Author Salvador Plascencia’s first love wasn’t writing, it was basketball ““ that is, until he realized that being 5-foot-4-inches wouldn’t cut it. Our conversation consisted more of X-Men, the latest Grand Theft Auto installment and the newest tech toy, the Amazon Kindle, than of his prose.
And, by the time we met for our interview last Tuesday, he had yet to finish the work he is set to read at the Hammer Museum this Wednesday at 7 p.m.
Plascencia, author of the Los Angeles Times best-seller “The People of Paper,” is anything but conventional.
“I’m planning to read from this manual on shape-shifters, teleportation, rapid healing and flight,” Plascencia said. He paused for a second, before adding, “Unless it just falls apart.”
Suffice it to say, Plascencia doesn’t go by the book. He just goes. When he writes, it’s less about rules and regulations and more about what comes naturally.
“I was writing this slaughterhouse novel and I was just confused. I had a plot, a process and chapters. And then I just let it go,” Plascencia said. “Every time I try to write a traditional story, it doesn’t work. I like to keep my possibilities open.”
Plascencia’s “The People of Paper” did just that with its nebulous genre and typographical nuances.
The story revolves around a community that becomes aware of the oppressive eyes of the narrator, Saturn. In search of a more private life, the townspeople leads a rebellion against Saturn, who is using their daily existence as commodity in the form of a book.
The format of the text skips back and forth, from a column system granting three simultaneous voices to a more traditional single narrator. At one point, the narrator learns his ex-love is in a new relationship and decides to literally cut the unnamed man out of the story. In the current edition the name is scribbled out, but in the first edition there are actual die-cut holes in the page where the man’s name used to be.
Plascencia’s work functions as a melting pot of text and typography and a work without restraint. “I just don’t believe in genre. This book is a magical-real, meta-novel, sci-fi cholo, war novel,” Plascencia said. “If you need a robot, you should be able to bring in a robot, and if you have cancer and heartbreak, that’s fine, then it can be in a detective story ““ why not?”
Plascencia’s inability to be categorized is the kind of attitude that helped his book find its way to Professor Katherine Hayles’s experimental literature class at UCLA last spring. Hayles has been teaching English at UCLA for 16 years and has used Plascencia’s work several times.
“Plascencia’s “˜The People of Paper’ breaks new ground in experimental literature in combining Chicano content with Latin American magical realism and U.S. metafiction,” Hayles said. “The innovative typography allows experiments in narrative form that are visually arresting and semantically meaningful.”
Plascencia has visited Hayles’ classes to speak about “The People of Paper.”
“It’s always interesting coming to UCLA,” Plascencia said. “You have this group of well-read and informed students asking you these questions like “˜Why are you such a misogynistic pig?’ and you have to answer.”
Fourth-year American literature and culture student Yvette Holzwarth was more positive about the novel than others.
“”˜The People of Paper’ required effort to read because of its formal inventiveness, but I found the read rewarding, especially in respect to form,” she said.
Benjamin Weissman, the curator of the “New American Writing” reading series at the Hammer, has brought in older writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Robert Coover, and is now branching out with Plascencia’s newer, younger voice.
“Plascencia has a very complex sense of humor, a brand of punk surrealism that makes a reader giddy. His sentences are beautiful, indirect, unpredictable,” he said.
The reading will be followed by a Q&A, book signing and a chance to meet and chat with the author. Plascencia will be joined by Rachel Kushner whose debut novel “Telex from Cuba” was released July 1. Tickets are free and available on a first come, first served basis.
Although his reading is only about a week away, it’s hard to make any sort of prediction when it comes to Plascencia, but that seems to be at least part of his appeal to readers.
“It’s more of a coming-of-age collection of short stories,” Plascencia said. “I think. But it might fall apart.”