Moondogs barking in the tropical sunshine

There aren’t many novels by foreign authors set in the Philippines. There’s Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson’s massive, genius novel about a crypto-hacker who plans to build a data haven in the Philippines. The description of the protagonist’s walk from the Manila Hotel to Luneta tells us that the author was in town to research his location.

The Blue Afternoon, a novel by the British author William Boyd (A Good Man In Africa), is set in Manila at the turn of the 20th century, but we’re not entirely convinced he was here. Years ago we heard that Brian De Palma wanted to do a film adaptation — Mr. De Palma, call us. The Tesseract, Alex Garland’s novel set in Manila and reportedly written in Quezon province, was adapted for film (Yay!) but relocated to Bangkok (Booo…).

Now there’s Moondogs, a novel about the kidnapping of an American businessman in the Philippines that readers have described as “Tarantinoesque.” For starters the perps are a taxi driver on meth and an evil rooster, and the crack force that is out to find them is endowed with supernatural powers. That sounds Pinoy all right, but how well does the author, Alexander Yates, know the Philippines? Has he even been here?

Oh yes, Alexander Yates has been here. He lived here, went to high school at IS Manila, and worked as a contractor in the US Embassy, where his job included reading stacks of Philippine newspapers dating back to the early years of the Marcos era. We spoke to Yates at the 32nd Manila International Book Fair, where he was one of the featured authors.

PHILIPPINE STAR: When did it occur to you that your novel would be set in the Philippines?

ALEXANDER YATES: At the point that I started writing, Manila was the city I knew best. I’m an American and when I went to the University of Virginia, people looked at me and assumed a certain level of shared experience. Which is nonexistent in my case. They talked to me about college football as if I knew whom I should like and dislike and as if I knew the rules. I had this weird sense that I had left home and come to a place that should’ve been my home but wasn’t. Then when I went back to Manila it was the same thing all over again. I don’t know if I was just less stupid or more mature, but obviously I’m not a Manileño. You have an experience of this city that I will never be able to access. It’s kind of my hometown, but I’m an insider and an outsider here.

2004 was a complicated time to be an American overseas. I was working at the embassy, and nothing will make you feel more like a foreigner than going to work behind four levels of gates. (Moondogs) came out of the sense of feeling at home but not out home, but also the very specific f*ed up summer of 2004, which was fertile ground of fiction.

Why are there so few novels written about the Philippines when it is a treasure trove of strange stories?

It’s bizarre to me that the Philippines is not more alive in the American popular imagination. I think it’s because (America’s) adventures in the Philippines do not speak to the country we tell ourselves we are. Colonialism is taught in the World History class, not in the American History class. We don’t like to see ourselves as colonizers of a foreign country, or people putting down a rebellion.

But particularly in 2004 when people were using the same words like “benevolent hegemony” in Iraq. In 1902 the US Congress passed “benevolent assimilation” for the Philippines. The same words!

There is no more fertile ground for fiction than Manila in particular and the Philippines in general. It is strange how pathologically overlooked it is. Especially in America, a country with a shared history. We do a good job of acknowledging that in the embassy, but in the US there is no collective reckoning of that part of our history. As there is no full reckoning of our adventures in Vietnam or our continuing adventures in the Middle East.

You were in the MFA (Creative Writing) program at Syracuse University. Did you workshop your novel there?

The cliché is that you can’t workshop a novel, only stories, but at Syracuse I did the novel all the way through. Everyone was very understanding, but they don’t do novels, only stories.

George Saunders was a fantastic reader. Have you read George Saunders (Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation)? He is a super genius, a rocket-powered freaking genius. He was able to look at my draft, circle a word, and diagnose a problem in my soul. He’s not workshopping you, he’s workshopping your character.

He’ll circle here, here, and here, and say, “This is where you’re being a coward, and this is why. This is what you’re avoiding. You’re not writing what you should be writing, because as a young male writer you don’t want to be vulnerable. You wanna be Raymond Carver, minimalist. You’re not saying stuff because it’s meaningful, you’re not saying stuff because you’re too scared to say it.” I adore that man.

Did you do a lot of rewrites?

I wrote the novel straight through, then I redrafted each storyline as its own novel several times. I lost count of the number of drafts, but I wrote about 6,000 pages.

Did you follow a routine?

With the first novel you’re teaching yourself how to write a novel. Once I knew what Moondogs was about I was really good at setting a schedule. Usually from 9 to 7, just powering through. I didn’t get up unless it was to pee or get water. I could do that when I had a to-do list and a blueprint of where I was going.

After the first novel you have to ask yourself the same questions: Who am I? What am I saying? Why am I saying it? With my next novel I’m still in the discovery stage: What it is, what it sounds like, what happens. It’s harder to power through that because you can’t just make it happen.

When you were in high school in Manila where did you hang out?

I was a theater nerd with a lot of Pinoys and international kids. My best friend was Pakistani. I’m musically deformed but I liked to hang around with the band kids. On Jupiter Street there used to be a place called H2O — I don’t think it had a very long tenure as a hot spot. Singapore Sling, which used to be by Friday’s in Glorietta — we used to go there on weekends, and that’s where I asked out the girl who became my wife (They were classmates in Psych at ISM; she’s Finnish). San Mig. In my senior year The Fort was going up and there was this place called Fat Willy’s.

What was it like, seeing Moondogs in store windows for the first time?

Gratifying and terrifying. I didn’t realize until the book came out that it would be scary. If you’ve written something that’s meaningful to you, you’re in it. To a big extent the flaws of the book, I will acknowledge, are flaws of mine. The flaws are places where I didn’t challenge myself to fully examine my own assumptions. So when people are judging the book, they’re judging me.

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Moondogs by Alexander Yates is available at National Book Stores.