Note: This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Barry Bergman, the author

Q. Proles, your debut novel, is set in 1973. You’ve said that some of the events in the book are based on things you experienced personally in so-called “real life.” According to my calculations, that makes you—

A. —old, yes. Next question.

Q. Okay, fine. Much of the novel’s action takes place in a copper smelter. Whatever made you think anyone would want to read a novel set in a copper smelter?

A. I never thought anyone would, really. I do think plenty of readers are up to their eyeballs in novels about college professors who’d rather be writing novels, and might be open to one about communists, copper, and cats. Truthfully, though, I didn’t even know I was writing a novel until I was too far along to quit.

Q. Explain.

A. I was having dinner with a friend one evening, remembering the surreal nature of my first graveyard shift in a copper smelter in the middle of the Arizona desert. I was trying to describe the eerie Halloween glow of molten copper against the endless black of the smelter, which opened out to the endless black of the Southwestern sky. My friend suggested I write about it. Before I knew it I had characters and scenes.

Q. And that became—

A. —the first iteration of Proles. That manuscript had a different title and was kind of a hot mess.

Q. So you rewrote it?

A. Yes, but not until it had been rejected by upwards of 100 literary agents, or their interns.

Q. And the second time was the charm?

A. Nope. That version racked up another 50 or so rejections from agents before it dawned on me: Maybe my potential readership was too niche, too non-commercial, for the Big 5 publishers. So I started sending the manuscript to independent presses, which don’t expect their authors to crack the New York Times bestseller list. And they actually look at your book, not just your one-page query letter.

Q. And that’s how you found a home for Proles.

A. Wrong again. More rejections. By this point it’d been years since that dinner, and I wasn’t getting any younger. I was pretty much resigned to kissing the book off as a practice novel—I was well into writing a new one—when the Covid shutdown hit, and addled by cabin fever I decided to give it one last shot. So I rewrote it again, major overhaul. A couple of years later, after still more rejections—some from publishers it pained me to have to pitch to in the first place—the lovely people at Serving House Books picked it up.

Q. Say more about the pain.

A. I’d rather not dwell on it. The low point was a rejection from this tiny, oddball outfit on the grounds that my book was set in the future, and they preferred books set in the past.

Q. But your book is set in 1973.

A. I made them aware.

Q. Okay, 1973 was the year of the Watergate hearings, when the U.S. Senate was investigating corruption and abuse of power by President Nixon, aided and abetted by an assortment of flunkies and thugs. Why would that be of interest to anyone in the age of Trump?

[Due to boisterous laughter, this portion of the transcript is unintelligible.]

Q. Should I repeat the question?

A. No, I’m good. Trump’s the autocrat Nixon aspired to be. Nixon was smarter, better educated, less avaricious, and less ruthless—and lacked the benefit of a lapdog Congress and Supreme Court—but he created the template for how a soulless, insecure wannabe king could bend democracy.to his own treacherous ends. Seen through that lens, Proles is eerily relevant.

‘I didn’t even know I was writing a novel until I was too far along to quit.’

Q. So Proles is a political allegory?

A. [Makes a noise like a game-show buzzer.] And here I thought you’d actually read the book. But you do you. I’d describe Proles as a coming-of-age, fish-out-of-water story, with notes of pop culture, counterculture, bro culture, second-wave feminism, and psychopathy in high places. It follows the adventures of Simon Bussbaum, a middle-class film junkie from Queens who becomes enchanted with a communist-made, McCarthy-era recreation of a miners’ strike in the Southwest. He’s inspired to move to Arizona to become a working-class hero.

Q. That can’t work out well for him.

A. No spoilers. I will say there’s an element of absurdism underlying our hero’s journey.

Q. Did you say “second-wave feminism”? In a copper mine?

A. A turning point in the book comes when the mining company hires the first woman ever to work as a hardhat in the copper industry. Simon adopts one of her kittens as a ploy to get to know her better. So not just feminism, but animal rights too.

Q. Say more.

A. I’ve already said too much.

Q. Moving on, then. You named the hero Simon Bussbaum. That’s pretty Jewish, isn’t it? Does Proles have some sort of hidden Zionist agenda?

A. God no. Simon’s what much of the tribe would call “a bad Jew.” He aspires to be a blue-collar Chicano, though his wish for this new identity—as distinct from his wish to escape the one he was born with—derives largely from a movie, and a work of propaganda at that. The most Jewish thing about Simon is probably his otherness, especially in a part of the world—and an industrial setting—where Jews, in those days, were as other as it gets.

Q. A fish out of water, you’re saying.

A. Right. A Jewish native of Queens, New York, flapping his fins in a copper smelter in a desert which, in 1973, is in the throes of a literal drought. Arizona itself, you could say, is out of water.

Q. In 25 words or less, then, how would you tell potential readers what Proles is about?

A. Proles is about the dual nature of stories—how desperately humans need to locate ourselves, and others, in some personally meaningful narrative—and, on the other hand, how badly we screw up our lives, and others’, by viewing them through the prism of our fantasies. It’s about the projection of various attributes onto people we don’t necessarily know that well—meaning, that is, as illusion.

It’s also about the flip side of our need for narrative, how nonhuman animals, to their credit, have no use for metaphor. Which makes people better at art, literature, and music than, say, cats and dogs. But also, in many respects, more ridiculous.

[Silence.]

What? Was that pretentious?

Q. Oh yeah. Also way more than 25 words.

A. Sorry.

Q. Care to try it again?

A. Sure. Proles is about 200 pages. Buy a copy and find out for yourself.

Q. I’ve already got a copy.

A. Did I mention it makes a great gift?

Q. Good to know. Thanks for your time.

A. You never asked me about the cat.

Q. I’m afraid we’re gonna have to leave it there.

A. But the cat—

[mic is cut off, transcript ends here]