The Texas town of Goodnight by the Sea is facing a couple of dilemmas: its economy is in ruins and a serious hurricane is brewing in the gulf, headed directly its way. (Cobb finished the novel before Katrina.) Gusef Smurov is a Russian emigre, the owner of two local businesses—the Black Tooth café and the Sea Horse Motel. It's immediately established that he has the kind of incurably optimistic attitude that all successful entrepeneurs are infected with and that, despite being an immigrant, he has achieved a kind of economic success that the native-born Americans all around him would claim is no longer possible. (In The Fire Eaters, his entrepeneurial counterpart in the business of viands is an American named Glen.) The opening scene outlines the collapse of the shrimping industry, a traditional source of employment in Goodnight, and introduces Gabriel Perez, a young shrimper whose own job is one of the casualties. Gabriel's pessimism is contrasted with Gusef's cheerfulness in this introductory glimpse, particularly in an anecdote about Gusef and a Mr. Buzzy. Gabriel's girlfriend, Una Vu, is a waitress at the café and Falk Powell, another local teenager, is a cook. In short order, Una will dump Gabriel in favor of Falk, and this is the macguffin which kicks off one of the conflicts that propels the plot. Falk, tossed out of school for possession of a knife, is an orphan living with his Aunt Vicky and her daughter Leesha, who will soon enough get tangled up in an affair with Gabriel Perez.

An ingenius backdrop takes shape behind this web of lives, an amazing natural phenomenon that has blessed Goodnight and its residents and tourists—a gigantic fish, like a prehistoric monster, has washed up on shore, with a small pony inside its open jaws! The fish is compared to an elongated VW Beetle (this is an image that semi-obsesses Cobb; it comes back in a nice way at the end of Goodnight, Texas and plays an important role in The Fire Eaters as one of the things that help the brothers Damon and Louis bond); Falk takes pictures, which he will later sell to a TV station. (He also chronicles the massively destructive hurricane, Tanya, with his camera, catching someone in the act of burning down their home in order to collect the insurance money. This is one of several scenes in which Cobb snares the "movement and color of life", the tenor of the times, perfectly. In another, he describes a tattooed bracelet of thorns; in another, a pair of hip hugger jeans on a girl—things about which we can't help but grin, because these visual experiences are so widely shared by us all.)

Gusef gets the idea to have the giant fish stuffed and mounted atop the Black Tooth café, as a sign. The scenes describing these preparations involve a gay taxidermist named Martinez who drives an outrageous purple tow truck. Martinez is an especially colorful character in a book fully stocked with them, as is Sheriff Littledog, a lawman who has doubt and compassion constantly on his heartstrings. In the course of the narrative, Littledog must make decisions about several of the principals. This fantastic image, of the giant stuffed fish atop the café, has many connotations—not the least of them being Gusef's P.T. Barnum-like flair for publicity and opportunity. (At the start of the novel, Gusef meditates that although disaster is coming, something better will come out of it, which is exactly what happens.)

I'd like to briefly get away from the story proper to consider a couple of aspects of the mechanics of Cobb's prose that serve to make it enjoyable. First, the author dispenses with quotation marks; and while this is not particularly new or earth shattering, here it functions in a way that highlights the overall clarity of the writing. Some novels which adopt this technique drive us crazy as we try to separate the writer's descriptive or declarative statements from the characters' speech. In Goodnight, this isn't a problem, whatsoever. It's hard to say what the stylistic reasons are for this, but at least it's not a detriment. In fact, it's an enhancement that highlights the Cobb's skill.

The second, deeper point has to do with the Spanish words and phrases peppered throughout the text and, to another degree, with the manner in which Gusef speaks a type of not exactly broken but not exactly fluent English. As I read, it felt as though the Spanish was too easy, almost baby-like, readily accessible to an English speaker with no dictionary and no knowledge of the other language, and I felt that this was a mistake. However, upon reflection, it simply made me reconsider the English and the elegant simplicity, very near to perfection—almost a Cézanne of words. The deceptively plain prose really conceals the amount of sweat that must go into writing such flowing, pristine dialogue and sentences. So, the elementary Spanish calls attention to the uncomplicated English, which calls attention to its own internal grace and smoothness. This is an important point; it shows that ordinary language is capable of transmitting extraordinary experience. Cobb never gives in to the temptation to be 'literary' with syntax or vocabulary, yet the degree of impact he achieves is no less for this fact.

