GALO: Can you go into more detail about the stranger?

BE: Sure. The kind of genesis story for the book was in 2001 or 2002. The so-called beltway sniper was still on the loose in the Washington DC suburbs, and there were several months before the sniper or snipers as it turned out was caught. No one had any idea who it was and police all over the eastern seaboard were waiting for him or her to strike again. At one of the crime scenes in the parking lot of a Home Depot (or something like that), somewhere in suburban DC, the press leaked [that] a note had been found. Nothing about the content of the note was made public except for one fact which was that it had been signed: God. What struck me at the time, both funny and mysterious, was that no one (neither the police who were interviewed in the story I read nor any of the media who reported on it) seemed at all willing to consider the possibility that in fact it really was God. This wasn’t a deluded person signing the note ‘God’ but in fact God had been so reduced and degraded by the events of the twentieth century that he (in my imagination, it was a ‘he’) was reduced to taking pot shots at commuters and suburbanites in Home Depot parking lots. I thought that idea was hilarious. It was the only way that God could exercise any power, or get people to pay attention, through these relatively petty acts of violence and cruelty.

I wrote the idea down in a notebook somewhere as one of those ideas that might make a funny short story, and it was one of the ideas that grew cold but then eventually became a short story, then became a novella, [and] then it became a novel.

But at the core of it was always the character who I just named “the stranger.” Who was in fact, and you figure this out I think a few chapters into the book, God who had somehow been demoted or had lost his grip on power and was no longer able to command. And certainly not create, but was desperate to get his power back, and only able to do so through these small scale acts of violence, which always in the book end up as a backfire.

GALO: I am fascinated by the landscapes you create. It feels to me the settings may have lost their soul. How important are these metaphors?

BE: Well, I live in southern California, and it felt like perhaps a slightly more advanced version of the landscape most of us live in in the U.S. In it there are cities, there is a city which most of the action happens at the edge of, [and] then there are these kinds of crumbling suburbs where everything is falling apart and possibility of movement through these landscapes without a car is very limited. There are giant parking lots and fences, and all the things that divide the earth and this country we live in. The only thing that’s really working anywhere is the surveillance cameras. Everything else is kind of falling apart.

GALO: Who is watching?

BE: Ah, that’s the question. Is anyone watching? I can’t answer that. It’s a question at least one of the characters is moved to ask as well. And, you know, those cameras for me both meant an exaggeration of the surveillance state that we live in. They also work on a certain metaphorical level because the book is about God, and so they’re also about dealing with the belief that someone is watching and not being quite sure who is behind those eyes, or if they are just layers of your own self which are watching each other.

GALO: I could see the wounded hummingbird that the deaf mute woman in Ether attempts to save as a symbol of beauty and nature trampled by our society.

BE: Sure, it could be. You know, whatever I do, I can’t help [it], but there are always dead or dying birds in my work and I don’t plan on this. In The Suitors, there are a number of birds that die a horrible death and in short stories I’ve written, dead birds keep popping up. I don’t plan to put them in there, I don’t have any conscious bird symbolism, but the dead birds seem to follow me.

A couple of years ago, I put out a humming bird feeder, which is just a container you fill with sugar water and the humming birds are attracted to it. I put one out by my kitchen window. They’ll sit there hovering over the feeder, three feet from my face, as I’m washing the dishes. That’s one of the best things about living in Los Angeles.

GALO: At the Fora TV site I watched you read a chapter from your first novel, The Suitors. In this chapter you invent a line of story then toss it off and invent another and another. Do you enjoy turning standard writing conventions upside down?

BE: Yeah, I mean in that book, I think more than in Ether, I was really interested in a kind of purposeful disruption of narrative expectation. I tried to tell that story in different voices — in almost every chapter the voice changes quite dramatically. I was interested in preventing a certain kind of narrative stasis from taking hold; in being disruptive but not just for the hell of it. I think I wanted to deprive, forestall the possibility of a certain kind of pleasure in reading that we’re accustomed to taking. I was hoping to try and create a pretty different experience of reading.

GALO: What are some of your particularly inspiring influences that you draw on?

BE: I teach writing now and it’s hard for any student to come out of my classes without reading some [Samuel] Beckett and some [Franz] Kafka and probably some Bruno Schultz as well.  They’re big ones that I find myself going back to again and again. I think in my own writing, a couple writers have been really transformative for me, certainly Kathy Acker. I think the first time I read any of her work was in the mid-90s. It just really blew me away as to how much more a novel could be than we generally expect it. The novel as a form was not this closed book. All of the ingredients that we tend to imagine add up to this marketable form called a novel, could be exploded completely and recombined.

Another writer that I kind of think drummed in the same kind of lesson was the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, who also just blew up for me the possibilities of what a novel could be. And in his case, I think he really broke down the distinctions between a certain kind of political writing in the confines of what we think of as literary fiction. He’s not very well known [in the USA] City Lights publishes him here. He’s quite well known in Spain. He went into self-imposed exile during the Franco years to Morocco and still lives in Marrakesh.

And there’s somebody who’s alive now [and] a good friend — the poet and novelist Sesshu Foster. We see each other quite often and I think, not just for me but for a lot of writers in Los Angeles, he’s been important in shaping the way it’s possible to think about the relationship between a writer and the community he or she lives in. I think it’s very easy in this society to think of a writer as some sort of buoy floating out there in the marketplace producing these items, these products called books every few years which you can go out to the store and buy. He has a very different notion of that relationship, one in which a writer is actually grounded in a place and relates to the history of the place and the community as it exists in that place, and takes part in that life in a more active, engaged way.

(Article continued on next page)