“Every Sentence Matters”: Eugene Marten, in Conversation With Blake Butler

Some writers are little more than perpetual motion machines of self-aggrandizement, playing off-the-page games to bait your dime. Others stand on business, letting their work speak for itself. Over the last two decades, Eugene Marten’s novels have been a gold standard of the latter approach, passed around by those in-the-know with the sort of reverent awe reserved for timeless pillars of their craft. For me, all it took was a few pages from his first novel, In the Blind, to understand that the opaque concept of a “writer’s writer” might just mean you already know you’ll want to read everything they write for the rest of your life.

Work itself is, in fact, inherent to Marten’s subject matter’s soul. His protagonists are locksmiths, janitors, warehousers; wanted and damaged men, persisting obliquely on the outskirts of social grace. His latest novel, Layman’s Report, a revamped version of the book originally released in 2013, forges even further past the limits of what can or should be comfortably embraced, exploring the opaque life and mind of Fred A. Leuchter, an execution equipment engineer co-opted by Holocaust deniers, as seen in Errol Morris’s 2000 documentary, Mr. Death.

It’d been ten years since I last saw Marten when we reconvened on Zoom to talk shop on revision, inspiration, tone, audience, perspective, sympathy, Gordon Lish, the changing landscape of the book biz, and “the impossible art.”

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EUGENE MARTEN: How are you doing, Blake?

BLAKE BUTLER: I’m all right, man. How are you? It’s been a minute.

MARTEN: Oh, real good. It’s been a while.

BUTLER: Where are you living now?

MARTEN: Albuquerque.

BUTLER: Oh, okay. How’s that?

MARTEN: Oh, it’s great. I love it. It’s hot, of course, but I’ll take that over Ohio. This is the last move, hopefully.

BUTLER: Nice. Last I remember, you were in Costa Rica. But I know you’ve spent your entire life kind of moving from city to city, so that must be nice to find an anchor now.

MARTEN: Yeah, it is. And also, I can’t afford to do anything else, so it’s good to not have that choice. But you’re in Baltimore?

BUTLER: Yeah, I’ve been in Baltimore for almost three-and-a-half years now. I was in Atlanta last time I saw you and I guess Firework had just come out, and the original Layman’s Report was released not long after that in 2013, right?

MARTEN: Yeah, yeah.

BUTLER: I remember reading the original version then, and now reading it a couple of weeks ago. I loved both versions, but I felt like reading it now in 2024 feels even more loaded in a way, given the content and Leuchter as a kind of useful idiot exploring this question of the Holocaust and getting used in a ploy. I wanted to start the conversation about what brought you to bring the book back out and what you did to revamp it.

MARTEN: Well, I don’t know how much you know, but the original publication was a disaster and a big debacle. All the work that was supposed to be done before printing wasn’t finished.

BUTLER: Oh, jeez.

MARTEN: It was a very, very bad experience, and from that moment, all I could think about was if I ever got a chance to do it again, I would jump at it. Even if I was going to resort to self-publishing or whatever. And then the opportunity came up with Strange Light and PRHC, and I was working on a new book at the time, Pure Life. I had a kickstarter project going ’cause I needed to go to Honduras and I wanted some help financing that. So a couple of years after the fact, Jordan Ginsburg, my editor, came across that project and emailed me and said he’d be interested in looking at that and anything else. And so I happened to mention Layman’s Report and he said, “Well, you know, one thing at a time.” But it turned out I was able to get the deal for both books. 10 years on, I like to think I’m a better writer. The 2013 version was as good as I could get it, but to me, a book is sort of a living document. Some things bother you, as I’m sure you know. You’re never 100% satisfied with something when it comes out.

BUTLER: You want to rip it to shreds the second that you see it in your hands, right?

MARTEN: Right, or you’ve moved on and it’s a bit anticlimactic. But as far as Layman’s Report, it’s still the same book. The events of the story, the structure, the ordering of things—it’s all the same. It’s a revision of language more than content.

BUTLER: I’m curious how you went about revising. Because I felt like the first page—some of the choices you made, removing details and kind of slimming it down—worked really well. I definitely agree that the idea is intact, and I wonder what it feels like to be given that carte blanche, because it’s rare that you get the opportunity to go back and fix those wrongs. Was it just a line-editing thing at the beginning?

