Voices from a room

Among other things, Declan Lynch’s third novelThe Rooms may be one of the grittiest depictions of alcoholism since John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas. Yes, the parable of the Dry Drunk has been covered before in memoir form – by everyone from Pete Hamill to Augusten Burroughs to James Frey – but few works of fiction have conveyed so feverishly the alcoholic’s carnal lust for the stuff.
Drink permeates the book. It stinks of it, sweats booze through its pores, its very pages. Lynch writes with utter certainty about every class of bender: jubilant jags, bored jags, crying jags, horny jags (and he is gratifyingly un-squeamish when it comes to writing about drunken fucking), loved-up jags, hair-of-the-dog jags, jags that have no specific purpose other than an irrational but compulsive obliteration of the senses.
He can also render in detail the horrible ambiguities of recovery, the mood swings from serene to aggravated, the constant sickly see-sawing between abstinence and thoughts of capitulation, the manic inner monologues of the addict, and his daily showdown with the phantoms of inebriation.
Lynch, a Hot Press alumnus and playwright who pounds all the right nails in his Sindo columns every week, impressed a lot of people as a sort of hometown Carl Hiaasen with his first two novels, All The People, All The Time and Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me. But this is deeper, more painful territory. With The Rooms, the writer has pitched his camp resolutely in the character-is-plot school.
The narrator, Neil, is a once-feted musician, who spun out his moderately successful rock career over 15 years of lost weekends, before bottoming out in a disgraceful rough-sex-gone-wrong episode, and through six years of sobriety has forsaken rock ’n’ roll for the rigours of trying to write an old-fashioned musical (or “tuner”) to compare with his idols Sondheim and Cohan.
His priestly existence is disrupted when he meets and falls for the Wicklow-dwelling aristo-bohemian clothes designer Jamaica, who may be either his salvation or a femme fatale from a fatalistic film noir. Lynch utilises her character to illustrate how, to an addict, those we love are also the most dangerous, capable of leading us deep into temptation. In one chilling scene, Jamaica beseeches Neil to forsake sobriety and join her in quaffing a glass of wine. Or maybe a bottle. Or a few bottles. Her doubleness forms the crux of the book’s will-he/won’t-he cliffhanger. This woman has turned his existence from dull grey to cardinal red, but she also arouses in him feelings of paranoia and jealousy – hard-drinking feelings.
Into this tale Lynch weaves wistful subtleties: memories of being a 15-year-old Harp-drinking misfit listening to Bob Seger on the beach, entranced by a never-nostalgia for an imagined California. Or feelings of brotherly love for the AA brethren who inhabit the rooms of the title: sometimes shamed and frequently haunted men and women struggling to stay on the wagon less out of the desire to do good than the dread of repeating the evils committed when they were drunk.
In this, his third novel, Declan Lynch has found the balance between popular fiction and the dirty realist school of Serious Lit; the user-friendliness of Hornby and the hard stuff of Fante. Above all, this is a serious book from a serious writer.
Peter Murphy: Of all the dipso-literature I’ve read, The Rooms comes across as one of the most accurate depictions of alcoholism.
Declan Lynch: “There’s a lot of stuff written about guys just drinking, but there isn’t a great deal about people not drinking and wanting to. It’s more keenly felt in those who are trying not to drink. I suppose you have guys like Bukowski, who are suffused in self-destructive behaviour, but in a weird way, there isn’t a lot of drink in Irish stuff, despite the reputation we have as drinkers.”
This kind of ground is usually covered in self-flagellating memoirs.
“The memoir thing is interesting; I can guarantee you that if you’re even vaguely well-known and you were to go to a publisher and say that you have a memoir about your drinking and you have a novel about your drinking, they’ll publish the memoir and tell you to fuck off with your novel. It’s just a marketing thing; they want someone to talk about their own booze hell. But the whole memoir thing – it’s a lie. The whole point is that these things may, in a sense, be true, but obviously they select things and leave things out just the same as fiction. It’s a bit like the drink – you need to distil it into something else. But the structure of the book is as simple as: ‘A guy goes into a bar and orders a drink. Will he have the drink?’ Just trying to get that sense of the amazing amount of mental torture people go through. It surprises me that more people don’t write about that razor edge.”
One presumes you have insider information on this...
