Caitlin Horrock’s second short story collection Life Among the Terranauts follows her debut collection This is Not Your City and her novel The Vexations. With stories set mostly in the western part of the United States (Arizona) and the Midwest (Michigan), Horrocks explores lives in locked away places—in small towns, in communes or compounds, biodomes, and vacation lodges— shining a light on characters who are stuck in their ruts and like their ruts just fine. These stories depict a sharp artistic departure from the stories in This is Not Your City where characters often sought ways to escape their dull surroundings, such as in “It Looks Like This” where a high school student’s friendship with an Amish quilter routinely gets her out of the house and away from her invalid mother, or “Zolaria” in which two young girls spend their summer vacation dreaming up a fantasy world and paint their middle-class suburban neighborhood awash in the colors of their imaginations. Instead, in Life Among the Terranauts, characters directly confront their stifling environments, seeing and embracing them for what they are. In “The Sleep,” in which a town collectively hibernates for the winter, the townsfolk try to explain why they sleep instead of leaving the economically depressed area: “Our people had moved to Bounty because the land was there and it was empty, and now all we had was the emptiness and one other (22). In “Paradise Lodge,” Victor enjoys his job guiding tourists through a jungle in Peru but his girlfriend wants him to aim higher and work in one of the company’s fancier resorts: “She quizzes him on when, exactly, he’ll transfer. He asks her what is so very awful about the place they live” (193). They dig deep roots and tenaciously fight being uprooted. Published between the publications of the two short story collections, Horrocks’ historical novel The Vexations ponders the nature of genius as well as its risks and rewards, asking: What is genius and who is a prodigy? Can we trust ourselves to recognize exceptional talent when we see it and how do we respond to it when we are directly confronted with it and must live alongside the one who possesses it? These questions form the subtext of The Vexations, Horrocks’ novel about the musical genius of Erik Satie. Told from multiple points of view, the novel follows the composer Erik Satie from his childhood to his death and details his relationships with close friends and relatives who, endowed with their own various artistic, literary, or musical talents, orbit him before going on to have satisfying, yet less spectacular lives.
Necessary Fiction spoke with Horrocks about her three works of fiction.
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N.F.: What inspired your second collection Life Among the Terranauts? Were any of the stories inspired by real-life events?
C.H.: I don’t write particularly autobiographical fiction–the “true” bits are usually hacked up potato pieces in a larger stew–but there are definitely real life seeds to several of the stories, especially in the settings. A lot of the stories began in my imagination with a place, and those were all real places: Sun City, the tourist sites in “All Over with Fire,” the lodge in “Paradise Lodge,” Arcosanti in “Chance Me,” the backyard in “23 Months,” and more. The title story is inspired by Biosphere 2 outside Tucson, Arizona, although my version of the experiment goes much farther off the rails. The story “Teacher” was sparked by an anecdote an airport driver once told me: I held it in my head for a long time, thinking I was cooking up something complicated and novella-length, but when I finally sat down to write, I ended up with one of the shortest stories in the book. “Murder Games” is one of the more autobiographical stories I’ve ever published; my sister and I had allergies and big imaginations, and our stuffed animals were more real to me than some humans I knew. Also I was wildly upset at my mother when she hemmed my blankie to try and stop it from falling apart: sorry, Mom.
N.F.: In many ways Life Among the Terranauts seems prescient, especially the story “The Sleep” in which a town collectively withdraws from the outside world to hibernate. How has your writing, or your thinking about writing been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic?
C.H.: I wrote all of the stories in Life Among the Terranauts before the pandemic, many long before, and I was nervous about how they would read in 2021, or whatever phase we’re living in now. In my first collection, many of the protagonists were people struggling with loneliness and isolation; after that book was out, I wanted to try writing more about groups of people, about people situated in communities or systems that they may or may not be able to see their way out of. That focus on the failures (or successes) of communities, about the moments where people decide to adapt or leave, turned out to be especially relevant in pandemic times, in ways I didn’t at all foresee.
My writing and thinking have been most immediately affected by my inability to do much of either over the last two years: I spent the early months of the pandemic trying to teach online and entertain a four-year-old while pregnant with twins. The pregnancy was mentally and physically punishing, and then my husband and I were trying to work and care for newborn twins in a world that was still pretty upside down. I’m finally reclaiming some brain space (gratitude to my children’s amazing teachers, in school and in daycare), and I want to return to exploring ideas of community, but I also feel very defeated by the abundant and obvious failures of community during the pandemic. I guess I want to write about community in a way that isn’t entirely frustration and fragmentation, but I’m honestly not sure how right now.
