A Quick Trip to Q-Town: An Interview with Jack O’Connell
Neddal Ayad
First published by Fantastic Metropolis July 25, 2004
Jack O’Connell is the author of Box Nine, Wireless, The Skin Palace, and Word Made Flesh, a series ultra-noir novels set in the semi-fictional city of Quinsigamond, MA. Critics, reviewers, and the marketing department tag him as a crime writer, but his work incorporates elements of science fiction, horror, and the weird. His writing is by turns intense, measured, and precise. He is a master of verisimilitude: get a few pages into one of the Quinsigamond novels and the lines between the “real” world and Q-Town get extremely blurry.
Despite stories to the contrary, I was pleased to discover that Mr. O’Connell is neither litigious nor dangerously unbalanced. I have it on good authority that several writers have “disappeared” as a result of attempts to catch Mr. O’Connell in the flesh. I decided to play it safe and caught up with him via e-mail.
Neddal Ayad: How does it feel to be “the future of the dark literary suspense novel”?
Jack O’Connell: That tag came from James Ellroy, a very kind and, normally, extremely wise man. And while I like to think that he genuinely believes in my work, in this instance he was also doing his damnedest to pull me out of the quicksand that has sucked so many mid-list writers down into the oblivion of contemporary bottom-line publishing.
It’s funny, when my agent first sent me Ellroy’s quote, I was, of course, elated. Because it sounded like a bounce on that famous John Landau quote about Springsteen being the future of rock and roll. And I remember thinking something like, “Christ, I wish I had a ‘Born to Run’ to back up those words.” Ultimately, you know, it turns out that I’m only the future of the Jack O’Connell novel. Fortunately, that’s the only genre in which I hope to work.
Neddal Ayad: What’s your relationship to language? Two of your novels feature linguists as central characters and one of the recurring themes of your work seems to be language as pathogen.
Jack O’Connell: The nature of my relationship with the notion of language is, I think, ultimately, ambivalent. The very concept of language is something that has obsessed me in ways both good and bad for an awfully long time, starting in my childhood. It sounds foolish, I know, but I’ve had moments of something pretty close to ecstatic joy just reveling in the gift of words and in the gorgeousness of the systems that make that gift into communication. Reveling in the beauty of the mechanics of, and the idea of, the process.
The other side of that coin, of course, is a sadness or, sometimes, a rage, at the profound inadequacy of language. The inadequacy of words and, so, the inadequacy of those systems of communication. They’re never good enough. Certainly, the tension between those two opposing reactions has been an ongoing theme in my stories. Do we revel in the miracle that we’re able to connect with others at all? Or do we despair that we can never fully connect?
Neddal Ayad: How do you keep the topography of Quinsigamond straight? Is it all in your head? Do you have a map?
Jack O’Connell: I’m not entirely comfortable with the question. The topography is a pretty big part of the magic, you know? I’ve got a few crude maps in the drawer. I’ll admit to that. Quinsigamond is always, entirely, in my head. But probably not in the way that you think. I’m always about one hour of sleep away from fading out of the here and now and into Q-town. Truly. I’ve grown accustomed to it, if that’s the right word.
Quinsigamond has a palpable concreteness to me. It’s only about two degrees removed from my mundane reality. I can be sitting at a red light and I can suddenly fade into the Q. I can see it. I can feel it. I can have a completely effortless sensory experience of some parcel of the city. And then the light turns green and the car behind me honks and I’m yanked back into “real time” like a fish on a hook. It’s an exhausting bit of travel sometimes.
Neddal Ayad: Was there a St. Leon?
Jack O’Connell: Yes, he’s the patron of philosophical anarchists and hardboiled noir writers, especially if they reside in Dearborn County, Indiana. St. Leon has guided my pen for some time and I sense that, should I persevere, he may come to possess me entirely.
While it might not be apparent yet, he has a strategy for all future Quinsigamond books. It’s a radical program of deeply structured propaganda. I’m just the vessel for St. Leon’s plan and, while I hope that I’ve served him well, I’m afraid I can’t say he has been gentle with me. I often feel that I’m the least important part of his revolutionary system. And, should I fall by the wayside, I sense he’d have no trouble grabbing the next passerby with a notebook and a working knowledge of narrative and press the poor bastard into service, like some pulp Simon of Cyrene.
