{"id":77617,"date":"2014-10-03T12:17:08","date_gmt":"2014-10-03T16:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=77617"},"modified":"2015-11-03T11:20:07","modified_gmt":"2015-11-03T16:20:07","slug":"nothing-happened-an-interview-with-joseph-oneill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/03\/nothing-happened-an-interview-with-joseph-oneill\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing Happened: An Interview with Joseph O\u2019Neill"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"oneill\"<\/a>

Photo courtesy of the author<\/p><\/div>\n

The narrator of Joseph O\u2019Neill\u2019s new novel, <\/em>The Dog, decides to move to Dubai. Transitional places make more sense to him than those in which \u201ceverything has been built and all that remains is the business of being in buildings.\u201d He sees his own life, in the aftermath of a recently disintegrated relationship, as somehow \u201cposthumous\u201d and shameful. And meanwhile his legal training, instead of arming his intellect, merely alerts him to the inadequacies of the language he\u2019s forced to use. \u201cLost in a fantastic vigilance of ambiguity, obscurity, and import,\u201d caged in by the feeling that \u201cthe very project of making sense [is] being mocked,\u201d he drafts endless disclaimers and other corporate documents that he only slenderly understands. His new apartment tower is called The Situation. His preferred spa is called Unique. But even recreation is an exercise in compromise\u2014\u201cthere\u2019s more than one Unique.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

Javier Mar\u00edas, paraphrasing Faulkner, once told an interviewer that \u201cwhen you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around.\u201d <\/em>The Dog isn\u2019t much interested in bright epiphanies. Instead it shows the extent of one man\u2019s ignorance\u2014his helplessness in a foreign world. The evocative sentences that helped to win O\u2019Neill\u2019s previous novel, <\/em>Netherland, the 2009 PEN\/ Faulkner Award and a wide readership, are largely absent here. With its deadpan existentialism and playful corporate-speak, <\/em>The Dog is perhaps closer to a book like Joseph Heller\u2019s <\/em>Something Happened. It is bleakly, unexpectedly funny.<\/em><\/p>\n

I met O\u2019Neill in Manhattan on an afternoon in mid-September. We talked about the fact that <\/em>Netherland \u201cvery nearly didn\u2019t get published at all,\u201d the relationship between his work and that of Louis C.K., and why he is \u201cdeeply uninterested in the chattiness you get in so many contemporary novels.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been mentioned by various reviewers that The Dog<\/em> is a very different book to Netherland<\/em>, at least in its tone. What sort of sentences did you find yourself looking for as you sat down to write, and what kinds of sentences did you find yourself striking out?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Generally, I want sentences that are both conscientious and surprising. For me, plot happens most of all at the level of the sentence. As I reader, I want to start a sentence and then be surprised by what happens to it, or intelligently happens. To be surprised by the conscientious movement of emotion and attention over the course of the sentence. I used to write poetry, and I think good poetry does that\u2014captures a movement of intelligence. Still more generally, I want a verbal landscape that\u2019s unusual\u2014that I haven\u2019t read a million times before, and that isn\u2019t easily replicable in other forms. This approach animated the writing of Netherland.<\/em><\/p>\n

In The Dog<\/em>, my main character is a theorist\u2014he is disposed toward theorizing and rationalizing, as well as to deep emotion, and is only occasionally given to recollection. To my mind, this makes him a comically urgent character\u2014a man who is constantly caught short by this thoughts, who constantly needs to take a mental leak. That being the case, it wouldn\u2019t have made sense to reuse the highly particular, contemplative voice of Netherland<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not interested in writing stuff that\u2019s indistinguishable from other stuff. I\u2019m trying to avoid that deathly sense that here\u2019s something you\u2019ve read before, but with different characters, or with one situation replaced with another. I\u2019m also deeply uninterested in the chattiness you get in so many contemporary novels. <\/p>\n

What are you thinking of when you say \u201cchattiness\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That kind of conversational tone that you see in so much fiction. The banal and treacherous lucidity that\u2019s underpinned by a bogus, consumeristic egalitarianism, which cannot tolerate the idea that good writing might not instantly and cost-effectively yield its full significance, and might in fact make one feel in some sense beneath<\/em> the work \u2026 I mean, when I read I want <\/em>to feel that I\u2019m beneath the work. That\u2019s what I look for in art. I want it to be my superior.<\/p>\n

When I was writing The Dog<\/em>, I was reading a lot of philosophical prose, which can be humbling and dense and strange\u2014the opposite of a page-turner, you could say. As a reader, I have almost no desire whatsoever to turn the page. I would rather stay right where I am, on the page I\u2019m reading, and stick with what\u2019s there. Stay with the text and joyfully see how it works, word by word, and absorb the language and what\u2019s going on there, and only turn the page as a last resort, when the language runs out. I wanted The Dog <\/em>to capture some of the stillness and depth of philosophical texts. For me, there\u2019s enormous pleasure and excitement in that.
<\/strong><\/p>\n

Both Netherland<\/em> and The Dog<\/em> are written in the first person. In the last decade, when you\u2019ve used the third person in your writing it has tended to be on smaller canvases\u2014your short stories.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I just don\u2019t think I\u2019ve cracked the third person. Haven\u2019t come close to it. There are these maestros like Flannery O\u2019Connor and Muriel Spark who situate the point of view in some dimension of objectivity that is their own. Bellow is a third-person master, too, though his trick is to write in the third person as if it\u2019s the first person\u2014to appoint a protagonist and then get very, very close to his thoughts and feelings. All that said, it\u2019s not just a question of my technical helplessness. I have philosophical doubts about writing in the third person. It\u2019s no coincidence, I think, that so many of the novels I love best have, at their center, a kind of turbulent consciousness around which everything else revolves. Both Netherland <\/em>and The Dog<\/em> are like that\u2014there\u2019s a central subjectivity to them\u2014and a first person voice feels to me like the right way to explore a consciousness of that kind. First person offers, among other things, immediacy, which I value very highly.<\/p>\n

My feeling is that I just get to<\/em> write in the first person. The reader understands that form of address and understands its infirmities, and understands that it is a productive misrepresentation of the character\u2019s inner state. Everyone gets this, just as they get and accept a close-up in a film and don\u2019t start shouting that the character\u2019s head is way too big or her voice is way too loud. We\u2019re talking about formal shortcuts, basically. The first person is the shortest of shortcuts to an elusive element of the real, a person\u2019s unspoken life, access to which is unavailable elsewhere in art.<\/p>\n

At the start of the book, in a striking passage, the narrator talks about scuba diving in Dubai. As the novel moved on, I felt at times like the relationship of reader to narrator in your novel was that of a diving buddy to another diver. The narrator is this oblique presence whose confusing signals we read\u2014at first with amusement, and then with a mounting sense of unease. We realize, slowly, that he\u2019s in trouble down there \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

He is in trouble, you\u2019re right. But aren\u2019t we all in trouble? Aren\u2019t you in trouble, too?<\/p>\n

Initially, I envisaged this whole book as taking place entirely underwater. That was my very first thought, before I began writing. I wanted that weird descriptive alienness that an underwater setting might involve: unknown entities, a fluid element, an inhuman space \u2026 Then I decided not to. It was too limiting, and also I don\u2019t scuba dive and I\u2019m too scared to try it. It would have been a nightmarish book\u2014an even stranger novel than it is\u2014if it had all been set underwater.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve moved around so much and lived in so many different places that I don\u2019t really belong to a particular place, and so I have little option but to seek out dramatic situations that I might have a chance of understanding. Hence Dubai: Dubai is an expat center.<\/p>\n

Has the fact you\u2019ve moved around so much in your life, living in so many different countries from childhood onward, been useful to your fiction in some way\u2014that sense of not belonging? <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"71swmvsiejl-_sl1500_\"<\/a>Essential, I think. But it\u2019s only now that I have some idea of how to make use of it in my fiction. Before Netherland<\/em>, I didn\u2019t know how to approach that sense of chronic displacement. It took me a while to realize it was a huge story, the sense of not belonging, as you put it\u2014of pretty much never<\/em> being in a position to say, These people and I are the same. You could write a thousand novels about it and it wouldn\u2019t get old, because it\u2019s such an essential part of what it is to be human\u2014that idea of where, if anywhere, you fit in, in the so-called scheme of things. And how does the world work? A lot of novels might inform you about how a character gets on with his Auntie, but they won\u2019t necessarily tell you where the characters stand in relation to the world. I\u2019m interested in putting characters in places where the world order is changing, and changing in a particular way. The word globalization<\/em> grunts into view, here, along with post-nationalism<\/em>, another brute.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s there in Netherland<\/em> from the beginning, incidentally. Hans reads about a group of tribespeople who\u2019ve emerged from the Amazon forest into a place they don\u2019t even know is Colombia. They haven\u2019t even heard of Colombia, or even Columbus. So the question of pre-national or non-national identities is raised at the start of the book, and the book ends with these moments in which the world appears, the Googling protagonist, as a merely physical, or post-national, entity. I feel that Dubai, in this novel, is the next iteration of my interest in those ideas. It\u2019s a place where societal participation or belonging is a very largely a question of denizenship rather than citizenship. Only around 10\u00a0percent of the population are natives. The rest belong there so long as they are permitted to work there.<\/p>\n

