Dave King Speaks
Dave Weich, Powells.com
I am of normal intelligence, promises the card Howard Kapostash reluctantly hands to strangers. To no avail. They don't know what to make of this gesticulating, groaning veteran who can't speak, write, or read. 
The Ha-Ha introduces a character like none we've seen before, opens the window on a life we can hardly imagine and when Howard's one and only, long-ago sweetheart rushes off to rehab, leaving her nine-year-old son in his care, the world comes rushing in.
The author, too, resists easy categorization. A New York-based painter and poet he tried turning The Ha-Ha into a long-form poem at one point in its evolution King shrugs off reductive distinctions between forms. "Where I live best is in the imagination. That's a place where I can explore the themes that are true to me."
"I started out as a painter," he explains. "I dabbled in film. Following my creative bliss ultimately led me to writing."
Now King's full-length debut has registered on just about every "New Writers to Watch" list in the book industry, and with good reason. "There's nothing forced or sentimental here," critic Ron Charles marveled in the Christian Science Monitor. "In the poetic voice of a silent man, King has created a strangely lovable hero whose chance for happiness will matter to you deeply."
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"Jo March, Holden Caulfield, David Copperfield, Alexander Portnoy: many of literature's most memorable novels became so because the protagonist was utterly unforgettable and completely human. That's the key to Dave King's first novel." Anna Quindlen
Dave (Powell's): Only a few authors have answered our INK
Q&A and also been interviewed separately for our site.
Dave King: It was a pretty funny questionnaire.
Dave (Powell's): People have fun with it. We've been shaking up the
questions a little to keep it fresh. I have to tell you, for instance, that
you're one of the first authors not to tell us about your favorite shoes.
Dave King: Really? That's so strange. I only have two pairs of shoes.
It seemed like my answer was going to be, "Well, there's the one I wear all
the time, and then there's the other."
Dave (Powell's): We haven't had too many people answer the Simpsons
question, just you and Anthony
Bourdain so far.
Dave King: That's the first one I answered. I'm obsessed with that
episode [A Streetcar Named Marge]. I teach a class at the School of Visual
Arts, and whenever I can I work it into the syllabus. Sometimes it's a big stretch,
but I just feel like along with teaching my students The
Tempest and about Bernini
or whatever else, that episode is essential cultural information.
Dave (Powell's): Thinking about The
Ha-Ha, I keep coming back to the card that Howie hands out: "I am of normal
intelligence," it reads. Those cards don't play a major role in the story, but
they speak as well as any detail to Howie's basic conflict, his yearning to
be acknowledged as a peer.
Dave King: Even the people who are kind to him forget. That's the thing
that makes him crazy.
I threw that little card into an early draft, and it kept coming back. I kept
finding it useful to return to it, the two or three times it recurs in the plot,
for just the reason you say.
Dave (Powell's): The book might be discussed in terms of loss. What's
the saying? You can't miss what you never had.
Reviewers are throwing around comparisons between Howie and other fictional
characters with disabilities, but a key difference is that Howie was
healthy until he was injured in Vietnam.
Dave King: I'm a huge admirer of both Motherless
Brooklyn and The
Curious Incident, but I do think that's the area where my book is different.
Of course it's about disability, but thematically it's more about loss and about
mourning than about the nature of the disability.
Dave (Powell's): A coworker at Powell's referred to "Howie's self-imposed
idea of what he can communicate or accomplish in his life." It does seem like
there could be potential outlets for Howie that he doesn't pursue. He doesn't
take up painting or some other nonverbal form of communication, for instance.
Dave King: To a certain extent, as the author, I had a vested interest
in making his communication as limited as possible. It wasn't in the interest
of the book for me to provide avenues of communication for him at the outset.
I was guarded about that.
In other ways, at the beginning of the book, although he doesn't
say it outright there's a sense in which over the years he's given up. Maybe
there was a possibility of some kind of art therapy in his early rehabilitation,
but by the time we meet him his life is about as small as he can make it.
He's got a big chip on his shoulder. He resists communication. He's not overtly
hostile, but I think he is at the point of saying, "You people come to me and
do a little work, yourselves."
Dave (Powell's): I mention painting because I know you've done a lot
of it, yourself.
Dave King: It's possible that's another reason I didn't automatically
go there, have Howie paint. Really, he's someone who's substantially different
from me.
Dave (Powell's): When the book's cover art was changed between the
advance reader edition and the hardcover, it made me wonder what cover you might
have imagined for it. If you'd painted a cover for it, for example.
Dave King: I actually submitted a cover to my editor. I don't know
how far it got.
I'm a painter of a certain facility. I'm pretty good with realism, but this was a little bit crude. It was a landscape with a kind of abstract sunburst at the horizon, which represented both the mine explosion and the sunrise (or sunset). A line drawing of Howard was merged into the green landscape so he actually became the ha-ha, and I know Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown, feels very strongly that a book about people and a book that focuses on the human condition should have a clearer figure represented on the cover.
Dave (Powell's): For a book about a Vietnam veteran, The
Ha-Ha stays surprisingly clear of politics.
