Realist Magicalism

An interview with Jeremy P. Bushnell about his new novel.

Jeremy P. Bushnell made his first appearances in the pages of One Could Argue back in the summer of 2021 when I was traveling across the country by train and only staying where I could scare up a free place to crash. Jeremy is a professor, publisher and experimental visual artist but he is most well-known as the author of three novels from Melville House. I recently read his newest book and asked him if I could interview him about it. Jez is also currently creating a role-playing game and is encouraging potential playtesters to contact him at hi@jeremypbushnell.com.

A few parts of this interview were lightly edited and expanded by both participants for detail and clarity.

Hey man. Thanks for doing this. I'll consider us "live" for this typed interview now. But you can let me know if anything comes out that you'd rather I edit out. I make no claims to journalistic objectivity and part of the context for anyone reading this should include the knowledge that we are close friends. Cool?

Extremely cool.

And as I mentioned when I was writing about Relentless Melt recently, I want to drive up sales of the book. I think people should buy it, both because I like you and your writing and because novels are a great medium and people should keep purchasing them — especially ones like yours which cut against the zeitgeist in a number of ways. Have you thought about that at all? How out of step Relentless Melt is with current novel-writing as a form?

It's probably right to say that Relentless Melt is a "hybrid" book. It has elements of what we'd traditionally call "literary fiction" — characters with psychological complexity, a setting that strives for realistic verisimilitude, those sorts of things. But it also draws elements from "whodunit"-style mysteries, Lovecraftian horror, and fantasy — there's a school for magicians in it, for goodness' sake.

Mmmmmm yes, this is interesting.

Whether you see that as "out of step" depends on who you talk to, and what they think of the state of the industry. Bookstores are still divided up by genre, and when I sneak around looking for copies of Relentless Melt on the shelf, I'm never quite sure what section of the store to look in. This might suggest that it's hard to market, in that it doesn't quite fit comfortably in any genre. When I'm feeling pessimistic, it feels like cool lit kids turn up their nose at my work cause it traffics in disreputable genres, and the genre kids don't quite know what do with my work because it doesn't really conform tidily to the genre norms that they're familiar with. But other days I feel more optimistic. I truly believe that there are a lot of cosmopolitan readers who like cultural products that cut across genres or jumble them in deliberate ways. Let’s pick a big, notorious example that appeals to a certain class of adventurous readers: Infinite Jest. I don’t think anybody would claim that that book isn’t a work of literary fiction — it’s the kind of sprawling intellectual doorstopper held out as the high-water mark of a certain kind of “literary” culture. But the book is enlivened by its many borrowings of giddy conceits from science fiction, not least of which is the impossibly irresistible film that forms the novel’s central plot device. Once you start looking for stuff that is dissolving the boundaries between genre domains, you start seeing it everywhere — not just in writing, either. In the realm of film I might point to someone like Tarantino, who is clearly making films that embrace genre fare, but in a sly, knowing, “meta” way that satisfies the scrutiny of (many) cineastes. So I guess whether it’s “out of step” depends on who you think will ultimately carry the market: sprightly genre-crossing cosmopolitans or Balkanizing genre purists.

That helps to articulate my notion in ways I hadn't thought of. But in contrast to something like Infinite Jest, which is perhaps out to prove its literariness partly by its length, Relentless Melt has a very intimate feel to me. It has a relatively small group of characters, unfolds over a period of months...and the storytelling is also very straightforward. Do you agree with that view and was that by design?

Yes, I’m not exactly trying to write my own version of Infinite Jest, though as a younger man I made my attempt. In fact, for about a decade I wrote mostly sprawling, complex manuscripts featuring vast casts of characters and aggressive, unusual structures. I even landed my agent by sending him one of these manuscripts, believe it or not. He tried valiantly, but couldn't land a publisher for it. So I decided to try my hand at a more traditional story structure — something with a clear beginning, middle, and end. (I love David Foster Wallace, but as a side note I will say that he very rarely manages to write a great ending.) It may not come as a surprise to learn that the more straightforward manuscript found a publisher more readily. There's still a part of me that wants to write big, unreadable postmodern books.

