Molly

Available from Autumn House Press: Pittsburgh. 2022. $17.95, as well as independent bookstores and online. Winner of Autumn House 2020 Fiction Prize.

What I value most in the fiction I like to read is characters that truly engage me. I don’t need thousands of words of description to make me love a character. In the case of Kevin Honold’s characters Molly and Raymond, a few deft strokes are enough. Honold, a high school teacher in Santa Fe, brings to life an entire ecosystem and cast of characters in a spare, poetical style.

Raymond, a 9-year-old boy, lives in a trailer on a remote, barren mesa in New Mexico with Molly, the partner of his now-deceased uncle. Through bitter experience, Molly has learned to trust no one, yet she tries to nurture Raymond’s imagination and love of nature. Other than that, they have almost nothing to live on. This is a story of small miracles and heartbreak, and I swear you will never forget Molly.

Ramona: You were first a poet and essayist. What inspired you to take on the novel form?

Kevin: I’ve been trying to write fictional prose for a long time, more than 25 years, but nothing ever came of it until recently. What inspires me to use this form, I think, is just having a long and (somewhat) complex story in my head that won’t go away—something that really only fits the novel format.

Ramona: With fiction I'm looking for strong, quirky characters that surprise me. How did you conceptualize Molly, Raymond, Fargo, and the other characters? Which one did you start with?

Kevin: Molly was the first character to take shape in my head, and she was pieced together from elements of several people, Dr. Frankenstein-like. Raymond’s voice occurred to me from somewhere, though I don’t know where, and I was able to sustain it, more or less, for 180 pages. Fargo and the other secondary characters were also cobbled together from various personality traits of various people. The characters existed before the book, in a way. I switched out parts, then disguised them a little, which is a lot of fun. I imagine that people who do puzzles get a similar satisfaction.

Ramona: In the interview Traci Hales did with you on KSJE radio, you said you got the original "spark" for Molly when someone related to you their difficult childhood in New Mexico. People can have difficult childhoods anywhere. However, as in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, set in the Pacific Northwest, setting plays an essential role in Molly. You could say none of the main characters could act in the ways they did if they lived in more populous, "civilized" states, where there are more people to observe and pass judgment and more government oversight. Tell me why you wanted to set Molly in rural New Mexico.

Kevin: Housekeeping influenced me deeply in many ways. Having read Robinson’s book several times, my mind is filled with its voices and descriptions. I think a spare or austere landscape, with a human being in it, heightens the contrast and has a way of intensifying a character’s troubles and traits. This sounds intentional, but it’s not. The characters were drawn mostly from New Mexicans, so New Mexico was the setting. The big skies and the climate impose a certain economy and a discipline on people’s lives and on their habits of expression, and probably that infected the prose. Noise and busyness are just kind of unwelcome in certain places. But the place can only speak for itself, in the end. Having lived here, Ramona, you probably know what I’m trying (and failing) to say.

Ramona: Merriam-Webster defines “tragedy” as “a serious drama typically describing a conflict between the protagonist and a superior force (such as destiny) and having a sorrowful or disastrous conclusion that elicits pity or terror.” To me, the protagonist Molly's trajectory fits that definition. Do you agree? If so, did you see her from the beginning as a tragic figure?

Kevin: That’s a good, tough question. If we count a society that provides little protection to its most vulnerable members as a “superior force,” then the definition holds. But to me that phrase implies something supernatural—something outside human control at any rate. Although he does come with the weight of state authority behind him, at a time and place when there were fewer curbs on abuse of all kinds, the man that visits so much pain on Molly is just a man after all. Not a superior force, but a human being with the power to act with impunity. In the end, though, I don’t see tragedy here, only garden-variety human cruelty and its toll.

Ramona: Bruce Holland Rogers defines “magical realism” this way: “Magical realism is not speculative and does not conduct thought experiments. Instead, it tells its stories from the perspective of people who live in our world and experience a different reality from the one we call objective.” Do you think Raymond's phantasmagoric visions  are unhealthy mental processes or simply an isolated boy experiencing a different reality? Are such visions more likely to occur in an isolated, stark desert like NW New Mexico? What do Raymond's visions tell us about his reality?

Kevin: Thanks for sharing that quotation, which I had not read before. These visions come out of the fact that the past is not past, but lives in the land and its inhabitants. The visions come to Raymond because he walks out without motive or fear or intention. The presence of the past here is palpable, even to an outsider like me. It’s in the languages, in the churches, in the Pueblos that are among the oldest continually inhabited places in the hemisphere, and in the rivers and mountains. I’m not speaking metaphorically. It’s a real thing. More real than real. The past is the dimension that endures, unlike the present or the future. But you have to open your eyes and ears and heart to recognize it. Raymond could see things because he wasn’t sophisticated enough to not see. If I was going to give a character the talent for seeing, I had to take him out of school and make him nine.

“...the one we call objective”: I like that part of the quotation. That phrase of Rogers’s gets to the root of a lot of ugliness in the world. Ours is the disenchanted world; the clarity of vision that most philosophies and religions speak is just so much nonsense now, and any inclination to see things as they really are is generally beaten out of us before fifth grade. But Raymond has never been indoctrinated.

Ramona: What was your greatest challenge in writing Molly?

Kevin: Being certain that no one would take it seriously. The fact that you sent these questions reassures me on that point. Thanks, Ramona!

Ramona: What will your next book be?

Kevin: It’s a book about trees. But I don’t know a thing about trees. So it’s going to be difficult . . .