Dan Leach Explores Y2K Apocalyptic Sincerity in “Junah at the End of the World” https://ift.tt/fURgTrI
Every once in a while, if you are lucky, you come across a book that you can’t put down. You begin that first word, and in a few hours, you’ve read the last one. Junah at the End of the World, Dan Leach’s first novel, is one of those rare books for me. This is a slim novel brimming with warmth, tenderness, humor, and wisdom. It was an absolute MUST for inclusion in “The Southern Summer Book Club”.
Leach’s novel, told in a series of fragments and vignettes, follows a boy named Junah, as he makes sense of the approaching new millennium. Anxiety surrounds him because, well, the world could very well be ending. With the company of family, friends, teachers, and bullies, Junah faces the possible end as well as any of us could hope to.
Dan Leach has published work in The Massachusetts Review, The Southwest Review, and The Sun. He has two collections of short fiction: Floods and Fires (University of North Georgia, 2017) and Dead Mediums (Trident, 2022). In 2023, Texas Review Press chose him for the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Award and released his collection Stray Latitudes (2024). He lives in the lowcountry of South Carolina and teaches writing at Charleston Southern University.
It was a pleasure to be able to talk with Dan about Y2K, novel structure, and faith.
Dan, it’s great to be able to chat with you. Thanks for taking the time!
Junah at the End of the World takes us back to the final months of 1999, with the panic and anxiety of the approaching Y2K. This hook took me back. I was thinking about the small stash of food my parents had and how it might’ve lasted a week; I was thinking about the fear in the air. Before we get to the novel, I’m curious about your own experience.
Were you worrying as the clock ticked closer and closer? Were you ready?
I appreciate the kind words, Bradley. That’s high praise coming from a writer of your caliber. You asked about my own experience with Y2K, and that’s a manageable question for me, since that moment in history happened for me about as it does for Junah. Like Junah, I was caught between two conflicting narratives — the apocalyptic anxiety of my mother and the pragmatic dismissiveness of my father. I remember being deeply unsettled by this dichotomy — half the adults in my life presenting December as the end of the world, and the other half passing it off as a hoax. That kind of messes with a kid, you know? You’re just trying to talk to your crush or pass pre-algebra with a C, and here comes this possibility that none of it matters because everyone’s about to be dead. Which is kind of the point of apocalyptic literature, right? “Memento mori” and all that.
So, yes, I was absolutely worried. Worried and (ultimately) baffled as to why, if the world was about to end, you’d spend what’s left of your short life doing things like mowing your lawn or attending public school. It made me existential, I think; and I’ve heard a lot of millennials report the same. There was Y2K, then 9/11, then the Great Recession, then COVID. Millennials (and not to fetishize my own generation here) have had a lot of practice with thinking the world’s over. It’s worth mentioning that, even though this is a book set in the late nineties, I wrote it during the early stages of the COVID pandemic, and I kind of used the confusion of Y2K to process some of the strange tensions that I experienced in early 2020 on account of the coronavirus.
I have so much respect for how you structured this novel. The vignettes work so well. Did you know going into the story that you wanted to use this style? Or did it kind of reveal itself?
If we’re being honest here, the structure happened as a kind of bottomlessly fortuitous accident. I recently wrote an essay about this for Lit Hub in which I call Junah an “anti-novel,” and while I won’t repeat all of that essay’s arguments, I will say that I originally intended for this to be an 800-page book with all the structural trappings of the traditional novel. In trying to write that book, though, I spent most of 2020 producing disembodied lines of dialogue, free-floating fragments, and dozens of scenes/riffs not really “grounded” in any larger narrative. All this material was in Junah’s voice, and all of it was (theoretically) stuff that he might deposit into the time capsule; but, as the scraps and fragments kept piling up, I swore to myself that, eventually, I’d restructure everything to resemble a traditional novel.
At some point (I think it was around Christmas of 2020), I accepted the fact that the book wanted the structure it had achieved, which was fragmentary and non-linear; and that (if I embraced that structure and added an epistolary register) the book would function as the time capsule in a kind of quasi-mimetic way. I should also say that, in the past five years, the books I’ve enjoyed the most have not been traditional novels. They’ve been books like Bluets by Maggie Nelson, Sophia by Michael Bible, and 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso. All very sexy non-novelist stuff, you know?
The book hits on some heavy stuff. There are thoughts of loneliness, death, divorce — just to name a few. But you balance this heaviness with such light and humor. Balance is one of those things that I feel like I talk about a lot at workshops and in classes. Is it natural for you to be able to include both sides as you are writing? Do you go back later and try to add in moments to make it all work? I’m curious about your approach.
You know who I go to for a model on balancing the dark stuff with the light stuff? And forgive me if this is cliché, but I look to Wes Anderson. Especially the early stuff. Rushmore and The Life Aquatic and (most of all) The Royal Tenenbaums. I’m thinking of a line like, “Anyone interested in grabbing a couple of burgers and hitting the cemetery?” Or the one at the end, when Richie’s in the hospital, and he says, “I wrote a suicide note…Right after I regained consciousness.” Anderson’s characters are usually full of shit, aren’t they? And so are mine.
