David Gordon’s fiction doesn’t fall comfortably into one category. Depending on what you’re reading and who you’re talking to, he might be a mystery writer, a postmodernist, a satirist, or a hybrid. His new collection, White Tiger on Snow Mountain, runs an impressive gamut. Its cast is large and varied—there are gunmen, grad students, investigators, vampires, struggling writers, Internet sex trolls, and men named David Gordon. (One of these stories, “Man-Boob Summer,” first appeared in The Paris Review’s Fall 2012 issue.) Gordon’s sentences are crisp and often jarring. His plots unspool in strange, sometimes disturbing ways. There’s little to be gained in trying to situate yourself according to generic conventions; better just to enjoy the disorientation and to trust that you’re in the hands of an earnest storyteller.
White Tiger on Snow Mountain is your first story collection. Did you approach the stories differently than you would a novel?
In conceptual terms, I do think there’s a difference, at least for me. A story usually comes into my mind like a three-dimensional object—something I can see and feel and rotate. I’m often completely wrong about what the object is, but it’s still there. Whereas a novel is more like a set of directions for a road trip to California, with a planned stop in, say, Colorado and a visit to the Grand Canyon. The truth is I have no idea what’s going to happen along the way or whether I’ll even get there, but I have this general sense of direction and an end I hope to reach.
Now that the stories are completed and assembled, are you surprised at any of the themes or images that crop up?
I wrote these stories over a period of years, so some of the thematic echoes that people point out seem fairly straightforward for somebody who’s been writing for a long time—you deal with certain recurring ideas and problems. But then there are very specific echoes that I wasn’t aware of, and those are really interesting to me. My protagonists eat a lot of Chinese food and go to a lot of cafés. People tend to have cats in my stories, and the women have long fingers. I have no idea where this stuff comes from. I have no lost love with long fingers. I guess these things just leak out of my subconscious. (...)
Struggling and failed writers seem to be a mainstay in your work. You’ve had quite a bit of success with your own writing, so I wonder, without involving any shrinks—why that particular fixation?
It’s been a very long haul. I’m one of those weird people who knew in the second grade that this is what I wanted to do with my life and really set about doing it. At least in my own mind, I was trying to be a poet and to write serious fiction at the age of seven. I was probably sending things to The Paris Review when I was a teenager. But I really didn’t start publishing until four or five years ago. It felt like a long, epic journey to where I wanted to be as a writer. So in a strange way, I think I tend to write about people who are somehow living in this twilight where they’re not really part of mainstream society. They might be comp-lit professors or artists or drug dealers, but they tend to be on the fringes. That’s just where I found myself trapped for twenty-some-odd years. If I meet somebody now and they say they’ve heard my name or read my work, I assume they must have me mixed up with someone else. It takes a long time to undo that underdog mentality.
You’ve managed to straddle the line between mystery and literary fiction, and in this collection you look to other genres as well.
I think that horror and sci-fi in particular are great generators of imagery, and genre produces great characters. To find figures in Western culture as lasting and powerful as Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, you have to go to the Bible or Greek myths or Shakespeare. But as my work matures, it’s really more about the forms of genre storytelling—the way these stories shape and generate and vivify narrative. I’m trying to express something very personal through these classic forms, to use them as a poet uses a sonnet form.
Image: Michael SharkeyIn conceptual terms, I do think there’s a difference, at least for me. A story usually comes into my mind like a three-dimensional object—something I can see and feel and rotate. I’m often completely wrong about what the object is, but it’s still there. Whereas a novel is more like a set of directions for a road trip to California, with a planned stop in, say, Colorado and a visit to the Grand Canyon. The truth is I have no idea what’s going to happen along the way or whether I’ll even get there, but I have this general sense of direction and an end I hope to reach.Now that the stories are completed and assembled, are you surprised at any of the themes or images that crop up?
I wrote these stories over a period of years, so some of the thematic echoes that people point out seem fairly straightforward for somebody who’s been writing for a long time—you deal with certain recurring ideas and problems. But then there are very specific echoes that I wasn’t aware of, and those are really interesting to me. My protagonists eat a lot of Chinese food and go to a lot of cafés. People tend to have cats in my stories, and the women have long fingers. I have no idea where this stuff comes from. I have no lost love with long fingers. I guess these things just leak out of my subconscious. (...)
Struggling and failed writers seem to be a mainstay in your work. You’ve had quite a bit of success with your own writing, so I wonder, without involving any shrinks—why that particular fixation?
It’s been a very long haul. I’m one of those weird people who knew in the second grade that this is what I wanted to do with my life and really set about doing it. At least in my own mind, I was trying to be a poet and to write serious fiction at the age of seven. I was probably sending things to The Paris Review when I was a teenager. But I really didn’t start publishing until four or five years ago. It felt like a long, epic journey to where I wanted to be as a writer. So in a strange way, I think I tend to write about people who are somehow living in this twilight where they’re not really part of mainstream society. They might be comp-lit professors or artists or drug dealers, but they tend to be on the fringes. That’s just where I found myself trapped for twenty-some-odd years. If I meet somebody now and they say they’ve heard my name or read my work, I assume they must have me mixed up with someone else. It takes a long time to undo that underdog mentality.
You’ve managed to straddle the line between mystery and literary fiction, and in this collection you look to other genres as well.
I think that horror and sci-fi in particular are great generators of imagery, and genre produces great characters. To find figures in Western culture as lasting and powerful as Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, you have to go to the Bible or Greek myths or Shakespeare. But as my work matures, it’s really more about the forms of genre storytelling—the way these stories shape and generate and vivify narrative. I’m trying to express something very personal through these classic forms, to use them as a poet uses a sonnet form.
by Dwyer Murphy, Paris Review | Read more:
