KEY POINTS:
Michael Collins is lauded as a master of the literary thriller in the US. In Europe he's hailed as a shrewd chronicler of America's faultlines. Collins, however, describes himself as a political writer.
From the moment he arrived in America 23 years ago, as an Irish student on an athletic scholarship, Collins, who also ranks in the world's top 10 ultra-marathoners, has felt compelled to voice what he calls "the socialist in me". Since his third novel, Keepers Of The Truth, he has charted the darkest corners of the American dream. "I see poverty, I see what is happening in this society, so it's fiction that's born of experience and observation."
Which is why it rankles with the still US-based author, that his eighth and most challenging novel, The Secret Life Of E. Robert Pendleton (Phoenix, $29.99) was marketed in the US as a crime novel titled Death Of A Writer. "To position it that way, you run into readers who are expecting a standard murder mystery," says Collins. Even among critics, he laments, "there was a measuring of it against how a regular crime novel would play itself out. There were numerous levels of different issues in the novel, but they were the ones least addressed".
This didn't prevent the novel being acclaimed in the US as a "tour de force" and literary fiction of serious intent. A murder mystery that doubles as a kind of extended philosophic rumination on the nature of fame and literary success, it examines the claustrophobia and pretence of academic life and asks questions about the nature of story and genre.
Set in a small town in the mid-west rust belt, the book revolves largely around the rivalry between Robert Pendleton and his friend-turned-arch-rival, bestselling author and king of the coffee-table book, Allen Horowitz.
What begins as a college satire takes on a different tone when Pendleton survives a suicide attempt, and perennial graduate student, Adi Wiltshire, finds an unpublished manuscript of a novel called Scream hidden in Pendleton's basement. Adi enlists the help of an infatuated Horowitz to get it published and champions Scream, a quasi-autobiographical story with a gruesome child-murder at its heart. But just as Scream looks set to bring its ailing author the national success he'd always sought, a cold-case detective, Ryder, notices the resemblance between the fictional crime and a real-life unsolved murder.
Just as his novel ruminates on the crisis of modernity, and hints at the notion that psychopathic crime has become the metaphor for "a godless age", Collins admits to being preoccupied with what he calls a crisis of societal disconnect. He also rails at the disconnection between the many small American universities - as typified by the fictional college of his novel - and the often depressed towns in which they are located.
This, he argues, reinforces the notion of "losers and winners" he believes lies at the heart of American society. "The prevailing message I get from America is winner takes all, and that philosophy, as it is put into capitalism and into various ways of living, creates terrible tension and violence at the heart of society."
Collins has felt driven to write about the inequities of American society from the moment he arrived in 1984. He traversed the country, driving through its dying industrial towns, witnessing "the death of an old America". He "saw the faces and menace of people, and when I came to write Keepers Of The Truth, those were the faces that spoke to me".
Collins is just as driven when it comes to the world's most extreme sports events. He won the North Pole Marathon last year and the Last Marathon in Antarctica in 1997. "Often when I'm writing a novel, I end up running these three- or four-hour runs. All of a sudden you're running 33 miles a day and if you start doing that regularly, you're going to be one of the fitter people out there. I'm 43 and I'm going to the world championships for Ireland in September."
Collins attributes both his compulsion to tax himself physically and his social conscience to his Irish heritage. Born in Limerick in an era when Ireland was characterised by 75 per cent immigration, he recalls "I used to run up into the mountain areas where people didn't live any more, I saw dilapidated famine dwellings people had abandoned. I've developed a great respect for those people and what they endured, so I don't like it when things get too easy. To find myself living easy, I think would be the worst possible thing, and I feel ashamed to be too well off, or not to give money away".
That's why he teaches creative writing as a volunteer at schools and prisons, and donates money to schools in small US towns. "We have so much in our lives," he adds, "and I don't want to lose sense of the way many people in the world live."
- Detours, HoS
