Fantastic Metropolis

Jeffrey Ford: In Tumbling After, the role-playing game, Mutes and Norms, plays an integral part, linking Jack’s and Kestrel’s worlds. Were these types of games something you were into as a kid or still are? Had you given the phenomenon of these games much thought before writing this novel?

Paul Witcover: I was a big D&D player, from high school through college and beyond. I still have the original boxed set somewhere. Tumbling After actually has twin dedications, which is only appropriate: the first to my parents, as mentioned, but also to the three friends who journeyed most with me across those miles of graph paper. I can’t begin to count up the hours I spent rolling dice, smoking pot, drinking beer, listening to prog-rock bands and, slightly later, punk bands too, while piloting my alter-ego of the moment through adventures as stirring and involving as the myths I had devoured as a boy. They were some of the happiest times of my life. But I don’t play any more. Such games demand too much time, and I give too much to them. Still, it was fun to revisit D&D in Mutes and Norms, figuring out the game-playing rules, how the dice would work, and so on, some of which made it into the novel. And I use dice—a 6-sided, 4-sided, and 8-sided—in reading from the novel.

Jeffrey Ford: Tumbling After has that marvelous parallel structure, one half resonating with, informing and illuminating, the other. While writing the book did you favor one side over the other? Both are very well done, but I was wondering if in the writing you found one a pleasure to write and the other more difficult? If so, which was which, and why do you think that was the case?

Paul Witcover: The Jack and Jilly stuff didn’t exactly come easier, but the material was already there. I mean, it’s set in a place that really exists, and both characters and action are derived from actual things, though not in a literal sense. But there was less outright invention there than extrapolation, I would say. Plus, I’d been thinking about that material for many years, even before I began the ill-fated Pynn. The origins of Tumbling After go back to a play I began to write in the late eighties called Decline of the Doones. I still like that title.

The Mutes and Norms stuff was excruciatingly difficult, and I’m happy to hear that you think it works. I wanted it to begin in a rather clichéd manner and then progress toward greater and greater reality, a reality that would be grounded both in ongoing parallels with the Jack and Jilly story and through slowly accumulating details about the world inhabited by Kestrel and the other mutes, as well as their own development as characters. By the end I wanted the two storylines, one of realism elevated to the fantastic, the other of the fantastic made real, to become equivalent, interchangeable within the structure of the book. I can’t tell you how much of the Kestrel material I threw away, how often I had to start over almost from scratch because the old bullshit detector kicked in. I was never satisfied that I had reached my goal with that material, and frankly, I’m still not satisfied with it. Finally though, there came a point when I felt I couldn’t get any closer, and the result is a book I’m very proud of, even if, inevitably, it’s not the book I set out to write.

Jeffrey Ford: Do you think that the relationship between the two worlds in the novel is an apt metaphor for the way in which the literature of the fantastic, in general, interacts with, investigates, enhances, and explicates a reader’s day to day life? Is the book autobiographical, not of your life experience, but of your relationship with the literature of the fantastic?

Paul Witcover: That’s a fascinating question or series of questions. The answer is yes to all of them. I was talking to Liz Hand just today about the consoling aspects of fiction. In many cases, that consolation—by which I mean consolation to the implacable facts of life—comes about through the fantastic. I suppose religion has the same function for some. But for me, it’s literature. In the novel, of course, I focus as much or more on the dark side of the equation, where consolation turns to curse.

Jeffrey Ford: What are you working on now? Are there other stories or books in the offing?

Paul Witcover: I’m working on a for-hire project that involves Dracula, but I can’t say anything more about it now. I’m shopping a short-story collection around, no takers as yet. And once Dracula is done, I have another novel in mind, which I’m eager to start.

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Paul Witcover’s Tumbling After is published by HarperCollins. You can read an excerpt right here at Fantastic Metropolis.