Crumbtown is populated by ex-cops who now play cops on
television, half-twins who have the same father and birthday but
different mothers and a former child TV star who’s now
coke-addled and method acting. The cast of characters isn’t
exactly your run-of-the-mill next-door neighbors, yet there’s
still a sense of strange familiarity as you read them. In
Crumbtown, fate demands coincidence being the rule, not the
exception. Crumbtown is a place of moral ambiguity, blurred by the
frenetic pace at which life happens.
“Crumbtown” is the mythical title place of author of
“Bringing out the Dead” Joe Connelly’s second
novel. “Bringing out the Dead” was a fictionalized
telling of Connelly’s time as a paramedic, which legendary
filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Paul Schraeder made into a film
starring Nicolas Cage. The experience of being on the set was a
perspective breaker for Connelly.
“”˜Who am I here?’ I wondered. “˜Frank
(the main character), or am I me, or Nic Cage?'”
Connelly said.
In “Crumbtown,” everybody’s life is being
turned into a TV show. The result is a book that follows the crumbs
of society, such as Don Reedy, an imprisoned bank robber
who’s released to be a consultant on a TV show being made
about his life of crime, which catalyzes the events of the rest of
the story.
“Crumbtown” runs on speed. There are car chases with
backward driving, and there are records played at a speed too fast.
Connelly wrote the book attempting to keep up with the pace of TV
shows and movie sets. He tried to write it combining nursery style
prose with sitcom-style, hammy one-liners. He intentionally set out
to break from the idea that the novel has to be slow and
doesn’t push the same limits television does.
“I just wanted to write something fast and fun, but after
you’re done with it, it makes you think for a couple
days,” Connelly said.
“I’m not trying to say we’re all lost because
of television,” he added.
Connelly is not concerned with traditional conceptions of the
writer. He prefers his job as part of the ski patrol in a small
town because, hey, you get to ski.
“Being a writer’s not so great, sitting in front of
a laptop for five hours and telling everyone to be quiet,”
Connelly said. “It’s obnoxious.”
For his next work, Connelly is beginning to consider,
coincidentally, writing a story about small-town volunteers.
It’ll be a change from the malleable identity crises
constantly occurring in “Crumbtown.”
“The ultimate truth of what I’m writing is that it
is the blur between the literal and fantasy,” Connelly said.
“They’re getting used to rationalizing.”