Photo by Yanina Gotsulsky
Once best known as the voice behind the popular literary blog The Elegant Variation that championed favorite writers and called out subpar writing and reviewing, Mark Sarvas is now an internationally lauded novelist in his own right. His debut, Harry, Revised, offers audiences a laugh-out-loud comedy laced with pathos, regret, and redemption. It was a finalist for the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Award and a selection for the Denver Post Good Reads.
Sarvas’s second novel, Memento Park, loosely based on his family’s history, maintains his signature viewpoint and undertone of humor while delivering a new take on what it means to be the child of a Holocaust survivor. It’s a riveting mystery about art reparation, family secrets, and how challenging it can be to know who we are. Memento Park won the 2019 Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize. A recipient of a 2018 Santa Monica Artist Fellowship, Sarvas teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers Program. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Threepenny Review, The Philadelphia Review, and many other journals and newspapers. A New York native, he lives in Santa Monica, California.
Memento Park is now available in paperback.
Mark Sarvas recently answered a few questions for Sacred Trespasses about his work, writing process, and teaching.
You’ve written about the freedom and the pitfalls of writing the second novel, which is notoriously fraught for many writers, noting that your agent warned you about straying from your strengths. After publishing a successful first novel that appeared in more than twelve languages, what fears – or, perhaps, self-congratulation – did you have to move through to begin Memento Park?
With Harry, Revised and Memento Park, I somewhat inverted the traditional trajectory of new novelists, which is to say that it is my second book that is more overtly autobiographical than the first. So the fear I felt around this second novel had to do with my ability to take on my relationship with my father, to approach it with clear-eyed honesty, and yet to feel free enough to change things around as required for fictive purposes. The truth is that I didn’t begin serious work on Memento Park until I knew my father wouldn’t be around to see it. I couldn’t have written it with him metaphorically, or literally, looking over my shoulder.
There wasn’t much self-congratulation because I’d come to see that writing a first novel does almost nothing to help you write a second novel; it might buoy you up somewhat with a little confidence – I’ve done it once, I can do it again – but each novel has such distinct problems that what you’ve done before is usually of little use. I can report from deep inside novel three that this remains true for me.
Why didn’t you want your father to engage with what you were writing? Were you trying to save him from emotionally difficult material, or were you afraid he’d want the “facts” more accurately represented?
Yes, all of the above. Primarily, I didn’t want to hurt him – I knew, after all, that he’d done his best as a father and was a product of another time and place. But I wanted to be able to present him in all his hues, and I don’t think I would have had the nerve to do that while he was alive. He loomed very large, indeed. But for all that, I did love him, and I didn’t want the book to make him think that had changed. As it turns out, he’s everyone’s favorite character in the novel, so I suppose he did get the last laugh.
At what point did you know the subject matter for what would become Memento Park? Had you already completed Harry, Revised, for instance?
I actually had this idea before Harry. I don’t remember the original spark, sadly, but I’d been toting around the idea of looted art for years. My first short story was published in the late ’90s in a now-defunct magazine called Troika, and my author bio there mentioned that I was working on a novel concerning looted art. But I came to see I wasn’t skilled enough to do what I wanted this novel to do, so I set it aside and wrote Harry as a training book. My starter marriage, if you will.
“The truth is that I didn’t begin serious work on Memento Park until I knew my father wouldn’t be around to see it. I couldn’t have written it with him metaphorically, or literally, looking over my shoulder.”
Were there times when you doubted your ability to go back to the story that would become Memento Park? Did you work on any other novel ideas after Harry?
Well, there were any number of moments during the actual writing of Memento Park when I thought, “Crap, I can’t pull this off.” But that seems like a fairly normal sort of doubt that afflicts all writers. I did go directly to Memento Park after Harry. I started it while on tour for Harry. I was eager to dive in because I believed from the beginning that I was on to something exciting and worthwhile.
