Benkharakh.com

By Ben Kharakh

When a pre-teen starts getting spam from his dead mother's e-mail account, he and his father start buying everything the junk mail has to offer, from penis enlargement pills and Ginsu knives to getting another mortgage, all while slowly succumbing to madness. With a premise like that, who can resist? I certainly couldn't and read Christian TeBordo's We Go Liquid in a single afternoon. That's how engrossing it was! And you can get engrossed in it yourself at Christian's reading at McNally Robinson on November 15th.

The book is a very fast read. Once I started, I didn't want to stop. How long did it take you to write and what inspired the premise?
I'm glad to hear that it holds together like that because the actual composition of the book was pretty scattershot. The last section – the part about the carving knife – was originally a short story I wrote when I was an undergrad. I called it "Congratu-fucking-lations" and it was terrible. I liked the basic idea so I continued reworking it for years, but was never quite happy with it.

Much later, my mother passed away, and I really did begin to receive spam from her account. After a while I decided to fictionalize that, and it resulted in a longish novella that is pretty similar to the book in its current form. That took about six months.

Then I had it accepted by Impetus press, and my editors, Willy Blackmore and Jennifer Banash, gave me a bunch of great suggestions, and after another six months of much harder work it looked more like a novel.

When do you know when you've actually "finished" a piece?
This is a difficult one for me because the more I publish, the more it seems like what I'm looking for in fiction is not what everyone else is looking for. I'm most interested in the way words are arranged and the rhythms they create, and I also like plot, as in event, particularly funny and/or violent events. I'm much less interested in psychology, so sometimes I'll finish something to my own standards and an editor will tell me that my characters' motives are unclear or worse.

I got lucky with We Go Liquid. I wanted to get the narrator's mind-state across, and Jennifer and Willy seemed to intuit what that mind-state was, so they would tell me where I was being too vague, and I would find a way to flesh things out.

What was it like to write from the perspective of a 12-year-old and what sort of steps did you take to make it feel authentic?
I cheated a little. Because I couldn't have written authentically from the perspective of a 12-year-old, I had a somewhat older narrator looking back at when he was 12, which allowed me room for a little more wisdom and a lot more vocabulary.

I also read and re-read Isaac Babel's early stories which take a similar approach and achieve some really haunting effects, even in translation.

I noticed that. I thought, "This is a peculiar boy who knows who Zeno the Eleatic is and uses the word 'abet' casually, but also thinks his mother is communicating with him from the great beyond." Do you imagine the afterlife as having Internet access? What do you think of the idea of an afterlife anyway
I'm the son of a preacher man and woman, and I went to a Baptist elementary school, so I've got a million versions of the afterlife. But I think my favorite, aesthetically at least, would be Book XI of The Odyssey, where even the good guys are just a bunch of bored shades who miss being alive. In any case, I don't want eternal torture, but I could do without streets of gold and jeweled crowns too.

What was it like to have two preachers for parents?
It had its ups and downs. I couldn't have asked for better parents. My mother was very cerebral – she could quote you the Bible in Hebrew and Greek – but she also had a really dark sense of humor, which is why I finally decided I could write this book, that she would have thought it was funny. My father is almost impossibly optimistic and charismatic, like a cross between Ned Flanders and an AME preacher.

But I also think I understand why Catholics insist on celibacy. While there are a lot of wonderful people in the church I grew up in, as a pastor's kid I always felt like I was being watched. Like one time somebody came up to my mom after the service to tell her that my sister, who was two years old at the time, was picking her nose during the sermon. You can see how that might complicate adolescence.

Did going to a Baptist elementary school while simultaneously having two preachers for parents mean that you were given special treatment by teachers and students alike?
In that situation my parents actually canceled each other out. We were Presbyterian, which isn't a deal-breaker, but for Baptists, women ministers are. So they loved my dad, but I think they were suspicious of my mom, because she preached and also because she was far from being a fundamentalist, which often got me into trouble in science class during the unit on creation and how evolution was a lie perpetuated by communists.

Interestingly, there was no mention of religion in We Go Liquid. Does it not play a big role in your life or your writing?
It's kind of a relief that you say that, because there's some imagery in We Go Liquid that I worried might come across as too heavy-handed.

All of my books so far have incorporated religious imagery and leitmotifs, but in the one I'm working on now, I'm confronting the issue directly. It's about a girl evangelist who proposes suppressing the message of Christianity for a generation to spare future generations the threat of damnation, but she's too young to understand the effect that not having the comfort religion can provide could have on the world.

As for my own take on faith, I read a lot of Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard, eh? How much inauthenticity do you think there is in America today?
As I understand them, most of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms would have said it was unethical to interrogate another's authenticity or ethical inwardness, but I'm not Kierkegaard. I think there's a shit load of inauthenticity in America today, but no more than usual, give or take.