So yes, it was by design — and it's a choice that I was somewhat uneasy with. It's not an accident that that first published novel, The Weirdness, is about a writer who makes a "deal with the devil" to get a book published.

I'm glad you brought up your earlier work because I have a couple of questions about where Relentless Melt fits into your career and process but also some questions about the text itself.

Relentless Melt is your third novel. I read your second one The Insides a few years ago. So having never written a novel myself, let alone three published ones and however many generally, I'm really intrigued about how the concept for a novel becomes finalized to the point where you have the "idea" for what it will be. Can you think back to a time when you had no idea what your third book was going to be? How did you get from that time to a time when you were ready to start outlining it or writing it? And did that time, the time of having no idea, overlap with the process of crafting those other novels that got published?

Yeah, I can remember when the little grains that eventually became Relentless Melt started to stick together, especially because — well, Relentless Melt is a historical novel; it takes place in 1909-10. I'd always admired historical novels but I had never really wanted to write one, cause the amount of research you would need to do seemed horribly intimidating, and I say this as a person who enjoys researching things. I remember the first moments when I was like "Oh noooo, I guess I am doing this now??"

Yeah I had questions about that research process too, but do you want to say more first?

Well, as to your question about how did you get from “the time when the book is just an idea” to “the time when you’re ready to start,” let me say this. I do have one advantage as a writer, which is that I belong to a long-running writing group. We meet every week, or close to it, and we each end up having to put "work on the table" about once a month. So I needed to start drafting pretty much right away, so that I could have work ready for the group to review. I would have loved to have spent a whole year researching and planning, but in actuality the time gap between "having the idea" and "drafting the first chapter" was only a few weeks, maybe? A month? And I almost never outline, though I do have a rough idea of the "shape" of the book in my head at all times.

And how did "having the idea" for this one fit in with your first two books? I haven't read The Weirdness but there are a lot of connections between The Insides and Relentless Melt. I'm even convinced they might take place in the same fictional universe. Is any of that planned with one book following another, or is it just you as a person and creator being drawn to certain themes and aesthetics?

Probably more the latter, though I would say that I do give some thought to how the books fit together as a body of work, and I have some private notions about whether they form a sort of shared world.

Too private to say more here?

I'll say that I have written some material that has answered that question definitively — that either links the worlds clearly or draws an authoritative line between them — but that this material has always been cut at the last second and has not made it into print. So canonically it's still up for grabs.

Going back to your research process, I was thinking about that a lot while reading the parts of Relentless Melt that are set in specific parts of Boston and Cambridge. Since you live right outside Boston, were you walking around certain areas a lot and envisioning where the action was set? And did you have to research certain historical features, like the building of a subway tunnel or Filene's Basement being founded in Boston (if in fact that's historically accurate)?

Yes to both. I did walk around a fair amount trying to squint past the vape shops and Dunkin’ Donuts, trying to see the bones of the past, especially for the parts of the book that take place around Boston Common, Old City Hall, and the Evening Institute — which eventually grows into modern-day Northeastern, where I work.

And I did a fair share of book-learning research, too, including a pre-Covid trip to the Cambridge Historical Society to see their collection of photos of subway excavation sites. The nice woman who helped me at the Historical Society had read The Insides, I later learned! A funny coincidence, but I took it as auspicious.

I thought you also made an interesting choice with how you wrote these characters and I have a question about that. Can we talk about the story itself? How concerned are you about spoilers? I can put a big warning up atop this interview and we can go nuts. Or I can just not get into the ending so much.

Let's try it and afterwards I'll see if I need to edit anything out.

Okay. So the protagonist Artie and her best friend Theodore are each under the sway of their respective teachers. Artie is in Professor Winchell's class on becoming a detective and Theodore is a student of the master magician Gannett. I thought it was really clever how you structure the novel so that those loyalties come into conflict with one another — Winchell and Gannett are these two skilled and capable authority figures who in some ways are working towards irreconcilable purposes. I noticed that you seemed to intentionally write Winchell with a more "old-timey" way of speaking, while the younger characters, especially Artie, talk more like you and I might talk today. What do you think?

