Kevin Curran, author of Beatsploitation, is a novelist and teacher in Balbriggan. He was recently awarded an Arts Council bursary for his second novel.

You took part in a novel writing workshop, was that a helpful, formative experience for your novel?

I studied English and Philosophy at UCD but always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I then did a Masters in Anglo-Irish writing and would have gone on to do a PhD, but decided to write a novel instead. That’s when I got involved with the Irish Writer’s Centre Novel Fair. We had an amazing man, Sean O’Reilly, whose best advice was, “‘nice’ is terrible. Throw out any nice characters.” Rob Lynch at the beginning of Beatsploitation is very nice, but not by the time I’m finished with him.

 

It’s been said that Beatsploitation is “a book about a teacher, music, ambition and racism in a town.” Would you see that as an accurate description? Are there any other major themes?

I didn’t set out to have it about racism, just modern day relationships and Irish attitudes towards race. It’s also about modern day ambition, selfishness, immorality. I teach a lot of African kids, and I give them the Norton Anthology of African literature and I know that in 10 to 20 years they’ll be writing amazing stuff. I knew that it would be false to try and write from their perspective as immigrants into the country, or to attempt cultural ventriloquism, I wanted to do an Irish racist’s perspective, how the teacher approaches him and how he views the whole thing. I always encourage my students to keep writing, but in saying that, you see why I had to write from this perspective. I think a lot more publishers would have taken it if it was a bit more like The Blind Side film, if it was a happy white Irish, black African story, but that for me, would not have been true given what is happening in this country at the moment.

 

What was your favourite part of writing your book?

Being in the writing and losing yourself in the moment. Finding yourself coming out of forty minutes or an hour of writing and feeling so satisfied. That’s more satisfying than launches or doing readings. There are a few scenes in Beatsploitation that I know I nailed such as the scene of Kembo talking with his friend in the classroom. I knew that had never been done. Somebody said to me in The Stinging Fly, “What’s the point of this scene,” because it hadn’t been structured properly yet and it was fourteen pages long, and I said “There is no point.” This is something that has never been written about in Irish literature before. I obviously tailored it later so he’d get something out of it, but I wanted to show a white person listening in on two black people talking, and that’s what I wanted. He’s listening through a partition, which I saw as the perfect metaphor, for listening in and taking what he could get. The name Rob Lynch was another intentional ironic twist, in that he robs and lynches.

 

Had you the novel planned out in its entirety before you wrote it?

I knew what I wanted the ending to be. I was involved in a deportation case with a Nigerian called Bola, when he was around sixteen. I was a teacher of his, I would have known him well. When he was around sixteen, he and his family were deported and he went on the run. They did it in the summer on purpose so that he’d have no support network. The story is loosely based on this. I felt that I didn’t do enough for him. Like in the novel, I went to a few rallies and meetings, but I always felt I should have done more for him.

 

Why did you set it in Balbriggan?

I was born and bred there and I remember thinking no one ever writes about where they’re from but I think to read about where you’re from validates your existence and excites you and that’s why I set it in Balbriggan, probably because of my inner child but I also thought it might excite others. Given that there are a lot of internationals there, Balbriggan is also a great microcosm for the issues around multiculturalism and race.

 

How do you see Dublin as changed? Were you writing to show a changed Dublin?

No, I purposely wanted to deal with the suburbs, I think that’s more interesting. Then again, I think the suburbs aren’t really in Irish literature. The city interested me alright, but it interests me more so now with my second novel as I’m looking at the city through the eyes of history. You can’t define the city, then again, you can’t grasp history either, so I’m trying to merge the two of them together; the city and history, insofar as you can touch the pillars of the GPO which were there in 1916, but you can’t quite grasp the significance. It’s the same with the city and trying to find boundaries with it. There are no cities in contemporary Ireland as I see it so cities are not for us to talk about that. That’s for those in London and New York. I would even argue that Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy is not about a city, it’s pastoral. If you look at Barrytown as a town, it’s a pastoral village. If you look at The Van, that’s the one most on a community, that’s not a city. But Doyle wasn’t an influence at all for me. I haven’t read him since 1994. Voice of Dublin suburbia. The Van is a village. The city is a place they go to and get drunk, or try to have an affair, but then they retreat back to Barrytown, and of course, Barrytown is an imaginary space and I think that’s fascinating.

 

Where does your knowledge of the music scene come from?

