Safety—at What Cost?

Since winning the National Book Award in 2005 for Godless, this Minnesota native's life has changed, if not dramatically, then mostly for the good. Here he talks about his new YA novel, Rash (S&S), a black comedy set 70 years in the future.

Your books are dark and satirical; in fact, they've challenged the image I had of Minnesotans. Is it just you?

Let me mention two people I went to school with: Joel Coen and Al Franken. I think the sense of humor I have in common with Franken and the Coen brothers is about understatement. It's a wry, fatalist sort of humor. There must be something in the water.

You could certainly use those two words to describe Bo's sense of humor, the hero in Rash.

Rash came from looking at how much emphasis there is on safety, especially child safety in modern society. If I'd worn a bicycle helmet when I was a kid, I'd have been laughed off the street. Kids ran all the way home from school and did whatever they wanted until it was time for dinner. A lot of that's changed, most of it for good reasons. But where's it going? How much safer can we get before there are negative consequences? So I created a society where people are very, very safe but there are a tremendous number of restrictions on behavior.

And lots of people in jail.

The trend in the U.S. is to throw more people in jail every year. So, what if we got to the point where 25% of the population was in prison? We'd have to give them something to do, so all the grunge work would be done by prisoners. Just the other day I heard some congressman from California suggest we stop immigration and use prisoners to pick fruit. I was going for outrageous but maybe I didn't go far enough.

Do you believe, as Bo does, that the novel is a badly antiquated format? He couldn't even get through Huckleberry Finn.

I think that I'll be long gone before the novel disappears, but I did wonder when I was younger why they didn't at least use different colors to indicate emotional content; I don't feel that way anymore, but the novel has remained incredibly unchanged for hundreds of years. Younger people are getting their information in different formats, specifically the Internet, and the attention given to the novel is going elsewhere. Those old novels require a different kind of settling in. A lot of modern novels can be read in little bits and I think that's kind of an indicator of where we're going. Maybe the serial novel will come back into fashion.