The Brooklyn Rail

I met Justin Taylor in the spring of 2017 at Butler University. His passionate, restrained teaching style had a tremendous effect on me, especially in terms of editing, aiming for a rhythmic quality of writing, and literary analysis. In his new novel, Reboot, we follow David Crader, a former child actor from the fictional hit teen drama Rev Beach, as he tries to navigate deranged internet behavior, the possibility of rebooting the TV show of his youth, and resurrect his alcoholic life. Reboot emphasizes Justin’s reoccurring preoccupations—faith, fanaticism, utopia—and warps them into a genre-defying, video-game-inspired novel of the present. On a gorgeous spring day, I spoke with Justin on the phone about anarchy, the rewards of literary criticism, the lineage of a teacher, and Garielle Lutz.

Taylor Lewandowski (Rail): In your memoir Riding with the Ghost, you write about your experience as a child actor, referencing a commercial you still can easily watch on YouTube. How did your experience as a child actor influence Reboot?

Justin Taylor: In some ways, very strongly. I started as a child actor as a literal infant. My mom fell into it by accident. In South Florida, where I grew up, the industry had a strong presence, so she decided to give it a shot. Before I could sit up, I was in print ads, usually European fashion catalogs. It felt natural. David Crader’s career starts in the novel around when my career ended. Frankly, I wasn’t suited for it. Puberty is the great separator. Reboot was born out of a what-if. What if I stuck with it?

Rail: I recently had a discussion with a couple of friends who experienced child acting. They explained this effect of a double image—the way you’re perceiving the world against the way others, who don’t know you at all, perceive you. It’s a pure projection. It’s a common experience to have as a celebrity, but as a child I imagine the psychological effects are greater. One of them said if they would’ve become a teen icon, they wouldn’t be living today, but on the other hand it also paid really well for a long time.

Taylor: That’s real. My parents basically used it to pay for my college. It wasn’t a mountain of money, but it was certainly more than they had. It made a difference. In terms of a sort of double image, Molly Ringwald has written about this, particularly her relationship with John Hughes. She felt honored by him, but it was also weird that he thought of her as a muse. Mara Wilson, who played Matilda, has also written quite persuasively about the way people process an image of you and how you process this image that isn’t you but is a picture of you.

Rail: The novel is very concerned with creating a contemporary portrait of our culture, specifically online. There’s even a glossary to the review in the New York Times defining words like “chud” and “headcanon.” Underneath all these cultural references how do you create a connection to deeper themes, or use these cultural signifiers to portray a specificity that can be new and exciting?

Taylor: After my second collection of stories, Flings, came out in 2014, I had this idea of a satire using media, viral tweets, celebrities, etc. At the time, it felt like a goof. The first big change was the 2016 election. Not to get too precious, but post-Trump election the idea of viral tweets and internet nonsense felt very different. What I thought was funny didn’t seem as funny. It was like the assumed universe of the novel didn’t exist anymore. It had to be recalculated. This makes it sound like a “current affairs” book, but it isn’t. I was trying to capture the culture at a particular moment. Every time I tried to write the culture, it was a different cultural moment. It taught me you can never capture the culture at large. I had to be specific—pick a moment and stick there.

Rail: Also, there are large sections about the Koreshan Unity, a communal utopia formed by Cyrus Teed in upstate New York, now headquartered in South Florida, founded on the theory that the Earth is hollow. This parallels the paranoid, conspiracy-prone present.  

Taylor: I was trying to write a hyper-contemporary book, as I mentioned, but it’s about rebooting and resurrecting. Everything is recycled. I wanted to literally revive this eccentric idea, because it’s an underrepresented conspiracy theory, relative to, say, flat earth, or Birds Aren’t Real. Hollow Earth Theory has a very long, rich history. I got into it when I was in college. I took a class where we read a lot of nineteenth century sci-fi and it kept coming up. David goes over the basics in the book. He zeroes in on Cyrus Teed and the Koreshans, because they’re in that part of Florida he knows. 

Rail: I wonder about this connection between place and your own preoccupation with religion, fanaticism, and utopia. It’s really in all your work. In Riding with the Ghost, you write, “I crave the inner spaces that faith pries open, even if—perhaps especially if—that space is empty and even if it closes up again. The strong thief breaks the lock, but he does not get to live in the house he enters; he only gets to keep what he can carry with him when he runs away."

