Both prequel and sequel to the author’s Signal Hill, which Kirkus Reviews called “what might have happened had Nathanael West lived on and been even more talented,” the linked episodes in Rifkin’s new novel comprise one bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy journey through a personal past so seductive the protagonists nearly stay there, until they can’t. Author Alan Rifkin talks to Book Glow about his new novel, The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual.

Describe the book in one sentence.

It’s a literary novel-in-stories—like Olive Kitteridge but set in Los Angeles—that threads together a reporter’s idealized past during the golden age of the magazine print boom with his troubled millennial son’s struggle to claim his own season in the sun.

What led you to write it?

Being a father with a melancholy bent, a melancholy awareness of drift—generational, cultural, personal—and how people coming of age in the 21st century more or less sensibly see the end of the last century as an unforeseen fork in the river of our collective hope. They navigate between wonderment and outright envy, along with epidemic levels of mental illness. They romanticize the music, the songs, the art scene of an earlier generation in ways that are both touching and worrisome. For all their resilience, the realities of urban survival without help from their parents are approaching dystopian. Where was the precise bend in the river for a given protagonist who’s also been a serial romantic, who chased dreams of marital bliss, artistic grandeur, family and fortune? The fact LA was coming into its own as an arts capital in the father’s young adulthood added another layer to the drama of expectations.

How long did it take to write?

Five years alongside fulltime teaching. Four of those five years were probably spent revising and trimming sentences. My friend Charlie Haas likes to say there are always problems that don’t get caught in the first 45 drafts, although I guarantee he said it better. He also calls writers “persons living with writing,” so I end up quoting him a lot!

Do you prefer writing in one genre over another?

I always felt I had a natural understanding of how short stories work, and I learned structure from magazine feature writing, so I’d have been happy forever cross-pollinating between those two forms, and I pretty much did until I couldn’t support a family that way. What I like about writing novels is not having to start from scratch so often. Beginnings and endings are so difficult to write, and middles are where you’ve achieved combustion and are most in touch with the questions a novel brings alive for you—which I think I’m discovering is the advantage and the essence of a novel. So few novels have endings worth their middles, if I could end this answer on a challenge. That is, some last lines of novels are memorable, but the endings themselves are usually complex, cyclical, whereas short stories crystallize some aspect of life much more vividly. All that said, this novel emerged from an attempt to have each chapter itself be a self-contained short story, mostly in hopes of selling them along the way.

What book most influenced your life?

Call It Sleep by Henry Roth had such a propulsive voice I think it literally forced me to start writing in my twenties. Like everyone my age, I wanted to copy Salinger somewhat, and then it was Hemingway, Didion, Ann Beattie, Raymond Chandler. I would practically run my hand over Chandler’s pages thinking, This is what it would feel like to write something of my own and not want to change a word.

Where do you write?

Mostly in my bedroom office, but I wrote my first book of fiction almost entirely in coffee shops. I still like to print five or ten pages and hike to a coffee place on Larchmont to mark them up with byzantine changes.

Is there any one thing that especially frustrates you about the writing process?

I think there’s an instant for a young writer, or there was for me, when your style perfectly balances roominess with the things you feel you have to say. My head is so overfull of qualifiers and complications in older age that I am in a constant struggle to pare them down to just the spare brush strokes that evoke the whole. I envy my students their natural voice.

Any advice for novice writers?

Ass plus chair equals pages. Now more than ever, rejection in the publishing business could mean a million things having nothing to do with the quality of your work. Your most embarrassing truth is what readers are starved for. The subject that looks unpublishable when you start writing something could be in vogue the day you finish. Or twenty years later. I think our job is to write what we want to read but are having trouble finding anywhere else. An old magazine editor friend used to look at every troubled manuscript, and sigh, “It’s going to be great,” because it is.

What’s next?

I’m a couple of years deep into a novel set in a future San Fernando Valley that tries to survive cataclysmic culture wars by becoming a retro-paradise for tourists based on its own mid-20th century past. So it’s all about drift again, I suppose. Real people live there, which makes things metaphysically interesting, and the protagonist is writing, but can’t stop overwriting, his generation’s history for his high school yearbook. It’s the first remotely sci-fi thing I’ve ever attempted, after infamously forbidding students to write sci-fi because I don’t appreciate most of it well enough. So we’ll see how that goes.

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