NICKY PELLEGRINO TALKS TO DOUGLAS KENNEDY

When I call him for our interview, American author Douglas Kennedy is in his London apartment fuelling up on several cups of morning espresso. He might just as easily have been at any one of his other four homes: the apartments in Berlin or Paris, the houses in Maine or on the Mediterranean island of Gozo. Or he could have been in Canada where he likes to spend a solitary winter writing and cross-country skiing.
Success has brought some big prizes for Kennedy yet he remains more than aware of the unpredictability of life, of how a few random events can so easily throw a person off course. It’s a scenario that forms the foundation of his bestselling novels like The Pursuit of Happiness and The Woman In The Fifth. And it’s very much at the core of his latest release, Leaving the World (Hutchison, $36.99).

This is the story of Jane, a brilliant academic, and the bad stuff life throws at her: an absent father, a judgemental mother, unlucky breaks in life and love culminating in a tragedy so devastating that Jane decides to leave the world. Since it turns out she’s no good at committing suicide she tries another tack and abandons her own life, running away to Canada to start a new one. The final part of the story becomes almost a crime thriller as Jane re-engages with the world in an odd and rather obsessive manner.
Like all Kennedy’s books this is an emotionally intelligent read with strong characters and a narrative that keeps you spooling quickly through the pages.

“With this book I sat down and tried to address the large stuff,” the author explains, “like not being able to find parental love or finding romantic love and it not working out. If you look at anyone’s life, things come into it that you don’t expect and people behave in unexpected ways. I think that’s why I’ve had such a strong reaction to this book so far. People have identified with it.”
To illustrate his point about the randomness of life, Kennedy tells the story of how he got together with his wife Grace. It involves his being in Glasgow for a film festival, unsuccessfully chatting up a woman in a bar, calling a cab and then having it hijacked from him by a Scottish tough guy, then walking back into the bar and seeing Grace.

“I might have ended up with that other woman. I could have caught the cab. The whole trajectory might have been different,” he says. “You have many lives within a life and things can change because you meet somebody or there’s a random event.”

Most of Kennedy’s plots seem rooted in his own biography. Relationships and families in his stories are almost always fraught, for example, and significantly he uses the words “combustible” and “Strindbergian” to describe his own parents’ marriage. “I was brought up in the middle of a domestic war,” he admits.

His love of books dates from that difficult time. As soon as he was allowed to, he escaped the conflict in his New York home by heading to the nearest public library and reading boy’s own stories like The Hardy Boys Mysteries. “That was my first real sense of freedom,” he recalls.
Kennedy’s early career was spent in the theatre and he was also a successful travel and arts journalist in London. His first taste of success with fiction came from writing psychological thrillers the biggest of which was The Big Picture. But just when it seemed he was set for stardom, Kennedy’s writing career faltered. His next novel, The Job, failed to take off and he was dropped by his US publishers.

“My life was at a crossroads,” he recalls. “I took two weeks off, took a long walk down a beach in Maine and had my Road to Damascus moment.”
In a sense Kennedy then “left the world”. Although he had no publishing contract he spent the next 14 months working on an idea he had for a story set in the McCarthy era. That book, The Pursuit of Happiness, went on to re-ignite his career and established him as a male author with a talent for writing complex women characters.

Today Kennedy’s novels are translated into 20 languages (he’s particularly big in France) and sell in every English-speaking nation except the US where, despite his nearly worldwide success, he continues to be overlooked. Yes, it’s frustrating he agrees. “But I think it will happen eventually and when it does I’ll be heralded as a lost son. I just keep my head down and keep writing.”
Having just finished a screenplay for French director Patrice Leconte, he’s hard at work on his tenth novel, The Moment, a love story set in Berlin. And, if at the age of 53 he needed any more reminders that the most settled of lives can take an unexpected turn he need only look at the end of his own marriage to Grace, mother of his two children.
“I’m in the middle of a divorce,” he says. “I’m dating people at the moment and it’s extraordinary material. I’m hearing the most amazing stories.
“I had a long marriage,” he adds, “it ended. I had huge success in America, it didn’t last. I think things can frequently fall apart and you can never trust success.”

Nicky Pellegino writing in the Herald on Sunday , March 15 2009.

Nicky Pellegrino is a novelist, her latest title, The Italian Wedding, will be published by Orion in April.