Ravi Mangla is the author of the novel Understudies (Outpost19). His stories and essays have appeared in Mid-American Review, The Paris Review Daily, American Short Fiction, Tin House Online, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Rochester, NY.
His story, "Face," appeared in Issue Fifty-Seven of The Collagist.
Here, Ravi Mangla speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about ambiguity, television withdrawal, and taking your time.
At the heart of this story is a man who fears losing his identity. I’m curious about what came first for you—the concept for the story or its emotional core?
The concept came first. There are few things more frustrating than seeing a familiar face on television and not being able to place it. At least with television, you can farm out the grunt work to IMDB. No such database exists for the real world. I’ll often spend days thinking about a face, trying to remember where I’ve seen it before. I love stories where small, seemingly negligible problems metastasize and assume some deeper cosmic significance. As someone with mild OCD tendencies, I often find my attention diverted by dripping faucets and odd buzzing noises. “Face” is an ode to the eternally obsessive.
Lyle never places the man’s face. When we leave the story, he is still reaching to remember. What appealed to you about ending the story in this way?
A clean resolution is tough to pull off in short short fiction. The form, for whatever reason, lends itself better to ambiguity. Someone (please don’t ask me who) said that successful fiction begins with a small question and ends with a big one. I’m not usually one to trot out aphorisms, but this one seems especially germane.
“Face” is beautifully concise; the whole story is only a paragraph long. Tell us about the revision process that led to this final draft. Did you start with more or has the story always taken this form?
There was actually more building up than paring down. The first half of this story was written five or six years ago. Every couple of years I would pick it up again and add a handful of sentences. Therein lies my advice to fledgling writers: If you don’t know where to take your story, set it aside for several years. Or if you can’t wait several years, a day or two will probably suffice.
If you, like Lyle, had a “specialty,” what would you like it to be?
Figuring out what TV show my neighbor is watching from the muffled sounds coming through the apartment wall. (I’ve been without a television for a few months now and I’m suffering from severe withdrawal.)
What are you currently working on?
An essay on the legal and social history of jaywalking. But I hope to get started on a new novel later in the summer.
What are you reading?
There are three library books on my desk: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, The Sellout by Paul Beatty, and The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems by Albert Goldbarth.