The Best People is Robert Lopez’s third and final installment of his novels-in-stories triptych continuing on from Good People and A Better Class of People.

The form and point of view shift, chameleon-like, throughout the work, driving the reader forward percussively and propulsively. This is not a languid read, but more like getting doused with the brackish water of the human condition. The reader is left gasping, alone, and damp to process what they experienced.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Lopez about craft and voice, bleakness and humor, contradiction and humanity. His interview answers evoke the same dry humor as The Best People itself.

—Severin Wiggenhorn

 

Severin Wiggenhorn: I’m excited to hear more about your thoughts on voice and form, but first, this is the final book in a triptych. For any readers on the fence, I think The Best People stands alone. Did you always envision this as a three-book project?

Robert Lopez: I put together Good People the way I would any story collection, without any thought to anything beyond that particular book. So, it was never a three-book project until it was, but that wasn’t until years later. The work evolved to take that ultimate form. For those who do read all three, there will be a certain recognition—of particular kinds of recursion, echoes, and rhymes—that should be satisfying.

 

SW: You said previously, “I work with fragments because it’s the only way I know how to work when I put together something long.” The Best People continues this use of fragmentary form, often with a lot of white/negative space between titled stories. How did you shape these fragments into a novel? How did you know when it was done?

RL: It’s about urgency and momentum, I suppose. The uncanny is something that intrigues me on the page and there’s a lot of the uncanny in this work. When the last piece of The Best People circled back to the first piece of Good People I knew it was done. 

 

SW: How did you think about form in The Best People?

RL: There are several different forms in the work: stories that look traditional with normal paragraph breaks, others presented as a wall of text with no paragraph breaks, and then fragmented work. 

I started working with fragments early on and returned to this form whenever it seems appropriate, which has been often. It’s important to distinguish between voice and form. To me, throughout my eight books, I’ve utilized a host of forms while the voice has been relatively consistent. 

 

SW: There are POV shifts between stories that make the reader wonder, is “the man” of this story the “I” of the previous story? Who exactly is included in this “we”? What about the work necessitated these shifts? How do they connect to other themes in the work? 

RL: I suppose it’s an attempt to question identity, to elicit just this sort of question, so thank you. I’m drawn to ambiguity, and confusion to a certain extent, but only as a means of getting to something that seems true about our human experience. 

These are the sorts of excellent questions I hope readers will ask. I only put the work together. It’s up to each reader to determine the rest. 

 

SW: You said, “The truth is, to me there’s no such thing as character. There’s no such thing as story. Or plot. All we have are words arranged on a page. It’s on the reader to make character.” I’d love to hear more about how you build character from language or what starting with language means to you? 

RL: Yes, I’ve said this many times. I never get a visual image from prose, which is why there are very few physical descriptions in the work, particularly of people. 

Unless there is. I forget sometimes. 

Regardless, everything is language and everything comes from language. How anyone encounters “character” is their own invention, which makes the work somewhat collaborative. Cultivating a singular (engaging) voice is the accomplishment and the goal.

 

SW: What other writers or artists do you feel your work is most in conversation with? 

RL: This answer has included many names over the years, from Beckett to Van Gogh to Tom Waits, but lately it’s my own past selves/voices, I think. 

 

SW: Percival Everett said, “I want a readership that wants to read things because the work is difficult, not because it’s only fun. I want the fun to be in figuring it out.”

In addition to the fragmentary form and shifting POVs, the reader is constantly forced to judge both the reliability of the narrator and who exactly is narrating. In one story the narrator says Esperanza is the only woman who doesn’t want to have his children and in another he recounts her volunteering to have his baby.

There are a recurring cast of names, but it’s not self-evident these refer to the same people. I found myself on a seesaw tilting back and forth wondering who was confused: me or the narrator. It feels like an intentional choice to strip away the reader’s sense of certainty—who are these people, what kind of world are we in, did I understand that correctly? How did you judge how far you can push and still have it be satisfying for the reader?

RL: Contradiction is another element of the human character that is always fascinating. So, yeah, Esperanza is the only woman who doesn’t want his children and also says, “I’ll have your baby.” 

You, as the reader, aren’t confused here at all, but having an uncertain feeling as to these questions–is this “I” the same “I” as before, is this the same Manny, the same Esperanza, etc., who exactly is included in the “we” point of view—these are all the right questions to ask. 

I appreciate what Everett says in this quote, but I’ll add that there might not be anything to figure out, per se. It’s not a puzzle to put together, but rather speaks to the unknowable, the essential mystery of life as a human. 

 

SW: You’ve mentioned you want people to see the humor in your work, but you also write quite bleak, bordering on hopeless, characters. I did find the book funny, in an almost absurdist tone. How do you make despair funny?

RL: I don’t know. You tell me. 

 

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ROBERT LOPEZ is the author of eight books, including Good People, A Better Class of People, The Best People, and Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Stony Brook University.

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SEVERIN WIGGENHORN has worked as a Senate staffer, software engineer, and technical writer. She graduated from Harvard Law School and has an MFA from Randolph College. Her work has been published by X-R-A-Y, Pacifica Literary Review, and Long Listed by SmokeLong Quarterly. She recently attended the 2025 Tin House Winter Workshop. Find her on Instagram @severin.wiggenhorn.