A Recursive Dialogue with Declan Toohey
On the Concept of a €5 Pint From 4-7pm in McGrattans Bar & Restaurant
👋 This is the first in what hopes to be a series of interviews with interesting people. Today’s guest is a close friend. Declan Toohey is the author of Perpetual Comedown (2023, New Island Books). His writing has appeared in Tolka and the Irish Times, among other places.
I cannot recommend Perpetual Comedown enough. It’s absurdly brilliant, inventive, and available at most booksellers, including Books Upstairs.
Declan and I met at McGrattans for €5 pints and to discuss writing, literature, and why we can’t stop talking about Ben Lerner. In an attempt to subvert the logic of the traditional Q&A, we conducted our follow-up conversation in reverse. I sent my first email answering questions Declan hadn’t yet asked, and on, constructing our conversation backwards.
Most writers are losers who write to approximate a feeling approaching victory…
Wed, 9 Apr 2025 at 09:41
James,
I write to you aboard a Dublin Bus at 09:07 on a sunny midweek morn. First things first – there was a reason I chose McGrattan’s as the venue for our conversation, but my digressive tendencies meant I forgot to mention it at the time. My introduction to Ben Lerner came in the form of a five euro purchase of Leaving the Atocha Station from Chapter’s on Parnell Street. (The pedant in you may scoff and ask, ‘Is there another Chapter’s in Ireland?’ And I assure you there is, though its whereabouts elude me; I daresay there are variations of Chapter’s all over the world, stuffed with recondite texts and sports biographies alike, waiting patiently for sweaty hands to linger awhile and pick them up.) Anyway, that afternoon in 2022 I also picked up a copy of Miriam Toews’ Summer of My Amazing Luck, which likewise cost me a fiver, and as I handed over a tenner to the fashionably polite shop assistant I felt a prime satisfaction in the orderliness of our transaction. Two books, one tenner. My point is that, with McGrattan’s, I knew from past experience that they do €5 pints between 4 and 7 of a weekday, and it was this sense of tidiness – two pints, one tenner – that prompted me to bring us there.
Yada yada. My gambit: I think young men especially like Lerner so much because most writers are losers who write to approximate a feeling approaching victory, and young men who read and write are the losers of losers, and in all of Lerner’s novels you have these literary buckos who by all accounts should be losers, but due to a combination of linguistic flourishes, stoneface lying, ribald anecdotes and – crucially – sadboi indulgence, the novels slide perfectly into that space between victory and defeat, so that Lerner’s protagonists fail to win in a traditional, outright fashion, but do so with concessions, the primary one being (to me anyway) that they still remain losers to some undeniable extent.
Dx
Sun, 6 Apr 2025 at 21:07
Declan,
“Young man” reporting in: that and, obviously we’re suckers for white suburban teenagers rapping along to Tupac.
We talked about this over pints, but really good novels inspire me to write while really great ones inspire me to change careers. So, seeing as both of us plan to move out of the way to make room for more Lerner on the shelf, eulogize your bygone writing career—tell me what it was like writing your debut novel, Perpetual Comedown. Because I remember reading it for the first time shortly after we met at your launch (which feels like a lifetime and was, in fact, only two years ago) and thinking that I'd never read anything like it. I've had the pleasure of reading much more of your work since and the voice continues to be fresh and consistent. Did that take years to work out? Is that how your consciousness sounds inside your head?
Writing is a strange art because it's necessary. You can get by a lifetime without touching an instrument, a paintbrush, without singing a song. But you cannot live without language. I've found two types of writers: those who treat it with spiritual reverence; and those who treat it like a lawnmower with one too many buttons. Which are you? What do you love about writing, if anything? I ask because these days I feel like neither. There are novels that excite me, which are inventive and leave me recontextualizing the space I move through, works with something to say. But it seems we've passed an inflection point in commercialized literature where even the well-written novels feel a little light, a little empty, like the spaces between the sentences have become larger than the sentences themselves.
