CALEB POWELL: (speaking into digital voice recorder) Current time: 6:30 p.m., Thursday, September 29th, 2011. Place: Seattle. My driveway. David has arrived. I’m going out to meet him.
DAVID SHIELDS: Where do you want me to put my stuff?
CALEB: Back of my car. I’m looking forward to this.
DAVID: Definitely, but did you see the article in the [University of Washington] Daily?
CALEB: It’s out?
DAVID: (pulling up the article on his phone) I must admit I’m a bit flummoxed by your quotes.
CALEB: (reading the article) Hmm. I don’t see the big deal. She asked me my first impressions of you, and I told her.
DAVID: Do you feel that much animosity toward me, or am I completely imagining it?
CALEB: Animosity?
DAVID: There’s hardly a line of yours whose purpose was to do anything but to undermine me.
CALEB: You mean when I said, “Your classes wasted time”? I went on to praise you, but she didn’t quote that, of course. And your novel classes did waste time—endlessly dissecting Ted Mooney’s Easy Travel to Other Planets and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
DAVID: I’d never teach those books now, but still, Caleb—
CALEB: Come in and meet my family.
CALEB: (entering the chaos of the house; the girls swarm at the entrance) That’s Kaya, Ava, Gia.
DAVID: They’re adorable.
CALEB: My wife, Terry.
DAVID: Hi, everybody.
CALEB: (entering living room and speaking first to David, then to his parents, then again to David) My parents, Dave and Beatrice Powell; David Shields. My parents came to help out with the kids tomorrow.
FATHER: Good to meet you, David.
CALEB: My parents met at Cooper Union.
DAVID: The free-tuition school.
CALEB: (speaking first to David, then to his parents) All the paintings in our house are my mother’s. David’s daughter is a freshman at college in Rhode Island.
DAVID: She goes to RISD.
MOTHER: Risby?
DAVID: The Rhode Island School of Design. RISD.
MOTHER: Never heard of Risby.
FATHER: Your sister Marilyn went there.
MOTHER: Where, Risby?
FATHER: Ris-Dee.
DAVID: It’s the Rhode Island School of Design, but they call it RIS-D for short.
MOTHER: Risby?
FATHER: Trice!
CALEB: (to David) You wanna beer?
DAVID: I’m good; thanks.
TERRY: You’re leaving him with your parents?
CALEB: Why not?
TERRY: You’re having a beer?
CALEB: One for the road.
TERRY: You excited?
CALEB: I’m ready.
TERRY: What if he makes a move on you?
CALEB: Ha ha.
CALEB: (showing David his shelf of books about Cambodia) Did you read The Road of Lost Innocence?
DAVID: Was I supposed to?
CALEB: It wasn’t a coaster. You’ve had me read, what, fifty books over the last few years, and I give you one?
DAVID: I spent an hour with it, thumbing back and forth. It’s not very well written. What’s the point? I already know people suffer.
CALEB: It’s not trying to be a work of art. Did you get a sense of it at all?
DAVID: It’s horrible—what she endured.
CALEB: I’m going to come back to this.
CALEB: (starting the ignition, pulling out the digital voice recorder, placing it on the console) Current time: 7:07 p.m. You ready?
DAVID: You probably prepared much more assiduously than I did. It’ll be an interesting experiment. I’m totally open to it bombing.
CALEB: I want to have a good time.
DAVID: How so?
CALEB: No kids for four days—something to take advantage of.
DAVID: We’ll walk, talk, read, cook. I think if we try too hard to have some point-by-point debate, it’ll turn out quite stilted. How did you explain this to your parents, your wife? That we’re going to go to a cabin for four days to yell at each other, and out of that we’ll try to produce a My Dinner with André–like exchange? Did that make any sense to them?
CALEB: My dad thinks My Dinner with André is about “two homos.” I told him it’s not.
DAVID: He’s homophobic?
CALEB: He’s old-school, military, was in Vietnam, but My Dinner with André is nothing like us: André talks ninety-five percent of the time as Wally makes quizzical facial expressions.
DAVID: Yeah, but it’s an argument about two opposed modes of being. Wally seeks comfort, André seeks discomfort, and they wind up, ever so slightly, changing positions. Same thing in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Somehow, when D. F. Wallace slides the tape recorder over to Lipsky’s side of the table, the tectonic plates shift. Not sure how. It’s beautiful. I definitely want to have an interesting conversation, but the goal, to me, is to come out of this with a book, no?
CALEB: Why don’t you commit suicide in the next year?
DAVID: Then we’d have a book for sure.… Christ, you were my student—when?—twenty years ago or more.
CALEB: From ’88 to ’91.
DAVID: And here we are chatting. I wonder what it is about us that gets in the other’s grille.
CALEB: Who knows? I never read more than one book by my other ex-teachers, but I’ve read all yours. I know a lot about you. You know very little about me, so I want to tell my story. I like interviewing people like you, Eula Biss, Ander Monson, Lidia Yuknavitch, Peter Mountford, but I’d much rather converse. When I met Peter, we just agreed, “Fuck it—let’s have another beer and finish this up online.”
DAVID: Bring in as much of yourself as possible. I want this to be an absolutely equal battle. Let’s make it so it’s not one-sided, not “Okay, David, tell me what you think about this.”
CALEB: Damn straight. Enough about David. You’re too academic. Who’s lived the more interesting life?
DAVID: I don’t accept the premise of the question.
CALEB: Terry knows about what we’re doing, but not everything.
DAVID: Meaning?
CALEB: You said you wanted homoerotic tension. Were you hitting on me?
DAVID: No. So far as I know, I’m a hundred percent straight. I just thought it might be good subtext to layer in. I’m sure it seems weird—two guys spending four days together in the mountains.
CALEB: You’re married, one kid; you wouldn’t be the first in that situation with a secret life, fishing, throwing out a few gay-friendly hints. So you say this and I’m thinking, Maybe he’s attracted to me, and I’m flattered, but … Terry calls this “Date Weekend with David Shields.”
DAVID: You don’t want her to freak out.
CALEB: That’s not the half of it. When she was still in college, she married this guy, Mark, who had his shit together—was in business, loved sports. They divorced after a year. A few months later he came out.
DAVID: Whoa.
CALEB: She doesn’t like talking about it. I want to pick at the scabs of experience: mine, hers. She said it was traumatic. It was relatively early in the era of AIDS. Mark had said he never cheated on her, but she didn’t know. She thought she could have AIDS. Mark’s dad had even died of AIDS. Her parents are “liberal,” but there are grandparents, aunts, uncles. People made a lot of comments. There was a stigma that, no matter how absurd the accusation is, she had made Mark gay. That she’d failed.
DAVID: “If she were sexier, she would have converted him.”
CALEB: Mark “married” a Korean guy; they adopted a kid. I’ve met Mark, and he’s sent gifts for our kids. Nice guy. Aside from the basics, though, I’ve gotten hardly anything from Terry except an offhand detail.
