A Conversation with Adam Berlin

More than two decades ago, writer Adam Berlin found success with his first book, earning a starred review from Booklist (which called it “A powerful debut novel with fascinating characters”) and favorable remarks in The New York Times. His subsequent book drew more critical raves, with periodicals like Publisher’s Weekly observing, “Berlin displays a nice, quirky sense of dialogue, and his violent scenes are etched with convincing—if sometimes gruesome—detail.” That novel was ultimately awarded the Ferro-Grumley Award for the year’s best LGBT fiction and was optioned for film.

Over the years, Berlin has received further literary awards, including The Clay Reynolds Novella Prize and, most recently, the Tartts Fiction Award. The prize comprises publication via Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama and marks Berlin’s debut short story collection.

In this exclusive interview with Lowestoft Chronicle, Berlin discusses his writing career, the backstory to his early novels, his first literary agent, and some of the stories in his newly published fiction collection.

Lowestoft Chronicle (LC): Since 1991, dozens of your stories have appeared in literary journals like The Greensboro Review and New Delta Review. Interestingly, All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights, published in August, is your first story collection, and it’s mostly comprised of newer fiction. What motivated this collection, and why release one now and not, say, twenty years ago, when Belmondo Style was garnering high praise?

Adam Berlin (AB): While I’ve published many stories since I received my MFA from Brooklyn College, several in All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights are more recently written. As for publication, I sent out different iterations of the current collection, but I finally found the right mix between chronological order (the first story is about a college kid, and the last is about a tenured prof.) and thematic throughline (the male narrator in each story behaves badly on the way to becoming a more-layered man). The collection’s epigraph is a James Dean quote, “Being a good actor isn’t easy. Being a man is even harder. I want to be both before I’m done.” The dynamic of living up to male tropes, often established by Hollywood leading bad boys, and the recognition that these tropes have damaging and damage-inducing edges ground my collection. When I sent out this line-up of stories, I was thrilled when Joe Taylor at Livingston Press gave my collection a home.

I did think Belmondo Style, my second novel on the heels of Headlock, my first, was going to be my early ticket to a wider readership and immediate book contracts, including a contract for a story collection. It wasn’t. I won a pretty big award—The Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for best gay-themed novel—but the novel didn’t sell as well as St. Martin’s had hoped. The hard fact is that literary fiction is a tough sell, especially story collections. I’m very pleased, after many years, that my first collection is finally out there.

LC: The title of the book stems from the story “Extra,” where a background actor yearns for a spark of insight that might further his career. Other stories, such as “Picasso’s Model,” have a fair number of indelible sentences. What made you choose this title?

AB: “Extra” is one of my flash pieces interspersed between stories—the collection has five flash pieces and ten full-length stories. I wanted a title for the collection that pointed to how Hollywood dreams diminish with time and felt All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights suggested this kind of entropy. The spotlights that shine on us in youth (optimism, the feeling that we can do anything, and, specific to my collection, that we can live movie moments without repercussions) become less bright. There’s something depressing about this inevitable dimming, but there’s also something necessary, even redeeming. We grow up by growing past our youthful needs, or dreams, or obsessions. A big part of the Hollywood dream is superficial—that’s why James Dean recognized the goal of becoming a good man was even harder. He understood, and I think my characters understand, that there’s a place for the look-at-me-for-what-I look-like definition of men and movie stars (what the actor in my flash piece “Extra” wants, even if, as the title says, he’s just an extra), but that the more nuanced look-at-me-for-who-I-am definition holds more weight and is more admirable. This ties into being a better man, I think. For the actor/narrator in “Extra,” he realizes his time is done—he can stare down the leading man, the one who has made it, and that gives him momentary power, a physical assertion of look-at-me, but it’s mostly worthless power. So, the lights on the characters in my collection are dimming on certain dreams, with hints that better dreams, more realistic dreams, more grounded dreams can emerge.

There’s another side to the title as well. The Hollywood ideal of men has changed. The leading men from before my (and my characters’) time, and the leading men the characters in my collection admire, like James Dean with his red leather jacket, and Marlon Brando with his motorcycle-swagger, and Jean-Paul Belmondo with his macho-cool and ex-boxer’s confidence, are dated. There’s an element of wanna-be in my male characters that gets them in trouble, but there’s also something lost when their alpha gets blunted. As the stories progress and, ideally, build on each other, and as my characters recognize they should move beyond their leading-man ideals, there’s a sense of loss, too. Technicolor times become less vibrant. The irreverent, fuck-it highs that happen during the movie-star moments in my characters’ lives become less intense.

