I wanted to write a novel that was about all of our grandfathers, that showed — I wanted to have a conflict between a man who is taken completely out of his culture, which is basically the culture of almost 60 or 70 years past, and dropped abruptly into the postmodern, or what I saw as the very advanced modern, which is chaotic and immensely predatory. And the figure of Joe Raven — the Joe Raven I wanted was — someone in the novel, I can’t remember, asked Joe Raven, why are you after this man? And Raven simply says, “He runs. He runs.”

And so, I wanted it to be almost — it was primitive, and Raven had spotted an American that he could take revenge upon. So, Raven was over the edge, because of his fall from the bridge. Someone asked him in the novel, “What was it like?” He says — as I recall, he says, “Alive, all the way down, I felt alive.”