Matthew Sharpe came to national prominence when his novel The Sleeping Father was selected for the Today Show Book Club. Jamestown, his most recent novel, is set in the near future and tells the story of a group of post-apocalyptic Manhattanites who take an armored bus to Virginia in search of oil and other resources. What they find there closely follows the historical encounter between the English and Native Americans when the first Jamestown colony was founded in 1607.

Scott Esposito: Jamestown's world is very violent, so violent in fact that it often feels cartoonish. Maybe its best summed up by the observations of one of your main characters, bus-rider and slacker skeptic Johnny Rolfe, who says "Some great, quaint pre-annihilation philosopher described the movement of history as thesis, antithesis, synthesis, whereas I've seen a lot more thesis, antithesis, steak knife, bread knife." Why are things so violent?

Matthew Sharpe: Because they were and are. The Jamestown settlement was a fertile ground for the flowering of man’s inhumanity to man: English against Indians, Indians against English, English against English, Indians against Indians. But especially English against Indians. The settlers decimated the locals, commandeered their land, kidnapped, tortured, and killed them. The English thought their God was better than the Indians’, thought their skin and clothes and civilization were better. And England’s foreign policy in the early 17th century bears a striking resemblance to ours now: extract the foreigners’ resources, save them with our superior values, kill them with our superior weapons, and do it all with breathtaking incompetence.

SE: With all this violence, is there an element of trying to shock people, trying to snap at them a little and get them to pay more attention?

MS: We live in a violent nation. We are purveyors of violent art, especially our movies. As the writer Maggie Nelson has said, there is a difference between showing violence as spectacle and writing about it. One thing novels are really well suited to is illuminating via language the texture of consciousness. So what does it feel like to be a sentient, conscious being—to be matter that is aware of itself—and to perpetrate or come to bodily harm? That was a question I was asking while writing Jamestown; representing the intimate experience of historical violence is one of the tasks I set myself in this novel.

SE: At one point a character remarks "I accommodate, therefore I am but briefly," which sort of updates Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." Would you say that this is indicative of the separation between our world and Jamestown's?

MS: I don’t think I know if I’d be if I didn’t think. I do know that I’ve observed time and again that the qualities and values a civilization professes to hold most dear are not necessarily the ones possessed in abundance by its most powerful citizens—witness Bush, Cheney, Rove, Steinbrenner. The Indian gentleman in my novel who utters the remark you quoted above is dying when he says it, and he’s dying because he’s too nice a guy, too accommodating of the wishes and needs of a colonist, in this case. He suspects he might’ve survived had he been more of an asshole. I suspect it of him too.

SE: The reason the Manhattanites head south is that Brooklyn and Manhattan are at war, and Manhattan is hoping to get the upper hand by finding increasingly rare oil. Toward the end of the novel the two sides meet to have a peace negotiation. Almost immediately they start bickering and Manhattan notes that Brooklyn's "increased violence and frequency of your recent attacks is a sign of your desperation." Is it just a coincidence that this sounds almost exactly like the Bush administration's rhetoric regarding the war in Iraq?

MS: No.

SE: Toward the end of the novel you take a time out to list the names of everyone who died in it. Why was it important to list the names of the dead?

MS: For the same reason it is important to honor each soldier and citizen who’s given his or her life in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you imagine if we could imagine the interrupted lives of each Iraqi who’s died in this war? What a wonderful world it would be.

SE: Although the book is set in the near future, it closely follows the events that took place at the historical founding of Jamestown in 1607. Center-stage here are Indian/English relations and the love affair between Johnny Rolfe and Pocahontas. What about the founding of Jamestown made you want to use it as the structure of your novel?

MS: The events of the Jamestown settlement constitute a foundational myth of our nation. We model ourselves on and live through myths and rely on them to justify our actions.

SE: Was structuring it around historical fact useful as a writing constraint, especially since in many ways this novel seems to defy limits?

MS: Yes. The model of improvisatory music comes to mind. Jazz musicians may use the harmonic structure of, say, “All of Me” to create a new melody for “All of Me.” Not that I regard historical fact (is there such a thing, by the way?) as merely a writing constraint.

SE: You've called Jamestown an "ahistorical fantasia," which I think means you've taken real elements of our history and applied them to a fantasy that occurs during an indeterminate historical point. First, do you have a definition of "ahistorical fantasia," and second, do any particular influences or reasons stand out as helping you decide to write the novel this way?

MS: “Ahistorical fantasia” would take as many words to define as are in the novel itself. Reasons for writing one I hope I’ve at least partly enumerated above. Influences include Henry Darger, Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Richard III and King Lear by William Shakespeare.

SE: In addition to "ahistorical fantasia" I think I would label this book, "hysterical realism." James Wood, who coined the term, has been rather vocal against this genre. Among the problems with it, he says it combines "the boredom that always attends upon cartoonish" with "rather old-fashioned, straightforward realism." Would you consider Jamestown hysterical realism?

MS: I don’t remember what James Wood’s definition of hysterical realism is but I do remember he used the term as a dis (though I gather you don’t mean it that way), so no, I don’t think I’m writing hysterical realism. I didn’t set out to write in an already existing mode or style. I improvised and wrote according to my interests, proclivities, and moods.

SE: The book begins with a long section of alternating chapters of narration from Rolfe and Pocahontas. Each chapter begins with an opening like "To whoever is out there reading this" and sounds reminiscent of MySpace or LiveJournal blog entries. How did you come to use this format to narrate the time leading up to the meeting of the Indians and whites?

MS: I’m not an authority here, but I think it’s possible the people you call the whites are not all whites. And I think the “blogging to no one” feature of the opening section might be seen as a metaphor for the possibility, in any communication, that one’s intended message will not be got by its intended recipient, as you suggest with your next question.

SE: Communication and its failings is a big theme here. Do you think there's a contradiction in a novelist writing a novel that examines the failure of words?

MS: Yes. I meant to do that.

SE: Jamestown also makes liberal use of Internet communication technologies—blogs, email, and instant messaging. What possibilities do these mediums open up for you, as a novelist?

MS: I think a novel is a good medium in which to represent language use. Any way that language gets deployed in the world—any form of speech or writing—can make its way into a novel. One way to try to make sense of contemporary life in a novel is to have that novel swallow and digest contemporary forms of language use, which now include the argot of blogs, email, and IM’s.

SE: Are there other writers that you think have been using them well?

MS: In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami gets at the irreducible feeling of remoteness and apartness that inheres in email.

SE: At one point Pocahontas laments her decreasing straightforwardness, saying "I used to always speak my mind in my own language too but that's getting harder the older I get." How do you think Pocahontas's emphasis on speaking her mind separates her from the other characters, who tend to court duplicity to various degrees?

MS: Pocahontas understands perhaps more consistently than some of the other characters that language doesn’t only describe the world, it also is a part of it and causes things to happen in it.

SE: Despite the miscommunication in this novel, there's also an awareness of certain things that we all understand. For instance, at one point Rolfe notes "decrepitude is egalitarian." Would you say that this kind of basic, shared stuff is essential for linguistic communication?

MS: I don’t know. I’ve tried to communicate with non-human animals, with trees, with rocks and machines, and sometimes I think they’ve tried to communicate with me. The results have been even more uncertain than communications with humans.

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Scott Esposito's work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Boldtype, and The Chattahoochee Review, among others. He hosts the literary blog Conversational Reading and edits The Quarterly Conversation.