Elliot Ackerman on His New Novel, HALCYON, Where Death is a Thing of the Past
“Is it always worthwhile to reach back and try to reconcile the past? Is it even possible?”
[Publisher’s Note: We are pleased to introduce the first in what will be a regular feature, in which award-winning author and historian Mark Braude interviews writers of newly or soon-to-be published books, with a focus on arts and culture-related non-fiction, as well as some fiction.]
In an alternate 2004, where Al Gore is President and scientists have discovered how to do away with death, Martin Neumann, a struggling and recently divorced historian, rents the guesthouse of Robert Abelson, esteemed lawyer, WWII veteran, and cherished husband and father. As Martin’s life becomes ever more entwined with that of the Abelson family, and as he discovers their complicated connections with the new scientific discovery, everything he thinks he knows about the past (and by extension, the present and future) will be brought into question.
Decorated Marine veteran, prolific author of fiction and nonfiction, and National Book Award finalist Elliot Ackerman speaks with us about his frightening, funny, and thought-provoking new novel, Halcyon.
OCTAVIAN REPORT: Your book is set largely in Virginia in 2004 in the runup to a presidential election, in a world much like our own but not quite. Could you tell us about the slightly bent America of Halcyon and about working in the realm of the counterfactual?
ELLIOT ACKERMAN: The genesis of this novel starts with my wife's father, a WWII veteran, who passed away in 2008. He was more than twenty-five years older than my wife’s mother. And he’s a much beloved figure in her family, so much so that as we move forward in history and changes occur at an ever more rapid pace there's often a refrain of “I wonder what Daddy would think about X or think about Y?” In March of 2020, with that refrain in my mind, I had a very intense dream about him. I never met him when he was alive, but he and I had a conversation in this dream that felt like talking with him about everything that was going on in the world just then. And I got to wondering what the world would make of him today. What if we were to place him in contemporary America? What would it mean for someone who's beloved in their own time to be thrown into a time that’s not their own?
The character of Abelson isn’t my wife’s father. But he’s a figure like him: a WWII veteran, married to a much younger woman, who was beloved in his own time but has now been brought back, out of time. And I thought it would be interesting to bring Abelson back to an alternate version of present-day America so that I could play with events and force the reader to bend their mind as well, to ask what happens when a time we know suddenly becomes unrecognizable to us. How does that affect our understanding of events that occurred in our past? How does that affect our thinking about events that didn’t occur, and what would be different about our world if they had?
OR: And you’ve made Abelson a man out of time by literally bringing him back from the dead (which takes place very early in the book, so I don’t feel like I’m spoiling anything…)
ACKERMAN: In 1999 we had this huge scientific breakthrough, which was the first ever mapping of the human genome. And when President Bush defeated Gore, he slowed down and rolled back a lot of that research. We’ve had a lot indulging in the “What-if-it-was-Gore-instead-of-Bush” counterfactual because it was such a close race, and such a momentous time in American history, but I thought, instead of engaging with the more obvious aspects of that moment, rather than focusing on 9-11, I would play with this one relatively unexplored piece of American history, the mapping of the human genome. And so I asked the reader, in the opening page-and-a-half of the book to bear with me, because we're going to be living in a world where the government has figured out how to resuscitate people from the dead. When we see the first of these folks coming back, one of them is Abelson.
OR: Our narrator Martin Neumann, the person who tells us Abelson's story at this charged moment in history, as well as the stories of others, is a historian. Was there something about the job of historian that spoke to you for this particular book set in this particular moment?
ACKERMAN: The book has a few historians. There’s Martin Neumann, the book’s Nick Carraway-esque narrator. There's also a fictionalized Shelby Foote, an actual civil war historian who’s recently become more controversial than he was in his own time, so that Foote himself is like an Abelson character, beloved in his own time and more controversial in ours.
I think I put historians front and center because they’re really the ones who pass judgment on a society. There's a moment in the book where the fictionalized Shelby Foote character inscribes a copy of his famous book, The Civil War: A Narrative, to Martin, and he writes, “Remember, history is what the living think of the dead.”
OR: I love the humor in having so many people connected to Martin almost pitying him for his profession, in which he earns so poorly in a pursuit that seems to them so useless while they’re doing things like practicing law or working in finance. Yet he plays a central role in this story, which is all about the living choosing how and what to think of the dead. We can’t have history without death and here is this historian who has to navigate a world where death might become a thing of the past, so to speak.
