Read Breakwater’s review of Moondogs
In Moondogs, Alexander Yates’ debut novel, an American businessman is kidnapped in the Philippines by a cab driver and a villainous rooster, drawing his son into a sordid Manila underground populated by terrorists, corrupt politicians, and superhero policemen. Begun as Yates’ MFA thesis project at Syracuse University, Moondogs was released in hardback March 15th and is already collecting positive notices. Entertainment Weekly called it “weird and weirdly affecting”, while the Wall Street Journal enthused “readers will be gratified by the ambition and raw energy on display”.
Breakwater sent Yates’ friend Calvin Hennick to discuss writing fiction that draws more from comic books than Joseph Conrad, his experience as a debut author, and whether an MFA degree helps or hinders writers.
Breakwater Review: Moondogs is set almost entirely in the Philippines, but some of its subjects, like terrorism and capitalism, are particularly relevant to Americans. Were you trying to sort of hold a mirror up to your own country by showing another?
Alexander Yates: Not as much. I was mostly trying to explore my particular experience of my home – in the case of the novel, my home being the Philippines. I certainly don’t identify culturally as Filipino, but I spent a good deal of my teenage years there. After college, that was the place I returned, where I had my first job. It’s where I met the woman who became my wife. It’s tremendously important to me. At the time I started writing, that was the place that held my most acute and urgent memories.
I think I was aware even when I was pretty young that this was a very conflicted sense of home, because not only was it manifestly not my home, but I also was afforded an experience of the capital city, Manila, that most people do not have, an experience that was shaped in every way by privilege. And so it was a question of reconciling that sense of foreignness and home that I had when I think about that city and, to an extent, that I still have. I certainly don’t feel like I could have written a novel set in Virginia or Washington, D.C., at least at that time.
BR: The superhero policemen in the book: one can shoot a target from any distance, another can turn himself into animals, etc. But much of the book is total realism – a woman stuck in a mundane marriage, a prostitute scamming for cash. Can you talk a little about blending the magical and the everyday in your work?
AY: That was something that kind of resulted from questioning my own intentions. It really resulted from the fact that I didn’t believe myself when I was writing certain storylines. The storylines about the Filipino police kept rendering themselves as inert and incredible, which makes sense because at the time I was a 23-year-old white boy. I had no access to that experience. And it was included in the novel purely in terms of banal plot support. I started to recognize that that was profoundly disrespectful.
So my changing the plotline was more a result of realizing my own limitations. I read a draft and said: This reads like a crap comic book. At some point the response to that is not to keep writing until it’s real and honest and believable in the world of narrative realism. At some point the response is, okay, make it a good comic book. Own the fact that this is, to a large extent, fantasy. And then, within that cartoon, let’s see how real and honest you can get with your characters. What I’m hoping to do in the magical threads is to still have an emotional realism, even given preposterous stuff that’s going on. I hope, at least, that my characters are reacting the way real humans would, in that comic book medium. Once I decided to do that, it was totally liberating and a lot of fun.
BR: Are you worried about people challenging you on your decision, as a white writer, to write about the Philippines?
AY: I’m not going to say that I’m worried about it. I think they should challenge me. That’s something I really questioned as I invested years into it. There are certainly profound moral hazards in representing people whose cultural experience I can’t claim to understand.
It’s not that I’m terrified of being challenged on it. I’m terrified that I haven’t self-interrogated deeply enough and that I’m not being as sensitive to the politics of representation as I should be. That said, all I can do is write with the fullest appreciation possible of those issues and really write to my own experience. The Philippines was home for me at the time when I started this. I didn’t spin a globe and say, let’s find some exotic and therefore deliciously interesting place to write about. This is where I had a lot of the experiences that informed my life.
BR: The first time we talked about your novel was on a trip to Peru, over whiskey, in 2006, and you told me that some of the characters were superheroes. At the time, I thought, this is either going to be great, or it’s going to be terrible. Were there spots along the way where you doubted the project?
AY: I would have to say no, and yes, I guess. I think as long as you’re a reasonably cogent person and you’re writing a first book there’s an undercurrent of doubt that’s going to be running through the project the whole time. To talk specifically about those superheroes – there was a point when I realized I was writing a novel that was in some ways, let’s face it, kind of silly, kind of a novel for the boy in me. I didn’t doubt that impulse. That felt very right. What felt wrong was trying to deny the impulse and trying to write my stuffy idea of a big-boy novel. That’s not what this book is.
BR: How did it feel to sell the book so soon after graduating?
AY: Emotionally, it was ridiculous. It’s unhealthy to put too much stock in validation because writers very rarely, if ever, get it. But getting it felt really fantastic, and also kind of weird. I am absolutely sure I don’t deserve it more than the other writers I was with in my program. I think I was in a lot of ways lucky to find a project that I liked and that I was willing to pour five years into. And I was lucky to have a really supportive spouse who gave me that space to be a ridiculous human being for five years, spending eight hours a day in front of a computer playing a one-person role-playing game, really, just making up lives.
So the validation feels good, but I also want to remain suspicious of it because I know lots of fantastic writers whose talent I am awed by and viscerally jealous of who have not yet gotten that validation. I have no doubt that they will, but it makes me suspicious of my own.
BR: How far along was the project when you entered the program?
