It can be disorienting to read a novel as good as True Failure (Coffee House Press; 280 pages) is when its bold title archly gestures toward the opposite possibility. Readers of Alex Higley’s third book will instead encounter the work of a writer coming into his full powers as a skilled ironist and cultural critic. True Failure is a moving, fresh, and very funny story about a cast of characters whose quotidian lives and aspirations will seem at once familiar and strange in highly inventive and memorable ways. (Think John Gardner and his dictum that all good fiction has an element of strangeness.) 

Set in present-day, suburban Chicago and sun-struck Los Angeles, True Failure centers on Ben Silas, a man in his early thirties recently fired from his accounting job. Having decided to audition for Big Shot, a Shark Tank-like show, and reverse his household’s fortunes, he doesn’t tell his wife, Tara, an artist, who runs a daycare out of their home, that he’s been fired. Tara is the novel’s moral compass and voice of reason, a competent and loving partner to the hapless Ben, who, against all odds, begins to progress through the Big Shot vetting process.

What ensues is both harrowing and hilarious as the author introduces three main point-of-view characters: Ben, Tara, and Big Shot producer Marcy Lon. True Failure swerves dramatically and deftly in its exploration of these and a few other characters’ inner lives and public-facing personas. Highly original and inventive, Higley has written a novel that celebrates and coolly examines the contradictions at the heart of our culture of consumption and obsession with life hacks and fame.

This interview was conducted via email and Google Docs and was edited for clarity.

ZYZZYVA: My hunch is that the show Big Shot, depicted with excellent, granular detail within your novel, was inspired by Shark Tank. Would you speak to this?

Alex Higley: Not dissimilar from Ben’s experience with the show in the book, I casually watched Shark Tank with my wife. It was never appointment television for us but something we would have on in the background or when we didn’t know what else to watch. Which, now that I’m thinking, is underselling how entertaining that show can be and why it is that it got under my skin enough to have it be one of the nodes of inspiration for what became True Failure.

Shark Tank is such a heightened ridiculous microcosm of what some would like to think is an actual available path for entrepreneurs in this country. The truth, it seems to me, is that the level of contrivance is so effectively buried on episodes of that show that viewers can be lulled into honestly thinking the process is as simple as a “yes” or a “no” on some invention or business. I’m rambling. The aspect of Shark Tank that I am a fan of is not knowing what the next pitch is going to be. The variance is appealing to me. Even though the variance itself is also an illusion.

Z: Would you say this undoubtedly pervasive belief in the simple “yes” or “no” is akin to creating the illusion that life hacks are not only easily accessible but are in fact the best path to success, i.e. working hard is for schmucks?

AH: The obsession with efficiency and optimization that approaches such as “life hacks” emerge from have nothing to do with the kind of life I want to live. Improvement is not the same as optimization, nor is thriving, and streamlining one’s life for speed or productivity is not something I am interested in.

I think writing teaches you that there is really no way forward but through. You can’t really optimize your way into writing a novel. There are small tricks that involve deluding yourself into thinking anyone will care about what you are writing, but those tricks could also be applied to one’s work day or social interactions. There is no way to hack writing a novel. In part because the writing of the novel, the first draft, is such a small part of the process. There is a Philip Glass quote I like to paraphrase to myself. In response to being asked how he has been so prolific, what his secret is, he said, “I get up early and work hard all day.”

Z: You’ve written a polyvocal novel. We have several different third-person narrators who alternate throughout the book. Did earlier drafts feature fewer POVs? I think you mentioned having done quite a lot of revision after this book was sold to Coffee House. I’m curious about whether POV shifts were part of this rewriting.

AH: The bulk of the revision actually took place before we sold the book. My agent, Monika Woods, and I went back and forth I believe four times with full drafts. There were always many narrators, but yes, the novel gained some as the process went on. But the main rotation of narrators was there from the beginning. From the start I wanted Ben/Tara/Marcy and that interplay to center the book. The revisions that took place after the sale of the book were more granular.

Z: I loved how subversive Ben’s investment pitch is. It seems like the kind of pitch Pozzo and Lucky would make if there were a Waiting for Godot version of Big Shot. Quite a few other pitches, some successful, some not, are included in the book. There’s irony here, but Ben seems to be an unironic character in a book laced with irony. Would you say he’s an antihero and Tara is the true hero of this story?

