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Chris Knapp’s debut novel, States of Emergency, carries with it a sense that the narrator is both of the chaotic world and also an objective observer of it.
States of Emergency is rich with beautiful sentences and self-aware reflections on modern life, and is extremely of our time and timeless in its exploration of identity, the frustrations and malaise that come with conception issues, and of those who want to do right for each other and by each other but find much resistance inside and outside the home.
I spoke with Chris about writing a book that takes place in such a recent past, writing about a marriage buffeted by larger societal forces and inner turmoil, and so aptly capturing a pivotal time rife with climate emergencies, political emergencies, and so many of the other vagaries of surreal modern life.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Pete Riehl:
I wonder about some of the seeds for the book; unfortunately [there was] so much generative material from the beginning of Trump’s campaign, and you start the book in the summer and fall of 2015 during this incredible heat wave. The most depressing statement ever, you’ve probably heard it: something to the effect of Summer 2023, Summer 2024, as “the coldest summers of the rest of your life.”
I went to Italy in 2003, and I remember it was the hottest summer in Italian history and I know it’s been eclipsed multiple times. You write about the narrator and his wife, Ella, going through this heatwave in Paris, with the narrator describing 15,000 dying from a heatwave in the recent past.
I wonder about starting the book with this heat wave, which is so indicative of a chaotic world.
Chris Knapp:
So many things happening at that moment felt unprecedented and I felt like we were really reaching this boiling point in history. Then, as you say, it turned out that it actually was just going to keep getting worse and worse, yes, and keep getting hotter and hotter.
That heat wave that’s described in the book really was [what it was] like in Paris. Paris is not a really hot place-nobody has AC and it was so hot. It just felt crazy to be in Paris and it felt like so many things in that moment-like the sign of the apocalypse. Then, yes, it turned out Oh, no, next summer is going to be worse, and the summer after that’s going to be worse.
The same thing’s true in basically every sphere. It’s like Brexit, [where many] thought, okay, here’s the boiling point before things go back to normal, [Hillary] Clinton gets elected and some kind of order and stability is restored in the world, and then it turns out, Oh no, actually, the direct opposite.
Pete Riehl:
Ella and the narrator are going through the fertility procedures-well, she’s going through the fertility procedures. One of her quotes alludes to this idea of hope as dread, which I thought was really interesting. You so skillfully depict this time waiting, this in-between time, waiting hopefully for a pregnancy.
Ella talks about body disassociation, which we can only guess at as males, but you really describe so well. The narrator thinks, If I do find out that she’s pregnant, I’m 3000 miles away (in Virginia). I’m intrigued by your sketches of the fertility procedures and the waiting and the in-between times.
Chris Knapp:
One of the things that distinguishes Ella and the narrator is the way that they experience hope, and I started to create this distinction in my mind between hope and optimism.
Optimism is this thoughtless assumption that things are going to turn out okay. I think that characterizes the narrator’s relationship to the future, at least at the beginning of the book, and that’s the same assumption that yes, things are getting weird, but everything’s going to go back to normal and we’re going to have the world that we thought we had in the future that we thought we were waiting for, where incrementally the forces of history lead us to a better and more just world.
I think hope is the way that Ella relates to the future. And the distinction in my mind is that hope requires a lot of courage. That’s what this fertility struggle is about. It’s that the amount of courage and the amount of bodily implication that are required of her are totally different from the narrator, where he gets to experience it as this abstraction.
She has to have all this stuff taking place inside her body and her physical, emotional, and psychological well-being is all on the line in this very real, very concrete way. For me, it just was this useful manifestation of their two different ways of existing in the world.
Pete Riehl:
In a totally non-judgmental way, but a totally true way, you as the writer and Ella as the character remind the narrator, “Hey, you can’t know my pain. It’s not your fault, but don’t pretend like you can.”
There are larger implications later on with her being from the African diaspora, from Martinique. The narrator sort of co-opts some of the stories she tells about growing up and the injustices faced. Then he describes Paris to his friends in Virginia, and he maybe makes it sound a little bit more dangerous than it is, as if seeking some kind of external validation.
Ella at one point expresses something to the effect of “Hey, you seem to care about injustice in the abstract, but my personal story, bodily function and the manifestation of it, you may not be so interested.” Is that a safe way to put it?
Chris Knapp:
I think that’s right. I think one of the things she says is she wants him to feel his own pain about what’s going on. She’s kind of saying, “Hey, this is happening to us, and you can witness my pain and you can demonstrate compassion for it, but you can’t feel it.
