While we think of action figures as things that kids play with and adults use as decorations, some have used them to tell deeper stories. Obviously, Barbie comes to mind, but there’s also Welcome To Marwen, 11 seasons of Robot Chicken, and Todd Haynes’ “lost” Karen Carpenter bio-pic, Superstar.
Now writer Scott Guild is doing something similar in Plastic (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), a socially and politically comedic novel.
In the following email interview, Guild discusses what inspired and influenced this toy story.
Photo Credit: © Michael Lionstar
To start, what is Plastic about, and when and where is it set?
Plastic is set in a world of figurines, plastic people with hinges and hollow bodies, who stride about stiffly and have “surfaces” rather than skin. When I tell people about my book, I almost always start by describing this world and setting. I’ve tried telling people about the characters and plot first, but then I get a strange look when I mention: “Oh, and by the way, they’re not human. They’re all dolls.” So it’s good to explain the setting first.
The main character is a lonely figurine named Erin, a plastic woman in her early twenties, who works a middling job at a tech chain store called Tablet Town. Erin is dealing with deep personal loss, and the near-future world around her is in turmoil, reeling from a recent nuclear war, suffering from climate change and a violent eco-terrorist movement. But the stakes of the novel, for the most part, are more intimate: Erin coping with grief about her father and sister, Erin opening herself up to a new relationship with Jacob, a blind figurine she meets in a terror attack at her work. Erin has lots of secrets, and these complicate her life more and more as the novel proceeds.
It sounds like Plastic is at least partially inspired by what’s going on in the world, socially and politically…
Absolutely, there are many connections to the world right now — particularly with climate change, and also with our general alienation from nature. There are fascist political movements in the plastic world, a rising surveillance state, an untethered capitalism that makes a commodity of everything. Like us, the plastic people are addicted to their phones and screens.
This might sound a bit odd, but any time I wrote about the figurines’ physicality — stiff, shiny, synthetic — I felt like I was tapping into something about the world as it is right now, even though Plastic is set in the future.
It also sounds like Plastic is humorous. Not jokey like Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, but more like one of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels.
I started Plastic in my MFA program, and I think everyone in my workshops would be stunned to hear that this book became a comedy. There were no plastic figurines in the novel back then, just lots of very unhappy people wandering about in a bleak future. It wasn’t called Plastic in those days: it was called Dead Limbs — a very cheerful title. I took a break from the book for a few years after the program, and during that time I was writing these little short stories about plastic figurines, and one day it struck me: wait a second, what if I went back to that speculative novel and made everyone plastic?
After this, the whole book came alive in a new way, like it had been waiting for that ironic layer all along. This definitely shapes the comedy in the novel: after that insight, I was adding these absurd and surreal comic elements to material that was initially very serious. There are some “jokey” moments in Plastic — like all the brand names I invented for the world (Glossy Gal, etc.) — but for the most part I wanted the reader to feel both absurdity and seriousness at the same time. Like Erin’s father dying of “Brad Pitt Disease” — a dreaded illness in the plastic world; it turns figurines slowly to ash — but then you see the step-by-step progress of him dying from the disease, needing home care and entering hospice, changing as a person as he faces his mortality. All while Erin sweeps up the ashes of his crumbling body.
So, who do you see as being the big influences on the humor in Plastic? And I mean both the kind of humor and how you use it in the story?
Once I’d decided to make all the characters plastic (and for them to have their own odd dialectic — they speak in non-standard English), I had created a book that could easily be read as a slapstick satire: “bonkers,” “zany,” etc. I completely embraced this at first: I was on a high of not writing that grim near-future novel anymore, which never really worked. I had so many wonderful comic influences for this: Kafka, Tina Fey, Dostoyevski, Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, The Simpsons, Norman Lear, David Lynch — they all juxtapose the serious and absurd in the way I described earlier, and they all deeply shaped my sense of humor in my life and in this book.
But after embracing the humor, the challenge was then to give my characters deep emotional stakes, and for their emotional arcs to feel vivid and consequential. So in the final stages of drafting I was reading lots of Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Marilynne Robinson — masters of character building and character arcs — just to stay deeply rooted in the emotional lives of the figurines. The writers I just mentioned also don’t get enough credit for being funny: there are huge laughs in every one of their books.
Aside from the people you just talked about, what other writers do you think had the biggest influence on Plastic?
Far too many to name. There are some, like W.G. Sebald, where the aesthetic of Plastic couldn’t have been more different — but his books had such a lasting impression on me and in some ways created the “space” in which I was writing. (If that isn’t too abstract!) Influence is a strange thing in general, because it’s often not a linear line from the authors we love to our own style of writing, or at least not for me.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled is an important book for me, as it let me grasp in a new way how formal experimentation and deep character work could coexist seamlessly. It’s certainly one of my favorite novels. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi was incredibly helpful along similar lines. I also discovered Olga Tokarczuk at an important moment, and I adore all her books. Primeval And Other Times might be my favorite of hers — I teach it in my classes, and hopefully soon it will be available in the U.S. as more than an eBook.
