Bird Man: Jeremy T. Wilson Discusses His New Novel, The Quail Who Wears the Shirt
With appearances by Wile E. Coyote, the Allman Brothers & an onion pie
(Early) Valentine’s Day greetings, friends and fellow literary travelers, and tomorrow is also the birthday of recent Bookish interviewee Colette Sartor and her sister, Lisanne Sartor - both are excellent writers/creators! ❤️ 🧁
And…congratulations to fellow Substacker () Sarah Tomlinson, whose debut novel, The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers, is out officially today! I interviewed her recently for ZYZZYVA - our conversation can be found here.
And happy birthday, Mom! (which is today) 🤓
It’s long been of interest to me why comedy—to borrow from Rodney Dangerfield, one of its legendary practitioners—“don’t get no respect.” When awards season rolls around, for example, it’s rare to see a comedic film or book on the list of nominees for the biggest prizes. Take a glance at the last ten years of the Academy Awards’ and the National Book Awards’ nominees and you aren’t likely to spot many titles with “side-splitting” included in their reviews or plot summaries.
Considering how strange and sad life often is, comedy seems to me one of the best salves for the wounds the day-to-day inflicts on each of us, and in service to the underappreciated gods, goddesses, and gurus of comedy, I offer this recommendation: Nelson Algren Award winner Jeremy T. Wilson’s debut novel The Quail Who Wears the Shirt, which follows the tragicomic adventures of quasi-everyman Lee Hubbs, two-timing husband, head honcho of a profitable produce store in small-town Georgia, and accidental slaughterer of a half-human/half-quail neighbor. Lee is one of the funniest characters I’ve encountered in a while. Wilson’s first book, the story collection Adult Teeth, is also worth adding to your to-be-read pile.
The Quail Who Wears the Shirt was published in November 2023 by Chicago-based indie press Tortoise Books. You can purchase a copy here from Bookshop.org. It’s of course available from other vendors, and you can order a copy from your local indie bookstore too.
This interview was originally published by The Brooklyn Rail.
Christine/Bookish: Lee Hubbs is among the most memorable anti-heroes I’ve encountered, and through the alchemy of your rich characterization and narrative voice, you managed to make me root for him, despite his crimes, large and small. He’s self-serving but self-aware, superstitious one moment, supremely logical the next. He wouldn’t be out of place in a Coen Brothers movie. Do you think of him as a kind of sad clown or idiot savant or simply an average guy who is more or less a well-meaning dingdong?
Jeremy T. Wilson: First of all, thanks for reading and for saying such kind things. I love the Coen Brothers and accept their influence proudly. A Serious Man is probably the movie that’s most related to this novel, or, I guess it’s kind of a mash-up between that and Raising Arizona. Anyway, to your question. I’m happy you were rooting for Lee. Voice is such a powerful tool for writers. Probably my favorite. I believe it’s possible for us not to like a character and still have a rooting interest in their story, especially if they tell that story in a memorable way.
But I’m not sure I think of him as any of the dudes you mention specifically. I guess he’s all those things. While certainly a dingdong, I don’t think he’s well-meaning. He’s a know-it-all, way too eager to mansplain, who is unaware that every single person he encounters knows more than he does. He’s representative of a particular white, middle-class, heterosexual, southern man who hears the word “privilege” and believes it doesn’t apply to him, a man who fails to recognize what all he’s inherited, both good and bad, especially when it comes to his own racism, classism, and wealth.
Now I’m certainly not saying this is every straight white guy in Georgia or even in the South. People like Lee exist everywhere, and a little bit of Lee exists in all of us. (But, okay, really he’s every straight white guy in the South).
What I hope happens in the novel is that the reader starts off thinking they are better than Lee, they might even look down on him, what a rube and all that, but slowly, as the story progresses, they might realize they are doing the same thing Lee and everybody else has done to [human-turned-quail] Valentine, namely, counting his life as worthless.
I want to implicate the reader while still having fun. It’s a tough trick. I’m not sure I’ve pulled it off. But I don’t want anybody leaving this book thinking they’re better than Lee. You might believe you know what you’d do in his shoes, but who knows? You might do worse.
CS: Some of the people in this novel have inexplicably turned into quails, hence the title—why this particular creature rather than a woodchuck or a sentient fence post or a walrus? (Maybe the quail is Georgia’s state bird… nope, just checked—it’s the brown thrasher.)
JTW: I wish I had a better answer for this one. I woke up one morning and wrote “quail people” in the notes app on my phone. I’d been working on a similar story for a long time, and it simply wasn’t coming together in an original and satisfying way, so I started over with this one note as my guiding principle and, man, I had a lot more fun. Now where the hell did it come from? I don’t know, but I have some theories.
There was a book I used to read my daughter called Be Glad Your Dad… (Is Not an Octopus!), and it’s a series of pages where the kids should be glad their dad is not a particular animal. “Be glad your dad is not a dog, because he would lick your face to say hello.” The illustrations are great. They all have the dad transforming into these animals by simply matching his smile and his glasses to the animal. Well, there’s one for a quail. Be glad your dad is not a quail, because then he’d be boring, I think is what it said. (I can’t find the book in the house, so I’m not exactly sure).