Memento Park deftly explores many big themes and multiple sub-plots, including the inability to connect to those we love most, the fraught practicalities of art restitution, the ways that the loss of religion, language and culture affect identity. Where and how did this complex story originate?
I can’t remember the spark, and that drives me nuts. I can visualize a shelf in my old apartment where I began stacking books that I knew I would refer to for research when I was ready to write. I do know that the aforementioned short story was a Holocaust-themed story, so I was quite immersed in the subject for a long time. But that Big Bang moment is lost to the mists of time…
Memento Park is about the things, literally and metaphorically, that are willed to us. You play with autobiography in this novel, including giving the narrator a name – Matt Santos – that echoes yours, as well as endowing him with a similar heritage. How did that shared history shape the way you thought about the novel, about how you might be exposing yourself? Did it add a sense of urgency to telling this story?
It certainly did. I’ve said since publication that it does feel in some ways like Memento Park is the book I was meant to write. Right now, my other ideas all feel a bit anti-climactic in its wake. Despite having been a nominal public figure back in the blog days, I’m a pretty private guy, so although Matt and I are quite similar, we’re also different in key ways. I think the lawyers call that “plausible deniability.” But it made the novel both easier and harder to write. Easier because all the material was already at hand, I just had to avail myself of memories. Harder because it was closer to the bone because it was so personal. Though I’m not sure that’s totally true or accurate, in that I’ve come to see that any work, autobiographical or not, should cut close to the bone, be as honest and unflinching as possible.
Will you discuss the implications in the novel of giving Matt Santos, a B-grade actor, and his fiancée, a catalogue model, careers that rely on the projection of fantasies but that offer them little satisfaction or fulfillment?
That’s an astute and interesting question. I suppose the question of satisfaction and fulfillment is a subjective one, though. I know some actors who have Matt’s career and seem wholly satisfied with their lot. But I’d say I was particularly interested in the implications of living in this place – Los Angeles – where people are constantly crafting a carefully curated, presentable self for marketing purposes. It’s easy to see how, to overwork the film metaphor, one might lose the script, become a bit unmoored from one’s authentic self when you constantly are presenting or performing. I’ve always been surprised how vacant or downright dumb some great actors can seem in real life; and then, on deeper reflection, it makes perfect sense: The person forever discarding and adopting personae may have very little room, or use, for their own. They consist largely of blank space, which can be filled by these great habitations.
In the process of writing Memento Park, how did you find the balance between a serious subject matter – an adult child of a Holocaust survivor and his attempt to understand his reticent father – and the playfulness and humor that propels Matt’s character and the book as a whole? It’s not a tone typically associated with this kind of subject matter.
A lot of people have mentioned the humor which, to be quite honest, I didn’t always register. This might be simply in relation to Harry, which was a true comic novel. But I do have a lamentable joke reflex, and humor is part of all of my interactions so I’m not surprised it’s in there. When I’m reading and people laugh at a moment in the book, I often think, “Huh. That’s interesting.” But I’m also very influenced by John Banville, whose narrators have this sly, arch register that I do enjoy. I was also influenced here by Rutherford Calhoun, the wonderful narrator of Charles Johnson’s National Book Award winner, Middle Passage. And he caught some flack at the time because it was a slavery novel that made people laugh, and some readers were troubled by that. For me, humor is a necessary way to confront and deal with the terrible. I find it a perfectly legitimate narrative strategy. But whatever humor you find in Memento Park slipped in there without my knowing it at the time.
I will say that having spent nearly a decade on a pretty serious book, I’m hankering a bit to write another true comic novel, though my current project is not the one. Perhaps it will be up next.
Aside from Banville and Johnson, what writers do you find yourself going back to, either for pleasure or guidance, while you’re in the process of writing? Are there writers you must avoid while you’re writing?
