The nights that precede the publication of one’s first novel are slow, cruel, and entirely sleepless. You lie there writhing madly in a fever sweat, haranging with bitter and paranoid rants your weeping spouse, and generally flopping about like a dying trout on a riverbank. All the while, the busy little maggots at work inside your fetid brain conjure up any number of sick and deranged strategies that might draw the world’s attention to your immortal, epic, visionary, groundbreaking, earth-shattering, magnificent, unprecedented, and never-to-be-bettered masterpiece.
These are among the strategies I have in recent nights considered:
1 Going Missing
On the eve of the novel’s appearance, I will stage a weird vanishing act. Executives at this publishing house will call an emergency press conference, announce that all attempts to contact me have failed, and with all due shakiness-of-voice will appeal for calm at this difficult time. It will be reported that I was last seen “heading into the Mojave desert”, and that no trace has been found. There will, over the course of the subsequent years, be occasional Pynchonesque sightings in used-car showrooms in deepest Tennessee, or Salingerian rumours of my being spotted in the frozen foods aisle of a 24-hour Tesco in Ullapool, looking haggard and unshaven but strangely bright-eyed. Nothing will be confirmed but persistent rumours will concern another masterpiece in the writing.
2 Taking All My Clothes Off
If the moment seems right, and if the lighting is tasteful, I am prepared to go the full nine yards, damn all modesty, and offer an entirely uncensored view of a pale young(ish) novelist’s pure and blue-veined flesh. Magazine editors can now forward closed bids to the usual address. I should say, however, that I do not want my dark-eyed, smouldering quality, or indeed my sheer manliness (as though hewn from Irish granite), to distract from the quality of my prose.
3 Setting Fire To Myself In The Main Square Of Stockholm
This strategy will only be used in the almost laughably unlikely event that I am not summoned to the Swedish capital to accept this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Even now, months in advance of the annoucement, I sit by the phone in the hallway, waiting to take the call from some bashful Bjorn or shy-voiced Magnus, whilst in the meantime spewing hateful venom about other likely Nobel contenders in the direction of my trembling spouse as she slaves over a hot ironing table preparing my dress suit.
4 Invent A Massively Colourful Back Story
Orphaned early, I was raised by kindly whores in a West of Ireland knocking shop. Imprisoned at the age of nine for horse rustling, I became a virtuosic harmonica player during the course of my confinement, and hit the road as soon as I was released. Stabbed in the eye by the vengeful father of an impregnated go-go dancer in a Tijuana saloon, I extracted murderous revenge with a crossbow and a can of diesel, and I was then forced to go “on the run” under an assumed name, Jesus Murphy, though I styled myself “Haysoos”, and it was then I began to write … etc etc ad lib to fade.
5 Dying
Thus guaranteeing the much-yearned-for sobriquet of “The New Bolano!” and achieving vast sales while similtaneously retaining for my repute a cultish timbre.
I accept that all of the above may seem a little much. And I am happy to say that none of it may even be necessary now that I have made it onto the Waterstones 11 platform! This is a marvellous campaign that will ensure prominent shelf space and many promotional opportunites for myself and ten other brilliant (though lesser) debut novelists. I expect to be outselling Nigella and Stieg, combined, by early May. The deathless volume that will do so is entitled “City Of Bohane”, and it will appear from Jonathan Cape on April 7th.
Kevin Barry's story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, won the Rooney Prize in 2007. His short fiction has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently in The New Yorker.