Craig Willse Suspects All Of Us Are Seeking Ways To Avoid Reality

When people strive for a Dickie Greenleaf summer—whether wearing bowler shirts, behaving petulantly, or just generally being in Italy—I always want to ask, do they remember how that ended for him? 

In Craig Willse’s debut novel, Providence, Dickie’s demise is part of the canon. The novel tells the story of Mark, a young professor at an elite college in a small town in Ohio. Mark exhumes a body of research on gay murderers in order to interpret cultural discourse around sexuality. When he takes a shine to one of his students, the precocious Tyler, he quickly unravels in Tyler’s world. Providence is a gripping page-turner, tracking a person’s descent through obsession, addiction, and the deception he long studied from a distance. This propulsive novel examines how a person can learn to negotiate the pressures of the world around him and how those maneuvers can lead him into his darkest hours. 

We met over Zoom to discuss his novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, gay murderers, and the trauma plot.

Michael Colbert: The novel opens in Mark’s classroom with a discussion on The Talented Mr. Ripley. I’m such a Ripley head—I love the movie, book, all of it. Can you speak to the genesis of your interest in Mark’s research subject, cultural discourses on sexuality and crime?

Craig Willse: Yeah, that was actually a project I was working on in my early twenties and then put aside for two decades. When the story of Mark and Tyler came to me, the idea that Mark would be working on this project came soon after. There’s a scene when Mark is explaining his research to Tyler and tells him about Andrew Cunanan, who killed Gianni Versace. I grew up in Miami and was living there the summer Versace was murdered, and I was obsessed. I still have a box with all of the Miami Heralds during this massive manhunt. That kicked off for me this interest in how stories about gay murder get told and what they reflect about the period of time that that murder or crime takes place in.

Mark is parroting me in that conversation when he’s talking about the AIDS panic, immigrant panic, and the discourse about Cunanan’s illegible ethnicity—as if Cunanan was doing something wrong in not being able to be read clearly by people. That was the beginning of my interest in the topic, and then I spent a couple years doing research on murder. That’s also around the period of time when The Talented Mr. Ripley film came out. I didn’t read the novel until I was working on mine. It was obviously a real influence, not just on the story but how I was thinking about telling the story. It’s funny, when you sit down to write, there are things you know you’re going to do, and then there are all these influences that you’ve been carrying around. 

MC: How does Mark’s relationship to the work and the discourse surrounding it influence his understanding of himself? Why is Mark the person to be researching this?

CW: That’s a good question. One of the things that defines Mark is a feeling of himself as an outsider and of not belonging. He gives a guest lecture about his work, and he says that he was drawn to it because he’s reacting against a sort of happy, positive version of gay life that he’s seeing represented. He wanted to spend his time with the worst gays possible and reject this idea of “gay is good” or pressure to tell only positive stories about gay people. I think all of that is true, but I think beneath all of that is his own sense of himself as being out of place, maybe out of time, of not fitting in. He is drawn to people who embrace that. At the same time, he gravitates towards people who seem to have found their place in the world and feel quite comfortable in it, which is his interpretation of Tyler. Maybe those are two sides of the same thing—people who either fit in or don’t but one way or the other really feel like themselves. I think Mark really struggles to feel like himself, or to figure out who he is.

MC: I want to discuss the two sides of that discourse: the good gay couple and the “rapacious gay man preys on innocent child.” How were you interested in situating the novel inside of the larger narrative, especially where the predation narrative is gaining traction among certain circles?

CW: One of the things the book is trying to explore is the difference between power as it actually exists and operates in the world, and our feelings of being powerful or being powerless, and the ways those things do and don’t correspond with each other. I think there’s something missing sometimes from public discourse around sex and power. At a party, Safie—Mark’s best friend at work—says if there’s sex, there’s power. I think Mark feels very powerless, and he feels completely overpowered by his desire for Tyler. I think he knows this isn’t true at times, but he feels very much that he’s under Tyler’s control. Of course, he isn’t—Mark’s an adult; he’s making his own choices—but I think that feeling of being completely overwhelmed by desire—by something that feels unreachable, unattainable, and also incomprehensible—deepens his feeling of Tyler’s hold over him. 

I’m very concerned about the right wing, obviously, but I also have seen online so many young queer people reproducing the same discourse and the same interpretation of power and exploitation. The lack of awareness—that feeding this discourse is only going to hurt you—is really unsettling to me. I went to college in the 90s, and I was really influenced by 1980s and 1990s feminist writing and early queer studies around these questions of sex, porn, and power. Gayle Rubin has a really famous piece “Thinking Sex,” and she talks about the charmed circle. Behaviors can move in and out of the charmed circle of what’s acceptable. She looks at how some forms of monogamous gay sex can move into the charmed circle, but sex in the back alley stays out. That was very influential for me. When I see queer people enforcing the borders of the charmed circle and feeding these sex panics, it makes me very angry.

MC: Yeah, it’s coming from within and enforces a social conservativism.

