Tale Gator

Q: This is your second Giller nomination; your short-story collection Open was on the shortlist in 2002. Does this nomination feel different?

A: No. I feel very lucky. And I felt very lucky then, too. A novel is a new experience. It’s a very risky format. The [second] nomination came very close to the book being released; it was very exciting to have that kind of positive response early in the game. It’s a thrill to be judged by experts in the field, and have them like the work. Exciting.

Q: Alligator has been described as North Atlantic Gothic. What makes it so?

A: It’s a phrase I kind of liked. The landscape in the novel is kind of a Gothic landscape: the power of the ocean, the cliffs, those galloping white horses, which are dreamlike and awesome in their power. In many ways, because this novel deals with struggles against poverty and oppression, it feels like a book of realism. But it is also not just realism. There are moments in the book that are hyperreal, I guess.

Q: Given Alligator’s episodic narrative, it seems like it might have originated as a series of short stories. Did it?

Courtesy House of Anansi Press.

A: I never thought of it as short stories. The book came very much the way it is presented. I thought of it as an orchestra, and I wanted it to be a portrait of St. John’s — not told through a central narrator but the way a city would tell its story. It’s told through a wide range of voices, and no voice is privileged. In the way that with an orchestra, a maestro would say, “Now the drums, now the violin, up with the trumpets,” the characters, when I sat down to write, came up in those ways.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between a short story and a novel, and I really feel that those forms are arbitrary. Whenever we think of a form that we’re going to pour our stories into, you know you’re going down the wrong track. The first thing to do is break that form, and figure out a way of making it new. I think a short story is different from a novel in length, and that’s it. I want to write a book that tells a story, and later we can say, it’s a novel, it’s this, it’s that. What would be really great is if nobody had a name for it.

Q: Do you have an avant-garde streak?

A: I want to break the parameters of what the reader expects is coming. So, if we’re talking about any given sentence, I want the sentence to end in a way that the reader is not expecting. I want the paragraph to end and begin and be something the reader is not expecting. But also be inevitable. If there is a golden rule, that’s it. If the reader knows where you’re going, there’s no point in reading that sentence; they’ll just skip it.

It’s not for the sake of being avant-garde that I want it to be unexpected. It’s because I think a real engagement with a book means that the reader has to chase after the story. Their imagination has to be working, and it’s the energy that’s expended by the imagination at work that is the pleasure of reading. If they know what’s happening, then there’s no pleasure.

Q: What does the alligator represent, as a literary metaphor?

A: I went to Louisiana, to an alligator farm, and I looked at one of those animals close up. I, like Colleen in the novel, got down by a chain-link fence. They’re very powerful-looking beasts, but they’re very, very still. They look like an inanimate object. They’re incredibly ugly and incredibly beautiful, at the same time. Any violence they do is instinctive; it’s not evil. But they are predators. They move quickly when they move, and they move with power and grace. I was interested in the metaphor of a predator, but also, it’s just such a way to survive. And what do we do when it’s just a question of survival? How do we behave? How do our moral registers change when we’re trying to survive, or trying to help our children survive?

In Canada, many people have a very privileged existence, where we don’t have to question our own moral stand, because it’s never really put to the test. And in this novel there are a variety of characters who are in very different socio-economic situations. There are portrayals of greed, but also ambition and creative ambition and a reasonable desire to be comfortable. And there are people who are facing unfair, but routine, poverty.