“I researched this deeply – but I wasn’t aware at the time that I was engaged in research! (laughs) In my case, having given up the gargle, it’s such a fundamental change in your life that it does colour everything else you do. There’s a line in the book about when the guy was drinking, there was nothing in his life except drink, and when he was not drinking, there was nothing in his life except not drinking. When you come through it, in some ways the absence of it is actually a more tangible thing, because you are forced to contemplate it more. Whereas when you’re drinking, you just drink – that solves it.”
The voices of temptation in Neil’s head are extremely insidious and persuasive.
“The last thing I wanted to do was to write a kind of moral tale, because that’s what everyone does now. It’s become so ubiquitous and there’s so much media stuff about it, naturally there’s a great deal of bullshit. When I hear these things about binge drinking being five pints in a row or something – that’s not binge drinking! Binge drinking for me is where you start off at the Birr Vintage Car Rally and finish up in San Francisco without realising exactly how you got there. If five drinks in a row means you have a drink problem, then everyone has a drink problem. And as a result, no-one has a drink problem. People forget what’s good about drink, and that’s very important in order to understand why people go to such depths with it. If you just ignore that, you’re not getting the whole picture.”
I was struck by the image of Neil as a kid taking his first drink, fantasising about all those Californian cocaine cowboys: Jackson Browne, The Eagles et al.
“It’s an odd thing, but each of the books I’ve written so far, I’ve listened to certain sorts of music through that time, the soundtrack of it in my own head, and to some extent it gets into the book. For some weird reason I developed a Jackson Browne fetish to the point of madness. I think this music tortured this guy Neil in his youth – it was the soundtrack of his worst misery and yet he is drawn to it, he knows there is some pristine quality about it that other people seem to have ownership of and it doesn’t work for him.”
There is a sense in which music and alcohol are intertwined in people’s lives.
“There is obviously another analogy here: why are you drawn to something, like say alcohol, which you know can cause chaos and catastrophe? And invariably the worst things that happened to you happened at parties where there was certain music being played, like Al Stewart’s ‘The Year Of The Cat’ or something. But music is a kind of a trigger. And I listened an awful lot to that West Coast stuff, although there’s none of that feel to the book... But then if you actually think about it, the vast majority of those designer cowboys have the most extravagant history of alcohol and drug abuse. Never was there a more stark contrast than between the perfection of David Crosby’s harmonies, crooning in the background, and what the guys got up to afterwards.”
Why go with the hotpress imprint for The Rooms after two books with a major publisher?
“I had a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster via Townhouse here, and initially when I wrote my first novel, I deliberately wanted to send that around to people who never knew me, just to prove to myself that I could get published by anyone. But I felt that the main problem with the positioning of the other two books was that the seriousness of them didn’t get across. They were done quite well for what they were, but they were brought out as kind of Nick Hornby-type books, whereas in fact there was really dark shit going on in both of them. People have told me they thought they were ‘funny’ books – and ‘funny’ books are never funny; they’re mostly shit. Humour invariably has a serious root somewhere, otherwise it’s just twaddle.
“So for all these reasons, the thing came to an end with Townhouse, and I wrote The Rooms, which I really felt strongly about. And it was a very obvious response: ‘What about Niall? Niall publishes books.’ Also, we get on, and it’s very important doing something like this that you’re actually speaking the same fuckin’ language. I’ve worked at Hot Press all my life and I was just comfortable with it. There’s enough problems associated with something like this without feeling like you’re on a different planet to the people putting it out. There was no great conflict involved (with Townhouse), it’s just that I have a specific idea of how this should be done, and it coincides almost exactly with what hotpress thought about it as well.
“For example, there was an extract from my first book published in Hot Press and a guy did kind of an abstract illustration for it, and it was fucking great, the sort that you normally see on high-class, dark books that finish fourth in the Booker Prize. But it was really strong, and it sort of struck me, a Hot Press illustrator who I’ve never met before has perfectly captured what I want here. So I took that as another sign.”
The grand irony of The Rooms is pointed out by Neil at one point: he’s from a generation who grew up seeking refuge from the Catholic mafia in wildness and drink, only for them to end up sober and living like monks in middle age, wrestling with the notion of a Higher Power.
“Y’know...go figure! I don’t know what to say about that, other than that – for some people at least – that’s what happens.”