ACKERMAN: Kafka - I’m paraphrasing - wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. So when we upend death, it scrambles the meaning of everything, even the idea of endings altogether. And history doesn't end. The people who populate history experience death but history itself is deathless. It's a story that keeps getting told over and over again. And when we reach back into history and we try to start dredging up the people who are dead, or maybe ideas that are dead, the result is that they start walking around amongst the living. We in the present then have to ask, do we want these people or these ideas walking around amongst us?
We see it in American life today, whether it's the 1619 Project, or school curriculums: these hotly contested wars, history wars. They may be intellectual battles but the people fighting them are fighting very passionately. Because these are wars about what version of history is going to get taught and all sides share an understanding that as Orwell famously said, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
OR: One of the most direct ways to experience how the past exerts power over the present is through our own experiences with family. Families create their own legends, their own myths. Martin functions as a kind of surrogate adult child for the elder Abelsons and gets himself involved, willingly or not, in that family’s sibling rivalries. Is Halcyon in some ways a book about parenthood?
ACKERMAN: A little bit. I want to be explicit that the people in this book are not my family or my wife's family. They're an invention. But you’re right that the first place where we start telling these histories is within our families. And I’m sure you have the experience, and I've certainly had this experience in my family, where I’ll hear a member of my family telling some story – usually a parent telling a story about me when I was younger – and I'll be like “That totally didn't happen. What are you talking about?” And it will usually be a story that has some kind of moral, or is meant to reveal some larger truth about who you are and who the teller is as a parent. And I’m a parent myself, and I tell my kids stories, and they'll roll their eyes at those stories. And I ask, Why am I telling them these stories? And I think to a certain degree it’s because I want them to understand me. I want them to understand the version of me that is the most aligned with my values. So, yes, family plays a big role in the book, because from the stories the Abelson family is telling itself we can extrapolate out to these larger stories that America is telling itself about itself. And from the hypocrisy we see inside the family we can then project out to see the larger hypocrisies that are taking place within the society of this alternate 2004.
OR: To push on families and storytelling: families, when they function, seem to do so through compromise, wherein each member maintains their own version of that family’s history and yet somehow all those conflicting visions coalesce into a wider shared narrative about what that particular family stands for and what it values. And the concept of compromise, and the question of how much value we should currently place on that concept, feels central to this book.
ACKERMAN: Compromise is a word that has been, I think, on many Americans minds in the past few years: when is it appropriate to compromise and when is it not appropriate? Are there certain issues where we have to be absolutists? The areas in which people are arguing for the absolute position seem to be increasing. The areas in which people advocate for compromise seem to be decreasing. And if, as Shelby Foote suggested, the genius of America is its ability to compromise, and the greatest example of Americans failing to compromise with each other was the Civil War, does it follow that compromise is inherently always a good thing? This is the question that Martin’s working on. When we meet him, he's trying to write a treatise on this idea of compromise as being an inherently good, inherently American characteristic. But as he enters this journey with Abelson, and he sees Abelson come back to a time that’s not his own, and the challenges that Abelson confronts, Martin’s thesis gets put to the screws.
OR: Clinton and Lewinsky occasionally appear here in the background, again with events unfolding slightly differently than they actually did. In a book with so many battlegrounds, literal and otherwise, did you see the relationships between men and women as one of the more central sites of conflict?
ACKERMAN: Yes, of the several strands of social and political conflict that exist in the book, that strand of tension between the male and the female is the most timeless, the one that has been through the most iterations. On certain societal issues it’s somewhat easier to say: we exist in an imperfect moment, but we’re making progress and can imagine a future with a resolution to issue x or issue y; but I think most people would acknowledge that the tensions that exist between men and women are circular, cyclical, and never go away.
Abelson says, slightly tongue in cheek, and during an argument with his daughter, that you can track all human violence back to sex, from men fighting one another over Helen of Troy. We're talking about social and societal conflicts that are inescapable. This is one that’s not ever going to be solved, and it’s not one that belongs to any particular side, one of which will eventually be the winner. It’s just conflict, and the existence of that conflict defines what it means to be to be a person, and so we just we just live with it.
OR: If Martin is wrestling with all the messiness of compromise as he writes his own book, with new events constantly altering his ways of thinking, I was wondering if during the stretch of time between conceiving of and completing Halcyon it ever felt like the grounds were shifting beneath you at such speed that you had to revisit your counterfactual world to keep it in closer conversation with the present?
