Interview: American writer Douglas Kennedy on the "Kennedy Theory of Human Behaviour"

Douglas Kennedy was born in Manhattan in 1955. He studied at Bowdoin College, Maine and Trinity College, Dublin, returning to Dublin in 1977 with just a trenchcoat, backpack and $300. He co-founded a theatre company and sold his first play, Shakespeare on Five Dollars a Day, to Radio 4 in 1980. In 1988 he moved to London and published a travel book, Beyond the Pyramids. His debut novel The Dead Heart was published in 1994. Other novels include The Job (1998) and Temptation (2006). His latest, The Woman in the Fifth, is published by Hutchinson. His work has been translated into 18 languages and next week he will be appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

For many years, the American novelist Douglas Kennedy had a post-it note pinned above his desk bearing the words: "It's The Story, Stupid." That dictum has shaped his work ever since. A player in the field of popular fiction, Kennedy's novels are never far from a supermarket shelf or the hands of a Hollywood agent. His noirish thrillers (The Big Picture, The Job) and adult love stories (The Pursuit of Happiness, State of the Union) offer all the narrative pay-offs of a blockbuster while addressing subjects close to readers' hearts: marital misery, professional humiliation, parental guilt. "It's why people buy my books," he says. "The stuff I'm dealing with isn't far off what really happens to people. Ultimately, the story is what it's all about."

Kennedy has made London his home for the last 20 years, but it's the French who are his biggest fans. On the other side of the Channel he is regarded by the critics as a heavyweight in the Mailer league, a writer with serious things to say about the postwar American psyche. Next week, the French ambassador will appoint him Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; in Britain, he's the recipient of WH Smith's Thumping Good Read Award.

When I meet him in his well-appointed terrace in Wandsworth, south London, Kennedy is in chipper mood. His new novel, The Woman in the Fifth (Hutchinson, £12.99), his first to be set in Paris, is currently vacillating between numbers one and three in the French bestseller lists. "The French like me because they have great taste," grins Kennedy. "A woman came up to me in Paris last week and said she'd resisted me for a long time. I know why she said that – it's because I sell."

Over mid-morning espressos in the family sitting room, Kennedy proves as user-friendly as his prose. His personable conversation is shot through with writerly anecdotes, Hollywood gossip and ironic asides. Fluent both in French and New Yorkese, he likes to refer to friends and editors as "mensch par excellence" and "dude extraordinare"; attractive women are known as the "Squeeze du Jour".

The Woman in the Fifth, as Kennedy is keen to point out, is a far from flattering portrait of la vie Parisienne. Set in the city's scuzzier arrondissements, there's not a philandering philosopher or bottle of chilled Brouilly in sight. It's the modern Paris of Sarkozy and Ségolène, not Sartre and Simone. "I've been living part time in Paris for the last seven years," says Kennedy. "Everyone sees it as a beautiful, romantic city. Which it is... But 10 minutes from St Germain-des-Prés and you end up in Château d'Eau, home to the Turks, Africans and Indians. In the sixième the only non-white face you'll see is the domestic help. I wanted to write about le Paris actuel. The French are terrible about integration, and they know it."

Harry Ricks, like so many of Kennedy's protagonists, is a man on the run. A disgraced academic – caught sleeping with a student – he arrives at the Gare du Nord armed with a laptop and $5,000. His wife has left him for another man, and his daughter is incommunicado. With no work permit, he takes a job as a night watchman for a Turkish gang leader. The only reprieve from this nocturnal confinement is a regular cinq-à-sept tryst with a sexy, and reassuringly mature, Hungarian émigrée. It is an existential thriller of a very Gallic kind.

"I liked the idea of someone living alone in a city," says Kennedy. "At the time I was suffering from a jag of insomnia and walking around Paris at night. I was also reading one of Georges Simenon's romans durs, Trois Chambres à Manhattan. It's about a French actor who screws up back home and goes to New York. There's not much of a plot but the atmosphere is fantastic. A nightscape of crap hotel rooms and small bars. I started to think I could turn Paris into something sinister. Paris is a place where you can easily live in a little cloud of depression. Simenon is brilliant at dirty rain – la pluie omniprésente."

