Adam Novy, The Avian Gospels
, Short Flight / Long Drive Books, 2010."A city without a name is cursed by a plague of birds they probably deserve. But when an angry beggar child and his father learn they have the power to lift the curse—they “control” birds—they cannot agree on how to use their gift, and end up using it on each other, taking out everyone around them, especially those they love."
“Imagine an alternate world in which Hungary borders on Oklahoma, where Norwegians and gypsies are secretly linked, where the cultural codes we think we know are reconfigured to become defamiliarized, and where characters slowly morph into their opposites. The Avian Gospels is about the birth and death of a religion, the birth and death of a city and the people in it. Novy's novel explores the way that myth is made and unmade, and is an impressive debut.”– Brian Evenson
"This debut has the potential to become a cult classic, if readers aren't distracted from the oddly compelling story by the unconventional structure. The beleaguered residents of an unnamed mythical city long at war with Hungary are enjoying a parade to mark the end of the "endless war." In the midst of the parade, refugee Zvominir's wife goes into labor, and then dies giving birth to their son in the abandoned storefront they call home. Seventeen years later, Zvominir and Morgan, his son, are "the Bird Man and Bird Boy"; they can control birds but are opposed in their outlooks and philosophies. But when the city suffers from a bird invasion so large that they block out the sun, the pair are commanded by their tyrannical ruler, Judge Charles Giggs, to clear the birds away, and soon the citizens (including the Judge's daughter, Katherine) and the birds are caught up in a conflict of ideals. Cleverly formatted in a Biblical style, this is a fascinating examination of what makes a martyr, a myth, or a legend." - Publishers Weekly
"The second half of the strange, apocalyptic story begun in August 2010's The Avian Gospels picks up immediately where the first one left off in a bird-filled city beset by rumor and turmoil. Morgan, the Bird Boy, has gone missing after a confrontation with Mike Griggs, the wastrel son of Judge Griggs. Taking advantage of the distraction, Zvominir the Birdman wrests control of a gang of rebels from Jane, who is pregnant with Morgan's child. As these troubled characters and their minions, allies, and foes seek Morgan, war overwhelms the city. The escalating deterioration of the various family relationships mirrors the destruction of the city and the surrounding countryside, and the end of order and civility. While the ending is consistent with the characters' established behavior, readers may still be vaguely disappointed by the lack of clear resolution. 11-city author tour." - Publishers Weekly
“Wildly imaginative, emotionally complex, gorgeously captured and crafted, Adam Novy’s two-volume literary aviary — so stuffed with birds you’ll want to keep your handsome copies nailed to the table lest they fly off or at you — is one of the most original novels I’ve read in months, maybe years.”– Laird Hunt
“I write from the aftermath of The Avian Gospels’ last sentence. There are feathers and blood on the floor, my location: a jackknifed timeline on shaken tectonic tiles. I have seen the horrors of broken fidelities to kin and creed, brutal sights of carnage and betrayal. But I have also seen soaring, beautiful, sculptures—sights never before imagined or dreamt. I blame Adam Novy for all of this.” – Salvador Plascencia
“You could call what Adam Novy's doing magical realism, but he writes as though the Latin American Boom never happened. In the world of the Avian Gospels, fire drools, houses wander like a mind, and the map has been rearranged so that China, Oklahoma, and of course, the dreaded Hungary butt up against each other in constant war. Even more striking, the novel contains all the pleasures or more conventional stories -- suspense, romance, violence, and slapstick. While the news he proclaims is not exactly good, Novy has written an authentic gospel for our time.”– Christian Tebordo
"If providing readers with hope for the world is one of the great dishonesties of contemporary fiction, then Adam Novy is as honest as they come. Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospels, is a cruel parable of waste and degeneration, set in a rough hybrid of the American Midwest and post-Kosovo Eastern Europe. Given in two volumes, and handsomely bound in red and gold, The Avian Gospels is a strange and unsentimental epic of a post-war city-state that wages war against its own population while struggling with a city-wide infestation of birds.
