Nathan Newman challenges readers to reckon with all the cruelties and joys of human interaction in their debut novel, How to Leave the House. Newman’s protagonist is a young man named Natwest, but he’s not the only central character: The novel intersperses Natwest’s interior narrative with the stories of the many people in his town whose daily lives butt up against his own.
Newman’s novel is transgressive and disruptive, an unserious look at serious things—in particular, how isolated we can feel when deeply immersed in our own problems. Here, Newman gets the main character treatment and shares their thoughts on art, storytelling, their neighbors and criticism in the internet age.
What is most likely to get you to leave the house?
Friends, a party, a trip to the cinema, an aquatic-themed fetish night—really anything social that might rescue me from the little cocoon of my writing room.
Do you know your neighbors? Do they know you?
I live on an estate with a somewhat uneasy and pretty diverse alliance of council flat owners, tenants, students, gentrifiers, care-service users. It’s always cordial. There is an estate WhatsApp group and everyone is currently unified against the midnight to 5 a.m. roadworks happening on the main street beside us. Nothing brings British residents together more than a good moan about the council—so that’s solidarity of some kind.
How to Leave the House follows Natwest throughout one day. Even though it takes place in his small town, the day’s happenings feel much like those of a big city, with horrors and chaos and hilarity around every corner, and human interactions that are intimate, intense and brief. Do you see similarities between big-city stories and small-town tales? Is How to Leave the House occupying both spaces?
I wrote the novel while living in London, right after my last year of university in Warwick (which is a very small town indeed). The spirit of both spaces is probably embedded in the book. Of course there are more stories on one South London street than could occupy a century’s worth of fiction, but I don’t think living in a small town is any different—except that you’re more likely to know the person you’ve just bumped into. The two are inextricable anyway: The bulk of How to Leave the House was written during lockdown, when London emptied out, and for anyone on the street it might as well have been a small town.
“Maybe all these binaries about art and life are just two punchlines to the same joke.”
Many chapters could stand as short stories. My personal favorites are about a dentist, a woman who dances a jig on her brother’s grave, and an egg fight. Which are your favorites and why? Yes, you have to choose.
Possibly Lily’s chapter—the one told entirely via text messages, imageboard posts and anonymous internet confessionals—because beyond her main story, there is a puzzle implanted in the heart of the section that nobody has yet cracked! Otherwise, Dr. Richard Hung, the dentist who is also an artist, but the only thing he can seem to paint is mouths.
Natwest is the apparent main character of the story, yet all these chapters have their own main characters. Amid our current obsession with main character energy, and the constant pressure to romanticize and glamorize our lives, how do you approach storytelling? How do you tell stories when everyone is the main character?
There are so many different people on the street, and they are all main characters in their own worlds—that’s a universal human delusion, and not unique to this generation (but it’s undoubtedly been massively exacerbated by the internet). Writing with this in mind seemed pretty sensible. My novel is told from the perspective of 15-year-olds, 80-year-olds, 30-year-olds and 50-year-olds, jumping between different classes, genders, races and sexualities with a freedom that hopefully explodes, or at least formally adapts this obsession with main character energy. When you’ve been born into the internet, and this is how you are encouraged to process the world, the alternating chapters of How to Leave the House feel like the most interesting approach.
Early in the novel, an imam tells Natwest that “there are two types of people in this world. Charlie Chaplins and Buster Keatons.” Natwest is told that he wants to be a Keaton but must accept his fate as a Chaplin, and we return again and again to the motif of Keatons and Chaplins. What does it mean to be a Chaplin but to wish you were a Keaton?
I think the binary that Imam Mishaal projects onto Natwest is a little false, a reflection of his own internal struggle between the worldly and the spiritual, and his inability to synthesize the two. The novel is constantly setting up dualities like this—doubles, oppositions, contradictions—and each character chooses their own way of approaching them. Maybe the real point is that there is no difference between Chaplin or Keaton—to slightly paraphrase a line in the book: Chaplin/Keaton, McCartney/Lennon, Hegel/Kierkegaard—maybe all these binaries about art and life are just two punchlines to the same joke.
When Natwest encounters his former teacher Miss Pandey, she challenges him to rethink art in a particularly wonderful discussion. “What would happen if you treated every work of art as perfect, and then worked backwards?” she says. “If you presumed that every ‘blemish’ or ‘failing’ or ‘irregularity’ in tone or pacing or structure or payoff was intended by the artist?” She says that such a mentality allows the world to “open up.” Do you approach art from this mindset, and if so, how do you hold on to that openness?
It’s an aspiration, and I don’t always achieve it! I think it’s also me-the-author being defensive, because a novel structured like this one—especially with the ending it has—is pretty vulnerable to some very obvious criticisms in the “‘irregularity’ in tone or pacing or structure or payoff” department. But any criticism is a difficult line to walk. There is a difference, I think, between coming to an artwork with an open heart and mind, and consuming something without any discernment. The internet has encouraged us to consume without prejudice, flattening out once and for all any distinction between high and low culture. A tremendous libidinal liberation—and partly what this novel is about. But we need some way of reining it in and finding a middle ground. I think that’s what Miss Pandey is arguing for.
On your website, you have reviewed other authors’ websites. Is it not a conflict of interest to review Zadie Smith’s website, as she was your mentor at New York University?
I think every author hates making their own website, but it has to be done. It seemed like a fun inside joke to give some tongue-in-cheek reviews of other authors’ websites as a result. It’s not serious at all. That being said, it’s true that I attended NYU for a single semester over Zoom before dropping out. During that period I learned that Zadie is incredibly defensive when it comes to her website. After I gave it an 8/10 she launched a defamation suit, and we are now in a pretty fierce legal skirmish—fortunately it looks like I’m going to win.
I think her sales are plummeting as we speak.