DAVID: Maybe she’s waiting to write about it herself.
CALEB: She’s not the type, but she’s always asking questions, suggesting fantasies, wanting to know if I’ve ever kissed a man, if I ever wanted to—if I had the opportunity, would I? I’ll say, “Only accidentally.” When I told her I was going to spend four days with you in Skykomish, she asked, “What would you do if he told you that he could guarantee you getting published, and then he made a move on you?” I said, “You trying to Mark me?”
DAVID: That’s a great line in about eleven different ways.
CALEB: I tease back, say that she makes men switch sides.
DAVID: She keeps going to it: sort of, What if? That’s fascinating.
CALEB: And there’s a short story of mine that relates to all this. I pulled it out of the drawer and reworked it specifically for this trip. You’ll see what I mean. Anyway, if you wanted a homoerotic subtext, there’s a certain serendipity that you picked me.
DAVID: You can’t make this shit up.
CALEB: There are other secrets we’ll get to.
DAVID: I like the idea of us being remarkably candid—
CALEB: The thing is—
DAVID: Let me finish. I think of myself—and perhaps I’m kidding myself—but I think of myself as being willing to entertain almost any idea or thought about myself or anything else. I can’t imagine me ever saying, “Oh my god, I can’t believe you said that.” But both of us have to agree about what we can or can’t use, don’t you think? I might say, “Caleb, we have to leave this in,” and you have the right to say no.
CALEB: We can’t faux-argue like Siskel and Ebert. It’s staged, but it can’t be fake.
DAVID: Agreed. A genuine disagreement. Civil, but barely.
CALEB: We have real disagreements. You’re way too focused on yourself. You’re fifty-five. Time to focus on other things.
DAVID: That’s why I’m talking to you.
DAVID: Any other ground rules? Ideally, our conversation will have an organic flow in which we just fly around from books to women to student-teacher antagonism to that guy you wrote that essay about—Ed Jones?—to whatever.
CALEB: I played ball with Ed the other day.
DAVID: Would he have seen the essay?
CALEB: I don’t think so, but one of the guys told me, “I saw that Ed Jones thing you did.” I said, “You read it?” And he said, “Every nigga in Seattle’s read it. You better hope Ed don’t have internet.”
DAVID: Where did it appear?
CALEB: The 322 Review.
DAVID: I liked it.
CALEB: You seemed to think it was missing something.
DAVID: What I found wanting about the piece—or maybe just the way I’d write it differently—is that I’d question far more than you did your impulse to romanticize him.
CALEB: I didn’t romanticize him. I wrote about his domestic violence collar, his divorce, his mooching, being kicked out by his dad.
DAVID: I wanted you to investigate more your liberal white guilt. Make yourself more of the—
CALEB: I don’t feel liberal white guilt.
DAVID: Really?
CALEB: Human guilt’s another question.
DAVID: One of the main ways I’ve overcome my stutter is that I speak slowly. You have a tendency to cut me off. I’ve noticed this in other interviews we’ve done. By all means, I want to give you all the room in the world to talk about anything, but I often get the sense you’re not listening to what I’m saying because you’re so eager to get in your seven points.
Caleb laughs.
DAVID: You’re the poster child for that Fran Lebowitz line: “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.” I always get the feeling you’re just waiting until I’m done so you can talk, and you haven’t really engaged with what I’ve said. I hope I can ask you to listen to what I’m saying. I’ll get to my point, and then you go to your point, okay? Is that fair? If we only do these interviews when one of my books comes out, it doesn’t really matter, but we’re trying to have a real conversation this weekend, and it’s important to me that I don’t feel incredibly frustrated.
CALEB: Very perceptive on your part.
DAVID: How is that perceptive?
CALEB: My wife observes me interrupting, tuning out what people say, waiting to get my point in. She thinks I’m rude. She read this article on Asperger’s symptoms: trouble focusing, trouble paying attention, and so on. She says, “Caleb, that’s you—you must have Asperger’s.” I look at the article and say, “Can’t be. I have empathy.” She says, “Okay, then you have partial Asperger’s, also known as pain-in-the-Assperger’s.”
Silence.
Hmm. Okay, anyway, with family gatherings, it’s not that I have trouble focusing, but that I’m willfully not focusing. I’m paying attention, just not to them. Once, we were sitting around with Terry’s parents and sister and Terry, and one of them said, “Caleb, why don’t you join us?” And I said, “No thanks, I’m in the midst of internal literary dialogue.” With Terry’s family I’ve become “Mr. Internal Literary Dialogue.” I just can’t focus. I’ve tried and I can’t.
DAVID: Too many micro-discussions of mac-and-cheese?
CALEB: One person talks about what their kids ate last night. The other two or three listen, mouths agape, eyes bulging, waiting to say, “And my son likes peaches but didn’t when he was a baby, although he’s always liked bananas yakkety-yak-yak.”
DAVID: Hey, man, you signed up for stay-at-home-dad duty.
CALEB: I know I come across as pretentious and detached and I’m certain I bore people. My wife thinks I’m arrogant and patronizing, which really isn’t—well, isn’t always the case. Her family is more successful and less insecure; they’re admirable and solid. I can be introverted at family gatherings, even though I’m starving for conversation.
DAVID: I’m by no means the only bookish person you know, but you’re eager to flash your chops, show me how I’m wrong.
CALEB: Shit.
DAVID: You miss an exit?
CALEB: A shortcut. We could have saved three to five minutes. It’s minor.
DAVID: How’d you meet your wife?
CALEB: She’s good friends with my sister Sarah, who set us up.
DAVID: And Terry and Sarah are still good friends?
CALEB: Best friends. We all went to high school together, but I hardly said a word to Terry, even though she was friends with Sarah. I didn’t talk much to Sarah, either—though Sarah and I are close now. Terry went to the UW [University of Washington] same time I did; she was a poli-sci major and lived with her gay ex-husband a block away from me my last year of school. A year or two after her divorce, she dated a guy twenty years older: the vice president of the Tacoma Rainiers. She stayed with him for four years—his “trophy.” She went to sports events, Detlef Schrempf’s house in Bellevue, Sonic boxes. At some function she sat by WSU coach Mike Price, and he pinched her ass.
DAVID: Mike Price? Didn’t he go to Alabama and get in trouble at a strip club? He said it was a one-time thing.
CALEB: It’s never a one-time thing.
DAVID: When did you start dating?
CALEB: 2001. I was between Brazil and Taiwan. We had a long-distance relationship. She came to Asia three times before we got married.
DAVID: You’ve been married ten years?
CALEB: We got married in 2003. We got married at the same age as you and Laurie, but you’re twelve years older. You had Natalie around the same age we had Ava. Natalie’s eighteen and Ava’s six. Twelve years. This is boring stuff we’ll probably take out.
