It’s an odd kind of satisfaction when the life you’re living and the novel you happen to be reading converge like two rivers.
Or make that three rivers. That half of Joseph O’Neill’s “Godwin” is set in Pittsburgh didn’t dawn on me until I was back home, having traveled four days with the hardback in tow. In dissecting the office politics at a technical writing firm he does allude to the city’s hills and neighborhood bars, while I had just frequented “the smallest licensed bar in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Monk’s Bar in the Priory Hotel, about the size of a McMansion’s walk-in closet, with room for only a couple of tables and maybe four stools where drinkers put their elbows up.
Not particularly a fan of hard liquor, I made an exception for the purplish, raspberry-infused Monktini, a glorious concoction, really, and when it’s made a bell is rung like a call to mealtime. Behind that bell, the liquor bottles are stacked like gold bullion in a thick-walled safe worthy of an F.D.I.C. bank.
That’s because for 93 years, until 1981, the room served as the priory library, back when a Benedictine order called the red-brick pile home and valuable documents of clergy and parishioners alike needed safekeeping.
Now, lay out a 10 o’clock charcuterie board after a long day on the road and even the order’s most penitent brother would call it heaven.
About that road in, who knew it was so elevated, as you seemingly fly in like the Jetsons past rocky outcroppings along Interstates 376 and 279, high above the rivers, before descending in a loop to land, in our case, in the heart of Deutschtown.
But O’Neill. He seems to me a kind of emerging literary hero. Irish-born, half Turkish, both of course beyond his control but interesting, soccer and cricket-obsessed, which is only somewhat beyond his control but somehow likable, a political essayist, an engaged humanist who left being a barrister and doesn’t suffer the usual American hypocrisies, and like that.
In interviews, he’s brutally frank about the state of the culture, in which there are so many books and so few readers. And yet the life of the novelist, he says, is to be so compelled.
For what it’s worth, here’s one reader who will seek him out again. The setting? I hear Detroit’s lovely this time of year.