JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Crux is a term that rock climbers know well. It's the most challenging section of a route - the place where, quote, "everything inside yourself told you to wait, to stall, to cling to safety, and yet where, if you wanted to live, you had to take the risk." That is how author Gabriel Tallent describes it in his new novel called "Crux." It's his first since his debut, "My Absolute Darling," made its own ascent on bestsellers lists back in 2017. Tallent is a climber himself, and embraces that fear that accompanies the exhilaration.
GABRIEL TALLENT: I love that climbing can have this inch-by-inch terror. And it just takes you to spectacular settings that you would never reach in your ordinary life, with just wild people. So you're on the journey with someone else, and it's cooperative. You're working together, which is something that I have always loved about this sport. It tends to open people up a little bit. Like, I have had some of my wildest and most confessional moments, like, sitting on ledges with friends.
SUMMERS: Tallent's new novel begins with one such moment, high on a ledge in California, between 17-year-old best friends Tamma and Dan.
TALLENT: Dan is a little bit, like, a disaffected golden child. He's tall, handsome, good at school, well-liked by his teachers, and it's believed that he's going to go on to have a promising future at college. But it's not something that he wants. He's sort of living through the onset of major mental illness, through depression. And every night he goes out and climbs with his best friend Tamma, who is this sort of mouthy burnout. She's a little bit provocative. She's equally smart, but in ways that don't lend to success at school, so she's not well-liked by her teachers and peers. But they're really bonded, and they go climbing together, and that's the future that he wants.
And Tamma herself is a little bit more - her family is a little bit more working class. There's no chance at college for her. If she's not able to make climbing work as a vocation and a future, she doesn't really see anything for herself other than slowly becoming her mother, like a sort of a burned-out waitress at diners, which is not a future that inspires her. So she's filled with sort of desperate urgency to escape that.
SUMMERS: I couldn't help thinking about my own friendships at that stage of life when you're, like, on the cusp of adulthood and trying to figure out who you are and who you want to be. What was interesting to you to explore about that stage of transition that Dan and Tamma find themselves in?
TALLENT: The dream of climbing is for them knit together with their friendship because they climb together. But friendship is itself not a relationship that I think is highly valued in the culture or that we have a lot of cultural narratives about. So they don't necessarily have a model for striking out together as friends, and that makes it seem in some ways impossible or risky. So I'm interested in that and the idea of betting a lot on a friendship, believing in a friendship when the culture doesn't believe in it. How do you make the decisions then?
SUMMERS: Another thing that comes up as I think about Dan and Tamma's shared love of climbing is this element of risk inherent in this passion that they share. Throughout the book, they attempt these ambitious climbs. They fail. They get hurt. Just to keep doing this thing that they love, they're literally putting their bodies on the line. Can you talk about that part of the story?
TALLENT: Sometimes we think about risk as if it's something we take on or don't take on - as if Dan and Tamma's life is somehow riskless if they never go climbing. But that's not true. Like, they are seeing people around them who, by not taking risks day after day, end up hedged into lives they don't love. So there is this way that just by avoiding risk you can end up losing everything in just the same way. To, like, chase that sense of aliveness and meaning, sometimes you have to embrace the risk. And that's scary and also important. But never doing that doesn't keep you safe.
SUMMERS: I read somewhere else, Gabriel, that it took you somewhere around eight years to get your debut novel, "My Absolute Darling," into a form where you felt it was publishable. What about this book? When did you start writing it?
TALLENT: Yeah. How long? It did take - it took me eight years with this one as well. I mean...
SUMMERS: Oh, interesting.
TALLENT: ...I started this book in 2015. But that's misleading because what I did is I wrote novel after novel that didn't work. And then, when our first son, Hayden, was born, it was the depths of the pandemic, and I had this experience of holding him after he was born and thinking a lot about my life and his life and what I would tell him would matter. And thinking about it, I found that I didn't really believe it was climbing that mattered. And I had written a book about climbing at the highest echelons of the sport, about climbing at important climbs, you know? Climbs of substance. Famous climbs in some of the most beautiful destinations in the world. And as I was holding this baby, it's like, that's not what you love about a person - that they succeed or that they climb at the highest levels. I felt it lay somewhere else.
And so I threw those books away. I really started this book then, and it came together kind of quickly after that, like, after I had the heart of it. And I realized it wasn't about climbing at the cutting edge. It was something else. It was the story of friendship and chasing meaning in your life and pursuing that.
SUMMERS: The other thing that I found really interesting - and I'm going to try to ask this without spoiling your beautiful book for people - is that later in the book, we see Tamma thrust into this family conflict where she ends up having to step in and step up and care for her sister's children as her sister's trying to juggle work and a parenting crisis. And I think it shows this sort of different side to Tamma, rather than sort of the brash and brusque and say-anything, do-anything person that you meet in the early pages of the book. What did you hope to show about Tamma as a caretaker versus the Tamma that you see when she's with Dan and when she's doing these climbs?
TALLENT: I mean, for one thing, this just happens in people's lives. Like, in my life, it seems like you're pursuing a dream and then a comet comes out of nowhere and changes your entire life. And so I think with writing, something I am trying to do is subject the protagonist to so much pressure that they are destroyed, that they come apart so that we can see their guts, we can see who they are and we can see who they are in their worst moments. So a lot of times, what you're trying to do is you're trying to make a character's worst fears come true - ask of them the thing that they are worst at. You ask the same thing of Tamma, right? You ask her to be in this role of caregiver that she - that she's terrified of because she doesn't have a good model for it and because it's going to take away from her climbing.
So yeah, I guess you're trying to ruin a character so that we can see how they muster, how they survive, what they do in the darkest nights of their lives. Because that's something that readers are going through. Readers themselves are sometimes going through hard things. So you want to show - like, if you want to put hope and joy and aliveness in a book, you have to take your characters to dark places because real people are searching for hope and aliveness and joy from dark places.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Gabriel Tallent. His new novel is "Crux." Thank you so much.
TALLENT: Thank you.
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