Sure, I have my touchstones. They include Marilynne Robinson, Zadie Smith, W. G. Sebald and James Baldwin. More recently, Max Porter’s brilliant novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers has exerted an outsized influence for such a slim volume. But I’m also at a point where I’m grappling a bit with the question of influence, trying to shake off the fetters of Banville, for example, whom I’ve perhaps too strenuously imitated at times. As for avoidance, I mostly focus on avoiding bad writing. At all times.
As you’ve mentioned, Harry, Revised does seem like an unusual debut novel. It finds its guiding force through the main character’s whim to remake his life according to the lessons he learns through The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged). It’s such a fun, ridiculous premise, surely a eureka moment in the writing of the novel. What was, before writing Harry, your relationship with The Count of Monte Cristo?
That’s such a wonderful novel, a great rip-roaring adventure. As a kid, I’d only read the abridged versions, had no idea that there was 1100 pages of this stuff available. I suppose I’m a closet romantic, and what romantic doesn’t love Dumas? He’s not especially literary, it’s true – he’s not long on psychology, for instance – but the man could move and complicate a narrative.
And you’re right, it was pure eureka. I was writing the opening café scene, just riffing, really, on a Zadie Smith inspired jag having just finished White Teeth, and I wanted Harry to be forced to eat something truly revolting and I just thought of the Monte Cristo sandwich, which is such a nasty piece of work. It began as a gag, just to torture my hero; but when I read it back the next day, I did have a lightning bolt moment. I remember where I was sitting when I realized that I could organize the events of the novel around the Dumas. You’re always looking for that with questions of structure – how do I arrange this narrative? And there it was, in a sandwich.
The first sentence of Harry, Revised reads: “Harry Rent used to fiddle with his wedding ring, now he fiddles with the space it has left behind.” It is, on the surface, such a simple sentence, but it sets up the conflict and Harry’s personality in a much richer way than it seems at first glance. How many times did you rewrite the first sentence to set the tone for the novel?
Actually, that first sentence was there from the beginning. I think I tightened the wording a bit, but the idea of this vacant space was just there, magically. I’m a pretty instinctive writer, and sometimes I just get lucky. I tell my students that one of the most important skills a writer needs is the ability to recognize the gifts of the subconscious – to look at something you blurted out in a fever dream and to realize its potential. I knew that was the right opening from the outset.
Similarly, the first sentence of Memento Park was more or less there from the beginning as well. With my third novel, on the other hand, I’ve already gone through four different openings, so maybe my luck has run out.
In both novels, you’ve played close attention to how the story is told. In Harry, Revised, the sense of the ridiculous is amplified by the use of chapter titles that lend it a false grandiosity, for instance, “In which our hero orders a sandwich and is late for an appointment.” Memento Park makes use of direct address. The narrator focuses his internal musings on “Virgil,” the guard who’s keeping watch over the novel’s central painting. Will you talk about how you settled on these structural decisions?
Well, Harry was my contemporary take on the great, grandiose Dumas tales of old, so those title headings seemed both a signifier, a connection back to an older style of writing, and a wink to the reader, a caution not to take it all too seriously. It’s also a close third, though so close it’s nearly first; whereas Memento Park is a proper first-person narrative. What I was most drawn to structurally with the second novel was the idea that the narrative events have occurred and are known. Matt begins to recount the story right at the end of the journey. So he knows what has happened but he hasn’t yet worked out what it means – hence the need to revisit events. I also wanted to play with the effects of memory and its mutability, and that seemed to demand a first-person unreliable narrator.
“I find the energy and enthusiasm of my students contagious, and I always leave my classes feeling energized. Above all, though, it’s forced me to, as a friend so elegantly puts it, “eat my own dog food”; which means doing all the things I tell them it’s necessary for them to do.”
As you mentioned, you maintained a successful and sometimes controversial literary blog, The Elegant Variation, from 2003 to 2010. When you founded it, what were your main goals? While you still release an occasional newsletter, you don’t maintain the site with the same intensity. Does your own writing now fill that space?
