vehicle for arriving at the tenor of that metaphor.
S: One of the reasons I enjoy talking to you is because, like many readers, I like to know about the author (I tend to look at the author photo to get an idea of “who is telling me this story”). I think this is because we want to see if any of the characters in the novel are subtly (or not) a shadow of the author. Would you say any of the characters in Noise have any connections to your own life (being aware, of course, that admitting to murder here might be a bad thing)?
DB: Of course, all of the characters are connected to me (are me), in that they’re all ideas of what people could be like filtered through Hiram’s perspectives, anxieties, beliefs, etc. But that’s a bit of a dodge. Hiram’s story is largely my story. Now, I won’t entirely say which of his experiences and characteristics are direct self-portraits, but, for example, my father is alive and well (unlike Hiram’s). However, I did live in that duplex at that age with a roommate like Adam (the duplex’s description, location in town, and its personal importance are all, definitely, lifted straight from my past—it’s still there, by the way, in roughly the same condition). Certainly, I’ve never lived through a social collapse, so I haven’t done anything that Hiram does in the novel, but a very large portion of his past experiences, personal mythologies, and perspectives might qualify as narrative nonfiction.
Hiram fascinates me because he is, indeed, my shadow, but he’s struggling much harder for clarity, for solidity, than I do (or did). His past tells us that he was a “good” kid, but the wholesome things he learned playing T-ball, or in the Boy Scouts, or at church become very confusing and problematic when their contributions to his identity can no longer serve him. When you can no longer count on inhabiting a generally peaceful and cooperative social environment, things like how to hit a ball off the T, or how to be “loyal,” very suddenly come to mean something else. When the mind is desperate to keep itself alive, any past experiences are fair game for deconstruction and revision.
As for Slade—I’ve renamed some streets, moved some buildings around, and taken artistic license with my descriptions, but otherwise, it’s very highly based on the town I was living in at Hiram’s age: Denton, Texas. Again, I won’t say what’s “real” and what’s not about the town—you’ll just have to pop in for a visit and see for yourself.
S: Hear that, Denton Chamber of Commerce—stock up on brochures! Okay—taking a different tack, what would you say if someone described this book as “a dystopian novel”? Do you find that an accurate genre for Noise?
DB: I think it’s difficult to say, one way or the other, in regards to the “real world” in the novel. However, the meta-society that Hiram and the gang intend to create at Amaranth very well could be dystopian. They envision an almost totalitarian, certainly fascist, regime. So, from the perspective of a real-world, contemporary U.S. reader, we could say that Amaranth is (or would be) dystopian. However, as far as the characters in the novel are concerned, it isn’t dystopian—it’s utopian. At Amaranth, they’ll be safe, they’ll be free from persecution and predation, and they will acquire everything they need to live their way. If one looks back at the utopias of, say, Thomas More, Charles Fourier, or Edward Bellamy, one might conclude that realizing utopia is impossible—but only sort of. Whoever ends up at the top can certainly achieve utopia, only personally instead of socially. History largely tells us that utopian communes fail (e.g., La Réunion near what’s now Dallas, or Brisbane’s and Greeley’s Fourier-inspired “phalanxes,” or the Ripleys’ Brook Farm), but could you make one succeed as a totalitarian compound, à la the medieval city-state, wherein the civic leader(s) lives in luxury? In a personal utopia? I think you could.
Really, though, for the novel as a whole, you’d need several perspectives to draw a conclusion about utopia, dystopia, or antiutopia. There is the collapsed world, but then there are the worlds that Groups have established (or will establish). CLO.WN, for example, seems to be in hog heaven, so I’m not sure we can call their society anti-utopian (it’s not striving to be utopian, it already is—to them). Hiram and his allies, however, spend the entire novel not having “Arrived” at their “Place,”