American-born Tod Wodicka’s inventive debut novel, All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner Of Things Shall Be Well, enlivened shelves in 2007, quickly garnering cult acclaim. For those that haven't yet bought the ticket for this ride, the titular benediction of Saint Julian of Norwich hangs as shakily above the book’s conclusions as the relentlessly misplaced optimism of its protagonist. A hapless member of The Confraternity Of Times Lost Regained, sixty-something Burt Hecker from upstate New York mounts a mead-stained crusade across Europe to emancipate his estranged son from the evil clutches of modern Prague.
Interlacing Burt’s tragically hilarious hegira with a more painful family story, Wodicka compresses time, space and polarised emotion to deliver a sobering cautionary tale. Currently feeling his way through the hypnagogic maelstrom of his second novel, The Household Spirit, Wheel caught up with Tod at his home in Berlin.
Interview and collage by Melissa Osborne
What are you up to these days? Writing the new novel... sort of. Does thinking about writing count?
Definitely. Mostly I’m listening to that Jack Rose tribute album, Honest Strings. It’s got some great stuff on it, lots of old favourites: Six Organs of Admittance, MV&EE, Pelt, Loren Connors...
You’re an embedded denizen of Berlin these days, how did that happen? Short version is, I impregnated a German girl. But I guess that’s the long version, too. Girl and I have since split but I’m here at least until my son, who is four now, is all grown up. That could be anywhere between 15 and 25 years, Germans seem to stay in university forever. If I’m trapped here it’s a gilded cage, like Versailles... But Versailles after the rabble threw all the nice chairs through the windows.
All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner Of Things Shall Be Well is a pretty munificent title... It’s absurd, I know, but I love it. It’s the title the character would use anyway – a desperate medieval mantra that only sounds positive until you’ve finished the book. Then it’s just kind of sad.
It’s definitely a sad book but this is offset by a lot of high hilarity. I guess it’s just the way I see the world. It’d be harder for me to write a straight out humourless tragedy – I’m not German, or a straight out farce – I’m not Swiss... I don’t even know what that means! I guess I have a very dark sense of humour and a very light sense of tragedy.
How did you come to inhabit the frenetic world of Burt Hecker with such clarity and insight? Clarity and insight were hard to manoeuvre for a character that, most of the time, lacks just those attributes. I spent more than a year pretty much only reading medieval history books, listening to early music, going to all the places Burt would go. It was also like taking a lot of my worst tendencies, expanding them and then following them to some kind of nadir or conclusion. Really, it was a soon-to-be-father’s cautionary tale written to myself. A pre-exorcism: getting the Bad Dad out.
The time-space of Burt’s continuum is a pretty bouncy ride... It jumps around but the internal logic of Burt’s story is very linear. I also saw the book as an X. Two lines: one going up, the other down. The one going up is the reader’s journey of empathising with the character. At first Burt should be really off-putting, annoying, but by the end I wanted him to win the reader over.
On the other line, at the start you shouldn’t see him as bad or anything, but as the book progresses and as his shitty behaviour and general fuck ups continue, you should want to shut the book on his face. The goal for me was to almost trick the reader into empathising with an asshole. Making an asshole human because most are – I should know!
Do you really think you’re an asshole? But with a heart of gold...
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