Patrick Somerville’s fourth book, This Bright River, is one of those novels that’s epic and intimate. Written from multiple first-person perspectives – all of them dead-on, authentic and hilarious – the novel tracks mysterious pasts, families in distress, substance abuse, and a favorite topic (rightfully so) of any novelist: social awkwardness. The story is mainly told by Ben, a brilliant, recovering drug addict, and Lauren, a doctor escaping a tragic marriage, who are former high school classmates now returned to their hometown of St. Helens, Wisconsin. Somerville (The Cradle, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature) has a blessed gift for sharp, witty dialogue, and the plot zooms, which makes This Bright River an ideal audiobook experience.
Somerville talked with eMusic’s Jami Attenberg about writing 454-page novels in long-hand, an inspiring reading by Ilya Kaminsky, and how to annoy co-workers by playing Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young too much.
This is the first time one of your books has been made into an audiobook. Have you heard it yet?
I haven’t heard the audiobook yet – just this little snippet of it – but I do want to hear it, as I love them and am fascinated by them. I always want to know what my writing sounds like in the heads of people who are reading; this is the next best thing.
When does it serve a purpose for you to listen to an audiobook versus reading it?
The last one I listened to for a specific purpose was A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I had read it before and taught it before, but I was teaching it again and wanted to review the text for class. I thought it’d be a good way to get it into my brain and sort of refresh it for myself, you know?
What turned out to be totally fascinating to hear, though – beyond the incredible performance by Roxana Ortega, the voice actress who seemed to really love the text and perform it with gusto – was the Powerpoint section. You wouldn’t think something so visual and non-linear could be translated back into linear text, but it works really well. They used a slide projector sound effect and different actors for the different voices, which I found to be totally simple and successful. Hearing it read, start-to-finish, you could also sort of hear the audiobook people trying to figure out what order to read slides in. The way in which different readers choose those different orders is one of many brilliant things about that chapter, I think, and the audio version highlights it when you’d think it would obscure it.
Do you ever read your books out loud when you are writing them? You write in so many first-person voices I wonder how you keep them all straight. I guess what I’m trying to say is: Do you hear the voices in your head, Patrick?
I don’t ever read them out loud to myself, although I probably should, considering how firmly I believe that it’s a different psychological experience to hear a text than it is to quote-unquote see a text. We’re all oral storytellers, even literary novelists, right? I think I might be too embarrassed to do it, as I often write in coffee shops. I am unprincipled in this way.
I do hear the voices in my head, though, when I write. Especially for dialogue. To this end, I usually end up feeling like I’m having most of the conversations my characters are having.
You’re about to do some touring for your book. Do you enjoy giving readings? Have you ever witnessed some really inspiring readings? I know a lot of people find them boring, but a good one can really change your life, I think.
I once saw the poet Ilya Kaminsky give a reading in Vermont. It was at the Vermont Studio Center, in this little church, and it was one of the strangest, most captivating, incredible readings I have ever heard. He is almost entirely deaf, which impacts his reading, certainly, and what’s more, English is his second language. So he distributed the text of the poems before the reading itself, and I was sitting there thinking, “What the F is this?” And then he began to read in a big way, using his arms and his body, using volume like I’ve never heard anyone use volume before. At times he was up there screaming at us. It scared the shit out of me. By the end, I felt like a medieval peasant must have felt at the end of a long morning at the church.
I’d love to talk about music a bit, and how it plays into your work. Do you listen to it all when writing?
I definitely do not listen to music while I write, which seems crazy to me – I would never be able to concentrate, I don’t think. I can barely even deal with the sound of someone eating an apple within 30 feet of me while I’m trying to write. I can’t imagine what music would do. But I do listen to a lot of music before and after I’m writing, especially when I’m trying to find the right emotional balance and the right tone for a section or a voice. To me, music is the most immediately emotional of the arts. I think writers are wise to heed how good music handles emotionalism. I think literary writers are often so afraid of being schmaltzy that they won’t do big scenes, but music is almost never afraid to go big.
And what exactly is your relationship with CSNY? They pop up a few times in the book.
I have liked Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for a long time, but at some point I made my protagonist, Ben, obsessed with them, and it just kept coming back up as I was writing. I listened to them every day in my car when I was writing this book; I once listened to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” so many times on repeat, trying to get into a Bennish mood, that my co-worker eventually came over to my desk and asked me to move on to a new track. I do love their harmonies, and I love how Steve Stills writes.
I’m interested a bit more in your process because I remember you telling me once that you handwrote it on legal pads first, and when you were finished you had a stack of them waiting to be typed up. This is unfathomable to me because I’m so into knowing exactly how many words I’ve written at the end of the day, possibly in this OCD way. Do you do any original writing on the computer or is it all transcribing?
I wrote This Bright River by hand for one pretty simple reason: When I’m on a computer I have a habit of circling back and working on the opening, obsessively, and therefore not pushing forward. I wanted to just have to go, especially for this book. I usually like computers better and have always written on computers. This was a good exercise, but I don’t know if I’ll keep doing it. The transcription alone took me months, and while I did edit as I went, I’m not sure I liked all that added time.
It didn’t hurt that I had no browser open beside me as I was writing, although I also want to go on record as saying that the internet is fine and not a huge distraction and totally manageable. I don’t like the sound of an apple, but for whatever reason, I’m fine with the noise of surfing.
