Jonathan Kiefer talks to Christopher Miller about his debut novel Simon Silber: Works For Solo Piano
Although the narrator of Christopher Miller’s debut novel is not to be trusted, the author himself seems very reliable. In person he is gentle and friendly, and wouldn’t think of putting you on, perhaps because Miller isn’t yet accustomed to being interviewed. “I’m in the adolescence of being a published writer,” he says. His book, though, is entirely a put-on.
Simon Silber: Works for Solo Piano explores the relationship between an impossibly eccentric contemporary composer and his grudging biographer, and between perceived genius and genuine mediocrity. It is a parodic romp, structured as a set of liner notes to the box set of Silber’s oeuvre, which includes variations on “Chopsticks,” an hour-long performance of the “Minute Waltz,” and such startling originals as “Sudden Noises From Inanimate Objects.” These are annotated by Norm Fayrewether, a lonesome and deservedly obscure writer of overcooked aphorisms (“In the kingdom of the blind, what you see is what you get”), who became Silber’s biographer by answering a classified ad.
“I sort of identify with both of them, but especially with Norm,” Miller says. At Balducci’s Delicatessen in Greenwich Village, the 40-year-old novelist eyes an ornate fruit torte. He confides that if he were able to stop time around himself, as does a character in a book he sort of liked, he would come here and indulge his appetite for exotic, display-quality delicacies. Miller lives in Brooklyn, but he likes periodically to come into Manhattan and imagine such things.
His imagination is well-deployed in Simon Silber, which has both the urgency of a madly improvised first draft and the polished control of an exacting revision. “I’ve never written anything straight through,” Miller says. “I hate having the plot first and writing scenes to fit it. The composer started as a minor character in another novel that I’ve abandoned. Finally I had so much Silber stuff, I just decided to give him a novel.” Hearing his work described, Miller’s face ripples with unspecified reactions – a wince, a quarter smile, a twitch or tic of the nose or cheek, a raising and lowering of the eyebrows. He is a stout, fair-complexioned man, whose glasses slightly magnify his cat-like eyes, and he has his own goofy-genius quality – a blend of quiet knowingness and vibrant, loping curiosity. Not to mention an admitted inclination toward living nocturnally, at the mercy of sharp moods and a short attention span, and a lightly self-ironizing yet assertive aesthetic sense.
“My apartment building was once a girdle factory,” he says, “which seems appropriate for a formalist like me.”
As befits a precocious new novelist, Miller is asking for trouble. First, because Silber’s daffy, temperamental antics are not so far removed from those of real people. Composers such as John Cage, for instance, “did some Silberesque things,” Miller says, diplomatically. Then, less diplomatically: “It’s more fun to think about them or talk about them than actually listen to them. You’re not missing much by not listening to them.” Second, the book unabashedly resembles an already existing literary masterpiece, namely Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
“I don’t want to get credit for certain originality,” Miller says, making clear his deference to the Russian writer, obviously a beloved influence. Many Americans pronounce it “NAbokov,” but Miller is among those who say “NabOkov,” cradling the word in his mouth for an extra moment, blowing it out like a ring of smoke.
“I think Pale Fire inaugurated a type,” he declares. “The unreliable narrator. Nabokov’s voice has cast a spell over a lot of writers. He found a way to write like you’re not supposed to write anymore. A way to misbehave and blame it on the narrator.”
One thing Miller admits to having in common with his cranky composer is an intense and comic aversion to noise. “I’ll find myself straining to hear my neighbour’s noise so I can be indignant about it,” he says. Miller is not a musician, but he tried the trombone for one semester in junior high. Each of his three brothers played instruments too. “My house was really noisy,” he recalls. One brother would “come home from a day of junior high angst and go upstairs and right to the drums. I think that’s really how I developed my allergy to noise.” Another now plays trumpet for the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra.
While in his twenties, Miller lived in Seattle, by night working a graveyard shift as an aide in a psychiatric group home (a job that exposed him to some Silberesque characters and got him thinking about how people choose what to live for), and by day tinkering on the “misconceived novel” he later abandoned. “I was so self-indulgent then,” he says. “I didn’t show my work to anyone. I was like a boxer who never stepped into the ring.” Miller later stepped into the ring of Washington University’s MFA program. His feelings remain mixed. “Any writing workshop is sort of a one room schoolhouse, with different levels of talent and sophistication,” he says. “One out of three got worse–it actually enfeebled their work.” But his own process has matured. “I used to be really ritualistic. For years it would be one brand of cookie. I even made a writing tape of music I like–sort of to tell myself that this isn’t everyday life. It had Bach but also Fleetwood Mac on it.”
Miller’s current projects include a short story about an inventor of party games that no one wants to play, and another novel, Eat, involving a conspiracy about psychotropic baby food. Miller describes a third novel in progress as more serious. “I was really into David Lynch when I started it,” he says. “I think of it as a novelization of a nonexistent David Lynch movie.”
It will take some time for the book to be ready. “It’s like a problem child. You can’t get it to behave.” Miller is not giving up, and will at least hold on to the thing until it’s ready to be sent off to military school. Meanwhile he plans to get through his own adolescence and on to the adulthood of being published.
