Immersions, Kyle McCarthy’s new novel, is Black Swan meets Bluebeard. Set in the New York dance scene, it follows Frances as she tries to figure out what led her older sister Charley, a star of the modern dance world, to retreat to an enclosed convent. In her search for answers, Frances approaches Charley’s ex-husband, Johnny, an ultra-rich, art-loving, enigmatic man whose hair, under the right light, looks suspiciously blue.
My debut novel, Sour Cherry, is a loose Bluebeard retelling with its own toxic man in the middle, its own set of women disappearing in his wake. The narrator slowly reveals herself to have been, once, a performer, and the Bluebeard figure also has ties to the arts. Though the two novels have different settings and styles, there is an affinity between them, both in the fairy-tale vein that connects them and in the questions around performance and spectatorship they ask.
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Natalia Theodoridou: Immersions is an incredibly accomplished novel. I loved its subtlety and the persistent knowledge that there was so much more beneath its surface, left there not out of avoidance or a need to obscure but in what felt to me like a gesture of trust towards the reader. It showcases a talent for understanding characters deeply while allowing them to retain the mysteries that make them complex and interesting. It is also a novel about many things: sisterly relationships, obsession, dance, the escape that can be found in discipline. And, of course, abuse. Where did this book start for you? When (or how, or why) did Bluebeard make his appearance?
Kyle McCarthy: The short answer is that the book began with a bad boyfriend. While we were dating, I became fascinated with the way he presented himself and his past, particularly the stories he told about his previous relationships. The omissions and elisions interested me: they felt like rooms he didn’t want me to enter.
For years I had been obsessed with The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, but it wasn’t until this toxic, yet incredibly important, love affair that I felt like I understood the ‘Bluebeard’ story, and Carter’s take on it. In her story, Bluebeard’s love brings both death and sexual awakening. The young girl is complicit in her fate; she finds she likes being a sexual object. And the story dares to suggest that that is not entirely a bad thing. We feel that if she had stayed with her mother, living this cloistered life, she wouldn’t have been able to grow fully into personhood. That interested me.
NT: I’m particularly curious about two elements of the book: the title, and the fact that much of the novel is addressed by Frances to her sister Charley. In Sour Cherry, which is also addressed to a “you,” the addressee made himself known quite late in the writing process, but the act of addressing it made the book what it was always supposed to be. I also started with a different title, and that change inflected how I understood the novel as a whole. How did you arrive at these elements in the process of writing Immersions, and could you tell me more about the title?
KM: Oh, I want to know your original title! Sour Cherry is so good.
Both my title and the direct address also emerged relatively late in the process. I had been struggling with this ‘Bluebeard’ project for a year or two. Then I read the German version of ‘Bluebeard,’ in which the previous brides, the murdered women, are all sisters, and it is up to the youngest sister to save them. When I read this, it unlocked Immersions for me. I understood that Frances would be interested in the earlier “brides” because one of them would be her sister, that the book would not only be about getting lost in a love affair, but also the power of family to call us home.
But then, of course, I had the problem of a protagonist doing an icky thing: becoming romantically involved with her older sister’s ex-husband. I thought: Well, of course, she feels bad about this. She probably wants to explain herself. To whom does she want to explain herself? Her sister, of course. So, the idea of narrating her actions to her sister arose from this.
You know, I love the idea that all novels are addressed to someone, whether that person is named or not. When we tell a story, aren’t we always telling it to someone? I think of early Gothic novels, which are always framed as letters, or have some teller, like in Wuthering Heights. So, I also think of the frame and direct address of my novel as a way to be in conversation with that Gothic tradition.
NT: That’s such a good point; it brings to mind Mikhail Bakhtin and the dialogic imagination, and I do think you’re right: all communication presupposes an addressee. Even more so, perhaps, the performing arts: one needs an audience, which also introduces complex power dynamics. Who has the right (or obligation) to watch, and who to be seen? Which brings me to another central theme in Immersions: I was struck by the emphasis not so much on the beauty of dance but on its discipline and violence. Both the man in the contemporary frame-story of Sour Cherry and Johnny in Immersions have a connection to the arts. Do you think there is a particular relationship between art and the type of violence Johnny represents?
KM: Yes, I think there is a relationship between the arts and violence, and it exists on two levels. Most obviously, whenever you have a field that is extremely competitive and yet also subjective, you have the ingredients for abuse: older people, often men, with career-making power, and younger aspirants who are desperate to sway things in their favour.
But on another level, I think there is something curatorial about the way Johnny collects women. He admires them; he’s drawn to their talent. Art can encourage a connoisseurship relationship to beauty, and because the history of Western visual art and dance can’t be untangled from the history of men looking at women, it’s easy for a man who enjoys collecting art to slide into “collecting” women, and having ideas about how to improve them. They become art objects, not people. There’s violence in that. Gilbert Osmond from The Portrait of a Lady comes to mind.