Taylor: I’ve always been interested in religion. I don’t know why. I think some people are born with a disposition toward that kind of inquiry.

Rail: You didn’t grow up in a strong religious household?

Taylor: No. I grew up culturally Jewish. My father felt strongly about certain types of observance: high holidays, Passover, but that was about it. It’s funny because all my friends who grew up Christian, especially in conversative places, this drives them up the wall when I say this, but my big problem with the Judaism I grew up with was that it wasn’t intrusive enough. I wanted someone to give me something to do and push me in a direction. Maybe I would’ve followed. Maybe I would’ve pushed back. But there was no push to speak of and I think a lot of my interest is borne out of that absence. Religion in general, and specifically Jewish and Christian theology, remain central concerns for me. A lot of my short stories take up the same line of inquiry. Sooner or later it sneaks in. In The Gospel of Anarchy, I was interested in the experience of conversion. What would happen if you took the most outrageous claims and provocations of religion seriously? It’s an attempt to dramatize Kierkegaard’s idea of the Knight of Faith. I staged it in a punk rock anarchist house, because I believe anarchism at its purest is a kind of theology and that it shares the core values of Christianity. You have to believe in a utopian possibility. A heaven on earth. That’s exciting.

Rail: Do you still believe that now?

Taylor: That anarchism and Christianity are the same thing? Yes, at least philosophically, if their adherents would let them be. In a world of transcendent and metaphysical egalitarianism, where there’s a limitless and equally distributed supply of love, the demands of anarchism would be met as a matter of course, because you would have to fulfill the demands of transcendent love. I’m not an inherent of either of those faiths, but I do see their truth claims as fundamentally the same.

Rail: In an interview with Rob McLennan you mention wanting to write a Stephen King-like novel in high school to “avant-whatever” in college, and now with Reboot it feels like you've borrowed all of these influences into one work. How has your literary taste shifted over the years?

Taylor: To whatever extent I have a reputation it’s primarily as a literary writer. My books are marketed as literary. I teach in the academy. I write book reviews for literary journals. That’s how people think of me and they’re right. I primarily talk about Barry Hannah, Joy Williams, Don DeLillo—I love all that. But I do have this other part of me. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on H.P. Lovecraft. I’m a huge fan of Philip K. Dick. I read a lot of Stephen King. Reboot is in part my love letter to my genre influences.

Rail: Also, I didn’t realize you played so many video games. I think this influence is also realized in Reboot.

Taylor: I’m not as serious a gamer as some people. I won’t play anything that requires going online and/or participating with other people. I learned that lesson in high school when I briefly played the original EverQuest. But I do really like gaming. During the pandemic, as I was preparing to write this novel, there was this game, Hades, that became kind of a viral hit. I must have put three hundred hours into that game. It became a model, semi-conscious at first, but then I decided to write a fictional video game into the novel, and there are some surprising overlaps between the structure of the novel and the structure of a Hades run.

Rail: Borrowing from all these types of narrative, you also write a lot of literary criticism. I assume it’s part of the engine that feeds into your life as a fiction writer. In Riding with the Ghost, you write about interning for The Nation, because two professors in Florida recommended you. Was this the beginning of your career as a critic? 

Taylor: In the beginning, I did it because I felt like I could. I was young. I was in New York. I was working at a magazine. I wanted to see my name in print but I didn’t know how to pitch. I didn’t have ideas that could support the types of pieces The Nation published. It made no sense to me at all, but I started to understand that having political opinions does not make you a political journalist. But having ideas about literature can make you a critic just as easily as it can make you a novelist or a poet. I knew how to read closely, and develop an argument, but I was way too invested in the idea that criticism should be pugilistic. I knew how to argue against things but not really how to argue for them. A lot of my early criticism was unnecessarily pissy. Over the years, I’ve developed more sophisticated ideas (or I hope they’re sophisticated) about what criticism is for–in the literary world in general, in my life specifically. My favorite pieces to do are in-depth career surveys with long lead times, where I can immerse myself in a writer’s whole body of work and then try to say something that no one has said before. That’s really exciting for me as a critic, in part because the bigger the writer the harder it is to do. If you’re writing about, say, DeLillo, you might as well be writing about Bob Dylan. You have to know the history of what’s been said, see the patterns and elisions, try to carve out your own little plot of ground. Every once in a while I get the chance to write what I think is the most substantive critical consideration of a writer’s work to date. And I don’t mean the other critics were bad or wrong necessarily; I mean that I have the luxury of being belated enough to consume all their work and synthesize it into my own, so you get a survey of the history of the body of criticism that the work has generated along with an assessment of the work itself. 

