Influenced is an interview series featuring authors talking about the works that influenced them.

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Thick Skin, where authors talk about negative reviews, from both critics and readers

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Episode XIV: "Executives playing at being executives"

Published 5/15/17
In this installment, Hermione Hoby talks about DeLillo's Underworld, Stranger of the Week, people playacting themselves, the virtues of being compassionate but perverse & more.

Today I’m talking to Hermione Hoby, a culture writer with words in The Guardian, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and more. I first came upon Hermione’s work through her Stranger of the Week series in The Awl—a series of soft-eyed snapshots of the denizens of New York that tend to disintegrate into blissfully wide-angled musings on life. From one, from April 21: “I wonder how many of our interactions are, at some level, forms of redress for previous encounters with other people, efforts to rectify and recalibrate. Being meticulously kind to one friend, for example, after having snapped at another. A false mathematics: the friend you snapped at remains disgruntled and oblivious of your extra kindness to someone else. And yet, in our private internal universe, it feels as though balance has been restored.”

We’ll get more into Stranger of the Week, as well your forthcoming novel I’m sure (NEON IN DAYLIGHT, out in January ’18 from Catapult)—but first, the context of the interview, a seminal work you’ve found influential in your development as a writer and a person. You chose UNDERWORLD by Don DeLillo, probably his second most read book after WHITE NOISE, and a choice I found a bit surprising, given the discrepancy between his writing and your own, if not just thematically then in style as well (but then again, maybe I should report back after I read your novel). When did you first read UNDERWORLD?

I read it when I was 21, and it's one of those reading experiences where I remember exactly where I was—sort of like receiving news of a disaster, you know? It was cataclysmic like that, or at least felt like that. I was looking for something to do my dissertation on in my final year of university and my professor, to whom, incidentally, I owe a long overdue thank you note, suggested Underworld. It just made me feel like, COSMOPHAGIC. I mean, it's such a cosmophagic book. So I just sat in the same place in the massive University Library, for about four days straight, and wolfed it.

Because I'm forever a try-hard schoolgirl I went back and reread it for this. I basically never reread because I sort of feel the same way about books and travel: there's so much out there so why would you retrace old ground, which is, I now realize, a really dumb and callow attitude.

I'm a victim to the same mentality, in both travel and books. How was it different rereading? Was it the first DeLillo you'd read? Have you read much of him since?

I always say, quite grandly, that I'm a DeLillo completist, and then someone will be like, ah what do you think of Ratner's Star, and I'll realize…l'm not. I've read lots, but not all. But rereading has been just wonderful. There's so, so much I forgot. I don't think I appreciated how good he is on men and women and gender politics, for example. And I'd forgotten that outrageous and filthy description of a cheesecake. Do you know it? He describes the consistency as being like an old guy who'll die from sexual exertion in the arms of his mistress. There's one small passage though, which really made me feel the enormous gap between 21 and 32, which is a passage about people playing themselves at their jobs. Can I just find it and quote it?

Please.

"I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions [...] You maintain a shifting distance between you and your job [...] but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing."

Isn't that perfect? I've totally felt that weird, alienated, playing-a-role but being a role feeling. And it made me realize something pretty obvious: that at 21, thinking I was so very smart and serious, I had no clue about so much, specifically, in this case, about what it was like to do a job and be in an office, which is just a really salutary reminder that the best, grown-up books get better when you've lived more life. 

That brings me to some long-forgotten passage in The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt, and that passage I now see is the (or a) bridge between DeLillo's writing and your own, or at least what I've seen in Stranger of the Week. Much of the time, seeing anyone on the street of this city is like watching someone watch themselves—something, if not explicitly stated in Stranger of the Week, that is always present. What got you started on the series, and did it actually have anything to do with DeLillo

