Elise Levine’s new book, Say This, is composed of two linked novellas that take on the aftermath – both immediate and over decades – of a violent, meth-fueled murder. But this is far from your typical crime novel. Critics have characterized Levine’s previous books — two collection of stories and two novels — as lyrical, experimental, and genre-bending. Those qualities are all the more evident in the context of the current subject matter.
In the first of the two novellas, Eva Hurries Home, the title character, now in her early 40s, reflects on her sexual relationship with her older cousin, the man who goes on to commit the crime central to this book, when she was just a young teen. That cousin is now in prison for life, and a celebrity reporter is hoping to speak with Eva about the murder. The second section, Son One, moves between the points of view of the victim’s siblings, his father, and his stepmother. In this novella, Levine seemingly effortlessly applies the abecedarian form – a form which progresses alphabetically so the first section contains sentences beginning with the letter A, the second with the letter B, and so on. Levine’s handling of the form is so deft, readers may not even realize Levine is working with such a strict formal constraint until reading the notes at the end of the book.
Levine addresses questions of identity and the impact of violence as well as addiction, consent, and society’s exploitation of trauma, and does so in gorgeous, surprising, and utterly gripping prose.
Originally from Toronto, Levine teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. She was kind enough to share with us some insights about her process and the inspiration behind her latest book.
Baltimore Fishbowl: How did you come up with the idea for Say This?
Elise Levine: In Spring 2017 I was living in Baltimore—as I still do—and working in Washington (which I no longer do). I was unhappy in my job, and began to think of a character making the same commute, also unhappy, with work, her weariness, a cold spring, rain for days. I wrote a quick draft of what is now Chapter 2 of Eva Hurries Home, the first novella in Say This, and realized that the character Eva needed more room to develop than what a short story could afford but not as much as with a novel. And that I could make use of my sense of gaps surrounding her, of what I didn’t know: at heart her story would be one of silence, the elliptical, what she didn’t know about herself.
Then I wrote what would become the first chapter, which captures the sexual entanglement between Eva and her older cousin when she’s in her early teens, in northern Oregon and southern Washington State, where I had spent an extended period of time a year earlier. And I had the form: fragments surrounded by lots of white space, to model adult Eva’s forensic turning of her splintered memories around in her head and the abrupt, charged choices she now makes. The rest—in which Eva’s cousin has gone on to murder a man, and a celebrity journalist contacts Eva in hopes she’ll reveal the details of what transpired long ago between she and her cousin, for part of a true crime book the journalist is writing—began to fall into place.
BFB: Did you initially set out to write linked novellas?
EL: For years I’d thought that what became the second novella, Son One, which explores a family’s grief in the aftermath of violent crime, would be a short story. But I never knew how to really start, or where it might lead. I was halfway through a complete draft of Eva Hurries Home when it occurred to me that the man Eva’s cousin murders could be the son and brother of the bereaved family. It was as if this narrative had been waiting in the back of my brain for Eva’s to come along before I could reach out and bring the voices of these characters into view.
BFB: One aspect of Say This that stands out – and a characteristic of your work that critics have noted in previous works – is the impressive development of characters. Do you have a particular method for developing characters?
EL: I call it the head-banging method. I keep asking questions about the characters, locating the walls they put around themselves, trying over and over to break through them. I look for their contradictions, what they find unsayable and unknowable about themselves—and how these drive their choices. Usually this is a long process, involving rafts of notes and revisions that include searching for the right register, and part of the challenge for me in writing these two novellas lay in distinguishing between their tone and voices. The strategic use of point of view really helped with this. Eva Hurries Home uses a very close third-person point of view, which fosters intimacy between the reader and character and yet offers a degree of detachment—which suited Eva’s coolly rational yet emotional grapplings with her past and present. Son One uses four first-person narrators whose deeply intimate voices cycle throughout. A strange and welcome experience: nearly the very second I (finally!) finished a complete draft of Eva Hurries Home, much of the sections for each of the characters in Son One came to me fast and furious. The revision process for these involved mostly just tinkering to adjust the voices and various timelines and character arcs.
BF: On a related note, the character who links these novellas, the murderer himself, is seen and heard only in brief scenes and flashbacks mediated through the other characters.
EL: I centered the characters affected by sexual exploitation and the aftermath of violent crime—Eva and the family of the murdered man—rather than the perpetrator’s experiences of what he did and how. I hope I created the grounds in Say This for the reader to at least entertain the possibility of empathy for him. But this ultimately isn’t his story nor is the focus on the acts he’s committed.
BFB: In other interviews, you and your interlocutors have noted the ways in which form and content play off of each other in your work. Has form always been a central consideration in your writing?
EL: I’ve always understood form and style as elements in service of character. But with Say This I felt greater freedom to formally experiment. Here I was writing a novella— when I’d previously written short stories and novels—and then a second one, so why not take things further? Especially in light of the characters’ experiences with the unsayable, the unanswerable, which called out for me to push hard on the use of fragments and white space as a kind counter-text. And also, for Son One, the abecedarian, in which the first section begins with the letter A, the next section with B, and so on to Z, and then back again to A. This form helped me get at the characters’ desperation to impose meaning on what was an essentially meaningless act, a way of trying to contain the immensity of their overpowering grief.
BFB: I have read that you don’t write poetry, but do you read poetry? Do you have favorite poets? Any strong poetic influences? Or influences you’d like to mention in general?
EL: Fiction with its long-haul demands seems to suck me in and give me a good shake and not let me go. I do try to read as much poetry as I can though, for the high-wire attention to language and the compressed interrogations of the self and the forces that pressure it. Poets whose work I’ve recently loved: Diane Seuss, Donika Kelly, Don Mee Choi. Dora Malech, Maureen Hynes. Also, I loved the collection Girls Like Us, by a certain Baltimore-based poet by the name of Elizabeth Hazen.
Virtual Launch for Say This
Elise Levine in Conversation With Jung Yun, March 9 at 7pm sponsored by The Ivy Bookshop, event page here.
