Stuart Evers’ debut short-story collection was called Ten Stories About Smoking, but even readers who are aware of this might be astonished by the multitude of burning cigarettes in his first novel, If This is Home. His characters smoke constantly, as if they are in the Forties film noir Out of the Past, where Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer are apparently incapable of breathing except through cigarette filters.

Evers’ novel, also in common with Out of the Past, deals with grim secrets and failed personal reinvention. When Mark Wilkinson flees England and his non-descript northern town for New York City he seems at first to be leaving only the scraps of a misspent youth behind. He makes one close friend in New York and eventually changes his name to Josef Novak. A whole new identity is constructed on a notepad. We are unsure why, except that Mark seems disconnected somehow, possibly callous or even crazy. His story is told in the first person, but we don’t feel the usual invasive privileges. For all we know he could be another Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.

The two friends move to Las Vegas and start a business that aims to comfort the rich, a hedonistic hideout in the desert. Grandly titled the Valhalla, it is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s highrises and holiday resorts. Its atrium is ‘modelled on the set design for a film about Atlantis that had never been shot’.  An underfloor pond filled with exotic fish adds the kind of tackiness that magnetises the rich, and the east wing, comprising 55 floors — where the restaurants and prostitutes reside — is mostly empty.

‘No one had the imagination to populate such places,’ we are told; ‘it was the impression that was important, the suggestion that only a closed, locked door could imply.’

But Mark’s mask of composure is about to slip. He is haunted by memories of his small-town teenage life 13 years earlier. His first love, Bethany, whose narrative alternates with Mark’s throughout, was supposed to go with him to New York, and their sundering forms the central mystery of the novel.

Miraculously the story pivots on its axis without losing momentum. When Mark returns to England — spurred on by an outbreak of violence at the Valhalla — the nostalgia of his teenage landscape after the otherworldly playhouse of Vegas is deftly handled. Mark is returning to fake gas fires, dodgy pubs, ‘the mazy sound of a tractor’ — a universal state of adolescent ennui. ‘Go back to America,’ he tells himself. ‘Home is where real life happens.’

If This is Home begins as a chilly take on greed and ambition and gradually softens to become a more sentimental tragic romance. What’s surprising is that Evers manages to land every dramatic punch, with a final twist that has devastating implications. Some readers may prefer the teasing and austere SF-style set-up to the later emotional denouement, but this is a fresh and eccentric novel that isn’t afraid of attending to the broader pleasures.

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Since his suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, David Foster Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature has expanded to the point where even writers who haven’t read him struggle to keep out of his shadow. Traces of his style can be found every time a young writer uses a compound conjunction, or a comically extended footnote. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the first biography of Wallace, has the difficult task of chronicling his life and work while we are still coming to terms with their impact.

Born in the American Midwest to liberal and academic parents (the kind who read Ulysses to each other before bed and tolerated their teenage son’s pot-smoking), Wallace was unusually clever from the start. D.T. Max doesn’t dwell on Wallace’s well-known talent for tennis (a successful player, though never close to world class) and spends more time on his intellectual precocity. Wallace’s father, who is a teacher of philosophy, said that his son’s mind was faster than that of ‘any undergraduate I have ever taught’. At Amherst College he won ten academic awards and regularly argued against the cherished ideas of his elders. One teacher responded by calling Wallace’s early attempts at fiction ‘philosophy with zingers’.

With adulthood came trouble. He was a man of obsessions and dependencies. Not just drugs, but also television, therapy, pop psychology, writing. Most of all writing. Max claims that Wallace could type 24 pages in three hours, and a substantial short story over a weekend. ‘He was so excited that when he wasn’t writing he would go to the gym and do sit-ups until he puked.’ This vacillated over time, in rough parallel to his horribly consistent dips in mood, which he began to medicate with the anti-depressant Nardil. But Wallace was always worrying about the next book.

