A Quick Trip to Q-Town
An Interview with Jack O’Connell
Jack O’Connell
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 (see my 2003 list).