Our hero is Morgan, born at the end of an earlier war and raised by his father, Zvominir, an anxious and conservative immigrant. After seventeen years of peace and poverty, the birds arrive: “a hundred thousand cardinals in the Square like a sea of dried blood.” They flood the city, blocking the streets, drowning the sky, filling shops and houses. The gypsies, an immigrant population, think of them as miracles. To the suburban bourgeoisie, however, the birds are an irritant, a danger to business, something that needs to be shooed away.
But there’s something you should know: Morgan can control these birds with his mind. So, as it turns out, can Zvominir, though he keeps his miraculous talent a secret and urges his son to do the same. But Morgan, always rebellious, begins to manipulate the flocks of birds as street theater, guiding them into formation, creating living portraits and depictions of historical scenes. And, as his father feared, the state takes notice.
In these early pages, Novy introduces all the novel’s major characters: the city’s sadistic tyrant, the Judge, and his wife, Mrs. Giggs; the Judge’s idiot son, Mike, who chases Morgan around the city with his gang of bullies; and Mike’s sister, Katherine, who pines after Morgan from afar. Behind them, Novy’s city is sparse and barely detailed, full of generic mobs and crowds: “Bystanders knew he was the Bird Boy, and looked at him with fear.” So much for the outside world. And the inside world is given in equally broad strokes: “It won’t be long now, she thought. I’m scared, he thought. What was he going to do without her, she wondered.”
Morgan’s firebrand politics soon emerge. “I want a revolution, I want justice,” he tells his father, after a violent meeting with the Judge’s family. As they walk home, they meet a band of RedBlacks, the city’s police-force, and are beaten nearly to death. This is one of many examples of institutional brutality in The Avian Gospels. The city, we learn, is like a camp: there is always the potential for the vicious RedBlacks to beat or kill gypsy or gypsy-like bodies.
As Morgan becomes more radical, he falls in love with Jane, a true insurgent. After Jane’s brother is killed, she plots to “overthrow the city.” At first Morgan helps her steal from supermarkets and department stores; eventually, Jane convinces him to help blow up buildings. In one night, she destroys a bank, an armory, and a doughnut shop. “I used to believe in pacifism,” Jane declares. “Now I believe in this.”
Jane and Morgan come to live, with the rest of the gypsies, in a network of underground tunnels. Like a more successful version of Germany’s Red Army Faction, she is soon using Morgan’s mythic abilities to inspire a citywide insurgency. Morgan, still performing for the public during the day, follows her lead in the evenings and urges other gypsies to mimic her violence: “Get off your ass and blow shit up.”
Novy zips through the plot. Over several exhausting pages, we follow Jane as she robs a department store; then we see Morgan declared the messiah of the gypsies; then, Morgan lies to Jane to appear more sexually experienced; consequently, Morgan and Jane almost break-up; and after everything, “they finally fucked.” At the end of this slim chapter, we see that Morgan has learned a lesson, “that he had friends, he had a girlfriend, and the family he hadn’t known he’d wanted.”
Oh boy. But this cliché, given the glorious mess of plot which lies behind it, is barely more than a joke, a code Novy playfully throws into the mix. Novy’s approach is consistently tweaked. Following the promise of his title, the novel begins with a soaring gospel, full of bathos: “[I]f you could witness His wondrous methods you surely would fizzle in awe, so decent and grand is He.” That rude, un-Biblical “fizzle” gives it away: while there might be lessons in The Avian Gospels, Novy isn’t giving us any lectures.
This is a recklessly inventive novel. At times, Novy’s careful artlessness can seem sloppy. When the Judge orders Zvominir to keep the birds from his property, the dialogue is rough, tin-eared:
You will come to my house, and do your birdshow for my daughter, on a trial basis. Make it rated G, keep her happy, and don’t piss off my wife if you can help it, I know I can’t. Keep in mind how hot I am to kill you. I live about an hour from the center of town.
This craftedly implausible dialogue may seem, to less sympathetic readers, like bad implausible dialogue—but given the horrors this book contains, the violence, the carefully paced plotting, and the strategic destruction of sentiment—it’s safe to say that Novy is in on the joke.