For Max, too, the work is what’s important. Despite the advance press for this biography, as well as the dopey dust jacket comparing Wallace to Kurt Cobain and James Dean, this is not a book about a celebrity martyr. While Max doesn’t neglect the drama — addictions, messy relationships, family conflict — the book pivots on Wallace’s creative turnaround between his first novel, The Broom of the System, and his masterwork, Infinite Jest. No other major novelist in recent memory fought so hard to be original. He started as what Max calls ‘an odd combination of mimic and engineer’, in love with postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon and John Barth. Yet he grew to reject his earlier influences, as well as his earlier writing, to become a ‘full-fledged apostle of sincerity’. The quest was to get outside the ‘ironic loop’ that infected the cutting-edge fiction of his time.

As Wallace once wrote, ‘The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “how banal”.’ He was constantly caught between twin desires: what he called the ‘physics of reading’ (the need to entertain and engage readers) and the sweeping maximalist impulse to include everything. After his first novel he realised he also wanted to redeem the reader in some way, rather than just confuse or beguile. Dostoevsky replaced Derrida as his literary model. ‘The last thin patina of rebelliousness has fallen off,’ he wrote in a letter to Jonathan Franzen. ‘I am frightfully and thoroughly conventional.’

Max’s approach is clean and methodical, and when he interjects it is neatly done. He has read widely enough to be able, for example, to follow a quote from Wallace — his definition of great fiction as ‘making heads throb heartlike’ — through Lester Bangs, to its possible origin in Gravity’s Rainbow. But mostly he stays out of the way and keeps his judgments to himself, so that the experience of reading Every Love Story is cocoon-like, a highly pressurised echo chamber that gets somewhere close to what it must have felt like to know Wallace. It turns out that he was perhaps one of literature’s last great letter writers, and his casually intense and self-deprecating voice is all over the book.

Anyone who has read the unfinished final work, The Pale King — ‘the novel that would defeat Wallace’, according to D.T. Max — will know he never resolved his vision. The problem of adventurous fiction in a digital, commercialised age stayed with him until the end, but what he produced in the struggle will continue to grow in truth and relevance. In Max’s words, Wallace ‘suggests a way to somewhere else’. This is a magnetic book, one that left me wishing for more pages, more life.

The post A way to somewhere else appeared first on The Spectator.

It is rare to encounter a writer whose work can be so neatly divided into two halves. George Saunders is known as a satirist with an interest in consumerism and the technology of the near future, but occasionally he will publish moving, sometimes brutal social realist tales. Early stories such as ‘Christmas’ were like strange, dirty artefacts among the glossier SF-tinged material.

Tenth of December is such a strong collection because the wackiness is mostly kept at bay. These are stories about people who are trying to do the right thing in an ungrateful world, and there is less of the shrill goofiness that comprised much of his previous collection, In Persuasion Nation. 

But there is still a spectrum: near the crazier end is ‘Escape from Spiderhead’, about a drug that administers a feeling of immediate love (‘Can we stop war? We can sure as heck slow it down!’). The drug, at its experimental stage, causes a Milgram-esque ethical tangle for the test subjects which recalls the paranoia of Philip K. Dick.

‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ is even weirder. Told as a series of diary entries by a man dealing with the mundane tasks of paying bills and pleasing his kids, while promising to himself that he will lead a better life, we gradually learn that there is something off-kilter about his terrain. So-called ‘Semplica Girls’, who are women from deprived countries looking to make some money, are being hanged — by a ‘microline’ running through their brain — as decorations in the gardens of the wealthy, and those who aspire to be wealthy. The story becomes a twisted examination of moral blindness without being flat-footed and obvious.

At the other end of the spectrum is ‘Home’, told from the perspective of a soldier returning from conflict. The narrator is haunted by a past transgression, but we never find out what it is, and no one else seems interested (‘Thank you for your service’ is all they can muster). The story avoids the stale device of the soldier who is happier in a warzone — this soldier is utterly deracinated, struggling to contain his violence and unable to articulate what is driving him towards it.

As always Saunders’ prose can be slangy and idiosyncratic. Often he uses one-sentence paragraphs, like a thriller writer, but his skill shows in how he can make a rather clipped style carry so much. He is comfortable relating the thoughts of a 14-year-old girl, for instance: ‘Mrs Roosevelt was quite chipper in spite of her husband, who was handicapped, while, in addition, she had been gay, with those big old teeth, long before such time as being gay and First Lady was even conceptual.’ But he is also capable of more refined sentences, inserted stealthily: ‘A dense ball of birds went linear, then settled into the branches of a lightning-blasted tree.’