N.F.: What are the difficulties, if any, in writing about an historical figure? And what were the rewards? Did you feel any pressure to strive for accuracy or were you free to imagine during your writing of The Vexations?
C.H.: I felt so much pressure. I should quickly clarify that it was self-imposed pressure, because I think successful historical fiction can be written at many different angles to fact, and that there’s nothing wrong with loose inspiration vs. “accuracy.” But every time I decided in a huff of frustration to change all the names and make everything up, I never followed through. What structure the book had for me was rooted in the set of facts I was working from, and while I felt comfortable inventing in the spaces left between them, I didn’t want to contradict what I knew to be true (or mostly true—a fascinating outcome of researching the same people for so long was finding contradictions or impossibilities in their own reminiscences). For me, adhering to the historical record was a gesture of respect towards these people who had really lived, and to whom I felt very attached and indebted, in complicated ways. But I also knew that I was writing novel characters who would always be different from whoever their real-life selves might have been, that their real-life selves were dead and gone and fundamentally inaccessible to me, or to anyone. It was a complicated balancing act.
N.F.: What inspired your fascination with the composer Erik Satie?
C.H.: I was once a mediocre piano student who fell in love with Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 3.” It’s easy to play, but was so very rewardingly melancholy and elegant to my moody self. I wanted to play everything he’d ever written, only to quickly realize that he had a handful of pieces like the Gymnopédies, and then a larger body of work that was… I didn’t know how to think of it, at the time. There wasn’t a ton of playfulness in the repertoire I’d been exposed to, and I didn’t know what to do with this guy who was telling the performer to play “Like a nightingale with a toothache.” My musician-brain was baffled, but my storyteller-brain was curious about who this person could have been. I held on to that curiosity for a long time, and finally started researching and writing to see where it lead.
N.F.: What are the challenges of conveying the sounds of music in literature? How do you make the reader “hear” the music?
C.H.: The main thing that worked for me (since exhorting myself to just “Try harder! Make the language really excellent and evocative!” was not helpful) was to root all the descriptions of sound in character. I tried to get away from describing what a piece of music sounded like to me, and instead think about what it sounded like to the character hearing it in a certain context. So in the book there are characters who are both experts and non-experts in music: the former might be hearing something about the construction of a piece, or being plagued by the gap between how they wanted it to come out, and how it actually sounds to them, while the latter is maybe struggling to get past calling something “pretty,” or being reminded of something more personal or idiosyncratic. I read a lot of other people’s writing about music and starred passages that just whacked me over the head with beauty or well-chosen words, but my way in was through character and point of view.
N.F.: What influenced your decision to deploy multiple points of view in your novel The Vexations, and was it a decision with which you began, or did you come to it at a later point in the writing?
C.H.: It came along later. The book started off very biopic-y, following Erik Satie from birth through career to death. It was like I was (weirdly) trying to write a book for Erik Satie superfans, centered around his discography. Two obvious problems: there aren’t that many of us, and he was a very difficult person in real life. I have boundless respect for his work, and in person he could be very funny and generous, but he was also often cruel, petty, and self-sabotaging. As a fictional subject, he was challenging, and at some point it occurred to me that the questions I was asking about him were questions the people around him were asking even while he was alive. That drew me to experiment with writing in their POVs, and then to research their own lives. Those lives turned out to be surprising and eventful beyond my expectations, and I ran with it. I didn’t want to try and shrink the book back into an Erik-shaped box that no longer seemed to fit.
N.F.: Speaking of point of view, reviewers of your novel have said that Louise steals the show and I’m inclined to agree. I greatly appreciated the incorporation of Louise’s POV into the novel, as I found her narrative so plaintive and compelling that I would often flip through the chapters to see when her POV was going to return. What do you think about your readers’ overwhelming response to Louise? Did you have an inkling she would make such an impact on your readers?