Dave King: I suppose it does. In this day and age, the politics ought
to be implicit. I think the message is the terrible cost of war, and as I read
the profiles and look at the photographs coming out of Iraq, it absolutely breaks
my heart, particularly because I have spent seven years thinking quite a bit
about the cost of Vietnam.
Again, Howie's situation is one of isolation. When it seemed like the nation
was going back to war, I did contemplate inserting that into the book. My manuscript
was already pretty far along, and I resisted putting the veneer of politics
in as window dressing. I thought that would be a little bit cheap, and possibly
a little foreign to Howie's narrow life at that point.
Dave (Powell's): The reader gets a lot closer to Howie than the people
in his life, and that provides various opportunities for humor. One of my favorite
lines early on was, "Ryan says nothing on the way home. I don't like this, but
I'm not speaking to him, either, whether he realizes it or not."
I wondered about this and other strategies you might have adopted to make
sure that Howie didn't come across as hopeless and unlikable.
Dave King: Part of it was trying to make him as intelligent as I could.
And to give him a certain amount of wryness and self-awareness. That passage
is an example.
My friends will probably tell you that in person I'm a pretty funny guy, but
I haven't figured out how to be very funny in print. I love funny writing
I'm devoted to Wodehouse,
and in my questionnaire I
write about Anthony
Powell, who I think is wickedly hilarious but it's not something
I do easily myself.
I gave Howie as much humor and sass and wryness as I could, and I do hope
that leavens the downer quality of his condition. It became clear pretty early
on that there had to be some joy in the book. Otherwise, it was just going to
be too grim.
Dave (Powell's): You've published poetry in the past. And I saw that
you actually wrote a section of The
Ha-Ha in verse at one point. What exactly were you thinking? Did you imagine
this being a Homeric epic?
Dave King: There are a couple novels in verse that I profoundly admire.
One of them is The
Golden Gate by Vikram
Seth. I was writing a lot of poetry at the time, more poetry than prose.
I had this manuscript lying around, and at some point I thought, It all takes
place inside his head. Wouldn't it be an amazing thing to pull off if unbeknownst
to all the characters, the inside of his head was iambic pentameter? Wouldn't
that heighten the glory of what's going on inside him?
Ultimately, I do not, or did not at the time, have the skill to write that
much iambic pentameter. I don't happen to be Byron.
But I took about fifty pages of it and did that. Some parts really worked and
really sung, and other parts dissolved into a terrible sing-song.
I don't consider myself a mature poet; I'm still learning a lot. But I would
like at some point to write a long verse work. It's likely that at some point
I'll take the thing I'm working on now and try again. Ultimately this time I
went back to the prose.
Dave (Powell's): Between your painting, poetry, and prose, then also
the posing you've done for other painters' work, how does each of these efforts
relate to your vision of communicating through art?
Dave King: Posing was really a social thing. I was part of what was
known as the East Village art scene, which flourished for about five years here
in New York just after I graduated from college. I was a painter. I lived in
the neighborhood. I have always had a lot of friends, and I like to go to parties
and openings. People began to ask me to pose, and I was relatively uninhibited
in terms of posing naked. One person would ask, and another, and pretty soon
without my knowing it there were a lot pictures of me without any clothes on
hanging on walls.
It was funny at the time because I would be walking down the street, and someone
would pause and start to speak to me, and then not really know where they recognized
me from. I'd say, "You saw the Dan Witz painting on Avenue B."
That was a social thing more than a creative one.
Now, I teach at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New
York, and I also teach at the School of Visual Arts. It's really a great combination.
I have business students who tend to be very conservative and earnest, and generally
they're good students; and I have artists, who are more flaky but often very
creative and delightful.
When I speak to the artists, I do think of a community. Genres are useful
to the critic and the consumer, but on some level artificial. It bothered me
in graduate school that I had to make such distinctions between fiction and
poetry, for the reasons I talked about in the previous question.
One thing I say to young painters is, "I started out as a painter, I dabbled
in film. Following my creative bliss ultimately led me to writing. Maybe the
seeds were always there my paintings were highly narrative, they were
pretty realist but I needed to pursue the creative element rather than
the genre."
That's something I feel about the community of artists. I think we can all
support each other and that we shouldn't all be in our little pigeonholes.
Dave (Powell's): Publishers Weekly compared The
Ha-Ha to A
Home at the End of the World. They talked about bonds arising between people
who aren't blood-related. That's a different kind of community, but it's essentially
the same thing, a non-biological support system.
Dave King: That was one of the themes that emerged in The Ha-Ha
early on. I've been lucky in that I have a family that I like, but also, as
someone who's been away from home since being a teenager, I have a huge family
of friends. That's really important to me.
The Ha-Ha
celebrates that, in a way. The one nuclear family unit that appears in the book,
if you discount the idiot neighbor, is the remembered family unit of Howard
and his mother and father. Every other family unit is in some way created or
nontraditional. I don't see that as a breakdown of the family but as a celebration
of interconnectedness and generosity.
Dave (Powell's): What did you take from being a cab driver in New York
City? Good stories, interesting insights?