Yes, that's true. Winchell's dialogue was a lot of fun to write. He's charming — I think so anyway — but he's also sort of an orotund gasbag. Once you find your way into that mode, it's hard to want to leave.

I liked him!

I’m glad! And these two characters also mark the first time I've really written characters who are teachers. Teaching is my day job, and it was interesting to create a pair of fictional teachers — who have some similarities but who also serve as distorted reflections of one another, and who, as you noted, are ultimately working against one another.

Does that reflect your mixed feelings about teaching? As a profession, as a career, the state of academia? Any mixed feelings you may or may not have, is what I mean to ask.

Probably. One of Winchell's great merits is that he's fond of his students, even a bit permissive (especially for the era). And that fondness is what drives him to dispense whatever wisdom he has. And Gannett's great flaw is that, ultimately, his relationship toward his students is the opposite. It's not that he's harsh towards his students, but it's that he's exploitative: he tries to get Artie to become his student in part because he gets something out of it, not because he really has something to give. I feel like if you're going to be a teacher you should know what motivates you — and certainly not every teacher falls on what I'd see as the right side of that line.

That's a really good point. Winchell seems like he's really out to share things with students because he wants Boston to be a better, safer place. And as a detective his purpose in life is to discover and reveal. Gannett by definition as a magician is somewhat withholding.

In your book magic is both real but also kinda fulfills the role it does in our own real-life culture — Gannett is a showman as a magician would be in the real Boston of 1909, but in Relentless Melt what the showman is hiding isn't the mechanics of the illusion, it's just a skill at manipulating unseen forces. I found that approach interesting and is what led me to coining the term "realist magicalism" in describing your book. (Unless someone else already made that term up elsewhere.)

I read that in your newsletter, and I liked it.

Oh, good! Do you want to say more about any of that or shall I move along?

Only that that was a fun part of writing the book. Grappling with “realist magicalism” meant trying to imagine a world where magic is known to exist, but where it doesn’t remap all of society so that the book becomes a more standard exploration of a “fantasy” world. It’s not a cornerstone of the society; it just exists in its own niche. The powers that be understand that maybe it's useful, but they also see it as a bit disreputable. Sort of like how people see art in our own culture, maybe.

If you were a city planner, you might talk to an artist if you were excavating a new subway line. On some level you'd know that might be useful. But it probably wouldn't be a thing you were looking forward to.

And that magic really explodes into their world out of that subway tunnel in a way that not even Gannett can control. You mentioned Lovecraftianism as a narrative component in this novel.

Readers, be advised that spoilers are coming next and are sprinkled throughout the conclusion of the interview!

This ghastly Thing Which Should Not Be sort of fulfills the role that a serial killer might in a non-supernatural novel. In fact it effectively is a serial killer, this spirit of the god Saturn that is breaking through rifts in time and invading their Boston of 1909. That connects to what you say here about art in our culture, because I definitely thought of that Goya painting of Saturn devouring his child, this searing image of unspeakable horror that really shoved a thumb in the eye of our collective visual imagination. You even wrote that as a component of your take on Saturn — this malign god of time who must be fed children, specifically young girls, to prevent it from doing greater harm.

Well-put, yeah!

Was any of that by design? Am I reading more into it than you intended?

I thought a lot about the role that Saturn, or this fragment of Saturn, is doing in this novel. On some level I'm using it as a stand-in for time in a broader sense — time as the cruelest of all devourers, the serial killer to end all serial killers, in a sense. And it also connects up, of course, to the "clock time" of industrial capitalism, which is widespread by 1909, and serves as another kind of Moloch in the symbolic landscape of this novel. I wouldn't say this novel is explicitly anticapitalist — it makes a point, early on, that Filene's is even playing an important role in the emancipation of young women — but you can't really write a story about how a city demands fresh lives to keep functioning without capitalism appearing as a specter in the background.

