Responsible Perverts

If for some reason Sherman Alexie were to suddenly renounce Seattle
and move to, say, Pismo Beach, Ryan Boudinot would immediately become
the most talked-about author of literary fiction in town. They are a twinned set of figures on Seattle’s
literary map: the accomplished author and the up-and-coming younger
star. And maybe it’s due to an unconscious comparison with Alexie’s
larger-than-life stage persona, but in person, Boudinot is much more
boring than you’d expect him to be.

Or maybe it’s because of his books: Boudinot’s short stories,
especially those collected in 2006’s The Littlest Hitler, are
populated with quiet people who are booby-trapped with some sort of a
freakish hang-up. The word “pervert” often comes to mind when reading
his fiction: A frozen-pea inspector finds salvation in a severed
finger, a serial killer discusses murder in front of his 6-year-old
son’s kindergarten class for career day (when one boy asks the proud
dad who he’s murdered, his reply, of course, is “nobody important”),
and a group of clowns toasts the successful bombing of a federal
courthouse to bring about the collapse of Western civilization (in a
story titled “Absolut Boudinot”).

So it can be a shock when you meet Boudinot. He looks medium
affluent, jovial enough, and decidedly normal. With his
always-just-trimmed black hair and perpetual hint of a smile, he looks
and sounds like your average early-2000s Seattle dot-com employee (and
for good reason; he worked for three large dot-coms earlier this decade
and was laid off from all of them). Boudinot makes that normalcy work
for him at his readings: When he’s onstage, his voice drones with a
dry, not necessarily self-aware sense of irony, like Kevin Spacey’s
voice-over work in American Beauty. The raw horror of his
stories, the glistening meat pushed up against the shiny plastic,
really comes through when he reads aloud. Many people don’t realize
Boudinot’s real genius until they see him summoning the monstrous
demons of his fiction to dance for everyone’s amusement.

Boudinot’s newest book is a debut novel titled Misconception.
It’s technically his fourth novel; the closest one to come to
publication before this was Frozen Novelties, a 700-page
manuscript Boudinot wrote when he was laid off from Drugstore.com in 2001. He had a prominent
agent—Melanie Jackson, who’s probably as notable for being
married to Thomas Pynchon as for her big-name clients—behind the
book, but he just couldn’t get it published. Over coffee, Boudinot
dismisses Novelties as an “inferior” and “very ’90s novel” whose
tone “didn’t match the post-9/11 world.”

Aside from a similar birthing story (Boudinot began seriously
working on the book on the day he was laid off from Apex Learning, an
online education start-up, in 2004), Misconception sounds like
the exact opposite of Frozen Novelties. It’s thin (just over 200
pages), it’s only got two main characters, and it leaps around in time
and perspective. It begins with what is possibly the best opening
chapter of a novel in 2009—a quiet high-school student named
Cedar brings a slide of his own semen to study in biology
class—and it grimly marches forward to a disastrous climax. The
book is narrated by Cedar and his first girlfriend, Kat, in a suitably
confusing mesh of voices: Some passages are taken from a high-school
memoir written by an adult Kat in a younger Cedar’s point of view, but
the change of voice from one perspective to another is so subtle as to
be nonexistent in some places. (When asked if he thinks Kat is a good
writer, Boudinot laughs and thinks for a minute and then replies,
“Yeah, I think she’s a good writer, but I don’t think she thinks
she is.”)

“I imagined myself whittling a stick” while writing the novel,
Boudinot says. “You reach a point in whittling where you sort of try to
determine when it’s the maximum sharpness it can ever possibly be, but
if you keep whittling past that point, you’re going to run out of
stick.” He kept shearing away extraneous material from
Misconception (repeating the phrase “The story is the unit of
measurement” as a kind of mantra) until finally he felt that he had
pulled away as much as he could while “still leaving something there to
read.”

This whittling does and doesn’t work. Much of Misconception‘s
central conceit, especially the lackadaisical push and feverishly horny
pull of early romance between Kat and Cedar, is remarkably warm for
Boudinot, but some elements, like a divorce later in the novel, feel
like unexplored elements that occur just to drive the plot forward. And
Misconception‘s climax is completely unearned, too, a slathering
of melodrama that feels uncomfortable in Boudinot’s terse, incredulous
language.

It’s a flawed novel, but it represents a huge step forward in
maturity from the flashy nihilism of Hitler. Boudinot explains
what he believes the differences between his two books are:
“Littlest Hitler was written in an era when it didn’t seem like
there were any consequences for actions, particularly politically,”
like the Iraq war and wiretapping. Misconception came just after
the birth of Boudinot’s first child, and thus much of the book was
written “with an infant strapped to my chest,” inspiring a more
responsible worldview. He calls Misconception “a sincere novel”
and says Kat and Cedar “are trying to do everything right and they’re
failing. I think their hearts are in the right place.”

Boudinot is a very active member of Seattle’s literary community. He
reads in large and small group events all the time. He’s a
writer-in-residence at Hugo House, which means in part that he helps
aspiring authors with the craft of writing. He’s talking with Cornish
College of the Arts about creating an MFA in creative writing, and he
genuinely loves teaching. “I’m interested in the emotional aspects of
writing, in the different stages of the process,” he says. “There may
be stages where a writer feels horrible writing a book, but there are
reasons for feeling like that.”

In the near future, Boudinot hopes to publish another collection of
stories, and he’s just completed a draft of a new novel. This one is at
least three times the size of Misconception, with five primary
characters, and Boudinot calls it “the most fun thing I’ve ever
written. I want it to be this crazy ride, like something I wrote when I
was in seventh grade, where anything can happen.” Boudinot can’t share
much about the book just yet, but he admits that Michael Jackson is a
character in the narrative, and he practically giggles when he
discusses how Jackson’s death forces the book into a kind of sci-fi
alternate-history genre. His quiet demeanor cracks when he talks about
it, and for a moment the bland dot-com guise disappears and you can see
that Boudinot is decidedly not boring.