Interview | Dean Bakopoulos

In the fall of 2008, Dean Bakopoulos handed his publisher the final draft of his second novel, My American Unhappiness (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24). The ending of the book depended on the ending of a much larger story: the 2008 presidential election.

“I had actually written two endings, one if Obama was elected and one if Palin was elected,” says Bakopoulos, speaking from a friend’s home in rural Wisconsin, where his family is on vacation. “They were very different endings. If Obama won, I wanted Zeke [the book’s protagonist] to ride that crest of optimism, even if you suspect he hadn’t really changed.”

That skepticism-tempered optimism proved regrettably prescient, as My American Unhappiness—a book grounded in Madison, Wisconsin—reads much different now, given the upheaval in the Wisconsin state capital. Bakopoulos, who lives in Ames, Iowa, and teaches at Iowa State, grew up in southeast Michigan and lived for a time in Madison, where he started the Wisconsin Book Festival.

“This book has at its core a political feel, in that it’s trying to capture where we were at the end of this era of unbridled, unsustainable optimism,” Bakopoulos says. “We began this really optimistic streak with Reagan and continued it with the election of Obama. But it’s an optimism based on rhetoric and messaging, rather than anything real. If you really stop and examine the economic structures that are holding up our country, it gets really scary.”

Zeke Pappas, the novel’s protagonist, is a 33-year-old widower, a waning wunderkind who, at 24, was hired to launch the Great Midwestern Humanities Initiative, a government-funded project designed to stem a purported Midwestern brain drain. The organization provides grants, and Zeke spearheads the flagship project, an oral history initiative called An Inventory of American Unhappiness. Zeke interviews Americans, beginning with the very simple question: Why are you so unhappy? Responses vary from boyfriends to, as a 39-year-old cab driver puts it, “The president. Lies. Liars. Secrets and lies. Most everything political.”

That depressing dyad of personal and political dissatisfaction both afflicts and animates Zeke. Not surprisingly, the funding climate for large humanities projects has become unfriendly, and as the money dries up, the GMHI comes under investigation by the Orwellian Department of Departmental Compliance and Oversight.

As in his first novel, 2005’s Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, Bakopoulos writes with tremendous heart about his main character’s inner life. Zeke struggles to do right, or at least he excels at telling himself he’s struggling to do right, but the actual force of his goodwill is met with the equal and opposite force of his complacency. Like Please Don’t, the new book is very concerned with class, both the ways it’s overtly (and deceptively) discussed in public, and the way it’s painfully felt in private. But My American Unhappiness is also seriously funny and entertaining, eliciting cringes from readers in a way that recalls the work of Sam Lipsyte.

Bakopoulos says the book was originally straight political allegory, before it became as much about Zeke’s search for love. He takes care of his cancer-stricken mother and two orphaned nieces, and it turns out, his deceased wife might not be so deceased. And while the book is about the various delusions of political and personal life, Bakopoulos keeps the impact of a political novel in 2011 in perspective.

“I don’t know if it can be influential at all, but I think it’s the duty of a novelist to reflect the anxieties of a culture in ways other forms of writing can’t,” he says. “Coming up with compassionate characters who are plagued by those anxieties might change a few hearts.”

Bakopoulos reads at Printers Row Lit Fest Sunday 5.