Last year, in an interview with Southwest Review, Grace Krilanovich reflected on the long and elliptical process of writing her second novel, Acid Green Velvet. Unlike her 2010 debut, The Orange Eats Creeps, which garnered her a nod as a 5 Under 35 honoree from the National Book Foundation, this new work required a decade and a half to complete. “Whole eras of publishing and several life stages went by while I was writing it,” Krilanovich explained. “There were ten years of torment because I had no time. Simply no time—three hours of childcare per week to just barely stir these coals so it wouldn’t die.” And yet, she went on to acknowledge, “this unique, unpleasant writing process had the silver lining of nearly infinite percolating time, years and years.”
There’s a lot to unpack in those revelations, and every bit of it is germane. First, we encounter the difficulty—especially for women—of finding a balance between parenthood and art making. Regrettably, this is neither a new story nor an uncommon one. The novelist Carolyn See once recalled her writing strategy as the mother of young children: Start as soon as they fall asleep because you’ll be stopping the moment they wake. It is a desperate and debilitating state. And yet, something else is at work also, the “silver lining,” as Krilanovich calls it, which is to say: the way the demands of daily living inevitably infiltrate and influence the fabric of the work.
Acid Green Velvet is a case in point. Set during the late 19th century, in a California coastal city called Anzar, the book is a gothic Western, in the vein of Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster or Rudolph Wurlitzer’s The Drop Edge of Yonder. At the same time, it is an entity unto itself. Opening with a sequence of three single-paragraph episodes—I hesitate to call them chapters—Acid Green Velvet revolves around a young woman named Paulette, who has decamped to Anzar after conspiring to commit patricide, only to find the town beset by tramps. “I’ve circulated among the varieties of tramps all my life,” she confides in a letter to her mother. “From my window I watch pale unbothered figures in the night street, shuffling their way through a blend of fog and cooking smoke, men partaking of the ramshackle splendors of the Main Stem.” Jack Black and Boxcar Bertha come to mind. Nevertheless, Paulette continues, pivoting to address the very tramps she is describing, “I am not your ‘sister of the road.’ But I have studied you.”
The slippage is both jarring and effective. It is the novel teaching us how it wants to be read. Throughout Acid Green Velvet, after all, Krilanovich operates as a literary shape-shifter, moving from first to third person, from Paulette’s point of view to that of Kenneth, the friend who she believes has finished off her father, and then to the perspectives of additional outliers and outcasts, all seeking to navigate the fervid fancies of Anzar as the tramps battle the Loganberries—a Pinkerton-like outfit of enforcers—for the soul of the town. “The spectacle is taking place; it is the dream itself,” Krilanovich writes. “Or rather it’s me, dreaming it.” That we are never fully certain whether these sentiments belong to her or to Paulette is the idea. In such moments, we experience the full degree of blurring that infuses this novel, which develops via a chorus of voices. “Here I feel like I can do or say anything I want,” the author intuits, “that I’m solving the problem of society just by lying low.”
Doing something by doing nothing, in other words. Watching as events unfold.
It’s a curious posture for a novelist to take, proposing that narrative develops at a distance. Still, as Acid Green Velvet progresses, this becomes a necessary strategy. Paulette may be the protagonist and sometime narrator, but there are sequences in which she does not appear. Even when she is present—or engaged in telling—she remains bound, to some extent, by 19th-century standards, which dictated that women stay primarily at home. Much of the book, indeed, unfolds at the sprawling estate of Johnny Hasley, dissolute heir of Anzar’s most prominent family and Paulette’s on-again, off-again…paramour is not exactly the right word, although it’s the only one that seems to mostly fit. This is not to suggest that Acid Green Velvet is a historical novel; its Western settings are largely, if not entirely, imagined, and its perspective is often contemporary in tone. Krilanovich makes that explicit by employing a steady stream of anachronistic phrasings. Kenneth, for instance, is “tasked” with looking after someone; later, he delights in an opportunity to “hang out.” The usages at first feel jarring, until we realize that they are intentional, that the novel has been written to speak, as every novel must, to both its time and ours.
“They may look familiar to you,” a character observes of the hoboes as they gather, “but these tramps, these Austrians, Italians, and whatnot, they’ve got a European style anarchism and they’re using our railroads to spread it.” When another interjects, “I heard these guys are American,” the first responds, “No, they’re immigrants, a lot of them are.” The purpose is not social commentary so much as continuity. Assailing immigrants as outside agitators, the great American pastime, as much in the 1880s as today. Time again, nearly infinite and percolating. The past is the present, as it turns out. “We obliterate ourselves in each other,” Paulette observes, “that is the way of things.… The threats on our freedom will flatten to nothing, it’ll be weather grazing the surface of water.”
What Krilanovich is saying is that it doesn’t matter, that time will have its way with all of us. Everyone in Acid Green Velvet is already dead before the book begins, the characters’ histories evaporated, the California in which they lived reduced to little more than myth. To re-create it, then, is to reclaim it—or, more accurately, to subvert it on the author’s terms. In that, Paulette might be a cousin of Mattie Ross, the protagonist of Charles Portis’s True Grit, which takes place in Arkansas around the same time as this novel and also pushes back against convention and inequity.
“The world was out there accelerating toward the point of incineration,” Krilanovich reminds us. “The people, the animals were rioting on jet plumes of glee. You couldn’t stop a single thing from happening.” Faced with that, there’s no point in creation, and yet, we go on creating anyway. Legacies and books, yes, but perhaps most essentially children: both the author’s own, whose needs determined the rhythms—and, to an extent, the content—of her writing, and those born to Paulette, who play a role in her reckoning. Such a reckoning, of course, is shared by Krilanovich. It infuses Acid Green Velvet with a feminist edge. Call this a final bit of blurring, another layering. Call it the secret story at the novel’s heart.•
ACID GREEN VELVET, BY GRACE KRILANOVICH
