When he started putting his latest novel about, Brian O'Doherty had reason to believe there might be some interest: he had published several books already, was well-connected and had a distinguished track record stretching back 40 years across the arts.
He was a professor of fine arts whose work is in the collections of the Met and the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and the Centre Pompidou in Paris; he had made an award-winning film about his friend, the painter Edward Hopper; written and presented television series; and held a senior position for nearly 20 years on the US equivalent of the Arts Council.
In short, 72-year-old O'Doherty had done rather a lot for a writer described as an unknown when he was short-listed for the Booker prize. "It was a despised book that I had put all my heart and soul into," he says, sitting by the swimming pool of his weathered-wood home in the Hamptons at the far end of Long Island. "It went round and round the publishers. They said: `Well, I suppose it is well written, but who needs another dark Irish novel?' They turned it down, sometimes contemptuously. I don't mind being turned down in this life, but don't do that."
Even now that The Deposition of Father McGreevy has earned a measure of recognition for its literary merit, the indignities have not receded entirely. The Amazon listing for O'Doherty's book suggests that if you have enjoyed it you might like to try, among others, Knick Knack Paddy Whack, by the comedian Ardal O'Hanlon.
O'Doherty laughs this off, as he does many things, an irreverent Irishman at the heart of American high culture. During a break in a lunch of turkey and Caesar salad he leans across and creases his lean face, under a flop of silver hair, into a rude story "while the ladies are away". This involves a misunderstanding of the term "a U-turn" by a gentleman who "can bring tears to a ewe's eyes" and is not entirely gratuitous, given an episode in his novel.
But if the big publishers had had their way we would never have got this far, to the bright, open-plan house surrounded by trees and lifted by art that he shares with his wife of 40 years, the painter and art historian Barbara Novak. The Deposition of Father McGreevy was taken up and championed by some of his influential friends in Manhattan and elsewhere, but it made no difference. He received a letter from Seamus Deane, who won the Guardian fiction prize and was himself shortlisted for the Booker, for Reading in the Dark. That was reassuring, but it still did not get O'Doherty's book into print. "It's good to have a friend in court, but the court wasn't there," he says.
Finally, the manuscript fell into the hands of a man who was a rare part of the writer's forgotten past. Jonathan Rabinowitz was a small publisher who, 25 years previously, had taken a class in art writing at Columbia University. "Slowly, a very remote penny dropped," says O'Doherty. "I remembered a very dark, insecure man who had done the best work in many years. At the end, he disappeared before I ever spoke to him. A great writer was lost and instead went into the great industry of publishing."
Rabinowitz's Turtle Point Press published the book, the reviews were good and O'Doherty was entitled to feel rather pleased with himself, especially when the Booker judges paid attention. "The Booker is validation for toil, sweat and the joy of writing," he says.
The Deposition of Father McGreevy is an allegory about a village on the west coast of Ireland destroyed by illness, gossip and rumour at the end of the 1930s. The events, recorded in a deposition by the local priest, are picked up decades later by a journalist in a pub in London. The author is proud that he has given the Irish language a starring role.
Rabinowitz, understandably, is also delighted. "The Booker means a great deal in the US. The phone's been ringing off the hook." In fact, the Booker shortlist receives scant mention in the mainstream US press, and dispute there is nothing compared with the internecine literary dogfights in the British isles.
When the nominees are announced for the National Book Award, the Booker's nearest equivalent in the US, the list appears in the press without any great fanfare and a month later the prize is awarded. The New York Times welcomed this year's selection with the sanguine headline: "National Book Award Finalists Announced". The piece below proceeded from start to finish without anyone having a cultural seizure or denouncing the judges, as one British publisher did when Vikram Seth was excluded from the Booker list seven years ago.
O'Doherty prefers to draw encouragement from the disputatious approach, and nothing would keep him away from the Booker prize dinner at the Guildhall in London on November 7th. "I'm glad someone's worked up about literature," he says. "I'm going there with bells on. I know I'm an outsider, but what is greater than the unexpected?"
Indeed, much about O'Doherty is unexpected. For one thing, he is also Patrick Ireland. This was the name he adopted, and under which he has shown all his art, since Bloody Sunday in 1972. "That was very upsetting and there was nothing I could do about it," he says. His conceptual art, paintings and sculptures will continue to appear under that name until the British military presence has been removed from Northern Ireland.
But O'Doherty/Ireland goes out of his way to say: "Patrick Ireland is not a terrorist. I've been accused of that. I don't hate the British or the Irish or the Church." He makes a point also of mentioning the five presidents of the US with a Protestant Irish background, and makes light of his adoption of dual US/Irish citizenship. He did it, he says, only because his wife got fed up waiting for him at the non-US citizens queue at Kennedy airport.
"I said, `Now I'll have to take responsibility for Vietnam and the repression of minorities.' I've had people come up to me and say: `You're the spit of Brian O'Doherty, but he's much nicer'."
Patrick Ireland is only one of his alternative identities. O'Doherty, who was born in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, trained for what he calls "the family business" and practised as a doctor when he was a young man. He continued to paint all the while, and a year working in a cancer hospital was enough to convince him it was time for a change. "After that, nothing matters that much."
New York had always been his goal, and he moved to the US in 1957. "What I am, I am because of America. It's the American dream, in a way." His dream took him into a world peopled by painters such as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock's widow Lee Krasner (Pollock had died the year before).
A retrospective of Krasner's work has opened recently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, but O'Doherty's wife is hesitant about going. The two are confirmed Manhattanites, and Brooklyn does not figure much on their schedule, even if it is much closer to their apartment on the Upper West Side than is their home in the Hamptons where, they make plain, they are not part of the social set.
O'Doherty took a job working as an art critic on the New York Times. He was a naughty boy in those days, he says - he is sorry to see that journalists affect a preference for mineral water with lunch these days - but this did not exactly hold him back. Later he was an arts reporter on network television, won a prize for writing and directing a documentary, published several books about art and spent 19 years as director of film, radio and television programmes at the National Endowment for the Arts. He also found time for more than 40 one-man shows devoted to his work, and is still professor of fine arts and media at the Southampton College campus of Long Island University.
All this, and yet he describes seeing Stanley Matthews play football as one of the transcendent moments of his life. He has time, too, for the former German international sweeper Franz Beckenbauer, and would be spending the evening after we met watching the New York Mets - dismissed by Yankees fans as New York's "other baseball club" - attempt to win a place in the World Series. He supports the Mets because of their blue-collar, underdog status.
O'Doherty and Novak never had children and, while there were small regrets at one time, they are satisfied they have led full lives. Or, at least, she is. He wishes he had become a full-time film director. That, he says, would have been the field in which he could have made best use of all his talents. Now, there is not enough time left. "I was not going to let other people determine the limits of my life. I believe deeply that our social pressures and lives limit people enormously and nullify their potential for development. People have more in them than they allow."
The Deposition of Father McGreevy is published by Arcadia, price £11.99 in UK
The winner of the Booker Prize will be announced on Tuesday