A great champion of Englishness, Joseph Connolly is the author of a series of bestselling novels and numerous non-fiction volumes, including his latest, The A-Z of Eating Out (he's also a prolific restaurant critic). He is known for his contemporary comic style and his new novel, Boys and Girls, is about a marital ménage à trois between Susan, Alan and Blackie which doesn't quite turn out as intended. He has been married to Patricia, a former special needs teacher, for 43 years, has two children and lives in north London.
Susan [in Boys and Girls] wants to stay with her husband – and take a new spouse. What sparked the idea for this "singular threesome"?
I don't plan an entire book from beginning to end because I think I would get awfully bored and the reader would too. This was an idea where I thought, I've never heard of this before. I've always been intrigued in fiction by secret lives and I thought it would be interesting to do this from the female point of view. I wanted this woman to be determined that she didn't want a fling or a sugar daddy, she wanted two husbands.
Susan starts off calling the shots but gradually the two men draw together. Is this a novel about gender, marriage, friendship or all three?
It's about bonding. And the title itself is deliberately naive. I think each gender requires the exclusive company of their own sex – women particularly. Friendships seem deeply important to women and they give much more than men. If a man has two or three good friends, then he is very fortunate indeed. To explore a mature male friendship that isn't homosexual is extremely unusual.
Most of this novel is interior monologue. Is that easier or harder to write than straight prose?
This started in my very first novel. I thought it was a good device to speak in the vocabulary and nuance of each character. Many novels on, I find that I couldn't not do it. It just falls out of me. It sounds a bit Norman Bates but I sort of become the person when I am writing in their voice. I try not to examine it too much in case it goes away. It's a bit creepy.
You write: "A woman is only a woman. But a good old boy is a bloke." Is friendship more important than love?
It's the sort of thing that two men would only say if there weren't any women present. One could never exist without women and these characters agree with that. But there is a tremendous safety and comfort in male friendship and I'm sure the equivalent is true for women. Excellent heterosexual marriages are like that too. You don't have to say something witty over dinner.
Before you published your first book in 1977, you were a bookseller. What do you think about what is happening to bookshops now?
With the book trade, if anyone tells you they know what's going on, they're lying. Everyone is winging it, and it changes from month to month. It's quite alarming. Bookshops are closing every week because Amazon and the wholesalers are deliberately squeezing them out. If you're notreviewed in the nationals and on the front table in Waterstone's, you may as well set fire to your books. I think soon there will be a few big-name authors at the front [of the average bookshop] and cookbooks and art books at the back. I'm depressing myself now. Maybe one ought to get a proper job.
You have magnificent facial hair. How did that come about?
At the age of 19, I inherited an electric shaver which gave me a terrible rash. I decided to stop inflicting this pain on myself. The amazing question is not "Why do you have a beard?" but "Why do 99% of the male population shave every day?" It is quite unnatural.
