The Interview

J. David Simons

(Saraband, £9.99)

People go off-grid for varied reasons, but Cal Drummond’s are more alarming than most. Once a famous talk-show host with a Mulholland Drive mansion, he now conceals his identity behind a beard, a false name and a battered pickup truck in the backwoods of Georgia. We’re not told straight away why he needed to go into hiding, only that it had something to do with the President. Indeed, his name is so closely linked with that of President Sterling Paterson that, when the President dies after a stroke, Cal becomes newsworthy again overnight.

The locals think he’s Hank McPhearson, a native of the area who left when he was a boy and has now returned to live quietly in a shack owned by his family. In fact, Cal Drummond was born in Glasgow in 1963 to a professor of Economics and the daughter of a Jewish political activist. He was uprooted in 1980, when his father got a job at Columbia University in New York, the three of them moving to the US to begin a new phase of their lives.

When tragedy struck and he was left orphaned, Cal was taken under the wing of his Uncle Rob, who got in on the ground floor as a music video director when cable music channels took off. The TV connection, and a childhood obsession with great talk-show hosts like Carson and Cavett, set him on the path to becoming a successful interviewer. Now that career is coming back to haunt him.

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Journalist Nina Fernandez has tracked him down, looking for an interview at the very least, to find out what happened to Cal Drummond after his notorious Presidential encounter. One of the locals has rumbled his identity too, and Cal discovers that his old radio presenter rival Troy Hansen was behind shots that were fired at him while he relaxed on the lake.

Realising that the time has come to break cover and face up to his past, he sets off on a road trip to New Mexico with his taciturn sort-of-girlfriend Penny, the herbalist, forager and player of exotic musical instruments from the next shack along, and mentally prepares himself to meet Nina Fernandez and finally bare his soul.

The present-day chapters are interspersed with flashbacks through Cal’s life (in the third person, as he can’t tell a story without putting a distance between himself and his subject) chronicling his relationships with alcohol, women and friends, the impact his high school stoner buddies had on his life, how his politically active grandmother influenced the choices he has made and how the death of his parents cut him off from his emotions. There are hints too of a guilty secret he’s been carrying around for years and never spoken of, and how all this led to the incident that defined his career.

The Interview by J. David SimonsThe Interview by J. David Simons (Image: free)

Despite Cal’s high media profile, Presidential connection and fears of assassination, The Interview is really a contemplative, intimate character piece about a man trying to overcome past trauma and perhaps carve out a better future by being honest with himself.

Thankfully, Glasgow-born Simons avoids cheap or easy sentiment. Penny and her AA sponsor Bear are not lacking in kindness or empathy, but they’re hard, resilient people who take a tough-love approach to Cal. Fernandez too is sympathetic and above-board in her dealings with him, despite her obvious ambition.

Simon’s prose reflects that, a compassionate heart beating beneath a literary carapace that can at times seem as tough as the sun-baked New Mexico landscape.