K. M. Soehnlein

K. M. Soehnlein's critically acclaimed debut novel, The World of Normal Boys [Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction] is a tough, dark and vividly rendered story that bristles with frightening realism. It is sometimes blackly humorous, but never glib, often viscerally moving, but never sentimental. The book finds 13 year-old Robin MacKenzie struggling with sexual self-awareness in the same six week period that his family is plunged into turmoil when 12 year-old brother Jackson is hospitalized after a freak playground accident. Robin becomes emotionally entangled with two other boys, Todd, the older brother of his female best friend, and Scott, a scruffy pot-head from a rundown nearby neighborhood. The World of Normal Boys offers an astonishingly deep take on superficially well-trod ground. Like the Academy Award-winning film American Beauty, Soehnlein's novel limns the shadowy psychological regions of American suburbia with more soul than cynicism. There's not a cliché to be found here.

In a telephone interview from San Francisco, where he works as a freelance writer, Soehnlein shared his perspectives on subjects including the differences between teenagers and adults and between art and activism. Read on...

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Jim Gladstone: Never mind the book, rumor has it you're in a band!

Karl M. Soehnlein: Yeah, I play clarinet in a rock band with some friends. We're called the Cubby Creatures. Its very intuitive, we get together and jam, and the songs come out of that. Its very free in a way that my writing isn't. My writing is much more disciplined. I hate to give prescriptions for what anyone needs to do, but I think writers need another creative outlet besides writing—another way to be in your body, creatively, other than sitting down all alone and gnashing your teeth.

One of the things I really loved about your novel is the degree to which it's saturated with 1970s' pop music, trends, and figures of speech without being snarky or condescending about them.

Well, I have to tell you, I am a total pop culture junkie and I always have been. The details in the book aren't there for camp or kitsch value. They're there for reality value. I remember how trendy those Trapper Keeper loose leaf binders were in the halls of my junior high school. I really was somewhat obsessed with John Travolta in Grease and Saturday Night Fever like Robin is in the book. I remember how badly we all wanted to see the original R version of Saturday Night Fever rather than the second PG cut they released. I could see all these details in my mind as I wrote. I didn't paste them in later for retro effect. When I first started writing about Scott's bedroom, I just knew he had a Bowie poster. And then I thought, he would have a Queen poster, too.

Do you still listen to the music you grew up with?

Every song in the book is in my collection. When there's a song mentioned, it usually means that it was playing when I was writing that section. In the second to last scene, Robin and Scott are listening to the Cars: "I don't mind you coming here, and wasting all my time." Well I remember that album was playing as I was writing, and I thought this was just a great lyric to help sum up what was going on between the characters.

You make a very pointed statement, directed to your family, at the end of your acknowledgements page: "I gladly make one thing clear: this is a work of fiction." Yet it sounds like there's a lot of your life in there.

It's about emotional truth, not about autobiography. The primary events of the book are fictional. I never had a brother. I never had a sibling who died. My mother wasn't an alcoholic. But it all feels very true to me. And, of course you draw on life. About ten years ago, my mother died after a prolonged hospital stay. So, in some sense, writing about Jackson being in the hospital for most of the book was a way of exploring feelings about my own past situation.

A lot of the events come from stories that my adult friends have told me over the years. When the boys talk about playing their game of "wiener in the bun," that's direct from my friend Dave's life. He's a hair stylist in New York.

So, you give Dave credit for weiner in the bun, huh? I bet there are a lot of guys out there who were similarly adept with metaphors in their youth!

I've always been curious about these stories we tell each other as adults. Things we did but never would have admitted to anyone when we were kids. One of the great advantages of adulthood is that you can be honest in a way you can't when you're a teenager. You've grown into yourself more. Of course, one of the disadvantages is the way we all learn how to protect ourselves a little too much.

In so much fiction I've read, gay high school kids are sort of drama club aesthetes who secretly pine for the jocks. One of things that's cool about your book is that there's the same kind of social variety among gay teens as we realize there is among gay men when we get older. You've Todd who's kind of a jock, Scott, the 'burnout', and Robin's sort of that drama nerd.

I agree that there's a diversity among the teenage characters. And its class diversity too, from Todd's very upper middle class family to Scott's much less affluent family. But I don't really think of them as gay teens.

Its not a gay world I'm writing about. Its a world of the suburbs and of families where nobody is out. I wanted to reflect an entire spectrum of not-outness. I hope readers will not just assume these are all gay kids. I hope they think about which of these kids are going to grow up to be gay.

Wow. You really don't think these guys are all gay? They have a lot of sex with each other.

Yeah. My boyfriend actually refers to it a "a cum drenched novel." But I think there's more continuity between 'straight' and 'gay' than most people are willing to accept. And I think that's even more so among teenage boys. It's not like I consciously decided to create three characters who were equally spread across the Kinsey Scale, but there it is; I think it sort of happened.

Its been really satisfying when straight friends of mine have read the book and said they related to the kids' sexuality. Straight women often tell me they relate to the idea of getting used by the bad boy. Straight guys, frankly, relate to having a dick. At that age its about your dick. For gay guys, its about the other guy's dick, too.

