RM: Speaking of The New Yorker, in his review of Pulphead, Dwight Garner bemoaned the “inevitable” day when you’d be hired by The New Yorker and your lyric idiosyncrasies would be neutered. What do you make of that—both the prediction and the threat?

JJS: I don’t know, I think he was just being goofy. I mean, I would be honored to work for them. In fact, I did have an assignment for them once, and I totally fucked it up…I suppose it is true that I would have to think strategically about what to do with my voice there, because of the formal constraints of having a kind of house style.  But the thing is, you have to do that at every magazine. Every magazine I’ve worked for I’ve had to figure out what to do with my voice to try to get it through the editorial machinery more or less intact. That’s just part of being a magazine writer. You have to be a little…crafty. I suppose it’s possible that if you took my pieces and subjected them to a more conventional standard, I don’t know how much there would be left.  Which on one hand could be seen as a real weakness. On the other hand, I’ve never tried to do the other thing, I’ve just tried to develop my own thing.

RM: You wrote this beautiful review of The Pale King in GQ. But one odd part, to me, was where you lauded the Cormac McCarthy-esque chapter about the character of Toni Ware. To me, that chapter just sounded like an exercise—Darrell Hammond practicing Dick Cheney in front of the mirror. But to you, it was him “groping for something more satisfyingly conventional, more adult, in his work.”

JJS: Did I really use the term “more adult”?

RM: Yeah.

JJS: Well, that’s his own diagnosis of the type of writing he did, when he was at his most self-excoriating. I’ve wondered about whether I was right about that—where that Cormac McCarthy material would have sat in his own estimation. I thought it was really vivid and powerful, and that type of thing is really hard to do. And he did consider, if I’m not mistaken, he considered Blood Meridian as one of his favorite novels. But was he going over the top and doing a kind of pastiche? That’s possible.