As Gabriel Tallent wrote his second novel, Crux, he would alternate intervals of writing with intervals of climbing a “crack wall” in his home office, in Salt Lake City.
“I had this big crack machine,” he says over video call from said office, in the basement of the house. “It was 12ft long, and made out of cracks – slats of wood two inches wide, 12 inches up and painted with textured paint. I would come down here, put on my tape gloves, climb laps, and think about the book. During my rest period, which was like, 2½ minutes, I would write. Then the timer would turn over and I’d climb some more.”
Tallent’s activity matched the physical action on the page, where the protagonists were avid rock climbers. But this unconventional approach also afforded the author time to cogitate rather than rushing the words out.
“You have a lot of built-in downtime, during which you’re thinking about [the book]. It slows you down in a way that’s good for me, because I can be a little too giddy and sometimes go a little too fast.”
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The crack wall no longer exists (it was wiped out, somewhat biblically, when the basement flooded on the same day his twin boys were born), but an array of free weights and a barbell rack can be seen in the background of the video call. Tallent wears a loose plaid shirt, holds a coffee mug and hovers behind what appears to be a standing desk. There’s a rare intensity to his presence. He converses deeply and openly – not necessarily the norm for someone faced with a journalist from halfway across the world on a Friday morning – stopping often to ask: “does that answer your question”, or to circle back to a point he was making earlier.
The now 38-year-old father of three found a somewhat unexpected amount of literary prominence in 2017, when his debut novel, My Absolute Darling, was published. For eight years prior, he had been doing shift work – bussing tables, scrubbing toilets, leading trail crews – all the while trying to carve out a workable manuscript. Then, the book found its way into the world and next thing Stephen King was hailing it a “masterpiece” and Tallent’s name was in the New York Times bestseller list. On these shores, he was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Such limelight for a debut is by no means a guarantee, but when asked what it felt like to achieve this success, he demurs.
“I was not ready to go out into the world,” he says. “I was never a highly functional person. I had just been working at restaurants, and writing, and climbing all the time, and never really got my act together. Then, all of a sudden, I had to be out in public. It was terrifying. I didn’t have any shirts I could wear to do anything – I just had clothes for climbing in and they were all rags. So going out and doing that stuff was intimidating.”
The novel dealt with large themes – in it, a young girl is abused by her survivalist father, whom she worships – and these contributed to the feeling that the publishing experience was “not one of success, but of controversy, because the material was so confronting”.
“Part of the impetus for the book is that you have friends that are dying because certain stories, certain life stories, certain experiences, are untellable,” says Tallent. “You’re trying to write this book to make these stories tellable. It wasn’t my intention to be controversial, but that was in some ways the experience here in the United States.”
Tallent has now followed up with a second novel, Crux, a coming-of-age tale centred upon two climbing obsessed teenagers growing up near Joshua Tree National Park (a climber’s paradise at the junction of the Mojave and Colorado deserts). How did he move forward from the mayhem surrounding the debut to write another, I almost finish asking, but he stops me.
“I have to go back. Like, what are you hoping to learn? I never know how to answer that question – what does the success of the book feel like? Because, you know, it’s daunting to represent a book with serious material. Mostly, the experience is of the terror of letting the book and readers down. You’re trying to do something, and you do it alone. You work on it for eight years, and then you go somewhere, and you’re trying to talk extemporaneously about it, and you don’t want to f*ck up, because what you’re doing seems important. My experience is of the responsibility and worry of it. But people ask me a lot what it is like to have the book succeed. And I don’t know what they’re looking for or what they expect.”
Perhaps, I say, we just want to know what it feels like.
“Soul-destroying agony,” he replies.
On the book tour, readers would share their own anguish with him.
“I am hearing these stories, and it’s just crushing, the suffering that people go through. And with one book, you’re going to let people down, because one story doesn’t speak to all those [stories]. So, you just feel grieved for the pain that people are going through – trying to write a book to help someone, and then you grieve to know how much more pain is out there.”
It would be another eight years before Crux was published, during which Tallent wrote two other books: one about cardiothoracic nursing that he couldn’t sell (because, he says wryly, “people don’t care about nurses”), and another about climbing that simply didn’t come off.
“I was just in swooning depression after My Absolute Darling. I wasn’t doing a good job of writing. I was kind of white-knuckling staying alive. And so, I wrote books that didn’t work. I was lost.”
When his eldest son came along, he began trying to articulate how to express to him what mattered about the world.
“It isn’t success in climbing. It isn’t success in writing. It’s something else. And I realised I had written a book that wasn’t congruent with what I felt was important in the world.”
He began to rewrite his climbing book.
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“It was the depth of the pandemic. We were running out of money. I’d written these two books. It didn’t look like I was a writer. A lot of my close friends were sort of failing out of the profession. It looked like maybe I wasn’t really a writer; that I had one book, and not another. We had a bit of time and I decided to take another run at it, chasing really what I felt was important.”
Crux tells of people who come from very little dreaming of escaping their circumstances, but it eschews a traditional redemption arc in favour of something more subtle and thoughtful.
“If you were trying to make Crux go big and be a commercial success, you would do a Hollywood structure. I didn’t care about that. I think after My Absolute Darling, I wanted to write something less violent, less upsetting, something smaller, more artistic, artsier, funnier, more of a romp. The structure is unblockbustery in ways, and that’s intentional.”
Tallent grew up in Albion Ridge, a small logging and fishing town that in the 1960s and 1970s became a popular destination for artistic people, cults, utopian communities and a back-to-the-land lesbian movement. This had “crusted and begun to collapse” by the time Tallent came along, but he was nonetheless raised by two mothers – the author, Elizabeth Tallent, and her wife, Gloria Rogers – among “a tremendous number of books”. He came late to reading, describing himself as being “ravaged with learning disorders”, but when he started, he got “extremely into it”, going on to study English at university with a focus on 18th-century cultural history.
Climbing became an obsession when he later moved to Utah, where Cottonwood Canyon boasts quartzite crags ideal for trad climbing. These are similar, though not quite the same, as the climbs described in Crux, which tells of “coarser and more golden” rock, he says. His expertise and passion seep into the pages, where descriptions are detailed and specific. Alongside and through this central “climbing” element, various themes and ideas are addressed – gender, class, friendship, family and the ideal of the American dream.
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“I don’t want to say the American dream is a lie, because where this [book] is coming from is a love of this country,” he says, when asked about this latter element. “I love this country and I love the things it stands for ... or used to stand for. I love its ideals …Our country will succeed only so much as we believe in it, and there is this creeping disillusionment which I think accompanies a slide into authoritarianism. But that said, sometimes the narratives get too easy. There is this too-easy narrative of: just pursue your dream in life and everything will work out. And the story is more complicated than that.”
Since publishing his first book, Tallent has gone full-time as a writer, a path that can likewise be overly idealised.
“It’s kind of complicated. I feel very fortunate. I love writing. I don’t function as a human being without writing. If I had some other job, I would just be writing books, then putting them away in drawers. But I don’t think it’s what people imagine it is. I think it’s a lot of terror about whether you have another story in you.”
He is ploughing through that terror. He feels “closer to what is important to me in my life”, since his twin sons were born prematurely and his wife almost died during childbirth. Two years later, all are doing well. In the “timeless strangeness” of the NICU unit, as he held his newborns skin-to-skin, he wrote a draft of something new on his phone.
“So yeah, I’m already embarked on the next thing. I’m excited about it. Who knows if my editor will be excited about it – I was also excited about the nursing novel,” he says, with a laugh.
Crux by Gabriel Tallent will be published by Fig Tree on February 5th
