INTERVIEW: David Leo Rice by Ben Russell, The Void Is Where It’s At

Tommy Bruno spent his life in a tuxedo, selling popcorn.

I conducted this interview with David Leo Rice on a bench in Carroll Park in Brooklyn around midnight at the very end of summer. We discussed his new book The Squimbop Condition, which was serialized in the Southwest Review between 2021 and 2024, and has recently been published by 11:11 Press with illustrations by Jan Robert Duennweller.

-Ben Russell

Ben Russell: I have been a fan since reading The New House and Angel House. We just saw the movie Weapons. Like many recent films, it’s been given a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes or labeled as “the best horror movie ever,” when it clearly isn’t. Why do you think this “hyper-praising” (in all the arts) has been trending so hard the last few years? Seems fitting, since a large part of The Squimbop Condition deals with wanting to be part of history.

David Leo Rice: I think mainstream culture is in a historical malaise where it’s spinning its wheels and trying to deny this fact by wildly overpraising its own products, rather than admitting that it’s out of ideas and thus either needs to die and be reborn as something else, or open its doors much wider and let in a new set of people with a new set of ideas to break the cycle of mediocrity.

BR: Neil Howe’s Fourth Turning came to mind while reading your book. Cycles repeating themselves throughout history. Did this have a direct influence on you?

DLR: I hadn’t read The Fourth Turning until after the Condition was done, so not directly, but I’ve always been interested in structuring things along the lines of seasons of the year, as Howe does with his “seasons of history” concept. For this book, I was thinking, in terms of how the stories develop, that there should be a lot of repetition but never a full return. I’m interested in the disjunct between conscious repetition, like in a ritual where we deliberately invoke the past in order to remain in touch with it, and therefore also to gain some freedom from it, as opposed to unconscious or dishonest repetition, which is where arts and culture feel stuck now.

BR: I was recently reading about the Specious Present, that short period of time we assume is the present. A lot of your characters feel like they’re trying to grasp this present, but can never hold on to it.

DLR: They’re stuck in limbo. Maybe that is the “Squimbop Condition” itself. It’s something about the relationship between the audience and the performer; they are always out of sync with each other because the audience member, by trying to focus on the spectacle, becomes part of it, which is related to the idea of how there are always forces of prophecy pulling you into the future and nostalgia pulling you into the past. And so there’s a limbo or a lurch or a glitch, a present-tense space that doesn’t quite add up, which is where all the events of your life are happening.

BR: It’s an odd feeling of never touching the ground.

DLR: There’s always a disappointment that the world is not more fantastic, right? If you’re someone who lives in your imagination, you always want to add something to the world, or you feel like maybe the real world is fantastic, but then the world you’re living in isn’t fully real. It needs to be made real through some action that you take, by doing whatever you’re inspired to do. And there’s always a disturbance where you’re not quite rooted in your own life, not quite touching the ground, as you said.

BR: Susan Sontag says, “Never worry about being obsessive, I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.” Repetition is teeming throughout the Condition. Cycles and events repeat themselves, but in different places, much like an obsessive state in art and creation. Certain things may change, but that flame always relights itself. Once you reach the end, you start again. There’s never any burnout, or if there is, it just leads back to another routine.

DLR: Burnout can be a good thing. There’s a negative burnout that we all know about. But I think there’s also a good feeling where people talk about “How do you know when something’s done?” I feel like something is done when you can’t remember what you intended, and the only thing you can think of is what it’s turned into. Then you’ve burned out the fuel. It’s a bittersweet feeling, because you can never tell if you achieved your goal, because you can’t remember what your goal was. When you light a fire, you can’t remember what the logs looked like after a certain point. They’ve been turned into fire and then ash. The reward for working on a project long enough is that you burn up that fuel of the desire to work on it. And then, like you said, it grows again.

BR: When I first read Angel House, I was incredibly new to this world of literature, and it left me stumped, but in a great way. I felt like I knew what it was about, but could not articulate it, I just felt that moment of alignment. Maybe it was because I read it right after a massive shift in my life and was searching for answers when there weren’t any, much like the characters in AH who are trying to establish themselves in their town, a town which makes up the whole world. It is also our first introduction to Professor Squimbop, who reappears in the Condition.

DLR: Angel House is definitely a much earlier work. It has the kind of story that’s more typical of someone who’s starting out, because it’s about me seeking purpose or maybe feeling purpose, but then trying to see, can I turn this into a thing? And I hadn’t done that yet, when I started to work on that book in 2011. Whereas the Condition is the opposite. It’s about people who have a purpose, but they’re trying to see if they can still find individuality within it.

BR: The Condition revisits the events in Angel House, but it was done in a cool, meta kind of way. I enjoy when artists repurpose or abstract their own work, something we don’t see a lot of in the arts. It’s like finding the found object from your own archive.