And yet, if there is a joke in these sections, a parody of seriousness, then it’s an open question how much Novy is laughing along. The Avian Gospels is a novel of bodies thrown around by power, and of the violent responses such power often compels. Sometimes, there is no possibility of peace. The police state Novy gives us is about as familiar a political organization as one finds in the 20th century, and the “terrorist” resistance which follows is no more or less brutal than any other. But as historically familiar as all this might seem, Novy has still written a cruel book—less about birds than about the simple failure of statehood. This is a strange, compelling, and relevant work of art." - Matt McGregor
"Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels, published in two pocket-sized volumes made to look like the Bibles you find in hotel drawers (faux-leather covers, gilt page edges, etc.), is no evangelical manual-for-living, but a “gospel” of a distinctly literary sort: a work of imagination and allegory, transforming contemporary America into a fantastical world.
“I’m from a suburb near Chicago called Northbrook,” says Novy, 39, now living in Irvine, California. “It is everywhere and nowhere, which is probably why my book takes place in some imaginary city that could be anywhere.” The “city” that Novy creates is part sci-fi, part Gabriel Garcia Marquez: an indefinite geography bordered by Hungary and Oklahoma, an anyplace filled with a nameless civilization that has suffered through a long war with a merciless enemy. Now, they find themselves overrun by birds, a Hitchcock film’s worth of birds that they try to trap and kill, but that just keep coming back. Below these people, both in social caste and literally (having built a world for themselves in the subterranean tunnels left after the war) are a race of gypsies who play ska and worship birds and who are daily oppressed by the dominant race’s militant Red-Black soldiers, bored and craving violence in this time of peace. “Peace” is a relative concept, here. Faced with this unending bird epidemic—this enemy that cannot be easily or directly fought—peace turns out to be far more upsetting to the Red-Blacks than war ever was.
Into this world come a father and son, Zvoninir and Morgan, believed to be gypsies though claiming to be Swedes. Morgan is an only child, his mother having died in childbirth, and is the precocious and bratty counter to his father’s soft-spoken submissiveness. Both share, however, a unique talent: They can control birds. They can make birds dance, can configure birds into flying sculptures, and most importantly they can make birds go away. Thus the book’s initial setup: a civilization oppressed by an enemy it cannot simply destroy, that hungers for a violent solution to its problem, if not for the relief of violence generally, is forced instead to put forth a diplomatic foot, and enlist the help of the very people it oppresses. Novy, who started the novel in 2004 while living in Chicago, is certainly aware of the ways his plot suggests parallels to circumstances in America today.
“One thing that interested me when I was writing was the feeling of being justified,” he says. “After 9/11, our country thought it had the right to go and fuck up other countries, as though we had been dumped, and felt we had to find a girl who looked a little like the girl who had just dumped us, who we in turn could fuck and dump, or in this case, invade and obliterate.”
In fact, the theme of terrorism is played out in both the back- and foreground of The Avian Gospels, and the critique of American foreign policy is palpable; yet as the book progresses, the story grows complicated. We meet the ruler of this land, called The Judge, a tyrannical figure who it turns out has a family and a whole slew of problems all his own. Morgan, meanwhile, falls in love with a gypsy, Jane, founder of a terrorist resistance movement, and finds himself caught between worlds. Other characters enter the fray, and a practically Shakespearean plot plays out, thick with sex, revenge and, of course, politics.
Against such classical drama, the novel’s Biblical packaging might seem a bit unusual—and, of course, it is unusual. In fact, it was his publisher’s idea, but one that Novy says he was immediately taken with, not only for the play on the “Gospels” of the title, but because it points readers back to the novel’s allegorical nature.As a form, allegory is at its best when it both does and doesn’t correspond to the world-as-we-know-it; when you can see correlations, but the story isn’t contained or defined by them. It’s literature’s way of being political without being predictable, or without being political only. Novy says that he wanted The Avian Gospels “to read like a bogus social studies lesson told by somebody untrustworthy.” It’s a terrible recipe for pedantry, but not bad at all for art." - Martin Riker
"I'd heard a lot about The Avian Gospels (Short Flight / Long Drive Books) before ever reading it. I'd stared at those covers online, the red and gold, the abstract of birds in flight, and imagined what a combination of The Birds, The Road, and The Stand might look like. Would it be dense language, a languid read of heavy prose? The sample online hinted at that. Would it be a story of nature rebelling against man, an image of a phone booth, birds attacking it, stuck in my head? Would it be a journey across the wastelands, a cast of misfits striving for redemption? It is all of these things, and at the same time, none.
