David Keenan on ‘Boyhood’ and Life in Exile from Glasgow

Starting with the critically acclaimed This Is Memorial Device, David Keenan has carved a singular career as an author unlike any other, one who offers a transcendental take on the everyday. Latest novel Boyhood is arguably his best to date, and SNACK caught up with David Keenan to learn more.

How would you describe Boyhood?

A love letter to Glasgow, a book of angels, and an attempt to redeem suffering through art.

It’s your seventh novel. Do you consider that they are related?

Yes, in that I feel, somewhat akin to William Burroughs, that all of my books take place in a reality just slightly parallel to our own, in the same way that William Blake saw angels in the trees of London.

One of the quotes in the epigraph is the Emily Dickinson poem ‘Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music’. Why is that important to Boyhood, and to you?

Because that poem to me is simply the pure presentation of a poem. It doesn’t go beyond what it says. There is no meaning beyond the poem, it doesn’t need to be ‘cracked’. It is the perfect spelling of itself. Same for me in my books.

I shy away from over-description and simile and symbols because I want to present the reader with the thing-in-itself. So when an angel turns up in my book that is a literal angel and not a symbol or a stand-in for something else. ‘Scarlet Experiment!’ seems to get to the heart of what I’m trying to do with Boyhood.

Place is central to all your novels. Do you feel they each have their own character?

Yes, certainly. I have written about Airdrie so much, as well as 20th-century Europe, and I realised I had never written a fully Glasgow book, which is crazy as I have spent most of my life there. I have such memories of growing up in the east end in the 1970s; I have always wanted to go back there.

Glasgow was for me a magical place, a place of wonder, where anything could happen. It still is. Each of my books is their own occasion.

Reading Boyhood made me think of the Alasdair Gray quotation from Lanark, that ‘if a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.’ Is that an idea you identify with?

Yes, totally. It’s interesting though, because I finished this book after I moved to London, where I have been living now for over a year, and so the Glasgow I was writing about existed only in my imagination, by that point. I felt like a remote viewer in the book, casting my eye back on Glasgow.

Perhaps, like Airdrie, you have to leave some place, become an exile, before you can write about it fully.

You write about people and places all too rarely found in art and literature. Do you feel compelled to do that?

There are never any conscious decisions made by me in terms of plot or characters – I like to let the book speak and rise to its demands – but it is certainly true that I am interested in existence on the margins.

All your characters are vividly drawn; they linger in the memory. Do you imagine their lives away from the page?

Yes, I think about my characters a lot, but the only way for me to find out more would be to write it and you can’t force characters to show up, at least I can’t, and so I always live in hope that a character that I love and am fascinated by will turn up in one of my books again.

There is a sensuality and spirituality to your writing which is rare. Individual lives are felt keenly as they move between the everyday and the ecstatic, magic and matter of fact. Is that a reflection of your world view and lived experience?

Yes, it is. I feel that magic is a fully embodied thing and that the experience of now is the experience of all eternity. I don’t aspire to transcendence or a higher consciousness or any of that. I aspire to presence and attention. It’s all here, right now. In all its ordinariness and wonder. Nowhere else.

The relationship between memory and culture is a central theme of Boyhood: how music, writing, architecture, and the other arts help transport both characters and readers to a time and place. Is that what your writing does for you?

Oh yes, I write to bring you there completely. My sentences aspire to invisibility; they are coded in such a way as to be presentational and not descriptive. Writing is remote viewing is angelhood is Christ of St John of the Cross looking down on all of Glasgow.

Do you have expectations of your readers, and does their understanding of your work ever surprise you?

I have no expectations, but I have some great readers.

I never fully know what my book is about until it is finished and even then it’s a process of discovery and uncovering, which readers often help with, pointing out things I never thought of myself. The book is alive and continues to grow and take shape once it is published. It’s so wonderful.

Boyhood is published by White Rabbit

Photo credit: Marzena Pogorzaly