Dave King: I'll tell you a story. I picked up this woman somewhere
in Manhattan and she was going way out to the edge of Queens, so we had a long
ride. We talked and we talked and we talked. We really hit it off. We had a
great conversation, but it was largely about her. When we were about a block
away from her house, she said, "We've been just talking about me. Tell me a
little bit about you."
I said, "Well, I'm a painter. I do this, that, or the other thing." She thought
about it, and she asked, "Do you earn enough money as a painter to earn a living?"
There I was, obviously, in the cab, driving around, so I said, "You know, I
do, but driving a New York City taxicab is really my first love, so I'm hoping
that soon I'll be able to give up painting entirely and just devote myself to
driving a cab."
There was quite a long silence, whereupon she put the exact change through
the little pigeonhole and got out without giving me a tip.
The other thing that people sometimes like to know about me driving the cab
maybe you already know this was that I read Proust
during that time.
Dave (Powell's): I read about that in one of your profiles. You said
that you might not even get through a complete sentence at each stoplight.
Dave King: Not even. Those sentences are so long.
Dave (Powell's): It seems like such an odd choice for that setting.
I think one's natural inclination would be to read Hemingway or something where
you could get through three paragraphs in twenty seconds.
Dave King: I was already reading Proust, and I just kept at it when
I got the job. It took me years to do it.
It worked so well, I think, because I really thought about what I was reading.
I've never read a book where I had to stop basically at every phrase and think
about it for a little while.
Now that the new translations of Proust are coming out, particularly the
Lydia Davis one, I'm going to read the book again. I'm in a different place
than I was at twenty, and the book is different now. I think that'll be a fun
experience.
Dave (Powell's): You mentioned Anthony
Powell earlier. In your INK
Q&A, you admit that no one you've ever recommended his work to has liked
it.
That seems to be a problem particular to books and readers. If I hear an album,
I know pretty well which of my friends might appreciate it. It's not so predictable
with books. Why is that, do you think?
Dave King: My sister asked me something similar about ten years ago.
She said, "I'm always recommending books to you, and I do that because I want
to talk to you about them. And you never read the books I recommend. You're
depriving me of my sibling rights by behaving this way."
I said, "I do a lot for you, and we have a close relationship, but you do
not own my inner life."
Reading, for me, is a serious exploration of the inner life. It's private.
I will, occasionally, look up from my book and say, "Listen to this," but the
pleasure for me is private. It's a personal enjoyment. It's interior.
In that sense, I think it's different than an album. With an album, you can
say, "Let's dance." Or turn up the volume so that the whole neighborhood hears.
But with a book, it's not social. Even though I'm reading someone else's words,
I feel that it allows me to be very much myself. I don't have to put on a mask.
Dave (Powell's): Generally when you've been asked about your favorite
books and authors, you've cited novels and stories from the past. But earlier
we were talking about the Simpsons. Do
you read much contemporary fiction?
Dave King: Some. It's not a great priority to keep up with what's being
written today. I read the work of my friends, and there are certain authors
who are alive that I return to again and again, but I certainly don't feel that
it's necessary to read the hot book of the moment.
If I'm reading Turgenev,
I'm not going to put that down and rush out to start reading what everyone else
says is terrific. But I may get to it. I buy a lot of contemporary books, then
get around to reading them ten years later. I'm comfortable with that, maybe
because I then feel that I don't have to engage in the discussion.
Dave (Powell's): As readers start to find your book, what have they
been asking you?
Dave King: One question that comes up repeatedly is the relationship
to my own life. I've said in various interviews that I had a brother who was
autistic and didn't speak. Obviously, a contemplation of that situation led
me to write about someone who didn't speak, but Howard Kapostash is very different
from my autistic brother.
People always want to know how much of this I actually experienced. I made
it all up. I really believe in working from the imagination, and also research,
using writing a book as a way to learn things. In this book, the Vietnam
War is real; everything else is invented. I feel like that's important to say
because people have been inclined to identify me with my character.
Dave (Powell's): And that's certainly a large leap with this particular
character.
Dave King: Right. Or they assume that Howard is based on someone that
I knew. He's really not.
The town is made up, the other characters are made up. That was fun for me.
It was fun to think, Who are these people that I can invent entirely?
I've recently been writing a short nonfiction piece about me and my dad. He
was a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials. He was twenty-six years old at the
time, the youngest prosecutor there. His career was made, and obviously he was
quite successful at an early age. Here I am, not at all at an early age, maybe
looking at some kind of success but maybe not.
The article I've been working on has to do with that dynamic, with father-son
notions of success, that kind of stuff. I've found it pleasurable to think about
my dad and our relationship, but very, very difficult to write about. A little
embarrassing, a little too raw.
I'm saying very nice things about both of us, but I've realized that I don't
enjoy writing about myself. I don't know if I'll ever do it again. Where I live
best is in the imagination. That's a place where I can explore the themes that
are true to me. The imagination is a home to some kind of truth, for that reason.
Dave King spoke
to Powell's from his New York home on December 16, 2004.
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