Guest Author: Damian McNicholl

Damian McNicholl spent the summer on the road promoting his first novel, A Son Called Gabriel; heck, he’s still got a reading left to do at the Barnes & Noble in North Wales, Pennsylvania next month. His fictional tale of a coming of age in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and ’70s “vividly captures the confusion, trials, and small triumphs of a boy making his way through a culture constricted by its religious doctrines and economic hardships,” according to the Chicago Pink Pages, and Seamus Deane tells us, “Comic, courageous and often painful, this is a beautifully paced and balanced novel that will have an assured place in contemporary Irish writing.” McNicholl sent me this account of his touring life, and I’m happy to introduce him, and his debut novel, to you.

In an era of declining budgets and declining readership, publishers always look to cut costs and inevitably return to an ongoing debate about whether it is financially sound to send first-time authors out on tour. As a debut novelist, contact between myself and my publisher revolved around the editorial and publicity staff, so I cannot answer this question definitively. But one thing is certain, I’m very glad they decided to send me out on tour because I’ve learned such a lot.

While on the road with A Son Called Gabriel, I’ve experienced both stinging lows and delicious highs and am now convinced the root of a new author’s humiliation is to be found at the entrances of bookstores. Always, as I approached them, voice warmed up and passages rehearsed to perfection, my stomach churned in anticipation of whether any people would show that evening. And this anticipation sometimes became the writer’s dreaded reality when I’d squint into the cavernous events room teeming with empty chairs and a mound of novels, a smiling employee poised at the front ready to soothe my ego with one of a triumvirate of reasons, too rainy weather, too hot weather, or too windy weather.

Of course, such embarrassments were instantly forgotten on those evenings when I’d walk into an event hoping for five attendees only to discover a cornucopia of book lovers, all of whom hung on my every word and followed up with brilliant questions. It’s events like that which make authors want to keep writing, and most of us never want the thing to end, even forget the reason why the bookstore has us at the store in the first place.

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23 October 2004 | guest authors |

Linguists on Literature

People go to great lengths to attack the “history” Dan Brown spins in The Da Vinci Code, but if you really want to discredit him, there’s a much easier way: Geofrrey K. Pullum of Language Log explains why his prose style sucks.

Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that’s why.

Meanwhile, one of his blogging partners, Mark Liberman, is puzzled by the prose stylings of Matthew Pearl as evidenced in The Dante Club:

For the first few dozen pages, I figured that Pearl was just trying to give his prose a 19th-century tone by using awkward constructions, making up unexpected figures of speech, and substituting rare words for common ones… a much more plausible hypothesis is that Pearl graduated from a slightly different Harvard University, in a universe slightly different from our own, and read a body of English and American literature that is also just a bit different.

3 May 2004 | uncategorized |