I think we’ve all had those moments when we’ve felt the spotlight right there, shining right on us—moments solidified and even brightened by memory, moments that often define us. We were movie stars for a moment, but those moments are impossible to sustain and become rarer, I think, as we grow up.

LC: Given that this is a collection about men and movies and “the underside of trying to live up to male tropes,” recent stories like “Like they teach in acting class” from the literary journal BODY seem an appropriate fit. How did you decide what pieces to include and what to cut? Will some of those earlier stories be part of a future collection?

AB: Thank you for doing such a deep dive into my work, Nicholas. Yes, the flash piece in BODY has a thematic connection to the collection. I felt this piece would be somewhat redundant when placed near some of the other flash pieces, so I kept it out. Most of the stories I’ve written, all of them, really, are about men struggling (often against their self-destructive male tendencies), so there was a lot I left out. As I said, I had many iterations of a story collection before I settled on this collection. And, yes, I’m thinking of putting together a second collection. The stories in All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights are mostly about single men with few responsibilities, which makes it easier for them to pretend Hollywood. I’m now married to a special woman, and we’re parents to a young son, so my feelings about being a “better” man have shifted, and this shift has, of course, entered my writing. Before I met my wife, I led a fast life, often irresponsible, sometimes seedy, full of excess, much like my characters in All Around. When I have enough stories for a second collection and when I find a clear throughline to order the pieces, I’ll start sending out the work. Perhaps Livingston Press will be interested in a companion collection.

LC: “Ten,” “Romance of the Seas,” and other deftly worked pieces explore self-esteem, and writing slumps, and even the challenges of teaching. There’s a tough, masculine swagger to the prose and a sharp, provocative edge to the dialogue. Naturally, at times, the light casts an ugly shadow on some of the narrators. Was this a conscious decision to focus on inglorious types? Or, as author Steve Almond more fittingly describes them, “bruised dreamers searching for a better shake in things and often losing their grip.”

AB: Steve Almond, a writer I greatly admire, was kind enough to provide a blurb for my collection, and his line is fitting. There is an ugly shadow cast by many of my narrators—they’re not only bruised but bruising, often irresponsibly so, which adds to their ugliness. When men swagger, a physical show of assertion, of taking up space, of saying with their bodies, “Look at me,” they often hit and hurt people in their way. But as with my title, there are layers to walking this way (and all it means), and sometimes, a swagger can give power to people in the swaggerer’s path. In one story titled “Black Belt,” a newly divorced man who is about to get evicted from his apartment poses as a karate teacher and helps an autistic boy find some self-confidence. What starts as a cynical way to make a few bucks moves to a deep connection—a better-man moment and perhaps the most uplifting moment in the collection. In another story, “A Picture of You,” a woman re-establishes her independence when the narrator’s narcissism crosses a condescending line. As for “Ten” and “Romance of the Seas,” the narrators are writers who aren’t living up to their writing dreams. Here, I stuck to the adage, “Write what you know.” I’ve been writing for years, and while I understand the truths of the writing life, how hard it is, how the competition is brutal, how it sometimes feels all the lights are being taken down on writing in so many ways, it’s often hard to completely swallow these truths. My writer-narrators are disgruntled, hurt that they haven’t made it the way actors, relegated to extra status, haven’t made it, and they allow their discontent to hurt others, which is unforgivable. Rejection is a big part of a writer’s life. Accepting rejection is also a big part. This push/pull of rejection/acceptance-of-failure is at the core of these two writing stories. And the narrator in each story receives enough pushback from the one he’s strutting against, each a woman with her own problems, to recognize his discontent is minor compared to life’s other discontents. People choose to be writers and to live a writing life. Writing is a self-imposed obstacle. For many, life doesn’t provide choices. As Steve Almond wrote, the men in my stories are searching for a “better shake in things” and, along the way, recognize that Hollywood-style dreams and failures are often less daunting than the dreams and hardships of non-Hollywood life.

