CONNELLY, Joe 1963-

PERSONAL: Born 1963, in NY. Education: Attended Colgate University for three years; attended Columbia University, 1989–99.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Knopf Publicity, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Writer. Has worked variously selling bus tickets in Port Authority, New York, NY, as a house painter in SC, pizza deliverer in CO, and bartender in Dublin, Ireland; worked as an emergency medical technician and paramedic, c. 1986–96; actor in films, including Bringing Out the Dead, Paramount, 1999, and Internet Dating, 2004.

WRITINGS:

Bringing Out the Dead (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1998.

Crumbtown (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.

ADAPTATIONS: Bringing Out the Dead was adapted for film by Paul Schrader, Paramount, 1999.

SIDELIGHTS: Joe Connelly's debut novel, Bringing Out the Dead was described by a reviewer in Publishers Weekly as a "searing and poignant narrative." The story features Frank Pierce, a paramedic in New York City's rough Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and his work on "good calls," where victims are saved, and "bad calls," where they are not. Connelly, who has worked as a paramedic in New York, knows the world he's writing about, and his knowledge comes through in Pierce's descriptions of experiences like "crunching on the chests of dead strangers" and the feeling of saving someone's life: "the best drug in the world. For days, sometimes weeks, afterward, you walk the streets making infinite whatever you see. Time slows and stretches forward and you wonder if you've become immortal, as if you saved your own life as well."

Pierce's life does need saving. Haunted by alcoholism and his failed marriage, he hallucinates encounters with the ghosts of people he has failed to save and suffers blackouts from too much drinking. Overwhelmed with grief and guilt, Pierce encounters other people who are less-obvious victims: other paramedics, who are consumed by their own problems. A Publishers Weekly reviewer praised the book, noting that Connelly "deftly renders the frantic deadpan tension and the black humor of a paramedic's job and of the ER personnel." The critic added that "one does not doubt the intensity of the world that Connelly … creates with such intensity." Charley Rosen, writing in the New York Times Book Review, similarly said that what is memorable about this book is not the "gruesome details, or Pierce's vivid psychological disturbance, or the thin plot, but the vigorous rhythms of Connelly's writing—the poetry of broken bodies and broken lives, of swollen blue limbs, of green fluids seeping between shattered teeth, of dead brain cells 'exploding like sap in a fire.'"

Connelly's second novel, Crumbtown, was similarly well received. Writing in the Library Journal, Lawrence Rungren called it "a wildly inventive and darkly satiric take on a world constantly shifting between reality and media image." The novel focuses on Don Reedy, an admitted career criminal and convicted thief currently on parole. Don has been convicted of pulling off a bank heist, though he was framed for this particular crime. He has to work as a consultant on a television movie about his life and his arrest as a condition of his parole. The movie is being shot in Don's hometown, the fictional city of Crumbtown.

Crumbtown explores the cross between real life and life as depicted on television through the events around the shoot. Citizens of Crumbtown and the actors there to depict them sometimes fail to differentiate themselves. Don himself plans his revenge with a new robbery, but he also becomes the novel's true hero. Calling the book "a dark screwball comedy," Megan O'Grady noted in the New York Times Book Review, "Beneath its affectations, Crumbtown manages to convey a genuine sense of frustration about the very act of storytelling." A critic for Kirkus Review found another element of the novel noteworthy: "Connelly's junky auto prose … sings out from every page of this broken-down dream of a book."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Connelly, Joe, Bringing out the Dead, Knopf (New York, NY), 1998.

PERIODICALS

Book, March-April, 2003, Don McLeese, review of Crumbtown, p. 79.

Booklist, August, 1999, review of Bringing Out the Dead, p. 2024; February 1, 2003, Michael Spinella, review of Crumbtown, p. 971.

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2003, review of Crumbtown, p. 6.

Library Journal, January, 1998, David A. Berona, review of Bringing Out the Dead, p. 138; February 15, 2003, Lawrence Rungren, review of Crumbtown, p. 167.

New York Times Book Review, February 22, 1998, Charley Rosen, review of Bringing Out the Dead, p. 17; March 16, 2003, Megan O'Grady, "Time Off for Bad Behavior: In This Novel, a Bank Robber's Life Story Becomes Fodder for a TV Show," review of Crumbtown, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly, January 5, 1998, review of Bringing Out the Dead, pp. 28, 58; February 24, 2003, review of Crumbtown, p. 51.

ONLINE

Columbia News, http://www.columbia.edu/ (August 22, 2005), Abby Beshkin, "Bringing Out the Dead: Joe Connelly's Experiences as an EMT Became His GS Senior Thesis, a Novel, Then a Scorsese Film," interview with and biography of Joe Connelly.