AY: It was a whole lot of crap. You talk about your novel draft as a mess of hot garbage. I can’t think of words better than that. It was only twelve chapters. It was the first fourth or third of the novel. Most of those chapters got deleted wholesale. All of the rest have been changed. I had worked on those chapters for two years. They’d each of them been through five to twelve drafts. They were inert, in a way. They were victims of all these unmade choices because I hadn’t finished the novel, I didn’t know what I was doing yet. I was focusing on sentences before I knew what the sentences were about.
BR: What were the hardest choices you had to make, the hardest things you had to give up, as you worked on the novel?
AY: The whole process was a series of hard cuts. The only way it’s bearable is that those choices are redeemed when they’re the right ones. Cutting stuff you care about becomes a lot less painful when you read the draft over again and realize how much what you loved was hurting you. It’s like giving up cigarettes.
When I was at Syracuse, I was having a conversation with a great student there who was also a novelist. He had just completed a final draft of a novel. As the older, wiser writer, he was talking about how almost everything he had written in the first draft was eventually deleted – that the book now was upwards of 90 percent just new words, new content. And I distinctly remember thinking to myself, you are friendly, but go to hell, because I know where I’m going, I like my structure, and that’s not going to happen. But he was absolutely right. I finished that draft, and I spent the next two years deleting it. So far, my method for writing novels is to write the book that it isn’t first. And then when I know what it isn’t, I can write the novel that I’m actually meaning to write.
For example, one character lived on maybe 250, 300 pages of the book, a principal character, and had to be deleted. And God, that was a painful week. Just hitting Control-F, “Ernesto”, replace with “nothing”.
BR: But you did keep most of the structure?
AY: In terms of the structure, almost all of it stayed. If you were to bullet-point the novel, it’s maybe 20, 30 percent different. In terms of the arc, if you zoom out, it’s going to look the same. It’s just a question of populating that structure with characters instead of cardboard cutouts.
BR: A lot of writers say they start their work with characters, but you’ve mentioned that some of your characters arose unexpectedly from the action in the book. How did you go about creating the people and world of Moondogs?
AY: In the context of literary fiction this is embarrassing to admit, but I was all plot. The whole novel started as an intentional arc, and it was, from the beginning, about the kidnapping of an American businessman in the Philippines and a son who goes to look for him. That plus a whole bunch of moving prose that I assumed I would write. All the characters were, to an extent, not given the respect that they deserved in the earliest draft, because it was all about the telling of plot. Everybody was a puppet.
Arthur Flowers, who’s a fantastic teacher at Syracuse, he took me to lunch. He was very sweet about it. He looked at me with this concern, and he said, I really don’t want you to think you are close to done, because there’s not a character in this book. That was rough. I can’t overstate how much I love him for that.
BR: Did you consider giving up at that point?
AY: Nah, I still had some more years to go in the program at that point. I would have just been too embarrassed to give up.
BR: What’s been the most surprising part of the publishing process for you so far?
AY: I don’t imagine for a second that my experience is typical. I don’t know that there is a typical experience. And this is going to be a boring answer, but I’m blown away by how friendly everyone is. I’m surprised how much like talking to other human beings it is, which is probably just demonstrative of my own silly assumptions, because, obviously, these are all human beings. That that’s a surprise to me speaks more to my own failings, I think.
BR: A lot of people enter MFA programs hoping to publish their theses, but not a lot of them are able to do it. Was there anything in particular about your MFA experience that helped you to pull it off?
AY: I think it was really just luck. I believe that publishing an MFA thesis is not necessarily preferable. Where my project went well was in the moments when I was able to back off on what I thought I was doing, what I thought I wanted to do, and realized that I was meant to do something entirely different.
I was just lucky to come into the program with a project that ended up not totally sinking. And I think the reason it didn’t sink is I was able to give up a lot of things that were precious to me about it. But like I’ve said, I’ve known so many writers who are not coming out with a full novels or story collections, but are coming out with chops that I wish I had.
BR: There always seems to be a debate raging online about whether an MFA is necessary, or whether it encourages everyone to write the same sort of stuff.
AY: Obviously, having benefited a great deal from an MFA, everything I say is going to be colored by that. Having given that caveat, I think the debate is a total waste of time and is a great deal of naval gazing. The idea that there are writers out there who will be ruined by one to three years of time spent devoted to writing alongside peers who are passionate about reading and writing, with teachers who are passionate about reading and writing, that that could be in any way counterproductive is a little preposterous, I think.
If you’re a writer, and an MFA program is what keeps you from being the artist you’re going to be, then that’s a shame. But life is not designed to make you into the artist you can be. If the MFA program is the thing that stops you, then traffic on I-95 would have stopped you. If that’s the thing, then it wasn’t meant to happen.
BR: Is there anything you would have done differently during your three years at Syracuse?
AY: I was kind of the I’m-going-to-get-published nerd at Syracuse. Honestly, if I could have done anything differently, I would have gone out for a few more beers. I left Syracuse with some really close friends that I share work with to this day, and I’m assuming I’m going to continue sharing work with them until one of us dies or they wise up. But I think if I could go back and do anything, I might spend 5 percent less time rewriting the scene where the superheroes have a shootout in a marketplace, and I might spend a little more time relaxing with people outside of the class context and buying them beer, and hopefully conning them into buying me some.