Bookpleasures.com is delighted to welcome David Fishkind, a Massachusetts-born writer whose work has appeared in The Believer, New York Tyrant, Forever Magazine, and The Paris Review.

His debut novel, Don’t Step into My Office, follows Jacob Garlicker, a struggling writer entangled in grief, failure, and a shocking murder on a Long Island beach.  

Murder on the sand, Gatsby conspiracies, gluten intolerance, and an unreliable narrator—Fishkind's novel has it all. 

In our interview, David opens up about dark humor, Jewish identity, and the unsettling truths behind elite institutions.

Norm: Good day, David, and thanks for taking part in our interview.

Don’t Step into My Office’s title references recurring gold nameplates that say ‘my office.’ What inspired this motif, and how does it symbolize themes of ownership and personal space in the story?

How does the concept of ownership and territory relate to Jacob's ongoing sense of displacement, encouraging readers to reflect on belonging and loss?

David: The nameplates were inspired by one my father had outside his office in the shape of a fish, and by another his grandfather had, some kind of commemorative plaque about his time working for Estée Lauder, which I found among my grandmother’s things upon her death. 

At the time, I was living in a tiny apartment decorated with stuff I’d found on the street and at garage sales, just a hodgepodge of crap covering the walls and shelves, and I hung that great-grandfather’s plaque in my kitchen.

 I felt pretty unaccomplished and self-loathing and would ironically think of this apartment as my office. Like Jacob Garlicker, “at some point, I’d realized I didn’t want to be anywhere.” Space meant less and less in a digital, gentrified, atomized landscape. 

My mind was a rotten, haunted glut, which I routinely worked to escape with drugs and alcohol. 

There’s this existential dread in the book and, I believe, widespread across the country, among millennials particularly, that the benchmarks we felt promised, or entitled to, are never going to be met—never going to be able to afford to buy property or start families, not enough well-paying, stable jobs to justify the exorbitant expense of the college degrees we obtained, etc. 

The ideas of belonging or ownership over anything become laughable, and I think Jacob sees that in the nameplates. 

They speak to him, because they’re the embodiment of a cosmic wink: you fucked up, it’s too late, you’re still very, very young, and this aimlessness is your station in life, your lot.

Norm: Jacob’s thesis about Jay Gatsby’s Jewishness forms a significant subplot. What drew you to this interpretation of The Great Gatsby?

How does the antisemitism in Fitzgerald’s novel mirror the prejudices Jacob encounters in contemporary Long Island?

David: The first draft of the novel actually didn’t include any Gatsby references. I’d finished the manuscript, but something still felt missing. The book was incomplete. 

After languishing through most of the summer of 2023, frustrated and uninspired, I thought if I read something short and familiar, it might buoy my spirits. I’ve read The Great Gatsby five or six times now.

It’s deceptively straightforward, but I notice new things on every pass. After living in Jacob’s snivelling, paranoiac monologue for so many months, I was primed to speculate on the root of Gatsby’s otherness, and to see the text’s Jewish themes anew. 

Pretty much all the evidence with which I could make such a case appears in Don’t Step into My Office. I don’t subscribe to it with the same devotion or desperation as Jacob. 

Fitzgerald’s ambiguities are what that makes that book a masterpiece. But teasing out the scathing allusions to Judaism and their relationship to Jimmy Gatz’s isolation and chicanery just felt like a proper foil to everything going on between DSIMO’s characters and the present zeitgeist. 

People are afraid of what they don’t know, compelled to scapegoat outsiders for ills they can’t easily assign blame because of myriad, nuanced, competing influences. Plus the book was already set on Long Island.

Norm: Jacob is deeply unreliable—drunk, paranoid, and traumatized. How did you balance making him sympathetic while acknowledging his flaws?Were there moments where you worried readers might lose patience with his self-destructive behavior?

David: I think we should be able to sympathize with addled, neurotic people. I do. Though I understand some readers find Jacob unsympathetic. 

I’m glad you didn’t. There are a lot of hypercontemporary internal and external pressures that cause people to lose sense of their values, their goals, lose control. Jacob’s character is an ode to that loserdom. 

Those doing well—mentally, professionally, financially, socially—might find less to relate to with him. These people, unfortunately, are often the mouthpieces of society, foremost to offer their perspectives and insights on life. 

Fortunately, or rather, even more unfortunately, there are an increasing number of people who aren’t doing so well and experience trauma and delusion and self-medicate with drugs, sugar, social media, and other coping mechanisms. 

Maybe they can see themselves through Jacob. I do expect some readers to lose patience with his behavior, but that wasn’t not by design. People like Jacob exist, you probably have analogs in your own life. 