The first word to come to mind when describing The Avian Gospels is surreal. The beautiful oxblood covers frame the two volume set, and immediately set the tone with their embossed gold stamping of birds slowly gathering, the gilded edges painting the rounded corners with shimmering flakes. It gives off a prophetic, biblical vibe, complete with numbers running down the sides of each page to mark the scripture of your choice. The Avian Gospels is set in the near future, where this city without a name has been shrouded in birds, a plague of flapping wings and desecration. This is an alternate future where Oklahoma and Hungary butt up against each other and society has descended into a battle between the RedBlacks and the gypsies, with the constant threat of the Swedes and Hungarians, just beyond the borders. The rich live above ground, or far away in the suburbs, while the gypsies hide in the tunnels, struggling to survive. The Giggs family rules over it all: the brutal Judge is in charge of the war, slowly losing his mind; his wife is but a ghost after the death of their eldest son, Charlie, in the war; the vengeful younger son Mike is left to his own destructive devices; and the lonely daughter Katherine wanders around the house as sanctuary to the looping soundtrack of shrieking parrots and the echoing gasps of death. Zvominir, and his son, Morgan, can control the birds, both a gift and a curse, and do so with differing ambitions. They send the birds away by day, but the beasts always return for the elaborately staged shows, at night. Morgan weaves the birds into hypnotic shapes, changing landscapes, and the faces of his lovers. It is a brutal, lonely life, this dystopia, every day a new challenge, with violence a commonality, death at the hands of your enemies, and friends.
At its heart, The Avian Gospels, is a love story, a coming-of-age tale of Morgan, the wunderkind, seeking to escape the rule of his father, the Bird Man, evolving into the new prophet and messiah. It doesn't take long for Morgan to fall for Katherine, daughter of the Judge, the one girl he should avoid. Their eventual couplings are carried out in secret, hidden underground. But at the same time, it seems he has gotten Jane pregnant, this self-appointed leader of the gypsies, queen of fire and destruction. Their future lies buried in the ruins of uncertainty, under the oppressive weight of their emotions. Every day gypsies are beaten and killed, and it doesn't take long for Jane to seek revenge on the RedBlacks, to stage an uprising in the name of love, for her abruptly murdered brother, Billy.
When there is nothing but chaos, the point of view in this story can only be fragmented and scattered. It shifts from the angry plans of the Judge to the sadness and concern of Zvominir, two fathers that watch over their children with little control or reward. To see such violence through the eyes of these lost teens, to sit in the heart and mind of Jane, Morgan, Katherine, and Mike, is to take the fear and loneliness of your typical teenager, and multiply it by a thousand, the chance of a brutal death imminent, the constant need to kill or be killed, mutating any chance of a normal childhood into that of desperation, revenge, and survival. And yet, even amidst this insanity, they are still teenagers, they still seek approval, still want to have fun with their friends, and belong to a group, even if it means joining a clique that is hell-bent on blowing up buildings, burning down barracks, and beating other kids to death in the name of a false god and elusive goal.
The language is both a dark poetic and the voices on the street, mixing dense prose that often pauses to reflect on the barbaric world around them with that of thugs and bitter teens, every threat riddled with profanity, every motivation driven by power, and sex.
Consider the following example:
"But we do not weep at your untimely death, Swede; you who were unchained from your body and freed; as from an Eqypt of the soul. It is we who are doomed, and you who are released, we who, spirit-corpses, toil beneath the living, brandishing our phantom-knives at plethoras of nothing, and you who see the Earth from above, clenched and pulsing, like a sparrow's heart."
Compared with:
"Punch me, said the tutor. Beat my face into a mess. Are you crazy, Mike asked, I won't do it. Tom and Gus said, We'll do it! You guys back off, said the tutor. It's between me and him. I don't want to hit you, Mike said. You're a pussy, said the tutor. A coward, a girl, a fag, afraid to fight.
As the tutor hurled insults, Mike hit him, blasting punches at his face, swung his hands like hammers."
