The Sabotage Café tells the story of Cheryl, a bored suburbanite playing with anarchy for the first time. After running away from home in the novel’s opening scene, Cheryl finds herself down and out in Minneapolis’ Dinkytown, at home– for the first time, perhaps– holed up among the lost youth of her generation in the abandoned building known as the The Sabotage Café.

But Cheryl’s mother, Julia, cannot seem to let her daughter go, especially since she knows what life in Dinkytown is like– having herself gone to live there some twenty years earlier, back when the now dilapidated The Sabotage Café was Minneapolis punk-rock mecca. Cheryl’s attempt to escape her mother, and her mother’s life, join them together, and it seems that the farther Cheryl runs, the closer she gets.

Adam Goldwyn: How did you come up with the name The Sabotage Café? Is there an intentional irony in this choice? How does the theme of sabotage play itself out in the novel, if at all? And also, what about "café," since this word, reeking as it does of bourgeois respectability and Starbucks' capitalism, is the very thing Cheryl and her friends are trying to avoid?

Joshua Furst: The title rose from a number of sources: When I lived in the East Village in New York in the early 90s, there was a bookstore on St. Marks called Sabotage Books where the gutter punks who were the initial inspiration for the book seemed to spend a lot of time hanging out. Then, also, there’s a legendary collectively-owned Anarcho-leaning joint in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis called the Hard Times Café. The title of the book nods to both these establishments. Hopefully, it does more than this. Of course, much of the action of the book transpires in a place actually called The Sabotage Café. But I think more interestingly, the central story being told revolves around Julia, and the ways her mind is at war with itself. She, in her respectable, bourgeois suburb is a kind of Sabotage Café of one.

AG: I know this is my peculiarity as a reader, but whenever I find a writer discussing the aesthetics of a third party, I always try and see in that description the aesthetic of the writer himself. So when I came across your first description of the band Nobody’s Fool, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps this was your aesthetic. The one line that stood out in your description of the band was “This ‘slacker’ attitude…with its unfocused energy and Midwestern fatalism, was the very thing that critics adored about them, but eventually did the band in.” This sentence seemed to me to be a summary of the entire novel; it seemed that this is how your characters live. Is there an element of personal confession in there as well?

JF:: The “slacker” attitude is a 90s motif that I wouldn’t want to wear too proudly. Chaos and entropy though (central components of slackerdom) do play a role in the ethos of the book, and in order to capture this ethos I found I had to adjust my writing process. Normally, when writing a story, I work out most of the structural and tonal issues in my head before putting any words on the page. By the time I begin writing, most of the major craft decisions have been made and the drafting of the story consists of playing—improvising and riffing and exploring character—within the formal constraints I’ve placed on the work. While writing The Sabotage Café, I found I needed to allow for more mess. I had to unlearn my craft. I wrote scene after scene in no particular order and with as little attention to the artful construction of the sentences as possible until I’d amassed a great many moments of lived reality for my characters. Only then did I begin to organize the information into a narrative. That this process left its imprint on the eventual texture of the book is heartening, because as you said, it is very much the way the characters live.

As for an element of personal confession, I must admit that I identify with the energy of rage, the combustion that passionate people are sometimes capable of. There’s not enough of this sort of anarchic freedom in America at the moment, and I think we’d be better as a people and a country if our wilder impulses had more space to roam.

AG: Additionally, I am curious about the phrase “Midwestern fatalism,” in particular. What is unique about Midwestern fatalism, as opposed to other geographic fatalisms? I mean, Minnesota is hardly the obvious candidate for a novel about post-punk fatalism, though it did offer such influential punk bands as Husker Du and The Replacements (and, though not punk, Minneapolis’ favorite sons Bob Dylan and Prince). Nobody’s Fool is loosely modeled on The Replacements, and their “life’s ambition… not to be rock stars but to be able to drink for free at their favorite local bar, the CC Club, for the rest of their lives” parallels nicely The Replacements hit “Here Comes a Regular,” which, I’m sure not coincidentally, is the song on your MySpace page. Why Minneapolis over more obvious candidates like New York or Los Angeles? What drew you to Minneapolis and Midwestern fatalism?

JF:: The reasons I chose to set the novel in Minneapolis instead of the more notorious scenes of New York or LA or San Francisco are multifold. I didn’t want to have to navigate any preexisting mythologies of the punk world, and the coastal scenes have been so well documented that I felt it was pretty impossible to approach them on my own terms. But there was something else at work in this decision as well. The fatalism of the Midwest is central to the tone I was trying to hit. For a long time, I had contemplated the differences in mood between coastal and landlocked regions. I’d noticed and been fascinated by the flamboyance of people’s stances—the modes by which they presented their emotions and beliefs—in cities like New York and San Francisco. There was something performative about these people, as though they knew, no matter how self-loathing, how tiny they felt, that they were on a world stage. In the Midwest, where I spent most of my formative years, people don’t have this kind of self-consciousness. The land stretches forever, unrelentingly, and you’re just a speck of flesh cowering on it. Depression is a lot less fun in the Midwest. Despair is more desperate. There’s no world party to disappear inside of. The ego has no currency. And this forces people to confront the facts: the world has no more interest in human beings than it does in the cows penned up in the barn, or the flies on those cows, or the microbes blossoming in the manure. The world doesn’t care. This can be demoralizing. To my mind, what distinguishes the Midwestern punk scene from it’s coastal counterparts was that instead of rising from a desire for fame—which a cursory look at Patti Smith or Darby Crash or even Henry Rollins’s biographies makes abundantly clear was a large part of the force propelling punks on the coasts—the Midwestern variety rose out of blind fury, a howling against the futility of it all and a lack of anything better to do. It was important to me, in The Sabotage Café, that the characters contain some trace of this.

