ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN

Photography by Paolo ZerbiniStyling by Alessia VaniniText by Guy Mackinnon-Little 

Guy Mackinnon-Little You’re currently on a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, where you’re working on your next book. What are your days like at the moment?

Alexandra Kleeman It’s a strange time to be anywhere, but even stranger to be in a city this old, thinking about the particularity of this time and its place in the longer view of my life, our life, the life cycle of our way of life. Rome is city that wears its attrition with real flair – wildflowers burst from the cracks in the sidewalk and moss spills from the upper basins of blackening fountains; the message written everywhere in the cityscape is that when something breaks, new life grows up through the newly opened spaces. At the Academy, we live a little like we’re back in college – a groomed campus, but with no classes or grades – and within a walled space that feels at times like it exists between time periods or out of time entirely. At the same time, I’m trying each day to imagine how it is in other places, places where the pandemic is lifting and an optimism I don’t quite feel yet seems to be taking hold. I feel dislocated in time here, dislocated in space – but that seems like a good position from which to write my next project, which takes place in five different moments in time, ranging from the 18th century to the far future of interstellar space travel. I wake up late, drink coffees until 8pm, and stay up almost until the morning reading and writing. In between, I walk and run in an overgrown park that’s so large I keep discovering new paths through it, which makes the world feel larger even though we’re still more or less confined.

GML I wondered also how your relationship to writing shifts when you’re in a single place devoted to a single task, rather than balancing it with other obligations such as teaching. You’ve spoken before about how there can be something useful about interruption in your writing process, how turning away from the text and jumping back in can unblock a problem or offer sudden insight. How do you manage that tension between shutting out the world to fix your attention on the task of writing and allowing room for useful forms of disruption?

AK I’ve learned that my writing thrives in spaces where I can use interruption strategically to move about within the mental space of writing without entirely leaving it – mostly by moving between projects, which allows me to take a breath from one line of thought that has been wrung out in order to focus in on another, unexhausted space. Right now, I’m moving between a new, still unformed novel, a nonfiction piece on racial passing in America at the turn of the century and today, and a hybrid project based on the idea of salvaging waste – waste materials, wasted time, the parts of the plant that are usually thrown out and not eaten – that takes the form of a ritualistic dinner with the courses accompanied by texts that are meant to be eaten, destroyed or burned. Movement forward in one project, however small or relative, serves as proof to myself that the others can move forward as well – which is important, because spending too long in a state of stuckness becomes, for me, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s very important to me to let the outside in, to stop to watch birds and stray cats outside the window, to let the Twitter feed intrude in my flow. The external world is a source of creativity, openness, engagement. More importantly, it’s something that remains real and present even when you try to pretend that it’s not – and the effort of pretending that it’s not doesn’t seem worth it, when you could be directing that effort toward creating.

GML You’ve spoken about the plot structure of Something New Under the Sun as “plate tectonics”. What’s at work with that metaphor?

AK I tend to write with a guiding metaphor or visual image in mind – something like a map to where I’m going with the story, but less strictly useful, a map posed like a question. For Something New Under the Sun, the metaphor that grabbed me was plate tectonics, the movement of rigid plates of stone across a substrate of shifting magma, the interaction between visible and obscured reality – and specifically the process of subduction, where two plates of earth collide and one sinks beneath the other, melted down to rejoin the earth’s liquid core. I think there’s a fit here with the Southern California setting. When I was a kid living in the San Gabriel Valley about an hour’s drive from the centre of Los Angeles, our school had us pack an “earthquake lunch” of non-perishable foods at the beginning of the year in case an earthquake struck and we were trapped there. More broadly, the way that California’s languor and ease sits atop a literal fault line seems like a perfect analogy for how we live, our apparently stable lives periodically upended by the eruption of what lies beneath, underlying conditions that we could have been aware of if it didn’t feel so right, so satisfying, to become absorbed in the surface of our living. I wanted to make a story that the reader could get immersed in, that felt busy and full in its own right, and then displace that set of concerns with another larger, less easily approached crisis. We live at the intersection of different planes of catastrophe, each jostling for awareness and cycling through at an increasingly rapid pace – the goal is to make that experience more perceivable, more nameable, by setting this motion down in text.

GML There’s a line early on in the novel: “When change happens, we want it to happen all at once. In transit, there’s catastrophe.” This seems to be a tendency in fiction, too – the founding axiom of much sci-fi or speculative writing is to imagine what the world will be like after some key parameter has been shifted. What’s harder to imagine is the messy, uneven event of change itself. What are the challenges of writing about upheaval rather than its aftermath and what compelled you to do so?

