(Image via New York Magazine's Vulture.)

(The conclusion of our interview with Joseph O'Neill.  Tomorrow, we'll be giving away a copy of the paperback edition of Netherland.)

TEV: You described yourself as a conventional soul. How so?

Joseph O’Neill: You know, my socks match. Have I – when did I say that?

TEV: In the Telegraph piece that just ran.

Joseph O’Neill: Oh. Well, I suppose I am conventional.

TEV: Well I know I am. But I’m accused of that all the time.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. Who’s unconventional, in a relevant context?

TEV: I don’t know, I suppose people would say William T. Vollman is unconventional and imagine that people thought David Foster Wallace was unconventional.

Joseph O’Neill: Frankly, anyone who is a novelist is almost by definition conventional. The idea that you create a body of words, a lengthy body of words, in the hope that people will read it, is conventional.

Also, almost any novel posits all sorts of conventional binary oppositions: reader-writer, creator-consumer, eyes-page. There are all sorts of pre-set structures. So, in other words, it’s very hard for writers to be unconventional, except within the very narrow ambit of literary considerations. And even then it’s practically impossible.

TEV: Sort of conventional unconventionality?

Joseph O’Neill: I’m all in favor of the renewal of the form. I just think that the problem with ‘conventional’ is that it’s an analytically meaningless word – it’s either a specific word, meaning reliant on convention, which everybody is. Or it’s a pejorative word, which is cheap.

TEV: You seemed to be using it self-deprecatingly.

Joseph O’Neill: I can’t have been talking about myself as a writer…

TEV: No, I think it was mainly living arrangements and styles and the way one lives.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. I suppose I am conventional in those terms.

TEV: It’s not a pejorative term in this question.

Joseph O’Neill: Now, if someone says, “A is a conventional writer,” what you are politely saying is, “Don’t bother reading A. He or she is terribly dull.”

TEV: No originality.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah.

TEV: How long have you lived at the Chelsea Hotel. And how have, if at all, have they reacted to being immortalized?

Joseph O’Neill: The Chelsea Hotel was immortalized long before I ever turned up.

TEV: That’s true, but they’ve gotten a new wave of attention.

Joseph O’Neill: Well if anything, I’ve mortalized it, because the hotel seems to be heading rapidly downhill. I’ve lived there since ’98, though we had an interlude in Brooklyn for a year and a half. And I love the hotel, it’s sort of a little village inside Manhattan.

TEV: Why do you think there is a resistance among young, American writers to what you have called the lyrical moment?

Joseph O’Neill: I don’t know, actually. If there is, it may be because it’s so hard to write.

TEV: So, we’re lazy?

Joseph O’Neill: No, I mean that if it were the case that everyone could write a so-called lyrical novel if they wanted to but had decided against it, then their resistance to it has authority. But is that really the case? I doubt it very much.

Take Zadie Smith, for example, who is resistant to the lyrical realist novel at the moment. I think she’s allowed to be, because she’s actually written that way in her last book, and has kind of shown that she can do it and has come away from it with reservations. She’s earned her resistance.

That said, there are a lot of critics, or readers, who don’t have a taste for so-called lyrical writing and can’t be expected to write lyrically before they voice a negative opinion about it. And again, you can’t really argue with taste. If people prefer to read something else, that’s fine.

You’ve mentioned this resistance of younger Americans, who are you thinking of, in particular?

TEV: No one necessarily in particular, really. Rather, I was thinking back to your comments about American writers under 65 and coupling that with things that you talked about in your interview about the lyrical moment. It seems to me like there is a nexus of those of those concerns.

Joseph O’Neill: Yes.

TEV: Because I agree with you. It’s interesting that you have brought up Zadie Smith because I was going to ask about her next. I think that a lot of people draw the wrong kind of conclusions with a piece like the one that she wrote. I think that it sets up some false oppositions. I feel like this form of the novel is capacious enough to accommodate all different styles

Joseph O’Neill: Yes.

TEV: And the notion that one has to chose between Netherland or Remainder just seems silly. I liked Remainder a great deal, as well. I don’t feel that they’re mutually exclusive, that one must declare an allegiance.

Joseph O’Neill: I’d actually read and liked Remainder before that piece. And I thought it was a perfectly good piece of writing. I’m not sure I would describe it as unconventional, not least because that description, as I’ve said, would not mean very much.

TEV: Yes. But I think that some of the sentiments that she expresses hold sway among this younger generation of writers, whether it’s people coming out of the McSweeney’s School or the purveyors of the uber-ironic, the tendency toward a hip nihilism or something like that that. That they mistrust, in essence, the idea of a beautiful sentence. Some people find that corny, the notion of a beautiful sentence.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, it depends on how you define them as beautiful. I mean, you know, Foster Wallace wrote many beautiful sentences. I mean, there’s nothing but beautiful sentences in his work. Even though he had a particular way of doing it. What makes a sentence beautiful, for me, is its conscientiousness. A hip, ironic sensibility is not necessarily conscientious. Neither is a sensibility that latches on to dusks and dawns and roses.

TEV: You spoke in the The Guardian of “going for it” in Netherland. I’d like you talk a little bit more about what that really means.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, it means that I just wanted to write something that I felt I wasn’t controlling. I wanted to write something that I couldn’t write. And so, simply on a level of language, and a level of attentiveness, I tried to concentrate a lot more. I mean, my default mode is comedy and I can write a comic novel very quickly, and I decided not to do that. I was going to try something harder, less natural to me. And also, not shrinking from politics and New York. If you think about it, writing about New York is a crazy idea.

TEV: Such a rich tradition exists before you …

Joseph O’Neill: Exactly. Why not reinvent the wheel while you’re at it?

TEV: What do you make of labels like post-colonial, post-9/11 and other things thrown around the book?

Joseph O’Neill: I think they’re fine. I think they reflect the fact that people are engaged by the book. People are entitled to attach whatever label they want. Of course, they may not always conform to my labels.

TEV: And what would your labels be?

Joseph O’Neill: Well, I’m not labeling. I’m not going there.

TEV: Do you know anything about your next book yet?

Joseph O’Neill: I know something important about my next book, yes. I know two very important things about my next book.

TEV: I can’t imagine the things you’d care to share.

Joseph O’Neill: Once your tape is off, I’ll tell you about it.

TEV: All right, I’ll get to tease my readers. How do you find literary celebrity? I mean, I know it’s a loaded and diminished term in its way.

Joseph O’Neill: If literary celebrity means sitting at the Getty Center, having a nice lunch and staring out at whatever it is I’m staring at over here, the green hills of L.A., I’d have to say, it’s extremely agreeable. What was it that Updike said about celebrity being a mask that eats at the face of its wearer? I would say that obscurity—I’m talking about long-term, grown-up obscurity—has the same effect, only far worse. Obscurity really is a killer.

TEV: I was thinking more in terms of the company you keep. You’ve mentioned you hang out mostly with cricket players. Has your literary circle expanded as a result of this? Do you make more time with writers?

Joseph O’Neill: I hang out with cricket players on summer weekends; that’s pretty much it. I don’t want to overstate that side of things. I’ve met some writers at readings. I don’t come from that world of creative writing schools and the communities springing out of that. And I don’t come from that background of having readers from an early age, which so many well-known writers do. I marveled at that piece in the New Yorker about Ian McEwan’s 60th birthday. What basically transpires is that his lifelong friends have been Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Salman Rushdie. And there they are like the Three Musketeers, plus D’Artagnan, in this famous photograph of the four of them together. And at the same wedding, Christopher Hitchens rolls in and Zadie Smith, too, and tying it all together is this amazing web of literary fame, that ... well ... I doubt very much that my 60th birthday will be celebrated in the same way. If I’m lucky enough to reach that age.

TEV: Is there any possibility that the success of Netherland will bring your early books back into print?

Joseph O’Neill: They’ve gone back into print in the UK, this summer.

TEV: Nothing in the U.S. yet?

Joseph O’Neill: I think Blood-Dark Track is supposed to come back. I believe that the idea is to wait until this book has had its day and then bring the others back. I think that they fear that I’m going to spend many years between now and my next book.

TEV: So, they want to space them out?