In The Fire Eaters, a teacher from Montreal, Miss LeClaire, speaks, like Gusef, in not quite complete English:

"Come, Damon. Tell me. What is boiling point of water?"

"Hot," I told her. "Really hot."

The class giggled.

"Two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit," said Penelope.

"And what is normal temperature of healthy boy?" asked Miss LeClaire...

Gusef speaks this way, as well, leaving out articles such as "the, a, an", and I think it's noteworthy that, in both instances, we have a foreigner, a non-native speaker who has not fully mastered the language, in the role of a sort of bringer of enchantment who combines practical hard work and diligence with elements of the mysterious and the fantastic. In both instances, it is the outsider who is something of a savior. Miss LeClaire helps Damon get over his lisping. Only Gusef would put a gigantic stuffed fish atop a café; only Gusef gives a girl, who loses everything in the hurricane, an automobile; only Gusef makes Mr. Buzzy feel good after his horrible accident. But Miss LeClaire is equally capable of introducing wonder; consider this next passage, remembering that it involves fourth graders in an American school in 1963:

After lunch, Miss LeClaire asked us to take a nap, so that we would not become sluggish and cranky. "It is important to sleep," she said. Each student had a bath towel for this. We unrolled them on the tiled floor beside our desks, and lay on these to sleep. I could see the other students through the legs of the desks, some of them fidgeting, but many of them at rest, at peace.

Cobb's view of family life can be rough—full of deadbeat fathers; fathers who run off, leaving their families behind; violent arguments; booze and drugs; teenage pregnancy out of wedlock; suicide; poverty; mixed race relationships in a time and place where such is highly taboo, etc.. In certain respects, Cobb is of the view that these things permeate experience: in The Fire Eaters, Damon watches Mr. O'Hara scream and curse at his wife by peeking through the curtains; in Goodnight, Texas, Falk Powell similarly observes the couple in Room 17. In The Fire Eaters, Lizzie gets hopelessly pregnant in her teens; in Goodnight, Texas, Leesha Day does the same. (In both instances, the fathers, soon afterwards, flee, reminiscent of not one but two of the fathers in The Fire Eaters.) At critical times in their lives, both Falk and Damon take note of the world at night from bunk beds. I think that such continuity demonstrates an author in firm command of a vision.

Lastly, a word about the author's skill with nuance and implication. Cobb's observations of the characters under stress, pressure and confusion—scenes between Una and her mother, scenes of Leesha and Gabriel alone in the school bus, scenes of the transparently insincere visits of the governor and various TV news personnel to Goodnight, the final scene involving Walter and India Hamilton—all these and more are evocative of the inarticulate silences which rise up in our throats in like situations. In writing about them, knowing what to leave out is as crucial as knowing what to put in, and this makes the words on the page that much more impactful. Goodnight, Texas is, in one sense, about the passing of an entire way of life—small town life—but it's also about seizing the chances that become available as a result change. It's about devastating natural disaster and the fortitude and resilience we must exhibit to overcome it. It's about falling in and out of love, about learning how what you thought was love really isn't, and about the molding of innocence and naïveté into wisdom and fulfillment. Most of all, it's about that tricky thing we still don't know enough about: the human heart.

THE INTERVIEW

QUINONES: In many ways, this is a novel about young people making the transition to adulthood: Gabriel, Una, Leesha, and Falk all have to come to terms with growing up very quickly within the time span of the fiction. What might be some specific points, if any, you wanted to make about these rites of passage?