Rail: I know your piece on Allan Gurganus in Harper’s was really special for him and others.  

Taylor: That’s a perfect example. Allan has had a long career. Many people have written about him. He certainly didn’t need me, but I was excited about The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus. I ended up reading his whole body of work. I think Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is an amazing novel, but it was his second novel, Plays Well with Others, that totally knocked me out. I think it’s one of the great novels of the 1990s, certainly one of the great AIDS novels, and no one thought that at the time. You can go back and read all the criticism: they’re the nastiest reviews of his career. That was a case where cultural circumstances conspired against him; you can see why he was read the way he was, but people were just wrong. They were just fucking wrong.

Rail: I think that’s the real joy of literary criticism: the power to emphasize the misinterpreted and lost, to start and lead a new conversation.

Taylor: It depends on who you are writing for. If you’re writing for the New York Times, your review will almost certainly be the highest-profile review that book will get, and if it comes out first, whatever you say will set the tone for a lot of the discourse that follows. So you still have to be honest, but nobody with the power to make or break a book in six hundred words should wield that power casually, or even feel comfortable possessing it. If you’re writing for the Sewanee Review, on the other hand, well, it’s a print quarterly. You’re writing longform and you’re probably going to come out a few months behind the publication cycle. Sewanee Review is one of the best literary magazines in America but I don’t think I’ll offend my editor if I note that it’s not the New York Times. You’re writing for a different readership, one that is smaller but also more judiciously self-selected, and ready to meet you at a certain level that you can’t expect of the general reader of a daily newspaper. So you won’t set the discourse, but you might just get the last word. 

Rail: I always remember, when I was in your class, how you talked about passing on any power you’re given. 

Taylor: It’s the anarchist in me: the belief that power itself is toxic. It’s this thing that exists, and we can all tolerate a bit of it in our blood stream, but if it gets too concentrated in any one person it poisons them. So the idea is that the only way to “use your power responsibly”—whatever that might mean in a given situation—is to divest yourself of as much of it as you can. In a graduate classroom, you can let go of a lot. You’re still what Lacan calls the “subject-supposed-to-know,” but you can admit you don’t know everything, and you can cede a lot of the authority that comes with the title and the role, while still doing the job you were hired to do, i.e. teaching writing. With undergrads, maybe you hang onto a bit more of your power, because there’s a wider range of maturity levels, some people are just there to fill an elective credit so you can’t assume they super care about the class, etc. But even there, you’re trying to model modes of attention, and the inductive potential of “not-knowing” (Donald Barthelme’s word) rather than searching for a specific answer like it’s Intro to Stats or something. 

Rail: Reboot is really trying to grapple and pull from our present reality. This can be seen in the way you write about music, especially your recent profile on Low for the New Yorker and Jason Molina in Riding with the Ghost. These are all, yes, bands you listen to, but they’re also cultural signifiers that connect to people in a very specific way. I first experienced this with Dennis Cooper. In his novels, it’s always the present day and the characters are listening to Slayer or Ride or Blur. I didn’t know you could do that. 

Taylor: Dennis was the first person to show me that, too. If I had been a generation older, I might have gotten it from the Kmart Realists. Or a generation before that from Barthelme, who took a lot of inspiration from painters who were looking to pop culture for subject-matter. But I remember so vividly reading Dennis Cooper for the first time. I was so blown away. Guide and Try are my favorites. The metafiction parts in Guide when he interjects as himself and tells you about what he’s doing and how he’s manipulating you. I’d never seen that before. And it’s even weirder in retrospect since that novel is, among other things, a quasi-documentary artifact of his being really cruelly manipulated by JT LeRoy. I read him obsessively in college and I met him when I was very young. He gave me one of my first interviews, and I was part of that first generation of people in the comment threads when he launched his blog in 2002. There was this incredible community around that blog. I hope there still is. I first met Ariana Reines and Mark Doten through the blog. I met Lynne Tillman through him. For a while he edited a book series for Akashic and one year he put out an anthology called Userlands that was all work by his blog people. It was an act of incredible generosity, and it was born out of his genuine interest in and support for what young people were doing. I know his fiction was and still is very divisive, for pretty obvious reasons if you read it, but he’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. 

Rail: He’s another example of a writer cultivating an entire community. It’s exciting. This alternative life force.

Taylor: He’s lived his whole life and had his whole career outside of traditional channels: no chasing the tenure track, no cushy grants, almost entirely published by independent presses, never compromised his vision for the sake of a buck—or just to save himself the headache of standing by his own radical vision. Which can’t have been easy a lot of the time, but he did it. I consider him one of my teachers as much as any of the people I paid various universities for the privilege of sitting in a room with. 

Rail: Another aspect of your life is teaching. It acts as another life source, or way of engendering meaning in one’s life. Writers, especially literary writers, do not often write about teaching, so it’s refreshing to read passages in Riding with the Ghost describing teaching as a vocation. How has teaching affected your life?

Taylor: I fell ass-backward into teaching. I did not plan for that career. I needed a job and the job I could get was teaching 101 and comp. Later, I started getting jobs teaching creative writing and I learned that I really loved doing it. Like criticism, it was my own writing that brought me to it, but I kept doing it because I came to understand that it was its own thing, valuable to me on its own terms. Not every writer should be teaching. Not every writer wants to. They stick with it for the wrong reasons. If I hit the lottery tomorrow, I think I’d still teach. I find it very nourishing for my writing, to have a reason to keep re-reading these texts to teach them, and frankly, in developing relationships with people like you and Anika Jade Levy. Not to get too self-congratulatory, but we’ve known each other a long time now. I first met you as my student, but that’s not some magical permanent status. This is a real friendship. My best teachers gave that to me, taught me what they could and then when that was taken care of, recognized me as their peer. I love being a link in that chain. When I read in Brooklyn the other night, Anika was my conversation partner. Her novel is coming out next year. I met her when she was in my freshman writing studio at Pratt. Ten years later, she teaches the exact same writing studio that I was teaching when I met her. One of her current students came to the reading, and Ani introduced her to me as my grand-student. Made me feel about a thousand years old—for the record, I’m a spry forty-one—but hearing her say it that way still made my day.

Rail: Totally. I’m now experiencing that as a teacher in high school. I sometimes think about this phrase you often used in class so many years ago: “aiming for acoustically-driven sentences.” I assume this is sort of related to Gordon Lish, as you’d always reference Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel. How has Lish influenced you? He obviously has this very fractious relationship to teaching and the workshop, but he’s also had such a profound influence.

Taylor: He influenced me through people like the ones you mentioned, and so many more. All the writers he published at Esquire or The Quarterly or Knopf, or all three. Many of them were his students first, his writers later. Sam Lipsyte, Dawn Raffel, Cynthia Ozick, Jason Schwartz, Mark Richard, Mitchell S. Jackson. I could keep going. Others were just doing work he felt moved to champion, like James Purdy or Raymond Carver. We all know the Carver thing ended ugly, and god knows that’s not the only example, it’s just the biggest one. For a lot of writers, knowing when to rebel against Lish, or going through the experience of gaining and then losing status as a favorite child, was the crucible that made them who they were. I have a story about that, but I’m going to hang onto it for now. Anyway, a lot of these writers I’m talking about became teachers and editors themselves. Diane Williams and Christine Schutt with NOON, or Giancarlo DiTrapano with the New York Tyrant, which was modeled explicitly as a successor to The Quarterly. The famous Garielle Lutz lecture, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” was given as a craft talk at the Columbia MFA program in 2008, at the invitation of (I think) Ben Marcus, who was a Lish alum. I wasn’t there, but I know a lot of people who were in that room. Then it was published in The Believer and it was like Moses coming down from the mountain. For a lot of us, Garielle revealed a path that we hadn’t known was there to even consider following. It was like discovering Narnia in the back of the wardrobe. It still feels that way.