“Back Line” by Raf Richardson-Carillo won our 2023 Novel Excerpt Contest, selected by Matthew Salesses, and was published on our site on Monday. Today, we’re excited to feature this interview with the winner!
In many ways, this feels like a tribute to football (soccer as we call it in the US). What’s your connection to the sport?
You’re 100% right. This excerpt, and to some degree the whole project, is completely and unabashedly an effort to capture something about soccer––maybe just a piece of what it feels like to play.
When I was a teenager I played every day in the courtyard at my high school before, between, and sometimes during classes. I played one year of varsity. Until the COVID lockdown in New York I played indoor every Friday, and today I play outdoor every Sunday until the winter gets too brutal. (My mood going into the workweek is way too tied up in the quality of those games.)
If I could play ninety minutes and simultaneously transcribe what was happening in my mind and body and get that published, I would do that. Playing is much more enjoyable than writing. Although writing about playing is an improvement.
Maradona is this kind of larger-than-life presence and memories of him in this excerpt are woven in with the narrator’s thoughts and observations of natural wonders—namely, stars and mountains. Can you talk about how Maradona is and isn’t like the kind of nature people are usually in awe of?
It’s funny––after reading and thinking about this question I remembered that Víctor Hugo Morales, the Spanish language commentator for one of Maradona’s most iconic goals (the second, non-handball one against England in the ’86 World Cup) dubbed him a “Cosmic Kite” and inquired as to what planet he could be from. I don’t think I could do any better than that.
In terms of him as a larger-than-life presence, I think he was a legend in his own time in a way that we’re not going to see again with any athlete. What I mean is that his closest contemporary comparison, Lionel Messi, who all in all might be a better player, is too documented, too commodified, and too exposed to be of much interest beyond his on-field accomplishments. There’s no room left for legend. Maradona came into his athletic peak at a moment in time when athletes’ lives away from the field were becoming fair game for sports journalists, but nobody had phones in their pockets to record everything, so there wasn’t enough of an incentive to not do some of the things he did.
If you’re a superstar athlete now, you’re media-trained, wealthy beyond comprehension, and terrified to lose it all by saying or doing the wrong thing. You’re a brand, which means billionaires have so much money invested in you that you can’t really lead a double life in the way Maradona did. (I say this from a basement office in upstate New York nowhere close to the loci of power, so grain of salt.) That’s better in a lot of ways. Messi is going to have a longer and healthier life than Maradona did, but my feeling is that it’s not going to be nearly as much fun to think about Messi twenty or thirty years after he’s done playing as it is to think about Maradona.
Much of this excerpt hinges on memory, relationships, and the intersection between the two. And because of that, there’s a strong feeling of nostalgia, for me, in these pages. Can you talk a little bit about what you see as the role of memory in your writing?
Yes, this excerpt and the whole first part of the book is basically the narrator ruminating, sifting through old documents, reconstructing details as they occur to him. It’s the kind of thing I was afraid to write for the longest time because it’s so indulgent, but when I started working on this about a year ago I was reading St. Sebastian’s Abyss by Mark Haber and The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, both of which are told by narrators who are hyper-attentive to their own thoughts and memories, and in both cases I was riveted. So that helped unlock the beginning in a big way.
To me, there’s a ton of overlap between how memory works and how a game of soccer works, and Back Line is an attempt to convey that overlap. All the action is contained and observed within a more or less defined space (a stadium; a brain) but there’s not really any predicting how things are going to play out. Soccer is worth playing and watching because of that unpredictability, not so much in terms of results (wins are pretty much correlated to wealth, as in the rest of life) but in terms of moment-to-moment turns of action and momentum. Memory and nostalgia, to me, are the same way, in that recollections can be prompted unexpectedly, as you’re going about your daily routines. I don’t think this kind of trapdoor storytelling is sustainable for the entire run of this book, but as a way in and to set the tone for how the narrator experiences the world, it makes sense to me.
What’s your process been like for this project? Is this the first novel you’ve worked on?
This is not the first novel I’ve worked on, though it is the first one whose overall arc has taken shape and made more sense the more I’ve worked on it. I know what each larger part of it is going to entail, more or less, and I know where it’s ultimately winding up. That’s a new feeling for me. It brings a lot of comfort and motivation to keep going.
Process-wise, it’s been slow and mostly steady. I have a full time job and I’m a parent, so I basically sneak in an hour to an hour and a half of work whenever I can, usually early in the morning. It’s not high yield but it’s also not the worst way to work. If I’m having a bad writing day the finish line is always in sight.
And finally, what can we expect for the rest of this novel?
I’m still working out whether it will be 3 or 4 parts, but I’m hoping to keep the whole thing to around 200 pages max––the short novel is my favorite format. Whatever it looks like, the second half of the book is going to play out much less in the narrator’s mind and much more in the world around him, though of course he’ll never shut up about his thoughts. He’s going to leave his small apartment in Flagstaff, deal with some of the death that’s happening around him, and attempt to reassert his own living by way of the game he has always played.
Interviewed by Jen Dupree