Three audio interviews are here:
Travis Macy Podcast – “The Feed” – Episode 74
Enormocast 241: Jonathan Howland – The Weight (80 min.)
Interview with Blake Pfeil / WKNY: The Pfeil File (starts at 17:30 - 42)
The following interview was conducted in December 2021 as Native Air was going to press.
Amanda Moore Hi, I'm Amanda Moore, and I'm sitting here with Jonathan Howland, author of Native Air. Hi, Jonathan.
JH Hi Amanda. I'm Jonathan Howland, and I'm sitting here with Amanda Moore, author of Requeening, a book of poems. It was just published this fall, and it's captivating, clever, and moving. It’s magnificent.
…
AM Before we get into your novel, I want to talk about you as a writer, to get to know you on that level. What are your origins as a writer? What drives you to write?
JH Well, it doesn't come from education, or at least not early education. I went to really mediocre schools in Southern California from preschool to 10th grade. And I honestly didn't read a book other than maybe one or two that my mother foisted upon me, and some John Muir I got from my grandfather. Certainly nothing school-related—I didn't have to because they weren't assigned until I went away to a private school in 11th grade. But I did grow up in a family where my parents loved language and took audible delight in one another's turns of phrases. I sort of marinated in that as a kid. And the other is that my dad was a minister, and so "the word," as it were, or his words, were somewhat elevated, generating a sense of meaning around matters of stature.
AM Your dad was a minister—does that mean that you read or were familiar with the stories and language of the Bible?
JH We didn't read a lot of the Bible, either in church or out of church. But the power of story certainly registered with me, and in my later teens I read the Bible out of a sense of curiosity and a little bit of duty and maybe piety as well. My mother is the truly literary person in the family. A huge reader. She was a junior college English teacher for 30 years and just has no patience at all for pulp or cant or anything that's conventional or popular. A modest person but a high brow intellect. My dad was not that way, at least in the time I knew him. He read the newspaper and Time magazine, and he was kind of a depressive. But he really did appreciate fresh language. Which became a way for me as a kid to kind of connect with him. I would try to get him to laugh, and I remember I used to send him papers from school or college and write letters in ways that were something more than newsy and prosaic. Some of my earliest and best practice as a fiction writer was in letters I wrote to my parents from New England. I say this with some chagrin because I was buffing the life I was having, making it more appealing and poetic rather than anxious, scared, and/or depressed.
AM When did you turn more definitively toward fiction writing?
JH I've been trying to write fiction since I was a teenager, mostly fitfully. But I had whatever it was: the impulse. I enjoyed the challenge and the activity. I think where it comes from has more to do with my reading than anything else. Just having so many kinds of fulfilling experiences as a reader made me want to play that game.
I started my first job 5 days after finishing college—as a history teacher at Putney School in Vermont. After four years there I went to grad school—with spouse and 9 month old Emily—for American Studies at the University of Michigan. There I just took all English classes and kind of did the full professional reorientation to literature from history and to creative writing and narrative writing from...I don't know...academic exposition and analysis. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but felt I was shifting to matters more intimate and, to me, momentous. Trading the study of people to the study of a person, or persons, I found something that felt to me more—I don't know—spiritual, ethical, emotional, profound.
I wrote fiction in grad school, even got a “Hopwood Award” from Michigan for a short story. But as a student I felt at sea, and I was both too arrogant and too poor to consider transitioning from American Studies to literary studies or to an MFA program.
So I came here, to San Francisco, in 1988 to take a job in the English department at Urban School. I loved it. I felt, wow, finally things were aligned: my interests and my duties. And since 1988, honestly, I've been an on the wagon and off the wagon fiction writer. I wrote a novel in the mid-90s, shopped it around, couldn't get an agent, and obviously didn’t get a publisher. I've also written 15 to 20 pieces of short fiction, including four in the past several years. Eight of these I'm assembling into a second book.
I've made peace at various times with not writing, and these have been some of the happier or at least more content times in my adult life. Being on the wagon as a writer—not writing—hasn't always been a bad, nagging thing. But sometime around 2013, I started feeling this stirring around what became Native Air, and on a rest day from a weeklong climbing trip in June 2013 I went into a coffee shop in Mammoth and wrote out a bunch of notes. I’d been cooking on this for a while because they were more or less pretty coherent. Then, in December of that year, my good friend and climbing partner Bill Beckwith died in a motorcycle crash, and it was just…. [pauses]. Another climbing partner called me that morning, and it was…it was tidal, a grief I hadn't felt before. I had felt grief before, of course, but this felt so out of the blue, immediate, sad, and pointless.
