Joy Castro’s much anticipated new novel Flight Risk—which Before I Go to Sleep author S.J. Watson calls “a deftly intelligent literary thriller”—was the subject of our recent interview with Joy here at Occhi. Joy’s previous work—literary thrillers, essay and story collections, and a memoir—have garnered numerous awards, including the Nebraska Book Award, an International Latino Book Award, and a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. Joy is a Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
In running away from her past, your protagonist, Isabel Morales, runs away from some essential part of herself as well. Is it possible to specify what that is?
Yes: the vulnerable part, the scared part, the part that needed to be nurtured and protected but wasn’t. The part that could be hurt. For Isabel, that’s associated with the poverty and degraded, polluted, coal-mined environment of West Virginia, where she grew up—where the land, too, was abused and exploited rather than being protected and nurtured.
I think it’s interesting that Flight Risk is coming out just as West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin is telling the entire nation what we can and cannot expect in terms of nurture and protection—and he’s doing so for his profit and the astronomical profit of all who benefit from fossil-fuel extraction industries. Links between the micropolitical and macropolitical intrigue me quite intensely.
What is the significance of the Six Swans fairy tale in your novel?
When my brother was very little, he would sometimes begin a monologue with, “When I was a crow…” and then tell the wildest, strangest stories as if they were absolutely true—as if he were simply narrating some recollected, recent, utterly ordinary experience. (Children are magical realists par excellence.) That’s why “Six Swans” came to mind when I was drafting this story, for the character Charlie in the novel is based upon my little brother, whose caregiver I was from a very early age.
Despite their deservedly criticized toxicity for women, I’ve always been seduced by the neat symmetries and enchantments of fairy tales—the radical metamorphoses they promise—and I love the ways that writers such as Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi, and Carmen Maria Machado take classical fairy stories and spin them on their heads, revealing exciting new elements of tales we thought we knew.
“Six Swans” is an unusually long, ungainly narrative about a girl’s love for her brothers—one brother in particular—as well as her enforced silence, work, and endurance. All of that resonates with Isabel’s story. “Six Swans” also has a deeply weird mother-in-law, as does Flight Risk. “Six Swans” explores what happens after the happily-ever-after promise with which most fairy tales end, and it reveals that what follows can sometimes be quite grueling.
I was trained as a scholar of modernist literature, in which 20th-century writers often used quite ancient archetypes—Homer’s Odyssey, the Grail myth—as scaffolding for contemporary explorations of interiority. I like the richness and challenge of that kind of literary game—but I like to keep it very subtle, very effaced, so that it doesn’t interfere with the narrative—so I’ve done that in my novel Hell or High Water, which draws upon imagery from Santería, and here in Flight Risk with a fairy tale that’s not quite as well-known as some others.
Isabel creates her artwork by combining odd objects—“sun-bleached spines of pigeons, small rusted springs, a torn strip of satin-banked mink”—that she finds in the streets. How did you decide that her creativity would manifest itself in this way?
One of the things I wanted Flight Risk to do was to respond to a couple of fictional narratives that, when I was first conceptualizing the story, had been recently published about women who become artists: Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs (2013) and Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014). While I enjoyed and admired those books tremendously, I wanted to explore what might happen when a female artist, already marginalized due to gender, doesn’t even have access to whiteness and middle- or upper-class wealth, as the protagonists of those novels do—that is, what happens when there is no network of prestigious connections, no inheritance at just the right moment, and so on.
Latinx, poor, and born and raised in Appalachia, Isabel is the opposite of an insider, and I wanted her art itself to physicalize that reality, so she works in the mode of scavenging and transformation: finding discarded, unwanted objects and reshaping them into beauty and meaning. This parallels the way she has transformed herself, too, into the kind of easily consumable beauty and status object she thinks people want. She’s doing her best with what she’s got within two milieux—the mainstream, whitestream, wealthy, male-dominated art world, along with her husband’s old-money Chicago society friends—that actively devalue everything she is.
This kind of art also poses a kind of mystery in images. The story of Isabel’s past—her trauma, her grief—is right there, laid out in objects, but because it’s not expressed in language, it’s illegible to viewers. She’s playing a kind of hide-and-seek, but she doesn’t actually want to be found.
Finally, Isabel is pursuing in her work what theorist Jack Halberstam calls “an aesthetics of collapse.” She’s fascinated with ruined and neglected buildings, places that nature is reclaiming. In her artwork, she’s trying to wrest some kind of logic and create some kind of beauty from the chaotic refuse of the rich.
There’s symmetry in the fact that Isabel explores her world by inspecting detritus on the street and her husband Jon, a doctor who specializes in x-rays and ultrasounds, explores his by looking into people, “reading their insides.” Both characters are highly observant. Is this part of what draws them together? Or is it what pushes them apart?
Yes—and yes! That’s a very astute parallel: both Jon and Isabel are extremely observant, which also makes them extremely sensitive. Though they’re both well-meaning and generous, they’re also both wounded by having been commodified, controlled, and exploited in the past—Isabel for her beauty, Jon for his wealth—and those prior experiences put them on their guard. They mistake each other’s intentions, and then their suspicions flare. Their trust ebbs and their marriage becomes an emotional minefield.
Over the course of years, Isabel becomes the kind of person her mother would loathe. She tells the reader this is a source of pride. Should we believe her?
