By Matt Wolfbridge
I admit, the news that Ron Currie Jr.’s next book was about, as it was said to me, “the Franco-American community in rural Maine” struck me with a degree of disappointment.
I’d read Currie’s work, particularly enjoying 2017’s The One Eyed Man and 2009’s Everything Matters! The novels feature elements perhaps atypical for literary stories. Think planetary apocalypses, mysterious omniscient beings, and Waco-esque sieges against paramilitary groups. Why would Currie suddenly pivot to a novel about fleur-de-lis window curtains in a de-industrialized town straight from the thousands of inane legacy media interviews with a baying “blue collar” conservative who secretly owns a half-dozen Porsche dealerships?
After reading The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne — which releases on March 25th — I’m pleased to say he didn’t pivot to lower stakes stories at all.
For starters, Currie’s latest novel is about a criminal enterprise in Maine run by the titular Babs Dionne — an elderly local opioid kingpin (or queenpin) — as she deals with the disappearance of one daughter, the estrangement of another daughter, and increasingly violent encroachments from the Canadian mafia looking to consolidate the northeastern drug trade. A lazier writer would market this as “The Golden Girls meets Breaking Bad.”
I know that description may worry some Typebar Magazine readers. After all, this publication has taken a firm stance against reducing fiction to simple tropes and “x meets y” formulas where neither X nor Y are books.
Yet that’s what’s so exciting about Babs Dionne: it has all the familiar trappings of a crime novel but packed with immense amounts of thematic beef jerky to gnaw on. It’s not a rehash of tropes that, to cite famed literary critic Sideshow Bob, “could’ve spewed from the power book of the laziest Hollywood hack.” There’s an immense amount of weight to the novel, both on the surface and beneath it. The tropes are there to keep the gears of the story turning, not to be the story.
Yes, it’s a crime novel, but it’s also a novel about the decline of the US empire. Yes, it’s a crime novel, but it’s also a novel about economic immiseration. Yes, it’s a crime novel, but it’s also a novel about patriarchal annihilation of women’s lives. And on, and on. Like all worthwhile literature, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is a novel about the abject horrors of the human condition.
I spoke with Currie (via email) about the book in late January. Before the interview, a quick editorial disclosure: Ron Currie Jr. was a professor at the MFA program I attended from 2022-2024. Our conversation is below (lightly edited for clarity):
Typebar: This book is multilayered in a way that makes it difficult to discuss concisely. It’s about the opioid epidemic, it’s about 9/11 and imperial decay, it’s about economic immiseration, it’s about exploitation particularly of women, it’s about police violence, and it’s about climate change. I’ve seen our current moment referred to as an “omni-crisis,” a “meta-crisis” and a “poly-crisis.” That is to say, a crisis of all systems. Would you consider this literature in a similar vein — literature about the omni-crisis?
Currie: I sure hope so, though that wasn’t necessarily a conscious aim on my part. I wanted to tell a story about a tiny corner of the American experiment that most people don’t know anything about, and I wanted that story to be undeniably compelling and exciting. No more or less than that. But it’s an article of faith for me, as a writer, that the particulars of a story told well will open up into much larger experiences that we all share. Despite what many people would have you believe, there is not, after all, much about me—a straight white guy from New England—that doesn’t have an analogue in the experience of someone who is wildly different from me demographically, and vice versa. We all laugh and weep and love and grieve, and the best stories remind us forcefully of that immutable fact. But we have to be willing to listen to them.
I think it’s probably true that if as novelists, or just as storytellers across forms, we’re keeping ourselves open to everything around us, even when it hurts, even when we hate it, even when it makes us despair, then different facets of the larger zeitgeist can’t help but make their way into stories that are ostensibly about very particular places and people.
Typebar: For me, the real villain in the book is consolidation. I recently read a great book — First Class Passenger on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers by Richard Lachmann — that concluded one of the pivot points responsible for much of modern America’s misery is the consolidation of the banking sector. More broadly, we’ve seen capital consolidate tremendously in recent decades. There is a reading of this book that paints the villain as consolidation of capital and its ruinous impact on the human race and the planet. What was your intent? Who or what is the true enemy of the novel? Existence itself perhaps?