Violence begets violence, and the outcome of these desperate measures has been wrapped in bloody rags and dropped in the dust for all to witness. The empty heads of those that have been to war, ringed with buzzing flies and covered in the stench of decomposition, have seen their loved ones die at their feet, with little or no help on the horizon. This is not a story for the weak of heart, or mind. It shows mankind at its worst, with little remorse or regret, and leaves us with a sinking feeling in our gut--the loss of so much, hard to swallow. In the end one can really only react to The Avian Gospels in one of two ways: absorb the destruction, and descend into the darkness and depression, embracing the soiled aspects of humanity as your own, or, wake up and run towards the light, eternally grateful that this is not our lot in life, our time to fight these horrific battles, the realities of our current lives so much better than what they could have been.
This book does not sit firmly in the lyrical prose of Cormac McCarthy, nor does it remain centered in the epic storytelling of Stephen King. You can certainly glean aspects of The Road or The Stand, but this is not a mash-up. It is more elusive than that. It forced me to think about what the author was trying to say, what the message was, and how my own experiences certainly must be shaping this reaction, my own history with violence and betrayal. As the hamster wheels in my head spun around and around, and I strained to decipher the babble of bible verses drifting in the wind, flashes of movie screens unfurled before me, toothpicks shoved in my eyes. I had the sensation of a heavy weight settling on my chest, the uneasy feeling that I was missing something, the blur in front of my eyes nothing but hazy shadows that would certainly slam into focus if I would only concentrate. To truly understand the Avian Gospels you have to open yourself up to it, to yourself, and that's not a comfortable thing to do." - Richard Thomas
"In September 2010, Hobart/Short Flight/Long Drive Books releases Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels Book I. After a summer of earthquakes in Indonesia, on September 4th, a volcano begins to erupt, thousands are feared homeless, lost, dead. September 21st, Vol. 1 Brooklyn interviews Adam Novy. September 23rd, the West Virginia Senate begins talks on providing rights for relatives of miners lost in coal tunnel accidents in response to last April’s explosion at the West Virginia Upper Big Branch Mine. September 30th, Angelina Jolie visits flood victims in Pakistan. October 13th, the trapped Chilean Miners are rescued. October 20th, James Yeh says to me, “You wanna take a look at the Novy?” October 30th, ink cartridges believed to have originated in the Yemeni region are found on cargo planes heading to Dubai, Chicago and elsewhere. November 15th, I open the Adam Novy Book I and Book II copies and proceed to read while sipping green tea specifically because Kyle Minor will not stop posting incessantly on his Facebook page about seeking healthy alternatives to soda after a recent trip to Haiti. December 9th, today, I summarize for the first time in a book review, God forgive us all.
I read The Avian Gospels Book I with an incredibly skeptical eye. In an effort to locate the reader, Novy chooses to open the work with an explanation of beliefs in his Dystopian and to my mind, Ecotopian world. (Ecotopian fiction is the wing of Dystopian fiction wherein the author posits either a utopian or dystopian world revolving around environmental conservation or destruction. The novel The Bridge [1973] by D. Keith Mano presents a world dominated by a global environmental fascism, where the government ultimately promotes the extinction of the human race by enforced mass suicide, so as to “save” the environment.) The Avian Gospels is an updated Ecotopian work in its use of the environment by man to attempt a subset of man’s entire genocide, and the book fuses a myriad of philosophical questions presented in the inherent struggle therein. Bear with me, I’m getting there.
The book opens with an introductory explanation on what we are to expect, this opening letter is written with such lyricism that we are intoxicated in the charms that are to befall us. We are indeed prepared for the tunnel into which we descend.
A man who is a bird in his own way, who is not a bird, who can control birds brings birth to the world, while becoming a widower. His wife dies during the birth of his son, and we meet our characters. A gang of incredulous and solid yet torrid mortals captive by world pained with war, starvation, dirt, hate make our allegory, our religious metaphor and referencing, our plot. Read carefully, for in these pages, a bible. We find Moses, we find Babel, we find Novy pulling out all the Dystopian stops:
“His village had been razed, his people scattered through a world inhospitable; his wife had died before his eyes. Every single thing that he had loved had been destroyed except his son. His face scared almost everyone, all horizontal wrinkles, shadowed hollows, like a cliff worn down by weather, his green eyes wide and terrified and ringed by circles dark enough it seemed he was a door to the abyss.”
