In ‘Hello Down There,’ Addiction Is a Metaphor That Questions Language and Daily Life https://ift.tt/CoT5O1s
The first Michael Parker novel I ever read was I Am the Light of this World. From the opening sentence I was transfixed, locked into the phonic ravel of his narrator’s world, and, somehow, magically both rooted and flying. I don’t know how Michael Parker does it. There is a wonderful rhythm to his sentences and a deep attention to sensory details, but there is also something even more ineffable going on. His novels are incredible. After I Am the Light of this World, I couldn’t get enough of his writing so I circled back and began to make my way through his seven novels and three collections of stories. Most recently, I read Hello Down There, Parker’s first novel which was just rereleased by the wonderful folks at Blair, a nonprofit press based Durham. Michael and I corresponded about the rerelease of his first book.
Michael Parker has received four career-achievement awards: the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the R. Hunt Parker Award and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. The three-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, Parker has published short fiction and nonfiction in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, Runner’s World, Men’s Journal and others. He taught for twenty-seven years in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and, since 2009, he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Hello Down There was first published in 1993. Obviously, it was not exactly the same Michael Parker who wrote this book as the Michael Parker who is answering these questions. You chose to keep all the words of that Michael, though. When I heard you speak at Letters Bookshop, you said that you did not change the text of Hello Down There for this re-release, and it reminded me of how Joan Didion, in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” talks about the importance of keeping in touch with our various former selves. I’ve never re-released a novel, but people like to ask me all the time if I regret the tattoos I had inked on me at nineteen. I never feel any regret, in fact I feel a strong fondness for the me that chose those odd images. This is probably a terrible metaphor, but I guess what I am trying to ask is, when you were working with Blair to re-release this text, did you feel like you got reacquainted with that 1993 Michael? Can you tell us about him and his impulse to put certain words in a certain order?
That’s not a terrible metaphor at all. The art we create might not last as long as a tattoo — the physical object might disappear, as Hello Down There had all but done before Blair graciously gave it a new life — but it’s in us always. I know a couple of writers who have regretted and gone so far as to disown earlier work. I don’t quite understand the impulse, but I respect their right to approach their work however they want.
The extent to which this novel is a part of me, and an important part of all the books I’ve written, since it was the first, was not something I’d considered until I re-read it. I have never re-read any of my books, unless someone asked me to read from one of them, and then it was only a passage or, at most, a story. I think most writers are like this. Whatever emotional connection I have to the work dissipates around the time I send it out. In fact, this is how I know something is finished — when I can look at it in a dispassionate way. I’m no longer obsessed with it. Time to find another obsession.
I agree with Joan Didion’s idea, and yet I don’t know how to keep in touch with my former self. I especially don’t know how to do it by rereading a novel I wrote 32 years ago. But I had a lot of reactions. And some surprises. I was surprised by how much I knew about certain things and surprised by my ability to select and distribute detail in a fairly nimble way. I was not so surprised to find the novel uneven and, in a few places, overcooked. I had yet to learn how to write less, and I’m not talking about page count, word count. I’m talking about the kind of work it takes to trim a sentence down to its essential notes, or to find what Debussy defined as music — the space between notes.
Most first novels are fairly or wholly autobiographical. Mine was set before I was born, and peopled with characters only slightly based on folks I knew. Aside from the story my father told me that sparked this book — more on that in a minute — I made it up. That surprised me a little, how much I made up, though why that should surprise me I don’t know, because making it up is what we’re supposed to be doing. (Apologies to the auto-fictioneers out there). What was not a surprise was the front-and-center addiction stuff. I was not sober when I wrote this book, but I had been sober for a time before I wrote it. I was well into my rhythm of falling off and climbing back onto the wagon, which started when I was a teenager. If there’s anything directly autobiographical in the novel, it’s the preoccupation with certain feelings — shame, guilt, insecurity — that accompany addiction. Fred Busch, in his review of the book in The New York Times, said something about its preoccupation “with self-disgust, which is the mood of our age.” He also cited the book for its belief in the “possibility of redemption.” I see the 1993 — or 1987 — Michael Parker in the parts about addiction, the mire of it, the daily struggle, but I also see in it what Busch was talking about: the possibility of redemption. These characters, despite their inadequacies and their inability to express their desires, were very dear to me, and they were dear to me only because they were flawed and easy, in many instances, to dislike. Yet they always believe that things will work out, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Do you remember what books you were most enthralled with during the years when you were drafting Hello Down There? I love finding echoes of books I love in my own work, and I wondered if you found any such echoes when you reread your first book?
