A Conversation with Joshua Mohr
INTERVIEW BY LORI HETTLER

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Staff Interviewer Lori Hettler sits down for a conversation with JOSHUA MOHR.

Joshua is the author of five novels, including Damascus, which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool”; Fight Song; Some Things That Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine’s Top 10 Reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller; and Termite Parade, an Editors’ Choice pick on The New York Times Bestseller List. His latest novel, All This Life, was recently published by Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint.

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LORI HETTLER: How’s the daddy life been treating you?

JOSHUA MOHR: I dig being a dad! And I love the way it’s affecting my preoccupations on the page. I’m still writing about maniacs, to one degree or another, but now they have children, which is its own kind of mania. Mania begets mania? Something like that. My daughter expanded my real life, and her presence is in my fiction, as well. She’s making my world bigger in its curiosities.

I’ve often heard that… that fiction can’t help but be influenced by the author’s immediate world. And how cool is that? To leave a legacy of novels behind that ultimately tells the story of who you were and who you became. Do you ever worry about what your daughter will think, when she finally reads your books?

No way. I’m stoked for her to experience these wild narratives! I want her to use them as portals to burrow into me, understanding her father in ways I probably couldn’t articulate, but the books offer more information, context, and ultimately, understanding.

If you were forced to choose, which one of your novels would you say most closely defines or represents who you are (or were)?

I have two novels that are the most autobiographical, Some Things That Meant the World to Me and Damascus. I bled a lot for those books, but any fiction writer will tell you that each new project offers a way to talk about things in your life that are confusing. I’m drawn to things I don’t understand about myself. And if I’m using a fictional character to help me understand more about my world, there is always an element of memoir hidden under the freeing veneer of fiction.

I like the idea of using fiction as a way to answer questions about yourself. What things did your newest novel, All This Life, help you work through? Was it as cathartic a process as the others?

All This Life grew from the idea of a Virtual Detective Story. There is a missing teenage boy in the book, who still communicates with his dad via Twitter. So he’s missing on one hand, yet he’s “there” on another. I’d never seen a cat-and-mouse-type story play out in a digital sense, except in sci-fi conceits. This novel is realism, but it occurs on our two sacred planes, capturing our online and real lives. I think about these things more now, as a parent. My daughter is only two, so I don’t have to worry about it yet, but I am conscious of her relationship with technology. This book isn’t condemning technology at all. But it is posing this question: how can we use these two ecosystems, these two worlds to live the happiest life we can?

Does technology enhance our overall happiness, or merely distract us from it, though?

I do think that technology can augment our real-world happiness. That’s possible, although so is the other extreme: an online maw of loneliness.

I love the way you played around with social media and digital technology in the novel. And it so truly depicts the gap between those who had to adapt to online life Vs. those who were born instantly connected. Man, I remember the awesomeness of Nintendo after years of playing Atari, upgrading from WebTV to an honest-to-god computer, purchasing my very first pre-paid cell phone. Now it’s all toddlers carrying cell phones, PS4 online gaming, texting and tweeting at the dinner table, Facebooking, Pinteresting, vlogging! Are there any forms of social media you find yourself refusing to use?

Man, I don’t even know what half of those things are! Truthfully, I am pretty slow with the gadgets. I try to keep my attention on the blank page, although I use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. That’s about all that I can handle, or I wouldn’t have time to write. I wouldn’t say I refuse others; I just don’t allow myself to try them because I’d probably like them too much. It’s a junkie’s paradigm. It’s the availability that I find myself resisting. Email and texts and whatnot, it’s very hard to disappear, even for a few hours. I miss the days when you could be unreachable, and it wasn’t that you were ignoring people, per se, you just didn’t know anyone was trying to get a hold of you. You were allowed to be by yourself. To think. To fuck up. To change. Of course, those things are still possible, but with that pocket-sized distraction machine, it’s increasingly harder.

It’s interesting that you mention how much harder it can be nowadays to disappear or to fuck up, because technology brings with it this complete lack of privacy. Anything you do, anywhere you go, smartphones and video cameras could be recording you. In All This Life, we witness the impact that taking something private, something that wasn’t yours to take, and posting it online for a million strangers to experience can have on individuals. Do you think technology makes us more aware of our actions, or more careless with them?

