McCann, Colum 1965–

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McCann, Colum 1965–

PERSONAL: Born 1965, in Dublin, Ireland; married Allison Hawke, c. 1993. Education: Attended Clonkeen College; Dublin Institute of Technology Rathmines, degree in communications; graduate studies at University of Texas at Austin.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Henry Holt & Co., Inc., 115 W. 18th St., New York, NY 10011.

CAREER: Writer and freelance journalist. Has worked for various newspapers, including the Herald, Evening Press, and Connaught Telegraph in Ireland, and with the United Press in New York, NY; Evening Press, youth correspondent, 1984–85; worked variously as a taxi driver in Cape Cod, MA, bartender, bicycle mechanic, volunteer for a program in rural Texas for troubled urban youths, and apartment manager.

AWARDS, HONORS: Best first fiction and best new writer, Hennessy Sunday Tribune Awards, 1991, for short story "Tresses"; Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, 1994; Academy Award nomination for Best Live Action Short, 2005, for "Everything in This Country Must."

WRITINGS:

Fishing the Sloe-Black River (short stories), [England], c. 1993.

Songdogs (novel), Metropolitan Books (New York, NY), 1995.

This Side of Brightness (novel), Metropolitan Books (New York, NY), 1998.

Everything in This Country Must (short stories), Holt (New York, NY), 2000.

Dancer (novel), Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2003.

Also author of short story, "Tresses," published in the Sunday Tribune. Contributor to books, including Ireland in Exile. Contributor to periodicals, including the London Observer.

ADAPTATIONS: The stories "Fishing the Sloe-Black River," "Smoke," "Everything in This Country Must," and "Blue in the Face" have been adapted for film.

SIDELIGHTS: Colum McCann is an Irish writer whose debut novel is Songdogs, a work Times Literary Supplement writer John Tague characterized as "an exciting book, because it vibrates with the energy of a new writer finding his voice." McCann's story takes place over a seven-day period when a young man, Conor Lyons, returns home to County Mayo, Ireland, to visit his father. Lyons has been away several years on an arduous trek with the ultimate goal of finding out what happened to his beautiful and mysterious mother, who disappeared when he was twelve.

In Songdogs McCann tells the story of Lyons' recent journey in flashback as the young man attempts to sort out and clean up the eccentric, unwashed, and unhealthy life into which his father has sunk. The son's travels parallel the path that his father had once traversed decades before: the elder, Irish-born Lyons had been an itinerant photographer whose adventures took him through the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s across the Atlantic to Mexico, where he met his wife, and finally to America in the 1950s. The author recreates this first journey in the text by recounting Conor's scrutiny of his father's archive of images. The key to his mother's disappearance lies in the Lyons' disintegrating marriage, some apparently risqué photographs that scandalized the rural Irish community, and an incident of disturbing abasement. "It's a nice paradox that the novel's satisfying structure encloses stories of loss, compromise, and unsolved mystery," according to Hermione Lee in the New Yorker.

Other critics responded equally favorably to Songdogs, and although New York Times Book Review contributor Scott Veale noted that "a first-novelish quality seeps in occasionally," he concluded that "for the most part Mr. McCann's hand is strong and sure. The halting interplay between father and son, in particular, is delicately portrayed." Reviewing what he termed "this hugely inventive debut" for the Observer, Tim Adams asserted that "if there is a fault in this book it is that of stasis, paragraphs develop images, then leave them hanging. But stasis is also Songdogs's central metaphor." Lee similarly commented: "This comedy of torpidity is finely done. And, for all its sadnesses, Songdogs reads like a celebration."

"It's always a joy when a second novel lives up to the promise of a writer's debut," remarked a Publishers Weekly contributor in 1998, "but this outstanding follow-up to Songdogs is a triumph." The reviewer was referring to This Side of Brightness, a novel spanning four decades during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1916 New York City, a group of men known as "sandhogs" undertake the arduous and treacherous task of tunneling underneath the East River to lay the groundwork for the city's fledgling subway system. The job brings together a mosaic of Polish, Irish, Italian, and African-American laborers who establish strong bonds based on mutual respect: "There is democracy beneath the river," one character states. "In the darkness every man's blood runs the same color."

The story follows Nathan Walker, a black man transplanted from Georgia who joins the company. In the early pages of the book, Walker and three colleagues are caught up in tragedy when a blow-out occurs in the tunnel they are digging (McCann based this scene on an actual incident). While Walker survives, his Irish coworker and friend Con O'Leary is killed. Walker takes it upon himself to look after O'Leary's young, pregnant widow. When the child, Eleanor, is born, the three characters stay in touch over the years—to the point where Walker marries Eleanor.

The legacy of Nathan and Eleanor's mixed-race marriage is one of both love and grief. As a World of Hibernia reviewer related: "Their son, Clarence,… is killed 'resisting arrest' after he himself killed both the man who ran over his mother in a car crash and a policeman who tried to apprehend him." Clarence's wife, Louisa, "slips into alcoholism and heroin addiction." Their son, Clarence Nathan, "in direct contrast to his grandfather," works the girders high above the city. He witnesses the death by train accident of his eighty-nine-year-old grandfather in the very tunnel Nathan Walker risked his life digging so many years earlier. "It is then that Clarence Nathan seeks refuge underground, becoming 'Treefrog.'"