AG: One of the first things I noticed about The Sabotage Café was the specificity in its description of location. When Cheryl first runs away she goes “clomping down the middle of the street, nearing the corner where Jonquil Court opens onto Jonquil Way, angling south headed toward East Fish Lake Road.” I was able to find this exact spot on Google maps. So, though the novel seems so deeply rooted in Minneapolis, it also seemed to me to be a story about an experience youth were having all over the country: the general malaise of the first couple years of the twenty-first century. But it’s also about a youthful malaise that seems almost timeless. Is this story unique, in that these constellations– Minneapolis youth at the beginning of the twenty-first century– will never come into alignment again, or is there something universally true about this story?

JF:: I’m not sure I’m comfortable claiming universality for my work—I hope for it, as I’d guess most every writer does, but my relative success at achieving it is, I think, better left to the readers to decide. I did want to convey an experience that was simultaneously specific to Minneapolis and the Midwest and also widely felt across the nation. The characters are responding to their direct environment, which includes the city they’re stuck in and the social and political climate of the country. We live in conservative times. Every city in America contains kids who’re living like those in my book. They’re responding to the very real commercial pressures that codify and mold our ambitions. Conformity is no longer one option among many; it’s the only option. You can choose from a wide range of clichés to become, but in the end you can’t escape becoming one. In choosing to say no, these kids are erasing themselves from the American reality. And of course, they’re reenacting their own particular cliché.

AG: At its heart, I think, the novel is about relationships between people, and what interested me was the way that the characters seemed to be doubles of one another. For example, Jarod and Cheryl are contrasting models of children, both of them dealt with their disabled mothers in an almost opposite way: Cheryl runs away, while Jarod stays with his mother and cares for her. At one point Cheryl thinks to herself “[Jarod’s] mother is an unrelenting mess of needs. Just like mine…Just like mine except with mine there’s no physical ailment, just an incessant attempt to suck me back in.” Trent and Jarod, too, contrast as young men and love interests. Over the course of the novel, we see Trent’s degeneration and Jarod’s growth. And, ultimately, what about Cheryl? It seemed significant to me that when she meets Trent, she adopts the nickname he gives her, Betty, and that she remains Betty until her eventual rejection of Trent when, as she runs away, he calls after her: “Cheryl! Wait!” and Cheryl thinks: “Cheryl. Not Betty, but Cheryl. The same old Cheryl she’d always been.” What purpose do all these doublings serve, and what aspects of character were you trying to explore?

JF:: While writing the book, I was very conscious of parallels I was creating between characters. I’d add Jarod and Cheryl’s father and Julia, Cheryl’s mother, and “the ho-bag,” Jarod’s mother, to those you’ve mentioned. On a certain level, I think this is just a natural instinct that rises up in the act of writing fiction. In teasing out meaning and ideas, the writer uses whatever is available to him, characters first and foremost. I’d like to think that the reader’s experience and understanding of the book will vary depending on which of these parallels he or she focuses on.

AG: To me, one of the most significant character pairings was Cheryl and her mother Julia. One of the novel’s great ironies is that, in her desperate attempt to run away from her mother, Cheryl is forced (or chooses, I suppose) to relive her life. Do you see, as I do, a cyclical pattern to the novel, and Cheryl continuing on her mother’s path, perhaps eventually leaving the squalor and uncertainty of street life for suburban security or do you see Cheryl’s experience opening up for her a different path?

JF:: The story is cyclical in a couple of ways. There’s the way in which Cheryl is following her mother’s path, but also, and more importantly, there’s the narrative itself. Julia is both reaching forward to her daughter’s experience and backward into her own. The two become one, and by the end of the novel, we’ve returned to the beginning. Cheryl and Jarod have in some way become Julia and Robert in the early days of their lives together.

AG: The novel ends with many lingering questions, but to me, the most pressing was what would happen to Cheryl? So, I am curious, why did you choose to end the novel at that moment?

JF:: I honestly don’t know what happens to Cheryl. To do justice to Julia’s experience, I had to relegate myself to what she knows—or at any rate, what she thinks she knows. When her world collapses in around her, Julia is forced to realize the limits of her power to cradle and protect her daughter. Though the book concerns itself primarily with Cheryl, it belongs to Julia and this is the central tragedy of Julia’s story.

Joshua Furst is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been the recipient of a Michener Fellowship, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Ledig House. He lives in New York City, where he teaches at the Pratt Institute.

Adam Goldwyn is a Contributing Editor of Literary Features & Contributing Writer for Small Spiral Notebook. He recieved a BA in History from Pomona College and an MA in Ancient History from University College London. He is currently working towards a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Adam also serves as an adjunct lecturer in English and Classics at Brooklyn College.