East Side called Brazenhead Books, and he liked my first novel a lot. One night, he said, "I've always wanted to be a cult leader." And that made me say, "Okay, he's Adam."
So I had the testimonials, I had Venter, and now I had Adam. And then I wrote the book, I think, in less than a year. Almost everything that's in the book now, I wrote between August of 2013 and the summer of 2015. Really, the 400 or so pages that are in the book, were written in two years, which is a decent rate. But that disguises the years and many hundreds of pages that are not in the book.
That leads me to one of my questions: There were a lot of unanswered questions about the epiphany machine—the where it came from, how it works, and if it was real. I don’t what to know what the answers to those unanswered questions, but are there answers in your head?
I will say that I changed my mind a couple of times between 2006 and 2015. I do know now the answer to that question, but you don't want to know the answer. The most interesting questions when you're reading a book, you never really want to hear the author so much, even when you think you do. You always want to be able to choose the answers for yourself, or leave them tantalizingly unanswered.
I agree. I'm interested in the process of a writer, when you have material where not all of the questions are answered, does the writer have an answer in mind and then how does one write without giving that answer?
Really, I'm just another guy with an opinion. I've created this world and if it's drawn you in enough to want to know the answer, then your answer to that question is just as good as mine.
That's an interesting way of looking at yourself as an author and relationship to your own writing.
Absolutely. I am now just another person who's read The Epiphany Machine. I don't have any real insight beyond that. I can see the text, just like you can. I, of course, also know stuff that I wrote that didn't get in the book, but there's a reason why it didn't get in the book.
One of the themes that I was most interested in was the tension between public and private. I heard you speak at Community Bookstore about choosing the forearm as the place to have it, because that was both private and public, a sort of an in-between place. In the process of writing the book, did you go in with a certain mindset of public and private or did your mindset as a writer change or develop, as you were writing?
I started the book in 2006, and public and private were very different then. Already, there was a great deal of us on the Internet. But, it's changed tremendously since there. So, to a certain extent, there's a relevant question as to whether the private sphere exists anymore. I forget which tech figure it was, who said, "You already have zero privacy, get over it" and Eric Schmidt of Google said, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it." It's kind of a really chilling thing to say.
Nonetheless, it's certainly true that we arguably have no privacy anymore, unless we disconnect from the Internet, which is increasingly impossible to do for any sustained period of time, no matter how much you might want to do it. It’s easy to announce you’re doing it. It’s easy to write a Facebook post announcing that you’re quitting social media, and you’re going to be writing with a typewriter and only send physical mail. I see some version of that post, almost every week, followed, two weeks later, by a post from that same person, going on as if nothing has happened.
We have lost a lot, through having lost privacy, and as we confront an increasingly authoritarian government, who knows what kinds of problems we will encounter as a result of having totally forfeited the private sphere.
At the same time, though, a lot of the stuff on social media is curated and so there's a selection process that you use to present yourself. Which makes me think of the epiphanies and the sales pitch of “Everyone else knows the truth about you, now you can know it, too.” The epiphanies aren’t so much what’s going to be revealed to other people, it's more that it's revealed to yourself. And now everyone knows you know the truth.
Which works in a similar way with social media. So, social media, you think you're projecting an image of yourself, but often people are reading something else entirely different. They see through what you've posted. "There are a little too many exclamation points in that particular post. This person seems deeply unhappy to me." But, yes, absolutely. Part of the machine's appeal is that it's supposed to be opposite of the way that we present ourselves.
Once the characters get an epiphany, they take different routes. Sometimes they lean into it, like, "Yep, that's who I am," and then they'll like commit themselves to that. Then there are people who try to fight their epiphany. It was interesting to see how the theme of self-acceptance and identity developed through the book. You also have the ongoing questions of the origin of the machine, is Adam reading people and choosing the epiphanies, or is the machine somehow mystical.
Yeah, right. And, to a certain extent, I wonder if the question matters, because if it's Adam ... Adam has a certain kind of insight that itself might be supernatural. What does that mean? Then you have a much larger question as to what we know and how we know it and what role the universe is playing in what we know. So, to say the machine is real or the machine is fake, is almost beside the point.
If you want to take a different view, if you want to say it’s a totally different book depending on whether the machine is real or fake, that's absolutely a valid thing to say as well. As I say, I'm just one reader.
The New Political Novel: An Interview with David Burr Gerrard by Nicholas Mancusi
“I admire my characters for their ability to do something that I would find far too embarrassing to do myself. Fiction can get us to experience what we might do if we were braver. Or dumber.”
Abrons Art Center
Feb 1, 6:30pm
Aug 2, 2017
Interview
Literature
China Miéville by Paul La Farge
China Mieville Bomb 01
David Burr Gerrard Light Bulbs
David Burr Gerrard’s 2014 debut novel, Short Century, was a propulsive, deranged, and hilarious manifesto portraying a debased neo-conservative in the hours before his death. With his latest novel, The Epiphany Machine, Gerrard has expanded both his scope and his ambition. In a cluttered Upper East Side apartment, Adam Lyons is the steward of a machine that can tattoo an epiphany on the forearm of willing participants.
The tattoo is permanent and delivered in all caps with revelations like: “ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST,” “MUST MAKE DIFFERENT USE OF HANDS,” and on the arm of protagonist Venter Lowood, “DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.” As the machine and its devotees emerge from the shadows of its cult-like early years into national prominence, Venter struggles to prove that his true fate isn’t the one inscribed on his skin. He does so as he tries to figure out what it means to live in the post 9/11 surveillance state, where political agendas impact and parallel personal ones.
The novel is a wild ride through a dark alternate history that resonates with the current political landscape. Interstitial sections including “testimonials” from users of the machine, various alternate theories of the machine’s origin, and a smattering of newspaper articles all combine to impart the disquieting feeling speculative fiction aims for—that this could very easily be real. I spoke with Gerrard at my kitchen table in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Nicholas Mancusi I’m interested in origin stories. What was the seed for this project?
David Burr Gerrard I had the title and I worked backwards, which I do not recommend to anyone trying to write a novel. I was getting my MFA, and frustrated with the feeling that I was supposed to be writing short stories that featured epiphanies. My teachers didn’t actually tell me that—epiphanies were already going out fashion. I didn’t know better though, and I couldn’t figure out how to write them. I was torn between thinking, “That’s a cliché and I don’t want to do that,” and “I can’t end a story with wisdom because I don’t have any wisdom myself.” Eventually I found myself wishing that I had some sort of epiphany machine, so I wrote a story with that title, received some positive feedback in workshop, and thought, this is my ticket to the big time, I’m going to write a novel called The Epiphany Machine. I figured it would take me about a year. That was in 2006.
NM You wrote another excellent novel in the meantime.
DBG I started Short Century in grad school too. From 2005 onward, I switched between working on those two books—I’d hit a wall with one, and go back to the other. For some of those years, even though I continued to write and to think of myself as a writer, I was convinced that I would never publish a book at all. It wasn’t until 2011 when I turned thirty that I decided, okay, I can either go around like a sad sack my entire life, or I can make some kind of commitment to finish at least one of these manuscripts. I had ideas for how to finish Short Century, so that’s the one I committed to first.
NM On the cover blurb, Ben Marcus says that you “channel” Kafka. What do you hope that means?
DBG Kafka said we live in a universe where there is “an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.” That squares with my feeling of existence. The fact that we are here at all is pretty astonishing, and a wonderful miracle. Still, life often feels pretty awful, even for the luckiest of us. The Epiphany Machine looks at how we handle those feelings.
NM What lesson was Kafka trying to teach us? Even though he’d probably be opposed to the idea of lessons in the first place…
DBG Every serious writer is, in some way, opposed to lessons. Despite this, I think every serious writer wants, or at least should want, to impart some kind of wisdom. If you really don’t have anything to say, why are you writing? I’ve never been a “beautiful sentences above all” kind of writer. I think there should be some kind of point, however oblique. One way to interpret Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony,” a primary inspiration for The Epiphany Machine, is that what we want to know is already on our skin—messages that are both illegible and fatal.
NM Your book challenges the idea that epiphanies are a positive thing—a rare encounter with truth. Instead, they seem to curse all the characters who receive them, operating more like punishments for desiring a shortcut lesson on the flesh.
DBG Absolutely. That’s how epiphanies function in real life. We assume they’ll resolve all of our discomfort with whatever is awful in our lives. You have one and you think, “Oh great,” but in a few minutes you forget about it, and you remember it a few days or weeks later and you feel bad about the fact that you didn’t do anything with it.
NM How does that play out in fiction?
DBG What fiction often gets wrong is that an epiphany is some kind of ending.
