Richard Hell's "Godlike"

·42 min·4 clips

Richard Hell hid that his novel 'Godlike' was based on Rimbaud and Verlaine—why did he keep this secret?

The conversation opens with a practical handoff. Eric Neumann says the broadcast is leaving SoundCloud and points listeners to podcast apps, KPFK, and the LA Review of Books site. Then Kate Wolfe takes over. Medea Ocher is with her, and Wolfe brings in Richard Hell through the roles that still cling to him: writer, poet, rock star, and a figure from seventies New York music. The book arrives slowly, which suits the discussion. Wolfe is less interested in retelling the plot than in how the thing is built. The timelines keep sliding around. Paul is in the hospital, writing and thinking in notebooks. One strand speaks in first person from 1997. Another moves back to the early seventies with a more novelistic feel. The frame is messy on purpose. Hell says fiction gave him a way into a charged youthful relationship without locking him to exact dates, documents, and literal reconstruction. Imagination is not decoration here. It is how the book gets room to breathe. He wanted to think about poetry as a way of living, and about the rough moment when youth starts to fall away. The hospital setting gives the book its ache. This is an older mind looking back, not a clean dive into the danger and glamour of the seventies. Wolfe pushes on that choice, asking whether he ever wanted to tell it from inside the original moment. Hell answers through process: a novel starts with what he is already trying to figure out. By the end, the talk lands somewhere modest. Art may not make anyone enlightened, but making it still counts, even when it does not help anyone get ahead.

As heard by us

A careful conversation about how fiction lets memory change shape without losing its charge.

Richard Hell's novel anchors a thoughtful discussion of lived memory, literary invention, and the uneasy work of turning experience into fiction.

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You can hear Richard Hell explain why he set a novel in a hospital and left himself room for invention.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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