BK: Do you still listen to them a lot?
MH: Not so much, like I don’t listen to the Beatles much anymore, I’ve heard them so many times. But there are new things to listen to. I listen to non-distracting things while writing. I listen to a lot of Zappa and a lot of prog and European rock that hasn’t made it’s way to America. There is a Internet chat section near the end of Pike’s Folly where I reference some of those bands.
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K: A lot of the book was based in Providence, RI, what is your history there?
MH: I was born in Rhode Island, and my parents got divorced when I was four so I moved with my mom to Providence for a couple of years. Then my mom moved to Detroit, but my dad still lived in Rhode Island, so our big trips together were hiking in the White Mountains. But when I was around 27 and I got out of grad school, to start selling my first book [The Egg Code], I had ideas for Pike’s Folly, and I knew I wanted some of it to be in RI, so I moved back. I lived in a beach cottage then moved back to Providence for a few years. My wife got a job teaching in Boston two years ago, so that’s why we live in Watertown.
BK: What inspired the “parking lot in the mountain”?
MH: I had this idea a few years before writing the book; I had this idea about a guy who builds a parking lot in the middle of the wilderness with no intention of using it. And people would start attributing some kind of symbolic ramifications, but he just wants it to be his own domain. But back in Detroit, there was this artist who made something called the Heidelberg Project (//www.heidelberg.org/) which was an abandoned housing project. So this artist took over the block and turned it into this odd conceptual art and painted the houses in day-glow colors and nailed shoes to trees to be this tourist attraction. The mayor eventually bulldozed it, but it was in my head.
BK: Are you working on anything now?
MH: I recently finished a new novel called Getting It. While I was writing Pike’s Folly, my wife — then girlfriend — was diagnosed with breast cancer and so we had to decide what we wanted to do as a couple, so we stayed together and moved in together and when I think of Pikes Folly, it’s what I did to keep sane. And as a writer, I thought about that. Bad things happen to people all the time, and it doesn’t mean I need to write about disease. But I had an idea of using the feelings we had together in that time, and putting them into a context. It’s 100-percent different than my first two novels. It’s much simpler, with a smaller cast and less intertwining story lines. It’s written in the first person, which is more intimate. I like it and I think it’s the best thing I’ve written.