Alex Shakar grew up in Brooklyn, attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Yale in 1990. He was a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1996, Alex won the National Fiction Competition and the Independent Presses Editors' "Pick of the Year" for his first collection of short stories, City in Love. He currently lives in Chicago.

Bev:  I saw an article about you in USA Weekend in which you were described as being THE voice for the Post-Gen-X Generation.  That was intriguing, but I had no idea what it meant...then I read "THE SAVAGE GIRL".

You do look at the world a little differently.  Could you tell us about yourself?  What is your background?

Alex:  Well, maybe one of the more unusual things about my childhood was that my dad is an actor, and so I grew up watching the strange roles he was hired to play in TV shows, commercials and movies.  In TV shows he was usually the guy who gets beat up: the kidnapping victim who gets beat up by his captors, the stoolpigeon who gets beat up by the vigilante hero for information, the racist thug who gets beat up by the vigilante hero for revenge, and so forth.  In commercials he more often than not played an Italian guy who loves the taste of a certain spaghetti sauce (which in reality is about as Italian as he is-his ancestry is Armenian).  He starred in a B horror movie about radioactive monster children who burn their parents to a crisp, his role being that of the adult who triumphs by hacking all the town's children to pieces.

As a child, I think watching my father become these odd "people" seemed both very funny and a little bit scary too.  This mixture of humor and horror is pretty much how I feel about popular culture to this day, and that's the feeling, I think, that's conveyed in The Savage Girl.

My dad's most well-remembered role was that of John Travolta's brother the priest, Father Frank Jr., in Saturday Night Fever.  In Brooklyn, this was a pretty big deal at the time, and whenever he'd come to events at my elementary school he'd get mobbed for autographs (and the occasional ecclesiastical question from kids who thought he was actually a priest).  His popularity extended to me of course too, so in that way I got a little taste of the absurd and somewhat arbitrary power of celebrity.
 

Bev:  Tomorrow, Ltd. is an interesting idea.  Are there really trendspotters that actually get paid to just observe the rest of the world?  What was your inspiration for "THE SAVAGE GIRL?"

Alex:  Trendspotters are for real... well, they certainly do exist at any rate.  The job description-how they're called upon to be part-businesspeople, part-cultural anthropologists-fascinated me enough to start writing a novel about them.  While I was doing this, about a year into the writing of it, I was sitting in a coffee shop and working on the book when a couple of real-life trendspotters walked into the place.  They came up to me and asked me if they could ask me some questions about my shopping habits.  For the first few minutes things went exactly as I expected they would from the research that I'd done-the books I'd read and marketers and trendspotters I'd talked to. They asked me what was my favorite casual outfit and fancy outfit in my wardrobe, where was my favorite place to shop, where I would go on my ideal date, and so forth.  But then they started asking me deeper questions: What was my philosophy of life?  What was my number one goal in life?  I started getting carried away with myself, actually taking the questions seriously and trying to answer them fully, when one of them looked down at my feet and said, "I like your shoes.  What kind are they?"  Without thinking, I replied, "They're Australian sheepherders boots."  And the two of them stopped, and looked at each other, and their eyes said, "we've got it!"  It was kind of a humiliating moment for me, because I realized in that moment that they'd found the product I most romanticized and made a part of my identity.  Australian sheepherders boots?  I thought about it.  Where had that phrase come from?  A salesperson?  I'd certainly never been to Australia.  I realized that the shoes signified to me a dream of a simpler, more manly ruggedly rural life.  The funny thing is, a year later (not that I'm claiming any responsibility for this) those shoes were everywhere, all the fanciest stores carried their version of them-Armani, Prada, Kenneth Cole-making them into the kind of dressy shoes people would wear to five star restaurants and upscale dance clubs; but still, even so, people would like them for that hint of rusticity they retained.  I think that this is a good example of how trends work: they begin as grassroots movements, as kind of yearning, be it emotional, political or spiritual; but by the time they get picked up and run through the mill of mass marketing and get handed down to you from above, their meaning has been changed, drained, and sometimes even turned into the opposite of what they initially meant.
 

Bev:  You are certainly not limited by the constraints of the English language. Tell us about some of the "Shakarisms" in the story.  Invisigoths...sloganition...postironic...paradessence.

Alex:  Yes, it's not only a writers right to improve upon the language, it's his moral and aesthetic duty.

Invisigoths are punks who dress all in gray and wear white contact lenses, rendering their eyeballs invisible.

In the future, as glimpsed by Ivy, the schizophrenic fashion model, words will not have definitions but rather sloganitions.  Look up "standing" and the sloganition will be: "The world at your feet."  "Walls" will be: "Giving you some space."  "Erections" will be: "Feel your power."

