"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."

After leaving Dublin, Kennedy has made London his home for the last 20 years but the French are his biggest fans. There, he is regarded by 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 received WH Smith's Thumping Good Read Award.

When I meet him in his terrace in Wandsworth, south London, Kennedy is in chipper mood. His new novel, The Woman in the Fifth, 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."

Kennedy is 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 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 Segolene, 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-Pres and you end up in Chateau d'Eau, home to the Turks, Africans and Indians. In the sixieme 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 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 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-a-sept tryst with a sexy, and reassuringly mature, Hungarian emigree. It is an existential thriller of a very Gallic kind.

"I liked the idea of someone living alone in a city. 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 a Manhattan. . . 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. . ."

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."

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 reprising 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 matters. 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 parents 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 and a brief stint working for various off-offBroadway theatres, he bought a oneway ticket to Luxembourg and pitched up in Dublin on a friend's floor. A job at the Peacock paid the rent and he started to write at night. It was during this time, while waiting for a post-party taxi, that met 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.

Despite his new Left Bank credentials, Kennedy doesn't feel 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." Kennedy writes 500 words a day . . . however much he drank the night before or in whichever country he wakes up.

For him, 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 a son destin. Life is a very contradictory business and anyone who thinks otherwise is a priest."

He has barely finished 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.