The movie Leaving Las Vegas, based on John O’Brien’s novel, stunned audiences and had critics raving. But the coming success did not mean much to O’Brien, who took his own life soon after selling the movie rights.
His new work, finished by his sister, also reflects his dark side.
Writer John O’Brien did not live to see the phenomenal success of the movie based on his novel, Leaving Las Vegas. In April 1994, not long after he sold the film rights to the book, O’Brien, age 33, shot himself in the head with a Smith &Wesson. But his sister has preserved his talent.
“Sometimes I still get angry about it,” says Erin O’Brien-Nowjack, O’Brien’s sister, on the phone from her home in suburban Cleveland.
“John had so much talent, so much promise. But he was also a very sensitive person, and his view of the human condition wasn’t very hopeful. In the end, he became over-whelmed by that.”
Since her brother’s death, Erin, 31, has devoted much of her time and energy to preserving the fruits of John O’Brien’s talent. In June, Grove Press released The Assault on Tony’s, a book O’Brien had nearly finished at the time of his suicide. Using an outline and copious notes that the writer had preserved in his computer, Erin completed the book herself, after leaving her job as an electrical engineer.
“Was it a daunting task?” asks Erin, with a laugh. “It was terrifying. When I began working on it, nobody knew who John O’Brien was. Then the movie came out and it was just astonishing – a huge success. I knew a lot more people would be paying attention to anything with his name on it.”
The reviews for the book have been mixed. Time magazine called The Assault on Tony’s “…choppy and dramaless despite a smattering of lyrical passages.” O’Brien’s hometown newspaper, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, was even more unsparing. “Anyone who thought Leaving Las Vegas probed the lowest depths of human behavior,” wrote their reviewer, “obviously didn’t anticipate O’Brien’s latest fictional Hades… Hardly anyone will enjoy being used by this book’s degraded goings-on.”
Says O’Brien-Nowjack, “Part of the problem, I think, is that Tony’s is so much more bleak than Leaving Las Vegas. This is the last thing John wrote before he killed himself. He was living alone, which terrified him. He was drinking heavily – again.”
Erin remains convinced that the book, roughly eighty percent of which was written by her brother, represents some of his best work. “After I found the manuscript and the notes for Tony’s, I went back and read all of John’s work in chronological order (there are two other finished manuscripts by O’Brien waiting to be published). I was amazed at how far he’d come. His prose had matured, and the ideas in his books kept getting more complex. With Tony’s I just wanted to do justice to his work.”
Before the autumn of 1995, when the movie Leaving Las Vegas first burst onto the scene garnering critical praise, solid box office, and eventually five Academy Award nominations, there was little reason to believe John O’Brien’s work would one day reach an audience of millions. Leaving Las Vegas, the story of an unrepentant alcoholic who falls in love with a Vegas street walker and embarks on a doomed love affair, was thought to be too sordid for most mainstream American publishers. It was rejected by virtually every major New York publishing house before being accepted by Watermark Press, a tiny company based in Kansas.
“John was ecstatic (when he heard the book was being published),” says Erin. “We all thought it was going to be the turning point for him.”
At the time, O’Brien desperately needed a reversal of fortune in his life. His drinking, which had been a problem since adolescence, had cost him numerous jobs. It was also destroying his longtime relationship with Lisa Kirkwood-O’Brien, whom he’d met at Lakewood High School in Cleveland and wed in 1979, when they were both nineteen. In 1993, after a painful year-long separation, John and Lisa were divorced.
O’Brien’s struggles with alcohol were known to his sister and his parents. He had been in and out of detox numerous times. During his sober periods, he wrote like a demon. When he was on a bender, he was known to disappear for days. “We were out here in Cleveland and he lived in Los Angeles,” says Erin, “so we weren’t always privy to the details. But I remember reading Leaving Las Vegas before it was published. There’s a passage where Ben, the main character, wakes up in a urinal and has no idea how he got there. That had the ring of truth.”
