GOING HOME CAN BE MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR

Going Home  

By Tom Lamont

(Alfred A. Knopf)

Interview by Diane Slocum

Teo goes home for a brief visit with his father and to hang out with his childhood friends. Nowhere in his imagination does he expect to wind up as the guardian for a two-year-old boy, the son of Lia, the ethereal girl in this pack of friends. But he does, at least temporarily. This turns into an extended stay with his dad, Vic, while things are sorted out for the child, Joel. Vic is gradually succumbing to a “surname” disease, adding to Teo’s responsibilities. His best frenemy, Ben, also complicates Teo’s life with his erratic irresponsibility. Added to this mix, is the new rabbi in town, Sybil, who faces her own challenges. One question that Lia never answered, that could determine Joel’s fate – who is his father?

AUTHORLINK: What was your first thought about the story of Going Home?

LAMONT: I suspect this was a bunch of thoughts coming together from a bunch of different directions, colliding in strange and interesting ways, evolving, being edited, evolving again, being edited again. After you’ve been through a long creative process that lasts a couple of years, it’s quite hard to pick out the individual sort of prompts of inspiration, but I remember that one of them was definitely an idea of exploring in a fictional voice or in multiple fictional voices what it might be like to have to learn to look after a boisterous, energetic, chaotic 2-year-old without any practice or lessons or warning.

AUTHORLINK: How did it develop from there?

LAMONT: What would that be like? What would that feel like? How would it go right and wrong? Who would be the people who might step forward and take such a task on? And from there I got to a cast of characters who in themselves would have come from different places and from different wells of original inspiration. I thought about who would be interesting people to put in in such a position.

AUTHORLINK: Did you always plan to have four point-of-view characters (five counting Joel in the prologue)? How did this benefit your story?

LAMONT: I think I knew from a pretty early stage that I needed two things to be possible in the book. I knew that I needed the main character who would be providing care for this little boy to be quite responsible, quite reliable, quite dutiful. Even though this is fiction, I wanted it to be plausible, to feel real. And so, I knew that at least one of the main characters would have to be able to shoulder the burden of childcare for a small child, and that perhaps wouldn’t necessarily make him or her the most dramatic character. It might also make them a bit of a drag in fictional terms if the entire story was left just to them. So, at that point I knew that there would be other characters whose brains we would climb inside, and whose view of the world we would get to see. It kind of made sense that Teo’s friend Ben, as I ended up calling him, would be quite the opposite, would be one of the last people on Earth you’d ever entrust with the safety and nourishment of a child. And what if those two were in opposition to each other, kind of helping each other, but both swirling around the centrifugal force of the little boy who was theirs to look after? I threw in the dad, the older character, Vic, because I wanted to play with generations and different eras of parental responsibility, of masculinity. I put in Vic as a sort of avatar for my father, who was going through a phase at the end of his life while I was writing this, that I very much wanted to try and capture and preserve in a fictional form while it was fresh and in front of me. And then the last of the four perspective characters, the Rabbi, Sybil. She popped up in a couple of the earlier chapters in quite a small role, but right away I had this inkling that I could write her and that she would serve the story very well. And partly that was because she’s a confessional figure. She’s someone the other characters might plausibly open up to because she’s a religious figure in their community. She’s someone who commands trust and respect by the nature of her job. And I thought it was realistic that anyone from a wild and tempestuous Ben, to a cautious and reserved Teo might open up to her. And I thought that would be useful in terms of letting the reader in on some more of the experiences these characters were going through. And to get them talking out loud and to get them talking with each other.

AUTHORLINK: Lia always has a presence in the story, even if she is personally only in the story for a few lines near the very beginning. Describe how you made her influence felt throughout the story.