Currie: I don’t know enough to say with confidence what’s responsible for modern America’s misery. But I can tell you I’ve been thinking a lot about modernity and the ways in which it seems to have failed us. Two very broad things are ailing us, I think: an enforced rootlessness, and a lack of meaningful work. But both of those things probably can fit under an even broader category: the absence of anything at all to believe in, one solitary thing to point to and say: this is why we’re here, this is what we’re doing, here’s why it matters, here’s why we’re willing to sacrifice and suffer for it, together. We’ve killed all the old gods and replaced them with…I don’t know, online sports betting? Anti-racism and other hollow secular orthodoxies? That selfish, despicable brand of Christianity known as prosperity gospel? To me at least, all of it appears self-evidently reductive and empty and solipsistic in a way that can only engender loneliness and frustration, a further distancing of ourselves from one another, an endless reinforcement of the feeling that we’re all so special and singular that we can’t help but be alone.
My hunch is that we’d all be better off mentally if we lived and died in the same place we were born and had to labor together constantly in order to eat and stay warm. But that obviously has its downsides, too. See, for example, the Middle Ages.
Typebar: The passage about the 9/11 jumpers was one of the most brilliantly chilling things I’ve read. I think everyone alive that day will have those images burned into their brains forever. Yet fast forward 20+ years and 9/11 is just another meme. The first thing people did with AI image generators was have Spongebob fly a plane into the World Trade Center. What went into writing that? Why do you think that moment was so uniquely horrifying? And what do you make of its state as a pillar of meme culture?
Currie: In the story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” by Denis Johnson, there’s a moment when the narrator overhears a woman being told her husband was killed in the titular car crash. He describes the woman screaming and, marveling at the sound, he tells us, “It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.” For me, one small part of the horror of 9/11 was realizing its aesthetic quality even as it happened. Disaster is often quite beautiful. The recent fires in Los Angeles, for example: gorgeous, hypnotizing to watch in person, I bet. Until you start to feel the heat. The horror, I think, comes from the dissonance: how could something so awful be so undeniably beautiful? And not just aesthetically, but emotionally, as when the first two people leapt out of the World Trade Center and into nothingness holding hands?
Regarding the meme-ification of 9/11, my first thought is every generation’s pieties become the next generation’s punchlines, and that’s probably as it should be. Certainly it’s how it is, and good luck doing anything to change it. Which is not to say the people making and spreading those memes aren’t shitheads. They 100% are, and I’d be interested in discovering if they think a broken nose is so funny when it’s their own.
Typebar: The book is incredibly timely in other ways, particularly around the approach to Natalism. You may not be aware, but anti-natalism is having a bit of a moment culturally. There’s books like The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Rush and The Parenthood Dilemma: Procreation in the Age of Uncertainty by Gina Rushton, both about the ethics of having children when the world has blown past its climate deadlines and increasingly apocalyptic natural disasters are now a regular feature of life. The anti-natalism subreddit’s membership has grown 180% since 2020. This book, either knowingly or unknowingly, seems to adopt some anti-natalist viewpoints. Namely, the book discusses the horror of being forced to experience consciousness, and the many doomed fates you are forced to suffer simply from the act of being created against your consent. Why do you think this type of thinking is growing in popularity? What was your intent in putting it into the novel?
Currie: For myself, I’ve decided that life is a morally indefensible thing to inflict on somebody. I won’t bore you or anyone else with my reasoning, but to answer your question, I think maybe one reason anti-natalist sentiment is becoming more widespread is because it’s impossible for a person who wants to live morally to do so, in a culture built entirely upon exploitation and extraction. There’s no escape from culpability, and there are fewer and fewer convincing ways to lie to yourself about it, if you’re paying attention. Not too long ago I spoke at a college and a student approached after and asked how I squared accepting money from Apple (for whom I’d worked on a television program about climate change) with my avowed environmental concerns. My response was, “It seems to me that these days anything short of suicide is a compromise.” Which was an asshole thing to say, not because it isn’t true, but because it was a response designed to preclude further conversation, when in fact what this young woman was asking for, I think, was my help figuring out how to live morally in such a world. Not that I could have helped at all with that, but I could have at least acknowledged we share the same horrid dilemma.
Typebar: I am curious how you approach the discussion of identity in this book. To me the ending made me ask a question: The daughter is taken back to Waterville so she can “find out who she is.” But who is anyone? What does identity even mean? Obviously that’s been a big and at times loaded question in the sociopolitical arena in the last decade and especially so now during the so-called “vibe shift” as the current presidential administration ushers in an age of the pendulum — nay, wrecking ball — swinging recklessly backward. [Editor’s note: this interview was conducted in late-January 2025 and there will likely be major events that have unfolded between then and the time you’re reading this that, given the nature of how humans experience time, we were unaware of during our discussion].