She also wants him to be supportive and say all the right things and comfort [her], and rub [her] feet or whatever, but it doesn’t give [her] any kind of solace to be thinking that [her] pain is just something for [him] to deal with. She’s saying, “If I weren’t here, you would just kind of be fine.”
Pete Riehl:
I wonder where the title comes from. There’s a point when the narrator is waking up to a loudspeaker from a nearby elementary school, like a public address announcement, and he can’t ascertain what kind of emergency it is, but he’s resigned to thinking, Great, what is it now?
There is this sense of immediacy where he’s literally close to this elementary school. I think of it as being akin to the Muslim call to prayer or to a place where there’s a public square and things are happening in a frenzied manner
With the timing of the book, I also think of Charlottesville, Virginia [where a 2017 white supremacist rally killed Heather Heyer and chilled much of the world]-like you said, so much was going on. I wonder about that type of environment and the title referring to these “states-plural-of emergency.”
Chris Knapp:
The thing about the PA thing at the elementary school nearby is that I think he’s kind of waking up in this foggy, half sleep and it’s actually just the morning announcements. It’s like just the ordinary business of the school, but blaring on this PA coming through the woods or whatever, it sounds like an emergency, and there’s this kind of dystopian feel to it.
I think that was very much a kind of sensation of that period. Suddenly all of the ordinary business of life was starting to feel like an emergency. It was starting to feel like things were going a little bit sideways. And at any moment, someone might come along with a bullhorn and start directing us to evacuate our homes or these kinds of things.
It’s part of [the narrator] becoming alert to these things that are in the air, and so he starts to see emergencies everywhere he looks and the emergencies that he sees maybe in some cases aren’t even really out of the ordinary.
Pete Riehl:
You reference that series of tornadoes [it was the deadliest December for tornadoes in the U.S. since 1953] that ripped through the Midwest and the South around that time.
Chris Knapp:
Yes, everything just felt like a sign of the apocalypse.
I think that [the title] points to a central question of the book. Raven Leilani had this great thing in n + 1 recently, about writing through grief. She references writing in order to access one’s emotions, including during times of grief. The narrator is hurting, but I think unlike Ella, he needs to write in order to access his emotions.
For him, writing is almost a tool, his way of feeling his emotions. I think that Ella’s really skeptical of that stance, especially in the moment she discovers this notebook where he’s been writing all this down about her grief and his grief. To her, it feels like [he’s] just making this into an aspect of [his] identity and [he’s] making it into this kind of brush with authenticity.
We were talking about authenticity before, and I think that that’s important and I think she’s right. I also think it’s this legitimate way of processing grief, accessing emotion and making sense of what’s happening to him and hopefully doing so in a way that might be useful in the world.
Pete Riehl:
This book fits both criteria for “historical fiction,” even if the events depicted were only eight or nine years ago. I’m so impressed by how you write about something that was not that long ago, and you write about it with as much clarity as possible. I’m curious about perspective: do you feel like this is a different book if you write it in 2030 versus the more recent years? With literally not a lot of time between the events and book’s writing, how was this a benefit and maybe how was it a drawback?
Chris Knapp:
I was writing it like even closer to these events than we are right now. I finished the first draft of the book in 2018, so all this stuff was really fresh. A lot of it, I was just kind of writing in real time almost, and I went back and sort of revised it during the first phase of the pandemic.
An important aspect of the book was that question of perspective, because now [the narrator’s] on the other side of a lot of the stuff that he didn’t know was coming when the book chronologically ends, and he’s looking back at all these notes that he took. He’s kind of looking at this version of himself that’s still innocent.
To your question about what will this read like in 2030 or in 2040, a lot of that depends on what happens between now and then, and a lot of that depends on what happens between now and November [the November 2024 elections had yet to happen when the interview took place].
Pete Riehl:
Like you said, it’s definitely going to read differently [in future years] and I guess that’s probably true for almost every book. I‘m wondering how the book would be different, if there were, say, 14 years between events, rather than two or three?
Chris Knapp:
I think it’s just a matter of remembering what were the things that made an impression on you and I guess maybe the real answer is that you just have more data you can look back on. Something that seemed innocuous at the time that wouldn’t strike you as particularly freighted with meaning-maybe something you caught on the news or a headline or something someone said in a bar-with the distance of, say, 14 years, you now have all these things that have happened since, and all of a sudden that one moment resonates in a different way.
This interview is excerpted from Episode 255 of the Chills at Will Podcast. Listen to the complete conversation here.
