Björk Interviews Ocean Vương

Ocean Vương talks to Björk for Bomb magazine about his new novel:

I was really frustrated by people telling me I had to create drastic change at the end of my fiction, à la Aristotle. That payoff felt closer to commerce: the way you buy a washing machine and it promises to change your life. The boy gets the girl. They find the killer in the end. Rags to riches. When I looked at my life, my family, the people in my community, I realized nobody lives like that. My aunt has worked the same job and driven the same car and lived in the same house for twenty years … That’s not a bad life. That’s a decent life. People aren’t failures because they’re “stuck.” Most of American life is a kind of stuckness, and so much of our culture wants us to make all of that into a winsome, sanguine hope. Optimism for optimism’s sake. And yet the majority of history is filled with people who did not start revolutions, who didn’t break out of the abusive relationship, who got stuck fighting in wars that they didn’t believe in. Most of history consists of people who are trapped by what they are but who still try their best. I wanted to write about kindness without hope, where people know that kindness will make no significant change in their lives and yet they commit to it anyway. I knew that no character would get a better job or have a grand epiphany at the end of this book. They end exactly where they started, but they are transformed, internally, because of each other.

I told my editors that this is my slump book. (laughter) I don’t know if it’s going to do well. It doesn’t do any of the things that American fiction usually depends on to sell units. There’s no thing to grab at the end. When you buy a bag of potato chips, you at least know you’ll get sixteen ounces of potato chips, whereas I can’t promise that anybody will get anything from this book.

I am almost done with the book.