Find an event
Writing lab
Jesse Ball discusses the nature of his experiments.
The subject of the e-mail read: “I didn’t know you liked ‘experimental’ stuff,” and it came from a friend apparently surprised by my recent expression of admiration for Jesse Ball’s second novel, The Way Through Doors (Vintage, $13.95). I don’t think he’d read the book yet, but he couldn’t be blamed for labeling it as such.
The book begins with Selah Morse, a pamphleteer taken under the wing of his possibly nefarious uncle and given the job of inspector for the possibly nefarious Ministry. Shortly thereafter, Selah witnesses a car striking a beautiful young woman. He accompanies her to the hospital under the guise of her boyfriend. When she awakes with amnesia and a concussion, he takes her back to his flat where he begins telling her stories to keep her awake—often odd fables or stories of his own life tinged with mysticism—and as he goes on, the stories interlock, overlap, blend and splice, in the hope that the girl will recognize something of herself.
“I actually feel like I write in an old-fashioned way,” says Ball, 30, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute. “I’m not interested in experimentation; I just try to find expedient methods for expressing, and in this case, it was this Russian-doll method of nesting.”
Though Ball actually wrote The Way Through Doors earlier, another novel, Samedi the Deafness, was released first, in 2007. Often described as a postmodern spy thriller, the Samedi earned him glowing reviews in prominent places like The New York Times and The Washington Post, making this book one of the more anticipated novels of the spring.
But to say that Samedi followed Way may be misleading. Ball’s writing methods are as unique as the books they generate. He composed Way over the course of June and July 2005, and then wrote Samedi in October of the same year. He’s just finished another short novel that he wrote in six days. The process seems essential to the work: For all of its varied invention, there’s a single-mindedness to Way. Even as it winds its way through various tales—as when Selah visits the tallest tower in New York, built into the ground—there’s a relentless momentum to the narrative, a sense that Selah is chasing after something while trying to keep everything bound together. Though calmly and evenly told, a strand of pressed mania runs through the telling, the sort of mindset that could benefit from long, frenetic writing periods. Which explains why he does almost no rewriting.
“I do think that when there are errors in a way of thinking or in a book’s construction, it can be helpful to the reader because it can help give a better picture to the way the author’s mind works,” he says.
Way is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler in the way it calls upon stories outside the main plot to dig at the truth.
“At the heart of this book is a love for story,” he says. “A lot of contemporary fiction will jerk you off with some kind of so-called realism— ‘the tenacity of family life in the face of modernity.’ I just want to get through the main concern of being alive in a way that’s tied to the oldest method of storytelling.”
The Way Through Doors is out now.
