The Bewildered author Peter Rock
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Peter Rock’s novel The Ambidextrist gained a cult following upon its release in 2002. Now his latest novel, The Bewildered, has just been released from Macadam/Cage. It’s about three outsider pubescent kids, Kayla, Chris, and Leon. The kids set out to find something real among all the bullshit. They run into Natalie, an adult consumed by the obsessive study of 1970’s Playboy Playmates. Natalie hires the three kids to harvest copper wire from telephone poles in clandestine raids.

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Daniel Robert Epstein: How are you today?

Peter Rock: I’m good. I haven’t talked a whole lot about the book, but I’m excited that you’re interested to do so.

DRE: Okay. Why haven’t you been talking too much about the book?

PR: I’ve been moving, again. Maybe no one wants to talk to me about it also. It’s the fourth book that I’ve had come out, so I don’t have the expectations I once had. I carefully avoid paying attention to reviews or anything else, so I’m just sort of oblivious.

DRE: Why are you always moving?

PR: I’m settling down a little bit now. Since I got out of school in 1990, I’ve moved every couple of years until I met my wife and then her schedule started to dictate mine. She went to medical school and then she did her residency. So I guess I just kind of attached myself to this smarter woman and follow her from place to place. But it looks like now we might be in Portland for a while. Actually, this move was more like a mile away. Hopefully, it’ll be the last one for a while.

DRE: Where are you originally from?

PR: I’m from Salt Lake City, Utah. Not a place you go back to necessarily, but an interesting place to grow up.

DRE: The Mormons, right?

PR: Yeah, it’s a very constrictive of society. It’s a very exciting and safe place to grow up in the sense because if you’re a white, blonde guy, like I am, there’s no place you can really feel like an outsider. When I grew up, I kind of felt like there were all these girls I wanted to go out with and no one’s parents liked me but I couldn’t quite figure out why.

DRE: Why didn’t the parents like you?

PR: Well I lived a very standard high school experience in terms of experimenting with drugs and drinking beer and stuff. I got to be kind of a bad boy without doing anything dangerous in the conventional American sense. I think it was a good place for me to grow up in the sense that I felt like an outsider and never quite understood what was going on. That hasn’t changed in other places, but maybe because I was so sort of warped by living in that environment.

DRE: Your latest book is set in Portland, so you must have been there for a while, I’d imagine.

PR: It was a book I was thinking about for a long time in terms of some of the things about it such as the harvesting of the electrical wire and the kids… I was thinking a lot about all those short novels written by the Japanese masters especially The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. My mother-in-law is Japanese, so I had this idea that I would write this book set in Japan. I’d read this article about the salvaging of copper wire by children in the Soviet Union and there are all these armless kids who continue to harvest after electrocutions and stuff. I wanted to write it in Japan, but I had a hard time getting to Japan.

One thing about moving for a writer, or for anyone, it that it is so exciting. As a writer, you have more reason to follow your curiosity anytime someone tells you about something strange. You figure out a way to get into the tunnels underneath the city or to just experiment with how this could fit in with a story that was originally going to happen in kind of rural Japan. It was the first thing that I was really working on when I moved to Portland.

DRE: Did The Bewildered take place in Portland because you were there or you just felt it worked for that story?

PR: Both things. A lot of my process involves just collecting a whole bunch of notes and a whole bunch of ideas and then trying to put things together. In terms of researching places, it made it a lot easier since I live here and it’s hard for me to travel very much because of my job.

I spent a lot of time writing on buses and stuff because my protagonist couldn’t drive. So figuring out what bus routes they took and what they would see and what kind of things happened on buses is good because public transportation is a writer’s greatest weapon in terms of finding out about a city

DRE: Electrocution addiction sounds like something that would exist.

PR: Yeah, it does.

DRE: How did you discover it?

PR: Just sort of looking around on the web and reading everything I could.

DRE: Did you electrocute yourself just to check it out?

PR: I’ve certainly shocked myself. I used to work on a ranch and I used string a lot of electric fence and there’s nothing quite like getting shocked with a jolt of electricity.

DRE: It’s quite an experience. That’s for sure.

PR: Trying to recreate that as much as I could was one place I took off from and then I tried to put in similar experiences or things that struck me as similarly startling. One of them certainly was skateboarding because I used to be a big skateboarder. That was something that I always return to for the same kind of fear, the same kind of surprise. A lot of the things in terms of disparate elements that came together in this book were sort of generated out of this idea of being shocked, and not shocked in an entirely bad way, but recovering from something unexpected.

DRE: Was the electrocution just kind of a MacGuffin to get to tell the story of these three kids?

PR: In a sense, I would say so. Sometimes people will say this story is a story about addiction or it’s a story about drugs. I don’t know if that’s true. I’m definitely not pro-drug. I don’t do drugs and I’m not into the whole idea, but I thought of it more as a book about what happens when someone who is close to you changes so much suddenly. Also in terms of sheer plot, like how would a character like Natalie get in touch with these kids or how should provide them with something for to do.

DRE: How autobiographical is the story?

PR: I don’t think any of my stories are very autobiographical. I’m not that interesting. That said, I think you always kind of write about yourself in some way. There are certainly things in this book that I find interesting and my interest is expressed through these characters, but it certainly is not autobiographical in any true sense of the word.

DRE: How does The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea relate to your story?

PR: I’d say that my story is not based on it or even inspired by it in any sense, but there are certain echoes of it and explicitly it’s referenced in the book. It is a short novel about a group of boys who are sort of anti-adult. It mostly centers on this one boy whose father is dead and whose mother takes up with this sailor who’s come into town and they think he might be an actual hero. But they become disenchanted with him over the course of the book. They have this series of codes that they follow and they torture animals and they do terrible things and it sort of culminates in this attack on the sailor. I think there is a way that my book follows this trajectory for maybe the first half. I guess early on The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea was more important in terms of getting the book started.

DRE: I heard that you’re writing a screenplay based on your novel, The Ambidextrist?

PR: Yeah, I have. I don’t know what will happen with it. I’ve done a couple of adaptations for people. I don’t know how I feel about that. At one point, it seemed that I was doing more of it and the pay was pretty good. I like to watch films, but I don’t know about that world. It’s a different level of money and a different level of people shouting at phones. It’s so much harder to realize a film because of the amount of financing and the way that people have to get attached to it and stuff. I write a lot of novels that don’t get published but I feel like I’ve realized the end result of what they were supposed to be in my mind. With the screenplay, it’s so frustrating to sort of put it together and want to see it, but it takes so long and it’s so unlikely. There are probably a lot of people who make pretty good livings writing screenplays that never get made. I don’t think I could live with that.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/The+Bewildered+author+Peter+Rock/