The Brooklyn Rail

The seafaring-adventure-story has been a foundational American text as early as Herman Melville, and Alice, or The Wild Girl, a debut novel by Michael Robert Liska, presents a cynical and contemporary new take on the genre. In this funny and grim work, whose inventive, dislocated narrative voice is part of the mystery, a middle-aged lieutenant in the 1850s named Henry Aaron Bird is determined to put his name on any “savage” and “uninhabited” rock in the Pacific. Bird’s grand ambitions result in the discovery only of the detritus of his own culture, in the form of a single, helpless young girl, a castaway from a previous voyage.

Alice, who was orphaned in a comically American tragedy involving the Gold Rush, a mutiny, and religious fanatics, becomes Bird’s unwitting grail. His attempts to conquer her are furious, failed, ridiculous, and ultimately, perhaps, worthy of pity. The novel leaves the reader with much to reflect on about the character of America. Liska, a writing teacher at Seton Hall University, lives on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, with a dog and, in his own version of maritime adventure, several canoes. He answered the following questions via e-mail.

Valerie Stivers (Rail): Some novels give me a strange, almost mystical impression of having a sculptural shape and yours is one of them. I see it as a kind of porous cloth draped over a globe in raised-relief. There’s a sense of nearly as much being concealed as is revealed. Did you see a shape when you were writing it?

Liska: A lot about this novel revealed itself to me in the process. The first thing I wrote, and the original vision for the book, was a narrative of William Christensen’s mutiny on the Lady Fortune when Alice became a castaway. After finishing that, I realized, painfully, that it wasn’t the most interesting part of the story, and I was more engaged by what happened to her afterwards. Then it felt playful to me to obscure that backstory, which dovetailed nicely with the book’s ideas about time, and things disappearing. The whole original novella disappeared, and could be seen only in a distorted, refracted way in the final draft.

Rail: I love that. In many ways this is a classic adventure novel—it has a plot and fully formed characters and it moves along—but stealthily it’s a much more speculative and ambitious book. Why did this combination of elements appeal to you?

Liska: I’ve always admired writing that can work on different levels; that can be entertaining and pleasurable to read, and also have meaningful thematic connections and an inventive structure. I’ve never understood why this false dichotomy exists, which says a novel can either be “serious” or “entertaining.” The work I gravitate to is usually both. My hope would always be to produce something that has depth, but is rewarding and fun for a less engaged reader.

Rail: Alice’s character seems to suggest some lessons for us about consciousness, is that correct?

Liska: Alice’s perspective grew out of a fascination I had with feral children. These cases show us how much consciousness is related to socialization. And as I wrote, her fragile perspective—trapped in the moment, with only a cloudy relationship to future or past—began to indicate something to me about memory in a more general sense. Memory, in itself, is an unreliable thing, and yet we base so much of our sense of identity on it. I can remember, for example, a time when I was at my cousin’s apartment as a child and saw that the master bedroom was connected to the living room by a rope bridge, over a chasm of junk. Of course, reliable relatives tell me no such thing ever existed. Alice’s relationship with memory is an extreme example of this uncertainty. As the book progresses, earlier experiences she’s had are recontextualized, forgotten and conflated with fiction and fantasy, until the character we’re looking at has an unstable, shifting sense of who she is. For her, the present moment and its imperatives are real, but the past is not. The past is a story that is constantly being assembled to meet the needs of the present.

Rail: Would you say that’s true of America as well? I like the idea of the nation’s history as a chasm of junk that we’re constantly assembling and re-assembling to suit us.

Liska: I like that image. History is the collective memory, and what we find in it from moment to moment probably indicates as much about us in the present as it does the past. The nautical adventure genre itself is an artifact of our history, and has been richly critiqued, but I think it can still be a lot of fun. When we rush to discard everything from the past that we feel is tainted by human evil, we lose things of value too.

Rail: You’re working on an American trilogy, I think this is the first volume. Can you tell us anything about the others?

Liska: Sure—one is a kind of crime caper exploring how medical authority began to be institutionalized in the 1920s, which has a lot to say about the current divide between “scientific” and “alternative” medicine. The other is a boy’s summer adventure story set in Wisconsin in the late nineteenth century. The boys are both innocent and corrupt, simultaneously. The American paradox. I have drafts of both of these, but I’m still not quite happy with them. They both have great titles, though. The titles are done!

Rail: This book plays an interesting game with satire. It lampoons a certain kind of American myth-making, and presents flawed and ridiculous humans, but the characterization is realist and painstaking. What’s your intent?  

Liska: There is a lot of satire in the book, but satirical novels always feel weak when the author isn’t invested in the characters, and is just using them as illustrations of something to be mocked. Characters are the heart of any story—investment in them is why we keep turning the pages. The book’s satirical elements were a secondary concern, for me, and probably just a byproduct of my temperament. I can’t help but make fun of things.