Oh, I’m fascinated that you read the line that way! I read it as expressive of Isabel’s quite lacerating self-critique—almost self-disgust—or at least ruefulness because while she keenly appreciates the luxuries of wealth, she well knows how the working-poor people she comes from would despise the pettiness, obsession with status, self-indulgence, and complacency that often attend it. She still has their voices in her head, which makes it impossible for her to lapse with unthinking pleasure and relief into the socioeconomic class she now occupies. She loves the luxuries of her new life, but she also despises herself for loving them, and she cannot settle on a stance toward them or toward herself. Locating Isabel’s unease in the specific objects of her life—clothing, food, shelter—is a way the book can organically offer a political critique of capitalist wealth without turning into a leftist lecture.
With Flight Risk, I wanted to problematize not only the happily-ever-after narrative of marriage but also the happily-ever-after narrative of class mobility, of having successfully achieved all that the American Dream instructs us to strive for and desire. To paraphrase Faulkner, closure’s not quite so neat; it’s not even closure.
When Isabel, who has grown up in poverty and under a dark cloud of secrets in Appalachia, moves to New York, she becomes acquainted with Magda, a Spanish-speaking Cuban woman who sells plantains on the street. Given the limitations of their relationship, can you explain the great sense of loss that overtakes Isabel when she learns that Magda has died?
Yes. Isabel grew up hungry, literally and figuratively, with a mother whose nurturance was intermittent due to poverty and her own troubles. As a product of her mother’s brief liaison, she also grew up without any knowledge of half her heritage. So when Magda, who represents both latinidad and maternal care, is kind to her and feeds her good food, Isabel becomes very attached—without quite realizing it, until she learns of Magda’s death. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
Another person Isabel meets in New York is Saqlain, a wealthy businessman from the art world, who offers to become Isabel’s mentor—for a cost. Does Isabel leave this relationship feeling she got her money’s worth?
Saqlain inducts Isabel into a transactional economy in which she realizes that she’s valued not for her talent, her ideas, her art, but simply because she’s young, beautiful, and fuckable. For that scene in the sushi restaurant when Saqlain outlines his proposition, I drew almost moment-by-moment upon a situation I experienced as a nineteen-year-old—sushi, sake, and all. As a young person, I made the opposite choice, yet I’ve always wondered quite sympathetically about the alternative path, and how choosing it affects people’s psyches and their art. There’s a lot of fantastic writing by sex workers, and I love learning from that.
I think Isabel does leave the relationship with Saqlain feeling that the transaction was fair, but she also has a quite brutal attitude toward herself and her value. Later, this causes her serious trouble with trusting that Jon could love her for herself—that he doesn’t see her as just a replaceable commodity. Saqlain’s voice is stuck in her head as well.
How difficult is it for Isabel, who considers herself “a refugee from Deliverance,” to get through the day-to-day in the world she has inhabited in Chicago?
Very. The pleasures of her new life are undermined by those voices: the working-class bitterness of her mother’s, the brutal misogyny of Saqlain’s. She can clearly see the gulf between her own experience and that of the cosseted denizens of her new world. For Isabel, impostor syndrome is quite acute. Everything about her past would be viewed as literally or figuratively dirty by the wealthy people who surround her, so she hides it. The only thing about her that’s real is her talent.
Once in grad school, Isabel takes a class in Critical Theory. Can you talk about how that changes her life?
I love theory so much. The possibilities of using varied interpretive lenses to understand the same set of circumstances are such rich terrain for a fiction writer. I’m often surprised that some creative writers express a kind of antipathy to theory when it’s basically just one What if? question after another—so provocative, so fruitful. (But yes, okay: not all theorists generate the most delightful prose, and it can be hard to wade through the muck sometimes.)
I’m not sure Isabel’s glancing education in theory entirely changes her life, but it does offer her a measure of liberation, some breathing room. It allows her to stand back from her experience and posit different explanations for it, rather than simply accepting the narrative she’s inherited. Seeing the past differently, she can envision a different future.
Do you know what you will want to work on next?
Yes! Thank you for asking. I’ve just turned in the manuscript for my next novel, Smoke, which is set in the Cuban insurgent rebel base in Key West in 1886 during the month and a half leading up to the Great Fire, which burned most of Key West to the ground. Six young narrator-protagonists occupy different class, racial, and gender positions in that utopian moment when cigar factories made Key West wildly prosperous—and all six characters have different motives to want Key West to burn.
As a period of U.S. history, it’s almost entirely unknown, so it’s exciting to have the opportunity to restore it to public awareness while writing a novel of political intrigue.
I’ll be getting the first round of edits back at the beginning of December, so that’ll be occupying my time for the next few months. It’s my first book-length attempt at historical fiction, so it’s entirely new and entirely challenging for me. I love pushing myself.
Where can readers learn more about your work?
My website, https://www.joycastro.com/, has useful links to essays, stories, and interviews online. Two interviews I particularly like are in Los Angeles Review of Books with Alex Espinoza < https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/beautiful-lies/> and CRAFT with Jacqueline Doyle < https://www.craftliterary.com/2020/12/15/interview-joy-castro/>. They’re very thorough—like this one! Thank you so much for these beautiful and thought-provoking questions. I really appreciate it.
Photo by Shae Sackman
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