Bluebeard is often portrayed as an aristocrat, with refined taste. Vampires, too, are often portrayed as aristocratic, with an appreciation for beauty. Perhaps, then, our association between the arts and violent, wealthy men stems from a distrust of wealth, or a distrust of aesthetes. Anything so refined, so elevated, must be disguising some kernel of violence.
NT: Yes! It’s not by accident that Marx described capitalism as dead labor that, vampire-like, sucks living blood. In this sense, accumulated wealth is inherently vampiric.
Vampires are relevant in another way, I think: they blur the lines between human and animal. Both our Bluebeard figures have an animal quality to them, and there is something evocative of nature (if not entirely natural) about them: their hair, their physique, the scent of soil they carry with them. In the city, Johnny seems slightly out of place, and nature is largely absent. We only glimpse it in Charley’s tame, unopened jam, and in Johnny’s animalism. But then we get to the island, where everything is wild, and Johnny and Frances become wild, too. They sniff like animals. They have sex on the floor, they eat creatures raw. Talk to me about the role of nature in the novel and its relationship with Johnny.
KM: My good friend Jessie Kindig once said to me that for women, sex and self-knowledge are linked. Stories about sex are usually stories about self-discovery. My best explanation for this is something that Audre Lorde says in ‘The Uses of the Erotic’—that sensual pleasure can colour the rest of our lives, just like that golden powder she describes massaging into the bag of white margarine. When we listen to what we want sexually, we start to discover what else we might want. If we let it, the erotic will help us hold ourselves to a higher standard of integrity. It will help us build the lives we want.
This explains why so many coming-of-age tales include sexual discovery. And Immersions, which I would put firmly in that bildungsroman tradition, is about Frances journeying from sexual naivete to sexual knowledge.
The complicated thing, of course, is that Johnny, Mr. Bluebeard, is the—what? guide? —to this sexual knowledge. And his erotic life is not balanced; he falls too easily into seeing his sexual partners as instruments, as accessories.
But I do think he is in touch with the animal part of himself. Part of his attraction to dance, I suspect, is that it depends on the body. And part of why he keeps retreating to his island is that he’s like a wild animal: he goes back to his cocoon when he needs to feel safe. Where he can be feral.
Nature in my book is about sex, but I guess I also find a villain who’s an animal more compelling than a villain who is mechanical. Why do you think your Bluebeard smells of soil?
NT: One of the central questions in Sour Cherry is whether a man like Bluebeard becomes the way he is because of nature or nurture, and whether his violence is natural or unnatural. My narrator claims her man’s nails grow too fast, that he causes plagues. He smells of soil because this allows her to point towards something supernatural, the stuff of fairy tales. It becomes an excuse both he and the women who loved him invoke: maybe he couldn’t help it. It’s the fairy tale version of ‘boys will be boys.’ A story told so many times and in so many ways it becomes its own trap, its own iterative haunting. To segue into my next question: I think all literature is haunted in some way, whether the author means it to, by leaning into intertextuality and retelling, or not. I feel this particularly in works that invoke myths and fairy tales or converse with their many iterations in literature and other media. I think I glimpsed the ghost of Pina Bausch in Immersions (she certainly haunts Sour Cherry). There is Bluebeard and Swan Lake, of course, and the Gothic notes you mentioned earlier: the heroine removed from her environment and isolated in the countryside, the sprawling house that seems to be an extension of its ambiguous master. Who or what else haunts this book?
KM: There’s a ton of nods to choreographers I love in Immersions, including George Balanchine, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and Ohad Naharin, along with Pina. Angela Carter is everywhere; she’s huge for me. But also, Mariusz Trelinski’s production of Bela Bartok’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle, which sets the fairy tale in a noir-ish, S&M inflected world. Part of what I find so piercing about Bartok’s opera is how much it emphasizes Judith’s care for Bluebeard. She wants to open all the doors to his house not (only) because she’s curious, but because she wants to understand his pain. And I think that impulse, to assuage someone’s pain, to understand and hold it, is part of what draws Frances to Johnny.
NT: The scene where Frances is given the keys to the castle is, I think, the one that most explicitly references Bluebeard. She, of course, throws open every door she can find. What doors did you open in the writing of this book? Are there any you left closed?
KM: When I ended that bad love affair with my fellow-writer, way back in 2013, we promised each other we’d never write about each other. I kept that promise for over a decade, but ultimately it was a door I had to throw open. Not to accuse him, or perform some kind of personality assassination, but because I had to tease out for myself what from the love affair still remained inside me. What, even, I felt grateful I had kept.
As for closed doors—well, that’s the beauty and horror of writing, isn’t it? As soon as you finish one project, you realize everything you didn’t say. And so, it’s on to the next.
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Kyle McCarthy is the author of Immersions (Tin House/Zando) and Everyone Knows How Much I Love You (Ballantine).