Because it took me so long to write it — I started when I was 25 and published it when I was 32 — and because I am not the kind of writer who doesn’t read much when he’s writing (I’ve heard some writers claim that, and more power to them, but I could not go a week without reading fiction, regardless of the influence it might have on my work) I read a whole lot of books while I was writing Hello Down There.
Technically, it’s an historical novel — though the 50’s did not seem so far removed from the 70’s when I was growing up in Clinton, N.C., and because I began writing the book not far into the 80’s, it didn’t feel like I was writing an historical novel. But I suppose my main echoes were the mostly dead word-drunk writers I was devouring at the time: Faulkner, Malcolm Lowry, William Styron, Flaubert, Henry James, Balzac. Someone in a bookstore where I worked during my undergrad years introduced me to Cormac McCarthy. I read Suttree when it came out. Like every other male writer who reads McCarthy at an impressionable age, it affected my style without my acknowledging it. I read almost all of William Goyen, a lovely word-drunk writer who has not gotten his due. But I was also reading lots of more “minimalist” writers who were popular at the time — Ann Beattie, Mary Robison, Elizabeth Tallent and their male counterparts— Carver, Woolf, the Barthelme brothers. I was reading Jane Bowles and Gina Berriault. Welty, O’Connor, lots of Cather. Poetry. Always poetry. William Gaddis and William Gass. Lots of Russians, particularly Turgenev. I was reading Padgett Powell and Mark Richard and, of course, Barry Hannah. Airships was a huge influence.
Most of these writers I can’t really see or hear in this book. Maybe there was something more contemporary in the dialogue, or the conception of scene, but when I think of this novel, I think of how hard I worked on establishing a credible, dynamic and shifting interior life for each of the characters. A lot of that I got from the Modernists — Faulkner, of course, but also Joyce, Lowry, Virginia Woolf, a little Beckett. It was tremendously important for me to get that right, for I felt then and still feel now, that many novels are written from the outside in, are overly narrated, and therefore much harder to be enchanted by, which is what Nabokov (who I was also reading at the time) said stories should do. I can’t be enchanted if the emotional and psychological aspects of character do not come through sentence rhythm, syntax, punctuation. I realize this is just an uppity version of “show, don’t tell,” but there’s far too many lyrics in most contemporary novels I read, and not enough music.
Hello Down There is as much about the town it takes place in — Trent, North Carolina — as it is about Edwin and Randall and Eureka and all the characters. In this way it reminded me of other great town or community novels like Suttree, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Paris Trout and Shadow Country. In all these novels the town is its own character, made up of individuals but also something more than just the sum of its residents. The town becomes an entity of its own that exerts pressure on the narrative. Can you talk about writing Trent?
Trent is kind of a composite of some towns in eastern North Carolina where I spent some time over the years: Clinton, where I grew up; Tarboro, where my father is from; and Elizabeth City, where I was living when I wrote the last couple of drafts. It is meant to represent any small town in America, or any village in France or Ireland, where people feel restricted or trapped, but also fulfilled by family and by the familiar. Place — particularly landscape — in a novel need always serve a thematic purpose, since landscape, as you say, both establishes tension and expresses character desire.