Joseph O’Neill: Yes, they want to space them out -- the rather dubious pleasures of my early novels. Which of course I can’t bring myself to read a word of. Who wrote them?

TEV: James Wood, whom we were discussing earlier, has written about reliably unreliably narrators versus unreliably reliable narrators, placing more of a premium on the second one. This unreliable narrator who we sense is discovering as we are when -- I think that James Jones (from the first novel, This Is the Life) feels very much the first kind of quintessentially reliably unreliable narrator, whereas Hans seems this idealized second type. How do you approach this question of narrator reliability?

Joseph O’Neill: Well, the moment you have the first person narrator, it’s almost inevitable that the narrator is going to be unreliable. Unless you think you have created a superhuman type who is capable only of correctly analyzing the world. There’s an inherent ambiguity in the first person; you always have to ask yourself, “Who’s telling me the story?” And the more apparently reliable the narrator, the better in a way. Because the unreliability, as I think Wood suggests, becomes much more interesting, and certainly truer to the philosophical murk which lies beneath the white page.

TEV: If you accept, and you may not accept this as a premise, that writers have one or two great themes that obsess them. What would you say yours are? And feel free to reject the premise, entirely.

Joseph O’Neill: I don’t actually have the answer to this. I’m not sure that I entirely accept the premise. I mean there are certain things that obviously have to be reckoned with. Death, or essentially, how to attribute meaning to it. Ditto love. And I suppose the form itself—the novel. So, these are concerns that are unavoidable. Apart from that, I don’t know.

TEV: Have you been following the Robert Allen Stanford scandal?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah.

TEV: Do you have any cricket-related thoughts on that controversy unfolding?

Joseph O’Neill: It was pretty obvious to me, early on, that this man was a walking bubble. And now it turns out it seems that he is a deceitful walking bubble, as well. So, I’m not surprised. But it is weird how this book, Netherland, has this absurd relationship with current events. I mean, who could have foreseen that a dodgy American cricket entrepreneur would be in the news? The fates are conspiring in favor of this novel.

TEV: And it keeps renewing itself. Giving you another go.

Joseph O’Neill: I know! It’s great fun.

TEV: How involved will you be, if at all, in the proposed film adaptation? Do you have any interest in that?

Joseph O’Neill: I’m going to be starring in it. I’ll be in the cricket parts.

TEV: Cricket consultant?

Joseph O’Neill: I mean, we’ll see. They’re still looking for a screenwriter.

TEV: So you have no interest in taking that on?

Joseph O’Neill: Absolutely not.

TEV: My last question is do you really think American’s can’t understand cricket? And, do you watch baseball at all?

Joseph O’Neill: I do watch baseball. I do understand it.

TEV: How do you find baseball?

Joseph O’Neill: I love baseball.

TEV: You do?

Joseph O’Neill: I love baseball, even though it’s the DOS-mode of cricket: “Are you having trouble downloading? Do you want the slower version?”

TEV: Does it seem unendurably slow to you?

Joseph O’Neill: No, baseball is not slower in terms of its activity. But it’s definitely a simpler bat and ball game.

TEV: Have you been to the cricket fields here in Van Nuys?

Joseph O’Neill: No, I haven’t.

TEV: It’s funny, after I read your book, I was talking to an Australian writer friend of mine. And I found that there is a cricket patch here in Van Nuys and I said, “Ok, you’ve got to take me out there one afternoon and explain it to me so that I can watch this game and see how it works.” And he promised he would but he said he’s been out there once or twice and it’s rather depressing. It’s a very shabby little patch of earth.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. You just don’t have real cricket fields in the United States. Except in Philadelphia, where the old cricket clubs these days have a cricket festival for a week or so in the springtime. Then the tennis nets come back up again.

TEV: Let me rephrase the question, do you think Americans can understand cricket?

Joseph O’Neill: Yes.

TEV: It’s not beyond us?

Joseph O’Neill: Well, I’m American now.

TEV: You’re a legacy case, you bring the knowledge with you.

Joseph O’Neill: I think they could understand. I think that Barack Obama certainly could.

TEV: Well, if Barack Obama picks up cricket, then you your book will really have its future sealed.

(Note: This interview was conducted well before President Obama added Netherland to his reading list.  This concludes our talk with Joseph O'Neill but please do come back tomorrow when we'll be giving away a copy of the new paperback edition of Netherland.)

TEV: Your wife was your editor at FSG and she turned down your second novel. Have you gotten over that or is it still a thing?

Joseph O’Neill: I’m still punishing her for that ...

TEV: You wrote your first books, while you were working as a lawyer. What sort of law did you practice? Do you miss practicing the law at all? And how did you negotiate your writing time then?

Joseph O’Neill: I was a barrister in London, which means you are self-employed. And so you are more or less able to determine the amount of work that you do. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that, because to practice as a barrister you have to be invited to join a set of chambers. Those invitations are rare and precious, because should you accept the invitation, you are tenured, you are essentially set for life. And your chambers will have certain expectations, the main one being that you turn up for work.

So you have a professional responsibility that weighs on you, happily in my case. I concentrated mainly on business law. From time to time, I would clear four months off, and ask for and get the indulgence of my colleagues, for which I’m still very grateful

TEV: Did they know what you were going off to do?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah.

(Photo: ADAM NADEL; the Telegraph.)

TEV: Beyond the obvious questions of the time and ability to concentrate, how do you compare the process of writing a novel post-legal career? Is it just a question of having the great liberty to work or does it bring its own set of complications?

Joseph O’Neill: I can’t really compare myself now to how I was as a lawyer. I now have children, which wasn’t the case when I was a lawyer. I’m now older. I’m a different person. So, in order to answer that question, I would have to fly to England and start practicing as a barrister and try to write novels and be a father and spouse at the same time. I think that would be really, really hard. It’s extremely demanding work, the law.

TEV: How many languages do you speak?

Joseph O’Neill: Three. English, French and Dutch.

TEV: Did you speak Turkish when you were a boy?

Joseph O’Neill: When I was four years old, or something, I went to pre-school in Turkey and I spoke Turkish like all the other boys there. And I forgot it all. And I also spoke Iranian, or Persian, when I lived in Iran, but I forgot all that, as well. I’m not sure which came first, English or French. Both, I suppose. I’m told by my parents that in Mozambique, when I was a very, very young child, I spoke Portuguese with the Portuguese-speaking nanny. So, I grew up speaking lots of languages and forgetting all of them.

TEV: As a child it’s so much easier to pick up those languages.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, you pick them up because your vocabulary is restricted to 100 words anyway.

TEV: So you need what you need, and you can express that need in any number of languages.

Joseph O’Neill: Exactly, you can be a fluent Portuguese speaker at age two and only know ten words of Portuguese.

TEV: So, you have this really extraordinary life and upbringing. I’m very interested by the internationality of it. What do you consider “home” today? Do you think about that? I would imagine you must. And what does “home” mean to you?

Joseph O’Neill: Well, that’s a really complicated question.

TEV: You spoke of being previously “exercised over nationality”; I think that’s what you said.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. I just don’t know ... the phrase “I’m going home” refers to where I live, which currently is New York City. But is New York City my home? I suppose it must be.

TEV: But isn’t there a resonance that accompanies this question of home?

Joseph O’Neill: I know, I know. When I was growing up, I thought Holland was my home. Then I thought London was my home. And now I think that New York is home. So eventually, you start thinking, well perhaps one is essentially homeless. If I go back to Holland – I’m going to spend seven weeks in Amsterdam this spring – I have no sense of going home anymore. And when I get back to London now, I feel somewhat alien. The only place now I feel like I go home to is New York.

TEV: I wonder if slightly advantageous as a writer, from that perspective, being able to slip in and out of all sorts of sensibilities?

Joseph O’Neill: I think traditionally it would be a disadvantage. Because so much of novel writing is concerned with shared memories of childhood and national culture, and Netherland was the first time I was able to use childhood memories. I have no deep roots in any culture, no natural allegiance to any particular culture.

TEV: Is the book available in Holland?

Joseph O’Neill: The Dutch edition is just about to come out.

TEV: I was told that that Dutch translations tend to come quickly because the Dutch are so English literate that if they don’t publish quickly in Dutch, the market is overtaken by English editions.

