A Writer's Edge

Background:  McNicholl was born in Northern Ireland, attended law school in Cardiff, Wales, worked in London, and came to the U.S. in the 1990's. He says he slaved as an underpaid attorney, and he taught himself to write fiction while commuting between Long Island and New York City. In 2005 his debut fiction, A Son Called Gabriel, garnered nominations for three national awards. He's now working on another novel "from the depths of bucolic Pennsylvania, within easy reach of principal cities and airports" because he "likes distractions."

 

WE: Was A Son Called Gabriel your first novel written?

 

DM: That’s an interesting question. I’d written a first novel--also set in Northern Ireland--about a young woman and her Protestant boyfriend that remains as yet unpublished. It was what I refer to now as my ‘cutting-your-teeth’ novel. It’s too long and too unwieldy and needs a lot of work, but I’m not ready to revisit it yet. What gets published first is out of the author’s control, but I’m happy A SON CALLED GABRIEL is my first published novel.

 

WE: Why did you write it?

 

DM: I wanted to write about my homeland at a time when the Catholic minority was marching in the streets for basic civil rights and sometimes being shot to death for it, as well as tell a story about a kind of protagonist that had not yet appeared in Irish literature.

 

WE: Will there be a sequel to it?

 

DM: Yes, I shall write a sequel to A SON CALLED GABRIEL when I’m ready to revisit Gabriel’s world.

 

WE: What's next on your book publishing agenda?

 

DM: I’ve just finished a novel entitled UNUSUAL STEPS. It’s set in London and is a dark comedy about a young Irishman, an assertive Englishwoman who finds herself blackmailed at work, and their inquisitive elderly neighbor. I’m also currently working on my next novel, the first to be set in the United States.

 

WE: What does it mean for your book to be "A Book Sense Pick of the Year"?

 

DM: It’s an honor. Book Sense titles are selected by the American Booksellers Association which is a body that represents the interests of independent bookstores throughout the United States. I was extremely fortunate in that, when the hardcover of A SON CALLED GABRIEL was published last year, many booksellers read the book, liked it, and enough of them nominated it so that it was selected as a Book Sense Pick for August.

 

WE: CDS publishes few books. What is the significance to be picked up by them? Why do you think they chose it?

 

DM: You’re right they’d don’t publish many and now that they’ve been purchased recently by The Perseus Group, I don’t know if there’ll be more or less books published by them. Many people at CDS Books read my novel before an offer was made. I think they chose it because they loved the story and wanted to publish it. I think that’s the significance, really.

 

WE: It is said to be almost impossible to sell fiction without an agent. How did you get your first agent?

 

DM: I found my agent the old-fashioned way. I sent a bunch of queries out and got the usual stack of rejections and a small number of agents who wanted to see either a partial or the entire manuscript. Jim Levine read the manuscript and loved it, passed it to his wife who also loved it, and then he called me within days of receiving it to say he wanted to represent it. A few days later we met in NYC and I knew immediately he was the right person to handle my novel.

 

WE: Speaking of your novel, is there loss of more than one kind of innocence in this coming-of-age novel?

 

DM: The novel is much more than a coming-of-age. While it examines that element in detail of course, it also looks at the protagonist’s education about his religion, country and Northern Irish politics and his reactions to those. Gabriel is very innocent yet intelligent when the book opens and loses all kinds of innocence--sexual, political and religious—as the plot develops. Moreover, when his parents learn of their son’s sexual confusion, they lose innocence, or perhaps naivete is the better term in this instance.

 

WE: Did you include abuse by clergy because it was/is a popular news item?

 

DM: This novel was written before all of that surfaced in the media. The abuse is an isolated incident in the novel that is essential because it affects the protagonist deeply and causes him to question himself tremendously and eventually ask for help from his uncle at a very critical time in his life.

 

WE: Do you think cities are more accepting of "different" people, as Gabriel was, and are rural areas still unwelcoming?

 

DM: People living in rural areas are generally conservative and
intolerant of people who aren't like them in any way and people like me, who don't fit in to that way of thinking, will leave. From my own point of view, I was fascinated by different cultures and other countries as a young boy. I loved to read about different places and knew I'd travel when I grew up. That's why I left Northern Ireland to go to law school in Cardiff, Wales after high school. That's why I studied German in Germany.