Robert Lukins' critically acclaimed debut novel, The Everlasting Sunday, was shortlisted for a number of awards including NSW Premier's Literary Awards in two categories. His work has appeared in Crikey, Overland, The Big Issue, Rolling Stone, Broadsheet, Time Off, Inpress, and other odd places.
Describe Loveland in one (or two) sentence(s).
Loveland is a the story of an Australian woman, May, who travels to Nebraska to settle an inheritance and escape the confines of a terrifying marriage. In the lake town of Loveland, May discovers she shares more with her distant grandmother than she could have known.
Loveland opens in a blaze of conflict, danger, and secrets. What was the seed/kernel for this story, and why did you choose to begin at this point?
The opening scene of the novel – two women standing in the shallows of a lake, a body at their feet, while around them buildings burn – arrived in my mind as a complete and unignorable image. I’ll never know where that scene came from – it’s the only time I have experienced something like that – but the whole novel is at a simple level an attempt to write the story of what lead to, and lead from, that single moment.
The sense of place in this story is immersive; Loveland (the town) feels as material as the human characters. What was it like to write Nebraska?
I have been fixated on Nebraska since I was a child. When I was about ten years old I remember looking through my family vinyl collection and finding Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska record. The front cover of that album is this very striking photograph, taken from the inside of an old American pick-up, with snow built up on the hood looking out to this impossibly distant, and impossibly flat Nebraskan horizon. At the time I was this fluoro-boardshort-wearing, zinc-creamed kid on the Sunshine Coast. So this image was the most alien, and fantastic image I could imagine. I became fixated with Nebraska – what this place could be. It was a place that I felt like I simply imagined into existence. As the years went on I read everything I could get my hands on. It’s history and people and origins, and this all combined with a personal mythology I’d built up in my mind. So the Nebraska I know is this place somewhere between reality and an utter invention, and this is the Nebraska I gave this novel.
While place acts as a strong character, the characters themselves are also forces to be reckoned with. In particular, May, her grandmother Casey, and Loveland local Jean form an interesting triangle of overlapping tensions and secrets while also caring for one another deeply. What was it like writing these relationships and, for May and Casey, their inner lives?
It was a task I certainly didn’t take lightly.
The lives of these women, the three generations of May’s family, are so intertwined and in so many ways mirror each other – but there also barriers to them fully connecting, truly connecting. In some way each generation feels guilt for what they’re passing on to the next. They wish they could have provided more, materially and in a sense of security. So these women, whose lives are running in such close parallel, are eternally frustrated at the things between them. The circumstances of their lives mean that emotional security seems almost a luxury – they are so tired, so exhausted with the task of maintaining material security.
May’s external life is shaped entirely by her circumstances – her struggle to stay above water financially, to raise her son, to endure her husband. And it’s in coming to Loveland that she, even briefly, is able to occupy space differently. The internal May is able to rise to the surface.
There is a sense that Jean isn’t governed by her circumstances – of course, as the novel goes on we learn that it isn’t necessarily the case, but she seems to think and speak and act without restraint. Jean is a great catalyst to May. Even in their brief time together, Jean’s sense of unbridled personality has this circuit-breaking effect on May.
And Casey; her experiences mirror May’s in so many ways, though her experience of being controlled, being contained, is a more literal one. She is essentially under house arrest in this boathouse on the lake. The rules she is forced to live by are more explicitly stated. Like May, there is this great tension between the internal and the external. The internal Casey is in a fight to exist. And like May, their internal selves are numbed. They numb their ambitions in order to cope. To tolerate their lives.
Writing these characters and their relationships came to be something that felt entirely natural. I spent years with them – the characters directing their own action. After all that time it begins to feel like I’m little more than a reporter of their story.
The men in this story are often far from heroes and, in fact, perpetrate violence at almost every turn. Two of the most interesting men, to me, were the teens - Loveland’s Tate who May befriends in a largely inhospitable town, and May’s son Francis who she leaves behind in Australia. What was it like to write such complex portrayals of masculinity, between such different men-folk characters?
This novel has existed in very different forms over the last few years. Completely separate, completely re-written forms. When it began it wasn’t intended to be a novel at all. I wanted to really interrogate male control – is this something that all men carry around buried within themselves. A capacity that men hide from themselves. Is this capacity in me? So I initially I wrote a version of this story that fully explored these adult male characters. I wrote about their upbringing, their family relationships, the lives they lead. I wrote this story again, and again. And in the end I found reasons and excuses, but – ultimately and obviously – no justification.
Having lived with these characters for so long I started to consider my role, as the author, in giving prominence to these characters. Within the universe of a novel, the one great power or privilege that I can give to a character is providing their perspective. Putting their experience at the centre of this story. So it was a conscious, punitive act the push the experiences of the adult men outside of the sphere of this novel. The men in this story are present through their actions and their culpability, but this is a novel of the experiences of these women, and how they exist. The younger characters of Tate and Francis evolved out of this process of re-writing. They came into being, I think, as an expression and need for hope.
Much of the narrative is about inheritance, both material and emotional. What does inheritance mean to you? Did this influence your writing of it
Maybe it’s the result of getting a little older and there being a (very) decent distance now from my childhood, but I think more and more on how shaped we are by our early years. It’s the unconscious things I’m fixated on. The lessons and attitudes and ways of being that we absorb without them being intended or noticed. It seems that this is more our inheritance than anything material. The way we cope.
Loveland’s themes of abuse, intergenerational trauma, and self-discovery are (fantastically) heavy. Amongst this ‘heaviness’ was there anything which surprised you, delighted you, or brought you joy whilst writing?
Despite the intense world and experience these characters experience, the act of writing them was an almost always joyous, almost ecstatic experience. It’s a genuine thrill to have my world go blurry and for the world of the novel take over. Everything that happened in the novel was a surprise. Despite all my good intentions, I just can’t seem to write with a plan. No matter what I might intend the second I start writing it all just goes in the direction it seems to want to go. When I wrote that first scene of Loveland I had no idea where I was headed or who I would meet.
On a similar vein, do you have a favourite passage or scene in Loveland?
The scene of May and Francis heading into the lake in their waders to clear the shore of rubbish always brought a smile to my face while editing. It captured a little of the atmosphere I always imaged for the lake – of the sun catching on the water and the rising smell and the moments of joy amongst it all.
What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
It’s really just the satisfaction and pleasure I get from the moments of writing. It’s about the only thing in my life that I don’t analyse and worry over. I just like writing. I try not to make it any more complicated than that.
What books are on your to-be-read pile?
Most for idle pleasure and a couple from a pile I’m reading specifically to chime with the atmosphere of the new book I’m (trying to) write.
Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel