David Liss’s Secret History of America’s First Market Crash

When I met David Liss in mid-October to talk about his new novel, The Whiskey Rebels, the stock market had just been through its first set of freefalls—a weird week, as we discussed during the brief period before my video recorders battery died, to be publishing a historical novel about an attempt to force the collapse of American finanical markets during George Washington’s administration. I asked Liss if he had heard about the conspiracy theories, which former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee had floated on his new talk show, that 2008’s financial crises might be the result of a similar plot. “I don’t think it’s possible,” he said firmly. “It’s the most completely clueless theory I’ve heard.”

“It took a certain amount of work to make the markets as unregulated and crazy [now] as they were in the late 19th century,” he continued. “What really made it possible then was the small parameters of the market.” It would have been easy for a few people at a few banks to inflict serious damage on the emerging American economy, he explained. What makes his novel so brilliant is not just that he comes up with an explanation that makes sense given what we know of the real American history, but that he layers in a fictional drama that makes his scenario compelling as well as plausible.

But when he began reading about the Founding Fathers in late 2004, he said, “it really had more to do with my own sense of political disillusionment” than with any literary ambition. It was only when he noticed himself circling around the Bank of the United States, the Panic of 1792, and the Whiskey Rebellion that he was thinking of a book.

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24 November 2008 | interviews |

Tony O’Neill and the Novel of Existential Drug Addiction

“I’m not AA at all,” Tony O’Neill declared as our interview about his second novel, Down and Out on Murder Mile, got into full swing. “I still get high a lot. I still drink. I just don’t put needles in my arms. I’m as recovered as I want to be.” He isn’t particularly interested in being a spokesperson for the futility of the War on Drugs, but he has a particular loathing for the recovery culture’s insistence on forcing a mindset of weakness on addicts. “That was the thing that kept me going back to heroin when I was in AA,” he explained as we sat in the upstairs café of a downtown Manhattan bookstore. “Having a beer is not a relapse, and I realized that it was becoming a pattern from me when I was in the program; if you tell a junkie he’s relapsed, it gives him the perfect excuse to start doing the drugs he wants to be doing.”

Down and Out on Murder Mile draws freely upon O’Neill’s experiences when he was heavily using crack and heroin. The opening scene, in which the protagonist heads out into the night on Christmas Eve looking for a score, was based on real events, and was originally conceived as a self-contained story that simply kept growing. “Given what my life had been like up to the point when I started writing, it would have been crazy for me to ignore it,” he conceded. “I’ve probably stockpiled material for fifty more books if I didn’t get bored talking about myself… [But] I feel like you have to bring somethng else to the table.” For O’Neill, that means trying to recapture the 1990s Los Angeles drug subculture, a time and place he sees as largely vanished: “The corner where I used to score crack has a multimillion dollar condo on it now.”

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18 November 2008 | interviews |