COBB: That's maybe the toughest time in life, right after high school, when you're trying to make it in the world and break away from your parents, when you're trying to become somebody. The people I'm writing about aren't privileged, either. They aren't the types who would immediately go off to college, get an internship at Dell Computers, drive around in the Lexus dad bought them. They don't have much money; so, if they buy a car, it's a junker. They don't have time or money for college; they have to work some crappy job. That reality is tougher and less hopeful than your average college kid's struggle with navigating the mouse maze of parties and coursework. I knew people like Falk and Una, and lived in that world. My background was humble, to put it mildly. It used to be people talked about "working your way through college", which is what I did, I guess. You don't hear that phrase mentioned much anymore. I worked construction in late high school and early college years. Then, I got a job cooking at a Mexican restaurant, which was pleasant enough, chatting with waitresses and scarfing guacamole and enchiladas.

If there's a point to the young people struggling in Goodnight, it's that it takes work to break out of the cocoon. Real work. Sometimes that work is an actual job—like waiting tables for Una—or, sometimes, it's a skill or hobby, like photography is for Falk. And, for others, it's the mistakes you make, like the way Gabriel can't control his rage. He's pissed off at the world, and takes it out in everything he does. College often puts off that maturation stage. Una and Falk are growing faster because they're not in school. By the end, two of them are orphans, and the third is cut off from his family for good. By then, they're out. I think they're stronger, too.

QUINONES: I was very intrigued by the whole idea of the giant fish. Is this something you came up with wholly out of imagination, or did you hear about something like this that really happened? Is this scientifically possible? It seems like a wonderful bit of sci-fi/fantasy in the mix of what is an otherwise very realistic story.

COBB: The zebrafish is totally imagined, but I'm a sucker for cryptozoology stories, so it's not all that unlikely. Think of the coelacanth and the giant squid. Both of these sea creatures are known to exist, and both were not scientifically verified until the 20th century. I wanted a jazzy, wild sea creature, and didn't want to be held back by the facts, hence the colossal wide-mouthed zebrafish. As a writer, it's fun to play the little god. A couple of my favorite books are an obscure tome called Dangerous Sea Creatures and Richard Ellis' In Search of the Giant Squid. I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast, and I've seen some strange things. Probably one of the weirdest sea creatures I've witnessed was a huge sea gar. I was out fishing and it surfaced near me. It was probably seven feet long and had a mouth of wicked teeth. It freaked me out to think creatures that big and nasty looking were in the water all around me. The sea is mystery. I always wanted to sail around the world. If I did, maybe this is what I'd find: a giant fish with a horse in its mouth.

That's probably the most fantastic thing, that the zebrafish has a horse in its mouth. The impetus to that is a visit I took to St. Joseph's Island when I was writing the novel. St. Joe's is an uninhabited island the other side of Aransas Bay, near my hometown of Fulton, Texas. It has herds of cattle on it and, supposedly, wild horses. I always thought that was cool—an island inhabited only by cattle and mustangs.

QUINONES: I'm sure you get many questions about the crystal ball-like foretelling of Katrina via the Hurricane Tanya of the novel; but this is, I think, one of the most important characteristics of fiction: it helps us understand the world in new ways. It can also be prescient; DeLillo wrote a novel in the '70s that eerily seems to predict some of the events of 9/11. Would you comment on this (1) in general and (2) specifically in regard to your own novel?


COBB: I'm fascinated with—and horrified by—the whole idea of global warming. I've read quite a bit about it, from more sweeping-vision books like Jared Diamond's Catastrophe, Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, and E.O. Wilson's The Future of Life, or recent works like Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change and Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers. Someone said it's the great wild card of the 21st century. Who knows what will happen? That seems like a good harbor for a novel.

But the actual impetus was an abandoned subdivision I heard of near Houston. It's a place where the rising sea level and sinking land made an entire suburb uninhabitable. All the families moved away, and the suburb was declared condemned. The streets are supposedly filled with water, and the houses all crumbling into the sea. I liked that image. In high school, I lived in a suburb right on the water. In the big winter storms, when the wind was out of the north, the wave spray would lash against the walls of our house. In a few decades, my old neighborhood could—and probably will—end up like the one near Houston, flooded and abandoned. Maybe even underwater.

