Souls of Grit
A Conversation with Greg Gerke
Greg Gerke is a literary and film critic known for his insistence on the sufficiency of the text. An artist’s intentions, creative process, and biography may all hold interest, but appreciating the artwork itself does not depend on any knowledge of this. For that, all one needs are the sentences on the page, the images on the screen. To honor this stance, I decided to ask Gerke about his first novel, In the Suavity of the Rock, without invoking any extra-textual matters—the usual fodder of author interviews. As a Künstlerroman, the book, which was released by Splice in June, charts the evolution of its writer-protagonist, Rick, which suggested a second stricture to me: an exclusive focus on the question of character. Together these constraints pushed Gerke to grapple with his book's hero not as his author, but as a reader.
Interestingly, although my questions kept to the text, Gerke’s answers did not always do likewise. Suavity turns out to be a highly personal book about the growth (and dissolution) of a writer from Milwaukee—the author’s own hometown—so personal that parsing the Rick of the text often seemed to force Gerke to turn inward and read himself. In no way did this interpretive maneuver erase the difference between the two. Instead, what emerged from our discussion was a sort of dual portrait of overlapping figures, the author and his principal—distinct yet inseparable—along with the thought, for me, that at least sometimes, truly understanding oneself as another may not be an option.
MS: In the first third of the novel, we find our Middle Western storyteller, Rick, in the Old World, reminiscing on the Continental pilgrimage of his youth, when he tried, in various ways, to distance himself from modern life, whether through the contemplation of old churches and old masters in ancient European towns, or by working the soil of provincial farms, trekking through the countryside, and living apart in a private cabin. I wondered what exactly he was trying to achieve, turning away from the world like this, since any peace or purity he might have attained is regularly shattered by some form of banal engagement: courting women in a writers’ group, people-watching at cafes, and so forth.
GG: This might be an opening for me to talk about art in a way I’m not accustomed to. In recent years, I’ve grunted at hearing or reading authors talk about the characters in their books as if they had a life of their own. I firmly believe sound is the story, the sentence carries the concepts—and the day. But hey, I’m in a good mood and will play along as best I can. There’s been enough distance that I can see this book in a less than askance way, though it is still well on to the slaughterhouse of my consciousness—I have to tear it up to make anew now. I’m sure Rick is hoping to find himself in Europe, as so many before him have tried to do. He wants to learn how to see, Rilke-style, but, of course, on his terms—with some control. Hence the routines he develops and his feignings of madness. Perhaps he creates all that in order to give himself something to fight against, à la the figures that are usually associated with that type of life (and who are name-checked): Dostoevsky and Van Gogh.
MS: Throughout the story, Rick compulsively walks long distances, and through the various menial jobs he picks up, deliberately works his body to a state of exhaustion. He goes so far as to say that there is “happiness in sleep.” It’s as though positive pleasure is beyond him, leaving only the consolations of calm and silence. (Even the appeal of sex seems to lie for him not in the act itself, but in the depletion of desire that follows.) Perhaps there’s one exception, though: his close, sensuous observation of the natural world. Here his satisfaction seems no longer merely negative, a byproduct of emptiness; it carries an independent vitality. What makes nature less disappointing to Rick than nearly everything else in his life?
GG: Well, I would say the Rilkean seeing again, but I think it extends to art and architecture—and the films that were so important to him, though he dropped out of film school. I should add that this novel is a bit of a confession for the character (not me)—more than a bit. In the first hundred pages he is leaving certain things out, because in some ways they wouldn’t make sense for a reader until later—and these are probably the things that are most defining about his life: a parent’s death, his scattered relationships. Similar to how someone doesn’t tell people these kinds of stories in detail right off the bat (usually), Rick is being a bit cagey with his information. His asshole self begins the book fully on display, but I don’t think he stays full asshole all the way to the end. He banishes himself to nature again—this time the Oregon Coast, probably because it reminds him of his twenties, as well as being three thousand miles from his family. As to his relationship with nature, Hopkins said it the best in his journals: “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.” Although he doesn’t know about that quote, I think Rick is after this experience. Nature is that eternal reservoir for all our feelings and memories—that’s why the neuroscientists want us to spend an hour in nature everyday…to calm our anxiety-prone lives, while hopefully not looking at our feeds too much.
