J. J. Viertel, The Glass Eel - Author Interview

Grab a drink and a snack and settle in for this fabulous Q&A. Father-and-son duo, Jack and Josh Viertel, graciously answered my questions in great detail and added a lot of comedic flair!

Read my review of The Glass Eel.

1. What is your association with Maine, and what about it inspired you to set your novel there? (I’m fairly sure Caterpillar Island isn’t a real place, unless it’s known by another name?) Furthermore, was it your intention to capture the kindness and openness of Mainers (beyond the indifference to away people), alongside the ruggedness of the landscape they inhabit? 

Jack: My wife and I live part time on Little Deer Isle in Hancock County. We can neither confirm nor deny that it inspired the book. So, yes, Caterpillar Island is a fictional place and any resemblance to any place living or dead is purely coincidental, so to speak. 

Josh: I spend a lot of time there, to be with my parents and my sister. I’ve fished and bowhunted there, foraged for mushrooms and shellfish. I feel very close to it. 

Jack: It is an extraordinarily beautiful place, full of contradictions. Hard sharp rocks, soft moss. Easy summers. Brutal winters. Poverty. Wealth. And it is quirky and full of character and characters. Of course, as a summer-fall resident I'm basically a person looked on with proper skepticism by the local population. We’re from away for sure. Having lived here, however, I gradually absorbed the nature of a lot of the folks, as well as the nature of the nature. I think we wanted to depict the somewhat minimalist way the people who are real Mainers often behave, speak and act. 

Josh: Maine begs to be written about.  

2. What inspired the macro focus on the chapters, such as the crab, the lobster, and the eel? It’s not quite a crab point of view, but it is a very zoomed-in focus. To me, these chapters almost divide the novel into three ‘parts.’ 

Jack: This was very much Josh’s idea. 

Josh: In the Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck is working hard to help the reader get a sense of Oklahoma during the dust bowl. Dry and dusty, displaced people trying to get someplace, being thwarted by forces bigger than them. He zooms in on a turtle trying to get across a highway and writes an extraordinary scene. When we were thinking about how to help people get a sense of the coast of Maine, I kept thinking about this one spot on the shore of Eggemoggin Reach I wanted to describe. I remembered this scene and I thought: What if instead of a turtle, we watched a crab. 

Jack: When he first explained it to me, I thought he’d lost his mind. Who has time for such things in a thriller? Well, he did, so we did.  

Josh: As the novel evolved, we realized that there were many creatures that gave perspective on Maine as a place and that there were opportunities to have people interact with these creatures in ways that became meaningful for the plot. 

3. Early in the book, a seemingly minor and even comical moment — the squirrel incident on Joe’s parents’ property — ends up having surprising narrative weight, ultimately tying into Shandy Epps becoming a burner. Epps’s brief, almost offhand thought about “fate and time” adds a philosophical layer to what could have been a throwaway scene. Are you interested in exploring how small or random moments can shape people’s lives? What draws you to that kind of storytelling — is it more about character depth, or about how we, as readers, think about causality and meaning? 

Josh: A big part of living in a rural area is the cast of characters you become intimately familiar with. This starts with people, but if you take your time in a place, you meet other characters, often over and over again. In my neighborhood there is a bear named Kevin. He knows the trash pickup is on Friday. He stops by for a snack every Thursday evening, and all of my neighbors come to expect it. I think Kevin may know us better than we know Kevin. I like this idea that we encounter each other, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, over and over again, and that these encounters can shape the course of our lives.  

Jack: A lot of life’s turns depend on accident, unexpected encounters like that, decisions made without much forethought and so forth. And I think that’s worth writing about. A lot of what happens in this book didn’t have to happen, but it did anyhow. Life is that way, and it interests me – to the degree that I understand it. It also reflects a lot of what’s happened to me in my own life, including Josh saying, “I have an idea for a story.” That’s how this all started.  