DAVID: It’s not boring. We’ll just talk, but then when we talked about your tendency to interrupt, the car got a little cold. You could really feel—
CALEB: Moo!
DAVID: You could really—
CALEB: Moo!
DAVID: There was real tension. Basically, any time we can—
CALEB: Mooooo!
DAVID: We need ninety-seven—
CALEB: Moo! Moo!
DAVID: Okay. I get it. The interrupting cow?
CALEB: “Knock, knock! Who’s there? Interrupting Cow. Interrup—Moo!”
DAVID: Did you just come across that?
CALEB: From Enough About You. You said that was the funniest joke you ever heard.
DAVID: It was my favorite joke at the time. Seemed like a good thing to say in the Bill Murray chapter, since he’s such an interrupting cow.
CALEB: You kept talking and I kept mooing.
DAVID: Noted.
CALEB: I hope you’re not one of those types that, you know, never cracks a joke and never acknowledges a joke cracked.
DAVID: I am humor incarnate, my friend.
CALEB: What’d you think of Adderall Diaries?
DAVID: I don’t know. I wanted to love it but didn’t. I liked it okay. I like consciousness contending with experience. It felt to me more like experience. What did you think?
CALEB: Murder, sex, drugs, confusion. Good stuff.
CALEB: I haven’t gotten to Helen Schulman’s This Beautiful Life. Not sure why you suggested it.
DAVID: It’s just an example of the kind of book I think doesn’t need to be written anymore.
CALEB: Have you read it?
DAVID: No, but—
CALEB: You’re asking me to read books you haven’t read?
DAVID: I don’t think I said, “Could you read this book?” I just meant, “Caleb, let’s bookmark this and talk about it later.” I’ve read a lot about the book, I’ve read her other novels, and I know her. It’s about what happens when a sex tape goes viral at a high school. But we’ve all already processed this narrative in real time: we already did this novel through the Tyler Clementi case.
CALEB: There was the Billy Lucas suicide and so many others.
DAVID: That was DeLillo’s big idea twenty-five years ago: terrorists are the new novelists.
CALEB: You probably didn’t read We Need to Talk About Kevin, then, either.
DAVID: Really great title, but what novel could ever touch Columbine?
CALEB: A friend of mine wrote a novel about a pop-star celebrity—how he picked up boys and took them to his mansion, etc. His agent wouldn’t even send it out.
DAVID: Why not?
CALEB: The main character was transparently Michael Jackson. The topic was too controversial, I guess.
DAVID: For a long time I wanted to write about Tonya Harding. These moments really grip you during the time they’re happening, but I’ve come to realize that for me, anyway—
CALEB: (stops car) Uh-oh.
David looks intently out the windshield.
CALEB: Jeez, I wasn’t even going fast. I saw the crosswalk but didn’t see her. I’ll wait until she crosses.
CALEB: How Literature Saved My Life—the title doesn’t work.
DAVID: Seriously?
CALEB: How Literature Saved Your Life?
DAVID: The good thing about it is that it doesn’t need a subtitle. “What’s it about?” Well, it’s about how literature saved my life.
CALEB: That’s every book you write. Didn’t Steve Almond already write How Rock ’n’ Roll Saved My Life?
DAVID: Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. Did you see that thing Almond and I did? Someone interviewed me, then she asked Almond to criticize my answers. It was supposed to be funny.
CALEB: He seems like a cool guy.
DAVID: He’s lively.
CALEB: His persona, when he’s in his element, works. He should be a comedian, but he’s not a serious writer—“serious” being a writer who writes about “serious” topics.
DAVID: In person he’s charming. And he’s quick, insanely quick. I like him, even if I’m not a huge fan of his work, and I think the feeling is mutual. I find his stuff a little superficial, don’t you?
CALEB: He hasn’t earned the right to be a political authority. Not that I have, either, but I’m not going around issuing self-indulgent moral stands that have no substantive value. Sartre refused the Nobel Prize. How many lives did that save? Almond was teaching at Boston College—
DAVID: Where he quit.
CALEB: —when Condoleezza Rice was invited to give the commencement speech.
DAVID: You wonder if there wasn’t another motivation on his part.
CALEB: It got him on Fox News.
DAVID: I saw something by him recently called “Twenty Tough Questions for Barack Obama.” A very, very stock liberal critique of Obama. I come close to sharing virtually all of Almond’s politics, but I don’t pretend to be a political scientist. He always winds up writing 1,500-word articles for Slate called “Steve Almond’s Solution to the Palestinian Crisis.”
DAVID: Did you ever feel compelled to have a conventional profession?
CALEB: No.
DAVID: Did you actively seek out a bohemian life?
CALEB: After college I worked construction and tried to be a musician. I never considered a career or saving for the future.
DAVID: How did you tend to support yourself abroad?
CALEB: Teaching ESL: English as—
DAVID: I know what “ESL” stands for. Did Terry ever put any pressure on you to have a career?
CALEB: No. She’s pretty good about it. It’s not like I’m a doctor and could walk into a six-figure job. And taking care of the children is a job. I could see myself teaching later.
DAVID: Do you have genuine expertise as an ESL teacher?
CALEB: No.
DAVID: In any case, the point being, I wonder if we’ve married slightly more rational and commonsensical people than we are ourselves. You wife is in advertising?
CALEB: Close enough. Technically, sales, but linked to marketing/advertising. And your wife’s at Fred Hutchinson—fund-raising?
DAVID: She’s a project manager. They study things like whether night-shift workers are more likely to get prostate cancer. Did you ever go out with people in the arts? Writers? Does it surprise you that you married someone who’s not an artist?
CALEB: Yeah.
DAVID: Me, too.
CALEB: When I was overseas, I never thought I’d marry an American. I thought I’d settle overseas. Probably Asia.
DAVID: Then, in 2003—
CALEB: Sorry to interrupt …
DAVID: No, go ahead.
CALEB: How much of your stuff does Laurie read? Does she criticize drafts? Does she read only the published book? Does she like your work?
DAVID: I’d say it’s one of the sadnesses of my life. She reads my work and she semi-likes it sometimes—there’ll be passages she likes—but she’s not exactly riveted. She liked The Thing About Life okay, I think, and she liked Dead Languages, but that was a long time ago. She’s a huge David Foster Wallace fan; she’s always apotheosizing Wallace. Enough about Wallace!
She’s a very smart person who’s not literary, so she’ll say, “I read Reality Hunger, and I kind of agree with it. I, too, am weary of fiction.” And that will be her whole comment. It’s a book I spent years writing, but it’s not in her to say, “It’s brilliant,” or on the other hand, “I liked this, but I quarreled with that.” In general, she’s not crazy about my work. How about Terry? Has she read all your essays and stories?
CALEB: No. You remember my story set in Thailand—the one I gave you, published in Post Road? Terry still hasn’t read that story. It’s four pages. I told her I’d like her to read it, showed it to her, put it on her nightstand, and left it there. If she’s read it, she never told me. The only things she likes come from my Notes of a Sexist Stay-at-Home Father family blog. I write stuff like “What do you call a guy who hates giving women backrubs?”
