Columbia native and University of South Carolina alum Jeffrey Rotter has recently enjoyed positive reviews in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere for his debut novel The Unknown Knowns, a story of post-9/11 paranoia and the potentially destructive power of an overactive imagination. Last week, Rotter graciously submitted to a pair of interview -- one conducted via email, another by phone -- in which he discussed everything from the Bush Administration’s “war on terror” to 1970s feminism to microwave burritos and his brief tenure as Clifford the Big Red Dog. He also shared a few thoughts on his time at USC and his diverse literary influences. The following transcript was cobbled together from just a few of the highlights.

FT: How did you end up wrapping a story about a comic book nerd’s obsessive (and debilitating) imagination around a story about post-9/11 paranoia and the so-called “war on terror”? Was it your intention from the outset to bring those strands together -- i.e., did you set out to write a novel with political overtones -- or did you arrive at your two principal plot engines more organically?

Jeffrey Rotter: My experience writing The Unknown Knowns paralleled, up to a point, my protagonist’s experience living it. Jim Rath believes he’s spotted an aquatic humanoid in a Colorado Springs hotel bar, and at first I thought he had as well. He pursues this alleged Nautikon across the state to a pretty grisly end. It was only after I got a close look at Rath’s creature that I realized he wasn’t a Nautikon at all, he was a mirror. Les Diaz is the embodiment of a different brand of paranoia.

I didn’t set out to write a political satire. In fact, the politics exist mainly to amplify Jim Rath’s personal drama. Like the old feminist button says: “The Personal Is Political.” Novelists -- and especially political ones -- tend to celebrate the imagination as a force that sets us free, because they can’t imagine that their pet would bite them. But when fancies turn into dogma, as they do in Jim Rath’s mind, there’s trouble brewing. Dick Cheney says that intelligence gathering is more an art than a science. In his case, it was extremely artful.

FT: The title of your book is an allusion to Donald Rumsfeld’s bungled justification for going to war in Iraq, during his now infamous press conference in 2002. In that press conference, Rumsfeld spelled out a number of rationales for the gathering of intelligence and for going to war, including what he called “known knowns,” “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” 

Interestingly, the formulation you’ve chosen for your title -- the unknown knowns -- is the one formulation Rumsfeld did not address, i.e. that there are things we don’t know we don’t know. Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slajov Zizek commented on this particular formulation in a 2005 op-ed for the Guardian, “The Empty Wheelbarrow,” in which he described the “unknown knowns” as “precisely the Freudian unconscious” -- in other words, “the suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.” Were you thinking of Zizek’s comments when you wrote the novel? And if you were -- or even if you weren’t -- should we read The Unknown Knowns through a sort of Freudian lens?

JR: I wasn’t aware of Zizek’s op-ed when I settled on the title. Which isn’t to say it was an original idea. Every guy with a Blogger account was making jokes about Rumsfeld’s crazy speech. My formulation of unknown knowns differs slightly from Zizek’s, probably because he has a much larger brain than mine. He’s concerned with the disavowed beliefs and hidden urges that nonetheless motivate us. I’m interested in openly acknowledged beliefs that lack any basis in reality. My unknown knowns are facts we can’t confirm, but we’re convinced they’re real, and they drive us to do stupid s#!t. Mobile labs, weapons of mass destruction, conspiracies about a lost aquatic race of humanoids -- you know, that kind of thing.

So, what I’m talking about isn’t Freudian. It lies squarely on the surface. Anyone who wants to read the novel through a Freudian lens will find out it’s one of those prank cameras that squirts you in the eye. There’s a protracted mock-sci-fi sequence set in the undersea city of Nautika that’s one elaborate and pretty tasteless Freudian joke.

FT: Much of the novel’s comedy derives from the juxtaposition of the mundane trappings of modern life (microwave burritos, town houses, a Toyota Corolla hatchback) with the more exotic fantasy world inspired by comic books and the Aquatic Ape Theory. It seems like Rath eats at least half a dozen microwave burritos during the course of the novel, and at one critical point he even worries about “bean seepage” when his wife sets her burrito too close to a prized comic book, suggesting an unwelcome incursion of the real world into the fantastic one he prefers. Does your inclusion of all these ultra-ordinary trappings constitute a critique of consumer culture or perhaps, at least, a commentary on the allure of escapism? Or is it all simply convenient comic fodder, stuff so universal that everybody can laugh at it?