Currie: I try not to discuss buzzwords, because if I can’t decide the definition of the word I’m using, I’d rather not use it. That said, the version of identity the novel is preoccupied with has to do, ultimately, with self-determination. Babs defends her culture and language and place in the world because those are the means by which she controls, insofar as is possible, the fate and prospects of herself and those she cares about. In her view, when we uproot ourselves from the place and people we’ve always known, we become powerless. I think there’s something to that.
Typebar: This book is decidedly not satirical or at least doesn’t feel so. Why did you depart from satire despite being viewed as a writer who delves into the darkly comedic?
Currie: It may not be satirical, but I do hope it’s funny! I certainly intended it to be. Anyway, I never thought I’d say this, but it seems like satire is dead, or at least in cryogenic stasis. Reality of late has outstripped any effort to satirize it, seems to me. I’m sure I’m wrong about that, as I am about most things, and I hope someone proves I’m wrong soon. Maybe I should just say that I personally don’t see a way to effectively satirize where we find ourselves. The absurdity is already turned all the way up; there’s nowhere left to go.
Typebar: This book, despite being less explicitly political than The One Eyed Man, felt far more pointed and multilayered. Why do you think this may or may not be the case?
Currie: Fond as I still am of it, The One-Eyed Man is really 300 pages of variations on the same gag. It was a good gag, and I feel like the book got out ahead of the true emergence of the things it made fun of, but it also, if you read it now, seems hopelessly out of date. This probably goes back to what I was saying a minute ago about the impossibility of satire. Back then, having a Rachel Maddow-type character threaten to put people’s heads on pikes if they didn’t embrace progressive orthodoxy still felt kind of edgy; now it just feels obvious and tired and boring.
Typebar: It’s been 8 years since your last novel was published. The trendy advice online is that you need to publish a book a year. Self-publishing has an even more breakneck pace where you’re essentially an indentured servant to Amazon. How do you approach the question of output? We recently had an essay about Claire Keegan and the necessity of taking one’s time. Is taking a long time between major works necessary? How do you approach the “problem” of creative output?
Currie: I write books as they come to me, at the pace they come to me, and I don’t worry much about whether I’m keeping up with some arbitrary schedule. That said, I try to exercise a wholesome discipline and treat writing like any kind of work: show up to your job, and do it. It happens that this novel had a fairly long runway to publication—about two years from the time it was accepted—and as such I’ve been able to write a draft of the second book of the Dionne family saga in the interim. Which will probably end up making it seem like I was killing myself—and maybe writing a subpar book—to follow up quickly, but that’s just how it worked out. My experience is that the time necessary to write the best book you’re capable of varies both by writer and by project. But that said, if you’re cranking out words like widgets for whatever reason, you’re probably guilty of what Truman Capote said of Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Typebar: It was clear you wrote The One Eyed Man with a particular idea — I dare say hook — in mind. A man who could only tell the truth and follow things literally as a way to expose the many veils of fraudulence we encounter daily. What was your motivation for this novel?
Currie: I could go on about this for a long time, but the simplest and most honest answer is that I wanted to write about the world I grew up in, which is now long-gone, before my memory of it became too blurry to do so. Despite my last name being Scottish, I’m mostly Franco-American, and certainly culturally I’m 100% Franco. My old man didn’t speak English until he went to school, and some of my strongest childhood memories are of listening to my grandmother and her friends chatter in Quebecois at her kitchen table, cigarette smoke drifting overhead. They are the women who inspired Babs and her gang of ladies in the book.
Typebar: Do you think there is a misread of this novel as a kind of rustbelt eulogy? To me, I think the historical and sociopolitical context of Waterville’s poverty and Bab’s death is placed quite well. And the novel features a band of mafioso old ladies cracking skulls and killing people. This book isn’t exactly the literature version of a diner interview with the MAGA construction worker. But I think in a previous cultural moment — even just two or three years ago — I think more people would’ve adopted a bad faith reading of this. I’m curious what you make of it.
Currie: Even at this late date, some people will probably still read it that way, but who cares? To do so, one would have to deliberately ignore the complete absence of the dumb, love-it-or-leave-it jingoism that passes for patriotism these days, as well as the walking, talking critique of America that Babs herself represents. To me, there’s an assumption lurking behind your question that is much more troubling: that any narrative about poor white people is by definition MAGA, and that the view of the theoretical MAGA construction worker is beneath consideration, or otherwise invalid, because it’s already been aired, or because it’s too dumb to engage with, or because he’s a blinkered, myopic, racist anachronism. I don’t know a whole lot, but one thing I do know is we’re going to need to find common purpose again as a nation, or else we won’t make it. Dismissing everyone but you and yours as subhuman or too stupid to live may be emotionally satisfying, but it’s also the 2025 version of whistling past the graveyard. Moral certitude and intellectual vanity on all sides has gotten us here; it’s probably not the thing that’s going to point the way out.
