Brenden Sullivan
interview by Holden Schmale
This May, I had the opportunity to read and review Brendan Sullivan's debut novel, The Even Tenor of Our Ways. The novel tells the story of a Pennsylvanian family who are pulled together by a personal tragedy, and peels back the layers of their relationships with one another through the use of a rotating point of view. A native east-coaster myself, I felt an instant connection to the portrait of Philadelphia that
Brendan painted. I was delighted by the novel, especially the way that Brendan was able to make every character feel so truly knowable yet unique. I was equally delighted to have the opportunity to talk to Brendan about his process, his characters, and his book.
Holden Schmale: What other novels did you see “The Even Tenor of Our Ways” in conversation with? How did that line of thinking change or evolve over the course of writing and revising? Is that something you thought about much during your process?
Brenden Sullivan: I did my best to avoid thinking along those lines at all. There are all sorts of minor and major things that get in the way of me writing a given sentence, much less a whole book, and I made a real effort not to allow the relation of my work to others to be one of them.
HS: One thing I particularly admired about the novel is the events that carry a lot of the weight, or are kind of touched on from multiple perspectives, are often not these giant blow-up fights or huge, seminal moments. You really zone in on a couple pretty quiet moments with these characters and place a lot of importance on them. I really love the sort of setting up and cleaning up sequences at the house around the celebration of life. Did you go into writing knowing what moments you wanted to linger in, or did that happen naturally?
BS: I’m interested in realism, even if it’s a bit of a slippery term. I spend a far greater part of my life doing the dishes than having big blow-up fights, and I want to be working in a kind of fiction that reflects that reality.
And really, even when in life we do have those big, seminal moments, they are always and forever shot through with mundanity, wedged tightly in between mundane pieces of life. For every solemn funeral you attend, you have to get dressed first, and feel how much your body has changed since the last time you put on nice clothes, and afterwards you have to go to the bathroom, and at the reception the food will either be bad or good or somewhere in the middle, and you’ll either be hungry or not based on if you skipped breakfast and how long the eulogy went on. These things don't diminish the very real and often very painful emotions you might have attending a funeral, but they walk right alongside.
Even Tenor doesn’t really lack for big seminal moments (there’s a wedding, that celebration of life you mention, an unexpected pregnancy), but my personal preference and style is definitely to approach those events with a view to foregrounding the mundanity that pervades and surrounds them.
HS: This novel has at least six characters that I’d consider main characters, and they all feel so lived in. When you were conceiving of this family, what did your thought process look like for deciding who each of them was going to be? How much of that happened before you had the story in place, and how much of the story was shaped by these characters that you created? Not to give you a chicken or the egg question.
BS: As a general matter, I do see plot and character as mutually load-bearing. In narratives if not in life, there's a way in which character is a line-of-best-fit formulated by a series of experiences and choices; changes to one have ripple effects on the other.
Specifically with the characters here, my aim at the beginning was to make sure they were both easily distinguishable and internally cohesive. I gave everybody pretty disparate circumstances (e.g. grocer/lawyer/barista, single/partnered/desperate for human connection), and worked backwards in my head (and in my dearest friend the Notes App) to ask myself why and how they ended up where they were. While I did do quite a bit of outlining for this project, if there was ever tension between the outline and what felt natural for a character, once that line-of-best-fit had been established, I always erred on the side of valuing cohesive character over outlined plot.
A late but very important choice was to pair off the younger generation with an older counterpart. This was a practical choice, so I wouldn't have to monitor the balance between characters as actively, but had the extra benefit of focusing my attention on the older generation more, and growing their characters, which were significantly more minor in initial conception. I'm not sure if it's apparent, but there was an active attempt to shift the focus as Act 2 progressed, from the younger person to the older: Kayla's story cedes ground to John's, Will’s to Helen's, Gabe's to Andrea's.