MARTEN: Yeah, it’s definitely a director’s cut. I think it did start out with editing sentences that bothered me. The first page, about half the paragraph is missing. It occurred to me that it just wasn’t necessary. I’m always a less-is-more kind of person, and it seemed like a little revelation. It had that momentum and it sped things up, which was the effect I wanted. It was a little bit simplified and more abstract and cleaner, which I thought was a good way to do a bit more of an overture.

BUTLER: I like the cleaner version better, even though I liked the original version too. But there’s something propulsive about it. What originally drew you to Leuchter as a subject?

MARTEN: Well, I’d never heard of the guy. Then some years ago, my wife and son, we decided to go to the Toronto Film Festival. And there was a poster for the film in the ticket office, and it was intriguing. His story is what blew me away and obsessed me right away. But I think the issue was that I felt like this was something I would’ve come up with given enough time. With a terrific ego, I resented reality and history for stealing this march on me. And I thought, “Well, I’m going to steal it back,” which you can do in literature. I was thinking along the lines of a nonfiction novel. And then, I went to Boston and met Fred and his wife, actually.

BUTLER: Oh.

MARTEN: Yeah, and that seemed to trigger something, one of those being that I couldn’t set it in Boston. It’s a great town, and we had a great time, but I just had no feel for it, no connection to it. It occurred to me that where I had grown up, in the Rust Belt Midwest, was a likely incubator for that kind of personality, maybe even more likely than Boston. And so the process of fictionalization began there, although it was still a few years before I started to write the book.

BUTLER: What was he like in person compared to the film?

MARTEN: You know, it’s kind of weird because he’s very much like the film. When he talks in the film and he’s addressing the camera—okay, I had a few drinks in me because we went out to dinner, but it actually looked two-dimensional. The way his head was kind of cocked and the voice he used, it was kind of like seeing the film replayed.

BUTLER: Woah.

MARTEN: He’s a very likable guy, and pretty smart about what he does. But I think he was looking for some kind of redemption, or maybe he thought I was sympathetic and would vindicate him. But I’m not going to condemn or vindicate anyone. I’m just going to generate language, narrative language.

BUTLER: Right. The book’s tone, even more so than the Errol Morris film, really lets you be alongside him. Because obviously he got caught in a bear trap there, some anti-Holocaust people didn’t tell him what they were going to do with his expertise. But he does have expertise—he is quite highly skilled at his craft. So you said that he’s the kind of character you would’ve come up with anyway, and I do see that. A lot of your characters are kind of handy and they have specialized knowledge, but they’re kind of on the outskirts of social acceptability. One of the great things about being able to write rather than see it on screen is you can provide all this nuance to him. Could you tell more about what it’s like to draw that inner life out in your prose?

MARTEN: Well, even though the film was the starting-off point, it was basically concerned with the detective work of proving him wrong, which was necessary and accomplished. But it really didn’t scrape the surface of what I would be interested in. I kind of naturally gravitate toward underdogs and unglamorous people, seeing how far I can push that envelope of sympathy, or at least my idea of what sympathy is. I suppose I started with his mannerisms. It was easy to attach this laconic temperament because a lot of the things he says are funny, although in a very deadpan and un-self conscious way. I do think, in a sense, that [characters] have a life of their own because the reader’s sensibility is the wild card, so it seemed to happen very naturally, and he just evolved. My first drafts are vastly different from the finished product, but in his case, not so much.

BUTLER: Do you trust that the reader can follow you? Or do you not give a shit whether they follow you? Do you think about readers when you’re sculpting a story like this?

MARTEN: I guess part of the reader is me, first of all. But no, I do think about the audience. I remember someone made a comment once, maybe on Goodreads or something. It wasn’t a critic, but they said that they found the book so well-written but could not muster a shred of sympathy for Fred. I thought, “Well, it’s not well written then, and I must have failed in that respect.” But I was surprised that someone would take that dim a view of it. I don’t know, is that how readers are these days, or is that just an isolated opinion? That’s actually stuck with me, but it didn’t make me want to please anybody any more.

BUTLER: Right, I get what you’re saying. But I don’t know how you could look at this book and think that it’s anything other than coming from a place of wanting to understand, right?

MARTEN: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe this reader was a really sentimental person and needed explicit reasons to like a character. But I like the idea of not liking a character and sticking with him anyway, or at least not judging him. 

BUTLER: Exactly. Well, where else can we explore these themes except in fiction, right? I think that there’s a big scare now of people reading things literally. And clearly, that’s not the case.

MARTEN: Right.

