Jack O'Connell

Interviewed by Eve Tan Gee

Word Made Flesh is the best crime novel I've read since...the last Jack O'Connell. So I decided to pin him down...

Loved Word Made Flesh - let's talk about it.

Sure we can, but I warn you up front to take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Why is that?

Because I genuinely believe I'm one of the least qualified people to talk about my work. And because the nature of my relationship with my book changes at the moment of its publication. I see my books as transcriptions of what I call the dreamlife. Books are visions, even when they're banal visions. They come into the world by way of an obsessive process wherein compulsive individuals spend inordinate amounts of time in self-imposed solitary confinement, hearing voices and transcribing those voices. At the moment of publication, that vision, for better or worse, is mutated, instantaneously, into a commodity. The book severs the umbilical and departs the monastery and goes off into the world where it's received, harshly or warmly, by others, by readers who understand the book, very often, in a way that's quite different from the writer's understanding.

How did Word Made Flesh come about?

Originally, it came about in the most cynical way imaginable. I began the book on January 1, 1995. My wife was pregnant with our second child. I sat down with a calendar and flipped forward to her due date and understood that once there was a toddler and an infant in the house, my writing time would be somewhat curtailed. So first I made a moronic, bone-dumb writing schedule. I was punching the calculator, scratching with the pencil, thinking If I write x-pages each day for x-days, I'll have a first draft manuscript by the time James makes his arrival in the world. An "ass-backward" way of working as my father used to say. Then all I needed was a plot. So I rooted around in my notebooks and pulled a couple items from "column A" and a couple from "column B" and applied the Elmore Leonard theorem, you know all you need is a weary good guy, some bad-ass killers, a few guns and a bag-o'-money. The writing process on my previous book (The Skin Palace) had been, to put it kindly, a bit unwieldy. It was a long haul and there were a lot of characters and a lot of subplots. I wanted to strip things down, including the language. I wanted to go raw and fast, like an old Gold Medal fable. I remember saying to my wife, "I want this one to be the novel-equivalent of Springsteen's Nebraska." Well, obviously, if you've read Word, things didn't work out that way.

What happened?

My son arrived ten days early. I had one chapter left to write to finish the first draft. It was a Friday night and we were beat and watching the season finale of the X Files, okay? Mulder's old man gets whacked and my wife lets out a yell from the couch. Her water had broken. About twenty-six hours later, James D is born. I didn't get back to work on the book for months. When I read what I had, I came close to burning it all. But here's a curious thing, and it reinforces my notion that some books want very much to be written into the world. Word ended up being a novel concerned with the meaning of books, of writing, of reading. And the reading I did in the year or two that followed my son's birth began to coalesce, to all come together and form a kind of metabook, and the metabook began to inform my thoughts about my manuscript. And those thoughts, slowly but persistently, radiated my manuscript and evolved it into what it ultimately became.

Which begs the question, what were you reading?

Over the course of that period, I read Ernst Pawel's magnificent biography of Kafka, The Nightmare of Reason, over and over. I couldn't leave it alone. It was like the bloody socket left in the wake of the pulled tooth. I couldn't keep my tongue from roaming through it. The book became, for a time, a touchstone. I had two copies of it. Kept one in the house and one in the car. I'd wake up and read snatches of it. I'd read sentences at traffic lights. Pawel's book intertwined with David Lehman's Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, they bounced off one another and then they bounced off my sleepless brain. Maybe one time too many, eh? And, of course, I went back and reread Anne Frank's diary in the midst of all this rethinking. And slowly, I began to make notes about how a book I'd hoped would be a stripped-to-the-bone joy ride might be transformed into something else. Listen, I've been on an anti-irony kick for a while, but it strikes me that the single book I consciously tried to assemble for speed and purity became, over time, my most dense work so far.

Looking back, was it a difficult book to write?