But yes, far too many writers to name.
What about non-literary influences; was Plastic influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games?
Yes, absolutely. Much of the book is written as a TV show, with the chapters written as a series of scenes (though not in a screenplay format) and descriptions of the camera angles filming the characters. There are voiceovers by the main characters, even a laugh track at times. Needless to say, sitcoms were a huge influence on the book — and I’m probably in “too many to name” territory once again with those. I already mentioned Tina Fey and Norman Lear, and everything from I Love Lucy to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Seinfeld to Veep are important to me. There’s so much to celebrate about the entire history of sitcoms, though some have aged better than others to be sure.
When I think about filmmakers important to the book, there were several while I was writing: Kelly Reichardt, Michael Haneke, Mia Hansen-Løve, Greta Gerwig, Robert Bresson. Also a few of the directors I’ve loved since my teens: David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson. I also had a huge Ingmar Bergman phase in those years — another artist is often very funny, but rarely gets credit for this. And Stephen Sondheim was a big influence on the musical side of the book, which I’ll discuss in a moment.
Right, because along with the novel, you are also putting out Plastic: The Album…
In my twenties, I was the lead songwriter and guitarist in the band New Collisions, but I took a step back from music when I started to focus on novel writing. When I wrote Plastic, I had no idea that it would bring me back to music. But then Erin started to have musical numbers in certain scenes (joined by singing figurines around her), and soon the novel had become a “musical” of sorts.
The idea of making an album started to grow around this time, and I began to collaborate on songs with Cindertalk (Jonny Rodgers), an incredible artist and producer who has worked with everyone from Son Lux to My Brightest Diamond. We’ve known each other for many years, so it was incredible fun to have this project come together. The artist Stranger Cat is the main singer on the album — she’s done stunning work with Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, and so many others. Anna Hoone, a brilliant singer / songwriter, sings some of the songs as well, which I worked on with the artist and producer Gainsayer. We’ve also been lucky enough to work with producer Peter Katis on this, a true genius who produced some of my favorite albums by The National. While many of the songs use lyrics from the novel, they also branch off in their own directions. The first singles will be coming out in early 2024, and the album will have a spring release.
The songs on Plastic: The Album have been described as being “dynamic baroque-pop songs.” Why do you go with that kind of music as opposed to, say, dark heavy metal or moody free jazz or rustic country pop?
That’s a very good question, and not the easiest one to answer. The musical choices are all shaped around Erin’s story, and the possibilities of baroque-pop — highly melodic music that can draw in both organic and synthetic elements, that can have traditional verse-chorus-verse structures and more experimental structures, that can be either “hooky” or ambient — just felt right for Erin and her world. There’s so much room in the genre for the music to slip into different moods and emotions, and this was very helpful for telling Erin’s story through a collection of songs.
Earlier I asked if Plastic had been influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Plastic could work as a movie, or a TV show, or a game?
I could definitely see Plastic as a movie or a limited TV series. A game would also be fascinating: there’s an amazing board game called Fog Of Love which my wife and I really enjoy, a collaborative game where you make emotional choices for characters as if they were the love interests in a romantic comedy. I could see a game for Plastic that used similar mechanics, and that had nuanced emotional stories which took place in the plastic world.
And if someone wanted to adapt Plastic into a movie or TV show, who would you want them to cast as Erin and the other main characters?
I’m guessing that the movie would use animation of some sort (though not necessarily!), so it’s interesting to consider who would be the best voice actor. I could see Thomasin McKenzie [Last Night In Soho] or Bella Ramsey [The Last Of Us] or Alicia Vikander [Ex Machina] being amazing, but there are so many actors whom I think could do an incredible job.
So, is there anything else people need to know about Plastic?
Once the book and album are out next year, I’m hoping people will feel drawn to have an experience of the whole project, both the novel and the music. The hope is for people who enjoy the songs to go and read the novel behind them, and for people who enjoy the novel to have a deeper experience of the story through the album. I love to immerse myself in the media I enjoy, and I’m hoping that others can have that experience of this project.
Finally, if someone enjoys Plastic, what similar kind of novel by someone else would you suggest they check out next?
Oh, so many. I’ve already mentioned The Unconsoled and Trust Exercise, but there’s Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth, Motorman by David Ohle, My Year Of Rest And Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, Sula by Toni Morrison, Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders, and The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. Not all of these are similar to Plastic in content, but I could see someone who enjoys my book enjoying any one of these novels.
