Gary Eberle

Interview with Gary Eberle

I recently had the chance to read an amazing book by Gary Eberle--Angel Strings. After reading the book, Mr. Eberle was kind enough to answer a few of my questions. In addition to Angel Strings (Coffee House Press, 1995), he has also published several nonfiction books: Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning (Shambhala 2003), Dangerous Words, Talking About God in an Age of Fundamentalism (Shambhala/Trumpeter 2007). He has also published one short story collection A City Full of Rain (2001).

Angel Strings follows Joe Findlay, a down and out backup guitar player and son of a professional magician. Joe takes to the road to try to find his place in the world. After months of playing dingy bars, he meets Violet Tansy, a teenage girl who caries a baby in a box who needs to get to San Diego. Their journey takes them through a landscape of neo-Pagans, Detroit slums, mini-malls, and Munchee Marts. As I finished the book I wanted to know more about the role of geography in Eberle's novel, what the relationship was between him and his main character, and different influences Eberle saw in his book. Here is how he answered.

What role do you think place and geography play in your novel?
Place and geography were important. The beginning in Northwest Ohio was important, personally, because that's where I am from. After that, the spine of the novel unfolded through an America that was mainly horizontal--the Great Plains. The joke was that Joe and Violet would drive and drive and then end up at another strip mall freeway exit that looked exactly like the one they had been at several hours before. I-80 became an East-West Mississippi River in the more or less implicit allusions to Huck Finn. I have driven across the country a couple of times and am always disappointed in how much it is the same, culturally, from coast to coast. We have no places anymore, in the sense of cultural geography.

In what way would you compare Joe Findlay's experiences as a musician with your own as a novelist?
Since Angel Strings is my only novel so far, we're similar in that Joe had only one hit. But other than that, I have been a musician myself and the idea of schlepping your act around from bar to bar or your book from book group to book group is roughly the same. At a bar, most people are there for the drinks. At the book clubs, they're mostly there for the chardonnay. The act, the book, or the writer are simply the excuse people use to get together. I hope that's not too cynical, but it's been my experience with all of my books. Few people have time to read deeply anymore, so I have had the experience of working for years on a piece of writing and then finding out that a reader spent a few hours with it then went on to the next novelty. I will be retiring in a few years and hope to get back to writing more fiction. In the interim, I have published non-fiction books.

What other books would you like to see your novel compared with? Was there a certain tradition of novels you were trying to follow? Were there some books in particular that influenced your writing?

In Angel Strings, I was obviously playing with Magical Realism. I wanted to see if I could do, in the American landscape, what Garcia Marquez does in the steamy jungles of Colombia. In the relentless banality of modern American life, can we find a bit of magic? My interest in comparative mythology and religions came to bear as well, so I suppose Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Bible are lurking in the background as well. In some ways, I was also responding to Beckett-style modernism, trying to find God in a godless culture that is lashing about trying to find something spiritual in a landscape of Munchee Marts.

Thanks for reading this interview. I proper review of the book should be coming soon.… (más)