NM I was thinking of Joyce’s “Araby.”
DBG Exactly. You could turn that around and say the point of good epiphany fiction like “Araby” is to actually show the likely possibility that he is going to go through this many more times in his life without really changing anything. He’ll see some kind of goal, and fail to achieve it, and return to the thought that he is just a creature driven and derided by vanity.
NM I feel some thematic overlap between the epiphany tattoos, which are handed down to these characters from an inscrutable intelligence, and the 140 character missives from our president, which are randomly extruded into our lives, sometimes also in all caps.
DBG Every single tweet the president sends is nonsensical, offensive, clearly contrary to fact, or some combination of the three—easy to make fun of for fifteen minutes or so. And yet, each one feels like it gets written on our bodies too. I like to think we’ll remove them one day, but just like tattoos, they’ll leave a mark.
NM Part of the reason I love your books is because they’re so funny in a pitch-dark way that more accurately renders the reality we live in. How does humor serve your work?
DBG I see the world as a very funny place, and I can’t tell the truth, as I experience it, without that sensibility. People have very grand ideas about what they’re doing, and those ideas clash with the very venal and absurd reality. No matter how special you are, you’re still just walking dust.
NM Your humor sheds a light on the absurdity of political reality too. There’s a detained character in The Epiphany Machine who people assume is probably innocent, but an impediment to his release is the idea that if he wasn’t a terrorist when he went in, he would be now. To me that seems like the ultimate—to use an abused phase—Kafkaesque stroke, in that’s it a truly hideous and revulsive bind, but it’s also linguistically structured like a joke.
DBG It’s an excuse I hear all the time from liberals as to why Guantanamo Bay can’t be closed, “people who are in jail must remain there.”
NM Do you consider your books to be “political novels,” written towards a functional idea, in conversation with political reality?
DBG I’ve always procrastinated by reading political articles and getting angry and doing little or nothing with my anger, and now everyone else is doing that too. In fact, I feel like everyone is just catching up to me. I’m only ahead of my time in the field of procrastination. Joking aside, the “War on Terror” has always been the biggest horror to me. I was in college on 9/11, as Venter is in this book, and almost immediately the US started torturing suspected terrorists. It was astonishing to me that more people didn’t feel appalled by it. I’m worried that this is going to sound self-righteous, like I have some secret and sophisticated moral understanding that other people lack, but what I’m describing really is confusion. I haven’t done anything to stop torture. I could have chosen to become a journalist and write about it much more directly than I do.
Epiphany Cover
I could have chosen to work for a non-profit that works to eradicate it. I’ve done nothing except dramatize it in various ways in my work. I really have been confused as to why torture became acceptable in the Bush administration, and why President Obama decided not to prosecute those who had engaged in torture, thus demoting torture from the crime against humanity that it is, to yet another political squabble. It’s now just a point of disagreement between liberals and conservatives. Liberals say, eh, I don’t like torture, but if you disagree with me, it’s not really that big of a deal. The liberal consensus seems to be that, relatively speaking, Bush is a reasonable foe. But Bush tortured people—many people. He should have been prosecuted for that. Certainly many people in the CIA, the same CIA that many liberals now love, should have been prosecuted. And the fact that they haven’t really is deeply disturbing to me.
NM This novel, distilled to its most basic elements, seems to be about ethics, both personal and societal, and the various ways in which we fail to achieve them. Do you think, as Plato suggested, that the state is the individual writ large?
DBG That idea is an inseparable part of the political dimension of the novel. If you want to outsource your thinking to someone or something that will tell you how to think, you have more options today than ever to do so. We can’t really tune things out and just “listen to ourselves” or whatever, since a lot of what we already believe is noxious bullshit that we have inherited and haven’t really questioned. Navigating this to find something like truth seems contradictory, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that the fate of the world depends on our ability to do it. This is true on the personal level too. We are all heavily influenced by people’s opinions of us, but we also feel immense pressure to think of ourselves as immune to outside opinion, and presenting that way might ensure that people think highly of us. Getting past all of this to think for oneself in any meaningful way is maybe impossible, but I also think that giving up on the quest to think for oneself is essentially the same thing as giving up on life.
NM Interviewers have asked you what your epiphany tattoo would be, but that’s seems a little on the nose for me. I think the better question is, would you use the machine at all?
DBG Absolutely not. I would be afraid both of what it would tell me, and of revealing myself as someone who would fall for it. I admire my characters for their ability to do something that I would find far too embarrassing to do myself. Fiction can get us to experience what we might do if we were braver. Or dumber. Maybe using the machine is brave, maybe it’s dumb. Only the machine knows for sure.
Nicholas Mancusi’s features, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Boston Globe, NPR, and many other publications. He is finishing his first novel.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Gerrard takes the reader from discussions of war, journalism, and their agencies into a metaphysical, almost Nabokovian intrigue. In his elliptical way he makes us focus on characters who do not even take the stage in this story, on the known and unknown victims who have been scarred by Arthur’s politics and his life.” Short Century is a “masterfully woven debut novel,”
The Power of History
By Matthew Daddona
APRIL 11, 2014
WITH THE ARRIVAL of drones, the question of when, if ever, there is a moral reason for waging war grows ever more complex and disturbing. Does targeted killing by aerial robot make war more precise and so less morally abject, or more impersonal and so infinitely worse? It will take an army of philosophers and ethicists to untangle these issues, but, for now, it is up to artists to begin the work of imagining the huge implications of a new way of killing.
Such are the questions that drive David Burr Gerrard’s masterfully woven debut novel. Short Century opens in a CIA control room where, at the pull of a joystick, an innocent burqa-wearing woman is killed in the greater pursuit of taking out Little Brother, the younger of two elusive dictators in a “REDACTED” terrorist-run country. Arthur Hunt, the narrator and pro-war journalist, is invited to the control room where he is induced to execute (or, in this case, pull the joystick for) this (un)strategic assassination, giving new scope to the role of the embedded journalist. Arthur has no illusions about why he is picked for this dubious honor; he was chosen, he writes, “only because I could be trusted to write an article that would make the CIA look like heroes. There would be nothing unexpected, or at least nothing unwelcome, in an article by Arthur Hunt.”
Hunt is the type of journalist whose vociferous cries for war’s importance are fueled by the narcissistic belief that he’s saving the world from irrepressible, moral harm. He is the corrupt journalist of myth and supposition: a rich, Yale-educated, former Vietnam War radical turned propagandist whose romantic idealization of war-stricken countries is not unlike sexual gratification. He is emotionally vulnerable too, equivocating between trying to forget the past and acknowledging that it is endemic to future survival. (Hunt’s shortening of his name from Huntington III reveals a conscious desire to move away from his family’s elite, yet tragic existence.) He is a man who knows all the reasons “why,” before he knows the “what.”
It is the “why” that mostly concerns Gerrard when constructing Arthur’s character. Short Century is a story told mostly by Arthur himself (in a memoir written in the 36 hours following the death of his ex-girlfriend, Miranda), with an editor’s note and afterword by a mysterious blogger with knowledge of an incestuous relationship that Arthur once had with his sister Emily. The “editor’s note” on the very first page reveals (so no surprises here) that Arthur is dead, and in the sweeping pages of his revelations, confessions, and past, he stalks like a ghost through his own memories, trying to articulate the causes for his incestuous lust and for the evolution of his political ideals. The various personas of Arthur Hunt come alive in haunting portraits of his childhood, college years, and in the aftermath of Miranda’s death. We are exposed to his darting brilliance, his ardent protectiveness over his sister Emily and his hatred of his brother Paul. We see him develop in his half-fast radicalism during Vietnam, his too-good-to-be-true relationship with the more radical Miranda during college, his lazy denouncement of his family’s waspy principles, and the influence on him by a fictional, platitudinous writer, Jersey Rothstein, whose words seem to connect all that was and all that is to come in Arthur’s relationships.
The book’s epigraph, which comes from Rothstein’s philosophical treatise The Dominion of Pleasure, also gives the book its title:
The most poignant aspect of our fumbling attempts to study history is our compulsion to divide each epoch into a century. Surely it is no accident that a century happens to correspond to outer limits of a human life span. But in reality very few of us survive a century. Most of us have to settle for a short century.
Rothstein views sexuality as primarily a weapon with the potential to rival a bomb, and both Arthur and Emily come to adopt Rothstein’s ideas and use them as a prism through which to view familial relations.
Giving a lecture at Yale University, Rothstein sounds a bit like a combination of Ayn Rand, Timothy Leary, and Al Goldstein:
There is one thing that matters. The pursuit of your own sexual pleasure. The ability to fuck whoever you want to fuck, precisely at the moment that you want to fuck them …What looks like justice today will look like repression tomorrow. What you may call your social conscience, what the surreptitious call their soul, is a siren that will lead you to crash upon rock after rock. Your body is your only true compass.
