Lee Klein is the author of six novels. Five of them—The Shimmering Go-Between (2014), JRZDVLZ (2017), Neutral Evil ))) (2020), Chaotic Good (2023), and, most recently, Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel (2024)—were published within the last ten years. From fabulistic depictions of autofellatio and serial immaculate conception to cryptid autobiography and the kind of thinly veiled autobiographical narrative the in-crowd calls “autofiction,” subject matter and genre-leaning have run the proverbial gamut. But what’s remained constant across his body of work is an obsessive attention to style. Equal parts propulsive readability and hopscotching discursiveness, his sentences move like no one else’s on the page. His new novel, Like It Matters, is out now from Sagging Meniscus. On one level, the joke of its subtitle—“An Unpublishable Novel”—counts as a playful reference to a famous paradox in which an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object: Clearly, this “unpublishable” novel has made it into print. On another level, it establishes a narrative-driving tension that slackens and tightens throughout the novel’s course. It turns out that, between the aching potentiality of an unpublished manuscript and the beatified actuality of a book in the world, there live scores of ranting writers. In Like It Matters, Klein lets readers in on a world of writers—backbiters, coattail riders, and gossips, but also earnest hopefuls caught between the calls to idealism and careerism—who haven’t gotten their way. Piercingly observant and trenchantly funny, a page-turner with a genuine payoff, it’s an unpublishable novel about unpublishable novelists, and it might just be his best one yet.
Eric Bies: Like It Matters takes place on a single day. What led you to using this constraint?
Lee Klein: The temporal constraint came pre-installed with the idea for a “Bloomsday book” limited to a night at a bar on a specific date (June 16, 2012), but also previous novels had taken place over three hundred years (JRZDVLZ, started it in 2006 and worked on it intermittently until publication in 2017) and a year (a truly unpublished novel called Alexander Sincere or The Sincerity Project or Cheesesteak Gardens, started in 2010 and then intermittently thereafter, about a guy who moves from NYC to Philadelphia to live an “authentic” life). The progression from a few centuries to a year to a day seems reasonable but it wasn’t really intentional. At least not something I remember thinking or talking about. I suppose the next novel should be limited to an hour. Generally, a tighter timeframe frees me to swerve associatively and descriptively before ascending another notch along the novel’s spine.
Doesn’t Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual take place during a single frozen second in time? You mention Bloomsday, which commemorates the single day in Dublin that serves as setting for Joyce’s Ulysses. How has your reading informed your writing?
You actually asked this question on the forty-ninth anniversary of the day Life: A User’s Manual takes place: June 23, 1975. Which is not nearly as well known as the day Ulysses takes place: June 16, 1904. My last three books are set on specific days, and I suppose the set-on-a-specific-date idea derives from Perec and Joyce. But the way my reading informs my writing seems to involve a good deal of forgetting, degrading the rational to a semi-digested mush more palatable to the imagination? The reading is all in there—scenes, styles, structures, characters, themes, experiences, et cetera come to mind when writing—but the process and result usually seem more intuitive than intentional to me. After the fact, I might be able to reverse-engineer where something came from, cite a legal-like literary precedent, but my experience of composition is really more about letting extreme caffeination have its way with me—and then I revise and revise and try to make some sense of what happened. But also sometimes I’ll read something I wrote years ago in a Goodreads review and I’ll see how reactions to my reading built up inside me in a way that came out in new writing. For years I found myself writing something like “fiction that feels unlike fiction is my favorite sort of fiction,” and then a few years after that I found my creative capacities favoring realism over the very fictional fiction I’d previously written (The Shimmering Go-Between, JRZDVLZ).
But generally, for example, whenever I use the word “however” at the end of a sentence, I know I got that from Paul Auster. Or comma splices to keep a reader’s eyes moving forward I learned from Saramago’s Blindness. And this sort of thing could go on and on, incorporation of techniques from admired writers. Writers sometimes talk about it in terms of a conversation.
I was recently reading Maggie Nelson’s new book, Like Love: Essays and Conversations, and it occurred to me that Nelson’s more than casually acquainted with pretty much all of the writers and artists she writes about. (Hilton Als is “Hilton,” Alice Notley is “Alice,” and so on.) In Like It Matters, there’s this hyper-successful writer named Jonathan David Grooms whose name is on everybody’s tongue. Rumor has it he’ll be coming down to the bar at which the other, less successful writers have congregated for the night. There’s the kind of conversation that happens between reader and writer in private, but what about the IRL version? Which writers have you walked and talked with, met at public readings, or merely brushed up against, and how have these encounters shaped you?
