A conversation with Michael Shilling

You spent several years as a touring rock musician. What elements of your experience informed the writing of Rock Bottom?

There are two kinds of rock bands. The first is the young and skinny people in their twenties, drug Aardvarks with no nutritional needs except beer, cigarettes, and two hours of sleep who, day after day, wolf a bag of Doritos for dinner, blast through an hour- long set, and then abuse themselves all night with the help of total strangers. The other variety is usually older and always weaker of constitution. They need the occasional home- cooked meal and as much sleep as the next accountant or dentist, and like to argue for hours about what Gore would have done as president.  That was the band I was in. You want to read that novel?

There are five different points of view in Rock Bottom. Why did you choose this structure, and how did you go about finding the balance between these different vantages?

After politicians, rock bands are the ultimate unreliable narrators. Though the comedy in Rock Bottom is what gets the reader’s attention, at its heart I wanted the story to be about people coming to tough terms with the choices they had made, and how those choices affected others around them. By having such a varied set of viewpoints, I could accomplish this thematic objective and provide a sense of solidity to the narrative, so that any epiphany or understanding that a character arrived at could be emotionally cross- checked by another. To mangle the words of Joan Didion, people in vans have to construct stories in order to live, and those stories are often ridiculously self- serving. Nobody in Blood Orphans passes even the lowest bar of objectivity, so this way the reader is the final judge, which is not something I strive for, but in this case is what served the story.

Is this “emotional cross- checking” part of the motivation to have the manager play such an important role and be a woman?

Very much so, but it cuts both ways. Joey’s carrying around her black- magic bag of delusions too, and having the four members of the band around to grab that bag and throw it into the nearest Dutch canal sends her on her own compelling journey of reckoning.  Of course, having a woman’s touch — even that of the coked up, gimp-legged, bitter-as-horseradish variety — was essential to facilitate emotions from the dudes that they would never have experienced if left to their own, all- male devices.

Speaking of which, why did you choose to set the book in Amsterdam?

Originally, I thought that Amsterdam was a good setting because it mirrored the dynamics of rock band life — known for its sinful, libertine ways, but in its heart very buttoned up and, in terms of manners and social graces, surprisingly conservative. But by the time I realized what a dumb simplification that was, I was already knee-deep in the draft, so it never changed. In the end, I think I set it there because Amsterdam is very pretty, and if I’m going to spend two years in the same creative place, I’d prefer it to be pretty.

What were the challenges you faced by setting the novel over the course of a single day?

When you have less than twenty- four hours, a story line can easily become contrived and full of expedient moments. I didn’t want the changes the characters went through to come cheap; so, certainly, creating an organic plot was difficult. Also, with such a tight time frame, the structure of the story seemed to either completely work or fall fl at on its narrative ass. When you’re telling a story that has weeks, or even days, of present action, you can move stuff around. With only one day, if you change the time that one character gets to one place, everything else has to shift. So revising was a bit scary. But when I was in Amsterdam I walked the routes of all the characters to make sure I wasn’t creating any physical or temporal impossibilities, so that matter was pretty nailed down. That said, it took a while to get the sequence of events to work in a believable manner, but when I did I had one very tight story.

A while? How long did Rock Bottom take to write?

About ten months to draft and a year to revise. And revise. And revise. I’d written two, uh, “practice novels” already — just saying it makes my hands ache — so I had a pretty good understanding of what it feels like when you’re on the right track and, even more important, what it feels like when you’re on the wrong one.  There is no greater gift to a writer than the sixth sense that what you’re working on is genuinely bad. Of course, if I hadn’t written that other stuff, I would have never been able to write something pretty decent. Or at least that’s what I tell myself to stop from crying.

Any writing advice you’d care to share?

I read an interview with Peter Carey, whose work is a genuine treasure of narrative artistry and fl at- out prose chops, in which he basically said that writing is a last- person- standing enterprise.  If you do it long enough with some amount of regularity, you will probably produce something good that gets published. I think that’s true, because if you stay at it for five, ten, fifteen years, you probably don’t suck at it. And also, improvement is exponential in this line of work, which, because it’s such a lonely endeavor, is a truth that is quite satisfying. The drafting I’m doing on the new novel is still pretty rough, but not anything like the crud I used to turn out. I don’t have to drag the dream into existence as much anymore.

Care to share what you’re working on?

I’m writing a novel set at the crossroads of Regency and Victorian England — the late 1820s — involving some of the characters and incidents from Jane Eyre and set at Thornfield Hall, but existing in a completely different narrative context with a whole new cast of strivers, connivers, grotesques, and romantics. I am trying to combine the dark fairy-tale fabulism of Angela Carter with the plot driven, hard- boiled push- and- shove of James Ellroy, all the while keeping in mind British class dynamics to create, as Ellroy called it, a reckless verisimilitude. The beauty of a story like this is connecting the desires and motivations of all the characters — from the lowest scullery maid to Rochester himself — while keeping the plot organic and fluid. It’s a large undertaking, but I like a challenge. If I go down in flames, at least it’ll be in a blaze of glory.