After far too long a hiatus my latest American Eye column, an interview with Jack O'Connell, is up at Shots (the link I originally posted to that has now expired). Jack was over to promote his latest novel, The Resurrectionist, which was one of the very best books of 2009 and deserved far more attention than it got.If you missed my retrospective review of O'Connell's first novel, Box Nine, last month, you can link to it here or just scroll back through November's entries. In the meantime, here's the original interview:
JACK O'CONNELL
The thing that stands out about Jack
O'Connell is his sheer enthusiasm for the art and craft of writing.
As we reduced the world's stock of Guinness, and a bitter named The
Fall, whose Biblical overtones impressed us, in an Irish pub nestled
in a West End alley, O'Connell spun out the pleasures of reading
which, for him, grew into the pleasures of writing. That we appeared
to share the same tastes, indeed many of the same experiences with
the same editions of the same paperbacks of our younger days meant
the two hours became an exercise of head-shaking agreement, each
punctuated by another drink.
O'Connell was born, educated, and has
spent his whole life in Worcester, Massachusetts ('within a
three-mile radius, really'), which provides the geographical basis of
his fictional Quinsigamond, but it is his reading that has provided
Quinsigamond with its unique mix of rust-belt America, Weimar
Germany, and futuristic LA. Although it's easy to see the influence
of any number of modern cult-favourite writers in O'Connell's work,
it is sui generis, never derivitive, and at least two of his five
novels, his first Box Nine, and his latest, The Resurrectionist,
deserve to stand alongside names like Pynchon, DeLillo, Disch, Dick,
or and Burroughs.
Like many cult writers, though, none of
O'Connell's books has found commercial success to match their
critical acclaim. His problems may have started when Box Nine won
the Mysterious Press first novel award. Prestigious as the prize was
(and appreciated as the $50,000 prize was as well), it saw him
labeled as a 'crime writer', and although it fit into that category,
it also resisted it. Genre labels don't quite work for O'Connell;
there are significant elements of sf, and stylistic experiment which
put much 'serious' fiction to shame, which makes it difficult for
them to appeal to the 'hard core' crime reader, while at the same
time making it almost impossible to reach beyond the genre boundaries
created by the 'mystery' section of bookstore shelving.
Along those lines, I noticed Jack was
carrying the new US paperback edition of The Resurrectionist, and I
commented that the covers of that book reflected his dilemma of
classification. constant nodding in agreement and digressing into
tangential concerns that seemed to be mutually apparent
immediately....
JOC: I loved that first cover (the US
cloth edition), but the publisher thought it was not quite right.
MC: It emphasized the circus/freak show
sub-plot; it reminded me of Glenn David Gold, or maybe a book like
The Prestige or The Illusionist.
JOC: And this cover (which features
cards) is along the same lines, but less mysterious. I think it
reflects part of the problem with my books. I was doing a tour
recently, and in Denver I was in the general fiction section, in
Phoenix I was in crime, and in San Francisco I was in horror/sf...
MC: Which might tell you more about San
Francisco than your books! But the British edition really looks
great, like a mainstream novel, perhaps historical, that John
Banville or someone might have written. Maybe we should call it
'slipstream'...
JOC: No Exit have done a great job with
my covers...
MC:...and they've always GOT the book;
the Box Nine cover is much more sf than anything else! I saw you
mentioned Harlan Ellison as an early influence. I didn't see Ellison
the writer as much as Ellison the editor, because everything you've
written would fit nicely into Dangerous Visions.....
JOC: Oh yeah. I loved those books,
Disch, Delany, Aldiss. I sort of stumbled into sf as a kid, but then
this stuff seemed so radical, and those writers led me, naturally, to
finding Gravity's Rainbow, and wow! There's an anthology of stories
out now, called the Secret History of Science Fiction, and it's based
on a piece Jonathan Lethem wrote about ten years ago, speculating on
what would have happened if the Science Fiction Writers had voted the
Nebula to Gravity's Rainbow in 1973, when it was nominated, instead
of Arthur Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama. From Pynchon to Delany's
Dhalgren was a natural step.
MC: And where does the crime fiction
fit in?
JOC: As a kid I loved Hammett and
Chandler, and the next generation of pulp writers, the Jim Thompsons
and David Goodises. But my first fictions were two Pynchon-type
novels, long and dense, and they never sold. Then I did Box Nine,
which is at heart a dark city noir, and has a female detective, and
after it sold the first question was, can you make it a series? Is
the main character coming back? And I said 'sure', because in my mind
the main character was the city, Quinsigamond, not the woman! Both my
agent and the editors were disappointed, but I said, did you see
where Leonore winds up at the end of the book? And they said, well,
send her to rehab! From a strictly commercial point of view they
were, as usual, righter than I was. I think the problem is that I'm
generally a little too dense for the dedicated crime reader, and
there's no way to make the jump to 'literary'. There have been some
relatively brief windows into what they call the 'slipstream', the
cultish books just off the mainstream, but now my attitude is I've
written five books, I'm turning 50, and I'm just gonna write what I
write. You never know what's going to come out...
MC: The Resurrection is your first book
in nearly a decade. Was it very carefully planned?
JOC (laughing): Just the opposite!
Partly, I was working days, editing the alumni magazine at Holy
Cross, and I'd get up at four ayem to write. But the first draft did
not contain Limbo ((the comic book story which Sweeney reads to his
comatose son)) and I wrote it in a white heat, in about 8 months,
which all began after a cafe crawl around Poitiers, at a festival
with Francois Guerif, or Rivage, my French publisher. It was inspired
by the Gold Medal guys I love, particularly Gil Brewer, and it was
the story of Sweeney and his son and the gang of bikers. I'd written
maybe 90% of it, and I was really excited and I sat down to write a
simple scene, where Sweeney reads a comic to his son, and the
questions started. I took a left turn. Six months later, the wife
says 'how did it go?' and I say 'we're going to have to get rid of
Sweeney,' and she looks at me and says 'Let's not do that, alright?'.
But the Limbo story just grew and grew, and in the end it was double
the length it is now in the book, as I had to select just the best
bits.
MC: How direct is the Gil Brewer
influence?
JOC: It's partly conscious and partly
organic evolution. I knew from the beginning that the only thing I
wanted to do was write, but I had this terror because it didn't seem
a career option to a kid growing up in Worcester! But it was the
verve of those guys, the Brewers, and Ellisons, and also Richard
Matheson, which I wanted to emulate. Eventually, I was able to marry
it to more metaphysical themes, and more epic scope, but it took lots
of experimentation, false starts, and frustration; not least those
two novels which are up in the attic somewhere. Box Nine finally
started to do it, I think by leaning more toward the genre
electricity side of things. The crime element of The
Resurrectionist is mainly one of character; Sweeney is a real noir
hero, he's disturbed, he's needy, and above all he's vulnerable, with
a weak spot that the ruthless can take advantage of, and there's a
black widow femme fatal, in Nadia, a seemingly virginal blonde in
Alice and a creepy shrink, a Dr. Ampthor type, in her father.
MC: And the Limbo Comics stories are so
wonderful. I'm amazed someone doesn't jump at adapting them in
comics, it's very much like Alan Moore..
JOC: And how great would that be.
Comics, and then the movies!
MC: I'll drink to that.
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