Photo by Samantha Holmes. Courtesy Penguin Group.

This summer my reading list consisted largely of first novels. Until very recently I’d deprived myself of the pleasures of Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping, Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden, Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, Richard Price’s The Wanderers, and even Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead. To my credit, I’d read these authors before, some quite extensively.  I’ll even admit that on some occasions I’d taken the liberty of talking semi-expertly on these very titles, which seemed all right to do; I find books can seep into your subconscious the same way songs do, and this connection allowed me to believe I could feel my way through an unread book.

But when I read these titles for real, the experience was much like coming across an old friend’s yearbook.  The early prose, the style, the themes, and, in some cases, the wobbly leaps of faith when forging structure in these first novels reflected both familiar and lost aspects to the author’s later writings, and much like the still-developing face of a friend’s class photo, the features that stayed and the ones that took an odd turn can surprise you.  One thing is for sure, though:  the kid in the photo isn’t thinking what you’re thinking, and neither is the young writer-she’s going to imbue those first pages with a kind of fervor almost only found in first novels.  Maybe it comes from the idealism and energy of youth.  Maybe from a certain obliviousness too.  In an interview found in the back pages of his second book Blood Brothers, Richard Price puts it like this:

“Once you’re published the only struggle then is to write another good book…The bad thing is that once you’re an author there’s the danger of becoming too self-conscious about your writing…When I wrote The Wanderers, my first book, it was a piece of cake, there was no pressure, I was just writing for writing class, but after that I became an author, and writing was never quite as much fun and easy.”

In any case, a friend recently recommended to me Ian MacKenzie’s debut novel, City of Strangers.  It seemed only fitting to add it to my summer list.  It’s the story of Paul Metzger, a failing writer in New York who receives a proposal from an editor to write The American Nazi, a memoir about his father who was once a public figure in the American-German Bund.  Paul’s life is complicated by other family and personal matters, and when one night he finds himself at the center of a racially motivated crime, he is forced to make some life-changing decisions.  This book is considerably plot-driven for a literary novel, but it is also driven by Paul’s introspection—and it’s the tone and style of his ponderings, at once liberated and angsty, that makes this a wonderful signature first novel.

Susan Chi: City of Strangers paints a picture of a lonely man in an indifferent city. Paul is broke, newly divorced, estranged from his half-brother and his father is dying—you set the grim state of his life against the bleakness of a New York winter and then hurl him right into a violent act.  This scenario makes for perfect crime fiction.  Would you describe your book as literary crime?

Ian MacKenzie: A week or so after City of Strangers was released, I was in the St. Mark’s Bookshop, in the East Village, and I noticed that the book was shelved with the crime fiction and thrillers near the front of the store. It may answer your question simply to say that I was surprised. I’ve noticed the usual genre wars flaring up again recently and so I ought to point out that I wasn’t in the least offended; only nonplussed. Not once during the writing of City of Strangers did I have in mind anything other than a work of literary fiction, and I can’t imagine that a reader who’s looking for the pleasures of Michael Connelly or Dennis Lehane will find the same variety of pleasure in my book. The writers I had in mind while working—Ian McEwan, J. M. Coetzee—write books which are frequently eventful, but which have as their core preoccupations the social, psychological, and political states of their characters. I don’t feel especially motivated to build the kind of suspense-filled plots crime fiction demands; and I certainly haven’t done the homework that most of these guys—Lehane, Richard Price, etc.—have done. To take one example, I dreaded any involvement of the police in the book. I don’t know the first thing about how the police work; I didn’t want to write a book which demanded that I know. So right there, I’m unqualified as an author of crime fiction. If there’s a defining attribute of that genre, it is the primacy of plot—not primacy at the expense of other literary qualities like character and prose, necessarily, but a primacy nonetheless. If I’ve written a book whose plot feels interesting enough to earn it an appellation like ‘literary thriller’—or what have you—I’m certainly glad, but I am far too aware of my limitations as a writer to put myself in the company of these guys who write really good, smartly plotted crime fiction.

SC: Talk more on your influences.

Ian: I’ve been reading Greene voraciously for years, and, along with McEwan, Coetzee, Naipaul, Camus, and a handful of others, he’s one of the strongest influences on my writing, at least one of the strongest influences I’m conscious of. And I think Greene’s work speaks to that borderless region where literary fiction achieves some of the effects of genre fiction (or vice versa), especially in terms of plotting and momentum. Greene consciously segregated his work into two camps: his ‘entertainments,’ like Orient Express, the novels about spies and crime and dirty deeds; and his ‘Catholic novels,’ like The Heart of the Matter, which is to say his more expressly literary efforts, those books in which he investigated the complexities of his adopted religion. But then you have a novel like Brighton Rock – one of my favorite novels of Greene’s—which is quite certainly a ‘Catholic novel’ and yet tracks through a grim, fast-moving plot of murder, deception, and small-time racing-track crime. Or take a late novel of Greene’s, The Human Factor. That one’s firmly an ‘entertainment’; but it also gets into some more interesting questions of devotion and duty. So what should we call it? I don’t really think it matters; the pages turn. Besides, if you write like Greene did at his best—or like McEwan or some of the other names I mentioned—I’ll keep reading.

