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Interview with British novelist Geoff Nicholson
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Geoff Nicholson's Book "Sex Collectors"
Geoff Nicholson is a British novelist and nonfiction writer. He's regarded as a satirist, although he's also been compared to Martin Amis and Thomas Pynchon. His books include leading characters with obsessions, sexual or otherwise, including Volkswagens, guitars, womens' feet and shoes and so on... His work contains quite a lot of black humor. He is currently the fiction editor at the literary magazine Ambit.
Q: One of your more recent books is entitled "Sex Collectors" and I'd like to talk to you about that book. It seems to me to be a book that explains what your work is really about. I hope that doesn't offend you for me to pick that book as central, but...
A: No. That seems like quite an interesting place to start. I mean, I'm quite interested to hear what you have to say and why you think that. It seems viable to me, but explain to me what you mean.
Q: Well, all of your books seem to revolve around either a fetish, or a character who has an obsession. It's really pervasive. It's in your first book "Street Sleeper," and it's in your second book "The Knot Garden," and fetishes and deviant sexual behavior just seem to be in all of your dozen or so books. And when I first read you, I began with "Still Life with a Volkswagen" I really enjoyed that aspect of your work. Not so much the sexual side, but the focus that you have on particular subjects or objects. I just thought that it was liberating to read a writer who was so overtly working on his obsessions, and as an anti-capitalist I immediately took to your work as a kind of critique of consumer/commodity culture even as it reveled in that culture.
And I thought that "Sex Collectors," even if it had just been titled "Collectors"...
A: Well there is a bit of a story there in fact, because as you can tell from my books that I am into it. Collecting is another form of obsession, and I have, well... However many genes you need to be an obsessive collector I haven't got quite enough. I've just got the right genes to recognize it. And I'd always been a collector since when I was a kid. I collected postcards and stamps, that sort of basic, schoolboy stuff. So I'd always been interested in people who collect things, and I'm the kind of person who cuts articles out of magazines and newspapers, and I got a big file that was full of their stories. I found a collector in Vegas who collected pinball machines, and another guy somewhere else who collected bumper cars. And I was thinking, oh yeah, this is a book. I go around with these ideas in my head thinking: "This might be a book. That might be a book."
And the idea was that it might be a book of ten or twelve or twenty chapters and one or two of them might be about people who collect sexual materials. The moment I started thinking about it seriously, and certainly once I started talking to a publisher about it, it became apparent that if I had two out of ten chapters about sex, those two chapters would be the two everybody read. Those two would be the ones everybody would be fascinated by. The other ten chapters would disappear.
It's always interesting to find out how books come to be the way they are rather than some other way. It could always quite easily have been different.
So for practical or commercial reasons I decided and my publisher decided that it was a good idea to concentrate on the sexuality.
I mean obviously, in terms of what you're saying about consumerism and commodity, to a large extent I would like to think that sex is a very difficult thing to commodify. It's natural, it's spiritual if you like, it's very personal, and it's not a thing that can be turned into an object. But, of course, we live in a society where there are enormous forces trying to objectify and commodify sexuality the whole time. So I set out to see how people made collections out of sexuality.
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