MS: Rick’s surprisingly direct about his failings as a writer, and even about his tainted motivations. Artmaking doesn’t seem to be an obvious strength of his—the book is littered with his false starts—but something he almost has to fight his nature to manufacture. What makes him so dogged? Why not quit writing, since he quits so many other pursuits (and people) along the way?
GG: Why does anyone do anything? Why do we get up in the morning? Luckily life hands us another day. He loves art so much, he lives through art so much—I think it’s pretty clear someone like that will be a maker of art. But there are of course failings that go along with any endeavor. This is probably why beginning writers shouldn’t and usually don’t have it easy—all the rejection and slogging and giving up makes them better artists in the end, at least in theory. Certainly there are exceptions. Maybe Rick is one of them. He’s so squirrelly that I don’t have a compass on him.
MS: I found his descriptions of life growing up in Milwaukee to be some of the most desolate and sobering in the book, even if they’re offered mostly by the bye: “the Percodanned envy, hops, and sour stench of Brew Town”; or the older friend with the “paper-factory job that he can’t screw with—he’s burned so much money in small-times schemes, creditors are on the hunt.” Rick’s relationship with his parents is fraught, certainly, but all the same, I wondered whether it was really Mom and Dad who’ve fucked him up, or Wisconsin itself, with its bleak economics and high-cultural barrenness, and most of all its mores: an old-school toughness and reserve that has no place for Rick’s effete soul, starved as it is for poetry in all its forms?
GG: This feels like a personal question—and maybe they all are. For Rick, and myself, I would say it is/was the mores—those customs and conventions of community. There can be a tendency to make oneself small in the Midwest in an effort to not stick out too much and, in so doing, undercut one’s enthusiasms. I think this legacy is handed down and eventually people end up at the bar, growing more glum—but now they don’t just look in the mirror, they look at the phone and see what everyone else is doing; but those people on the phone’s screen are not the people they are surrounded by, wherever they are. I don’t know. Milwaukee has many good things. A world-class art museum, beautiful architecture, the lakefront, some universities. Like Buffalo (also featured), in the ’70s there was a ton of stuff going on there artistically. But it also has incredible racism and social division. I got the sense that I had to leave—in the novel, this movement makes the plot more interesting. Why have a character stay rooted the whole time? There are so many locations in the book, I can’t keep up with them.
MS: The second half of the book turns for a while to the present-tense, and Rick’s tone surprisingly lightens as we jump forward from those alienated days abroad to a more quotidian existence with a wife and child in Brooklyn, and later vacationing with extended family in Maine. Domestic comedy and gentle irony come to the fore in the narration here: it feels as if Rick’s finally succeeded in making peace—or at the least calling a truce—with life, yes? He’s managed to grow up.
GG: Yes, I think having children can do this for you. At least at first. Divorces usually come when the kids are older. The bond of raising a child—there’s nothing like it—and it is the toughest job, tougher than the Marines. More of the lighthearted moments are in that section, before the coffin of Buffalo is opened. Maybe there is something about needing to go through the peaks and valleys of relationships before finding the one that works. The seeds are there though—for those interested, it seems to me, only in retrospect, that the recounting of the Buffalo relationship is, though on the surface about Buffalo, really about the relationship with his then-current wife. The same relationship-breakdowns repeat, which will be seen in the last section, filling in what happened in the twenty years after that marriage ended. I suppose there is a strange Abbas Kiarostami special effect there—as in his film Certified Copy, where the man starts playing the role of a husband to the Juliette Binoche character, though they are strangers.
MS: Rick describes his years living in Buffalo with a girlfriend, after Europe but before marriage in New York, at great length, but the five-year stint in Oregon and California, not long after college, is denied this sustained treatment. Why does Rick seem uninterested in—or evasive about—those years? Do they abash him, the hippie spirituality of it all? They would seem to be important formative years, yet they lie mostly in shadow.