Arthur, Emily, and Miranda all reject Rothstein’s view at first, but it seeps into their consciousness like a hypnotic suggestion. Miranda adopts the sex theory only after she leaves Arthur and wholly accepts Rothstein’s dominion. Arthur, in turn, shockingly acts upon his desire to have sex with his sister, and, in that same stroke, helps destroy his family, community, and, most importantly, Rothstein and Miranda.
Within this poisoned love triangle, Gerrard raises questions few dare to ask about the relationship of sex to political power structures, beckoning the question of whether Arthur’s infatuation with his sister is sexual, romantic, or historically provocative. Is Arthur satisfying a selfish desire, or forcing examination of a historical taboo and a class system? Gerrard keeps the reader always one step ahead of Arthur’s admissions, causing revelations and astonishing details to rain upon the page.
In one gorgeous sequence, Arthur imagines himself as Miranda, moving the prose into stream of conscious passages that reveal what she must have felt during her respective narrative timeline. Gerrard is a gifted writer, with a voice direct and resonant but also with an underlying delicacy, like one trying to uncover a lifetime in a single breath and still sound collected. What ensues are relational shocks and career conflagrations so astonishing, the incestuous affair becomes just another knot in the web of Arthur’s life, another entanglement of which we are forced to find the beginning and end.
In some Lacan-like order, Arthur’s sexual fantasies act like automatic triggers, as in the war room when he imagines the sexual prowess of a young CIA agent as she glides the joystick while locating Little Brother, before handing the controls over to him. Gerrard writes history and sexuality concurrently, shape shifting one to resemble the other, excavating ways to show that Arthur’s sexual desires are in fact tied to historical forces, and that his mind, with all its rhetoric, conceit, and devotion to public appeasement, deludes even himself. The descriptions of Arthur’s childhood and his devotion to Emily amid their terrorizing relationship with their older brother Paul (in one harrowing scene Paul tortures Arthur by shoving an apple core down his throat) are so powerful that we cannot help but think that Arthur’s current, inflated notion of terrorist cleansing is nothing more than an apple core, a piece of tormenting history, lodged in his throat; to him, Paul and Little Brother are the same oppressive people, but in the present, Arthur actually has the power to do something about it.
¤
We first meet Rothstein as an aging professor for whom Miranda leaves Arthur, and who eventually fathers Miranda’s children, Daisy, Jason, and Sydney. Though at first we don’t understand the children’s relationship to Arthur, he influences each of their lives: after reading Arthur’s reportage, Jason leaves Columbia University to serve in Afghanistan; Sydney uses Arthur’s connections to become a reporter who, like him, champions the overthrow of certain Middle Eastern dictators; and Daisy opts out of Western culture entirely, choosing to don the burqa. Could Daisy be the very civilian whom Arthur kills with the joystick in his drone strike on Little Brother? And would he have pulled that joystick if he could have seen the face of the person he was killing?
Gerrard takes the reader from discussions of war, journalism, and their agencies into a metaphysical, almost Nabokovian intrigue. In his elliptical way he makes us focus on characters who do not even take the stage in this story, on the known and unknown victims who have been scarred by Arthur’s politics and his life. In the same way that drone warfare has shifted opinions about “right” and “wrong” warfare, Short Century produces a taboo that is essential to our understanding of history and humanity. At the end of the line lies love, acceptance, and forgiveness; the question is how to get there.
¤
Matthew Daddona is a poet, fiction writer, and reviewer residing in New York City.
David Burr Gerrard with Scott Cheshire
David Burr Gerrard
Short Century
Rare Bird Books, 2014
I like opening sentences, paragraphs, and pages, especially those that seem to contain inexplicably all things that follow. Whole novels lying dormant on a single page that, with a turn, spring forth like a minor Big Bang, or one of those giant sequoia trees from an incredible tiny seed. David Burr Gerrard’s debut novel Short Century may not be giant in size, but the cast of his voice—and his narrator’s—is so broad in scope and content, it subsumes pretty much every modern political polemic. And all sprung from these few opening lines:
My sister was the one who ensured I would never sleep soundly. When I was a child I couldn’t sleep for fear of what would happen to her; as an adult I can’t sleep for fear of what has happened to her. Those who make it their primary purpose in life to attack me—and their ranks have swelled in the past twenty-four hours—would probably say that I sleep badly because I have lived badly. But popular language gets sleep backwards. The indifferent and the evil find it easy to sleep at night, while the sleep of the just is fitful at best.
Short Century is a novel-long defense on behalf of one Arthur Hunt, a leftist public intellectual whose pro-war stance supports the invasion of an unnamed nation, referred to only as “REDACTED.” Echoes of the Iraq invasion, and Christopher Hitchens’s polarizing support of the war abound (a Yale-era George W. himself makes a few appearances), as Hunt is slowly undone by some rather sordid breaking news: that of his incestuous and past relationship with younger sister, Emily, now apparently trending on Twitter. Gerrard’s manic and hilariously unreliable narrator is utterly modern, desperate, comic, and smart, like those of Philip Roth and Thomas Bernhard, but also classic in the tragic sense. Hunt’s demise is essentially self-inflicted, unavoidable, and foretold. Like one of Hunt’s beloved drone strikes, Short Century hits with devastating accuracy. We are all complicit in its unfortunate “real world” context.
Rail: I cannot think of another novel that so deliberately pairs sex and death. Especially in that opening drone strike scene, which is as funny as it is uncomfortable. I’m curious, is this a pairing that makes sense for you only on an artistic level?
Gerrard: One of my favorite books is Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, the epigraph of which comes from The Tempest: “Every third thought shall be my grave.” Of the remaining two thoughts, one is about sex, and the other is resenting that the world is not the way you would have designed it. In various forms, resentment seems to me an important part of the sex-death cocktail, at least in my novel. (Relatedly, I always confuse the words epigraph and epitaph.)
You mention the drone strike scene. I’ve read a lot of memoirs and novels by war correspondents, and one thing that comes up again and again is that war makes you horny. Flesh in danger seems to want to connect with other flesh. Of course, Arthur is in no physical danger whatsoever; this is, I hope, part of what makes the scene funny, but as with everything that’s funny it’s no laughing matter. Anyone in the control room of a drone strike has transcended fleshy mortality and has assumed the status of a god, throwing lightning bolts from the sky.
And apart from sex and death, what else is there? Family, maybe, but obviously I’ve got that covered, too.
Rail: The incestuous relationship between Arthur and Emily seems neither cheap nor exploitative, and by introducing it so early in the book, we become slowly accustomed to the idea. And when we finally do come to those scenes they are almost entirely bereft of voyeuristic attraction.
Gerrard:I like that you say “almost entirely bereft of voyeuristic attraction,” because I don’t think any good story is entirely bereft of voyeuristic attraction. I don’t think conflict would be the heart of drama if we didn’t, in some way, enjoy watching people suffer. And when drama contains no conflict, we call it pornography. Either way you turn: voyeurism.
This is why some of the recent talk about literature and empathy strikes me as suspicious. Empathy is often merely a respectable uniform in which we dress voyeurism.
That said, I was wary of the voyeuristic attraction, and I wanted to do as much as I could to distance you from it and make you question it. Much more importantly, I wanted to make sure that Emily would come across neither as a sexy, compliant little sister nor simply as an exploited victim, but rather as a particular human being in a particular situation. I hope I’ve succeeded.
Rail: Arthur Hunt, too, is a very particular type of person, an exaggeration of the idea of some public war intellectual, and yet he also seems completely believable and real.
Gerrard: If he seems real, this gratifies me as a writer but terrifies me as a citizen. Arthur wants to believe he cares about the lives and freedom of others, but really he makes them pawns in his own psychodrama. He uses empathy as a weapon and as an excuse to use other weapons, and I wish I were wrong that real-life public war intellectuals do this as well. I certainly wish that the New York Times op-ed page would stop supplying daily evidence that I’m right.
He is an exaggeration, as is his world. In the real world, it is unlikely that a journalist, no matter how pro-war, would be permitted to attend a drone strike; they are conducted with the greatest conceivable secrecy (a secrecy that is itself fetishized in a sexual manner). This is mostly a matter of my preferences as a reader and as a writer. All good fiction is about seeing through the walls of politeness and evasion that we put up both individually and collectively. A lot of really great fiction does this by guiding you to these walls’ tiniest cracks. But the fiction that I’m most drawn to tends—and I choose this metaphor only in part because an interview that references Shakespeare must also reference Miley Cyrus—to come in like a wrecking ball.