One of the characters in the book who posts content on YouTube “pirated” from people’s lives calls himself a Disaster Shepherd. And he’s obviously not alone—people scavenging others, looking for something dangerous or humiliating or titillating to get an online audience. I’m no better. Just this afternoon, I watched a clip of some crazy Thai guy putting fire ants on his cock. And I’m not talking metaphorical fire ants. You should’ve heard him screaming. Wow. It’s that curiosity in all of us, those sick voyeurs living inside, demanding we make those clicks, post those comments, upload the latest chum and fish for other usernames. That’s really what the book is about: Connection, in every contortion of the word. The computer creating intimacy between strangers, and yet it’s often an alienating kind of intimacy. All This Life is interested in how, in one way or another, we’re all Content.

And now for the shotgun round. Here are five quickie questions for you. What’s the worst—

Thing anyone’s ever said to you? A new lover re: my awful dreadlocks in college: “Do they always smell like that?”

Place you’ve ever crashed for the night? Dolores Park.

Thing you’ve ever tasted? Shame.

Piece of clothing you own? My pants collection is truly despicable.

Interview question you’ve ever been asked? I’m a teacher, so I know there is no such thing as a stupid question...

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Lori Hettler is our Chief Staff Interviewer and handles our interview series for The Inductor. Lori founded the book blog, independent press resource community, and book club The Next Best Book Club (TNBBC) in 2007. An advocate for the small press and self-publishing communities, she has been featured from coast to coast, in both The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Portions of her reviews have been quoted for a number of books (most notably in the press release for Graywolf Press’ I Curse the River of Time, Red Hen Press’ catalog for David Maine’s An Age of Madness, and Heather Fowler’s Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness). Formerly the Marketing Director for Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (CCLaP), Lori has now begun to take on freelance work under TNBBC Publicity. When she’s not curled up on the couch with a good book, you can find Lori on Twitter, TNBBC’s blog, Goodreads, and Facebook talking about it.

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All This Life
JOSHUA MOHR

Fiction  |  Novel
304 pages
6” x 9” Hardcover
ISBN 978-1593766030
First Edition
Review Copy: Kindle Mobi ARC
Soft Skull Press
Brooklyn, New York
Available HERE
$25.00
Review by Al Kratz

All This Life by Joshua Mohr kicks off with a typical setting of an angry teenager and his middle-aged-crisis-fighting father stuck in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. By the end of the first chapter, and the end of the lives of a group of bridge jumpers, it’s clear all of this life isn’t going to be typical—it’s going to be complex and heartbreaking.

The 14-year-old boy, Jake, video records a band of musicians walking on the bridge because it’s the only thing for him to do in the bumper-to-bumper malaise. His father, Paul, spaces off to fantasy football daydreams. The mundane ends when, one by one, the band members jump off the bridge. Jake records it all and begins a series of events that will throw a wide set of characters into an unforgettable journey and an inevitable, but well-crafted, convergence.

We also meet Sara and Rodney from a small Nevada desert town. Rodney, a.k.a. Balloon Boy, was a teen who ended up in a stunt ride in a weather balloon that spit him out fifty feet in the air and left him forever a slow speaker with fast and valid thoughts stuck inside his lucky-to-be-alive head. Sara had been his girlfriend at the time of the accident. She later becomes the victim of a different boyfriend sending her sex tape viral, which leads to Sara and Rodney making an escape road trip to look for Rodney’s mother, Kat, who had turned to alcohol after her son’s accident and had run away from him to live in San Francisco.

This may seem like a long list of characters, and I’m not done summarizing them yet. It was the type of book where I wrote down the names and backgrounds of the characters as I went on so I could keep them straight. They are so developed that, by the climax, putting them down feels like watching a large cast of a play come out for curtain call. They seem like friends at that point, to be appreciated and missed after the exit.

There also is a character simply referred to as Noah911. The central themes of the book revolve around us losing our personal identities to our social-media-online-selves. Noah911 is the older brother of one of the bridge jumpers. He’s dealing with the guilt of not knowing what she was headed for. He’s dealing with the pain of seeing Jake’s video of the jump go viral.

Jake’s mom, Kat, is a recovering alcoholic who spends some time with her sponsor and only friend, Deb, a bold tattoo artist. The final main character is Kat’s Craigslist roommate, Wes. Wes is an eccentric scientist of sorts, with unique theories in existential math and a longing to bring back the spirit of Albert Einstein to save the world from its path of disillusionment and unhappiness.

