One wonders how a writer as successful as Jim Crace can remain so boy-next-doorish. He has almost made an art of talking himself down, making an extraordinarily levelheaded appraisal of his work while remaining flushed with enthusiasm for everything he has written and wants to write. Signals of Distress is his fourth novel. He published his first nine years ago.

Crace admits that while writing is a wonderful career, books are not the be-all and end-all they once were for him. “When I was a teenager, I would go out and buy books which caught my imagination and then borrow the same books from the library because I couldn't bear to read the edition I bought; it had to stay absolutely pristine. Eventually there came a realization that I could mistreat books, I could turn the corner of the page over and no one would be injured, and I could give it away when I finished it.”

Crace deeply loved his father, a self-educated laborer with a big conscience. “My father had osteomyelitis, which is a disease of the bone marrow, and if you read my second book, The Gift of Stones, the reason that man's injury is convincing is that I was brought up with a father who hadn't lost an arm but had a useless, narrowed upper arm. He was a trade-union kind of guy whose attitude was that opera and literature were not only for the toffs. ‘That should be for us too,’ he'd say. The books he brought into the house—just 40 or 50 books—would be revered. I inherited that kind of possessiveness about literature.”

The biggest liberation, says Crace, who is 50, came very recently, “when I learned the secret about books is that you don't have to read them. I've a big garden, my son is 13 and my daughter nine, and they take up a lot of time. I am a tennis fanatic, I'm politically active, and we've a dog that's got to go out twice a day. I think that idea that to become a writer you have to read a lot of books is kind of crap, really, because books don't come out of other books. They come out of experience. I haven't even read any Thomas Hardy, though my last novel, Arcadia, was compared to his books.”

He hastily qualifies this point: “I think I am a slow reader as well, which means that when I do take on a novel it is quite a commitment.”

Crace can hardly believe that his fiction can be enjoyed simply as a “good read.” He has, he says, the kind of puritanism which puts everything in a story for a purpose. On one level, Signals of Distress is a tale about dislocated lives: how a small fishing village in the west of England in 1836 is disrupted when an American boat flounders and its crew comes ashore. But Crace is writing very symbolically about the clash of culture and commerce, about moralists and immoral entrepreneurs, and about a dozen other big themes. “People who don't like my books don't because they're schematic. My view is: What's wrong with schematic?”

Signals of Distress is a short book (276 pages) with a huge cast of characters, and in this respect it is a change from his previous books, in which he has stayed with two or three characters. Crace laughs when asked how he kept track of so many people. “I am not like some writers who have a flowchart on their walls before they start writing. I definitely fly by the seat of my pants.”

5000 WORDS PER WEEK

He has, however, an admirable, working-class view of his working schedule. He lives in a Birmingham suburb and, after taking the children to school, he writes from 10 to 3:15, sitting in a glass-roofed study. He never breaks for lunch or feels tempted to work weekends or evenings. He has a faint red “burn” on his forehead, about a three-inch circle, which his doctor says is “screen rash,” from getting too close to the screen of his word processor. “As an ex-journalist I don't believe in writer's block, so I've never had any problem about getting on with it. I also have this sense of what I have to achieve by the end of the week—5000 words. If I have written only 4600 I can't enjoy my weekend in good conscience.

“It doesn't mean I am not passionate about my writing, but I am very measured about it. Of course I don't do that 52 weeks of the year because if I did I would he writing massively huge novels.” He agrees that for this amount of work he is paid extremely well. “People keep demonstrating great faith in me and offer me substantial advances.” Maybe his publishers make it up on other books, he suggests, with a laugh. “I may not sell a single copy anywhere.”

Crace's break came with a short story called “Annie, California Plates,” about a car that travels across America entirely by itself, constantly picking up hitchhikers. First published in the British journal The New Review in 1974, it later appeared in several anthologies. “So then people contacted me, asked me to write a novel and I came down to London and they were all stuck-up upper-class types who took me out for a drink but never looked me in the eye. Then one editor, David Godwin, came up to Birmingham. He held my son and said ‘What a sweet baby,’ so I took a contract with that man.”

Godwin was then at Routledge, Kegan & Paul; he moved to Heinemann, and Crace followed; then to Secker & Warburg and then to Jonathan Cape. Each time, Crace followed Godwin and let his editor look after all his interests rather than engage an agent. American publishers dealt with David Godwin. Last year, Godwin left Random House and set up as an agent—so although Crace does not “believe” in agents, he became Godwin's first client.

