Readings Monthly Editor Jo Case talks to Miles Franklin longlisted-author Kirsten Tranter about her second novel, A Common Loss.

A Common Loss is mostly set in the somehow unreal setting of Las Vegas. As your characters often muse in the book, it’s a place you think of people holidaying in (as your four old friends do) rather than living. It seems removed from ordinary life. What drew you to that setting?

I liked the idea of taking this city that has the reputation as being really shallow, soulless, devoid of sophistication and subtlety, and making it the backdrop for a story that involves complex, dark emotional dynamics. We think we know this place because it’s been filmed and photographed so often, so it’s challenging to see it fresh, a bit like New York. In fact, my interest is in the way it’s impossible to see it fresh; the way we see it is always mediated by its representations. My characters know this place as a vacation site, yes, but it soon emerges that one of them, Dylan, actually had a very complicated relationship with the city that he kept hidden from his friends. And they have a disturbing confrontation with the ‘real’ Vegas, in the person of Colin. I visited Vegas when I was writing the book and I found it really fascinating and complicated. It’s troubling in so many ways, but also interesting, full of eccentric characters and surprising beauty – and its own forms of ordinary, complicated life.

Your narrator, Elliot, opens the second chapter by saying, ‘This isn’t going to be one of those stories about a suburban boy seduced into a picturesque world of wealth and charm by a group of high-class eccentrics’. What sort of game are you playing with the reader there? There is an element of those stories in it, isn’t there?

Elliot is not the most reliable narrator, it’s true, and he is a suburban Jersey boy. There’s an element of those stories, I suppose – the passage you’ve quoted indicates my debt to classics, such as Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (whose narrator confesses his fatal weakness for ‘the picturesque’) and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. But I also hope it suggests I’m doing something different. Elliot’s college friends are not dissipated aristocrats or Classics-loving aesthetes: they are from different backgrounds, they aren’t all rich, and they’re fairly ordinary, if not downright philistine, in their habits and interests – apart from Dylan, who does have a definite seductive glamour. They all insist on meeting in Vegas every year – the opposite of high-class, the opposite of the picturesque – to Elliot’s persistent embarrassment and exasperation. Yet, when he’s among them, he’s able to keep believing in himself as the critical, sophisticated observer.

Dylan says of his mother that she ‘loves to perform’ and that ‘she’s very good at reading people ... she calculates’. Could this be said of him, too?

Yes. Dylan is good at intuiting what people want to hear, and is quite chameleon-like in being able to craft his personality to make himself likeable. He uses that power in disturbing ways, and manipulates people. But I hope that there’s some sympathy for him as well: he’s developed those talents in order to earn his mother’s rather cruelly conditional affection, and uses them to make himself needed and loved.

Elliot says, ‘Most people expressed admiration and envy at the way we had managed to stay friends and meet up together every year. The loyalty, the commitment, the affection for one another, the fact that we did what everyone else said they would like to but never got around to doing.’ What is it that appealed to you about taking that ideal-seeming friendship and exposing a darker underbelly?

I like exploring ambivalence and the existence of conflicting feelings, especially as they relate to friendship – the way love and affection and loyalty can exist side by side with resentment, envy, even hate. The complex passions of friendship are often underestimated, especially in comparison with romantic love. What really interested me here was the idea of this character who not only has a conflicted, sort of grumpy relationship with these old friends, but who over the course of the story becomes progressively disillusioned about these friendships that have actually meant everything to him. He’s always thought of himself as the smart one, but he realises he’s been wrong about a lot of things, he’s been betrayed and manipulated. And so a lot of the motion of the story is this kind of vertigo for Elliot, where he has to reinterpret the past, and what it means for the present and the future, in the light of always-evolving, new knowledge about his friends and what they have really meant to each other.

There is much in A Common Loss about the idea of the authentic – what is real, what is fake, how to recognise the real, how we perform the real (and the question of whether this can acquire its own authenticity). This theme is mirrored in the setting of Las Vegas and the character of Cynthia, who is researching a thesis on authenticity and replicas. What attracted you to that as a theme?

