Five Questions with Mark Doyon about Deep Fried

In the forthcoming novel Deep Fried by Mark Doyon, Americanized millennial Arjun Chatterjee is a food-truck chef working in a parking lot outside the nation’s capital. He dreams up multiethnic recipes and pursues a young woman toiling in a Kafkaesque office nearby. Building a clientele, he faces life with a sly optimism. 

One day, he idly asks the sky: “Why am I here?”

Deep Fried is a playful love story wrapped in creative freedom. Its characters – chefs, musicians, and entrepreneurs – face a world of oversized dreams and shaky prospects.

Review Tales spoke with Doyon about his novel.

Deep Fried contains elements of magical realism. Do the food truck lot and its inhabitants exist in the real world or in some alternate universe?

Deep Fried takes place in the real world. But it’s a fable. Each character represents a facet of human creativity: Arjun is compassion, Candy is carnality, Melinda is competition, Antwaan is justice, Jared is ambiguity, and Eddie is righteous anger. They’re all artistic dreamers, trying to transcend their limitations.

I thought at first that Arjun, who operates an eggroll truck in the lot, was the protagonist, but by the end I decided it was Candy, who works in a nearby office. Is that by design?

I think of both characters as protagonists, but it’s reasonable to cast either of them as the centrepiece of the story. When they get together romantically, they form a sort of unified front. Their future is shared. They become co-protagonists.

I laughed, sometimes nervously, at the seriocomic characters and situations. How funny are they supposed to be?

They’re supposed to be as funny as you find them to be. Some people will chuckle, others might not. Perspective is unique to each reader, including whether or not one considers life to be amusing.

You include some surprising glimpses into American history. Do you see them as controversial?

I don’t think facts are controversial. I was well into adulthood before I understood that the history I learned as a kid in school wasn’t always complete. That is what a lot of the prevailing cultural conversation is about – telling the full story, the largely untold story. Setting the record straight.

Deep Fried could be interpreted as a sort of absurdist epic or simply as a warm love story. Which one is it to you?

Oh, I don’t know. Both? Maybe it’s an absurdist love story. I think experience with that condition might be universal (laughs).

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Deep Fried will be published in softcover and ebook editions on September 17, 2024. For more information, visit: www.markdoyon.com.

Add Deep Fried to your shelf at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212333113-deep-fried