The notes I had taken earlier in 2013 positioned things from Pete's point of view. They actually started with him in an airplane over Colorado juxtaposing what he was seeing of the Rockies from 30,000 feet and what he knew of the Sierra from three feet, sort of old mountains versus new mountains, that kind of thing. It had a really different flavor from what I’ve got now. Joe's voice kind of got birthed out of the feelings I had for Bill, and in June of 2014, I started writing again, including the letter from Will that opens the book.
AM Deep intimacies infuse the relationships in the novel, so it makes sense to me that your personal grief for Bill birthed Joe as the narrator. Since there is also intimacy between the characters and the mountains they climb, particularly the Sierra, and since you were on a climbing trip when the first stirrings came about, I want to ask you about your climbing life. What are your origins as a climber, and how does your climbing life relate to your writing life?
JH I took to the outdoors as a kid. We lived in Goleta, near Santa Barbara, which is this Mediterranean paradise—at least that's how I experienced it, though I see it quite differently now. We moved when I was 12 years old to Los Angeles, which was this suburban nightmare in this brand new suburb in East L.A. County that had been dairy farms. So it really stank, too. And I just wanted out of there. My friends weren't there and the schools felt strange to me, but there were all these great things about it, too. It's far more culturally diverse than the Santa Barbara area, and surrounded by higher mountains and vast deserts. But I just wanted out of there.
My mother put it together that my pediatrician, Frank Riseley, was also the leader of an Explorer Post with a mountaineering focus. So I basically went out with these older teenagers and young adults on mountaineering trips to the Sierra. They were peak baggers—eager to touch the tops of the thirteen thousand, fourteen thousand foot peaks. But there was this subgroup of them who were into rock climbing. And in the fall of 1974, I went to Joshua Tree with those guys, and that's where I first discovered technical climbing. I took to it right away—it just spoke to something in me, the exposure, the movement, the cerebral aspects of it. All the complications of making something really dangerous somewhat safe. The combination of aesthetics and ascetics. I climbed a fair amount through high school and into college and actually went to Dartmouth because it had a somewhat legit climbing culture and good access to some great cliffs.
In 1981, I spent the fall of my junior year in Yosemite and had a bracingly disillusioning season. I sort of arranged my whole academic schedule and my time at Dartmouth to train and practice and do things in New England that would support this trip. I had three months, I spent a big chunk of it in Yosemite Valley, and it was really awful. Lots of reasons, but probably sort of late adolescence depressive syndrome above all. And then I pretty much quit, I didn't climb at all from 1981 until 2000 apart from a few solos on Sierra peaks. I threw myself into my work, having a family—two kids, marriages—getting my feet under me. I found other athletics, as well. I was really into distance running and racing. I played squash and basketball.
My main Dartmouth climbing partner, David Goldstein, joined the Navy after college, of all things, and then came out of the service and was working for IBM in Boulder, Colorado, and was just super-committed to his climbing. Somehow in 2000, we reconnected via email and decided to meet up at Joshua Tree. I had started to feel the bug again on a couple of recent backpacking trips in the Sierra on peaks that were third and fourth class, where I didn't need gear or protection. Again, really getting it that the exposure was something that appealed to me. And then when I got hooked up with Dave again it was, Whoa, here we go.
Climbing really changed between 1981 and 2000—it got way bigger. Sport climbing came around, which both opened up vast territory by rendering crack-less cliffs protectable (by bolts), and altering or at least adjusting the ethics in favor of really pushing yourself. I was steeped in the “never fall” ethic; sport-climbers fall all the time. And then there were these things called climbing gyms, which I had never heard of or seen. So anyway, since my reintroduction 20+ years ago I've just been climbing a lot, and in the last two years, since I quit my job, twice as much as any other time in my life, literally. It's been 50 days on rock in each of 2020 and 2021. My previous high water mark was twenty-seven.
AM Oh wow. So this on-again, off-again life is both writing and climbing. Are the two related, then, and if so, how?
