Adam Wilson on Plot vs. ”Concept” (and While He’ll Never Write a Yankees Fan)

Despite being a book that revolves around a cryonically-frozen (dead) father being transported two thousand miles in the back of a U-haul, Adam Wilson’s Fail Sons is laugh-out-loud funny. It might be aimed at a certain subset of readers—it helps if you know which unremarkable Pavement B-side became a viral TikTok hit—but it’s ultimately a story about being someone’s child and someone’s sibling and someone’s parent. And also what’s it like to be a stressed-out person in this ridiculous country at this ridiculous time.

At a svelte 224 pages, it’s Wilson’s tightest, funniest, most moving novel yet. Critics and Wilson himself refer to Fail Sons as a “midlife-crisis” novel, which makes me feel older than I thought I was. But that’s neither here nor there.

What’s here: I asked Wilson some pertinent questions over email as the September days grew chillier. We discussed the vulnerability of writing about aging bodies, Knicks fever, and how much Stanley Elkin is too much Stanley Elkin, among other hot topics. Our exchange has been condensed and edited for length.

Sam Axelrod: The bulk of Fail Sons is a cross country trip from Arizona to the East Coast. That’s a lot of geography to cover. What was your research process like?

Did you leave the house or was it all from the comforts of your desk? Adam Wilson: The initial inspiration was a road trip from Los Angeles to Denver that my wife (then girlfriend) and I took in 2014. I also spent a month at a residency in Woody Creek, Colorado the following year.

I’d never been to Arizona, Utah or Colorado before, and the project began as a repository for my observations about those places, most of which were, like, whoa, what a beautiful landscape, who knew? (Many people knew.) I started writing it right after my first son was born. The plan was always to go back and retrace the route once I was farther along in the manuscript, but then the pandemic hit, and then I had another kid, and it became unfeasible. Thankfully, the internet exists.