I think the rest of my life fills that space now. Yes, writing, but also a young daughter, teaching, editing. Something had to go, and blogs were waning anyway, so it seemed like a good time to quietly step back. As for the goals, I’m pretty impulsive and don’t always look before I leap. I knew there was a growing conversation about books that was taking place online, but it felt very Brooklyn-centered, and I felt like I was reading about the same writers again and again. I wanted to chime in, write about Los Angeles writers but also champion writers I was passionate about. I was cheering on John Banville years before his Booker Prize came along. I think it was less about goals and more about, “Oh, look at that interesting table of people talking, I’m going to elbow my way into the conversation.” I’m grateful for everything that the blog brought me, but I’m also grateful not to have that daily pressure to produce. “Occasional” is a time frame that suits me just fine these days.
In what ways has teaching creative writing changed the way you approach your own work? How has it changed your life as a reader?
Oh, it’s helped in countless ways. Most basically, it forces me to actually think about the things I believe, to be able to articulate and make a persuasive case for doing things one way or another. I find the energy and enthusiasm of my students contagious, and I always leave my classes feeling energized. Above all, though, it’s forced me to, as a friend so elegantly puts it, “eat my own dog food”; which means doing all the things I tell them it’s necessary for them to do. And foremost among those many things is the critical importance of continually reading, but specifically to read like a writer – pen in hand, marking up the page, asking questions, interrogating author choices. The more you can unpack a text to try to understand why the author chose to start here and not there, why she chose this POV character, why there are no commas, the more critically you can think about your own writing, and move beyond that early, and magical, stage of pure instinct into something more carefully considered and constructed.
As in Harry, Revised, in Memento Park you drop in seemingly innocuous details and characters early on that we as readers realize are integral only later, as the scope of the story becomes clear. How does this decision – to unfoot the reader while creating a sense of mystery or intrigue – reflect what you like to experience as a reader?
It’s funny, I was just having a conversation with another writer about reader expectations, and how they play into what we write; how, from the moment a reader opens a book, they bring all sorts of associations with them and how we, the writer, must simultaneously gratify yet mess with those expectations.
Ultimately, for me all of this is bound up in revision, in layering, in taking rough ideas and refining and preparing them for the reader. Striking the right balance. I remember reading Banville’s Eclipse, the book that started it for me, and encountering a scene in which the narrator, wandering in the forest, happens on a dead bird, fallen from its nest. The parent bird is lamenting the corpse, and Banville’s narrator decides that the bird is a father. In my first reading, I remembered the scene, was moved by the images and the lovely writing; but it was only when I re-read the novel that I realized what an elegant piece of foreshadowing that moment really is. In my journal at the time, I wrote, “How is it possible to so completely miss a book the first time around?” I think, now, I was being hard on myself. When it’s done right, you shouldn’t notice but it should add to your emotional experience of encountering the novel, which I always describe as an aggregate of effects; so I do pay attention to where those go and how they add up.
In Memento Park, the narrator, who’s an actor, tells us: “That’s my specialty, after all, throwing myself into my research, since one never knows where the useful note that brings a role to life will be found.” What role does research play in the creation of your characters and their situations? I’m thinking specifically about your borrowing aspects of the artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner for your artist character Ervin Laszlo Kálmán. Once you decided to use Kirchner as a model, what responsibility did you feel toward the historical figure?
None whatsoever. Fiction really is just that, as I tell my students all the time. It’s about making things up. I do research so that I have a frame of reference around things I’m not intimately familiar with. But once that frame is in place, it serves as a leaping off point for all sorts of invention. My sense of obligation is to the novel, not to the historical truth of things.
In what instances has research shifted the direction or focus of your work?
My current novel deals with an area I know very little about – intelligence agencies. To prepare, I’ve read a ton of memoirs by CIA field agents, among other things, including detailed examinations of metadata analysis and cyber reconnaissance, and in reading them I’ve come across human details, things that hadn’t occurred to me, that open up dramatic narrative opportunities in my own work. Still, I try not to over-prepare. I remember something E. L. Doctorow said to a writer I know. Essentially, and I’m paraphrasing, he said do no research for the first draft, because then that draft becomes a showcase for everything you’ve learned instead of focusing on the characters and their stories. Research after that to add veracity and correct any errors. I like that, and have tried to work that way, although I find I do need a bit more foundation than that to start.