When I hear writers use the word "grueling" in relation to their writing life I want to roll my eyes. On my bad days, I want to reach for my grandfather's billy club. That said, it was the toughest book I've written. It was a reckless undertaking, maybe moronic, to write about the holocaust and language theory and the intersection of those two subjects using a genre format.

Do you think you were successful?

Honestly, that's never for me to judge. To step back and broaden your question, we're never successful. There's a story about writer Lorrie Moore that may or may not be apocryphal, but which sums up the nature of the compulsion beautifully. The story goes that she takes a pencil into the bookstore and makes changes to the published book as it sits on the shelf waiting to be purchased. The only thing better would be to get the name of each buyer and mail them successive drafts, changes, betterments until one or the other, writer or reader, dies. Were it possible to do this, I'd send different versions of the book to different readers.

Why?

Why not? The acts of reading and writing are connected in immensely complicated ways, I think. I'm old fashioned enough to genuinely believe each act is sacramental. That every reader remakes every book in the act of reading. The reader takes the raw material the writer provides and invents her own book. If I supplied a slew of differing raw materials to each inventor, we'd fabricate more and more stories, we'd up the ante geometrically.

That makes me want to ask you about your own reading habits.

Influence is a tricky and fascinating subject, I think. I recall in my early twenties trying to work my way through Luis Zufoksy's A and, in the midst of my reading, hearing he was an "influence" on Robert Creeley. This floored me, but at the time my conception of influence was extremely literal. Evidence of influence may not exist in the work itself, as a force that helped shape style and voice. Sometimes I think the most profound influences are those writers who jar our worldview, alter our personal cosmology.

As a kid, I spent every found dime at the corner drug store on paperbacks. The day the cost of paperback rose from 60 to 75 cents was a bitch of a day for me. I read whatever was stocked in the little black wire spin rack next to the cash register. I sometimes say that the traveling paperback salesman that supplied Rexall drugstores throughout New England was my first writing teacher. As a kid, I just read everything - the Hardy Boys series and Jack London and Ray Bradbury. I had a period in my mid-teens when I devoured a lot of Harlan Ellison stories. But the biggest bolt of lightening hit at 16, on that day in Spanish class, when a kid turned around and asked if I'd read Jack Kerouac. On the Road was the first book that changed me as a person. This is a cliché at this point, I know. But nothing was the same for me after that reading experience. Nothing's been the same since. More than any other, that one book made me want to beat myself into a writer. A few years later, Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 worked the same kind of spell on me. Just disassembled my identity and my sense of the world. A few years after that I immersed myself in Ulysses and became fairly enamored of the idea of the book as universe. When I was writing my first journeyman short stories, in my early twenties, a friend, a teacher, pointed me to Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love when it was first published. Carver's voice seduced me and, ultimately, took over for a time and I wrote imitation-Carver stories for about a year.

As a reader, I've always been fond of obsessing over a newly discovered writer who rings the bell for you. I remember going on an extended John Barth binge at one point, just tearing through Barth. They almost lost me forever in LETTERS. That's just a stunning book. My sister, who's a professor of Spanish, turned me on fairly early to all the Latin American Boom writers, Borges and Garcia Marquez and Cortazar. Some of Cortzar's stories had a big impact on me and I think you can still see some of the lasting effects in my stuff.

All of these writers and all of these books helped shape me to varying degrees. But so did a lot of other things. Hearing Springsteen's "Jungleland" at 15 was an important moment, you know? That song was a book. It was pop, but it had this scope and this density. It was a noir epic. It had characters and plot progression, metaphor and a tragic view. It sounded like the city, all these interweaving dramas unspooling through the night. As a teen, I wanted to just radiate myself with that vision and atmosphere and melodramatic intensity and spew it out in a big fat book. Tramping downtown with my friends during that same year, paying a buck for a rerelease double-feature at the Paris Cinema, watching Assault on Precinct 13 and Mean Street, Dirty Harry and It's Alive, all this weird pop jive, it went into me and took root. And it mixed with all of the sundry media mentioned above and came to build the platform, both conscious and subconscious, I write from.

