Many readers will be familiar with Flann O'Brien's novel The Dalkey Archive, in which James Joyce is discovered alive and well and working as a barman in Skerries, but few will know of the Chicago-based Dalkey Archive Press, writes Aisling Maguire.
Its founder and owner, American-Irishman John O'Brien - no relation to Flann, but clearly an enthusiast - describes it as "a hopelessly quixotic adventure", yet the press is tilting at more than windmills.
Having established a journal called The Review of Contemporary Literature to champion the work of writers ignored by large publishers, O'Brien decided to publish these writers. Twenty years ago he founded the Dalkey Archive Press as a not-for-profit organisation supported by endowments and grants. A major sponsor is the Lannan Foundation, which has benefited many Irish writers, including the former Irish Times journalist Mary Morrissy. As well as publishing the work of the legendary Flann O'Brien in the United States, the press also has on its back list, and still in print, fiction by Carlos Fuentes, Camilo Jose Cela, Danilo Kis, Yves Navarre, Luisa Valenzuela and our own Aidan Higgins.
One of its most recent publications is a novel by an ex-patriate Irishman, Meredith Brosnan. Mr Dynamite meets John O'Brien's requirement that a book "requires me to be figuring out how in the hell the writer is doing what he or she is doing" by evoking William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson and a dash of Martin Amis in the voice of an outraged Irish emigrant in New York. Mercifully free of romantic, ex-pat tropes, it pours hilarious bile on the protagonist's birthplace, as well as most other places.
Mr Dynamite takes us on a switchback ride through three months of Jarlath Prendergast's attempts to fund his movies. Reversing the usual picaresque order, Brosnan begins with a bequest that might rescue his protagonist but instead sends him on a manic downward spiral till he becomes embroiled in a quixotic revenge for the death of his ex-girlfriend. The dizzying monologue deploys punk musical and literary references, an unlikely mix signalled in the book's epigraphs from Pessoa and Sinatra.
As Brosnan is the son of the cartoonist Warner, whose work featured in Irish newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, it is apt that his novel is endorsed by Harvey Pekar, "hero" of the film and comic American Splendor, as "one of the funniest books I've read in the past several years".
Prendergast's monologue is a mordant rant against a world which has ignored his genius. His favourite project is a film about the "Troubles" featuring "a walking-talking-singing female hairbrush with breasts and long false eyelashes wrapped in a strip of green fabric to suggest a shawl - our own Cathleen ni Houlihan".
By contrast with his belligerent hero, Brosnan is a softly spoken, gentle person with a quirky sense of humour. He arrived in New York, aged 26, in December 1984, around the time that O'Brien was establishing Dalkey Archive Press. He says it took him three years to realise that he had actually emigrated, though he returned to Ireland for the first time last year. On arrival in New York, he "walked around with wads of cash hidden in my shoes. . .drank a lot . . .became enamoured of American women and lost my travellers' cheques." Now he is happily married and, like all "ageing expats", dreams of retiring to a little grey home in the West, adding "I've always wanted to have a donkey" - all a far cry from the life of Donnybrook, St Michael's school and UCD that he knew before he left.
His experience of miscellaneous "mac" jobs in New York and living at 14 different addresses in 20 years informs his gritty evocation of the city in Mr Dynamite. Although fired from his first job in a one-hour photo shop for losing a customer's honeymoon snaps, he works today in a photographic library specialising in pictures of the former USSR. He continues to play bass guitar and writes music journalism.
Since moving to the US he has read international literature widely, particularly theatre scripts. Some of his own plays were performed off-Broadway by the Tribeca Lab. This background is evident in the way he sets up the action in Mr Dynamite and in the protagonist's endless capacity for self-dramatisation. He also discovered the "genius" of Nabokov. Among Irish literature he admires John Banville's The Book of Evidence and regards Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy as a "no-holds-barred masterpiece". His own writing bars no holds and pulls no punches. For his next project he is working on a "rollicking parody of a famous American Christian lady inspirational novelist whose work has touched the heart of millions".
On his return after 20 years away he was struck by the changes in the face of Dublin, which he left was in the bleak mid-term of the 1980s recession. "There was a new smugness in the air, the Tiger at full stretch, mobile-mania, flash cars - this must be what freedom from fear looks like." Ironically, he lives in a city beset by fear but loves New York and in its glory, madness and diversity has found a match for his own eclectic satirical voice.
For more information on Dalkey Archive Press go to www.centerforbookculture.org. Mr Dynamite is available from www.amazon.com for $13.50.