The term postirony started out as kind of a joke but quickly turned into one of the central themes in the novel.  The trendspotters in the story all have different ideas about what it means, but one way of thinking of it is that it's the state wherein you no longer no if you meant something you just said ironically or earnestly.  Since the book has come out, the word has spread like wildfire (or like the Plague, depending on your outlook).  I've seen it used in articles describing everything from the post 9/11 mindset to the next wave of TV commercials to the new style of young American visual artists.

In my novel the diabolical trendspotter Chas Lacouture believes that every product has a paradessence, or paradoxical essence, two opposing desires it can promise to satisfy simultaneously, and that it's the job of a marketer to harness this "broken soul" in order to make you buy it.  For example, the paradessence of coffee is stimulation and relaxation, every successful ad you see for coffee will promise you both of these mutually exclusive feelings.
 

Bev:  What else have you written?

Alex:  Before THE SAVAGE GIRL I wrote a collection of stories called City in Love, stories of people searching for love and meaning and belonging in a surreal New York City.  The stories are based on the amazingly beautiful transformation myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
 

Bev:  As grandmother of a covey of kids in the 8 to 12 age bracket, I was amazed at your astute observations of the psyche of tweens and the adult conspiracy that they imagine.  It was right on.  How did you come to these conclusions?

Alex:  I think a lot about the effects of consumerism on children, and about our marketing industry's increasing tendency to target them at younger and younger ages.  As a result even small children are becoming so jaded that a lot of commercials are starting to lampoon commercialism itself (and in the process, to paint a rather dark picture of their own industry) in order that they can pretend to be on kids' side.  It's a bizarre, vicious circle, and I felt like someone needed to write about it.
 

Bev:  What are your future writing plans?  Is anything new in the works?

Alex:  I had about twelve ideas for a novel, and I've narrowed it down now to two.  Hopefully I'll be able to make up my mind and get started soon.

Bev:  Your characters are wonderful, but they certainly live in a world unfamiliar to me.  I'm sure they have a life of their own.  With that in mind, could I ask Ursula a couple of questions?

Ursula, I get the feeling that Ivy's schizophrenia is something that you sorta envy and yet feel guilty about.  Is there a guilt feeling, and if so why?  Tell us how you feel about your sister.

Alex:  It's harder for me to channel Ursula these days, since finishing the novel is a sad farewell to the characters for me as well.  But yes, Ursula does feel both sorry for and envious of Ivy, both for her beauty and for her insanity as well.  Because these two things have given Ivy a lot of trouble in her life, but they also, paradoxically, have given her power.  The schizophrenic Ivy believes herself to be a famous fashion model, and lo and behold, in the course of the story, she ends up becoming one.  It takes Ursula much of the novel to figure out whether she herself, by allowing her mentally ill sister to be used in a marketing campaign, is doing this to help Ivy, or doing it to help herself; and this internal conflict, until it is resolved, leaves her feeling guilty.
 

Bev:  Ursula, what are your new goals with middle age approaching?

Alex:  I see Ursula living, after her experiences in The Savage Girl, if not happily ever after, then certainly, at least, far more fulfilled for her troubles.  I see her returning to being an artist and going on to create works of art that give the rest of us insight into the problems we might have otherwise thought to be too big and insidious ever to get our minds around; works that give us the courage to confront these problems head on in our day to day lives; and that, though the sheer beauty of their construction, give us an ideal of the wondrous potential of our world toward which to strive.

Alex Shakar takes an up close look at the conflict of consumer culture in this satirical novel of American marketing.  Unforgettable characters populate his city posed on the walls of a volcano.  Even the sane ones have their delusions.

Ursula VanUrden rushes to help her schizophrenic supermodel sister, Ivy, when she very publicly attempts suicide.  Ursula, who is an artist, joins Tomorrow, Ltd., the firm owned by Ivy's boyfriend, Chas Lacouture, as a trendspotter to predict the next fad for their clients; to find the paradessence, or the paradoxical essence of products to be exploited.  On Rollerblades, Ursula follows Javier throughout the city trying to spot clues to future obsessions.

Ursula is intrigued by a homeless girl, an urban savage, that hunts urban animals for food and wears caveman style hides for clothing.  Her artistic rendition of this girl sparks an innovative and elaborate advertising campaign for Diet Water that has a surprising backlash.  Diet Water??

Chas uses Ivy as spokesperson on the Internet site in the hugely successful advertising campaign, but her delusions and search for instant fame and fortune open a window on a world we've never even imagined.

Shakar is a very talented and innovative writer with a different view of the world.  He is not limited by current English usage, and gives us new meanings for words, and invents new words that will surely come into common usage. Move over Pynchon and Wolfe; Shakar is the voice of the future.  We'll be hearing much more from this author and I can't wait to see what kind of ideas he will come up with next.