“Going to museums has become a necessary part of my writing routine, and I’m aware as I stand in front of a painting that I have more resources now, more knowledge, more understanding and so I can travel into a deeper place with a work of art, a place where technique and intention meet.”
You’ve written about how, in your twenties, painting became important to you, leading you to collect art books, to travel to visit particular works of art, and even to try your hand at oil painting. Now that you’ve spent so long thinking and writing about art for Memento Park –particularly how a single work of art as an object can affect an entire family – how has your relationship with visual art changed?
There’s an epigraph that opens the novel, from Rilke: “I can see farther into paintings.” I think that’s true for me. I still engage regularly with the visual arts. Going to museums has become a necessary part of my writing routine, and I’m aware as I stand in front of a painting that I have more resources now, more knowledge, more understanding and so I can travel into a deeper place with a work of art, a place where technique and intention meet. I have these discussions with friends about modern music and its difficulty, and a friend always says, “Well, you just haven’t learned how to listen to it yet.” I think with visual art, I have learned to read it – thanks in large part of my hero, the brilliant John Berger – and so I can have different internal conversations about a work of art. It allows me to experience it as more than merely a pleasant, or unpleasant, image. I’m currently reading Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word for an essay I’m writing, and it’s such a dopey, resentful, anti-intellectual screed; but it has a weird inverse and unintended way of reinforcing for me that there is a pictorial language, if you will, and it’s worth trying to grasp. Writing this book gave a chance to wrestle with some of that.
Will you describe your process a bit? Does a project begin with a sentence or a scene or an idea? You’ve said you’re an instinctual writer, but do you also, for instance, create outlines to find the shape or scope of a novel?
I outlined my first book because I’d been a screenwriter, and that way of working was familiar to me. But I don’t do it anymore, I find that it can result in a work that feels a bit overdetermined. I didn’t outline Memento Park, and I’m not outlining my new book. The downside is that it took four years to write a first draft of Memento Park – I’m hoping to improve that performance this time around – but it resulted in a book that felt to me freer and truer. I think each book began a bit differently, so there’s no single process. Harry came from a what-if question sparked by a true-life event I’d heard about: How would you rebuild your life if you learned you were indirectly responsible for the death of your wife? With Memento Park, I’d long been fascinated by the world of looted Nazi art; and the new book popped into my head after I watched the Snowden documentary Citizenfour, and I wondered about what kind of person chooses to listen in on his fellow citizens, his neighbors, friends. I always say I don’t necessarily visualize a storyline, but I know how I want the thing to feel, how I want it to make me feel. I suppose you could say I’m chasing moods.
Literature is obviously very important to you, not just because you’re a writer and teacher of writing. What does reading mean to your day-to-day life?
I don’t think anyone has ever said it better than President Obama, in his 2015 conversation with Marilynne Robinson. He really speaks for me when he says: “the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.”
What are you learning through writing this third novel? Aside from the subject matter, what new challenges is it presenting to you that the first two novels didn’t?
This new book is a drastic departure in terms of form. So I’m having both fun and frustration with the unpredictability of it. In a novel that is consumed, yet again it seems, with questions of truth, I’m trying to keep the reader and myself a bit off-guard with respect to what can be trusted, but not in a cheap, withholding kind of way. I’m also thinking a lot about the limitations of genre, the built-in familiar expectations, and how one might push back against familiar literary tropes. It’s also sort of polyphonic, though not really – it’s another first-person narrator but it mixes a lot of found documents, transcripts, that sort of thing, to tell the story. I’ve already tossed a hundred pages and started over, but I think I’m finally on the right track with it.
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