All About Lulu
Reading Jonathan Evison’s novel, All About Lulu, you’ll swoon over his gorgeously crafted endings and beginnings. You’ll re-experience the romantic velocity of being a teenager and grow to understand — in a comforting and disturbing way — even the most complicated of family relationships. You’ll also learn a thing or two about powerlifting and hot dogs. I know, you’re already buying the book online, right? I thought so, that’s why I added the link right here: All About Lulu from Soft Skull Press. Recently we caught up with Evison. Read our interview with him after the jump. — Lori Huskey
Dark Sky Magazine: Your next book, West of Here, is said to be a Northwest-based novel. If you had to encapsulate the NW writing zeitgeist, what would it be to you? Also, how helpful is it to compartmentalize writers into scenes or themes or even schools?
Jonathan Evison: I’m not big on compartmentalizing much anything beyond my work schedule. The breadth and diversity of our state’s literature is dizzying. But the Northwest I personally sought to capture in West of Here–and lord knows I’m not the first–is a region haunted by its own past (dead logging towns, gutted forests, dammed rivers, botched treaties, political and environmental mismanagement), a region forced to reckon with its own mistakes. The Thornburgh Dam (a fictional amalgam of numerous existing dams), its construction and subsequent removal, along with all the attendant economic and ecological fallout, provided one of several good opportunities for me to pit two epochs in our history in conversation — one speeding blindly toward their future, and the other trying to undo past damage. When you get down to it, this haunted element is not so different from Faulkner’s south.
DSM: In what direction do you see American novel writing going in now?
JE: In the future, I hope more writers (especially dudes) will stop hiding behind “realism” and “sarcasm” and loosen the emotional reigns a little bit. Me, I wanna’ see a writer lay his heart bare.
DSM: Let’s talk about the characters in All About Lulu. You said that you have learned to create them lovingly, with a Dickensian flair. The reader comes to love Lulu as if she were a half/step sister. We come to like/dislike Big Bill and internalize all he’s put Will through. How were you able to do this and would it have been any different if the novel were written in third person?
JE: I crawl inside the skin of my characters, so that I have no choice but to empathize with them, since I have to suffer with them. And I make them suffer a lot, though I don’t delight in it. I put my characters through hell, without ever forsaking them, and see how they come out on the other side. Writing is living for me, probably more than living itself, because it allows me to explore the human condition from an endless variety of perspectives — sometimes first person, as in the case of a voice novel like All About Lulu, and sometimes three dozen third-person-limited points of view to form a kaleidoscopic effect, as in West of Here.
DSM: I don’t think I’ve ever read a story with twin characters in it. It certainly allowed you to add more and more layers to the characters.
Check Out Evison's Web Site
JE: Frankly, I wish I could have twins in every book. I’d be hard-pressed to think of a more fascinating character dynamic with which to explore the quagmire of experience, and how it shapes us, regardless of where our journey begins.
DSM: All About Lulu is highly emotional and asks pointed, deep questions about love. That’s a freshness I am surprised to find in novels these days. At the same time, the notions of free love didn’t overpower the novel. How were you able to compose something so wild and startling with such balance? Was it hard to direct the reins of the novel?
JE: It’s always hard to direct the reins of a novel—that’s one of the things I love best about writing them, the problem solving. Writing is like acting, in that a narrative is fundamentally about decisions. What is my motivation, what do my characters want, how do I show it, what information do I share, what information is central to the themes, and what information is peripheral? The longer you live inside a story, the more you cut to the heart of it, the more you understand everybody’s motivation, the easier these decisions become to make. So I guess the short answer is: rewriting, rewriting, rewriting.
DSM: Memory is always changing. How do you see All About Lulu right now, at this hour today? How is this vantage point different from how you saw it, say right after it was published?
JE: So much pain and sweat and sacrifice goes into a book for me, I can never really help but care for it like a child. I suspect I will always feel the same about Lulu as I feel now, I will be blind to her flaws and love her unconditionally. That said, I can’t wait until she’s eighteen.
DSM: Tell us something we don’t know about rabbits.
JE: Rabbits chew on their own butts because they produce a bacteria down there that helps them digest. This is why it’s important that rabbits not be obese, or they won’t be able to reach.
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Jonathan Evison is the author of “All About Lulu,” which won the 2009 Washington State Book Award, and the novel, “West of Here,” forthcoming from Algonquin in fall of 2010. He is currently at work on a third novel, “The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving.” He likes rabbits.
