BOOKSETC.

Interview with Will Ferguson

Until now Will Ferguson has been known mainly for his travel writing, but with the publication of his debut novel, Happiness, it is obvious that a major new talent has appeared on the scene.

A Catch-22 style satire for the Oprah generation, its main target is our persistent need for self-help books, programmes and gurus. The novel considers what would happen if a self-help book was published--in this case entitled "What I Learned On The Mountain"--that actually lived up to all its promises and cured the reader of all their problems. The ensuing chaos produces the funniest novel since The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

1. Whilst this is your first novel, you're no stranger to the publishing industry. What made you turn to fiction?

My university degree was in screenwriting and film production (York: Toronto, BFA 1990), and I have always been interested in story-telling. Even in my travel writing and social critiques, I tried to create a strong sense of narrative flow.

You may have noticed that Happiness actually parallels the "Wizard of Oz." Edwin is the straw man. Leon Mead is the cowardly lion. Mr. Ethics is the heartless tinman. May is Dorothy. The urine-soaked green rooftops of Paradise Flats are the Emerald City. There is the fake wizard (Harry Lopez) and the man behind the curtain (Jack). The highway is a "line of gold bricks" drawing them in. The wicked witch of the east (the librarian) says she is "melting." And so on.

My background in film informs a lot of what I do. I think each scene should be layered in as many allusions as possible, with divergent and convergent lines of perspective (i.e. intersecting themes, storylines and images). [I just read that last sentence again. Man. It sounds more pretentious than I had intended.]

2. What other allusions should we be looking out for?

Running through the book is both a love of words and an acknowledgment of their limitations. May collects obscure words; Edwin collects Latin phrases. They both seem to be asking the question: Can feelings exist if there is no word available to capture it? Are we limited by language? Or liberated by it? Language is both a curse and a blessing, I think. And the repeated image of words "punched through the page revealing the darkness on the other side" is crucial. ("What I Learned on the Mountain" was a travesty precisely because it abdicated the role of words and language: it sought to dissolve reality, rather than confront it.)

On a less serious level, I played with language as well. I used portmanteaus to unite disparate qualities: Mr. Mead (as noted) is a combination of "Me and need" which sort of sums up his generation. McGreary is a combination of "Grumpy and weary." Edwin is a play on the "Ed." tag used by editors--as well as marking him as the ultimate victor ("win"). The publishing house, Panderic, is a combination of "Panacea" and "Epidemic." And so on.

There is also the image of damaged hands (as opposed to broken hearts and muddled heads): Edwin's thumb is broken. Harry's finger is shot off. Mr. Mead's hands are clawed with arthritis. Jack's hands, in sharp contrast, are revealed to be massive and strong.

3. And why in particular did you choose the Wizard Of Oz? What is it that appeals to you about that film?

The Wizard of Oz parallel grew out of the first draft. It wasn't intentional at first. But when I finished the first draft, I realized that I had a "fake wizard" and a "man behind the curtain." Originally, Edwin stalked Jack down on his own, but once I decided to parallel the "magical dream journey" of Oz, I created a Tin Man character (Mr. Ethics) and included the Cowardly Lion (Mead, who was in the book from the start) on a road trip.

4. Do you think you'll write fiction again, or was this a one-off?

In my dream world, I would write a travel book one year and a novel the next. I am already outlining my next work of fiction, a tale of grifters and small-town con men.

5. What were the differences you found between writing fiction and your usual travel writing?

Fiction is the art of addition. Travel writing is the craft of subtraction.

In fiction, you build up a story around an idea or a character or a theme. With travel narratives, you seek to edit, condense and summarize your experiences, to distill what happened to its purest form. To "chip it down" in a sense. If fiction is clay sculpture, travel is marble.

6. Happiness seems to be a very idea-driven novel, so maybe you could explain for us how the idea started and developed into its current form?

It honestly started with a comment, made in passing, by a book publicist: "If someone ever wrote a self-help book that actually worked, we'd all be in trouble." I just extrapolated from there. I am a great believer in having ideas drive a novel, to give a work momentum. So much of our current fiction (at least in North America) lacks plot and story. A lot of it is excruciatingly boring. I didn't want to write about moody characters having cryptic conversations about nothing. I wanted the novel to be about something--in this case, the Meaning of Life Itself. Or, failing that, why Oliver Reed is the World's Greatest Role Model.

7. What kind of research did you have to do for the book?

In preparation, I went to a secondhand bookstore and bought a bunch of self-help paperbacks, everything from I'm OK, You're OK, to The Seven Habits of Successful People, The Celestine Prophecy, Living a Simple Life in a Complex World, and so on. I also read a whack of Deepak Chopra, the greatest charlatan the New Age has produced. It was mind-numbing. I waded through a swamp of self-love and banal life-affirming mottoes until my frontal lobes started to ache and my eyesight went all blurry on me. It was exhausting and nauseating, but it helped me get the pitch right.

8. What's the worst piece of self-help advice you've heard?

My older brother Ian once convinced me to jump off the garage roof, saying "If you close your eyes, really tight, it won't hurt." He was lying, of course. And so are all the feel-good, self-help merchants who ooze calm and peddle their wares, trying to convince us that if we just hug ourselves really, really, really hard everything will be okay.

9. And the best? (If there is one!)

The best advice came from my father, Jack Ferguson (aka. Jack MacGreary). My Dad was a hard-drinking Scottish crank who lived the last years of his life in a trailer in the dusty, prairie town of Rapid City (population 420)--which was, of course, the model for Paradise Flats. Fayther, as we liked to call him, always said, "The trouble with having an open mind is that people come along and put things in it."

Booksetc.
February, 2002