JH Well, I should wear a helmet while writing (laughs). Actually, I shoud wear a helmet while climbing, at least more often than I’m inclined. Yeah, they're definitely related. I feel a similar kind of exposure as a writer. You know, you're out there at the end of that notion, that feeling, and then the phrase and maybe sentence, and it's not clear whether you're going to tumble or whether you're going to be able to make this move, as it were, much less finish this pitch. So to me there's a lot about the somatic experience of the process that's related, for sure. And then so much of it is about form, it's about what happens in the process of what you're working on; it's not about finishing it. Summiting isn't the point. The point is to do it deftly and well. Stop me. I could talk about this too much. Suffice it to say writing and climbing are the two hardest things I've tried to do. And yeah, that's why they appeal to me. I don't think I can ever really succeed at either, apart from highly discrete circumstances and with lots of qualifications.
AM Yes, or if you change what success looks like. As you say, summiting isn't really the point, and certainly in the novel the summit isn’t the goal…or if it's generally the goal, it's not the crux. Let's talk more about your book, because I'm really interested in the characters and the character development, the construction of your characters and what their perspectives and experiences represent. They are climbers, of course, and I'm not a climber, but I found them so deeply relatable. In some ways this is a climbing book, but this is really a book about these men and their relationship with one another. So maybe you can talk a little bit about how Joe and Pete came to be and who they are. Are they foils for one another, two halves of a whole? What does their separateness and togetherness offer you?
JH The way they came to be… honestly, there’s an idealized relationship here. An awesome friendship. I think it's the friendship that I've always longed for with another man, and in some ways I do have it with a couple of men where we're just completely honest with one another. But my friends and I have never needed each other the way Joe and Pete needed each other because of the ways thing play out in a climbing partnership. Joe is really the only one who “works” for Pete, and Pete knows that. And Joe wants out of it. It's not enough for Joe, or Joe needs to try some other possibilities, some other ways of being, before surrendering to this one. I think I tried to construct Joe and Pete out of a tangling of love and need, beginning with the looming vacancy triggered by Joe leaving and then definitively not-completed by Pete dying.
AM It's interesting that you say that they're honest with one another, because as a reader, very often I was frustrated that they weren't more forthcoming with one another. They might be honest, but so much of what they have is unspoken between them. That idea of honesty, it's a really relative term.
JH Yeah. And maybe honesty is overstated, although I love disaggregating honesty from forthcomingness because clearly there's a ton of unspoken stuff between them. The other thing is, and this is true—I mean, it's real: they get each other. Let's put it that way. You know, when when Pete says about Joe, when they're talking to Lester and Bill around a campfire and Pete's gassing on about climbing history and this and that and and then Lester, sort of poking fun at Pete says, “You know, was it good, you know, or is it good?” Of course they're playing with Biblical references—He made the rock and created all these people, and is it a good thing. Well, “Pete says, I don't know, I just do the verse, Joe handles the commentary.” And I thought that that's kind of like an instance where they get each other deeply—Pete copping to fully embracing the moment and marking Joe as the more provisional one, keeping a foot out of ring in order to make sense of things.
Now, back to forthcomingness and honesty.
AM Yes, you said you had always longed for that sort of an honest relationship. But in the novel the honesty isn’t always shared—I mean, Joe certainly is honest with himself about his desires, but he's not forthcoming about leaving.
JH No, there's a scheming around the edges because they can't both have what they want from the other; Pete can't have what he wants from Joe, and Joe isn’t yet aware he can’t have what he wants period. So Joe ends up feeling not just grief, but guilt. And it's a ridiculous kind of guilt, but it's a nagging sense of responsibility, if only because by definition it’s the absence of a partner that causes Pete's death. And in some ways this absence also causes a strain in Pete’s marriage to Nor. Nor says she gets mad—or used to get mad—at Joe whenever Pete was on her case about not being up for climbing. And Joe kind of knows that. To compound it all, I think Joe's attempts to domesticate and ritualize the experiences of exposure and meaning-making that he actually did experience with Pete deeply hurt Pete. The attempts don't work, and I think that compounds his feelings of both grief and responsibility.
AM So that meaning-making that you're talking about, is that what leads Joe to ministry?
JH Yeah.
AM For whatever reason, maybe my own suspicious relationship to religion, I found it to be such a surprise right from the very beginning to introduce Joe as a religious character. In some way I suspect Will also feels the strangeness of it as he struggles to know how to even address Joe in the letter: “Reverend? Rev. Holland? Rev. Joe?”