So, what did you think was heavy-handed? Was there any correlation between God and Jane Grundy, the radio host whose obscenity laden program the protagonist enjoyed listening to. She was certainly vaguely threatening, did a lot of judging, and she loomed over the narrator, who thought she possessed answers that she really may not have known.
Yeah, there's a quote from Don DeLillo's book Mao II: "When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottletops." Why not an amateur talk show host? Why not make counting sheep or popping pills or cutting bread with an electric carving knife sacramental?

What do you think of our views of death in general?
We could stand to be a little more comfortable with it. I'm not ready for it yet, but when I think about, for example, people who starve themselves on calorie restricted diets because they think it'll add years, I can't figure out the point, like dying later is only technically living longer. I'm still pretty young, though.

After the death of the mother, the boy and his father were seemingly without guidance and attempted to fill that void with medication and material possessions before ultimately slipping into madness. Do you consider people's fixation with material possessions and reliance on medication misguided?
I suppose I do, though I'm more comfortable talking about my own experience than "people" in general. Like, for example, my wife and I have a 500 square foot apartment and two Swiffer Sweepers. Thinking about that sometimes astounds me, but it doesn't exactly make me want to smash capitalism. The exception here would be Hummers. I feel a kind of primal rage when I see one rolling down the street.

Medication is a murkier subject. I think people who really need it should take it, and I'm not the person to decide who really needs it. The boy and his father only use it because they want to believe that the mother is offering it, and as a way of bonding. It's not the healthiest way of dealing with grief, but they're trying.

You may not want to smash capitalism, but is there anything you would like to smash?
Any cell phone not set on vibrate.

The boy and his father were also both isolated and seemed to lack the proper support network needed to deal with the death of such a close family member. This sort of isolation, however, is not uncommon and many have been saying that Americans are becoming much more isolated. How do you feel about this sentiment?
I absolutely think we're becoming more isolated, but I may be dating myself. I just don't get warm all over when a close friend offers me a Macy's gift card via Myspace comment. I feel closest to my family when we're all around the dinner table, close to my friends when we go out dancing, but I also understand that I'm very privileged to have family and friends. So yeah, while I see a lot of new cultural developments isolating us further, I imagine there are people who think those same things are bringing everybody closer together.

What sort of cultural elements do you see isolating us further?
I mentioned cell phones before. I read somewhere that a surprisingly large percent of the time people are talking into those things there's no one on the other end. People just hold them to their ears because they want to seem important or they don't want to be bothered.

And though I don't think there's any conspiracy or intent on the part of the powers that be, I think Youtube, Blogger, and social networking sites have worked out conveniently for them, whoever they are. Give people a choice of layout and a place to spout off, maybe some comments to spout back, and they imagine they're unique and communicating when they're really just soliloquizing. Maybe that's better than being lonely, but it doesn't match my understanding of friendship or even connection. Which isn't to say those resources can't do any good. I use all of the above.

While the Internet was the impetus for the events in We Go Liquid, it has also been the biggest barrier for many aspiring writers, becoming an almost ideal means of procrastination. Have you also fallen victim to its charm?
I am the Internet's willing victim. I spend way too much time watching Santana shred on Youtube, and the only way I can get any writing done is to bring a pen and a notebook to the coffee shop down the street.

You're going to be in town to do a reading at McNally Robinson . In the time that you've spent in the city, have you had any strange "Only In New York" sort of moments?
Every moment in New York for me is strange. I live in Philadelphia, and while I guess it's a big city, it doesn't seem that way once I get off the Chinatown bus in Tribeca. For the past couple of years, I've mostly been there for readings and shows and the strangeness comes across by comparison.

Philly is arguably provincial, but the scenes are close-knit and forgiving. I can act the fool at a reading and no one there minds and no one not there is likely ever to hear about it. Last spring in New York I was doing a reading from a really obnoxious and, for lack of a better term, politically incorrect story and getting kind of hammy when I looked up to see Zadie Smith watching and got flustered. An editor for one of the major houses came up to me afterward, and as we talked I realized that my presentation had made him think the persona of the story was really me. A week later, someone sent me a link to an article in an Australian newspaper. It was a profile of the guy I was reading with, who had been the real draw that night, but it led off with a paragraph about my performance. So, for me, "Only in New York," means the whole world could find out.

Given the opportunity, how would you change New York?
Fire Isaih Thomas, probably.

Is there a New Yorker do you most admire?
I would have to say Stephon Marbury. He's not even my favorite Knick, but the shoes … I got a pair of Starbury Ones for only 15 dollars, the white high tops with the orange and blue trim, and now I totally dominate the playground. Don't tell my friends.

What do you consider to be the perfect day of recreation in the city?
I would spend a lot of time and money in bookstores. I never have enough of either when I go to New York.

Check Christian out at McNally Robinson on November 15th when he'll be joined by authors Dave Housley and Jennifer Banash.