Angie Abdou: Why did you choose an athlete—as opposed to another kind of star—as the novel’s celebrity protagonist?

Timothy Taylor: A word about celebrity in the arts, first. A positive public verdict on your work, whatever it might be, is one of the headiest possible highs. A great review. A bestsellers list. Media requests. Someone stopping you in the street or recognizing you in a restaurant. I don’t know many people who aren’t thrilled by that kind of attention. But there is a bitter flipside. If you accept the public verdict, that the approval and interest is a true indication of value, then the work itself is rendered provisional. If acclaim signals value, after all, then being ignored must be a true sign of irrelevance. The writer Mavis Gallant once said to me that she didn’t read reviews of her work because, were she to revel in the positive ones, she’d by extension have to treat negative reviews as a legitimate repudiation. So she resisted.

Athletics run parallel to the arts in at least this one respect. If the athlete accepts that value is determined externally—by fame, by celebrity—then the athlete fails in its absence regardless of what internal objectives may have originally motivated the effort. But much more than artists, the prowess of even successful athletes is expected to fade. If you buy celebrity’s verdict under those circumstances—ignoring Gallant’s warning, as it were—you are virtually guaranteed to suffer a crisis of withdrawal in later years. And it seems to me that being recognized in the street with nostalgic gestures years later—old jerseys and programs to autograph, recounts of pinnacle moments from decades prior—will not compensate. Indeed, that phenomenon might only serve like looking through a telescope in reverse, miniaturizing what was once all-consuming, distancing it, making it smaller than it should be.

Eve handles this all without much anxiety in the book. But it was my intent to show her living in the shadow of what came before, to show her vulnerable to provisionality, even if she does not in the end succumb to it.

AA: You made up the term freesteal, right? Why did you need an original, fictious term rather than using already existing terms that describe the activities (i.e., parkour and graffiti)?

TT: There is a term for the free movement of people around built objects not really designed to be traversed. That’s parkour. And then there are terms for unsanctioned public art, like graffiti, street art, and so on. But there wasn’t a single word for what happened when a practitioner combines these things. Freesteal combines these two qualities in the work as I observed it, mostly in Vancouver, and mostly around the years 2007 and 2008. First, that the art itself is free to the viewer. Second, that the work does involve borrowing, even theft, as not-strictly-public locations must be accessed. Parts of the city must be borrowed and used in ways that the city might not otherwise agree. There are fire escapes to climb, rooves to traverse, catwalks and highway overpasses to cross, tunnels to enter strictly against the rules. And the more the moves of parkour are integrated with this artistic practice—as they are in my novel—the more this becomes a flowing interchange of what is given and what is taken. That was the idea.

AA: It’s noted in the novel that Rabbit has the same name as Updike’s famous ex-basketball-player and Ali of course calls to mind iconic boxer Muhammad Ali. Neither fared well in their post-sport existence. What do those sport allusions add to our understanding of the characters of your Rabbit and Ali or our understanding of the novel’s commentary around sport?

TT: Well, this is interesting. Neither Ali nor Rabbit were named with that post-sports tailing off in mind. Eve owned that dynamic more or less on her own, in my mind. The naming of those two characters was more the product of a changing method. In every novel I’ve written, names have come about in ways that live towards one or the other end of a spectrum from careful and planned, to intuitive and spontaneous. Blue Light falls to the latter end of the spectrum. In these cases, the names are often first chosen as place holders. So you name a character thinking it’s just for compositional purposes. A hundred thousand words later and the name has bedded down by usage to be inextricable. That happened to Jeremy Papier in Stanley Park, whose name was first chosen just to get a French surname on the page, to get a name literally on “paper.” Blue Light was maybe a degree less impulsive in that I looked for names that, to my ear, sounded right for the character’s mood. But I got them down quickly and in every case they stuck. Ali was supposed to sound situationally ambiguous. Eve slips through the air, to my ear. And Rabbit. Well Rabbit is elusive and free.