One Question Interview: Nathan Whitlock

02Dec23

Nathan Whitlock is the author of the novels A Week of This and Congratulations On Everything. Nathan’s writing has appeared in places such as the New York Review of Books, the Walrus, Chatelaine, Today’s Parent, the Globe and Mail and Best Canadian Essays. He is the coordinator for the Humber College Creative Book Publishing program, which he also teaches in, and makes the weekly author-interview podcast What Happened Next. His recent novel is called Lump.

I grew up on stuff like the original Twilight Zone and enjoy writing that’s both meaningful and puts a twist of some kind on reality, but I also love your novels for being engaging even as they’re about everyday life. Your dialogue feels quite real. Did you purposely develop your ear for dialogue (as writers should, really) and where are all the giant ice monsters? 

Answering the second part of your question first: for decades, I have carried around this idea—which I used to think came from Stephen Fry or someone similar*—that American comedy is based on the idea of “wouldn’t it be funny if…”, whereas British comedy is based on “isn’t it funny that…” And I, as someone with British parents, and who grew up watching hours and hours of British television and movies (via PBS and my own inclinations), always leaned toward the latter: finding the funny (and the tragic and the moving and the joyful, etc.) in the way things are, rather than imposing some kind of wacky or contrived plot structure. In other words, digging into a seemingly banal scenario to reveal strangeness and perversity, rather than creating a bizarre and/or extraordinary scenario, then letting the characters within it react.

I think some writers can do the latter brilliantly, and I love a lot of stories that follow that pattern, but some part of my brain insists it’s cheating to throw in a strange or unlikely element, and then stand back and say: “Look at how wild this is!” It’s like an arsonist standing back from a house he just doused with gasoline and saying: “Man, these houses catch fire a lot!” Writing a story about a sentient refrigerator can be fun, and a story like that might be fun to read, but if fun is the only goal, you’d be better off chugging a beer and jumping into a pool with your clothes on. No book can compete with that.

It’s entirely possible I simply lack the imagination for the other kind of story, but for whatever reason, it’s the way I operate as a writer. I don’t get inspired by wild ideas or elaborate scenarios and questions of what if? My stories usually start by watching someone spend an hour blowing every leaf off their yard with a leaf blower. Or stand in the middle of a grocery store aisle, staring at a box of cereal, clearly having forgotten why they’re there. Or pace impatiently around a playground, waiting for their kids to get their fill of fun for the day. That’s usually what makes my brain start to spin out a story, for better or worse.

(Having said all that, I did just put out a novel in which a woman has a brief dialogue with a character in a cartoon, and later with a panda. And there’s a whole chapter from the perspective of a dog, so obviously it’s just as important to violate all these puritan rules when necessary.)

As for the way I write dialogue, I very much appreciate the compliment, because I always worry that my dialogue is not as good as it should be. I have a kind of Platonic ideal for dialogue in my mind that I work hard to match, but mostly I feel like I only ever get close, at best. I have a lot of thoughts about dialogue in literary fiction—at least in the kind of sad-funny-cringey literary fiction that I write—that mostly boil down to: characters shouldn’t know they’re in a story. They don’t know they’re being watched. So don’t have them expound upon the underlying themes of the story they’re in. Don’t make them sound writerly, since even writers don’t sound like that when they’re not onstage at a festival or whatever. Don’t have them advance the plot or provide useful backstory. And don’t ever, ever have them be funny—don’t let them perform for the reader or wink at the reader. (Though they can perform for other characters in the story, which can be funny.)

All this is to say that maybe we were the giant ice monsters all along.

*I looked this up while writing this response, and could only find it referenced in an onstage interview with Salman Rushdie, who put it that other way: that Brits are the “funny if…” people and Americans are all about it being “funny that…” He cites Monty Python and Seinfeld as examples of both, which makes sense, but I still say it makes more sense the way I had always known it. And I think the best Canadian comedy is closer to the British kind, for a lot of bad reasons, probably. Our funniest stuff is about the absurdities of everyday life, whereas we always go wrong when we get wacky and self-consciously outrageous.

Obviously, all of this is reductive and easily argued against and ultimately a question of taste, but I clearly enjoy the opportunity to run my mouth about it. And I do appreciate the compliments in your question. So, thank you.

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