An Interview with David Long, Author of The Inhabited World 

1. Why write a ghost story?

I’m at the point in my life as a reader where I crave differentness. I’m reading more novels from other times and from regions that are quite foreign to me, Eastern Europe and Asia, for instance. And increasingly I’m looking for stories told in unusual ways. So I think the urge to try a more eccentric book originates there. I’d actually started another novel, when I saw a scrap of paper beside my reading chair on which, a few days earlier, I’d scratched: Ghost of a suicide. I dropped the other project immediately—I knew this was what I was supposed to work on next.

2. What’s different about your ghost story?

First, I wanted to avoid the conventions of ghost fiction. I didn’t want the novel to be about spooking the living, and I didn’t want it to be a fairytale—like the movie, Ghost, for instance, where there’s a hugely sentimental moment of contact between the dead guy and his widow. The word “ghost” never appears in the book. All during the time I was writing it, the working title was Purgatorio. I wanted my character be in an intermediate place. He knows he’s not alive, yet he’s not in a state of total nothingness. He’s somewhere between life and death. His task is to try to understand why. Is it permanent? Is there a purpose behind it? Why him? Much as I love to evoke the physical world, I’ve been influenced by Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, who hammers away at the idea that the novelist’s job isn’t to portray reality, but to explore existence itself, to create what he calls “experimental selves.” So my character, Evan Molloy, is in an experimental afterlife.

3. Is Evan a voyeur?

Well, he’s an observer. Toward the end of his old life, he’d gotten so rattled that he couldn’t see the good in things. He was in a bunker mentality—he kept thinking, Oh no, what next? But now the world fascinates him. In particular, he believes his mission is to pay attention to the woman, Maureen Keniston, who occupies the house that used to be his. So that’s what he does. It turns out that there are certain parallels between their two fates—each is in a version of purgatory. So, no, I don’t think he’s voyeuristic, at all—what he wants, more than anything, is to be Maureen’s guardian spirit.

4. You’re on record as believing that each of your projects should be a departure from what came before. But is there any connection between The Inhabited World and your earlier fiction?

I’ve always been interested in life’s flukiness, how slim the margin between success and failure can be, how it can hinge on a small detail, a small choice.

A number of years ago, a light plane crashed into the mountains not far from where I lived in Northwest Montana. I happened to know one of the Search and Rescue people, and I learned that the plane had come so close to making it over the ridge that when it hit its engine broke off and came to rest on the other side. I found that a devastating image, and built a short story around it [“Clearance”]. In various ways, the idea of the near-miss, or its flip side, keeps coming back in whatever I write.

In The Inhabited World, a man finds himself in a downward spiral that leads to his death. Looking back, from his peculiar new vantage point, he sees that right up until the last moments, the outcome could’ve been different. His depression wasn’t the utterly black, utterly hopeless variety. His was “a surmountable despair" —he just didn’t surmount it.

There’s a piece of wisdom my father drummed into me (and I’m sure it had been passed through our family for generations): “Battles are won by the remnants of armies.” What he meant is that winning can be a matter of outlasting your enemy when you’re both beleaguered, both badly worn down. Sometimes you just need that extra five percent of staying power. That’s what this book is about.

5. Your first three books were collections of short stories. Do you still write stories - and what’s different about being a novelist?

My story writing is on hold for now. Stories are tough. It’s not that writing a short story is harder than writing a novel, but writing a book of short stories is really difficult—for me, at least. My last collection, Blue Spruce, represented seven years of work. A book of stories is all beginnings and endings, each of which has to be just right. Whereas a novel is mostly middle. If you get stuck while writing a story, then you‘re just stuck. But in a novel you can go and work on a different place. Someone once compared novel writing to laying pipe. The dailiness of it appeals to me—every day you lay down a little more story. In any case, these days I’m feeling the need to pick up the pace a bit. I want more books on the shelf.

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