Q&A with the Author
Personal & Narrative Origins
What first drew you to Soda Lake and the Carrizo Plain as a setting for this novel? Did a particular experience inspire the story?
The opening scene of the book is quite true. Some years ago I was on my way to see Painted Rock because good friends had talked about it many times. I knew nothing of Soda Lake until I suddenly saw it expanding in front of me, like a mirage, as I was driving south into Carrizo Plain. When I saw a right turn to a look-out point, I went up the hill and parked and, after a short walk, was gazing down upon the expanse of Soda Lake shimmering beneath the afternoon sun. Something unreal did happen... a car pulled over next to the lake, and a man got out wearing dark clothes and began running across the white salt lake until he disappeared into the haze and sunlight. The car took off... Concerned that the man might not survive crossing the lake, about eight miles wide at that point, I drove down and parked next to the lake and stepped into his footsteps. After about twenty yards, my feet were sinking too deeply into the black muck underneath the white salt crust, and I turned back.
Themes & Symbolism
Soda Lake becomes almost mythological, a site of disappearance and transformation. What does the lake symbolize for you?
I don't think Soda Lake becomes mythological until it is referred to several times in the last couple chapters--"Pont Authou" and "Achill Island." But the idea of "transformation" is profound, especially with the surprise ending inside the book's coda--"Soda Lake." Throughout the book, the actual Soda Lake had been the source of Being for all the characters except, of course, for McCuade.
The story is laced with themes of exile, identity, and displacement. How do these ideas relate to McCuade’s journey—and to yours?
It is the characters who deal with exile, identity, displacement. McCuade is rather indifferent to them-- "And He, not concerned about the multitude failing to find Him." McCuade is a sort of personal God for the book's primary narrator. And inside the myth of Soda Lake, McCuade is older than Yeshua and Yahweh. The quest for much of the book is to find McCuade, who may or may not be real. But McCuade is the key mantra in Soda Lake. In the penultimate chapter--"Pont Authou," the narrator finds, in a striking moment, that while he is moving into McCuade's memories and past, McCuade is moving into the narrator's memories and past, which is suspenseful and psychologically wild.
Structure & Style
The prose often shifts into poetic, almost prophetic language. How did you approach the stylistic variation within the novel? Why did you choose to fracture the narrative between personal memoir, philosophical musing, and dream-like sequences?
Oftentimes, in the process of my writing, I did not know where Soda Lake was going and trusted my subconscious to lead me. The result was that many times I felt like I was not so much writing Soda Lake as I was uncovering it. And when the characters--the Garage Wall Man, Father Fenton, Helena, Praxilla, Heraclitus, the lord trapped in his castle, and McCuade himself--speak or narrate I had to wonder--what language will they use and what will their voices sound like? Most of the time they took over their own stories and I was simply trying to catch up to them. However, the conscious goal was to contrive different styles of language and rhythm for each character, especially McCuade when he takes over the narration in the last chapter--"Achill Island." I was actually living on Achill Island in the west of Ireland for a one month solo residency at the Heinrich Boll Cottage when, after ten days of moiling, I realized that McCuade had to narrate, and I had to hear what he would sound like... What diction and tropes of language might this suigeneric man-god use?
Influences & Allusions
Heraclitus, Chumash iconography, Greek philosophers—your text is steeped in ancient thought. How do you see these elements functioning in the novel? There’s a rich interplay between geography and metaphysics. How did your travels—especially to Ireland and Greece—influence this book?
Even though I've been a Professor of Classical Greece (as well as British Romanticism) for 37 years, I've never actually been to Greece. However, in the spring of 2013 I had a sabbatical to go to Greece and do research in Sicyon, on the Gulf of Corinth, where the classical Greek female poet Praxilla had lived, and then on to Ephesus on the central coast of Turkey where the great presocratic philosopher Heraclitus had grown up.
"But McCuade got in the way." ... Because I had told the Garage Wall Man that I would go to Dungloe, Ireland to find McCuade for him. And at the last second I switched my sabbatical direction from Greece to Donegal, Ireland. I would still do my sabbatical research, but in a creative manner--writing imaginary portraits of Praxilla and Heraclitus.
"Perhaps I don’t have to go to Sicyon and Ephesus in order to write about Praxilla and Heraclitus. Perhaps I can reimagine them, conflating geography and time…Praxilla, poet and great adorant of Adonis, and lover of simple corporeal things, like cucumbers…. Heraclitus, philosopher and visionary of a universe in flux, with fire as his first principle."
Narrative Ambiguity
The man in black disappears; the footprints vanish. How much of this novel is about the unreliability of memory and perception? The narrator often doubts himself—did I see him? Did he exist?—how important is that uncertainty to the heart of the book?
The man in black disappearing into the white glimmer of Soda Lake is at the heart of the book. And who that man is or was, is the key mystery of Soda Lake. The book, then, is an archetypal detective quest complete with stories of the uncanny. The characters experience confusion and threat as their being dissolves at the margin of the self. And various tropes link one character to the others--false identity, hallucinations, intimations of a god, imprisonment, eroticism, philosophic journeying...
Final Question
Do you see this novel as a self-contained work, or part of a larger literary or philosophical project?
The vision in Soda Lake is complete, but vision itself is never complete. As Nietzsche says--"what is great in us is that we are a-going-across..." In terms of Soda Lake being a part of a larger literary or philosophic project--in a personal and aesthetic sense, Soda Lake is connected to my earlier books, as it relies upon my notion of paranoic thinking (a beside-the-mind journey that is creative and dangerous) set forth in Paranoia and Contentment, and draws from the twilight vision of childhood portrayed in Kaufman’s Hill. I believe Soda Lake offers a new myth of self inside a larger psychological-philosophical construct. And it relies upon the mining of autobiography (Kaufman's Hill) to sculpt a new form of the post-modern novel. Finally, the new book I'm working on now--Blood and Spirit, (autobiographical fiction) draws on all three previous books--Paranoia and Contentment, Kaufman's Hill, and Soda Lake. But one will have to wait and see regarding Blood and Spirit.