Collins, Michael 1964- (Michael D. Collins)

PERSONAL:

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

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management, 521 5th Ave., 26th Fl., New York, NY 10175.

CAREER:

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

AWARDS, HONORS:

Winner of Pushcart Award for Best American Short Stories; winner of The Kerry Ingredients Irish Novel of the Year; short-listed for Booker Prize, 2001, for The Keepers of Truth.

WRITINGS:

SHORT STORIES

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

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

NOVELS

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

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

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

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

Lost Souls, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 2003, Viking (New York, NY), 2004.

Death of a Writer: A Novel, Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2006.

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 that 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." Studies in Short Fiction reviewer Brian McCombie commented: "It is difficult to read a collection by an Irish writer and not think of Joyce's Dubliners." The reviewer continued: "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 Books, 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 wrote 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. According to Times Literary Supplement contributor 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 Book Review contributor Maggie Galehouse observed 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. He followed this effort with Lost Souls, a dark story set in a small town in Indiana where a child in an angel costume is found dead on Halloween night. Officer Lawrence is put on the case, an apparent hit and run, yet told to stay away from one likely suspect, the town's star quarterback who has a championship game coming up. Lawrence himself is newly divorced, and struggling with the emotional fallout of the end of his relationship, as well as the demands of his job. Collins uses the bleak circumstances of the novel as a commentary on life in an American small town, and the ways in which the American dream often fails to materialize. Joanne Wilkinson, in a review for Booklist, called the book "a finely crafted novel written with intelligence and grace." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote that Collins's writing "alternates between the clipped prose of a cop novel and some surreally introspective passages."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

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

Booklist, July, 2004, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Lost Souls, p. 1824.

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.

Publishers Weekly, July 26, 2004, review of Lost Souls, p. 40.

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. Dallet, 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.