LAMONT: I’m glad you said that because Lia is a sort of hovering, ghostly presence in the story. I wanted her influence felt throughout the story. I wanted to do her justice as much justice as possible, as a character within the sort of confines of what happens to her in the year that this story takes place. There are a few moments where she appears in memory and in flashback. She appears a little bit at the beginning. That beginning cameo has to carry a lot of weight because it’s the only time the reader meets her in real time. I wanted her to be missed. I wanted her to be a bit of a question mark because these are the things that the characters would have felt. Everyone from the kid to the to the old man. And. I just tried to have the characters think about her when they might think about her. I tried to have them not simplify her too much or carbonify her. Because she wasn’t there to speak for herself. I tried my best. I’m glad you seem to suggest in your question that it worked so thanks.

AUTHORLINK: Your story delves into a lot of male relationships – between friends (or frenemies), father and adult son, men and a little boy – can you talk about writing all these relationships? What did you have to do? How did you analyze them?

LAMONT: The simple answer to your interesting question is that I lived it. I’ve always been interested in intra-male relationships because I’ve been bound up in complicated ones. With my dad, with my brother, with friends, with frenemies. With enemies. You’re thrown into these dynamics just by being a human in the world. And you don’t choose a lot of the dynamics. You don’t choose your position, you don’t choose your angle of entry into the world. I was never an. Alpha to use a horrible term. But you’re absolutely surrounded by alphas in school environments, in clubs and sports, and in all sorts of ways. And you have to find your way through. And I was always interested. I was always observant of the way men talk to each other, try to intimidate each other and support each other. Curious little codes and strictures and absences. Just all the appalling jumble. I definitely don’t put it above any other experience, like the experiences between women,  woman friendships, mother and daughter relationships.. But as a writer. In midlife, who’s really only had one life to draw on, there is a certain point where you just have to draw on what’s in there, what you’ve got. And that was something I wanted this book to explore fictionally.

AUTHORLINK: What did you learn writing and publishing your first novel that might help other budding novelists?

LAMONT: You have to keep going. It’s hard. It’s really hard. It’s hard if everything goes right. So, it’s really hard when things don’t go right. The wind won’t always be with you. Internally and externally, there’ll be all sorts of obstacles and reasons to stop or to feel like you should stop. Or people telling you you should stop. If you believe in the creation of art. If you love novels, if you want to write a novel, if you want to get to the end of one, you just have to push on. At a certain point, you have to ignore what people are telling you and just push on because it is a slightly deranged pursuit. It takes so much time without any guarantees. You just have to push on. So, I think that’s the very simplest answer to a long and complicated process. But it could be summed up with the word continue.

AUTHORLINK: Besides enjoying the story, what do you hope your readers will take away from Going Home?

LAMONT: I guess a part of me on a practical level was just hoping they might like me as a writer and want to read more of what I’ve written. I think you are in the end trying to create a readership for yourself. A group of people who like your vibe? Like your style, your tone, your approach to the world. Like your language, like your heart. And you’re hoping to build that group so that they return to your work or dig out your old stuff. Help you continue doing this difficult work. I hope that people get to the end of Going Home and as I do when I like a book think that I could read that again in a few weeks, or I want to know what else they’ve done. I think that’s always a really, really good sign. If it hasn’t felt like homework, it’s felt like the beginning of a relationship. And that’s what I would hope.

AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?

LAMONT: I’m trying to write another novel. I’ve written something like a draft and started to show it to people, but. It doesn’t get easier. I definitely feel I’ve learned a lot from the experience of finishing a draft and publishing my first novel. But yeah, I think it’s always going to be difficult work. It sort of should be. You’re trying to drag narrative, people, accurate description and plausible experience out of nothing. Out of the air and set it all down and make it shapely and satisfying and make it surprising. Make it original. It’s just hard. It’s really hard and I’m trying. I hope it works. My next book, I hope you read it.

About the author: Tom Lamont is an award-winning journalist. He has written in-depth articles about Adele and Harry Styles since the two musicians became popular in the 2000s. He is one of the founding writers of the Guardian’s Long Read desk and is also a regular contributor to the American GQ. He lives in London with his wife and two children. Going Home is his debut novel.