Men try to find their way through life under consistent Hitchcockian attack via Aves—the winged, bipedal, endothermic, egg-laying, vertebrates we call birds. The birds serve as allegory for varying strife and the phases we attempt to fly over, below, and through. There is a love story, there is a familial duty story, there are Kafkian references to four political movements; The Penal Colony rises from the grave and sings as a beautiful feminine ghost, long hair floating behind her, swimming through the air. There is a common fight toward hope and survival.
The work feels as though Adam Novy was writing for his life, actually. Like he set out to prove something. Foreshadowing, plot twist, all the elements woven like an unworn night cloak. The work is about vulnerability, but it is told with such a strong voice that it at times risks sounding too authorial. Sometimes Novy stamps at the page instead of letting the words flow from it, but we keep reading. “There was nothing left to do but destroy her.” We are consistently met with charging though the night sentences and imagery. The writer has stamina. A very controlled at most times narrative, humanity and vulnerability do simultaneously seep through, perhaps against Novy’s steering, actually, but now and then, simplicity in complication is there, exhaustion is there. “I do what I have to do to keep my wife from crying.” “Nothing is real here, least of all me.”
Our major characters: Zvominir, a father; Morgan, a son; the Judge, a father; Mike Giggs, a son; Katherine, a sister, a daughter, a love; Jane, a vigilante, a love, a vehicle. Outerlying characters include a mother, armies of “RedBacks,” species of birds, Hungary, Gypsies, a gang of Rosencrantz and Guildensternish (yet unfunny) men such as one named Chico, war itself, starvation itself, guns, mortality, an omnipresent narrator, the Tutor, the book looking like a bible itself as physical object which consistently gets us looks from people in the coffee shop. By the way, Novy, I loved the Metallica reference on p. 271. Let’s move on to Book II, which is what we’re supposed to be talking about.
Book II:
The RedBlacks have won, Charlie Giggs Jr. has grown and our author Novy, within the first three sentences, is making a statement on wartime draft. Then comes the nod to Carver’s Popular Mechanics, fitting with the rest of the narrative, two worlds at war, essentially. But what Novy is able to do is then create the war within the war. The Judge, who is leading the larger war is more finely watched via microscope, we are not only given his war professionally, we are given it in greater layering personally, we are given his narrative at home: “The Judge did not return to the house for three days, and when he finally re-appeared at six am, he was drunk, and barged into Mike’s room. Mrs. Giggs tried to seize the boy, to protect him, but in the melee, Mike was dropped, and started screaming. His parents pretended not to hear him.” A war-torn home leading the middle of war-torn lands.
Katherine comes into her own, escaping the walls of her house, hiring a driver to take her to liquidate her bank (interestingly called “Boston”), while passing a field of wildflowers in the car. We are torn with love affairs. Writes Novy: “Katherine, always Katherine, as if his daydreams lingered in the sky and still made Jane suffer.” Katherine and Jane both serve the narrative, and women for that matter, as veritable Joan of Arcs and the fact that women are depicted so loudly, so strongly, yet thought of so tenderly by our protags is quite moving, actually. Outerlying character Andre (who is a poet as character), stays with us throughout the work. “He was tall, and seemed to judge her from above, with a dark and sleazy gaze that seemed to say he knew her all too well.”
We are met with so many intricate personal wars within the larger war, that we are reminded of our own. Novy uses the larger to ask us in the smaller, to not forget, to remember what it’s like to have a sore back: “When Zvominir came to our part of the city to de-bird, his professional veneer had disappeared. Anytime the birds suggested patterns in the sky, he’d start to weep, claw his face, or cry out at the sky. The de-birding would stop, he’d forget he was at work, and stare off at nothing. RedBlacks gently tapped him, to remind him of his job.”
We are brought deeper toward the Ecotopian philosophies, inescapable and proudly pronounced. It is some pretty punk writing: “A night of rain had cleared the sky of smoke, and Katherine could see the whole city from the rooftop, the venus flytrap river and the trees like squatting turkeys, and slums where streets were thriving with rebellion…Birdclouds blocked the sun and revealed it, blocked and revealed it. People sang together when the birds were overhead, and their prayers were like laments, strange and reproachful. Who was the God that had left them in this dreadful situation?” (This dreadful situation we realize is geographically in a world where continents have fused, by the way.)
