David Leo Rice’s The Squimbop Condition is in many ways a culmination, a capstone on one phase of his career, and at the same time, a hint at which of the many forking paths he may travel going forward. The book—a collection, a novel-in-stories, a saga—gathers threads from much of his earlier work while never giving in to the temptation to tie them together. There are no neat, ribboned bows, no definitive histories, no stable ontological landscape. There is continuity, but there is also much that threatens the mere suggestion of continuity. It’s a remarkable, thought-provoking, and metaphysically rich work of fiction, of social commentary, and of imagination. The resulting interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The Squimbop Condition is, on the face of it, a story collection, but it can also be read quite comprehensively as a novel, or a “novel in stories”; I feel like I’ve seen it marketed variously as either. How are you thinking about it these days?
I think of it as a “saga,” a body of tales and recollections that forms a relatively linear narrative if read straight through, with gaps and discrepancies between the tales, where each chapter is a self-contained story that tries to hold its own against the others, as if vying for the right to be the “official account” amidst a lot of apocrypha and hearsay. I like the idea that, as in an oral tradition that’s passed down over many generations, the narrator of each story is slightly different, working with a different perspective and different information about the Squimbop Brothers and their legendary exploits. When I was writing these tales, I tried to adopt a nonfiction perspective, imagining that the events had really happened and that I’d heard about them somewhere and was trying to set them down for posterity.
Each story reflects on and partially retells or refutes the previous, to explore the accretion of media and meta-media that characterizes our time in history: the way that events occur and instantly leave a vast and ever-spreading trace of videos, articles, rebuttals, denials, movie versions, remakes, supercuts, doctored accounts, propaganda, etc… I thus decided to treat the events in each story as if they’d really occurred, and then to consider their treatment in subsequent stories within this matrix of infinite media.
All my fiction writing partakes of this approach in some ways, but I was more conscious of it here than I usually am, especially since a key theme is the question of who and what the “Real Brothers Squimbop” are, and which story they might be found in.
Yes, the “Real” was something I wanted to discuss, especially as it pertains to your interest in histories and hermeneutics. This collection—or saga—seems particularly resistant to any attempts to nail down a concept or ontology of the “Real.” To say the least, that feels timely given our political moment.
I definitely think this is a “post-Real” book, as are perhaps the 2020s, in that the fight over what’s real and true and “proven” has become a pure ritual, almost occult in its dedication to form even when that form’s content has morphed or crumbled away. People nowadays are so concerned with what “feels true” or “seems right” that there’s almost no way to go beneath or beyond that to posit what actually is, and it’s hard to assimilate that knowledge even if it ever does break through. The Brothers are very much part of this problem; they and their fans are always trying to return to a simpler, truer time, a “Golden Age” or “era of pure comedy,” before tragedy and comedy were forever mixed up, and yet their attempts to do so are themselves part of the post-Real phenomenon. It’s like their efforts to escape this trap only wind them deeper in.
One thing that struck me particularly in The Squimbop Condition was what I’ll refer to as “the metaphysical potency” of the Brothers. This is perhaps most evident in “The Brothers Squimbop in Europe,” but throughout the book there seems to be little distinction between what is willed or imagined and what is.
Their metaphysical potency–great term, by the way!–this is part of the titular “Condition,” in that they’re never sure if they’re exploring the map or drawing the map, watching the show or performing in the show. Eventually, these actions merge to the point where the Brothers are at once all-powerful, totally deforming and rebuilding the world through what they have to say about it, and also totally powerless, just ranting loons pissing in the wind.
This too feels very much a part of the era we’re living through, where discourse has swallowed reality so thoroughly that we don’t notice the disjunct anymore. People who say the right or wrong things are seen as equivalent to people who actually do things—and perhaps not incorrectly, if our world is now as susceptible to what is said about it as it is (or ever was) to what is done to and in it. I tend to think that a culture that has foregrounded fights over language and opinion is either in great shape—all the major, tangible problems have been solved—or in truly awful shape, if it’s tacitly given up on even trying to solve those problems as such. It’s like language becomes a kind of magic with the innate ability to conjure and destroy beings and objects, which, in some conceptions of reality, has always been true.
There’s also a frame around these stories or tales, the “Dr. Forearm” sections. I’m curious to hear how that came about; many of the stories had been published previously, but those texts are new to this volume.