JH There are lots of ministers in my family. I grew up in the church and am drawing on all kinds of familiar impulses, frames of reference, and even tone at times with Joe. But I also think that what I'm trying to evoke in Joe and in his relationship to faith is what I believe. Or what, for me, faith is and my attempts at faith have been about, which is to...kind of....get close to whatever it is, the precipice, the void, the sources…to tap the sources but not have or achieve the somatic experience of that. Which, you know, is a very heady life. My understanding, my experience of faith, has been a heady thing that didn't and doesn't work for me.
AM That makes sense, I think. Joe's not an evangelist. His ministry is actually…
JH …that’s one reason his church fails
AM Right. There's no overt religious discussion with Pete. Joe's not trying to convert or take Pete with him. And in fact, I frequently forgot over the course of the climbing section that this ministry is where Joe's soul and heart and mind were turned. I think that has to do with this sense of, as you say, “meaning making,” and also self-perception and selfishness. I don’t mean selfishness as in a withholding or coveting sense, but rather this focus on the self and what he wants for himself, no matter what people want from him.
JH I think it comes down to exposure and proximity to what I would call sources. I'm going to read a little section. Joe says, "In the ensuing years, I moved further in his direction than he did in mine"—he's talking about Pete—"but I never believed this could go on forever." He's talking about their partnership "nor ever wanted it to. Even during stretches of relative reciprocity, I felt his version of nothing"—Pete claims he wants “nothing”—"demanded an awful lot of me. I maintained a by now, grossly malnourished idea of myself as someone who could be of service and not solely to Pete, but to a range of people who themselves sought more in life by way of purpose and meaning, if not profundity. And yes, I trusted there was something I saw and even got out of climbing that could be rendered accessible in more domesticated forms.”
AM Which really points the way to where Joe ends up after his church fails.
JH Exactly. He's a nurse, and I think, you know, he says at one point, that's maybe what I've been all along. He says this when he's up on the cliff with Will, and he realizes they're not going to succeed on the route. He says, you know, I'm going to throw myself into nursing. Maybe it's the one thing I'm good at.
AM And it’s worth noting that Pete is not without his own philosophical quandaries. He's thinking of…what is it… eschatology? I’m interested in where that comes from, Pete’s philosophy. He's one of the early believers in climate change, really, or the first Joe encounters. So Joe isn’t the only one thinking of purpose and sources and the larger importance.
JH Yeah, but Pete’s is more earth-bound and earth-based. In some ways it’s more profoundly sad because he realizes he's a little preoccupied with the temporariness of things, or at least maybe just accepting of the temporariness of things, while Joe's got the “ultimates” obsession. But I also think Pete, at least as a younger person, is happier and more accepting of himself, and more accepting of Joe than vice versa. In any case, anybody cognizant of human impacts on the Earth since the 1970s and 80s, like Pete is—particularly someone who loves nature and loves the mountains and loves climbing the way Pete does—is going to experience some real sadness at the prospect that it's all changing very fast.
AM And is this why Pete doesn't want to place bolts?
JH Yes, but it’s also a matter of old school ethics. It’s inside climbing stuff, the “bolt wars.” I would have to talk too long about this to make sense of it, except to say that to many placing a bolt is an act of desecration. By now things have largely changed and Pete was part of the change. Sport climbing came into fashion in the 1990s, and Pete participated around the edges of sport climbing development. But sport routes are very concentrated around smaller areas, and the whole point of sport climbing has nothing to do with just getting to the top because it's... well, number one it's all free climbing, no aid involved. And, number two, you're not just putting ridiculous lines up big cliffs like Half Dome or El Capitan the way some threatened to do in the ‘60’s. You're just doing these single pitch things. Still, a purist would say that's a form of desecration too. These are fungible standards.
AM I’d love to hear a little about the language and how you constructed these climbing moments that are both alive with jargon and yet relatable and comprehensible to me. As I said, I'm not a climber, and even after reading this book and its beauty, I don't even want to be a climber, as much as I’m completely drawn in by it.
JH Lucky for you. Truly. At one point Joe analogizes climbing to a disease.
AM But I'm interested in the language because it's so precise and so specific to climbing, there is such attention to the rhythm and pacing, the music of it. The way you fit together expressions like “chickenwing, kneebar, and mantle….” I could scan parts as if they were poetry. How did you achieve the balance between the lyric and the technical language? Are there other audiences you were writing towards or for? How conscious of a reader like me were you when you were writing?
