Vu Tran's first novel is Dragonfish, a NY Times Notable Book of 2015. He is the winner of a Whiting Award, and his short stories have appeared in publications like the O. Henry Prize Stories and the Best American Mystery Stories. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. (Q1) In your first novel, Dragonfish, a woman writes letters to her abandoned daughter in an attempt to explain her immigrant story, a story that is folded into the main narrative of the woman's ex-husband’s search for her. Did the shape of the novel always hold these two storylines?
No, actually. Originally, the main "crime" narrative with Robert was the sole dramatic thrust of the novel. Once I got about 70 pages in, however, it didn't feel emotionally or thematically deep enough. I felt like I didn't know how to go beyond the premise. It wasn't until I reached into Suzy's past -- her escape from Vietnam, her time on the refugee island, her reasons for abandoning her daughter -- that I felt I found the story. Her voice within that epistolary structure gave the novel an emotional foundation, which then allowed me to tie all the characters together and weave them into an arc that the rest of the novel could follow, escalate, and deepen. So I ended up writing all the letters before returning to page 70 of the crime narrative and then continuing it until the end. (Q2) Throughout the novel, you emphasize the deep, yet tenuous and destructive bonds of love, both romantic and filial. How did the noir fiction genre allow you to shape these relationships?
I think romantic and filial love is often as complicated as it is because of the ways we choose to share and not share ourselves with other people. The truth is that it is impossible to know someone else entirely, just as it is impossible to make someone else know you entirely, and so much conflict comes out of us needing, expecting, or pursuing this kind of complete knowledge and getting only ambiguity and uncertainty. Noir fiction is always concerned with this dilemma. It thrives on incomplete information. It's about the absence of light, of truth, about the stories that exist in the shadows and are only partially revealed to us and of course the endless and endlessly unanswerable questions that come out of that. The atmosphere and metaphorical trappings of the genre became for me a great way to dramatize what I essentially saw as a story about a bad relationship.
(Q3) What works of literature or film influenced your choice of topic, genre, and place for this novel?
Vertigo has always been a favorite movie of mine, and along with the noir elements, I tried to bring a lot of the film's melancholy and romantic tone to Dragonfish. I also had Wong Kar Wai's films on my mind, since they share a lot of stylistic and tonal DNA with Vertigo.
In terms of literature, I had a number of books on my desk as I was writing the novel, and the ones I picked up most regularly, simply to read random pages, were: Graham Greene's The Quiet American (for its cynical but wise narrator and its depiction of Vietnam), Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (for its surreal and propulsive plotting), Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (for its hard-edged style and the beautiful rhythm of its sentences), and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (for its epistolary structure and the deeply human voice of its narrator).
(Q4) As a professor of creative writing, are there particular works you most enjoy teaching?
I think the kind of fiction I most enjoy teaching is the kind that makes students the most uncomfortable. Writers like Mary Gaitskill, Paul Bowles, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, and Alice Munro not only write about difficult topics like sex, violence, and bad behavior, but they also write about it in an unusual and disorienting way. As readers, when we're confronted with fiction that makes us uncomfortable because of its content or its form, we're forced to react more viscerally and to think more deeply about the ways we engage with it on an aesthetic level. This also happens to be the best space for a writer, because it's in that uncomfortable space that the most unexpected and interesting stuff resides.
I'm not saying, by the way, that all my favorite fiction is of this ilk or that good fiction necessarily needs to be confrontational in this manner. Shock value, in and of itself, has diminishing returns. But I do believe that teaching the craft effectively often requires that you challenge students with the way they see their art and the world itself.
(Q5) What new work(s) do you have forthcoming? Will your next work be noir fiction as well?
Unfortunately, I'm not presently working on anything new just yet. I've been too busy and distracted by the "business" of having the novel out in the world for 6 months. I also tend to think a lot about a project before I commit to it, since I'm not very good at just typing out words and seeing where they take me. I can say that I recently reread Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and have been fancying the idea of writing a Vietnamese Victorian/Gothic novel. I haven't developed the idea enough to talk about it with any clarity or certainty, but I do like the idea of using that framework -- the atmosphere and style of the gothic tradition -- to tell a story about colonial Vietnam, the impact of the French and American footprint there, and how it has shaped the resulting Vietnamese diaspora.