Neddal Ayad: If someone was to order Word via Amazon.com, one of the “Customers who bought this book also bought” suggestions is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I mention this because in an interview with Crime Time magazine you discuss the difference between film and literature and seem to have a slightly antagonistic relationship with film. I recently read an interview with Danielewski where he said that he consciously applied cinematic narrative techniques to sections of House of Leaves. Have you read HoL, and, if so, what did you think?
Jack O’Connell: I haven’t read it. I’ve heard it’s terrific from people whose taste often run along the same tracks as my own. I wish Mr. D well and hope he writes lots of other fine books and lives a long and happy lifetime. But I’ve gone through a kind of crisis of reading in the last few years. It’s not a crisis of faith—I still hold a primal and ferocious belief in the power of narrative to create meaning—but rather a crisis of aesthetics. About three years or so ago, my old yardsticks began to fail me. I was getting less joy out of the kinds of books that had always sustained, excited and inspired me, and, conversely, I was finding myself picking up books that I’d never before given the slightest attention.
I still don’t know what triggered the crisis and I’ve yet to emerge from it. It’s an unsettling feeling, like finding oneself a foreigner in the old hometown. There are times when this change feels like a punishment for a sin I don’t recall. But there’s also a part of me that believes “the crisis” is a good thing, like a traumatic conversion experience. Like Saul on the road to Damascus or a really sweet Twilight Zone episode. I’ve been drawn, compulsively, to the lost and the forgotten stories. The ones that were never reclaimed and retroactively sanctioned.
Neddal Ayad: You seem to be tagged as a crime writer, but to me your books have a strong weird/surreal element that ally them with sf and fantasy almost as much as, if not just as much with those genres with hardboiled/noir fiction. As an adjunct: How do you feel about genre? Are you comfortable being defined as a noir writer? A dark suspense writer? A noir-fi writer?
Jack O’Connell: I’m all of those things and none of those things and, in the end, what you call my stories doesn’t matter very much. When someone reads my stories, it’s always a little miracle to me. Beyond that, I’ll accept any tag that anyone wants to apply. You can waste a lot of effort fighting the tendency of others to categorize you. You will be categorized. For better or worse, you will be put into a box. Very likely, you will insist that it is the wrong box. That you’re uncomfortable with the fit and the design. That it’s entirely inappropriate. And maybe you’ll be right. And so what?
History does not speak well of the critics. Their batting average is shameful. They’re almost always wrong. Let me say it again: they are almost always wrong. And while, by and large, the critics have been quite kind to my books, let me confess that I feel some small amount of glee in their ineptitude. Not just because it’s a posthumous tweaking of the ego and ignorance of the cultural gatekeepers. But because it’s indication of the fact that the stories that best embody the soul of an age are pretty hard to identify at the time of their appearance.
My gut has always argued that the lasting myths often bubble up out of the gutter, where no one is looking. I spent the last week reading the critical assessments of Melville that were handed down in the writer’s lifetime. It was a bittersweet experience, because while it’s gratifying and instructional for me to see what absolute morons the critics were, it was fairly devastating for the old mariner.
If you look at late 19th century literary histories and encyclopedias, Melville was grouped with the minor travel writers of the day. It makes the blood boil. I want to get Mr. Peabody’s “Wayback Machine,” find the critic for the Southern Quarterly Review of 1851, bash in his teeth with my copy of Moby-Dick and scream, “You don’t deserve this gospel, you pathetic halfwit,” in his patrician ear. Which makes you wonder: whom would the time-traveling reader of tomorrow rush to defend?
You know, it’s no secret I’m an admirer of Pynchon. I think he’s Melville’s true heir and I’d think about betting the house that he’ll be regarded as the primary mythmaker of my day. But then I see Harold Bloom genuflecting before Pynchon’s shadow and it makes me want to pull my money off the table. And in the instant of that flinch, I wonder if maybe tomorrow’s readers won’t be found nodding and smiling at the millennial metaphysics of The Simpsons.
Neddal Ayad: Have you read anything recently that has blown you away?
