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Nick Earls is the author of ten books, including the best-selling novels Perfect Skin and World of Chickens (Two To Go in North America). His newest book, Thompson Gunner, has just been released in Australia and is partly set in Canada. He has an honours degree in Medicine from the University of Queensland and lives in Brisbane. London's Mirror newspaper has called him "the first Aussie to make me laugh out loud since Jason Donovan."

Rob Payne: The Australian commented that you have "a superb eye and ear for the comic and simultaneously painful aspects of life." How does comedy fit into your writing. Why is it a tool?

Nick Earls: It was a survival tool in the beginning. My first book in Australia (a collection of short stories, now long gone) was mostly very serious, and it was so savaged by the critics that I kept being asked to talk to writers' groups about the experience. And the only way to get through it was to turn it into some kind of joke at my own expense. So, I discovered self-deprecating humour the hard way, but I liked how it worked with live audiences. Then, since I had nothing at all to lose -- my first book had left me with no career to speak of -- comedy crept into my fiction, I started to learn more about how to use it, I started to find myself readers and everything changed in a way that I hadn't expected.

RP: How can comedy be used effectively, even more effectively than say a dramatic, internal monologue to shed light on human truths/the human condition/this thing we call life?

NE: This is a really good question. Most people think comedy is about the jokes. In a way, they're a bonus and the real game is what comedy does to narrative. At least that's how it feels in the midst of writing a novel. But the corollary is that if you focus on the people and the story and get them right, the comedy has its best chance of being funny.

Life, at its most interesting, can be a roller coaster ride. Sometimes fiction should therefore be a roller coaster ride too. And it's important to remember, when you're the one bolting the parts together, that roller coaster rides have highs and lows. The escape valve of comedy gives you some of the highs, and the art then lies in how you put the ride together. If you balance the highs and the lows well, each increases the apparent amplitude of the other and the reader feels more engagement with the whole thing.

Of course it can be scary sometimes, writing it and wondering what you can get away with. But I've found that a lot of people are willing to go with the ride. In Perfect Skin, fifteen pages after one of the bigger human revelations in the novel, readers can find themselves thinking, "Oh my god, I can't believe he's peeing on that woman's cat."

But it's there, and readers let it happen, because it's real. Things like that can happen. Comedy is justifiable because it's real.

When Perfect Skin came out, a TV crew was interviewing me on my back deck and the reporter said, "Your life seems really together now, hardly like your characters at all." And I think I agreed, which was dangerously complacent of me. I got what I deserved that same day.

After the crew left, I made myself a fruit smoothie for lunch. It didn't blend properly, so I gave it another go while the lid was off, and it spouted up into my face. I thought that was my lesson learned, but it wasn't quite. I went out for a couple of hours to buy groceries and do the banking and mailing. When I got home I walked past the hall mirror. And saw a large chunk of banana sitting in my hair, in a slick of smoothie. It looked as though I'd spent time under the world's largest seagull.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, people the world over can relate to life's everyday survivable pratfalls. These things happen to most of us, one way or another. I think they might even happen to people as cool and together as Canadians, judging by my recent visit. I know this'll sound like I'm sucking up, but the festivals in Calgary and Banff gave me some of my favourite audiences ever. They laughed, they bought my books, they flattered me greatly (and I'm always up for that) and from what I heard a lot of their lives had known the occasional ignoble moment. But sub-lethal embarrassment only makes us stronger, right?

RP: As you mentioned, comedy is only an element of your writing. There's certainly an underlying substance and commentary on modern life and life in general. So how would you describe your writing to the uninitiated? And how do you feel about being compared to Nick Hornby?

NE: I've yet to find a slick, succinct way of describing what I do. In a naive kind of way, I think I try to channel what comes naturally and use it in the best interests of the story and the characters. My foreign-language-rights agent in London described it as "intelligent commercial fiction," which I liked. But who wouldn't? Who wouldn't want to be described as both clever and saleable?

I did two tours of the UK where Nick Hornby's name came up ten times a day or more, but there's less of that now and it doesn't happen at home. Comparison is inevitable -- classification is the way we start to make sense of things. And Nick Hornby's a big success, so I don't particularly mind. It doesn't have any bearing on what I do though.

RP: I've read that Zigzag Street has been reprinted ten times. Do sales numbers affect your writing?

NE: I've always tried to avoid developing an obsession with sales figures. But to give you a number, I know that the novels each tend to sell more than 50,000 in Australia. How many more I don't know because once they get to that sort of level I figure I can't complain and I leave them to look after themselves.

I've sold hundreds of thousands of books altogether, I suppose. But I decided a while back I could either become a numbers freak (and far too easily), or I could work on the idea that as long as I was selling enough I would get to keep writing more. For peace of mind, I decided on the latter.

I'm only just getting started in Canada and the U.S., but my publishers are very supportive and seem to really be behind me, so there's some hope.

RP: Overall, how would you describe contemporary writing in Oz?

NE: To borrow a word from my med student days (and the description of a lot of pathology slides), pleiomorphic. My impression is that contemporary writing here takes a range of shapes and follows a number of quite different paths. And I think that's a good thing.