Like most writers, I've got an abundance of early, dreadful, unpublished work, which calls out to be destroyed. I think about such things, probably, too much. But since I don't know when the bus will jump the road and run me down, why don't I take precautions tonight and feed the fire with my juvenilia? This year's debate about what Hemingway "would have wanted" should be instructive, as should the endless and, to me, endlessly fascinating Kerouac estate war. You can't trust friends to do the job after you're gone. Max Brod, bless him, ignored his buddy's last request. But I can understand the desire to get the job done by putting it on someone else. It's a little like suicide, isn't it? You're erasing some part of your existence. Jim Crumley once told me about a moment in his life when he walked to his fireplace and heaved in 1000 pages of a novel he'd been working on for a decade. Because he made the determination that it "wasn't any good." I admire him for that kind of instinctual self-honesty almost as much as I admire the books he deemed to share with us. I've got reams of putrid shite taking up closet space. And while I'm not sure why, at the moment, it's extant, I think it has something to do with a kind of queasy nostalgia I have for the person, the writer, I was when those crippled, doomed works took form. They're some kind of a map I can look back on and see how I got from point A to point B. From time to time I wonder if they might, at some crucial point, offer up a word, a moment, I need. However unlikely, they might yield a functioning lung or kidney at the precise moment I need the organ. There's a terrible novel and dozens of stories I'll certainly destroy, probably sooner rather than later. But it'll take some real fortitude to shred my very first novel. For all its flaws and they are legion the arduous, three-year journey of making that book transformed me into a novelist. I have a crystalline memory of the night I finished this book, of stacking those 600 pages and resting them on my desk and looking at this physical manifestation of years of doubt and excitement, of losing my way and discovering, so slowly, my voice. I recall that the manuscript was thicker than my city phone directory. And for a moment that night, I suspended any thoughts of quality, of aesthetic value, and took a rare pleasure in the simple fact of the book's existence. From a very early age, I had been aware that the only thing I wanted to do in my life was write. Staring at that thick block of a manuscript, I felt, for a brief instant, that I'd answered a calling. I know it likely sounds pathetic, but there you are. So it'll take some effort to scratch that one.

What do you wish you'd written? Who do you love, books-wise?

Let me use the standard boilerplate disclaimer favored by every writer who's ever been asked that question: the danger in making such lists is that a). I'll leave out somebody I shouldn't leave out and b). today's list might not be tomorrow's list. Hell, this morning's list might not be tonight's list. (There are writers who effected me deeply, influenced my own growth as a writer, my aesthetic and perhaps my voice, that I no longer reread. I'm done with them.) I'd rather duck the question and say that I read for some ideal combination of voice and vision. That if you speak to me in a seductive voice, from an interesting perspective, I'll listen to any story that you have to tell. That said, it is an efficient yardstick of value, isn't it? which writers cause you to part with cold cash on publication day? Who do you own in hardcover? It's more than likely I'll be in line of the day a new DeLillo or Pynchon hits the shelves. And within the week I'll probably have a new Robert Stone or Paul Auster or Jonathan Carroll or Steve Erickson. Regarding genre folk, or, rather, folk who, for better or worse, have been labeled "genre folk" for so long we pretty much accept the label: I get a rush from the usual suspects Dan Woodrell, Jerome Charyn, Jim Crumley, James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, George Pelecanos. I love Thompson and I love Goodis. I love a lot of those Black Lizard guys that Barry Gifford reclaimed for us. I was thrilled to learn of Norton's Old School Books project. I love the possibility of reclamation, of resurrecting writers that escaped us the first time 'round or were forgotten along the way. I can't tell you what a buzz I get when a critic or a publisher or some word-of-mouth movement brings a lost writer back to the surface. A few years back, when I found Profit and Loss by C. Gus French, I was just high for a week. Nobody knows French anymore. Not a single book remains in print. I've got a small press interested recently I've agreed to do the introduction. I'd love to put this fully subversive pulp mythmaker into a few hands again.

