Kyle Ellingson lives in Saint Paul, MN, where he works for Garrison Keillor’s Common Good Books. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Sou’wester, Bluestem Online, Euphony, and Pacifica Review. His short story, “Our Employer,” is forthcoming to Carolina Quarterly and centers around the life of a young male celebrity as he is observed by a group of caretakers and handlers who narrate and form the celebrity’s identity. Observations of stardom, the representation of luxury, and the disturbing hypocrisies of being in the public eye come to bear in creating an “employer” both recognizable and uncanny.
CQ: I really enjoyed your story, “Our Employer,” and found it quite fascinating in a number of ways. One thing that is immediately striking about the story is the narrating voice – an undefined “we,” six people who are never distinguished from one another, apparently speaking in unison. Most people are familiar with traditional first-person singular narrators and third-person narrators, and Junot Diaz is known for his second-person narration, but first-person plural narration is rather rare. The only other example I can think of is Joshua Ferris’s novel Then We Came to the End. What drew you to this mode of narration for this story? Are there any other authors you’re familiar with who have also used first-person plural? Is there something particular to the contemporary moment that makes first-person plural narration appealing?
KE: In part, it’s an economical thing. I didn’t want to use up paragraphs individuating the bodyguards—I wasn’t interested in the ways they might differ from or disagree with each other. I wanted to heap focus (six dudes’ worth) on the employer, to help him seem important. Also I found it funny, in a maybe cartoonish way: six big interchangeable men with maternal feelings converging on this one weirdly unguided kid. The fact that the six are settled into a common voice exaggerates their concern, sentimentalizes it, as if they carry the good intention, like many parents, of not showing disagreement—of presenting, in a phrase from my own parents (by way of Dr. Phil), “a united front.”
Then We Came to the End is the only example of first-person plural I’ve read. I liked how it nailed that particular workplace dynamic, where some we or another is always conspiring to comment on a she or he or they. A nimble way to navigate a group. But the neat thing is that every use of first-person plural is unique to the group dynamic it presents. Every we exists via specific, personal terms. A we is always developing or devolving. I’d like to do more of that with fiction—tracking the birth and death of wes. The we of a couple; of some lady janitors; of a goatherd and goats. (Please don’t, if listening to this aloud, hear wee.)
What makes “the we” especially relevant to our present culture, I think, is our abundance of methods—new, untested, many fated for obsolescence—of constructing we-dom. The other day I spoke to a Wisconsinite who met her Australian husband playing W.O.W. So—do they sit at dinner parties and narrate the story of their meeting? The in-game circumstances that brought their avatars together on-screen for the first time? They must. (And could their relationship also end more or less via W.O.W.? I don’t see why not.) Other modern wes are unprecedentedly brief and tiny—the we between you and a twitter follower, or between you and your IT-services instant-message center representative. My question: does it elevate or magnify those passing relationships in an interesting way, to use we instead of I? And how many of our narratable feelings are “shared” enough to justify use of we? What separates a genuine we from a schmaltzy, wishful one?
CQ: The titular “employer” in the story seems to live in a world of privilege so extreme that it’s like a fundamentally alternate universe to the one most of us inhabit. Certain things about the story, especially the way the “brudes” airbrush reality and language for their employer, reminded me of science fiction. Do you see this as a science fiction story in some way? Do you see any other genres at play here?
KE: My favorite kind of sci-fi—which is maybe still called “soft-sci-fi”—parodies elements of the everyday (like the mood-machine in the first chapter of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which presents anew to us, for our review, the freedom/burden of using drugs to alter our behavior).
“Our Employer” is, most outwardly, a parody of celebrity, of life inside a 24/7 lucrative machine that places no emphasis on the subject’s privacy or emotional health—basically scavenges the surface of their lives for marketable narrative. In this case, it falls to the bodyguards to stabilize the celebrity’s life—they being already in a position of care (over “the body”—“the merch”). They sense that if they don’t humanize this little dude’s emotions, no one will. The point being that in every life, but especially a celebrity’s life, someone has to keep things real. And probably this someone is getting paid, one way or another. Which ideally doesn’t diminish the reality of their care. Ideally.
The story might’ve read a bit more like science fiction fifty or a hundred years ago, before mega-luxury and -stardom really skyrocketed in American culture. But you’re right—compared to the average American life, much less the average global life, wealth and celebrity is a bizarro world. But the things that matter in “our” world matter there, too.
CQ: I was really intrigued by your story’s depiction of social media and the ways in which it can be used to manipulate perception.
KE: Yeah. It’s strange how we curate our own profiles—representing ourselves on a daily basis through images and text and favoriting of content. Fussy self-portraits. I think sometimes we, feeling a little fidgety or dissatisfied in life, examine those portraits to confirm things about ourselves.
CQ: Fantasy and reality collide in really clever ways in your story, particularly towards the end. By the end of the story, do you think the “employer” is genuinely living in the real world, or is he still in his fantasy version of it? Do you think he’ll ever make it to the real world? Does it matter one way or the other?
KE: I wanted, by the end, to highlight how our (or at least my) “real world” resembles his fantasy world more than we (I) might notice.
A lot of people like to say—or have said and, like me, are tired of saying—that they “might’ve been an actor” or “would someday like to act.” We think we have some idea of how to inhabit roles well enough to make a career out of it—to deserve an audience. And, big surprise, we do. Down all avenues of life, we track our ability to play roles we want to play. When I was first dating my wife and we were en route to visit her parents, I had all sorts of scenarios play in my head of being a sweet dude. I was rehearsing for scenes no one was directing.
When the “employer” is clerking at a hardware store, he’s no different than his coworkers—all are playing the role of a clerk. Trying or failing to be a good clerk. The difference being that the “employer” experiences it as an act. He’s actor first, clerk second. He is convincing an audience, however small of one. And he knows how to derive pleasure and meaning from this. Many of us (I, at least) don’t.
CQ: How do you think Justin Bieber (or Zac Efron, or any of the other such precociously famous stars) would react if he read this story?
KE: They’re used to being portrayed in ways they don’t control, ways that don’t ring true to their experience. Probably they would read my story as just another of those ways. But that’s what celebrity is: volunteering to have one’s image mishandled. Enduring wildly reductive depictions of self.
Still, we tend not to care how major celebrities feel. None of them quite resemble failures. Talented or not, they aren’t overlooked, and that’s hard to relate to.
CQ: Are there any less well-known authors out there you’ve been especially influenced or impressed by recently?
KE: I’m looking forward to Greg Jackson’s debut collection Prodigals (March 2016). He’s the first writer I’ve really gotten hooked on before much work is out. I keep searching his name every few weeks to see if new work is published. He’s overshadowed on Google, for now, by MMA trainer Greg Jackson.
Jackson’s piece in VQR, “Serve and Volley, Near Vichy” is consistently vivid and patiently structured and does a sweet riff on a scene from Antonioni. Jackson is interested in flawed scenarios, self-made embarrassments, slow-burning confusions, fresh language. His New Yorker story, “Wagner in the Desert,” was insanely good—lots of “modern” moments (friends with filmmaking schemes, a snarky park official, the friend zone, masturbation as relief from the friend zone, drug use as fun delay of adulthood). I try only to read writers who sink me into a jealous stupor, an intelligent-feeling unrest. Delillo’s White Noise does it, Miranda July’s The First Bad Man does it, Edward P. Jones’ Lost in the City does it, DFW’s “Good Old Neon” does it. I’ve got Greg Jackson’s Granta issue coming in the mail, and I’d better wrap up whatever I’m writing before it gets here.