Rail: Hitchens seems to figure in your portrait of Hunt. Am I wrong?
Gerrard: Probably the single biggest reason I wrote this book was that, as a senior in college during the invasion of Iraq, I found myself persuaded by the arguments of a lot of pro-war pundits, many of whom had been ’60s radicals (or at least ’60s liberals) and who argued that the war was the fulfillment, rather than the repudiation, of their ’60s ideals of freedom, democracy, etc. I wrote the book in part to find out why I had been fooled by my parents’ generation.
Hitchens was clearly the most attractive of these pundits. He wrote sentences I might aspire to write myself, unlike Thomas Friedman, who writes sentences that I would write if I suffered massive trauma to the verbal centers of my brain. On the other hand, there seems to be a certain honesty to Friedman’s prose, the incoherence of which mimics the incoherence of his thought. Hitchens often prettifies brutality, and often quite effectively. When I read him, I think: “Yes, yes, bring on the bombs!” His work constitutes an accidental argument against good writing.
Rail: The novel seems deeply informed by Roth and Bernhard, both in its humor and manic rant-like nature. But it’s is also a take on the classic Greek tragedy, no? It goes straight for the eyes actually, literally and hilariously. It suggests a certain kind of unavoidability, as in if we engage in certain story lines we cannot escape the outcome.
Gerrard: There’s an uncontrollable (or rather, apparently uncontrollable) anger in both of those writers that both Arthur and I relate to, though Arthur and I are angry about very different things. And of course there’s nothing funnier than a manic rant.
A manic rant is basically an attempt—life-or-death for the speaker, often amusingly trivial for everyone else—to solve a riddle. When the rant expresses certainty, that riddle is: WHY DOESN’T EVERYONE SEE HOW CORRECT AND LOVABLE I AM??? Oedipus Rex is funny because it’s about a guy who is really famous for solving one (pretty dumb) riddle, but is totally clueless about another one. If you had been told you were fated to kill your father and marry your mother, don’t you think you might repress your road rage at the old guy who cuts you off, and don’t you think you might repress your attraction to that hot older lady?
But of course we all think we can avoid our fates, which is why we fall into them so easily. For more on this, stay tuned for the novel I’m currently completing, The Epiphany Machine.
Rail: Emily talks a lot about her fear of “the boring life.” Is this a fear based on mid-century suburban values? Or is it just teenage angst? I ask because the book is very complicated with regard to its take on “modern values.” The book seems to be a poke at 1950s traditionalism and at 1960s “taboo-busting” against that traditionalism.
Gerrard: One of my all-time favorite novels is Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, in which Frank and April Wheeler destroy each other because they are afraid of living boring lives. Is this an argument for living a boring life? No, but it is a reminder that if you’re living a life of quiet desperation, it’s easier to get rid of the quiet than it is to get rid of the desperation.
How much of what Emily says about boredom is teen angst? (For that matter, how much of teen angst is an accurate perception of the pointlessness and injustice of many social structures, a perception that we choose to stigmatize as “teen angst” once we no longer have the energy to object?) How much of it is her attempt to make her brother think she’s cool? How much of it is nonsense that she sees through but pretends to believe because she’s afraid that her brother is drifting away in the weeks before he, catastrophically, does the opposite? These are questions I hope readers will find provocative.
Rail: The book is obsessed with place—for example, the Hotel Chappine, where Arthur’s brother has committed suicide. It feels like a primal place, where a basic formative and ultimately unexplainable action has taken place, and in some ways you can never really leave it.
Gerrard: That puts it perfectly. A family inexorably drawn back to a hotel within their own city was immensely enticing to me. The Chappine is not based on a real place, but it had an effect on me similar to the effect it has on the characters. The more I wrote, the more I found myself coming back to the Chappine. This is also true, in a somewhat less intense way, with the other places in the book. The process is mysterious and should remain so, but the act of coming back keeps on coming back. Sometimes I’ll have a thought like: “Here I am, sitting in a chair and reading a book, just like when I was seven.”
This dynamic is also at play in Arthur’s relationship to “REDACTED,” which he basically treats as his own private childhood make-believe playground, a playground that has been taken over by monsters with whom he believes he must do battle. The fact that it is a real place populated by real people hardly registers in his mind. Teju Cole has a brilliant essay on this phenomenon called “The White Savior Industrial Complex.”
Rail: Can you talk about the structure of the book? Did you start with Hunt’s manuscript? Or the frame narrative? And at what point did Bush walk into the room? He is an amazing character, weirdly likeable, funny, and not at all a cartoon.
Gerrard: Bush is impossible to separate from the story. I first conceived of Arthur essentially as a version of Bush that I might be able to understand. The original impetus for the novel dates all the way back to the fall of 2003, when I had just graduated from college and was working as an intern on the Howard Dean campaign. I noticed that not only Bush but several of the men vying to replace him—Dean, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman—all attended Yale sometime during the 1960s. Suddenly I found myself with a riddle: what’s the word we use for a very small group that’s closer than it should be? Answering this riddle wound up taking 10 years of my life, because I’m a lot dumber than Oedipus.
As for the structure, it was basically trial and error, with an emphasis on error. At first I was writing about Arthur in the third-person; then the voice basically shoved itself into first. And then the character who speaks at the end of the book shoved that voice out of the way.
Before I had finished the novel I got very annoyed when writers would say things like “the characters took over,” and to a certain extent I still get annoyed, because obviously the characters don’t exist and I selected each word that’s in the book. And it felt like intense labor even when it was going well, not at all like the characters had taken over. There were times when I felt like the car had stopped and I was pulling it down the street with a rope. Then suddenly the book was done and I was just sort of there, with no real idea how I had gotten there, like a small child who has napped in the backseat for the entirety of a long car ride.
Rail: The book is hilarious and death-obsessed, and yet it never stops being funny at its core, even while it remains sad, desperately sad. It’s a complicated perspective. How do you maintain a balance?
Gerrard: I wouldn’t say it’s a balance for me because I don’t see death-obsession and humor as in any way opposed. On the one hand, death makes pretty much any human endeavor funny—Really? You’re writing a book? And you think that that accomplishment will make dying more tolerable? Hahaha!—and on the other hand, death-obsession itself is funny, since it’s kind of hilariously stupid to think that your death is any less trivial than your life.
That sounds dark, of course, but there’s a strong positive purpose to remembering the essential triviality of life and death: it takes the wind out of the grand world-remaking plans that tend to create truly gratuitous misery. I’m reminded of the brilliantly sardonic title of one of the best books of recent years, a book that is by far the best war-correspondent memoir I’ve read and very important to Short Century: Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. As far as I’m concerned, getting rid of meaning would be a small price to pay for getting rid of war.
Contributor
Scott Cheshire
SCOTT CHESHIRE is the author of High As The Horses’ Bridles. He is the interview editor at the Tottenville Review, a co-host of The Workshop podcast, and teaches writing at the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop.
Embracing and Erasing Self-Doubt, Summer After Summer
By David Burr Gerrard
July 21, 2014
That Summer - Life's Trials
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Editor's Note: David Burr Gerrard's work has appeared in The Awl, The LA Review of Books, The Millions, Specter, Extract(s), and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Manhattanville College. His debut novel, Short Century, has just been published by Rare Bird Books. For Signature's That Summer series, in which authors share personal stories on the summers that shaped them, David recalls his first summer out of college, when the U.S. stumbled into Iraq, and how his self-doubt and instincts battled within him for summers thereafter.
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I graduated from college in May 2003 feeling very little trust in myself but a great deal of trust in American military power. My instincts had been to oppose the war that had, at least from the vantage point of the Columbia University lawn on which I sat in mortarboard and gown, been won. I had the ambition to be a writer, but I had neither confidence that I had anything worthwhile to say nor any compelling job prospects. When the speaker invoked the famous last line of James Joyce’s Ulysses -- "Yes yes I will yes" -- to add some prestige to some platitudes about saying yes to life, I had no real sense of what I was going to say yes to.
My flailing was such that I briefly considered, or told myself that I was considering, enlisting in the military. The prose that felt most vital to me was nonfiction, pro-war polemics, mostly by Baby Boomer writers who saw the war in Iraq as the fulfillment of their 1960s ideals rather than the repudiation of them -- freedom and all that -- and I was more or less convinced that the war was just, so serving seemed like my duty, or at least like something to do. (Also, as far as I knew the war was over, so serving seemed relatively safe.) I got as far with this idea as mentioning it to my mother, who laughed. She knew I was about as likely to join the military as were any of the pro-war pundits I was reading, which is to say, not at all.
