Travis Mulhauser’s latest novel Fair Chase returns to his fictional Cutler County on the northern shore of Michigan’s lower peninsula. It’s his second novel to feature the Sawbrooks, a family of ungovernable-but-totally-loveable landowners doing their best to keep the encroaching tourist industry from developing the last bit of wild territory in the area. Like with each of his previous novel’s, Fair Chase centers the conflict between humans and the natural world. This time, it’s a wild gray wolf that has wandered down from the upper peninsula and settled onto the Sawbrook’s property to find his pack. The problem: the nearby resorts and land developers want the wolf dead. An apex predator killing people’s chickens and cats is bad for business. It’s not long before corrupt officials begin hiring poachers to take the wolf out. Meanwhile, a runaway orphan named Delos has come to the Sawbrooks claiming he’s a lost cousin of theirs. And he knows where the wolf is and wants to help the Sawbrooks protect it.
The novel is an absolute page turner and readers looking for a rugged outdoor thriller will get everything they want, but it’s Mulhauser’s voice and characters that make the book. Delos is the real star here, evocative of both True Grit’s Mattie Ross, and the boy heroes of Lewis Nordan’s best work. He anchors the novel thematically and oversees the novel’s most compelling and emotional moments.
I got the chance to talk with Travis about the novel, why he returned to Cutler County, and the conflicts with the natural world that drive his fiction.
Cody Lee: We get a brand-new Sawbrook character this time in Delos. Or potential Sawbrook given some murky family tree stuff. How did he come to you?
TM: So, he’s based on a kid that I knew years and years ago. Not so much in terms of his story in the novel, but in his sort of vibe and energy. Just this really scrappy, resilient kid that I knew years and years ago. And the name always stuck with me.
And then, the rest of it had, kind of a piecing together of different ideas that I had in relationship to the Sawbrook family, which is that they would have some sort of relative they didn’t know about. It just seemed likely to me that there would be somebody out there that had this link to the family that they would be unaware of and that would come back to help-them-slash-haunt-them at a specific time and place. And that was the idea: I had this family that’s so close-knit, now all of a sudden there’s this new element they didn’t know about. How do they handle it?
CL: Creatively speaking, how did you come up with the Sawbrooks? They’re such a great family and this is now the second book we have with them.
TM: So I have been working on that family as sort of an idea for a long time long before the first book came out. And originally, I had tracked their entire lineage over the course of each generation. I have outlines with the first Sawbrook generation to the next one and what happened to them. Then I have maps of the property—this is what the property was with this person and then they got this part. And I have all this history that I just wrote down with no context or aim for a story, and it was my former agent actually that said, “Yeah, this is all great, but you can’t really write a novel with all of this. You need to pick a spot to jump in.”
So I decided to go with the contemporary because I started to write about some of the bootlegging stuff. And as interesting as all that was, it was getting sticky doing the research of sailboats in the 1930s. What was the terminology people use? What kind of equipment did they use. All that kind of stuff really became laborious to me. So I was like okay I’m just going to jump ahead and get it to a spot where I know what the surrounding information is and then build out from there. So that family has been with me for a long time.
CL: Yeah, you can feel that in reading the novels, that there is this much larger history and a lot more stories there. I mean, not just in the way the characters speak to one another and refer to other events. You feel it from the author. There’s a whole universe here. It’s something as a reader I really appreciated. I felt like I was stepping into a real lived space.
TM: Yeah, thanks, man.
CL: All of your books feature multiple perspectives, and I’m wondering how you decide who gets the first-person narration versus who gets the close third and so on.
TM: Man, I wish I didn’t write with those multiple perspectives. I think it makes it much harder. Every book I start, including the one I’m starting literally now, it’s just one perspective. I’m not doing multiple. I think it makes it harder to sell. I think it makes it harder to market because it doesn’t have that one person, that one person’s story, that one line that you can just be like this is what the book is about. And it drives me crazy that every story I write, I find myself doing these multiple POVs.
