Keith Ridgway’s Shelf Life
Keith Ridgway is from Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of the novels A Shock (Winner of the 2022 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction), Hawthorn & Child, Animals, The Parts, and The Long Falling (filmed as Où Va La Nuit). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope - All Story, Stinging Fly, and others. He is a winner of the Prix Femina Étranger, The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the O. Henry Award. He lives in London.
How and where are you?
I’m at home in Peckham recovering from a hospital visit, a medical procedure, an intervention, a violent — let’s not beat about the bush here — assault on my body. Though of course it was a necessary one, one I agreed to, and it will certainly be to my benefit in the long run, but nevertheless, they take you in and — in the nicest, kindest possible way — they kick the bejesus out of you. Not literally of course, though I can’t be certain given that the first thing, or one of the first things, they did was render me unconscious. I doubt there is any actual kicking. A shove or two, maybe, to get me into position. My inanimate, mostly lifeless, flesh, the meat of me, arranged on the table for ease of access, a grotesque sort of buffet. Some rolling, poking, lifting and placing. I’ve had too much of hospitals really in the last couple of years. I feel that I should now be excused. As with jury duty. Thank you for considering the distressing details of this murder, you don’t ever need to do this again. But it doesn’t work like that does it? I feel that I know my way around too many London hospitals already. But there are lots of them, and they’re big, and I’ve probably only started.
What are you reading at the moment?
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet. It’s been on my shelf for years — we have the same agent, the same US publisher (New Directions), and they send me everything he writes as, I assume, a sort of taunt. This is quite hefty — maybe 600 pages — and the sentences are very long. People make a big deal of this, as if their lives are so precious that they don’t have that sort of time, or as if they’ve never had a conversation, or a thought. Ridiculous people. The sentences are gloriously funny, intricate, moving, absurd, funny again, and they trip along like rain and lighening and a rattling train, and they start and stop and deviate in ways that I find enthralling, and the Mulzet / Krasznahorkai rhythm and pace and momentum is pretty much flawless. I’m speed-crawling through it on my hands and knees like a happy infant, giggling and farting my way through the subclauses and the spirals and the damp Hungarian undergrowth. I don’t want it to end. It is of course entirely about Hungary, and Hungarian people and Hungarian things. But Hungarian things are the things of the world. There may as well be no place other than Hungary.
Anyway, I thought this would be good to read while highly medicated and a little bit giddy. Occasional bouts of nausea, terrible dreams, physical discomfort. It struck me that these would be the ideal reading conditions. And I was right.
And, of course, watching or listening to or otherwise consuming?
My boyfriend tells people that I like my books dense and my films stupid. So I watch a lot of thrillers and nonsense, and have a great time doing it, but I can never remember the name of anything, or their plots, or who was in them. It all blurs in my mind into a sort of ur-trailer for The Blockbuster Movie Singularity. I am listening these last few days to the EABS/Jaubi album In Search Of A Better Tomorrow, new Emma Rawicz tracks, and some new Yussef Dayes things. There is a new Eluvium album that I have on a lot, but I haven’t listened to it yet if you see what I mean.
What did you read as a child?
I don’t remember really. When I was little I think I read all the usual things — Enid Blyton, The Hardy Boys, Rupert The Bear, The Wooden Horse — with varying degrees of enthusiasm. It wasn’t until the age of about eight when I got my hands on the Tintin adventure The Black Island that I really settled into thinking that books were the greatest thing in the world. Then I read everything I could find. And there was a lot in the house — mostly books that had come from my grandfather. He was a writer and an union activist in his younger years, and there was a small but impressive library of fiction and non-fiction that I read — not always with a lot of understanding — all the way into my teens. George Bernard Shaw. James Connolly. The Riddle Of The Sands. Liam O’Flaherty. Yeats and Wilde and Oliver Goldsmith and Victor Hugo. I didn’t realise that women wrote books until I was 27. Actually I did, because Anne Holm’s I Am David made a big impression on me.
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
Well I’ve learned from all of them. You learn to write by reading, and it’s cumulative. With every book I read — even a terrible book — I become a marginally better writer. Or a marginally different writer anyway. And my favourite writers come and go. I was fed up with Krasznahorkai for a while. But he’s back in favour. Clarice Lispector has been a bit of a constant for a long time now. Vasily Grossman and Victor Serge. Chester Himes. More recent (to me) writers that have become important include Fernanda Melchor, Patrick Modiano, Natalia Ginzburg, Percival Everett, Eva Baltasar, Yan Ge, Yuri Herrara, Dino Buzzatti, Kathryn Scanlan, Maya Binyam, Vanessa Onwuemezi… there are so many, and I’m forgetting many of them. Anyway. Great writers. I seek them out and steal what I can.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
I try not to linger on these sorts of things. I do read reviews (though I’ve never bothered with Amazon or Goodreads ones) and of course I’m mostly human, so I am depressed by bad ones, and a good one can make me inordinately happy. The reviewers that annoy me the most — and this can happen in a positive review as often as in a negative review — are those who have plainly not read the book. They’ve skimmed it. But they haven’t read it. Do they really think that a writer won’t spot that? It sticks out a mile.
I haven’t had many very bad reviews. But sometimes a reviewer will have a go at me. Sometimes even personally. With cruelty. There have been no more than one or two like that over the years. Two or three. And I pretend that they don’t bother me. I shrug them off. And I listen to friends and agents and publishers who reassure me that this person has an axe to grind, they’re not even writing about me they’re writing about themselves, it’s all about them, it’s not about you Ridg, don’t let it bother you. And I agree with them. But nevertheless. Nevertheless. I am almost entirely human, and those reviews break my heart.
Tell us a little about your creative process.
I think a lot. I write a little. I have no settled process really.
How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
It’s been very variable, unsurprisingly. I’ve had a different UK publisher for each of my last three novels. I miss Faber to be honest. But that was a long time ago. All those people are gone. I went to Picador because Philip Gwyn Jones had gone there, and he’d published Hawthorn & Child at Granta. But then Picador got rid of Philip and I am an orphan again. It’s a tough business, and I’ve been quite unlucky I think in that I’ve never had consistency in the UK. With Barbara Epler at New Directions it’s been the opposite. She looks after me. She’s a wonderful publisher and a wonderful person, and I’m extremely lucky to be at New Directions. They’re great. I mean, I could tell you a lot about the publishing industry in the UK. I have a lot of years under my belt now. But it would probably get us both sued.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
“Be subtle but don’t be completely silent. People can’t hear what you’re thinking.” Sean O’Reilly, a great Irish writer, said something like that to me once. He was talking about writing, ostensibly, but he’s a subtle sort of guy, and I think he thought it would be good general advice for me, and he was right.
What are you working on right now?
I’m writing a novel. I’m afraid to tell you anything about it, lest it dissolve. It’s really good though.