And that’s right. People turning into quails is boring. It gives them no real advantage, while at the same time it is instantly visual and funny. I say quail people and the first thing you are likely to see is that goofy plume. But it’s also benign, yet that doesn’t prevent people from treating them like shit. In creating a hybrid that’s boring, the cruelty they endure should appear even more cruel. I mean, they pose absolutely no threat to anyone.
I never wanted the quails to be a one-to-one stand-in for any particular identity or social position. I wanted them simply to be Other. And in that way I hoped the idea would resonate with anyone who has been treated like an other or has treated someone like an other, which is to say, everybody.
CS: Quail is set in Georgia, your home state, which of course has been in the news more than usual since the 2020 election. If this novel were given to aliens who had no familiarity with Georgia, what impression do you hope they’d form?
JTW: I hope they would recognize the Georgia peach as the greatest fruit in the galaxy. I also hope they would seek additional sources of information to make their judgment other than a satirical novel written by a man who hasn’t lived in Georgia in twenty-plus years. I hope they would set their spaceship down and watch a Braves game on TV with my mother. She would make them fried chicken and zipper peas. This would leave a better, and far more accurate, impression. They would likely wonder where all the quail people went.
CS: My favorite passages in Quail are those where Lee or another character riffs on some artifact of pop culture or aspect of the social contract. One of these (often very funny) passages occurs in a scene where Lee and his young son Leo watch an episode of Tom and Jerry. Lee reflects, “I love cartoons because anything can happen. A frog can sing and dance. A coyote can order terrorist equipment by mail… The rules of logic and life do not apply.”
Comedic observations abound throughout Quail. My sense is that humor comes naturally to you—would you say, as John Updike once said about his own work, your default mode is the comic?
JTW: I think so. Although the harder you try to be funny, the less funny you are. The comic default probably means I’m avoiding something, but whatever. I don’t really like to read or write stories that don’t have at least a couple of jokes. I mean, are these writers actually walking around in a humorless void? How depressing. On The Lives of Writers podcast recently you answered this same question—you weren’t sure who said it and thought it might have been Woody Allen—“Life is too important to be taken seriously.” The quote is actually Oscar Wilde’s, and according to the internet and its infinite wisdom, goes like this: “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”
I mean, I do think there are gravely serious matters we must confront, but why must we always confront them seriously? That’s what cartoons are doing, which is one reason I love cartoons. And by cartoons I don’t simply mean animation. I mean the Saturday morning cartoons I grew up on, the ones Lee grew up on. They are largely based on physical humor and I gravitate to that. Tom and Jerry cartoons rarely had words, but did they need words to communicate? Same goes for Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, probably my favorite.
The same joke over and over again, but always funny in new ways. It emphasizes the thrill of the chase, the journey over the destination, the yearning over the attainment. These are all serious matters! Wile E. Coyote is determined and resourceful and full of unfulfilled hunger that spurs him to violent action, and yet he is always disappointed, and this is why he is one of the greatest characters in American culture.
CS: Speaking of Updike, there’s a moment near the end of Quail that reminded me of a scene in The Witches of Eastwick where Satan vomits up enormous quantities of cherries. Was your scene of epic regurgitation inspired by this one? Either way, would you comment on how you arrived at this memorable scene of what I’d call both somatic and spiritual upchucking?
JTW: I haven’t read The Witches of Eastwick, sad to say, so it wasn’t inspired by that. I do like that you call it “epic regurgitation.” That’s right on. How did I arrive at this scene? Not exactly sure, but I do think Lee was definitely getting sick from his catfish platter and once he started to throw up I just kept on writing (although the specifics of what he throws up took a lot of time and experimentation), and it was fun to think of that regurgitation as spiritual.
The only way to really get to a man like Lee is through his body. He will not come to a spiritual reckoning without a corresponding bodily reckoning, and in this epic upchuck, I was allowed to have both. When his body revolts, turns on him, becomes something he doesn’t recognize, Lee finally must deal with what’s really been making him sick.
CS: The Allman Brothers Band plays an important (offstage) role in Quail—Lee is not a fan—he prefers Otis Redding, another native son of Georgia. Did you take your life in your hands by creating a character who is not an Allman Brothers devotee?
JTW: Well, I don’t really share Lee’s negative opinion of the Allman Brothers Band. Growing up in Middle Georgia though, they were hard to avoid, and when I lived in Macon, they were even harder to avoid (mushrooms, mushrooms, everywhere!), and so I think I never fully appreciated them because they were always present. It’s like if the same music is being played where you work, that music simply becomes the soundtrack of your work life, and you may even grow to hate it, but you’re not really giving it an honest listen because so many other factors—your terrible boss, your smelly coworkers, your daily hangover—are getting in the way of you truly listening.
So, it took getting away from Georgia to fully embrace the Brothers, and now I torture my family by listening to all twenty-three minutes of “Whipping Post.” It’s like that with a lot of things, right? We don’t fully recognize all their good qualities until they’re gone. (I think it was the band Cinderella who first spoke that truth so memorably). But there’s one thing that Lee and I do agree on: Otis Redding is the greatest soul singer of all time.
Great interview, Christine. Thank you. I'm heading posthaste to purchase a copy of Jeremy Wilson's book. (And maybe some onion pie, too).