DAVID: Is this a joke?
CALEB: A massage-ynist. But my serious stuff she hates or isn’t interested in. I have to twist her arm to read any of it. She usually finds it boring, calls me a “literary snob.”
DAVID: And yet she mocks your preference for beer over wine.
CALEB: She loves Harlan Coben. He writes the Myron Bolitar series. She’ll say, “You’d like Myron Bolitar because he was a basketball player, number one draft pick for the Celtics who blew his knee out and became an agent who cleans up athletes’ messes. Not only that, it’s verrrrrrrrrrrrrry literary!” Two months ago, when you and I marked this trip on the calendar, I said to her, “Give Reality Hunger a shot. I’m really interested in your take; it’ll give us something to talk about. I’m going to leave this book on the night table, and please take a look.” She said, “Okay.” She still hasn’t read it.
DAVID: And you put it there in August?
CALEB: Yes.
DAVID: Laurie is capable of the same.
CALEB: But she likes Wallace.
DAVID: That’s not generally her taste. Maybe it’s a Midwestern thing. “Shipping Out,” “The Illinois State Fair,” “Consider the Lobster,” and “Host,” but those are it. Non-writers could never fathom the hurt inflicted—or maybe they can.
CALEB: My dad read that Gulf Coast Q&A you and I did and called it literary fluff. Sarah read our interview in the Rumpus and couldn’t get past the fact that we said “fuck” a few times. I didn’t know what to say. Then Sarah read a few pages of Reality Hunger and wasn’t impressed, and Terry shares Sarah’s opinion, even though she hasn’t read a word of it.
DAVID: Some galleys of How Literature Saved My Life arrived while I was away. Natalie said, “We opened the box not knowing what it was, and then we read it. We really liked it. So funny!” I asked, “How far did you get?” They stopped at page twenty. There’s a heavy-duty sex scene at about page fifty that I’m glad they didn’t get to, but I was just sort of baffled that they’d read and stop after twenty pages. Not even curious? I wonder if it has something to do with not wanting to know about that part of you.
CALEB: Terry hates the way I analyze everything. I pushed some books on her that she liked: Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, Maugham. Then she wanted me to read Water for Elephants and Stones from the River. I’m open, but I immediately started dissecting. She says I don’t like books because of envy, because I’m unpublished. As if, all of a sudden, I’m going to like these books as soon as I’m published.
DAVID: Would Terry read Thing About Life?
CALEB: She’d probably like that more than Reality Hunger.
DAVID: Maybe she’d like Dead Languages.
CALEB: She might.
DAVID: She wants smooth entertainment. What does she like beyond Simón Bolívar or whatever his name is?
CALEB: Oprah selections: Rohinton Mistry. Amy Tan. Lisa See.
DAVID: Those are probably not terrible.
CALEB: She’s a big David Sedaris fan. She’s always, “Why can’t you be funny and write like David Sedaris?”
DAVID: Did Terry ever read your rape novel?
CALEB: Maybe ten percent. She says she supports my writing, and if I ever get published, she expects me to write in the acknowledgments, “I thank my wife for her loving support.” She supports me as a father and husband but not as a writer. She endures my writing. My passion could be race car driving or eating hot dogs for all she cares. I don’t know if she’ll even read this.
DAVID: Sounds like she wouldn’t.
CALEB: Well, I’m not going to edit myself. I realize family or intimates don’t like to see themselves portrayed in an uncomplimentary manner. Writers turn to fiction to protest, perhaps.
DAVID: You’re still invested in fiction in ways that I’m not.
CALEB: (to the DVR) September 29th, 2011, 8:38 p.m. Caleb and David are departing from the parking lot at Red Apple Market, in Sultan, Washington, where they bought groceries. Groceries and beer.
DAVID: So who’s this guy whose house we’re staying at?
CALEB: Khamta. He’s with his wife and son in Hawaii. His wife is his ex-girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend.
DAVID: Yowza.
CALEB: His wife and ex are/were bi.
DAVID: Got it. How do you know him?
CALEB: I grew up in Coupeville—fifty miles north of Seattle. Two friends from high school, Dave Barouh and Khamta Khongsavanh, built houses outside of Skykomish. I worked on both houses. Barouh’s is smaller and the power has a problem, so we’ll probably stay at Khamta’s.
DAVID: I’m happy to stay wherever you want. What are my requirements? Warm. I like heat. And I’d like to take some walks.
CALEB: I have a Washington State Parks pass. We can do casual or serious hikes. I know the terrain. Whenever I’d work on these houses, I’d stay a few days. Terry calls them work vacations.
DAVID: Is it hard to leave? Are the girls fine being with Terry?
CALEB: They favor her. When she comes home, they leave me and pounce on her. My wife’s a better wage earner, and if she were a full-time mom, she’d be better at that, too.
DAVID: I’ll bet you’re better at it than most men would be.
CALEB: I’ll give myself that.
DAVID: What’s the state of your novel? I thought it was eminently publishable (whatever that means). Didn’t Sarah Crichton at FSG [the publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux] like it a lot?
CALEB: She was hooked by the beginning but thought it lost momentum.
DAVID: That would have been so great.
CALEB: Would have been. You liked my novel but didn’t love it.
DAVID: I think that’s fair.
CALEB: I had to push you to read it.
DAVID: I’m a hard sell: I’m not interested anymore in the conventional novel.
CALEB: My novel’s been rejected by some really great editors. My agent tried her best, got it to the right people.
DAVID: Where’s she based?
CALEB: D.C. Her biggest clients are a congresswoman named Barbara Lee and Helen Thomas until she dumped Helen after her anti-Semitic tirade. She didn’t change a word of my manuscript, just sent it off. She sells genre fiction and nonfiction by politicians and journalists. I’m the only “literary” writer she has. It’s time for me to switch.
DAVID: It’s best not to tell an agent or an editor what’s going on until you have to. You have to be willing to piss people off.
CALEB: That shouldn’t be a problem.
CALEB: We just passed Baring. One grocery store/post office. Same building. We’re near Stevens Pass.
(parking in front of a run-down house)
What do you think?
(long silence)
DAVID: Okay.
CALEB: Let’s go in.
DAVID: Okay.
CALEB: We’ve got different senses of humor.
DAVID: I find stuff funny. I just don’t laugh all the time.
CALEB: Look at that house. You’d stay there?
DAVID: Why not?
CALEB: I wondered whether to do this. I told my wife, and she said, “Really?” You’d have a stoic expression, and I’d tell you that it was a joke, and you’d say, “Huh?”
DAVID: You should do it, whatever it is. Ah, I see. I’m an idiot. You were going to pretend this horrible place is where we were staying, and I would freak out.
CALEB: Pretend?