There are enough moments like this to settle the hearts of people who have a low tolerance for his usual tics. The far-out fabulist has given way to the consummate craftsman, and the result is Saunders’ most involving collection yet.

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Harry Christmas, the central character of this bitterly funny debut novel, is a middle- aged, overweight alcoholic, with no friends and no prospects. After marrying a woman and running off with her money, he flies to Venezuela. He justifies this in two ways, the first sentimental, the second pragmatic. He wants to visit the country of his deceased first wife’s family, and he wants to escape the Rot.

The Rot can be defined as everything that Christmas doesn’t like about England (or, we soon learn, about the world in general). This turns out to be a long and varied list. He despises the indoor smoking ban and sport, but he also can’t stand scatter cushions and people who make quotation marks with their fingers.

Most of all, he hates the internet and everyone who uses it; ‘an electric Gulag’, as he puts it, ‘a network of lonely children indulging in communities of self-surveillance’ (this appears more masochistic if you know that Gibson is co-founder of thepoke.co.uk, a popular humour website). The first few chapters, as Christmas does his best to deflect and avoid everything that irritates him, can be read as pure observational comedy. These passages mostly take place in airports or on planes, and are reminiscent of David Lodge’s early, globetrotting campus novels, although with a sharper edge.

But this is more than just a stand-up routine. Once in Venezuela, and after a couple of heroic binges, Christmas meets Judith, a lonely Englishwoman with a big house and a pottery habit. He lies to her as he has lied to almost everyone and pretends to be a novelist with writer’s block so that she will provide him with money and shelter.

A subscriber to the view that being English is about displaying ‘a mix of good manners and utter sadism’, Christmas seems only to have affection for his dead wife, whose favourite poetry book he carries around in his jacket pocket. It’s not long, however, before the people he’s defrauded and betrayed are too numerous to escape from. The greatest threat is William Slade, the mother-obsessed son of his second wife, who has followed Christmas to Venezuela. Slade loves knives and Anglo-Saxon re-enactments. He is both an inept assassin and an opaque psychopath, sizing up everyone he sees, imagining cinematic fight sequences with strangers, ‘a blizzard of punches and kicks, balletic moves executed with a serene face’.

Every character is broken, disappointed, let down by others or accustomed to letting others down. There’s a vein of sadness throughout that enlivens, and eventually overwhelms, the comedy. Gibson is very skilled at manoeuvring the narrative across different emotional plateaux, often switching between slapstick and tragedy within a single paragraph. This is, in effect, a simple tale of redemption. Yet the prose is so limber and the atmosphere so hallucinatory that Gibson has created something much more than that. Few first novels are as bold or as haunting as this.

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Thick, sentimental and with a narrative bestriding four decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings feels above all like a Victorian novel, one which finds itself as comfortable in our time as it would have been 150 years ago. It’s an American story ruled by classic English themes. Fate, coincidence, class and envy are what bind — and in some cases disperse — the six central characters.

It begins in the mid-1970s, in Spirit-in-the-Woods, a summer camp for young people interested in the performing and visual arts. Run by a couple of bohemians, the camp is supposed to be an approximation of utopia, or, as one character
remarks, the opposite of Lord of the Flies. Here the six teenagers meet and eventually label themselves ‘The Interestings’ as a sarcastic tribute to their only half-joking hubris.

Julie — or Jules as she is rechristened by her new friends — is particularly enamoured of the camp. A ‘dandeliony, poodly outsider’, she sees greatness all around her. There’s Ethan, a bright cartoonist filled with unreciprocated love for Jules, and Jonah, an introverted musician who is somehow unwilling to pursue his craft. Highest in Jules’s affections is Ash, a pretty girl with a rich family in New York. Ash and her brother, Goodman, represent a hip city life which seems to beckon Jules, while also causing her to glance regretfully at her own small-town mother and sister.

To the surprise of everyone Ash later marries Ethan, and Ethan takes on the potential of all six friends for himself — his own television cartoon makes him a millionaire. But he’s the exception. Much of the novel is about failed ambition and the burning desire to be special, and how this desire can flicker to nothing under a range of forces, not least economics, disposition and ‘the most daunting and most determining force of all, luck’.

