In his well-received debut novel The Town of Babylon, published in March, Alejandro Varela’s background in public health informs his critique of the alienation and oppression of twenty-first-century suburban life. Varela expands on this exploration through a different narrator’s perspective in “Peterloo,” which appears in the Summer 2022 issue of The Georgia Review. Novelist Xhenet Aliu (Brass, 2018) interviewed him about the story.
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Xhenet Aliu (XA): The narrator’s unease in his setting—a popular Italian restaurant in the city—is apparent from the very first paragraph of the story. Some of his grievances are minor, like the cacophony of a crowded restaurant, or the intrusion of elbows into his personal space, while some point to more endemic social conditions like gentrification and racial/ethnic erasure. However, aside from a seemingly offhand comment about an ex, the narrator avoids almost any allusion to personal conflict until several pages into the story, when he states, “It is the end of December and my twenty-third day of living alone.” The previous paragraph was an innocuous description of the meal he’s ordered; how did you come to understand that this was the moment that the narrator would reveal this intimate pain? How do the social and cultural criticisms of the first pages lay the groundwork for the revelation of the personal anguish?
Alejandro Varela (AV): My protagonists and I usually have something in common: a hopeful fatalism. The narrator, in this case, is disillusioned with the state of the world, and in particular the neighborhood in which he lives. For him, there is no enjoying life if the backdrop is a frieze of injustice. He knows, from an epidemiological perspective, that life is short and that he is unlikely to see any of the wrongs corrected. He carries that frustration and sense of loss with him. At any given moment, he’s a powder keg, but the demise of his marriage is weighing heavily while he’s in this restaurant.
I didn’t lead with the relationship woes for two reasons. I wanted to craft a scene in which the reader doesn’t yet know why they’ve been plopped down in this setting. A moment of surprise, if you will. I wanted to upend expectations. The other reason was that if I’d begun with the separation, this would be a story about divorce and its effects. But this is a story about how the personal and the political each take their toll on us. Sometimes they’re acute; sometimes, chronic. The weight of one can contribute to the weight of the other. I wanted the personal to be in background, more shadow than center stage.
I chose that moment to reveal that he’d recently separated from his husband, because of timing—back to my point on introducing an element of surprise—and saturation. When writing in such a curmudgeonly and screed-like voice, I feel obliged to mind the limits of the reader. How much can one take before they feel attacked or scolded? A little bit is interesting. A little bit more is entertaining. Too much, and I risk alienation. Which isn’t to say that the diatribes can’t continue throughout, but from time to time they must be interrupted. Or one must be a better writer. I’m not there yet.
XA: Throughout the story, the narrator fixates on several conversations occurring around him, particularly those that relate to popular culture. Some of the many texts, actors, and films referenced are Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Scarlett Johansson, Alfre Woodard, and of course the film Peterloo, which gives the story its title and triggers a crisis moment for the narrator. Given how powerfully associative each of these allusions proves to be for the narrator, how did you decide which particular cultural touchstones to include?
AV: I believe that the battle for racial equity requires representation. Yes, I do. But sometimes it feels as if representation is the only angle that gets attention. I’m a bit of a pop culture nerd, and I’ve noticed trends recently where one nonwhite actor, sometimes two, are included on posters, casts, panels, etc. But without more substantive shifts in power, vis-à-vis economic and social policy, some of which I name in the story, we’re just creating a Benneton ad. It’s more interesting and enlightening to look at trends and numbers. It happens that Alfre Woodard is an actress revered by peers and critics alike. I’m sure when she was nominated for her first Oscar forty years ago, someone used that as evidence of progress, but she was never again nominated. No matter how many acclaimed performances she’s given, she’s been snubbed every time. On the other hand, I’ve also noticed that when white actors break through, they are forever recognized. Scarlett Johansson, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, etc. These folks can turn in pretty paint-by-the-numbers performances and get nominated. But their nonwhite counterparts must be impeccable, and frankly, pigeonholed, just to be nominated once in their lives. Look at Jordan Peele. He made arguably one of the best mainstream (and artistic) films of the new century (Get Out), and then his follow-up, Us, was ignored by the Academy. I can’t think of a white filmmaker who was ever so quickly forgotten. In fact, the Oscars are known for celebrating the wunderkinds, e.g., Paul Thomas Anderson, Spielberg, Scorsese, etc. But when it comes to Spike Lee or Dee Rees or countless other nonwhite directors, they’re largely ignored after proving themselves. The problem is if we celebrate Peele’s Get Out success and ignore the snubs that come afterward, we’re substantiating a nonsense theory about one-off representation being sufficient. The public seldom wants to have upstream conversations about structures, institutions, or history. They stay close to the surface. I wrote about the Oscars because they’re popular and because they illustrate, in a way, the distinction between equality (a nonwhite person can be nominated) and equity (is everyone getting their fair share?).