I encourage people not to reject those who are struggling out of hand and consider the contributing factors that accompanied them to that place, one from which they can always be delivered. 

That said, redemption is not necessary for a person to be appreciated. Suffering people deserve empathy and sympathy, even if they aren’t suffering by some moral standard. 

An easy way to develop greater empathy, in my experience, is to read about experiences that are unfamiliar and consider how that stuff came to be. An easy way to develop better patience is to read a book you’re feeling some resistance to, for whatever reason, to completion.

Norm: The book explores the publishing industry through Jacob’s failed novel and relationship with Sofia. What commentary are you making about literary gatekeeping? How much of Jacob’s story reflects your own experiences navigating the publishing world?

David: I’m not really making a commentary on gatekeeping. I can see obvious hazards and benefits to gatekeeping in any industry. Anarchy seems cool, but I’m not promoting an alternative necessarily. Like Jacob, in my mid-twenties, 

I wrote a novel, which was rejected by several dozen editors. I thought the prose was strong enough to vindicate its plotlessness and uncomfortable subject matter. I also didn’t think the book was plotless. 

In any case, the manuscript was deemed unmarketable, laying the foundation for how I’d approach my next novel, the one we’re talking about. For better and worse, I have a defiance streak. I was like, oh, I’m not commercial enough? 

Then how about I write a neo-noir metafiction murder mystery beach thriller dramedy about capitalism, identity, and family. 

If my unpublished novel was accused of being too minimalist, I’d make this one as maximalist and genre-fluid as possible, that way there’d be no arguing against its market value. 

Still, I wrote only what I could, and have been too-long guided by Houellebecq’s advice—“Be abject, and you will be true.”—to start from scratch. That, and I may have been a bit slaphappy in my calculations, because my book was on submission for eight months before it sold.

Norm: Food restrictions and Jacob’s gluten intolerance appear throughout. Is this a realistic detail or a symbol? How does his digestive “wandering lump” represent his inability to process trauma?

David: It’s realistic. I’ve experienced all those things myself. Mysterious physical illness and the grasping attempts to reconcile it do have some symbolic weight, but they’re also just symptoms of modernity, ripe for exploring in a narrative about alienation, disillusionment, learned helplessness, and so forth. 

There’s a good deal of research now on the gut–brain axis, and the relationship between mental and gastrointestinal health. Jacob’s wandering lump can certainly be seen as a manifestation of his stress, repression, self-punishment, and trauma. 

It can also be seen as random bad luck. There’s a lot of confusion still about the origin of microbiotic disorders like IBS, otherwise known as functional bowel disease, wherein western medicine and lab imaging reveal nothing out of the ordinary while the patient remains in a state of chronic gastric distress. 

He can feel it, he can see it, but maybe the lump really is in Jacob’s head. This obscure, enigmatic condition aligns nicely with the more urgent mysteries in DSIMO’s plot.

Norm: The mystery of Jacob’s parents’ disappearance drives much of the plot. When did you know what happened to them? Did you consider alternative explanations during the writing process?

David: I played around with alternative explanations for sure. I didn’t explicitly know what happened to them until I listened to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo audiobook on a breakneck thirteen-hour drive from Michigan to Rhode Island a few weeks before I finished the first draft. I still don’t entirely know. It doesn’t feel extremely important for me to understand all the particulars of their disappearance. 

I wanted to play with ambiguity and equivocation throughout the text. I wanted to play with allusion and illusion. And I wanted to put the solidity of reality on trial, emphasizing the role of fiction and its powers within the fictional narrative itself.

Norm: Emma seems remarkably patient with Jacob’s behavior until she isn’t. How did you approach writing their marriage? What does their relationship say about the compromises people make for love?

David: Principally, Jacob and Emma want their marriage to survive. They’re sort of putting the cart before the horse, less concerned with whether the relationship is healthy or gratifying than with making good on their overt commitment.

 I strove to be acerbically realistic in this regard, as well as compassionate, hopeful. Still, like many things in the novel, Jacob and Emma should be taken with a grain of salt. There’s a lot of irony baked in. 

The story is suffused with incongruity and derision and pathos. Of course compromise is a part of life, but I don’t know if I believe it’s a part of love. Compromise implies “sides” and “concessions.” 

Matrimony is an economic arrangement. Love, in my opinion, is not. I see their marriage as both an indictment of the institution, and an endeavor in sacrifice, forbearance, and acceptance.

Norm: Class consciousness permeates the novel, from Coney Island to the Hamptons. Why was economic disparity essential to explore? How does Jacob’s middle-class background inform his resentment of his wife’s wealthy family?

