Neilan, Paul

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Neilan, Paul

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Portland, OR. E-mail—paulneilanapathy@yahoo.com.

CAREER:

Works for an insurance company.

WRITINGS:

Apathy and Other Small Victories, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Author of the blog Paul Neilan's Blog.

SIDELIGHTS:

Paul Neilan's first novel, Apathy and Other Small Victories, is about Shane, a loser who is a temp for an insurance company, travels by Greyhound bus, drinks too much, and engages in self-destructive behavior such as sleeping with his landlord's wife (at the landlord's insistence) and allowing his girlfriend to beat him up during the heat of passion. At work he sleeps in the bathroom, at restaurants he steals salt shakers, and at his dentist's office he hits on the deaf assistant. Though Shane does not care much about anything, when the deaf assistant, with whom he has had profanity-laced sign language conversations, turns up dead, the cops look in his direction and he must decide what to do. Critics appreciated the book's humor and even if Shane's brand of ennui, which highlights "the tawdriness and sterility of American life," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, proved to be unrelenting. Even though the story "never quite jells," according to a writer for Kirkus Reviews, "if you can hang with Neilan's taste in rude jokes and non sequiturs, there's lots to like."

Like Shane, Neilan himself works for an insurance company and shares some of his character's aimlessness. As Neilan told an interviewer for the online journal Identity Theory, "I know a lot about his shame and bitter humiliation.… And I agree with pretty much everything he says about how compromising and depressing it is to work in an office and how crushing it feels." He also told the interviewer about the start of his literary career: "For years I just wrote in journals and didn't really worry about turning any of it into stories or stuff for other people to read, so I guess I developed my writing style by talking to myself, like some homeless people do."