When Ted Solotaroff at Harper & Row paid ＄40,000 for Crace's first novel, Continent, in 1987, Crace was especially grateful. That figure changed Heinemann's attitude about the book: they had given him a 15,000 pounds advance and suddenly they had a ＄40,000 sale. Then, within a period of 10 days, Continent won three big British book prizes. “It became a roman candle of a first book. It seemed like the resolution of a lot of unspoken dreams. My father, who was dead by then, had always wanted me to be a writer. When I was 11 he gave me this copy of Roget's Thesaurus for Christmas, and I remember being disappointed then, but I still use that same thesaurus now. So the success was full of all kinds of emotions.”

But in the States something extraordinary happened—about which, Crace confesses, he may not know the whole story. “Harper & Row by mistake pulped the hardback of Continent soon after delivering the subscribed copies. It was a case of getting a computer number wrong. So they rushed the paperback out, and it came out too soon. So though the reviews were transcendental, sales of that book were a bit of a disaster.”

Since Harper & Row had forfeited most of its big first-book investment on Crace, for his second, The Gift of Stones (1989), they offered him only ＄7000. “John Glusman, who was at Scribners, went crazy for The Gift of Stones; he published it wonderfully well. However, John left Scribners just as the book was appearing in paperback.”

Lee Goerner at Atheneum acquired Crace's third book, Arcadia (1992). “He published it very, very well,” Crace says. When Atheneum folded, Goerner lost his job (he died earlier this year), again Crace's hopes for editorial continuity evaporated. “For Signals of Distress we were most impressed by the bid from Farrar, Straus, where John Glusman is now working. He wanted to buy three books [as Penguin has done in the UK], but Penguin UK were loathe to sell the three books for anything but a lot of money. In the end we made a decision to sell just one book to them. However, they are treating me as a long-term prospect.”

Crace's new 400,000-pound contract with Penguin UK (with Godwin acting as his agent) made newspaper headlines. Of that, 136,000 pounds went to buy Crace out of his next-novel contract with Random House UK (leftover from the days when Godwin was still an editorial director there). Crace still prefers to sell his British publisher world rights, so the remaining 264,000 pounds represents all the upfront money he expects to see for Signals of Distress and for his next two novels.

One of the next two books is The Devil's Larder, a collection of 100 short stories about food. That will be published in three years, but five pieces collectively called The Slow Digestions of the Night were printed in Britain as one of those tiny volumes Penguin issued to celebrate its 60th anniversary.

40 DAYS IN THE DESERT

The novel before that and after Signals of Distress is called Quarantine, and it is set in the Judean desert at the time of Christ. Crace says, “The idea occurred to me that when Christ went to the desert for 40 days, for his temptations, what if the desert were full of people who for one reason or other were going there for their 40 days? What if it was a cultural activity which people with problems did? So I imagined that while Christ was there, there were 30 or 40 other people there too, all on the edge of their lives. As an atheist—which is what I am—it seemed to me that Christ's trials would be the huis cios, the other people—it wouldn't be the devil at all. The tension is: Who lasts the 40 days? And who exploits the people who come to the desert?

“So last February I went to the Judean desert with a Bedouin guide. I went to the Greek Orthodox monastery which stands where Christ was supposed to have stayed, and next to the cave where he was supposed to have spent his 40 days, there were about 60 other caves. So the precept that I thought I had invented was true to real life.”

Some journalists carp that Crace is hypocritical, earning generous money while supporting left-wing causes. This accusation is the only one which seems to rile him. “I am very puritanical with my money,” he assures PW. “There is no way my children are going to go to anything but the comprehensive school. I don't have any investments. It is all dealt with morally. We live in a small semi-detached house, and I drive a three-year-old car, but I don't want to be trapped into sounding like Mother Teresa. My wife teaches English to refugees; her job is socially important and her income is very small, and I do something which is useless and get paid well.”

What Crace's books are, sublimely, is moral. He argues, for instance, that “the preacherly point that Signals of Distress is making is that optimism is difficult. The triumph of life is not that we admire characters who look like Hollywood good guys—because that would be no triumph at all. The triumph is that, despite all their worst blemishes, people are lovable. What this book is doing is asking you to take a really blemished, hard-to-like person [an obtuse moral prig] and find something in him to love.”

On the other hand, Crace says, he plays fast and loose with historical details. “I warn you, all the history in my books is bogus. There are at least 40 pages about pilchards in this book and I wouldn't know a pilchard if it fell in my lap. I do not write books which carry any information.”

Though Crace is known in England as a political activist, he claims his politics never intrude on his stories. Indeed, he says that the stories invariably contradict his politics. “All my novels deal with a community that is undergoing change, and I always take the side of tradition against modernity. In my political self I am very much a modernist, very much in favor of technology and improvement. But in my fiction, yes, I am a conservative romantic.”