Don’t Connect the Dots: An Interview with Kevin Kearney
photo by the interviewer
My first exchange with Kevin Kearney was in his capacity as the fiction editor at the lit mag Rejection Letters. He had accepted a story of mine and was suggesting a major change to its end. My original draft finished with something of a punchline. Kearney challenged me to find a deeper resonance and push beyond the joke. He was right, of course, and the piece was much improved. It’s feedback that helped me evolve the story, even after publication. In fact, I was reminded of it recently as I read his debut novel.
Like so many books, Kevin Kearney’s How to Keep Time is about a family. Unlike so many books, it pushes beyond the familiarity of its setting and characters to achieve something much rarer. It’s a book that manages to be both earnest and incisive, complex and realistic. Which is not to say it ever feels heavy. On the contrary, stories of loss and grief are rarely this fun. I hesitate to use the term page-turner, but the tidal pull of this narrative is such that if you don’t finish it in a day, it won’t take you much longer.
I was fortunate enough to get an audience with the author after reading an advanced copy, and one Sunday afternoon, I called him on the phone and recorded the whole damn thing. Our conversation, edited below for length and clarity, is an inside look at how Kearney’s worldview and experiences shaped a novel that ranks easily among my favorites of the year.
Kyle Seibel: I was thinking about how religion pops up at different points in your book in places where you wouldn’t expect it. Specifically, I'm thinking of the Frank Bruni quote about Trump. Was that an intentional thematic point for you?
Kevin M. Kearney: It's almost unavoidable in everything I write. I grew up much like Mercer, the main character in How To Keep Time. I went to kindergarten through 12th grade at Catholic school. I was surrounded by Catholicism, not in an evangelical sense, not in even a deeply religious sense. More like an identity. I grew up Irish-Catholic. It's something that permeates everything that I do for better or worse.
KS: In the book, Mercer’s version of being Catholic is so different from Alejandra's, his wife. Was there an autobiographical detail here? Did someone from your life offer a counterpoint to your Catholic worldview at some point?
KMK: I met my wife when I was 18. She’s from Southern California, and she was raised without any religion, despite her family being a mix of Jewish and Italian descent. Up to that point, I’d assumed that growing up with faith, despite all of its obvious baggage and my subsequent hangups, had provided me with a necessary moral understanding of the world. But seeing her as this fully realized human who has great emotional intelligence and is able to process things in a healthy way offered a different context to my experience. I realized that the world doesn't have to be one way. Seems like maybe an obvious thing in retrospect, but at the time, that really shifted my thinking.
KS: It reminds me of something Alejandra's father says in the book. He has that line about how religion is one way to look at the world, but not the only way.
KMK: Right. I guess at this point in my life, that's where I am in general with religion or spirituality. Whatever helps you understand things a little bit better.
KS: One of my favorite parts of the book are those little interstitials among the chapters. They felt almost biblical to me. What was your thinking behind including those? How did you go about writing them?
KMK: A lot of those stories are regional folk tales or urban legends. They're the types of stories that growing up in South Jersey, I had heard as early as I could remember. Sometimes they would appear in history class in social studies. Sometimes they would be things that I would read in Weird N.J., which is this magazine about all the strange aspects of The Garden State. And I've always been fascinated by them, how there's no real authorship, how they have existed and have been passed down, and how they shift depending on the time in which they're being told. Even before I started the book, I was trying to write about the Jersey Devil. I was pitching a story to local publications where I was going to go follow a Jersey Devil Hunter on one of his searches for the actual creature.
The story never ended up working out but the interest in the topic never left me. And when I started writing the book, I wanted to write about National Park and I had this idea for a family, but I also thought I could bring in this other fascination and maybe there's a way to make all of it work together.
KS: The book is mostly written in third person but with those interstitial chapters, you occasionally drift into a first person. Is that an authorial character you're using? Or is that you, Kevin M. Kearney?
KMK:The boring but true answer is I was just having so much fun playing around with voice and perspective. I gave an early draft to another writer, and she wasn’t a fan. She was like, "What am I supposed to do with that?"
But I liked that it caught her off guard. And the earliest drafts of the book were really a lot of fragments. I didn't set out with a clear narrative arc. I liked these characters and I liked this location and I liked using all that mythology. I built from there.
To circle back to your original question, I think it's definitely me. It's just acknowledging that this is a story I’m trying to tell you in the same way that the Jersey Devil is a story. It's trying to explain something that feels inexplicable.
