A. It’s definitely, definitely not about mulch. You all made me swear I’d say it’s not about mulch.
Q. What is it about, then?
A. OK. Maybe it’s a little bit about mulch. But really it’s about a father, Jack Lang, who simply cannot get his life together, no matter how hard he tries—and it’s about Jack’s relationship with his autistic son, and his relationship with his wife, and his girlfriend, and the girlfriend’s boyfriend. It’s also sometimes about mini-golf and karaoke and fire. And dogs.
Q. Jack doesn’t always seem to be trying to get his life together. Sometimes he seems to be doing the opposite, in fact.
A. I’m not sure he knows that—or I’m not sure he always knows it. I don’t think he’s innocent of most of the things his wife Beth accuses him of, but I’m not sure it’s right to say he’s guilty, either. Mainly, he’s lost. One of the ways I started to understand Jack was when I started to understand that even when he’s not doing the best thing he can do, he’s still trying, in his own broken-down way, to make things right, if he can see how. And then there’s the one place—and I’m not saying he’s in line to win parenting awards—where he does manage, almost, to hold things together, and that’s with his son, Hendrick. The rest of the world can be absolute chaos, and Jack still knows where Hen is, what he needs. Or at least he knows as well as anyone could know.
Q. Which brings us to Hendrick. He’s the center of the book, in many ways. How did you come to write that character? And why did you choose to make him autistic?
A. I grew up with an autistic brother. This character isn’t a replica of my brother, or even a version of him, really—my brother, though he was diagnosed in much the same way Hendrick is diagnosed in the novel, is now much more high-functioning than Hendrick is in the book. In fact, he’s more “high-functioning”—a term that carries delicate metaphorical weight, I think—than most of us are: he’s got several graduate degrees, he’s married, he pays his bills on time. But I couldn’t have written Hen if I hadn’t grown up with my brother. Some of the repetitions, the obsessive behaviors, and surely the extraordinary intelligence are shades of what I saw in my brother. If I understand anything about the “disease”—another delicate term—it’s because of my brother.
And I’ll say this: one of the things I love about Hendrick is his filterlessness: he sees the world in much more clear and exact and precise ways, I think, than many of the other characters in the novel are able to. If he’s the center of the book, or if Jack’s relationship with Hen is the center, then that’s part of why. Hen sees the world for what it is. The rest of the characters—the rest of us, fictional or not—aren’t always able to.
Q. We have to ask: is Hendrick’s progress in the novel—his improvement—clinically accurate? Or possible?
A. I’m not a doctor, and I don’t pretend to be. But one of the things that’s so vexing about autism and Asperger’s and the like is that they’re spectrum disorders—there is no common set of the same six things each diagnosed person evidences. There are families of behaviors common across diagnosed patients, and there are common therapies, but a spectrum disorder means just that: the diagnosed patient lands somewhere in a family of recognizable maladies. How and whether to treat those maladies is often a deeply difficult question.
Can progress be made, though? Absolutely. And can progress be sudden? Sometimes. I mean in no way to represent Hendrick as a “normal” or an “average” child suffering, if that’s even the right word, from autism spectrum disorder. But I do think that there are patients like him, and I do stand by him as an accurate representation of someone with autism.
Q. Why all the domestic drama? Why the partner-swapping?
A. I didn’t really mean for any of that to be there at first. But my wife woke me up one morning saying, “You have to get up. They’re auctioning the stuff from the house across the street. This is your kind of thing.” And it was my kind of thing—I went over there, and there was a moment, like there is in the book, where the house itself was up for sale, and it was the same layout as our house, and for a lot less money, and I thought, “Huh.” I didn’t buy it, but that got stuck somewhere in my head, and then I realized I had, at least, the initial problem of the book: what would Beth do if Jack bought the house across the street? And I realized: if that wasn’t all he’d done—if it was part of a pattern; if she was exhausted, and exasperated, and over it—then she just might leave him for a little while.
Q. That’s the thing: Jack’s not even sure if she’s really left. How can that be?
A. I’m not sure he’s ever that sure about anything. He’s often bad at his life. He’s good at his son, but basically terrible at his marriage. He doesn’t mean any malice in that—he just can’t always hear Beth when she asks him for things. And then she’s gone, and she’s moved in with his best friend, mainly because she’s got no real place else to turn, and then his best friend’s ex-girlfriend knocks on his door, and then everything’s a mess—but if it works, and I hope it does, then it’s because of the messiness. I’ve been in enough romantic fiasco to know that we tend to do some foolish things, so I tried to let these people do foolish things, and then I tried to figure out what the fallout from that might be.
Q. Jack doesn’t always react to all this the way you’d think he would, right?
A. Maybe the basic problem is that he’s asleep in a lot of ways, and the novel is about whether or not he can wake up. He’s in trouble. He knows he’s in trouble. He just doesn’t know, at first, at least, what to do with that knowledge.
Q. It doesn’t seem like all this would be fodder for humor: autism, infidelity, financial ruin. What is it that’s funny in that?
A. On the face of it, nothing. But—and this isn’t my idea—I think tragedy is often inextricably bound up with comedy. Maybe laughter and crying are the two basic human outbursts. And sneezing. So maybe there are three basic human outbursts.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. My wife and I are expecting our first child, and I’m finishing a novel about a husband and wife expecting their first child. The husband—in the novel—is terrified of having a child, and in fact semi-secretly doesn’t want to have it. I myself am terrified of having a child, but I’m also excited. Not even semi-secretly. I’m out-and-out excited. I got interested in that fear, though, and then there were enough pages to keep going.