When it comes to capturing female ennui, however, Kennedy takes his lead from Flaubert. "He was the first novelist to understand the importance of suburban malaise," says Kennedy. "When I was writing State of the Union I reread Madame Bovary through the eyes of a 40-year-old man. Never underestimate the role that domestic boredom plays. People say, 'How can you have done that... slept with that person?' But my theory - the Kennedy Theory of Human Behaviour - is that behind most human actions there are five things going on, three of which the person themself doesn't understand." Sex and retribution are frequent bedfellows in Kennedy's tales of East Coast adultery.

The fragility of success, like the instability of marriage, is a recurring theme in Kennedy's fiction. It's a lesson drawn from the ups and downs of his own career. At the age of 43, when his second novel, The Job, failed to live up to its six-figure advance, Kennedy was cast out of New York literary circles and dropped by his publishers. Instead of trying to reprise his role as a putative John Grisham, he got straight to work on his next novel, The Pursuit of Happiness, his first female-narrated romance. "We all try to create a world that protects us, but that's absurd," says Kennedy. "It's what Philip Roth says in Everyman: if you look around any room, in 100 years time nobody will be there. That makes nothing matter, but at the same time, everything matter. It's also what I say in my Hollywood novel, Temptation. When life is in freefall, there's only one solution: 'Go Back to Work.'"

Work, and the movies, have always been Kennedy's way out. As an only child growing up on the Upper West Side in New York, he escaped his parents' miserable marriage in the basement cinema at the Museum of Modern Art. His father, a "moderately successful corporate guy", and his mother, who worked at NBC, wanted him to go to law school and write on the side. He says his mother's Judaism and his father's Irish Catholicism have left him feeling perpetually guilty. "Guilt is a huge subject. I'm schooled in it."

After graduating from Bowdoin, "one of those very good, small East Coast colleges", and a brief stint working for various off-off-Broadway theatres, he bought a one-way ticket to Luxembourg and pitched up in Dublin on a friend's floor. A job at The Abbey Theatre's second house, The Peacock, paid the rent, and he started to write at night. It was during this period, while waiting for a post-party taxi, that he bumped into his future wife, Grace.

For the next 16 years he worked as a freelance journalist and travel writer. His breakthrough novel, The Big Picture, was published in 1997. An impressively peripatetic novelist - he owns houses in Paris, Gozo and London - Kennedy says that on trips back to the States he feels both at home and several steps removed. "I've even begun to look back with fondness on Richard Nixon. After seven years of Bush he's starting to look like Bismarck or Chateaubriand. I think that's what the French find so interesting about American society, it's so schizophrenic. Over here we have Walt Disney, over there, Jackson Pollock. We have the Carpenters and then we have John Coltrane."

Despite enjoying his new Left Bank credentials, Kennedy doesn't feel like he has arrived. "The moment you think you've made it in life is the moment you've had it. Creative arrogance is a dangerous thing. Part of you has to be nervous and worried. I'm already 180 pages into my next novel. If you have too much doubt you never write, but if you don't have a bit you lose that frisson." Like Graham Greene, Kennedy writes 500 words a day - however much he has drunk the night before, or in whichever country he has woken up.

For Kennedy, one of the pleasures of writing is the power to shape events and dictate consequences. "All our lives are narrative arcs. Writers put characters in terrible situations and get them out, or not. We all need crisis. But who's the controlling hand? God, the government... your husband, your wife? Chacun à son destin. Life is a very contradictory business and anyone who thinks otherwise is a priest."

Kennedy has barely finished speaking when a man in a dog collar hurries past the window where we're sitting. "Now, I arranged that," laughs Kennedy, a storyteller to the last.

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