Stop making sense

The cult writer Mike DeCapite was crossing Broadway one morning, still high from a reading he gave the night before, when suddenly it hit him: what he wants to do is to write an ambient novel, just as Brian Eno makes ambient records. “It’s basically what I’ve been doing all along,” he says when we meet, “but that’s the first time I was able to describe it to myself so simply.”

I am in New York, sitting nervously on a sofa in DeCapite’s snug, dimly lit Upper West Side apartment, politely asking if he can turn Van Morrison down so I can begin recording. The trail that led me here started earlier this year, after I left my editing job of 20 years with no plan other than to give myself time to think. When a former colleague told me that a feature I’d written for this paper about a tattoo parlour reminded him of something written by DeCapite, I bought a couple of his books on eBay and was astonished by what I read. Then, when my partner invited me to tag along on her work trip to New York, I sent DeCapite my tattoo article and told him I wanted to meet him.

Making coffee in two moka pots on the stove, DeCapite seems unfazed when I explain this unlikely chain of events: “When you get out of that regular schedule, into the open field of time – only then do these things that seem fated start happening, right? Because you can hear better.”

DeCapite was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1962. Aged 18, he started a journal, typing each entry as if he were writing a novel and handing photocopies to friends to read. When incident was in short supply, narrative gave way to observation. Some days, he would simply describe the weather. A template was established; his fragmentary, autobiographical style determined.

Instead of going to college, DeCapite became a cabbie, a painter, a construction worker, a factory worker... anything that gave him the freedom to write how, and when, and what, he wanted.

“William Burroughs said of Kerouac that he was incomplete without writing,” says DeCapite, who talks slowly and deliberately, and with quiet confidence. “I don’t know if that’s true of all writers, but it’s true of me. Experience is not enough. I have to complete it in some way, by transposing it into writing.”

DeCapite was in his twenties, driving a cab on Cleveland’s Southside, when he befriended his neighbour “Fast Eddie”, a gambler whose outrageous tales of the city’s poker dens, dive bars and red-light district would become central to DeCapite’s self-published first novel, Through the Windshield (1998). The book became a classic of underground literature and won DeCapite a cult following.

When Through the Windshield came out, DeCapite was living in San Francisco with his second wife, working as a file clerk at a law firm, chipping away at a second novel, Ruined for Life! – a book, never published, he describes as “very dark” and “soaked in alcohol”. By 2003, he’d split up with his wife and was renting a small room in the Mission. His drinking, he says, had closed in on his imagination.

Out of the blue, he was invited to write a monthly column for Cleveland arts magazine angle, an opportunity that would turn his life around. He quit booze and, after a three-year break, returned to his novel with a clear head and renewed purpose. So what happened?

“I came to think of it as one of those artistic quagmires from which you just have to extricate yourself or be pulled under,” he says. “Like that Balzac novel The Unknown Masterpiece, in which a painter gets stuck on some technical problem and is unable to finish this painting he’s working on.”

In 2005, DeCapite moved to New York. He found work as a copyeditor and, still scarred from two failed marriages, resolved to write a manifesto about the comforts of solitude. That’s when he bumped into an old friend, June, whom he remembered as being “all the glamour and potential of a New York night when you’re 25”. His intense feelings for June, herself going through a divorce, would become the narrative thread of Jacket Weather (Soft Skull Press, 2021), his first novel for a publishing house.

Throughout our conversation, my eye is drawn to two tall bookcases at either end of the room, where I spot one or two of my own favourites, including Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here – an ingenious book that imagines one point in space depicted at different moments through time. DeCapite tells me that lately he’s been reading a lot about time – “although I can’t say that I’ve made any progress” – especially in the works of the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli.

What about fiction, I ask?

“I feel like I’m in constant conversation with musicians,” says DeCapite. “I don’t think so much about other writers, other books. I’m always in some sort of back and forth with Dylan, with Van Morrison. What I’m shooting for is what the musicians I love are able to do. I would like to be able to do for people what records like [Van Morrison’s] Saint Dominic’s Preview and [Television’s] Marquee Moon have done for me.”

How’s the ambient novel coming along?

“I’m really struggling with this one,” he says. “We have a deep connection to narrative, and I’m having a hard time wrenching myself free of it.”

The subject then returns to Brian Eno – how, when he was recording his masterpiece, Another Green World, Eno found himself in tears.

Well, it is a beautiful piece of music, I say.

“No, that wasn’t it,” he says. “It was because he realised he had no idea what he was doing.”

Illustration by Oscar Ingham/Observer Design