Michael Collins is telling a story about Nabokov at a recent UW Watermark Series reading of his most recent novel, The Resurrectionists (due for American publication this fall). He's talking about the Russian immigrant's knack for picking out the childishness and sadness of our language, a knack that only someone of foreign origin and certain linguistic genius could have. For months, Collins tells us, when Nabokov first immigrated, he was obsessed with riding American trains and eavesdropping on the chatter of schoolgirls. His amusement with the situation gave him the idea for the novel that became Lolita.

Afterward, a nervous creative writing student offered Collins a manuscript. "You don't have a mentor at the UW?" Collins asked--disappointed, though clearly not surprised. He gave the young man his e-mail address and carefully placed the 50 pages in his bag.

I met Collins later at an Irish pub on Queen Anne, where he now lives with his wife and baby. We spoke a bit about the student with the manuscript, and the American academic system, with which Collins is disgusted. "Youth is a powerful phenomenon," he said. "It can be very politically charged. That's why they corral people into college in the U.S."

Like Nabokov, the Irish-born Collins embraces his position as an outsider, and writes about America with clarity, incisiveness, and sometimes disgust. Collins moved to America 19 years ago to attend Notre Dame on a long-distance running scholarship. During the summers he lived in his car and traveled with friends, going to races and living off of his winnings. Even then Collins knew that part of the motivation for these trips was ultimately to write a book about Americans, even if he didn't yet know how to approach it. "I felt at a loss as to how to write an American novel," he said, "since all I really wanted to say about America was from a political perspective." Reading family dramas such as Don DeLillo's White Noise and Rick Moody's The Ice Storm "profoundly changed me as a writer. They gave me a way into discussing America."

Collins' last novel, The Keepers of Truth, is an angry, hopeless, thoughtful portrait of decaying life in a small rust-belt town that has been diseased by the post-industrial age. The Resurrectionists, set in the early 1980s, begins with the account of a murder and rolls into a cross-country road trip to a small northern Michigan hometown where the dead won't stay buried. Throughout the novel, a man sits on death row as his wife and kid, and his wife's new husband, devour each other with anxiety. The world is waiting for nuclear attack, and no one can figure out the identity of a comatose murderer. Both novels are tightly written, cinematically framed, ironic crime/thrillers. They are wonderfully and painfully American.

Although Collins has a lot to say about America, America has remained surprisingly silent about Collins. Since 1992, when he received the New York Times Notable Book of the Year Award, Collins--a highly celebrated, consistent award winner and bestseller for nearly a decade in Britain (where Keepers won the 2000 Booker Prize), France, Italy, and (a very proud) Ireland--hasn't been able to contract with an American publisher until recently. In 1993, a few American publishers showed some interest, until his criticism came too close to home. "They saw a venom to my writing," he said, "and canned it."

But Collins doesn't need to vent; he's too busy writing. And until about a year ago, he worked long hours at Microsoft, which inspired Exodus, the book he's currently writing.

Exodus, departing from the thriller genre, follows the paths of twin catastrophes: a global terrorist computer virus and reactive genetic engineering. Collins would like to include a CD-ROM or link to a website that shows how to easy it is to infiltrate e-mail and operating systems, and the book would have pages of code in it: "I want people to face this hidden language, to see its beauty, its complexity, but also its simplicity, to almost feel strands of DNA within them as they read certain passages of the book. To have a fiction that goes to the microscopic level, that looks inward beyond consciousness to a cellular level."