TALK SHOW 12: Time Capsule

Quinn Dalton is the author of a novel, High Strung, and a story collection, Bulletproof Girl. Her third book, Stories from the Afterlife, was published November 2007. Visit Quinn at www.quinndalton.com.

Owen King is the author of We're All In This Together: A Novella and Stories, and the co-editor (with John McNally) of the forthcoming anthology, Who Can Save Us Now? His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Bellingham Review, One Story, and Subtropics, among other publications. He lives in New York. Visit Owen at www.owen-king.com.

Adam Langer is the author of the novels Crossing California, The Washington Story, and Ellington Boulevard. He is also the lyricist for the musical companion piece to Ellington Boulevard. He is currently working on his fourth novel and a memoir entitled My Father’s Bonus March. Visit Adam at www.adamlanger.com.

Nelly Reifler is the author of the collection See Through. Her fiction has been published in Bomb, McSweeney’s, Post Road, Black Book and Jubilat. A regular column on faith and religion (or the lack thereof) can be found at www.nextbook.org, and her lazily maintained website is www.nellyreifler.net.


––What book would you include in a time capsule and why?

Dalton: My favorite books—A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and Pretty Birds by Scott Simon. I would put both in because they so beautifully—and hysterically in the case of Dunces, tragically with Pretty Birds—capture a time and place. They are great stories. They put you on a certain street on a certain day. And readers fifty years from now should know about those streets and the people populating them.

King: I'm going to assume that there's a compendium version of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy available somewhere and put that in. (By the way, we need to be very careful about selecting and sealing our container. For those of you who didn't see the photos: in Tulsa, a Plymouth was buried in 1957 for excavation at the 2007 Oklahoma Centennial. Awesome idea, right? Not so much. At some point that capsule had flooded, so when the Plymouth emerged from its grave it appeared to have been afflicted with what appeared to be a particularly malignant case of car-leprosy. Yuck. Even fifty years after my own internment, I expect to look better.)

While I believe that Ian McEwan is probably our finest novelist writing in English - with Phillip Roth and Michael Chabon snapping at his heels - Pullman's fantastical young adult trilogy provides the most timeless evocation of our world that I've encountered. The series is essentially the chronicle of a war against god, a god who has abandoned his duties and dwindled to a ghastly little figure in a glass box, propped up as the standard of craven zealots of every stripe. It's a metaphor for our times, an affirmation of reason and humanity in the face of the pestilential fundamentalism that has so thoroughly infested our world.

Also, the books feature some ass-kicking armored bears. The optimist in me says that the people of the future will still recognize how awesome that is – bears wearing armor and kicking ass.

Langer: If you wanted to reflect what living in 2007 or thereabouts was like, you’d probably have to stick a memoir in there, one of those supposedly all-revealing but actually self-mythologizing books, some purported confessional or tell-all written by some guy who’s name rhymes with schrei or even Chronicles, by Bob Dylan, a book I loved, though I only believed about half of it. Instead, I’d choose a book that suggested we lived in a more elegant, nuanced, and truthful world, one where subtlety reigned and indeterminacy was favored over certainty, a world where people had been so very eager to read The Florist’s Daughter, by Patricia Hampl or Listen, by Wendy Salinger that they had buried those books in the time capsule instead of some more obvious choices.

Reifler: David Ohle’s Motorman was first published by Knopf in 1972—and then it was out of print until 2004, when it was republished by Third Bed. It’s a dystopic little tome. Our hero, Moldenke, once had a life that was “free and new green, bright suns behind him, spirals ahead.” But he has been manhandled and winnowed down bit by bit, through the replacement of his one fragile human heart with multiple sheep hearts; the sacrifice of his feelings to the cause of the mock War; the loss of his woman, Cock Roberta, who has been institutionalized for her compulsive punctuating. When we meet him, he is under surveillance, forced to stay inside his quarters, harassed, constipated, addicted to drugs. He’s unsure whether or not he killed a couple of humanoid jellyheads. In its own queasy way, Motorman is as good a portrait of its era as any of the more literal books that were its contemporaries. But the reason I’m putting it in my time capsule is that it’s also an eerily perfect picture of this moment. Or the way this moment feels to me. Sitting in my apartment on Atlantic Avenue with the monstrous condominium construction grinding outside and shaking the earth, my neighbors gingerly making their way up and down the stairs in their burkhas, the mock War thriving and mutating, everybody’s hearts seeming to becoming sheeplike, I often feel like Moldenke.