Philipp Meyer: 'We don't have a good context for where we come from as Americans' Jul 21st 2013, 08:30
The acclaimed novelist discusses The Son, his latest examination of America – and why learning to hunt was part of the process
Born in 1974, Philipp Meyer grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, studied at Cornell University and produced two novels while supporting himself in a variety of jobs, from Wall Street trader to ambulance driver. Though these early works were rejected by publishers, Meyer persevered, penning another book while on a writing fellowship at the University of Texas. American Rust was published to huge critical acclaim in 2009 and the New Yorker rated him one of the 20 best novelists under 40 in 2010. His next novel, The Son, greeted in the US as the big literary read of the summer, is published in the UK on 18 July.
Where do you work?
Life throws up enough road blocks to keep you from writing, you can't be to adding them yourself by saying you can only write in one specific place. I'm in New York half the time and Texas half the time, and I work wherever – in my computer bag I have some foam ear plugs that I can put in.
Why did you choose to leave Wall Street to pursue writing?
You don't make a decision about being a writer. There was a point, aged 21, when it became clear that this is who I am. The choice is how good you are going to be at it and how hard you are going to work. But the problem is, of course, writing doesn't pay for a very long time, so you're always doing other jobs. Since I quit banking, all my major life decisions, when they could, have revolved around writing.
Do you think the majority of readers are aware of the amount of effort that goes into a novel?
American Rust was about 375 pages in print, but there are at least 3,000 pages that I wrote along the way, and that doesn't include revisions. I didn't even bother to keep track in The Son. On top of that, your job as an artist is to make this piece of writing appear as if it leapt into existence fully formed. There has to be a sense of inevitability in terms of what happens, almost like a natural event, but the fact is every word is enormously laboured over.
Were you surprised when American Rust became such a success?
Not at all. There was a logic to it – when I became competent, the world began to reward me, and when I became better than that, it continued to reward me. I knew when I'd figured things out artistically. It was a gut feeling. One of the things that happens is that you do learn to put much more faith in your instincts than you do in your rational mind.
Where did the seed for the idea for The Son come from?
When I finished American Rust I knew I was going to write about Texas, having learned about its very rich but tortured and complicated history, but I didn't know why. I was trying to get at what America was really about – the country's wealth, its foreign policy, the way we control things – and somehow I knew this was connected to frontier mythology and how comfortable we are with violence. I realised the way to tell that story was to follow a family, the McCulloughs, back 155 years, and write about the settling of the frontier, showing that we don't actually have a good context for where we come from as Americans.
The novel focuses on three characters, Eli McCullough, his son Peter and his granddaughter Jeannie. Why them?
Jeannie came first – this very strong woman who had been brought up with a lot of privilege but had also struggled to keep the family together and forge her identity in a fundamentally male world. Peter's diary covers a series of massacres of Mexican people by ranchers and Texas rangers that no one likes to talk about. Over a three-year period 6,000 Mexicans were killed. As soon as I heard about it I knew I wanted to write about it. Eli's perspective did not develop until two-and-a-half years into the writing of The Son. I realised that if I wanted to comment on mythology, I had to engage in some myth-making of my own.
Eli is kidnapped by Comanche Indians and adapts to survive. How did you research the details of Native American life?
I had to figure out what day-to-day life was like and the skills they would have used, not just on paper but physically, so I taught myself to bow hunt, skin animals, tan hides, find and eat native plants. I also took a bunch of classes on animal tracking and how to make rope from plant fibres. It was like learning a language that I felt I could study for the rest of my life but never really master.
Both your books have been described as Great American Novels. What does that mean to you?
It's very flattering – the books I think of as Great American Novels are by Faulkner and Hemingway – but you can't take those things seriously. From an artistic standpoint, praise is just as destructive as criticism. It's very important to me that people connect with my work, but it's also important that I don't let opinions about my work into my mind, negative or positive. You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If I'd listened to what other people thought about my work in the first 10 years that I was a writer, I never would have made it to begin with.
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