So, like many unemployed college graduates my age and younger, I spent the summer feeling a rich variety of emotions that I secretly (and, at least in my case, correctly) suspected could all be characterized as moping: worries about my future, grief over the end of college (AKA The Most Fun I Would Ever Have), anger that college had not been even more fun, anger that my diploma in English and creative writing was turning out to be of little interest to employers, and, most prominent and mopiest of all, a deep, constant self-loathing. I think the weather was beautiful that summer, but I was much more interested in the terrible weather inside my own head.
Somewhere amid my busy schedule of rumination I managed to spend a lot of time on my laptop. I looked through job listings, I started writing a novel that went nowhere, I procrastinated. Procrastinating proved the most fruitful of these activities, as my procrastination consisted in large part of reading about the war. Day by day, it started to seem that the war was not only not over, but was going quite badly. I found a job as a paralegal temp -- hardly a dream job, but a job -- and moved into an apartment in Manhattan. I abandoned the half-baked novel I had started, but I kept reading about the war.
Slow to catch on, I was finally catching on. The war had been the terrible idea my instincts had told me it was from the start. I wondered how it ever could have made sense to me, even for a moment, that we could invade a country with bombs and tanks and expect the people in that country to be grateful. I wondered how so many of the writers I admired -- writers probably better and certainly older than I was -- had gotten the war so wrong.
In September, the paralegal temp job ended and I moved to New Hampshire to intern for the presidential campaign of the anti-war candidate Howard Dean. In my off-hours I started writing a new novel, a black comedy about a Baby Boomer journalist whose ‘60s ideals are transformed into support for American wars. More than ten years later, that novel, Short Century, has just been published.
There is a temptation in writing about oneself to draw the line between before and after too starkly. The summer of 2003 was not The Summer I Learned to Trust My Instincts. My novel took a decade to write, and that decade was filled with self-doubt, self-doubt that is still very much with me, not least when writing this essay. What took root that summer -- and has been lost and regained many times since, and will likely be lost and regained many times over the rest of my life -- is a commitment to doing the best I can to trust my instincts, while maintaining skepticism and distance from them. It’s a quest doomed to failure, but it’s a quest I will continue. Yes yes I will yes.
Inspired to share your own summer experience? Submit your story to Paste’s That Summer writing contest by July 23rd for a chance to win a book bundle and an Out-of-Print t-shirt.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “a razor-sharp alternate history” that “emphasizes just how desperately people want confirmation of their place in the world.”
Best new science fiction for summer
By Everdeen Mason July 7, 2017
(Putnam's Sons)
David Burr Gerrard’s new novel, The Epiphany Machine , is hilarious. It’s a razor-sharp alternate history that imagines the United States — mainly New York — shaped by a mysterious piece of technology. This odd sewing machine-like device tattoos a short, pithy truth on each person’s arm. These tattoos have inspired history-changing events, including John Lennon’s songs and his assassination. The novel includes excerpts from other books and interviews with those tattooed or affected by the machine. But it’s mainly the memoir of Venter Lowood, whose entire life has been defined by the Epiphany Machine. His parents were once in the inner circle of a cult, but his mother abandoned him due to a revelation from her tattoo. Venter spends the novel trying to find meaning in his life, all in defiance of the phrase emblazoned on his forearm: “DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.” Venter’s circular arguments about himself and society are funny even when they’re depressing. Gerrard’s novel emphasizes just how desperately people want confirmation of their place in the world.
Quoted in Sidelights: “is an absolute must-read for pretty much everyone,” remarked a contributor to the online magazine Odyssey. The critic continued: “Gerrard might be a language wizard. He keeps his words and sentences short and sweet and then shocks the reader with beautiful metaphors and sudden bursts of imagery and intricate language punctuated by vulgarity. … The short chapters keep you longing for more and the very realistic characters keep you wondering what to believe.”
A Review Of David Burr Gerrard's Soon-To-Be Published "Epiphany Machine"
Is this about to be a new cult classic?
There may be spoilers here depending on how pure you like to keep your mind before jumping into a novel. That said, the following two paragraphs are completely spoiler-free.
"The Epiphany Machine" is an absolute must-read for pretty much everyone. This is the first book I've read that I would recommend to people I hate just as much as to people I love. I'd also say it's just as well suited to PhD-holders as to high school students. Fans of Kafka, William S. Burroughs, and James Joyce may find it especially interesting due to a number of allusions and tonal similarity, while fans of J. G. Ballard will likely enjoy use of current culture in the novel. Due to a rather dominant soul-searching aspect of "The Epiphany Machine" I would highly recommend it to recent graduates (of high school or college or whatever else) and incoming freshmen. Throughout the book, I found myself simultaneously pondering both the causes and effects of fortune cookies, horoscopes, recommended YouTube videos, and news outlets.
Not to falsely accuse anyone of witchcraft, but David Burr Gerrard might be a language wizard. He keeps his words and sentences short and sweet and then shocks the reader with beautiful metaphors and sudden bursts of imagery and intricate language punctuated by vulgarity. I didn't realize quite how tightly woven his themes are until somewhere around the last quarter of the book. The short chapters keep you longing for more and the very realistic characters keep you wondering what to believe. There's a sentence or two where his style didn't quite work for me, but this is only his second novel. I'm ready and waiting for a third!
The slogan of the epiphany machine (and literally the first line of the book) is "Everyone knows the truth about you, now you can know it, too." Of course, this immediately prompts the reader to question themselves. If there were a machine that tattooed a phrase on your forearm with great insight into your soul (or brain or typical behavior -- let's not get too technical) for you and everyone else to see, what would it say? This is followed by a list of things to consider before getting an epiphany tattoo, and by that point Gerrard has effectively put the reader in a position of wanting to get one (by continuing to read).
For the most part, you follow the main character, Venter Lowood, on mostly mundane adventures through mostly contemporary New York. His psychological struggles are the most exciting. He is faced with his family's history with the machine, the strangely charismatic man who owns it, it's reputation of cult behavior, the questionable significance of it's insights, and the consequences that fall on those with certain tattoos. Now throw in a mysterious author writing about the machine, a shadowy Russian American businessman, relationship problems, and a terror attack. You might find the reality line a little blurred. Did I mention the novel is also written in a mix of first-person, testimonials, and in-novel excerpts (such as chapters from the unknown author's book)? It's good!
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I believe that if the epiphany machine tattooed "The Epiphany Machine" it might just read "cult classic" (in a cool tattoo font, of course). I am thrilled that I was able to read this book through Penguin's First to Read program (which you too could join if you Google those words). Really though, whoever you are, you should probably read this book.
The Only Certainty Is Uncertainty: David Burr Gerrard Talks The Epiphany Machine
By B. David Zarley | July 19, 2017 | 5:11pm
Author photo by Albert Cheung
Books Features David Burr Gerrard
The Only Certainty Is Uncertainty: David Burr Gerrard Talks The Epiphany Machine
“I finished the final copy edit of this book on the morning of November 8th,” David Burr Gerrard tells Paste about The Epiphany Machine over the phone from his home in Queens.
He had just finished voting for Hillary Clinton, as many had in his neighborhood, and the jubilant atmosphere had him concerned that the ending of his sophomore novel was a bit too bleak.
The Epiphany Machine details the personal and social fallouts of those who come into contact with the titular device, which is a kind of sewing machine that tattoos a truth about the user on her forearm. (E.g. DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS or DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES or ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST.)
The novel is predominantly told from the perspective of Venter Lowood, whose parents used the machine in the ‘70s and who serves as testimonial collector for the machine’s keeper, Adam Lyons. The machine and its adherents polarizes the populace: Is it a cult run by Lyons and the tattoos it generates just generic bromides? Or does the machine truly reveal deep truths about its canvases? Few things beyond uncertainty can be counted on in life, and that is something in which The Epiphany Machine revels.
As soon as the inevitability of Hillary’s victory reversed itself, and the future Gerrard and his neighbors had envisioned became uncertain, a new inevitability arose: Donald Trump was always going to win. There had been so many signs, we all missed it.
“By the end of the night,” Gerrard says, “I felt much more confident in my book, and much less confident in the country.”
The whirlwind surrounding the election serves as a microcosm for the power that uncertainty can have on a life. Gerrard first conceptualized The Epiphany Machine as a graduate school student; absorbing from his reading that his short stories were meant to end with an epiphany earned. The idea engendered uncertainty in himself and his work.
“Maybe I don’t have any kind of summarizable wisdom to impart,” Gerrard says. “And if I don’t, then what am I doing writing? What am I doing asking people to take time out of their day to read my thoughts if I don’t have any kind of conclusion to come to whatsoever?” Afflicted with a “profound ambivalence” toward epiphanies in fiction, he desired a machine that could crank out a little koan for him, from which he would work backwards and create the story.