DAVID: If you’re joking, it would be the kind of thing I’d laugh at.
CALEB: This house hasn’t been lived in for ten years. No lights, grass four feet high, broken windows. I was working up to telling you we’re staying at a meth lab. Sensors, wires, and pit bulls. You’d stay here?
DAVID: I could handle it.
CALEB: (driving farther on the dirt road) I give up.
CALEB: Skykomish, September 29th, 2011, 8:57 p.m. We’re about one mile south of Highway 2 and three miles west of the town of Skykomish. We turned off Money Creek Road, down a dirt road, a driveway, and are entering Barouh’s house.
DAVID: This is nice.
CALEB: He should rent it out. The ghost of Barouh is all around. I just wanted to check the gas stove. If the gas doesn’t work, we’ll go to Khamta’s.
CALEB: Khamta’s house.
DAVID: This isn’t our place, is it?
CALEB: Outdoor basketball court, kids’ wading pool, hot tub. He’s got four-wheelers and a riding mower. It’s no cabin.
DAVID: Christ, it’s gorgeous. I’m going to send a picture of it to Laurie.
CALEB: (playing a CD inside the house) You’re friends with the singer.
DAVID: Is it Rick Moody’s band?
CALEB: Mountain Con.
DAVID: Oh my god! James sounds great. Wow! Man! They sound terrific. It’s so cool that you looked him up.
CALEB: I didn’t. I saw him perform about eight years ago and bought the CD. When you mentioned Mountain Con in that essay, I looked at my CD and noticed James Nugent’s name.
DAVID: They sound great. It’s so polished. What’s the name of the song?
CALEB: “Future Burn Out.” You didn’t recognize it? You’ve written about them.
DAVID: I must admit I didn’t. I have the ear of a penguin.
CALEB: You ready for some music and chess?
CALEB: There’s a cold war going on: art vs. life. Shields vs. Powell.
DAVID: Man, I can barely remember.
CALEB: Are you that rusty?
DAVID: I’ll give it a shot.
CALEB: Ain’t like riding a bicycle.
DAVID: I’ll try. If I get killed, so be it. This is the queen (thump). Queen on color.
CALEB: She has a necklace. These pieces are odd looking. It’s the chess set my dad had as a boy. The king has a beard.
DAVID: I’ll start and go out with a bang.
• • •
DAVID: (thump) I like the idea of a little chess game where I get mad. It’d be hard to transcribe. I’m playing a little recklessly. What was my mistake? Shoot. Dumb. What am I thinking?
CALEB: (laughing) That’s staying in.
DAVID: Like Wallace when he loses at Ping-Pong. Hmm. My mistake. What an idiot. Oh my god.
CALEB: You haven’t played chess in a while.
DAVID: Helpless. You’re good, but this is all pretty basic stuff. I’m oblivious. Boy, I was just excited that some of the moves came back to me. This one’s over.
• • •
CALEB: (setting up the pieces) I can’t play chess at home, on the road, or around Terry.
DAVID: Why not?
CALEB: If I play, I tune out and she goes bananas. I never play chess on my computer.
DAVID: Why not?
They begin another game.
CALEB: Same as why I stopped smoking pot. I wouldn’t be able to stop. On our honeymoon, she and I were in Flores, Guatemala, and stopped off at an internet café. Terry finished her email and I told her that I wanted to finish my chess game, so she went to our hotel, about a five-minute walk away. An hour later—she’d say three hours—she comes back and I’m still playing chess.
DAVID: Computer chess?
DAVID: Have you gotten good?
CALEB: My game has stayed more or less the same as it was in high school. A friend and I play through email. One game lasts weeks. Anyway, from the first game I could see that you haven’t played in a while. You made an unorthodox opening.
DAVID: I played seriously the year I had a broken leg in high school. The apex of my chess career was dreaming in chess notation.
CALEB: Want another beer?
DAVID: No thanks. (thump, thump, thump) Let’s see, I move there, you grab this guy … (thump) I get confused sometimes.
CALEB: I’d like to teach my daughters chess. Chess helps you think. You can make a lot of analogies to life. Most people think intuitively. Chess exposes this. Namely, what looks good at first glance, prima facie, might be an error. And from that you learn to question judgment. Speed chess, on the other hand, is more instinctual.
DAVID: Obviously.
CALEB: “Look before you leap” or “see a chance—take it.” What do you do? Okay, you have two objects: one is worth a dollar more than the other, and they are worth a dollar ten total. How much is each object worth?
DAVID: Unless I’m missing something, isn’t one object a dollar and the other a dime?
CALEB: That’s a difference of ninety. One’s worth a hundred and five. The other’s worth five.
DAVID: True that.
CALEB: You have doors A, B, and C. Behind two of the doors are goats and behind one is a car. You pick door A. The announcer goes to door B and opens it: it’s a goat. He asks you if you want to take door C or keep door A. Should you switch doors?
DAVID: The guy could be lying, so what difference does it make?
CALEB: Assume he’s not. Three doors: behind two are goats, and behind one’s a car. Whatever door you pick, you get what’s behind.
DAVID: And you want a car?
CALEB: No, you live in the Himalayas and want a goat. When you pick door A, he opens door B and there’s a goat, and he hasn’t opened door A or C yet, but he gives you the option of switching from A to C. Do you switch?
DAVID: I gotcha.
CALEB: Do you switch?
DAVID: To door C? Umm, I would say no. I’d stay.
CALEB: Wrong. If you switch, you’ll have a two-in-three chance of getting the car. If you stay, you have a one-in-three chance.
DAVID: Isn’t there still, at this point, an equal one-in-two chance?
CALEB: No. You switch and you always have a two-in-three chance of getting the car.
CALEB: By switching, you can expatiate your wrongness two out of three times.
DAVID: I’m not sure “expatiate” is the right word.
CALEB: You have to switch.
DAVID: Are these math puzzles?
CALEB: Math and logic.
DAVID: Are you good at math?
CALEB: I scored two hundred points higher in math than verbal on the SAT. I was an average English student.
DAVID: I barely passed trigonometry. Hearing all these logic puzzles makes me think about something a student told me the other day about David Wagoner. Did you ever study poetry with him?
CALEB: No.
DAVID: Perfect example of misapplied logic.
CALEB: Hold that thought. I’ve got to pee.
DAVID: When Wagoner taught, he required his students to present their work by reading it aloud in class. That way he wouldn’t have to read their work on his own time.
When Wagoner retired ten years ago or so, David Guterson got up and told a funny story about how whenever he tried to track down Wagoner for a response to his work, Wagoner would say, “Just keep writing.” Guterson pretended that Wagoner was actually providing deep Buddhistic wisdom, forcing the apprentice back onto his own resources. Wagoner stalked out of the ceremony, furious.
