Generation Loss

Questions for Elizabeth Hand

Jeff VanderMeer for Amazon.com: Your novel Generation Loss introduces readers to a very eccentric and sometimes selfish photographer named Cass. Are all artists inherently selfish?

Hand: Yes. You can’t be an artist without being inherently self-involved, without believing that the world owes you a living, and that everything you do—anything, matter how sick or twisted or feeble or pathetic—is worthy of attention. This is the secret behind the success of stuff like American Idol and YouTube. This is the world Andy Warhol bequeathed to us.

Amazon.com: Isn’t it partially that selfishness that results in great fiction? Isn’t the antagonist of your novel in a way driven by selfishness?

Hand: I don’t think I’d call it selfishness, to be truthful. I think creating any real art depends on an intense amount of focus—of filtering out the rest of the world as much as you can, to sustain and then impart your own vision or secondary world—what John Gardner called “the vivid and continuous dream.” I think the antagonist of Generation Loss sees himself as being impelled by love—romantic love, carnal love, the pure love of artistic creation—not selfishness. Whereas Cass’s motivation is something far darker and more sinister than love. She’s seen the abyss; she lives there.

Amazon.com: Is Cass Neary a prototypical “bad girl”?

Hand: Well, she’s your prototypical amoral speedfreak crankhead kleptomaniac murderous rage-filled alcoholic bisexual heavily-tattooed American female photographer. So, yeah.

Amazon.com: So this is definitely not what you’d call “chick lit”?

Hand: Umm, probably not. If it were a movie, it would have a NC-17 rating. Or maybe NR. Is Lolita considered chick lit? That book had a huge influence on me, especially with this novel. I always wanted to create a narrator like Humbert Humbert, someone utterly reprehensible and unsympathetic who still manages to command a reader’s attention and even an uneasy sympathy. I loved the idea of making a reader complicit with the crimes committed by a protagonist. The simple act of continuing to turn the pages makes you guilty by association.

Amazon.com: Did you have a particular artist in mind as the inspiration for the foul-smelling but visionary paintings in the novel?

Hand: No. That part I made up.

Amazon.com: C’mon. You’re not allowed to just make things up. Spill the beans.

Hand: No, I really didn’t have anyone in mind. There are elements of the work of photographers I admire—Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Sally Man, Joel-Peter Witkin—and of outsider artists like Henry Darger or Richard Dadd or Roky Erickson. But the whole concept of an artist creating his own emulsion paper—I thought of that, then researched it and learned that, indeed, some photographers work that way. I also consulted a photographic conservator who’s an acquaintance and asked him, Is this possible? He said yes, and I took it from there.

Amazon.com: Are people in Maine as mean toward tourists as you describe?

Hand: No. Just me. Though folks who work at the general store three doors down from me really do sometimes wear a T-shirt that reads THEY CALL IT TOURIST SEASON, WHY CAN’T WE SHOOT THEM? So, okay, me and them.

Amazon.com: Have you ever driven a tourist off your property with a shovel?

Hand: Not yet. But I would. A few years ago friend said he pictured me up on the Laurentian shield, threatening outsiders with a pitchfork. That’s pretty accurate.

Amazon.com: Weren’t you once a tourist?

Hand: Never. I lived in DC for 13 years, and worked for a long time at the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum—Tourist Central. That effectively killed any sympathy I might ever have had towards them.

Amazon.com: What’s coming up for you?

Hand: Well, I’ll be doing some touring and readings for this book, and I hope to record the entire novel as a podcast/audio book—I’m very excited to be performing again. I’m presently at work on a YA novel about Arthur Rimbaud called Wonderwall, to be published by Viking, and am brooding on another novel that might be something along the lines of Generation Loss, or not. I get restless and like to shift gears a lot. So we’ll see.