Usually I write the whole thing in third because I don’t want to do a voice. And then I get to a point where something isn’t working and it’s that I don’t have a first-person narrator to thread through the story. So then I have to go back.
With Sweet Girl and The Trouble Up North, I wrote the whole book and then something wasn’t working. And all of a sudden, I’d have this experience, realizing not only do I need to put this in first person, but I’d literally hear the voice to write it in. I told the story with The Trouble Up North with Rhoda, I literally had the sense of her character watching me try to write this book and being like, “You’re doing it wrong, dumbass. Let me just do it for you because I don’t have time to sit here and watch you bumble around with it.” And then she just got in and it was so easy. It’s done. With Fair Chase with the kid’s voice, I was like, “All right, I’m not even going to pretend that this is going to be third person. I’m just going to do it from the start.” And to me, it’s also a way of identifying the main character and keeping a little bit of a focused through line with the story so it doesn’t get too far afield.
Having said that, yeah, I wish I could write a book a different way because I think it makes it harder and it’s frustrating because I think it’s easier to do just one perspective.
CL: I love the split narration, getting the multiple perspectives. I love hearing the different voices that come out in that close third. So I know in the past you’ve mentioned Charles Portis and Tom Drury and guys like that as influences.
TM: Yeah I would say Fair Chase is still in the Charles Portis world. I think the Charles Portises of the world, the Lewis Nordans of the world, those are always going to be kind of the blueprint for me. I mean, honestly, I would put those catalogues of novels up against anybody’s really.
CL: Nordan is one of my favorites. I picked up on that too in some of the humor in your book. I mean Darnette is just so funny.
TM: Yeah. I love Darnette, dude. Yeah, he was so fun.
CL: That’s something I’ve really appreciated it in your books is the antagonist always feels very three-dimensional and usually pretty likable believe it or not.
TM: Yeah. Easily my favorite characters to write.
CL: I find that so much more engaging than the typical villainous arc.
TM: Yeah, to me that’s the good stuff and that’s what I like in the books I read. That’s what I like in the shows I watch. And it’s surprising to me that it’s not the norm at this point because it creates so much more tension when your bad guy is also likable to a degree.
CL: So the issue with the wolf’s presence upsetting the townspeople and developers—that’s something I’ve seen crop up in the news in Wyoming and Montana and places like that. Is this something that’s actually happening in Michigan, or is potentially happening soon?
TM: That’s a good question. The wolf thing came from two places. I had the Delos character and I had the story of being estranged from the family and I was trying to figure out how he was going to connect to the Sawbrooks. Two things happened on literally two consecutive days. The first was that I got a text from my dad who lives up there. And it was of a small pack of gray wolves that were walking that a trail camera picked up not far from his cabin where he stays in this little tiny town called Hessel UP. He sent it to me and said, “Hey, wanted to let you know these things are out there next summer when you’re out walking around.” And it was a very cool image of these wolves. And they have been in the news with the reintroduction program and the national forest up there. That’s a real thing.
So what I started to think about is what’s going to happen when these gray wolves show up in the lower peninsula. And then to somebody that’s not from up there, the upper peninsula is not that big. But the difference is very big in terms of who lives where and how the UP is kind of frozen in time a little bit. It’s a much more rural part of the state. So I was like, what’s going to happen if and when these wolves show up where the state has developed this infrastructure, especially of tourism? I have always had this idea that a wolf would just freak out this community for some reason. They’ll eat your cat or whatever, but they’re going to have this big overblown reaction. So my dad sent me a picture which reminded me of this storyline that I’d had in the back of my mind of what’s going to happen when these wolves show up.
The second thing that happened was the next day outside my house in Durham, this woman and her husband, neighbors of ours, walk by and we start talking about something completely unrelated. I don’t really know them. And it turns out that she is a wolf reporter for the National Geographic. So she starts talking to me about this book she’s working on, a non-fiction book about red wolves. And I’m like, whoa, that’s weird because I just started writing Fair Chase. So then I was like, “Okay, that’s a sign. I gotta put a wolf in the book.”