RP: Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally and others have been successful internationally with historical fiction in Oz. Does the past play a large role in the literary landscape?

NE: I think the scope of Oz Lit has broadened over the past 10 years. A lot of the writers we produced in the 70s (Peter Carey included) seemed to have an association with the Balmain area of Sydney, and write in a predominantly literary way. I think it's easier to come from other places now, and write in a range of ways, and still find a publisher and a readership.

Brisbane's a good example. It's a place people used to leave in order to become novelists, now we have a couple of dozen novelists living here. I think there are a number of reasons for that. It's a bigger, more progressive, more supportive, more normal city for a start, but the increased ease of communication and travel does make it more possible for writers to live where they want and still do business everywhere else.

In terms of subject matter, the past does get a lot of coverage, but I certainly don't feel dominated by that. There's plenty of room for what I do as well. Besides, World of Chickens / Two To Go is a historical novel. It's set in 1985.

It just occurred to me that a lot of the literary prizes here go to novels set in the past. I don't know if that means anything, but maybe it in some way reflects our view of what's "worthy." Needless to say, as a writer of urban contemporary comic fiction, I probably don't score a lot of points for worthiness, but clearly you can do what I do and find readers. Of course, competition judges and the big Oz Lit people would say that winning is all about merit, but that only leads directly back to what anyone might or might not see as meritorious.

But when I look at what I'm trying to do when I write a book, and what I think people like Peter Carey and Frank Moorhouse are trying to do, it makes no sense to compare us, and awards probably have to focus in on something and some particular understanding of what merit is. When I look at Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang and Moorhouse's Dark Palace, I can't see any basis on which you'd judge my fiction against theirs. You might as well compare it with a trout or a hammock, for all the sense it'd make.

RP: Given the diversity of the industry, does the media effectively differentiate between literary fiction, contemporary fiction and fat airport blockbusters like those written by Matthew Reilly?

NE: In terms of reviews, the very mass-market books tend to get a belting. I'm not sure that we've found effective ways of reviewing them yet. The quality literary books obviously fare well but, interestingly, mine are somewhere in between genre-wise and tend to fare pretty well too. We do have quite a few reviewers who know what to look for when they're tossed contemporary comic commercial-literary crossover fiction. They'll find the comedy, and treat it on its merits, and usually they'll find what's going on beneath the surface as well.

RP: Film noir/crime writing is a vibrant though under-celebrated genre in Canada, mostly because it isn't seen as being "serious." Australia is home to the crime awards such as The First Blood Award and the Ned Kelly Award and home to writers such as Shane Maloney, Christopher Brookmyre, Marshall Browne and (gulp) Chopper Reid. How is crime writing regarded in Oz?

NE: It's a pretty big deal. There are lots of people doing it, it sells, and it gets dedicated review space in the big newspapers. Crime writing is treated seriously as a genre in its own right and with its own rules, and some people here are very good at it. As you mention, it has its own awards, but it's a rare piece of real crime writing that crosses over to the more literary awards too. Andrew McGahan's Last Drinks was recognized by both crime and literary awards, but as a book it's somewhere between the two and it's not straight-out crime fiction.

RP: Were you really a vocalist on a hip-hop album?

NE: Um, yes. I worked in the company of experts and felt like the amateur I was. We did an album and played two gigs, one of them an outdoor festival with 40,000 people. After that, I figured I should retire on a high. Naturally, the pressure to get the band back together is relentless, so I keep trying to come up with things to distract Lawrence, the guy who makes it all happen.

Here's this weekend's distraction for him. Through my attachment to War Child, I was recently in Kosovo taking a look at some of the projects we'd funded through the Girls Night In anthologies and I spent a couple of hours at their youth radio station. There are some people connected with the station doing some really interesting things musically, so I've been working on lining up a collaboration involving them and Lawrence and his crew. It should work out, because beats-based music is already global and they can email files to each other at will. And it should keep Lawrence busy for at least a few days.

RP: Do you still run seven kilometres a day?

NE: Yes, I still run whenever it's feasible, and I miss it when it isn't. I don't know if there's a connection between condition and creativity, but I'm pretty sure there's a connection between exertion and not being in a shitty mood. If anything's annoying me -- not that much does -- it usually annoys me less after I've gone for a run. But maybe it is creative too. If I'm working on something, I'll often set two characters off in conversation when I'm running, but then I have to run home faster to make a bunch of sweaty notes before it's all lost. Some of my answers here came about the same way, so my chair is rather unattractively damp now.

Read an excerpt from Nick Earls' new book, The Thompson Gunner, here.

Rob Payne is the author of Live By Request, an acclaimed debut novel, Working Class Zero and Sushi Daze, which was recently released in Australia and will be available in Canada in January 2005.

He is the former editor of Quarry Magazine and has edited two anthologies of Canadian short fiction, Carrying the Fire and Pop Goes the Story.

Payne's previous Bookninja publications are "Bright Young Things" and "A Report from the Brisbane International Writers Festival."

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