Joseph O’Neill: See, we are assuming that translators were interested in this book. They weren’t. Nobody was paying much attention until after the New York Times kindly intervened on my behalf.

TEV: Would that be Dwight Garner or Michiko Kakutani or both?

Joseph O’Neill: All the above. They saved my skin. James Wood, too.

TEV: What are your thoughts on the recent comments alleging an insularity of the American fiction? And along the same lines you’ve mentioned something about the American cupboard being bare, the under 65’s lacking the power of their predecessors.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah, well I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial statement. I grew up reading new novels by the likes of Bellow and Roth and Updike. I took it for granted that the world, and America in particular, was a bottomless reservoir of literary excellence. In retrospect, I can see how lucky I was. Beckett was around for the first 25 years of my life. Bellow was around all that time. Even Ralph Ellison was around, even though he wasn’t writing anything. I think even Richard Ford is over 65 now.

So you’ll have extremely accomplished younger novelists, of course. But you have nobody with these bodies of work. If you asked any of the writers under 65, “Do you acknowledge that the over 60s, the pension brigade, represent a difference of order of achievement?” I think they would have to say ‘yes.’ I mean, how do you contradict that? And it’s not just because longevity creates a larger oeuvre. These writers were substantially accomplished from an early age.

TEV: Do you think that this question of the insular nature of contemporary American fiction afflicts the younger generation in a way that it didn’t the Mailers and the Roths and the Bellows?

Joseph O’Neill: No, I think part of the problem for the young generation may be that they’re not insular enough. I mean, Updike and Bellow and Roth achieved their finest, most resonant effects by disregarding conventions of universality. You wrote about what American Jews, or what you have you, were up to in these little towns, and the world followed you.

TEV: Very particular and very personal.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. There is no space between these writers and their concerns. You rarely get the sense with them that they are just trying to write a novel. I’m talking about their most successful work. And I think they were appropriately insular with regard to their raw materials. I’m not sure who the Swedish commentator was who thought that this was somehow bad form.

TEV: He was a member of the Nobel Committee.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah, but what does that mean? We all have first-hand experiences with committees and who sits on them.

TEV: The counterpoint to his comment came when there was brief talk of opening the Booker Prize to Americans. And a British writer or judge, I can’t remember who, said she didn’t think British writers could stand up to the best Americans.

Joseph O’Neill: I do remember that. I think that would depend on the premise that the Booker is a virtuous prize that correctly sifts through contending novels of contending merits and identifies the most meritorious at the end of the day. If the Booker worked that way, then it might end up going to Philip Roth every year.

TEV: Since you’ve raised the question of the Booker, I might as well briefly discuss your thoughts around it. Have you read The White Tiger or are you curious?

Joseph O’Neill: I’ve not. Not yet.

TEV: Did you read any of the other short list titles? I’m not recalling what they are.

Joseph O’Neill: I’m not in a position to comment on the shortlist, although I have no reason to believe that these are anything other than excellent books. As I said, I don’t think literary competitions are the ultimate gold standard, but you have to wish the shortlistees well. They paid their dues.

TEV: Do you feel like you are being expected to express a disappointment that you don’t feel? In these discussions around this subject?

Joseph O’Neill: I think it’s natural for people to think that you are disappointed, because the Booker Prize is perceived to be a fantastic prize to win. And it is a fantastic prize to win because you sell hundreds of thousands of copies of your book. So, from a financial point of view, it’s wonderful. See, my problem is I’ve never won a prize. So, (a) I don’t have an instinct to validate the whole prize system since I’ve never been validated by it myself. I’ve never been shortlisted for anything. But (b), I think prizes for books are great because why not have prizes for books?

TEV: And as you say, it’s certainly beneficial for the author that wins.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah, and if I win a prize, then I will be profoundly in favor of it.

TEV: Let’s talk about the American sense of possibility, with which Netherland is imbued. It seems to me that it’s more strongly felt by people who come here from somewhere else. Perhaps that Americans, natural born, may tend to take for granted.

Joseph O’Neill: Immigrants naturally feel enriched by new possibilities, since almost by definition these didn’t exist in their country of origin. As for the natives, America is a notoriously rigid society. I mean, my understanding is that your grandfather’s occupation is a much more reliable predictor of your occupation in the US than it would be in England, say, or in Ireland. So, the local sense of possibility is largely a phenomenon of brainwashing. People are indoctrinated.

TEV: You see that in the opposition to the estate tax, because everyone thinks that their day to become a millionaire is out in there the future somewhere.

Joseph O’Neill: I think that the idea of social and economic mobility works in America because of the promise of the jackpot. In America, there are jackpots out there, there’s no doubt about it. It’s a big market. (I know a little bit, a tiny bit about that, though the literary jackpot is relatively small in financial terms. All it means is that for a year or two your earnings resemble those of a nothing-special attorney.) If, for whatever reason, your book finds favor nationally, you can sell 80,000 copies in hardback. Whereas, in Britain – or in Ireland or in the European market--it’s very hard to sell in these quantities. There is no ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ ethos—or less of one.

TEV: So there isn’t an equivalent market out there.

Joseph O’Neill: I don’t think so.

(The fourth and concluding installment will be posted here tomorrow.)

(The second of a four-part interview.)

TEV: How do you develop your characters? And how often do they have real-life bases, and how much of that do you coral?

Joseph O’Neill: Well let’s just talk about Netherland. I have completely forgotten how I wrote my first two novels.

TEV: (plaintive) But I did all my homework ...

Joseph O’Neill: I know you have. Sorry about that. It was a complete waste of time to do your homework.

Let’s say we have a general idea of who the character is going to be. I need an entrepreneur, say. Who is this entrepreneur? You have the general notion and then you cast around in your mind for something from your life – the real world.

And in the case of Chuck Ramkissoon, he’s this Trinidadian cricket entrepreneur in New York. I had two specific men in mind who I thought of at the beginning. After a while, Chuck appeared.

It’s not that you trying to write about these actual people. But you feel authorized by their example to invent someone like Chuck. An imaginary voice might say, “Well this guy seems implausible, who is this guy?” And I can mentally answer, “Well actually, you know, I can give you his phone number.” Or, “I can give you the phone numbers of two people and you can take it from there.”

I mean, if I make up a character whom I know nothing about –- say a Cambodian banker-- I mean it might work on the page: “Oh here comes the Cambodian banker.” But, it will always, to me, have this tinny, hollow kind of feel. So, I am reassured by real life, by actuality.

TEV: Do you have any writing superstitions?

Joseph O’Neill: No.

TEV: Do you require any specific conditions to be able to work?

Joseph O’Neill: That sounds like I need a sort of pampering. “Yes, I need a tumbler of half sparkling, half still water. And scrambled egg whites brought to me in intervals of four hours.” There are actors who have these personal assistants who are like manservants…

TEV: I know, I know. But, I mean, there are some people that can sit and write in the airport waiting lounge, and there are others who need their chair and their view.

Joseph O’Neill: Oh! I don’t need any specific conditions to get ideas. When it comes to actually writing the sentences that ostensibly will stay in the book, then I do need to have as much isolation as possible. And also, no time pressure.

Which may be why I write most productively when I disappear into the depths of Ontario where a friend of mine has a cabin. I will write for 2 or 3 weeks. It’s a wonderful feeling to know you can warm up for 4-5 hours, not doing anything, and then still have 12 hours in which to write. Especially if you have got, you know, a thousand children, as I have.

TEV: Do you work in the morning or in the evening?

Joseph O’Neill: I probably work in the morning ... and afternoon ... and evening.

TEV: How much time do you spend at the computer? Does it distract you from writing? Do you read blogs at all?

Joseph O’Neill: Literary blogs do you mean?

TEV: Just blogs in general.

Joseph O’Neill: I sometimes read blogs. During the election, I would read Huffington Post a lot, all the various kinds of blogging that was going on there. And TPM.

TEV: Did it interfere with your ability to work?

Joseph O’Neill: Oh undoubtedly. And thankfully it does. Otherwise life wouldn’t be worth living. That’s the thing about Canada, there is no internet reception there. I am addicted to following various sports around the globe, 24 hours a day.

