By Glen Starkey
(New Times, San Luis Obispo, CA 19:42: May 26, 2005)

The most important thing you need to know about Susann Cokal’s new novel is that in it, in a somewhat small subplot, a 19th-century quack creates a cure for tuberculosis that involves electricity and a vibrating device … applied to you know where.

     “If that sounds crazy, think of the articles in magazines like Cosmo—orgasms seem to be the prescribed cure for just about everything that ails the modern woman,” said Cokal, a former Cal Poly English professor who now teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

     Okay, let’s just come out and say it. Susann Cokal, who I happen to know personally, is more than a little nutty. But her nuttiness translates into stunningly original and endlessly surprising works of fiction.

     I couldn’t put down her first novel, “Mirabilis,” which I gobbled up in large chunks over a couple days. Now comes “Breath and Bones,” about a dauntless tubercular Danish teenager who travels to the wild American West in search of her lover.

     Cokal, who engaged in an e-mail interview with New Times, will read this Thursday at Cal Poly.

New Times Your first novel, “Mirabilis,” was a truly weird book about a female protagonist — a nurse maid — who feeds a medieval village under seize with the bounty of her bosoms. To call the idea inventive seems a gross understatement, and yet you ground your novels in historical fact. Is truth stranger than fiction?

Susann Cokal “Truly weird,” eh? I think I’ll take that as a good thing. Truth is at least as strange as fiction, and ideas of truth change significantly over time. All but two of the “weird” happenings in Mirabilis have some empirical explanation, for those who want to look for it; the two exceptions are the elevation in the prologue (when invisible hands raise Blanche to the church rafters and sweep her three times around the nave) and what happens to Radegonde in the courtroom. Both of those events could be mass delusions, but in fact elevations like Blanche’s were reported pretty widely in the Middle Ages. People believed in miracles, and miracles were truth.

     As to contemporary life, I find our reality somewhat unsatisfying. When I love a book, it’s because the author has made me believe in crazy things that are just barely possible. The books I’ve loved in the past year or so are Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Elizabeth McCracken’s Niagara Falls All Over Again. Only the first of those is actually what’s called magic realism, but they’re all about pretty wacky, improbable things—or characters with improbable viewpoints—that the authors make completely believable.

New Times Your new novel, “Breath and Bones,” “blends pre-Raphaelite painting, American brothels, Utahan polygamists, a bit of cross-dressing, a dynamite-wielding labor movement, one California millionaire, and the invention of electrical stimulation (as treatment for consumption) into a comic novel that gallops across the American West.” What sort of factual research is this based on?

Susann Cokal I started thinking about this novel after my father died, when I was driving between Berkeley, where I was living, and New Mexico, where he’d died (there were a lot of things to take care of, as he’d gone unexpectedly, so I made that trip a lot; then my mother got sick, and I was out in New Mexico even more). My father used to love the old stories of the Wild West, the outlaws and trains and miners; I started telling myself stories that I thought both he and I would be interested in. I’d lived in the Southwest and California most of my life, so there were some things I just knew; I also visited countless local history museums and sites—I love the kind of museum where you pay a dollar or two and get to go in and look at dioramas of fake Barbie dolls mining turquoise and suchlike—and I read even more books about nineteenth-century art, Mormonism, mining towns, and so on. The books take up about sixteen feet of shelf space now, and that’s not counting what I checked out of the library and what I gave away when I moved to Virginia (it’s incredibly expensive to move books across the country, alas; I still miss some of them).

     Some of my research had to be jettisoned. Originally, I’d thought this was going to be a story primarily about my heroine, Famke, falling in with a band of orphans who’d commandeered one of the infamous “mercy trains”—the trains that moved scores of New York City orphans (or abandoned children) across the country under the protection of some well-intentioned man of the cloth. They’d stop at one town after another along the way, and the children would line up to see if the townspeople wanted to pick them. I thought it would be interesting if the ones who made it to, say, Des Moines got really angry at not being chosen, kicked the minister off the train, and began blowing things up. (You might guess junior high PE classes were painful for me.) I did a lot of research based on that idea, and I figured out ways it was just barely possible for those orphans to be driving their train over the rails, eluding all the yardmen and station masters … and then, once I had a complete manuscript, I discovered the novel had become something else and the orphan anarchists didn’t suit it tonally or thematically. So I threw away 120 pages, and the mercy train became a small but still key part of my plot. I replaced boy orphans with girl prostitutes, and the book was better for it.

     At one point I’d also had some notion that this would be a high-concept story in which each section took an old European fairy tale and saw it played out with Wild Western characters. The orphan anarchist section would be Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the Mormon patriarch would be a sort of benevolent Bluebeard; the crackpot doctor with his electrical “galvanic” device and invisible servants was to be the Beast of Beauty and the Beast. I think I made the right decision by keeping those notions very much in the background, but now that I’ve mentioned them you can probably see how they play out.

New Times This novel also has characters named Mormon Fitzhenry, Suky Rummell, and Madame Armstrong. Interestingly enough, the Cal Poly English faculty, where you used to work, includes a William Fitzhenry, Kathryn Rummell, and Mary Armstrong. Do the characters mirror these faculty members’ actually personalities?

Susann Cokal Yes, well, there is a bit of an inside joke. This novel has a huge cast of supporting characters—the Mormons, other immigrants, prostitutes, shopkeepers—and so I borrowed a couple of friends’ names. My editor says he doesn’t want to know about that, though … Well, I did check with just about every person to make sure it was okay; all of them were delighted. Some people even demanded that I use their names. And I must insist that I used only their names, not their personalities; any resemblance there is purely coincidental and not intended by the author, as we say. The Mormon is called Brother Nathan Fitzhenry, by the way; “Mormon Fitzhenry” is Dr. Rummell’s invention. Suky is Rummell’s dog, named after a famous literary prostitute—the name was just begging to be recycled.

New Times Publishers Weekly calls the book at “literary bodice-ripper.” As bodice-ripper conjures thoughts of grocery store paperbacks, is that a good thing or bad?

Susann Cokal I’ll admit that “bodice ripper” is not exactly how I think of B&B—after all, the heroine is usually naked and doesn’t have bodices to rip. When I think of that label, I like to emphasize the “literary” part of it. Then again, after my first novel, which has a pretty claustrophobic atmosphere, I wanted to write about someone who would travel a lot and have lots of, er, fun. Famke just didn’t turn out to be as strumpetlike as I expected. In some ways, I think Mirabilis is a sexier book. And I’d probably be pretty lucky to see one of my books in a grocery store: literature as nourishment, tra-la!