The narrator of “A, S, D, F,” your story in this week’s issue, is a young man who’s working in an art gallery in Aspen. What drew you to that setting? How hard is it to do a job that’s so full of empty hours?
Basically, I needed to come up with a setting that could accomplish one simple thing: give the narrator sufficient downtime to ponder. In other words, he needed to be bored. It was out of his boredom, his “empty mind,” that he would slowly—and then suddenly—become aware of something central about himself. Of course, there are an infinite number of jobs that are boring—I should know, I’ve worked them—but the art gallery allowed me to draw specific parallels between art and language and the inchoate thoughts in the narrator’s mind. One of the questions I wanted to pose—but not necessarily answer—was how can we “know” ourselves if we’re not equipped with the necessary vocabulary?
There’s a great, haunting short story by Bryan Charles, called “World Trade Center, Spring 2001,” about an aspiring writer trapped in a boring, well-paying job; the story captures, better than anything else I’ve read, the soul-crushing ennui of deadening office work in the modern age. In this case, the character’s job happens to be in the World Trade Center, pre-9/11, but, as far as the story is concerned, that’s beside the point. Workplace lethargy always begins, at least in my experience, as welcome delight—“I can’t believe I’m being paid to sit here and do nothing!”—and then quickly morphs into the horrible realization that my brain is rotting, my body is atrophying, and that time is passing, albeit slowly, and, by extension, so is my life. In order to occupy my mind, I would become fixated on the smallest of routines during the workday: when lunch was ordered, when mail was dropped off, when I could go to the bathroom again, etc. And, of course, I couldn’t stop myself from constantly checking the clock—only one minute has passed? I remember that I could perceive a distinct difference in how I felt about time depending on whether the clock I was looking at was digital or analog, and that time in fact seemed to move faster with analog, possibly because the hands were situated in a twelve-hour face, rather than just a single, solitary minute ticking off. But this was the cold, hard reality of the Faustian deal I had made in exchange for being paid to do nothing. Needless to say, this is not good for your spirit, it’s not good for your self-respect, and it certainly doesn’t make you hit the ground running once the workday is over. Indeed, lethargy begets lethargy.
The gallery specializes in Abstract Expressionism by less-than-major artists. Did you know from the outset the kind of art that would be on the walls?
No, the story originally began on Easter weekend, at MOMA, with the narrator and his girlfriend breaking up in front of one of Monet’s enormous paintings of water lilies. Twenty drafts later, the story takes on its current form, with the narrator working in the art gallery—and Monet and his water lilies aren’t referenced until the final scene. At some point, I realized that there would be more depth and complexity—and room to play—if the art was as inscrutable as the narrator’s sense of himself, particularly how the past has impacted him. I wanted to be able to suggest a psychological contrast between the “Rorschach-type” abstraction and the more straightforward landscape painting that he gravitates to later, i.e., the kind of art where “what you see is what you get.” Clarity vs. obscurity, surface vs. depth, consciousness vs. unconsciousness. I wanted the art in his gallery to be driving him slightly crazy, because it’s reflecting something back on him, something that he can’t quite name yet, but that, given the fact that he has nothing better to do than stare at it all day, is jogging something loose in his brain. He’s trying to create a narrative out of something that’s intentionally non-narrative—both with his past and with the art—and it’s not clear that he’s going to ever be able to succeed. Whenever I walk into an art gallery, I might spend thirty minutes tops looking at the art on the walls, and then I leave, and I’m done for good, but the person working at the front desk will spend the next two months, forty hours a week, staring at the same things. That’s going to have some sort of an emotional effect.
The gallery’s owner likes to send letters to prospective buyers that have been typed on a manual typewriter. For the narrator, it’s “a white-collar high-wire act without a safety net.” When did you come up with “A, S, D, F” as the story’s title? Did you know how touch-typing lessons, metal letters, and Abstract Expressionism would come together in the story?
I had no idea how this story would come together, considering that the early drafts were completely unrecognizable and, as I mentioned, the first scene took place in MOMA. My original title was “Now Is the Time for All Good Men to Come to the Aid of Their Country,” which I liked, and which lasted ten drafts, until I sadly saw that it wasn’t capturing what the story was actually trying to do. (The titles I use are critical, as much for me as they are for the reader—they guide me as I write, and I can generally sense when the title is not matching my intention, which is an uncomfortable feeling.) And so at some juncture, some nth iteration, the answer to your question becomes yes, I had all the major elements of the story—the art, the typing, etc.—and I could see clearly how they would eventually fit together. I knew how the “abstraction” of the home row of the typewriter keys was going to mirror the “language” of Abstract Expressionism, and how sitting in an art gallery, typing away on a manual typewriter, would dramatize this. I knew that I would have the “origin story” of the typing class, the vocational emphasis, and the essential phrase that the teacher utters, “A body never forgets,” which has darker implications. It’s at this point in the process that the story ceased being titled “Now Is the Time for All Good Men,” and became “A, S, D, F.” But this final version is so different from the story that I set out to write that I wonder if it’s even fair to say that they’re technically drafts of the same story.
A question that’s asked at the gallery is “What is it that you’re seeing?” And the gallery’s owner once told the narrator that seeing is not the same as looking. What does your narrator think? Will he come around to this point of view?