TEV: What else, besides cricket, do you follow? Soccer?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah, soccer.

TEV: I should call it football, I suppose.

Joseph O’Neill: Football.

TEV: Have you been following the whole David Beckham returning to AC Milan story? And do you have a feeling one way or another on that?

Joseph O’Neill: Beckham belongs in Italy. That’s all I’m going to say about that. Sorry. I mean, I love L.A., but the guy is still a great footballer. He should be playing in Italy.

TEV: Do you think of your audience at all, when you are writing?

Joseph O’Neill: No. I’ve never had an audience. I’ve never had reason to think about that.

TEV: Do you expect that to change now?

Joseph O’Neill: In a way, and I’m certainly glad that I have actually found an audience after years of not having one. On the other hand, there is no way you can sit around for years writing a novel that nobody wants and nobody’s interested in if you are somebody whose sense of mission depends on the audience or editors or a third party reaction. So, I write for, you know, the famous bystander-self who reads one’s own work and is probably more critical than anybody.

TEV: Most of the writers that I speak to generally think it’s insidious to start worrying about the audience any way. All sorts of wrong decisions and wrong emphases creep into your work.

Joseph O’Neill: I think it can. I’m sure it does. Depends what you are writing.

TEV: If you are trying to write the next Harry Potter, then I suppose, the audience matters differently.

Joseph O’Neill: Right.

TEV: Do you keep a journal?

Joseph O’Neill: No.

TEV: Do you write letters?

Joseph O’Neill: No.

TEV: Do you read fiction while you are writing fiction?

Joseph O’Neill: I do. And I might do a couple of quick laps, and that’s it. It depends. Obviously, I can’t go seven years without reading a book. If I’m stuck for juice, I will go back to certain writers or investigate new writers and find out what’s going on.

TEV: Will there be any risk of seepage when that happens?

Joseph O’Neill: I hope so. I mean, you want a little bit of that. You know, you’ve got be grown up about influences. I think you’ve either got it or you haven’t. By ‘it’ I mean the knack of writing something valuable that’s your own. So if you are worried about being influenced, it’s almost a pointless worry. Either you’re going to be influenced or you’re not going to be influenced—it doesn’t change anything, it’s all about whether you have the knack. Anyway, the alternative is to not read anything. And no one can be a writer without being familiar with other writers.

TEV: And yet, all too often, I find myself in conversation with people who are writing, and I ask them what they are reading and it’s followed with blank stares.

Joseph O’Neill: Is that more the younger writers who give you that?

TEV: Generally.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, that I do find terrifying. I mean, I’ve only been in a creative writing class on one or two occasions, at least in a post-graduate setting ... I’m not going to say anything more.

TEV: How do you know when your novel is finished? Insofar as it’s ever finished.

Joseph O’Neill: I don’t know. I don’t know if there is a magic moment.

TEV: When did you know you were finished with Netherland?

Joseph O’Neill: I kept telling myself I’d nearly finished, to keep going. You know, when you talk to writers they all say, “Oh yeah, I’m just about finishing my book.” Then, about two years later, you go back to them and you say, “How did the book go?” They say, “Oh, I’m still just putting the finishing touches on it.” It can go on forever.

TEV: When writer friends tell me ‘they’re finishing’ I ask, “Well which finish is it?” There’s the first draft finish. The submission draft finish. There’s the copy edit finish. There’s multiple finishes before finishing. But surely there’s a moment when it feels done?

Joseph O’Neill: I supposed when you see it in print, then you know it’s finished. Too late to change it.

TEV: Moving to point of view, can you talk about your thoughts regarding the first person versus third person?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah, I find the third person very difficult. I do it in short stories, but… I’m sometimes tempted by a baroque third person. But that’s, again, hard to do or, oddly enough, too easy to do. Nothing about writing is straightforward, but it’s not especially difficult to write a humorous, verbally tricky fantasia, because that’s a way of dodging certain big challenges. The big challenge for me, as I said earlier, is intimacy. The third person seems particularly apt if you want to write a novel that is less intimate; the satiric novel comes to mind.

TEV: It’s a different feeling kind of work. Both reading it and writing it.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. But it can work really well. I mean look at someone like Jonathan Coe. Great third person writer. Great panoramic view of society and town and country and all the rest of it. He’s writing in a very specific tradition and really knows what he’s doing and can really do plot. My problem with third person, from a selfish point of view, is that I find it hard to write sentences that are ungratuitously interesting and at the same time don’t intrude or lapse into formal incoherence; and I’m interested in sentences that are both ends and means, because that’s the most interesting, high-stakes stuff, the stuff I most want to read. Third person sentences, when I write them, seem to gravitate unduly towards the most efficacious, most simple, pared down. This raises the problem of reductiveness, of false transparency, of false authority.

Typically, a writer’s style matures towards simplicity and stays there. I’m attracted to the idea of arriving at simplicity and then going onward from there. There’s a part of me that believes that flat, conversational writing, which has undoubted strengths and is the most popular way of writing fiction, is playing it safe. It can be a little too well-behaved. It can reinforce established ways of seeing things. If your third person is a little frisky or frilly, people will ask, “Who is this narrator? Where does his personality come from?”

TEV: ... to whom does this sensibility belong or who is it being generated by?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It’s extremely hard to have that. And I’m not very interested in third person narrators (or first person narrators) who are distracted by their authorial existence, since at this point that is usually just too old hat for words and, if you’re not careful, drags the novel down to the level of a Wikipedia-deep philosophical footnote. And then you have the free indirect style, which means that you slide from the third to the first person. Herzog is a superb example. Also, third person narratives lend themselves, in my hands, to plottiness, and the problem with plot is that it becomes – and again, all this is from my point of view – it becomes excessively psychological and ordinary. Whereas if you want a narrative capable of the full, flickering range of empathies, the sort of empathies that everybody has, that approximate the depth and spottiness of human apprehension, you are able to draw that out much more in the first person. At least, that’s the case with me. I suppose it means I’m as limited as a writer.

(Part three of this four-part interview will be posted tomorrow.)

 

Joseph O'Neill at The Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA.  February 2009.

Back in February, Joseph O'Neill passed through Los Angeles, and we had the chance to sit down over lunch at the Getty Center for a long talk about Netherland, writing, cricket, literary celebrity, Zadie Smith and other assorted topics.  The Irish-born, Dutch-raised barrister-turned-novelist is the author of three novels and a memoir.  We'll be running the interview in four parts this week, and we'll finish up with a giveaway on Friday of the new paperback edition of Netherland.

TEV: How do your books begin? Do they begin with a voice or with a theme?

Joseph O’Neill: This reminds me of those philosophy questions about whether existence precedes essence.

My books certainly don’t begin with a voice, though I immediately look for one. I mean the big question in the beginning is, “How do I find this voice? And what is the voice?” (thinks)

I think I start with one idea. In Netherland, it was cricket in New York. Then there is an accumulation of sentences, and often just single words. Words that interest me. And I sort of build it up like a poem. Then you see what you’ve got, what patterns have emerged, and you see what meaning has been generated by your notes. As opposed to starting off with some theory of everything and trying to cram it into a book.

TEV: So, then there is a moment that occurs where you suddenly begin to feel like you are getting your hands around it?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah, and then you start thinking about your characters. In other words there is this pre-psychological, pre-characterological impulse, which has to do with language. In the case of Netherland, as I’ve said, I was very concerned with voice. I wanted to create this very intimate relationship between the reader and the voice of the book. Almost a romance. That’s risky, of course. Not everybody likes to be hit on. But you want to take risks.

And then there’s question of what sort of character would be amenable to serving such an obscure, murky, poetic purpose. And, meanwhile, you are thinking “Cricket” and various other things. And you are just hoping that they will fuse. And you sort of wait until they fuse. That’s partly why it takes me years to write stuff. I have to wait until sentences have life to me, and I try to make use of them.

TEV: How important is plot to you?

Joseph O’Neill: Not important at all, really.

TEV: Neither as a reader nor as a writer?

