Humans are naturally curious. As a species, we want to know how things work, to figure things out, to understand. So what to do with a novel like local author John C. Hampsey’s Soda Lake? It’s fragmented, episodic, told from shifting points of view, arcane, often opaque. It’s the sort of novel that can make you feel unintelligent and undereducated. It’s also got all the qualities of a postmodern masterpiece that if you commit to and submit to will take you on a thought-provoking, experiential ride.
Hear him read
Author John C. Hampsey will read from his new novel, Soda Lake, in Cal Poly’s Phillips Hall, on Friday, Oct. 17 (7:30 p.m.; free).
You might not understand every moment of this novel, but learning to let go of your need to understand is its own reward. In the end, Soda Lake is literature. It’s art.
It begins with an unnamed narrator watching a man disappear in the distance at Carrizo Plain’s Soda Lake. The next chapter, “Garage Wall Man,” finds a narrator puzzling over a man sleeping in his garage and speaking about a mysterious man called McCuade, which will eventually lead to a quest to Ireland to find McCuade. Before that, we follow Father Fenton on his ecclesiastic rounds in San Luis Obispo, going to Linnaea’s Café and to minister to some agricultural fieldworkers. There’s a chapter about a lord who’s forced to live in his castle as if he were on display for the public. The book even winds up in ancient Greece. Somehow, in the end, all these disparate elements and characters coalesce into a conclusion that satiates.
Since he nodded to Linnaea’s, it seemed the café’s back patio was the perfect place to ask Hampsey what the hell is going on in this wild ride of a novel.
“My New York City agent, Nat Sobel, who was a great agent, he got to chapter 4, and he said, ‘I’m out.’ He said, ‘I thought you were going to write me a novel. This is a collection of short stories.’ And I was thinking, ‘Maybe I am writing short stories.’ But deep down inside, I kind of knew it was a novel,” Hampsey, a Cal Poly literature professor, said over coffee.
One of Hampsey’s colleagues, Brad Campell, has already adopted the novel as a selection for his postmodernism class.
“Brad’s the one who told me to go to Ireland to find McCuade,” Hampsey explained. “And I thought, ‘Brad, you’re kidding me.’ He said, ‘No, you’re going to apply for a sabbatical.’”
Hampsey traveled to Ireland to write the chapters that take place there as his narrator searches for McCuade, and perhaps one way to interpret this search is a search for oneself. Hampsey teaches classes on existentialism, and those kinds of queries concerning freedom, choice, an individual’s responsibility to create meaning in a world that lacks inherent purpose of universal values, are all here in Soda Lake. But even Hampsey can’t explain the novel’s absolute meaning or offer a road map to understanding it completely.
“I don’t know how common that is for somebody to write something that they don’t even get it all,” Hampsey said. “The only thing I can give you as an explanation is [that] there are parts of it, maybe more than half of it, that are written really from the unconscious. And I’ve never done that before.”
Hampsey’s other books include Paranoia and Contentment: A Personal Essay on Western Thought, an intellectual examination of understanding human thought, and Kaufman’s Hill, a memoir. Both are accessible and clearly come from Hampsey’s scholarship and memory, respectively. Soda Lake feels more like he’s channeling ideas from an unseen wellspring.
“The stuff about Father Fenton. I wrote that,” Hampsey asserted. “I don’t know where that idea came from, but I wrote it. You get to a chapter like ‘The Lord.’ I didn’t write that chapter. I mean, I didn’t. Honestly, on my mother’s grave, I never sat down and said, ‘Hmm, I’m going to have a castle with a lord, and he has to live there, and death art, and the ancient goddess Asherah.’ No. That whole chapter just came to me. It was like I was uncovering it. And that happens a lot.
“It happens in chapter 2 with the garage wall man,” Hampsey continued. “I didn’t sit there and say, ‘I’m going to go out and look at a pile of wood.’ No, I’m going out to dump the ashtray or the chicken dung, and I thought I saw a man. And then I quickly went in and started writing Socratic dialogue. I swear, I never thought of McCuade. I mean, the garage wall man’s a character who then says the word ‘McCuade’—I had no willful power in that. But I swear I didn’t make him up, I uncovered him.
“I think the reason why [the book] doesn’t always reveal itself is because a lot of the book was written from the unconscious,” Hampsey concluded. “And now my whole thing is, the greatest muse is not your girlfriend or some goddess, the greatest muse in writing, and art, is the unconscious. Not the subconscious, which is Freudian and everything, the unconscious, which is, you know, we’re lucky if we get little messages from it, and we have to be open to its communication, and we have to trust that it’s not a creative dead end, but nothing I ever write again will be like this book where the unconscious played such a huge part. And I think that’s why I don’t even understand it all.”
If Hampsey sounds a little crazy, it may be because writing the book drove him there. In the last chapter, ‘Achill Island,’ he was on a months long writer’s residency on the Irish island.
“I’m an extrovert. So being alone in this cottage without Wi-Fi, I was starting to lose my mind and freak out, and after 10 days, I’d written one sentence. I was very, very lonely. That’s when I started talking to myself for the first time. All this stuff in the chapter is real. I mean, I did record those things, I was speaking out loud to him. I feel like I’m having a mental breakdown. I had this kind of moment where, ‘You idiot, you don’t write this chapter. It’s time [for] McCuade to speak.’ I mean, that’s as honest as I can get. It’s like, ‘What the fuck? Of course! He now narrates; he’s watching me.’ And then I thought, ‘Oh shit, what does he sound like?’ And I took another week to think of what his voice was, but the idea that he’s going to do the telling, and what does this trickster god sound like?
“I mean, to me, that speaks to the unconscious, and then I knew it was the way it should be.” ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Oct 9-19, 2025.