1 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 First I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed, then about the murders which happened later. 2 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The robbery is the more important part since it served to set my and my sisters lives on the 3 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 courses they eventually followed, nothing would make complete sense without that being told first. 4 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Our parents were the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank, they weren't strange people, 5 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 not obviously criminals, no-one would have thought they were destined to end up the way they did. 6 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 They were just regular, although, of course, that kind of thinking became null and void 7 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 the moment they did rob a bank. 8 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I always have liked beginnings that were grabbers, I always liked beginnings that would, you know, 9 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 throw down the gauntlet for the reader. The only problem with a beginning like that is that 10 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 then you've got to have a second act, and sometimes if you don't have a second act, 11 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 if you can't follow up a really good beginning like that with something equally gripping then you might as 12 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 well not have it, because you've just basically created a trap for yourself and sprung it so, 13 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 no I just um, I always, I think when I wrote it I knew it was OK. 14 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I thought it was just a sort of typical old fashioned narrative hook, and, you know, 15 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 you're going to have a murder down the line here, you're gonna have a bank being robbed 16 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 by my parents, so I thought it was good. 17 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It's an American family of 4 people, 2 children, twin boy/girl, mother/father, and the father has been 18 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in the air force since World War II, and the book takes place in 1960. 19 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Eventually after staying in the air force, he gets out of the air force, and then doesn't really 20 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 know what to do with himself, he's been in the military his whole life, and they live in a little town in 21 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Great Falls Montana, where none of them have ever lived before, and he just happened to be stationed 22 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 there in the air force. 23 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And he hatches upon a scheme to sell stolen beef to the railroad, to sell to the dining cart customers on the railroad. 24 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And he very quickly runs amiss and runs afoul of the Indians who he basically goes into business with to 25 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 kill the beef and deliver it to him, and he finds that he owes them $2,000, which is in 1960 26 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 a considerable sum of money, for half a beef that is somehow or other gone rancid before they can sell it. 27 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And so in a fit of sort of chaotic lunacy rather than just leaving town in the middle of the night, or 28 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 borrowing the money, because he had no contacts in the town, no collateral, he didn't own anything, 29 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 he determines he will rob a bank and get the money that way. 30 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And that sets in motion, the book actually. 31 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And what happens to him and his wife, who is his colleague in this bank robbery, is that they 32 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 are immediately caught, and once they are immediately caught, then the children are left alone, 33 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and the children fend for themselves. 34 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I mean I invented that, so I don't really know what relation it bears to most peoples normal thinking. 35 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I did discover when I was trying to make plausible to myself the idea that 2 people who didn't 36 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 have to rob a bank would rob a bank, that anybody who robs a bank who's not already a hardened, 37 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 criminal, who's not John Dillenger or Pretty Boy Floyd, anybody who's a normal person who robs a bank 38 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 is crazy because they're going to get caught immediately, so all manner of assumptions about 39 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 how you do it and how you get away with it and what happens to you afterwards, are complete lunacy, 40 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 because none of those things is going to be true, because as Dell says, without wanting to 41 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 quote my own book as though Dell was a creature I didn't write, but he says when you think you're 42 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 going to get away with robbing a bank you forget one thing and that is that you're the only 43 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 person in town who's robbed a bank, and so you're going to stand out no matter what. 44 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Somehow or another you're not going to be, you've given up your hold on normal, yeah. 45 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 For some reason or other that was very vivid to me that you will have the discretion of all of your 46 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 normal life up to a point, and I think Dell describes as being on a boat that's getting farther and 47 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 farther away from shore, or you're in a lighter than air balloon that rises higher and higher very quickly 48 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 away from the surface of the earth. For a long time you could just let go and be there, 49 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 or for a long time you could just swim back to shore and be safe, but all at once, imperceptibly, you can't anymore, 50 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and then your life is totally not a life you ever understood. 