Conversation with Alexander Yates, Author of Moondogs
"A man and a rooster exit a taxi idling on a crowded street."goes the first line of Moondogs, Alexander Yates' novel set in the Philippines. The local language and descriptions sound authentic enough to be written by someone who knows the Philippines, yet there is enough perspective of an outside observer's point of view. The novel reads like a movie with an ensemble cast of characters and their interwoven relationships, and their roles and reactions to the kidnapping of an American expat.
Here is our conversation from the first event from Alexander Yates' Manila book tour, held at Power Books Greenbelt.
One of your characters
did not like food stewed in vinegar and spaghetti in sweet sauce with hotdogs.
Do you feel the same way?
I like Filipino food. The trip has been less than a day and
I’ve eaten chicken adobo, garlic rice, kilawin ng tanigue
What is it about the
Philippines that inspired you to write a novel?
The Philippines and Manila are very important to me. I moved here when I was 15. This is the
city that felt like home for me. I
met the woman who would become my wife in International School Manila. When I went to college in the
States, I had never lived in the United States before. When I went to the
United States, people expected that they could say the name of a football team
and I should know what that was, why it was important and why I should know
that person. I had some culture
shock when I went there. When I
came back to the Philippines after graduating I had the sense that I was
returning home. Of course when I
got here I had to reckon with the fact that it was not really my home and it is
still alien to me in a lot of ways. It’s that sense of dissonance--seeing
Manila as home and longing for it as home, and being an outsider.
What are the most
memorable experiences you had from studying or working in Manila and did any of
those appear in the book?
There is no autobiography at all in the book. I have a great relationship with my
parents. But there is a lot of
emotional biography in it—dealing with questions of cultural identity and trying
to figure out where they fit in. The experiences in Manila that affected me
most are my high school career and my friends. I loved International School Manila. I had a fantastic high
school drama teacher who put me in a few plays. An English teacher read the first novel I wrote while I was
in IS, and gave me notes and comments and was very encouraging. My teachers invigorated a passion for
the arts.
Are any of the
characters based on real people? How about the character who was an actor who
played a politician who became a politician?
They are certainly inspired by real people. Everything in
the book comes out of my life, what I’ve read and what I’ve seen. The process of fiction writing is
taking the raw material of life and making it into something.
What is the
significance of Moondogs and why did you choose that to be the title?
The first time I saw a Moondog was in Manila. I looked up
and there was this big halo around the moon. It is caused by
ice in the upper atmosphere and the moon’s light refracting through it. There was a big beautiful lunar halo
and there were flares of light on each side, and it struck me as being
preposterously beautiful. I called my girlfriend to come out and see it with
me.
One of the characters early in the book looks up and sees a
moondog. I realized that the novel was working that way. There was a lot of stuff going on
around a core, so Moondogs felt like an appropriate title.
There are several
plotlines in the book. Who are your favorite characters and what relationships do they have with each other?
It has been pointed out to me that some of the characters
are jerks. They are all struggling, but not winning the struggle. They have “being jackass” issues. Some
people have said the characters are surprisingly sympathetic or perversely
sympathetic. I really care for all of them.
Monique and Joseph
The character that is closest to me is the American Embassy
employee in the book. She was
raised in Subic Bay because her father was in the navy. She has never felt at home in the
States. She gets a job in the Foreign Service and works in the American Embassy
in the Philippines with a sense that she is going to a place she understands,
an idealized version of home. The
Philippines of her memory is not the Philippines. It’s a little girl’s
Philippines: a yard and a few special people. She goes seeking a nanny. She arrives, does not get that sense of
home and she feels lost.
Her husband is a Trailing Spouse. He gave up a job in the States to go with her and he does
not handle the transition well.
Benicio and Howard
Benicio is to some extent the main character. He is the
young man who looks for his father in the Philippines. They have not spoken for
5 years. His father was unfaithful
to his mother and Benicio found out about it. There was an enormous flight. They kinda sat on the issue as people do. They never got around to making
up. In the opening of the book,
Benicio’s mother has recently died.
He reconnected with his father at his mother’s funeral and decided to
spend some time together. His father lives in Manila. He is a hotelier whose company manages resorts. Benicio travels to the
Philippines to spend the summer. When he arrives, his father is missing. He initially
thought his dad was just being the dad he knew—too busy, not available. But it
is revealed that his father was kidnapped.
Reynato
Reynato is the celebrity policeman. His exploits are
chronicled by the media. He is
based on the characters that Estrada would play--the tough guy, Dirty Harry
macho archetype. He has no aspirations to be an actor or a politician. There have been a series of movies
based on his life. There is an
actor who plays him in the movies, and who is running for the Senate when the
book opens. Their relationship is
full of friction because the actor is trading on his likeness to gain
credibility.
Reynato runs a police task force that is assigned to rescue
Howard.
Task Force Ka-Pow
The task force members all have super powers. They have one
foot in X-Men land. They are not heroic and they only have conceptual powers. One
guy is just unlucky and soaks up the bad luck from everyone else. Another guy can do magic for real, but
only cliché magic tricks. He can
pull a coin out of his ear, and can saw a woman in half and put her back together. There’s a character that can turn to
any animal he has seen. A new recruit, Efrem, can shoot anybody wherever they
are just by knowing their exact location.
Can you tell us about
the social commentary in the book?
In 2004, kidnapping felt urgent and salient and was in the
media constantly. A Filipino truck driver was kidnapped in Iraq which caused
the Philippines to pull out their troops.
In the opening of the book, a taxi driver has a crime of opportunity: a
wealthy American, who is a little drunk steps into his cab late at night. Everything is set up for something to
go very wrong. I have this American in the car.
Clearly, the thing to do is to sell him to terrorists. The 2 bumbling criminals are reacting to
the media narrative. They are steeped in international news. Then to keep the victim quiet, they put
a booming television in the room, and it is turned on to the news so he is also
imprisoned by a larger narrative.
Your characters are
very real. How did you create them?
I wrote the characters one by one. If you unthread the novel,
you can read each character as his own short novel. I would spend six months just doing Efrem and another six
months just doing Monique. The
content comes first , voice comes much later after a slow process of figuring
out what the character sounds like. I need to do my due diligence, making sure that every character has its own breath and that no character is enslaved by something I want to say.
What is next for you?
I am teaching writing at George Mason University. I am working on another novel, a ghost
story based in Finland where my wife is from. I am also putting together a
collection of short stories. My wife joined the Foreign Service so we are moving to Rwanda in the spring.
What books have
influenced you?
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This
book changed my life. It is so genius, so beautiful that I don’t know why I
even bothered writing a novel. Midnight’s
Children by Salman Rushdie has superheroes yet is a serious book. I didn’t know
writers can do that. I was also moved by Filipino authors. I am a huge fan of
George Saunders—he is a genius. He writes short stories about post apocalyptic
theme parks. When I moved to the Philippines, my Father gave me Gagamba by F. Sionil Jose. Moondogs is also a tribute to Gagamba where different characters react to a singular shared event, an earthquake.
At the end of the conversation, I got my book signed with a note I was thrilled to read. And I got all 4 stamps of the woodcuts designed by Rebecca Cullers and cut by Emily Bender. Each chapter starts with the symbol of the character featured in it. Can you guess who is represented by the gecko, the rooster, the crescent moon and the sun? Moondogs is available in National Book Store and Powerbooks.
Follow Alexander Yates on Twitter @TheOtherYates