XA: Speaking of the title, this piece originally shared two: “La Folla,” which is the name of the restaurant where the story is primarily set, and the aforementioned Peterloo, the film that has apparently deeply affected the narrator. How do you see these titles working in cohort or contrast?
AV: I like Mike Leigh’s films because he takes moments and circumstances and makes them cinematic. He could have dramatized the hell out of that restaurant scene, and to great effect. But I settled on that picture in particular (Peterloo), which isn’t a small film, because, like the narrator of this story, I’d recently watched it. And I was struck by both the banality and scale of evil. How masses of people can be oblivious to the systems of oppression that encircle them, until it’s too late. But also how a crowd of people can be powerful. There’s the crowd of protestors who are massacred while agitating for voting rights, and there’s the mass of soldiers doing as they’re told. Groupthink and communal futility were on my mind—honestly, they’re always on my mind—as I was writing the story. I found the parallel to crowded restaurants in a gentrified neighborhood interesting. The hordes of wealth are like an archipelago of cluelessness and privilege in a sea of injustice. But these very people also tend to be highly educated and they have the resources to disrupt systems—even if they never do.
As for “La Folla,” that simply means the crowd in Italian. And this story about a person who feels threatened and isolated by the crowd. The literal crowd in the room, as well as the people on the street, at work, and in society at large. In the end, I cut the restaurant name because it felt too on the nose. In fact, the title was originally “LaRina/Peterloo.” The Italian restaurant was based on one in my neighborhood, one where I never saw a single person of color dining or working, apart from a few mestizo Latinx folks in the kitchen, despite the neighborhood being majority or at least plurality Black and brown. But after George Floyd’s murder, LaRina changed a bit. I noticed more people of color (front and back of house), and they were very receptive to putting up some anti-racist flyers in their window calling for legislation to reduce police power and to support reparations. I felt bad dogging them.
XA: Going back to your point about the gentrification and the “cluelessness and privilege in a sea of injustice,” one of the strangers in La Folla who’s discussing Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, according to the narrator, “isn’t white. I assume Indian. Possibly Latinx, like me.” Her conversation partner, a college friend, is a self-proclaimed “gay guy.” The latter hasn’t read Giovanni’s Room, and the former has wildly misread it, based on her belief that the protagonist is Black. Meanwhile, both engage in some pointed criticism of the book—the term the story uses is “a certain preening authority”—and the female character even suggests that “Baldwin missed an opportunity to talk about race.” Can you speak to the decision to make this a conversation that emerges from two of the very few characters in the restaurant who come from marginalized (though non-Black) communities, rather than any of the white characters who fill the room? (Total aside: when in the dialogue I read, “The character is Black . . .” I was momentarily convinced by this fictional woman that I had misread the book and gotten this key fact wrong for all these years.)
AV: Race and class make for interesting bedfellows. As a person of color, the higher up the ladder I go, the more I encounter other marginalized folks who are eager to assimilate, who don’t want to rock the boat, who don’t want to expose the systems that have benefitted us to the detriment of others. LGBT folks who believe that liberation means being able to get married and join the military. Or Latinx Americans who vote for candidates with anti-immigrant platforms. Asian Americans who are opposed to affirmative action. Kinship is important, but it’s just as important that we remain vigilant about how a politics of (scant) representation can belie a lack of true analysis. The few of us who make it through or into the rarefied spaces should be plotting. We should be holding the door open for others like us. And we should be reimagining the world.
As for Giovanni’s Room, I thought I was reading a Black narrator the first time I picked up that book. It took me a minute to realize that he was white. Afterward, I wondered why I’d made that assumption. What wasn’t I analyzing about myself? It was a small moment, nothing earth-shattering, but there have been many of those in my life, and I’m grateful for them because they lead to introspection. Including the Baldwin conversation in the story allowed me to really unmoor the narrator, because he showed how disdainful he is of everyone. No one got a free pass. It allowed me to make the earlier point about the futility of representation without conviction. I also like being able to reference in my own work people whose work I admire. For all the love and praise that Baldwin gets today, it’s still not enough, in my opinion.