4. Coming from a holiday destination, I empathize with the issues surrounding seasonal visitors and second-home owners. The irony being, people who moved from the city years ago also then complain about the busy summer period. To me, this highlighted the dichotomy of locals having their property bought up and Indigenous people having their land stolen. Obviously, it’s a huge topic, but what inspired you to explore this discourse?  

Jack: Well, we all do that, right? We moved here many years ago. We cut down trees and built a road, then a house. But when a neighboring landowner starts cutting down trees and building a house, no matter how irrational, one is tempted to feel like it's an invasion. 

Josh: Well, it is an invasion, but we all inevitably take up space.  

Jack: I think it’s all part of the passage of time and how things that seem stable and permanent fall away and other things replace them. Often it’s done through violence – as in the case of Indigenous tribes who had their land stolen. Sometimes it’s done with money, as in the land grabs of a more recent era, including our own. But it’s always done by a combination of two things: the more powerful controlling the less powerful, and the world changing technologically, making certain things possible that had been impossible. Sometimes there’s a good result. More often not. We had to touch on it. We were writing about a place that has this very strong sense of who is local and who is “from away.” It’s a part of what Maine is. 

Josh: And we were writing in a time when non-native people were becoming more aware of the history of land theft in our country. People began reciting land acknowledgements which began with the best intentions, but over time it began to feel like a fashionable performance sometimes. Particularly when these acknowledgements weren’t accompanied with reallocation of resources to the descendants of the people from whom the land was stolen. You’d hear things like, “We want to begin this screening of Diehard 3 by acknowledging that this Loews Theater is built on stolen land. And please: remember to turn off your cell phones.” Pat yourself on the back. Move on. For us, it begged the question: ok, so you’ve acknowledged you are benefitting from a crime, now what are you going to do about it? And it made this whole question of whether you were really from Maine--even if your parents were born in New Hampshire—seem less important. 

5. The one-liners really started to shine toward the end of the novel. Bill Penny’s wisdom, ‘you know, you’re all from away,’ made me consider the idea of place, identity, and belonging. Was this your aim, or are you actually trying to make your readers have a full-on existential crisis? 

Josh: If we haven’t caused one in three readers to have a full-on existential crisis, we aren’t doing our jobs as authors.  

Jack: That’s not true. We just want people to enjoy the book. To be entertained. I don’t think we want our readers to have full-on existential crises – they might cease to exist, which we can’t afford.  

Josh: But there is also some meaning in it. We were talking about this question of being from away, and one day, dad said, “You know, unless you are Wabanaki, the truth is, you are ‘from away’.” It just started to feel to us like we couldn’t write about the place without writing about these issues and how they related.  

Jack: “Away” for our family means Minsk and Alsace-Lorraine, if you go back far enough. And a lot of other places.  

Josh: Some of the indigenous people I know really pushed my understanding about this. One, in particular, a wonderful, and brutally honest man named Hank Herrera, who sadly died of Covid, told me, “You can’t just disappear and not farm, not have a home. All of these settler systems are not going to go away. The question you need to be asking yourself is, what does it look like to be a good settler?” I’m really interested in how to become more native to a place. Not to steal indigenous ways of doing things, or pretend you are indigenous, because that is insulting and silly (though weirdly common), but how to be in the ecosystem and social system in sensitive, meaningful, connected, nourishing ways. Beyond learning not to mess up a place, but learning to listen to one’s surroundings, and cultivate something good. I wanted the book to touch on that question. 

 Photo credit: Margaret Kirchner.

6. In the opening of the book, when setting the scene, you mention that second-home owners move into the area and have ‘money to burn.’ Without giving anything away, does this conceit purposefully come full circle at the end of the book, demonstrating money’s true insignificance? I often think about how, in zombie or apocalypse movies, the first pillar to collapse is always money. Your novel reminded me of this. 

Jack: Well, when you decide to write a crime thriller, the first pillar to collapse is also money.  As Thornton Wilder wrote – admittedly in an entirely different context – money is like manure. It has to be spread around for anything to grow. In the case of our story, it starts with a modest amount of mysterious money and grows to a much larger amount, but the money never seems to get to the place someone intended it to go. I think we were reaching for irony here – when the shit hits the fan, the manure ends up in unexpected places.  

