The first time Clara Mallon wrote a story, she wrote it only in her head. She was five years old, looking out the window at school. “I was narrating from a boy’s perspective,” says Mallon. “Imagining what it would be like to be on the ground, outside, as somebody else.”
Mallon grew up in London, though her family is Scottish. After getting her M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she arrived in Provincetown five months ago as a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. Here, as she did at five, Mallon is writing a novel in her head. Copious notes are part of that process, she says: on her computer, in journals, on large pieces of paper stuck on the walls.
“I know what the characters look like,” says Mallon. “I can see the setting.” It’s going to be a “very American” book, she says, set in a lush green Midwestern landscape.
The book, written from the point of view of more than one character, will depart from Mallon’s usual practice of writing from a first-person male perspective. One narrator is female. “She’s on the road with her lover shortly after her boyfriend is killed,” says Mallon. (They are two different characters.)
Mallon’s first novel, Dogs, to be published by Scribner in August, is narrated by a boy named Hal. “It’s a book about being a teenager,” she says, “and having friends.”
Mallon says she is interested in the way men behave and in the tailoring of their clothes. “I like their straight lines,” she says. “When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be clean and delineated in that way.” Mallon describes herself as “genderqueer.”
She’s especially interested in young men’s coming of age. “There’s a kind of attraction and threat and complexity there,” she says. “We have this idea of what a man is allowed to be. There’s a tendency to turn the masculine into a monolith — one that is overwhelmingly straight, white, violent, cruel, and oppressive.” There is an aspect of truth to that, she says. “But do we focus on that part to the detriment of the individual man?”
Mallon doesn’t write about the United Kingdom. “I don’t write about real places,” she says. Instead, she combines elements of her reality to make new landscapes, all set in America — more easily done with the “misty-eyed perspective” of an outsider in the American Midwest, taking in “the red rock and the big sky and the scale of everything.”
After getting a bachelor’s degree in American literature and creative writing from the University of East Anglia in England, Mallon wanted to study writing in America partly because she says the writing programs here are better than those in the U.K. but also because she doesn’t “write from life.” She’s never been a realist, she says. “Not a firm one, anyway.”
She was influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, and T.S. Eliot — authors of “sound and rhythm-led prose,” she says.
Mallon comes from a family with “a rhythm and a voice,” she says, everyone “deft with language.” Many are lawyers. Practicing law isn’t so different from theater, says Mallon, which isn’t so different from being a fiction writer. And in Scotland, where Mallon spent much time as a child, dramatic storytelling remains a tradition. Her mother recited Robert Burns’s poetry competitively all through school.
“There’s a lifesaving quality to being able to deeply express what you mean,” Mallon says. “Writing is the way that I talk to myself about myself.”
She remembers learning about onomatopoeia as a kid. “As I’ve gotten older,” she says, “I feel like everything is onomatopoetic. Everything sounds like what it is.” Words and sentences have shapes, she says. When those shapes fit together — or don’t — they make noise. “I think about collisions and impact, pain and violence,” says Mallon. “My work tends to be very dark and sort of brutal.”
In the middle of Dogs, Hal is driving into town with his friends “to go on a rampage.” Mallon reads aloud in a voice sick and heavy: “Kids in pajamas in all of their hot orange living rooms, watching cartoons on the carpet floor, cross-legged, dense little bodies full of milk and mashed potatoes, green peas and sandwich cookies, sliding past the windows in a spun sugar film reel. We were headed for the tracks.”
When the words are right, she says, a reader won’t have to work hard to understand their meaning. Their sounds and their meanings will refract, bouncing off each other like light from a prism. “Like a loop that reinforces itself,” says Mallon, “the meaning is amplified.”
In this part of Dogs, the boys are going to pick up drugs and go to the mall, says Mallon. “But Hal is thinking about killer whales.”
“I’d seen the killer whales on the television before,” she reads aloud. “Black rubber bodies all built to kill. Heavy and dense as a neutron star. All of that muscle. All power. I wanted a powerful body.”
The whales, with their “peg teeth,” are “built to withstand the fantastic black pressure,” she reads — the consonants clicking and slapping, the short “a” sounding wet and dark. “It had to be really quiet down there,” reads Mallon, and the sentence feels quiet, the word “down” sinking, the soft consonants in “there” murky.
“I think a lot about what it would be like if we used our teeth for everything,” says Mallon. “That very crunchy, tactile experience.” Writing can be physical like that, she says. She calls herself a maximalist, eager to luxuriate in language. “I have an idea that if I can select the right words, then I can convey something to another person exactly as I experience it myself.”
When she was working on Dogs in Iowa, Mallon’s peers didn’t always respond positively to the severity of her writing. In the novel, there’s trauma related to sexual abuse and its legacy — “and not a huge amount about how you might live in the aftermath of it,” she says.
Like Dogs, Mallon’s next novel will include pain. But the new project is also about “trying to live again” after trauma.
As the book takes shape in her mind, “I feel like I’m outside of a house, and it’s locked,” Mallon says. “I’m tapping on the door and looking in the windows.” She can’t get in yet, she says. “But I will.”