To Booklist writer Bonnie Smothers, "it's not surprising to find [McCann] tackling the peculiar, unexplored and violent nexus" between the persecuted Irish and African-American populations. Likewise, a BookPage reviewer cited the author for addressing "the big issues of race, love and time with a literary majesty that completely befits the nature and scope of this family epic."

In 2000 McCann released Everything in This Country Must, two stories and a novella centered on "The Troubles" as experienced by three teenagers in modern-day Northern Ireland. The title story is told from the point of view of a fifteen-year-old Irish farm girl as she and her father try to rescue their draft horse, which is trapped in a flooded river. Their efforts prove in vain; and when British soldiers appear on the scene to help, it becomes clear that the father would rather lose the beloved horse than acknowledge the hated British. The girl then knows that the horse must die, "because everything in this country must." This story and the two others, declared Smothers in Booklist, "are beautifully, poetically written, but the suffering is so palpable that reading about these characters is painful."

"I think the idea of place is very important to language," McCann told Peter Costanzo for the Title Page Web site. Speaking of his work on This Side of Brightness, McCann continued: "The language in it is much more pared down than the language of, say, the West of Ireland. It's a different landscape, a stark world of light and dark, people living underground. And so the geography demands a different type of word use. Ultimately, though, it is a test of the imagination to match place, time, language and human stories together—to weave them into some proper tapestry."

Dancer is McCann's fictionalized biography of famed Russian defector and ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. It is not a biography in the classic sense, as much of the work is fictionalized, characters are created or meshed together, and events in Nureyev's life are imagined rather than reported. The book is "more a character study of the many people in the dancer's life and the cultural changes that took place during his lifetime," observed Theresa Connors in the Library Journal. Beginning with Nureyev's childhood in Russia, where he danced to entertain wounded soldiers in a hospital during World War II, the book relates his early training and grueling practice sessions; his determination to perform, even against his father's wishes; his defection and emergence into a wider, more accepting world; and the irresistible call of money, fame, and sex that eventually led to Nureyev's death from AIDS.

McCann, in a novel that stands as a "a lovely showcase for his fluid prose and storytelling skill," explores Nureyev's effect on the people he knew, and the impact others had on the phenomenally talented artist, noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. Adam Dunn, writing in Publishers Weekly, called the novel "a noteworthy literary achievement: a seamless narrative with a constantly roving POV." "Dancer is neither a biography of Nureyev nor does it quite stand as an independent novel," observed Judith Mackrell in the Guardian. "Like its subject, it spins with virtuoso, charismatic brilliance around a core of willful mystery."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 1998, Bonnie Smothers, review of This Side of Brightness; January 1, 1999, review of This Side of Brightness, p. 778; March 15, 2000, Bonnie Smothers, review of Everything in This Country Must, p. 1330; August 18, 2000; June 1, 2004, Ted Hipple, review of Dancer, p. 1764.

Bookseller, November 1, 2002, Beneticte Page, "The Elemental Art: Colum McCann Talks about His Experimental Novel on the Life of Rudolf Nureyev," p. 23.

Europe Intelligence Wire, January 26, 2005, "Short Film Puts Irish Pair in the Frame."

Guardian (London, England), January 11, 2003, Judith Mackrell, "Being Rudolf Nureyev," review of Dancer.

Houston Chronicle, February 28, 2003, Suzanne Ferriss, "Nureyev's Life Fleshed Out by Fiction," review of Dancer.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1998, review of This Side of Brightness; October 15, 2002, review of Dancer, p. 1498.

Library Journal, August, 1995, p. 118; March 15, 1998, Barbara Hoffert, review of This Side of Brightness, p. 94; January, 2000, Brian Kenney, review of Everything in This Country Must, p. 161; September 15, 2004, Theresa Connors, review of Dancer, p. 89.

New Yorker, November 6, 1995, Hermione Lee, review of Songdogs, p. 174.

New York Times, January 19, 2003, Peter Kurth, "A Story with Legs," review of Dancer, p. 14.

New York Times Book Review, November 5, 1995, Scott Veale, review of Songdogs, p. 24; March 19, 2000, Charles Taylor, review of Everything in This Country Must, p. 15.

Observer (London, England), July 9, 1995, Tim Adams, review of Songdogs, p. 15.

Publishers Weekly, January 5, 1998, review of This Side of Brightness, p. 57; January 31, 2000, review of Everything in This Country Must, p. 80; November 18, 2002, review of Dancer, p. 40; January 13, 2003, Adam Dunn, "Dancer from the Dance: Colum McCann," interview with Column McCann, p. 36.

World of Hibernia, summer, 1998, review of This Side of Brightness, p. 175.