One the one hand Vegas is a giant Disneyland of fakes, and on the other it is obsessed with authenticity: the Bellagio is one instance, with its gallery of fabulously valuable, original fine art. I’m fascinated by the interplay of the fake and the real, surface and depth, truth and falsehood, the way they exist in complex interdependence. For me these issues reflect fundamental dilemmas and questions about selfhood and subjectivity and how we exist to ourselves and others as complex emotional beings who communicate through the limited medium of language. Elliot’s constantly being struck by this sense of performing something, consciously lying, or mouthing clichés, and then finding that there is something truthful in there, something real, that he’s actually telling the truth almost in spite of himself – especially when he’s trying to cope with the unpredictable, confusing emotions of grief. This is a story in which all the characters are quite often dishonest with themselves and one another to greater and lesser degrees. Not all of them are as angst-ridden as Elliot about questions of truth or authenticity.

Dylan loves secrets. Uncovering the mysteries of a friend’s secret life were intrinsic to your debt, The Legacy, as well as this novel. Do you love secrets?

Well, yes – doesn’t everyone? I don’t mean to suggest that I’m an obsessively secretive person – maybe I am! – but as a writer, secrets are compelling, dramatic, powerful stuff. We all have secrets we want to protect, vulnerabilities that put us at risk. I think that what Dylan loves – and, to a lesser extent, Ingrid from The Legacy – is power and the power that knowledge of other people’s secrets brings him. I’m very interested in the power dynamics at work in all relationships, and Dylan is a master power-broker, a role inseparable from his status as keeper of secrets.

A Common Loss is about the long friendship of five old college friends, all male, and much of it takes place on an annual bonding trip in Las Vegas. It’s a very male subject matter. Were there any challenges in getting inside the heads of your characters and imagining the dynamics between them – as well as what would go on during an all-male trip to Vegas?

It wasn’t quite as challenging as I thought it might be. I knew that the novel would succeed or fail to a large extent depending on how much I could make this voice convincing, and I did worry about being able to get a male voice right. But ultimately unless you are writing the most simplistically autobiographical stuff, all fiction involves getting inside other people’s heads; when you write first person narration, you are assuming a character and using your imagination. And it wasn’t all that different writing Elliot than it was writing Julia in The Legacy. Neither of them is me, although both of them have some of me in them. They were both voices that spoke to me very strongly in their own terms as individual characters. As for imagining what goes on in Vegas – you could say that wrote itself. Actually, some readers will be disappointed by how few naked girls there really are in my story, I’m sure.

Your first novel, The Legacy, was a contemporary reworking of Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady. In A Common Loss, Tennyson’s poem ‘In Memoriam’ looms large. What is it that draws you to use literary references in your work?

John Banville once said that books don’t come from life, books come from other books. I’m not sure whether this is taking it too far, or not far enough. I’ve lived in books ever since I learned to read; they exert tremendous power in my life, in my way of thinking about things. It’s hard for me to imagine writing that would not invoke other writing. I like to attend to echoes and allusions as they present themselves while I’m writing, whether it’s to Tennyson or Bret Easton Ellis or Ford Madox Ford (the other major point of reference for A Common Loss is Ford’s The Good Soldier). I hope I’m not heavy-handed about it.

But I don’t want to use literary reference as though it’s arcane knowledge or an in-joke. You can read The Legacy on its own terms without knowing anything about Henry James – even though, for me, that book emerged from a passionate need to respond to his novel. Tennyson has a very different place in A Common Loss – it’s more of a touchstone than a structuring device. I love that messy poem, the way the emotional chaos of raw grief exists so palpably inside these formal structures that try to control it. But Elliot has a very frustrated relationship to it, one that was interesting to me to explore, especially as someone who’s thought and written a lot about poetry. In very different ways than Elliot, I should add.

Colin is ‘obsessed with the movies, with noir plots’ – and this obsession shows through in the way his actions inform the novel. Are you a fan of noir? Did you enjoy working that element into the novel

Yes, I’m a fan of noir, and am more than a little obsessed with Raymond Chandler in particular. Vegas makes a great noir setting: bright lights, dark shadows and so on. Once the blackmail plot made its way into the story I could see the potential for it to become a more sort of straight noir novel. But in the end the story pulled very strongly against that. I find myself more interested in moments when the narrative strains against expectations or the conventional script and moves in another direction: the moment that is interrupted, frustrated or deflated rather than fulfilled, the irresolvable mystery, the irreducible ambiguity. Maybe there’s something noirish about that after all.

A Common Loss is out now in paperback ($29.99) and ebook ($16.99)

A book by Booki.sh

Jo Case is the editor of Readings Monthly and associate editor of Kill Your Darlings journal. You can follow her on Twiiter - @jocaseau.