Joseph O’Neill: Certainly not as a reader. I mean, you know, if the plot is good then I am grateful for it. But I am a terrible reader of novels. I only read a few and I re-read what I read. And then I re-read them like books of poems and sort of dip into pages 12-17 and I look at words and sentences. The whole suspenseful element is not really something that particularly interests me. Possibly because I lack concentration. Possibly because my brain has turned into macaroni cheese.

TEV: Do you revise as you work?

Joseph O’Neill: Yes. Absolutely. Some writers knock out a first draft and then start polishing it. I just don’t – I mean, I can kind of see how you can do that. But for me, that’s unthinkable. I find most sentences that I originate intolerable -- and so, the only way to make them at least tolerable is to work on them as I go along. I have a very low tolerance for my own writing, unfortunately, even when it’s done.

TEV: Can you discuss your own literary influences? Authors you especially admire? You mentioned a love of voice. What literary voices particularly stand out for you?

Joseph O’Neill:  Well, your preferences and your susceptibilities aren’t really fixed. It sort depends on who you are reading, and when. I mean, I recently read through Flannery O’Connor for the first time, and I was knocked out by how she does it. And I have just been reading Beckett’s letters.

TEV: I’ve seen in an interview recently that you had some Bellow sitting on your desk.

Joseph O’Neill:  Yeah. See, when you actually bother to pay attention to writers – good ones, very good ones, great ones, in fact - you obviously are mesmerized by it to a certain degree, by what they are doing. And they all pull off the voice.

Other writers, I mean, apart from those I mentioned – and because he died recently – Updike, of course, I love. Particularly Selfconsciousness, his memoir, which I think may be the best thing he wrote.

What else? When I started reading properly, I loved Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. That was a very powerful voice. I didn’t really understand Bellow and Ellison when I first read them, partly because I was growing up in Europe. There were whole areas of their work that I just didn’t have access to culturally, and also because I was too young. But I was thrilled. What really impressed me were books in which this central, turbulent consciousness was at the center, and the novel arriving out of that.

TEV: You said, “when you bothered to read closely”. Do you think perhaps we tend not to read closely enough? Whether as readers or as writers?

Joseph O’Neill: I don’t know about other people. Speaking for myself, I just don’t read enough. I’m thrilled, I’m amazed that people are still reading.

TEV: It seems to be decreasing every day and then a book like Netherland finds an audience and gives lie to that idea that readers are disappearing.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, I don’t know about that but it’s certainly nice to have readers of any kind.

TEV: You’ve indirectly answered one of my next questions which is, do you read poetry? I ran an interview with Jesse Ball, who complained about the number of novelists who don’t read poetry. But, it sounds like you pay attention to poetry.

Joseph O’Neill: Oh, I love poetry. I mean, I started off writing poetry. My first published works were poems. But then I stopped. I retired very prudently at the age of about 24. It’s funny, that was when I received a letter from Andrew Motion, who at that time was the poetry editor at Chatto & Windus. You know, “I’ve read some of your poems, do you have any more?” Sadly, I didn’t.

TEV: Where were these poems published?

Joseph O’Neill: British and Irish poetry magazines. Legitimate outlets. And I just wrote back to Motion saying pathetically, “I’m sorry, but I’m not that prolific.” And I haven’t written a proper poem since. (Laughing)

TEV: The sudden glare of attention was too much?

Joseph O’Neill: I just think writing poetry is so difficult as a sustained venture. It’s extremely unforgiving and naked, like painting, making marks on canvas.

TEV: Such concentrated language all the time.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, I have this idea about what makes poetry tough.

TEV: What would that be?

Joseph O’Neill: I think it has to do with the poet’s theory of knowledge. A poem has to know something, and find that knowledge. But how? I mean, how do you write a poem without making it recherché or a kind of pretty re-statement of that which is self-evident? It’s very, very hard.

TEV: I think novelists experience a similar sort of struggle.

Joseph O’Neill: Writing novels is challenging, too.

TEV: And one can have the sense of continually re-stating and re-stating and re-stating what has gone before you.

Joseph O’Neill: It’s really hard. You certainly want your writing to be smarter than you are. You want your text to generate ideas and feelings which you, yourself, are not capable of generating.

TEV: It’s quite a paradox.

Joseph O’Neill: Yes, it is a paradox. And you have to unleash it in some way. That’s why people like Wallace Stevens and, more recently, Paul Muldoon are really good poets. Because their poems have this almost impenetrable mystery behind them. And it’s a mystery which arises from how they allow the language, the form, to conduct an exploration which they, themselves, need not conduct on a conscious level.

TEV: I thoroughly enjoyed Muldoon’s recent collection of his essays on poetry. You’ve mentioned that as a friend of yours, he sort of nudged you in the direction of your title.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, he nudged me, though not really in the direction of this title as much as away from my old title, really. I look back on that that title and it’s a horror. But at the time, I thought it was a great title. Netherland was suggested by my wife.

TEV: My original title for my novel was Obiter Dicta. Which I thought was wonderful and my lawyer friends all liked it. But, nobody in the literary world thought much of it.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, they probably thought it had something to do with penises.

TEV: You recently published a short story in Harpers. I’m wondering what your thoughts on the form are. Are you writing more them? I didn’t know you had written any before – the only things of yours I have found were the novels and the memoir.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah, I have a few short stories that emerged over the years. But I’m not someone who grew up and went to creative writing school and had to write short stories. And I’m not someone who likes writing exercises. I can’t bear writing exercises. And a lot of short story writing – even excellent short story writing--emerges from the tradition of exercises, short, essentially optional exercises in fiction. Like a workout. I can’t do that. So, I have only written a few short stories. They tend to be, in every sense, occasional.

TEV: Are they written upon request or because you’ve had an idea for a short story that you just recognized as a short story and not a novel?

Joseph O’Neill: Not really on request. I mean, no one ever requested me a short story from me before. Actually, that’s not true, a couple of kind Irish editors did—David Marcus, Caroline Walsh. But I just don’t really think of myself as a short story writer. I may well – hold on, I don’t want to hang myself here.

TEV: No one’s going to hold you to anything you say in an interview for my blog.

Joseph O’Neill: Good.

TEV: The New Yorker won’t turn you down because you said you aren’t a short story writer.

Joseph O’Neill: No, no, they have turned me down already. (laughs) I’m actually surprised by how people have reacted to the Harpers story. People have read it, first of all, which feels very surprising. And then, second of all, it seems that it excited some feelings and some reactions.

TEV: What sort of feelings?

Joseph O’Neill: Well, people have said, “I prefer it to your novel.”

TEV: Really?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. I’m doing a thing tonight with some of Mona Simpson’s students. She was telling me she got them to read it and they are all excited. And it’s divided them in some mysterious way. I can’t imagine why.

TEV: Do you read your work aloud, when writing?

Joseph O’Neill: No. I’m a real believer in the very peculiar but very real medium of the printed word and the suggestiveness of the words on the page. The visual journey of words into the reader. I mean, I’m not a font bore or anything. But, you know, Eliot used the phrase “the auditory imagination.” As distinct from the audible words, which preclude a vital imaginative interaction. I’m much more in that camp.

TEV: How much writing constitutes an average day, whether in hours or in pages. And how much planning or outlining do you do?

Joseph O’Neill: It is far too shameful to start talking about that stuff.

TEV: Keep that in the box?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah.

TEV: Next question please?

Joseph O’Neill: Well, it’s a disgrace, really. Having said that, I’m a great believer in the essential disgraceful nature of writing. I mean it really should be as close to idling as possible. Of course, I venerate the 300-400-500 words a day sort of writers. I used to be one of them. But at the moment, I’m just too idle to do that.

TEV: Someone, I think it was Fran Leibowitz, talked about the curse of the writing life, that we always feel so felonious because we aren’t writing more often than we are. And there’s not a writer I know who isn’t sort of secretly ashamed in some way of their work habits, that they don’t write enough, or they aren’t disciplined enough.

Joseph O’Neill: I have the opposite. I am secretly ashamed about the fact that I have written so much even thought I have only written very little.

TEV: Can you elaborate?