In the decade that followed, he worked simultaneously on both his debut novel, Short Century, and on The Epiphany Machine, writing the former while trying to find a way to frame the latter. At one point, the book consisted of testimonials from the machine’s recipients; the breakthrough came when Gerrard realized he was more interested in the person taking those testimonials. Fragments of his other ideas and false starts still remain in the manuscript—to the book’s strength. They imbue it with an organic sense of uncertainty that heightens the reader’s feeling of being unmoored.
So important is uncertainty to the book that the very question at the heart of the story—“Is The Epiphany Machine magic or a con?”—is not known even by the author himself.
“There were times when I had one position or another,” Gerrard says. “But I wanted it to be an open question, both for the reader and for myself. Because for me, all questions are open.”
To Gerrard, the notion is at once frightening and hopeful.
“We really don’t know the answers to the most basic questions of why we’re here, or what we’re supposed to be doing,” Gerrard says. “That makes us look for answers, sometimes makes us look for easy answers. But also offers whatever hope there might be, whether or not we have access to that hope.”
For The Epiphany Machine’s detractors, the device offers not only easy answers but generalities so universally true that they should hardly constitute being called “answers” at all. For those for whom an epiphany leads to life-altering change, the fact that their epiphany happens to be true for many others is hardly an indictment of the its ability to improve their own lives.
“If you’re looking for answers, there are slogans,” Gerrard says. “Literature is about trying on an answer, then trying on a different answer.”
B. David Zarley is a freelance journalist, essayis, and book/art critic based in Chicago. A former book critic for The Myrtle Beach Sun News, his work can be seen in Hazlitt, Sports Illustrated, The Chicago Reader, VICE Sports, The Creators Project, Sports on Earth and New American Paintings, among numerous other publications. You can find him on Twitter or at his website.
David Burr Gerrard’s Forthcoming “The Epiphany Machine” Has a Cover
By Vol.1 Brooklyn On November 2, 2016 · 0 Comments · In Lit., Literary Ephemera
epiphany-cover
Two years ago, we interviewed David Burr Gerrard about his terrific, politically-informed first novel Short Century. At the time he discussed the book he was working on at the time: a novel titled The Epiphany Machine.
It’s about a machine that tattoos epiphanies on the forearms of its users. That is my attempt to question and honor one of the major ideas of fiction, which is that fiction should lead up to an epiphany. That leads very easily to cliche; at the same time, I’m not very comfortable with total rejection of the idea of an epiphany. If fiction doesn’t force its characters into a realization of some kind of truth, if you don’t force the reader into a realization of some kind of truth, then what is fiction really for?
The Epiphany Machine is due out from G.P. Putnam’s Sons on July 18, 2017, and the cover has been revealed. Given that Short Century was that rare political novel that grappled full-on with the political issues it raised, we’re eager to experience what his followup has in store.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “self-serving or pointlessly topical,” but Gerrard “infuses the stylized opera of his proceedings with some humor and mercifully frequent touches of self-awareness.”
Book Review: The Epiphany Machine
By Steve Donoghue (July 18, 2017) No Comment
The Epiphany Machine
by David Burr Gerrard
Putnam, 2017
Considering the now near-universality of the tattoo fad – try to find an otherwise-normal adult under the age of 40 who isn’t festooned in poorly-done-but-nevertheless-permanent INK, so that every simple summer garden party now resembles the freak parade Ringling Bros used to charge you a dollar a head to see – it was probably inevitable that there would come along a big, meaningful tattoo novel, an earnest doorstop of literary aspirations that yearns to convey to a wider audience what its author has been trying to convey to long-suffering relatives and sex partners since he got his first forearm dream-catcher: that skin art is somehow significant, that this isn’t just the dumbest fad to sweep a bored nation since the hula-hoop (with one big difference: devotees of the hula hoop aren’t forced to carry it around on their saggy flesh for the rest of their lives). There’ve been miscellaneous stabs at such a work of literary justification, but they’ve mostly been every bit as tiresome and trivial as every tattoo ever created.
There’s an exception now to that dubious record. David Burr Gerrard’s big, generous debut novel The Epiphany Machine is executed with such rhetorical care and such obvious earnest conviction on the part of its author that its presiding gimmick – tattoo-maker whose creations end up speaking oracular insights into the nature (and the future) of its customers – could be almost anything that’s self-serving or pointlessly topical.
Instead, Gerrard infuses the stylized opera of his proceedings with some humor and mercifully frequent touches of self-awareness. He could scarcely do otherwise, given the winning plot he’s constructed: it’s a New York world whose citizens have always been fascinated and haunted by a famous thing called the Epiphany Machine, a device presented to the public by the flamboyant, oddly charismatic figure of Adam Lyons and pivotal in the family life of the book’s narrator, young Ventner Lowood, both of whose parents were tattooed by the Epiphany Machine, with slow-burn disastrous results that prompted them to warn Ventner against the machine the whole time he’s growing up. The notoriety of the device is widespread, as is its allure: the tattoos it dispenses aren’t chosen by the customers themselves but rather, through some mysterious process, seemingly chosen by the machine itself (or by Lyons – we’re told late in the book that the two are essentially the same). These tattoos appear to speak basic, revelatory truths about their bearers – Ventner’s reads DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, despite his lifelong high estimation of his own personal independence – which has drawn all kinds of people to the experience, including high-powered movers and shakers like real estate magnate Si Strauss, and as Ventner’s researches into the operations of the Epiphany Machine reveal, this network of customers often proves important, especially given Lyons’ sloppy business practices:
Indifferent to the concept of “inflation,” he never charged more than a hundred dollars for the use of the machine, even though there were many who would have paid thousands, and he never refused service to anyone who did not pay. But most people wanted to give him money before he put a needle in their arm; most people wanted it to feel at least a little like a business transaction. How Adam evaded the illegality of tattooing remained a mystery to me, partially because tattooing had already been legalized by my first visit; I suspect it was largely due to the many high-ranking city officials who were rumored to have received tattoos and, of course, to the influence of Strauss.
Naturally, not everybody is pleased about the cult phenomenon of the Epiphany Machine. One group – the one you’d expect – is having none of the dictatorial mumbo-jumbo of the experience:
Most tattoo artists hate the epiphany machine, and for good reason. It’s a cheap perversion of what we do. If Adam Lyons were peddling some kind of magic dance that healed your soul, don’t you think choreographers would hate him? If he ran a magic barbershop, don’t you think barbers would start daydreaming about what they’d do with their scissors if they could get him in their chair? Furthermore, the epiphany machine negates the most important aspect of tattooing choice. Real tattoos are a kind of marriage vow you make with your current self; you’re saying that who you are is who you will always be and what you want is what you will always want.
If a passage like that feels like a genuine world-view dragged roughly through the gears of a high-powered MFA blender, it’s not alone in The Epigraph Machine. All of Gerrard’s characters sound like just that: characters rather than people. This would ordinarily spell a novel’s doom, but the tone Gerrard employs in this remarkable book is of a piece with his outsized characters; the book is as much a modern fable as it is a work of social satire. And the fact that some pseudo-literate hipster in Bushwick has almost certainly already had DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS tattoo’d on his forearm is hardly something we can blame on the novel. Not quite, anyway.
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #94: David Burr Gerrard
By Ryan Sartor
July 27th, 2017
David Burr Gerrard’s new novel The Epiphany Machine is one of the more ambitious books you’ll read this year, centering on a device that can reveal the epiphany of your life by tattooing the words onto your arm. “ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST” is just one example of the sort of permanent self-owns that get written on the flesh of characters in his funny and riveting novel. Gerrard is a mid-aughts graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in creative writing, so, of course, I asked him what James Franco is like in real life, but, alas, they just missed each other. We talked at the HiFi Bar in Manhattan ahead of an edition of the Whom Wants to Cry reading series in June 2017.
***
The Rumpus: How did you come up with the concept for the novel?
David Burr Gerrard: Mostly because I was resentful and lazy. I was resentful of having to create epiphanies in stories and too lazy to really try. And also fearful that I couldn’t do it, fearful that I didn’t have any kind of wisdom to share. How could I lead my characters to wisdom when I really didn’t have any myself? And then I was in an MFA workshop and I just came up with the idea: “Oh, I can just write a short story about this thing called ‘an epiphany machine,’” and so that’s what I did. I liked the way it turned out, but I was like, “Okay, I think this should be a novel.” And I thought, “Okay, I can write this novel in about a year.” That was in 2006.
Rumpus: Was there a moment during your most recent draft where it clicked in?
