Fantastic Metropolis

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 19^th 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.