David: Economic disparity is, like, the driving force of American life. It’s the basis of our economic and social order. I don’t particularly want to explore it, it’s depressing, but it’s impossible for me to ignore. 

So many human activities and interactions here are defined by class and money. So naturally, in combining any family, this is going to rear its unpleasant head. 

That said, Jacob’s middle-class upbringing arouses fetishization of his in-laws’ class standing even more than it informs his resentment. 

He’s totally enamored with their casual superiority and self-possession, and it’s in searching for his own security and place in the world that he attaches himself so readily to Emma’s clan. 

He feels entitled in that way. And I don’t remember who said it’s an artist’s responsibility to cross class boundaries, but that idea impels and validates Jacob’s drifting throughout the novel. He sees himself as unfettered by socioeconomic hierarchies and gives himself license to indulge indigency, addiction, pretension, laziness, and the luxuries of wealth without consequence. 

This gets him into trouble sometimes.

Norm: Music plays an interesting role—Jacob claims not to understand it while constantly referencing songs. What’s behind this contradiction? How does his relationship with music reflect his broader struggles with emotional connection?

David: I mentioned my defiance streak earlier. In framing the narrative, I wondered what it would be like to follow an insufferable protagonist. 

Would readers be able to look past Jacob’s hideous self-exile and see him as the sensitive, generous soul he claims to be? I think the greatest consensus among all people is a certain predilection for music—that is, in general, genre and style aside. In his failure to appreciate it, Jacob is chronically left out. Only another expression of his pathetic loneliness. He thinks about songs because he lives in a musical context. 

Everyone likes music, even murderous creeps. When Sofia says as much, Jacob responds:
―I just don’t understand what I’m supposed to be enjoying!
―It’s like . . . our bodies . . . represented through sound.
―Like coughs and burps?
―Like waves and vibrations, Sofia’s patience was infuriating. ―Our heartbeats. The flow of blood and digestion, gestation and time. The circadian rhythm.
―Rhythm . . . Two syllables, zero vowels. Graphemically maniacal. It’s like a prime number. The whole thing is made up. Time is made up! And our digestive systems are deranged.

It’s supposed to be funny, but turned out to be one of the darkest elements for me to write about.

Norm: Jewish identity threads through the story—from the Gatsby thesis to Jacob’s complex relationship with his heritage-inviting readers to consider cultural belonging and prejudice.

How does Jacob’s Jewishness intersect with his position as both insider and outsider in different spaces?

David: Jewish exceptionalism is a net negative, but it’s how I was raised. In our evermore individualized, narcissistic, navel-gazing society, people seem to be seeking out means to define themselves against the collective. 

This generates victims, artists, and self-proclaimed geniuses abound. Jacob is, in some ways, vying to separate himself further from others by fixating on his Jewish heritage. 

On the other hand, antisemitism does historically pervade many sectors, and this has an enduring impact on those who’ve inherited the ethnicity. 

Gatsby too is seeking to separate himself from his past, and revision his legacy on his own terms. 

In the early twentieth century, being Jewish would’ve been a perfectly loaded catalyst for rejecting one’s humble backwoods beginnings, and something to conceal amid newly exalted prominence. 

Only collaborators, bootlegger gangsters like Meyer Wolfsheim, could be privy to Gatz’s secret. In Jacob’s case, he doesn’t need to hide his Judaism for fear of actual reprisal. 

The low-stakes, jokey prejudice he experiences is more a reference to past hardships, and a nod to the mutable identities and status Jewishness has implied. Jacob doesn’t know if he wants to belong or not, he wants to have it both ways. 

If he’s trying to hide anything, it’s his deep-seated insecurity and shame, which aren’t expressly accounted for.

Norm: The book’s humor is very dark and often self-deprecating. How did you calibrate this tone to balance comedy with the novel’s serious themes, and were there moments that surprised you in how readers responded?

Were there jokes or passages that readers found funny that surprised you, or vice versa?

David: Oh, everything is a laugh, misery not excepted. Maybe that’s where the real Jewishness of the novel coheres. If you can’t find humor in the most dismal, dire circumstances, you’re going to have a bad time of it. I know from experience. 

Still, I try to have a good time.

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and Don’t Step into My Office?

David: I recommend people refer to my reading list if they’re curious about me and my writing: http://www.davidfishkind.com/2016/07/books-ive-read.html.

Norm: As we conclude, the open ending invites readers to ponder unanswered questions, fostering engagement and personal interpretation of Jacob’s journey.

What do you hope readers take away from Jacob’s journey, even without complete closure?

David: Redemption isn’t guaranteed, but opportunities for it do present themselves. Reality is slippery. There isn’t one reality. It’s always collapsing and reforming. Indulge your dreams, literally the ones you have while you’re asleep.