I wanted something in the book that hadn’t been published anywhere before, and so I thought of this frame narrative that could call into question whether it’s possible to engage with the “Squimbop Condition” (as a book or as a medical condition) without falling into it. I wanted to use a metafictional frame where it’s never clear if the layers are separate (is Dr. Forearm in “our” world, reporting on the world contained in this book?), or if they’re all entwined (is Dr. Forearm just another character in the same book, afflicted with the same condition he’s attempting to study?). I also just liked the character—both Professor Squimbop and Dr. Forearm were characters who’d lived in my head since my teens and early twenties, so I was glad to bring them together here.
I couldn’t help but think about our last conversation while reading this, when you mentioned having “always aspired to ‘be a genre.'” The Squimbop Condition, pretty explicitly, cuts across and interleaves a lot of themes, characters, locations, and ontologies from what I’ll call “The David Leo Rice Cinematic Universe.” I suppose the obvious question is: why this pulling together, why now, and what about this particular vehicle (pun intended) seemed like a good fit?
Thanks! I definitely want to build a Cinematic Universe and have been working toward that for a while. Maybe this book was the first time that I felt like there was enough other work out there to justify pulling it together into a single universe, and also enough work to require that pulling-together if I wanted it to be understood that way. Over the past few years, I’ve felt a life transformation taking place, perhaps simply the move from young adulthood into (early?) middle age, and with that the conclusion of a long phase of writing which began with the first Angel House drafts, back in 2011.
So here, almost like a deathbed vision of your life passing before your eyes one last time, I wanted to draw together a lot of themes, ideas, stylistic tendencies, characters, and locations, like Dodge City, the Totally Other Place, and the kinds of towns that crop up in Angel House, The New House and many of the Drifter stories, as well as the uncertainty about history and shared reality that permeated The Berlin Wall, and do one last pass over them before moving on to new territory.
And, as you say, there’s a vehicular aspect here, a constant roaming through detritus, circling the map while trying to move on. I hope that this book can be enjoyed as a standalone work while also serving as a skeleton key to all of my work so far, rewarding those who’ve read the earlier books and also perhaps intriguing newcomers to go back and check them out. This book is very much about a “culture that’s winding down,” which could have outward resonances with the world we’re living in today, and also inward resonances with the completion of what’ll hopefully stand as the first phase of a multi-phase life project.
Birth, rebirth, birthing itself is a strong theme in the novel, and yet even birth itself is subject to the slipperiness of—or absence of—reality in the tales. As the brothers have multiple lives, so, too, does the “woman in black”; I’d love to hear more about her role in the saga, and the ways in which you may have been thinking about how gender—and various kinds of engendering—pertain to the Brothers and the larger narrative.
In many of my books, I’ve been interested in the question of “where people really come from” or how people, in their own lives, cross the cusp from the half-life they’ve been born into toward a state of being “truly born,” which I think requires everyone to become their own father and mother to some degree. Perhaps this is what’s meant by phrases like “coming into your own” or “hitting your stride,” some psychic or emotional process you have to enact alone, or in concert with the wider world, after your biological mother and father engender you in the physical sense. Having seen the birth of my daughter up close, I can say that I’m certain where human bodies come from, but not at all certain where human minds and personalities come from.
When I ask myself what a character actually is, on the simplest level, I find the question gets stranger and stranger the more you think about it, it’s not exactly a real person, even if it’s based on someone real, but it also has to become real, or at least strain toward realness, while you’re writing. Then, if it’s conjured well, it also takes on life in the reader’s mind. All of this feels like a biological process, like some network of pregnancy and delivery that mirrors the physical versions of those processes. It’s like, as an artist, you take in a lot of unformed goo from the world—ideas, impressions, intimations, heresies, feelings of history and futurity—and then this goo takes shape in your mind and eventually demands to come out in the form of a character. It’s a gut-level process, not a cerebral one. Maybe this is what it means to be an artist, beneath any questions of technique, tradition, ambition, etc: it’s the ability to take this goo in and let it grow into a new form that you then find a way to output, using materials, like language, that already exist but that aren’t alive until something enlivens them.
The woman in black is the eternal mother of the Brothers, possibly summoned by their own running joke of each being the other’s father. It’s part of the theme of repetition and reincarnation, of them being reborn again and again, like characters in a saga or in a video game (or a slapstick routine where the scenario keeps being reset), though there’s a waning aspect to this, a sense of diminishing returns, until this woman refuses to keep being their mother and absconds to another world where she can live her own life in peace.