There was a time when it would’ve been possible to name every writer I knew or had seen read or talked with. When I moved to Brooklyn in 2000, I didn’t know any writers at all, really, although I’d been writing pretty consistently for about five years. I started Eyeshot.net, a weird little lit site in 1999 and through the site met some writers online and IRL, including one of the more famous young writers in the world at the time. I seriously went from knowing no writers at all to talking all the time with a WRITER, accompanying her to readings and meeting some of her equivalently well-known friends. At one point I found myself dancing to “Groove Is In the Heart” with a dozen famous writers at the New Yorker Festival party. In NYC, I also went to too many readings at, for example, the KGB bar, Pete’s Candy Store, various Barnes & Nobles, and—other than DeLillo—saw pretty much every living writer who I had ever wanted to see read.
A few years later I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and nearly everyone I knew for two years was a writer. It was like I’d been studying a foreign language alone for five years and then did a few study-abroad years in Brooklyn and then a serious two-year immersion course in Iowa City. I became fluent in the lingo, found myself for example at last call on a weeknight engaged in intense discussions about the particularities of point of view.
At Iowa, the teachers were famous writers and famous writers visited for talks and special workshops. I sometimes drove these visitors to or from the airport. I sometimes had drinks or dinner with them. Or at least observed these people, who had made their names sitting in silence, in overpopulated social settings. And then in Philadelphia in the late aughts for a while there was a group of fiction writers in town, many with MFAs from Iowa and elsewhere, with whom I drank and talked immoderately, and every once in a while one of their successful writer friends would visit for a reading and we’d all go out afterwards.
Jonathan David Grooms is pretty much a composite of all of the above, although to my mind he resembles a cross between a smooth Euro athlete like Federer and Malcolm Gladwell (who I observed for an hour, seated maybe fifteen feet from our table at a swanky restaurant in Miami, December 30, 2010). But the idea for writing about a so-called great writer probably emerged from encountering great writers in 2666, The Man Without Qualities, and In Search of Lost Time (Han Reiter/Archimboldi, Paul Arnheim, and Bergotte, respectively).
A line from Jonathan David Grooms—“When asked how I write, I like to say like it matters”—serves as an epigraph for the novel. Another bit of sleight-of-hand attributes the blurbs on the book’s back cover, which are completely made-up, to the fictional cast of writers that figure in the story. You mention a tradition of great writers writing about great writers. You are a talented, accomplished writer yourself. Yet there will always be a literary underclass, writers whose names no one knows, or whose greatest efforts are met with relative silence or ridicule (and not necessarily as the result of their being Melvillean visionaries). What made you want to write about this group?
The writers in the book aren’t members of a hapless deluded untalented underclass; they’re all talented in their ways, and they’ve been committed to the effort and had their early efforts validated by acceptance at serious MFA programs and some publications in good journals here and there. One of them has published two novels with a major press; another has published several novels with small presses. They’re good writers, but they’re coming up against obstacles in the form of polite declines, their ambition and self-conception and hope for a semblance of conventionally determined success challenged by discouraging industry reactions. No one seems to care about what matters most in the world to them. They’ve staked their lives on writing, reading, literary history, everything involved—it’s close to a religion for them, essential to how they spend their time and organize their lives, but they’re encountering for the first time the possibility of their mediocrity (maybe even their sub-mediocrity!), at least related to the work they’ve done so far. But they also don’t believe these doubts, they won’t accept them, they cast them out like evil occupying spirits. They just need to push forward, not give up, keep at it, endure, prevail.
I’m not exactly sure what made me want to write about these guys. I suppose I wanted to capture all the talk and quaffing of craft beer in the years after grad school before I became a father. I wanted to control the mess of it and sort of end it from rattling my spirit by representing it and capturing it in text. Plus the situation seemed ripe for mining a precious metal known as “poignancy,” the urgency of their strong desires to fulfill their ambitions and the wrenching back of that desire in the form of rejection.
Also, as represented in the book’s climax slot about three quarters through, a writer friend at one point had said that the thing we all ask ourselves but never talk about openly is when are we going to quit? He said this one night as we were unlocking our bikes after some beers after some doubles tennis—and it really struck me and stuck with me. Quitting had never occurred to me, it sounded completely foreign, antithetical to everything at the time. But that conflict seemed interesting/intriguing, maybe even spiritually significant, regardless of its relevance to the wider world.
But I also simply wanted to write about the bar the book is set in (The Pub on Passyunk East, AKA The POPE, in South Philly) and the initial proliferation of craft beer and walking and reading and arranging bookshelves associatively and anticipatory anxiety related to impending paternity—and so the generally open form of a night at a bar, populated by a handful of ambitious yet thwarted writer reader drinker friends, seemed like it could accommodate all this.
