Darryl Whetter: Oh no, I’m a maddeningly tangential and spiraling novelist. It took me ten years to write The Push & The Pull, and for more than half of that I didn’t know the ending. The plot with the house inheritance didn’t emerge for about four years. That house inheritance was a big anchor, but for years and years I just had the following base ingredients:

(1) journey by touring bicycle (in which all gear—food, shelter, warmth, mental stimulation, pain management—makes climbing hills more onerous). As the novel says, "any desire is a weight."

(2) the juxtaposition of Andrew on a bike in the present tense with his father’s disease in the past tense. The bike is such a naked and visible piece of technology (unlike all this electronica) and it impacts the human body so directly. A bike is a skeleton, and it changes the skeleton of the rider (asking us not to be bipedal, to hang our noses closer to the ground and be more mammalian). The generative image for the novel was the juxtaposition of two skeletons: that of the (largely enabling) bicycle written by a healthy young man and that of his ill father who has a degenerative disease which eventually warps his skeleton.

(3) Love. Ultimately the how, what and where of his journey aren’t as important as the why. If he’s going to do all that work, he needs a big why. The how, what and where gave me plenty, including the idea that he was carrying his own home (a "nylon nomad"). For him at least, home means love. Here’s a guy who cuts off part of his toothbrush handle to have less to carry up each hill, yet he carries postcards from his travelling, exish lover.

(4) The landscape was also foundational. In the abstract, in fantasy, I can imagine biking in the Prairies, where the flatness would allow you to bike into the most Zen-like trances. But I needed Andrew to suffer. Although the Rockies are obviously high, many X-Can cyclists claim that New Brunswick is the most challenging (because of its constant ups and downs). Also, a journey from the Maritimes into eastern Ontario has him biking into linguistic incompetence. As he passes from Nova Scotia into New Brunswick, the French rises incrementally. He may be biking home, but I wanted him biking into uncertainty first.

DW: I wanted to write about illness in a novel of both familial and romantic love precisely because illness blurs the boundaries between spectator and sufferer. In family or in love, to be spectator and/or caregiver to the suffering of another undeniably in ways makes one a surrogate to the suffering. This is a novel of intimacy, and that intimacy isn’t always in health and happiness. To live with the illness of a loved one is a profound intimacy: there are vicarious rewritings of your own body as well as domestic overlaps and intrusions. On the other hand, those intimate to disease also at times feel their acute separation from the diseased. That may be a source of guilt, wonder, fear, anxiety, or of resentment. The novel explores this paradox of union and separation (through the body etc.) in both disease (death) and romantic love. Like many adult children, Andrew grows to see similarities between his body and his father’s, but his father’s body has been profoundly altered by disease (for example, the "reorbiting" ribs).

To return to the origin of the question, there is a bit of a moral mutation for Andy when he’s young. His father Stan’s disease is steady but gradual. When Andrew is younger, Stan is more able. As the boy Andy grows and strengthens, though, his father weakens. For a time at least, they are intersecting lines on one graph. I wanted to imply that outwardly Andy had been a good kid, perhaps out of nervousness and/or responsibility. As he loses Stan, however, he and the reader discover immaturities buried beneath the seeming maturity.

DW: Stan does give Andrew an out, at least nominally. Andy’s old enough to, as the divorce phrase goes, "choose." Stan assures him that he could go, but part of his pitch for staying (genuine or not) is that Andrew will emerge stronger for staying. That’s part of the big, uncertain investigation of the novel. Is Andrew genuinely stronger or, like a touring cyclist, has he strengthened some muscles at the expense of other parts of the body?

The novel does try to arrive at some wisdom, part of which is the young adult Andrew’s recognition that even Stan’s death has, in ways, improved him, that Stan’s death was a kind of graduation. Eventually Andrew’s able to admit that he wouldn’t have traded a sick father for a healthy one and he wouldn’t even, couldn’t even, trade losing Stan for keeping him. Andrew has to bike through all of that. Is Andrew a conscript or a volunteer? Does he know? By the end, he gains for his losses.

DW: You’ve skewered me. Richler is crucial to me: as writer, reader and human and sometimes as lit prof. Interestingly, I didn’t read Richler until later in life, around the start of my PhD. He was good antidote at that time. Our educational system, even in the so-called Arts like my study of literature, still prefers the head to the heart. Like many middle-class grad students, in life before Richler my head had been popped by formal innovation and fiction that concentrates on the intellect over the emotions. Then Richler. He’s so committed to character and he gives his characters all of his intelligence, his wit and his compassion.

At times, parts of me think it an added bonus that Richler is Canadian, although in fiction’s genuine landscape nationality is also a fiction, a story we tell ourselves. If I had to recommend one Cdn. novel to someone it would be St. Urbain’s Horseman. I love a thousand things about it, but he won me, permanently, with a single short line: "I can be your wife or your nurse, not both."

Canadian students are far, far more likely to have read Laurence’s The Stone Angel or Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business than anything by Richler, and that shames all of us.

Rushdie has a beautiful essay about Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, calling it the "novel that taught me that the novel, as novel, has to bet the farm, go for broke." Here’s THE anglo-Indian novelist talking about THE post-war German novel. Richler's best novels—St. Urbain’s Horseman and Barney’s Version—go for broke.

I could go on and on. My life is wider and richer for having read him.

DW: Well yes, notice who was completely ignored by awards. I couldn’t write this for nine years and then suddenly Can Litify it for the last one. The pressures are very clear: remove all sex and humour, add rural history, have him stop in a milltown, think of WW II, use as many grandmothers in house dresses as you can.