DLR: The meta aspect here is literal in the sense that when I was writing Angel House, it didn’t exist yet. Writing it was just an idea that I was trying to develop. And then for a long time it was this nebulous mass of pages that didn’t have a final form or any certainty that it ever would. Whereas when I was writing the Condition, I could refer to Angel House as something that already existed “in my archive,” as you put it. And it was almost incidental that I had written it. The important thing was that it already lived out there in the world.

BR: Compared to Angel House, this one feels a bit more jaded. It asks us, does individuality actually exist?

DLR: My sense of that question is more complicated than it once was. In Angel House, I was sure that it did. Writing Angel House was a pure force of individual will, which is part of why it was so hard. I felt like I had to force my way into the world, against the world’s entropy—to “hammer myself into the world,” as a mentor of mine put it once. Now, in my late 30s, I feel less pressure to do that. The question now is more, how do you sustain it? Or what if that isn’t even the goal? What if you do what you dreamed of in your 20s, but that still isn’t the point? And maybe that’s a deeper hope here also, like there is something to aspire to that’s deeper than anything an individual might seek for themselves.

BR: Like the Mayor in Angel House, he’s so terrified to face a certain truth that he ends up destroying himself by forcing meaning onto his rituals. He doesn’t want to trust reality.

DLR: There’s a certain truth in life that’s obvious, but it’s also unspoken. Often the things you already know are weirdly also the things you go on a vision quest in order to not know, or in order to pretend to discover for the first time. We tend to think that our purpose is hidden and that we have to make a huge effort to find it. But in reality that fear is an avoidance mechanism because what is actually terrifying is that our purpose is obvious, but it’s hard to accept because it implies risk and hard work.

BR: A lot of your work has this sense of adventure. A “going into the woods” mythical feel. Some characters feel like they are just wandering through the “forest” and others feel like they are on a more direct path.

DLR: I’ve always been drawn to that feeling of adventure, and the question of whether it can be real or if it’s always a kind of wishful thinking. Any kid who loves to read comes to it through the love of adventure and enchantment that books can nurture. But nowadays, we feel that we live in a world that has shut off adventure, where there’s no true discovery. Travel is just tourism. You’re not gonna find a new continent or a new frontier. But I also wonder if sometimes we overvalue the idea of adventure for that exact reason, that we think it would be great to go out and discover something important–that life could be meaningful if only this were still possible–but it’s really a way of hiding from what we already know. It’s not hard to see what’s good or what’s meaningful in life, but we think we still need to go out and find it, because what we already know is hard to face. We act like there’s some original point, like Moses going up the mountain, that we can’t get back to anymore, so we content ourselves–though we’re not really content–with living in a second- or third-order world.

BR: That’s like the Primal Scene, which keeps coming up in the Condition. The beginning, the birth of the myth.

DLR: What if you could see the emergence of the Saga? The Squimbop characters are caught in this Saga, for better or worse. It imbues their lives with grandeur and crowd appeal. There’s some aura around them: people are excited about the Squimbops and want to be them, or want to see them and collect their memorabilia, but the anxiety that they feel is, where did this all begin? Why are we playing this role that we didn’t write and we don’t know who wrote it or why? The Primal Scene is the solid ground they can’t reach.

BR: As soon as you’re born, you are bombarded by all this shit, all this experience and influence from all directions. How do you sift through all of that to find the beginning?

DLR: And is the goal to get under that shit, to peel it away to see who you really are? Or is that shit the answer to who you are? I think about this in terms of the idea of Time versus our times. Because on the one hand, we all yearn for something beyond the present. It feels dumb that we’re just in 2025, letting the events of this time period fill our lives. It feels like meaning is either in the past or in the future. Or maybe meaning is off the map entirely. And yet at the same time, this moment is the only window we have onto whatever we want to see beyond it. It may be covered in shit, but it’s the only window we can look through if we want to see the world.

BR: Charlene Elsby, in an essay in your Cronenberg book, says something along these lines about how people love the future because it doesn’t exist.

DLR: People feel that there’s something they’re trying to escape from. It’s like the mind wants to escape the body. We want to regress to a pre-conscious or progress to a post-conscious state, but we’re stuck in the middle, “between beast and God,” as they say. I used to think that writing was about overcoming this middle and working toward transcendence, but now I feel it’s more about exploration and acceptance. Making do with what we have, but not seeing this as a loss of ambition or hope.

BR: We were talking before about how this new book feels like a capstone on a certain idea. A climax of some expedition for a reader. Has it led to any answers? Are you okay with just starting something new?

