AVC: You've continued to set your books in kind of a noirish world. When you walk through real life, do you see the world that way? In terms of dark shadows, shadowy figures and things like that?
WG: I think there's quite a bit of that around. I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing. [Laughs.] But there are moments when—depending on what neighborhood I'm in, or what city I'm in, or what channel on television I'm watching—my eyes get really wide and I go, "Chandler wasn't even close. This shit is truly dire." We live in pretty extreme times. Some pretty dark stuff.
I don't know what constitutes "noir" in 2007. I mean, would The Wire be noir? I don't think so. Actually, noir—I was taught in college—is a kind of baroque pop version of literary naturalism. Anyway, that's the way some critics have looked at it. I think that a show like The Wire is the closest we come these days to naturalism. It's a genuine, authentic attempt at naturalism. I've never really attempted naturalism before, but I value it a lot, so all of its more baroque forms have been very valuable to me. One of them, I think, is noir.
I haven't thought about stuff like that since I was an undergraduate. [Laughs.] I'm amazed I can still do it.
AVC: You were born in South Carolina. Did you spend most of your youth in the South before moving to Canada?
WG: I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town. I was thinking about that this morning, and I thought that the thing about growing up in the South in the 1950s and early '60s was that it produced memories that look like the 1930s and 1940s. It wasn't the South of today. It was this old, old, old, backward, weird, isolated kind of South, the pre-television South. I think that contributed a lot to my worldview, and the way I look at things as a writer. I could simultaneously see this ancient Cormac McCarthy kind of reality in this Southern mountain world, plus Sputnik and Twilight Zone on television. The gap between where I lived and the media universe was much wider than it possibly could be, now that everybody's online. I mean, my grandmother refused to call the Civil War the Civil War. She called it the Northern Invasion, and she wasn't joking. She was a very, very old lady. My mother was born in 1907, believe it or not. I was raised by Edwardians. My grandmother gave me a little bronzed bust of Robert E. Lee when I was 5 years old. Seriously, we were scarily Southern. She couldn't conceivably understand the world today.
AVC: Do you get back to the South much these days?
WG: Not very much, aside from Atlanta, which I visit occasionally. I haven't been back to my hometown for about 10 years. It doesn't much figure on the book-tour circuit. I sort of stay tuned into it though, through the Internet. I think I'd be less surprised at the changes just from following it online. I read local newspapers kind of at random from small, Southern towns, just to savor it. But yeah, I mean, television did it, basically. I think the South is extremely different, and it'll be that much different again in another 20 years. It's become the place that's changing fastest, I guess because it had the most changing to do.
AVC: The character Tito is Cuban-Chinese, which seems to sort of speak to the idea that borders are dissolving. Do you think that's the way the world is moving, to the dissolution of regional distinctions?
WG: Well, I've always been interested in people who aren't from anywhere in particular. I think it's all melting. This has been true for as long as I can remember in my adult life. If I meet someone and discover that they're an absolute, very earnest nationalist, it's unlikely that I'm going to get much closer to them. I don't understand them. It doesn't matter where they're from, I just don't get it. I'm a multi-national kind of guy, I think.
AVC: There's a sense in Spook Country that your three protagonists are living through a fragment of a much larger story. There's a lot going on, and they're part of it, but they're not the main part of it. That seems to be a trend in contemporary fiction: stories that take place on just the outside fingernail of something much larger. Did that occur to you at all while you were writing?
WG: I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea. I haven't been reading much contemporary fiction lately, but if you're seeing characters operating on the outside of things that they can't fully comprehend, then you're seeing part of the zeitgeist, and I think you might also be seeing an emergent, new kind of realism, where the individuals that write books are willing to admit to themselves—and to some extent to the reader—that they don't know what the hell is going on. I mean, if they're trying to be really honest, and they're not just trying to sell some conspiracy theory, they're writing about characters who don't know what the hell is going on, because… well, we don't.
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