Having grown up in a small town (6,000 people) it’s really hard for me to separate my feelings of isolation and my moments of connection from the heat-wavy tobacco fields that surrounded our house and the (relatively) vibrant downtown on Saturday afternoon. I don’t think this emotional response to place is confined to small towns (though I do think the idea of separating fiction into south/north/east/west rather than rural/urban is just plain wrong). I know people who grew up in Manhattan and Chicago who felt the same kind of emotional disconnect with home. But I do think it’s more pronounced in small towns. Obviously the options are fewer. You have to search harder for your people.
Trent, in this novel and a couple of others where it appears, is mostly oppressive and restrictive because it’s meant to mirror pretty much every character’s thwarted desire. I’ve lived in medium-sized cities, large cities and small villages since, but none of these places, even though I’ve written about them, are as important to me, as vital to my work, as Trent. Having said that, I know I won’t be setting any fiction there again. I’ve said all I have to say about that place.
Hello Down There revolves around an axis of addiction — Edwin, a morphine addict who is also the son of Trent’s most powerful family, his mother who enables him, his father who ignores the starkness of the situation, the doctor who is also Edwin’s uncle and who allows himself to be convinced to prescribe more, the druggist who tries to sound the alarm, the drug store owner who would do anything to please the powerful people pulling the strings, the young boy tasked with delivering the drugs, his sister who is swept into it as well. The most recent opioid crisis has caused us to talk openly about the toll of addiction but we still tend to associate “addiction narratives” with working class folks, people who have to steal and rob to get their fix. Can you talk about how addiction functions when it is tied to wealth and power?
I know from some years of recovery that addiction does not discriminate. I’ve been in the rooms with doctors, construction workers, lawyers, plumbers, academics, waiters, Uber drivers, actors. But as you wisely point out, it stills feels to me that the current narrative of the opioid epidemic focuses disproportionally on poor white addicts, mostly from Appalachia and the rust belt states.
My novel was of course written twenty years before the Sackler family and their ilk came along. That’s one reason why it deals mostly with the aristocracy. I did a little research for this novel and found that in the first half of the twentieth century, there was a high percentage of morphine addiction among white people of means. A lot of it had to do with a relative lack of governmental oversight, but it mostly had to do with the loose hands of doctors and even druggists. (In my small eastern NC town, there was one druggist in particular who would dole out barbiturates to his buddies who had sprained their ankles or had a bad hangover).
This novel came from a story my father told me. When he was young — maybe 10 or 11 — he got a job making deliveries for a drug store. In his first week he was sent to the “good” part of town to deliver a package to a house that was huge and decrepit. He knocked on the door and a window a few feet down the porch creaked open. A hand came out of the window, beckoning him over. When he got to the window, the hand snatched the bag and shut the window.
I don’t remember a lot of my father’s stories from his childhood, because he never talked about his childhood — he grew up poor, his father died when he was six, and there were seven other children in the family to deal with. But this image stuck with me. I wrote my way out of it, as we do, by asking questions: whose hand was that? Why did he not open the door? What had happened to the house? I didn’t know what was in the bag when my father told the story, but of course when I got older, I figured out it wasn’t castor oil.
So much of this novel is about privilege and social stratification in small towns, where a few families call the shots. The Keane family, because of their power and position in the town, have control over their son’s addiction in ways that other parents and siblings of addicts do not. I’d never heard the word “enabler” when I wrote the novel — it wasn’t a thing back then — but the Keanes, and the doctor and druggist, certainly enable Edwin to stay addicted. Of course in some ways they struggle just like the family and friends of any addict, but their money does insulate them, and Edwin, from the kind of “low bottom” point that most addicts face.
Hello Down There is a story about stories — the stories we tell ourselves when we are deep in the arms of addiction, the stories we tell about the places we come from; it is a novel about words and lack of words. The characters are constantly trying to reach one another through language and often they fall short. Edwin’s mother craves the attention and words of her son, but when she is close to him her own words fail completely. The druggist, Roy Green, wants more words from the stockman, Speight, who barely says anything aloud at work, but once the narrative shifts into Speight’s own mind he is full of language and his own desire for the words of his children. Can you talk about how language and communication play out in this book?
