Rock Bottom (42 page)

A while? How long did
Rock Bottom
take to write?

About ten months to draft and a year to revise. And revise. And revise. I’d written two, uh, “practice novels” already — just saying it makes my hands ache — so I had a pretty good understanding of what it feels like when you’re on the right track and, even more important, what it feels like when you’re on the wrong one. There is no greater gift to a writer than the sixth sense that what you’re working on is genuinely bad. Of course, if I hadn’t written that other stuff, I would have never been able to write something pretty decent. Or at least that’s what I tell myself to stop from crying.

Any writing advice you’d care to share?

I read an interview with Peter Carey, whose work is a genuine treasure of narrative artistry and flat-out prose chops, in which he basically said that writing is a last-person-standing enterprise. If you do it long enough with some amount of regularity, you will probably produce something good that gets published. I think that’s true, because if you stay at it for five, ten, fifteen years, you probably don’t suck at it. And also, improvement is exponential in this line of work, which, because it’s such a lonely endeavor, is a truth that is quite satisfying. The drafting I’m doing on the new novel is still pretty rough, but not anything like the crud I used to turn out. I don’t have to drag the dream into existence as much anymore.

Care to share what you’re working on?

I’m writing a novel set at the crossroads of Regency and Victorian England — the late 1820s — involving some of the characters and incidents from
Jane Eyre
and set at Thornfield Hall, but existing in a completely different narrative context with a whole new cast of strivers, connivers, grotesques, and romantics. I am trying to combine the dark fairy-tale fabulism of Angela Carter with the plot-driven, hard-boiled push-and-shove of James Ellroy, all the while keeping in mind British class dynamics to create, as Ellroy called it, a reckless verisimilitude. The beauty of a story like this is connecting the desires and motivations of all the characters — from the lowest scullery maid to Rochester himself — while keeping the plot organic and fluid. It’s a large undertaking, but I like a challenge. If I go down in flames, at least it’ll be in a blaze of glory.

Questions and topics for discussion

1. Of the five main characters in
Rock Bottom,
which one did you find the most compelling, and why? Which character did you find the most humorous?

2. Amsterdam plays an important role in the novel. Discuss the ways in which the city influences the actions of each band member.

3.
Rock Bottom
is a no-bruises-spared portrayal of the rock-and-roll world. In your opinion, which band member gains the most from the difficult experience the band endures?

4. What do you think of the “friendship” between the band members? Which characters did you feel were really friends at the beginning of
Rock Bottom
? Did that change in the course of the novel?

5. What is the importance of Joey in the story of Blood Orphans? What does she ultimately learn from her experience as manager of the band?

6. Discuss the idea of forgiveness in
Rock Bottom.
How important is forgiveness to the members of Blood Orphans?

7. Darlo starts off as a truly vile character, yet as the novel progresses he is forced to confront much of his past behavior. Does he eventually find a conscience?

8. The love story between Joey and Darlo is, to say the least, a fairly unconventional romance. In what ways does their relationship impact the lives of the other band members?

Suggestions for further reading

Some of Michael Shilling’s favorite books:

The Bloody Chamber
by Angela Carter

The White Album
by Joan Didion

American Tabloid
by James Ellroy

A Public Burning
by Robert Coover

The Palm at the End of the Mind
by Wallace Stevens

Bear and His Daughter
by Robert Stone

Frank Zappa’s Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play
by Ben Watson

Amy and Isabelle
by Elizabeth Strout

Salem’s Lot
by Stephen King

Among the Thugs
by Bill Buford

Money
by Martin Amis

The Production of Space
by Henri Lefebvre

Self-Help
by Lorrie Moore

Observatory Mansions
by Edward Carey

The Violent Bear It Away
by Flannery O’Connor

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones
by StanleyBooth

The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Libra
by Don Delillo

To Bedlam and Part Way Back
by Anne Sexton

Mystery Train
by Greil Marcus

Ariel
by Sylvia Plath

The Medium Is the Massage
by Marshall McLuhan

Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf

The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness
by Kenzaburo Oe

Chasing the Sea
by Tom Bissell

Lord Weary’s Castle
by Robert Lowell

Titus Groan
by Mervyn Peake

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami

Midnight’s Children
by Salman Rushdie

Rubicon Beach
by Steve Erickson

Budding Prospects
by T. C. Boyle

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer