Matt Bell’s visionary debut novel In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and Woods is one of the most singularly strange and beautiful and wondrous books to come along in a long time. I picked it up one afternoon just to read the opening paragraph—

“Before our first encounter with the bear I had already finished building the house, or nearly so.”

—and finished the book before going to sleep that night. It took over my life for any number of hours and it’s one I continue to go back to from time to time, surfing the pages for the many passages I underlined. I drew checkmarks and more checkmarks in the margins. Consider yourself warned: do not pick up this novel if you have other commitments that day.

In the House is impossible to categorize. It’s impossible that anyone else could have written such a thing. It’s a novel that—as Borges wrote of Kafka—invents its own precursors. Of course, there’s a tremendous amount of fabulist fiction in our midst these days; in fact, there’s so much of it right now that fabulism is beginning to taste a bit like the flavor of the month, a fad resulting from a natural and reasonable distrust of realism and a desire to return to pre-commercial methods of telling stories. But what Bell accomplishes here is something that doesn’t happen very often: he has invented an entirely new rhetoric of fiction and marked unique territory of his own.

No plot summary can do this novel justice, so please let it suffice to say that a man and woman build a remote house where they plan to raise a family. Their efforts are complicated by a series of biological occurrences that make even the noisiest scenes in Eraserhead feel like an episode of Sesame Street. There’s also a bear that talks, sort of, and something menacing in the lake. You just have to read it.

Bell is the also the author of a novella and a collection of stories. We met a few years ago at the Winter Wheat Literary Festival in Bowling Green, Ohio, where we were late to an event because we stopped in a dive bar for a drink with Kyle Minor. I ran into Bell again a year or so later outside of a hotel room during the MLA conference, where we were both applying for the same job. Neither of us got it. I’ve followed his career with awe and jealousy and more jealousy—he’s an amazing writer—and absolute respect. He answered these questions via email in March.

Andrew Ervin: What impresses me the most about In the House is the immersive experience you’ve created. The first-person voice carries a mythic or timeless quality, and it’s sustained beautifully for hundreds of pages. Tell me how you found that and how you pulled it off so well.

Matt Bell: There’s a glib answer possible here, where I just say, “Slowly,” and then leave it at that—but of course I’ll go on. I suppose it really did take a long time to flesh it all out, but I had a kind of sketch of the voice early on—I can’t usually get very far into a story without having the story’s way of speaking at least partially in hand. Before I was finished, a lot of other influences had been mixed in: there’s a little bit of King James Version, some Greek myth, a little bit of Old Norwegian, a smattering of unusual words lifted from nineteenth-century dictionaries, some Cormac McCarthy and Brian Evenson and Hiromi Itō and Christine Schutt, all these writers who work so well at the sentence level, who write so wonderfully about the body. I’m sure there are plenty of other influences on the voice, ways of speaking I’d never be able to untangle from the novel’s, some of them there for the beginning, some folded in later.

One thing that I’m sure helped me: I was constantly reading aloud from the book, from the first day of drafting to the last day of revision, years later. I’ve read the book out loud cover to cover multiple times, at the end of every major draft, and there was never a day when I worked on the book in silence.

I think that there was also some want on my part to prove wrong a truism I’d heard too often in grad school and in other places: When I was in school, it seemed to be a given that an intense focus on language and acoustics couldn’t be carried over an entire novel, that this kind of voice was the province of the story, the poem, that it was too difficult for the writer, too exhausting for the reader. From the first time I heard someone say that, I didn’t believe it—there are plenty of books out there that prove otherwise—and I think I wanted to find out for myself what I could do at this length, with the kind of voices I’m drawn to.

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Ben Schrank’s latest work, Love Is a Canoe, centers around the idea of marriage but it is also about desire and ambition and what grows when these things are absent.

I find Schrank to be a confident, intelligent writer, who seems to know his characters well, always revealing a truth at precisely the right moment in the story. He is particularly adept at creating strong female characters who are nuanced, a rarity in fiction about love, sex, and marriage.

We recently had the opportunity to talk, via e-mail, about his latest book.

Roxane Gay: I was particularly interested in Emily Babson. I don’t know that I’ve seen a more fully realized character in recent memory. There were so many odd details about her that felt very true. One detail I cannot let go of is how she loved calling 311 and felt satisfaction when she saw that one of her calls was successful. Where did this character come from and how did she fit into what you wanted to do with Love Is a Canoe?

Ben Schrank: Thanks about Emily. She was the hardest character for me and the one that my wife and my agent and my editor had me work on the most. Perhaps because she was a needy case in earlier drafts, I overcompensated, and gave her more texture than the other characters. I wanted Emily to be shy and involved and determined to be in New York and also always wanting more from New York and able to explain things that are not animate. I wanted people to trigger anxiety in her. I wanted her to duck down behind cars when she saw people she knew from college. But most of all I wanted her to marry because she believed in a construct and trusted that construct. This is, I think, not a good reason to marry. A close friend of my wife sees me in Emily. I also love 311.

RG: The structure of Love is a Canoe was really interesting, both in using a beloved, very sentimental self-help book on marriage as a narrative frame, and by writing each chapter in the point of view of the character whose story is being told at a given time. Why did you choose this frame and structure?

BS: This structure felt modern and necessary to me. I understand now that I took a risk that some readers didn’t embrace by indulging in very sentimental material (in Marriage is a Canoe) but at the time, I didn’t know that. And regardless, I don’t care. I know that a lot of the book is interior (a whole lot if you analyze it) and breaking it up give it some momentum. Also, because I work full time, I wanted a ‘kitchen sink’ of a novel, that, hopefully, would stretch to accept all I could throw into it—so that I could write at different times with different intentions. With three months at MacDowell, for instance, a very different novel would have come out of me.

RG: Do you read self help books? Can they help?

BS: No, and I doubt it. But I heard a good writer speak on a panel last week who said that we all think self-help books are dumb until it’s 4am and we’re desperate and hopeless and then we turn to them. So I suspect that there will be, undoubtedly, a time for me when my answer will seem unforgivably glib. Future self: I am sorry.

RG: Even though there’s this cynical undertone, that Peter Herman “wrote” a book about marriage, and was pretty terrible at marriage himself, that he didn’t really believe in his own words, we also see somewhat of a happy ending. Each character seems to get some approximation of what they want. Do you believe in happy endings as a writer?

BS: Well, I don’t know that getting what you want leads to a happy ending. It’s just an ending. Hopefully, my characters stumble into events that may feel like choices to them. Some end up happy, and some are, perhaps, over-served with happiness. Some spoilers: One character is fired, one is dating a rebound guy who isn’t too sexy, and one ends up with a lady who is mean. I don’t look for happy endings in books. I hope for endings that are true.

RG: Did you feel like the ending in Love is a Canoe was true?

BS: I know it’s true for Emily Babson. I crossed my fingers that readers would ‘get’ what I was trying to do in the last few pages, which is that, though the ending may seem happy, if you look a little closer you see that the characters are moving on with their lives, by which I mean that they are setting themselves up for new problems. A few readers embraced the ending I was trying to achieve. That felt good.

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Is that true? Are we all—all of us writers—fans? Fan-like, do we not passionately—sometimes even obsessively—engage with our subjects? Do we not write in order to gain access and understanding? To be able to become part of the greater whole? But what about the freighted and fraught side of fandom? When our desire for access and intimacy creates a debit or comes at some other cost?

I put the question, as it were, to a variety of authors whom I admire and consider myself a fan. I asked them to describe their best or most interesting or most transformative experiences as fans. As the answers came back, I discovered another distinct and weirdly interesting pleasure: that of being a fan listening to fans talking about being fans.

Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake) Years ago, I went to see Canadian singer/songwriter Jane Siberry perform, as I have done many times before. This one was at the El Rey on Wilshire in Los Angeles—a performance with her band. Whenever I heard her I felt lifted and filled by the music and presentation. In the 90′s in particular, I listened to Jane Siberry CDs and tapes all the time, and found her inspiring on many levels.

But at this show, at the end, after the bows, I felt a curious pang of longing as she exited, a desire to go have dinner with her and her band, to lean in with intensity and tell her what her songs meant to me. To try to convey something that would be difficult to convey. It was curious, even odd, because I felt such acute loss even at the same time that I felt full and nourished by what had happened at the concert. So why did I care? I wanted, at that moment, to be her friend, to be in the inner circle.

She had been a little more accessible in her latest tours by holding salons at people’s houses and that slightly confused the relationship for me. Did I know her? Did she know my name? For one of those salons, I was given the instruction to make her a baked potato. I probably put more care into that baked potato than any I’ve ever made.

But that night at the El Rey, my pang seemed to have more to do with fame and longing, the desire to be her buddy, to know her, to have her know me, to have my love for her music—and therefore myself—validated somehow.

But—and I can’t recall if she said anything to this effect or if it just clicked into place for me, it struck me as I was leaving the theatre, returning to the feeling of the music itself, that the intimacy had already happened. That what I experienced with her singing and songwriting was where I met her, where she taught me something and moved me. It was so incredibly unlikely that hanging out at a restaurant would have anywhere near the impact that I felt when listening over and over to her songs.

I’ve thought of this too on occasion at readings, when signing books. Sometimes someone will seem moved by the book, and I will feel the same pang—that we can’t quite access the connection that has already happened via the page. That that connection is deeper and is acknowledged simply by the act of it happening. That reader and I connected. Jane Siberry and I connected. But it’s invisible.

The whole concept of fandom switched in my mind that night. I think the longing to be someone’s friend, to be seen ‘back’, is a denial of the reader or listener’s role in the process. The listener matters. Is essential. Without the listener, the music doesn’t exist. If the music or book is understood deeply, that is because the reader/listener has brought a lot to it. As Paul Auster says, writer and reader both make the book.

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Historical fiction, we’re told, always says more about the era in which it’s written than that in which it’s set. Yeah, yeah. Set in Egypt in the waning years of the nineteenth century, Ken Kalfus’s glimmering new novel Equilateral takes a different approach in that it isn’t content to only offer commentary on who we are now but, also, on who we might have been. The premise is deceptively and beautifully simple: a British astronomer named Sanford Thayer is overseeing the construction of an equilateral triangle, three hundred feet long on each side, in the Egyptian desert. His purpose—for which nine hundred thousand Arab laborers are toiling night and day in advance of a June 17, 1894 deadline—is to demonstrate human intelligence to the people of Mars and “petition for man’s membership in the fraternity of planetary civilizations.” (14) There are, as you might guess, complications.

Kalfus offers a staggeringly intelligent re-imagining of what have become out-dated scientific principles; the entire novel is steeped in an intellectual world that no longer exists. He has exhumed an entire and extinct intellectual worldview, one that arose in the early years of what has become the secular era heralded by Friedrich Nietzsche, among others. With God dead or busy or indifferent or away on business, humankind has been forced to make meaning in other ways and attempt to find connectivity to other things, even Martians.

Although things don’t go especially well for Thayer, by peeling away the twentieth century, Kalfus was able to imbue the novel with a lovely optimism missing in most contemporary fiction even though it never shies from the difficult questions about colonialism and imperialism. In addition to Equilateral, Kalfus is the author of two story collections, Thirst and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies and the novels The Commissariat of Enlightenment and the National Book Award finalist A Disorder Peculiar to the Country.

He answered a few questions via email in late February.

Andrew Ervin: Equilateral is enlivened by a lovely kind of optimism that the twentieth century may have beat out of the scientific community. Because the novel’s so rich in its understandings of geometry and symmetry and construction (among other things), my first question is about form: how did you decide on its shape? Why does it have thirty-two chapters?

Ken Kalfus: The 32 chapters don’t have any numerological significance, and I hope you didn’t spend too much time looking for one! I can see how a book like this may invite some speculative search for symmetries and hidden formal structures. While there are certain geometries to the relationships in play, in fact the story grew more or less organically, and I wrote every chapter with the desperate desire to make it work, and make the story hang together as a whole.

