Author Michael Farris Smith Might Just Salvage This World Through Prose

In his latest novel, Salvage This World, Mississippi author Michael Farris Smith stitches together an unsettling (and, perhaps, uncomfortably near) future in which hurricanes pound the Gulf Coast every two weeks or so. Meanwhile, a violent traveling religious outfit searches for a way to change the weather, and the U.S. government considers abandoning the region altogether.

Salvage is a propulsive story that opens with Jessie, a young mother, darting through the woods with her son, Jace, swaddled in her arms — religious fanatics giving chase all the while. Jessie carries with her a mysterious set of keys left behind by her partner, Holt, who has disappeared. Worried for her son’s life and her own, she has nowhere to turn but to her father, a recovering alcoholic to whom she hasn’t spoken in years.

In sharp prose, Smith explores climate disasters, the theocratic grifters who could try to exploit environmental crises, the pocked underbelly of Americans enduring economic decay and a tangled daughter-father relationship.

Salvage is his seventh book and sixth novel, following, among others, Blackwood, Nick and Desperation Road. His 2018 novel, The Fighter, follows a bare-knuckle cage brawler with hard luck and is currently in production to become a film under the title Rumble Through the Dark. Adapted for the screen by Smith, Rumble doesn’t yet have a release date but will star Aaron Eckhart, Bella Thorne and Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Ahead of Salvage’s release late last month, Smith spoke with the Observer about the novel, climate change, his foray into screenwriting and the experiences that helped turn him into one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the Deep South.

(This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.)

Salvage This World takes a hard look at climate disaster. In the novel, residents of the Gulf Coast experience regular storms, evacuation orders, economic corrosion and a spike in vigilante violence. How did the idea for the novel first come to you?

Actually, Salvage This World is kind of an echo of my second novel Rivers. In Rivers, I went kind of full literary sci-fi, and it imagines the Gulf Coast after years and years of hurricanes that become so bad that the government actually completely abandons the region. One of the big things in Rivers is called “The Line.” It’s this geographical boundary the government draws 90 miles north across the Gulf Coast, and if you live above The Line, you get services and government and civilization. If you live below The Line, they basically abandon it and say, “We’re not going to try to do anything down here, and if you stay below, you are on your own.”

I kind of always thought I might come back to that world, but I didn’t want to do it as a sequel. I thought I might come to it from the side, indirectly. Then, when I had the idea for Salvage This World, in the first chapter where Jessie’s standing there with Jace on her hip and she’s just staring out at these thunder clouds, I thought, what if we’re like six or eight years before the absolute abandonment but we feel ourselves creeping toward it? That was a train I was excited to get back into. I always kind of loved the isolation and desolation of it, but I also know that in the 10 years since Rivers has come out, we have crept closer and closer to this type of landscape here in the Deep South. There are so many places, especially the smaller places, that are already struggling. When they get hit, and when they get wiped out or flooded, people are leaving, and fewer and fewer people are returning. You really begin to see a degeneration of this across parts of Louisiana and Mississippi and Arkansas and Alabama, too. These little places are just eroding, and the people living there are certainly living without economy and, I think, services that add to the quality of life. The storms clearly are not going to stop. We don’t have to look very far behind us or very far ahead for what’s coming. It was a landscape I was ready to get back into and excited to get back into, but I really thought it being almost closer to reality, kind of backed up to where we are now versus extended out into the larger dystopian thing, gave it a sense of reality for me that made it very harsh and emotional and a little bit scary, too.

There’s a little town not far from Oxford here, Rolling Fork in the Delta, that just got completely obliterated by tornadoes a couple weeks. It’s hard to say … but that little place has very little chance of being what it was in terms of recovery. There’s just not the infrastructure, there aren’t the people there, there’s not the money there, and quite frankly, because it’s such a small place, there’s not the attention there. And to be also quite frank, there’s not the leadership in Mississippi to make it happen. On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, you can still go down there and see the remnants of Hurricane Katrina. There are still things that are there because of Katrina or aren’t there because of Katrina, and it still kind of just lingers as time goes on.

Salvage isn’t your first novel that grapples with a harsh physical environment. In Blackwood, encroaching kudzu vines blanket communities, homes and even rivers. In Rivers, you also have a storm-hammered Gulf Coast where society has largely collapsed. What is it that draws you to the harsh, often malevolent forces of nature?

It’s probably a combination of a couple things. One is the influence of the writers that I read that really inspired me to try [writing] myself. Cormac McCarthy, who makes such a tremendous use of landscape in his border novels. Carson McCullers — one of my favorite books is The Ballad of the Sad Café, and how that café in that little dead town is just its own character. Hemingway in Paris — that was some of the very first stuff I read in my 20s when I started thinking about writing for myself. I was living abroad and reading those stories, and I was like, I recognize these cafés and these bullfights and things like that because I’ve been to them.

