Trying to Make Sense of It All

Hanging on the wall of Dale Peck’s East Village apartment is a picture of a blind boy in a monk’s cell, holding a blank text. In the distance, white light fills a round window. White is the color of the blank page, Peck says, and it is also the color of prison walls. In so many ways, writers are imprisoned, he believes, mostly by their imaginations.

“The reason why we become writers,” Peck says, “is that we can’t stop imagining stories. We’re running ahead of those stories as fast as we can to try to control them. If we stop running, if we stop writing, we’ll become tangled in them. I can’t stop thinking of stories. I can’t stop metamorphosing experience. I can’t stop taking the real and making it into the unreal.”

Dale Peck’s writing is blossoming. At 30, he is not only one of the leading literary voices of his generation, but also one of the few avant-garde writers of any age who is changing the rules for prose fiction. His novels simultaneously define and defy the genre. Peck writes to deliberately investigate the process of writing. He self-consciously evokes traditional genres while investing them with new meaning.

In his new novel, “Now It’s Time to Say Good-Bye” (Farrar Straus & Giroux), Peck infuses the Hollywood detective thriller with race, gender and literary themes. He uses a sensational story about a lynching, rape and several murders in a small Midwestern town as a vehicle to investigate why we tell stories. A kaleidoscope of various perspectives, “Now It’s Time to Say Good-Bye” is mostly about the world of the author--which Peck does not limit to professional writers. The novel suggests that we are all writers, living amid a net of stories, both inside and outside of our minds.

“We need these shared myths,” Peck explains. “What I’m trying to create are [fictional] situations that teach people how to use these myths, but to use them self-consciously, without becoming so self-conscious that they can no longer use them. . . . I’m not trying to pull the carpet out from under the reader’s feet, as much as to give it little tugs so that he knows it’s there.”

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Raised in a primarily white Kansas town, Peck believes that he has been educated out of his family’s blue-collar sphere.

“I have entered a kind of bourgeoisie mind-set that does not take cultural artifacts as givens,” he says.

While the members of his family simply accept the images that they see on TV and in movies, Peck tries to transmute them by revealing their artificiality. His work shows that an image only gains its importance from its context.

He wrote half of his new novel on a small black-topped metal desk. The first draft he wrote by longhand in a brown covered journal. Then he typed the morning’s work into his computer that afternoon.

“The real writing happens during the rewriting,” he says with a confidence that belies his age. His sky-blue eyes light up a boyish face. He usually wears jeans and a T-shirt. He is both intellectual and playful, casual and intensely serious. Four hundred and fifty-eight pages long, “Now It’s Time to Say Good-Bye” took him only 11 months.

This volume is his third in a series of seven. His first novel, “Martin and John,” a love story about two men living in the age of AIDS, won critical acclaim. His second novel, “Law of Enclosures,” received almost as many accolades. A former member of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Peck also has written fiery essays on AIDS and the gay community.

He believes that “Martin and John’s” success was made possible by political activism in the gay community during the 1980s. That agitation, he says, brought an awareness of AIDS into the mainstream and paved the way for widespread acceptance of the book’s fragmented narrative about grief set in a homosexual world.

“The mainstream critical establishment was at a point where they were eager to show their goodwill and their ability to embrace homosexual writers and writers who were writing about AIDS,” Peck says, “and here [I] came, this very marketable young man who’d written a pretty good book that they could demonstrate their goodwill by loving.”

Peck believes that AIDS is one of the few defining aspects not only of our time, but also of his own imagination.

“It is incumbent upon me to bear witness to this because I was spared infection,” he says. “It’s incumbent upon me as someone who can report upon it constantly as opposed to those people who are infected, who write about it until they die. I’m affected, but not infected.”

People do not know how to think about AIDS anymore, Peck says: The old narratives of anger, fear and righteousness have become hackneyed, and the new one that claims new medicines have turned AIDS into a chronic, manageable illness is untrue. Peck believes that both the homosexual and heterosexual communities are running from the disease, personally, culturally and politically. Hence, Peck’s new novel opens with two gay men literally running away from AIDS.

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Peck never writes a story that lacks a political message.

“The art for art’s sake writer--on some level, I find that immoral,” he says. “I’m probably a bit of a Puritan about that. But I think art has to serve social purposes.”

A writer has a moral duty, he believes, to create stories that make sense of the world. But any meanings offered in Peck’s renditions are never fixed.

“I like to think of my work as being a mirror onto which readers can project themselves,” he says, “and that as readers change and grow, the image that they see reflected back at them will also change and grow.”

Peck explains how he creates such a mirror in his new novel.

“The book offers various stories that explore moral complexities on a social plane, but exist in a framework that allows the reader to accept or reject the moral truths or judgments that the stories offer,” he says. For example, one of his characters, Eric Johnson, rapes and beats a young girl who had falsely accused him of rape several years before. He is caught in a fiction that actually turns him into a criminal. If stories are inevitable, Peck reasons, then all we can do is try to understand the various myths in which we live.

Some of the myths that Peck investigates are the societal definitions that separate people. “These artificial divisions between races, genders and sexual orientations produce the strangest sorts of behaviors among and between the members of the various groups--most of which are detrimental to everyone involved,” he says. In his stories, he shows not only the fabrication of these divisions, but also a few of the political motives behind them.

He does this by fusing what have been defined traditionally as opposites: blacks and whites, homosexuals and heterosexuals, authors and their characters. He shows that these categories are not distinct. For example, Eric Johnson is also an albino, and his neighbors define him as either black or white, depending on their politics.

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Peck also blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. By depicting the unreliability of memory, he questions the veracity of any memoir. But he admits that he twists his own experiences into imaginative lies. “On some absolute level, there is a division between truth and fiction,” he explains. “But on a functional level, the boundary is blurry.”

In fact, the characters in “Now It’s Time to Say Good-Bye” actually fight back against the authors that are confining them in tales. Characters become authors, and authors suddenly turn into characters.

The novel also suggests that authors are murderers. “There is always a gap between the actual and the imagined,” he says, and an author’s rendition of an experience or person is inevitably inaccurate. And that inaccuracy inflicts violence, Peck explains. It kills the real, by replacing it with the imagined. “There’s no way that you can write about someone without them feeling betrayed.”

Then, how does a writer continue?

“I have always believed in languages’ fundamental inadequacies,” Peck answers. “[But] to focus on that is to hobble oneself before ever leaving the gate. You cripple yourself. More important is what language can do. I feel like I have to make this very old fashioned effort to tell the story anyway, in the most beautiful language that I can muster. It’s a pathetic offering, but it’s all I can do.”