Welcome to our Indie Spotlight series, in which TNBBC gives small press authors the floor to shed some light on their writing process, publishing experiences, or whatever else they'd like to share with you, the readers!
Dave Fitzgerald shares some insight today,
I first read Notes
From Underground in the backseat of my parents’ minivan, on the way to some
college visits in North Carolina. I’m not going to claim any preternaturally
good teenage taste here – I wanted to read a Dostoyevsky and I picked it
because it was short. End of story. I was high-minded with regards to my
fledgling literary tastes, but also a little pretentious and kind of lazy (all
of which, for anyone who’s read this hilariously scurvy little book, will
surely strike a note of delicious irony). I figured I had a lot on my plate already
as I endeavored to put some distance, however scant, between myself and my
one-horsepark town. Shorter was better; the easy way to go.
But regardless of my questionable criteria in choosing
it, as I sat quietly chuckling to myself, en route to an official visit with my
dream school, I never could have guessed at the indelible impact it would have
on my future creative life. In Dostoyevsky’s nameless “Underground Man,” I had
stumbled upon something like a prophetic archetype – a century-ahead-of-its-time
template for every dark, self-aggrandizing antihero I would soon fall in love
with as I finally escaped the censorious clutches of a churchy home and a standard
curriculum (though honestly fairly liberal) public high school, as well as a
dire portent of a future societal scourge that only (again, somewhat
ironically) a mad Russian could have possibly foreseen. But more than that
even, I had found, almost entirely by some indolent slacker’s version of luck,
the seed of what is about to become my first published novel (Troll, Whiskey Tit Books, 2023).
I didn’t escape quite as far as I would’ve liked (waitlisted
by the dream school, I ended up at the gargantuan state University only an hour
away from my one-horsepark town), but it was enough to feel free to read
whatever I wanted – all the sex-positive feminist theory and depraved, druggy
head trips I could get my grubby freshman hands on. With a ravenous lust to
catch up on all the heretofore verboten art and liberal politics I was just
sure I’d been missing out on, it was here I first (and last; and only time ever)
tackled what remains the most singularly affecting and disturbing book I have
ever read – Bret Easton Ellis’s transgressive masterpiece American Psycho. I still remember both rushing to hide it from view
when an old acquaintance unexpectedly materialized in the hallways of the Comp
Lit building to invite me to Bible study, as well as multiple instances (you
know the ones) where I felt the need to put it down despite being entirely alone
– moments when I felt physically ill at what I was reading – at what no one was
any longer preventing me from putting in my own head. I didn’t quite know if I
liked it or not, but that it was even allowed – much less successful – felt
revelatory. There was a shocking power to this work that, here 20+ years later,
still virtually nothing has matched.
It was around this time, and with these two works very
much at the forefront of my mind, that a certain now-titular term began its
slithery entrée into both the common lexicon, and my own fledgling authorial
plans.
As I and my fellow (deep sigh) “elder millennials” can
attest, there is a big difference between growing up “with” the internet, and
growing up “alongside” the internet – hitting our adolescent growing pains more
or less concurrently with the defining technological advancement of our
lifetimes. As ostensible guinea pigs for every stage of online life – from
e-mail (middle school) to instant messenger (high school) to Facebook (college)
to our current, livepost-everything, streaming into the void,
InstaTwitterTinderTok social media hellscape (#Adulting) – there were no real guardrails
for us. No cautionary tales yet told. No examples to point to and say “too much
of X” will lead to “Y disorder” and “Z addiction.” We were a herd of goats,
clearing a minefield of Nigerian princes and XXX celebrity nudes; a generation
of high-stakes bets on futures no one was even trying to predict. Everything
the internet has become, it became in large part for us, in response to our evolving relationships with, and needs
from it. And it was this codependent, inosculatory timeline that gave rise to
the now all-too-well-known figure of the Troll.
Though the word has come to mean a lot of different
things in the (checks notes) seven some-odd years since I first started writing
Troll, (!), back then it was pretty
much just anyone who hopped into an online forum to be a dick for no reason.
Anyone whose express purpose was, to shamelessly quote myself, “sowing
indiscriminate discord.” Of course this definition still applies. It’s only the
stakes that have risen. It would take a whole ‘nother book (which I am in no
way prepared to write), (yet), to explore all the ways in which this gleefully
nihilistic mindset has grown and mutated since 2016 (when Troll is set). The ways in which it’s fed the rise of the
alt-right, QAnon, the incel movement, cybercrime, (Russian) election
interference, and any number of other unsavory elements that now daily douse
our country’s already infernal political bonfires with hateful accelerant. As a
young naif, I remember feeling true, righteous anger upon first hearing about
this burgeoning trend taking chatrooms and message boards by storm. “Why would
anyone do that?” I wondered aloud to my new dorm friends. “What’s the point?!”
I’ve never been an especially online person. I enjoyed
conversing one-on-one via text, but I resisted Facebook longer than anyone I
knew, and quickly grew tired of it after joining. I only started Tweeting a
couple of years ago (more ironically still, in service of promoting this book),
and still regard it as an activity much closer to work than play. But this idea
of the anonymous Troll – the willful, recreational villain – the dedicated
thorn in our collective sidebars – it took hold and wouldn’t let go. I muddled
over it constantly. I began taking notes. Connecting dots. Forming theories.