C.H.: I knew she was walking off with giant portions of the book, and I decided to let her. Her life was plaintive and compelling to me, as you put it, and I hoped it would be so for a reader. (and since I’ve gotten questions about how much of it is true: I followed what relatively little is known about her: I probably wouldn’t have voluntarily heaped that much misfortune on a character totally of my own invention!). The piece of the puzzle I didn’t anticipate was how much difference the first-person narration makes for many readers. I always just “heard” her voice in first-person, the way I heard the Erik sections in third-person present tense, or the Philippe sections in third-person past tense. I tried for a while to bring them all into alignment, but no one wanted to budge. I didn’t mean for the choice of first-person POV to convey that Louise’s “I” was automatically the central “I” of the book, but I’m not going to argue with anyone who thinks she steals the show. At some point I did think about whether I had a Louise book and an Erik book and they’d be better off separated, but for better or worse, I decided all these people belonged together in the same long, tangly novel.
N.F.: I’ve had the fortune to read other stories of yours, which do not appear in either of your collections, such as the one about the foreign exchange student in France and Morocco, the one about the mermaid parade, the one about the divorced violinist, and the self-explanatory “Somewhere in America a Man Named Jason Brockman Weighs 470 Pounds and I Am Going to Save Him.” How do you determine which stories to include in your collections?
C.H.: In general, I have a pretty capacious sense of what stories can go in a collection together (I admired tightly linked collections, but I don’t know if I’ve got one in me) so I’m never kicking stories to the curb for not being tightly tied to the others. As long as I still like a story on its own merits and feel like it’s plausibly in conversation with the others, I think it can fit. But I’ve also never felt like it’s a particularly tragic or momentous decision to leave a story out.
I once heard the writer Alistair MacLeod say he pictured his uncollected stories, the ones that were published in magazines but never made it into a book, as little kids left behind by a bus, running frantically after it. He said it jokingly, but I thought it was the saddest image, and I imagined it would someday be a terribly hard decision to leave any of my own story-kids off the bus (I’d started publishing individual stories by then, but didn’t have a book anywhere on the horizon). Turns out I’ve never felt that way! I originally wanted “Somewhere in America a Man Named Jason Brockman Weighs 470 Pounds and I Am Going to Save Him” to appear in my first collection, but editor Sarah Gorham said she thought it just didn’t fit, that it was more insubstantial than the other stories in the collection. I hadn’t necessarily seen it that way, but I didn’t feel the need to argue. A story got cut from my second collection that was 30 pages long and about an 18th century taxidermied lion: it was the longest story, the only historical story, the only story with animal POVs, Swedish politics, and a pirate kidnapping. I’m okay with the idea that it didn’t add anything essential to the conversation the other stories were already having together, or at least didn’t add anything that merited its out-of-left-field-ness. Maybe there will be a later bus that story can climb on, and maybe not. Maybe I’ll slowly assemble a collection titled The Weird Bus.
N.F.: When it comes to short-form and long-form fiction, some fiction writers prefer one form over the other and some have difficulty writing successfully in both forms. Now that you’ve written a novel and two short story collections, how would you compare the challenges of the two forms?
C.H.: I was a story writer before I was a novelist, and before I tried in any deliberate way to write a novel, I thought my main problem might be running out of things to say: I was so trained towards efficiency, towards compression. But it turns out I have no problem being long-winded! My real challenge in tackling the novel was psychological: when you’re writing stories, there are lots of little opportunities to check in with what you’re doing, to send a piece out and get a yes or no or a word of encouragement or redirection. A novel felt like a lot of eggs to put in one basket, artistically speaking: that I might spend literally years on a project only to feel like it wasn’t going anywhere good terrified me. But the only way out is through, and the novel got easier to write the more time I spent, well, writing it. One difference between stories and novels I’m not sure I ever reconciled was the difference between the 10–25-page arc of a story, and the longer narrative trajectory, suspense ratcheting ever upward, of many novels. The Vexations unfolds in sections that are suspiciously story-like, and I’d be interested in someday tackling a novel that has a different rhythm to it.
N.F.: What are you working on now? Anything new and exciting?
C.H.: I don’t know if it’s exciting or not, but I’m trying to write an essay about an album of lullabies I have listened to literally thousands of times while trying to get my kids to fall asleep, and how it may have broken my brain. If my brain turns out to not be lullaby-broken, I’m hoping to move on to a novel.
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Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This Is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selections. Her novel The Vexations was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2019 by the Wall Street Journal. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story, as well as other journals and anthologies. Her awards include the Plimpton Prize and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the MacDowell Colony.
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Amina Gautier is the author of the story collections At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. For her body of work she has received the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.