AE: I’m reminded of John Aubrey’s description of Thomas Hobbes’s first encounter with Euclid:

“He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman’s library, Euclid’s Elements lay open, and ‘twas the 47 El. libri I. He read the proposition. ‘By G–,’ sayd he, (He would now and then swear, by way of emphasis) ‘By G–,’ sayd he, ‘this is impossible!’ So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of the trueth. This made him in love with geometry.”

Mathematics and literature often make uncomfortable bedfellows, yet Sanford Thayer fully appreciates the aesthetic beauty of geometry and sees in it a vast potential for improving the human condition. How did the idea come about? What amount of research was involved?

KK: I love the Aubrey story, dramatizing that electric moment when a geometric proof suddenly reveals itself to describe a fundamental truth about the structure of reality. Hobbes has just fallen upon the Pythogorean Theorem—a good excuse to use the word hypoteneuse and a truth about the relationship between the sides of a triangle that comes up time and again in my novel. The philospher’s delight and the work of my novel rest on the notion that this theorem is true for all men and women, whether British or Hottentot, and true from one planet to the next. Thayer is convinced that a common knowledge of mathematics will allow us to share not only ideas between planets, but feelings of beauty and love too.

I’ve always enjoyed math, which isn’t the same as being good at it. One of my many pleasures in the pursuit of this novel was relearning my high school trigonometry (SOHCAHTOA!) and then performing some basic equations, for the dimensions of the triangle, the amount of sand being excavated, the positions of the planets in 1894, etc. I bought myself a decent compass and  spent a lot of time on this, hunkered at my desk, filling in pages and pages of calculations, in many of which I did something like forget to carry the 1.

AE: Why do you suppose we have such an endless fascination with Mars?

KK: Since the 19^th century, we’ve thought that if there were life elsewhere in the solar system, Mars was the place for it. It has solid land and an atmosphere, its climate is almost temperate, and astronomers like Thayer thought they discerned magnificent artificial waterways crossing its surface—which recalled the great terrestrial canal projects like Suez that had seized the public imagination. This was also the century in which European explorers heroically traversed the Earth’s most forbidding deserts, making the Red Planet’s parched landscape seem more familiar and more attainable.

Mars still drives us crazy with promises—witness the strong public interest in sending astronauts there, something whose cost is not justified by the scientific benefit and which is unlikely to happen in this century. The planet is passing behind the sun this spring but will reappear in our morning sky in a few months, a steady beacon for our hopes for interplanetary companionship.

AE: That need for companionship strikes me as a natural result of the newly (or relatively newly) secularized world of the late 1800s. Many of the tensions you’ve written about here—the colonizer v. the oppressed, West v. Middle East, scientific certainty v. faith—are of course still in the news. Do you buy the argument that historical fiction speaks more about the time it’s written than the time in which it’s set?

KK: I’m not sure my novel qualifies as historical fiction, since the central event is so far removed from anything that ever happened, but these historical themes were very much on my mind as I wrote Equilateral. The epic, generations-spanning struggle between the First World and the Third is the central question of our era. Meanwhile, the real news of this century may prove to be the discovery of alien life. Both these preoccupations led me to Equilateral. I don’t think writers can ever escape the moment in which they write, or that readers would want them to.

Your comment that the secularization of society has increased the need for companionship is an interesting one. I would say the need has always been there: that’s why human beings invented religion in the first place.

AE: What’s next for you? How quickly do you transition between projects?

KK: I’m always thinking about my next project, and I’m currently finishing a new collection of short fiction that will be published next April. The book’s anchored by a novella that fictionally reconstructs the events of a catastrophic weekend in New York, during which an international finance official sexually assaults a hotel worker. The story’s title is “Coup de Foudre.”

AE: Finally, what are the 2013 books you’re most excited about?

KK: In a short story frame of mind, I’m looking forward to reading Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I have Lynn Coady’s new epistolary novel, The Antagonist, waiting on my pile—it looks very funny and very compelling. Also, I’ve gotten an early look at Allison Lynn’s novel, The Exiles, which comes out in July. The first few pages are gorgeous, and the writing is intensely felt. I hope to get to them, soon or eventually. There’s so many good books out there, I always feel I’m playing catch-up.

Andrew Ervin is the author of a collection of novellas, Extraordinary Renditions.