KS: I think that the shift in perspective in those chapters is handled really confidently. That's half the battle. The pace also helps in this case, which is my next point. The pace of the book is, for lack of a better word, awesome. It zooms.
KMK: Thank you for saying that. When I started writing the book in earnest, I read two books that I think influenced what you’re talking about, that type of velocity. The first was Jenny Offill's Department of Speculation and the second was Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia.
They’re books you can read in a day. They don’t feel like homework. When I went back to reread them, I was trying to figure out how they achieved something so fun without feeling cheap or half baked.
KS: I think that’s exactly what you did. It doesn't neglect the ideas that you're trying to talk about either.
KMK: I’m glad it comes off that way. Writing this book helped me realize there's a real power in blank space and very compact short paragraphs. And that blank space allows people to more easily connect with the story.
It felt like such a gift knowing that I could just end this chapter after a scene, even though it's only a page and a half. I don't have to connect every dot. I don't need this huge outline to understand where the story's going.
KS: When I got to the chapter in How to Keep Time from the dad’s perspective, I said—out loud—“Holy shit.” In a book where very pivotal moments happen off page, I thought this was a novel way to raise the tension.
There's not a question here, I'm just saying that's badass.
KMK: [Laughs] The dad, Lake, he's my favorite. It probably sounds self indulgent, but I'm very, very proud of that section. There's so many details from my parents or my uncles or my in-laws and delving into that world was very rewarding. Also, anytime I was writing from Lake's perspective, I would listen to Europe ‘72, which is always a good thing.
KS: Music comes up a few different times in the book. Another great Lake detail is how he only listens to Eric Clapton’s Unplugged when doing chores. It's very Hall of Fame dad stuff.
KMK: Unplugged has always stuck out to me as being so impotent and sexless. It's this guy who had so much power decades earlier completely phoning it in and trying to pass it off as though he's doing something innovative.
KS: That’s almost another theme of the book, isn’t it? The University library transforming into the Communication Hub is another example that comes to mind. It almost feels apocalyptic.
KMK: Absolutely. I do personally feel inundated with the fact that the world is ending. And I'm not trying to be overly dramatic, but we receive more information every day that things are getting worse and that there's less hope for things to get better.
One of the publishers that I sent the early manuscript to responded with a very lengthy rejection message, which I suppose was kind, but it basically explained that they weren’t interested in publishing post-nihilism. That it wasn’t a philosophy that they subscribe to.
I had never heard of that before, post-nihilism. But I guess there's something to it. I think that it’s true that things are coming to an end, but I also believe there's still good you can do, even if the world around you is crumbling.
KS: The end of your book seems to suggest there's a peace for these characters. I also thought it had a quite uncynical take on their faiths.
KMK: I mean, I agree with you. I think overall I am optimistic even when I don't want to be. Yes, things are bad, maybe things are even getting worse, maybe you're going through something that you never could have imagined, but not all hope is lost.
KS: Speaking of the end of the world, the cultural moment surrounding the book is an ominous one. It's the 4th of July weekend in 2016. What were you thinking by choosing that time?
KMK: I was teaching high school while writing How to Keep Time and it seemed like for a lot of the kids, the moment Trump was elected marked a change in their understanding of American history in the same way that 9/11 did for me.
I was interested in going back a few months before that and trying to explore a little bit of how we could have been so wrong in thinking about the election’s outcome. And as Mercer's character and storyline developed, I realized he’s just as delusional.
KS: One thing your book made me want to do is read more books like it. If someone were to finish your novel and want to explore more of that world, what would you put in an appendix? What's the reading list for this book?
KMK: Oh, that's a good question. I think that Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan made me very excited about writing again after being exhausted by another project that went nowhere. He makes all his own rules and then continues to break them and then makes new ones. It shows you what is possible for a book.
There’s another one too. It's a history book on the Jersey Devil. It’s called The Secret History of the Jersey Devil: How Quakers, Hucksters and Benjamin Franklin Created a Monster. And I also spent a lot of time with Henry Charlton Beck’s Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey and M.R. Harrington’s The Indians of New Jersey, two books that helped me understand the history and folklore of the Pine Barrens.
Also, I'm totally indebted to John McPhee's The Pine Barrens. I think it's one of my favorite books of all time. It's incredible. Everything about it is, I think, a masterwork. It's nonfiction but it feels like a novel. It's truly a book about a place rather than about a topic. And that’s really what I tried to do with my book.