All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well has become one of this season’s surprise literary hits, but there’s just one small problem: “I’m embarrassed about the title. I can never say it,” Tod Wodicka admits as we chat in the Housing Works Café during his recent visit to Manhattan. “I cringe whenever somebody asks me what the title of my book is. But I love the way it looks on the cover,” he emphasizes, “and I love its desperate optimism. It suits the character of Burt perfectly.”
Burt, the novel’s protagonist, is a vehemently faithful medieval reenactor, who dresses in handmade garb and refuses to drink coffee because it’s “out of period.” He tries to give up all his possessions and journey to Prague to reconcile with his estranged son, but don’t let your sympathy build up just yet. “I wanted Burt to be an unlikable asshole,” Wodicka says, “and in the earlier drafts, he was even more of one than he is now. I don’t think it’s necessary for characters to be redeemed at the end of the story, especially if they aren’t self-aware, and somebody like Burt wouldn’t be. I don’t want anyone to say he’s really a good guy with a heart of gold. He’s a difficult character, and he should be… As the novel progresses, you might begin to like him, but you also realize that he’s even worse than you thought.”
Wodicka pinned down Burt’s voice by a process he described as “Method writing;” for about a year, he read only the sorts of history books that he thought Burt would read, listened only to the medieval music recordings he thought Burt would hear. When he traveled through Europe—he lives in Berlin with his family—he kept notebooks describing what he saw as he imagined Burt would see it. The result is a very writerly voice: “He’s digressive, he twines around things,” Wodicka says. “He rarely pushes forward in a narrative way.” That tendency, he observed, could make the readings on his American book tour somewhat challenging. “I didn’t write this book to read it out loud,” he admits. “It was a learning curve to make Burt’s voice work ‘in the air,” and I think I only nailed it towards the end.”
The funny thing is, Wodicka’s not even really into medieval reenactment that much. “I’ve never dressed up. I never even met a reenactor until this tour,” he says. He did, however, read a lot of material from the Society for Creative Anachronism for his research, which created an imaginative foundation for Burt’s Confraternity of Times Lost Regained. “In the end, I found them really beautiful,” he says. “It’s not for me, but I can’t help thinking about their approach to history, of trying to understand how people actually lived then. It can be just as serious a study as anyone else does when they pick up a history book.”
His next book, however, is going to be completely different—an “existential horror novel” about sleep paralysis and psychedelic drugs like DMT and ayahuasca. I’m thinking that should make for fun on the next reading tour.