New territories: Sophie Cunningham talks to Steven Amsterdam
June 01
Steven Amsterdam has experienced huge success with his debut novel, Things We Didn’t See Coming – including winning the Age Book of the Year in 2009, being shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2010 and making it onto the 2011 VCE reading lists. In the March edition of Meanjin, Sophie Cunningham spoke to Steven about breaking with convention, the idea of bravery and trying to imagine what the future might look like. A brief extract is below, and you can read the full interview on our editions page.
Sophie Cunningham: I read Things We Didn’t See Coming as a novel but it’s also been called a short-story collection.
Steven Amsterdam: Even on the book itself it’s not that consistent. On the flap copy it says it’s stories and some other place I think it says ‘novel’. But Sleepers has pitched it as a novel. In the States it’s going out as a collection, in the UK as a novel. Marketing departments make some of these decisions and I’m fairly happy with either mode, though I think a reader would be poorly served by reading the last story or chapter first.
Sophie: While there were leaps that meant that we were a bit surprised by where the main—unnamed—character was, I read him as the one character the entire way through. Have the words ‘discontinuous narrative’ been used?
Steven: Only with people who work at university presses. It’s just not one of those phrases that brings in the crowds. I’ve been a little sensitive to it because I’ve seen certain reviews where people seem confused, and to me it’s pretty straightforward that the grandparents reappear, Margo is Margo in three different stories. Time passes and life alters people. To me, that was part of the reward of writing the book. How would they have changed since we saw them last?
Sophie: You’ve spoken about the human tendency to catastrophise and be pessimistic when in fact people tend to rally, no matter what’s thrown at them. Was each chapter intended to work through the implications of a different catastrophe, or were you making a point about the way the personality can change and shift quite dramatically over time? I know I’ve felt like a very different person in different phases of my life.
Steven: Yes, same. I was very conscious of the fact that I could not have imagined my current self five years ago, and letting that growth in character occur offstage seemed like an interesting way to go. In a sense, each of the stories/chapters leaves the narrator on the verge of another 180-degree turn. Not everybody experiences that much change in their life. Maybe this is actually the answer: the readers who have a hard time with that have been in the same place for thirty years, and the people who related better have had more experience with dodging through life. Finding yourself in a new territory and finding yourself surviving things you didn’t think you’d survive, that’s interesting to me. If I set out to make a point, that was probably the point.
Sophie: Well, I wanted to know if you could literally connect these catastrophes or whether you played with different catastrophes and hoped that they created some sense of relationship. Did you try and map out the disasters?
Steven: I hate sounding a little haphazard, but someone in my writing workshop at one point said, ‘You have to give a timeline of what’s happened in all these stories because I’m not understanding it.’
Sophie: You do that with the character’s age.
Steven: That’s about the only thing. When editing it into its final form I was conscious of things that had happened in the past, so was able to call on the post-viral stuff after the plague chapter, for example. But I didn’t have a consistent history for exactly everything that would have happened. I did indulge a lot of these ideas at the same time because I think (and this is maybe a bit of Y2K thinking) it was all supposed to happen at once anyway. It wasn’t like I threw a whole lot of different dystopias at the wall and said let’s try them all. I did come to something of a timeline: the government split and then it rained a lot and then everybody got the plague and then everybody was living in communes and so on …
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Comments
02 Jun 10 at 16:51
I’m probably making this up, but I think Frank Moorhouse might claim the term ‘discontinuous narrative’. Stephen’s probably right that it’s a ‘university press’ type of term – e.g. I work for a university press and I’m using it right now. In this case, though, it’s useful shorthand for readers/critics/whoever not having to get worried about whether ‘Things We Didn’t See Coming’ is or isn’t a novel, given that it the episodes so obviously fit together to form a bigger story and given that the gaps are hugely important.
...03 Jun 10 at 10:07
I read an article a while ago about Geoff Dyer’s ‘Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi’ where he spoke about carving a narrative around the absence of something. I love the idea of that inverse and the way the gaps in TWDSC work to do that. For me, the question of whether it’s collection of short stories vs novel is almost an afterthought to that.
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