By Eisa Nefertari Ulen

Victor LaValle’s third book belongs on your shelf if you enjoy fine literary work from African-American writers. Or if you like to kick back on a wild ride with a fast read. Or if you dig genre fiction.

Plot basics: Ricky Rice, a suicide cult survivor, is summoned to the woods of Vermont, away from his middle-aged, mediocre life, and goes cross-country to investigate paranormal activity in the San Francisco Bay Area. To describe the story further would be to ruin its experiential power for the reader.

LaValle creates a convincing narrative out of this improbable plotline while honoring the best of African-American literary ambition. He also manages to expand the rim of possibility for Black Books, in the tradition of speculative fiction writers from Ishmael Reed to Octavia E. Butler.

LaValle, whose 1999 short story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, was a PEN/Open Book Award winner, and his debut novel, The Ecstatic, was a finalist for the

PEN/Faulkner Award, LaValle is a clever, agile, proficient author whose newest work swings way past easy categorization to stand as a transcendent 21st-century American novel. Mos Def calls his work “a mix of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Edgar Allen Poe.” Anthony Doerr says it’s Haruki Murakami and Ralph Ellison with “several fistfuls of twenty-first century attitude” thrown in.

LaValle shared some of his prodigious thoughts and wisdom in this interview for TheDefendersOnline.

Q: Big Machine is a mad ride with a cult hecatomb survivor. He falls to the floor of a bus station bathroom, battles a cat in a dank cellar, and flees the sewers of a Bay Area town. There are frightening angels, weary benefactors, chunky women, and snazzy vintage attire. Please share what led you to this story.

A: First, thanks for interviewing me for the site. Also, thanks for using the word Hecatomb: a large scale sacrifice or slaughter! I’d never seen it before and now I promise I’m going to abuse it in my next book.

The first few drafts of the novel (and by few, I mean about 20) had a totally different opening. The first line was “By that time I’d impregnated a whole series of women, but not one of them ever gave me a child.” That’s kind of the heart of the whole novel right there…Once you have a line like that it’s pretty hard to go slow though! It’s also hard to write a quiet little tale. While … that line [now] appears much later in the book, in a different form), I think that level of energy, that effect, became the way I tested all that came afterward. When I wrote that first line, it felt kind of atomic, like I had the material for a devastating weapon.

Q: Big Machine is literary, with its strong narrative voice and elegant prose, yet it also seems to fall into the category of speculative fiction. What do you call it? Did you set out to write genre fiction? Literary fiction? A mash-up?

A: Can I be so bold as to say that I set out to write a great book? By that I don’t necessarily mean one that everyone will agree is a classic or something … I mean “great” in the sense that it would be a book that took enormous risks (as much as writing is ever actually a risk, compared to say shark hunting). A book that made me uncomfortable, a little scared, but also felt exhilarating to write.

With that in mind I felt I was absolutely writing a “literary” novel because I spent so much time and gave so much care to the language, the ideas, and the form. I wanted Ricky, the narrator through most of the book, to sound like a real person, a guy you’ve met on a train or at a dive bar, but to turn that voice into something that still contained poetry, beautiful description, and wisdom. And I wanted to use his language to show that he had an incredibly complex mind. That he carried wisdom based on living a hard but illuminating life.

All this makes it literary, to me. The fact that it might also be a wild-ass adventure doesn’t have to change that fact. Literature is writing that makes life familiar and fantastically strange, both at the same time. I don’t care if you do that with a quiet family drama or space aliens. If it’s done well, then both qualify as art to me.

In case that doesn’t quite answer the question I’m going to say you can call this book literary horror. I know, I know, could any two words sound less appealing together? And yet, for a lack of better terms, that’s the mash up I’ll take.

Q: Your novel contains elements of apocalyptic / post-apocalyptic fiction, yet Rick, your male protagonist, and Adele seem to be anticipating a larger confrontation at the novel’s close. What would you say is their central battle?

A: I’m glad it felt like the end of the novel was only the beginning of an even larger story. I wanted to end on that kind of note, instead of just wrapping everything up neatly, because I liked the idea of the reader putting the book down and believing that Ricky and Adele are still out there, driving the back roads of America, fighting for this country–for all its citizens–even if most of us will never know they’re there. Between you and me, they are out there. They send me postcards from time to time.

The second reason the book ends on that note is because I imagine this story as something much longer, and larger, than this one novel contains. I’ve got three more books in mind that map out the entire, epic battle that’s implied at the end of Big Machine, a four-part myth about America in the 21st century. And it only gets crazier.

Lastly, I wanted to write Ricky and Adele as these heroes, kind of super-heroes really, because I felt like the black novel—novel of color?—was ready to make another leap. Or at least, I was ready to make a bit of leap with my version of the same.

Recently I did an event [with] writers Asali Solomon and Michael Thomas [where we] discussed [Ralph Ellison’s] Invisible Man and the legacy of that book.

Rereading the novel in preparation for the event was a pleasure, because I got to know the book again, in all its long-lasting glory as well as its more dated aspects … But the last idea, that the Invisible Man was finally ready to come out of his hole, to return to the world, struck me as a great summation of the point Ellison’s novel could imagine (ready to reenter the world as a thoughtful, independent individual), but that also what it couldn’t imagine (what that kind of black life might look like).

So, in that sense, I see Big Machine as the extension of a continuing question: as we gain more power, more centrality in this nation, how do we exercise that power? For my book, I thought it wouldn’t do for Ricky and Adele to exist at the moment when power is promised. And it certainly wasn’t enough for them to be sidekicks or consciences to the larger national concerns. So I wrote them as central to the nation’s future. America’s last, best hope. Which is exactly what they deserve to be.

