Joseph O'Neill: 'It’s naive to say that a book which describes the situation of rich people must be a book which celebrates that situation.' Photograph: Ryan Pfluger
Joseph O'Neill is a writer of Irish-Turkish descent, born in 1964, who grew up in the Netherlands, worked for several years as a barrister in London and now lives in New York. He has written three previous novels and a family memoir. His last novel, the critically acclaimed Netherland, about cricket in New York, was praised by Barack Obama. O'Neill's new novel, The Dog (Fourth Estate £16.99), is about an American lawyer who, following a break-up, moves to Dubai to manage the wealth of a rich Lebanese family. It has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize.
How much research did you do? Why did you decide to set your new novel in Dubai?
I think it's my ongoing connection to England. Around 2007, every time I was talking to English people, they all seemed to be commercially orientated towards Dubai. It's on the European map in a way it isn't for Americans. And Dubai is a kind of California. It's the future for the so-called sophisticated west. We're all headed to Dubai, not just culturally but on matters such as labour organisation and the hollowing-out of the nation state.
I took two trips out there of just over a week, to meet people and get some stuff I couldn't get online.
Netherland was often described as a post-9/11 novel. The new book, which opens in 2007, is obliquely about the financial crisis. How conscious are you of being a writer who tackles big events?
I don't sit around waiting for these things to occur. It's not my fault if every time I sit down to write, something big happens! But I suppose I am more interested in global events than in what's happening, say, in Galway or Pittsburgh. It's my background. I don't have home turf, so I have no choice but to float around on these post-national currents.
Your fiction often focuses on corporate elites. Do you feel a pressure to write about the other end of the social spectrum?
I think it's naive to say that a book which describes the situation of rich people must be a book which celebrates that situation, or that there's a path of novelistic virtue in describing what happens to the poor. My experience is that the more privileged the reader in question, the more readily they demand that people write about stuff that doesn't resemble their lives.
The Dog's language is interesting. There are lengthy passages of legal/philosophical argument, in which the narrator justifies his behaviour. Then there's quite a bit of satire of Dubai-style capitalism and of social media. Why this particular collision?
There's a way in which the discourse of the Enlightenment, of reason, is coming under enormous stress from technology and consumerism and the strains of self-righteousness unleashed by social media. Nowadays, if you say anything that is clearly true but upsets people, it starts to lose validity. You see this in US politics very clearly. There's a comedy in the way the narrator tries to use arguments that no longer have much value. He's tilting at windmills with his powers of reason.
With Netherland, you suddenly went from being an unheralded writer to being well known. How did that affect you?
Unheralded is putting it mildly. Family and paid readers came into contact with my work and no one else! But yes, the success of Netherland had a huge impact on my life because it enabled me to carry on being published. I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't found some readers.
What's your writing routine?
I don't have a routine. I've got too much going on in terms of getting through life. What I do is go away for two weeks at a time about twice a year, and I do most of my writing there. This book is 60,000 words and took five years. I have no urge to write journalism; I write so slowly it makes no sense. In fact, I just wrote something for a magazine which was about 1,000 words and it took a month. And it wasn't even that good!
Obama famously endorsed Netherland. Have you read his books?
I think I pretended to have read one of them at some point, but no I haven't. I felt uncomfortable with the whole Obama thing. I'm sure it sold books, which I'll take. But he's now been in office for six years and they're still force-feeding people in Guantánamo Bay. So it's kind of problematic to have that name on your jacket.
