Devil is Fine, John Vercher's third novel, is a masterful examination of grief, the legacy of our ancestors, institutional racism, and fraught familial relationships. For longtime readers of John's fiction, his attention to detail and incisive character portraits will be no surprise, but this book also sparkles with humor and leans into the absurd. Last semester, John was my faculty mentor at the Randolph College MFA program, but in this interview, we were able to speak simply as reader and writer, examining what it is that makes Devil is Fine truly special. After, of course, the obligatory gushing about how much I personally loved the book.
John Vercher's novel Devil is Fine is out June 18, 2024 and is a July Indie Next pick. You can buy it wherever books are sold.
Malavika Praseed:
You make the choice to frame the novel in the second person, with the narrator speaking directly to his son. Can you speak to the challenges of this point of view choice? Did you ever consider first or third person?
John Vercher:
I never considered anything other than first person, but the second person arose out of a conversation with my editor. First person was a challenge I wanted to take on, especially with an unnamed narrator. While you can argue that every narrator is unreliable, there's something about the first person that completely hones you in on their view, and you have to take for granted what they tell you is true. But on the first draft, sending it to my editor, we detected a bit of narrative distance with the smartass, snarky narrator. I couldn't care less about an unlikeable character, but there has to be some level of relatability. So, he [my editor] brought up the idea of a confessional. That just sent all kinds of bells off in my head. The minute I went back to the opening chapter and tried that, it made so much sense, it opened the book up in ways I never imagined.
Malavika Praseed:
It's an interesting formal choice, and it also sets up the crux of this novel with the narrator's unresolved conflict with his son. It's a kind of dialogue that allows everything else to develop around it. Thinking about some other bold choices, Devil is Fine takes on some absurd, speculative twists, a little different from some of your other work. As someone who writes speculative fiction, I'm curious to know if you found it freeing? Limiting? What was it like?
John Vercher:
Incredibly freeing. And honestly, working with students like yourself and other speculative/magical realist authors, there was this sense that everyone was having so much fun! Of course I have this tendency towards darker subject matter in my fiction, but I also like to laugh and I think I have a pretty good sense of humor, and it wasn't until midway through the writing of this that I thought "am I just writing another dark novel? Is that what I want to do?" As I've done this longer, I've been thinking more about the book as art form, not just words on the page. What else can we do? No other art seems to be limited to that part of the medium, visual art has so many means of interpretation. But for us with words on the page, we all tend to follow a kind of structure, and I thought 'what if I mess with that?' What if I put pictures in it? I remember reading Breakfast of Champions where Vonnegut was randomly inserting pictures, and it was weird but it worked! That, along with this feeling that I wanted to write a book that would be reread. There are several books I've gone back to, and they're all satirists, absurdists, surrealists. I'm always advocating to write what you want to read, and that's what I want to read. To come back to your question, it was immensely freeing, it felt like I was practicing what I preached.
Malavika Praseed:
This segues nicely to my next question, actually. With the satire elements and the humor elements along with the dark storyline, there were points reading this where I thought, how did he balance the tonal shifts? Did it ever feel like you were writing two different books at times?
John Vercher:
I think I brushed up against that, maybe once? And my conclusion was, who cares? Two things can be true at once. You can be experiencing a very dark time and also experience humor, not that the situation is funny, but there is levity to be found in the absurdity of how dark something is. Sometimes you just have to lean into that. I pull a lot of that from my own way of dealing with discomfort, with sometimes inappropriate, annoying humor. But that feels very real to me. This feels exactly where it belongs.
Malavika Praseed:
There are so many times when your protagonist, for lack of a better phrase, has his foot in his mouth! But that relates back to the father-son conflict, that mistakes have been made and those mistakes set the tone for the rest of the novel, so it all belongs here. Another thing that occurred to me while reading, you make some metafictiony, autofictiony decisions in this book. Autofiction not in terms of you, but your character being a writer with his own fiction. I think of this as…I'm a South Asian woman who writes South Asian characters and people always ask me 'are they you?' It made me wonder if this character was almost reacting to that kind of feedback that you might've faced?
John Vercher:
I'll give you the long answer here. As I was editing at my residency in Asheville, my friend Jason Mott came by to hang out and we were talking about this question in particular. I was getting it a lot about After the Lights Go Out, which makes sense, I trained in MMA and was an amateur fighter, there's so much of myself. But it got uncomfortable after a while, all of the questions were about this, and it felt like we were losing sight of the book. I brought this up to Jason, and he told me he was getting the same questions about The Returned, and what he said to them was "you bought the book, you didn't buy me."
Malavika Praseed:
Wow, that's brilliant.
John Vercher:
I thought it was a perfect way to put it. Not confrontational, but the book is not me, and the book is something I've created based on imagination and things I've absorbed. Some of the experiences are very close to life, some are very fictionalized. But I'm not a memoirist, and the fun for me is how to take what's real and make it bigger than life.
Malavika Praseed:
You start from something familiar and real and let imagination take you further. I feel like it's a question that can be skewed towards writers of color a lot of the time. Your character says it himself, people push a responsibility towards him to represent a whole demographic. So much of this book felt like a direct response to that feeling.
John Vercher:
To take your point further, with white interviewers asking that question, it feels like one step removed from trauma porn. As if this is the only thing you could write about. While my protagonist experiences a specific publishing experience that I haven't experienced, a lot of this was written during the publishing 'racial reckoning that wasn't'. It's been happening. We went from Hulu and HBO and Netflix taking every Black story, to them being pulled off the channels. I felt some responsibility to call some attention.
Malavika Praseed:
Absolutely, 100%. The last thing I want to ask you about, and you alluded to this earlier. So, I had the fortune of working with you at Randolph, and in your acknowledgements you called this novel "your Randolph book". What do you think you've gotten out of working with the Randolph community and all the other communities you write with? How has that shaped your work?
John Vercher:
That's a great question. Because writing has been this second act in my life, I'm so grateful for the opportunity and I've become more of a sponge than ever. I can't read enough, I can't be around other writers enough. I can't push the boundaries enough. When you're around students and other authors, I even bristle at the word students, it feels like a peer situation, there's this drive and rampant, radical desire to be as creative as possible. I know this sounds kinda precious and pretentious, but I mean it, being around that it makes you want to do those things yourself. I don't think I could've written this without my communities. I wouldn't have had the courage to step outside what we've been told is craft. We could get into another conversation about the colonization of craft. The things I want to do are okay, and they're encouraged. Just being immersed in that, you can't help but draw from it yourself.
FICTION
Devil is Fine
By John Vercher
Celadon Books
Published June 18, 2024
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