Josh: I don’t think we purposefully returned to that as a theme, but it is a very keen observation on your part. It must have been our collective unconscious. But when you create something, your values and your aesthetics – which are very intertwined – slip out, whether you like it or not. 

Jack: We’ve both been fortunate to do work we are passionate about, that pays us fairly. We’ve never made a fortune, but that hasn’t been our priority. We’ve also seen a lot of very happy people with rich lives who are not rich, and a lot of very rich people who have big holes to fill (and some who are quite fulfilled). Poverty is absolutely brutal. But great gobs of money don’t necessarily mean happiness. The whole mishmash of people who occupy the coast of Maine demonstrates this beautifully.  

Josh: One thing that really matters to us is how these made-up ideas become calcified realities. Like money. And that there is a sort of liberation when one realizes that it is made up. It doesn’t mean you don’t need to play the game, but it is helpful to know that it is a game you are playing. I was once with this extremely wealthy guy who was showing me his art collection from Micronesia. He told me how the Yapese people traditionally used giant carved stone circles for money. The story he told me was that one day, a boat carrying a massive stone circle sank in a storm. The owner was distraught, but the elders got together, and decided that they could still account for the stone even if it was on the bottom of the ocean. This, he said, was the invention of banking, and the acknowledgment that money was a concept. And as he’s telling this story, I look down and see he is wearing an ankle bracelet with a monitor on it. Turns out he was on house arrest. Good thing he didn’t have to carry his big stone circles around with him. 

7. Keith’s humour truly was the highlight of this novel for me. The line, ‘I mean, if a cat gives birth in the oven, it don’t mean the kittens is biscuits,’ is so insane and so hilarious. He says what he thinks. What was your intention behind writing a character like this? 

Josh: And someone actually said that once to someone I know who was born in Maine but was still considered “from away.” I wish we were brilliant enough to make it up, but alas, we are from away, and don’t have that magic touch. 

Jack: We’re reduced to pilfering from real life. Keith is a kind of hero in this book in that he says what’s on his mind (as briefly as possible) and he’s on the side of the angels, should there be any. He gets what life is and is content to live it that way. He likes building houses, so that’s what he does. And we do know people like that in Maine, where life, as hardscrabble as it may be, is just a lot simpler than it is in the big city. You can live a life to be proud of it without chasing the ever-shifting trends and opinions that keep buzzing past. Keith sees things for what they really are, and we should all respect the few people there are who do. And he’s good at his job.  

Josh: Keith is an amalgamation of a few people we know and love. Describing a guy like Keith is like describing any other part of the coast here. He is very real, wonderful, extraordinary, and not atypical. 

8. Does your reference to the green light at the end of the dock relate to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? For me, it made perfect sense, tied to the idea of hope and the virtually unattainable American dream. I noticed the colour green was a recurring theme, whether in flannel shirts, aprons, leaves, or moss. Perhaps mirroring the beautiful Maine landscape? 

Jack: Great catch! You are the first person who has noticed that, and a lot of literary people read the book and commented on it without noticing. You win a lobster roll. 

Josh: Which is a big deal. Prices are up this summer.  

Jack: And yes, it was about striving, but it was also a casual answer to Gatsby. Because the end is ultimately about surrender, and learning to be satisfied, and still. That’s what a dock is for, right? But it’s also true that a green light is better for the insects who are trying to avoid getting eaten, which is kind of what the book is about anyhow. There are lots of little tips of the hat in the book, not only to Gatsby, but to sources we’ve enjoyed over the years from Steinbeck and Thornton Wilder to E.B. White and various TV series and movies, particularly Robert Benton’s The Late Show, which we stole from without apology. Readers are welcome to go hunting for those and others.  

