Here's an excerpt from an interview with Charlie Smith in BOMB magazine, which provides insight into Smith's writing style and how it carried over into writing Three Delays. Makes me want to read it again....

CSI don’t have plans when I write a poem or a novel, or even hard notions in terms of whom or what I want to write about. I don’t have a template that I try to place things into. I just start writing. What comes out is something that I discover, if I ever discover it, because I don’t ever really go at books critically. As far as the characters in Three Delays, they are imagined people who are discovered, by me and by the reader, in a certain situation, a kind of extremis. A psychic extremis in terms of personality and abilities; a spiritual extremis, expressed, say, by drugs. The veneer that the drugs and the alcohol provide in this book, covering what turns out to be pretty honest emotion, is a kind of carapace. It’s just in the nature of the situation and what’s going on. How long can love last? When do you quit? How do you stay in it under terrible circumstances? All of that is interesting to me—in the lives of these people—so I wrote about it. I’m not trying to figure anything out about it: those are problems for people’s individual lives. I try to let myself be as open as possible to characters and situations within the confines of the book. That means that in my own life I may need to act in certain ways to make that possible, so I’m not distracted by all that’s going on in the world. Live quietly. Let the world take care of itself. Seek a calm heart.

JR Turning this question to the writer: what about ego as a writer?

CS Well, I look at writing not as a management position but as a service position. I’m there to serve the needs of the book. That’s all it is, and the more I’m able to do that, the better the book goes. When I start thinking that I’m the big shot in the book, or that the big shot is writing it, there is no book.

It’s like raising a child or loving a woman; when you really do love them you’re willing to serve. That’s what I find operating in my marriage. I find it operating in the lives of people who have raised families—despite ourselves, despite our shortcomings, and our inabilities, we’re willing to serve the ones we love. A book is like that; it’s not a living thing, but the act of writing is. I go after the willingness to serve the poem, or the novel. I do that as best as I can within my limitations.

[...


...]

JR Billy and Alice are mutually attracted.

CS They see the universe in simpatico ways; that’s what pulls them together.

JR Like pathologies attract?

CS Yeah, in a sense. Early in the book they compare themselves to people who seem to have no particular pathology—the husband Alice has at the beginning of the book is described as a guy without pathology. He’ll just live a good life and prosper and all of that. But they are people with pathology: they’re fucked up and they’ve got to deal with it. Whether it’s their fuckedupness or their nature—I mean, they’re extremely bright and perceptive people but . . . It’s a gas when you’re around somebody who yucks at the same things you do. Whether it’s friendship or a marriage, you can go on that. People who can yuck it up together. They see the same things in the same way and that’s extremely powerful. That’s not to say that it’s some kind of solipsistic deal where you’ve got schizophrenics over there yucking it up.

They’re human beings, they appreciate life—that’s what’s going on with them. They’ve got severe handicaps. Alice is overburdened by rage and fear, and Billy is overburdened by rage and fear that he treats with chemicals. She treats her affliction, I guess, by raging and trying to get over this particularly obsessive, fucked-up way of loving somebody. But, I think, they are, at all times, like I said, just struggling to go forth and get something going. They just happen to be alike.

Truth is, they are both in love with beauty to the point of death. And they find this to an inestimable degree in each other.