Brian McGreevy’s novel “Hemlock Grove” is coming to Netflix
GQ interviewed McGreevy on what it’s like to adapt his monsters-in-Pennsylvania story for a 13-episode series on Netflix:
GQ: What inspired you to sit down and write this book?
McGreevy: A deeply, deeply abnormal brain. I reached a point in my relationship with my own work—I was in graduate school for an M.F.A. at the time—when I realized I wasn’t very good at realism. And so I wanted to do something that had a level of imagination I found more compelling, but still anchor it in a world that was as familiar to me as possible. And so I thought, all right, I’m just gonna take a shitload of monsters and stick ‘em in my high school.
“I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need… is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we’re smart. And that’s the stuff that TV and movies — although they’re great at certain things — cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of art… Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don’t want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.”
PULPHEAD NOTES: Reality TV and The Novel
Q. Nabokov describes the term “reality” as “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.” In “Getting Down to What Is Really Real,” you seem as much appalled by “Reality TV” as you are fascinated by it. Can you talk about its complicated allure? Why do you think it’s become so popular?
John Jeremiah Sullivan: Seven or the eight years ago, the genre started expanding—to the point where now you’d be hard-pressed to find an aspect of American life it hasn’t touched—and there came a point when you started to feel that for some people, in some people’s minds, it was actually messing with reality. The boundaries were mingling. This was years before you had a spectacle like, a recent Republican VP candidate getting her own reality show, but you could feel that coming. It’s the feeling I was interested in and tried to write about. Genres can do this thing sometimes of giving us frames to shape our lives in, to make sense of them. The novel did that for a couple of hundred years. These shows are doing it now for a lot of Americans. That’s probably not good.(Read the rest of the interview at Critical Mob.)
Your daily brainfood: Daniel Kahneman, bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, stops by “Charlie Rose.” Especially helpful if you plan on buying flight insurance anytime soon.
