The writer Mike DeCapite was crossing Broadway one morning, still high from a reading he gave the night before, when suddenly it hit him: what he wants to do is to write an ambient novel, just as Brian Eno makes ambient records. “It’s basically what I’ve been doing all along,” he says when we meet, “but that’s the first time I was able to describe it to myself so simply.”
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I am in New York, sitting nervously on a sofa in DeCapite’s snug, dimly lit Upper West Side apartment, politely asking if he can turn Van Morrison down so I can begin recording. The trail that led me here started last year, after leaving my editing job of 20 years and with no plan other than to give myself time to think. When a former colleague told me that a feature I’d written for the Observer about a tattoo parlour reminded him of something written by Mike DeCapite, I bought a couple of his books on eBay and was astonished by what I read. Then, when my partner invited me to tag along on her work trip to New York, I sent DeCapite my tattoo article and told him I wanted to meet him. To my surprise, he replied, saying he enjoyed the article: “As you can probably tell from [his novel] Jacket Weather, I like when a piece of writing can be sort of a place to hang out.”
DeCapite, making coffee in two moka pots on the stove, seems unfazed when I explain this unlikely chain of events: “When you get out of that regular schedule, out of regimented time, into the open field of time – only then do these things that seem fated start happening, right? Because you can hear better.” DeCapite, 64, has lived life with his ears open.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1962, he is the son of writer Raymond DeCapite, a second-generation Italian American whose two novels, published just before Mike was born, were well received but didn’t make much money. His mother worked to support the family. The teenage DeCapite had a flair for visual art. He developed a narrative cartoon strip but lost interest when he realised he’d need training to progress. With writing, he felt, he could do whatever he wanted on his own. On 5 October 1980, aged 18, he started a journal on the advice of one of his father’s friends, a stage director. When incident was in short supply, narrative gave way to observation. Some days, he would simply describe the weather. He kept at it for a year, typing each entry as if he were writing a novel and handing photocopies to friends to read. A template was established; his fragmentary, autobiographical style determined. Meanwhile, his father continued to write – novels and plays – not to make a living but as a necessary aspect of living.
Just to live is not enough. Experience is not enough. I have to complete it in some way, by transposing it into writing
“I lionized my father,” says DeCapite. “We were very close, and his first two published books are among the pillars of my life. But he didn’t do any writing for money – he just did the writing he wanted to do, and eventually he got a part-time job in a liquor store. So early on, I made a choice of doing work that I didn’t expect to find fulfilling, in order that I would be able to write what I want to write.”
What did your father make of that?
“About my writing, I’d say he was supportive rather than encouraging. By that I mean he always seemed to regard me as my own person rather than as his son. Which is how I saw him, come to think of it – as his own person rather than as my father.”
Instead of going to college, DeCapite became a cabbie, a painter, a construction worker, a factory worker... anything that gave him the freedom to write how, and when, and what, he wanted – an ambient novel, for instance.
“William Burroughs said of Kerouac that he was incomplete without writing,” says DeCapite, who talks slowly and deliberately, and with quiet confidence. “I don’t know if that’s true of all writers, but it’s true of me. Just to live is not enough. Experience is not enough. I have to complete it in some way, by transposing it into writing.”
Aside from Kerouac and the Beats, DeCapite’s head had been turned by the colloquial prose style of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and by James Agee, whose 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, documenting the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression, demonstrated just how unconventional good writing could be. His father’s first novel, The Coming of Fabrizze (1960), a folk retelling of his father’s experience of arriving in the US from Italy aged 14, was also foundational.
“Some writers invent worlds and plots and characters,” says DeCapite. “That’s one way to use your imagination. But the other way is just to invest your surroundings with meaning. If you’re using the materials of your life, then the world is your book.”
