Dear Friends,
I wrote a short novel in honor of the World Cup. The first chapter can be read here at Cult Classic and the rest will be serialized shortly. I’m grateful to my friend David Steiger for reading and conducting this interview about it.
Best,
Sam
AN INTERVIEW ON DEFENDER
DS: I didn’t know you were interested in soccer!
SK: I’m not. I don’t know anything about soccer.
DS: Sooo. How did this novel come about?
SK: Well, I was following the World Cup, like everybody else, and kept thinking about some way to capture some of the mania of it in a fictional format. I knew I didn’t really have the credentials to do that but thought it would be an interesting challenge. So I speed-read about a dozen books and did the best I could with what I knew.
DS: Which books did you like?
SK: It’s interesting. For all the global obsession with soccer — and it really is a totalizing obsession — there hasn’t been all that much great writing about it, at least that I’ve come across. Fever Pitch is almost certainly the best, but that’s about something pretty different. I really liked a memoir called Only a Game? by a mid-tier English footballer in the ‘70s. In general, the memoirs by football players are almost unbelievably dull. The exception that I came across was by Zlatan Ibrahimović, which is interesting in large part because he didn’t try to write it — just told it to a ghostwriter. The atmosphere of the council estates really comes through, and the cutthroat side of football. I probably drew on that more than on anything else for the Jović character, although he’s not quite the wild man that Ibrahimović is. There were also a couple of more technical books — Das Reboot, about German football, and Brilliant Orange, about Dutch.
DS: So maybe we haven’t exactly hit a sales pitch here — a topic you’re not all that interested in, that you don’t really have the background to write. So why write this? Why read it?
SK: Well, hopefully, it’s entertaining. But it also contains a few of my deeper beliefs about writing.
DS: Which are?
SK: First of all, that a writer should be able to write about anything. That the central activity of creative writing is imagination, and that means that you can cast your mind very far —
DS: In this case, to a Croat defender —
SK: Who plays for the Slovenian national team. Yeah. And then that wherever you cast your mind to you end up finding the signal of yourself somewhere in the noise here, which I did writing this. It’s maybe not obvious, but it’s there. And then I feel like I have a whole sub-genre of writing that’s about intensity, that’s about characters engaged in the activity they care most about, who have to get something more out of themselves than they seem to be capable of. That’s maybe very obvious as a narrative structure, but I think it really is at the heart of what narrative is about — and it’s definitely exciting for me.
DS: In this case, that’s Jura Jović having to guard Messi?
SK: Yeah, he’s a journeyman defender who’s marking the very best player in the world and for 45 minutes (for the duration of the novel) has to keep him from scoring. That’s it really. That’s the narrative.
DS: So you’re sitting there watching the World Cup —
SK: Yeah.
DS: And you’re trying to come up with a narrative. How did you hit on this one?
SK: Somehow it seemed like the only possible one. Whenever I’ve watched football I’ve been taken by the defenders. The things they have to do — clearing the ball over their own goal, knocking the ball out of the mouth of the goal — and if they mess up and the ball just bounces off them in the wrong way they get an own-goal for their efforts. And then they’re never as famous as the strikers, and nobody watching them really cares about them — everybody, pretty much, is rooting for the goals. So that just seemed like a natural tension. The forwards and the defenders are clearly equally important in a football match, but the defenders end up being these anti-heroes just for doing their job. And then that gravitated naturally enough to wanting to have a defender tagging Messi, since the World Cup had been such a love-fest directed towards Messi.
DS: Do you have anything against Messi? Narratively speaking, he’s kind of the villain.
SK: No, I have nothing against him! I think I toyed with that at one point — “fuck that little fuck,” that kind of thing — but Messi seems like a perfectly decent guy. What came out pretty naturally was having everybody be a professional. Anytime I see a sports movie, there always seems to be some kind of a moral dimension to it — our guys for some reason are the good guys, and the opposing team is wicked. And I didn’t want that. I wanted just two groups of professionals on the pitch, and all of them just dealing with the unfairness that they’re all playing the same game, all of them to the very best of their abilities, and they’re going to end up with entirely different fates, depending usually in some slight differentials in their natural abilities but also on some critical turns in their careers.
DS: Hm. I’m trying to think about whether that’s the key narrative in sports.
SK: Well, at this point I’ve actually written a whole bunch of sports stuff. I think more than that it’s about getting an outcome out of yourself that’s more that you thought you were capable of. The key moment is all about going somewhere inside and cutting out everything that’s of less importance to you.
DS: So in this case that’s — ?
SK: His father, then his wife, then eventually his teammates. Basically, all of the people who brought him to that point. At some stage he has to cut them out, even betray them, and focus entirely on the result he’s trying to get out of himself.
DS: That’s an interesting narrative for a team sport.
SK: Yeah, but I think it’s pretty obvious that that’s really what sports are about, and that’s the more challenging narrative within this book. The first one is pretty easy — it’s defense as an action movie, Argentina keeps getting the ball close to the goal, and Jović and the defensive line have to have all these hair-raising adventures just to stay alive. But the other one is this, is about Jovic narrowing ever more single-mindedly on what he really wants to do and then the personal cost for that. The challenge writing this was to keep some kind of a balance between those two threads without losing track of what’s happening in the Argentina match and then with the back story echoing with but not intruding on the action.
DS: And then I can only imagine that Jura Jović was a challenge to create?
SK: Yeah, but I decided not to worry too much about that. This happens to be about him, but it really could be about anybody on the pitch. There’s pointedly nothing all that special about him, he has a back story but he’s a kind of run-of-the-mill professional. In any case it seemed like the writing was supposed to pass through him, as it were. I wanted to get the feeling of physical intensity, which of course is hard to transport from the activity itself to writing about it. I didn’t want to get too lost in his psychology, except insofar as it affects his mental state in the match.
DS: That makes sense. That answers one question I had about the work — usually, it feels like you’re more interested in interiority than you are here. I guess the last question was about the title. What did you feel it refers to beyond the obvious?
SK: Yeah. This was the main thing for me writing this. What exactly does he stand for? What is he defending? What I was thinking about, just in my life and watching the World Cup, is the way a very light, consumerist attitude has overtaken everything else, has become in effect the only way to be. So that’s why I chose to have Jović playing for a Balkan team. I wanted that juxtaposition of real death and suffering — not to mention real nationalist rivalries in the memories of some of the players — paired with the faux intensity of the Cup. It’s like his father says, “There used to be a time when there were things people cared about.” But then that’s only halfway. He needs to figure out what he’s really playing for, and that takes him until the end of the book.
DS: Very interesting. What about the decision to post this on Substack? Don’t you feel like people don’t really read fiction here?
SK: I’m getting a little tired of that question to be honest. Yes, people have trouble reading fiction online, but what am I supposed to do about that? I like writing and I like sharing with the tools at my disposal. Another of my beliefs about fiction is that it can be a lot lighter, and more responsive, than we tend to think it is. I started this after the World Cup began and wanted to finish and start sharing it before the Cup ended. If I was looking for a traditional publisher, then the text, in the best of all possible scenarios, would come out in, what, like two, three years? People can enjoy this now if they feel like reading it and not read it if they don’t want to.
Sam, there was a very good piece, years ago Granta 45, "Gazza Agonistes" on the brilliant if troubled lad Paul Gascoigne. Very much up your alley.