Kimball F. Burin: "Sherman is probably looking for a teat to suckle on."

Legendary local novelist Kimball F. Burin in an interview with Walter Kirn in this week's New York Times Review of Books:

Kirn: The city councilman in your district, who you've written about ["Councilboy Moonface," in the December 2005 issue of Esquire], has been in the news recently, having disappeared in Ireland for a week while on vacation.

Burin: I don't see what the big deal is about this thing. I used to go missing for weeks all the time when I was a young man. Hell, I disappeared for five weeks in the god-damned deserts of Arizona or New Mexico or somewhere in 1956, and when I was finished, I just wandered back into my home in Kendall Park, and [third wife] Sarah was waiting for me, and that was that. Not only that, I managed to find time to write four novels about the whole god-damned experience [Tender Mercies, Christ In Tahoe, Here Comes the Evening, Never to Return].

Kirn: Yes, the Desert Quadrology. Those aren't necessarily...

Burin: Hell, I disappeared for a month in the Tarawa Atoll for three months -- I was living in a rusted-out Japanese water tower and killing god-damned howler monkeys with my bare hands so I could eat their brains. You know, the islanders thought that the brains had a special power, a sort of primitive atavistic magic, so I would rub the gray matter all over my face and go tearing through the jungle in my skivvies and scaring the hell out of the god-damned Krauts or lemurs or whoever. So my point is I don't know what the bally-hoo is about. Sherman is just another infantilized boy-man tied to his mother's apron strings, and probably wandering around Ireland looking for a teat to suckle. Maybe this will finally coerce him to grow a pair, if he isn't holed up with a commune of Irish hookers with a mothering festish, which he probably is. By the time I was his age, I'd already had three wives and killed nineteen men. What's he done, besides stain the marble floors in City Hall bright yellow with his boy-scented terror-piss?