AK Exactly. I grew up reading a lot of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, and always bought into the idea that showing how much we could lose, how different our lives could become, was one of the best ways of stoking a sense of responsibility and reverence for what we have. But it began to feel to me like the tropes of the genre – setting the catastrophe in the past, representing the before-world as a sort of nostalgia-object, and the project of restarting civilisation from scratch – were not only limiting, but reinforce the idea that change happens by sudden, dramatic, undeniable movements rather than through accumulation. I’d argue that waiting for the dramatic event blinds us to the micro-events that, taken together, drive the most dramatic and difficult-to-reverse change. And our present is continuous with the past and with the future: how can we act effectively on any part of this whole if we don’t recognise the causal ligature? But to write about change is untidy, even unsatisfying in its way – because when you prioritise depicting change and movement over depicting resolution, you never feel like you’ve truly finished the job.

GML That difficulty made me think too of how the experience of the pandemic has been described as a moment of “global narrative collapse”. At one point in the book, one character reads a post on a message board: “Whenever someone tells you that a so-called ‘conspiracy theory’ is too complicated, too convoluted to be true, ask them exactly how complex they feel reality to be. If they insist on its simplicity, then you know with confidence that they are an imbecile, and can sever the conversation with no guilt whatsoever.” What do you make of the proliferation of conspiratorial thinking, and how does the book respond to this impulse to simplify and smooth over what is opaque and incoherent about experience?

AK I’m always drawn to learning about the conspiracy theories others have crafted. To me, the desire to theorise conspiracies using the communal, visible elements of our consensual space is intrinsic to our nature as a species, to our way of shaping our surroundings. We tell stories to metabolise the world, to bring things within our sphere of comprehension and comfort, or to make the world reflect the uncertainty and disgust we feel about it. What feels new to me is the will to make the fiction real, to begin shaping the world in the image of your conspiracy theory, a fabulism turned fabrication. I feel more and more that the most popular conspiracy theories of our time are designed to comfort by consolidating the systemic and cultural ills of our time and making someone or some group directly responsible for them. It’s a fantasy of massively coordinated, intentional wrongdoing – at a moment when there is so much well-substantiated evidence of corporate, governmental and personal corruption out in the open. The complexity and diffusion of the data, and the helplessness you can feel when facing it, makes some want a smaller, tidier story.

GML Could you tell me about the decision to set the book in Los Angeles, the flat, amorphous capital of mass culture? What are your experiences of the city, and what makes it a fitting frame for the novel’s themes?

AK For me, Los Angeles is one of the strangest and most interesting urban landscapes around. I’ve always wanted to write something set there and when I decided to write my version of an environmental novel it seemed like a perfect opportunity. The mythology of the city as a place where new transplants can take root is mirrored in the broader ecology of the area, all the different plant and animal life that can thrive there, or can be made to thrive there with the massive redistribution of energy and resources. Beneath the effortless exterior is a very particular, very fascinating terrain prone to drought, earthquake, and other natural catastrophes that break the spell of the fantasy. It’s a place that on the one hand symbolises paradise, a dreamland of raw imaginative capacity, of pure availability, and on the other hand the periodic destructive resurgence of the repressed Real. Most of the Asian half of my family lives in LA, and I lived there as a child in a tourist-free area of LA County where most of the signage was in Mandarin or Spanish, where sprinkler-watered landscaping gave way to dry scrub and brush and the coyotes would come down from the hills at night to disappear small pets. This is a part of the city that you never see in movies, a part that most people I know only drive past on their way to Joshua Tree – so I became interested in telling a story oriented around the centre, but where the vast, vital unseen periphery of the city exerts a haunting presence.

GML The titles of both your novels are taken from advertising slogans. What’s the thinking behind that? Both books deal with characters whose motives or desires are somehow compromised by forces beyond them.

AK I find advertising slogans so compelling – they’re missiles of language, phrases designed to broaden the reach of a particular capitalistic dream. As a person raised in a constant stream of television, magazines, and movie-theatre releases, these different dreams that are not precisely my own saturate my own psychology in a way that makes it difficult to tell where my will ends and the collective fantasy begins. I’m fascinated by how these floating, untethered desires choreograph our behaviour. For a while I was in a graduate programme for rhetoric, and it left me with a difficult-to-shake feeling that advertisements and literature are both just different modes of persuasion, one weaponised and the other diffuse. I’m interested in putting my fiction right up against advertisements, so they can stare each other in the eye.