Writers can’t help but to form opinions about their own work. Kafka and Gogol, self-critical to the extreme, both eyed the incinerator with manuscripts in hand. And Twain, maybe joking, maybe not, notoriously singled out a decidedly minor work, his Joan of Arc novel, as his best. Even though conventional success has so far eluded them, the writers in Like It Matters must on some level imagine that their work is deserving of that success. What’s your take on the phenomenon of writers rating their own work?
I always joke that the most efficient way to improve a manuscript is to click ctrl A and then ctrl X and then ctrl S, the modern equivalent of burning one’s manuscript. But I think Kafka’s “burn it all” was more of a running joke with Brod than a last wishes–type commandment, or at least I remember reading that somewhere. Otherwise, I assume all artists are self-critical of their work. How could they not be? Constant evaluation is essential to revision. Plus writers write something so it can be read by someone other than themselves. For the text to come alive, it needs readers. To find readers, manuscripts need editors and publishers, and so all writers who submit for publication at the very least rate their work highly enough to be published and read by people other than themselves and some friends.
I don’t think the writers in the book or writers in general believe they deserve publication or critical and commercial success. It’s not that they feel entitled to the achievement, but in exchange for all the time and effort, all the concentration and concern and related opportunity costs, all the “anguish and travail,” per Faulkner, they hope to receive a little something in return—not necessarily what Grooms or Joyce have achieved, but a sliver of conventional success, at the very least something more than polite declines from agents and editors. And all this is magnified of course by the success of others, particularly those whose work they deem undeserving, represented in the book by the pages about Sarah Driscoll.
And of course I feel like this new novel may be my best. At least it’s the one I’ve worked on the longest. I like how it rants about common creative writing advice like “endings should be surprising yet inevitable” while relentlessly working toward a surprising yet inevitable end. I like how the characters emerged from real-life writer friends but developed lives of their own. I like how there’s no dialogue until about fifty pages in. I like how one should obviously not write a book about a handful of white male writers sitting in a big wooden booth drinking beer.
If I hadn’t liked these things and deemed them undeserving of being read, this unpublishable novel would have remained unpublishable (I may have even selected all the text, deleted it, and saved the document). I wouldn’t have kept working on it until one fine day I finally realized that I had to remove a character who shared my name and showed up toward the end, and once I killed that “Klein” character off a few years ago it all came together in a way I’m happy with, proud of, all those good words. And so now the final result is close to what I’d hoped to achieve when I started it on June 17, 2012.
What motivated you to keep working away at the manuscript for so many years? And what does a twelve-year writing process look like?
I wrote most of the first draft in daily 1200-word early-morning sessions during the second half of 2012 and early 2013, before our daughter was born. It was originally a four-hundred page, quasi-Bernhardian single paragraph. Around that time I worked on a translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (ultimately published by New Directions in 2016), and in a way, the new novel could in part be seen as a version of “Revulsion” about literary publishing instead of El Salvador. I also worked on JRZDVLZ (ultimately published in 2017) intermittently, the aforementioned unpublished novel Alexander Sincere (or whatever it’s called), and then Neutral Evil ))) (2020 publication) and Chaotic Good (2023 publication), as well as random extended stretches of writing destined for the “Fragments” folder.
And every once in a while I’d rotate back to this one. I reduced it to an 187-page paragraph, reduced that to a long story, returned to the original draft and formatted it more conventionally with chapter and paragraph breaks, all while honing the language, discarding a solid novel’s worth of text without cutting any major sections, doing what I call “draining the swamp,” AKA tightening throughout.
The benefit of the twelve-year gap between initial composition and publication is being able to let it sit for long stretches several times, sometimes for more than a year, allowing me to “regain the burn of entry” (a James Salter phrase) and see it with fresh eyes.
Also, with time, I liked how it started to seem dated, how 2012 began to feel like a comparatively innocent world, before the MAGA and the Woke. I also liked how the concerns of the writers the characters were based on had evolved and resolved, leaving the characters on the page behind—that is, I liked how the novel preserved times now passed. But mainly when I returned to the manuscript about two years ago, I thought it seemed alive and active, ready for airing in public, and I’m grateful to Jacob Smullyan/Sagging Meniscus for agreeing to publish what I had always figured would remain unpublishable.
Sagging Meniscus published your last four novels. How did you get started with them? What are some of the ins and outs of working with an indie press?
