More than a decade after Tin House released his second novel The Dismal Science, Seattle fiction fixture and 2012 Washington State Book Award winner Peter Mountford returns with the story collection Detonator, a darkly funny gaggle of ten works spanning his career. These tales appear in all sorts of highbrow landmarks – The Paris Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Missouri Review – and form a thematically consistent (if, it must be said, tinted) window into the human condition. Dropping readers into Ecuador, Sri Lanka, and Scotland, Detonator echoes Mountford’s worldly childhood and his time spent in both Washingtons, the state and D.C.
Mountford and I met by Greenlake to discuss the new collection, his fiction inspirations, and the craft of short story writing. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
It’s been over ten years since your last novel came out. Aside from teaching, what have you been up to?
I tried writing some sort of genre fiction novels but found that I just didn’t have it in me. I love those books as a reader, like Tana French, character driven mysteries. Or even the more caveman Lee Child stuff. But I couldn’t do it. For whatever reason I think I’m just too closely tied to the world that I know. I would finish whole books, two or three of them. But they just weren’t good. I could tell. I simultaneously started writing long short stories more. And I love those. I would do one or two a year, and I just love them.
In “One More Night Behind the Walls,” you dissect the foibles of adults from the perspective of a child. What other books make you think of this viewpoint?
This story was very directly inspired by “The Point,” a story by Charles D’Ambrosio, in which a 14-year-old boy has a summer job using the family wheelbarrow to transport drunk women home from big ragers at the house. He gets paid like five bucks a trip to take people home. So he’s this sober, clear eyed child in the presence of a completely inebriated woman. I really loved that juxtaposition, and was just entranced by it. My experience [as a child] in Sri Lanka was a little like that, with a lot of drunk expats. There was a lot of extreme violence and mayhem in addition to the [Sri Lankan civil] war. There was violence and mayhem in everyday things.
“Love of Her Life” involves something of a trope: the long-stagnant protagonist trying to escape a rut. Are you drawn to this sort of character, or do you usually avoid them?
I was specifically interested in this thing where we make what we believe to be well informed decisions as adults. I’m gonna go to this college, I’m gonna marry this person. I’m going to have this hobby, get this job. Then the fates intervene, and it’s just chaos. It’s like, why do we bother trying to plan? The decisions we make come ricocheting off and hit in strange ways. So this is a character who makes a bunch of rash decisions foolishly in her 20s, as many of us do, regrets all of them and thinks, that was stupid. And so she kind of resolves, as I’ve seen other people do, to stop making decisions. She is stuck in amber for 10 years or more, because she’s terrified of decisions. So it’s a sort of philosophical question: how do you live in a world in which so much is unknowable?
At the end of “Pay Attention,” you pull back the curtain and perform this big moralistic reveal, which reminds me of some old 19th century authors. “Let me wrap this up for you!” How did you get to that excellent paragraph? Did it take many drafts?
This story was written in two or three weeks, and it just kind of came out in the direct order that it’s read. I don’t know if there’s many of them in this book, but at the end of a short story I sometimes let my mind go blurry a little bit. I just go into the darkness and see what’s in there. I don’t even know necessarily what the themes are at that point, but I’m feeling for meaning, for something that can be lifted up and feel resonant for me. For that one, I don’t know quite what it’s trying to say. But it felt like it fit the story.
In “Out on the Cold Road,” we have a short section that really reveals the narrator’s forgetfulness. In other words, his unreliability. What do you enjoy about this sort of protagonist?
I like that feeling of a character who will actually contradict themselves mid-sentence and say, oh, I’m wrong, it was something else, please disregard those last two pages. I think it’s very fun. With this guy, you can feel how blown apart his mind is. He’s not just unreliable. He’s truly messed up. Like, he can’t think straight at all. He’s a middle class person who gets swept up with these American aristocrats who are zipping around Europe. That was very relatable for me, the experience of being middle class in the presence of fabulously wealthy young people. It’s almost inherently humiliating. That’s what happens in this story. He’s under such intense class pressure. It just breaks him.
Peter Mountford appeared at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park to launch Detonator and an event with Elliott Bay Book Company; contact the stores to inquire about signed copies while supplies last.
Eric Olson is a Seattle novelist and journalist based in Seattle.