I read somewhere that you admire Updike\u2019s book Self-Consciousness,<\/em> and when I was looking through my copy of that book I found this quote\u2014\u201cFor many men, work is the effective religion, a ritual occupation and inflexible orientation which permits them to imagine that the problem of their personal death has been solved \u2026\u2009\u201d Is there something applicable to the narrator of The Dog<\/em> in that quote?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My narrator has a very unusual job. He doesn\u2019t really have any colleagues. He has one underling who, due to Dubai laws and the underling\u2019s non-nationality, doesn\u2019t even rise to the status of an employee. The narrator also has this rather paradoxical relationship with the corporate entity he works for\u2014he\u2019s the man who signs the papers on behalf of this rich family\u2019s trust, but at the same time he is constantly trying to limit his personal liability in case the company is involved in wrongdoing. But despite his efforts, he feels unprotected by the corporate veil, and he\u2019s terrified, because there comes a point when, as the corporate officer, his actions are indistinguishable from those of the company he works for. He is the biological manifestation of the corporation. I think, like many people, the narrator of The Dog<\/em> feels, in his work life, subject to a terrible indeterminacy. Work, for him, is really a question of being frightened. He\u2019s not even sure he really knows what his job is<\/em>, beyond its humiliations and shame.<\/p>\n

The breakup of his relationship is clearly painful to him, but he seems to feel a shame that is far more general and amorphous than that. An unspecified shame at who he is. <\/strong><\/p>\n

It does seem to me, as it has seemed to countless others, that there\u2019s a very ancient and powerful condition, let\u2019s call it shame, that we all, as human beings, have to deal with in some way or another\u2014most obviously by covering ourselves up. The Adam and Eve myth. Nakedness. Being uncovered. It leads to shame, and by our shame we achieve our humanity. It\u2019s as if humanity is<\/em> shame. And I would agree with you, the shame experienced by the narrator of The Dog <\/em>doesn\u2019t seem to come only from his former relationship or his conduct in it. We all have those moments, moments that\u2014this is a very English phrase, isn\u2019t it?\u2014we\u2019re not very proud of. His shame would seem to be bigger than that. He\u2019s sensitive to an idea that it\u2019s shameful simply to be who he is, a person who needs to go to work, to take orders and sign documents, interact with others, take a shit \u2026 I feel he\u2019s related to the character in Louie<\/em>\u2014Louie. Louie<\/em>, if you\u2019ve watched the recent episodes, isn\u2019t that funny anymore. It\u2019s almost too dark. It has become a deliberately excruciating comedy of ethics.<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t thought of Louie<\/em>. But I thought at times of Joseph Heller\u2019s Something Happened<\/em>, that dark portrait of a man on the edge, misunderstood at work and at home\u2014the bleak comedy of that. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m joyfully surprised you mention Something Happened<\/em>. Do people still read that book, do you think? Would it even get published today? It would certainly get panned. There is eventually a reveal in Something Happened<\/em>\u2014something does<\/em> happen\u2014but not much. It\u2019s more a past tense question in that book. What has happened to this guy to make him who he is? I think there\u2019s a sense in which The Dog<\/em>, like Something Happened<\/em>, traces the consequences of a crime that cannot be fully identified. Why\u2019s he in the doghouse? Why does he feel like a dog? He doesn\u2019t even know.<\/p>\n

The books you wrote and published before Netherland<\/em> didn\u2019t receive much attention. Netherland <\/em>broke out in a spectacular way. With this book things seem to be going well\u2014it\u2019s been longlisted for the Booker Prize, after all\u2014but the reviews have been more mixed.<\/strong> Have your views of what it means to be a published writer changed over time? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book. Netherland<\/em> was\u00a0an exception. The right reviewers discovered the book at the right time. There was a lot of luck involved in that. The Dog<\/em> hasn\u2019t been quite so lucky, although I\u2019ve got to say that it\u2019s had its share of breaks.<\/p>\n

When I was writing Netherland<\/em>, all I knew was that I was giving it my best shot. If I assumed anything it was that, as with my previous books, it wouldn\u2019t reach any readers at all. Which nearly turned out to be the case. The manuscript did the rounds for ages and was rejected by everybody. Eventually we found one editor in England who would take it, and one here in America. That\u2019s all you need. It very nearly didn\u2019t get published at all. My previous books had gone out of print at that point. Then my luck changed. It could change again. That\u2019s the way it is. My job is to keep writing\u2014isn\u2019t it?
<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jonathan Lee is a British writer. His new novel, <\/em>High Dive, will be published in the U.S. in March.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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