The most honest compliment I think a writer can give another writer is "Goddamn, I wish I'd written that." It's a fine child's game. Very likely, the single piece of fiction I most wish I'd written would be Joyce's "The Dead." I wish I'd written The Trial and The Magic Mountain and Ulysses and Absolom, Absolom and On the Road and One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gravity's Rainbow and White Noise. No big surprises. But it's a game that never ends. If I turn my head at this instant and steal a quick look at my study bookshelves, I'll immediately see dozens of random contemporary novels, mostly American, both genre and mainstream, that I wish I'd written: Bones of the Moon by Jonathan Carroll and Geek Love by Katherine Dunn and Misery by Stephen King and Easy Travel to Other Planets by Ted Mooney and Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien. I close my eyes and take a second look and suddenly there's Dog Soldier's and The Universal Baseball Association. Carver's What We talk About and O'Connor's Wise Blood and Roth's The Ghost Writer and Didion's Play It As It Lays. A third look and there's Red Harvest and Blue Eyes and The Last Good Kiss. You know, how much time do you have?

What are your rules about writing sex?

I'm not one for rules and regs. To me, most of the time, rules and regs are the deathblow, so to say, of the creative impulse. Maybe this sounds simplistic to you but I think the writer should work in a manner that's most natural to him and which most effectively serves his particular story. I don't shy away from sexually explicit passages. I don't find them any easier or harder to write than any other kind of scenes. I do shy away from writers and critics who say this is the way to handle sexuality in your work. Legislate the constructions of your own books. If you don't like mine, leave them on the shelf like everyone else.

Can an American writer disregard politics?

The simplest way I can frame a response is also, I suppose, the most tired. But I honestly think, even in this day and age, maybe more than ever in this day and age, these waning days of the book culture, that writing is, in and of itself, a political act. The very notion that you can transcribe your vision and share it with another is an ardently political notion, suffuse with hope and faith. I disagree, at some fundamental level, with anyone who thinks one can write and refuse any kind of belief in redemption. That's the paradox of the noir form: we write stories of hopelessness, of a perpetual descent into the abyss, and yet, the act of making stories is an act of faith. Inherent in the act is the belief that we're capable of vision, capable of codifying vision, capable of transmitting vision, capable of negotiating the transmission. That's the very reason we feed on stories they give form to the concerns that have rolled around inside us since the beginning, since we straightened up and got the knuckles off the ground. Stories tweak our perpetual, subconscious ruminations about all the big ticket items. Love and hate and death and God and identity and fear. The greatest bond we have is our eternal need for stories. What platform we use to deliver those stories is another question we could argue about all night in a warm diner. But the need, to me, is one of the chief definitions of the human. One of Philip K. Dick's obsessive themes was "what is human?" Often, his answer was "the capacity for compassion." A wonderful, problematic answer. I'll stick with my story test. Machines don't need stories. Things without souls do not need stories. Listen, I know what I sound like as I say these things. But when it comes to narrative, I'm a true believer. This is the font where I've drawn meaning throughout my life.

Do films do it for you?

Most of the writers I know both love film, and, to some extent, bemoan the usurping of the narrative tradition by film. But what are you going to do? You're either a novelist or a filmmaker. You want to make films, knock yourself out. Go to film school and claw your way into the industry. But don't ever believe that the stories you tell will be anything but collaborations. I read for individual vision and voice. So far, filmed images can't provide that, can't deliver a fully transforming experience for me, at least not in the way I define it. Perhaps that's a generation problem. But here's one way I think about the difference between the two mediums. When I enter a theater and the lights go down and the film is thrown on the screen, I'm an easy mark to entertain. I've never walked out on a movie and, to the best of my memory, I've only wanted to walk once. But what makes me simultaneously amused and annoyed are those three words that often flash on the screen before or after the title: "A Film By." At this point in time, that credit is nothing but a pretension and a conceit. You might have written the screenplay and directed like an iron-fisted dictator. You might have also designed the costumes and built the sets. Maybe you even wrote the score and did the food service tables. But screw you, pal, it's still a story by you and dozens of other people. This simply isn't the case with the average novel. There are obvious exceptions what Maxwell Perkins did to or for Thomas Wolfe, for example. That's a collaboration. But when I read Kafka, I'm getting an individual nightmare. It's nothing but grace that the nightmare can be shared and universalised. It's grace that, upon receipt, I can take the nightmare and stretch it, warp it, let my own peculiar consciousness make it into something else. But I'm fairly insistent the novel can deliver individual, idiosyncratic vision and, at the present time, film simply cannot.