Jack O’Connell: Take a look at Milabs: Military Mind Control & Alien Abduction by Dr. Helmut Lammer and his lovely wife, Marion. And, if you can find it, The Collected Journals of Kirk Allen.
Neddal Ayad: Who are some of your not-so-obvious influences?
Jack O’Connell: The most truthful list I could compile would be mostly meaningless to you because it would be comprised of people and—pointedly, places—of my childhood. I sometimes think that the impetus to all of my writing is a desire to reclaim, not so much a lost time and place, but rather a lost sense of a kind of malleability of a certain time and place. That is, there seems to me to be a crucial personal era, between, let’s say, the ages of seven and about 15 or 16. It’s during this era that your sense of the world, your sense of your identity and your sense of yourself in the world is in the process of being formed. After 16, you’ll be able to hone that sense to some degree and, certainly, you’ll come to understand it in more complex ways. But your particular cosmology is created during those early years. Or at least, let me say, mine was.
I think that part of the impulse to make story is a compulsion to understand why I came to see reality in the manner that I did. To understand why my vision was constructed in this particular way. I’ve said in the past that Quinsigamond is what the inside of my head feels like on any given day. But Quinsigamond was not created in a vacuum. It was formed from the detritus of three thousand days of raw, angel-headed childhood.
So, you want to know what influenced me? Sitting in a rear booth of Coney Island Hot Dogs on Southbridge St. on a Saturday night in 1966, listening to my father describe a kamikaze attack on his LST during WWII. Hiding from friends in the narrow stone passageway behind Anderchow’s barn as we ran and rolled through the industrial gothic landscape of mid-century New England. Lying on top of my garage roof and watching the cars slide down June St. Exploring the utterly decayed downtown train station on a fall day in 1972. You see what I’m saying? My environment of that era felt just breathtakingly rich. My mundane milieu was, somehow, perpetually shiver-inducing. Everything felt hyper-real and not real enough, at the same time. It was like being a 12-year-old wandering Gnostic and with every step I took, I knew the screens of reality might slip and the truth might be revealed. That feeling, as much as any books or writers, caused me to pick up a pen. In fact, that feeling caused me to pick up the books that would make me into a writer.
Neddal Ayad: Have you written any short fiction?
Jack O’Connell: Certainly. I started out the way most writers do, by reading short stories and then trying to mimic them. You begin by impersonating. You discover that there are some stories you want to mimic more than others. For me, from the start, there was a particular kind of voice that excited me and gave me terrific pleasure and even, at some point, a sense of meaning. Of course, I wouldn’t have defined the experience that way at the time. I just knew that some writers could push my button harder than others. But from a fairly young age, I was comparing and contrasting writers’ voices. Not intellectually, but I was processing them and reacting to them with my ear and with my gut. And in short order, I began to realize that there were some writers who were more “language-oriented,” let’s say, than others. There were some writers whose style was more musical, more playful, more lyrical than others. And those were writers I wanted to mimic. So I spent years filling notebooks with bad imitations. And then, at some point, with imitations that were, perhaps, not so bad. And finally, with stories that, though sometimes bad and occasionally good, were pretty much mine.
When that happened, almost at once my stories began to expand. I recall giving 150 pages to my mentor and asking if he’d read my latest “short story.” He laughed and kind of hefted the manuscript and said, “You know, maybe you’re starting to write novels.” My natural proclivity is for the long form. But—maybe because it doesn’t come naturally to me—I still love the short form. I’ve written some short pieces in the last few years and I’ve enjoyed the change of pace. A novel is really a long march for me. It takes me two or three years to write a novel. I hope to write more short fiction. I’ve hundreds of notions for stories. I’ve got notebooks overflowing with story ideas. I fear they’re all going to die on the vine.
Neddal Ayad: Has any of your short fiction been published?