Working with Sagging Meniscus oddly starts with Tao Lin. After a year of teaching at Temple University as an adjunct after grad school, I returned to working as an editor on clinical medicine journals (similar to the sort of work I had done before Iowa), and at some point in May 2007 during the first month at the new office job I received an invitation to Goodreads from Tao Lin (I’d posted one of his early stories, possibly his first publication, on Eyeshot). I quit smoking around then, and so instead of taking smoke breaks outside I would rate every book I had ever read and write silly little reviews, which seemed like a natural extension of the rejection letters I’d been writing for Eyeshot and responses to stories in workshops I had attended and taught. I also became Goodreads “friends” with like-minded readers all over the world, including a young Scotsman named MJ Nicholls, who loved Gilbert Sorrentino, Alexander Theroux, and seemed to be on a mission to read and write wild alliterative reviews about every book ever published by Dalkey Archive.
After nearly a decade of familiarity with MJ’s reviews, always looking forward to them, I received a request to blurb MJ’s novel manuscript from MJ’s publisher, Sagging Meniscus, the existence of which interested me in a few ways: First, they were publishing MJ’s inventive, linguistically overflowing, magnificently meta novel, House of Writers; second, they were based in New Jersey, my home state, and Jacob Smullyan, the editor, had grown up in Princeton, a few miles from where I’d grown up; and three, when I received a print edition of MJ’s published novel, I was really impressed by the cover art and general presentation of the physical object. Because they were based in New Jersey, had unconventional tastes, and had proven themselves able to produce a comely paperback, I submitted my novel to them about the Jersey Devil, the cryptozoological beast that roams the Pine Barrens of South Jersey. Jacob accepted and published it and the experience was most excellent.
With the three other books, the single lingering impression of the experience has been near total freedom. Jacob sagely restrains my wilder ideas—including photos in Chaotic Good, for example—in a way I benefit from and always appreciate. And in exchange for artistic freedom, the drawbacks, common with most small presses, relate to existing outside the establishment and therefore difficulties getting the word out to reviewers and readers post-publication.
But, as the 2016 Nobel laureate for literature once sang, “to live outside the law you must be honest,” and honesty is a corollary of a commitment to Truth, which equates with Beauty, all of which is a righteous position for one’s so-called writing career to occupy.
I recall you saying of Goodreads (where we first “met,” when, a decade ago?) that it’s the only social media site you could never see yourself quitting. Then there’s Facebook. Twitter and Instagram feature as minor plot devices in Neutral Evil ))) and Chaotic Good. To what degree has your participation on these platforms altered the ways you read and write?
I’ve been on Goodreads for seventeen years somehow. I save all the reviews I post there to a Word document that’s approaching three-hundred thousand words. That chronic practice has been invaluable to how I write, same way writing workshop responses over and over each week are. Writing these little critical responses to other people’s work over time reveals via repetition what you most care about. That’s the secret lesson of workshops: It’s less about receiving feedback from others twice a semester or so than giving feedback on two stories a week, every week when you’re not up, and thereby figuring out what you really care about, the concerns you find yourself constantly bringing up. Goodreads functions the same way. It’s not about accruing the most likes or followers or anything related to status. It’s about finding out via repetition what you care about. INVALUABLE STUFF. Thank you, Jeffrey Bezos!
Otherwise I don’t really think about the socials too much. I generally try to keep my distance and use/peruse them gently. I have to be especially careful about scrolling through Instagram Reels. I like seeing images of old friends’ kids and all that, keeping up with people I knew in real life at one point. The app formerly known as Twitter, I can see how devoting oneself to it could be fun for a writer with advanced epigrammatic skills. But that’s not me. And it doesn’t seem like everyone’s on there anymore, or maybe I just muted everyone?
In terms of writing about social media, or its influence, when I do write about it, it doesn’t seem so foreign or new or insidious or anything along those lines at this point. It’s just another part of life now, like incorporating the radio or movies or television or websites into fiction. Twenty-two years ago, when I included emails in The Shimmering Go-Between, it felt exciting and new, and in 2007 when I included a slew of texts in an unpublished novella it felt fresh. But not now, not so much. Same with social media.
You’ve written a lot, about a lot, and it sounds like you aren’t slowing down. What’s next for Lee Klein?
The goal is to “eff off for a while.” That’s the phrase I use, how my self-talk articulates a desire to disappear for the rest of the decade, take care of my daughter (special needs etc) and wife (very special in her own way etc), write regularly but maybe just try to publish some stories and essays here and there, and then emerge newly formed sometime in the 2030s? Lord knows if I’ll be able to pull that off, but it’s worth a shot.
Eric Bies is a high school English teacher. His writing has appeared in Rain Taxi, American Book Review, Barrelhouse, Open Letters Review, 3 Quarks Daily, and elsewhere.
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