Well into my sixties, I found myself trying to answer the question posed by David Byrne (no relation) "...How did I get here?" The gulf between my coming-of-age in the decade between 1945 and 1955 and the early Twenty-First Century seemed unbridgeable in any way other than a book.
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
That a reader will take away some authentic feeling or insight into a recent but already unknowable past, a singular, specific past in an urban, blue-collar, Roman Catholic world in the years following World War Two. I don't have a nostalgic bone in my head, and the book is, I believe, absent any of the "Happy Days," "good old days" nonsense that seems to pervade so much of 1950's memory. Then as now, coming of age, despite the material differences, remains pretty much a process of "working on mysteries without any clues."
Is there any special method to your writing?
Initially structure proved the most difficult barrier to getting the book written. It was only when I set the chronological boundaries of 1945 and 1955 that I was able to harness and winnow out the material. I used chronology, the boundaries of the neighborhood and specific subject matter; my family, people in the neighborhood and mostly myself and my memories of how I felt about what was taking place. I used cars, clothes, streets, corners, etc., to organize the flow of the narrative. Each chapter is almost a stand-alone piece, but if the book is read sequentially it does form a coherent whole.
How many hours a day do you spend reading /writing.
Constantly. Like most people who write, I'm a printed word obsessive. I read, often to the detriment of more pressing matters. I've written for a living. I've journaled compulsively for over forty years and the journals serve as a place to try things out. I've also been blogging at "The Compost Heap" for the past several years.
What books have most influenced your life?
Wow! From Harvey Kurtzman's EC Comic Books of the early 1950s to the academic canon; Joyce, the Russians, Eliot. Then there's everything Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh have written. Russell Banks, John Banville and Richard Russo are on my lists, as are W. G. Sebald and John Gardner. I was a History major and I gravitated toward the more literate historians, both academic and popular; John Lukacs, Max Hastings, Fritz Stern, Antony Beevor and on and on and on. At this writing, I'm two-thirds through Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence," and I hope that Lethem's terrific writing, like the writing of every author I've ever read and liked, will in some conscious or unconscious way influence my own writing.
If you could be the author of any novel, which would it be and why?
Evelyn Waugh's Second World War trilogy, "Sword of Honor." Even his active service in something as overwhelming as a world war couldn't tarnish his powers of observation or his withering wit. The series also communicates, sadly and gently, his awareness that the war will destroy everything he holds dear in English life.
What are your current projects?
There's a half-finished novel, about 60,000 words to date, on a working life in the belly of a major American corporation. Again referencing Waugh, It' s general tone so far is one of benign if grotesque comedy. There is also a stack of unpublished short pieces that I hope to develop into a short story collection.
