An interview with Daniel Torday, author of THE 12TH COMMANDMENT, by Joe Phipps
Interviewer’s Note: When we at Salt Hill set out to conduct our first interview/review double feature, Daniel Torday immediately came to mind. An accomplished novelist and graduate of the Syracuse University MFA program in creative writing, his novels include The Sensualist, The Last Flight of Poxl West, Boomer1, and The 12th Commandment. His latest novel, The 12th Commandment, which is out now from St. Martin’s Press, is an exercise in faith, reckoning, and more than anything, the quest for truth and righteousness in an increasingly polarized United States in the 2020s. It is a book that challenges us to look beyond the veil, and intentionally question all we believe in. It was a privilege to interview Dan about his process, his newest triumph, and his plans for the future. We hope you enjoy.
Joe Phipps: Where did the novel start conceptually for you? With the mystery behind the murder, a desire to write about mysticism, or even somewhere else?
Daniel Torday: There are kind of two answers to this question. The first is that I’ve been fascinated by mysticism—the direct interaction with the deity—and with Kabbalah, Jewish Mysticism, since I was a kid. And in digging back into that reading a couple years ago, I made a deep dive into the story of this 17th century false prophet, Sabbatai Tzvi. I’m always spun up by stories of moments when deep belief and extreme thinking go wrong, and he’s a prime example. So when I discovered that his remaining followers, almost all of them in Istanbul, have their own 18 Commandments, the 12th of which is essentially that it’s OK to kill a member of the community who leaks details of their esoteric practices, I felt I’d found a way to dramatize it.
The second is that my first reported piece of writing, when I was a 24-year-old editor at Esquire Magazine, was about a college friend of mine who was abducted and murdered by a serial killer from Kenyon College’s campus the year after I graduated. It was an experience and a trauma that lingered, burrow inside, and I think all the nuances that I hadn’t been able to get into even a six thousand-word magazine piece had been looking for somewhere to seed. For years.
JP: How familiar were you with Jewish mysticism before you started on the novel?
DT: I knew a good deal about the basics (if there are basics!) of Kabbalah as early as when I was 12 or 13, even though you’re not supposed to start reading the Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism, until you’re in your 40’s. More recently I spent a couple of years reading the writings of Rabbi Nachman with a neo-Hasidic rabbi friend of mine as I was writing the book. I wanted to be able to dig deep into the beliefs and practices of this character I was writing. Plus my rabbi friend is a bearded tattooed poet with an MFA, so it was a joy to spend so much time reading and learning with him.
JP: In the acknowledgements you thank people from various Jewish mystical sects who helped you research for the novel. What did that research look like and what led you to begin researching it to begin with? Did the novel idea come before the research or vice versa?
DT: Sadly, as per the content of those acknowledgments, I think I’m a little limited in what I’m able to say here. There’s the novel you set out to write, and the novel you find you can write as you get going. I had plans to travel to Istanbul and spend a couple months really digging in with the community I was writing about—and as I began having initial conversations here in the States, via phone and Zoom, I discovered that I’d be putting folks at real risk if I took it much further. If I was writing a nonfiction book, there would be a desire to push, I think. But I’m a novelist and the nice thing about writing fiction is… you can make shit up! So I imagined a group of Dönme in central Ohio. The premise shifted. I also read all there is to read on Hasidism past and present. And I plunged into my imagination, a good place to be as a writer.
JP: What was it like going at a mystery like the one in the novel from the perspective of a reporter, a fact collector, and not that of a detective trying to find clues?
DT: Since I was a magazine journalist when I went into that piece about my friend who was murdered in central Ohio, I felt like I had that material to work with. I think for me, anyway, this is ultimately an America-in-2020 book more than it is a Jewish or mystical book, more a book about the clash of a religious sect in the midst of a dark moment in the class of cultures in this country, than anything. Journalism has been so maligned in certain subcultures, various subcultures, in the past six years plus, and the idea of pushing Zeke into this subculture as a representative of a world of inquiry just felt right. I’ve been in a years-long reading kick trying to fill in a spotty education in American history, and the Constitution. One thing that always shouts at me in that document is that the press is the only non-governmental job, profession, enshrined and named in the Constitution itself. It’s very near sacred in this country. So. It also felt like it was pushing the ball forward on a kind of noir-ish aesthetic that couldn’t help but be fruitful.
JP: Did you always anticipate that some of the characters in the novel were going to be as complex as they ended up? For example, was Sheriff Shaw meant to be as deep a character as they ended up, or were they originally convinced as simply a corrupt lawman archetype to move the plot along?
