John Andrew Fredrick

John Andrew Fredrick was born in Richmond, Virginia and grew up in Santa Barbara, California. After receiving his Ph.D. from The University of California at Santa Barbara, he formed an indie rock band called The Black Watch (www.facebook.com/theblackwatchmusic) that has released 17 records to considerable underground acclaim. He has taught in The Writing Program at USC, and in the English departments at Santa Monica College, Loyola Marymount University, and UCSB. At UCSB Fredrick won the Graduate Students Award for Professor of the Year in 1987. He plays tennis at least five times a week and sometimes puts on show his abstract paintings of book covers for such classics as "Madame Bovary" and "The Catcher in the Rye."

Latest review of "The King of Good Intentions II": http://sluggerotoole.com/2015/12/11/long-on-material-for-jeremiads-like-this-john-andrew-fredricks-the-king-of-good-intentions-ii/

An Interview with the author in Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/one-level-up-a-conversation-with-john-andrew-fredrick

A Talk With John:

1. What book is on your nightstand right now?

JAF: So many. A graduate school habit--reading several books at a time--that never departed. Nabokov's "Ada, or Ardor" which I have tried to finish so many times. Patricia Highsmith's "The Tremor of Forgery"--wild good stuff. Shakespeare's "I Henry IV" which I read once a year. Dostoyevsky's "The House of the Dead" which my kid is reading to me aloud a couple of times a week.

2. What's the last truly great book you read?

JAF: "Tenth of December" by George Saunders. A writer about whom almost everyone who writes says: "He makes me want to write." I have followed his career from its onset. This is his masterpiece. I'm pretty sure I've read it six times now. Iconoclastic humor and a true humanist--with reservations! Never fails to make me laugh.

3. What's your favorite literary genre?

JAF: Both Classic and Experimental Fiction. Plus Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressida"--a genre unto itself. Plus a great reading experience--like Proust or Tolstoy.

4. What were your favorite books as a child?

JAF: Anything about war--The American Civil War in particular.

5. What author(s) made you want to be a writer?

JAF: Oh, doubtless J.D. Salinger. I wrote my first "novel" when I was fifteen or so? Lonely at a posh new school and having quit the football team, I went to the library at lunch and wrote a Salinger/S.E. Hinton mishmash--very much under the spell of "The Catcher in the Rye." I loved Neville Shute's work and George Orwell's as well. "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" I can tell you made me STOP writing! I was under the spell of Vonnegut as well as Hermann Hesse--writers I'll never go back to!

6. If you could ask the president to read one book what would it be?

JAF: Michael Herr's "Dispatches"--so that he could "know" war and do anything and everything he could to stop us from having another one.

7. Which writer, alive or dead, would you like to meet?

JAF: I think the obvious call here would be Shakespeare, but I don't reckon he'd be terrifically forthcoming or self-consciously interesting about his approach. Maybe on account of the whole Keatsian "Negative Capability" thing?! Oscar Wilde would be great, great company, surely.

8. Where and when do you read?

JAF: Very early in the morning, before tennis. Then after dinner. I like to write in the afternoons--or sometimes first thing in the morning, if I've had inspiring dreams.

9. Have you ever written a writer a fan letter?

JAF: Yes! I wrote to David Foster Wallace when it was announced that he was coming to California to teach at Pomona. He didn't write back--too famous by that time. I wanted to hit with him--see how good he was on the tennis court. He's been an (Anxiety of) Influence on my stuff, so I also wanted to see if he'd read "The Knucklehead Chronicles." No go. I wrote to both George Saunders and T. C. Boyle--they were kind enough to respond. Just notes to thank them for the inspiration. I read Boyle's "Water Music" when I was finishing my Ph.D. and looking about to see what I'd missed in contemporary U.S. Lit. I was hooked on old T.C. Then I found "Budding Prospects" and freaked out: I have to do something too, I thought. I wrote my second aborted novel--500 pages--and shortly after THAT I started a rock band and didn't write any more fiction for, oh, 15 years or so!! Once in a very great while I might see Boyle across campus [at USC] when I taught there (2001-2005), but he always just kind of disappeared. I'd see him at the campus bookstore once a year or so, but never said hello. Dunno why. Just didn't.

10. What are you going to read next?

JAF: Probably something I've given up on before? Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" sits there on my desk--staring at me.

11. Do you read poetry?

JAF: Well, I used to read so much more. Keats was one of my "areas" of specialization in grad school. I've outgrown him. And Shelley, alas. I do read the Troilus every other year. Chaucer I have not outgrown--though I know the Tales too well, I imagine.

12. Who are the most over-rated authors?

JAF: Oh, heavens. So many. I'd rather talk about under-rated ones! Amit Chaudhuri triplejumps to mind on that one. So, so good. So Laurentian. Quietly beautiful prose. Compulsive reading, once you get into him. Wish he as much better known in the States. But while we're on the topic, my vote for most over-praised would have to be Cormac McCarthy. When he was travestied in Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums" I was tickled pink. He's impossible. So pretentious and empty.

13. What books do you revisit?

JAF: Proust. Always Proust. And Henry James.

Q. One of the several epigraphs for "The King of Good Intentions" comes from Vladimir Nabokov and reads "All novels are, in a sense, fairy tales." That must be something that rings true for you--or is it one of your tricks, an inside joke like so much of this novel? Are you a particular fan of fairy tales--or just novelistic ones?