Despite this, movies are winning. Or maybe they won years ago and we're all still milling around the ring, tallying scorecards. I recall an interview in which Mailer said that he remembers when college students would have fistfights over books. I'm around enough college students to say I can't imagine such a scenario. But I guess I can imagine them coming to blows over a movie.

Maybe the better way to think about the question is to step as far back as possible and gain some perspective. The new forms are already on the road to us. The theorists are already busy at work, aren't they? I love Dennis Miller's line about virtual reality: The day an unemployed ironworker can pay $29.95 to bang Cindy Crawford, it's going to make crack look like candy. It's funny or it's frightening, but it's a dead-on acknowledgment, I think, of what we're sprinting toward.

But ultimately, the mechanism is probably unimportant. I was bemoaning the death of narrative fiction, in, yes, an e-mail to Dan Woodrell recently. And I wrote:

"What I wonder is if this is just true for me or for my generation and those that came before it. Maybe we've already bred the next level of 'readers' whose lives, whose consciousness, can be remade by film, by TV, by the virtually real revolution down the road, by the Matrix and Gibson's soap operas to the cortex. I'll be dead and buried by the time that happens, but I feel sometimes like I'm some 19C poet watching folks salivate over the penny dreadfuls."

And Dan wrote back:

"If I am at present the equivalent of a sixteenth century sonneteer, well so what? I've read a few aged sonnets in my day."

And that was exactly what I needed to read. The mechanism is just the vehicle. The truths we need to rehear remain elemental. My sadness at watching the novel die is a personal, emotional reaction. And in this manner, it's also juvenile. As long as we remain human, in the Phildickian sense, there will still be readers and storytellers and they will still intersect at some sacred and beautiful point that will be the story. Even if you or I wouldn't recognise it.

All of my books have arrived in an instant. Someone tells me a story or hands me an artifact, and I realize as she's delivering it to me that it's a gift, it's a fertile ground where a story can grow. My first book, Box Nine, arrived on route 146 somewhere outside of Whitensville, Mass. My wife told me a story about working in a post office and finding a box that contained a dead bat. And my alarm went off. My antenna set to quivering. As I listened to her story, dozens of questions occurred to me Why do you send somebody a dead bat? What would you do to deserve finding a dead bat in your mailbox? Where do you get a dead bat if you need one? then dozens of possible answers occurred to me. So I woke at 5 the next morning and began writing a scene set in a post office late at night. And a mailman was discovering a terrible package. I didn't have a plot. I didn't have my characters. I had that space where I knew plot and characters would grow. Sometimes I tell people that half the process of being a writer is the continual honing of your antenna. That chronic hyper-awareness of the possibility of story in everything around you. The danger in that sensibility, of course, is that your life can be reduced only to fodder for your work.

Your books have a great sense of place...