Typebar: There’s been so much talk online in the last few years about tropes. You have that being a central marketing plank of so many releases in genre fiction. Just “this book has enemies to lovers, chaotic bisexuals, and elemental magic!” Yet this is genre fiction that manages to take many familiar elements of the crime novel (corrupt sheriffs, mysterious assassins, etc) and turn it into something with lots of substrate to burrow into. I liken the book to one of those YouTube cooking challenges where a chef is given Big Macs and Doritos and told to use them in a dish and they come up with something delicious. I’m curious how you managed to walk this tightrope?
Currie: Maybe I’m being too dismissive, but what you’re describing just sounds to me like shitty, lazy storytelling. If things have gotten so absurdly meta that the ad copy is there solely to sell itself, fine, I guess. I’m not going to be able to do anything to change that, but I sure hope I’m not the only person left who expects more from our stories. I could go on a diatribe about how we’ve been infantilized by mass entertainment and technology to the point where we can’t make the distinction between filet mignon and strained carrots, but 1) that should be obvious to anyone paying attention and 2) the solution, if one exists, is more interesting to me than the problem. There’s no reason why what we call genre fiction can’t or shouldn’t provide an ass-kicker of a yarn and tell us something that feels meaningful and true and essential and soul-nourishing about being human. And vice-versa for so-called literary fiction: there’s no excuse, except snobbery, for failing to provide your reader with a story that actually entertains.
Typebar: Military disillusionment is a present theme in much of your work. It’s in Everything Matters! where the father gives up a lucrative baseball career to enlist during Vietnam War and it’s in The One Eyed Man where the antagonist is an ex-military veteran who chopped down a flagpole in front of his father to show his disillusionment after serving in the so-called War on Terror post-9/11. The same topic is present in this book yet the ferocity is almost subdued, baked into the background and less explicit. Death and dispiritment is just part of the Dionne family’s ambient misery. How much of this was intentional? Were you trying to say more with less?
Currie: Maybe I’m just old enough now that I don’t feel the need to beat the ground that the dead horse is buried in, as I maybe did sometimes as a younger novelist. And maybe, unlike in previous stories, just having a couple of people in Babs’ family come home in flag-draped caskets says enough, without belaboring the point further?
My own disillusionment with the military, if it can be called that, probably comes from a bunch of places, not least the things I knew about my father’s two combat tours in Vietnam, and the things I learned from his VA records after he died. But that’s not all of it. There’s also the basic sense that, regardless of the ideology of the people declaring war, it’s always the poor who are sent off to do the killing and dying. That was true of my father, who enlisted because it was a certainty he would be drafted, and it was a certainty he would be drafted because he was poor and had no prospects for getting a deferment by, say, going to a four-year-college.
But think also about the complete turnaround, in one generation, from the sense of noblesse oblige among America’s wealthy that prevailed during WWII to the complete lack of a sense of duty among elites during Vietnam. I guess the perceived righteousness of the cause probably had something to do with that, but I don’t think that was all of it. There was just an erosion of the sense of common cause and responsibility for one another, especially from those who were already situated nicely in life. In one generation, we went from “Profiles in Courage” to Donny “Bone Spurs” Trump. That probably says as much as anything about where we find ourselves in this late, degraded age.
Typebar: Typebar is, as contributor Dave Walsh put it on Bluesky, “vaguely typewriter themed.” You learned to write before computers, I think? If so, what typewriter did you do most of your writing on back in the day? Was that your favorite? Do you use one now?
Currie: Jesus man, you make it sound like I started out covered in ink from my quill pen. Here’s a bit of history: in between electric typewriters and computers there existed, for a short time, maybe a decade, these things called word processors. They were basically electric typewriters with a dollop of RAM that could store a line or two of text, and then when you hit “return” they would print out the entire line at once. That’s what I got my start on, once I graduated from writing stories longhand as a little kid. I was such a word nerd that I asked for a word processor for, I think, my twelfth birthday, and miracle of miracles, I got one (I have no idea where my parents came up with the money). I loved that thing. It had a little strip of an LCD display just above the keys, where you could see what you were typing before you hit “return” and it printed out.
A while back now I had the tremendous good fortune to be asked to stay for a week at Kurt Vonnegut’s house in Cape Cod, and I spent a little time futzing around on his old Smith Corona. Even though it was electric, I was shocked by how hard you had to stroke the keys. It taught me a lesson about writing with intent, writing like you mean it.
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne publishes on March 25th.