XA: Your Twitter profile says that you “write fiction, public health themed,” which suggests an earnest belief in the social utility of fiction; however, this story suggests a scenario in which the epidemiologist narrator’s attempts to understand his own personal situation through a clinical lens fails. How do you see the public health theme working in this story?
AV: I don’t believe in narratives alone changing societies—sometimes you have to tell and not show. Neither do I believe in one person making a difference. These are feel-good tropes that dilute earnest and radical struggle. I’ve agonized over how to continue my career as a public health worker while also writing fiction. And I’ve landed on a hybrid. My writing isn’t for everyone. It’s heavy handed and possibly off-putting. But I, like my protagonists, believe that our time here is limited. So I pepper my work with sociological and public health asides, always with an eye on advocacy. How do I make irrefutable or at least thought-provoking observations about our injustices? How do I take a radical idea or intervention and give it efficiency and common sense?
Consider this passage:
I want a national health service so that I don’t have to continue shelling out monthly for my parents’ insurance supplements. I want the minimum wage to be closer to thirty dollars so that I don’t have to worry about getting jumped on the way home. I want reparations for the descendants of enslaved peoples and the repatriation of lands acquired by the United States outside of valid treaties with Indigenous nations so that I can stop feeling like the few moments of joy in my life all occur against the backdrop of genocide and settler colonialism.
These are all upstream policy interventions that the narrator presents in a moment of frustration. He (and I) are trying to connect dots that aren’t readily connected in our society. Doing so allows me to make the jump from top to bottom, cutting out all of the middle causes and effects that bog down our political discourse and processes. Forget cops and drugs and prisons. What if the minimum wage were $30 per hour? Might that not accomplish what we seek? It’d lead to a decrease in poverty and stress and all of the consequent effects of the two. It would also lead to an increase in empowerment, dignity, and agency, which would address many public health issues at once.
I’m not injecting my characters and stories with my personal politics because I have an ax to grind—well, I do. But I’m also sharing a real anxiety and discomfort that many people live with daily. People who face systemic oppression don’t have the privilege to disengage. They are always balancing and juggling and obfuscating pain and fear. I write characters who live this reality. I want the reader to know that there is a disproportionate burden that falls on marginalized folks, even when they capture the trappings of success that everyone is after.
XA: I’m intrigued by your statements that you “don’t believe in narratives changing societies,” and “neither do I believe in one person making a difference.” Back in 2014 I read a Boston Review article entitled “Against Empathy” and recall believing that it had a disingenuously provocative title, if not thesis. Eight painful and humbling years later, I’ve come to acknowledge that while pie charts and stats don’t typically rouse otherwise disengaged people into action, neither do the most exquisitely wrought narratives—fictional or otherwise—necessarily translate understanding into action; instead, we might simply feel good about ourselves for feeling bad for another person. However, in this story, there is one singular character, Cathryn—who, through a concrete intervention—seems very much to make a difference to the protagonist. This is a very long-winded way of asking if Cathryn, who’s notably a social worker, and their actions toward the individual at this moment are an attempt to reconcile or bridge your pursuits of public health and fiction writer, which you said you’ve “agonized over.”
AV: Humans are social animals above all things. We live in a society that tries to rid us of our sociability through hierarchies—racial, economic, gender, physical ability, etc. But given the opportunity, we’re going to support and care for one another. And even in spite of the hierarchies, we find ways. It is in those moments that the kindness becomes solidarity. Cathryn represents that strength of character to follow through on something natural despite all of the barriers. I am not, however, arguing that one act of goodness or bravery can change a society (unless that act is well orchestrated and documented). And yet, I am moved by the willingness of humans to stand up for one another. The guy who jumped onto the subway tracks to protect another man from an oncoming train, for example, makes me tear up. Whenever people act selflessly, I’m touched. If no one had raised their voice for the narrator, I would have left the reader with a rather bleak picture. That’s not the story I wanted to tell. As I said before, my fatalism isn’t entirely bereft of hope. I believe that the cumulative effect of narrative, research, solidarity, and people power are going to change our society for the better. We’re living through a particularly tough moment with a morally corrupt and untouchable Supreme Court, a lackluster president, and a weak-willed Congress. But we’re one general strike away from turning this country around. If Biden were to truly throw his weight behind labor and workers, if he showed up at picket lines and used his bully pulpit to inspire more unionizing, Manchin and Sinema and Pelosi and even Biden himself would become obsolete, because they’d be following, not leading, which is how representative government should work. So yes, I do see a place for narratives to move the conversation along, so long as they capture the moment well, i.e., they critique where we’re at or present a path forward.
