In 2008, Sergio De La Pava self-published his 700-page-debut novel A Naked Singularity to little fanfare, until an intrepid reviewer at The Quarterly Conversation snagged a copy and lit up the blogosphere with chatter that the book was “one of the best—and most original—novels of the decade.” Republished this past spring by the University of Chicago Press, the sprawling, obsessive opus—a potboiler for literary introverts interested in whittling away at the inheritances of Dostoevsky, Melville, and Woolf—has since been profiled by the Millions, the Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal. Unlike the work of many of the postmodern writers to whom De La Pava has earned comparisons, A Naked Singularity is not quintessentially difficult. It tells the story of Casi, a young, prodigiously talented public defender whose world is falling apart around him—he’s contemplating switching from lawyer to criminal, while still pursuing justice for his clients—with equal degrees of compassion and enlightened skepticism for a character (and system) on the verge of a breakdown. – Kristi McGuire and Pete Beatty

The Believer: Let’s start with: What’s your writing process like?

Sergio de la Pava: There’s a little secret that I never hear anyone say. Some parts of a novel are just easier than others. You’re writing a 700-page book. There were times when I was rolling, just because that section happened to be something I could write quite easily, and there are other times when it could be a bit of a slog. I try not to set up any kind of artificial barriers, because there are so many natural ones in place already. If you say, “I have to be in this chair, wearing this hat, in order to write,” then you’re just setting yourself up to not produce anything. I write wherever I am. I spend a lot of time sitting in a courtroom, waiting for a case to be called—

BLVR: Writing by hand?

SDLP: The beauty of writing by hand is that you have to type it in. That’s built-in editing. That’s really the optimal way for me; typing it up serves as a quality-control checkpoint.

BLVR: In many ways your book is an object of mass entertainment—there have been a lot of write-ups and send-ups: “It’s a zany, heist-driven novel for people who think they don’t like that sort of thing,” even though it’s also deeply engaged in a particular kind of morality play. Are you attracted to or did you have in mind other objects of mass-cultural engagement when you set out to write this book? Or were you just engaged in the act of writing something—uncertainly, without aim, as an obsessive pursuit?

SDLP: Well, it was born from...