SC:  Your writing is so detailed.   I’d believe you if you told me you’d actually gone to each location in the novel and sketched out your scenes.  What leads you word to word, sentence to sentence, etc.—what is important to you stylistically?

Ian: I’m glad the style of the novel comes across as intensely detailed; certainly detail—both sensory detail and psychological detail—was something I labored over, and it is nice to know that it strikes a reader. I spent a lot of time, mentally, with every scene, especially the very physical, almost cinematic scenes—the choreographed scenes—such as the assault at the end of Chapter One and the chase near the U.N. building in Chapter Eight—because if you have characters moving through space you want that to feel authentic. But I do wonder—looking at things I have written more recently—if I’m moving away from some of the more lyrical moments in City of Strangers and toward a sparer style. When I reread the book now I think there are too many similes, too many adjectives.

I wrote the book between 2005 and 2008, which is to say between the ages of 23 and 26, and I can see the effect of my own education as a writer—my reading, my thinking at the time, my observation of the world—in the scenes that were written four years ago as opposed to the scenes written only months before the book’s publication.

More and more, I find myself favoring writing that is very nonfigurative; writing that doesn’t rely on metaphors and similes. Naipaul is a great example of a writer who invests his prose with incredible force and style and memorable language, but who does so by means of punctuation, rhythm, and a strong eye; he uses very few similes. Ishiguro is another such writer. I can’t think of a single simile from either The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go, and yet those stories are so fiercely gripping, their characters so intensely poignant.

SC:  It’s interesting you used the September 2005, Jyllands-Posten publication of anti-Muslim cartoons in City of Strangers, especially in light of how a senseless street fight swelled into the grave outcome of Paul’s life. Can you speak about these particular cartoons and what it meant to incorporate this event into your novel?

Ian: My thoughts on the Jyllands-Posten cartoons are essentially what the thoughts of any white, American, nonreligious person would be—that is, a jumble of uninformed opinion. The primary reason I had for staging the novel in February 2006, when the riots over the cartoons had abated but not yet ceased, was to stitch into the story a leitmotif of images—of their strange power, of the effect they have on people’s minds and emotions. Both Claire and Paul, at different moments, stand in front of Cy Twombly’s Quattro Stagioni, in the atrium of MoMA, and have a series of thoughts prompted by the paintings; Paul is deeply troubled when he sees a young girl touch one of them. (This actually happened: I was standing in the atrium, when the Twombly paintings were still at MoMA, and saw a girl of eight or nine do exactly that; and I indeed found it startling and oddly upsetting.)

Art, by its nature, perverts: it breaks from the usual; it alters a previously held idea; it surprises. One doesn’t need a gallery of offensive images in a Danish broadsheet to do that. It ought to be said, however, that while torching cars and embassies—not to mention causing the deaths of others—over some cartoons is an abominable obscenity, some of the cartoons in question were astonishingly racist and provocative in a very reductive, uninteresting way. There is no excuse for that sort of violence, but the moment didn’t strike me as some unmitigated ethical victory for the ideals of the West, either.

SC: Do you think any of your characters found redemption in the end?

Ian: I don’t feel any more qualified to answer that than someone who has read the novel. Redemption is a nebulous concept; I’d to say that either we all receive redemption or none of us do. But I’m glad to know that redemption is an idea that emerges from the novel. It’s one of those Christian doctrines that have a rich secular meaning without shedding a religious dress: redemption is the noun of the verb redeem; from the Latin root you see that redemption literally means buying back your soul. Leaving aside religion, I’d say that to gain redemption is always to punch your ticket out of one hell or another.

SC: Having published a novel so young, is it safe to assume you’ve always wanted to be a writer?

Ian: I wish I had a more interesting or nuanced response than ‘Yes, I have always wanted to be a writer.’ But that’s the truth of the matter. When I was 12 or 13 I sent a short story to the old STORY magazine—it narrated, in the first person, the events of a suicidal lesbian’s road trip from Virginia to California—and received a very kind handwritten note from the editor, Lois Rosenthal; part of me suspects that, despite the subject matter, she intuited how young I was and, in a moment of truly extraordinary kindness, decided to encourage me.

There isn’t an advantage to that sort of focus from an early age except perhaps that you read with a great deal of energy and need. It was from reading—Greek mythology, mostly—that emerged the desire to write, and once that desire emerged more reading followed. So by the time I was fourteen or fifteen I’d read a lot of the names—Nabokov, Camus, Burroughs, Kerouac, Hemingway, etc. – you’d want to have read. The downside is that you are one of those people who have always wanted to be writers, as opposed to one of those people who participated in a revolution or flew airplanes in the Air Force, and then looked for language to address the experience. It’s a bit of a paradox—you have to do all the necessary legwork, train yourself in the discipline, to be a writer, and at the same time you have to pretend you haven’t always wanted to do this one thing all along.

About the Author: Ian MacKenzie is the author of CITY OF STRANGERS, a novel, available in the U.S. from Penguin and in the U.K. from Harvill Secker. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Massachusetts.  Visit him at http://therevisions.wordpress.com.

Susan Y. Chi is a writer in New York.