It doesn't take a genius to know the storms will get worse as the effects of global warming kick in. But there's an awesome beauty to the storms as well, the sublime terror. Plus, my family has a long history with coastal storms. My mother always said we had "sand between our toes". Some of my ancestors died in Galveston during the Great Storm of 1900. One of my earliest memories was of Hurricane Carla, when I was a baby in the early Sixties. We moved to the Gulf Coast in the Seventies, right after Hurricane Celia. My parents had four feet of water in their house in Hurricane Alice in the Eighties.

I wrote most of Goodnight, Texas in 2004, while living on a ranch near Austin. I don't remember the hurricane season that year, but I do remember that June was particularly rainy. To reach the ranch house, we had to drive through a creek, and we were flooded in during the heavy rains of June, when the creek rose. When the flood waters receded, the branches of the trees were full of debris, like Styrofoam ice chests and lawn furniture, plastic bottles and pool toys.

The best fiction gives us a peek into the back rooms and, hopefully, some understanding of the people in them. I just watched Spike Lee's documentary about New Orleans during and after Katrina. You can't see that and not get angry and disgusted at the failure of government to help the people. That's one thing I didn't imagine. I would have expected better. We all would, wouldn't we? At heart, I'm an optimist and believe that people want to do the right thing. Terrible storms will always happen, and there is no simple answer to how to prevent or react to them. But it's shocking to witness the ineptitude of our government on such a grand scale of misery and failure.

QUINONES: On a Web site called gnooks.com a reader wrote this about you: "When Bill was young, he told me he would keep writing until he was 'excellent'." Were you referring to any one particular aspect of writing, in this remark—plotting, characterization, prose style, symbolism, etc.? It's pretty obvious you've been a very serious student of the craft of writing. Is there a particular area of writing fiction that gives you the greatest satisfaction or fulfillment?

COBB: Did I say that, years ago? Actually 'excellent' seems too modest a goal, doesn't it? I do remember wanting to imitate the masters. Back in my caterpillar days, I was a huge Nabokov fan. For many years, what I shot for was closer to 'virtuosity'. Nabokov has that ability to write any kind of sentence—short and punchy, long and lyrical, funny, wry, heart-breaking—all of it. All of it, that is, with an air of sophistication. I've changed, now. I'm thinking: to hell with sophistication. Or, to stick with Nabokov's penchant for lepidotera metaphor, maybe I've turned out to be a moth. Una mariposa nocturna, in español: a night butterfly. In our bedroom, we have a framed Atlas moth, one of the largest in the world. It's not pretty, but it's powerful.

Although Nabokov is still one of my all-time favorites, I rarely read him anymore. I think I'm less concerned with the special effects of virtuosity and more so with the overlooked—both people and places. I don't want my fiction to seem reliant on allusion and metaphor. I want to show the reader people's lives that will make them wince or smile or groan. Cormac McCarthy is one of my all-time favorites, a brujo of language and vision. He's added the Texas landscape to a map of the world's great fiction. And, the last few years, I've been reading the novels of Pete Dexter and Kent Haruf, two writers who don't rely so much on sophistication and irony as heart-twisting fate and character. There's a moment in Haruf's Eventide, for instance, when he describes these poor luckless misfits in a supermarket, buying the wrong food with their foodstamps, the other townspeople glaring at them, and I know these people, and it's sad and true and heartbreaking. It's not fiction about being cool, about hipsters and satire. It's about the rough edges of the world. I hope I'm writing about that, as well, and I hope there are some rough edges in my writing. For instance, I use more slang and odd modes of expression that I hear people use in actual speech, rather than worrying too much about imitating the correctness of bland TV speak. One of my favorite people in Goodnight, Texas is Oscar Martinez, the gay Mexican taxidermist. He's not terribly lyrical or sophisticated. He's resentful and drunken and funny and a true chingado artist, in that he taxidermies the colossal zebrafish into a beautiful thing. I met a guy like him in New Mexico. He made me laugh.