Oh wow, this is most surely the first and last time I'll be compared to Hannah Arendt! Thanks! Anyway: I've been trying to find out whether there might be any honest connection between the two, absurd as that seems (greatest novel of the twentieth century vs quotidian doodles: sure) and I guess the slightly woolly answer that I have is in itself, a bit DeLillo-ish—namely, that art and history kind of work through us. (I'm thinking of Klara Sax coming out of the screening of the fictional Eisenhower movie and feeling it kind of weft through her. DeLillo has a much more elegant verb than "weft", sorry.) But what I mean is: if reading Underworld when I was 21 DID, in some way, lead me towards doing these weekly riffs on strangers, then it will be in, you know in the sort of unseen and Underworld-ish ways that are resistant to hubris! One thing, though, that I've been very taken by in rereading the novel is this sense of the force and mystery of crowds. That's so compelling to me—there's a lot of crowd stuff in my novel. It's why I think I'd find it painful, now, to live anywhere but New York. The much more prosaic and un-DeLillo-ed answer to all this though, is that I was feeling somewhat limited by the work of writing profiles. Not that I still don't really enjoy doing that, but writing about strangers is, I realize, pretty much the perfect inverse: to interview a celebrity is to go up against a massive prevailing narrative, and a subject who feels very "known" before you even meet them. And then to have a conversation with them that's supposedly natural but which you both know is highly functional. So, observing people on the subway or the streets or whatever—total strangers—is such a creative relief from that. Also, and I'm in danger of sounding pretty wanky here, but, looking at people, and investing in their humanity as well as their un-knowability, just seems to be, well, what fiction does. (Even though the strangers are always real!)

Also, writing a profile of a person for a magazine is, necessarily, formulaic. (I don't mean that pejoratively, just practically) So one of the joys of writing about a stranger each week is just not knowing where it will go. I didn't intend, for example, to write about ASMR, but there it was.

That's interesting, the inventiveness that the series allows you, and that painting a portrait of someone real that might never be challenged by reality is, in essence, a form of fiction. I also find it funny that you're making the DeLillo connection of the force and mystery of crowds because—and I understand this comment may not be appreciated—if there's one thing I've found repeatedly lacking in DeLillo is that sometimes, if you look close to one of his characters—that is, if he does—there's something fundamentally unreal, empty, hollow about them, forced through the narrative of the book and so characters are rendered as characters and characters only (I'm specifically thinking of Great Jones Street here). But in your portraits there isn’t (thankfully) an impulse towards truth, which doesn't mean there isn't a wanting to know—and that, I think, is DeLillo's unwavering life force, the drive to find out.

Oh that's so interesting. Not to be a rabid DeLillo-defender (one of the nice things about rereading was spotting, with great relief, his fallibilities! Dialogue, for example—characters all tend to sound a bit like DeLillo), but I sort of think we ARE all a little empty, or hollow or unreal. This, I suppose, goes back to Klara Sax being so filled-up with the Eisenstein movie; we're changed and remade by things all the time. I mean, perhaps all I can really go on here is myself (however much fiction we read or write we can't really transcend our solipsism, right?!) but I feel a little skeptical about the idea of a fixed and essential self. I feel constantly provisional.

Okay I am very down with that point. How often has your series made you rethink how you appear to other people in public?

Oh my god. Too much. My novel is kind of clotted with stuff about visibility and invisibility, and cities and crowds magnify and refract that endlessly, I think. It just struck me, with this awful kind of clanging, sad trombone noise feeling, that the last line of my book is, "it was hard, even to look at." And then the reader will turn the page and see a picture of my face. I feel a bit like DeLillo’s executives playing at being executives every time I'm reminded that I am a visible person in the world. I suspect a lot of writers feel this: they're kind of sneaky, they just want to observe and not be observed.

NEON IN DAYLIGHT comes out in January from Catapult. What's the marketing-ready elevator pitch? I feel like DeLillo would've had a hard time with modern publicity departments.

Oh lord, you'll have to ask the (very wonderful) marketing department! I think he absolutely would. I saw him on stage with Dana Spiotta and it was gorgeous how he kept just casually batting the question back to her. Quite magnificent really. 

I think there has to be a necessary division of self: there's you that writes the book, and then there's "author" you that goes out and smiles and promotes it. I had the really huge pleasure of interviewing Ann Patchett last year (she drove me around Nashville in her car and we went thrift store shopping) and she talked about this, how she has to put her 'Ann Patchett' hat on.

