The past looms large in Ian Maloney’s novel South Brooklyn Exterminating — both through the novel’s setting in the recent past and the ways in which it invokes the rich literary history of New York City. It follows several years in the life of its protagonist, from his childhood assisting his father in the field of pest control to his gradual awareness of unsettling truths about their family. I spoke with Maloney about the novel’s genesis, its evolution, and writing about a part of Brooklyn that isn’t always in the spotlight.

South Brooklyn Exterminating is set in the recent past, beginning a few decades ago. How much of invoking that time and place involved your own memories and how much involved revisiting specific places?

I did some digging into the world I remembered from that period in NYC in the 1980s and 90s.  Drove around to jog my memories. Looked at a lot of photo albums and work documents and then talked with a bunch of family members. I kept some notebooks from my exterminating days, and I had to sift through so many crazy things we came across doing that work. I relied a lot on the stories we told as a family over the years, and my memory kicked in with a lot of crazy details.  Freedom to maneuver and get to the emotional truth of the story was critical for me.

There are plenty of allusions within South Brooklyn Exterminating to older literary works, and your own bibliography and CV include an extensive knowledge of the likes of Melville and Whitman. What, for you, makes these writers’ words still endure today? Are there any other authors from the 19th century who you’d say are due for a revival?

Great question. First off, my dad always saw me as an idealist like Larry Darrell from W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, and my mom named me after Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. So, it seemed like the family always had literary aspirations for me from identity quests to spy novels.  Writing was always a part of our work conversations from the literary clubs we serviced to the paperback novels in the truck.

Melville and Whitman meant so much to my early teaching and writing. They were New Yorkers, who occupied the exact same timeframe (1819-1892) with Melville passing in 1891, Whitman in 1892. And you couldn’t find two writers on opposite ends of the spectrum.  It’s the light and dark of NYC; Melville the philosophical pessimist, Whitman the everyday optimist. And that’s exactly what drew me to them. That’s the range I needed in a work like SBE. Melville’s monomaniacal characters in Moby-Dick and Pierre fascinated me with their dark existential quests. I loved his strange working-class characters like Israel Potter and Bartleby. Melville couldn’t write any other way. He was always a seeker. My favorite quote from him: “It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation…Failure is the true test of greatness.” That was Melville’s credo and it captivated me throughout graduate school and led to my first critical book, Melville’s Monumental Imagination. His failures always inspired me to keep going when I couldn’t see the end of this book. With WW, I was drawn in by teaching “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in Brooklyn Heights and by my dad’s respect for his working-class roots.  Then, I was mesmerized by WW’s self-promotion and self-publication in Brooklyn at Rome Brothers, near Cadman Plaza, and his work as a journalist at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.  I think Song of Myself is the American epic, akin to what Dante did for Italy and Homer did for Greece.  It’s complicated, it’s messy, it’s self-centered, it’s American from start to finish. It also provides a lot of hope and belief in the country in the darkest times possible. WW published the first edition in 1855; Civil War was only a few years away.  Amazing how much faith he had in Leaves of Grass to heal and bring a nation back together. Could use more of that, and that’s why I remain active with the Whitman Initiative in NYC.  I could go on about these two, but I’ll stop myself from going overboard, pardon the Melvillean pun.

As far as 19th century authors for a revival, I would go back to my days at the CUNY Graduate Center.  I had great teachers like Bill Kelly, Neal Tolchin, and David S. Reynolds.  And since I tend to like the dark Gothic undercurrents of Poe in that period, I think more people should look at Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard (friend of Poe’s).  Brown’s Wieland and Arthur Mervyn deserve another look, especially as critiques of rationalism and enlightenment virtues.  Lippard’s Quaker City is a nighttime ride through Monk Hall where the evils of life under the city come into full view.  Totally makes sense why Quaker City was seen as wild and depraved and American readers couldn’t get enough of it.

When we were talking at the Asbury Park event, you’d mentioned that an earlier version of South Brooklyn Exterminating made use of a much more experimental structure. What prompted that approach – and can you still detect any of that version’s DNA in the final version?