DT: I’ve learned not to anticipate too much as I’m writing. The dream is for every character to carry their own secrets, their own complexities. If those complexities are outward-facing, things we can all see, that presents itself in one way to a narrator. If they’re hiding what’s nuanced or conflicting in themselves, that presents itself quite differently. I think in this case, characters like Shaw and Faiz Effendi were clearly keeping secrets from themselves from the start—and so they present themselves one way in dialogue, in action, while carrying something darker inside. And not to sound too gnomic, but isn’t that part of what we’ve been dealing with since 2016? That if, to paraphrase Zadie Smith, there’s a conductor forcing out the melody of our inner darkness, it’ll start spilling over into our public selves? That’s what I saw, anyway, on days like January 6. The ugly melody we all work to suppress and avoid spilling out into the streets.
JP: For the “In the Voice of the Prophet” sections, what was the process of embodying a religious leader like that for you? Was it a difficult voice to create?
DT: In a weird way, the sections in Natan of Flatbush’s voice took the longest to arrive at—but were the easiest to write once I was going. I knew his was going to be the only first-person voice in the book, and as we were talking about above—the first person is both where we perform the self we want to show to the world, and hide what we want to keep hidden most fiercely. For me I’m always writing toward an ending and some challenge the work in progress has presented in the early going that demands to be grappled with by the end. I have a vague sense that no matter how much a book spirals or meanders, that’s where much of the narrative energy comes from. And by about two chapters in, I couldn’t see any way Natan was going to survive all he’d been a part of, and to some extent wrought. So how both to write in his voice for long sections and have the book feel complete with him no longer living? So for me those final chapters were both the most difficult and the most rewarding.
JP: You use a lot of specific names for companies and television shows in the novel, for example Uber, Lyft, and Sportscenter, where other authors would just use stand in terms like “call a car” or “they were watching sports.” What was the reason for this choice?
DT: Specificity. I find the sublime and the beautiful come from specificity that allows for a sense of universality. I’m a big fan of proper nouns.
JP: Injury and its recovery seem to be an important theme in the novel. Could you speak some on that?
DT: Too funny—part of being a parent is observing in your kids this almost Wolverine-like speed at healing physically. When my daughters were toddlers I’d see them skin a knee, and like 12 hours later it would be totally healed. And then I’d observe in myself as a kind of joke-notjoke that after 40, I had the kind of reverse-Wolverine body. I was playing in a softball league and made the mistake of sliding into second on a hard, pebbly field, and I had a scrape on my ass that took like 23 months to heal. Which I guess is to say: the speed of healing is a weird fucking thing. And if part of the deal with spiritual healing is pushing into that space where you recognize there’s an injury, and then tracking its regrowth, a novel might want to concretize that.
JP: I’m very interested in the chapter “The Afterlife of Stars.” More specifically I am interested in the move to change the form for a small part of the chapter to more resemble stage directions than traditional prose, and I would love to hear your thoughts on the move.
DT: Well not to settle into college-professor mode, but in my novel-writing class we always start by talking about what a bastard form the novel is. The poem has been around for centuries. Ditto the play, the Socratic dialogue, Psalm or song. But long before there was such a thing as a novel, there were all these forms, and so when we’re writing novels, I can’t help to think: how can I overtly incorporate those forms? I love novels that are actively playful in this way—Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, which won the National Book Award a few years back, was written in the form of a screenplay. I love at the end of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, in an otherwise conventional-seeming novel, when suddenly she’s writing like six pages of KJV-style scripture. When at the beginning of Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison starts mashing letters together on the page. In that same novel-writing class we always find ourselves asking: where are these mythical novels people imagine that are just stacks of paragraphs, a single narrator standing and delivering for 400pp? After about the time our grandparents were born, they’re frankly hard to find. And more than that: Tristram Shandy.
JP: We often say that a piece is never done, that we are often editing our own work over and over in our heads, so I want to ask you, now that it is printed and bound in hardback, how do you feel about the novel? Are there any lessons you learned along the way of making it you wish you had started knowing?
DT: Oh I’m very much on board with the advice that the quickest way to find a typo is to attach a file to an email and hit send. The second those words are out of your hands, all their flaws start giving off heat like sparklers on the 4th of July. But I will say, long ago I made a rule for myself: I don’t send off any new creative work, to anyone, until it’s sat for at least six months on my desktop. If I open a file up after six months and read through and it still seems done, it’s probably done. I spent five years researching and writing on this one. So I fear it’s more done with me than I could ever be done with it.
Daniel Torday is the author of The 12th Commandment, The Last Flight of Poxl West, and Boomer1. A two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for fiction and the Sami Rohr Choice Prize, Torday’s stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and n+1, and have been honored by the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays series. Torday is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.
Joe Phipps is a poet from southern West Virginia where he earned a BA in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from Marshall University. Joe uses his poetry to explore ideas like the liminality of loaned tools, people’s inability to visualize wolves, and other things his father describes as, “things he’s put a lot of effort into thinking about, even though they aren’t important whatsoever,” in an attempt to connect to something bigger. He just hasn’t quite settled on what something bigger is yet.