Paul La Farge’s novel The Night Ocean starts when Marina Willett’s husband Charlie goes missing and is presumed dead by suicide. She believes her husband’s death is a hoax, and starts to look for him. The Night Ocean tracks Marina’s search, from New York to Mexico City to Canada, and deep into the history of the twentieth century. Paul La Farge talked with Rivka Galchen about the book on March 8th, 2017, at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. A slightly edited transcript follows.

I. IT’S A GIANT SQUID

RIVKA GALCHEN: Much of this novel centers around the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft…

PAUL LA FARGE: Mhm.

RG: And specifically on the short period of time when he lived a young fan, a sixteen year old boy named Barlow. Lovecraft and Barlow’s relationship is a love story of sorts, and more than enough for a novel, but you choose to start the book in the present, with Marina, a woman whose husband Charlie has disappeared while researching and thinking about Lovecraft and Barlow.

PLF: My hope was that the book might appeal to people who are not already Lovecraft devotees. Lovecraft is a complicated and in some ways a problematic figure. He’s become increasingly polarizing these days, because, aside from his weird relationship with Barlow, he expressed horrific, racist, xenophobic, misogynist, antisemitic statements in his letters and conversations. So I don’t want to assume that my readers are all on board with Lovecraft and with Lovecraft’s project.

Someone needs to lead us into the world, and for me that person is Marina. She has the advantage, unlike more or less all of the other characters in the novel, of being both sane and honest.

RG: I was interested in the way that Marina doesn’t know what happened to Charlie. She continues not to know for a long time, and she’s really holds onto this not-knowingness. Was this something you were consciously lining up with the Lovecraft story, and all the fans and academics pursuing his secrets, his unknowables? Or did that just grow naturally?

PLF: That was part of the idea of the book. Lovecraft’s stories are about the secret truths of the cosmos, and you learn, if you read them, that all of these horrible things turn out to be true. The Earth is basically run by giant monsters who are going to destroy civilization. But there’s also this feeling in the stories, that you go from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge. You’re slowly uncovering facts. Highly alternative facts about the state of the cosmos. I wanted to tell a story like that. Also, I love that Lovecraft’s stories are about people who read, and who...