Chandler Klang Smith is the author of The Sky is Yours, a weird and wonderful new novel about a self-centered ex-reality TV star, his reluctant fiancée, and a feral girl in a high tech city slowly being destroyed by two fire breathing dragons. We spoke with Smith about the novel, its influences, and the importance of getting comfortable with weirdness.
Unbound Worlds: So far, The Sky is Yours has resisted every effort I’ve made to place it within a specific genre, so much so that I’ve found myself making stuff up: Magic Late Capitalism? Post-Modern Fantasy? Dystopian Farce? I know genre is a narrow concept, but how would you go about classifying the book?
Chandler Klang Smith: I like all the ones you came up with! But as a writer, my goal wasn’t to tell this story within the bounds of a single genre – not even a new one I invented for myself. Instead, I wanted to write each part of the narrative using the conventions of a different, existing genre that evoked the mental and emotional associations I was going for. So, while it all takes place in the same world, one part of the novel is a Jane Austen-type marriage plot; another is a dystopian, slightly futuristic satire of media and consumption a la George Saunders; another is a Gothic romance; another is a sci-fi fairy tale like “A.I.” or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH; and so on.
I didn’t want to just reference these genres. I wanted to actually execute them, setting up and paying off the expectations that make them so pleasurable to read, while changing their meaning by placing them in conjunction with one another – a modular approach to narrative structure. A metaphor I’ve used to explain this in the past is “combining mecha.” I wanted each genre piece to function on its own. But I also wanted all those pieces to assemble into something more powerful than the sum of its parts. Like a giant, kickass robot, ideally!
UW: Were you worried at any point that the unconventional nature of The Sky is Yours might affect its marketability? I know that every artist wants to follow their own vision, but it’s also good to find readers, too, right?
CKS: Practically every time I sit down to write, I worry that no one will ever care about what I’m working on. But my hope was that, if I did my job right, I’d reward readers enough along the way that they’d stay on this ride with me.
UW: Who were your influences? A few names came to my mind when I was reading the book — Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Leyner’s early works, maybe even Margaret Atwood’s Maddadam trilogy— but I can only guess. I’d love to know for sure.
CKS: So many books were essential to me. I’m an enormous fan of Thomas Pynchon. I love how, in each novel, he creates a whole sprawling universe that orbits around a single image – the V-2 rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance. His work made me realize that I could have a large cast of characters and a lot of crazy imaginative detail as long as it always revolved around that center (which for me were the dragons). I also love and thought a lot about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. She concocts such an elaborate alternate history that takes place before the present action of that story, but manages to seed it in throughout in ways that feel essential, not digressive. And Jonathan Lethem’s entire career has done a ton to open my eyes to the aesthetic possibilities of genre. His novel Chronic City particularly has my heart – I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that book also features a fearsome beast, in that case a tiger, who destroys parts of a city.
What else… House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski inspired me to try using different kinds of formatting and text, which I’d never done in fiction before. The Magicians series (especially the first two books) by Lev Grossman showed me it was possible for adult novels to harness the influence of fantastical YA and kids’ lit while exploring mature themes and deeply screwed-up characters. Angela Carter and Donald Barthelme both repurpose fairy tales in razor-edged, postmodern ways that I couldn’t live without. I wouldn’t say DeLillo was a huge influence, but I did have both White Noise and Cosmopolis in mind while working on parts of this… Basically a million things went into the blender of my brain, and this was what came out!
UW: One of the book’s protagonists, ex-reality star and current spoiled rich kid Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, isn’t particularly likable at first, but becomes so as his character starts to mature. As an author, it must be quite a juggling act to tell that kind of story without repelling readers. How do you do it?
CKS: When you’re writing, there’s no way to tell if you’re repelling readers. And even when a book is out in the world, there’s rarely a consensus about what works for people. So as an author, you’re sort of left to suss out the situation for yourself.
I mentioned earlier that one genre I was interested in was dystopian satire. To me, the thing that’s interesting about a dystopia is that it doesn’t just happen to people, like a natural disaster or an alien invasion; instead, we’re complicit in it. It’s a society made by flawed people that produces flawed people in return. So, in writing a dystopia, the goal is not to set up a situation where an untainted hero goes up against an inhuman “big bad.” It’s to think about what reality would look like to someone who’s truly a product of that toxic society, and to consider how they might realistically grow and change given that as a starting point.