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DeCapite was in his twenties, driving a cab on Cleveland’s Southside, when he befriended his neighbour “Fast Eddie”, a gambler whose outrageous tales of the city’s poker dens, dive bars and red-light district would become central to DeCapite’s first novel, Through the Windshield (1998). The book reads like an act of manifestation: as it progresses, we realise that the narrator, Danny, a struggling writer, has the material for a novel right under his nose – in fact, we’re reading it.
Through the Windshield became a classic of underground literature – “a down-at-the-heels masterpiece”, “a hard-boiled version of Beat expansiveness”, according to US critics – and won DeCapite a cult following. Here’s Danny, gathering his thoughts at a cafe he calls the Greeks:
“The Greeks always seemed like a good place to sit and think, but usually once I sat down I found I had nothing to think about, so I just sat and watched the Greeks. The Greeks, having already thought of everything twenty-five hundred years ago, argued and played cards and waited for their lottery numbers to come in.”
DeCapite has said that Through the Windshield took on a life of its own, slowly finding its way to the people it was supposed to go to, but it very nearly didn’t see the light of day. He began writing it in a housing co-op in London in the mid-80s, where he was scraping by with his girlfriend (later to become his wife), an English art student. He continued working on it in Williamsburg, in an apartment containing only a foam mattress, typing while sipping whiskey and listening to his one tape, Dylan’s “Albert Hall” bootleg. He finished it back in the room where he started it, in West Kensington.
A manuscript of the book found an early advocate in New York punk legend Richard Hell, who excerpted it in Cuz, an avant-garde literary magazine he edited in the late 80s; other bits of it dribbled out here and there. At one point, DeCapite tells me, laughing, Fast Eddie got hold of the completed manuscript and took it with him on a trip to Las Vegas, trying to pass himself off as DeCapite’s agent. Eventually, in 1998, DeCapite published it himself under the imprint Sparkle Street Books.
I came to think of Ruined for Life! as one of those artistic quagmires from which you just have to extricate yourself or be pulled under
“By then, I knew all these poets on the Lower East Side,” says DeCapite. “People who had put out their own magazines and published themselves and one another. There wasn’t this stigma attached to self-publishing a book.”
Fast Eddie must have been a gift to an aspiring writer. Is he still alive?
“Yeah, I just talked to Ed last week. And he still says to me, when he tells me a funny story, ‘Put it in the book...’”
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DeCapite was living in San Francisco with his second wife when Through the Windshield came out, working as a file clerk at a law firm, chipping away at a second novel, Ruined for Life! – a book, never published, he describes as “very dark” and “soaked in alcohol”. By 2003, he’d split up with his wife and was living alone in a small room in the Mission. His drinking, he says, had closed in on his imagination.
“My tendency to take things too far wasn’t limited to alcohol,” says DeCapite. “I make a habit out of everything.”
Out of the blue, he was invited to write a monthly column for Cleveland arts magazine angle (collected in Radiant Fog, 2013), an opportunity that would turn his life around. He quit booze and, after a three-year break, returned to his novel with a clear head and renewed purpose. So what happened?
“I came to think of it as one of those artistic quagmires from which you just have to extricate yourself or be pulled under,” he says. “Like that Balzac novel The Unknown Masterpiece, in which a painter gets stuck on some technical problem and is unable to finish this painting he’s working on or move on to anything else. Or maybe it’s just the book that got away.”
(Part of Ruined for Life! was published as the short story Sitting Pretty in The Italian American Reader, a 2003 collection that includes writing by Don DeLillo, Gay Talese and Raymond DeCapite. A few days after I arrive back in London, I receive a copy of the book in the post, along with a note of encouragement: “You can return the favor by sending me your own work, as you come to write it.”)
In 2005, DeCapite moved back to New York. He found work as a copyeditor and, still scarred from two failed marriages, resolved to write a manifesto about the comfort of solitude. That’s when he bumped into an old friend, June, whom he remembered as being “the living night – all the glamour and potential of a New York night when you’re 25”. His intense feelings for June, herself going through a divorce, would become the narrative thread of the autobiographical Jacket Weather (Soft Skull Press, 2021), his first novel for a publishing house.
