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We are excited that John Kenney made some time to talk to us about his humorous new novel I See You’ve Called in Dead, publishing April 1. Some people might think about what their obituary will say someday, but Bud Stanley goes a step farther and publishes his own with surprising results. Learn more about this story and the friendship at its center. John’s witty sense of humor is just a bonus.
Ingram Library Services: Can you give us the elevator pitch for I See You’ve Called in Dead?
John Kenney: It’s the story of an obituary writer who is afraid to live. After drunkenly publishing his own obituary one evening, Bud Stanley is suspended pending an investigation. Ideally his company would like to fire him, but his obituary has caused the company’s system to mark him as dead—and they can’t legally fire a dead person. So Bud does the only smart thing during his suspension … he goes to the wakes and funerals of strangers.
ILS: What inspired the novel?
JK: It was inspired by something my brother, Tom, said the last time I saw him. Tom died in June of 2019. He was a firefighter, like our father and both of our grandfathers. He was also a Lieutenant on the Massachusetts FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Team who worked at the World Trade Center during 9-11.
He was the man. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and my four other brothers and I had been visiting fairly regularly. His condition worsened and Tom’s wife, Kathy, a nurse and a saint, called to say we should visit as soon as possible. I arrived before my other brothers. Tom was sitting in a reclining chair, a blanket over his thinning frame, but still himself, still in there somewhere, still sharp, quiet, darkly funny. We talked and after a time I heard a car pull into the driveway and looked out the window, a cold May day in New England, winter hanging on. He wanted warmth.
“The others are here,” I said to Tom.
With a Buster Keaton stone-face, Tom dropped an arm over the chair, let his head fall to one side, and, trying to suppress a grin, said, “Tell them they’re too late.”
ILS: In addition to your novels, readers will also be familiar with your work in the New Yorker. How does this background inform your novel writing?
JK: I’m not sure. They’re different animals. But I do like to laugh when I’m reading. I like to be moved, of course. To be stopped by a remarkable sentence or scene. But I very much like to laugh in the face of the lunacy and pain of life.
ILS: At the heart of this novel is the friendship between Bud and Tim. How did you develop their bond?
JK: I would love to say I planned it all out carefully with detailed notes. Unfortunately, my addled brain doesn’t work that way. What I can say is that I am drawn to wounded people. By that, I mean the wounds we all carry, that form us, that we try to overcome. Bud and Tim are both damaged, in different ways. And yet they make each other whole. I find that very beautiful.
Male friendships are strange things. Maybe it’s just me, but I think we’re taught wrong. We don’t (certainly in my own experience) have the emotional intelligence women do. Or perhaps we do but have a harder time showing it. It could be, too, that in this answer I am revealing my own insecurities and flaws.
ILS: What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
JK: Matthew Klam’s Who Is Rich. It came out in 2017 but I just got around to reading it. I think he’s a superb writer. Nuanced, keenly observed sentences but also ridiculously funny. I feel he and I would be friends.
In fact, I may write to him and ask him to go camping.
ILS: What’s next?
JK: Working on a new book. I’d share the idea but I’m afraid Spielberg would steal it, like he did with my idea about a man-eating shark who terrorizes an island community. Totally my idea, even though it was a book first and I was 12 when that book came out.
ILS: Can you share a favorite memory of, or experience with, a library?
JK: For many years I worked at the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library. To walk into that room, to get to sit there, in the quiet, in those gorgeous oak chairs, surrounded by all the knowledge in the world, all those New Yorkers working on God only knows what—a screenplay or a book report, a dissertation or a poem—is such a gift. This public place that feels like a private club.
