When Chris McCormick was growing up in California, his mother’s large Armenian family passed down a story about how his great-grandfather hid in a tree and watched his father beheaded by Turks in western Armenia.
“This story was a very specific personal anecdote, the nitty-gritty of history,” McCormick said, explaining one of the inspirations for his widely praised novel, “The Gimmicks.”
McCormick, an assistant professor of creative writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato, has successfully pulled off the feat of pairing the Armenian genocide that began in 1915 with — wrestling.
If this sounds grim, it isn’t. His story of two men who love the same woman, set against the backdrop of memories of the genocide, is sometimes funny and always heartfelt in its themes of brotherly love and love between men and women, injustice, personal and national identity and what happens to unrequited pain. His sprawling cast of characters range from old Armenians to traveling wrestlers who all have a “gimmick,” a persona that dictates how they dress and behave in their roles as good guys or baddies.
The novel’s intricate plot bounces from Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, in 1973, to California during the Cold War, to the 1988 earthquake that devastated Armenia.
We follow Arvo and Ruben, cousins who are close as brothers. Arvo is huge, good-natured and joyous, a man to whom people are drawn. Ruben is a backgammon whiz, thin, serious, bespectacled, reminding people of a little old man. Both boys love Mina, a backgammon champ who’s slated to compete in a major tournament. Before that happens, Arvo does something that will haunt the trio for years.
Ruben joins the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, a political extremist group that wants to punish Turks for massacring between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. To this day, the government of Turkey denies the killings amounted to genocide and it is illegal in Turkey to talk about what happened to Armenians during that era. (Last December the U.S. Congress recognized the massacres as genocide but Pres. Trump refused to use that word, instead referring to the deaths as “mass atrocities.”)
Arvo spends time in the Armenian Secret Army but revenge isn’t his thing, and he heads to California where he becomes a wrestler known as The Brow Beater for his unibrow. He’s managed by an old former wrestler, Terry “Angel Hair” Krill, a delightful character who narrates parts of the story after Mina seeks him out to learn what happened to the cousins.
This book didn’t come easily for McCormick.
“I had to constantly revise, write and rewrite for five years to understand exactly what happens and then, the big revelation as storyteller, the introduction of Angel Hair as the reluctant narrator,” he said. “His voice helps me create momentum and suspense.”
McCormick graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in creative writing. His story collection “Desert Boys” won the 2017 American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award. While he was at the university he met poet/essayist Mairead Small Staid, who works at the Mankato public library. They will be married in May in Ann Arbor.
When McCormick finally began “The Gimmicks,” he knew he wanted to write about genocide.
“I grew up with that legacy as a huge part of my understanding of lack of justice in the world, the cruelty,” he says. “But I didn’t want to write about the genocide directly. Even the best fiction about the topic has this explanatory tone, where they want to prove it happened. I wanted more exploratory than explanatory, allowing the reader to participate rather than just receive information. I set the story generations after the genocide to show the legacy of its denial. I wanted it to be tonally complex, raising the question of what happens to pain when it is denied for generations, when your pain is called fake.”
And that’s where the wrestling theme came to him: “I was thinking about how to get into the question of denied pain in a way that was not so direct and suddenly had the idea to put professional wrestling in the mix.”
Here’s how he explains linking genocide and wrestling:
“Turkey’s denialism — its accusation that Armenians are lying about how our families died — is a fiction built to protect itself from a painful shame. It’s that element of performance — creating a fiction to avoid dealing with the painful truth — that interested me, and I got to thinking about different kinds of pain and performance. It occurred to me that professional wrestling — which I’d grown up watching at the same time I was learning about my family’s history with the genocide — could be connected to this question. Wrestling makes explicit what we’re all doing, all the time: telling stories about ourselves. The performed pain in wrestling is played big for the back rows to see, and so it’s easily dismissed as ‘fake,’ but I was curious about what happens to the real pain lying beneath the performance, the pain of slowly losing sight of the line between the fictions we put on and the reasons we start believing in those fictions in the first place.”
Setting the novel two generations after the genocide allows McCormick to explore the characters’ different feelings about the deaths of thousands.
“How much do we owe the past and how much to balance the future is the central tension in the book,” he says.
Ruben does horrible things for the extremist group in his unrelenting need for revenge. Mina believes “Dwelling on history was a luxury reserved for people who didn’t have present demands. … She never said it, for fear of causing further pain, but she wanted — very badly wanted — to move forward already.”
And big, friendly Arvo, McCormick says, “is a little bit cowardly” in his inability to choose between Ruben’s and Mina’s paths. “He sees both sides as having valuable points.”
McGuire has had several events promoting “The Gimmicks,” and he enjoys seeing audiences that are split 50/50, some interested in the Armenian side of his story and some the wrestling side.
“The book feels like a mirror of my own split identity,” he says, recalling his childhood. “It was surprising to people that I was Armenian. I looked like friends who never heard of Armenia. I had this entire culture at home, different food, language, music, but nobody had known that. As a kid I didn’t know where I belonged. As I’ve gotten older I’m trying to think of it as less split and more duality of spirit.”
McGuire frequently had to explain the Armenian genocide to American friends, which isn’t surprising given how little history of other countries is taught in American schools.
“I didn’t learn about it in school myself,” he admits. “It’s interesting to think about what we do learn in history. What is framed as relevant and what irrelevant changes over time. To quantify which tragedies are more important than others is a crass and sad thing to do. The genocide was a huge news story in the U.S. when it was happening. It was the central story as Pres. (Woodrow) Wilson began our life as international world leader in World War I. “ ‘Don’t leave food on your plate because Armenians are starving’ was a colloquialism.”
“To some degree it’s not their fault. There is so much suffering it’s not possible to expect people to know everything. I hope my book will lead some readers to at least understand what happened.”
- What: Chris McCormick reads from “The Gimmicks”
- When/where: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 5; Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul
- Admission: Free
- Publisher/price: Harper, $27.99