JAF: Nabokov's talking about archetypes, I think. A wicked, evil, nasty bad guy (or girl), a magic thing that helps the "lost" get out of the wilderness, or Alice get out of Wonderland, a knight in rusty-shining armor, a talking emu, etc. And, no, it's not one of my "tricks"--though there are others interlarded of course throughout the texts. "The King" and especially my first book, "The Knucklehead Chronicles." Which is a novella of inter-related stories. Like Beckett's "More Pricks Than Kicks." But of course not as brilliant. And apropos of the subject of trickery, I think we have to keep in mind the idea of the artifice of art. Plain-spoken honest aw-shucksness--in an author's voice, mind you--is, to me, a sort of sham or scam.

Q. What do you mean?

JAF: That all storytelling's a kind of trumpery--to cast a spell on the reader, keep her or him reading, interested.

Q. And then I suppose we might remark on the sort of magical characters you do create--a PhD in Chemistry called Psycho who loves to party...

JAF: Some might say "unbelievable" characters! Haha!

Q. Right. As I said, the Psycho character, and the narrator whose vocabulary is sort of remarkably erudite and surferish at the same time, and the musical prodigy/love interest Jenny character who just so happens to be the drummer's roommate, and the fact that there is an emu that's a "character"--plus all the crazy Los Angeles characters that appear in the parties you describe.

JAF: What's the question, if you please?

Q. Okay, so, are all the kind of crazy characters and situations in the novel just specific to LA or to a time in Los Angeles--the 90s--that you are writing about?

JAF: Have you ever been to or spent very much time in LA yourself?

Q. No. I've been there, but only for a few days.

JAF: It's like this--one might say that I downplayed a lot of the zaniness of the milieu. LA is a place that is so diverse; some of the most, the very most, brilliant, articulate, interesting people in the whole wide world live here! The craziest ones, if you ask me, are the ones who move here in order to become famous. Especially the actor types. But in so many ways, those "types" are the least interesting! Unless they are fictionalized! So it all goes round and round.

Q. You don't seem, in the novel, to have much love for thespians.

JAF: It's easy to parody them. I will just say this: I have really great friends, truly amazing people, and none of them are actors.

Q. So you hate them, actors, that is?

JAF: I didn't say that! I always tell my students: Look, without them, we wouldn't have those wonderful things called plays and movies. I just said I would find it hard to... that I simply, as a matter of fact, don't run in LA circles where actors...

Q. But they're all over LA, right?

JAF: That doesn't mean you have to go gregariously... Why don't we talk about something else?

Q. Musicians?

JAF: (laughing) Oh God!

Q. But you yourself are one. A very serious one and have been for more than twenty years! Tell me about your band, then.

JAF: Just go, if you would be so kind, to www.facebook.com/theblackwatchmusic and listen instead. That'd be better.

Q. Fair enough. What would you like to talk about?

JAF: Nothing! Just go read the novel! I'm kidding. Ask something else, please.

Q. What's your typical day?

JAF: Thank you. That, I can remark upon. I get up very early and make really good coffee and read and pray a bit--for my family and loved ones and friends and then for everyone, you know? I think it's ridiculous just to pray for certain people, the ones you know, okay? Sometimes I am inspired to write, maybe for a couple of hours--it depends how my dreams went the night before, weirdly. I dream a lot of things I end up using in narratives and songs.

Q. Anyone might say that there are a number of dreamlike passages in "The King of Good Intentions."

JAF: Sure. Think of John Berryman's "The Dream Songs"! Songs are a sort of dream--and what you dream can sing to you, as it were, for sure. Anyway, after coffee and writing and stuff I go off to the tennis courts close to my house and play for a couple of hours, then I come home and shower and go teach Freshman English for a few, then I rehearse, maybe, with the band or play acoustic or go out to dinner, watch sports (well, I used to--I don't these days; I don't have a TV, and anyway, sports on television just inspires me to go play tennis), read some more, go to seances or exorcisms...

Q. Right. So, except for the seances and exorcisms...

JAF: I have a very normal, pretty boring life. But on weekends... wow! those are spent in Vegas poolside with supermodels manque and hitting tennis balls with Andre Agassi and these sword-swallowing midgets he keeps on payroll.

Q. Right. Okay, last question. Or next to last. Who are your favorite authors?

JAF: If I say Nabokov, then Henry James and Proust are gonna be, like, really pissed. I have enough ghosts in my life, thank you very much.

Q. What about contemporary authors?

JAF: Okay, well, i will just say--I don't love this question, by the way, but there are a lot of great writers out there... and I am going to forget a bunch of them. I'll just tell you who I have been reading of late, okay?

Q. Okay.

JAF: George Saunders. Jhumpa Lahiri. Lydia Davis. Stella Gibbons (hardly contemporary but so funny!) Kevin Barry. Ian McEwan. The thing is, unless it's Saunders or another one--Steve Almond--I just don't finish many contemporary novels! Even a guy who used to be my very favorite, William Boyd... I don't know. Tan Twan Eng's "The Gift of Rain" I finished. Gimme a book I can finish!

Q. You get bored--or distracted?

JAF: Both, I imagine. Conventional contemporary narrative bores me. Martin Amis (whom I adored) bores me. Magical Realism and all that stuff--not my cup of tea.

Q. Just one more.

JAF: Shoot.

Q. What about all the drugs and drink in the novel? The characters do speed and smoke "from the Hookah" and wake up super hungover and go to these wild parties where everyone is wasted. Why so many allusions to "substances"?

JAF: Well, you have to keep in mind that the characters are all in their late 20s and somehow involved in rock and roll or rock-related scenes and things. You get out of college and your expectations and hopes have not been dashed quite yet but they might just drive you to indulge a bit, you know? Keep that collegiate roistering going somewhat? But if you are asking if I am endorsing drugtaking and excessive drinking--why of course not! What do you take me for?!!

Q. Thank you, John. It's been most amusing. And your book is really funny, I must say. I can't count how many times I laughed out loud. Really.

JAF: Thank you for laughing.