SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
"The Devil Is A Southpaw" is a novel within a novel - a manuscript, we're told, received via airmail from a long-lost friend. The friend, Milton Muleborn, had been living in a yurt in the woods and writes about his childhood rival, Matthew Echota. They were locked up together at an Oklahoma juvenile facility in 1988. It is the latest novel from Brandon Hobson. He's been a finalist for the National Book Award. He's an associate professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He joins us from Las Cruces, New Mexico. Thanks so much for being with us.
BRANDON HOBSON: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: Tell us about these two rivals and occasional friends. Matthew is a young Cherokee artist - cripplingly shy, talented, smart and handsome boy, in your own words. Milton's own words. Your own words. Whatever (laughter). Why does Milton envy him?
HOBSON: Well, first of all, Milton's sanity is questionable, I think. He's a very unreliable narrator. He tries to manipulate the reader by using long sentences and difficult vocabulary and obscure language as an attempt to write a heavy literary work. And he's very envious of Matthew, whom he was locked up with as a kid. They're both artists and they're both writers, and Matthew's had a level of success that Milton was never able to achieve. And he's written his own novel, or what he also calls his memoirs, which is the first part of the manuscript of "The Devil Is A Southpaw."
SIMON: What put them in that juvenile facility?
HOBSON: Well, he tells us, first of all, in part one, that it was an attempt at a school shooting. And we later find out, when he kind of retells his story in part three, that it wasn't that at all. And I spent time working in a juvenile facility with incarcerated youth. I know that there's a lingering trauma from being locked up, and so I wanted to try to convey that in this novel.
SIMON: Well, help us understand a little bit of that, insofar as we can, by reading a few sentences, if we could, about what life is like in the juvenile facility.
HOBSON: Sure.
(Reading) The first night, we were too afraid to fall asleep. All around the facility, where floodlights stood high over the parking lots and basketball court, shadows from the trees spread across the lawn, and a stream of hazy light slanted in from the narrow and soulless windows high on our walls. And how we imagined such a light as a symbol of hope - an apparition streaming its way into our rooms to examine us, abandoned as we were in our solitary rooms.
SIMON: Is that a valid description, you think?
HOBSON: It's a little bit exaggerated from Milton trying, again, to write this very artful novel. And so a big part of this was he uses an exaggerated vocabulary, obscure language and these kind of poetic descriptions in a way that would hopefully challenge the reader. He's using it as a sort of way to create these difficult questions. I think that for him, serious art is where complex and difficult questions are made human and uncomfortable.
SIMON: Oklahoma is so vivid in this novel and often forbidding. You have the storms and screeching birds, you know, instead of the bright golden haze on the meadow.
HOBSON: Right.
SIMON: What do the elements set off in people, in your characters?
HOBSON: Oklahoma's really a strange place. It's - I think it's - you know, a lot of people consider it sort of flyover country, but it's full of hills in parts of it. It can be very pretty. Parts of it can also be very flat and desolate. And part of the birds and the landscape is an important part, I think, of hopefully conveying that desolation and that emptiness and that struggle, especially at a juvenile detention center. And so I wanted to make that setting very dark and desolate.
SIMON: And how do you work in what I'll call celebrity cameos into the book? I mean, speaking of surrealism (laughter).
HOBSON: Yeah. There's - I'm interested in this idea of doppelgangers and doubling. And it was fun to be able to see a - you know, here's a doppelganger of Salvador Dali, and he's going on and on about the band Duran Duran. And I think part of that comes out of also the pleasure of writing the book, and hopefully that comes across in a sort of playful way. It's a serious novel, but it's also supposed to be playful. And so I think with the playful language and vocabulary, the doppelgangers - those are the kinds of novels that I - that really brought me to writing, were books that were challenging and fun.
SIMON: Who's the Brandon H. who makes appearances? A - he's locked up with Milton and Matthew and often feigning illness.
HOBSON: Yeah. That's - that Brandon H. - it's just a very minor character in the book. He feigns illness and tells us that he has received this manuscript from Milton. And he, like - there are a few other minor characters that - who are in the book, and he's just one of them.
SIMON: So is this you?
HOBSON: No. I'm not going to say that it's me, but it is a Brandon H.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: So that - I mean, that could be Brandon Hoogstraten, for example.
HOBSON: It could be. It could be another Brandon Hobson, too. There are - I think there are many.
SIMON: Oh, my word. That hadn't occurred to me. How do you work things out when you're writing a novel? This is a wonderfully intricate story, and it's set over, you know, even different eras in a person's life.
HOBSON: Well, that's a hard question. I - every book is its own thing. You know, there's something magical that happens when someone sits down to write - especially fiction - and pretty soon, three hours have passed. It's a kind of mystical experience, maybe much in the way that prayer can be if you pray for long periods of time or meditate for long periods of time. I very much see creating art in that same way. Time just seems to fly and doors open. A lot of those doors that you enter aren't always the right doors, which is why revision is so important and rewriting. So other doors appear, and you explore those rooms. That's a big part of the writing. I don't - I'm not a plot-heavy writer, and I don't think literary fiction is really designed to be heavy in plot. It's much more interesting to pay attention to language and structure, I think.
SIMON: But it's important to open the doors, find out where they lead.
HOBSON: Absolutely. Of course.
SIMON: Brandon Hobson's new novel, "The Devil Is A Southpaw." Thank you so much for being with us.
HOBSON: Thanks so much for having me. It's an honor.
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