John Darnielle, frontman of American indie-folk band the Mountain Goats, has recently published his debut novel, 'Wolf in White Van'. He explains to Georgia Moodie why he keeps coming back to stories about troubled teens in both his songs and his fiction.

Darnielle’s first foray into writing fiction, a 2008 novella called Master of Reality, tells the story of a lonely 17-year-old stuck in an adolescent psychiatric unit.

The songs he writes for the Mountain Goats also deal with oddballs and misfits, many of them teenagers: metal heads stuck in small-town America, meth addicts, high school drug dealers and people on the verge of suicide.

Yet Darnielle demurs when I suggest that he’s drawn to the stories of outsiders. ‘Everybody is on the fringe in some way or another, it's just that you have to tell enough of their story to realise it,’ he maintains.

When you see the struggles of young people from both sides, you can take that as an opportunity to really develop your more nurturing side, and see things through other people’s eyes. John Darnielle, author and songwriter

‘The normal person who has no story to tell is super mythic. Everybody is unusual once you get to know them; it's one of humanity’s better points.’ Darnielle says all he does is bring these stories to light. ‘They are not people who would necessarily look odd to you in their daily errands, but they are opening up their private world in my songs.’

Although he wrote fiction as a child, Darnielle says it was a big transition to shift from writing songs to writing a novel.

‘I'm done with the song before I even have any idea what it is about,’ he says. ‘That is why song writing is so exciting—by the time you're done, you are still in the heat of it.’

Darnielle finds writing fiction much more demanding: ‘You have to have the discipline to keep coming back to the same story, revising it and bringing a freshness to it. It is just so much longer. Songwriting is kind of like picking something off of a plant, and writing a book is like seeding and tending a garden through to harvest.’

Darnielle has done well with his first crop of fiction. His new debut novel, Wolf in White Van, made the New York Times bestseller list and was also longlisted for the National Book Award in America.

The novel mines a very similar thematic vein to his songs. The main character is a man called Sean Phillips who has lived with a grotesquely disfigured face since he was 17. Darnielle describes his face as ‘Tire tread. It's like a shag rug. It's like rope burn scars; it's like a badly paved road; it’s like bent wheel spokes pressed into taffy.’

Sean looks the way he does because of an event that his family insist on calling ‘the accident’, which we come to understand better later in the novel.

Sean rarely leaves the confines of his suburban apartment in California, and his human interactions are visits from his nurse Vicky and the odd phone call from his family. Instead, Sean engages with the outside world by inventing a choose-your-own-adventure game that is played through the mail.

The game, Trace Italian, is set in a post-apocalyptic America, where the sole refuge is a star-shaped, medieval fortification of the same name buried under Kansas. Sean’s only way of connecting with those who play Trace Italian is by gleaning occasional details about their personal lives from their letters.

‘He has a very mild engagement in their lives, as a sort of benign God figure,’ says Darnielle.

Sean makes Trace Italian almost impossible for his devotees to finish.

‘No one will ever get to safety,’ explains Darnielle. ‘The point is to remain engaged with the play, which is a lesson that Sean has learned in life. It’s true of most games. If you play Monopoly with your family, the end is tragic,’ he laughs.

‘One person bankrupts everybody else. The fun of Monopoly is the ongoing play. Pinball is the perfect example because the idea is to keep that first ball in play until you have to leave—to not finish the game.’

Oddball teenagers make an appearance in Wolf in White Van through the characters of Lance and Carrie. Their obsession with the science fiction game Sean has created leads them to travel from their native Florida to Kansas in search of the imaginary fort. One dies and the other is left severely injured.

One of the reasons Darnielle keeps coming back to these disturbed teenagers is because of his own adolescence. ‘American boys in particular are conditioned to think of our teenage years as a very formative time, and it certainly was for me,’ he explains. ‘It was a very turbulent time, and even though I'm far from it now, a lot of my responses to things formed during that time.’

Darnielle’s parents divorced when he was five years old, and his mother remarried. ‘My stepfather was a complex person, I always want to say that first, but he was abusive to my mother and me. That was the governing reality for me.’

As an adult, Darnielle worked as a psychiatric nurse, caring for the kinds of teenagers who appear in his songs and fiction: ‘When you see the struggles of young people from both sides, you can take that as an opportunity to really develop your more nurturing side, and see things through other people’s eyes. That time is so raw and naked for so many of us and there is a lot of stuff in there to look at.’

Although Wolf in White Van draws on Darnielle’s troubled teenage years, it is far from autobiographical. Sean has a strained and distant relationship with his family, but his parents are not abusive.

‘They haven't done anything to him at all, they are pretty guiltless,’ says Darnielle. ‘Sean is his own creature, and that is where we diverge. I had this turbulent adolescence, and Sean has a turbulent adolescence too, but largely of his own making.’

Mountain Goats' frontman John Darnielle delivers debut novel Tuesday 3 March 2015 Listen to the full episode of Books and Arts to hear lyricist, songwriter and vocalist John Darnielle talk about his debut novel Wolf in White Van. More This [series episode segment] has image,

Sean’s responsibility for his own troubled adolescence is revealed in the final chapter of the novel, which narrates the day leading up to ‘the accident’. Yet even though we witness the entire event, neither Sean, nor his parents, nor indeed the reader, is left with any idea about why Sean does what he does.

That, says Darnielle, is the point of the novel. ‘When I was writing the book I struggled with the idea of causes, until I realised that it was the theme of the book.’

When I protest that Sean’s actions are too extreme, too radical, for him not to understand his own motivations, Darnielle assures me there is no secret reason he has withheld from the reader.

‘That is the horror of it,’ he says. ‘Think about the many things that you have done in your life that you don’t really understand. The idea that we sit down and say, “I'm going to do this and here's why,” is a very hopeful idea. People act on impulses they don't understand all the time, which can be catastrophic in the long- or short-term. Sean is really connected to that idea that you sometimes follow an idea down a path and end up in a dark little corner.

‘I take a much bigger, haunting thing so I can look a little harder at the idea that we don't really understand our own behaviour.’

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