Adam Wilson (LA ’04) has garnered enough critical acclaim and literary merit over the past two years to turn more than a few heads. A regular contributor to The Paris Review and a finalist for the National Jewish Book award, he has had work published in Tin House, Meridian and “The Best American Short Stories 2012” — to name only some of his many accolades.
The writer and Tufts alumnus has published two books. His debut novel, the tragicomic “Flatscreen” (2012), chronicles the life of Eli Schwartz, a lackluster high school graduate navigating suburban malaise, drug-addled entropy and the loss of authentic identity in the cultural fallout of the modern entertainment industry. His most recent publication, the short story collection “What’s Important Is Feeling,” has just been released in bookstores.
On writing
Surprisingly, writing wasn’t Wilson’s first career choice.
“Mostly, I wanted to be a baseball player,” he said. “But that dream ended at age 12. Then I wanted to be a rock star, but then that sort of petered out.”
He concluded that writing, “honestly, was the only thing I was any good at.”
Written over a 10-year span, several of the stories in “What’s Important Is Feeling” were written during the same period as “Flatscreen.” When asked if he subscribed to some ritualized method to guarantee productivity — something several writers claim to do — Wilson said he didn’t follow any particular regime. Commenting on a writer’s ethic more broadly, he claimed a simpler tactic.
“You’ve got to be somebody who’s willing to wake up every morning and write,” he said. “You have to be able to finish something. And that takes incredible amounts of work.”
He speculated that having the motivation to write over such an extended period of time — or having the motivation to write at all, for that matter — requires a particular disposition.
“You have to have an incredible amount of narcissism,” he said. “You have to be able to tell yourself, ‘These characters are so important [that] the rest of the world needs to know about them.’”
This, he says, is coupled with deep self-loathing and a brutal inner-critic (and, of course, plenty of coffee).
It’s not difficult to imagine this as Wilson’s modus operandi. Many of his protagonists tend to be hapless individuals: laid-off investment bankers wandering New York, two OxyContin addicts attempting to spice up their sex lives with a live lobster, a bandleader-turned-corporate-sellout reminiscing over his twisted first love. They are people who subsist on the fringe of society, oscillating between self-loathing and the need to carry on with life. What’s remarkable then is Wilson’s ability to make the drab, noxious minutia of these people’s lives so incredibly humorous.
The dark laughs
“What’s Important Is Feeling” toes the line between comedy and grief, and it is this combination that makes the book so appealing. Wilson has been lauded for his ability to effectively achieve this delicate balance, and it is something that he has a great deal of interest in himself.
“I’m a big fan of Louis C.K.,” he said. “He’s constantly playing with the line between what’s funny and really sad.”
The influence is clear: Wilson, who is the recipient of the 2012 Terry Southern Prize for Humor, is constantly conjuring black comedy from the bleakest corners of his characters’ lives. Coupled with his rapid-fire prose and forthright tone, the stories are lucid to the point of hilarity, much like the titular story, “What’s Important Is Feeling,” in which a chiggers-infested movie set is waylaid by its impossibly pompous writer and vexed production crew.
“The director, Andrew Solstice, had lost interest,” Wilson writes. “He spent most of his time trying on cowboy hats, posing in the hair/makeup mirrors, and blowing residue from his finger gun.”
This is to say nothing of the inimitable confrontation between the writer and the set’s animal wrangler, regarding whether the movie’s cat can be guaranteed to “smell death” in the climactic final scene.
When asked if he thought people undervalued literature’s comedic power, Wilson responded that he believes they often do.
“People underestimate literature’s capacity for anything,” he said.
What is both brilliant and difficult about black comedy is its ambivalence — its ability to remain simultaneously sad and funny. Wilson clearly recognizes that many struggle with this dichotomy.
“Humorous books often aren’t taken as seriously as less funny books are,” Wilson said. “This may be part of the great American problem of genre delineation — everyone’s very quick to categorize.”
It’s difficult to imagine anybody not finding the book hilarious. Beyond the more sophisticated instances of humor, there are plenty of belly laughs sprinkled throughout the stories. Not least among these are the sexual frustrations of Wilson’s characters. When asked if he simply found sexually-frustrated characters more entertaining to write about, Wilson aptly pointed out that nobody cares that much about a lady-killer and that, almost indubitably, bad sex is funnier than good sex.12
