Reality through the prism of technology

Q: What prompted your recent switch to fiction?

A: I spent eight or 10 years as a newspaper journalist; I did memoir stuff for about five years and at some point I suppose I wanted to write about people who don’t exist.

Q: Was it difficult?

A: It was difficult; it was a slower process. I could write, say, 2,000 words of nonfiction to 500 words of fiction. It was satisfying, I guess, when I had finished but writing fiction was more intellectually exhausting because criticism - all of journalism, really - is reactive. You’re reacting to what already exists.

Q: And you had to be sincere about your characters?

A: I suppose, although someone criticizing my novel might say that there was a degree of glibness. But I kind of wrote fiction backwards. I think most writers start with plot and character and try to work toward an idea. I start with an idea. That’s how I write nonfiction as well.

Q: Why did you choose multiple points of view?

A: I was always going to write “Downtown Owl” in the third person because I suspected that otherwise readers would assume that one of these characters was me. Then I wanted characters living in a small town where the assumption is that everyone knows everyone and lives are entwined. But my experience of small towns was that the inhabitants didn’t know everything important about each other. So I wanted to separate these characters and having different points of view seemed like the clearest way to do it.

Q: Is Owl, North Dakota, the unmediated reality that most Americans no longer inhabit?

A: That is absolutely true. The reason I picked that place and time was firstly because 1983/1984 is about as far back as I can go and still have a fairly vivid memory of things. I would have been 11. But more than that I wanted to depict an America that existed before the most recent technological acceleration. Not everybody has cable, the Internet doesn’t exist, people don’t have cellphones. If you’re caught in your car in a blizzard you’re really caught there. That was exactly the point.

Q: Is your cultural criticism influenced by writers like Neil Postman?

A: I would feel more confident if I could say here’s this rich tradition I’m tapping into but that’s not really how it is. I try to be interesting, entertaining and clear; that’s the only thing I worry about. My biggest concern is how I get to the point fast. Every critic is influenced by other writers, but I suspect I’m less influenced than most and I see that as an advantage. Or maybe I just had a bad education.

Q: Do you consciously make these odd pairings: David Koresh and Kurt Cobain, for example?

A: “Eating the Dinosaur” was originally going to be about the 1990s. So I was going to write about the Branch Davidians and when I wrote about Waco I found myself thinking about Cobain’s “In Utero.” Each chapter is broken up into sections marked 1A, 2B and so on because I wanted a structure that reflects the way people think. Or at least the way I think. When I’m contemplating a topic I’m inclined to think about something that’s different yet somehow connected later on.

Q: On advertising, are you saying we’ve internalized its messages?

A: We’re used to the idea that advertising is sophisticated; that it is frivolous to discount advertising as an art form. So practically all advertising you see is treated intellectually. If you put up a billboard with just a glass of Coke on it, there would be talk about the brilliance of this. People would create explanations to project their own meaning because nobody ever assumes that things are devoid of meaning. They have become so good at finding a subtext that they will write it into their own minds.

Q: What impressed you about Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto?

A: Reading “Industrial Society and Its Future” is what generated that essay, although I’d been interested in the Unabomber case all along. I began reading the manifesto, expecting it to be much crazier than it was, and I was compelled by his argument that technology prevents us from experiencing a kind of freedom that we can’t even imagine. This dovetailed with my own thoughts, particularly about the Internet and how it has changed the experience of being alive. Then I started to wonder how often this happens, where somebody comes up with something valuable that is dismissed because of his actions. That’s understandable and Kaczynski is a diabolical person. But sometimes crazy people have good ideas.

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a contributor to the Irish Times. She can be reached by e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.