I found myself thinking back often to the Underground
Man, alone in his wretched apartment, bitterly railing against old schoolmates
and obsessing over petty slights, as certain of his superiority as he was of his
abject failure, “frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing [him]self with it.”
The weeks he spends plotting his small, pitiful revenge – plotting to simply bump into a man on the street – for the unforgivable
crime of that man “just not noticing [him]” – began to feel like the truest,
and most fatidic expression of the modern Troll I’d ever read. The isolation.
The dread. The wild swings between seeking love in others, and despising them
for offering it. The constant battle between narcissism and self-loathing. Who
amongst us hasn’t felt all of this while doomscrolling latenight through a
perpetual feed of our life’s acquaintances and their photoshop-perfect lives?
Who among us hasn’t thrilled “to feel offended on purpose for no reason,” or
known “the pleasure of despair,” or understood all-too-well that “to be overly
conscious is a sickness”? It is uncanny how little one would have to change to
transport Dostoyevsky’s 1864 Notes into
the present day, and imagine his Underground Man alone in the darkness of 2023,
furiously pecking out vitriol by the light of his computer screen.
By the same token, I became fascinated by the ongoing
conversation around American Psycho in
the wake of Mary Harron’s popular film adaptation – both with regards to her
interpretation of the material as a feminist text, and the
widely-speculated-upon fan theory that Patrick Bateman’s sadistic murders never
happened at all – that they were metaphorical fantasy sequences, born out of
his alienation and internalized rage amidst a high-pressure, hyper-misogynist
social environment. From my enlightened perch in Women’s Studies 101, I fell in
love with the idea that this character – the most infamous rape-monster ever
committed to page – was nothing but an impotent corporate poseur; a satirical
stand-in for a grotesque, but ultimately vapid and ludicrous culture of toxic
masculinity.
With the increasing popularity (and decreasing stigma)
of internet dating sites in full effect, alongside an exponential (and exponentially
free) rise in pushbutton pornography, I began to hear more and more stories,
more and more frequently, of bestial Troll behavior toward women in particular,
both online and in real life, and this defanged portrait of Bateman never
strayed far from my mind. As this newly flattened (if by no means leveled) playing
field set about splicing the wires between lizard-brain fantasy and hookup
culture reality, as well as establishing a new layer of scrutiny by which all
potential partners would be prescreened for rapey red flags, the vasts of
cyberspace quickly became a dumping ground for male insecurity and sexual
frustration of every stripe. Men were, with regards to the historically skewed
hierarchies of American courtship ritual, at least arguably starting to lose a
small, somewhat nebulous fraction of institutionalized power which they had
heretofore taken for granted (while still maintaining, just to be clear, an
overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of all existing, available power), and
the internet was helping them freak the fuck out about it with multifarious
gusto. And awful as it sometimes was, the underlying patheticness of all that
was kind of cracking me up. If Patrick Bateman was just a hard-up loser, I
thought, then how much sadder must be these assholes perving out on OKcupid and
Match.com?
And so, with these two towering works of
proto-trolldom as my twin beacons, connected across 130 years by little more
than an epigraph and a fearless will to heinous confession, I set out to do the
same. To lay bare the ugliest, most pervasive ills of the 21st
century male psyche, as well as interrogate the patriarchal structures through
which they’d flourished, and call bullshit on the lot. It was, in many ways, a
terrifying ordeal. There were days – more than a few – when I was frightened by
the words and ideas coming out of my own head (maybe my censorious parents were
right – be careful what all you put in there), but nothing else I’d ever
written had seemed so necessary; so important. I felt duty-bound to be neither
too funny, nor too serious, while understanding that it was vital to be both. To
pull no punches with regards to my odious protagonist and his indefensible
proclivities, nor to imbue him with anything resembling a moral compass or a
redemptive arc. He needed to be tragicomic in toto. A bad joke, at all of ours
expense. “Empathy, not sympathy” became my mantra. I would give him no quarter.
I wrote him to disarm him. I wrote him to understand.
It would be years before I finished my final draft,
and years more after that before I reached my now-fast-approaching pub day. I
could write a whole ‘nother article (and may well do so before all’s said and
done) about my personal struggles with addiction, with dating, with loneliness
and depression and self-doubt, and the roles, big and small, that each played
in the development of this book. Likewise, I could go on for another ten pages
about influences – from the immersive, coke-addled debauchery of Jay
McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City,
to the self-immolating artistic spleen of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf – but pound-for-pound, no two authors contributed more than
Dostoyevsky and Ellis to the long gestation and difficult birth of Troll. It decidedly won’t be for
everyone – satire, almost as a rule, cannot and should not be – but I hope I at
least hit the right notes. That you’ll find yourself amused by him, and
repulsed by him, in more-or-less equal measure. That his utter ridiculousness
will temper his vile ubiquity. That the character can do evil, even as his
story does good. To spark conversation and debate, laughter and anger – to
shock powerfully enough to be remembered – is all I have ever wanted for him,
and for this book. Maybe that makes me a little bit of a Troll too. “Long live
the underground.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dave Fitzgerald is a writer living and working in the dank and balmy South. He has previously written for Flagpole Magazine and the (now-defunct) film website Cinespect, and currently contributes to Heavy Feather Review, Daily Grindhouse and Cinedump. He tweets @DFitzgerraldo. Troll is his first novel.
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