Duncan, or “the Dunk,” as he likes to call himself, is not an aspirational character. At the very beginning, he’s basically the embodiment of the combined excesses of late capitalism, new media, and hegemonic masculinity… as if an Axe Body Spray commercial, auto-playing in your newsfeed, made a deal with Satan to attain corporeal form. Even at the very end of the book, he’s not someone who questions everything or completely rises above the garbage culture from whence he emerged. But I did try to make him human – to show him struggling to synthesize new emotions and experiences with his initial self-serving and limited understanding of the world and his place in it.
UW: Each of your main characters has a very particular voice, and I noticed that the prose style changed considerably between chapters. Duncan’s cultivated narcissism, Swan’s sense of the melodramatic, and Abby’s religiosity affect the way they see the world, and you did a great job of capturing that. Was it difficult to switch back and forth between these voices?
CKS: Thanks so much! Giving each character a distinct voice was one of my big goals, so I’m delighted that was your impression. It wasn’t easy, exactly, but being able to change up tone, diction, and style at regular intervals helped keep the long slog of the writing process entertaining for me.
Swanny’s sections were probably the easiest for me to write. As you mention, she’s melodramatic and tempestuous – plus she’s bookish and “accomplished” in the Austenian sense, the daughter of a poet who’s spent much of her lonely childhood in a drafty mansion reading novels, honing her musical chops, and dreaming of grand passion and romance. She’s the only character with an extended first person section, when we get to read her diary. It was fun to cut loose and let the prose get really decadent and rococo – then dial it way back when I switched to say, Abby, who grew up on a landfill island and offers a much more plainspoken, earthy kind of lyricism.
UW: After finishing The Sky is Yours, I came to the conclusion that it is pretty much our own world with the worst of its excesses amplified and distorted like a funhouse mirror. Is there a message here beyond the fun romp of the story itself?
CKS: This might sound like a cop out, but I feel like, if I could boil the book down to a single moral or thesis, I wouldn’t have needed to write it as fiction. Learning to be a writer has been a long process of training myself to sit with confusion, ambiguity, weirdness, etc. – what Donald Barthelme called “not-knowing.” So I don’t exactly have a straightforward takeaway.
That said, a central concept for me in this book was inheritance. What does it mean to live as a human in the Anthropocene, in the shambles of a world that’s been created/ruined by others of your kind, and yet be powerless to restore the default settings, whatever those might be? What does it mean to receive narratives and language and other cultural detritus from the past and see your own life and emotions through their (perhaps warped) lenses? What does it mean to live with the burden of familial expectations, to have parents and to lose them? What does it mean to be young in a very old world?
UW: It must take at least some familiarity with the most outrageous aspects of celebrity culture and capitalism to successful satirize it. Have you ever found yourself sucked into a reality television show, for example, or wasted time following news about people who seem to be famous only for being famous?
CKS: When I was writing Duncan’s character, I totally thought about pop-culture figures like Justin Bieber and Levi Johnston (though I know them more by reputation than as a result of extensive research or immersion). There’s something so disturbing about someone getting thrust into an international media spotlight when they’re still in the early stages of developing an adult personality. It doesn’t just stunt them; it hooks them on a type of gratification that’s largely dependent on their own novelty as a subject, and will thus be in ever-diminishing supply.
Meanwhile, alert readers have also pointed out that Duncan’s father Humphrey bears some resemblance to Donald Trump. That’s not a total coincidence. I never watched “The Apprentice”, but I definitely knew of Trump as a media impresario and business mogul, and his persona was an influence on my initial conception of that character. It’s unsettling how timely that element of the story has become… even at my most cynical, I never dreamed he’d go on to political prominence, let alone the Presidency! Here’s hoping the dragons aren’t coming for us next.
UW: What’s next for you?
CKS: I’m working on what I call a speculative noir, with shades of Double Indemnity, Paprika, and body horror. I love giving myself a new challenge!
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