Confounded by the literary world: An Ordinary Ecstasy author Luke Carman on James Joyce, literature and speechifiers

Carman says he set out to make the stories a more conventional length. But once he got started, they took on a life of their own: "As you say, they're not really short stories. At 40,000 or 30,000 words, they're novellas. But the stories just kept growing and I thought ... I've got to go with the needs of the story before anything else."

His debut work of fiction, An Elegant Young Man, won the NSW Premier's award for new writing and was shortlisted for a host of other awards. In 2019, he released Intimate Antipathies, a collection of essays, and this new work marks a return to fiction. Some of Carman's most memorable characters are autodidacts, people with the gift of the gab whose run-of-the-mill lives contain handsome and sometimes unpredictable inner lives. A Beckoning Candle, the first in the collection, is the story of Joseph, an older man "with an absolute lust for life, but life has moved on so much that he doesn't know where to put those energies," Carman says.

Carman finds characters like Joseph endlessly appealing, given that he comes from a family of great talkers. "My father for example is one of the world's great speechifiers... I think that's the reason I became a writer. I've always been in love with listening to people, and Joseph is somewhat inspired by my own father," he says.

There are also pockets of exquisite clarity in these stories, when the characters and the narrative pull are momentarily stilled by wonder. In the eponymous story, Holly sees a beautiful run-away horse in Centennial Park, and then sees its young rider overcome with emotion at having lost control of her mount. When horse and rider are re-united, Holly ponders those "strange moments where life seemed to be portraying itself too openly, as if aware of its mystical excesses".

Carman's characters buck against conformity in all its guises: Holly cannot bring herself to flick back a cutesy message in response to a banal greeting from a recent date. Liam, a musician, performs at the opening of a friend's art show, feeling like an insect on a specimen board and knowing that nothing short of flawlessness will be acceptable to the waiting crowd.

An Ordinary Ecstasy was mostly written in 2020 and 2021, through lockdowns and a period when Carman took a break from teaching creative writing at Western Sydney University. Wandering the deserted beaches and streets of The Entrance where he now lives, he listened to audio books including James Joyce's Ulysses.

"I just couldn't believe how great that book sounds. It was intoxicating. That's what I hoped - at the best points that these sometimes long-winded speechifying moments [in the stories] would be somewhat intoxicating," Carman says.

Joyce also inspired him to experiment with third person. "I've only ever published in first person before. And again, listening to Ulysses while I was walking around, I was just amazed at how potent that free and indirect third person style is, where you can move in and out and create this really amazing diversity of voices and tones and effects," he says

"I love listening to people and when we were all in isolation I missed that a great deal. So I'd go for walks. When I wasn't listening to audio books, I just started hearing voices in my head in the absence of anyone else.

"That's what I used as the material ... that became the process. I was listening out for voices out in the ether and a lot of them are based on people that I know but [fictionalised]. They all came to me in that same fashion and I recorded them."

The book is also something of a homage to Raymond Carver. Putting Carver within cooee of Carman may seem counterintuitive - Carman's longer stories are powered by their own inimitable velocity and populated by rascally speechifiers. Carver's trademark was his clipped prose and famously pared back dialogue. Stylistic differences aside, both share an emotional intensity.

Carver might have developed a more fulsome style if he'd managed to shrug off the control of his controversial editor, Gordon Lish, says Carman. "He was extremely expressive and that was all taken away from him in a sense."

"One of the things that was in my head when I was writing this book was to try and imagine if Raymond Carver was expansive and expressive rather than the minimalist that we know him as," he says.

For Carman, a trend in recent decades towards the bare and basic in fiction is almost anti-literary: "There needs to be more respect for the ornate and the flowery and the extravagant and the excessive ... I know it's anachronistic but I enjoy it and that's what I look for when I read."

While a note of nostalgia runs through this book, which is set in and around Western Sydney where Carman grew up, he's not sentimental about the city of his childhood. "The development of Parramatta, for a lot of writers that I know is almost a tragedy or a testimony to neoliberal excess ... but I don't feel nostalgic about it. The looking back that I was doing in this book was purely literary in the sense that I wanted the stories to feel anachronistic".

Since the book's release in July, Carman has been thinking about his characters and how memory can possess people "in the primeval sense, taking us, like a malignant spirit so to speak".

"All the characters in the book are possessed at times, in this spirited manner. That's the primary way that ecstasy operates in this work: to become 'beside yourself'," he says.

Carman's characters are also comfortable within their own milieu, but retain an outsider's critical eye. The indefatigable August from Tears on Main Street is one of the Carman's most original and funniest creations. August has Fijian heritage, but realises that he is not suffering from the melancholy of the diaspora. Rather he decides: "That it is better for some of us to be outside belonging than to be constituted by it."

It's a fitting sentiment for Carman too. "I know that my sensibilities are old-fashioned, and that makes me a little isolated because when I look at what's going on in the literary world around me I am often confounded," he says.

Carman rails against the seemingly irresistible commercial mandate for novelty in books at the expense of substance. "The literary or artistic essence of the books seems to be secondary in the way that people engage with them," he says.

"I get bombarded [on Instagram] by these images of people standing next to a stack of books that have been colour-coordinated. It's a complete surrender to conformity. The idea that literature is meant to be a war against everyday speech, or against the status quo has gone right out the window."

But literature can and should be a weapon against that, he says.

"That's what I've always loved about art. That it has that transformative and interruptive or awakening capacity, the kind of Promethean capacity in people and culture. I don't want that to be swept away."

An Ordinary Ecstasy by Luke Carman. Giramondo. 240pp. $26.95.