I do see some bits of it in this final version. Basically, I saw the book as a novel-in-stories, like Dubliners, Winesburg, Ohio, Olive Kittredge, The Things They Carried, A Visit from the Goon Squad, The House on Mango Street, and most notably, Jesus’ Son.  My first take on this story was titled, Things of His World, and it basically was the narrator telling his dad’s story through the work objects he left behind when he died.  The narrator makes them an art installation, and then is forced to tell the stories behind the things, rather than making them an abstraction. My sister Jen and I talked a lot of this out as it developed, and we thought about The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millenium General Assembly by James Hampton, which is also a title of Denis Johnson’s collected poetry.  Hampton’s work played a big part in the conception of the experimental structure. I still love this odd concept, and Jen and I are exploring something akin to this in a collaboration project, but ultimately it wasn’t the right fit for SBE, a redemption story about a father and son working the underbelly of NYC.  I needed to tell this one straight, without the book’s structure acting as a distraction from the core of the book’s focus and direction.

How has writing this novel affected the work you’ve done since, if it has at all?

I think it’s made me more aware of my readers and understanding what can distract people away from your core story arc.  I also became very aware of how setting can really help a complicated story along in different ways. I think I was able to find places which helped bring the core working relationship to light better and bring readers to a world behind the scenes, beneath this great city at work.

I’d imagine that drawing on your own experience in pest control yielded some fascinating and/or bizarre stories. Was there anything so extreme or outlandish that didn’t make it in here?

There were so many!  My dad had a cast of characters as friends. Some of them I wish could have made their way into this book.  One story which I couldn’t find a spot for was in a large law firm in downtown Brooklyn.  Huge mice infestation all over the office.  Naturally, the partners were not pleased.  What we found was one person in the firm, with a locked desk drawer, was not only taking away the poison and traps, but she was creating “safe spaces” in her desk for nesting and sheltering.  I would love to do something with this story down the road, but it didn’t have the right fit for SBE.  It was like a dark and absurd office comedy, complete with tears, protests, and mouse funerals.

One more: one customer was absolutely terrified of mice and rats. Moved everything to her couch and refused to leave the spot.  Ran to the bathroom. Wouldn’t go near the kitchen. Forget about going downstairs to do laundry. When we investigated, we came to realize that the rats were living inside the couch she was sitting on the whole time.  I still can’t forget that reaction.  Like the line from When a Strangers Calls, “The call is coming from inside the house!” Imagine hearing: “The rats are living right underneath you!”  She threw something at her husband, left the house shivering and screaming, and moved to a hotel.

Brooklyn has long been a setting for fiction, but there’s been something of a boom in the current century. That said, there’s far less fiction (as far as I can tell) set in the working-class neighborhoods of south Brooklyn; your novel and William Boyle’s fiction are the main works that come to mind. Is there anyone else out there who you’ve found is chronicling similar lives and landscapes?

William Boyle popped into mind immediately.  Really enjoy his work a lot, especially Gravesend and City of Margins and looking forward to Saint of the Narrow Street.  Mark Chiusano’s Marine Park comes to mind as well, although his Marine Park seems very different than mine.  A few friends have seen connections with Selby’s Requiem for a Dream and even Sol Yurick’s work.  Honestly, I looked at writers near and far (and particularly those dealing with class and work) like Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Jayne Anne Phillips, Flannery O’Connor, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Junot Diaz, Richard Yates, John Cheever, Stuart Dybek (his Chicago stories really resonated), James Salter, Joyce Carol Oates, Deborah Eisenberg, Charles D’Ambrosio, Andre Dubus, Jim Shepard, Annie Proulx, and Thom Jones.  Then, I considered what I could bring from them into this often-overlooked NYC place and rarely written-about profession.

What’s next for you?

I’ve got a couple of projects percolating.  As I mentioned, I’m working with my sister Jen (a realist painter and professor of art at Adelphi University) on a project centered around our old home in Marine Park.  We call it Never Go Home Again. Microfiction from me, paintings from Jen.  Think it’s going to be a cool project.  We should bring it to a close in 2025.

I’m also digging into a detective series, which promises to bring my lead private detective into some great adventures around the city and elsewhere, with his chronicler and confessor Catholic priest confidante.  Not a lot of details to share yet, but I’ve been doing a mystery mission reading tour as of late and enjoying where it has taken me.  I’ve been to fictional Santa Teresa with Sue Grafton, to Kiewarra with Jane Harper, to New Orleans with James Lee Burke, to Dublin with Tana French, to San Francisco with Dashiell Hammett, to Florida with Carl Hiaasen, to Harlem with Chester Himes, to LA with Ross Macdonald, Michael Connelly, and James Ellroy, and then back home to Manhattan with my dad’s favorite, Rex Stout. I can’t wait to keep going here.  Opening up so much for me as a writer, as I chart my own detective’s trajectory.  Viktor Frankl once wrote, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” That quote has really helped frame my decisions as a writer and teacher, particularly as I move between genres and professions.

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