Interview with Tom Kelly

Payback

By Thomas Kelly
Alfred A. Knopf, $23

ISBN 0679450513

From the depths of Manhattan
comes a vivid new storyteller, Tom Kelly

"The only working-class people portrayed in a favorable light in fiction in America today are cops," says Thomas Kelly with obvious disdain. "These days the 'heroes' are all lawyers and savvy entrepreneurs."

With the publication of Kelly's hard-driving first novel, however, all that may soon change. Payback takes a decidedly different look at the New York of the late 1980s than such celebrated novels as Bright Lights, Big City or Bonfire of the Vanities. And according to Kelly the difference is deliberate. "One of the reasons I wanted to write Payback was that I read those books and I kept thinking that the people I grew up with and was hanging out with were more interesting and their stories were a lot more compelling than stories about Donald Trump, say, or the characters in those books."

In the late 1980s, Kelly, the first in his family to finish high school, was hanging out with New York's sandhogs. Attending Fordham University in the Bronx by day, he descended 90 stories beneath the streets of New York by night to build the city's newest water tunnel. The difficult and dangerous work of the sandhogs -- vividly and sympathetically portrayed -- is the memorable backdrop for the seemingly unstoppable action of this book, and Kelly admits that one of his chief aims is that readers gain "a greater appreciation for what sandhogs -- and construction workers in general -- do and what they mean to the life of the city and the country."

"But," Kelly quickly adds, "you can't preach about it. The prime thing is to be a good storyteller. If you can weave the rest in there and it gets across, great. But the minute you start preaching people stop reading."

There is precious little preaching in Payback. At the book's center is the relationship between two brothers, working-class Irish Americans from New York's Hell's Kitchen. Billy Adare works as a sandhog after finishing college and before entering law school. His brother Paddy, a former boxer, works as an enforcer for a brutal Irish mob boss. An escalating series of conflicts involving mobsters, politicians, bankers, and striking workers put the brothers' loyalties to each other and to family and friends at risk. The resolution is as surprising as, well, the fact that Thomas Kelly himself has actually become a novelist.

According to Kelly, a perceptive, hilarious, and sometimes unprintable storyteller in person, he knew by the time he was a teenager that he wanted to write fiction. But coming from a working-class family in which his father only finished two months of ninth grade and a neighborhood where everyone he knew dropped out of school to work, writing wasn't an obvious career choice.

Still, from an early age Kelly read with passion, everything he could get his hands on, he says, and that set him apart. "Even in high school when I was a total screw-up, I read. I barely went to class, I barely graduated, but I never stopped reading. I had a real hunger for knowledge. I think I graduated in the bottom five percent of my high school class, and the top five percent of my college class -- when I finally got there."

Until he finally got there, Kelly worked construction, drifted out to California and worked on building the Monterey Aquarium and finally realized "maybe I didn't want to pour concrete all my life." He returned to New York and got into Fordham. "I really wanted to study literature and writing, but as the only high school graduate in the family you don't go to college to be an artist; you go to college to get a job." He studied political economy. Eventually he went to Harvard's Kennedy School for a masters degree in public administration, worked for the Teamsters union and in progressive political campaigns, and began the long, slow process of learning to write.

Now, ten years and countless revisions later ("I put the book aside for almost two years," he says. "And when I came back I rewrote almost every scene."), Payback is being released to enthusiastic advance reviews.

Has he sold the movie rights? I ask. Kelly dismisses the question. "I care about books," he says. "I want to spend my life writing novels."

And that, at long last, is what he is going to do.

Alden Mudge is a frequent contributor to this publication.

©1997, ProMotion, inc.

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