From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant

A Conversation with Alex Gilvarry
As a native Staten Islander of Filipino descent who attended college and grad school in Manhattan, you’ve seen many New Yorks. How has this informed your writing in general—and your hero’s experience in particular?
As a kid in the eighties, because we lived on Staten Island, Manhattan was a very dangerous place in my mind, where my father rode graffiti-ridden subways to work, and got into altercations (sometimes physical) on the way home. Brooklyn was a place we never went because of its image on the local news. Knifings and shootings happened in Brooklyn while you were waiting for the school bus. When my mother started working reception in Bensonhurst at a garment factory called Phyllis Baby Wear, I thought she’d never make it out alive. Whatever Manhattan seemed like to me, Brooklyn was ten times worse. But when I moved into the city in the nineties and eventually made the young college graduate’s migration into Brooklyn, both boroughs had already been refurbished into a type of fantasyland for the middle class. SoHo was full of models and boutiques. Williamsburg had converted lofts and artsy girls. Park Slope was like living in the Cosby Show. This was a far cry from Travis Bickle’s New York in Taxi Driver, a film I grew up romanticizing. So I fell in love, and easily. The city I had feared as a kid suddenly seemed like a new, limitless place to succeed in the arts, and not just as a police sketch artist. This is how my hero sees the city when he arrives from the Philippines. Everything I write about New York in the book, through my hero’s eyes, is pretty much true. I love the city. But this love affair with New York is like all love affairs: there’s a good dose of jealousy and resentment and feelings of ownership along with all the swooning.
The hero of FROM THE MEMOIRS OF A NON-ENEMY COMBATANT is a new addition to a long line of outsider narrators in American fiction—Huck Finn, Ishmael, Holden Caulfield, Augie March, Nathan Zuckerman. Do you feel there is something distinctive about the American experience that invites this type of storytelling?
Absolutely. Where as British fiction deals a lot with class or being the top colonial dog, American fiction is distinctively “outsider.” Our lineage arises out of immigration in some form—with the exception of Native American heritage—and attached are some very dark histories. Our greatest struggles, too, are also very recent. Segregation, the civil rights movement, etc. The American experience is very much about being the outsider, or fearing the outsider. I think that’s why this type of storytelling continues to be told and retold.
While writing From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, you worked as an editor at a major publishing house.Did being an insider in the publishing industry inform your writing in any way?
It did in as how publishing is a culture industry. The hero of my novel is trying to infiltrate the fashion world, another culture industry, so the players you work with are the same. Agents and publicists and editors, and some big personalities. In all culture industries there’s a tremendous focus on placing the talent, selling the talent, and nurturing the talent. While I was editing my novel at night, I was thinking about the game makers at work at Picador during the day. Also, what helped me most while writing was reading the great contemporary authors, some of whom we published.
The protagonist in your novel is mistakenly accused of being a terrorist and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay to await his combatant status review. This January marks the 10th anniversary of Guantanamo Bay. With this story, what message are you hoping to impart to readers about the existence of and tactics used at Guantanamo Bay? Why did you choose fiction as a vehicle to get this message across?
Fiction is the only thing I’m good at, and so when I was feeling really disturbed about what was happening in Guantanamo Bay, and when I realized that innocent men mistakenly imprisoned there was not just a rare anomaly, I was compelled to write this novel because it was the only outlet for my grievances at the time. I discovered a much more complicated answer to the problem of Guantanamo than I expected—which is why it is still open ten years later. But in the end, the principles remained the same. I’m talking about the principles of a fair trial, to be charged with a crime rather than imprisoned on suspicion alone, and that of humane interrogations. When these principles are violated as they have been, regrettable mistakes are made at the cost of people’s lives, many of those innocent. So if even one reader walks away with something of this notion, then the novel, for me at least, is successful. I have to believe that fiction, particularly the novel, still has the power to influence the way people think, or at least introduce a strand of thought that did not occur to them. I know novels have certainly affected me this way over the years. That’s why I read them.
Who have you discovered lately?
I was at the Boston Book Festival recently and picked up the novel Stoner by John Williams. Not John Williams the film composer, but the other guy. Discovering new writing can be like finding religion. You have to discover it for yourself at a particular time in your life, and when it comes unexpected, it feels like you’ve been saved. This is something that’s very relevant to the protagonist of Stoner, a man who spends his entire life at the same University, first as a student, then as teacher, and whose life changes course because of literature. Not much else happens to him, but it’s one of the most addictive and emotionally riveting books I’ve ever read. The prose is quiet, clear, precise. And yet I read the book as if it were a thriller. I’m also reading The Black Banners, by former FBI-agent Ali Soufan, who seems to have been the most valuable interrogator in the war against al-Qaeda, and a major opponent of enhanced interrogation techniques. It’s amazing how much of his book has been redacted by the C.I.A. There are pages completely blacked out. In one chapter the word “I” has been removed. I think many of us—me included—look at censorship as a thing of the past, but it isn’t. It’s very real and is happening right now.