The book is a meditation on ageing and mortality. Episodic and digressive, it superimposes a six-month timeline on to 10 years of life. As the couple’s romance develops, the story is interlaced with observations of the weather and urban environment and amusing locker-room chat from the YMCA (always about food or music, never about women), where Mike works out with an assortment of wisecracking New York old-timers straight out of Scorsese. DeCapite has spoken about novels being systems of ordering information, and it’s the book’s bold structure – not just the condensing of time, but the stripping away of all exposition and transition – that makes it so memorable.
Jacket Weather arrived with endorsements from author Chris Kraus (who helped DeCapite get the novel published), film-maker Kelly Reichardt and critic Lucy Sante, who named it as one of the 10 best books of the 21st century. “Jacket Weather invents a new genre,” wrote Kraus. “Call it lyrical realism.” During my visit to New York, when I ducked into an independent bookstore in Brooklyn to shelter from the rain, there on the wall was Jacket Weather, prominently displayed as a staff pick with a card that read: “A poetic walk through late love, changing New York, and the afternoon shifts in light that limn our happiness.”
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Throughout our conversation, my eye is drawn to two tall bookcases at either end of the room, where I spot one or two of my own favourites, including Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here – an ingenious book that imagines one point in space depicted at different moments through time, from primordial Earth to modern suburbia. DeCapite tells me that lately he’s been reading a lot about time – “although I can’t say that I’ve made any progress” – especially in the works of the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli.
DeCapite’s fascination with time, I realise, is there on the page: “Isn’t the past just the present, minus the uncertainty?” (Jacket Weather); “Once you understand you’re going to die, your experience of time changes. It’s not a lake anymore, it’s a river. You’re no longer bathing in it, you’re being carried toward death. Life gets linear.” (Creamsicle Blue, 2012)
He then pulls out copies of The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton (“the greatest book I’ve read in years”) and Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness by Philip Goff. Fiction, it turns out, doesn’t get much of a look-in. Perhaps he really is done with narrative.
“It’s like rewatching a movie you love,” he says, about dispensing with plot. “Once you’re no longer worrying about the plot, you’re free to enjoy everything else – the whole thing opens up. When you are worrying about the plot, the first time you see it, you’re missing everything, just as you were probably missing all kinds of things, messages the universe was giving you, when your time was regimented.”
Then of course there’s music too. In Jacket Weather, Tom Verlaine appears, browsing the dollar books outside Strand on Broadway; Mike and June get stoned listening to Bowie’s Station to Station; a gym buddy says the Beatles were “the squarest shit I ever heard”; Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, Mike complains, “seems like it was written by someone who’s never been outside”. The book has its own Spotify playlist. In his novella Radiant Fog (2013), DeCapite recalls the moment he first heard Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue: “It was about being honest rather than good. It accepted the nature of time and change, and imagined life as a series of episodes and entanglements which add up to an idea.”
“I feel like I’m in constant conversation with musicians,” says DeCapite. “I don’t think so much about other writers, other books. I’m always in some sort of back and forth with Dylan, with Van Morrison. What I’m shooting for is what the musicians I love are able to do. I would like to be able to do for people what records like [Van Morrison’s] Saint Dominic’s Preview and [Television’s] Marquee Moon have done for me.”
How’s the ambient novel coming along?
“I’m really struggling with this one,” he says. “We have a deep connection to narrative, and I’m having a hard time wrenching myself free of it.”
The subject then returns to Brian Eno – how, when he was recording his masterpiece, Another Green World, Eno found himself in tears.
Well, it is a beautiful piece of music, I say.
“No, that wasn’t it,” says DeCapite. “It was because he realised he had no idea what he was doing.”
This is an extended version of an article published in the Observer, UK (“In Real Life: Stop making sense”, 19 July 2026)