Stepping out of the chaos of Santa Monica Blvd and into the New Theater to meet Calla Henkel for our interview about her latest book, Scrap, had the transportative quality of entering a portal; exiting the speedy streets and entering the hermetically sealed darkness of the cool, dark, velvet-lined theater for a different kind of vector. Side-stepping two girls in prom dresses rehearsing a cat fight, Henkel mentions she had just returned from a swim at a public pool a block away, thus explaining her swimwear. She has an incredibly disarming demeanor—a calm, collected amiability rare for Los Angeles, perhaps equal-parts informed by, and resistant of, the twelve years she spent in Berlin running TV, a smorgasbord performance space, nightlife venue and film studio with Max Pitegoff (also co-founder of the New Theater).
The New Theater is something of a nexus for the burgeoning literary scene and (stagnating) gallery-circuit of Los Angeles, buttressing each through its unique hybrid programming. And not unlike the New Theater, her latest novel Scraps is an intersection between Henkel’s understanding of narrative and lived experience within the arts. It’s a lesbian neo-noir trojan-horsing a deeper critique of the gallery system, true crime, and the underbelly of schadenfreude inherent to both.
OLIVER MISRAJE Scrap operates in the incredibly rare space between a commercial thriller and a hyper-localized critique of the art world. What is it about the thriller genre for you that makes it the ideal form for that kind of discourse?
CALLA HENKEL I love thrillers because they provide a really fast engine, and you can strap anything to it. The art world may not be completely interesting when you talk about it in another set of prose or language, but there's something about a thriller that allows me, as a writer, to focus on minutia, sadness and pain, the flaky parts of a universe which would otherwise maybe be annoying, but because it’s a thriller it can still be consumed with violent pleasure.
MISRAJE You can plug into it.
HENKEL Exactly. Photography and theater have an immediacy. And in a funny way, the thriller novel sort of replicates that immediacy. It is like the cocaine of literature. There's a relief and a joy in that for me. For a long time, Max Pitegoff, my artistic collaborator and I were writing plays in Germany, partially in German, partially in English. And I was like, “These are for twelve people.” I wanted to find a format to write in that was more accessible, but still allowed me to exorcize the same questions I’d had when making theater.
MISRAJE The social dynamics of the art world, especially from the perspective of industry, is so heavily gate kept—I’m curious how you’ve had to tweak the thriller in relation to such a specifically in-grouped context.
HENKEL I think a big problem is that the art world lends itself to such a unique bastion of extreme satire. It’s a total tragicomedy and it’s easy to make fun of it. But it never feels right because the pain is in the detail. You know, it's not in the big funny abstract painting with an insane price, It's the mechanics of the exchange of energy. That is what I think is rarely captured well. I'm really interested in the politics of labor; how works are sold and in turn how they're used to sell an idea of politics or a performance of identity. The art world always looks fake because what’s portrayed is not what it’s really about. But I wrote the book when people I knew were dropping out of the art world. There was a lot of complaining and melodrama at the moment, and my gut reaction was to sort of laugh, and be like, Cool, then do it. Nothing's holding you here. I stole a lot of their rhetoric for the book. I think it’s interesting how people working within the arts pretend like it's a cage that they're stuck in—when in reality they've decided to be there. And I think Esther, the main character, is caught in this thought trap, which is only exacerbated by her obsession with revenge, which disables her from moving forward.
MISRAJE I appreciate the gray morality of Scrap. There’s a nuance to each of the characters that feels very human, regardless of their social and class positioning. The relationship between Esther and Patrick especially stands out.
HENKEL I don't plan my books out in advance. Really, not at all. I’m always surprised by who my characters become throughout the writing process, so none of them end up representing one thing or another. There is never a moral agenda. With Esther, she was a character who reacts linearly, so every time she gets hit with something, she goes ten inches farther than she should each time, which mirrors the logic of true crime. It's invasive but I also think true crime has this propeller engine where they have to get to the bottom of something within the time-span of an episode. But violence is confusing. And those two things together create this type of narrative netting where people are constantly trying to cover violence with something that makes total sense, but it never makes total sense. With Esther, she has this desire for justice that’s really just a desire for a palatable shape. And that's not real.
MISRAJE Was Esther a character you channeled from within or without?
HENKEL I always have this feeling that there's a bar or like an annex in the nightclub in my brain where the characters sit and smoke cigarettes until I finish the story. It can be annoying and kind of disruptive to have them always there, especially with someone like Esther. She was a difficult character to live with in my head. It got quite claustrophobic. It's this thing where you satisfy them with an ending, and till that ending is set they're just blabbing at me all day long. So, I feel like most of my characters usually sort of get what they want. But It's not always the right thing.
MISRAJE It’s a monkey paw situation.
HENKEL Right. It just maybe costs something they weren't willing to pay, but they didn't know that when they made the request. I had this meltdown because I had written this Esther as someone who has nothing to lose which is arguably very difficult narratively speaking. But then I realized, Oh wait, that has to become her power. So, that enabled the ending.
MISRAJE Do you consider yourself a noir writer?
HENKEL It's so funny because I never would've decided for myself that this is what I’d be doing. ButI also really love committing to a form. That’s what I like about the theater we run here, because it’s a form. We could do pop-up Shakespeare in the park or whatever, but instead we have fifty red seats and a bunch of lights. When you commit to a form, you really have to sit inside of it, literally speaking. And that’s also what I am doing with writing. So yeah, I guess I do consider myself a noir writer.