AH: I like that understanding of each of their paths in the book. Your reading of Ben is the same as my own, there is certainly an earnest quality to him. Tara understands her own agency in a much more powerful way than Ben does. This understanding allows her to move and shape the events of her life and her husband’s life in a way Ben could not do on his own. From a purely demographic standpoint, Ben is the character that most resembles myself, but Tara is the one I feel closest to in the book.

Z: Tara’s work as a daycare provider with the unique M.O. of introducing the children she cares for to the culture of a different country each week is so imaginative. You and your wife have two small children—is this daycare idea something you implement in your own home?

AH: It is not! I think a lot of the programming for kids now does that work for us, in a sense. There is more of a multicultural focus in a lot of the popular cartoons on PBS Kids, etc. If anything, the kids come to us with questions surrounding whatever culture they were exposed to, and we have to google on our phones to keep up.

Z: Law and Order: SVU andMariska Hargitay are prominently featured in Big Shot, to surprising and hilarious effect, especially considering the depravity of the crimes depicted on the show. Were SVU and Hargitay with you from this novel’s inception?

AH: No! I originally was toying with Michelle Pfeiffer serving in the Hargitay role in the book. Something about that fit was off. There is a pretty unique way in which Hargitay exists for modern television audiences; she’s been on the air forever in this very specific, very dark role, and yet because of her work in that role and her efforts to impact the real-world horrors depicted on the show in the real world she is a real symbol of hope and perseverance for many. It is easy to think of actors who are known for one role and have been or who were on TV for long stretches; it is much harder to think of one as uniquely transcendent as what Mariska Hargitay has done with Olivia Benson.

Z: Big Shot’s Marcy Lon is obsessed with a murder committed on her family’s front lawn thirty years earlier, her parents gawking witnesses. Along with SVU, this gruesome murder and the murder-podcast genre make frequent appearances in the novel. Unusual bedfellows for a show like Big Shot, but it makes sense, surreal as it sometimes seems. What the hey is going on here—senseless consumption? Numbness to violence and its import?

AH: For me the link between Ben/Big Shot and Callie (Marcy’s assistant)/murder podcasts is the desire to bring the entertainment into your own life. Both Ben and Callie have trouble separating their lives from the lives they interact with through television/podcasts. They are active participants, or believe themselves to be. Ben and Callie (and Marcy) end up where they end up in the novel because of their inability to separate their lives from those they consume (I like your word) in their favored style of entertainment.

Z: What you said here is so interesting. What have you noticed in regard to possible effects on our society of this inability to separate fabrication/fantasy from reality?

AH: It makes me think a little about your earlier question about optimization. Podcasts can’t stand in for reading or actual research. Ultimately, they are entertainment, which is fine, of course. But I do think there is a danger in ceding too much of our time to having chatter on in the background or foreground of our thinking. I’ve had to stop listening to many podcasts because the host or hosts voices would get too stuck in my head. There was a kind of taking over of the tone of my thinking that I wanted to protect myself from. Maybe I am more susceptible because I’m a writer and inventing conversation so often. Who knows?

Z: You recently co-founded an independent press, Great Place Books. What led to this decision and what’s your mission?

AH: Our mission as stated is: Great Place Books publishes literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and work in translation. Our mission is to be a home for rigorous, weird, beautiful books—and their readers. These books are imperiled by the stratification and commercialization of publishing. Against the grain of the industry and the times, we aim to support the careers of idiosyncratic and alluring writers whose voices might otherwise be lost.

We have so far published a debut poetry collection, a debut novel, and a translated novel from the Spanish. Each book was one that we felt strongly needed to exist and either had been struggling to find a place for that to happen or we felt would be unjustly overlooked. Emily Adrian and I knew we could never publish 10-12 books a year, but we did feel confident that we could learn how to publish 2-3 a year and do our part to help other writers’ work find a home.

We also wanted to create a small community where we could teach classes online, and GPB has allowed us to do that. If we have an idea for a class that would be fun, we just run it. For example, in January we ran a course where Emily and I co-taught a class on Joy Williams’ short stories. Four classes total, we each chose stories we loved. What could be better than that? So GPB allows us to create a little community around work we love and have published.

Christine Sneed’s most recent books are Direct Sunlight and Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos. She’s also the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up. She has received the Grace Paley Prize, an O. Henry Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, among other honors. She teaches for Northwestern University and Stanford University Continuing Studies.