The South’s filled to the brim with grifters, and most of them (myself included) are quite aware of their insincerity. But it’s that consciousness that allows them to make light of incredibly dark situations (which is Sadie’s typical contribution), or to reveal a darkness that’s hidden in the light of “ordinary” life (which is Junah’s move). I think we play with the truth down here, and I think that playfulness is a gift for anyone trapped in an existential situation. As for your question about when the balance gets achieved — as you write or after you write — most of my magic happens as I write. I think my best sentences come when I’m deeply immersed in both the language (on the page) and the situation (in the story), and when I demand that the characters surprise me.
I love these characters. Junah, of course. His dad. His mom. Miss Meechum. Coach Mac. Sadie. Even Rusty (my goodness, where that story goes) and Chrissie. They are all so real. I know these people. I think we all do.
I want to ask about the wisdom so many of them share. For example, Miss Meechum gives us this: “The question is not ‘Will the world end in December?’ The question is ‘How might you live as if it will?’” Junah’s father gives a brilliant few lines about death’s inevitability being comparable to a fart on an elevator. These kinds of moments occur throughout the book. Truly, there are a lot of profound statements about death and loneliness and what it means to live.
Did you pick up lines you’ve heard over the years — or were these all new, just for this novel?
You asked earlier about the structure, and I confessed that it happened by accident, mainly after I had collected about 200 pages worth of fragments. Amongst these fragments, there was a serious amount of aphorisms. Moreover, the aphorisms didn’t feel greasy/contrived, as most forms of wisdom tend to feel when you shoehorn them into a traditional narrative.
To this day, I’m not sure why these aphorisms work (if they work at all), but I’m willing to offer three speculations. One: Junah’s youth (in conjunction with his passivity) means he’s often standing in front of an adult with something to say. In fact, he’s often asked someone a question that would logically generate a quotable line. Two: because so much of the novel takes place in school, I think the deployment of wisdom feels excusable, especially since we understand that everything Junah reports is technically part of his “assignment.” Three: once I added the epistolary element (i.e., Junah addressing the future “you” who has theoretically discovered his time capsule), Junah’s tone became oddly parental, as if he’s instructing (often via snappy proverb) the survivors of the apocalypse. In this sense, it becomes logical for Junah, even at his young age, to play the role of sage.
Did I pick these lines up over the years? Absolutely. Much of what Coach Mac says can be traced back to actual mentors like George Singleton or Dale Ray Phillips. The hot takes from the other kids in the book can usually be traced back to stuff I actually heard in my childhood. Sadie’s wisdom is a composite of my first crush (who was, in fact, hopelessly punk) and my current wife (who’s the most unblinking truth-teller I know). So, yeah, the wisdom was nearly all recycled, even if I did stylize it for Junah’s register.
I was quite moved by the exploration of faith in these pages. I don’t know that I have a question, but I do want to acknowledge the sincerity of Junah’s search for his brand of truth. It resonated with me.
I appreciate your calling it “sincerity.” That was the goal, especially with all those late-night exchanges between Junah and his mother. Junah’s mother is (like many Christians in the South) completely sincere in her desire to save her son from any kind of future pain (including the pain of an eternal hell as she understands that concept). And Junah reciprocates with his own sincerity — the sincerity of doubt. She is telling her truth when she reads him Bible verses and prays with him at night; and he’s telling his truth when he expresses uncertainty about his biblical language and confusion about God in general. It was very important for me to make their relationship feel equitable and, as you say, “sincere.” I didn’t want to mock his mother’s evangelistic tendencies (especially since those are based in large part off my mother’s evangelistic tendencies). And I was not trying to glorify Junah’s precocious brand of agnosticism either.
More than anything, I just wanted to show that, when you think the world is ending, you try to save the ones you love, and you save them with the language that has gained purchase in your mind. The best we can be to each other is sincere.
As we get ready to end, I feel like I have to mention how southern this book is. It’s very South Carolina, to be exact. Do you mind talking about the influence of your home state on your book?
There’s a line from Padgett Powell’s Edisto Revisited (and I’m paraphrasing here, though I used to know the quote by heart). Something like, “My father loved the place he was, and that just happened to be the South.” What I love about this line is its implication that affection for geography is in some ways incidental. A true sentimentalist could love Antarctica (assuming he was born there), whereas a heartless bastard could remain unphased by a flood of culture and history and beauty. You’ve read my book, so you know where I fall on all of this. I’m a sentimentalist, and Junah (for better or worse) had to narrate through that sentimentalism. What can I say? I love South Carolina, especially the Greenville area where I was born and raised. Carolinian landscapes appear in the novel, but so do Carolinian speech patterns and Carolinian associate jumps and Carolinian historical references. In this sense, there’s really no great compliment than when a reader from the South says something like, “I grew up there, so I knew exactly what you were talking about.”
Thanks again, Dan. You’ve written a beautiful book — one that will stay with me for a long while.
Thank you, Bradley. This conversation was a real thrill.
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