An Interview with Shane Jones

“Once you start thinking about sales and readers you go a little batty. I don’t know, you create this object, and you want other people to love the object too. You want a passionate response—for people to love it and for people to hate it. But how much is enough? I think the Internet fucks you up. You just want more and more and there’s no end.”

Jobs that foster familial environments:
Bookstore clerk
Motel lifeguard
Driving a forklift at Lowes

I know Shane through email. He’s been generous in supporting my work, giving me advice, but mostly we’ve spent time discussing Emmanuel Mudiay, Nikola Jokić, and other happenings between the NBA teams we root for. It’s very easy to not talk about writing, and I think what Shane and I have in common (with a lot of writers) is that we’d prefer to talk basketball instead of talking writing. We relented here.

Vincent and Alice and Alice follows recently divorced Vincent as he works his desk job for “the State” and fixates on what led his now ex-wife, Alice, to leave him. Vincent is recommended for a new program at work that allows him to continue living his normal life and working his normal 9-5, weekends off, but also have his ideal life overlaid into that reality. But unlike past participants in the program, Vincent’s ideal life is not a larger house, new car, or any object, but instead, the return of Alice. The novel’s main project is to interrogate what it means for Vincent to be living with this not-Alice, while the memory of the real Alice, and her departure still loom large. Alice’s return, though not real, causes Vincent to investigate the minutiae of what he remembers of the real Alice’s behavior, his own behavior, and the slippage between various versions of both. And it’s funny.

Trying to think of who I would hand this book to, I would say, I would hand it to fans of Mary Robison. Any reader who understands why Robison’s ear and particular attention to our American descent matters and appreciates droll comedy, well, Shane Jones is another one for you. Robison comes up in our conversation, as does Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I thought of too while reading Vincent and Alice and Alice, but I did not bring up the latter thinking Shane might bristle at the comparison.

—Alex Higley

THE BELIEVER: Of your four novels, this one borrows most from your actual life. Was it hard to know where to draw the line? Did that line move?

SHANE JONES: I don’t really care about the line. I...