DLR: It’s definitely a capstone. Angel House was the beginning of this phase. I started it 15 years ago. And that led to Dodge City, which led to The New House and The Berlin Wall. The stories in Drifter were written behind the scenes of those novels. The Condition is a capstone on all of that, both personally for me and narratively within the larger world that all these books share. Angel House was the beginning of an ongoing story, and this is the end. As you said, this one has a sense of return and recursion, like a life review. The Squimbop routines are playing in an abandoned cinema, like the classics of something that’s been going on for a long time but that’s fading out now. Like a farewell to an entire culture, which is a spirit that’s in the air in America these days too.

BR: Speaking of the routines, the Brothers’ performances feel ritualistic to the point of OCD. Wherever they go, the act compulsively begins.

DLR: These routines are based on slapstick and silent comedy. If you think of people like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, everywhere they go, they’re doing the same routine. And if you read about their lives, it’s clear that these are guys who are hyper-competent. They’re incredibly skilled actors and directors. They are obsessive about physical space and their own bodies and objects and props and timing. And yet the humor of the performance is always about someone out of control. Somebody who’s constantly falling down and running into things and getting into trouble and not understanding the situation. There’s something interesting about geniuses playing fools. This is the essence of art in the sense of creating controlled chaos. Artists are usually people who perceive a high degree of chaos or entropy in the world and in themselves. And they fear it, probably for good reason–they see how things can just fall apart. So they seek out a laboratory, like scientists do, where they can control the conditions under which this chaos is unleashed.

BR: Do the Brothers represent order and chaos?

DLR: Together, they represent the possibility of some greater order–some intelligence shaping their antics into a coherent story–and also the desire to rebel against or profane that order, or to deny that there’s any such thing and just run roughshod over the map.

BR: That aspect reminded me of today’s world. People feel desperate to grab onto any sort of identity, like the MAGAs or super-fans of various shows or celebrities, and influencers. Everyone is desperate for some sort of guidance or answer, and they look in the worst places, it seems, rather than just taking responsibility for their own lives.

DLR: Maybe again it’s because it’s too hard. The truth always lies within, but it’s hard to look at. Once you take responsibility, you realize it’s a heavy burden. For many people, it feels like they’re desperate for someone to tell them what to do, how to think. People want some kind of leader. The zeitgeist in the 2020s is that some wave has receded and left us all stranded on the beach. It’s like the world died but had nowhere to go, so it just remained in an undead state, causing this strange, paralyzed era where it always feels like too much is happening and also nothing is happening, where we can’t stop moving and also can’t get anywhere. We can’t just sit still and face the present, and accept that it’s all we have. People are like, “If I don’t have something to immediately fill the void, the void will be terrifying.” But facing that void is the only way to come into your own as a person.

BR: The void is the source.

DLR: It may be the essence of everything. It’s an interesting question of what do you tell someone who’s grasping at straws and latching onto ideas that are obviously not making them happy, but who also doesn’t want to go on that void-journey? I don’t know what you can say, but somehow you have to think about what you already know that matters to you. Maybe it’s too scary to feel that time is precious and therefore there’s a perverse desire to waste time, so later on you can pretend that you never had a chance to spend your life well.

BR: That’s why I think the world actually can’t wait for AI to overtake us and do everything. Take away the fear of thinking. We already see it everyday, people drooling into their phones on the subways and streets, asking ChatGPT for advice.

DLR: If AI is our evolutionary successor, maybe at every stage of evolution, the beings that are being left behind are okay with that. AI can be part of history, so we don’t have to be–we can just watch from the sidelines. It’s why people vote for dictators too. People fear making decisions. People talk so much about how they want freedom and then almost always throw their freedom away.

This is true with writing as well, but in a positive sense. The creative project is, on the one hand, an expression of freedom. But at the same time, in order to actually do it, you have to renounce that freedom. Because the deadly freedom that every artist faces is the freedom to always do something else. At some point, you have to bind yourself to the thing you started if you want to finish it.

BR: I really wanted to ask you about Tommy Bruno, to whom the book is dedicated.

DLR: He was the concession man at the theater in Northampton, MA, where I grew up. I never knew him, but I discovered him in a photography book of notable Northampton characters, of which there were many. Tommy Bruno was the concessioner at this great old opera house called the Academy of Music, which was a movie theater when I was growing up. It had sculpture and fancy moulding and lush carpets and red curtains and opera booths, and this elegant, gilded concessions area. Tommy Bruno spent his life in a tuxedo, selling popcorn.

BR: The ideal human.

DLR: He was a heroic character. He looked like Mr. Burns. I love nothing more than people who know what they want. This goes back to the idea of purpose we were discussing earlier. I think it’s a mistake of a striving culture to think that everyone wants to rise to the top, to get as much prestige and money as possible. Some people love what they’re doing already. They live in the present. I don’t know anything about the real Tommy Bruno, but it might not be that he wished he was something else.

I feel that way about literature now too. Everything is apples and oranges, so it’s pointless to compare yourself to other people. All you can do is tend your own garden, your own little concession stand. You’re never gonna get much money or power or even much respect in the wider culture, but if you can live with that, then nothing can stand in your way.

