About two-thirds of the way through “Daughters of Chaos,” Little Rock writer Jen Fawkes’ debut novel, Sylvie Swift — the book’s closest thing to a protagonist — ventures beneath the brothel where she’s been staying in Civil War-era Nashville and discovers that the prostitutes are up to something darkly mystical, foregoing sex work in favor of feminist rituals through which they subtly reprogram the violence-prone psyches of their clientele.
Sylvie’s path to the brothel’s undercroft is only a single strand of Fawkes’ novel, though, unfolding in parallel to two other tales. First, there’s an ancient playscript called “Apocrypha” that becomes Sylvie’s destiny to translate from French to English. Loosely inspired by the real-life Aristophanes text “Lysistrata,” it concerns a movement of Greek women who masquerade as prostitutes in order to thwart the militaristic schemes of Athenian patriarchy. It’s frequently hilarious, with classical and modern language and sentiments enmeshed in a surprisingly intuitive way.
Then there’s the brief biography of Gaia Valentino, a 16th-century Italian woman and literary prodigy who originally translated “Apocrypha” into French, and who dressed up as a man in order to work as a gondola driver, allowing her to amass a cultural facility not typically available to women of the era. Acting as a Union spy, Sylvie participates in some rebellious masquerading, too, landing her one step closer to understanding the larger, millenia-long conspiracy of feminine empowerment — the Cult of Chaos — to which all three narratives belong.
“Daughters of Chaos” also includes other found texts real and imagined, like actual entries from the eighth edition of “Encyclopedia Britannica” and heartfelt letters from Sylvie’s brother, whose missives are littered with family secrets and tidbits about the early submarines he’s piloting for the Confederacy. It’s a lot to hold in your mind at once, and occasionally the book feels bloated by competing interests, but I think the best way to read “Daughters of Chaos” is to conceive of it as adjacent to a linked short story collection, where most of the threads stand alone but are made stronger and more human through juxtaposition.
Before the release of “Daughters of Chaos,” which came out on July 9 via The Overlook Press, we spoke with Fawkes — also the author of “Tales the Devil Told Me” and “Mannequin and Wife” — about her writing process and the novel’s preoccupations.
In the author’s note at the end of “Daughters of Chaos,” you mention that the novel was initially a failed attempt to fictionalize a Smithsonian Magazine article about how Union authorities in Nashville tried to exile the city’s prostitutes during the Civil War. That plot point remains in the story, but it’s not the focus. What didn’t work about that approach and how did you find the right one?
When I had a couple of high-profile stories come out in major venues, different literary agents reached out to me, and one of them read the book that I had written at the time and was like, “I don’t like this.” But I had mentioned a story that’s set in a brothel in Nashville and she’s like, “I like that idea. Have you done any writing?” And I was like, “No, but I could.” So it ended up that she signed me for this idea, which was not remotely a book yet.
She wanted me to write an upmarket [combining commercial and literary concerns] women’s fiction book, which is not what I do. I do something that’s far more strange and out there. I was trying desperately to write something that was never going to work because I hadn’t figured out how to make this my story. I was trying to write a straight-ahead mystery book. I wrote three drafts. And when I sent the third draft to my agent, she then fired me. I’m laughing about it now, but I had a nervous breakdown. I mean, not literally. It’s not like I was hospitalized or anything, but it was incredibly hard. As it turns out, most writers have multiple agents, and split up with their agents. I have an MFA and Ph.D. in creative writing, but no one in those spaces teaches you about the business of publishing.
Then, I read Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” which I had last read in college, and I had a literal epiphany. And I was like, “What if Sylvie was a translator? What if there was a lost play?” Which is something that I love. I love secret doors and lost texts. It was figuring out that what I needed to do was braid different storylines, and employ the epistolary form, that enabled me to break the novel up into segments that I could work on separately. I wrote each of the strands in one go and then figured out how to integrate them.
