Michael Collins is candid about the writing life – it's about sitting 'in your underwear, with Oprah in the background'. Thankfully, it inspired his new black comedy, writes ARMINTA WALLACE
MICHAEL COLLINS strides across the bar of the Royal Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire as effortlessly as a marathon runner. Then again, he is a marathon runner. A carpeted bar is no challenge to somebody who has legged it across the Antarctic wastes, or up the side of Everest. Tall, dark, handsome and fit, Collins is as unlike the speckled band of assorted coffee-drinkers, tourists and holidaying families dotted around the hotel’s ground floor it’s as if he has been parachuted in, immaculately suited, from another planet.
Which, in a way, he has. Collins has been living and working in the US since he went to Indiana on an athletics scholarship in the early 1980s.
His, though, is a very different America from the one we might read about in the work of Colm Tóibín or Joseph O’Connor or Colum McCann. Not for Collins the dubious comforts of east-coast ex-pat culture: instead, he plugs right into the wide-open spaces and small-town weirdness of the American Mid-West, dissecting its assumptions and pretensions with a wily blend of outsider observation and insider information.
His new book, Midnight in a Perfect Life, is a black comedy on an unlikely theme: infertility. How did he hit on a topic which, for many men, is something of a no-go area? "I'd say, number one, just from watching the TV – all the Oprah shows and stuff," he says. There are also magazine articles, websites, you name it.
“There’s a huge push on this in popular culture.”
Traditionally, having children amounts to 50 per cent of the American Dream – motherhood and apple pie. But getting the ingredients of the pie together has, in many cases, turned out to be a costly business. “When you hit 40, you get into that strange realm where people can’t get pregnant who got pregnant when they were 18, 19 years of age,” he says. “I saw a lot of that when I was working at Microsoft. People who had definitively ruled out having children. Rejected children. Rejected the whole married-and-settled lifestyle. And then, in their 40s, spent heaps of money trying to become pregnant. It raises the question of, why are they doing it?”
As a father of four children himself, Collins didn’t have direct experience of the darker corners of fertility treatment, surrogacy and all the rest of it. As a writer, however, he has a penchant for strange sub-cultures – and for metaphors so surreal that the reader doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In this book, such a moment arrives when the narrator, Karl, and his partner Lori turn up at a clinic to be fitted with an inflatable bump.
“The model was top of the line,” Collins writes, “featuring a realistic heartbeat and fetal kick, along with a pliable vinyl material that could . . . be weighted to forty pounds, and adjustable rib belts to induce lower back pain, bladder discomfort, shortness of breath . . .”
Oh, come on. Surely not? Collins is the picture of innocence. “I looked stuff up on the internet, and then I went to a place and told them my wife couldn’t have a baby and I was thinking of getting her one of these as a present,” he says. He was trying to find out how much the thing would cost, but nobody at the clinic was in a hurry to come up with a figure. “What they usually do, they get the wife in. She loves the bump, and then the guy has to begrudgingly pay for it. I said, no, I’m really committed to this – whatever it costs. And they said, ‘$8,000’.
“It introduced me to the mania that’s out there. I think I got out of it cheap at €8,000. I was getting a deal. I didn’t buy it, of course.”
In the book, Lori breaks down in tears when her bump is fitted: her partner, meanwhile, muses on “the unreality of reality”.
IT IS, FOR COLLINS, a central theme. Another strand of the book is concerned with one of the couple’s neighbours, a transvestite who documents his/her life on a porn website to which Karl signs up. “What you see is not what you get,” says Collins. “For me, one reason for becoming a writer is to ask what truth is. I try to play on that theme of him looking across at the transvestite, and also watching him on television.
"A kind of Rear Windoweffect – the tug between what's right there and also on the screen. Reality is torn right down the middle. Everybody, I think, is torn like that these days."
Collins himself is a case in point. Is he an Irish writer or an American one? His first book of short stories was praised to the skies in the US, and “lacerated” – his phrase – back here in Ireland. When he began writing books about America, he became big in Europe – especially in France, where he’s routinely compared to the mischievous Michel Houellebecq. The Americans, though, weren’t so keen on having an Irishman take satirical potshots at their culture. Genre-wise, he says, he also finds himself in something of a no-man’s-land.
"I had a book called Emerald Undergroundthat was published here and other countries, and in about 10 or 15 languages – but not in America," he says.
“In New York I met all these publishers and they said, ‘It’s gotta be genre. That novel is ponderous. There’s no real reason that you would keep turning the pages’. I said: ‘It’s the musings of a person. It’s a journey.’ But they said ‘No. It has to be a love story, or a murder.’ I wasn’t partial to the love story thing. It’s not in my nature.
“So one day I thought, ‘Okay, dismember or kill somebody’.” Figuratively, of course.
Every book of his since The Keepers of Truthhas featured a murder, a literary task he describes as "a chore".
“With The Keepers of Truth I didn’t know anything about crime and murder, and it was unsolved. Then I went through a couple of books where I struggled trying to have cops solve things and have a resolution at the end. I had to do a whole lot of stuff that’s not my forte, to make them into crime novels. Even with this book, at first I had a cop who showed up halfway through. And then I realised it just killed the whole nature of the book – so I changed it.”
The narrator of Midnight in a Perfect Lifeis a 40-year-old writer who had a big hit with an early book but is now writing porn and ghosting for a crime writer to make ends meet. Collins says all his books are semi-autobiographical: but does he ever worry about giving too much away?
“I would always be candid about the life of a writer,” he says. “You’re in your apartment in your underwear, with Oprah in the background. I would say you get depressed. You get lost. But I wouldn’t hide behind the autobiographical nature of it.”
His basic modus operandi, he says, is to reconfigure the narrative of his own life. “Just throwing extra details in, to make it a story.”
Certain details in his own life, though, you couldn’t make up if you tried – such as his fondness for running (and winning) marathons in such extreme environments as the Sahara, the Antarctic, the North Pole and on Everest. Having four children, one of whom had a brain cyst a couple of years ago, has put paid to the ultra-running for the moment; but at 46, he’s still hoping to qualify for the Irish team for the 100km race at the World Championships in Gibraltar in November.
“In 2007, we went to the world championships with a team made up of five guys. One’s a teacher, one’s a tree-feller, and me. We finished seventh – and we beat the English, who are all full-time athletes. I got a great sense of satisfaction from that. I’d like to have one more go at it.”
COLLINS HAS WRITTEN, on his website and elsewhere, about the psychology of extreme running. He presents it as something of a schizophrenic sport since it’s often tied up with charity fund-raising or other humanitarian work. At its core, however, it demands a ruthlessness and determination which he describes as predatory, almost atavistic. Does this predatory aspect have any relevance to his writing? “Yeah, I think it does,” he says. “When you’re trying to write something, you’re trying to creep up on the media. Creep up on the public. A lot of my novels are quasi-vicious – or they say something that you normally couldn’t say.
There are kind of barbs and attacks; the whole book can be an indictment of something.
Over the course of a race, you’re just chipping away at someone all the time. Trying to wear them down – make them submit. With the novels, I don’t know what I want somebody to submit to. But I want them to submit to something. Chapter by chapter – chipping away at people’s ideas.”
Midnight in a Perfect Life, by Michael Collins, is published by Weidenfeld Nicholson