The story this student told me was that Wagoner advised his grad students, “Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Don’t do drugs. Don’t have too many sexual partners. Be a cautious, risk-averse person because—look at me—I’m eighty-four, I still have this mane of silver hair, and I’m still cogent and writing poems and you, too, if you’re lucky, at eighty-four, can—”
CALEB: I saw this blog once that posted a list of keys to being a writer and one was not drinking.
DAVID: That’s such an inadequate response to existence, and Wagoner’s work suffers from exactly the same caution: every poem he writes is about how he took a walk in the woods and came across a snake or a dying ember, which turns out to be a symbol of something or other. I know I’m guilty at times of being overly careful about health and food, etc., but even I know the point of life can’t be to die at ninety-two safe and secure in your jammies.
CALEB: This girl, a friend from Whidbey Island, Samantha, had a fling with Harv—his name is Harvey, but we call him Harv. It’s a good story and happened here in Sky when Harv was staying out here. And before I begin I’d like to say that that writing mantra “show—don’t tell” is bullshit. You don’t show stories; you tell them. Too many writers “show.”
DAVID: No kidding. I’m the one who taught you that twenty years ago.
CALEB: Write expediently. Speak expediently. Okay, Samantha and Harv were colliding into each other. Backstory: Ten years earlier, Harv had a fling with Jen while Jen had a boyfriend. Six months later Harv bumps into Jen at a party and she’s six months pregnant. Harv says, “Mine?” Jen says, “It’s not yours.” A year goes by and Jen calls. “Harv, my boyfriend made me give the baby a paternity test. It’s not his. Come on in.” So Harv goes in and boom, he’s a dad. Ten years later Harv and Jen are together, and then Samantha comes into the picture.
At the time Samantha was seeing Jefferson, a meth head ex-con. Jefferson and Samantha dated for four years. Anyway, when Jefferson was five, he saw his seven-year-old sister hit by a car. They lived in a trailer park and the local drunk nailed her. Jefferson went home and told his mom. His sister died. Later, Jefferson married young, at twenty-two, and has a two-year-old son. Son contracts a disease, they perform tests on Jefferson, and Jefferson discovers he’s not the biological father.
DAVID: At this time is Jefferson with Samantha?
CALEB: No, this is years before Samantha. Like I said, it’s backstory. Jefferson confronted his wife, she confesses—big blowup and breakup. Since then Jefferson learned a trade, he works, but when things get bad he turns to drugs. He’s nice, quiet, introverted, and not an idiot. He once was reading Moby-Dick. I tried to talk to him about it. “What do you think?” And he gave one-word answers. “Good.” Or: “Interesting.” He’s fifteen years older than Samantha. Samantha’s young, cute, and fun. We don’t know why Samantha keeps going back to him. She wants out. It just drags on and on.
So when Harv and Samantha hook up, they carry unhappiness. Harv tells Samantha he and Jen are kaput, invites Samantha to Skykomish. Samantha and Harv spend a couple days here, everything’s great, and then Jen calls and says she’s driving to Skykomish with their ten-year-old son. Evidently, Harv and Jen are not kaput. Jen’s an hour away. Harv is trying to get Samantha out the door. Six weeks later Samantha finds out she’s pregnant.
DAVID: Have these people not heard of birth control?
CALEB: Go figure. Samantha’s sweating for a few days. It turns out the fetus is Jefferson’s. Samantha dumped Jefferson and now has a four-year-old son. Jen left Harv, got a degree from the UW, and now works at Boeing. Harv’s derailed but hanging on. Same with Jefferson.
DAVID: You’ve got a good bad novel on your hands. I don’t really have anything to say other than “There it is: real life comin’ at ya.”
CALEB: What sort of response is that?
DAVID: There’s no particular larger—
CALEB: It’s just what happened. It’s not a—
DAVID: Do you know the Danish TV show The Killing?
CALEB: My sister lived in Denmark for four years. When she was here this summer, she dropped off the whole series. My parents are watching it now.
DAVID: Twenty one-hour episodes. It’s not great, but it’s good. You watch it in Danish with huge English subtitles. By the end, you’ve convinced yourself you know Danish. It’s an endlessly elaborated investigation into the murder of a high school girl.… This song is so beautiful.
CALEB: “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam.”
DAVID: That voice, the bottomless sadness of that voice.… I get bored easily by the plot, it takes a million times too long to get there, but it finally builds to something very beautiful. Brag points: I figured out who the killer is in the first episode. It—
CALEB: Aargh. Stop. Anyone who didn’t appear in episode one will be eliminated as a suspect.
DAVID: Uh, it actually wasn’t in the first episode, come to think of it. It felt like the first episode. I figured it out toward the beginning. The killer may have been anywhere in the first several episodes. Anyway, what these twenty episodes build to is this: the men are always certain, and they always get it wrong. Basically, men know nothing and women know everything, intuitively. In some sense it’s a feminist parable disguised as a detective story, but it’s very delicately done. The merest bass line thrumming away. When you told your story about Jen cheating on her boyfriend and then Harv cheating on Jen and then Jefferson seeing his sister die and becoming a meth head and on and on, I was only slightly interested in it. It was just a “story.” It has to flip over into something, into “X.” I need an X factor. Without that, it’s just life.
CALEB: Let’s talk about that former student of yours you keep writing about—the guy who served time in prison for “shooting a dude” and whose prison credo “Do your own time” you don’t like.
DAVID: “His stoicism bores me.”
CALEB: Why keep writing about him?
DAVID: I’m running out of ideas. That’s where you come in. You’re fresh blood.
CALEB: Ha ha.
DAVID: I’m serious.
CALEB: I want to know more about this guy. Did he kill or injure his victim? Was it assault? Was it murder? Manslaughter? How many years did he serve? In your books, the only question you ever ask is, “How do we deal with the fact of mortality?” In essence, “We die. What do we do about that?” That’s your modus operandi, but I’m interested in why we kill.
DAVID: Why people commit individual murders or genocide?
CALEB: In Vollmann’s Butterfly Stories there’s a restaurant owner in Phnom Penh who survived the Khmer Rouge, watched them kill his wife and children, and did nothing because if he’d showed emotion, he, too, would have been killed. Vollmann writes a sentence or two about suffering and moves on. I wanted Vollmann to stay.
DAVID: And what I loved is that Vollmann moved on. He knew we could fill in the blanks. That’s where the art comes in.
CALEB: I grew up around Cambodia, metaphorically. My parents went to Angkor Wat in 1956; they shot 16mm film. My dad was in Saigon for a year, and he has a lot of books from that era. They subscribed to National Geographic. I remember this issue: “Kampuchea Wakens from a Nightmare.” I was maybe twelve years old. After college, Cambodia became an obsession. I became engaged to a Cambodian woman; it lasted a year. Later, I went to Cambodia. I’m now writing a Cambodian woman’s biography. That’s my X factor: suffering, the sociopath, the serial killer, atrocity, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, what motivates Ted Bundy?
DAVID: Do you somehow think that will get you closer to anything?
