5 Questions with Manuel Gonzales, author of The Regional Office is Under Attack!
The Regional Office, a subterranean superhero organization which recruits young women with extraordinary powers to protect the world from terrors unseen by average citizens, is under attack, possibly by its own rogue operatives. Riffing on comic book and pop culture plot lines and characters, Gonzales bounces between perspectives and time in short, propelling chapters, revealing, amid the chaos, the history of the secret Manhattan-based society in an inventive and ridiculously fun debut novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack!
Manuel Gonzales is the author of the acclaimed story collection The Miniature Wife, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. He teaches writing at the University of Kentucky.
- The summary of The Regional Office Is Under Attack! starts off with a real kicker: a “coterie of super-powered female assassins.” Did that idea just burst fully formed into your brain? Where did it come from?
That idea did not burst fully formed into my head, not even a little. When I first started writing the novel I didn’t know I was writing a novel or what it would even be about. I had a guy picking up a young woman from a detention center, had her smash his foot with her foot and break free, had her scramble up four electric fences and almost escape, and had him think to himself how, if he let her get away, the boys back at regional would give him a hard time — which was all I knew of the Regional Office at the time. I didn’t even know what kind of world I was writing in until later in that same section, I had this guy decide to walk away from his job — I didn’t know what that was exactly but I knew he wasn’t happy at it anymore — and then I went on a riff about how you didn’t just walk away from the Regional Office, and he started thinking about who they would send after him, and out of nowhere came a character, Sarah, dark-haired Sarah, Sarah with the mechanical arm — and only once I wrote that — Sarah with the mechanical arm — did I realize the world. And then the rest came as I began to explore why this guy, Henry, wanted to leave, and who Sarah was, and from them the rest of the world and the people in it began to take shape, affect the physics of the world.
2. Your writing blends the fantastical with the mundane. Would you describe yourself as a fantasy or science fiction fan? What excites you about the tropes of that genre?
I am both a fantasy and a science fiction fan — though these days I read fewer and fewer books that are considered straightforwardly fantasy or sci-fi. But fantasy was my gateway drug for reading in general. And I guess when it comes to my own writing and why I draw from those genres — and sometimes horror and sometimes thriller — it’s not that there’s any one thing that excites me about the tropes, but that the tropes — or rather those genres — were built into my writing DNA from when I was young and so it’s hard for me to imagine storytelling that doesn’t involve potential for magic or alternative universes or cars possessed by demons, just as it’s hard for me to imagine storytelling that doesn’t wholly invest itself in character and breaking my heart.
3. The plot of The Regional Office Is Under Attack! pits Rose, a young defector, against Sarah, fiercely devoted to the titular Regional Office. Was it important to you to show both sides of this fictional conflict?
When I started writing, one idea I held onto in the back of my head was less telling both sides of this story and more telling the story from — well, not minor characters in the drama because Rose and Sarah dominate the novel, but, I guess, characters who weren’t fully in charge of their own destinies because they worked for other people, they become caught up in forces larger than themselves, etc — and organically, writing the first chapter, which is no longer even in the book, Rose took shape as someone sneaking into the Regional Office to bring it down, and in the same chapter, Sarah arrived, too, as did her mechanical arm, and so I just followed that instinct.
4. You’ve said that you take your inspiration from “what ifs”. What would you say is the “what if” at the center of this novel?
The ‘what if’ that brought me to the novel is long gone from the novel. I had an idea: What if this mysterious man dressed in a sharp suit and powerful looking and handsome and persuasive arrived at a women’s detention center and singled out one young woman to take her away and she totally beat the crap out of him and escaped — I didn’t know what would happen next, or why I even had that guy or that young woman in my head. And he’s there for ostensibly a good reason — she’s got powers and he wants to train her to use them in a La Femme Nikita kind of way — but she doesn’t care or even wait to hear any of this, just smashes his foot with her heel and knocks everyone else down and sprints for the electric fences and scales three of them before he finally catches her. But then as the novel came together and I started rewriting it, the main “what if” I toyed with — a more existential kind than “What if I had a unicorn” — was, What happens when you get what you want and it’s not at all what you wanted?
5. What would you describe as driving forces of your writing? What themes do you find yourself coming back to?
The idea that seems to be the most consistent in my work — short story or novel — is how firmly wedded I believe tragedy and comedy are. That the two — to be truly effective — are inseparable. And what I’ve also noticed is that I open with and coax you in with comedy or action or both and then half way through, three-quarters the way through you realize — if you’re like me — that you’ve been snookered and really what you’re reading is a really funny tragedy.
BONUS: Whether it’s new picks or old favorites, could you give us a sample of your favorite books?
Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel
Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins and Life after Life
Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins (there was a streak where every book I read had ‘ruins’ in the title)
Tana French’s The Likeness
Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
And hell, this list could keep going and going and going but I’ll stop there.
The Regional Office is Under Attack! is on sale today, find it here.
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