GC: There are several different storylines running throughout the book, some even on different timelines, yet you weave them in and out through each other. Did they evolve at the same time as you were crafting the story, and how did you decide on their intersection points?

NP: This is the formal experiment of the novel—to present the historical past, the recent past, and the present all in the present tense. This written form is the analog to the city’s mounting layers, which collect and store all of it.... Yet because the time fields shift naturally (at least I hope) they come to form a dreamscape to mirror the cityscape and Nicholas’s inner life.

***

GC: On one level this is a story about avoiding truths as much as digging them up (or realizing them). Why does avoiding something in front of your face seem to also trigger another discovery? Is it nature that eventually brings a person around full circle?

NP: Oh yes, repression never really works does it? You can’t really erase or avoid or ignore. Whatever’s lurking there will find a way to make itself known—because you need it to. Nicholas needs to deal with his own personal memory, his own sense of shame. But I don’t believe in the full circle. Who knows where it will take him? Maybe not full circle.

***

GC: Anarchy plays a significant role in this book. How did you come upon the story of the anarchist Moskowitz (I’m assuming he’s real) and why did you choose to build a story around him and that movement?  

​NP: I came upon the story of the anarchist Moskowitz in the same place Nicholas does—the history book by Harry Boonin.... This led to a significant thematic exploration of the book, between anarchists who in popular imagination tear down and architects who in popular imagination build up. In the world of this book if not in real life, though, anarchists espouse a philosophy of building organic community without state interference—almost in exact opposition to conventional wisdom—and architects all too often are the ones, out of ego or desires of the marketplace, to tear down.

Popkin’s eye for detail leads to many resonant vignettes of Philly in the summer, like the bus driver who wears a rolled-up white towel on the back of his neck, or the parking-lot attendant’s shack with its “cheap desk fan” that “rocks back and forth, letting out a tiny wail each time it turns.” The author’s sense of sound is acute. In the library, he writes, “my chair against the polished floor lets out a trumpet note, slashing the silence of the reading room.”

Liz Spikol in the JEWISH EXPONENT

On the city as a force in the character's lives:

There’s very much a powerful dual force between the person and the place.... I am a very big fan of fiction writers who have explored place or a specific place or places, or have gone deep with their interrogation of themselves in place....

This book is the most personal yet, because it allows me to consider issues of erasure. Erasure of personal memory or erasure of people, erasure of moments of one’s life, and mirrored in the erasure of the streetscape. Sometimes I’ve written about that erasure of the streetscape almost directly through writing on preservation matters. But in this case, it’s a much more interesting way to consider it. In this book particularly, I think of the city as a text that can be read, that can be drawn on, that can be muted, blacked out, erased, written over, reconsidered, torn out, all these great metaphors....

The way that we imprint ourselves onto the place, and the way that place is alive in our lives— it’s an atmosphere. It’s a moment. It’s a construct. It’s a physical construction that shapes us— shapes our movements. And, that notion is really, really important. I think in some ways the physical being of Philadelphia has more impact on us because it’s— because of the scale of the city. It’s big enough to matter or be an – aggressive is not the right word – impactful, apparent force on us. Like, “Oh yeah we feel it.”

On the theme of luring someone into self-betrayal
(discussed in the preceding post on this blog):

We have ideals. We have beliefs. We have values. But how easy is it for us to just lose it and act stupid, and angry? And I find myself doing that a lot. It also made me think about a time in my life where I sort of lured someone into self-betrayal ... and I wanted to explore that moment and I did that through the story of Nicholas and his recent past. The story of his failed love with Eva.