Jean Marc Ah-Sen explores the power imbalance in a complex mentorship in novel Kilworthy Tanner

The Next Chapter14:47The importance of failure with Jean Marc Ah-Sen

The experimental author shares his take on the literary scene, and discusses the battle between mainstream and avant-garde in his latest book Kilworthy Tanner.

In Jean Marc Ah-Sen's novel Kilworthy Tanner, Jonno is a young writer looking to make waves in the literary world. 

When he meets legendary author Kilworthy Tanner at a party, he's shocked when she takes an interest in him — and the two fall into a complicated relationship that blurs the lines between mentorship and an affair. 

Ah-Sen is a Toronto-based writer of Mauritian descent. His books include Grand Menteur and In the Beggarly Style of Imitation and his writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Catapult, The Comics Journal, Maclean's, Hazlitt, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus and The Toronto Star.

He spoke with The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about the power imbalances he explores in Kilworthy Tanner.

How did the story come to you?

I've been writing about Kilworthy and Jonno for about three books now and I think it was an exercise about mentorship and the power imbalance that might be inherent in arrangements like that. And there have been certain books where I've felt more sympathy for Kilworthy. I've tried to flesh that out. And there have been other books where I've been more sympathetic to Jonno. 

I think in this book I wanted to ostensibly produce a kind of sympathy for the narrator [Jonno], but as you kind of read more, you realize he's really not likable. He makes very dubious decisions. He has a terrible temperament, very obsessed with hedonistic fulfillment and little else. 

Let's talk about the book and the actual structure of the book. It's a "pseudobiography" of their entanglement. What's a "pseudobiography"? 

I was using that to describe a book of dubious origin. There's a tension in the text that things that are said by various characters may not be true, that this is something of a character assassination written by Jonno. I was also thinking about the history of revenge novels, like things like, Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy, which was largely a really terrible portrayal of his wife as his marriage crumbled. I remember she said something to the effect that calling this fiction is an abdication of responsibility.

So I thought about the tradition of books that were written like that and I found them to be very rich, problematic. And I thought that it might be worthy to talk about that tension or reproduce that tension in a novel. 

I enjoyed the power dynamics that are at play here. Kilworthy comes from wealth, Jonno is often scrounging to pay his next month's rent. What are they both getting out of this relationship? 

I think there is a kind of mutually parasitic thing happening on both sides. You could say that Killworthy is slumming it. You could say that Jonno is a bit of a social climber. But at the end of the day, I think they're united in this search for a life of ease. There's a line in the book where it says, 'Relationships should be like biting into a cream tart.' I feel that kind of laziness might speak to both of their attitudes. It's comfortable. It doesn't really work. It's riddled with problems. But that kind of slackness is exactly what they need to to get on with life. 

They're united in this search for a life of ease.- Jean Marc Ah-Sen

I'm fascinated by this whole mentor-mentee kind of relationship and dynamic that's at play here. It speaks to this larger transactional dynamic in terms of why would someone want to be a mentor, why would someone want to be a mentee? What's your take on that?

I feel like a lot of writers reject that prospect and mentorship is antithetical to their ability to produce. It's not always the case, but I don't actually know what a mentor, for example, might get out of it. There might be a sense of duty and obligation to return to the community. I think especially if they had a figure in their life as well, they may feel honourbound to do something like that as well. But the cynical side of me might say it is a kind of search for power — I'm sure there are productive artistic relationships out there — but maybe they just want to have a doe-eyed person who hangs on to every word they say, who takes their craft advice like it's the word of God. I don't know, but a part of me does wonder about those things. I think the book is largely a thought experiment about what that might look like.

Jonno is also of Mauritian heritage and your work in general centres your heritage, but it comes in organically. It's not the focus, but it's definitely worthy of mentioning and exploring in this novel. There's a certain nuance in terms of discussions around race and writing about race. Why did you include that? 

I felt that I had explored a lot of that in my other writing at length and I actually started to think that the writing was coming off as a bit didactic. And with this book, I kind of wanted to try a different tact and see what a kind of apolitical configuration of race might look like in the book and what that would do for various subjects. So it was a kind of reframing. 

The market only dictates what type of story you can tell, whether it's a diasporic narrative, whether it's a homecoming narrative. Sometimes you just want to do something different.- Jean Marc Ah-Sen

I think that that is also something that writers of colour, the further they get in their career, there is a sense that you are cashing in on your own otherness sometimes and so parallel to that is the idea that we are only allowed to tell certain stories. The market only dictates what type of story you can tell, whether it's a diasporic narrative, whether it's a homecoming narrative. Sometimes you just want to do something different. I feel like those are some of the frustrations that Jonno has, that he happens to have written this party novel, this super vapid, superficial story of his relationship, but nobody wants it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.