LC: “Usually when I write a book it takes three years from start to finish,” you said in interview with Sports Network. In a later interview with writer Erika Dreifus, you mentioned that your third novel, The Number of Missing, took 12 years to write and revise. Apparently, the fourth book, Both Members of the Club, also spans years, beginning as a short story for an academic journal before being adapted into a novel, which became your graduate thesis. What’s the backstory to your first two novels, Headlock and Belmondo Style? Didn’t Belmondo Style begin as a short story for Rain Dog Review?

AB: Headlock was the fourth book-length manuscript I wrote and the first MS to get accepted. It was a great experience, getting that letter every budding novelist hopes for, and I had an excellent editor in Kathy Pories at Algonquin, who helped me shape the book. My grandfather was a wrestler in Russia, and I used that backstory to write a novel about the history of violence in a family. There’s violence in one form or another in all my work, violence I try to write in a non-Hollywood way, and Headlock is a coming-of-age novel that shows a young man trying to control what’s in his blood. Belmondo Style was my second novel, also a coming-of-age novel about a high school track star who comes out during the book. But Belmondo Style started as a story. The short story version is about a young man, new to NYC, living life as if he were Jean-Paul Belmondo. As you can see, I’ve had movie stars on my mind for a long time. He rubs his thumb across his lips like Belmondo in Breathless. He believes in only living for the moment. In the story, he picks up a married woman, spends the night with her, leaves in the morning, no-strings. His constant one-night stands are his movie moments, and he exits that story with a swagger. I liked the idea of a character trying to live like a movie and the connected truth that this lifestyle is impossible to sustain. I started writing a longer version of the story but quickly recognized the man’s behavior would feel static. To dramatize the repercussions of his Breathless-lifestyle and to add conflict to the story, I knew I needed to come at the story from a different angle. So I gave the player a son, a kid who grew up feeling the effects of a father who’s constantly moving from one woman to another. The son became the narrator. The father became a petty thief like Belmondo in Breathless. And I used a hate crime against the son to catalyze the plot and to show the beautiful bond between son and father, even when it played out against a violent backdrop.

LC: My understanding is that you had a notable literary agent, the late Robert Lescher, early on in your writing career. How did you come to work with him, and how influential was he in placing your first two novels with the big publishing houses Algonquin and St. Martin’s Press?

AB: Robert Lescher was an old-school agent who gave me old-school attention. I was a kid writer when I contacted him, fresh out of grad school. I’d published a story in Aethlon, a respected journal of sports literature, and I sent that and a few other stories to him, and he took me on, which was very kind of him. Coincidentally, the day after I sold Headlock (I’d submitted the MS without an agent), Robert Lescher signed me. Bob negotiated the contract with Algonquin. And he sold Belmondo Style to St. Martin’s. And he was trying to sell a version of Both Members of the Club, a short boxing novel, when he died. Having lunch with Bob at The Gramercy Tavern in NYC when we signed my first book contract was a day I felt like a real writer. My current agent is Alec Shane and he’s been great, sticking by me even during lean years. He worked closely with me on a book that’s out at publishers now, and I look up to him as an agent and an editor.

LC: What future projects are you working on? I read somewhere that you were focused on a further foray into boxing literature. Would that be a manuscript or a nonfiction work?

AB: With so many parallels between boxing and writing, especially the solitary work that goes into both, it’s a great subject to write about and a great backdrop for novels and stories. I’ve written boxing fiction and a bunch of articles for boxing websites, but I’m probably done writing about the fights.

As for future projects, I’ve got a few things in the works. I have the novel out with my agent. I just finished a hybrid/flash prose piece I hope to place somewhere. And this summer, I’ll do a final read-through of a novel I’ve been working on for a couple of years about race and art and the movement from apathy to engagement. The thematic threads in All Around They’re Taking Down the Lights are in these projects. I think they’re in almost all my published work—themes I must have been thinking about, at least subconsciously, before I started writing, when I moved to NYC at seventeen to study acting, dreaming Hollywood, but really dreaming, I think, of living a heightened life.

Thank you for these probing, insightful questions, Nicholas, and for your close reading of the stories in my collection (and some work outside my collection). I wish you consistently bright lighting at Lowestoft.