Garth Greenwell on Capturing What Thinking Feels Like

Photograph by Gary Doak / Writer Pictures via AP

This week’s story, “An Evening Out,” takes place on a single night in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. The narrator, an American who’s just decided to quit his teaching job there, is spending the evening with two of his former pupils, whom he calls Z. and N. Did you embark on the story knowing that it would be contained within one evening?

I did, yes. I’m interested in the quicksilver nature of human interaction, the way that so much of the emotion that passes between human beings is transient, multiple, ambivalent, contrary. A single moment might be tinged with attraction, competitiveness, insecurity, sympathy, all passing so quickly that they barely register. I like writing that takes an expansive approach to time, slowing time down to allow for the parsing of these emotions, the examination of passing impulses. The frame of a single evening felt like a way to open up possibilities for this kind of expansion. That said, I wanted that frame to be flexible enough to allow for interruptions of linear chronology, flashbacks and premonitions that can offer a context for this interaction.

Z. has insisted that the narrator should have “a real Bulgarian night out”—Sofia, the narrator explains, “is famous for these clubs, where the city’s wealthy dance and drink; they’re called chalgoteki, after the pop-folk music they play.” How challenging was it to capture the atmosphere of that kind of place, and to immerse the reader, as well as the narrator, in the club—and in Bulgaria?

Place is at the heart of writing for me; more or less everything I’ve written has been spurred by a response to a particular place. The first time I went to a night club in Sofia, I knew that I would have to write about it. For this story, I wanted to put the narrator in an environment as different as possible from the classroom, a place where the boundaries he has set around himself might be crossed more easily.

I think literature is the best technology we have for communicating the experience of consciousness, for capturing what thinking feels like. To do that, consciousness has to be embedded in a particular place, a particular time, a particular body; one sign of the success of a piece of writing, for me, is the extent to which I feel immersed in a physical environment. I don’t think there was anything especially challenging about placing the story in a chalgoteka: it’s hard to render any setting in a way that feels immersive.

You published your first novel, “What Belongs to You,” last year. It, too, was set in Bulgaria and the protagonist was a teacher there. What relationship is there for you between the novel and the story? Do you see the story as a continuation of the novel or something quite different?

The collection of stories I’m working on now is very much a companion to the novel: all of the stories are set in Bulgaria, all of them feature the same narrator. It was clear to me early on that “What Belongs to You” was a very streamlined container, and there was a great deal that I knew wouldn’t fit into it. I started working on the stories and the novel at almost the same time: I would finish a section of “What Belongs to You” and then, while I figured out the next bit of the novel, I would work on a story. I was overflowing with material I wanted to write about, and it sorted itself fairly intuitively into categories of “novel” and “not-novel.” The stories are more mobile and diverse, I think; they allow me to go more places.

You lived in Sofia for several years before moving back to America. Were you writing much fiction while you were there? Did writing about Bulgaria change the way you thought about it? And did your years in Bulgaria change the way you thought about the States?

I had never written fiction before I moved to Bulgaria: all of my literary training to that point had been in poetry. Something about the place made me a novelist. I had never been to Eastern Europe before, and I had never lived abroad. I was overwhelmed by the place—by my bewilderment and fascination, at first; then by the love I came to feel for it. I was working as a high-school teacher, and all of my students were Bulgarian. Working with young people puts you in a particular relationship to a place, I think: you feel, or I felt, bound to it in a peculiar way, invested or implicated in its destiny. This creates a different relationship to a foreign place than that of a tourist, say. And my experiences in Bulgaria were also inflected by the fact that I was living there as an openly gay person, for most of my students the only openly gay person they had ever met. Writing about Bulgaria was a way to think about the place as deeply as possible, with all of my faculties. It’s an odd paradox: writing takes you away from the world, in the literal sense that it requires spending so much time squirrelled away in a room by yourself; writing is also the way in which I engage most deeply with the world.

I think all novels about Americans abroad are finally novels about America. That’s certainly true of Henry James’s novels, or of James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” (Also of Baldwin’s brilliant essay “Equal in Paris.”) It wasn’t until I lived in Bulgaria that I understood what it meant to be an American. I’ve always been horrified by patriotism of the “America First” variety; I had never realized, until I moved abroad, the extent to which my sense of myself was buttressed by confidence in the importance of the place I came from, by faith that it was a place whose history—whose dramas, grievances, triumphs—could expect to claim the world’s attention.