51 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 In the first book, I was just thinking about this, in the first book I ever wrote there was an image which 52 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I just collected out of the culture about putting a frog into a pan of water at room temperature, 53 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and little by little by little by little heating the water up and the frog sitting there perfectly fine 54 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 when all of a sudden he's not perfectly fine and all of a sudden he's no longer viable, 55 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and that's, there's something about that odd change from what is totally normal to what is totally 56 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 abhorrent and felonious, it appeals to me, maybe that's just one of the strange perversity involved in 57 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 being a novelist I don't know. I don't know. You know Thoreau says that a writer is a man 58 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 who having nothing to do finds something to do. 59 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I think it's all about being loved, I mean as a child I was loved, and one of the things my wife 60 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 always says to me, she says you know I grew up in a household of divorce and she says love was always 61 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 conditional, she says, in regarding me, she says with you love is unconditional because I love her 62 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 unconditionally, and that's because I just think that's the way life should be, and I'm far from perfect, 63 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but on that one issue I do understand that to create a sense of reliable normality that the person who 64 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 loves you loves you, and will always love you, is your due in life. 65 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And again I'm speculating about a book I wrote, OK?, so there's a certain fortuity to that, 66 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but I think that's because those two children, Dell and his sister, were loved as children, 67 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that they were most impressionably persuaded that normal was normal, that life had its normal 68 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 parameters around it, and that no amount of eccentricity and no amount of shocking behaviour by 69 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 their parents quite disturbed that sense of normal so that they were pitched off, at least in Dell's case, 70 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 his sister may be differently, so that they were pitched off into the chaos that no normalcy would describe. 71 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I always say that if the devil always was in your life wearing a read suit, with a tail and horns, 72 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 you wouldn't get anywhere close to him. 73 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But the fact of the matter is the devil often comes with certain appeals, it's also true just in dramatic 74 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 terms, that drama is interesting when the villain says something that's true. 75 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So to create a persuasive villain, to create somebody who has the power that evil must have, 76 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 because if evil was just dispensable none of us would run afoul of it, but to create a character who has a 77 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 sort of tempting evil to him he has to be able to make sense, he has to be able to have affection, 78 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 he can't just be the antithesis of all that is good, he has to be tinctured by something that's appealing. 79 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Maybe none of us is a character at all, I mean I don't believe in character anyway, I don't believe 80 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that any of us has a sort of a kernel, hard, essential core, that we are basically as human beings, 81 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and certainly as literary creations, we are a combination of imputed memory, wishes in will, fears, 82 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 desires, all kinds of things that just kind of get laid on, laid on, laid on, and laid on, and that because 83 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that is a such a vertiginous kind of human condition, we ascribe to people to have cores, 84 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 to make that vertiginous seem less scary, so Dell is that way, but one of the things he does to establish 85 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 his own sense of persuasiveness to himself is that he tells this story, and his ability to intercalate 86 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 good with bad, violent with normal, love with not love, is a measure of his gaining dominion over it, 87 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 into the extent that he can gain dominion over it then he once more performs an act which would conclude that he has a character. 88 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And I think we don't. It's a kind of, it's not an heretical idea, it may be a slightly nihilistic idea. 89 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Growing up in the south was lucky in one way because I grew up down the street from Udor Welthy 90 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and not far from Wayne Falkoner, and the idea that being a writer was a possibility, was ingrained in everybody, 91 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 writing literature was just in the air in Mississippi. 92 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 That was probably the only good thing about Mississippi, and everything else was bigoted and 93 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 racially tense, and unfair, and absurd, and it made most of us who were white kids growing up in 94 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Mississippi kind of absurd creatures, 95 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So what I wanted to do to escape that sense of burden, a burden visited on me simply by the 96 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 accident of my birth, was to get away. 97 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And one of the things I found out when I got away was that the south had been perpetrating a great 98 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 lie upon me, many lies actually. 99 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 One big lie was that the south was unique, that the south was in fact a very special place 100 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in the middle of an otherwise nondescript land country which was America. 