By Aaron Calvin

The writer Adam Wilson has made a career plumbing the depths of the human tragicomedy. His first novel, Flatscreen (2012), is an unlikely meditation of life filtered through the claustrophobic world of a stoner hiding from the world. His story collection What’s Important is Feeling (2014) is rife with memorable characters portrayed with dark wit in a bleak suburban milieu. His new novel, Sensation Machines (2020), was published in a world gripped with pandemic and recession, reinforcing the novels effortlessly zeitgeist-y plot, which follows a pair of wealthy Brooklynites against the backdrop of a collapsing late-capitalist America.

The distanced press tour for Sensation Machines has included interview with Full Stop, InsideHook, and Bomb Magazine. Wilson fielded a few questions for Assignment via email concerning his new novel and the craft of fiction.

Aaron Calvin: Students at Mountainview are familiar with your craft talks on humor and your talent as a humorist shines through in Sensation Machines. Every little phrase that prompts a laugh also feels like it's using the absurd to crack open a little window into a sadness that wouldn't hit quite the same if you'd just stated that sadness straight on. Is humor a device that can be deployed to show us something that would be perhaps too painful to state head on?

Adam Wilson: Definitely. Humor can do so many things in a novel. As you say, it can make pain more palatable, and maybe also more palpable by locating it within a more dynamic emotional field. It can also cut against potential sentimentality, protecting your sadness from tipping into bathos. And it can be used to cover up deficiencies in other areas—I’m willing to forgive a lot if a book makes me laugh, and I bank on the fact that my readers are too.

I’ve always said that the one quality I can't abide in fiction is humorlessness. This doesn’t mean the books I like are all funny, necessarily, but I think they all present some fundamental awareness of the absurdity of human life, the sheer ridiculousness of it. I dunno, maybe it’s because I come from British Jews, but irony—along with beans on toast, and not having a foreskin—feels like a part of my birthright, and I feel an urge to defend it from the growing armies of the drippily sincere. There’s a seeming misconception that for art to be serious it must be either sober and dull or drunk and lachrymose, and because of this we tend to celebrate a lot of joyless, boring work. This feels especially true in the current climate, in which the magnitude of our crises would seem to demand our utmost solemnity. But to me, the writers who most successfully engage with big serious questions about society and humanity tend to do so with at least some sense of irony. Well, maybe not the Russians, but that’s kinda their thing.

AC: There are so many great moments in this novel where cultural theory is filtered through the characters, particularly when it comes to Michael and his obsession with the rapper Eminem. What does theorizing through a character allow you to do differently than, say, a straight-ahead essay on the subject?

AW: It allows you to temper the self-seriousness I tend to associate with cultural theory, and it protects you from the onus of having it add up to a concrete thesis. Fiction is more forgiving of ambiguity than criticism, so the writer can work through ideas without the pressure of landing on a clear takeaway. Eminem is a good example. I’ve thought a lot about him—enough that this thinking made its way into a novel—but if I were forced at gunpoint to provide a verdict on his cultural value, I’d end up with a bullet through the ears.

AC: The novel is written primarily through two characters, a married couple, but diverges at various points into different POVs. How did the process of writing a book that brings in so many viewpoints work? Did you begin with one character and expand from there?

AW: From the beginning I knew that I wanted to write a book with a lot of characters in it. My first novel, Flatscreen, is told from the perspective of a twenty year-old stoner who rarely leaves his mother’s suburban basement and has learned everything he knows from TV and movies. I wanted the book to feel insular, borderline claustrophobic. By the time I’d finished writing it I was ready for some air, and for a different kind of challenge. Add to that, I knew that writing the protagonists I’d envisioned—a derivatives trader and a marketing strategist, both wealthy white Brooklynites—meant exploring questions of privilege. As a way of underscoring that privilege, it seemed useful to offer the perspectives others New Yorkers, people whose lives my protagonists’ privilege had insulated them from having to consider in any kind of depth. Figuring out the logistics of how all this would work took a long time. I tried different approaches, used different novels as models. What I eventually landed on felt like the most plausible shape from which to attempt the impossible task I’d assigned myself, to write a novel that somehow managed to feel both sprawling and intimate.

AC: The plot structure of the novel is an interesting one. There are two acts, the first told through two first person POVs and then a second act told in a close third person among a variety of characters. Then there's the epilogue/ conclusion with its own movements in time. Through it all, the plot is constantly surging forward, propelled by a strong sense of urgency. What was the process of fine-tuning the movements of characters and their actions through time and space like? Did that develop in the initial drafting process or was it fine-tuned in revision?

AW: Revision, revision, and more revision. And then more revision. The initial draft was a mess. The second draft was a mess. I’d say by the fourth draft it was less of a mess, but there were still quite a few kinks to work out. I don’t know how many drafts I ended up writing, or even what technically counts as a draft, but the book took nearly nine years from conception to publication, and it may have also taken my soul.

AC: The process of world building when it comes to the near-future seems rife with challenges. The world of Sensation Machines is made up of certain satirical exaggerations and certain aspects of today's world taken to their logical conclusions in order to reveal their absurdity, particularly when it comes to targeted advertising and data mining. What was the process of building this near-future world like and how did your world-building process work? Was it vindicating or disturbing to publish a book set in the United States amid a meltdown crisis period that strongly resonates with the present moment?

AW: The process was fun at first, and then gradually grew more challenging as the world started shifting so rapidly that it became impossible to keep up, let alone project ahead. I’m glad you feel like the book resonates with the current moment, though—I really feel like it could have gone either way! I’m not sure it’s felt vindicating or disturbing so much as just frustrating. It would have been much nicer to publish the book into a world where bookstores still function at full capacity.

Adam Wilson is the author of three books: the novel Sensation Machines (Soho 2020), the novel Flatscreen (Harper Perennial 2012) and the collection of short stories What’s Important is Feeling (Harper Perennial 2014). He teaches at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program among other programs.