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There's an incredible interview with Jeffrey DeShell on Colin Marshall's The Marketplace of Ideas. I just finished DeShell's latest, Arthouse, which is a retelling of William Faulkner's Sanctuary set in a meth lab compound in Pueblo, Colorado. From the FC2 website, which does a better job of summing it up than I could:

Arthouse is an audacious transformation in prose of fourteen modernist films. From film to film, Jeffrey DeShell follows a forty-something failed film studies academic—The Professor. While The Professor is reinvented with each new chapter (or film), what remains is DeShell's inventive deconstruction and representation of modern cinema. At times borrowing imagery, plot, or character elements, and at times rendering lighting, rhythm, costuming, or shot sequences into fictional language, The Professor's journey sends him from the Southwestern town of Pueblo, Colorado, into the role of rescuer as he aids an attempted-rape victim, and finally to Italy. Ultimately though, The Professor is left alone, struggling to reconcile the real world with his life in cinema.

The podcast has one of the greatest lines to ever come the internet. After DeShell mentions that Arthouse was based on Sanctuary, Marshall says, "Now, Sanctuary, not usually the Faulkner novel you see assigned in school."

DeShell laughs, and says, "Well, yeah, for a number of sort of, I guess, corncobberies."

That sense of humor is everywhere. Along with the stuff that ain't so humorous. Or maybe is, I dunno. There's an argument about nostalgia in there that had me shifting in my skin, suddenly entirely uncomfortable (I listen to pretty much exclusively +30 year old country music, and spend half my reading time buried in books about 120+ year old Indian wars). And another about film and architecture which set me to hunting down a copy of The Conformist.

It's a brilliant novel. One that doesn't violate or rupture the formulas and conventions of noir, but explodes them. Like the best of Jim Nisbet's work, upon finishing you kinda just stand back and wonder at the thing. Right before you read it through a second time, notebook close at hand.