Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel The Ballad of a Small Player is a perfectly structured book about an English lawyer on the run who spends his life playing baccarat in Macau casinos and hits a streak of luck so remarkable that he nearly falls in love. It’s something like a combination of a ghost story and a long lost love poem from the eighth century poet Li Po. I wept when I finished it recently.
It also made me realize I missed a friend.
Osborne and I first met back in the 1990s in New York, where he had a reputation as a writer who could tackle any subject, a gift reflected by the subject matter of his books, such as: Poisoned Embrace: A Brief History of Sexual Pessimism; The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World; and Bangkok Days, an account of what came to be his new hometown.
And then in 2012, nearly thirty years after writing his first novel, Osborne returned to writing fiction, publishing in quick successionThe Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player, and this year Hunters in the Dark—three award-winning novels that have earned high praised both here in the United States as well as in his native England.
As Osborne’s Wikipedia page recounts: The New York Times selected The Ballad of a Small Player as one of its 100 Notable Books of 2014. NPR included it in its Best Books of 2014. Neel Mukherjee picked it as one of his Books of the Year in The New Statesman. In the London Sunday Times, Robert Collins wrote: “Into this relatively quiet period for British fiction, someone remarkable and unexpected has emerged fully armed with a formidable, masterly grip on the British novel. At precisely the point where most novelists start to show signs of flagging, Osborne has hit his creative, fictional stride…and has arrived as a thrilling, exceptional talent in British fiction’s landscape.”
After I finished The Ballad of a Small Player, I emailed to congratulate Osborne and to catch up. It turned into a very long conversation, which is in fact still ongoing. Here are some excerpts of our chat:
Lee Smith: You’ve written a number of nonfiction books since your first novel, Ania Malina, was published in 1986. What sent you back to the novel?
Lawrence Osborne: I suppose I reached the limit of what I could do with nonfiction books, perhaps because they never felt quite intense enough—it’s a journalistic enterprise ultimately, even if you are using the memoir as a form. But having gone four novels now, I might go back to a travelogue about something that interested me personally. Maybe Japan, which I have a great love for.
LS: You’re a great literary critic, one of my favorites, with a wide range of interests and traditions. I think you wrote on the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. And then another great piece of criticism was on Frederic Prokosch. What novelists are you reading or thinking about right now?
LO: I am reading Chandler, since I have been asked by the Chandler estate to write the next Philip Marlowe novel, although only Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep. I don’t want to get immersed too much in them. Aside from that I am reading the Japanese thriller writer Keigo Hagashino because I like the numerous film adaptations of his books that I’ve seen—a rare case of seeing adaptations first and then going back to books I didn’t previously know.
LS: Your novels are set abroad—Paris, Morocco, China, Cambodia, etc.— and thus reviewers keep likening you to various Anglo-American novelists who set their characters in foreign places. Nothing against Graham Greene or Paul Bowles, et al., but how did writing about people and things outside your area code become a genre? Is this a reflection on how domestic, or domesticated the novel has become?
LO: I think it is. It’s completely absurd really. I thought we were supposed to be a large, sprawling, global, imperial culture. But this is a reflection of the neurotic careerism of writers—they don’t dare leave the metropolitan social circuits which guarantee their upward movement through the literary industrial complex. They have a point, I suppose. But the world now isn’t that big. You can live anywhere and it makes very little difference except to your weekend drinking routines. I made the decision that I didn’t want to spend my life in rooms and write about rooms, or else make books that are researched constructs. I think you do have to get out there and live it. Thriller and genre writers seem to understand this. It’s just the literary writers who are obsessed with a few metropolitan centers—which aren’t that interesting anymore. However, I’d love to set something in New York now. I lived there for 20 years and yet it would seem very refreshingly exotic now!
LS: By the way, why did you leave the U.S., more particularly Brooklyn?
LO: New York was very congenial to me when I was young, like most people. I met my comrades in arms and partied hard. It’s the way it should be, and then you get sick of it. I was on a cruise with Lewis Lapham earlier this year and we were going around the coast of Spain and we’d get up fairly early and go for our morning coffees in the squares. And Lewis said how much he and his wife would like to retire somewhere like these places—Malaga, Cadiz, or wherever it was. I thought, Well, I came upon that feeling when I turned 50, I don’t know why. I just wanted out. My mother died and I vacated my New York place and I went to Istanbul on a whim. It was straight over the cliff. But having moved there, hardly knowing anyone, I started writing again more seriously and I realized that all those years that New York was the problem not the solution. Now I’m even further East but I feel that I’ve found my perch. That’s all you do in life, you find your perch and if it suits you just carry on. There’s nothing Graham Greene about it.
