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I wrote a novel in three days
A guy, his best pal and a bottle of tequila. It was a recipe for literary greatness.
By Dave Fox
[11/16/99]

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"Breakfast With Scot" by Michael Downing
In a smart, funny and affecting novel, two gay men inherit an 11-year-old boy and blanch when he turns out to be a budding queen.
By Greg Bottoms
[11/16/99]

Book Bag
Men at extremes
The author of "Bad Behavior" picks five tales of guys at the end of their ropes.
By Mary Gaitskill
[11/15/99]

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"Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad" by David Haward Bain
It's sprawling and overloaded with facts, but this account of the building of the transcontinental railroad does justice to one of the great American achievements.
By Katharine Whittemore
[11/15/99]

Ivory Tower
The secret life of war
A historian exposes the unpredictably diverse feelings of ordinary soldiers, but fails to learn from their words.
By Annie Murphy Paul
[11/15/99]

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Before we discuss the Troubles and Bennett's incarceration in the Long Kesh prison camp in 1974, the Irishman asks, "Well, you're a writer. You're up at the crack of dawn. And what do you do, a thousand words a day? Or more than that ... ?"

His accent is light. I tell him, "Well, I don't count. Do you?"

"Yes," he answers. "And sometimes it's in the low 200s. Just correcting a sentence can cut your word count in half sometimes at the end of the day."

The Catastrophist By Ronan Bennett Simon & Schuster, 336 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Oh, I see now. It figures. After all, Bennett is one of those writers -- a brilliant stylist. His lean prose reminds me of the purity of James Salter's or Joan Didion's. It figures he'd spend all day fiddling with one damn sentence. We continue with small talk:

"So, what kind of Irishman are you, living in London?" I ask him.

"Well you know, like a lot of Irishman, I got on the boat and I came here and I thought I was coming for six months maximum to work. And that was 20 years ago ..."

We talk for an hour. Then it turns out he's coming to New York. We continue our conversation two weeks later at a cheap coffee shop near the Gramercy Park Hotel. Bennett is lean. Mid-40s. With a face I figure women fall for.

What led you to write about the Congo?

I wanted to explore the role of the writer in a politically polarized society. I knew I didn't want to set it in Ireland because I wanted it to have a wider resonance.

How direct are the parallels between the Congo in the late 1950s and Ireland?

Both countries have a kind of thwarted bid for independence, continuing involvement of more powerful economic interests, political interests, colonial interests. Things that are never one-sided -- the Congolese themselves are as divided as the Irish. I wrote things that are more apparent to an Irish reader than to an American. I sprinkled the text with a few little giveaways. For example, there's a point where Stipe [an ugly American] tells Gillespie that the U.S. has no selfish, strategic or economic interest in the Congo. And that's a phrase that the British government used about Ireland.

Can I be frank? I recently found myself complaining to a Yeats biographer about how impatient I was with the Troubles.

[With patience.] I can understand someone from a well-organized, settled society being impatient with somewhere like Ireland, where issues should have been settled years ago but haven't.

Why were you imprisoned?

That would take a very long conversation, but it goes back to the early 1970s, when very large numbers of young Catholic men were arrested in mass roundups and went to prison. I was still at school when I was arrested.

What had you done?

I hadn't done anything. Most people, in fact, who were arrested in those early years were not even charged. The British brought in a special law which allowed people to be interned without trial for years on end.

You were political then?

Yes. I was taken to a political prison called Long Kesh, which was really like a World War II prisoner-of-war camp, with huts and guard towers and a fence and so on. It was about nine miles from Belfast. It had been an old RAF station. American soldiers were camped there during the Second World War as well. And it had been hastily converted into a prison camp. [Pause.] I have to say that I feel slightly embarrassed talking about it, because my experience wasn't anything unusual. It would be very hard to find a Catholic family in Belfast that hadn't had somebody who was jailed at one point or another over the last 30 years.

Were all the prisoners sympathizers?

Most were either actual members of Republican organizations, or sympathizers. The place itself was very bleak. It was wind-swept. I can remember being cold a lot of time. And there was certainly an atmosphere of great brutality. But at the same time, there was a tremendous sense of solidarity among the men. You go in as a very frightened kid, and instead of being brutalized by prisoners, you actually discovered that you knew most of them from your street, from your school ... Often it was a family reunion. So, in a funny way, looking back I haven't regretted that experience at all, actually.

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