GG: I don’t know about that. There’s probably a reason they lie in shadow—they weren’t too important to the life. Aspects of them were repetitious—that doesn’t teach one much about life. That’s probably why they don’t make good copy. It seems he’s only confessing the painful things: relationships, parents, his daughter. Once you log those there’s no use looking back on formative years—that’s my take. I’m sure people have different experiences. Now childhood, yes. Those seem to be the real formative years, as Freud would contend. And childhood is examined in the confession. But the big life changes—like moving to Oregon from Wisconsin—that is important, that moment, and there are a good few pages devoted to that.
MS: At every stage of life, Rick seeks counsel from male writers, and by the end, he himself has become an established writer and mentors a young man in the art. Throughout, his most spiritually engaged relationships seem always to be with men—and with some of those men, Rick takes things beyond the platonic. Women, by contrast, seem primarily palliative in their value to him, when they aren’t a source of amusement (or occasionally bemusement). What is it men do for Rick that women can’t, don’t, or won’t? Or has he failed to see possibilities there?
GG: Good one. Right—and in the last part of the book, he confesses that the connections with men have been more important. Probably because of all the baggage that comes with romantic relationships. But men are more slithery, in some ways. There’s the competition aspect that comes up with the German character, Gerhardt. And the brother, in a way. And, most notably, his closest friend, who is not fully described until the last section. It’s easier to say nothing to men and get somewhere—you can’t do that with women. They are too smart, too verbal. Maybe women remind him too much of his mother—and the tagline of hers that haunts him: “If you don’t solve your problems with me, you’re going to have these same problems in all your relationships.” She means the female ones, but I think it applies to both sexes.
MS: The book’s tone and syntax swerve again near the end, this time toward the tragically poetic. It’s also where youthful illusions seemingly overcome return, in old age, to taunt Rick, undoing whatever rapprochement with life he’d achieved in the middle years. The truce is apparently over. What had seemed, then, a novel of spiritual formation becomes…what exactly? Whatever the case, it’s a resounding, majestic finale—for us, anyway, if not for Rick.
GG: Here’s one I can’t answer in a straight manner. I should say that I’m most happy with this section because it took the most work. I completed the draft in 2018, but didn’t start the third section until the winter of 20–21, with Covid raging. At first I didn’t know what it needed, until I saw that it needed him as an old man, dealing with where he had left his life. The tone had to be different and I think it took a while to come up with it. And when it did come it was in lightning-fast, stream-of-consciousness type of thing. My family and I were in a big rented house in Connecticut and I went upstairs in the farthest room and just looked out at the mounds of snow. I started rereading one of Coetzee’s semi-fictionalized books, Youth. And that just jiggled something and soon I was off building this different time period. I had to complicate all that had come before and draw it out of my consciousness of being older—and I was finally ready to do it, to leave the comforts of writing from the perspective of youth and explore the real bitterness of old age and regrets.
MS: Pondering his life from somewhere near its end, Rick says near the start of the book that his motto could be “it didn’t feel right”; that his “agita” found him early, which is to say, before many of the affronts of living. A question recurred to me throughout my reading, one that still vexes me: do you think it’s mostly that the world betrays him, time and again, or that his natural temperament—melancholic, aloof, irritable—fails to do justice to the world’s complicated merits, and so sets him up for a life of discontent?
GG: Well, the world betrays everyone—the key is how we react to that. Life is unfair and beautiful at the same time. Love fades. It seems he struggles to find his place—but, of course, he says this all in retrospect. I don’t think he knew that the agita found him early until he was on that beach at seventy years old. Doesn’t it sometimes take that long to come to terms with our lives? We fight our temperaments for decades and maybe we don’t let go until it’s in our interest to let go, but what if our interests have become passionless? Maybe the book charts loss of passion—it’s there in art and nature at the beginning, then with his family, and then something happens. He isn’t as successful as he wanted to be, or he wanted people to love him in a certain way and they didn’t; but he feels lost on this earth, no matter the love that is there. Rick doesn’t put out enough love, so what can he expect in return?