JR: That’s my world. I have eaten dozens of frozen burritos in my day, microwaved and otherwise. And like Jim, I delivered books to elementary school libraries dressed as Clifford the Big Red Dog. But, yes, Jim Rath is constantly being brought down from his rarified fantasy world by everyday humiliations -- the bean seepage, as you say. But while most of us would take the hint and hang up the fantasy, he just forges ahead. It’s the old Don Quixote thing, except instead of donkeys and inns, the boring crap of Jim’s world includes Corollas and Radissons.

FT: It is tempting to focus on The Unknown Knowns exclusively as a satire of post-9/11 paranoia. However, you satirize a lot of things besides our response to global terrorism. Jim Rath, for example, is an avowed feminist, raised by an ultra-feminist mother in the 1970s. Unfortunately, he tends to take things to the radical extreme, and then suffers the consequences. For example, when he is tasked with building a diorama called Scenes from the Life of Margaret Sanger for the Center for Gender and Power -- and in the interest of authenticity he decides to give the mother of modern birth control an actual period and to include “a meticulously reproduced menstrual rag” in the exhibit -- he gets fired by his feminist boss. Is he too big a feminist for his own good? Or is he just really, really into his work? 

JR: Ha! He’s really into his work. When Jim adopts a worldview, he is compelled to build the entire world for himself. And that world eventually becomes a trap. The Margaret Sanger episode is just one example.

Jim’s heart is always in the right place. He wrote a paper on the myth of the vaginal orgasm in grade school. He knows how to “operate” a tampon. My satire of Homeland Security comes from a fearful place, but my jokes about seventies feminism come from nostalgia. My mother was a member of the National Organization of Women, and I went to meetings with her at this vegan coffee house in Columbia that served probably the first cup of chai in the entire Southeastern United States. I remember being really into the trappings of seventies feminism. Gloria Steinem was a little like a superhero.

FT: As interesting as it is to wrestle with the heady intellectual questions suggested by The Unknown Knowns, I find the novel’s human story at least as compelling. In a lot of ways, this can be read as simply a tragic, if twisted, love story. Can you help connect the dots between the personal politics of Jim Rath’s wife’s failed marriage and the larger, sort of capital-P politics that propel the novel’s central plot and inform the larger, or at least more pronounced, conflict?

JR: Yes, it’s a love story! Thank you. The Unknown Knowns was, from the start, Jim Rath’s story, which is a story about falling in love with a beautiful illusion and suffering for it. He is not a politically astute person. The fact that he becomes a political prisoner is an accident of history. The pain he suffers throughout the book is ridicule for his very sincere beliefs and rejection by the woman he loves.

FT: Rath isn’t just an unemployed comic book nerd, passively consuming somebody else’s fantasy. Until he loses his job, he is also a dioramist who takes his work very seriously, perhaps too seriously. And even after he does lose his job, he still gets very deep into his projects, so much so that by the time he fully immerses himself in his Museum of the Aquatic Ape of the Mind, he loses touch with reality. In many ways, Rath’s obsession with the museum he envisions could be seen as a direct corollary to an artist’s obsession with any large-scale project. I’m thinking specifically of a novelist writing a novel….

JR: Hmmm. Who could that be? Books about writers have been done to death, and often they’re so inside-baseball that they read like keynote addresses at the BEA or something. So I didn’t want to write about a writer. But Jim Rath is a world-maker, and his threshold for believability in diorama building is similar to a novelist’s. Fantastic literature -- and it’s all fantastic, from Richard Ford to ETA Hoffmann -- has to feel lived or it’s pretty worthless to the reader.