Jack O’Connell: I’ve published a few things in the last couple of years. A story called “The Procurer” was actually the opening chapter of a trunk novel. “That Sense of Impending Doom” was a fictional introduction to the noir issue of Paradoxa. “Legerdemain” and “The Swag from Doc Hawthorne’s” appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction. “Legerdemain” was written in memory of Robert Cormier, a wonderful man who wrote some great books, like The Chocolate War and Fade. That turned out to be one of those good luck stories—it was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and Robert Silverberg anthologized it. Which was a thrill because Silverberg was one of my first writing idols. His novel, Time of the Great Freeze, just kidnapped me when I was about nine years old. And then the icing on the cake was that the anthology was recorded as a book on tape and my story was read by the great William Windom (Commodore Decker to some, but forever James Thurber to me).
Neddal Ayad: Do you feel that aspiring writers need a mentor?
Jack O’Connell: It’s not a requirement and, with some personalities, I can imagine such a relationship doing more harm than good in the long run. That said, it was essential for me. I had a teacher, who became a mentor, who became a friend: Bob Cording read every miserable poem and story that I gave him and brought me along, step by step, with a degree of patience and generosity that, in retrospect, is humbling. To say it as simply as I can: I wouldn’t have become a writer without Bob’s help. I sometimes wonder what might have happened to me if I hadn’t found him. Bob’s level of interest and instruction was extraordinary. But I’d say, at very least and in most cases, a mentor can save you time. They can key you in to things about the craft that would otherwise take you years to realize.
Neddal Ayad: What are you working on at the moment? Is there any chance that Wireless or Skin Palace will be reprinted in N. America?
Jack O’Connell: The hope is that they’ll be brought back in conjunction with a new Quinsigamond book. I’m working on the second draft of a new one right now. It was conceived in Paris a few years ago as a straight-up noir thriller. A stripped down, rock-hard bullet of a book. But as always, at some point in the composition, it went renegade. Turned out to be a strange and rabid mutant.
Neddal Ayad: Can you give us a hint as to what it’s about?
Jack O’Connell: It’s about entombment, bikers, consciousness, circus freaks, stem cells, parasites and pharmacists.
Neddal Ayad: Do other forms of media influence your work?
Jack O’Connell: Yes, and maybe more than I want them to. I’m married to books, but I have flirted shamelessly with film and even, I admit it, with television. I’m interested in any platform for launching stories into the world. And what’s really intriguing me (sometimes haunting me) of late are thoughts about the new platforms that are rushing down at us from the future. I’ve got a strong hunch that we’re on the cusp of an evolutionary leap in story-manufacturing and story-consumption.
I’m speaking, I suppose, of the nexus between TV and the PC and the Web producing a platform that delivers an incredibly sophisticated pool of interactive world-creation myths. I think this platform will be significantly different from film and TV in the way it tells stories and in the way readers receive and handle those stories. Unlike books, film and TV are mediums that require a passive audience. The reader plays no part in what takes place on the big or small screen. But I’ve got a feeling that in the not-so-distant future, things are going to get aggressively interactive.
Now, to be honest, I’m reluctant to embrace this new platform. Because I was built to work with words, to make narrative out of words, not images. Or, rather, to make images out of words, not out of pixels. I’m an old dog who is not at all sure that he can learn any flashy new tricks. That said, there is something about the New Media on the horizon that excites me. And the alternative is to stand on the sidelines with the other grumpy old men, wringing my hands and shaking a palsied finger at the kids, who are having all the fun.
Neddal Ayad: What was the impetus behind Dark Alleys of Noir ?
Dark Alleys of Noir is an issue of the journal, Paradoxa . This goes back about seven, eight years ago, I guess. I’d gotten a letter from critic Steffen Hantke, who, at that time, was teaching in Colorado. Steffen explained that he’d written a piece about my books and would like to come to town and interview me. This was a new experience for me. You have to realize that I often feel that I’m operating in a vacuum, mailing my books out into the void. So I wrote a note back to Steffen that read, in effect, Who are you really? Is this a joke? Who put you up to this? But he persisted and convinced me that he was genuinely interested and wanted to meet. So we arrange to get together at a local diner on a freezing December night, in the middle of a blizzard. And we hit it off and drank gallons of coffee and fell into a discussion about pop culture and American imperialism, while a half-dozen overtired truck drivers glared at us. Steffen eventually placed the essay and the interview in Paradoxa. Subsequently, I became e-mail-friendly with the erudite and charming editor of Paradoxa, David Willingham. And when I suggested that his magazine devote an issue to all things noir, Dave said, “Great, you edit it.”
