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John Prendergast
interviewed by Harry Goldstein
"It's only on TV that "friends" (dare I use the word?) live across the hall post-college."
John Prendergast's first novel, "Jump," focuses on a Big Chill-like reunion of college friends, and most poignantly on a love triangle between Walter, the protagonist, his girlfriend and the ever charismatic Dave, that handsome playboy every normal guy loathes and at the same time wants to be pals with. It's sort of the classic boy wants girl who sort of wants other boy but settles for him. Prendergast is a native of Philadelphia and now makes his home, along with his wife, poet Carole Bernstein, in a Brooklyn neighborhood he wryly refers to as SoBro.
Tripod: Is there something essential about the college experience that allows for these sick relationships to fester unresolved for months, even years after graduation?
JP: People who stay in "sick" relationships tend to do so because of fear and inertia -- two emotions/qualities that people who tend to hang around their college after their "college years" are through may be more prone to than others who are quicker to move "up and out" into the big world beyond campus.
As for college being conducive to such relationships, people are maybe thrown more together for more hours with more of the same people there than any other time in life -- so all members of a "triangle" may be closer at hand than in later life, when it's just as likely that A may be semi-attracted to B who is a coworker or whatever, while officially romantically with C who has never even met B. It's only on TV that "friends" (dare I use the word?) live across the hall post-college.
As for maturity, I don't know if people get more mature as they age when it comes to relationships or just more impatient. In your twenties, it can take one, two or even more years before one or the other partner asks, "where is this thing going, anyway?" That time of just sort of moving along shrinks considerably, I think, by the time people hit their 30s.
Tripod: You came out of the Johns Hopkins writing program and saw a lot of other people's writing and presumably got to know some of them very well ... did people fall into categories as far as their fiction went (i.e. write what you know/confessional or metafiction) and do you think writing programs foster certain kinds of writing?
JP: I didn't feel any pressure to write in a particular way. As it happened, most of the people in class my year were on the "realist" side, so it wasn't an issue. The fact that John Barth, who headed the fiction program, is not a realist may have helped, in fact. Although an astute and encouraging critic, he didn't have any special stake in the style most of us were writing in, so could be more clearsighted than otherwise, perhaps. He could see what we were trying to do -- and where we were succeeding or failing, as the case may be -- without having an interest in doing it himself.
The valuable things about writing programs, I think, are two -- one is time, since writing is the main thing you're supposed to be doing and two, having careful readers, who have to say something about what you write, so you'll do the same for them. Sometimes people in a class may write in a certain way to gain praise (who doesn't like that?), but once the class is over they usually revert to being themselves. The damage done by creative writing classes -- if any -- may be to those who don't become writers but editors, and who take the "rules" they learned too much to heart in judging manuscripts. But that's hardly the worst affliction suffered by publishing these days.
Tripod: Are writers better off being in the swim of things -- Wallace Stevens was in insurance, Scott Turow is a lawyer, you're a magazine editor -- or is the life of academe appealing to you? So many people in writing programs seem hell bent on teaching in one right after their first novel is published ...
JP: My opinion on that changes according to the day I've had. Fact is, most writers have to do something besides write to make a living and the decision on what that will be, exactly, will be for personal, rather than literary reasons. I like living in New York, for example, and so does my wife. Teaching jobs are, of course, famously scarce.
Reading John Barth's novel/memoir "Once Upon a Time," I was struck by how each of his teaching jobs was the result of an English Department that was expanding -- something I doubt we'll ever see again. I like working as an editor, but I still feel at home on a college campus and find it easy to imagine myself working on one, if anybody would like to offer me a job ... half-time, say, at full-time salary plus benefits?
Tripod: "Jump" is a careful study of one small group of friends and in particular the inner life of Walter, the protagonist. But there was also a political world perceptible at the fringes of the story -- the novel is set in 1984! In what way is "Jump" a social commentary on the 1980s, and do you see yourself writing a more explicitly "social" novel about the 1990s?
JP: One really negative review of the book nevertheless included my favorite description of the characters as "Big children demanding instant gratification," which I think is a pretty good capsule review of the 1980s. Rick, not really a major character, is maybe the closest the book comes to a satire of the decade -- a corporate cokehead who puts a monetary value on everything, obsessed with keeping his unbalanced wife drug-free in order to bear him a child.
To me, the topical references in "Jump" -- the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, attitudes about drug use (particularly cocaine as more or less benign), the emergence of AIDS, etc. -- feel important as "setting" the characters in their context, rather than in any direct way. I don't know that I'm equipped to write a more overtly political or social novel about the 1990s, although there are certainly plenty of stories like that to tell.
Tripod: What story are you working on now?
JP: A couple of things. Since I love movies and since it seems everybody has to try and write a screenplay sometime, so have I. It's a thriller type thing -- but of course with interesting, rounded characters -- about serial killing, incest and cartoons, tentatively titled "Cat and Mouse." I'm also taking early notes for another novel, to be made up (I think) of three linked novellas. And working on some short stories, to be included in a collection, currently called "Lost Things," that I'm trying to place with a publisher.
"Jump" is available at bookstores or from the publisher, Mid List Press, 4324 12th Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55407. Price: $14.00 ISBN 0-922811-23-7
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