Photo by Sebastian Duran de la Huerta
Anna Barrington is the author of the new novel The Spectacle. She has worked in the art world, and she lives in the UK.
Q: What inspired you to write The Spectacle, and how did you create your characters Rudolph and Ingrid?
A: I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a charismatic figure who pulls people into a scam or a catastrophe that expands beyond their control. It’s a very American concept. Bernie Madoff, Tom Ripley and Donald Trump come to mind.
I think it’s maybe the realization that people will break their own rules for someone who speaks to them on an instinctive level, or is willing to jump over the bounds of law.
Rudolph was inspired by the first idea, but Ingrid came to me first. It was easy to imagine a shy and naïve young 25-year-old who feels like a fish out of water in expensive galleries, because that was kind of my life.
Rudolph, on the other hand, took a bit of work but once I had his voice, it was like a powerful faucet. Men like him are everywhere – in politics, finance – and I guess I wanted to read inside their thoughts. At the same time, I had sympathy for him because he was my creature, like Frankenstein’s monster or something.
Q: How would you describe the relationship between them?
A: I saw Ingrid as someone who wanted so badly to be loved. At the same time, she’s lost and adrift in her career. Such vulnerabilities can also translate as femininity, and its combination could draw someone like Rudolph.
I gave him the pathos, the enfeebled masculinity, and the fury to impress that I have often seen in men who need to make a lot of money to feel they are worthwhile. They will go to any lengths.
It’s a classic and even predictable relationship, but troubled by Ingrid’s feeling that she has no agency, her insecurities, which might have developed into a feminist reawakening – and yet, so many of those relationships simply solidify into the old order. Desire can be sad and self-destructive.
Q: The writer Rachel Koller Croft called the novel a “highbrow fever dream”--what do you think of that description?
A: That was flattering. Some of my favorite writers, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allan Poe, Joyce Carol Oates vein, make the stylistic decision to intensify their rhetorical translation of life so that it becomes more vivid, more hyperreal – both for the entertainment of the reader and to make the words a vehicle for the period it describes.
There is an excitement, too, to certain experiences of youth – like going to a cool party after you’ve just graduated from college and moved to the city. You have to let the characters feel those things.
Then elements like the super-colorful paintings in the novel, the excess, and the constant presence of an almost all-knowing news online that narrates the characters’ pitfalls and scandals.
Because of the content, I made the conscious choice to make the style of the book a sort of snow globe of sights and sounds, both real and imagined, that I wished to transport the reader into the time and place. I just hope it’s not too purple!
Q: How did your background in the art world affect the writing of the novel?
A: The art world became my setting because I worked in it. Its effects were profound on The Spectacle. Issues of class, wealth and race were made large to me, for example, because of the cultural community and how much money is thrown around in galleries and at auction, versus the struggle of artists and poorly paid workers.
At the same time, I was having a great time. The gallerists I knew were smart, ambitious, interesting people. The artists, too, and I loved my friends and colleagues.
How did their passion for the intangible – art, movies, books – get made tangible? By putting a price on things. I’m fascinated by this. This alchemy of art into the dollar. I started seeing it everywhere.
I also started to notice how another intangible thing – the social justice movement – was being converted into a marketing strategy for brands. Fast food brands, art galleries, and fashion were using the language of protest.
What exactly was their role in a social protest? Non-existent. Just hopping on the train. This process of transformation happens on every level, with any object you want to buy. So I thought about how people search for authenticity in a world that feels manipulated.
I felt that someone like Rudolph would perceive this as a world of fakes and, therefore, his own fraudulent activity as merely a continuation of that disingenuousness.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m writing a literary mystery set in New England. A woman returns to her family’s home on Cape Cod to investigate the death of her relative, a famous poet.
I love 1950s and ‘60s confessional poetry and want to explore the lives of its writers, which were often tormented and very moving. They were struggling to break free of the conservatism of the 1950s, getting very deep into psychoanalysis, and expressing a desire for the individual beyond the family. The 1960s impulse to self-actualize, the violence of its rebellions, feels really relevant to me now.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: You can follow me on Instagram at @annabarringtoncampbell.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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