Neddal Ayad: You use a lot of strong Catholic imagery, yet you don’t come off as a lapsed Catholic. Would you consider yourself a Catholic writer?
Jack O’Connell: The answer probably depends upon what day of the week you ask me the question. In truth, most of the time I define myself as a Catholic. But I’m doubtful that anyone else would use that descriptor if they had access to my innermost beliefs. I don’t like dogma. I don’t like institutional hierarchies. I do like ritual. And I do like the notion of faith. But I think of faith as an energy that tends toward flux. I think that it comes and it goes and that if you’ve never experienced cold, core doubt, you can’t possibly have a true sense of the reality of faith. I’m suspicious when anyone other than a child describes faith as a constant.
I suppose I’d allow that there might be some benefit to some reader to use a Catholic lens to view my stories. But I’d add that it’s not the only lens to use and it’s not the first one I’d recommend. I was raised Catholic and as a young and deeply impressionable child, I was schooled by zealous and superstitious nuns. And let me say that, while there were a few terrors among them, the majority was pretty kind and loving. You don’t hear that too often from Catholic School survivors.
These days, I’ve actually been thinking of some of those nuns a bit and, from my middle-aged perspective, I realize just how much I owe them. After my mother, they were the ones who encouraged a profound, almost religious, love of the text. They nurtured a devotion to reading and writing. They instilled this belief that reading could save the individual and change the world, and a sense of work as vocation. (Of course, that lesson took root in me in ways they didn’t anticipate and would never sanction.) Beyond this, and somehow despite their dogmatic nature, they cultivated a sense of wonder about the universe, that there was more to reality than meets the eye. All of this is gold to the future writer. As is the solid work ethic they inculcated, that sense that, if you want something, you better be willing to really labor for it.
So, to some degree that I’m still attempting to measure, I’m ready to say that my Catholic childhood had an influence on my desire to be a writer and on the things I’ve chosen, consciously and otherwise, to write about.
Neddal Ayad: What’s your writing process?
Jack O’Connell: My “process,” such that it is, has remained fairly unchanged for the last 20+ years. I wake up before dawn every day, make some tea, and move quietly to a semi-isolated, book-lined room, where I sit for two hours and try to make a page of narrative. Beyond that, I try to spend the rest of the day and night being conscious of the world around me and open to any notions that might present themselves.
Like many writers I know, I have a notebook fetish. Your notebook is your net. You’re like Nabokov trying to catch his butterflies. The ideas, the notions, are out there in the air, flitting past you. You have to stalk them gingerly. When you’re lucky, you catch one in the notebook. You pin it to the page with your pen. Most of the notions die beneath the point. But now and then a strong one will live and, if you’re very lucky, thrive in captivity. Those are the notions that evolve into stories. But though that evolutionary progression is still mostly mysterious, it’s almost certainly, I think, symbiotic. You need to transfuse your lifeblood into the story in order for it to live. And it, in turn, needs to give you a sense of your mind successfully transmitted onto the page and (potentially) into the consciousness of others.
Neddal Ayad: When you start a piece, are you thinking of genre? As in, “I’m gonna write a science fiction story,” or “This one is going to be a straight up hardboiled kind of thing…”
Jack O’Connell: Never. Which has led to letters and phone calls from a frustrated agent or editor forced to point out uncomfortable instances where I’d failed to put any crime into a contracted crime novel. But I think I’d go crazy trying to operate that way. For me, a story arrives as a notion. And notions, by and large, are most often single-celled organisms. They’re not yet differentiated. They are images, lines of dialogue, an imagined conflict. Not to be too simplistic, but my stories are usually noir narratives simply because they take place in Quinsigamond and bad things often happen to innocent people in that city. God tends to fall asleep in Quinsigamond. And sometimes His dreams are perverse.
Neddal Ayad: Do you listen to music while you write, and if so, what kinds of music/which artists?