Through tunnels we find pain, faith, fighting. “Nightingales roared like lions, and that is how she knew.” The safety our character once slightly knew is overtaken, women are made to live in houses with a half dozen others, our beings are defeated and fighting, a head, as Saint Valentine’s wife’s heart, sent in a box. An Oulipian moment on point of view aptly and cleanly stated: “It seemed like an embellishment at this point to call herself ‘I.’ And yet, she persisted. We’ll get through it together.” A gorgeous, complicated work where everything is all and nothing is all and everything and characters alone become one through wading waters made of their own lack of humanity and deeper sense of humanity. A triumphant publishing project for Hobart, and an inquiry into the future of fiction." - Nicolle Elizabeth
"To be totally honest with you, when I first received parts 1 and 2 of The Avian Gospels, (Short Flight/Long Drive) I thought to myself, “no fucking way”. The books are designed to look and read like The Bible, and in the hands of most people, that could be a terrible idea. But after reading both books, I thought to myself “hey, this is like a cross between The Birds, The Road, and The Stand, except way more out there. I should ask Adam Novy a few questions.”
When you started writing The Avian Gospels, was it your intention for it to look like the bible?
- Splitting the book in two and making it look a Bible were the ideas of my editor, Aaron Burch, who runs Hobart, along with Elizabeth Ellen. Aaron’s a really bright guy and he did a great job. His vision is unusual and creative. I’m blessed to have ended up with him. He understood the project incredibly well.
Not to make this a theological interview, but are you very interested in religion, and stories from the bible?
- I’ve always wanted to write a sequel to the Bible. There’s a poppy, grindhouse aspect to it, crazy things are always happening—Lot’s daughters, Job, the Tower of Babel, the death of Moses, Christ, etc.—it’s terse and violent and engrossing in the same way as, like, zombie movies or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I knew there was some overlap between what I was writing and that uncanny tone and pace. The reportage is so deadpan and the stories are so old the reader ends up in a place of incredulous belief. The prose makes its own kind of truth.
When I started writing The Avian Gospels, not long after 9/11, the news had that same weird quality. Some guy with a beard in a cave hatched a plot to fly airplanes into buildings? I abetted him whenever I bought gas? I figured it was true, but as someone from a suburb in the midwest, I found these interconnections inconceivable. The book was an attempt to reckon with the feeling that we were suddenly part of history in a way we didn’t understand, that we were all inadequate to the task and that our old social narratives only left us more confused. A lot of 9/11 books focus on people finding their inner children, or discovering that their lives before the tragedy had been fatuous, and that a new and more productive, almost spiritual way of life had been revealed. This is wishful thinking, really. As James Ellroy says, “Closure is bullshit.”
How long did it take you to write the book? Did you write both parts at the same time?
- It took about three-and-a-half years to write the book, a year to find an agent—the indefatigable Susan Golomb—another year of re-writes, and a year to find a publisher. I don’t want to know how long that is. When Barack Obama got elected, I thought there might be unity and the book would be obsolete, but it didn’t seem to work that way. Just two days ago, I read that anti-masturbationist Christine O’Donnell once ate dinner on a blood-slaked altar to the devil. I guess I’m a realist.
What are you working on for the future?
- Right now, I’m writing a novel about Perseus and Medusa. I’m pretty sure it’s called The Gore and the Splatter. Like The Avian Gospels, it takes place in a world that’s half mythic past, half the 80’s suburbia I grew up in.
What gives you the willies more: avian influenza or the movie The Birds?
- The avian flu seemed like a hoax to me, but swine flu scared me shitless. I was teaching at Long Beach City College at the time, which is not the kind of place where folks have health insurance, and my students and I had this feeling of inevitable doom, even though, in the end, none of us got sick. I kind of feel like I might die in a plague.
I like The Birds, of course, but trendy viruses scare me more. Have you heard of Morgellon’s Disease? The victims grow colored fibers from their skin! Doctors mostly refuse to admit this disease exists—no cause has been determined—but it’s a big hit on Youtube, and many people insist they have it. The internet can make me believe anything for, like, five minutes." - Interview with Jason Diamond
Interview with Katherine Krause