BUTLER: You have lots of different perspectives here, but near the end of the book, it goes into first person and we’re kind of able to hear Fred talk about himself. I thought that was such a sharp move. There’s a quote I want to point out where he says, “I believe that acquiring a work ethic and a sense of integrity and craft is the path to character development and inner discovery,” which sounds like something I would apply to you as an author. What’s the link between your respect for the working man and the specialized knowledge that’s held by a person like Fred Leuchter, and how that translates into your passion? That must be part of what gives you the sympathy you have for him, right?

MARTEN: Yeah, it is. Because on the one hand, it almost makes him seem like a moral character. Let’s say he’s going to build a chair, not necessarily an electric chair, but if you sit on it, it’s not going to collapse. He’s going to do the best job he possibly can, and you’ll get your money’s worth. To me, that was another way of showing how Fred can be a decent and sort of ethical person and, at the same time, have this adjacent compartment where he’s alive with something evil. And I like that close disparity, but I do have my own thoughts about craftsmanship and work ethic. There are times when you’re writing and you could sort of make things easy for yourself. But it’s also about working with other people. It’s hard to fault my editor for anything. He always does what he says he’s going to do, keeps his word about everything, always gets back to me. I mean, I had never been in a situation like this, and it really goes for the whole crew at Strange Light and Penguin Random House Canada. There are great indie publishers, obviously, but my experience is a bit of a mixed bag.

BUTLER: I hear that. And I agree with you very much that one of the most important things is feeling you can trust who you’re working with. Because you can do as much craftwork as you want, but if someone takes it away from you and fucks it up, then what did you even do? So I’m glad to hear that you found someone that believes in you that way, because I do think it’s more and more rare. What we really need is people who have that craft of integrity to work hand-in-hand with the vision, right? While we’re on the note of editors, I know you have some affinity for Gordon Lish, and I’ve always seen him as a bit of a craftsman in that way, where sentences are dredged out word-by-word. As we get near the end here, could you tell me a little bit about Lish?

MARTEN: I think there was a kind of affinity there from the beginning. I’d read [Raymond] Carver’s collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? At the time, I didn’t know [Lish] had edited that and what an influence he had had on it. I think he knew when to leave things alone, but he would really insert his voice into things. When I first started reading books years ago, I would notice that a lot of books that have a great opening, a great first sentence or paragraph, and then they would back off with the style and sort of let the story take over the characters. And I always assumed that was the way you did it. But then with Gordon, you see that every sentence matters; it can be very simple and plain, or it could be something really ornate and baroque, but every sentence is an object of integrity and every word considered. It never occurred to me you could write a whole book like that. So then my taste level began to change and got a bit more elevated. And that was one thing that sort of got me on my way, actually, trying to pull that off. Like he said, “that’s why they call it the impossible art.”

BUTLER: “The impossible art.” I’ve never heard that phrase, but it sounds right to me. Trusting the language to carry you where narrative doesn’t is underrated in that way, especially as readers become more bent on narrative and thinking everything has to pay off a certain way. But this book has proved to me exactly what you said: that every sentence matters. You’re able to cut the line between craftsmanship and artifice, which is a rare breed. We need it in the world, and I think it’s going to be fun to see this book hit people, especially the comedic aspects of it. This is a darkly comedic book, but as I’m reading it, I feel like it’s really sweltering and difficult, but that’s the best kind of comedy to me.

MARTEN: Looking around, life is filled with irony and comedy, and not intentionally. That’s really the best stuff. I’m a bit of a smart-ass, and I don’t get much opportunity to use that. And I’m just a frustrated writer, I always wish I was better. So I don’t think, “Oh, I need a joke here” or something. I try to establish conditions where it occurs spontaneously. And then with Fred, again because of his laconic temperament, that provides the tone where it can happen. It’s sort of like in music, where you could be trying to write a melody but once you find the exact sound or tone of the instrument, then it sort of writes itself. That’s generally my attitude toward it.

BUTLER: To me, it connects to the question of the banality of evil. It’s like, evil isn’t just some dark monster consuming everything in front of it. It is made up of people like Fred, you know?

MARTEN: Right, I think that’s really how it happens. I mean, when I look at the way things have gone in this country politically. I knew people who were very mild-mannered and noncommittal and they would vote a certain way or support someone, and I would think, “Do they know how monstrous this is?” They had no evil intentions in mind, it was just a simple six-to-one decision for them. That’s really interesting to me, because I don’t know how that works. I’m interested in how compartmentalized people can be.

BUTLER: Well-said, man. I’m grateful to be working in a world where you exist.

MARTEN: I’m very honored that you did this. It was great talking.