Among the burn-outs the most peculiar is Goodman, who is accused of assaulting his girlfriend but disappears before the law can deal with him. Where has he gone? Wolitzer handles our expectations with flat calm; Goodman isn’t dead, in prison, or damaging other women — he’s in Iceland, doing nothing much. It’s as if, in a novel based around quiet diminuendos, a character who threatens to disrupt the tone must be quarantined in the deep freeze of northern Europe.

Wolitzer is much better at conveying the sweep of time than she is at relating specifics. Some of her phrases strain to be particular but end up vague or pedestrian, such as: ‘Foosball was played, that perplexingly popular game with all those knobs.’ Or, ‘the dazzling truth of his success was indisputable.’ Somewhere around the halfway point, though, the writing settles and the characters take over. Previous Wolitzer novels, such as 2011’s The Uncoupling, ended before seemingly anything happened. But now, with all this extra space, she has written something that is more absorbing as it goes along. Like the great baggy monsters of the past, The Interestings asserts its power through a slow but irresistible momentum.

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In calling their book Art as Therapy Alain de Botton and John Armstrong have taken the direct route. They’re not waiting for us to interpret their motive: their title tells us everything.

Art, the theory goes, can help us improve our psychological state in a way that’s progressive and cumulative. It can assist our relationships, our careers, our money concerns. Art is a tool which ‘compensates us for certain inborn weaknesses, in this case of the mind rather than the body’. It is a ‘therapeutic medium’, and it should be treated as such. This means that galleries, instead of arranging works by period or style, should place art in emotive groups, based around how they can reform and enrich our own lives. An illustration in the book shows a re-imagined Tate Modern floor plan with the ‘Gallery of Suffering’ on the first floor, the ‘Gallery of Compassion’ on the second, and so on.

This may not sound too radical, even if it risks seriously narrowing the possible responses to a work of art (how many works communicate both suffering and compassion, for example?) But this is merely the thin end of a very substantial wedge. Galleries should also include ‘therapy rooms’ which ‘one might need to pass through before getting to see any works for sale’. Who will be the therapists in this scenario? Art dealers, of course. They will ‘help clients live better lives by selling them the art they need for the sake of their inner selves’.

The authors seem to have a rather specific idea of who their audience is. You will be a fully employed professional, middle-aged, married, secular and quick to reveal your feelings to others. I don’t tick many of those boxes, which possibly explains the detached feeling I had as the authors’ ambition overflowed and spread into almost every crevice of modern society. By the end they are sketching a new kind of ‘enlightened capitalism’ and making tentative steps towards a didactic form of art, where artists work to parameters laid down by some vague social body. They also want to restructure the physical landscape and, with a twist of Roger Scruton’s aesthetic philosophy, wage gentle war on ugliness.

Even though many of its schemes are idiosyncratic, Art as Therapy has its pleasures. The pictures are diverse and well chosen. A cracked and mottled Korean moon jar is elevated by being in close proximity with work by Cy Twombly and Joseph Cornell. Captions will often reflect the nervous responses of someone entirely new to art, so beneath Sebastiano Ricci’s ‘The Vision of Saint Bruno’ is written: ‘I don’t do weird religious stuff.’ Beside a Sargent portrait we find: ‘Snobs make me feel sick.’ This will annoy some readers, but the point is to pre-empt these responses and explain how the works might retain value for the uninitiated.

Still, this couldn’t be described as a coffee-table book, because no one would keep a book called Art as Therapy on their coffee table. It would send the wrong signal, like offering guests a tour of your medicine cabinet (a practice which the authors, with their thirst for self-revelation, might advocate). No, this is a book you keep under your bed and read before sleep, when its aperçus and confessions feel satisfyingly irresponsible.

But as fun as it is to watch an argument accelerate through the barriers of good sense, at some point the contrary feelings have to kick in. Isn’t great art — excuse my generalisation here but de Botton and Armstrong have given me the bug — about blowing apart our complexes and fears, rather than reflecting them? Or isn’t it about that sometimes, at least? The suggestion that the limits of our perspective define the limits of the universe, that we must see the work of others through our own mesh of anxieties, cuts off the opportunity for submission and transcendence (as rare as those opportunities are). To gaze at Manet’s asparagus and see a reflection of your struggling long-term relationship is not objectionable by itself, but I’m not sure it should be endorsed as the best way to approach a painting. Solipsism is already in plentiful supply outside the world’s galleries; we don’t need two philosophers recommending more of it.