CALEB: It seems futile, but yes, I do.
DAVID: Yeah, let’s hear about another murder. You got the happy solution to murder?
CALEB: What’s frustrating is the vacuum. No one’s interested in Cambodia, but we follow celebrity waistlines. Books about Cambodia and such: I read these books over and over again.
DAVID: What kind of books—genocide porn?
CALEB: Atrocity can become cliché, but—
DAVID: I’m much more interested in pulling back and seeing the big picture.
CALEB: Huh?
DAVID: My closest friend, Michael, has been spending the last decade writing a book called Investigation into the Death of Logan. His father died in Vietnam in ’63, almost certainly a suicide. His wife, Norma, died at forty-six of cancer. And German soldiers in World War II had to return home from the Eastern Front because the war had made them insane. Michael is convinced that he and Norma decided she didn’t need to get a biopsy—when she did—because Michael had been so obsessed with his father’s death for so long that the two of them, Norma and Michael, just couldn’t deal with any more incoming. What Michael loves about the German soldiers is that they couldn’t handle the war. Through them, Michael—
CALEB: There’s no satisfying X factor to life: people suffer and die, and that’s it, but that’s what I’m interested in. Let’s get to life, not this evasion of life, not “escaping reality” hunger. Maybe your friend thinks he’s gotten to something, but it’s personal and not universal.
DAVID: I couldn’t disagree more. You’re missing the entire point of art.
CALEB: I get what life’s about.
DAVID: Sometime soon I want to write a book where I talk to three guys around the corner from me: the owner of a French bakery who fled from Vietnam, an Iraqi guy who runs a mailing service, and the owner of the overpriced restaurant Kabul, who left Afghanistan.
CALEB: That’s a book I’d read.
DAVID: I’m sure I cartoonize you, too, but I think you cartoonize me as unaware of the world. I think of myself as political.
CALEB: Politically naive.
DAVID: Let me get to my point. I’m also interested in why human beings behave the way they do—how could I not be? You’re trying to take the position of “Open it up—I want to hear about people’s lives.” Okay. Sometimes, though, my reaction is just “Heard it. Heard it. Tell me something new.” The endless complications of that soap opera you were spinning out—this guy fucked that girl and that girl fucked this guy—who gives a shit? I don’t know these people. You know them; they’re part of your life. Me, I’m bored. You have to cut to the fucking chase: what’s the point?
CALEB: That’s a legitimate response. You investigate abstract questions; you keep circling back to them. You want these serious epistemological and existential questions: What’s “true”? What’s knowledge? What’s memory? What’s self? What’s other? What’s death? I’ll quote Gertrude Stein: “There ain’t no answer.… That’s the answer.” I want to ask questions that have substantive answers: Why do we kill? Why do we inflict pain? Why do we suffer? How can we stop suffering?
DAVID: And I’d say the only way you can get at those questions seriously is to watch how you yourself think.
DAVID: A former student of mine is writing about her marriage to a Libyan Muslim. She’s a blonde beauty from San Diego. Her daughters wear the veil. She and her family live in the Research Triangle in North Carolina. Her name’s Krista Bremer.
DAVID: Not particularly.
CALEB: In name only?
DAVID: I guess.
CALEB: Because it’s illegal if she’s not “of the book”—namely, a Jew or a Christian.
DAVID: But don’t be atheist.
CALEB: Or Hindu or Buddhist or Wiccan. When I worked in the United Arab Emirates I had to fill out paperwork, and my employers told me to check the “Christian” box, even if I wasn’t. Also, and I realize you’re more Jewish than me—
DAVID: I’m not really that Jewish.
CALEB: You were raised that way. In that one story, your stand-in uses an anti-Semitic slur, tells his father, and the father goes ape. I never had that.
DAVID: You’re Jewish?
CALEB: Yeah.
DAVID: You are?
CALEB: Persian. My grandfather was born in Iran, though my father was born in Lebanon. He’s Sephardic.
DAVID: That’s a major surprise. Not that it particularly matters, but with a name like Caleb Powell—
CALEB: My father’s name, at birth, was David Jamil Mizrahi. He came to America when he was two.
DAVID: Hold the back page, as my father used to say.
CALEB: My grandfather, his dad, Jamil Mizrahi, died when my dad was five. His mother was named Powalski and changed it to Powell. As a single woman in the 1940s, she had to fight her in-laws for custody and compromised by keeping my dad in Jewish school. Then she remarried a Catholic when my dad was nine. I’m just a quarter Jewish. Supposedly I can become an Israeli citizen based on this.
DAVID: Do you think of yourself as Jewish in any way?
CALEB: Not religiously. Ethnically, a little.
DAVID: Culturally, does it resonate?
CALEB: I’m fascinated by it. Whenever I bring it up, Terry will say, “Oh, you just want to be Jewish.” Yeah, like I want to be black, too.
DAVID: “Caleb”: it’s such a religiously loaded name.
CALEB: Moses sent twelve spies to Jerusalem and only Joshua and Caleb did God’s work. Joshua got an entire book. Caleb got a few lines. My father went to Jewish school, then Catholic school, and came out neither. I suppose he considers himself Christian. He says, “I know it’s silly, but I believe in God.” We rarely talk about it.
CALEB: You ever believe in God?
DAVID: Zero. How about you?
CALEB: Yeah.
DAVID: Really? Surely not now.
CALEB: You read my novel twenty years ago. I don’t expect you to remember. It’s partly about a Christian youth who loses faith.
DAVID: I didn’t know how autobiographical it was. What was the title again?
CALEB: This Seething Ocean, That Damned Eagle.
DAVID: I’m obsessed with titles, and no offense, Caleb, but that has got to be among the worst titles I’ve ever heard.
CALEB: That’s what you said twenty years ago, too.
CALEB: I never became serious about life until I was twenty-six or -seven. Until then I focused on art, writing, and music. Then I switched and focused on life. And the best artists focus on both.
DAVID: Writing a book is as much an experience as falling in love.
CALEB: If you’re a writer, you can’t focus only on life as depicted through art. Externally, you have to live, then internally create your art.
DAVID: It doesn’t work like that. It’s the Yeats line: perfection of the life or perfection of the work, but not both. You’ve got to choose. It’s the only way to get anything done. Most people live through life. Not that many people live through art.
CALEB: You’ve worked hard. You’ve written a lot of books.
DAVID: People always praise me for “working hard,” but it’s the only thing I can do. You’ve immersed yourself in life much more fully than I have. You probably wish you’d written books that had been published. Whereas my portico gates slammed down a long time ago. It’s obviously a concern of mine: by focusing so much on art, have I closed myself off so completely from—
CALEB: Yeah: the stutter, masturbation, acne, basketball heroics, the girlfriend whose diaries you read, the journalist parents who always did the “right” thing. I can’t objectively evaluate your writing because I know you, but at times it’s like you’re writing one long book.
