13 Questions for Alvin Lu
Alvin Lu lives in San Francisco and is the author of the novels Daydreamers—out this month from Fiction Collective 2—and The Hell Screens. Other writing can be found at alvinlu.co.
Alvin, self-portrait
What are you reading now?
I’m reading Moby-Dick with my kid, who’s taking a class on it in the fall. It’s a first-time read for them, and it’s fun having the travails of the Pequod, or whatever comes to Ishmael’s mind, as a topic of daily conversation. It’s indicative of our respective ages that my kid’s first thought was of how others were going to interpret it, outguessing the ChatGPT response, I suppose, while on my first reading I was primarily concerned with use value: how was all this yakking about whales supposed to help prepare me for my bright future? The class is being taught by Michael Holt, himself the author of an eccentric, dreamy maritime novel, The Seaside Hotel, that Sublunary put out last year.
That was the real horror of it, the sensation of the infinite opening up in a very narrow space, which is literature.
What book(s) most altered your taste in literature?
When I was a kid, my dad had one of those “great American short stories” anthologies lying around the house. I can’t quite remember how old I was. It was early in my reading, maybe fifth or sixth grade? I read voraciously from the start, as if there were a hole in myself I was trying to fill, mostly with newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, and so-called kids books like Narnia, Ellen Raskin, and Madeline L’Engle. I remember wanting to find out what the grown-ups read, so I started with “The Fall of the House of the Usher”. It was tough going. The language was dense and opaque. I could not see anything in my mind’s eye, not the relationship between the principals nor their state of life or death nor the architecture of the house, which was pure atmosphere.
Of course, the murkiness and the labyrinthine are there in Poe’s story, as we commonly understand it, so I got the story better than I thought I did, but there was no way of confirming that then. I struggled to the end, coming away with only the sensation that I had read something, but not quite sure what it was. But the experience stuck.
That was the real horror of it, the sensation of the infinite opening up in a very narrow space, which is literature. It drew me back when I tried blasting my way through Ulysses in high school and even now, when I try making my way in a language I’m no good at, like Japanese.
I started writing horror stories in high school, which I sent to Twilight Zone magazine. Ted Klein, the great author of The Ceremonies, was the editor-in-chief then. He didn’t publish any of my stories, but he wrote long, generous letters (I imagine he saw himself carrying on the Weird Tales epistolary tradition), exhorting me to find work outside of publishing and literature and introducing me to Lovecraft, Machen, Blackwood, and Le Fanu. I only know this in retrospect, but that informed my notions of “what’s good” to this day, although the thing I got from those writers I get more now from someone like De Quincey.
Describe the last time a work of literature affected you physically? & How do you treat the books you read?
I put these two questions together because I think they are both trying to get at the act of reading as something anchored to our bodies and surroundings, but they’re difficult questions for me, because I have always read dissociatively. I suppose everyone does to some degree. I was the kid who looked up from reading, unsure what time it was or where I was or even who I was. I love that feeling, something that’s gotten harder to get back as an adult. At the same time, I tend to read cerebrally, without reactions like laughing or crying. It’s not that these were just symbols on a page to me, but that forest of symbols, and things like architecture and mode of address, were what I could escape into too: it wasn’t all about “content”; there was also the mystery of the container. I did and do admire writers like Stephen King and Jin Yong who can play that movie in your head, but I valued other things since that first encounter with Poe.
When I read “affected you physically” I think of specific editions of books, for example, where the print is too small (more common as I’ve gotten older), leading to headaches, or most interestingly when the paper stock has a weird off-putting odor. My parents kept Chinese books, printed in Taiwan, around the house, so you could say I grew up around exotically perfumed paper stocks. I have a hazy memory of some—which I associate with British-printed books from a certain period—which had a very pungent sour smell to them, as if the paper had been soaked in acid. There was one—maybe it was the Virago edition of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop?—where I actually had difficulty getting through it until that sharp odor wore off.
I treat my books as if somebody else owns them, like they’re on loan from the library. I also don’t organize my shelves. I used to spend a lot of time coming up with ordering systems, but then arrived at “completely random” as the best method, which fosters a sense of rediscovery, but can suck when I’m looking for something specific. Another tendency of mine, a good one, is that I don’t care about owning books, much less collecting them. I give them away, the more important they are to me, the better. There are some I gave away that I want to replace but am finding it hard to—Semiotext(e) SF and the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, with illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner, come to mind—but I remember them so well, I feel like I still have them.
Please share a passage from the book nearest at hand.
From LJ Pemberton’s Still Alive:
Hubris and youth. We broke up without fanfare; he had places to disappear into and I had too much to grow out of. I didn’t know I was sad about it until I saw he had married years later, and I felt a flash of another life, ungiven, pass across my mind’s eye. But it would not have been good.
I am always a spy as I stir the batter for a cake, throw a party, attend a concert, wondering, is this what is fun? Add Lex, add Leroy, Cecilia, add Yvonne, add Claire, add any of my loves, add the harsh sensation of a body tired, add sleep deprivation, take away money, silence anxiety, forget the future, let the past and the new collapse, bake at 350 degrees for an hour and cool in the early morning, just before the sun heats the world. I am more a vampire of sensation than a lover or friend. C’est la vie.
The seeming artlessness is the charm, but there’s also that cold streak that runs through it, the observing the observing. That indeterminacy makes the book.
What quality do you most appreciate in a novel?
There’s a long list of great novels that set out to fulfill what they imply from the start, but I really appreciate the ones that shapeshift along the way, as if the book is trying to find itself as much as the reader is. Some exemplary cases in my mind are Cigarettes by Harry Mathews, The Absent City by Ricardo Piglia, The Lost Scrapbook by Evan Dara, and Schism Blue by Christina Tudor-Sideri.
Who is an author you feel should be more widely read?
What book are you avoiding reading?
Hogg by Samuel Delany, for obvious reasons, although I own a copy. Also, I have no idea why this is happening, but I keep meaning to read Renata Adler. This has been going on for decades, since I was in college, where I think I first heard of her from Carole Maso. I imagine I’d like those two books and they’re not long, but for some reason every time I get around to one of them, I’m interrupted or diverted.
What novel would you add to our current season (on Family)?
Such Was the Season by Clarence Major. A kind of stock scenario from the developing world—the intellectual’s return home to estrangement from family and community (think of Lu Xun’s “My Old Home”)—takes place here in the Black, American Southern context: the journey home from North (Yale) to South (Atlanta).
There’s something to be said for reading your own books prior to the journey, to refamiliarize yourself with the words you spent so much of your life coming up with before returning to the source.
What book would you like to be the last one you read before you shuffle off this mortal coil?
If I wanted symmetry, I should return to Poe one more time, but I don’t think reading a story about being buried alive would put me in the best state of mind. There’s something to be said for reading your own books prior to the journey, to refamiliarize yourself with the words you spent so much of your life coming up with before returning to the source.
If you were to design a literature course around a singular word, what word would that be, and what are some books that might appear on the reading list?
L.A.
For novels, I’d want to look at the literary counterpart of “hyperlink cinema”, a form with roots in hypertext and which for some reason lends itself well to examining Los Angeles, particularly as it was in the 1990s.
In the Heart of the Valley of Love by Cynthia Kadohata
City Terrace Field Manual by Sesshu Foster
Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita
La Medusa by Vanessa Place
In what character in literature do you most recognize yourself?
The husband in Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai.
Why read literature?
My replies above are all some way of answering this question. As for why read difficult literature, it would be in order to reach a failure of understanding, to get at the heart of the mystery.