Joseph O’Neill: Let me put this another way. I think the sort of middling kind of novel that tides you over between novels is not ideal. There’s a lot of that around: “I haven’t got a fantastic idea for my next novel, but I must write 500 words a day. Because if I don’t write 500 words a day, then I won’t have a novel of 65,000 words in the next 18 months. Therefore, I must start writing 500 words a day based on idea X, even though it’s not that brilliant.’

TEV: The system must be fed.

Joseph O’Neill: The system must be fed. Less cynically, there’s the hope that, by writing, you will come to discover that idea X is, in fact, much better than you suspect. So refraining from writing is never, for me, a source of artistic or professional guilt. Of course, to be fair, there may be pressing financial reasons to be productive.

(Part two of this four-part interview will post here tomorrow.)

What is no longer really tolerated, or even practiced, is living to tell the way that he did. Was it ever tolerated? By living to tell, I mean portraying a realm unfamiliar to the literary world, which mostly depicts a social class whose troubles take hold despite money and elite schooling. I’m still amazed that this dark and risky novel, The Man with the Golden Arm—it ends with a poem/epitaph!—won such high canonical praise (perhaps making way for descendents like Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, and Denis Johnson’s Angels?). There are hazards to working in realms peopled by “denizens,” and certain aspects of Algren’s novel do seem quaint and even meretricious—like Frankie Machine’s articulated aim of going “from monkey to zero” in hopes of making it “pounding the tubs” (though Algren is never as meretricious as Otto Preminger’s awful movie version of the book). Many of his descriptions are perfectly keyed, the junkies and their “rigid, panicky walk,” the women with hair “set so stiffly it looked metallic.” In any case, Algren didn’t choose his subject. It chose him, and he went along.

My friends and I write more than we used to, often more than we talk. We correspond with each other and to colleagues, school teachers, utility companies. We send e-mails to our local newspaper reporters about their stories; we write to magazine editors to tell them what we think. And most of us do labour to write well: an e-mail to a potential romantic partner is laboriously revised and edited (no more waiting by the phone); a tweet to a prospective employer is painstakingly honed until its 140 characters convey an appropriate tone with the necessary information. A response to our supervisor’s clever status update on Facebook is written carefully, so to keep the repartee going. Concision and wit are privileged in these new forms. Who would not welcome shorter, funnier prose?

Discuss.

For those new to the Tour, we direct you to this primer, notable for its mention of a certain South African cyclist we admire:

I once asked artist William Kentridge if he’d ever met JM Coetzee. Once, he said, in Chicago.

“We spoke about the Tour,” Kentridge said. “He is a knowledgeable cyclist and I am a couch potato — my daughter and I love sitting and watching the hill climbs — so we had a lot to talk about.”

(Speaking of Coetzee, the film adaptation of Disgrace has won a prize at the Taipei Film Festival.)

The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

There must be some people who when parked on a beach feel they should be in the permafrost with Ivan Denisovich, but I'm not one of them. No, give me the sumptuous, wistful, sensual, warm-blooded Leopard any day. It may be Sicily in the 1860s but everything is in there: appetite, love, history's cruel laughter, lamplit Palermo, the rustle of silk. You live the Prince of Salina's life and revisit your own with an almost unbearably sharpened awareness of the texture of life.

"The real Beth Cooper was someone I had a crush on in seventh grade," Doyle says. "I thought it would be fun to have a guy have his entire high school experience in one night. He never did anything and now he's doing everything."

The story of the book club, now in its 10th month, is a tale of ordinary city life upended. It began with a stunningly unlikely friendship, between two men from different worlds: Peter Resnik, a high-powered lawyer on his way to work, and Rob, a homeless man guarding a friend’s shopping cart on Boston Common. Through months of daily conversations, that began with jokes and sports talk and gradually delved deeper, they found a common interest: literature. And when they saw the bridge that they had built, they recognized its potential for others.

The literary critic James Wood wounded his hand in Bryant Park today while playing the tambourine.

“I picked [it] up in a rather awkward way and was playing a song with it, and it began to rub away,” Mr. Wood said, showing off newly applied band-aids on his fingers.  “It just took the skin off.” 

For those not already acquainted with Wood's rhythmic gifts, we direct your attention here.

"I'm slightly wary about putting those two books next to each other," he says. "I'm not going to come out of it well. Gatsby is regarded by many as the seminal American novel of the 20th century, so obviously one is reluctant to invite comparisons! But I must acknowledge that debt. I was influenced by Gatsby to a degree I didn't realize until I was halfway through the book, by which point my book was significantly different to accept the possibility that the plots are similar. They're even similar in perspective and mood, with narrators, outsiders who come to New York and leave sadder but wiser men."

* It's that wonderful time of the year - the winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is announced.

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

* Emma Garman, whose criticism we've long admired, looks at Nathalie Abi-Ezzi's A Girl Made of Dust for Words Without Borders.

* Hanif Kureishi on turning his second novel, The Black Album, into a stage play.

* Jens Petersen wins the Bachmann Prize for best German language novel.

* Maud Newton returns to give Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain another try. 

* Apropos of nothing at all, just saying - a reporter on NPR tonight actually said "razed to the ground."  If we tweeted, this is probably the sort of thing we'd tweet, but we don't, so it's stuck in here.  Seriously.  Razed to the ground.

* Making An Elephant, Graham Swift's collection of essays on writing, is reviewed in The Star.

"I find distasteful the idea that writers are on a permanent reconnaissance trip, one eye always on the lookout for what might fuel their work, he retorts.

* Lloyd Lockhart, the last man to interview Hemingway, has died at 89.

* And, finally ... Michael Bay ... James Frey ... the headlines just sort of write themselves, don't they?

Common themes of family, guilt, dysfunction, and shame informed many of the stories in Silver's debut collection, Babe in Paradise (2001), as well as her first novel, No Direction Home (2005). These concerns remain present in The God of War, but the story is primarily a sustained meditation on questions of agency and volition; the acceptance (or refusal) of responsibility and the apportioning of blame. Indeed, her damaged cast has settled in this remote backwater in the futile hope of controlling their own fate beyond the reach of government and society. That they largely fail suggests how impervious to geography and inescapably human the so-called human condition really is.

The God of War has just been released in paperback, and I'm pleased to offer a copy this week to a lucky TEV reader.  (And I'm pretty sure I can arrange to have it signed for you, too.)  It's been a while since we've done one of these, so we're probably all a bit rusty on the rules.  Therefore:  Drop us an email, subject line "GIMME SOME SILVER".  Include your full mailing address, please, otherwise you will be disqualified and possibly mocked.  All entries will be accepted until Sunday, June 28 at 6 p.m. PST, at which time the Random Number Generator will practice its own special brand of tough love.  Until then ...

* Edward Hogan has won the Desmond Elliott Prize.

An "extraordinary new voice" with a tale of an albino in a depressed mining community has won the Desmond Elliott prize. Edward Hogan, who describes his previous jobs as "grass-strimmer, pot-washer, conservatory salesman, bloke holding the board in Leicester Square, and teacher", won the £10,000 first novel prize for Blackmoor, a novel set in a Derbyshire village at the time of the miners' strikes.

* Ismail Kadare has won the Asturias literature prize.

* Retracing the steps of Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall in the Times.

* Reducing literary classics to tweet-length.  Would that make the condensers "twits"?

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

* Aleksandar Hemon plays twenty questions.

6. You're proud of this accomplishment, but why?

Once I fell asleep in a dentist's chair during a root canal. Keith Richards fell asleep during a Rolling Stones show, which is as impressive as can be, but I had a little nap with the dentist's hand up to his wrist in my mouth.

After years of being able to sleep in any situation: on the street, at work, in school etc., I managed to sleep through pain. That's pretty impressive, if I may say so myself.

And I wrote four books in English, not my native language. That's not too bad, either.

* Top ten literary threesomes.

* The Big Read is just throwing money at you - 269 new grants have been announced.

* Maud Newton on all things Jean Rhys - first, an epistolary essay at Granta online; and then, a biography reviewed at The Second Pass.

* And, finally, please check out Masha Hamilton's Afghan Women's Writing Project.

Husband-and-wife team Andrew MacDonald and Irene Coray decided to take a risk — pack up their highly successful 17-year-old bookstore in the middle of bustling Dupont Circle and take their chances in Santa Monica where the people are well-read but the weather is more inviting.

