Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait courtesy of Jackie Ess  

NW What format is the book written in? Who is Darryl talking to, in these chapter-vignettes?

JE I sometimes call it “journal tense.” Something a bit like public journalling on the internet – somewhere between that and Star Trek’s captain’s log. It’s slightly contradictory: I’m talking to no one, but expecting to be read. Apologising in advance for the misunderstandings. “Sorry, all I mean is” – I make these dispatches in a way that feels obliged. But by who? You could say this is the inner speech of a subject that doesn’t have a venue of inner speech. Instead there is an audience, imagined indistinctly. Perhaps we all need a sense of that, that we are witnessed, usually by a projection whose vagueness and concreteness are frustratingly reversed, tight in all the wrong places. I think this is why people see Darryl as an “internet novel”, which I always felt was slightly off, as the book itself is not about technology in any way. But maybe the internet shows up because that is where we have that voice.

NW To what extent is this book a Bildungsroman?

JE I was interested in this as a novel of becoming, but the model of becoming that I had in mind was something more akin to a discovery of true feelings, a discovery that comes too late. I do want to laugh at Darryl quite a bit more in the earlier stages of the book. He is somebody who is trying out the terms of identity and engaging in a kind of serious play with them; but, if we’re honest, the cucking thing is too silly to constitute a real identity – no offence if that’s your thing. But it has problems. Its culture is mostly pornographic, it’s a little bit gross, and a little bit racist, and finally depends on a constant attempt to coordinate the activities of other people whose enjoyment is hardly reciprocal. His sexuality, which involves having to orchestrate those around him in a very role-conscious manner, and the shoes don’t fit anyone, is something of a scandal. Good thing that isn’t true of the rest of us. As the book progresses, he does begin to become acquainted with a deeper ability to feel for others. He begins to let people surprise him, and he begins to surprise himself. His emotions become more heartfelt, but he struggles to know how to take responsibility for and accept them as such. You could say that he has an experience of heterosexual desire, for a woman called Satori, which is quite ordinary and quite transformative. This then takes him into being a gay man and stealing motorcycles and killing people. As a teenager, I was obsessed with Hart Crane and his poems, which convey not only depth of feeling but also the fear that our new feelings might destroy us as they did Crane. How do we find the line between opening up and falling apart? He says, “There is a line / You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it / Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses.” And fair point, honestly.

NW Is this feeling linked to a specifically adolescent or non-developed state of being?

JE Yes and no. One can say, “My life is changing, and desires that I never knew of may come to dominate my entire life, and I don’t know how to feel about that,” at any stage in life, even though for most people it’s in adolescence that this experience is most pronounced. It’s interesting to look at a person who is on the brink of such changes and they’re asking themselves questions like, “Will I die alone or not? Who will I live with? When I get a job and move to another town, who might plausibly come with me?” What becomes apparent is that the answer for many of us is going to be something like, “The guy that gave you a couple of orgasms when you were 26.” That love connection turns out to be the one that determines everything in your life. This sort of relationship is fundamental to a happy existence, and if it’s absent then one’s life might be practically a life unlived. Just to say, the question has high stakes. So I think the question, “Am I going to be one of those people for whom that question has a negative answer or remains undecided forever?” is a pretty pressing one. For Darryl, sex is learning the truth about sex, and that truth is evaluated by the fact that the more punishing it is, the more clear and true it is. This is a masochistic truth criterion. But Darryl isn’t seeking any real discomfort. In one scene he talks about having receptive forms of sex and describes it as “a little like going to the dentist … I guess I kind of want to be better at it.” He rarely describes it as something pleasurable in itself but an experience in which he is trying to find pleasure. He says that it feels right, it feels correct, but he doesn’t talk about it in terms of pleasure or transport or connection. And certainly when people are actually violent with him, he’s not so happy about it, only a little bit amused. Real pleasure and pain are beside the point.

NW Darryl shares a universe with Dennis Cooper’s 2004 novel The Sluts. How do those worlds interact?

JE I always loved the way that book handles uncertainty and unreality. There’s a lot that might have happened in The Sluts, but nothing actually happens. There’s not a single definite thing that occurs. There’s not a single definite character that exists. That amazed me. And I wanted to have the unreality of my book meet the unreality of The Sluts. Some of what might have happened here might have happened there. We don’t know, but the style of not knowing is similar to the textures which Cooper is the master of.

NW   Do you think something can be heartbreaking without being a bit funny?

JE No, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that our most intense feelings draw us towards cliché. Some are very verbally quick and are cliché-avoidant in many areas of life, and when they engage in a relationship, they enter a sort of crisis. “What are the words that I should be uttering? I love you? What are those? What are you saying?” You could say that there’s a little bit of humour in the fact that in our deepest moments we are finally reduced to pretty stock forms of expression, and we are surprisingly ridiculous in our inability to negotiate certain aspects of our lives which we also acknowledge to be central. It’s really a question of why we can be so unable to argue or reckon with ourselves about such things. I find it’s so important to be able to step back, to laugh, and accept the fact that there are things which are much more meaningful than what actually kept me up all night, and to which I actually have a deeper connection. And in spite of that, I can be mastered by the baser material. Innate human ridiculousness has to be kept in the frame. .