COLLINS, Michael 1964-

PERSONAL: Born 1964, in Limerick, Ireland. Education: University of Notre Dame, graduated, 1987, M.A., 1991; University of Illinois, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Writer and computer programmer. Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, head of computer lab, creative writing teacher;

AWARDS, HONORS: Winner, Last Marathon in Antarctica, 1997; shortlisted for Booker Prize, 2001, for The Keepers of the Truth.

WRITINGS:

The Meat Eaters, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 1992, published as The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters, Random House (New York, NY), 1993.

The Life and Times of a Teaboy, Phoenix House (London, England), 1994.

The Feminists Go Swimming, Phoenix House (London, England), 1996.

The Emerald Underground, Phoenix House (London, England), 1998.

The Keepers of Truth, Scribner, (New York, NY), 2001.

The Resurrectionists, Scribner (New York, NY), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Born and raised in Ireland, Michael Collins focused on that troubled land and the harsh lives of its unluckiest inhabitants in his earliest works. Abusive alcoholics, pious junkies, and doomed IRA renegades inhabit his first collection of short stories, The Meat Eaters. Critics noted the combination of brutal subject matter and intricate, often philosophical writing. Comparing Collins to earlier Irish writers such as James Joyce, Boyd Tonkin wrote in the Observer, he "takes the language of his mentors down to a dank cellar and then thumps the stuffing out of them. He writes exquisitely, but the gore and spleen on show here still have a bookish stink about them." Less complimentary was Nicholas Clee in the Times Literary Supplement, who wrote, "Michael Collins's language veers between the febrile and the banal. Every noun must have an adjective." Reviewing the U.S. edition, published as The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters, a Los Angeles Times critic wrote, "Indeed for a while it seems that cruelty and a vivid muscular prose style are all that Collins does give us. . . . Only gradually do we sense a counter-theme: the endurance that has sustained the Irish for centuries." A reviewer for Studies in Short Fiction wrote, "It is difficult to read a collection by an Irish writer and not think of Joyce's Dubliners. . . . Yet Collins is his own writer, his voice strong, as capable of the lyric as of the harsher tones of a difficult world." Joseph Coates, in the Chicago Tribune, felt that "Neither the style nor the material is entirely under control, but their strength is undeniable. A powerful new writer is loose."

For his first novel, The Life and Times of a Teaboy, Collins focuses on a young man growing up in Limerick, Ireland, shortly after Irish liberation from England, who is ground down by the poverty, cruelty, and cloying piety of his family. Young Ambrose Feeney grows up to take on civil service jobs that leave him stranded between Irish independence and the old subservience to English customs and attitudes. Gradually, Ambrose slips into madness, unable to work out the contradictions in his own life. There was a certain ambivalence in the reaction of some critics to the novel. Jonathan Dyson in the Times Literary Supplement felt that "Despite an often rich, fluid style and many interesting ideas, Michael Collins doesn't quite make it home in this, his first novel. The patness of the madness metaphor is reminiscent of similar failings in his earlier, often brilliant, collection of short stories, The Meat Eaters." David Buckley, in the Observer, expressed more mixed feelings: "Collins can be irritatingly clever . . . but much of the time his aim is exact and his effect eerie."

Collins's next work was again a collection of short stories, The Feminists Go Swimming. In one story, "The End of the World," the pope is scheduled to open an envelope containing the secret of Fatima, and possibly bringing on the apocalypse. For Kim Bunce, writing in the Observer, "Collins's book, once opened, is as irresistible as the secret of the Pope's envelope." Other stories explore coaches who push their students too far, dutiful relatives negotiating canonization for an aged aunt in a convent, and an abusive husband who goes too far and enlists the local priest in his cover-up. For Times Literary Supplement critic C.L. Dallet, "in all the stories, the prevailing instinct is to avoid scandal, to cover up anything which might upset the conservative Catholic status quo, and it is in this one strand that Michael Collins may have most accurately identified the crisis in Ireland's struggle with the modern world."

Collins has relocated to the United States, and with The Keepers of Truth, so does his fiction. Set in an unnamed, decaying town in the Midwestern Rust Belt, the novel tells the story of Bill, a young man who returns to the town after his father's suicide and takes a job at the local paper, The Daily Truth, founded by his grandfather. For awhile he muses about inserting diatribes about deindustrialization into the inoffensive paper's editorials, while carrying on a desultory relationship with a supposed girlfriend that consists of swapping answering machine messages. Then the disappearance of a prominent local citizen, with suspicion focusing on his ne'er-do-well son, captures Bill's attention. New York Times contributor Maggie Galehouse found that "as Bill fumbles around the breaking news . . . the reader fumbles along beside him, trying to figure out what kind of a novel Collins has cooking. A thriller? A mystery? A twisted love story? 'The Keepers of Truth' turns out to be all three, and Bill pulls us through with his gift of gab, twisting the plot into unlikely but somehow plausible scenarios." Atlantic Monthly reviewer Robert Potts concluded, "This book, in the words of its narrator, is 'an almighty . . . roar of despair'; but it is also intelligent, witty, humane, and utterly haunting."

In 2002 Collins published The Resurrectionists, about a man who returns to the town where his parents died in a fire twenty years earlier, seeking the answers to questions about his past.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Atlantic Monthly, November, 2001, Robert Potts, review of The Keepers of Truth.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 13, 1993, review of The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters, p. 6.

New York Times Book Review, February 3, 2002, Maggie Galehouse, "Rust Belt Blues," p. 15.

Observer (London, England), August 9, 1992, Boyd Tonkin, "The Hypnotist Takes the Lead," p. 51; June 26, 1994, David Buckley, "A Dab Hand with the Mutton Patties," p. 19; March 17, 1996, Kim Bunce, review of The Feminists Go Swimming, p. 16.

Studies in Short Fiction, fall, 1994, Brian McCombie, review of The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters, p. 704.

Times Literary Supplement, May 15, 1992, Nicholas Clee, "At the Assassin's Table," p. 22; July 8, 1994, Jonathan Dyson, "Speaking for Ireland," p. 20; February 9, 1996, C. L. Dallat, review of The Feminists Go Swimming, p. 27.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 18, 1993, Joseph Coates, "The Ferocious Paradoxes of Ireland," pp. 1, 9.*