I realize this may sound like an outburst instead of a question, but . . . Is the sky falling? Literature is in flux . . . or WORSE! Isn’t it? People have forgotten how to read or don’t have the time. Technology is destroying our culture! What’s happening? WHY?

I guess a lot of people in the arts feel haunted right now—haunted by what we sense is starting to happen, the cultural continents pulling apart. You can’t sit down with another writer and not get into some wild-eyed back-and-forth about tempora and mores. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s very important what we think. It’s a purely journalistic fixation anyway. Or worse, a business one. I laugh when I read so-called “Arts” reporting and it’s all about box office and Ipads and 3D-graphic-novel-delivery-systems (I made that one up). Don’t writers have more important things on their minds? That’s not to say I don’t wonder about the future like everybody else (though I believe that all the anxious wondering itself is a symptom of paralysis). I’m trying to enjoy as much as I can the feeling that we’ve entered a barbarous age.

Barbarous! What are you talking about?

Well, I do think it’s a barbarous time, though I don’t want to sound flip about trying to enjoy that. To me the culture looks vast, panting, messy, petty, scholastic yet stupid, vapid yet lavish. It reminds me of Byzantium and the dark ages and the early Renaissance rolled into one, except instead of actually losing the texts and knowledge of the ancients, we’ve lost the will or the ability to locate them in the whiteout of so much art and information, so many voices.

With such a bleak world view—

Don’t write that. You’ll make me sound . . . Anyway, it’s not bleak.

With a world view like that, where exactly would you place your own work? Especially your new novel The Silver Hearted? Just another voice?

Of course, I think it’s more important than that. I hope I’m not just adding to the uproar. I wrote the kind of book I love but that I found just wasn’t being written.

You seem to think awfully well of yourself . . .

I don’t mean to sound that way. It’s just that I’ve been frustrated by the sameness and timidity of so many writers and publishers. I’ve never liked most of the books that come out, especially novels, odd as that sounds. Even as a kid I found novel conventions hard to take. In France, in the late nineteenth century, they were already making fun of them: “At nine o’clock the countess stepped from her brougham.” Or whatever it was. Though I loved anything “classic,” it just didn’t seem right that people were still writing that way. It didn’t work for me. I’d groan inside if my mother bought me a book with that little Newberry Medal sticker on it. In a lot of ways I still feel that way. What does it say about reading that they have to make public service announcements promoting it on TV? Who wants to be involved with something that lame? There’s a horrible good-for-you virtuousness that I think has done far more to ruin fiction than any dearth of readers.

A novelist who doesn’t like fiction?

Let’s say I’m skeptical of it at the moment. I know this will make me sound like a rube or an off-duty lawyer, but I love non-fiction. I’m very comfortable with memoir. When it comes to fiction I love things with an incredibly strong, almost obtrusive, intelligence behind them. So the experience of reading becomes a particularly vivid encounter with a brilliant and nearly real person. That’s why, even though I prefer hard reality, I adore hyper-imaginative writers like Harry Mathews, Firbank, Roussel, and to some extent Nabokov. I feel like I’m reading the exquisitely eloquent author as much as I am “a novel.” It’s especially clear in Roussel’s case. Reading Locus Solus, which has nothing to do with Roussel the man, is like watching a photograph of him slowly develop. It’s like reading a mad and inadvertent autobiography. As you go along you realize that the fantastic imagination of the creator is the book’s subject, not the insanely detailed things he imagines. I’d put The Silver Hearted in this category, too. Despite all the characters, all the action, there seems to be a single unsteady intelligence behind the whole thing. Only I meant it to be like that.

So is it gay or not? I really get the feeling you’re waffling on that. Where’s it supposed to go in the bookstore?

I don’t know. I didn’t invent the categories. I suppose it’s gay, because all the characters are male and it’s full of lust and sensuality. Seafaring, violence, is that gay? But maybe it’s not gay, because there’s no repression, no liberation, no coming out, no subculture of any kind. I wasn’t interested in that.

Are you distancing yourself from the gay world?

In fact, minority status is something I’ve always found difficult about being gay. I think a lot of white guys, as soon they realize they’re gay, dive head first into the (to them) exciting new “minority” experience. I’m gay, but I always found it hard to let go of the great “white guy” feeling that the world revolves around you. Of course, now I’m perfectly self-conscious about it, and I can’t help but associate that wonderful feeling with cluelessness. . . But, hey, I’m working on a non-fiction book that’s got “gay” in the title. Gay Panic. How gay is that?

Well, not at all, really. That sounds like a book about gay people getting killed. I mean, pardon me, but that makes you seem even more homophobic or self-hating or just crazy.  Why would you be interested in something so dreadful?

It started as a joke. A friend of mine became the publisher of a company here in New York. We were throwing around ideas for big-selling books (not something I usually worry about) and I told him he should get in on the True Crime action. I came up with a title I thought was funny: “Gay Panic: Men Who Kill the Men Who Love Them.” As we thought it about over the next few days, we realized no one had written about most of these cases. My friend asked if I was interested in writing something fairly pulpy under a pseudonym, and I said “Sure.” Then as I started doing research, visiting the places where the murders took place, talking to law enforcement officials, corresponding with the killers themselves or their accomplices (one of whom is on Death Row in San Quentin) I just got excited by the possibility of doing something a lot more significant. These stories are incredible. They’ve become really important to me, though, I admit, the material is pretty upsetting.

And there was a good deal of violence in The Silver Hearted. Where does that come from?

I have no idea. I had a very ordinary suburban upbringing. I was formed as much by TV and the arts as I was by experience. Maybe creative people with an art-heavy upbringing tend to use exaggerated or artificial dramatic tools to get at the subtleties of experience. Like Senecan tragedy in Silver Age Rome. You and your audience have formed such a thick skin from years of familiarity with stimulation that  you need to increase the intensity just to get an effect.

TAGS: authors, David McConnell, Gay Panic, The Firebrat, The Silver Hearted

DAVID McCONNELL is the author of The Silver Hearted, a novel just published by Alyson Books. His short fiction and journalism have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. His novel The Firebrat came out in 2003. He’s currently at work on Gay Panic, case studies of six murders. He lives in New York City.

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