Ah, I see. I hadn't thought of that; thanks for elucidating it.

May I ask about how your Saturn connects to gender and the questioning thereof, which is an important theme in this novel? Any of our private disagreements and misunderstandings about that subject won't come up in this particular forum, so you can say as much as you want on that subject knowing I want to hear it on your terms, on the book's terms, and not dispute it. I'm just curious how you see Saturn devouring the lifetimes of these young girls and leaving them as desiccated old women connects to whatever points you were making about gender and the journey that Artie goes on from at first seeming to the reader to be male, to then seeming more like possibly a homosexual young woman in a time before we had an acceptable vocabulary for that, to the suggestion in our glimpse of her future that she becomes a person who defies gender, and I guess sex, categories altogether. Possibly by means of magic and possibly not; we're not sure. Do you want to comment on any of that? I know that's all kinda broad, so feel free to ask me to narrow it down.

Well, the Saturn of the book doesn't strictly need to eat young girls (earlier in the book we do come across a man who has been a victim of Saturn's devouring energy). But the book's villains reason that if they're going to try to keep it under control with a steady stream of victims, they'd better try to choose a category of victim that "no one will miss." In 1909 that works out to be "working class young girls." This does get one thinking, even if behind the scenes, of the way that modern society creates these hierarchical structures — that some groups of people are seen as valuable, and get to enjoy existence on the top, whereas other groups are seen as less valuable, all the way down to the groups that get hated, scapegoated, and legislatively persecuted. I try to be cognizant of that in my writing, and it was hard, as I was writing the book, to overlook the fact that, back in our own time, there are increasing numbers of people working hard, every day, to see that noncompliant queers and gender-nonconforming people don't escape a bottom-of-the-hierarchy position. There isn't the clearest "connection" here — it's not like I'm saying "Saturn stands in for our culture's transphobia" or anything — just that the book is aware of the way culture is stratified, and who gets harmed when those stratifications happen. It was important to me to give the book a protagonist who would be in a lot of danger from those stratifications at that time — and, to a very real degree, would still be in danger from them today.

That helps me understand the book on a deeper level. I was really interested in that aspect of it. Is there anything else you want to say about Relentless Melt? Do you have any questions for me about it? I'm also interested in where you go from here as a novelist and a writer in general.

This isn't a question, but I really appreciated that (in your newsletter) you caught that the very conclusion of the book echoes the first chapter in a formal way (around the issue of gender, and how it is written). I felt pretty smug about that and to the best of my knowledge you're the first reader who has remarked on it.

I had to respect the planning and execution that went into the broader picture of that triptych. The conclusion echoes the first chapter both in the progression along a gender spectrum as I mentioned above with regards to Artie herself but also in the choices you made with how to use language to scramble our expectations in that first chapter, in the middle section/bulk of the novel and then in that concluding portion. You were tying choices having to do with language, narrative and structure into one another. Like how a good songwriter has to make lyrics, melody and rhythm work together. Or, pick your analogy.

Feel free to respond to that if you'd like, and/or to say anything about your upcoming plans as a writer. Do you already have some sense of what another novel will be, should you choose to write one?

There isn't another novel in the works quite yet. In the writers’ group I am working on some short stories that I'm tinkering with, including some very short one-page stories, which are mostly unsuccessful, but maybe practice makes perfect. But to be quite honest, the writing projects that gave me the most joy this summer were a set of rules for a homegrown role-playing game — I am looking for playtesters if anyone who reads this likes to play or suspects that they might — and a guide to research that I'm writing for the new crop of students who I will be working with in the fall.

How would you like potential playtesters to contact you?

They can email me at hi@jeremypbushnell.com!

Cool! Thanks for your time and for being the first person I've ever interviewed about anything. I'll follow up with you privately but who knows; maybe we can continue discussing stuff like this in public some time, in one format or another.

I had a great time. Thanks for making me your guinea pig.