I've lived my entire life within approximately two square miles. I sometimes think it might be convenient to carry business cards that read Worcester is not Quinsigamond. Worcester is, however, the place I know better than any other, with the exception of Quinsigmond. I spent uncountable hours driving around this city with my father. Through my eight-year-old eyes, this rustbelt mill town was a living story. I'm not sure I can say it better than that. All those half-destroyed factories, all those ethnic enclaves, all those rail yards, and scrap lots, and the ruined train station, all those streets that twisted and turned without logic, they all seemed both frightening and enormously intriguing. While to most of my boyhood friends, our town was the definition of a dead end, to me it was the antithesis of the mundane. Now, looking back, it was an amazingly elaborate noir set waiting for a film crew that never arrived. Lots of dark alleys and shadowy warehouses and decayed Victorian manses. But I don't plug the nuts and bolts of my city into my book. Instead, I let my imagination warp the city, enlarge it. I pillage its DNA and radiate it until it glows neon.

You're with HarperCollins in the US?

A timely question given the sacking of the mid-list. I can't say I've had any true nightmares in this regard. My first publisher in the US was Mysterious Press. Good folks who were very nice to me. Sara Ann Freed is a gem. But ultimately, I couldn't seem to write the kinds of books they were best at selling. I'm with HarperCollins now. My UK publisher is Ion Mills at No Exit. I'll tell you, it's a sweet moment when you look at your new publisher's list and find all the books you want to read. For me, it's a sign they "get" you. Nice sharing a publisher with Marc Behm and James Sallis and Kem Nunn and Dan Woodrell and Charles Willeford. All writers I respect enormously. Should I stop now, Ion?

The major commercial publishing houses are, by and large, minor subsidiaries of multinational conglomerates. As such, they only exist to turn an adequate profit for the stockholders. Publishers were probably always businesspeople, but in the past, most were, simultaneously, bookpeople. They were in this particular business because they loved writers and writing. That is now a quaint notion, I think. I'm not being dramatic to say that accountants and marketing people decide what books are published today. Books, once the repository of our cultural life, are now thought of no differently than hamburgers. It is not enough that a book earn a profit. It must earn x profit in y time. If it's still under the warming light when the buzzer goes off, send it to the furnace.

This saddens me less as reader than as writer. As a reader, I worry only that I'll have less access to the quirkiest writers because they don't stoke the profit engine efficiently enough. But while that's a bit depressing, I can still go back and read the old oddball visionaries and

As a writer, however, it's a pretty terrifying time to be making new books. But dealing with the reality of the corporate publishing climate, however, has required a renewal of my understanding of the fundamental difference between writing and publishing. Writing accessing and transcribing that dreamlife is a deeply personal experience, a meditative plunge into the realm of myth (even if its cheesy myth), by which the writer gains not only some measure of meaning but, sometimes, moments of peace and joy.

Jaysus, it sounds like a lot of pretentious bull, doesn't it, Eve? Can't be helped, I guess. I've never quite been able to follow some of the smartest advice I've ever been given: The wise man says nothing.

As an adolescent wanting desperately to be a writer, I bought fully into the bardic American myth. I just loved the notion of the traveling American writer, read the biographies of London and Kerouac and Hemingway. And as a teen, I was convinced this would be my future: adventuring out into the world, then returning to the monastic desk and working the alchemy by which your life becomes your art. I was young and stupid. Post college, I fully embraced the antithetical notion of craft. I had a Flaubert quote tacked above my desk for years something to the effect that you should be orderly in your life so you might be wild in your work. You know, Thomas Mann saying writers should dress like bankers. Don't call attention to yourself. Observe and transcribe. Be a recording machine. Today, I'm pragmatic and, frankly, less interested in the question. Maybe it's a young writer's question. It's so damn hard today just sustaining your own conception of yourself as a working writer, your own conviction, that you need to go with what works, keep your head down and hold tight to your voice.

Next up?

I've been researching a book on the Brazilian surfistas, the street kids who surf on the tops of commuter trains. I understand there's been some instances of this here in the UK the past few years as well. It's been a slow process. The book has come to me more fully, in the note-taking stage, before the actual writing, than any other. I'm hoping it comes to fruition. But something new commandeered my attention just weeks ago and it's been coming nonstop and quickly. My guess is that one or the other will force its will in the coming months. And I can only say, may the best book win.