With my short fiction, I write it start to finish, really no changes, which is not how most writers work. Most writers draft and figure things out as they go. But I’m the kind of writer who doesn’t move forward until I’m absolutely sure that I’m branching in the right direction. So if I go in the wrong direction and realize the story isn’t working, I back up to the last place I was sure. But it will take you a very long time to write a novel that way. So one of my main challenges transitioning from short fiction to novel writing was figuring out how I could break it up into manageable pieces, because a novel is so vast.
Which of the strands was the most challenging to write?
The main Nashville story was the hardest for me because some of the other strands [have qualities] that I tend to love, like the absurd and comedy and things that are dramatic. But I wanted the Sylvie section to feel more staid and calm and fairly grounded because I felt like I was asking a lot of the reader. I’m asking them to read an ancient Greek play that is supposedly by Aristophanes. I’m asking them to incorporate different kinds of texts and be able to deal with those tonal shifts that happen. Also, I did so much research about what life would have been like in Nashville.
A good portion of this book exists in a mythic or magic realism space, but what things were important for you to get historically accurate?
My first cousin lived in Nashville for many, many years. She lived in this big house on Love Hill and I went to visit her while I was working on this book many times. I stayed with her, went down to the river and felt the space down there. Even though I’ve never lived in Nashville and I don’t have a real personal connection to it, I wanted people who live there to recognize the streets and parts of town. There’s a fort in the book where a scene takes place — Fort Negley — and it’s preserved as a park. I went to Negley multiple times and explored the fort remains that are there.
There were all sorts of questions about dress, how the streets would have been paved or not — they weren’t — and what things would have looked like. I looked at tons of old pictures of Nashville from the Civil War, sought out newspaper articles and maps, and studied all of those to figure out how to do the setting. I’m not a big setting person, but setting out to write a book like this you really have to focus on that. There are some writers who are writers of place — like Flannery O’Connor or Stuart Dybeck with Chicago — who are from areas where everything they write is set. I’m not like that because I’ve moved all my life from place to place to place. I’ve always felt rootless.
Also, I like books that use actual historical figures — like “Ragtime” by E.L. Doctorow and “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell” by Susanna Clark — and I already was doing that in the first incarnation of the book. John Wilkes Booth has been in the book since the very first conception of it. But when I did this major overhaul and completely rewrote it, I put in more historical figures. I like work that feels real and surreal at the same time.
The women who live at the Nashville brothel — The Land of the Sirens — aren’t really prostitutes. They’re pretending to be, but are instead using their position as a way to engage in clandestine, anti-war efforts. What’s the significance behind the fact that they’re not actually sex workers?
These women can basically do anything they like, so I’m not saying that any of them aren’t having a good time with men or women or whoever they’d like to, but writing about that aspect of life was one of the things that was hanging me up in the original conception of the book. Because I’ve never been a prostitute. I don’t want to write about sex work in a serious way, although I think that’s wonderful. That’s something for someone else to do. The point of my book was not to explore historical sex work, which I think a lot of people are interested in. It’s not that I didn’t want to explore the sexuality of the women at all — it’s not that I couldn’t have tried to include some scenes of women feeling and exploring their own sexual power and potency — but the main thrust of their work is to overthrow.
When you were writing the “Apocrypha” section, which is supposedly a lost comedy by Aristophanes, to what degree were you trying seriously to approximate his voice?
Reading “Lysistrata” or another Greek comedy, a lot of today’s readers would not make it through. The chorus has a large speech that they open with. The chorus has a lot to say. And these plays are full of jokes that were period-appropriate but today we don’t understand. I wanted to approximate the tone and feel of an ancient Greek comedy — extremely bawdy with lots of sexual humor and proclaiming and exclamation marks — but write one that people could read and follow today. The structure is based loosely on the way that “Lysistrata” works. I think there’s the same number of acts. I was really excited when I realized I could bring in the Greek gods because, although no gods appear in “Lysistrata,” Aristophanes has three or four plays in which the gods do appear as characters.
There are three plays that Aristophanes wrote in which women take power. They could be seen as proto-feminist writing, but in each of those, it’s a joke. It’s in the subtext of the play that women couldn’t run things. The whole thing is like, “Wouldn’t it be ridiculous if women took power?” So obviously for my play, I wanted to completely twist that and have them be successful.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.