I like reading something that hasn’t been pre-read for me.  It’s nice to feel you’re in a weird place that not many people have been before. What I want is David Shields’ “deep plumbing of consciousness,” that psychological penetration, and so much novel stuff, designed to make the reading experience nicer, just bores me.  The drift towards nonfiction is more of a dissatisfaction or impatience with a certain limited and widely available idea of what fiction is.

MC: Which is what?

GD: A lot of English fiction.  It’s conceived as a cliché.  It’s enslavement to ‘telling details’ and ‘plots,’ whereas American fiction is more voice-driven, or the American fiction I like is. I can’t read proper philosophy, but I like writing that has a philosophical way of addressing big issues.

MC: Does your writing fit into that category?

GD: I don’t really know what metaphysics is, but I like doing little metaphysical things. 

When you write a book, you learn stuff about whatever it is you’re writing about.  Out of Sheer Rage records a sort of epistemological journey.  At the end of that book, I and the reader know stuff. Traveling in Thailand, there were all these people talking about enlightenment; they really liked this idea of enlightenment and I can see the attraction of that, but what I could never fathom is why they didn’t take advantage of the vast body of Western literature about how to live. I reckon Nietzsche is the top guy.  Read him and Tolstoy and Rilke and George Eliot and all the rest of them and you will receive a great labor-saving reservoir of wisdom, which, unfortunately is not condensable to some little Christmas Cracker thing like enlightenment. 

MC: Can you spell Nietzsche?

GD: N-i-e-t-zed-s-c-h-e.