An Interview with Matthew Eck
by Levi Asher December 10, 2007 12:33 pm AFRICA, BEING A WRITER, FICTION, INTERVIEWS, POLITICS
The Litblog Co-op has chosen Matthew Eck's debut novel The Farther Shore as the Winter 2007 READ THIS! Selection. This war story by a young veteran of US actions in Haiti and Somalia is one of the most impressive books I've read this year, and I was happy to have a chance to interview the author via email last week.
Levi: Your novel's main character joined the US military to pay for college. Why did you join the US military?
Matthew: I joined the army because I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I’d been reading Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien and Ernest Hemingway and it just seemed like the right thing to do to gather life experience and meaning and understanding
Levi: Your novel's main character joined the US military to pay for college. Why did you join the US military?
Matthew: I joined the army because I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I’d been reading Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien and Ernest Hemingway and it just seemed like the right thing to do to gather life experience and meaning and understanding
Levi, I have not read The Farther Shore, but I want to see if I understand your “Pre-Raphaelite” comments. Are you saying that Matthew Eck evokes a sincerity that predates some of the more self-conscious meta-lit that has appeared in recent times? Or am I way off?
Bill — well, the confusing name of this group seems to indicate that they worked before the Renaissance painter Raphael, but that’s not what it means — the Pre-Raphaelites worked in the late 19th Century (post-Romantic, pre-Bloomsbury) and they sought a richness of expression and a simplicity (or sincerity, as you say) that they identified with Medieval art (thus, “Pre-Raphaelite”).
At the top level, no, Eck’s realistic and gritty novel is not in any obvious way similar to the fanciful and decorative Pre-Raphaelite style. But I felt a subconscious similarity when one of the book’s characters referenced John Ruskin, which I can’t actually explain.
Okay, I see. Thanks.
I’m looking forward to reading The Farther Shore.
Levi–I love the possibility of taking the pre-Raphaelites seriously as more than just undergrad code about sex (Ruskin saw pubic hair and was put off sex forever; he’d spent too much time looking at those marble statues…).
Maybe it’s all the women with lusious lips and glistening eyes, looking expectantly into the distance. Pre-Raphaelite women are ripe and awaiting their men; Pre-Raphaelite men are often sleeping or running away–they have that same haunted look, but with more danger. I’m thinking of a painting of a deserter or another of the death of Chatterton (a poet, arms flung to the side, in his garrett)–all of this over-ripe images of youth in extremis seem right for Eck.
But the Eck is never sentimental or lush. Hmm…
your writing is eloquent. nuff said.