Small Apocalypses: An Interview with Lamar Giles

Henry Stevens: In The Getaway, you present so many ways of resisting. Your characters are united against their oppression, but they clash over how to take action.

Lamar Giles: I wanted to have these internal clashes in their friend group serve as the typical clash in any movement against oppression. If you think back to the Civil Rights Movement, the most prominent leaders were butting heads with each other all the time. Even though everyone agrees the goal is progress, how you get there is rarely agreed upon. Sometimes those clashes trip up some of the more worthy efforts.

The thing I was trying to do with Jay specifically in The Getaway is show a person whose perspective is wrong in terms of what’s best for the group. Jay is willing to overlook a bunch of things as long as his family is safe. In some ways, that was me interrogating myself, like, what would I do? How far would I go if it meant my daughter was safe? Would I overlook something happening outside my front door as long as it kept my little girl from harm? That can take you to some really uncomfortable places because the answer is a lot. 

If you take that, extrapolate it to everyone around you, it could mean absolute chaos and brutality in service to your family. I think we actually see that quite a bit. That being said, I want Jay to be the focal point of that, so you can ride with him. And, in some ways, I want the reader to agree with him for a little while. 

In your jacket cover, it mentions Connie disappears. I was wondering how much of her disappearance is supposed to reflect the experience of community members who are taken away like that.

I don’t know that I have an actual, personal experience of having lost someone in the way of, for example, Sandra Bland—thank goodness I haven’t dealt with that—but when you see these situations on the news, they feel like family members and friends. 

In The Getaway, it is very much an analog for a tragedy isn’t a tragedy until it’s your own. In the terms of Jay, it’s not like people hadn’t disappeared from Jubilee prior to Connie, but then it comes home. The revelations that he comes to are likely the sort of revelations other people have come to when their friend or their neighbor disappeared. The difference here is Chelle provides resources that allow them to pursue the leads they have. That was very much on purpose, like, people have had this happen before, but now it’s our friend, and we have a wealthy friend who can help us chase this stuff down so we can actually do something about it.

Let’s talk about Chelle, the wealthy friend. What do you think of her?

I love Chelle. She was one of my favorite characters to write, because it felt like the biggest exercise of my fiction muscle. I don’t know anybody wealthy like that. I don’t know what the dynamics are in that kind of household. 

Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Survival of the Richest, is one of the stories that inspired The Getaway. In his book, he’s invited to speak at what he thought was a conference, and he’s expecting an audience, but when he gets to the venue it’s five people. Five of the richest people on the planet, and they don’t want to hear a speech, they just want to ask questions about the end of the world, how to survive. 

This is real? 

Yeah, this is real, and from that story of these rich people asking these super dark questions, it gave me a lot to play with in imagining a household—Chelle’s—where people with money know what’s coming. That’s just me, honestly. It’s fun villain stuff. 

In this book, there is a rebellious servant class. Can you talk about their role in this book? 

That’s me giving a shout out to resistance when I read history books, when I read about the relationship between slave and master. From a modern perspective, it trips me out how comfortable the slave owners get with their power over a huge slave population. 

This is nothing new. A lot of people talk about psychological games a master plays to keep control of a group of people who clearly outnumber him. He uses torture and murder against them. And in the situation in The Getaway, when people flip, it’s me thinking the modern mindset would always have people plotting for that rebellion, because we’re aware of the history. It’s my belief that in a modern situation, no one’s going to waste that moment to get some payback. 

How does the apocalypse in this novel fit with your own beliefs about society?

I just don’t believe in a true, global apocalypse of man moment. I believe what we think of as the apocalypse happens for someone on a daily basis. Someone’s whole world is destroyed every single day. If we’re fortunate, we can make it through life and it’s not us. 

The rate of mass shootings. That, to me, is a small apocalypse. Again, that’s someone’s whole family taken away from them in a moment. Their world ends. That’s my view of the apocalypse. And granted, in the book it’s a larger scale thing happening outside the Karloff country walls. And that’s on purpose, I wanted to play with that. But my true view is that almost every day the society we know ends and the next day is a new society.

There’s a delusion among the rich people in The Gateway that there’s a grandeur in this mass end of man moment.

That’s right. If you hear anybody–whether it be motivated by religion or something else–talk about the end times, it’s always a good thing. You very rarely hear someone bring that up and be scared. They’re the ones that are going to be okay. Whether that means survival or heaven. And that’s always creeped me out, because what they’re saying is they’re looking forward to this event even though it means the majority is going to suffer. They may not say that aloud, but that’s what they mean.

How is whiteness constructed in The Getaway?

When I was drafting the book, something that popped up in my mind quite a bit was Colin Kaepernick, and kneeling during football games, and all the ways that caused problems in the social, political sphere. That sort of whiteness protects itself over all things, justifies anything it does by saying it has to happen. It’s not my fault. It’s just the way it is. And, we can’t dwell on the past even though we repeat it. I wanted that there. But in some ways I felt like that part is very obvious. 

Another way I wanted to get at it was with the black couple, the Greers. To me, they represent one of the most insidious protections for white supremacy, which is the black person who offers cover. I wanted to talk about that because I think that’s a prominent part of giving white supremacist protection, because if they can find the black person who will spot their hateful things and bolster their ideas, then it’s so easy to say it can’t be racist because they’re okay with it. 

Joy is important to your work, too.

When I was in high school, I had a teacher tell me that I could find a joke in anything. I don’t think they meant that as a compliment, but it’s the truth. It’s something I have to be cautious of, because I can literally find something funny at a funeral. It’s not that anything is really funny, it’s just a defense mechanism. I don’t feel comfortable engaging in grief, and the humor is something that I try to bring to my work because the material is very, very grim. I feel like having it be 100 percent grim is asking too much of me and the reader. And I think that’s fun to play with, because people in general aren’t 100 percent of anything. 

The dedication in this book is for the Vista Way Crew, Spring 2000. Would you talk a little bit about that?

In the year 2000, I was a junior at Old Dominion, and I took a semester off to go work at Walt Disney World’s College Internship program. I think that program still exists. I went to work at the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, where I lived in an apartment complex for all the workers called Vista Way. The friends I made there are probably not that dissimilar to Jay’s friends in the book. We would all hang out and gripe about work and have good times, and that experience was probably the other big thing that inspired the book. 

I’ve got to be careful here, because I signed a bunch of paperwork back then, but I’ll put it this way. Corporations care about corporations. If I didn’t know that before my internship, it was made very clear within the first week. That particular corporation, they are very good at the customer service part. But I think it’s been documented in the news how maybe the labor part isn’t their strong suit. In those incidents, I found a good amount of inspiration for what Karloff Country ended up being. I’ll leave it at that.

Since we’re doing an alumni issue for this edition of the Barley South Review, I was wondering if you had any advice. 

So, first of all, I had an Old Dominion hoodie on this morning when I took my daughter to daycare. It’s just too warm in the house to wear it. I wish I had it on, just to prove it, but I absolutely loved my time at Old Dominion. I went there for undergrad and graduate school. I got my MFA in Creative Writing from Old Dominion in 2017. Met my wife there. We’re both alumni. Advice? I mean, I don’t know that there’s much advice to give other than enjoy that time.

And in terms of writing, being an ODU student, I’m not sure who’s teaching in the program right now, but the teachers I had were excellent. Take advantage of all of them. Matter of fact, the very first time that I recognized that I might have a path to a writing career was when I realized I could take creative writing classes. I was 19 years old, and I took a class with Sherri Reynolds. That was life changing.