ACKERMAN: The book deals with certain hot button issues: civil war monuments, and whether they should be torn down; it brushes up against ideas about MeToo; and it considers shifting cultural mores in general, how what’s appropriate in one time and context suddenly becomes totally inappropriate in another. Fortunately, I wrote this book under a short enough timeframe that I didn't have to change anything radically during the writing. But had I wanted to write my opinions on any of the these issues, I wouldn't write a novel, I'd write an opinion piece, or a polemical treatise on that subject.
So much of the process of writing a novel is about wanting to try on alternate points of view. I want to take all these arguments out for a spin. When I’m writing a character, I feel like my job is to advocate for that character on the page. It's like they're stepping in front of the reader, and they have to make their case to the readers as though they're making their case before God: “This is who I am. This is what I'm about, and I'm going to make the best argument for me as a character as I possibly can.” And I take a lot of joy in doing that with the characters inside the context of a broader story. So my own views on a subject might change over time, but in wearing the various masks of the different characters I just have to make sure that their views are intelligible and relevant to the world and moment they are living in, not my own.
OR: I’m glad to hear you use the word joy in relation to writing. I got the sense that you had fun with creating this version of the recent past, and with conjuring other pasts before that one. I imagine you must have gone to Gettysburg during the writing because that setting in particular feels so alive here.
ACKERMAN: I actually wrote most of this in my father-in-law's old study, because we were sitting at my wife's house during long stretches of the pandemic. So it was fun to sit in his old study and work on this book that was, you know, very much inhabited by the spirit of him. I did have fun writing it.
I know Gettysburg well. I've been to a few of the Civil War battlefields, and they're all interesting in their own ways. The thing that's so interesting about Gettysburg is you can really see the whole battlefield, and the terrain tells the story. So you can understand, to use an example from the book, how there was this audible gasp when the entire Army of Northern Virginia saw the ridge line in the distance defended by Union soldiers during Pickett’s Charge and they saw how far they had to go and how impossible the odds against them were. You walk there and you see it yourself and can feel the residue of what they must’ve felt. The whole story is there, still trapped in the ground. It’s like that every time I go. It’s chilling.
OR: Abelson, who fought in the battle of Saipan, suggests that soldiers will form some of their deepest bonds not in battle but after battle, remembering what they've been through together. Is that something you found in your own military experience, this bonding deeply through the creation of a shared memory? And did that inform your ideas about reconciliation and compromise, and of conflicting visions existing in a kind of unsteady harmony?
ACKERMAN: There is this string of very consequential events in Abelson’s life and in the life of the people around him. When we meet him, we don't understand that entire emotional and social topography. But as the story moves along, we start to understand how all of these people somehow trace back to his experience in this battle. Ironically, the people there were actually strangers to each other at that time. And then these events happened, and then, through the processing and the story-making of those events, these people become soldered together. In Abelson's case, we see that one of his old comrades died in connection to that battle, and he basically adopts this man’s son. That relationship becomes fundamental to Abelson and, yes, maybe it is an act of reconciliation. I don't mean necessarily reconciliation of individuals but also reconciliation of events.
Horrible events happen and people have to reconcile them in their minds, and that's what storytelling is. Storytelling is making meaning out of random, often violent, events. We see Abelson doing that on an interpersonal level within his family. But we’ve also got Shelby Foote and this story-making about the Civil war, this question of how America, after the trauma of the Civil War, goes about telling its story, making meaning of these cataclysmic events. And in this case is the meaning-making wrong? Is the reconciliation wrong? Is it always worthwhile to reach back and try to reconcile the past? Is it even possible? Those are the questions underpinning the novel. I think every character is asking those questions at a certain level.
I served as a Marine and led a rifle platoon in the Fallujah battle in 2004, and we started with forty-six of us. There's a core group of us that are all still friends and we all talk all the time. We’re texting, we know each other's wives and kids. But when the battle that soldered us together occurred we’d only known one another for a total of six or seven months. So actually, those relationships were built on all of these post facto years.
You think that the depth of a relationship was there from the inception, but no: the events that took place caused these very deep relationships after the fact, because, as we’ve been discussing, you have to reconcile the past with the present. You tell the stories together, and you all have to make peace with it together. And in the end the stories are what draw us together.
Elliot Ackerman
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.