A Conversation with Percival Everett / 2020
An edited version ran in the April/May 2020 issue of Bookforum, on the occasion of the publication of Everett’s novel Telephone, under the title “Trout Fishing in America.”
GM: Why don't we launch into this. What I'd like to do—I want to talk about a number of books from the last ten years. Obviously Telephone most of all, but also So Much Blue from 2017, Half an Inch of Water from 2015, a collection of stories, then Assumption from 2011. Those strike me as books that have unifying ambiance, if not themes. Does it feel that way to you?
PE: I kind of suffer from work amnesia.
GM: Well, here's how they struck me, thinking about them, rereading them. Raymond Chandler once said that Dashiell Hammett took murder away from the English puzzle mystery and gave it back to people who committed it for real reasons. And your books may not often involve murder, but it seems to me that over the last decade, you've been writing detective stories about ordinary people looking for someone or something where everything is a matter of hesitations. Of blocked gestures, and incomplete thoughts. That’s all through Half an Inch of Water and it strikes me as just the essence of Telephone. So I wonder if you have a reaction to that.