James
Tue, 1 Apr 2025 at 13:56
James,
In retrospect, Perpetual Comedown was a fluke in that it was a breezy experience with few roadblocks on the path to completion and publication. That has not been the same for anything I have written since or before and, potentially, ever again. While writing it, I felt as though I'd finally stumbled on a voice/character/milieu/approach/&c that allowed me to draw on 25% of my experiences and observations and 75% of my imagination, so that after a while I felt like I was method writing from Darren's POV, rather than filtering my words through him. I wish I could do the same in the multi-voice projects I've started since, but it hasn't worked out that way; for the most part I can't bring myself to care enough about the fictitious worlds I've created, so I abandon them before long. But, as you know, I'm retiring early from the writing life to become a tai chi instructor, so this answer will probably be out of date within weeks, let alone months.
I've been ruminating about empty books, on and off, for the past year. Often, I'll imagine myself rifling through a 300-page novel whose every page is blank, or walking into a bookshop only to find that every title I pull from the shelves – fiction, non-fiction, poetry, cookbooks, the lot – consists entirely of blank pages. And whenever I think of these blank books I feel calm. I imagine I hear waves, but very probably it's only the pages in my mind, flicking inexorably like roulette spokes. I don't know if this recurring image speaks to my waning belief in the power of words or an increasing disinterest in books more generally. Both thoughts surprise me. But I'm coming around to the opinion that I no longer believe I have anything of worth to say, hence my new career as tai chi instructor. All of which is to say that I think novels – to state the obvious – should arise from the author's need to tell that particular story in a hyperspecific way, and the novel, through the hyperspecificity of its language/voice/style, should transcend the potential of its opening 30/50/70 pages, as all good novels should.
It's very simple: I love language. Possibly too much. Often I love it more than character, psychology, plot, theme, drama and setting combined. And the reason I'm becoming a tai chi instructor is because I no longer find language as liberating as I once did.
What about you, what do you love?
Dx
Sat, 29 Mar 2025 at 17:27
Declan,
Lately, I've become uninterested in literature that isn't suffused with some kind of political thought: it indicates either an absence of politics in the writer (bad!) or failure of that writer to bring their entire selves to their work (worse!). And I mean political broadly, just having to do with power systems. Like you, Lerner loves language. Like, really loves it. And symbols and references and referents and all the rest. Poets, am I right? But he’s using that love to dissect systems, and that’s what keeps me coming back.
As to your question of what I love (which I view similarly as a question of what I hope to suffuse my work with right now): I guess I've become particularly interested recently in the idea of writing fiction about the impotence of fiction. I'm sure that's a side effect of living through what they call "interesting times" and feeling, like you, caustically pessimistic about my own ability to influence change through art.
An aside, I'm reading The Idiot by Elif Batuman. I found this quote that relates to our conversation. In it, the main character's friend is trying to convince her to stop liking a mathematician who already has a girlfriend:
“…For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system."
"But it is a self-sufficient system."
“It's like you said: math is a language that started out so abstract, more abstract than words, and then suddenly it turned out to be the most real, the most physical thing there was. With math they built the atomic bomb. Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin. Now there's this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you're the elite who speaks it—you can control everything."
It's got something to say about the realization of the virtual. That's obviously something Lerner is also preoccupied with, it appears in each of his novels: the first (Leaving the Atocha Station) being so concerned with authentic experience; the second (10:04) with parenthood and conception and chronology; and the third (The Topeka School) with the invention of a certain type of destructive speech.
Interesting about your Perpetual Comedown experience, by the way. I read this thing about how humans have trouble recognizing their own voices in audio recordings because the acoustics as we speak are so bass-heavy—something about the bone density of our skulls, hearing from behind our own sinuses—I wonder if the same goes for writing, if we're blind to something that could be called "style" because we're inside of it while it's being produced.
I don’t know, maybe there’s a metaphor in there or something.
James
I hope that you enjoyed this linguistic experiment as much as we enjoyed creating it. It was a real treat to have such a high-minded conversation, record it, and then throw it out the window in an effort to piece it back together in the emails that followed.
You can find more information about Declan, including his work and contact information, here.
-JSR
P.S. These photographs (courtesy of my Olympus XA and its 45-year old flash attachment) captured the night of our initial conversation in every way: we entered McGrattans in daylight and ended up a few hours later outside Ismael’s chipper in absolute darkness.