The Call & Yannick Murphy

Posted By jatyler - 14th January 2012

Seriously, how do I get so lucky? After having read and loved all that was Yannick Murphy’s latest novel The Call, I get the chance to ask her some questions about this new book & her writing process!

MB: One of the most talked about aspects of your latest novel The Call is its structure, written as a constant barrage of specific call and response, each bit of writing and narrative introduced with its antecedent, for example “What the kids said the next evening” or “What the doctor, my doctor, wore when I went for my exam” or “Who holds my pager while I’m swimming in case there is an animal emergency” Can you talk with us a bit about how you decided to start using this structure and what it was like to write under this kind of controlled arrangement?

YM:  Writing in a controlled arrangement actually liberates some writers much more than if they were able to write free form.  A controlled arrangement immediately sets up a tension, which adds to the entire headlong direction of the story.  The tension is that is revealed is that the writer is always having to struggle with transforming the arrangement so that it’s dynamic at every turn.  The form is always rebuking the writer and making the writer’s job difficult, so it’s up to the writer to try and create the illusion that the story is breaking free of the form without actually breaking the form.  That’s the fun part!

MB: The Call also plays heavily on the emotional impact of life-changing events – a severe injury, a coma, new found family relations, medical uncertainty – is this a planned trajectory of the novel, established before you began writing, or is this focus on emotional intensity more like a thematic pull that only appears so vibrant after you put the book to rest?

YM: Planning novels is difficult, you have to commit yourself to a trajectory, and then you have to be open to taking the risk of swerving away from that trajectory because sometimes literary occasions arise that are too good not to put on the page.  I don’t think I consciously plan novels, but I do think a part of me sometimes looks pages ahead, other times I’m only looking back and trying to find my next sentence in the sentences that came before it.

MB: Another aspect of The Call is a reliance on unresolved elements. For instance, David, the veterinarian narrator, is regularly told to pay attention to “his levels” either via his wife Jen or his doctor or his own slender worry about wellness and longevity, but the reasons for these levels and all the concern is never made explicit. Can you talk to us about why you chose not to divulge many details about this medical aspect, and also perhaps what you hope that does to readers?

YM:  The more an object or element isn’t named, the closer it feels to the reader, and makes the reader’s reading experience unique.  In real life, if something is of importance to us, we don’t name it right away either.  We first know its nature, and the feeling it invokes within us.

MB: But to dispel one mystery for us, your biography says that you live in Vermont with your veterinarian husband and your children, so of course one can’t help but link that to The Call, the veterinarian husband and the children and the maple trees tapped just as we can assume they are in Vermont – so just how much of The Call is your own life rendered into fiction?

YM: All writers borrow from their real lives, especially when some of their real lives happen to coincide or intertwine with the lives of interesting characters.  It’s not always necessary to make everything up, not when such good stuff is right in front of you.  The work is training your ear and recognizing what to include and what not to include from the real world.

MB: And for fans of your other novels – Sea of Trees, Here They Come, and Signed, Mata Hari – can you talk with us a little about the differences and similarities between The Call and those previous books? Where do they meet, where do they diverge, and what kind of progression is The Call in your novel writing experience?

YM: All the novels try and push the envelope a little by using structures that take a few pages of getting used to, but once you’ve read the first few pages, you are immersed very quickly into the mind of the storyteller.  It’s as if the writing in the books is trying to engage the reader in a new language, but the comprehension of that language takes very little effort, and the rest of the reading is as easy as riding a bike, but unlike any other bike you’ve ridden before.  The novels are all similar because they are all written in the first person. (Except for Signed, Mata Hari, which is written from multiple points of view including first person.)  The novels are also all different because the stance from which they are written varies.  Here They Come, for example, is written from a very close stance, you are privy to some immediate thoughts that the girl character has about her ordeal growing up.  In Signed, Mata Hari, the stance is at times a little farther back, and there are more instances where you can tell that Mata Hari has filtered her thoughts on a subject or an experience relating to the events that led to her incarceration.  In The Call David Appleton the veterinarian is also divulging thoughts that seem to randomly pop into his head, and draw the reader in close to his psyche.  However, the effect of these ruminations appearing in an arrangement format like the call log, also work to formulate a kind of distance from the character’s thoughts.  This distance almost creates the illusion of the book being written in third person, giving the reader a more objective perspective on David’s life than a true first person narrative.

MB: Lastly, for people who have not read The Call and need a tiny shove to get them purchasing this novel from their respective booksellers, what would you say to make the case for picking up a copy of The Call?

YM: It’s short!

Purchase a copy of The Call here & read more from / about Yannick Murphy here.