Since the election of Donald Trump, Ohio has served as a sort of political Rorschach test. Depending on the ideology or affiliation, some squint and see the state as the avatar of humble, plain-speaking “Real America.” Others view it as a downtrodden place that embraced Trumpism after being abandoned by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Then there are those who see a state of racist white people angry about the crumbling foundation of white supremacy.
The way I’ve been describing it, I have wanted to be a novelist this whole time but I got sidetracked because I was getting paid to write that jocular stuff. And that led to Publish This Book. And I just sort of found myself in a different career than I actually wanted. A major turning point was getting into Iowa. Just saying, This is what I’m gonna get myself into, full-bore. Five years later I emerged with this novel, but it is like a pretty serious departure from everything else I’ve written.
I had plenty of unprocessed material from my hometown in Ohio. Year after year I’d go back home and hear of various tragedies that had befallen people I’d grown up with, some of whom were very close friends and others who were peers or people I looked up to or admired in high school.
I read a recent interview with you where the publication made it sound like you were once against our military involvement in the Middle East but had changed your mind?
Absolutely. I think it springs from the fact that I know normal human guys who served. Because it’s such a small percentage of our population that actually does serve, there’s this weird way in which it’s alien to some people and venerated blindly and sort of ignorantly by a lot of others. And troops are used for political reasons, or to sell car insurance or cell phones or whatever else.
From my perspective, I’m writing every single character as a full human being who has been hurt by somebody, who’s loved somebody, who cares about the people around them and could easily be any of us if we were brought up in whatever position and condition they were. And that also applies to the self-righteous liberal character. I just wanted to write a book about people and have those political themes emerge through their characters.