I met with her a couple times and just learned about wolves. And that’s kind of where that thread came from. And it was really the scene in the novel where they’re having the town hall. She had written this article. I think it was in National Geographic or maybe it was just on her Substack, I can’t remember, where she went to a town hall in rural North Carolina where these red wolves had shown up and it was like that where everybody’s freaking out and I was like, okay, this lines up perfectly. And so that was what pulled it all together.
CL: I was going to ask about that section where you wrote from the wolf’s point of view. What writing that was like because it’s one of the more memorable sections.
TM: Thanks! I really liked writing that section and my editor on that book did not want me to do a perspective from the wolf. She was pretty hesitant about that. She also didn’t want the wolf to die. But I felt like that had to happen. And writing the perspective from the wolf, I was really conscious of not making it like a cartoon, the wolf is having these human thoughts and emotions. I just wanted the camera to be panned way out and I needed to, first of all, to explain how it got across because any reader familiar with the area would wonder how did it get from one peninsula to the next.
I remember being really nervous when I talked to the wolf lady because I wondered, would they even cross the ice? And when she told me they would I was like, “Okay thank god. I can just have it cross the ice.” And I just wanted to write about that. Then she explained to me the process of what a wolf would do when the pack it was born into got too big. Why it would leave its pack and set out on its own.
CL: That actually feeds into my next question, which was Delos has this connection with the wolf but he doesn’t seem to understand where it comes from. But as you’re reading the novel, you realize, especially when you get to that section with the wolf, sort of the emotional climax of the book, you realize that he and the wolf they have the same motivation. They’re looking for their pack. And I wondered if that was something that you had planned ahead of time or if that came out in the writing of the novel.
TM: So I didn’t plan it and it was so obvious that I worried about it once I realized I’d done it, if that makes sense. When you’re writing something, you’re like, “Shit. This is too over the top. It’s too easy to see.” I didn’t even realize I was doing it until I wrote the book and I’m like, “The lone wolf kid and the lone wolf. Jesus Christ. It’s a Disney movie.” So that was my big concern. But it turns out, I don’t even know if most people picked up on it. A lot of people didn’t. You know what I mean?
CL: It’s really subtle and like I said, that’s one of my favorite sections when you describe why the wolf is leaving his pack. Because that just makes the whole novel click, I think.
TM: Yeah. It was totally unintentional.
CL: There’s this line that Rhoda, the matriarch of the Sawbrooks, says in The Trouble Up North that really stuck with me, and I thought about it while reading this book. I wonder if it was in your head while you were writing it. She’s referring to a cormorant species that’s protected by the government and has been eating up all the fish and hurting the fishing industry up there. She says “There’s nothing more dangerous in this world than a predator the law won’t let you near.” And I wondered if that was in your mind because there’s some things in this book that seem to refute that.
TM: Yeah, totally. The big thread for me is our relationship to the natural world and the balance of nature. In the wolf’s case, it was pushed out by man. In the cormorant’s case, it became protected by man until it began to push back too far. And it’s just like this balance and the predator prey thing. And for me, it was like with the wolf, it’s like what is the downside? What do we lose when this predator vanishes from the planet? What is the flip side of the cormorant coin? And I don’t really have an answer. But in this instance my character Lucy was like “This is how I stop the development encroaching on our land. The wolf got pushed out by the development. Now the wolf comes back and now I work with the wolf.” Because in her view it’s both the right thing to do, but also because it’s going to shut down this push to develop everything, which she feels is essential. It’s like leveling that scale. That’s going to be her way to try to do that.
So yeah. I don’t have an answer for it, but it’s the same question.
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Travis Mulhauser’s Fair Chase is available now from Grand Central / Hachette.