BR: That’s what drew me to smaller presses and indie lit. Things have always felt truer on the “outskirts” and also more absurd. The two go hand in hand. It was basically finding people like Tommy Bruno, just truly doing what they want, expressing the ideas in their head not as some mode to get to the top, but just as a pure conversation with the void.

DLR: And that’s also part of the story of the wave receding. It happened over the course of our lifetimes. The idea of linear progress, in your own life or in society, ceased. The 19th and 20th centuries were very much about linear progress in America. But at some point that hit a wall or went through a funhouse mirror and everything turned into this phantasmagoria where no one knows what’s true or what’s good or what’s really happening, or why. Reality reasserted itself and turned out to not at all match the simplified definition of reality that Millennials were raised with.

Now, the idea that you would try to climb to the top of publishing is risible. This led to a great horizontal expansion of different kinds of presses that is about there not being a pole to climb. It really is what you see is what you get. There’s something very honest about it, since there’s no reason for any of these books to exist except their desire to exist. Maybe it’s a kind of vanguard movement to just embrace this crisis. I can’t fix it, but at least I can seize whatever freedom it makes possible. I’ll let my mind be empty of expectations for a while.

BR: It’s exciting in a way, in terms of untapped potential.

DLR: It’s like a second childhood, where we’re learning about the world from scratch all over again. There’s a weird hope beyond despair, like the way children get a second wind when they get overtired. It’s a jagged form of energy, but it’s something you can work with.

BR: Like almost dying and then coming back to realize there is nothing to be afraid of. I spent years in hardcore opiate addiction, which led to the edge of death. At a certain point one realizes the absurdity of suffering and there is a relinquishment of searching.

DLR: If you go close to death and return, it means you know it’s there but you don’t have to go over the edge right now. Death becomes part of your life, rather than the opposite of life. You no longer have to satisfy your own denial.

BR: You become okay with your impermanence.

DLR: You can believe in a totally controlled world, with a God who has a specific purpose for you and is making everything happen exactly the way it happens for that reason. Or you can believe the opposite, in a completely chaotic world with no rules and no limits and no good or bad, a world where you can just improvise and try things out. Either of these is a better mindset than being stuck in the middle, where you feel as though there’s no guiding principle but also you’re fighting everything that happens and constantly disappointed when your plans don’t work out.

BR: It’s like you gotta choose one or the other or both. Maybe you can have both, but not neither.

DLR: Right, you can’t just linger in between. When I was younger, I wanted to “get somewhere” in life. But now, I don’t know, I have a feeling that as long as I follow my gut, that’ll be the path. If you find obsessions that are pulling you, then you owe it to them to go where they’re going, to not put your foot down or your head up too much.

BR: It’s just getting more in touch with intuition rather than planning everything out.

DLR: When you’re actually working on a book, you have to be thinking about what’s happening moment to moment, not what the end goal is supposed to be. The only thing a novel should “say” in the end is “here I am.”

BR: My favorite books are ones that abstract our crazy existence and revel in the strangeness of life. I wanted to end with this line from the Condition: “Here the Brothers remain, fighting to the death for the right to use the word I.” It feels like in the world right now, people are desperate to be a part of that history and to claim their place as individuals.

DLR: Yeah, maybe we’re moving into the post-crowd era. DeLillo had this whole thing of how the future belongs to crowds. But his big books are from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. That period was about people coming together into mass movements in the mass media era, or the beginning of what people thought the internet era would be. But we’ve come through that now, into some era of degraded individuality, where everyone’s building their own cave, creating their own illusions, but with tools provided by massive corporations. Like we were talking about before, people recoil from the void and end up backing into an even worse void–a truly sterile void, with all meaning synthesized into a demonic facsimile of itself.

BR: This might be a good last one: “I’ll never forget that it is the Golden Age for everyone else, that by which all past and future generations will define themselves according to their distance. But never for you, you can never reach it because you’re already here.” I feel like that pretty much sums it up.

DLR: We were texting before about how the “Golden Age” story is meant to be elegiac. All the other stories are trying to refer to it, and yet that story is already about the Brothers leaving the Golden Age behind. With the Golden Age, if you picture the golden glow, it’s always in the distance, like the sunset. It’s always somewhere else. You’re never in the sunset exactly. It’s ironic, because the fantasy of the Golden Age is that of a pure present, a moment you’d never want to and never have to leave, but it only exists in the past or the future.

BR: It’s only preserved in the Squimbop Media Center.

DLR: Right, and that’s related to how this book is a capstone of my other books. The Media Center is the museum of all of them. It’s where all these different projects are stored, in rooms full of gadgets and souvenirs, like a movie studio shutting down and making a museum of all the props and posters and costumes from its heyday. Hopefully I’m not shutting down, but I do feel like some very productive phase has concluded.