Gerrard: I’m staring at your iPhone, which has an icon of a physical tape. I got the idea to write the novel in the form of these testimonials. One day, in August 2013, I decided, “Everyday, I’m going to write a flash fiction piece about the epiphany machine.” And, for a while, I thought that was going to be the book. It was going to be a collection of these testimonials. But then I got curious about who was taking these testimonials and I thought, “Okay, let me explore this character.” And then it became kind of a deeper story.
Rumpus: You can notice that tension in the book where you can see the version of it where it is just the testimonials and I feel like that feels like more of an experimental novel. It could have been a postmodern exercise about the annoyance of coming up with epiphanies, but it’s great that it doesn’t feel like that. It’s a fully fleshed-out novel. Was that difficult for you, finding that balance?
Gerrard: Absolutely. Throughout the process of writing this novel, I was playing up against the thought of: “Okay, is this just a gimmick? Is this just an idea that sounds cool, but then doesn’t really have any heft? And does this expose my own deep callowness? That I don’t have anything meaningful to say and I’m just doing this trick?” Because I do think that’s how the novel began. That was true when I started writing the novel. And the novel could have been many, many different things. I think it’s reflected in the novel, it carries with it all of the ghosts of the different novels that it might have been, which I think is also true of any novel. I think it’s one reason that fan fiction is so popular. When you read a book, you kind of write your own book. “I wish that this went in this direction or that direction. I’m interested in this character or that character.” I would love it if that happened for readers. If readers said, “Okay, I want to write my own testimonial,” that would be great. But I’m very happy with this novel, which is the best that any novelist could hope for. When I say that I’m very happy with it, I mean I only hate it maybe forty percent of the time.
Rumpus: What was it like to walk the line between humor and more delicate subjects in The Epiphany Machine?
Gerrard: All of the books that I love do that. My biggest influence is probably Philip Roth, blending humor and blending tragedy, and big historical tragedy, is what I think books really should be doing—at least to capture my attention. That’s not to say every book should be like that, but the books that I’m interested in reading will tend to do that. And it feels very natural to me in that I look around and I see horrible things happening every day. And I also see constant humor in both the absurdities of daily life and in the absurdities in how people behave.
Rumpus: You graduated in 2006, so what was it like from 2006 to 2014, when your first novel came out?
Gerrard: Until 2012, when I signed the contract for my first novel, I felt like I was nowhere and I was going nowhere in life. I think the things that all writers feel in their heads: “I’m wasting my time, I’m not talented,” et cetera, et cetera. I had various jobs. I was a copy editor at a research firm for a while. I taught the GMAT. In retrospective, those were good jobs that allowed me to do a lot of writing. But at the time, I thought, “Okay, I’m seeing my friends go out and get real careers and start real lives and what am I doing?” At the same time, I never really considered doing anything else because I knew that this was what I wanted to do and at a certain point I just decided, “Okay, this is it for me. I’m going to write and I have no control over what happens.”
Rumpus: The Epiphany Machine centers on this device that you stick your arm inside and it tattoos the epiphany of your life. How did you come up with that specific device? Were there a few versions of the epiphany machine?
Gerrard: It always looked like a sewing machine, even in that short story I wrote more than ten years ago. And that needle was important, I think because of my fondness for that Kafka story, In the Penal Colony. You talk about someone who blends humor and horror and he’s definitely up there. In that story, there’s an apparatus that describes that prisoner’s crime on the prisoner’s skin until the prisoner dies. Really, it probably should have led me to the tattoo idea almost directly. It took me a few years to say, “Okay, why don’t I just have it be a tattoo? Why don’t I actually have the truth about oneself written onto the skin?” As, in fact, it tends to be in life. Looking at somebody’s face when they tell you how things are going usually tells you more than whatever they happen to be saying.
Rumpus: What do you think the epiphany machine would inscribe on you? Have you gotten this question yet?
Gerrard: Of course, that’s the most natural question. I’m going to give a cheat answer and a real answer. The cheat answer, which maybe is the more real answer, is that I simply don’t know. I can’t know because your epiphany is something that you on some level know, but you can’t admit to yourself that you know. And you certainly can’t admit it in an interview that will be read by, hopefully, many people. You’re not going to admit the unpleasant truth about yourself. And that’s why you have to have it inscribed on your arm so that people can see it and you have less of a choice about whether you reveal yourself or not. That being said, I did ask myself, “What would I be most afraid of to have as my tattoo?” And the answer to that seemed to me to be dependent on the opinion of others. I think I have been dependent on the opinion of others and I think that would probably be my tattoo. And certainly what I fear my tattoo would be.
***
Author photograph © Albert Cheung.
Ryan Sartor is a writer and host of The Difficult to Name Reading Series. More from this author →
The Epiphany Machine
July 14, 2017
Written by Philip Rafferty
Published in Kindle, Print, Reviews
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Written by David Burr Gerrard — The Epiphany Machine opens with a with a list, a disclaimer, covering 19 things to consider before using the machine followed by a testimonial from one of the many people who’ve used it. What is the machine? It’s a device that looks just like an old sewing machine, but instead of mending a torn blouse, the metal arm will give you a tattoo. And that tattoo is not just any tattoo, it’s actually a magically delivered personal epiphany just for you, etched right there onto the forearm of your choice. The magical device, an inventive and otherworldly invention, is the center of what is a coming of age novel by the author David Burr Gerrard focused on the themes of family, fate, and personal shortcomings.
After the initial list and testimonial, the book jumps into a narrative from the perspective of Venter, a young man whose parents have used the epiphany machine with troubling results. They both received epiphanies on their arms that hung over them like curses, and his mother’s absence is either a result of the tattoo or of the tattoo’s prophetic nature. The tattoos the machine deliver are always difficult for the recipients to handle, phrases like “Should not be a father” or “Dependent on the opinion of others” are some examples. The two Venter’s parents received were neither becoming nor well received.
Finding his mother becomes is the mystery that drives the book’s beginning. Venter seeks out the machine and eventually meets Adam Lyons, its kooky stoner owner. Of course, Venter ventures down the rabbit hole and gets a tattoo himself which is not complimentary, and after this the story shifts to the relationship between Venter, his tattoo and the machine’s owner.
This is a well-written contemporary novel but there’s not much for crime fiction fans here and it tends to meander. The New York City created by the author is a slightly modified New York to account for the magical realism in the story and it is really unextraordinary. There are endless interruptions in the form of testimonials and documents which eventually crowd out the narrative.
We hear of celebrities and notable people who have interacted with the machine, there is even a semi-subplot concerning John Lennon and his murderer Mark David Chapman. But after the initial interest piqued by the machine, as this otherworldly fictional creation grows its grip wears off. Eventually, 9/11 happens and the second half of the book centres around a possible connection between the machine and one of the terrorists responsible. The ethics of the machine and the rules and practices Lyons employs using it come into question.
The book continuously and aimlessly wanders and as it pushes along, nothing feels that fresh or new outside of the initial conceit. David Burr Gerrard is trying too many things here and falls into a strange literary limbo straddling the contemporary literary genres of writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and John Irving, along with a science fiction-like element and a mystery. But the resemblance to those other writers as well as the lack of clear genre and narrative drive make for a slow, jumbled, uneven and eventually tiresome read.
In the end, The Epiphany Machine is a good idea gone awry. A book that tries too hard to be deep, a book reaching to deliver an epiphany to its reader that never does. The personal narrative is at times compelling and Burr Gerrard is a good writer, but to get the goods from his latest is a lot of work.
GP Putnam’s Sons
Print/Kindle
£11.99
CFL Rating: 2 Stars
God in the Machine
by Chris Campanioni
The epiphany machine wants to know our secrets, the ones we show to everyone but ourselves. I know the conceit well, too: we keep making the same mistakes; the pattern is obvious to everyone except ourselves, because we are too busy performing our various social scripts to know anything about the performance, or whether we are still performing, or whether we are ever not performing. But the audience knows. And today our audience is the world.
Of all the items that preface David Burr Gerrard’s second book, the one closest to epiphany is the last in the list labeled THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE USING THE EPIPHANY MACHINE: “You already know what the machine will write on your arm. That lie you’ve been telling yourself—you know what it is. … You already know whether you’re going to use the machine. So why are you still reading this?” Gerrard’s The Epiphany Machine, more so than any other novel this year, postulates an analog to our hyper-polarized, “likes for likes” exchange culture, a seesaw between the propensity to overshare and our resistance to vanquished privacy, all of them (re)cycled images of self.
