NS: Your narrator, Audrey, was born on February 29 of a leap year. So although she’s lived 24 years, she’s had only six birthdays. What intrigues you about a character who’s half-child and half-adult?
JG: What I feel isn’t so much intrigue as comfort. I’m comfortable with Audrey because her status as leapling makes literal a paradox I feel pretty much 24/7: being an adult without knowing how to be one.
When your narrator is two ages at once, you can throw plausibility out the window. For instance, would a grown-up disarm an air marshal and then lock herself in the bathroom and adjust her ponytail? Probably not. Also, a leapling never comes of age. A big plus. I’m against coming of age.
NS: Audrey’s father is killed by a Christmas tree. You handle death in a way that’s hilarious but touching. How did you strike this balance?
JG: I actually felt off-balance writing it. Granted, one’s reaction to death might be more off-balance if the instrument of death is a magical object, like a Christmas tree. Death by magical object takes you to a new altitude of ludicrousness—and tragedy.
I wanted to draw attention to the off-balancing nature of all deaths. It’s impossible to grasp the loss of a person because he or she is immeasurable. The whole novel is about that: the immeasurability of people. Take the human brain soaking in formaldehyde in Audrey’s father’s lab. You can hold this brain in your lap. It’s 1,400 cubic centimetres. It’s finite. But people are not finite! They are whole universes.
NS: Tortoises live a hundred years; mice live two. Both figure in your novel. What purpose do they play?
JG: Not a metaphorical one! I am against metaphors. The mouse was there from the get-go. He’s supposed to live for only two years, but he lives (ostensibly) for twenty. He also has the number 18 tattooed on his ear from his laboratory days. You can read that tattoo as an exponent. In other words, he’s bigger than he appears.
The tortoise, Winnifred, came later. She started out as a pet. Then she became a character. Then she became a narrator. I didn’t intend this, and I felt great anxiety about it. But she was too much fun to hush up. I needed her because Audrey has blind spots that only Winnifred can fill in. On the other hand, a tortoise comes with blind spots of her own. Can’t see behind that big shell of hers. So I ended up with two blind-spotted narrators who complement each other.
NS: Uncle Thoby attends a school where amputees build their own prosthetic limbs. Despite how crazy the plot becomes, you make everything seem plausible. How did you manage?
JG: Maybe having a tortoise co-narrate your novel helps, because once you cross that line, there are no lines left that you don’t feel perfectly within your rights to cross. Here’s my thinking:
1. Throw plausibility out the window.
2. Try staging your crazy story as a “biography” within your novel. Everyone knows that biographies are the biggest lies ever. Most readers will accept an implausible biography with a knowing nod.
3. Another trick: have Audrey, the audience of your inset “biography,” interject disbelief every so often. Have her liken Uncle Thoby’s new prosthetic to Luke Skywalker’s in “The Empire Strikes Back.” This will calm down any remaining plausibility-obsessed readers.
Neil Smith’s first book is called Bang Crunch. His second book will be a novel set in a heaven where atheists go when they die.