CW: We bring really messy, conflicted selves into sex. That’s always true, and I think some of this discourse is rooted in a fantasy of sex with no conflict, with no friction, with no bad communication, with only transparency of desire on both sides. That’s a great idea, and I don’t think it exists in reality, so I don’t think we’re actually serving ourselves when we’re propping up that fantasy. I think we can have better, more fulfilling, and safer sexual experiences when we’re honest, actually, about the impossibility of ever fully being able to know, articulate, and actualize ourselves to ourselves. That’s what’s happening for Mark in this book, and so I think that’s what I’m nervous about with this flattened discourse about power, for the ways that it actually sets us up to not be able to care for ourselves in what are charged and confusing experiences and settings.

MC: The book also explores addiction—to substances, to social media, and to other people. How do they relate to each other through the novel?

CW: I had a whole academic career and spent years writing things where I was trying to convince people of what to think. With this book, I really wanted to raise questions, not give answers, and I wanted it to be a story that was engaging and moved quickly. 

In terms of addiction, I think the way those things cohere for me in the story has to do with Mark’s early family experiences and his older sister, Cassie, and her life of drug use as a teenager. Mark learned a certain way to be in that family system that had to do with not being the focus of his parents’ attention because of how much attention and energy Cassie took up. The story that gets told in Mark’s family is about Mark not needing help; we get one of Mark’s rare flashes of anger about the idea that a child wouldn’t want help from his parents. 

But of course, Mark also has gone on to build a life where he mostly doesn’t rely on other people, where he doesn’t believe people would choose him or want to help him. There’s a way that Mark has learned to be in the world that I think is one of the ripple effects of addiction, substance use, and the way it impacts groups and families in particular. Like Cassie, Mark, is seeking an escape from reality—through projection, and fantasy, and social media. For me, this is not a moral discourse. We live in an unbearable world, and I think probably all of us are seeking ways to get out of reality. I’ve tried in my own life to figure out ways to balance that. Certainly, characters in the book are not finding that balance. 

MC: There are these really propulsive sections in the novel where I felt Mark’s desire. He longs for connection—he looks for it in the synagogue and at school. Do you understand his loneliness as a feature of his character in any other ways?

CW: Mark is somebody who has both been isolated and felt outside his entire life, and then there’s also the specificity of this moment in his life. He’s gotten this academic job that he’s worked so hard for, and he is wrestling with the disappointment of what it actually looks like. He’s in a small town in Ohio and feeling the drudgery of what this job is day to day. The book is set very intentionally in this period of time after 2008, when universities took advantage of the recession to do everything they wanted to do in terms of slashing permanent tenure track jobs, increasing people’s workloads, freezing or cutting salaries. This thing that at some point in time had been a wonderful job had been chipped away. 

Although I want to say I did spend one year teaching in Ohio, and I actually really liked that job and made a lot of really good friends there. My experience of teaching in Ohio was more like Safie’s. I found a group of friends, and we figured out a way to be in this small, weird place together. There was something very bonding about being in the small town together, but Mark doesn’t have those. He already feels so alone and so isolated, so those circumstances that intensify it become pretty unbearable.

MC: We’ve talked about serial killers, obsession, loneliness, addiction, and also social conditions. This all makes me think of the famous trauma plot essay. How were thinking about the interaction between trauma, backstory, and broader social conditions? How do those things interact to exert pressure on a character?

CW: I’m not against happy endings, but I’m against a moral discourse that a happy ending is the best ending, or the kind of ending a writer should write, or a reader should want to read. I think the trauma plot discourse ends a conversation about desire before we can have it. I’m really interested in why we like and enjoy stories about horrible things happening to people. What is the pleasure that we get in reading about really painful, really horrifying things? I think that the trauma plot discourse falls into a moral discourse that suggests there’s something bad about the desire to read about traumatic events or to read something that has a traumatizing effect on the reader. 

When I read the initial trauma plot piece, I understood that the writer was drawing our attention to something that can feel really forced, where it’s like there’s one thing that happened to the character in the past, and then maybe two thirds of the way through the story that one thing is revealed, and it’s supposed to explain everything. That does not feel to me like how the world works. Even if in our own lives we have one particular traumatic event, how we experience that event is also embedded in our whole lives. 

In terms of crafting the story, that’s why I was trying to think about Mark’s family system, the stories his family told, and all the different ways he learned to be a person in that family system. I hope it doesn’t feel like it’s about one bad thing that happened to him in his childhood but more about the way he learned to be a person in relationship to his parents and his sister and the things he closed down, the possibilities for life that got shut down for him in those experiences. I hope that’s a little more nuanced and rich than what happens in a superhero movie where that one thing explains everything. 

Also, with some of the online discourse around the trauma plot essay, I wonder about being in a moment of what some scholars call multicultural neoliberalism, where publishing has expanded a little bit in terms of publishing work by authors of color and queer writers. I wonder sometimes about the relationship between some of that discourse and this moment. It feels to me a little bit like the message is, “you can publish your stories, but don’t bum us out,” like tell us a story of immigrant triumph or of gay resolution. I think there’s something there.