After the book was finished, my wife and I built a series of dioramas for an online Museum of the Aquatic Ape, and I realized just how frustrating Jim Rath’s life was. It’s really freaking hard to build a convincing diorama. If you haven’t done it, you have no idea. I spent hours tweezering fragments of moss to make miniature kelp forests. Painful. And I was somewhat drunk. For Jim, world-making is way more painful. He wants his life to conform to a fantasy that it can never measure up to.

FT: Can you address your decision to tell Agent Les Diaz’s version of the story entirely through the transcripts of a Congressional hearing, as opposed to letting us into his head the way you do with Rath’s narrative, which is told in the first person and with a great deal of interiority? Also, I’m curious about the redacted portions of Diaz’s testimony. You milk a good deal of humor out of redacting seemingly insignificant factual details.

JR: I wanted to give each of these men the discourse he deserved and the language he’d be most comfortable telling his story in. Les Diaz is a bureaucrat. You get more truth from him in a Congressional hearing than you would in a book of free verse. He isn’t capable of real honesty, but his testimony gives away secrets he doesn’t intend to give away. The redacting is a bit of a cheap joke. These men are talking about the most obscene lies a government can tell, but they won’t allow a cocktail with a dirty name to stand in the public record.

FT: Presumably, it’s been a few years since you finished the book -- and a few more than that since you began writing it. In the meantime, a great deal has come to light about the Bush administration’s claims regarding everything from WMD to torture. We also have a new administration in Washington. Your book is certainly timely, and yet one critic has noted in an otherwise favorable review in the Financial Times that “Post-Obama…The Unknown Knowns feels as if it has missed its moment.” Would you agree that the book may have come out a year or so late, or at least that it speaks to a bygone or passing era? Or does the book, in fact, benefit somewhat from having a tiny bit of historical perspective?

JR: I understand the criticism. I guess I have a couple things to say in defense of the novel’s timeliness. Historical novels about Napoleon don’t cease to resonate even though the man died on St. Helena some 190 years ago. Certainly the politics of last year should continue to haunt us for a few more months. And are these really the politics of last year? Under President Obama, the rhetoric has certainly shifted, but when I hear members of congress say the closure of Guantanamo will release terrorists into American communities, I wonder. When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over, and order is restored to Pakistan, then -- maybe -- we can consider critical analysis of the war against terrorism passé.

FT: Other reviewers have favorably compared your writing to Thomas Pynchon’s, and your publisher tossed in Vonnegut. That’s pretty high praise. Have these particular authors significantly influenced your work? And if not them, which authors or works did inform the novel or have influenced you as an author?

JR: I admire Pynchon and Vonnegut immensely, of course -- which is about as interesting as saying I like the Beatles. But I don’t feel their direct influence on what I do, mainly because I don’t think I’m equipped to do what they have done. Pynchon plays games with paranoia that are as f#!ked-up and complex as the Enigma Code. And Vonnegut takes misanthropic jokes to some places my Catholic-boy conscience wouldn’t allow. The writers who exert the biggest influence on my style and the way I see the world are the ones I try to shut out when I start typing. Saul Bellow is a big one. John Cheever. Peter Carey, my teacher at Hunter College, has to be another one. That said, I had specific voices in mind when I wrote the book. I wanted Jim Rath to have the brain of Stan Lee, the spirit of Elaine Morgan, and the poetic voice of Kenneth Koch.

FT: You graduated with a degree in English from the University of South Carolina. Is there anybody in the USC English department you want to acknowledge as an influence or mentor?

JR: Yeah, definitely. Don Greiner. He's such a perceptive and enthusiastic reader that he made me appreciate novels, and especially American novels, in a whole new way.

FT: When you were at USC you were also some sort of research assistant for James Dickey, weren’t you?

JR: I did have a fellowship with James Dickey, I believe it was through the Honors College. I think he wasn't exactly sure what to do with me, and I was pretty intimidated by him. My tasks involved typing correspondence, watching him play guitar, and listening to him drop pearls of wisdom about poetry.

FT: Finally, what’s in the works as a follow-up to The Unknown Knowns?

JR: Another novel. It’s set on two islands. One is on the coast of an unnamed Southern state with excellent fried shrimp, and the other is a mysterious landmass that surfaces in the South Atlantic.