How it works in the novel is simple: a user is buzzed in to a rent-controlled apartment and requests a seat beside something that resembles an antique sewing machine. After walking past velvet curtains, they take a seat, place their forearm down, and the tattoo needle tells them who they are, in pithy, cryptic koan-like statements that read like our micro-processed About Me’s, except actually true.
Gerrard’s language, too, is candid, easy, frank—a revelation on its own by much of today’s hyper-conceptual, verbose, literary standards. The succinct prose has a knack for producing its own epiphany, which is often, like good comedy, funny because it’s true.
Example 1: “One of the worst things about men is that they make it dangerous not to lie to them.”
Example 2: “Failure was something that might happen, but probably to other people, and death lay in a future so remote we would be long dead by the time it arrived.”
Example 3, which occurs only a few pages later: “This made me even madder, and also more in love with Leah, since she had now outmatched me in the two things at which every teenager wants to excel: caring and not caring.”
Example 4, in the voice of the teenage protagonist Venter’s grandmother, whom he is interviewing: “Being a housewife is a lot like running a business whose finances you have no control over.”
Example 5: “I tried to think, one of my favorite ways of not thinking.”
Gerrard’s several voices, in turning a circle around our affinity for self-delusion (and sometimes even self-sabotage) are always refreshingly honest, never more so than when the truth serum is offered to Venter himself, during a conversation between father and son:
“Why didn’t you tell me how sick she was?”
He was pulling out of the driveway now. “She’s been sick for years. If you wanted to know, you would have known.”
“That’s not true,” I said, “and you’re an asshole.” What I was actually thinking was that it was true and that I was an asshole. I had noticed that my grandmother was sick and had paid no attention. I had barely even asked what was wrong with her.
If the characters didn’t have the epiphany machine, they would have to rely on interaction with others to learn about who they really are. So it makes sense, in our age of individually-curated knowledge and isolated recreation, to seek self(help) in a machine instead of other humans. The judgement, in 2017 and in years past, of course, is free. The same is true in Gerrard’s novel, as Adam Lyons, the machine’s sole operator and chief of the Rubicon Epiphany Corporation, makes explicit. His visitors aren’t customers; they are guests. He takes donations, not a fee. And when his guests receive their statements of self on their forearms, it’s up to them to do something about it. As in real life, machines can only give us so much. The rest, in a sense, is man-made. Adam explains this to a client who receives DOES NOT STAND HIS GROUND on his arm.
Sometimes the tattoo points you in the direction of what you most resent about yourself and think you should change, but is in fact the best part of you. Maybe what your son needs is for you not to stand your ground. I certainly don’t know that. I don’t know anything. The machine doesn’t know anything. Only you know. Your tattoo is there to help you know what you know.… We tell people who they are. Sometimes that helps people become better. Often not.
The line between truth and beauty is never really clear—in real life, in the book, and much of The Epiphany Machine, as well as the machine itself, grapples with this relationship from the opening chapters. “You’d rather believe pretty things than the truth,” one best friend tells the other. “You don’t know things anywhere,” a third tells Venter, quoting a character in The Glass Menagerie. “You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions.” Earlier, Venter and his best friend, Ishmael consider what comes first, truth or beauty, in their love—or lust—for Leah, the one who is so often literally between them. Are truth and beauty mutually exclusive, or do they depend on each other for their singular strengths? The question reflects the novel’s own pursuit of authenticity and ethics: Venter’s coming-of-age in nineties New York City and his search for his mother, who abandoned him as a baby after receiving her own epiphany: ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST. The ugly truth is the one we can only tell ourselves when we’re alone, before sleep or upon waking, in private or at least in solitude. Then again, the truth will set you free, as it does for users who attend weekly meetings to talk about their lives post-epiphany: “We’re all like criminals who have been caught,” someone replies after Venter acknowledges the anxiety of most social situations in which “everyone is worried that everyone else sees through them to their deepest, most secret flaw.” Gerrard’s writing is free of hackneyed aphorisms and yet so much of what he is exploring—and exposing—has the a-ha winking moment of a tea bag’s inscription, even the bitter aftertaste that signifies its resonance.
The novel moves from testimonials about the epiphany machine to Venter’s first-person narrative, to excerpts from books about the epiphany machine, to newspaper reports detailing current events, to e-mails and AIM conversations between close friends and former lovers, all under the specter of more scarlet lettering: judgement, shame, and punishment; World War I, the Holocaust, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and ultimately, the terror attacks on September 11, 2001.
Every major character is likeable because each one is flawed and deeply believable. We believe them because, in a story about self-knowledge, their flaws, unbeknownst to many of them, are acutely visible to each of us—literally inscribed on the flesh as well as evoked in narrative—but also in a metaphysical way, affirming the legitimacy of the machine we are reading about: a literary version of big data analytics. The effect of our own voyeurism as reader, coupled with issues of meme culture and mob mentality provoked by the plot, begs the question of motive. Why do we do the things we do? Because we want to do them,1 or because we think other people will like us more if we do them?2 To see ourselves for who we really are, we’d have to ask ourselves the questions that often go unspoken. What’s the difference between tattooing yourself with the truth and saying it out loud? Both have potential illuminating outcomes, as Venter learns before he himself decides to use the machine: “‘My grandmother’s not going to live to see my eighteenth birthday,’ I said. I hadn’t realized this until I said it, and the knowledge reduced me to sobs.” And several chapters later, “The worst thing about words is that they mean something.”
Venter’s decision to put his own arm under the epiphany machine results in his realization of being DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, a fact or fate that, only pages earlier, he criticizes, after observing a man in a business suit with the same tattoo leaning on a friend to ask, “I’m not DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, right?” Venter’s response—“What a sad and pathetic man”—foreshadows the hypocrisy that Simone Weil, in her diary-like Gravity and Grace, discloses when describing our tendency to overly criticize friends and strangers for faults that we privately recognize in our own behavior and actions.
Whether or not we are all DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS (in fact or on flesh), we all depend on our knowledge of how to function—how to perform—from the movies, and music, and television programs, and of course, the books, we consume daily.
Example 1: “I think I feared that we would be tarred and feathered and sent out of town, ‘tarred and feathered’ being a phrase I had heard in movies I watched with my grandmother.”
Example 2: “I fell in love with Ms. Scarra as soon as I walked into class on the first day, and I was determined to lose my virginity to her, a goal I probably chose because I had seen the scenario in a few of the nudie movies I had only recently discovered on late-night cable.”
Example 3: “Thoughts of my grandmother and even of the machine fell away, and my head danced with the idea that I had found a slice of the secret and therefore authentic Bohemian New York I had been dreaming of gaining admittance to since the first time I’d listened to Rent on CD.”
Example 4: “I straightened my shoulders, since I had read somewhere that you should keep your shoulders straight in a confrontation.”
Example 5: “I thought that his accent enhanced that song’s most sinister qualities, and then I chided myself for being influenced by bad Hollywood movies with vaguely European villains.”
Gerrard plays up our co-dependence as simultaneous producers and consumers of culture to form a parallel with the question the epiphany machine poses each time it inscribes text on flesh: are our lives dictated by fate or free will, God or the cogwheels of our own machinations? If our lives are literally before us—on an epiphany tattoo or in the data we keep accumulating—how can we learn to be conscientious eyewitnesses instead of passive spectators? And, amid the crush of surveillance and celebrity worship, how can we learn to think by and for ourselves? The epiphany machine might resemble an antique sewing apparatus, but Gerrard’s novel is most certainly a mirror. Fittingly, its major characters are all producers of some type—playwright, actor, author—and one of the most intimate, vulnerable moments occurs in Venter’s own admission of the sacrifice required when transposing real life into a representation: “Writing makes you a bad person.… It stops you from actually being in the world.”
As I organize these notes, I break the cookie bestowed at the bottom of the bag I’ve just had delivered. The love of your life is right in front of your eyes. Of course, my laptop is humming in front of me, the pulse of a single line to indicate a word inserted, the pause before what comes next. I don’t need the epiphany machine to know I write myself into everything.
1. I stood and shoved up my sleeve for him to see. “Happy now? Because, uncharacteristically, I don’t give a shit.”
2. My first instinct, of course, was to ask for a gauze pad. But then I realized that if I asked for a gauze pad, I would be showing Adam that I was worried what … people think about me. “I’ll take the Saran Wrap,” I said.
Contributor
Chris Campanioni
CHRIS CAMPANIONI is a first-generation Cuban- and Polish-American and the author of Death of Art (C&R Press). His "Billboards" poem, a response to Latino stereotypes and mutable—and often muted—identity in the fashion world, was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize and his novel Going Down was selected as Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards. He edits PANK, At Large, and Tupelo Quarterly and teaches literature and creative writing at Pace University and Baruch College.