Principally, though, my excuse is realism. One of the reasons I wanted to write about a journey by bicycle is because it removes him from contact. Go to an airport now and you'll see people sending email before and after they touch down. Even if he were backpacking, as Betty partly does in Europe, he’d meet others, converse, be able to buy new books. In sustained isolation and exertion, of course he thinks.

In short stories, I’ve often written (again realistically) about characters who are drunk or high for portions of the story. That happens a little here too, but generally he’s high on all that aerobic exercise, all that exertion.

I don’t want to lose sight of the novel too much here, but I for one am a very disappointed reader of Canadian fiction. We have an anemic review culture and a so-called public broadcaster utterly unwilling to devote Dollar No.1 to a demonstrable expert telling others whether Book X deserves your $20 to $40 or not. The same taxpayers who fund Can Lit also fund the CBC, and yet the CBC pays people to intelligently review Hollywood film but not Can Lit. Universities generally don’t reward profs for actually writing for the taxpayers who bankroll them either. Without a strong critical presence in the media or education, we're left with only a market, and it's now dominated by a few awards a year. Literary appreciation in Canada consists solely of one big stadium wave in the fall and then a critical vacuum. As a result, Cdn. fiction is too homogenous and also too formulaic. Award books will be (a) rural and (b) in the past at a time when 80% of Cdns. live in cities and, per capita, we’re a more urban population than the US. I've been living in Nova Scotia for a few years now and the market demands are absolutely crippling: you write about ye olde fishing village or you don’t write anything while Halifax has NSACD, a fine-art university, singer-songwriters etc.

DW: The novel is, as my art school friends say, a time-based art. Now that I’m deep into my second novel [and third book after a collection of stories in 2003] I see more of how I write novels. A finished novel has a timeline and writing novels has a timeline. As noted above, I write by an incredibly subtractive process of finding, making, reshaping and often cutting. During early stages—before I have one linear, paper draft—I’m not very good at doing multiple things. I left a job at U.Windsor in part to clear my desk and head. With low, low, low cost living in a rural Nova Scotia fishing village, I was able to write full-time for two years. As you note, part of that writing was the reviewing of fiction, but writing fiction in the morning and reviewing it in the afternoon was the perfect thing to do while I did much of the finishing on Push/Pull and then started the very, very raw work on a new novel. I taught last year (at Université Sainte-Anne) and am teaching on another one-year contract at Dal this year, but I’m certain I wouldn’t be as deep into Novel No.2 by now if I hadn’t two years of punching my own clock.

A new discovery for me has also been the creative boost of working on multiple projects. In ways that lesson should have been available to me more fully with the writing of Push/Pull as I wrote all of the Sharp Tooth stories during the writing of Push/Pull. The stories were vacations from the novel and then wound up as a collection long before I ever finished the novel. Now I quite like having one project in an advanced stage and others gestating or mutating.

Lastly, I don’t have kids and my partner is a writer. We’re very respectful of silence in the house.

DW: My escape route for those moments is always to return to the body (Andrew’s, his father’s and the romantic body discovered between Betty and Andrew). Yes, there are moments of intense interiority or reflection, but I hope they’re balanced with a more immediate and tactile sensuousness.

I was also committed to making the landscape dramatic and the journey active. The bike journey couldn’t simply be a place to remember, a sort of moving slideshow for memories. That firetower scene was designed to provide a physical analogue to the father’s spine (as he suffers from a spinal disease). In a novel in which a character changes through a self-propelled journey, I couldn’t just tell the reader about his father’s spine; I had to try to show that spine.

In ways my answer here needs to recall my disappointment in so much Canadian fiction. Margaret Atwood is a great essayist and smart cookie, but her novels are so condescendingly telly. Every significance is explained.

DW: Layering with all the nudity and vulnerability of his caregiving but also the cycling as well. The novel does dwell on how "tight and bright" bike clothing is and there are the gender-bending scenes which compare Andrew washing and wearing his cycling gear to "male lingerie." For a time, Betty shaves his legs for him.

Although the bisexuality hasn’t endeared me to cyclists or Cdn. readers, I think I was simply following a logic to male bike culture. Many group rides are gender segregated, either by pace or peer groupings, etc. So why do these all male riders with blazing bright jerseys shave their legs when they’re not in formal competition? Also, when I describe Andrew’s apprenticeship with another rider, I do think those actions—of following another's grunting, sweaty body closely with your own—are homo-erotic. And the cycling shorts—they just serve up male ass. How could I not follow that logic?

Here too is the novel’s concern with survival. Andrew figures so much of his identity in caring for Stan, and then when Stan is gone, he’s guilty, lost and yet also wandering around in the "euphoria of survival." Part of that new, exploratory self must of course be manifest in sexuality. Their ages—mid-twenties—invite that to a degree: plenty of freedom, inexperience giving way to experience, sexual needs becoming more frank. The bisexuality was also designed to work in concert with the male aggression and violence in the book.

In ways, Andrew’s casting about for other male models than the one he knows. Remember that even Stan’s job involves gender segregation: he teaches in a prison.

DW: It’s set in Windsor, which really means the somewhat porous Windsor-Detroit border. There’s a bit of history in it, although I refuse to write another Canadian historical novel stranded in the past. All of the history—which I won’t disclose—is folded into a now(ish) story. This time it’s first person, and I add multiple generations. Layers again.