Interesting that David Lynch and J.G. Ballard are also working their imaginations from the suburbs and they’re ultra hip now. It was the weirdness and fear in your novels that always drew me to your writing. I guess it was missed at the time.
With Divine Concepts [of Physical Beauty] there was a double death in it when a woman performance artist hanging from a wall plummets and for me that’s quite funny. It was also supposed to have a kind of high operatic mellow dramatic camp atmosphere. But you were in a minority. No one saw it at the time.
Ahead of our time undoubtedly! So then came The Conclave, a different kind of book.
The writing became more economical and I was trying to drain myself out of it. I was trying to see if I could make a book which was simply fact follows fact. I ended the first draft mid-sentence. My editor at Secker just sat there and said I couldn’t take a reader through a 360 page biography of someone and then just cut the tape. It’s still one of my favourite pieces of work though because it’s one of the only books from that period which was about its time rather than of its time. I still think it stands up as a kind of anatomy of a new middle class standpoint. There really were young people at that time thinking in terms of how near am I to somewhere where I can buy a bottle of Perrier water at eleven o’clock at night. I was interested in that state of banality. I was asking where the moral centre of that mind was. I was thinking in terms of the American minimalist Dean Graham. He did a project with homes for America in which he simply lifted the names of American housing estates and that was it. That was such a big influence on The Conclave. The fact that this really out there guy who had written an opera about hippies taking over lighthouses and stuff, had done a signature piece that consisted of simply the names of American suburban housing estates and published it in an art magazine, that had such a huge influence on me at the time.
A sub editor at Cape went through the manuscript before it went to the printers and put lots of inverted commas in it and the name of every single food item he put in italics. When it came out there were so many inverted commas that it just read weirdly – even sandwich would be in inverted commas and quite rightly reviewers found this mystifying. As did the author. The sub editor ended up running Macmillan!
What was interesting was that whereas Divine Concepts had turned a lot of people off with The Conclave they were saying “My life is exactly this. I am so depressed, I don’t know, I can’t cope with it.” At the same time the demonstration of middle class experience was really underway. One of the things that Ballard and Lynch achieved was to describe the pathology of ordinariness. This anatomy of anxiety and strangeness made The Conclave a very weird book but it passed most people’s eyes. Having said that it did get short-listed for the John Llwellyn Green prize.
3:AM is ten years old this year. This interview with Michael Bracewell is from September 2001.