Mohr takes a couple of risks with this cast of characters but manages to get them to work. First, with so many concurrent stories going on, and switching between several characters’ points of view, he risks that the reader won’t like the jumping. The reader may not like some of the characters or their stories as much as others. Yet, the chapters were fairly short, and the plot was in constant movement, so getting back to that favorite character wasn’t ever a long wait. Each time I thought the multiple branches were going to be a problem for me, the sub-story took the right twist to keep it as compelling as the others.

A second risk was that, to explore the themes of the new disillusionment, Mohr had to spend a lot of time inside the characters’ heads. This included nice moments where his characters were escaping their conflicts, like the flashback of Rodney’s escape in the balloon, appreciating the view before the accident:

This must have been what it was like when they realized the earth was round, not flat—to understand that there were no edges to fall from, no end of the world. It would spin and spin forever, and they were all so lucky to be here. Rodney for the first time felt a great appetite to experience life outside of Traurig... All he craved was flight.

(Loc 1484)

A similar moment occurred for Sara when her brother is helping her deal with the news that her sex tape had exploded on the Internet. He’s helping her use her imagination to escape, pretending the broken down pool they are in is still thriving:

Sara can’t get in the pool fast enough, tearing toward it and leaping in. There are a couple inches or so of dust and sand at the bottom. The walls are cracked and puckered. But right now Sara doesn’t see any of that. All she sees is the water and her brother and her parents sitting in chairs on the side, watching them swim.

(Loc 1432)

Sometimes these inner conflicts are explored through beautiful images.

The funeral was a fist. It had tear ducts. The funeral was held in a lung, clammy and loud with mourners plucking clumsy ballads on heartstrings and razor wire. Grief felt tight to the body, like a wetsuit, squeezing Noah911’s anatomy into a tangle of pall and regret.

(Loc 3387)

There were moments when this wasn’t as strong as the external scenes, wasn’t done with imagery, but with the explicit thought that felt more like being in the author’s head than in the character’s. This was particularly true in the Jake and Paul plot line. Sometimes Paul’s thoughts seemed to be more an exposition on the Internet themes than the natural outcome of the problem.

It’s like everything is dammed up behind a wall of worry. Fear, concern for his son. For his whole generation, really. Their crass way of publicizing everything.

(Loc 2023)

Other times, these thoughts were good at capturing the midlife-crisis anxiety:

It all makes Paul feel so old. So irrelevant. He’s sexually irrelevant and emotionally irrelevant and socially irrelevant, and if he keeps pretending that certain advancements in the workplace don’t exist he’ll soon be occupationally irrelevant, and in a few years Jake will go off to college and his wife’s already gone, so Paul will be left familially irrelevant, and that will be the end result of his life.

(Loc 2038)

Mohr paints a vivid picture of the Internet age. How the connected world is more unconnected than ever. How our brains have become tricked-up by over-stimuli. How organic and ridiculous viral events are. My favorite part of his characters’ struggles, though, is how many of these conflicts were as valid in 1950 as they are in 2015. Maybe Sara’s sex tape couldn’t have existed in that era, but sex shaming is certainly not a new social phenomenon. The challenge of happiness and connection isn’t the new problem it sometimes feels like—it’s the same old human problem we’ve always had. That is simultaneously reassuring and scary as hell, and prevalent in Mohr’s book.

One of the sadder story lines was Noah911’s dealing with his self-applied guilt over his sister’s death. He responds by disconnecting. It’s not the viral video of his sister’s suicide that disconnects him. It’s his personal psychological retreat. It reminded me of Into the Wild and the Christopher McCandless story. Every time McCandless had a family, either actual relatives or “his” people he encountered on the road, he pushed them away. It’s not the outside world that does that. It’s the individual. It was Noah911.

My favorite part of the read was feeling the book gain momentum about three-quarters of the way through. By the time the characters were fully established, well on their various journeys, a surprising thing happened: the book moved from a fun cerebral dive into a riveting and urgent suspense story. The result was a pleasing and deserved end, an enjoyable but heartbreaking read, and a memorable story.

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Al Kratz is our Fiction Reviewer for The Volt. He is a writer from Des Moines, Iowa, an Assistant Fiction Editor at Pithead Chapel, and is currently working on a novel and a short story collection. He has had work featured in Red Savina Review, Wyvern Lit, Flash Flood, Daily Palette, Apeiron Review, Ardor Flash Fiction, 1000words, Gravel, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere, and he is the winner of the 2013 British Fantasy Society Flash Fiction Competition.

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• This book was submitted to Alternating Current by the author. The reviewer does not know the author or the publisher and received the book from Alternating Current at random. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •