Interview: "Meeks" Author, Julia Holmes

Julia Holmes’s first novel, Meeks, is just out from Small Beer Press and has been getting plenty of attention.  Publishers Weekly calls it “a highly imaginative debut,” and The L.A. Times says, “with humor and heartbreak, Holmes’ novel unfolds like a game in which the deck is irredeemably stacked.”

Holmes’s eligible bachelors are mayflies:  they either find a wife in a season or suffer the consequences.  Ask her more about the book and pick up a copy when she reads and signs at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne next Monday, August 23, at 7:30.   Until then, you’ll have to be satisfied with the questions we thought to ask…

Q: Hi, and congratulations on publishing your debut novel! So, lots of people are calling this book “Kafkaesque.” Did you have Kafka (or Orwell) in mind when you wrote the book? Do you like hearing the comparison? Does it fall short for you in any ways, or miss the mark of what your book is doing?

A: Thank you! I’m very excited to be reading in Portland next week.

I didn’t have Kafka or Orwell in mind when I was working on Meeks, but I can see why people make the comparison — the story unfolds in the shadow of a bureaucratic menace, and it pits a sympathetic individual against a big, horrible, indifferent system. In Meeks, citizens live in constant fear, not because the rules of their world are arbitrary — they’re totally clear, and the consequences hang together logically — but because the rules are inescapable and disconnected from a rational, natural sense of what’s just.

I can see how a character like Ben (a bachelor whose time is running out) would probably be at home, in the worst way, in one of Kafka’s worlds — he’s an ordinary person whose complacency isn’t so much a sin as it is a fact. His complacency is something that just lives in him next to a kind of alien, implanted sense of shame over his lack of ambition and courage, and he spends his time dreading the day he’ll be yanked from that complacency “by the trailing teeth of some awful machine” — and the day comes of course.

Q: Marriage is the crux of life in Meeks; if you don’t marry, bad things happen. What got you started thinking along these lines? Do you see the book passing implicit commentary on our own society?

A: The idea of marriage is full of emotion, good and bad, no matter who you are or where you’re living, and the customs and rituals around it (always and everywhere) are strange and complicated — way stranger than anything in Meeks. But the book’s not necessarily intended as a critique of marriage as an institution, nor does it in any way make light of people needing/finding other people. In Meeks, it’s more that marriage is the exaggeration, and the finitude of life is the problem — the limited time and opportunity we have to understand the mystery of being in the world, and the unlimited fear of becoming isolated somehow from other people, who are still probably the best, if not the only, means to cracking some small part of that mystery.

Q: Meeks is a very rich book at the sentence level; you seem to have a poet’s interest in language and imagery.

For instance: “I was in a hurry, but once or twice I found myself standing, still as a statue, in a clearing or under a tree, mesmerized by the blue bud of summer: the river mist warming like wool under the first sun, the ants and beetles commuting along their branches, the worms boring silently through the new green leaves.”

Can you say a little about how you used language to build the mood and world of the book?

A: I think language is the great motivator, especially in the beginning — the pursuit of language should be the pursuit of pleasure, and I think you have to trust that what means something to you will mean something to other people. And, every now and then, a phrase or image comes along that somehow feels deeply true and excitingly alien at the same time, and it’s thrilling to try build out from that. Then, I think the real job is always to go back and subject what you’ve written to immense scrutiny and stress over a period of years.

But the farther along you go, the better you understand the world’s weird local laws — even in an entirely invented, contrived world, there’s no tolerance for lies. I think that’s just crazy and delightful.

Q: Meeks is published by Small Beer Press, a small independent publishing house. How did you find them (or how did they find you?) How’s your experience of publishing your first book been, so far? Any surprises? Any lessons learned?

A: My agent, PJ Mark, sent the manuscript to Small Beer — I was already a fan through Kelly Link’s books, which I admire, so I was very happy when they decided to publish Meeks. It’s been a wonderful experience — all exceedingly good surprises so far. Jedediah Berry is a superb editor, which was most important to me, of course — though he also designed the Robyn O’Neil cover, which I love, and he’s done a multitude of other things on behalf of the book.

I think the way Small Beer thinks about books, and how they go about producing books, is exemplary of what’s great and exciting about making books in the first place. Anyway, I feel lucky to be a part of it, however indirectly. And as is well known, they’re also just some of the smartest, nicest, funniest people around, so it’s been fun.

Q: What books informed Meeks? What else are you reading these days? What do you recommend to everyone you meet, and what can you not wait to get your hands on?

A: Lately I’ve been recommending Wittgenstein’s Mistress a lot — by David Markson, who died in June. I was sort of a latecomer to the book and read it just last year, but I loved it. One of the most genuinely surprising books I’ve read. It gave me that great experience, which maybe you tend to have more often when you’re first getting into reading — you’re totally absorbed by a book but you don’t understand how it’s working on you, how it’s making you feel such strong feelings. It’s just devastating. A great book.

I’m not conscious of any specific books directly informing Meeks. I think you get (or I got) sort of fiction-avoidant when you’re in the middle of things, so I tended to read a lot of poetry and nonfiction, especially books about the natural sciences.

One thing that struck me while reading about biological systems like ant colonies and coral reefs, is that the application of strict rules on a sympathetic or “beautiful” world has a way of elevating the emotional lives of its constituents — whether they’re bachelors or jellyfish. Human beings are, by nature, sympathetic creatures — our brains strive to understand the rules of a new world before we’re even aware that we’re trying to master them. And that certainly works to a writer’s advantage.