Jack O’Connell: Way back, in my misspent youth, I always listened to music when I wrote. (I honestly have a specific memory of writing something with Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” cranked up in the background.) But which artists or records played in the background is probably less important than the fact that I played the same record over and over again, non-stop, hour after hour, day after day and week after week. In this way, the music became a kind of partition, a way to block myself off from the world around me. The repetition of the music created a space, an invisible womb in which my mind could fall into the world of my story. But at some point, I simply stopped that practice. I’m not sure why. Possibly, it was after I married and, as I said, I began to write in the pre-dawn hours, while my wife was still sleeping. Maybe I didn’t want to wake her.
For the last 22 years, I’ve written in silence. Today, I can’t imagine writing while music is playing. These days, I see people writing in bookstores and coffee shops, tapping away on their laptops while the people at the next table order scones and discuss the bad movie they just saw. I don’t know how they do it. I couldn’t write a shopping list under those circumstances.
Neddal Ayad: How much research do you do? It seems like quite a bit of research went into Wireless. What about your other novels?
Jack O’Connell: The simple answer is: Probably too much. I like research. I like wandering around in libraries. I like tracking down information. I like letting one book lead me to another book. I enjoy it all too much and I probably give it too much time. When you’re a young writer, you can forget that your job is to create a sense of verisimilitude. You can start to believe that you need to know everything there is to know about everything in your book. It’s possible to over-research and I’ve been guilty of that. Research can get in the way of the organic, instinctual unfolding of your story. You have to remember, at all times, that all you’ve got is your instinct. And you have to tend your instinct. You have to respect it by following your intuition, sometimes even when logic argues, violently, against doing so. That’s the great risk. You have to risk being a maniac who’s willing to savage his own story. That’s how you’ll make the breakthroughs and expand your capacity.
There have been moments when I’ve been unable to visualize a specific scene in a book. And so I’ve found a “real-world” analog in which to place my characters, a location, like, say, a diner, where they can play out their necessary interactions. And I’ve installed myself in that analog. I’ve eaten breakfast and lunch and dinner there. I’ve crudely sketched the locale. I’ve counted the number of light bulbs. I’ve transcribed the titles of the songs on the juke box. I’ve transcribed the graffiti on the men’s room walls. I’ve taken inventories, you know, trying to make that place live on the page. Trying to capture every square foot of its space. Sometimes, that kind of ridiculous effort is necessary. When your imagination stalls, sometimes you have to climb out and just walk. But it’s always better to ride.
Neddal Ayad: Is the gang situation in Quinsigamond based on a particular city or is it an amalgamation of the situations in other cites? Where do you get your information?
Jack O’Connell: The gangs of Quinsigamond are mythic and they come out of 1,000 paperback novels and b-movies and record albums about juvenile delinquents and turf rumbles and motorcycles and black leather. That said, I’ve read non-fiction books on inner city gangs, sociological studies on gang culture—there a lot of great stuff out there and on occasion I’ve lifted details from some of it. But my gangs are a baroque distillation, purposefully removed from the visceral tragedy of Crips and Bloods headlines.
My gangs are a romantic conceit, owing more to West Side Story and Hal Ellson novels than to the history of the Born to Kill gangsters of New York’s Canal St. or even the Latin Kings of my own hometown. In fact, I’ve recently hatched a notion for a gang book that I’m aching to write. I can see this book, can picture its people and places with a thrilling clarity. I can’t wait to get to it.
Neddal Ayad: Do you have much interaction with your readers? You don’t seem to have much of a Web presence.
Jack O’Connell: Beyond the occasional out-of-the-blue letter or e-mail, I really don’t have much contact with readers. Because of this I’m not always sure they exist. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
As for the Web, I wouldn’t know how to construct a site and I wouldn’t have time to maintain one. I’ve browsed the Web sites of some writers and I have to admit that I’ve gotten lost in a few blogs. It’s an interesting experience but I can’t help but feel I’m snooping in someone’s diary.
Copyright © 2004 by Neddal Ayad
Click here for Neddal Ayad's review of Jack O'Connell's Word Made Flesh
NEDDAL AYAD graduated from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador with a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature and Anthropology. He lives in St. John's, Newfoundland under a large pile of books, guitars, and compact discs. He likes his noir weird. And bleak. The weirder and more bleak the better.