They figured that even at a 50 percent loss in sales from the Washington D.C. store, the change in atmosphere would be well worth the move.

Three years later, the owners of KULTURAs Books on Ocean Park Boulevard are preparing to head back to where it all started, a result of a more than anticipated dramatic decline in revenue.

You have until July 20 to stop by and apologize in person on behalf of all of Los Angeles ...  (Thanks, EG)

But what if you have some ambition, as all writers do, and really want a readership and think that you deserve one?
If they deserve one, they'll get one. I believe that. I believe that eventually they will get their readership. Now, I also think there are way more people writing books than are going to get a readership. But I think that the books that really make a difference are going to have a readership. It may not be immediate. There are many examples of writers who have labored in relative obscurity for a long time until their ship came in. Look at Bolaño. His great success is posthumous and not even in his own country.

Writing is its own reward. It has to be. I really believe that. This is a part of publishing that's really hard to come to grips with. But publishers can't make culture happen the way they want it to happen. They can stand up for what they believe in, and they can work to have an impact, but in the end it's like the brilliant thing that Helen Vendler said about poets. She was asked, "What's the canon?" and she said something like, "The poets are going to decide what the canon is. The poets who poets read are the canon." I think that, in the end, that's true about all literature. The books that people read over time, and keep reading, are the books that matter. We can huff and puff and pay money and advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don't come, we can't do anything about it.

The attention still feels surreal to Jollett, who began his twenties as a budding novelist and freelancer. His writing credits include NPR, the Los Angeles Times and Filter magazine. In fact, Jollett was offered a column by NPR before Airborne formed.

Rushdie later repaid the show of loyalty by writing the lyrics to 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet' (a track which appeared on the Japanese and British versions of 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind), drawn from the author's novel of the same name. He continues to be an outspoken supporter of the band.

So it's been a day of pizza, Bond, and especially catching up on lost sleep.  But there's an undeniably bittersweet air to the day, coming almost exactly three months to the day since my father died.  As we had our breakfast this morning, I remembered a Father's Day moment from about fifteen years ago.

I was spending Father's Day weekend in Big Sur with my best friend at a favorite inn of ours.   We were sitting in the dining room, enjoying a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast, when a lady entered and addressed the only other people present, a young couple at the next table.  "Are those your children out front?" she asked.  The couple nodded.  "They're lovely.  You must be very proud.  Happy Father's Day."  At the sound of those last words, I leapt out of my chair as though it had just kicked me, and raced from the room.  I found the pay phone in the lobby (these were pre-cell days, and anyway, I think there's still no reception in Big Sur), and called my father (collect, I fear) to wish him Happy Father's Day.  I returned sheepishly to breakfast, where the couple grinned at me.  "Did you reach your Dad?" they asked.  I did, and I thanked them for reminding me.

My greatest sorrow at the loss of my father is that he didn't get to meet his granddaughter.  This saddened him, too, and he told me he was sorry he would not see her.  I am not at all inclined to mystical thinking, but my mother informs me that my father had an unconscious habit of placing his thumb between his index and middle finger - apparently, an obscene gesture in Russia.  Whatever its meaning, Clara appears to do the same thing.  (Though I'll advise her to cool it if we ever visit Moscow.)

Finally, I share the absolutely perfect present Mrs. TEV gave me today.  If only I had one of these growing up ... Literary hijinks resume tomorrow.

If you're in the Los Angeles area, I hope you will consider coming out Saturday night for my only appearance in support of the paperback edition of Harry, Revised.  I will be sharing the stage with Damion Searls, a talented author and translator whose Dalkey collection,What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, is witty and inventive, so even if you're heard my schtick before, you still have a reason to come by.

The appearance will be held at Book Soup (details after the jump), and I would love for my one L.A. area appearance to be a smash and to see as many friendly faces as possible.  Book Soup is centrally located, there's parking in the rear and it's not a school night, so please do stop by and say hi - there will probably even be drinking and such afterwards.  The details are after the jump.  Hope you see you!

Book Soup
8818 Sunset Boulevard
West Hollywood
Saturday, June 20 at 7:00 p.m.

Sarvas is best known for the popular and controversial literary blog The Elegant Variation. His debut novel Harry, Revised is just out in paperback and was a Denver Post Best Book of 2008 and finalist for the Fiction Prize of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. (Bloomsbury)

Searls is also an award-winning translator from German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian—with forthcoming books by Rilke, Proust, and others—and has recently abridged Thoreau's 7,000-page Journal for a one-volume edition. More info available at www.damionsearls.com. (Dalkey Archive)

Critical Praise for Harry, Revised:

BEST OF 2008 – Denver Post. “[Sarvas] promise[s] much for the future.”

FINALIST – Southern California Independent Booksellers Association 2008 Fiction Award.

“A remarkable debut.” John Banville

“A marvelous, enviable debut.” Andrew Sean Greer

“Mark Sarvas's debut novel is fun, fast and heartfelt.” Joshua Ferris

“Harry, Revised is immensely readable, very funny and rich with earned emotion” David Leavitt,

" As a comic novel, Harry, Revised ranks among the best of its kind. At the same time, its language elevates it to literary success." The Australian

"Sarvas has a sure hand for vivisecting 21st-century absurdities” New York Magazine

"... a deeply felt and often hilarious book of mock heroics." Time Out, New York

"... poignant ... blisteringly funny ... " The Guardian

“Sarvas gives us beautiful bits of wisdom about marriage, which is really what this story is about. This is a book for grown-ups, for people who know how complex adult relationships are” Philadelphia Inquirer

"Sarvas is a wonderfully original writer ... " The Times (UK)

“Yes, Harry's a major league dolt, but, to Sarvas' credit, we end up pulling for him.” " Los Angeles Times

" ... the uninformed reader of this work might be forgiven for assuming he had stumbled upon some minor classic of the 1970s, whose author had won comparisons to John Updike and Philip Roth. ... Sarvas' compact, elegantly paced and pleasingly understated novel recalls a more literate and patient era ... At its best, Sarvas' prose seems effortless... " Chicago Tribune

“... deft one-liners, jokes and elegantly-turned insights ... " Boston Globe

" Harry is a genuinely likable character in spite of his shortcomings, and the reader roots for him in his quest for enlightenment and transformation." Bookforum

"Self-loathing was never so funny” Los Angeles Magazine

" A marvelous, often comic and moving tale." Harpers Bazaar (Australia)

"Harry, Revised is an entertaining read from the word go." Cosmopolitan (Australia)

" [Sarvas] delivers a first novel that – continually amusing us with the simple and fault-ridden Harry – never feels like one." New Zealand Listener

" ... endlessly inventive ... a cram of darkly hilarious scenes ... “ New Zealand Herald

“Harry is a romantic comedy with dark undertones and an ending that is not quite Hollywood. This is brilliant entertainment with something more.” VG, Norway

It seems very humble, helpful, and earnest in its endeavors. Though that didn’t stop Walter Kirn from painting you as the world’s greatest snob in The Times.

I was bemused by the Walter Kirn attack — that’s diplomatese for “I wanted him dead and bound in the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car.” It was the purest American anti-intellectualism: Fiction, he claimed, is about noise on the streets, not words on the page, because words on the page mean ... the library. And that is where I spend all my time, apparently. His review traded in the coarsest binarisms: On one side, according to Kirn, there are [Henry] James and Flaubert, tortured and isolated souls, who spent their lives rubbing nouns and adjectives together in onanistic bliss, and on the other side, there is ... none other than David Foster Wallace! Does Kirn think Wallace did not spend Jamesian amounts of time and energy rubbing together exquisite nouns and adjectives? Of course, he did. Writers who care about language care about such things as nouns and adjectival phrases. They aren’t cowboys — at least, not on the page.

And then there were all the silly things he said about my having a Burberry coat. Alas, he revealed much more about his own social anxieties than he did about my criticism.

* Paris marks Bloomsday.

* Reconsidering Life and Times of Michael K.  (Speaking of Coetzee, FOTEV Andie points us to this tantalizing but slight glimpse of his next.)

* A word of advice to academic literary critics.