I was in a band and I when I was doing my Masters in Anglo-Irish Literature in UCD, Sony were literally on our shoulders after our first gig, but it was too soon for us and we didn’t want to get into it, we didn’t have time to develop. We were given money to record and put under pressure, it came to a point and we just said no. Aged 23/24 during Masters. We did it for a few years, played a good few gigs. Our music was like Death in Vegas, Dance, Pop, Rock, and a bit techno, sounds odd I know. The music I reference in the book is very much my own taste. The Terrors as a band name was a pull off the Horrors, who I love and it also worked because the band in the book start off and they’re not terrifying at all and they never fought so I thought it would be ironic.

 

Whose writing style do you admire most?

A lot of Americans, particularly Don DeLillo, John Updike, Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck and Albert Camus. Any sort of moral writer. A lot of writers write for a pretty style, or a turn of phrase. I’m more about saying something about society, rooting it firmly in the soil that it’s in. Steinbeck said in his Nobel speech that a writer should be engaged with society, but then of course, there are others who say the opposite.

 

Are you reading anything influential at the moment while writing your second novel?

In the film Midnight in Paris, the Hemingway line is brilliant. He says to Owen Wilson that he’s writing a novel and he asks him to read it, he says he won’t because “If I like it, I’ll hate it because I’ll be jealous, and if it’s bad writing I’ll hate it because it’s bad writing.” That’s so true. Colin Barrett’s stuff I’ve read, and it was just amazing. I’d read a few of his stories in The Stinging Fly and I read a story in the Faber book. I went to his launch and I was on the train home and I thought wow, this is just so good. I went home and thought, I’ve got to write like that, but you can’t, you’ve got to stay true to your own voice. Colin Barrett’s the only person I’ve read who is contemporary. Martin Amis said he doesn’t read contemporary authors, because “if they’re any good I’ll be reading them in twenty years’ time,” and so he’s twenty years behind. I think he’s right, and also, you get insanely jealous. It’s a naturally competitive world, it shouldn’t be, but it is. I thought, when I was writing the novel, that if another book came out about a white character dealing with race, I would be devastated. Especially if they had done it, and I wasn’t published. Just the same with the book I’m working on, if someone does a story about a newsreel in 1916, and what the real representation was of our supposed heroes, I’d be furious. 1916 is so accessible to everyone, but no one has ever thought about it from this angle. Beatsploitation is in the present tense, with no flashbacks so with my next novel, I’m trying to push myself on. The first person voice is from early twentieth century. I’m a copy and paste man, like Joyce. I write a couple of books and then merge them together. I did that with Beatsploitation and with this one it’s the same again. Disgrace by Coetzee and Dubliners is what I’m looking to for language and sentence structure.

 

Has your life changed in any substantive way since you published your novel?

I moved into a new house, I had my first child, and got my book published, all within three weeks last year. It was mental. Sebastian, my son, was three weeks old at the book launch, but I’m still finding time to write. I don’t count myself as a writer. I write every day, but I’m a teacher. I’d call myself a writer if I could give up my job, but that will never happen because I’ll never be able to. I was talking to Rob Doyle about this, who has a new book coming up, and I said I’d love to just give up work for a year and write, then I’d be a writer. Maybe if I have a second book published. Or when I get an agent, maybe then. It’s never about money or fame, but a drive to tell a story that hasn’t been told, and to get that perfect book. For me, Beatsploitation was too big and clunky and has me striving on for a 180/200 page book that is just a work of art. I’m always interested in finding things that have never been written about. There is no emigration story out there yet. I’m in my early thirties, and I see that a lot of people are gone. Thinking about generations, Zadie Smith’s essay on The Social Network, talks about what is a generation. Her angle was, that the man who wrote The Social Network, is the wrong generation to write that film. I think a lot of my generation missed the boat, as in they’re still here. I don’t know how, only that my brother and his friends who are only three years younger, are all gone. And that’s why in the new book, the character is going to Canada. The tension is, why would he stay, and then he gets reasons to.

 

What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received about writing?

Beatsploitation is all show don’t tell, and it shouldn’t have been. It’s only now that I’m re-reading J.M. Coetzee who is all tell don’t show, that I see that what he decides to show is so subtle and controlled and therefore I think that advice, show don’t tell, which I stuck with as a mantra isn’t always true. Even now, with the second one I’m writing, it’s all show don’t tell but I’m going to pare it all back and decide what needs to be shown and what can I tell. It was the best and the worst advice. Real skill and real craft comes from honing back. Disgrace by Coetzee is a book that really inspired me. It shows the idea of race from an oblique angle. I loved the structure of the novel, plain three act structure, twenty one chapters, you can see how it progresses. You get an unlikeable character, like in Beatsploitation, unfortunately maybe, too unlikeable for a lot of people, but I did that on purpose. I knew where the novel was going before I started. I knew what I wanted the ending to be, and what I wanted to say.

 – Jane Farrell