JH Well, first of all, thanks. It's so complimentary, everything you said. And so wonderfully expressive of…well, authorial intention is a big mystery, but you named some intentions I had. I was writing for you. I was writing for the language lover. When I started this, I absolutely had no illusions about publication and no certainty I would finish it. I had a big job (at Urban), and I wasn't sure that this novel would nourish me over the period it would take to write it.
And then it became this crazy obsession. It was weekends and vacations for three years. I could never work on it during the work week because I didn't have time and couldn't split my attention that way. But I would structure these periods, I called them “sessions,” into weekends and vacations and just punch things out, and then of course I thought about it a lot, which was great and stimulating in its own way.
None of this is answering your question, though. I think what I told myself early on was that—and this is going to sound ridiculous, but it's honest—Moby Dick is just saturated with stuff about whaling, and if you don't care about whaling, then you have plenty of reason not to appreciate or care about Moby Dick. Except: it's not about whaling. Those are just the frames of reference. The language is where he is working, Melville and his narrator, on all the analogous stuff to what the book is about, which in his case is, for the most part, epistemology. In my case it's more squarely around love and grief. At least that's how I feel about it. So I felt early on that there ought to be a climbing novel that’s not about climbing, and there ought to be people who would be patient enough with or even tickled by that whole world and all of its vocabulary and all its shenanigans and all of its ridiculous passions to wade through or put up with them to get to the passion and grief. I felt like I was taking permission there. I kind of told myself, “No one's going to read this damn thing anyway, and you probably won't finish it, so why not?”
AM I don't know how whalers received Melville, but certainly what's been interesting about your blurbs and early reviews from people like Bill Finnegan, who's been writing about surfing from that same technical, but not fictional, point of view, is how some people see this as "the book climbers have been waiting for.” I wonder if this is a flattening of all you are working toward in the novel. My sense is that more than a “climbing novel,” this is a work that is meant to be a literary feat that uses climbing for…
JH The worst-case scenario is that it's way too climbing-involved for readers of literary fiction, and too literary for climbers. The hope is that there's a well-populated overlap between climbers and readers of literary fiction. Bill Finnegan suggested as much. We had a great chuckle on the phone about this when he called me and said, “You know, there's like three surfers who read.” His point: climbers tend to be a pretty well-educated lot. A lot of physicists and doctors and engineers. One of my own good friend’s and climbing partner’s goal one year read a book a week. And he did it.
But what I really hope, of course, is to appeal to readers exactly like you and who describe what they appreciate about it the way you did, which has to do with being folded into this world but not in a claustrophobic way, but a sort of opening way, and then fundamentally expressing or evoking or exploring themes that are treated—I don't want to say “uniquely,”—but they're treated in this novel the way they're treated in other novels that have to do with love and grief and friendship and loss and storytelling. And searching.
AM One particularly satisfying element of the language is the naming of the climbing routes. You mentioned to me that you made up many of these routes’ locations and the names as well. What did that offer you in terms of the writing? And do you have any named routes from your own climbing?
JH I've never done a first ascent that has a name on it, anyway. Naming is just a fetish of climbers. It’s about appreciating the routes, but also having the opportunity for first ascension and getting to christen them. Sometimes people take almost no care with it, like "the Northeast Face Direct." Other times, people have a blast with it. It can be impish. It can be very serious. Sometimes they're named for the famous people involved in them, Chouinard-Herbert on The Sentinel in Yosemite, for example. But yeah, it's just part of that culture, the naming, and I had fun with it because roughly half the routes in the novel are made up. So, you know, “Light As" on Feather Peak is a pun, and "All Premise, No Proof" was a name that I enjoyed because it seems to reflect the kind of philosophical thing Joe and Pete would hammer out together, and then the ones Nor did with Pete are somewhat meaningful to me. "Just This" on Lone Pine Peak, for example, and then "Inventing the Difficulties," which is somewhat featured in a digression in Part Three of the novel, are Pete and Nor’s routes from the 90s. And then, of course, one of the driving elements in the book is whether Pete and Joe will ever get the "Hunter-Holland Route," akin to “Chouinard-Herbert” and "Steck-Salathé" and other iconic routes like that. It’s out there as a tease and a talisman, as it were.