It's funny that you noted that all characters end up DeLillo-esque, which somehow (counterintuitively) completely makes sense with someone who doesn't want to be seen. Your novel does sound incredibly DeLillo-inflected. What other writers went into your mix do you think?

I love Rachel Kushner and Dana Spiotta, which is kind of funny because I think the two of them are just about the biggest DD stans on the planet. Mary Gaitskill, perhaps? I don't think I'm quite as…astringent as her, but I aspire to be. And then there are so many writers I love, with whom I have next to nothing in common: George Saunders and DFW, for example. I just love anyone who seeks to render honestly and precisely all the dishonest, imprecise mess of human relations. It has to be compassionate, but preferably a bit perverse too.

Oh, and Maggie Nelson! Maggie Nelson.

Well compassionate but perverse—that's Gaitskill. Her Veronica is pretty much someone so outwardly depraved they circle back to a sort of moral purity. All of what you'd said up to this point in relation to DeLillo makes sense, and yet when I reread some of my dog-eared passages in Stranger of the Week, I revert to disbelief. From your posting from McCarren Pool: "I noticed your swimsuit was both sporty and fashionable and that you were young. Younger than me, that was the main thing, because toe-shaving in public constituted the sort of admirable nonchalance I usually attribute to women at least twice your age. A ‘when I am old I shall wear purple’ vibe. The walnut-tanned old woman I’d seen as a kid on a beach in Nice, standing in nothing but bikini briefs on the shore, squinting as she plucked her own nipple hairs." Maybe it's just the humor of it, or at least the buoyancy, which I don't think you'll find in DeLillo, or Gaitskill.

Totally with Gaitskill—I don't think there's another writer on the planet who could pull off a story about "a girl and her pony" and have it be the opposite of mawkish. And humor and buoyancy are good. Phew, we need them. If we're speaking about humor, I just want to salute Zadie Smith—that's something she does so wonderfully: that slightly melancholic humor that cracks your heart a little, mixing up pain and pity with the compassion. But I do think there's humor in DeLillo—it's just such fine-tuned irony that it doesn't seem like humor. (Incidentally, I don't think I've ever liked a novel that thinks of itself as "comic". They just make me cringe.) I also think that people look at this guy called "Don" and a book the size of a doorstep and they think it's going to be this bloated, pompous thing. But the thing I love most about Underworld is the ego-lessness. I really think there's a profound, genuine humility in the writing. 

Okay, I am so on board with the word "comic" turning me off to a book for good, and also the ego-lessness of DeLillo, and I think that's another string between him and Stranger of the Week (and perhaps NEON IN DAYLIGHT, too). You have to have a level of compassion to judge someone without it coming off sour (the inversion of Gaitskill averting mawkishness while writing the "girl and her pony" story), and I think that's evident throughout your writing. Seeking to understand someone is, in essence, seeking empathy for yourself, and that to me seems the impetus for your stories, even if you are, as you said, in an endeavor toward fiction.

That is absolutely the impetus, for everything really, and I feel like falling off my chair with gratitude when you say that's evident in my writing. I mean, that's also why I love my day job, i.e. interviewing public figures. I recently sort of changed my thinking on that though: I'd always kind of operated on this belief that it was my job to find the person beneath the public narrative, and that doing so was the most empathic and humanizing mode I could adopt. But I now think that's actually a little arrogant and intrusive. Maybe accepting someone's public persona is just…well, better manners. And maybe it's just as honest or not as their private self (see our earlier stuff about the fallacy of the fixed self).

I see you there. That's become a well-tread mode of its own, hasn't it? The "X celebrity isn't who the public thinks, they're actually this person", and it just reads like the work of a slightly advanced publicist.

We're nearing time. To close us out, what do you think DeLillo would do (WWDDD), handed a feature assignment on Taylor Swift?

Oh my god please let the world give us Don DeLillo on Taylor Swift. They might really hit it off.

You're not getting off that easy. Let's get a three sentence pitch.

"LOVING YOU WAS RED... LIKE MAO II"

I'll take it.

Thanks for your time and words, Hermione. This was a pleasure.

This was really fun. Thanks so much.