Henry James and James Baldwin are more eloquent than any other writers I know in dissecting how “American” as an identity depends upon subscription to a set of myths (of innocence, opportunity, equality), and how life abroad can destabilize those myths.

The narrator in the story has always held himself apart from his pupils, and he’s been careful never to let any lines blur. Yet now he’s no longer a teacher, Z. and N. are no longer high-school students, and they’ve all been drinking a lot. How significant is alcohol in softening the divisions between them? There’s a powerful sense of precision in your writing—how did you marry that with the imprecision of inebriation?

The narrator of the story is, in some ways, a fairly buttoned-up type. (This can be a survival mechanism for queer people in homophobic places—and maybe especially for queer people who teach in homophobic places.) There’s a passage in “What Belongs to You” where he reflects on his life as a kind of diminished life, a life of narrow routine, and on the extent to which he’s unsure how much that diminishment is something inflicted on him, and how much it’s something he has chosen.

In this story, I think he feels desperate to try to escape that diminishment, and alcohol is a way to soften the boundaries he’s drawn around himself. It was a challenge to depict his inebriation in a way that allowed the story to remain committed to psychological precision. One thing I tried to do was narrow the scope of the narrator’s regard: as the story progresses, details remain clear but he becomes less aware of his surroundings, and especially of the other people in his surroundings; he becomes more and more fixated on Z. This is a function of desire, but also of drunkenness. It allows for his loss of restraint by providing a defense against shame.

The narrator’s desire is accompanied by a sense of shame. It’s a distant, dull feeling for now, though one he fears will sharpen in the days to come. Yet in many ways the story seems to save the narrator from that shame—how much did you think about this, and about whether the narrator would act or pull back, spend the rest of the night with the boys or go home alone? And did you always know the story would close with the dog, Mama?

I’m not sure the story does save the narrator from shame: I think he’s right to expect a kind of agony stemming from this evening. But it’s true that the story delays that shame, and it’s also true that the story doesn’t pass judgment on the narrator, even as he acts badly. Or I hope that’s true: I’m not very interested in fiction that passes judgment on its characters. I think fiction, at its best, is a tool for thinking about situations whose moral complexity or ambiguity is so intense as to be finally irresolvable.

The narrator wants, or part of him wants, to cross the boundaries he has drawn around his life, and this presents both moral opportunity and moral peril. I think there is something morally admirable or beneficial in the friendship between these characters, or in their desire for friendship; they intend this evening to be a celebration of the love they feel for one another.

At the heart of meaningful teaching, I think, is a relation of selfless love. I wanted in this story to track what happens when that love shifts into or is mixed with eros, sexual desire, a love that does want something for the self, and in which there is often something predatory. That conflict is most interesting, I think, in a kind of middle zone, the zone of ambiguity and ambivalence and doubt. If the narrator gave himself over entirely to predation, if he lost all of the limitations imposed by that other teacherly kind of love, I think I would have been less interested in the story.

I wasn’t sure where the story was going as I wrote it, and I didn’t know Mama Dog was coming until she appeared. I remember being stuck at the point where the narrator had fallen on the steps outside of his apartment, which is where I thought the story might end. I think I knew that would be a disappointing ending, that the trajectory of the story would have been too predictable for too long. I often think of narrative structure in musical terms, and I felt that the story’s harmonic progression was missing a chord. And then Mama appeared, and I was surprised by her, and I thought the story would be surprised by her, too.

The story is punctuated by Bulgarian words and phrases. How fluent in Bulgarian did you become when you were living there? Did you think in a different way in Bulgarian? Did it have any effect on the way you thought or wrote in English?

I don’t speak Bulgarian as well as I would like, but I worked hard to learn it, and I’m fairly fluent. I taught in English when I lived in Sofia, but otherwise I more or less lived in Bulgarian: I had friendships and relationships in Bulgarian, I watched Bulgarian TV, I read Bulgarian novels. There’s a lot of Bulgarian in the novel, and there’s a lot in many of the stories. Part of that is because I think Bulgarian is the most beautiful language in the world, and I wanted the music of it in my sentences. And part of it is that I’m fascinated by what thinking feels like in a foreign language, maybe especially a language you don’t speak with perfect fluency. That imperfect fluency allows for reflection on difficulties of expression and communication that are endemic to all of our attempts to make meaning.