So, place became part of the story for me out of the gate. I would also say the extremity of it probably harkens back to my Southern Baptist upbringing. My dad’s a preacher, and so I knew all the Bible stories. And the Bible stories are filled with extremities of nature and landscape — the floods and the parting of the seas and the burning bush and all these things that, as a kid in my imagination, they were kind of these marvelous images. They’re still marvelous images. Even when Faulkner is doing his thing it’s very literary, but the landscape of Mississippi is really harsh and really its own thing in his novels in particular. I think it’s that combination of me knowing those Bible stories as the first stories I really knew, and later on the writers I was reading [showed me] how much effect place could have. I feel like it seeped into me. Then, as a writer myself, I wanted to create very distinct and visual worlds for myself to live in but also for the reader to live in — to make it an intense and unique experience. That’s something that as writers we all look for, this new world you can create to carry the reader along with you.

So, it feels urgent at this moment to tackle the way the world is physically changing in front of us?

You just kind of look up and it’s here. We had tornado sirens going off here in northern Mississippi three Friday nights in a row. People lost their homes and businesses three Friday nights in a row across this part of the region. It’s typical of ignoring issues for so long. You ignore them to the point that they become extreme, and then they’re just there and you’re left to deal with it. Salvage This World doesn’t really feel like much of an extension to me at all. It’s pretty easy to look around the Deep South and see these places.

You wrote the screenplays for Rumble Through the Dark and Desperation Road. What it’s been like adapting your own literature for the cinema?

It was a really interesting process. I don’t think it was as big a jump as I anticipated. I wanted to do it. I was interested in trying something new and doing something different. As an artist, it’s really important to shift gears every now and then. I had been writing prose alone in a room for a lot of years, and so the opportunity to adapt and write screenplays, I raised my hand and said, “Yeah, I definitely want to try it.”

One of the other reasons it wasn’t as big of a jump as I thought it might be is one of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got when I was starting out. And I can’t even remember who said this to me, but I was in a workshop and the author in charge of that workshop said, “When you’re writing prose, you should pretend you’re sitting in a movie theater, the person next to you is blindfolded, and you have to explain to them what they see on the screen.” You’re not just going to say to them, “There’s a neighborhood with some trees.” You’re going to say, “There’s a row of red brick houses. There are azaleas blooming in the garden. There are kids playing in the yard. There’s smoke coming from the chimney, and the sky behind the houses is filled with big, white puffy clouds.” You have to hit images hard, and you have to hit them efficiently, because the screen changes. … That made a tremendous amount of sense to me when I heard that advice. You’ve got to be image-driven, and you’ve got be economic with it. That’s very important in writing fiction, and I think it’s helped my fiction become kind of cinematic.

But when I sat down to write screenplays, that advice was still in my head. It made sense to me in prose, so certainly it made sense to me when I started writing scripts. You’ve got to be lean and mean and keep the blood flowing. It’s been a fun shift for me. I like the conciseness and the muscular nature of a screenplay. But then again, I also like when it’s time to sit here very quietly and write two or three pages of prose. It’s a big shift, but it was one I was ready for and welcomed at the same time.

Reviewers and critics have lauded you as a distinct new voice in the ever-expanding canon of Southern Gothic literature. How do you feel about the current state of Southern literature?

That’s always a nice thing anybody says about you. When I started out writing, the Southern writers were my biggest influences and the writers I wanted to emulate. It’s very cool.

I can even just look at Mississippi — it’s had its own renaissance with writers. We lost a lot of writers in a quick amount of time: Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Eudora Welty, Willie Morris. They all died within like 10 years of each other. Then, it felt like there was a void there for a while. Then, myself and probably a dozen more Mississippi writers came along, and you kind of feel the energy of it. When I go to the bookstore, I feel the energy. Salvage This World comes out next week, and there are two or three other Mississippi authors with books coming out this month too. It’s been a steady cycle of that over the past six or eight years, and I really don’t see it slowing down much. And it’s not just Mississippi, but other places as well.

It's an interesting time. It’s a kind of Southern renaissance. It’s kind of a Mississippi renaissance. The thing that’s cool about it too … is we have a lot of writers, and everybody is of a different color, of a different shape, of a different gender, writing about a lot of different topics. That’s what makes it exciting for me. It’s a great thing that the writers coming out of the South are more exemplary of the lifestyles and the people that live here. It’s very dynamic. The faces of [Southern literature] are different. There are more of us now. I needed examples when I was coming along to help push me along, and I think we have a lot of examples of Southern writers now who appeal to further reaches than before. And that’s good.