Meet Trevor Cole
ALL MY LIFE, or as much of it as I can remember, I wanted to write novels. And yet I didn’t allow myself a real opportunity to pursue that wish until I reached my late thirties. Instead, I rerouted the desire to create stories into other kinds of word-work, doing ad copywriting at radio stations or working as an editor at magazines. It seemed very important to me to maintain a full-time job, to be a responsible wage-earner, no matter how much the artist inside of me wanted to get out.
There’s no mystery as to why. My father had been an artist, a musical stage actor who achieved a small, brief level of stardom in Canada. But he had demons, terrible insecurities and narcissistic tendencies that led him to drink and behave irresponsibly, and that prevented him from reaching his full potential. He was the perfect role model for everything I didn’t want to be, and so for many years I did everything in the world of words except the thing that would have made me happiest—writing fiction full-time.
Marrying a woman who understood the life of an artist finally gave me the courage, or the sense of permission, to quit my job as a senior writer at a national business magazine and dedicate myself to writing novels. I suppose it shouldn’t be any surprise that the first novel of mine to be published told the story of an alcoholic, narcissistic actor whose insecurities prevented him from achieving his artistic dreams.
An Interview with Trevor Cole
A version of this interview was published in the online literary magazine The Puritan.
Q: What was the genesis for the story of Practical Jean?
A: I’d been toiling for three years on a book that wasn’t working. It was big and serious—my attempt at weighty historical fiction—and I was itching to return to the kind of writing I loved, something sharp, dark, and funny. I decided I wanted to write an entire book from the perspective of a female character, which I’d never done before, and so I thought for a while about who that woman would be, and what she’d want to do that would drive the novel forward. I knew it would be some kind of dark quest, and briefly I thought that Jean might be driving across the country to do harm to her husband’s lover. But I rejected that pretty quickly. To me there was no point in writing the book if Jean’s actions were driven by vengeance or evil; we’ve read that or seen it on the screen too many times. So, what was the opposite of vengeance? What emotion was the least likely to drive someone who was passably sane to kill? The answer was love. Everything fell into place for me when I figured out—it hit me like a splash of water—that Jean had witnessed the slow death of her mother, and that she had a group of friends whom she loved and wanted more than anything to protect from a similar fate. For me, nothing holds more potential for both comedy and tragedy than the character who heads with absolute conviction in the worst possible direction.
Q: Your fiction is very character-driven. How has the work of describing and expressing your characters contributed to the process of finding your voice as a writer?
A: I can’t begin writing or even planning a story until I’ve figured out who my main character is and what that person is all about—what are his or her deepest fears and desires? How does he or she think and sound? I didn’t know that at first, earlier in my career, and so I stumbled in my fiction writing for a while, half-completing a couple of books that didn’t work. Then I hit on the idea of writing a novel about a character based on my father—a narcissistic, alcoholic, washed-up actor. And I knew that character so intimately, it allowed me to find his voice immediately, and that helped me to write with far more confidence than I’d ever felt to that point. It was figuring out that my stories don’t spring from the landscape or the history of a place, or from an issue or a constant recurring theme, but from the psychology of the story’s central character, that has made everything possible for me.
So, the process of writing each new novel now begins by meeting and, if you like, romancing my main character, getting to know him or her the way you’d get to know a new love interest, finding out everything, good and bad, and becoming enthralled with every detail. The narrative voice of the novel comes from the understanding I develop about that person, and I try to carry an element of that person’s essential personality in the words I choose.
How does that work in practice? In the case of Practical Jean, one example is that the prose picks up on Jean Horemarsh’s tendency to use casual “y” words—wonky, goose-bumpy, jutty, pebbly—whenever it’s following Jean’s perspective. Those aren’t words I would use in my own descriptions (and you’ll notice they don’t appear in any of the chapters written from Cheryl’s perspective) but they are apt for Jean. It’s not something that’s meant to jump out at the reader; the effect should be almost subliminal.
Q: Most of your books are told by a fairly uniform third-person narrator. But your main characters are all very different—a murderous ceramics maker, a control-freak executive, a narcissistic actor. Why do you use this kind of narration and how does it help you to accommodate such resoundingly different personalities?
A: I tend to write most happily in the subjective third person. In a sense, my narrator sits on the shoulder of the protagonist, facing where she faces, seeing what she sees, while maintaining a kind of Vulcan mind meld that allows the narrator to know the character’s thoughts and pick up on her personality. Why, then, don’t I just write in the first person? Because that slight separation allows the narrator to observe not just what the character observes, but also the character herself, and to notice the reactions of others. The narrator is more aware than the main character, and from the reader’s perspective, that makes the narrator more reliable. So, in the tone of the prose, the narrator is able to offer a comment on the character. In Practical Jean, for instance, you can tell when Jean has misinterpreted something or made a terrible decision, even if she isn’t aware of it herself.
Q: You’ve mentioned elsewhere your admiration of the work of author Jonathan Franzen, and Franzen has said that, in an age with so many sources of distraction and entertainment, modern fiction should reward readers for the time they invest in a book. Do you agree, and how much thought do you give to how your readers will respond to your work?