As in Angel House, where the town is made up of all men, I was interested here in the ways that men try and fail—or succeed with very strange results—to reproduce themselves, which I suppose is always the hope or the conundrum of male artists, to somehow give birth to something, to become a mother. I like the idea of becoming impregnated by the compulsion to create, and then gestating it throughout the pre-writing process (I often think about projects for years before I begin writing), until finally giving birth throughout the work of actually setting it down on paper, giving it life outside my body, while putting my own body’s life largely on hold for a while. Then, to extend the metaphor, the process by which the book finds readers and takes on meaning in their minds is akin to the process by which my characters, let loose in their fictional worlds, strive to “become real” or “be fully born” through the adventures they go on. Both the book itself and the characters within it seek legitimacy through encounters with an outside world.
Returning to the idea of a “culture that’s winding down,” I’m finding myself thinking a lot about “Decadence.” I’m wondering if that might also inform one’s reading of the horror elements in the book.
This is for sure a decadent time and thus a decadent book. The 2020s feel like a new kind of decadence. As opposed to the late nineteenth century decadence that the term usually applies to, when the technological revolution was still very much underway and so many breakthroughs were still to come, ours is now a world where great surges of progress have plateaued and started to backslide, leaving all this detritus in their wake, like a wave going back out to sea. Technology has ceased to be exciting and hopeful and reached a point where it feels impotent—like our ongoing inability to cure cancer—or frightening, like mass surveillance and AI.
Everything that washed up on that wave of the late twentieth century, when we thought “progress” was going to continue forever and remain a good thing, is the leavings of the “culture winding down,” and, though it’s all waterlogged and rotten, it’s also full of strange new life. Unholy, undead life, and seeds waiting to sprout. This is what interests me as a twenty-first century decadent writer: not lamenting the receding of that wave, nor proposing any way to summon it back, but simply exploring the new, unexpected and even illicit potential of all the trash strewn in its wake.
It’s like God and history and the soul and all these other grounding, fundamental principles died—like the world really did end—and yet here we still are, going on anyway, unsure if we’re really alive, or whether we’re even still human. My books, perhaps just because this is the time I live in, have this at their core, which leads to an irony that I hope is productive: on the one hand, they’re about the loss of core principles and truths in the world–about the possibility of the Real being closed off, as you say. And yet also, because they have this very idea as their core, some terra firma remains. They’re still rooted in a coherent and even premodern storytelling tradition, and hopefully have a humanistic essence in the end. I’ve never been interested in “detritus novels” in the sense of writing in fragments or cut-ups a la Burroughs. Even though I love his work, I’d rather try to tell a coherent, straightforward story, but set it within a world where doing so takes on a fanatical or absurd dimension that it didn’t used to have. It’s like the famous experiment where those monkeys embraced sharp wires rather than being alone: it seems that we can make meaning out of anything, no matter how dubious and degraded.
One term I’ve heard recently is “necro-modernism,” which I like a lot. There’s so much debate about what comes after postmodernism, and perhaps this is the beginning of an answer. I’m not totally sure how this term is used in general, and I get the sense that its meaning is still evolving, but I take it to mean a return to the subjective and Einsteinian logic of modernism—1920s authors like Kafka, Faulkner, Lovecraft, Schulz, and Pessoa have always been my favorites—but infusing it now without hope for the coming modern era, but rather with a necrotic sense that modernity has failed or is failing, leaving all these zombified minds in its wake. This seems like an apt description for the space I’ve been working in all along. And just as the 1920s played out in a lurch between World Wars, with the sense that some mass trauma had just occurred but was not yet over, I think we’re in a similar boat in the 2020s too: some aspect of life has changed irreparably in recent years, but the full scope and implication of that change isn’t clear yet, and maybe won’t be for quite some time.
The Squimbop Condition is now available from 11:11 Press.
David Leo Rice is the author of the novels Angel House, The New House, The Berlin Wall, and the Dodge City trilogy, as well as the collections Drifter and The Squimbop Condition. He lives in NYC and is online at www.raviddice.com.
Danny Elfanbaum is a writer living near Boston, MA, and organizes a reading series called Two Page Tuesday.
minor literature[s] 