Why was that feedback particularly meaningful to you?

Well, to a small extent, I was sort of afraid of straight people reading the book. Some degree of internalized homophobia. Not wanting them to read it and think gay sex is icky. But also, it's really important to me that the book not be pigeonholed as a coming out novel or a coming-of-age novel or even, in some sense, a gay novel. I'm completely grateful to the gay audience. It's my core audience. Gay men have the most stake in reading my book. But the book's not about gay men or gay boys.

In a nutshell, what would you say the book is about?

I wanted to write a book about a moment of calamity. How this one boy falling off a sliding board and ending up at the edge of death puts the entire family into this agonizing state of suspended animation.

The design of the book from the beginning is to have two things working in a kind of tension: to explore a kid coming into his sexuality at a time of crisis. Robin has to take on this huge emotional responsibility within his family at the exact same time that he is feeling like an unworthy deviant in his own mind. Everyone in this family has other, major things going on psychologically besides the accident. They try to set these things aside, which only amplifies them. Everyone ends up behaving really badly.

Do you think of your book as potentially helpful to teenagers who might read it?

Maybe kids who are in late high school. But I think its very much an adult book. I don't think it would be a good book for a kid as young as Robin. Its about high school kids, but its about tensions and relationships than you just can't understand except in retrospect.

I wrote the book that I wanted to write, without a specific audience in mind. But had I been thinking about a teenage audience, I think I would have written it differently. It's a pretty scary picture of suburban adolescence. I think you need some distance to protect yourself.

What's the scariest part of the book to you?

It's actually a relatively passing moment. Robin has this habit of scratching his fingernails against his headboard when he sleeps because he's so distressed. He wakes up and finds these bits of varnish under his nails and scratches in the wood. And one day I just sort of found myself writing a scene where he takes his nail clippers and starts hacking away at his fingers, cutting the nails down to fleshy nubs.

It's not like I sat down and decided ahead of time that I was going to write a scene of self-mutilation. But there it was. I felt sick afterwards.

After reading the book, I was surprised to learn that when you lived in New York, you were one of the founding members of Queer Nation. In the novel's middle-class suburban world, you manage to show real empathy for a wide range of characters, including homophobic ones. How does a one-time guerilla activist resist polemicizing in fiction.

I haven't really tried to articulate this before, but it seems like an important thing to consider, the relationship between working as an activist and as a literary writer. Both activism and art are valuable ways of contributing to society. They're both about communicating. But the nature of the communication is really different. The goal of activism is to enter an argument with your own point of view and to try and win that argument. To convince others that you have a right answer. Fiction is more about a dialogue than a debate. And I think the reader is more in control of that dialogue than the author is.

How so?

Well, if activism is "in your face," fiction is more "in your head." I don't think literature should be pushing an agenda at people like activism does. Fiction starts as a dialogue between the author and the reader, but it pretty quickly becomes the reader's dialogue, between his own varied perspectives on the world. In some ways, literature is more three-dimensional than activism. That's not to say it's more valid. It's just that while activism is about making people decide on black versus white, fiction is about helping people recognize that there is a tremendous range of shading in the world.

It must be awfully difficult to shift those gears as a communicator. Was it hard to switch from politics to fiction?

When I decided to go back to school for a fiction MFA after six years of ACT UP and Queer Nation, I did have to unlearn an awful lot about trying to persuade people about my opinion.

But the flipside is that having been involved in activism helped me be more single-minded in dedicating myself to fiction. I know it's kind of a cliche, but it was a very empowering experience. You have to be so confident when you're out there on the political frontlines; you cultivate a fearlessness which turns out to be very applicable when you sit down with that blank piece of paper. As a writer, you need to have a sort of zealous feeling that expressing yourself is worthwhile and can make a difference.

I'd always written fiction of some sort, from stories in my bedroom as a kid, to film scripts as an undergraduate at Ithaca. But I'd never had the belief in myself that I had when I started writing this novel.

I think the confidence really comes through. It's as if you're so self-assured that you can fade into the background and let the story tell itself. I never felt like there was an author trying to manipulate my feelings.

I've thought about James Baldwin in regard to this. I really admire alot of his work, but think I see Baldwin becoming more didactic as he became more and more famous. A lot of the grace and subtlety of his earlier work seemed to fade as he took on a mantel of social responsibility in his writing. It seems really hard to be a mouthpiece and an artist simultaneously. I didn't want to do that.

The only thing I want to persuade people of in my fiction is that the people and situations I create are "real." I don't want to control their opinions of the characters.

Sometimes authors talk about characters 'taking on lives of their own as they're being written. It sounds like you're happy to let your characters take on lives of their own as they're being read!

One of the coolest responses I've gotten from readers of the book is a totally split reaction to Dorothy, [the mother of Robin, the main character]. There's no doubt that she's dramatic and sometimes over the top, but some people think she's really a positive influence on Robin's life others really think she's a monster who does damage to him.

When I wrote Dorothy, I saw both of those sides but its fascinating to see how some people pick up one or the other much more strongly. Clearly, that has to do with what's going on in the readers' minds, not what was going on in mine.