Your story in this week’s issue, “The Crooked House,” is set in Los Angeles after it’s suffered a series of earthquakes. You grew up in New York, but now live in California. Do you think you would have written the story if you were still on the East Coast?
It’s such a good and confusing question for me. I mean, exactly this story—no. But, then again, a part of my imagination lived in Los Angeles before I ever even visited here, thanks to Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West and also Hollywood films (the idea that Los Angeles seeps into your brain from films is a thought I associate with Thom Andersen’s essay-film, “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” which was an influence on this story). And just the way that U.S. history and the idea of Manifest Destiny and the frontier imperative—all things I was helplessly steeped in, even as I was given all sorts of reasons to be skeptical of them (among those, Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West, etc.)—pull you West, if you try to think about this identity or proposition of being American at all.
Also, I lived in the Bay Area in my twenties, when I was trying to figure out who I was as a writer—and my first four books are all set in some version of California or the desert west. That’s despite the fascination with my New York upbringing that results in certain books I’d write later. What’s true about those early books, too, is that they’re all some form of science fiction. Now, living in California for a second decade, I’ve begun writing science fiction again, like this story.
The story’s protagonist, Mull, has found himself living in a once spectacular tesseract house—an architect’s grandiose solution to L.A.’s housing crisis—which has collapsed yet is still habitable. The structure keeps shifting and Mull struggles to find his way around. A corridor he used one day may have vanished the next. When did you first imagine this building? Do you see it as a three-dimensional space in your mind’s eye? Do you know it better than Mull? Or as well as Mull?
The idea of a tesseract as building comes from Robert Heinlein’s famous 1941 short story, “—And He Built a Crooked House—” (an influence my story wears on the sleeve of its title). It was one of my favorite stories growing up, and, for a lot of readers my age, it might be as responsible for the introduction of the idea of a tesseract as Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” It’s also an L.A. story, and Heinlein was a resident when he wrote it. The house in the story is across the street from his own address, if I’m remembering right.
That people in Los Angeles live outside right now, in tents and under overpasses, is such a cruel and overwhelming reality that it may be atrocious to make reference to it in passing (though it probably isn’t better to leave it unmentioned at all, which is what happens constantly). I’ll try saying simply that I sometimes find it easiest to let certain realities express themselves in my thinking when I give them a surreal or allegorical expression. I grew up reading Stanisław Lem and the Brothers Strugatsky, and also Kafka and Anna Kavan and Kōbō Abe, so I may be predisposed to place the severest subjects into this kind of indeterminate fictional space.
In Heinlein’s story, the tesseract house is a single-family dwelling, which collapses after a minor earthquake, just before the architect is going to take his two clients, a couple, on their first tour. Lost in the reconfigured house, the three finally exit the building—or are ejected from it—at Joshua Tree. You’ve taken the basic structural elements of Heinlein’s story, but you’ve built something quite different with them. Could you talk a little about that process and the decisions that you made? Why did you want to reinvent Heinlein’s story?
The first anthology of science-fiction stories I read was called “Other Dimensions.” It was published in 1973—edited and introduced by Robert Silverberg—and it probably fell into my hands within a couple of years, when I was eleven or twelve. I remember a kid who lived on Strong Place in Cobble Hill loaned it to me; I never gave it back. Great, canonical stories by Heinlein, R. A. Lafferty, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Alfred Bester, and others, including Silverberg himself. It changed my life. I didn’t know who any of those people were, or understand the context for their writing, but a couple of them were to become favorite writers for a while, and others I was destined, eventually, to meet.
“—And He Built a Crooked House—” was the opening story in the anthology. It blew my mind. The story’s energy is so infectious and strange. Even when Heinlein’s trying to write a dystopian piece about the potential horrors of scientific overreach, he’s also delirious with a mid-century triumphalist capitalism—he’s in love with the mad architect, you feel. Heinlein’s verve and inventiveness still attract me—he’s like the Chuck Berry of science fiction. But he might be the most American writer ever, and risks being a disastrous influence if you take his politics, or sexual politics, seriously. My own science fiction, from the start, came out tonally much more like the writing that came later: the moody, doomy, cautionary or satirical science fiction of Robert Sheckley, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, and on from them, to the writers who project into something more contemporary, like Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany. One thing those writers were doing is writing in reaction to an existing thing, and often that thing is Heinlein.
For twenty years, at least, I’ve had the idea of writing a cycle of stories derived each, in turn, from one of the ten stories in the “Other Dimensions” anthology. They still loom so large in my imagination. Think of it as a tribute album. At this point, having written “The Crooked House,” I’ve finished exactly one of them. The second, my take on Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley,” is a messy draft of five or six pages. So, at the current rate, I’ll complete this project in 2036 or thereabouts. I’m sure my publishers are very excited at this reveal.
In your story, Mull, a college instructor in the field of environmental analysis, was studying the Los Angeles River—“the secret system of concrete channels” that runs through the city before the earthquakes. Why did you choose the river as his area of expertise?
I have two friends here in Los Angeles whose work entered mine. One is the sculptor Charles Long, who for a while took up a studio on the concrete bank of the river, and even made sculptures based on the forms of the streaks of bird shit there. Learning about Charles’s contemplation of that “crap oasis” became part of the story. And another friend, James Becerra, teaches environmental architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, and his thinking about the city was for me an entry point into certain mysteries. But he’s a much more inspiring teacher, I think, than Mull.
One of Mull’s students, James Gutiérrez, is imprisoned in a nearby jail, Men’s Central. He had tried to kill the architect, blaming him for the entombment of his mother in the tesseract shelter. Mull goes in search of Gutiérrez’s mother, and starts obsessively trailing other residents in his quest. But in the crooked house, there’s a chance that the chaser may, in fact, become the chased. How significant is that sense of circularity to the story? In addition to Heinlein’s influence, did you ever think of M. C. Escher’s drawings?
Do I ever not think of Escher’s drawings? How I studied them, at approximately the same impressionable age that I was studying “Other Dimensions” and “The Twilight Zone” and René Magritte, and Jack Kirby’s collages of the Negative Zone, and album covers by Hipgnosis and Paul Wakefield. The title song of Supertramp’s “Crime of the Century,” for which Wakefield designed the album cover, reinforced my suspicion that, when you catch up to the criminal you’re following and rip the mask off, it’s always your own face you see there. Anyway, as this list of influences suggests, I’ve been trailing myself down the same corridors all these years, so why shouldn’t Mull be?
The last story of yours to appear in the magazine, “The Afterlife,” also had a building at its center. In that case, events took place within a vast hangar-like structure, which could have been an empty warehouse or an art gallery, say, but for the troughs that prove to be impossible to avoid. Were you surprised to find yourself writing another story of architectural speculation?
It’s weird. Both stories have the word “atrium” in them. I don’t think of myself as knowing anything about architecture. But, apparently, I’ve been thinking about it in this oblique way, using stories and films. At the recommendation of Alexander Nazaryan, I did read an amazing book as research for this story, Reyner Banham’s “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.” If I think of architecture as sculpture you live inside, I relate to it a little better. I’ve been looking at sculptures intentionally all my life, and I even made them for a little while. I’ve never made a building, but I did grow up in a house that was never-always being renovated. An early memory, a kind of waking dream, involves looking down through a hole in the unfinished floor of my bedroom, after I’d been supposed to go to sleep, to see my parents and their friends in the kitchen.
