Better off Greg

Some books should come with health warnings attached. When Greg Baxter’s incendiary memoir, A Preparation For Death, was published in 2010, the Dublin-based Texan writer knew that his days as a staff journalist with the Irish Medical Times were over. It wasn’t just that he’d written about his Bacchanalian sex and drugs lifestyle, or how mind-numbingly boring he’d found the job. His description of a failed attempt at masturbation in the office toilets more or less guaranteed his P45.

Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t want to talk too much about this aspect of his life (though he’s hilariously candid once the recorder is off). “It was a mutual decision that it was best that I moved on,” Baxter explains with a wry smile. “I’d been in that job for six years and I made sure the book was gonna make me quit. I was surprised at some of the people who were suggesting that I hadn’t seen it coming. There was a little bit of stuff in the newspapers about it. In fact I knew exactly what I was doing.”
We’re meeting in a bar in Dublin. Although his memoir detailed a fairly prodigious drinking habit, he’s on mineral water until after he’s recorded an interview with Matt Cooper for The Last Word. “I’d love a pint, but best to do this kind of stuff with a clear head.”
A tall, handsome and quietly intense 37-year-old, with a trimmed goatee and owlish horn-rimmed glasses, Baxter bears a slight resemblance to a young Salman Rushdie. Currently based in Berlin, where he lives with his partner and young son, he’s back in Ireland to promote his second book, The Apartment. Although billed as his debut novel, he now says of his memoir that it was largely a work of literary fiction. Preparation was also remarkably candid about his enviably busy sex life. However, while based on real people and events, so many names and details were changed that it might as well have been fiction.
“It was a cautious book,” he explains. “I asked for people’s permission. If I didn’t know them anymore, or they were reluctant to be named, often I changed them so they weren’t recognisable. Some of them I turned into fictional characters. And I created fictional events that were akin to events that actually happened.
“For that book to be read as it should be, I have to be dead. It takes a really, really skilled critic and reader to read it the right way. A lot of people who’ve read it the right way have done the right thing – which is, understood that person is the narrator. It’s not me. In some ways, while that was a huge part of my life at the time, it was only part of my life. There was another part of me that was doing other things.”
While the book was praised by the likes of Anne Enright and David Shields, some literary critics really didn’t get it “Rarely have I so much disliked a book I’ve reviewed, or found such little merit in one,” thundered an appalled Des Traynor in the Irish Independent. Not that the hostile reviews bothered the author too much.
“I thrive on negativity,” he laughs. “It doesn’t bother me so much what they say. It is extremely difficult to look at an autobiographical work and not conflate the narrator and the author. I was probably naïve not to have expected the response of, ‘This is a book about sex and addiction’. There was a sense about Preparation that it was me wallowing in depression about things. But it’s a book about joy, about liberation.”
Freed from the constraints of his office job (though he still taught creative writing classes in the Dublin Writers Centre some evenings), and buoyed by an Arts Council grant, he wrote The Apartment in “a kind of a fever” in his Clongriffin house in just three months.
“I was newly unemployed. I was still teaching at nights and that involved a lot of prep. However for the first time I had blocks of hours to write. A weird kind of confluence occurred in which everything seemed to make sense. The book sort of came to me, and I never looked back. It wasn’t something that I started and put down and went back to a year later. I basically woke up one morning and just went for it.”
Set in an unidentifiable eastern European capital and narrated by an unnamed former US Marine, The Apartment isn’t big on plot. So much so that there isn’t really one to speak of. One winter morning the narrator – moderately wealthy from private contracting work in Iraq – wakes in his cheap hotel room. He doesn’t have any particular reason to be in the city, nor does he have any reason to be anywhere else. A pretty local girl he has befriended calls around, and together they head out into the cold streets to find him an apartment to rent. As they walk, they swap stories and reminisce about their lives and experiences. Along the way there are lengthy meditations on art, architecture, music, friendship, war, economics and politics.
“I think plotless-ness is often a misdiagnosis of good books. Do we say that Thomas Bernhard’s books are plotless or do we say that he redefines plot? What most people call ‘plot’, I call ‘coincidences’. Bernhard’s influence was huge in the permission I felt to write a book that was just a thought. I knew that I didn’t like books in which coincidences occurred that helped resolve the conflict in the book. I always felt like every single coincidence that initiated or furthered plot resolution was a deus ex machina. Every one of them! Every book I read, every time a coincidence comes up that helps things, I’ve to close the book. It’s that sensitive.”
With thematic undertones of dislocation and alienation, The Apartment is also about the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Although Baxter had no direct experience of war, he relied on the first-hand accounts of friends and acquaintances who had served in the military for authenticity.
“I don’t know who the narrator is, but the job he did is a real job. The guy the book is dedicated to – BH – is a lieutenant commander in the US Navy. He did the job in Iraq, the Forward Dissemination Element. The private contractor stuff I had to research, and then build from research, but the stuff about life in Camp Victory and the Forward Dissemination Element, I would write emails to BH and he sent me stuff back, and his buddies were sending me emails about life in a submarine. And I said, ‘Listen guys, can I just cut and paste this?’ And that’s what I did.”
The cutting and pasting was seamlessly done. Despite its slightness of plot, The Apartment has a fluid urgency and pulsing energy to its prose that compels you to keep reading. The first stream-of-consciousness draft actually had no paragraphs. Although he eventually made that concession to form, the finished version has no chapters.
“The book is a thought,” Baxter states. “It’s a single continuous thought. How are you supposed to put chapter breaks in there? At what point does a thought say, ‘Okay, let’s take five!’?”

The Apartment is published by Penguin. Samples of Greg Baxter’s work can be found at someblindalleys.com.