101 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And what I found was that America was equally interesting irrespective of where you went, 102 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and that the values, if you had particularly good values, which is to say that you didn't wish to harm 103 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 other people, you didn't want to be prejudiced against other races, that you wanted to treat people 104 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 equally, that those kinds of morays and values worked everywhere, that the language in America 105 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 was English, that the currency was the dollar, that the President was the President, 106 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So America was a much more, for me, approachable, and I won't say it was homogenous because it 107 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 really isn't homogeneous at least not superficially, but America was a much more approachable, 108 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 knowable place, even for a southerner than I had been led to believe it was. 109 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 You know, you sort of think southerners only know the south, southern writers only write about the 110 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 south, southern writers only write for other southerners, what southern writers know only 111 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 other southerners can know, all baloney, it's all bullshit, complete bullshit, so I just decided to 112 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 dedicate my life to proving that that was bullshit. 113 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It was worth doing because those preoccupations and those presumptions and those lies were very 114 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 confining, intellectually confining, morally confining, spatially confining, all those things you don't really 115 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 need in a country as vast as ours. You want to go, you want to see. 116 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Canada is hugely appealing to me for a lot of reasons, one is I always feel better when I go there, 117 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I'm not quite sure why, I feel restored, I feel I'm in a more tolerant place. 118 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 There's also something about Canada which is mysterious, and that is that it is retinally 119 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 similar to America, but that once you pass across the 49th parallel and into Canada you realise 120 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that you are in a totally different place from where you were before. 121 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And that combination of retinal similarity and profound difference is to me mystifying and interesting, 122 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I can't explain it, this book is not about explaining that but it is about putting that fact 123 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in play and seeing what can be said on the strength of that peculiar kind of nexus. 124 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Similarity encased in mystery, mystery encased in similarity. 125 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 You don't need a book to go out there and feel what it feels like, and smell the surf. 126 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I just appropriate the language of the place and from the language of the place, which is chiefly what 127 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I'm interested in, I kind of use, I sort of co-opt the reader to in his or her mind eye envision the place, 128 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 where these words are appropriate, so saskatchewan. I would want to write about 129 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 saskatchewan only so that I could put the word saskatchewan on the page as many times as possible. 130 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Because I think that's exciting, but when I put it on the page then that gives me an opportunity to 131 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 use other language to create descriptions and create word pictures which will help make more plausible 132 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 what the characters are doing in the foreground. 133 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So it's a kind of a, you know one thing, on the one hand it's just language, it's just words, 134 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 on the other hand, once you have the words well you might as well describe what those words mean to 135 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 most people's experience, and you do that again so you can make what the characters do be plausible. 136 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And chiefly I think for me the language is pleasurable to the reader. I mean a reader finds it pleasurable 137 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 to read a description and think she or he can identify that out of life. 138 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But they also take pleasure in the fact of seeing that it's made of all of these words which can be put 139 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 together in such a felicitous way as to become almost but not quite visible. 140 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 So the complexity of that kind of dual medium experience is very pleasurable for a reader, 141 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and it's something that we all as people who live on the earth are better if we know, we're better if 142 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 we know, we're better if we know that we look out a window and we see the surf but we also see the 143 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 window, we also see the droplets on the window. 144 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It's in an attempt to make lived experience be more valuable, to be more morally good, and to be alert to it. 145 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I have changed as a reader because when I was young I didn't know what I was reading, 146 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was just reading books that I was taking on faith, that people said were great books, such as 147 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 'Absolum Absolum', for instance, I just dived into books like diving into the surf, and whatever 148 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 stuck to me stuck to me, without my sense of knowing necessarily what that good stuff would be. 149 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Now I think I'm much more discerning as a reader, so that I know what the good stuff is when it's 150 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 happening to me, but I couldn't have done that without that act of faith which is to dive in without a clue,