* Tablet Magazine launches On The Bookshelf, looking at Soloveitchik, Céline, Salinger, and more.

* Ha'aretz hands over the paper to a group of 31 writers for the day, and the Guardian likes the results.

Roni Somek cheered up the weather page with his poem Summer Sonnet ("Summer is the pencil / that is least sharp / in the seasons' pencil case"), while Eshkol Nevo was (perhaps mistakenly) given the TV review, starting his piece "I didn't watch TV yesterday".

* It's good to be a poet in the UK - they actually get knighted.

* Another Kindle objection answered - authors can (and do) sign them.  (By the way, speaking of the Kindle, Michael Antman distinguished himself around here last week with some very thoughtful comments on the subject, and we absolutely urge you to check out his full length essay on the subject over at Pop Matters.  Thought-provoking and admirably free of cant.)

* Many thanks to Carl Bromley for alerting us to Eduardo Galeano on The Writing Life.

* And, finally, this is old so perhaps you've seen it already but it was new to us (thanks, Paul), and we're speechless at this collection of the most beautiful libraries in the world.  How many of them have you visited?

Soon my grandfather was emerging from the novel. The further I went in, the more complex he got. The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction. After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom. I began to see my grandfather outside Dlugacz’s butcher shop, his hat cocked sideways, watching the moving “hams” of a young girl. I wondered if he had a penchant for “the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” I heard him arguing with the Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub. I felt him mourn the loss of a child.

What hath Anthony Bourdain wrought? In the wake of all the imitators it spawned, it can be hard to remember just how bracing Kitchen Confidential was when it was published back in 2000. There had always been famous cooks -- Julia Child, Graham Kerr -- but Bourdain somehow managed to simultaneously deglamorize the kitchen and make it sexy and dangerous. From Top Chef to Hell's Kitchen to Ratatouille, the not-so-humble chef (mostly bad-tempered, mostly male) has emerged as a cultural icon. Names like Keller, Robuchon, Senderens, and Achtaz, once known only to the cognoscenti, are now common currency, and even the layman can tell a sous-chef from a saucier.

One of the kitchen's dirty secrets that Bourdain was intent on exposing was how much of the unseen labor necessary for preparing fine food was done by people of color, often underpaid, often illegal. It's a setting that would have held obvious attractions for Monica Ali. In her two prior novels, the superb Booker-nominated Brick Lane and the less sure-footed Alejento Blue, Ali has been a messenger of multiculturalism, drawing back the veil on the subtleties of life in an increasingly diverse world with elegance and empathy. And, indeed, her new novel, In the Kitchen, is at its very best in its deft handling of a large and ethnically varied cast, as she guides them through the "part prison, part lunatic asylum, part community hall" that is the kitchen of London's Imperial Hotel.

You can read the entire review here.

A debut novelist who says he's never really had a proper job has won the world's richest literary award. American writer Michael Thomas beat authors including Philip Roth, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates to take the €100,000 (£85,000) Impac Dublin prize with his debut novel, Man Gone Down.

It’s a startling move in a straightforward realist narrative, not entirely unlike the moment in Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber,” when after about a dozen pages of mundane description of a rich man hunting, we’re suddenly thrust into the head of the lion that will maul Macomber to death. The narrative rules as they’ve been established appear suddenly to be broken; we’re given access to a new moment out of chronology and we can only assume that it’s for a particular reason; now it’s up to us as readers to figure out why we’ve gained that access. Where discussion of contemporary fiction tends to be increasingly polarized between the experimental and the traditional, the post-modern and whatever the post-modern’s opposite might be, the George Saunders/Aimee Bender/Ben Marcus fantastical aesthetic against the straightforward realism represented by writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Tobias Wolff or Richard Ford, Jones throws into chaos such distinctions. In particular, our reigning critic of record James Wood has drawn increasing ire for ostensibly favoring a more traditional aesthetic, however wrong-headed this reading of Wood’s perspicacious criticism may be; within a mostly formal, conventional narrative language and framework, Jones employs such unusual and precise narrative moves as to muddy any discussion that conforms to these kinds of reductionist dichotomies.

... and in The New Republic, Peter Green looks at the new Cavafy translations by Daniel Mendelsohn (about whih we promise, promise, promise to have more for you on soon):

Thus the recognition that Greece sought so long from the English-speaking West has been lavished on a poet who quietly opposed or undercut almost everything that Hellenizing propaganda stood for and continues to uphold today. Famous poets from Auden to Heaney have written about Cavafy, introduced his translations, and acknowledged his influence on their own work. The texts of Cavafy's unfinished poems, now translated by Mendelsohn for the first time, were pieced together from fragmentary successive drafts by the Italian scholar Renata Lavagnini, with the minute care--and the same technique--normally lavished only on the papyrus scraps of a major classical author, and their retrieval was hailed as a major literary discovery. If the Greeks, as is sometimes alleged, invented irony, this has to be an almost unrivalled example of it. What, we may well ask ourselves, has been the secret of this marginal Hellenist's astonishing and unprecedented success in the Anglo-American literary world?

At a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, I watched with bewilderment as a novelist I admire declared, without apparent irony, that "The Kindle is evil." It should have been easy to ignore so foolish a statement, but this author was scarcely alone in expressing antipathy for Amazon's popular electronic book. A table in the Green Room, with a slightly forbidding "Reserved for Amazon Kindle" sign, sat unoccupied, and was the object of much free-floating scorn and fear.

... and Fictionaut, a terrific literary community online, subjects me to the Fictionaut Five.  My answers can be found here.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

I’d love to be a chessplayer. Or a professional cyclist. Or a busboy at the French Laundry.

* From the Guardian Archive:  Mr. Charles Dickens has died at 58.

Mr Charles Dickens died last night at ten minutes past six o'clock, at Gadshill, near Rochester. He was seized with illness about the same hour on Wednesday afternoon, as he was about to sit down to dinner with his sister-in-law, Miss Hogarth. She observed something unusual in his appearance and became alarmed. She told him that he looked ill, and proposed to telegraph for medical assistance. Mr Dickens replied, "No, I have a toothache. I shall be better presently." Almost immediately he fell into unconsciousness, from which he never recovered up to the moment of his death.

* A conversation with the new editor of Granta, John Freeman.

* Another venerable independent falls: Shaman Drum Bookshop is set to close June 30.

* Maud Newton on Sarah Waters: " ... a master at stoking anticipation ... "

* The "Kindle Beater" sounds vaguely like something we'd find in a kitchen drawer ... or a specialty at the local S&M club.

* The new Murakami is an immediate bestseller in Japan.

The new novel by Japanese cult author Haruki Murakami has become an instant bestseller with its latest print run pushing it over half-a-million copies in less than two weeks, the publisher said on Tuesday.

* Germany's PEN center offers a home for exiled writers.

* Come and visit Tablet Magazine - the completely revamped version of Nextbook.  There's an introduction to the new venture here.

* Canongate has been named Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards, and Jamie Byng is interviewed the next day.

* Margit Frenk has won this year’s Menendez Pelayo International Prize.

The prize, which recognizes authors for literary or scholarly achievement in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, is conferred by Menendez Pelayo International University in the northern Spanish city of Santander and includes a cash award of 48,000 euros ($66,000).

* David Ulin profiles Frances Kroll Ring, F. Scott Fitzgerald's last typist ...

"She's the last real witness," Berg points out, "along with Budd Schulberg" (the 95-year-old author of the classic 1941 Hollywood novel "What Makes Sammy Run?") "to Fitzgerald as a working writer. She had a front row seat for a year-and-a-half." Novelist Steve Erickson calls her "a living connection to an American culture that cared about writing and literacy . . . She is the keeper of a literary flame in a city that has always had more literature than it gets credit for."

* Kate Christensen's guilty pleasure?  Janet Evanovich.

* Dave Rosenthal worries about men who don't read novels.

* And, finally, many thanks to the superb Opera Chic for alerting us to this profile in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra ... Ciao!

The couple founded Arcade in 1988. Its list of authors includes the renowned Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Mr. Seaver, who died in January at the age of 82, began his career at Grove Press, where he championed the work of Samuel Beckett and helped bring books by Henry Miller and Jean Genet to the United States.