David Hollander is the author of the novel L.I.E. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in dozens of print and online forums, including McSweeney’s, Post Road, The New York Times Magazine, Failbetter, Poets & Writers, Unsaid, and previous issues of The Collagist. His work has been adapted for film and frequently anthologized, notably in Best American Fantasy. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and two children and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, where he is revered as a God.
His story, "Powers of Ten," appeared in Issue Forty-Nine of The Collagist.
Here, David Hollander talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about the myopic nature of human myopia, stealing structures, and self-destruction.
What section or scene did you first write, in what would eventually become, “Powers of Ten”?
Believe it or not, I wrote the sections in the order they appear. I was working from an outline and had some idea of what additional sections might look like, and I moved very methodically forward.
The structure of this piece had an odd effect on me, in that on my first read through I felt sadder/more horrified after each section, but on my second read through I felt almost the opposite. A sort of: man-if-10³-only-knew-how-good-she-had-it sort of take, which isn’t to say that my second interpretation is true, but the work seems to invite this oddly hopeful perspective. Could you talk about the overall structure and how you view this piece?
So there’s a picture book titled Powers of Ten, which is where I got the idea for the piece. Basically you crack the book’s cover and see a picture of a couple picnicking together in a park. The shot is taken from 10 meters above their heads and is titled, 10. You turn the page and see a shot of the same couple, taken from 100 meters above their heads, titled 10². And so on. By the time you get to the last shot, taken from 10,000,000,000 meters away, you’re “viewing” the couple from deep space. Then the book reboots and you’re again looking at the original picture, only this time you move one power of ten closer with each page. By the end you’re looking at the atomic structures that form the surfaces of their bodies. The amazing thing is that the most distant shots of galactic madness and the most close-up shots of molecular chains are very nearly identical.
Anyway, that book made an impression on me 20 years ago and for whatever reason it occurred to me that it would be an interesting structure for a story. I am often looking to steal structures from elsewhere. But what I decided to pour into that structure was a conundrum that has informed many of my fictions in recent years: Here I am, a tiny collection of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen atoms, locomoting around on a tiny planet orbiting an average yellow star lost among (cue the Carl Sagan) billions and billions of other stars, and the entire mechanism that contains my individual life—with all its seeming nuances and complexities—is soaring around a galactic black hole that is itself soaring through what is for all intents and purposes an infinite freezing blackness. Not only my life but the existence of our entire accidental species nets out to zero in the cosmic prospectus. And yet my life feels so important. My stupid experiences seem to matter so much. This incongruity interests me, and cracks me up, and brings me sometimes to the brink of self-destruction.
I guess I wondered what it would be like to take the suffering that I feel and to keep expanding it by another “power of ten” until we reached a variety of suffering that might have some objective validity… suffering as known by God or by the Universe. So yeah, the 10³ woman may not know how good she has it, but I don’t think I was trying to say anything about who has it good and who has it bad, so much as I was exploring (or like, scoffing at) the perspective that venerates suffering and assumes any of this matters. Which, after all, is the perspective from which most of our nation’s most lauded fictions are written.
This is a story told in the third, but it reads in many sections like a first-person narrative, due in large part to your use of the free indirect. Can you tell us about your experience in writing this piece? Was there ever a moment where you found yourself absorbed in a particular voice or character?
The free indirect, huh? I’ve always thought that was a pretty dumb or misleading expression for this variety of very close, inside-out third person. But I blame James Wood, not The Collagist. You guys are the only ones who’ll publish me at all these days and I love you all. In any event all the characters and scenarios are interesting to me and I enjoyed, more than anything else, what it felt like to switch into a new cadence and diction at the end of each section. I could feel a little “pop” whenever I entered a new Power of Ten. I know that with certain sections I felt more “on,” in terms of the sentence writing, than I did in others. And I struggled a lot with how to end the piece. Originally I looped back to the vapidity of the opening section, but that didn’t seem right. I wanted to find an ending that might suggest that the story’s (implicit) suggestion of human myopia was itself myopic, and that in the end we can’t and don’t know anything. Which is my default intellectual position these days.
If so, were there moments where you had to step back from the particular character and remind yourself that this was not the story’s character, but a character contributing to the overall story?
Honestly, I think I just drove my way through the structure with maniacal certainty in its excellence.
Are you familiar with the old SNL skit: the Chris Farley Show? If so let’s pretend you are Chris Farley interviewing David Hollander. How would you fill in the blank: “Do you remember that time in your story “Powers of Ten” when ____________happened?...That was awesome!”
Greatest question ever, but hard to answer because all the scenarios in “Powers of Ten” are either laughably shallow or seriously bleak. Maybe Chris Farley (or the character in the skit who shared his name) would have liked the last section. “Remember that story you wrote, ‘Powers of Ten’?” “Yes, I do.” “Remember when God was looking around at all the darkness and smoking a joint?” “Yes.” “And then he thought about all those different kinds of darkness and how dark they were and how darkness was like, really dark?” “Yes, I remember, Chris.” (awkward pause) “That was awesome.”
What are you currently working on?
I’m finishing a great novel that no one will publish. In fact I’ve got three great unpublished books in the hopper at this point, and this will make four. But I like the book a lot. It features an inept terrorist organization bent on the eradication of the human species, enormous superintelligent robots with a vendetta, multiple kinds of mind control, a small army of paranoid schizophrenics, and best of all, Ultimate Frisbee.
What are some books you are eager to read?
During the teaching year I’m so busy with student manuscripts that I have to choose my published reading carefully. I end up rereading books I love more than taking a risk on a new release. Though I did just finish Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, which was so good that I don’t even know how to talk about it; it’s actually rekindled my belief in literature. I hope to have a chance to read my friend and colleague Nelly Reifler’s short new novel, Elect H. Mouse for State Judge, which is on the bedside table. Also I have sitting here on my desk a copy of Robert Coover’s A Child Again, which McSweeney’s released maybe 7 or 8 years ago and which I’m almost scared to read because of the influence Coover has had on me in the past. But I’ll be honest—most days I come home exhausted, either from the College or from one of my several other jobs, and then I spend a further exhausting hour or two with my kids before getting them to bed and turning on the television and thinking of how my entire career has been defined by failure and rejection and self-loathing. Which is to say I’m suffering a lot out here, and it doesn’t matter and nobody cares.