Josh: And that’s a great observation about the color green. We didn’t decide deliberately to lean on the color green. But Maine has so many extraordinary shades of green, that it makes sense we slipped into it. It hadn’t occurred to us to pick colors as themes, but we got there.  

Jack: My college roommate wrote a paper titled Black as a Symbol of Evil in Moby Dick. He got a D. And the only comment from the professor was, “What about the big white whale?” I wonder if Melville thought about it. 

9. One of the final lines in the book reads: ‘As the eel wove into the sea it would not be possible to distinguish the extent to which its progress was owed to its own exertion or to the current.’ That line really stuck with me; it made me think about how we, as humans, often believe we have a plan, that we’re actively shaping our paths. But how much of where we end up is really because of our own choices, and how much is fate, or something beyond us? Are we forging ahead, or just going where the current was always going to take us? Again, was your intention here for readers to consider the philosophical element of fate? 

Josh: Absolutely. One of the many things we learn from watching the natural world is about the interplay of our own will, and the forces around us. And then, eventually, you start to realize that even what you think of as your own will may actually be driven by some underlying animal nature, which is its own force, and not entirely in our control. 

Jack: I don’t know. I didn’t study philosophy. But one night Josh and his sister got into an epic fight at a Hunanese restaurant about whether free will could exist in a world with cause and effect. It went on for hours, and ruined the meal. Cold fried shrimp and cold tea.  

Josh: We actually still argue about it sometimes. It’s been going on for twenty-five years now. I think we have to keep arguing about it. She thinks we are choosing to.  

Jack: I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I’m absolutely certain that I am a current-drifter more than a hard swimmer. My life – particularly my career – has been a series of mostly happy accidents and turns of fate, not one of which I had predicted when it happened. The writing of this book is only the latest example, but I could point to a dozen others.  

Josh: One other thing worth noting: The very last sentence of the book, which follows the one you mention, is also a Fitzgerald reference. We’d be curious to see if anyone can spot it. So far no one has.  

10. Why eels? They seem to be part of the current zeitgeist, particularly in the New York Times. I remember this article in particular blowing everyone’s minds. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-come-from  

Jack: Well, eels are interesting. And dramatic. They get pushed as babies by currents, metamorphosing multiple times, most of their lives they are completely asexual, then they turn their digestive tracts into sex organs while they all converge on the Sargasso Sea, where they have a massive, never seen orgy, and then die. The book is about the off-spring of that event. 

Josh: Freud’s first major attempt in his career was to find eel testicles. He failed, went home dejected, and went on to create psychoanalysis.  

Jack: Aristotle thought they spontaneously were born in mud puddles out of the entrails of the earth. This turned out to be incorrect.  

Josh: There have been major crime waves over fishing for baby eels along the coast of Maine. Fish and Wildlife and the Justice Departments ran a major coordinated sting called “Operation Broken Glass” to break up glass eel crime rings. For a while they were fetching $2800 per pound on the black market. One guy moved over 12 million dollars worth of poached eels just in one season. It is a real life story with poachers, conspiracies, crime bosses, questions about tribal rights, international trade, coolers full of contraband with aquarium bubblers in strip mall parking lots at night, head lamps, nets, guns… I mean, how could we not write about eels. Why isn’t everyone writing about eels?  

11. You refer to the song Me and Bobby McGee. Do you really think it’s a bad song? Do you agree that ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’? Were you thinking of Janis Joplin’s or Kris Kristofferson's version (or someone else’s)?  

Jack: I’ve never had a clue what “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” means, and when I try to think about it, A) my head hurts, and B) I think it’s nonsense. In August Wilson’s play Two Trains Running an older character instructs a young Black Power kid about the dangers of performative action that has no result: “Freedom is heavy. You’ve got to put your shoulder to freedom and hope your back holds up.” That makes much more sense to me. And I was thinking of Kris Kristofferson’s version – he wrote it. I never thought it was a great song.  

Josh: Janis. Definitely Janis. And it’s a great song.  

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 Photo credit: Margaret Kirchner.