A refrain I'm sure you'll notice is my trying to make the process of writing a novel as easy on myself as I could. So I invested much more prep time prior to launching the narrative with this one, compared to the (less successful) long projects I've worked on in the past. That may have been the most consequential decision I made for this whole thing; it was immensely helpful.
HS: I grew up on the East Coast as well, and I noted, in my review, how much I felt rooted in the East Coast by these train schedules. It’s a real thing the characters face in the novel, and I really appreciate that. How much of your own experience in Philadelphia found its way into the novel, and how much did you try to circumvent that with fictional storytelling to make sure you stayed true to what you wanted these characters' experience with Philadelphia to be?
BS: I did grow up in Philly, and didn't have a driver's license until I was in college. Public transportation is a feature of pretty much every memory I have of high school. Let's hear it for public transportation!
A good amount of my circumstance, but not my life, made it into the book. It was another active choice: if I let go of the fear that someone is going to read into my writing something about my actual life (a downstream effect of making peace with myself that it was unlikely to be read, period) then I open up a vast stockpile of specific detail that I might otherwise have ignored or suppressed. Place detail I choose to use about Philadelphia has a higher base level verisimilitude, because I am a first-hand witness, so imbuing my sentences with a sense of "reality" is a lower lift.
On this same front (the instinctive defensive posture) I opted for a very depersonalized narrative voice. All value judgments get passed to characters, and the narrator is free to make very specific claims without being subject to the higher level of scrutiny we give personalized narrators. Or one hopes. I'm deeply embarrassed talking about it this way. These are the things I was trying to do, and I refrain from saying whether or not I was successful.
HS: Was there a character in the novel that came easier to you or was easier to write than others? On the contrary, were there any that took a bit of extra time and elbow grease to get right?
BS: The middle brother was a test of some early readers' powers of empathy. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case for some readers still. There's a prickliness, I acknowledge. But I have known and loved prickly people, so the effort during revision was to retain that as a character trait but sand him down enough that readers had something to hang their very generous compassion on.
HS: With the switching point of view, you had a lot of leniencies in the order you wanted to section things in, and I really admire the tension you create through how it plays out now. Were there any other changes in sequencing or structural tinkering you thought about during the process of writing, or did you always kind of know the order you wanted the reader to experience the story?
BS: The sequencing of focal characters was pretty firm from the jump, again as much as a writing aid as anything else. I wanted to break a big thing into little things, in the spirit of Bird by Bird, or "one bite at a time."
But as much as the high-level sequencing was essentially arbitrary, the movement of focus within a section was not. The two main dials I used were intradiegetic chronology, and distance between narrator and focal character. When a character does or feels something, my assumption is that the reader wants to know why. If I choose to address that question right away, I might flash back to an earlier event or period in the character's life, and through that provide emotional/psychological context. Or perhaps instead I might push the narrator even closer to the character, and allow that character to think or speak the Why themselves, and not have to slow down any momentum I might have by transitioning into and out of a new scene.
On the flip side, I might not want to address it. I could simply move on and leave the Why hanging, but I might also want to accentuate the unansweredness of the question. I like to do this by pushing more distance between the narrator and the character, by for instance dropping discussion of the internals of the character and speaking only about their physical movements through the world. The choices here were made in real time as I was writing, and I certainly did modify them during the revision process as needed. Some Why's do need to be answered, and many answers I tried in the first draft or two didn't make it into the final version.
HS: Lastly, if you don’t mind me asking, what are you working on now? How do you feel your writing or relationship to your writing has changed or evolved throughout your journey with The Even Tenor of Our Ways?
BS: I remain very interested in perspective, and since finishing Even Tenor I've written half a dozen or more violently unpublished short stories as experiments. As an example, I use flashback quite a bit in the book, so I later wrote a story that made heavy use of flash-forward - it wasn't hugely successful, but now I've written and revised flash forwards, so next time I want to try that technique, I'll hopefully be a touch better at it.
Brendan Sullivan lives on a hill in Western Pennsylvania. The Even Tenor of Our Ways is his first novel.