The stereotype of the rural Southerner is someone who tells stories non-stop. A lot of writers from the South credit this trait with making them into writers. I certainly grew up around a lot of “talkers,” and I loved to hear my best friend, who came from a long line of auto-mechanics and part-time farmers, tell stories about his family. I come from a large family with a lot of cousins, and stories were just as important as food at the dinner table. My father was editor of the local newspaper, so that brought more stories into the house.
I was always more interested in what was not being told. Maybe that’s the real reason I became a writer, because I wanted to figure out the untold story. I was always listening for it, but rarely did I hear it. So I wrote stories. I tried then, and still do, to get at what we cannot tell, or what we tell when we’re trying not to tell something else. Of course that is a crucial technical question that we use to access theme. The story, how it’s told, its shape, asks these questions about the unarticulated and ineffable nature of consciousness.
At a certain point, the novel became less an interrogation of what we don’t or can’t say, to a much more thorough examination of language itself. As you point out, almost all of the characters to some extent ponder the nature of language, and of stories. So the novel, if I succeeded, was asking the same questions the characters were, but on a higher level. I think of Edwin telling the doctor at the hospital where he goes to get clean that his addiction is a metaphor. The doctor pegs him as the entitled and arrogant — if not unintelligent — kid that he is. Thinking of addiction as a metaphor is just one example of the way this book questions how language relates to our daily life. Edwin writes long letters to Eureka, who for all he knows might not be able to read, because he doesn’t feel he can accurately depict his feelings to her in a conversation. He wants to use written language as a shortcut; he feels that the written word accesses more “truth” than talking out loud. They are all at the mercy of language — as is the book, as is every book — but they don’t stop questioning it, lusting after it, seeing it as their salvation.
Most of the characters in Hello Down There are from Trent or the surrounding area with one major exception, Roy Green. Green is not a local and the people of Trent are wont to remind him of this. It is Green who narrates the first chapter; it is Green who ushers us into this town and this all-important drug store that functions as the heart of the town. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of an “outsider” in a book like this?
I confess I did not remember until I re-read the novel, and read your excellent question about Roy Green, how important his outsider status is to the book. I think about people who moved to Clinton from other states, how exotic they were. They were always “cool,” even if they came from the same sort of place as Clinton, but with different weather. You carry a certain cachet if you’re not from a place, but also, obviously, you’re viewed with a good deal of suspicion.
Roy’s attempt to intervene in Edwin’s addiction — to stop the drug store owner from making excuses to send over more morphine before it’s due, to get Edwin to treatment in Kentucky — is futile because he needs his job. Because of the social stratification we talked about earlier, he has no power. He’s a good guy in a lot of ways, but he’s also weak, and his weakness stems in large part from his being a transplant. He walks into a world he doesn’t understand. The forces already in place to control him mirror his own emotional need to make some sort of difference, to connect. So Trent, again, is just as much an emotional force as a physical one.
I think I was able to put such energy into the complexity of Trent because I wasn’t that far removed from it at the time. Lots of writers set their entire oeuvre in one place. I respect that immensely. My work has migrated in the last fifteen years. I’ve written books set mostly in Texas, but also in Oklahoma, Wyoming and Oregon. I don’t know if this has to do with my getting all I can get out of my native state, or just geographical curiosity. I have an idea for a novel set in Butte, Montana, but I know I will have to spend some time there in the winter, which is an obstacle. After living in Texas, even North Carolina is too cold for me.
Explore Hello Down There and Michael’s other books on his website.
FICTION Hello Down There By Michael Parker
Originally published by Scribner on January 1, 1993
Paperback published by Blair on August 27, 2024
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