Getting the book published and selling the movie rights apparently was not the panacea O’Brien’s family and friends had hoped for. After his death, Erin came across a number of correspondences John had written in his final months. “He was as frustrated as ever,” says Erin. His subsequent manuscripts had all been rejected. Plans for the movie were going through the usual torturously slow Hollywood development process. O’Brien never even met the film’s eventual writer-director, Mike Figgis, or any of the actors. And he was paid only $1,000 for the rights, which did little to stave off constant financial troubles.
Still O’Brien somehow managed to begin and nearly complete a first draft for another book, which would become The Assault on Tony’s.
Set in an unnamed city in a bar called Tony’s, the story revolves around five white males and one woman barricaded inside the bar while a race riot rages in the streets around them. The novel chronicles the character’s mental and physical disintegration over the course of seventeen days, as they devour what remains of the bar’s rapidly dwindling liquor supply.
Unlike Leaving Las Vegas, which was written as a tone poem – with beautiful, elegiac passages, each sentence carefully crafted – The Assault of Tony’s unfolds in flat, unadorned prose. The harshness of the book’s premise and the characters’ unapologetic mania for booze is not softened with humor or any redemptive human compassion. The only vaguely sympathetic character is Rudd, who, like all the male characters inside Tony’s, is incapable of seeing beyond the confines of race, gender, and social class. The book reflects a sour, utterly hopeless point of view, perfectly rendered in the last passage written by the author’s hand:
For the first time in his life Rudd found himself wishing for death, hoping (praying?) that the walls came down before the liquor ran out, that they were stormed, bombed or shot in some truculent surprise attack, some irresistible force, divine intervention.
Despite the unrelenting grimness of The Assault on Tony’s, there is evidence of O’Brien’s brilliance. Most of the book was written in the wake of the L.A. riots of 1992. O’Brien was living in Venice Beach, and although he may have been absorbed with his own alcoholism most of the time, he was still creatively engaged with the world around him.
“The thing people need to keep in mind about Tony’s,” says the author’s sister, “is that it is basically a first draft. There are things I know John would have wanted to change or develop more. There are things I would have liked to change. But that’s not what you do when you release a posthumous novel. You release it the way it is, based on the belief that it still has merit.”
One task O’Brien-Nowjack was required to undertake was to bring the novel to its inevitable, harrowing conclusion, in which two of the novel’s main characters hover over a recently deceased patron of the bar with a knife, pondering whether to cut him open to get at the last remnants of booze in his stomach. As O’Brien-Nowjack writes in her afterword to the book: “John and I always had a somewhat telepathic communication between us… Between his notes and my instinct, I knew, too painfully well, how (the book) had to end.”
The harsh criticism Tony’s received in some quarters has not been pleasant for O’Brien-Nowjack, who is herself trying to-establish a writing career. The nasty review in the Plain-Dealer was especially hurtful, since it suggested that Erin had somehow diminished her brother’s literary reputation by releasing the book. In the light of the review, Erin admits to asking herself, “Would John have wanted Tony’s out there for people to judge for themselves, or would he want to kill me for publishing his writing in an unfinished form? I go back and forth on that.”
Whatever doubts O’Brien-Nowjack might have about the posthumous publication of the book will likely recede in the months ahead. In the long run, The Assault on Tony’s will be judged as part of O’Brien’s entire body of work, which continues to grow after his death. Early next year, Grove Press will be publishing Stripper Lessons, a book which, the author’s sister promises, is completely alcohol-free. Another finished manuscript, entitled Better, is slated for publication later in the year.
O’Brien-Nowjack has herself turned to writing full time, after having worked eight years for BP-America as an electrical engineer. She has finished an early draft of one novel and begun work on another. Having come from a working-class background (her father owns a business that designs industrial machinery and her mother works for a bank), she would have little reason to think she could succeed at such an illusory endeavor as writing, were it not for her brother.
“It bothers me when the people who write about John O’Brien always describe his life as `said’ or `tormented,'” says Erin.
“John certainly had his problems. But look at what he was able to produce. This was a person who took only one writing course in his entire life, that I know of. He proved that to be a writer you don’t have to have special training or have gone to the best schools. John was a writer because he wanted to be, and he kept rewriting and working despite the rejections.
“That’s how I choose to remember my brother. Despite the way things ended, he was a talented guy and he led a productive life. He was an inspiration.“
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November/December 1996 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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