A: Franzen’s right. For a work of fiction to live it has to be read, and to be read it must be enjoyed. Reading should be fun. That’s the main reward I think Franzen is talking about. And yet how many times as readers have we given up on a book after only a few chapters, or “toughed it out” to the end because of a sense of obligation? I think sometimes writers get so focused on conjuring up their vision that they forget to think about the reading experience. When I’m working on a book, I read over every page again and again to make sure that it’s not lagging. I want to create characters that readers actually care about and I want to make sentences and paragraphs that are fun to read. One of the biggest compliments I can get from a reader is, “I read the whole book in one weekend.”
Q: As works of social realism, your novels contain a fabulously convincing level of detail. How much research do you do for your novels?
A: Each one is different. My second novel The Fearsome Particles included sections about an armed forces base in Afghanistan and also examined the affluent world of a stager of luxury homes. Those sections were built on the research I’d done for two large magazine stories, and the grounding I got in those two unique settings gave me the confidence to be able to fictionalize them, and also made me aware of what additional research I needed to do. In the case of Practical Jean, I had a basic understanding of the process of ceramics, which I fleshed out by talking to ceramics artists—one in particular who did some leaves in her work. And Jean’s experiences as a child, seeing her mother performing operations on animals in her kitchen, is based on something learned from another magazine story I’d done. My understanding of Jean’s sense of loss and her need to do something constructive after her mother died comes largely from my own experience after the death of my father a few years ago.
Q: You’ve referred several times to your work in magazine journalism. In what way does your ability to distill and communicate a large amount of information stem from your years writing nonfiction?
A: The work of fiction and nonfiction is very different, but it’s true that the years I’ve spent doing magazine pieces have helped me tremendously. When you’re preparing a magazine story, the process of research is like gathering up a whole bunch of tiny puzzle pieces, some of which will fit together and some of which won’t. And you have no picture to go by other than the partially formed one in your head. Eventually, once you’ve got ten times the number of pieces that you need, you get down to the task of putting the puzzle together, bit by bit, discarding the pieces that don’t fit. So from that I’ve learned how to recognize which details will help the story of my novel and which won’t. And I know how to parcel out information, whether it’s a plot point or a character trait that needs to be established.
Q: Your novels have all been commended for their use of comedy, but most critics have noted that this humor is married to themes and concerns that are both deeply serious and timely. To what do you owe your particular sense of humor? Are there works of fiction (literary or filmic) that serve as personal models for this blending of comedy and serious dramatic storytelling?
A: I was definitely planted in comedy. How I got there I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it was listening to Bill Cosby and Don Adams records when I was a boy, the way other kids listened to the Rolling Stones. Maybe it was lying in bed at night, listening to my father laugh at Johnny Carson. When Dad was laughing at the television, everything was all right in the house. When he wasn’t, things could get unpredictable. I always preferred character-based humor over one-liners. To my ears, character-based humor was more human and more realistic, and therefore richer and funnier. So that meant I was a Barney Miller guy rather than a Welcome Back, Kotter guy. In movies, I loved the multiple-character comedies of Peter Sellers.
So my early comic influences were all based in performance, rather than in literature. Even as a boy I seemed to understand the process of actors, and had some insight into the decisions they made, probably because I watched my father as he rehearsed the plays he was in, and even helped him practice his lines. My childhood sources of print humor were few—Mad magazine was about it. But I loved its sly, cruel irony. As I grew up I graduated to Philip Roth novels, which always had a kind of fury underneath the funny and showed me how complex humor could be. Today, there are deep resonances for me in the black humor of the Coen brothers’ movies. Jonathan Franzen, who we’ve mentioned before, exemplifies in his treatment of his characters, particularly in The Corrections, the ideal balance between irony and empathy. And somehow Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News manages to be, at the same time, the funniest and saddest book I’ve ever read.
Q: Practical Jean is concerned largely with conflicts and connections between women. What were some of the anxieties and challenges that arose while trying to portray your female characters?
A: The positive reaction of women to Practical Jean has been hugely satisfying, and I think the response comes partly from the fact that I didn’t approach my female characters as women so much as individuals. In our society there’s no one way for a woman to be. So I never found myself thinking “how would a woman deal with this?” Instead, I wondered how Jean or Cheryl or Fran or Natalie would deal with it. And I tried to steer clear of having my characters doing or thinking things that a man might consider obviously “feminine.” I don’t, for instance, have a lot of purses or lipsticks cropping up in the book. When Jean worries about what she’s wearing it has to do with her own personal insecurities not the fact that she’s a woman.
The one important aspect of the novel where I thought quite consciously about the difference between women and men was in the area of friendship. It’s my sense that women think about their friendships more than men do, and they work harder at nurturing them. To me, that quality of female friendship is the crux of the novel; I just don’t think you could have a Practical John, about a man killing his buddies out of love. So my challenge was to be observant and respectful of the way women are with their friends, and then to find a way to satirize it.
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