AM I want to talk a little bit about the book’s time period. Because the first part happens in the 80s, which I learned from this conversation was a time where you weren't climbing. What do the 80s offer you that feels significant and necessary in that first part of the book?
JH Well, there's a number of things, but one of them, you know, the main thing, was just verisimilitude because it had to be situated in a way to me that that was not contrived, that it really registered with things as they were then. And there's a few things about the 80's relationship to climbing. One, which Pete invokes by way of a phrase, is the "The Post Golden Age Funk." There was this time in climbing, centered in Yosemite, and it was in the 60s and 70s, which was called the Golden Age. Climbers even now will refer to the Golden Age, and everybody knows what they're talking about. And that's when free climbing became "the thing" as opposed to summiting, which is just getting to the top by any means necessary, pounding Pitons into cracks, just spending days on cliffs. Warren Harding drilled a line of bolts up the Dawn Wall, which Tommy Caldwell frees almost 50 years later. And so Pete and Joe are kind of living out their climbing life in an interregnum after the Gold Rush, if you will. And to me, that both intensifies Pete's commitment, or at least further extolls Pete's commitment in that he recognizes how great something is that a lot of people think is kind of done. So that's one thing.
Another thing is that climbing hasn't become the mega thing in the 80s that it sort of is now. It's still a subculture. It hasn't been domesticated. There isn't a Patagonia catalogue, or it's barely started. Guiding isn't a big deal. When I was a kid, there were no climbing guides, and now they're everywhere. And of course there were no climbing gyms. There were a couple of glossies, but they were always going in and out of business. Climbing was in the shadows.
It made sense to me that Joe and Pete were in their 20s during this particular period. If they had been older it would have had a really different flavor as a novel. They would have been kind of unaccomplished during the Golden Age, or under-accomplished. And if it had been later then they would have been swept up in the sport climbing scene and with gyms in every major city. So there's this little sweet spot when the Eastern Sierra is still a little unknown, underappreciated and underexplored or unexplored.
AM It feels really remote, too. When you think about politically what was happening in the 80s or culturally. These “dirtbags,” as they call themselves, stand in contrast to the opulence that we associate with part of that decade, the sort of decadence…
JH …and materialism.
AM Yes, the materialism. There's a resistance to that, even just in the way they drive their cars. Everything is utilitarian the way they live.
JH Yeah, I think it's pretty deep climbing culture DNA that we're talking about here. I mean, you even see it in the now, even if it’s often taking the form of a very expensive Sprinter van. There is this kind of mobile culture of people going from climbing area to climbing area and not spending much money except on their gear.
AM Let's talk a little bit about time, particularly the way it expands and contracts in the novel, operating through layers upon layers of memory. One of my favorite moments of your writing is a long paragraph, that starts with the tap, tap, tapping on a rock face and then pulls way back to consider the roads in the valley and the people moving through the landscape….
JH I have it right here.
AM Will you read that?
JH "Then the tap tap tap of the hammer. I locked it off at the belay and unwrapped a peanut butter sandwich and wondered why I had told Nor about Pete soloing the first several hundred feet in the fall. I was pretty sure it wasn't just to explain why he danced through a section that stymied me. I'm not that small. I think it was a warning to the both of us about the risk of loving Pete. The sun swung behind the mountain, abandoning us to shade, but the valley was still bright. A broken ridge of iron-stained parapets on the north side. Broad swaths of white granite boulders below, and the patch of green where we were camped, nestled at the base of bees and the laurel lined cascades to the east for a several alpine streams intersect for a long, loud plunge to the Owens Valley and in the distance that valley or even morning temperatures would be climbing into the 90s and semi-trucks hauling up 395 from Long Beach to Reno and SoCal families in their vans and station wagons and campers just two hours now from Kinglake and Bodie in Yosemite. Schats would be a mess at this hour and the Highway Patrol raking in fines north of Bishop for a long stretch of open road beneath the vast Sierra that makes even 80 miles an hour feel like a crawl. Twice I caught sight of Nora in the meadow, once shuffling to the stream. Sometime later was sitting on the center of a large, flat boulder at the far edge, probably with the binoculars. Then Pete shouted tension, and with one hand I released the knot at my belay device and looked up. He hollered a plan to lower 30 or 40 feet and pendulum left. He added there wasn't anything obvious over there, but the cliff seemed more featured in that direction. It was a single quarter inch bolt he was lowering of standard for the day, but with two free hands, he managed to back it up with a sling wedged behind a dark pillar, some six or eight feet below. And then he started the route-finding,"
AM The scope of that lens! I mean, starting with that small "tap tap tap," then wandering through the complicated intimacies of a relationship, of many relationships, and then following the natural world to the Owens Valley, but also managing to get 395 and all of the people traveling through there before coming back through the meadow. This all feels like route-finding to me. There are so many moments in the novel where I feel the same thing happening with perspective and point of view, this ability to be present with the smallest and biggest thing at the same time. I can’t adequately describe how time unfolds in the novel, but it feels almost like an accordion, opening and closing. I found myself deep in a narrative of a memory realizing wait, this memory came out of another memory, and we're already in the past. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing with time and how it relates to memory?