Q: The apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic (or anti-apocalyptic) aspects of your work are striking, given that Big Machine is a post-9/11 American novel. Did something shift in terms of black people’s relationship with America after 9/11? Is the DuBoisian concept of “two-ness” somehow different now?

A: One thing I do remember, post 9/11 was the kind of shock some folks, by this I mean black people, felt about the blanket attack on the World Trade Center. There was a sense of surprise (and I know I’m making blanket statements here, but I’m just recalling personal conversations), that the men who flew jets into the towers couldn’t differentiate between “us” and “them.” “Them” being the folks who make tons of money off the backs of poor people around the world, who occupy foreign lands with their armies, and so forth. But of course even this sense of difference is only really one you notice if you are an American. Why would the rest of the world spend their time parsing out the subtle differences between one set of New Yorker versus another? … I think the shock had a lot to do with the idea that the rest of the world didn’t see us the way we saw us (again, generalization).

As a result, I think many black people had to do a double take, in the immediate aftermath, but even in the years since. Am I an American? We’ve spent so long with a long list of pretty sensible grievances that it can be a shock when someone points out that those differences don’t necessarily mean anything to people outside the tent.

One of the reasons I wrote this novel was to track the ways the answer to this question—am I an American?—changes as the story continues. My hope was that the novel would offer more than just simple yes/no formulations. Instead, patriotism began to seem a lot like claiming family ties. When do you say “yes, we’re related,” and when do you cover your face and say, “I do not know that dude?”

I don’t think the conclusion of the novel negates Dubois’ idea of double-consciousness. Instead I think it suggests something more like quadruple consciousness. So that the issue isn’t just about divisions between black and white (which it never was). But divisions between black and black. White and white. (And let’s not forget brown, red, and yellow, too!)

Q: Ricky initially appears to be an average, everyday addict until the narrative reveals startling truths about his past that make his dependency, inability to maintain regular employment, and yearning for children and a stable home life specific, tragic, and kind of logical. Does Ricky suffer from a form of PTSD, or a Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary-esque post traumatic slave syndrome?

First, I’d like to think there’s no such thing as an “average, everyday addict.” Every addict is distinct and special! I mean that sincerely. In Ricky’s case I was trying to illustrate that exact idea, but because it’s a novel—a wild epic—the events from his past had to be a little bigger than normal. Nonetheless, I wanted to suggest that the path isn’t that hard to head down, it usually just takes a handful of terrible elements occurring in one life and boom—you’ve got trouble.

My hope was that if readers could come to sympathize with Ricky and Adele, they might see the next troubled person they came across in a slightly different light. That’s not meant to excuse anyone’s behavior, or offer a free pass for personal failings, but to suggest that trouble comes into all our lives, but still most of us are recognizably human.

With that long pro-addict message out of the way, I can also see the thread you’re following to the DeGruy-Leary idea. It makes sense to me. I particularly like that one of Dr. DeGruy’s main points is that we begin “simply by telling the truth.” This is no small task. And yet I do think it’s at the heart of any healing, in anyone’s life.

Q: Ricky remains invisible throughout the narrative. Despite paranormal activity, gunshots, explosions, and a wacky wardrobe, few characters outside of other marginalized African Americans seem to notice him. Why do you think this theme of invisibility, in the tradition of Dunbar and Ellison, persists in the work of black male writers?

A: I think it persists because Ralph Ellison became so damn big because of it! Seriously, if Invisible Man had sunk like a stone, we’d have some other touchstone in our canon. As for me, I think that idea of being unseen exists but I only want to give Mr. Ellison so much credit for patrimony here. I love Ishmael Reed and hope (pray?) that his mix of humor and sharp political eye have shaped me, and this novel, just as much. Also, Gayl Jones, every day.

As I hope this list makes clear, I feel more indebted to a certain strain of black writers rather than strictly male or female. Whether it’s called HooDoo or Afrosurrealism, I like to think that’s my camp. Uncle Jam Wants You! That’s my flavor.

Q: Which contemporary authors do you find most interesting? What trends do you see among living writers of African descent?

A: Regardless of race, region, gender and so on, I’m always excited by writers who don’t give me what I expect. Meaning, I may think I know where the book/story is going to go but the writer finds way to surprise me, even if they don’t include fantastic twists or surprises. But thinking specifically of books by black authors that came out this year: Marlon James published a novel earlier this year, The Book of Night Women, which was amazing and assured.

There’s a brilliant poet named Lyrae Van clief stefanon who published a book of poems called Open Interval. She’s been nominated for a National Book Award this year, so I’m happy her book got the well-deserved recognition. Also Cheo Tyehimba Taylor has a collection of stories out earlier this year called Like Loving Backward, in the tradition of Henry Dumas.

I think Kelly Link (Stranger Things Happen) and Dan Chaon (Await Your Reply) do wonderful stuff. And I’m really looking forward to ZZ Packer’s novel about the Buffalo

Soldiers. If you want to go back in time a bit I’m constantly pushing Kenzaburo Oe’s first novel, A Personal Matter. He’s a Japanese writer and Nobel Prize winner. And Salar Abdoh’s novel, The Poet’s Game, will pull you in from the first page—a 9/11 novel written before 9/11. Read it and you’ll see what I mean.

Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of the novel, Crystelle Mourning, and a founding member of RingShout: A Place for Black Literature. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. www.EisaUlen.com