DAVID: It’s true of everyone. Everyone has only one—
CALEB: Could you go a month without writing, but live extreme?
DAVID: I’m sure I have.
CALEB: Stupid question.
DAVID: No, it’s an interesting question. I’m always working on a book. It’s pathological. The moment I’m finishing one book, I absolutely have to, as if I were an addict, create a windstorm around a new project.
CALEB: Ken Kesey stopped writing because he said he wanted to live a novel rather than write a novel.
DAVID: Such bullshit.
CALEB: It’s partly a copout, but he has a point. I wanted to be a writer in college. I wrote one novel, kept rewriting it in your class, and then I said I wanted to live a novel before writing one. It’s not like I completely stopped, but writing took a backseat. I’ve written four books, along with stories and essays that could make another, but from the age of twenty-three to thirty-five I stopped writing creatively. Writing was always the goal of experience—traveling to forty countries, learning several foreign languages, spending eight years overseas. I kept a journal in the UAE and you could count that as a book. If I didn’t write, I compensated by reading. I read compulsively.
DAVID: How old are you now?
CALEB: Forty-three.
DAVID: So what is your larger point?
CALEB: Just that I think you’re partly right: writing is so hard, you can’t compromise. Sometimes I wish I’d chosen art. I submit to a lit mag and a grad student editor half my age tells me I’m backing into sentences with too many subjunctive clauses.
DAVID: You remind me at times of my college friend Azzan, who was born in Israel, grew up in Queens. Big man on campus: walked around with a khaki-colored, military-looking jacket and a purposeful stride. Compared to the other intellectuals at Brown, he seemed so assured. A ladies’ man, a year or two older. I admired him, even idolized him to a degree. He always said he was going to become a writer. He spent junior year abroad, had a torrid affair in Paris. Got a Rhodes scholarship and at Oxford focused mainly on boxing. He went here, went there, was always saying, “Oh, I’m just gathering material for my great novel. You can’t write without living your life.” I’ve always thought it was his mistake, substituting experience for writing, but maybe it’s my mistake. Maybe he didn’t really want to be a writer in the first place. He’s nearly sixty now and now he’s ready to write, but it’s too late for him to become a serious writer.
CALEB: What are you trying to say?
DAVID: Your writing is interesting, and getting more so, but—
CALEB: It could be better.
DAVID: It’s stuff you should have been doing twenty years ago.
DAVID: The Trip was originally six half-hour episodes on BBC, which later got edited down into a two-hour movie. I much prefer the show, but this is the movie—hope you like it.
Steve Coogan: Hey, Rob, Steve.… Are you free?…
Rob Brydon: Why me?
Steve: Well Mischa is unavailable. You’ve met Mischa, haven’t you?… I’ve asked other people, but they’re all too busy. So, you know, do you wanna come?… There’s a small fee, which I’ll split with you, sixty-forty.
• • •
Rob: It’s 2010. Everything’s been done before. All you can do is do something someone’s done before but do it better or differently.
Steve: To some extent, that’s correct.
DAVID: To some extent, that’s incorrect. If I believed that, I’d slit my wrists.
CALEB: I agree. Nothing is exactly the same. Every work of art is both original and influenced by other works. You want this flip at the end, like at the end of Wallace and Lipsky, but maybe I come out of this more convinced that I’m right and you’re wrong.
DAVID: Hmm. Not sure we self-consciously say that we’re trying to do all that, do we? Is that gonna work?
Magda the Hotel Clerk: Sorry, we only have one double room for you.…
Rob: We can share, that’s all right.
Steve: No we can’t.…
Rob: This is a huge bed. We could easily share this bed.
Steve: It might be huge to you.…
Rob: What’s the problem, anyway? What do you think’s gonna happen?
• • •
Mischa: (on phone with Coogan) You think I’m gonna go to Las Vegas and become a prostitute?
• • •
Rob: (to his wife, Sally, on phone) Could I interest you in some rather salacious … I’m not wearing any pajama bottoms …
• • •
Rob: Don’t you find it exhausting, still running around going to parties and chasing girls at your age?
Steve: I don’t run around and go to parties. I don’t run around and chase girls.
Rob: You do …
• • •
Steve: Do you find it exhausting looking after a baby?
Rob: Yes …
• • •
Man on Street: Are you Steve Coogan?
Steve: Yes, I am.
Man: Aha!
Steve: Aha.
Man: All right, man. How you doing?
Steve: Fine, thanks.…
Man: Can I ask you a question?
Steve: Yeah, of course, absolutely.
Man: Is it true what I read about you?
Steve: What do you read about me?
Man: That you’re a bit of a cunt.
Steve: Well, where did you read that?
Man: It’s in today’s newspaper. Here, look. (Holds up a newspaper with the headline “COOGAN IS A CUNT”)
Steve: Uh, whoever said that doesn’t know me very well.
Man: Are you sure? (Unfolds newspaper with full headline: “COOGAN IS A CUNT SAYS DAD”)
• • •
Steve: I’m sure people think we’re gay.
Rob: I don’t care.
• • •
• • •
Steve walks around his empty apartment, looks through his mail, sighs. Piano music.
• • •
Rob: (playing with his daughter, then sharing dinner with Sally) … delightful homecomings …
• • •
Steve: (watching a video of himself with Mischa, then leaving a message on his agent’s voice mail) I’m not going to do the HBO pilot … I’ve got kids … Bye.
• • •
Rob: (hugging Sally) I don’t like being away from you.
• • •
Steve is alone in his apartment.
• • •
Film ends. Credits.
DAVID: It’s pretty great, isn’t it? We’re watching the trading of skins. I love that moment when Brydon, even though he thinks of himself as a domestic man, comes on to that girl and gets rebuffed.
CALEB: You almost want to see what would have happened.
DAVID: The way he crawls back to his original position on the couch—it’s hard to watch.
CALEB: He’s relieved he doesn’t have to go through with it. Did he do it because he’s not happily married?
DAVID: To me, no. It’s because he feels pressure from Coogan to act out. Then, of course, at the end, there’s Coogan, looking forlornly at his copy of Vanity Fair.
CALEB: “I’m not going to do the HBO pilot. I’ve got kids. Bye.”
DAVID: It’s incredibly beautiful, but the first time I watched it I thought (and Laurie did, too) the ending was a little too easy. I wish they hadn’t oversold the pathos.
CALEB: It’s almost a happy ending, even a moral ending, which I thought you were supposedly against.
DAVID: I cry at Friday Night Lights.
CALEB: Coogan chooses fatherhood. And Brydon probably feels relieved he didn’t cheat, as he returns to his wife and child.
DAVID: I can feel Coogan’s loneliness at the end. It’s quite palpable.
CALEB: And he realizes this. Even though his children live with his ex, he chooses them. He won’t advance his career if it means he’ll be a nonexistent father.
DAVID: I think I’m starting to fade. I’ll see you tomorrow, Caleb.
CALEB: Good night.