USA Fellows Stories: Victor LaValle

Victor LaValle - New York
USA Ford Fellow 2006, Literature

by Susan Morgan

“I always start with first lines first,” replies writer Victor LaValle when quizzed about how his brilliant, brazen stories are created. His answer is succinct and incendiary, terse as a proverb and taut as a high-diving board. LaValle lays down riveting sentences, tightly wrought opening lines that jump-start situations, ignite attitudes, and grip the reader from the get-go.

“This lawyer was fucking my moms, right in the pocketbook,” declares the incredulous 11-year-old who narrates “How I Lost My Inheritance,” one of the stories in Slapboxing with Jesus, LaValle’s 1999 collection of interlinked episodes tracking the lives of restless, smart-mouthed boys in New York’s outer boroughs. “The next morning I was still scratching my nuts for hours; in the afternoon I called Lianne; I was fiending,” rattles Sean, the uneasy teen who voices “Raw Daddy.” When LaValle’s debut novel—a picaresque tale about an obese man’s unraveling life—appeared in 2002, Maud Newton, the Internet book maven, noted: “A copy of Victor LaValle’s The Ecstatic just arrived, and I made the mistake of opening it. It’s hard to put down a novel that starts like this: ‘They drove a green rented car into central New York State to find me living wild in my apartment.’”

Born in New York in 1972, LaValle grew up in Queens, received his MFA from Columbia University, and now lives in Brooklyn. His published fiction, as he’s quick to point out (no shame in his game), has drawn deeply from the autobiographical well: the offspring of a Ugandan-born mother and white American father, LaValle and his sister were raised by their divorced mother and African grandmother in Flushing, Queens—an area of unequaled ethnic diversity. “When I became a storyteller, I had so much stuff to take from that place,” he readily acknowledges. While he was an undergraduate at Cornell, LaValle’s weight swelled to nearly 400 pounds. His essay about this phase of his life, published on nerve.com, begins: “I made it self-destruct. My body. I destroyed it.” In The Ecstatic, he masterfully spun that experience into unflinching and often hilarious fiction. LaValle always writes with his ear tuned to the sounds around him and his heart at home in the library. “I was a big reader, a nerdy kid in an aggressive neighborhood,” he recalls. “I loved horror stories and a sense of humor.”

LaValle recently completed a new novel. Due out in 2009, it’s a contentious story about a man, a woman, and a monster baby. While he was trying to find his way into this story, he returned to an old favorite, The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson’s chilling twentieth-century ghost tale. “I remember first reading it as a kid and the line ‘Hill House, not sane, stood by itself,’” he says. “It still gives me shivers of joy to read that book, and I understood how the best stories always give you something right from the onset.