JH Thank you. That's…again…super complimentary. When I read that passage, I think, Oh man, that's so redolent of being on a belay ledge for a long time. You have to figure out what to do with your attention, and it can be really dull. One of the epigraphs for the novel is from Faulkner: "Nothing ever happens once and is finished." I feel like that's an attitude I experience—which is to say the past is always present in some fashion.
There were two things that I wanted to accomplish with this—I like your analogy—this accordion-like narrative structure. One was to evoke that experience of the past bearing down and influencing and interrupting, both animating and punctuating the now. And the other is a strategy to enable Joe to introduce Will to his father. Several scenes in Parts Two and Three of the novel involve Joe telling Will a story that happened when Pete was alive and.
It's surprising to Joe that when he gets out to California with Will it isn't just the climbing that they're doing, but a friendship they're making. And it's this grief that they're going to be processing, and that each is experiencing very differently. For Joe, it is this “stab,” as he describes it. Pete’s death and the grief he felt was life-changing, and it destroyed his capacity to continue on as a minister with any kind of authenticity. He feels this absence.
Will's experience is much vaguer, if also powerful. It's not the absence of a presence; it's the presence of an absence. What Joe tries to offer him is maybe an opportunity to get some traction on that. I don't know if it works or not. It seems to work a little bit because at the end, particularly in the afterword, Will offers—or Joe offers about Will—that he's become more accepting of people saying he is his father's son and more accepting of what it is that he inherited from his father, rather than feeling like—he calls it "all that slop."
AM More accepting, but maybe not welcoming. There's something I really love about the lack of full transformation that the book might otherwise head toward—Will still full of doubt about his dad.
JH Yes.
AM That's appropriate, I feel.
JH I think so. It's part of what makes and keeps him safe, both as a climber and as a young man with a heart. Will hasn't gotten a real sugarcoated version of his parents' marriage; he hasn't been steeped in that or sold that. I think he kind of gets it that it was a struggle.
AM He gets it, but one of the things I love the most about Will as a presence is that whatever he eventually comes to believe or know or understand is all pretty much based on faith, at least in terms of his father. There's this storytelling, and Joe can trot out all of the escapades he wants, and Joe can even assure him that Pete's death was accidental, but there's no way for Will to ever know for sure. Whatever he comes to at the end is really of his own making, which is complicated. The book really reflects the emotional strain of wanting the stories, the knowledge, and also the inability for stories to ever fully reach the knowing, the real experience. As the book moves toward its end, I was feeling a lot of tension around what I wanted from the story and the way in which I also wanted the book to withhold that from me as a reflection of reality. These competing desires are ironic, particularly since one of the routes Joe and Will talk about is, or the one of the names they talk about giving the route is “The Witholder.” I wanted, I wanted to be satisfied and I wanted to be thwarted in that desire at the same time.
JH To me, you're zeroing in on the key, which is this business of entertaining a story that you can believe in. And that's been such a central struggle for Joe and for Will—Joe because he's been burned, and Will because he's savvy. Both, through grief, are really skeptical of the various stories that they've heard or inhabited. Part of that becomes the standard that Joe wants in the novel, the story he can believe in. I mean, they basically talk about this in the Afterword on the phone, but it's very clipped and it's clipped because they're both witholders (laughs).
AM: I’m eager…
JH: And I’m so grateful for your attention and your questions—you’ve prompted me to plumb the territory more directly and deliberately than I otherwise would have. Even more, I’m grateful for all that you see here. I found my reader—and so adjacent! I am complete.