V.B. Price on The Oddity

V.B. Price photo credit: Jacki Fuqua

Poet, political columnist, and professor at the University of New Mexico, V.B. Price has become something of an Albuquerque institution after living and working in New Mexico for 40 years. The state of enchantment is often the subject of his nonfiction and poetry, including Albuquerque: City at the End of the World and Chaco Trilogy (both UNM Press). Price has said of the landscape: "Much like any human being you love or any animal you love, a place can transform you…. We are not only who we are and what we are, but where we are."

New Mexico and Los Angeles, where he was raised, are the settings for Price's first novel, The Oddity, to be published this month by UNM Press.

Using an unusual structure -- the novel contains an author's note introducing another novel, by a different title, written by a fictionalized author -- The Oddity encourages active participation on the part of the reader as the story of Hana Nicholas, an artist deprived of her civil liberties during the McCarthy-era paranoia of the 1950s, and Lowell Briscoe, her protege, unfolds. Briscoe's experience as the victim of a violent attack during the 1992 L.A. riots and his examination of the destruction of his mentor allow for a timely exploration of issues surrounding individual rights versus government control during an era of crisis and fear.

BTW recently had the chance to visit with Price in Albuquerque, where he talked about his new novel.

BTW: Why were you interested in pairing the L.A. riots of '92 with WWII era Albuquerque?

VBP: I found an odd parallel, and an accurate time frame for my characters, in these places and circumstances. The L.A. riot was caused by the perception of a horrible injustice. Justified or not, riots in their full frenzy display mob mentality, a species of violent conformity that no one can question. It's the tyranny of the majority at its worst. The events surrounding Hana in the McCarthy era, as the news of anti-communist witch hunts pervaded New Mexico, mirrored the same kind of mob thinking and unreflective conformity, which resulted in grotesque violence against Hana's human and civil rights.

BTW: In The Oddity there's a lot of detail about Albuquerque during the '40s, including old streets, irrigation ditches, and grocers markets. How much research was involved?

VBP: There's a wonderful book I used called Shining River Precious Land: An Oral History of Albuquerque's North Valley by Kathryn Sargeant and Mary Davis (Albuquerque Museum) that's an oral history of Albuquerque in the '40s. But mostly I used my own experience of walking, running, and skipping on the ditches and I extrapolated onto the 1940s and 1950s. I superimposed the present on the past. I've also been writing about New Mexico for so long and I've talked with lots of people who grew up in the area.

BTW: Your novel is a unique compilation of journal entries and excerpts of an imagined novel all told from the perspective of a fictionalized author. How did you decide on this structure?

VBP: I've been interested, since I was a teenager, in the idea of multiple perceptions of the same reality. My interest comes from an early reading of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's story Rashomon, and Akira Kurosawa's film by the same name. Basically, Rashomon takes a killing and describes it from the perspectives of a handful of different people viewing it from different physical and psychological perspectives. That's what I've tried to do in The Oddity. Which perception is true? Are they all true? Is one more true than the others? Who do you believe? And seeing as how I was interested in inhabiting many different characters, including the character of the fictionalized author, I decided to let them speak in the best way they could, some through journals, some through letters, one through the device of an unfinished novel, and through the "docudrama" storytelling of the fictionalized author.

BTW: The novel is told from the perspective of the fictionalized author, Helen Contreras-Robles. As a white male, how did you feel about writing as a Latina feminist?

VBP: In this novel, I inhabited the characters and voices of many different people, the majority of them women. It just seemed to fall out that way. But when it comes to Helen Contreras-Robles, the fictionalized author, I was looking for a person who would understand what was going on, who could embrace open-mindedly the story's many different perspectives. Being a feminist male in New Mexico, I have many friends who are Hispanic females -- writers, administrators, academics, politicians, healthcare providers. They served as models for the character who is the fictionalized author. She's the sanest person in the book, through and through. And she exhibits a sophisticated intelligence, and a profound awareness of injustice and being marginalized. My Latina feminist friends are among the most savvy, good hearted, and critically astute people I know. So it seemed natural to me to have them become guides, helping me try to think like my author does.

BTW: Characters in The Oddity rail against what they call the "mass mind," or mob mentality. Were your characters purging some of your own frustrations?

VBP: Oh, yes. I'm a liberal American and a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." I believe in the Bill of Rights. I believe it reflects the best qualities of our culture -- independence, freedom to be who you are and to express your talents and perspectives in ways that best suit you, and the right to be safe from illegal intrusions by government authorities and the various insanities of self-imposed keepers of conformity.

American innovation, our entrepreneurial and creative spirit, rests on freedom of expression and the right to privacy. Governmental spying on citizens is an anathema in a free society. It inhibits the kind of trial and error thinking that leads to useful new ideas and new solutions to intractable problems. Self-appointed snoops, snitches, busybodies, meddlers, informal moral police, upholders of the mass mind and the tyranny of the majority, and all gatekeepers and enforcers of so-called normalcy and conventionality are also an anathema in an open society. Hana Nicholas was a wise and gifted person who lived an eccentric life, perfectly within the law and within her human rights, harming no one, especially not herself. Her "friends" who were also eccentrics, took it upon themselves to impose a normalcy on her, a politically acceptable normalcy, and used the law, that should have protected her, against her.

BTW: What are you working on now?

VBP: A collection of poems, a modern sequel to the Homeric Hymns. I'm also doing an environmental history of New Mexico, which covers everything from mining to agriculture to ranching to urban issues, water issues, water pollution. It's a history of human impact on the land. That'll see me through till I'm doddering; it's a huge book. I'm also editor of In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960 (UNM Press). --Interviewed by Karen Schechner