The post The healing art appeared first on The Spectator.

The troubles of Richard Pryor’s life are well known — from his childhood in a brothel to his self-immolation via crack pipe — but arranged in a biography their impact is renewed. So grotesque was his upbringing that an early encounter with a dead baby in a shoebox warrants but a single sentence in David Henry’s and Joe Henry’s addictive, frenzied book (Furious Cool, Algonquin Books,£17.99, Spectator Bookshop, £16.19).

The authors are fans who have the tendency to swoon, and they hold back from condemning Pryor’s numerous wrong turns (he was a serial wife-beater who fled responsibility wherever he found it). But that hardly matters when there’s so much to pack in. Enlivened by the 1960s counterculture, Pryor absorbed everything and made it his own. Even among Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce and Nina Simone, he was a giant.

What’s especially striking is how literary his stand-up style was — much sharper than the post-Beat poetry that was being recited in the hippest New York bars in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a shame he starred in so many bad movies, but showbiz is intoxicating even for an artist, and Pryor’s second greatest talent was for sabotaging his own potential.

Rich in incident and anecdote — every page carries something either appalling or amusing — Furious Cool is an energetic contribution to the written history of stand-up comedy.

The post Cracking up appeared first on The Spectator.

Readers familiar with Nicola Barker’s hyper-caffeinated style will be surprised by the almost serene first few chapters of her latest novel. It’s 1984 and we are in Pett Level, Hastings, a marginal location even by Barker’s standards (previous novels have been set in Luton, Ashford, and the Isle of Sheppey), and a well-travelled man named Franklin D. Huff is investigating a series of events that took place there many years earlier.

The events themselves are nebulous. Something about miracles, romantic affairs, and a saintly child deformed by thalidomide. Before Huff can find any answers, though, countryside serenity is replaced by the quirks of Barker’s reckless imagination.

As is usual with Barker’s fiction, the story is a blurb-writer’s nightmare. She prefers a constellation of seemingly banal symbols freighted with meaning — a cryptic number, a coat, a hair-clip — to plot. Above all else, she enjoys spooky, ungraspable forces attached to ludicrous situations. Posting an envelope becomes a supernatural catastrophe; a pilgrimage to Douai Abbey leaves Huff with painfully sealed buttocks; sudden landslips swallow sheds and bungalows.

Characters take turns narrating chapters in the fervid first person — exclamation marks and italicisations are used as blunt instruments to signal their agitation — except for a few interludes that are in a cracked kind of third person from the perspective of a parrot.

Weirder still is a country bumpkin called Clifford Bickerton, who is perhaps the furthest Barker has ever gone in her quest to cajole her audience. He is a dull, sidelined figure who finds himself conscious of his plight as a work of fiction, and begins railing against (what he sees as) the flaws of the novel. ‘The book’ll bomb,’ he remarks (meaning In the Approaches). ‘It’ll be remaindered two days after publication and I’ll be remembered as one of her most unsuccessful characters, ever.’ Later he disparagingly compares Barker to Edna O’Brien, a ‘real writer.’

This kind of trickery can be as annoying as it sounds, just as the non-stop shuffling and re-emphasising of words can get out of hand (‘The envelope was gone. Of course it was. It was gone. The envelope of cash was gone. It was gone.’) Barker is not a very careful writer, and all of her characters seem permanently to have either a grimace or a ‘wry’ smile etched on their faces.

There is, however, a curious energy to In the Approaches that picks up speed as the narrative becomes more preposterous — contrasting with many of Barker’s previous novels, which tend to run out of steam about halfway through. I read it quickly, and I smiled (though never wryly) more than I grimaced, but I’m certain Barker had much more fun writing it. This is her tenth full-length work, and clearly she is wedded to the divisive pungency of her own voice. The consistent lack of compromise is admirable, even if it means no sensible person would want to read any of her novels more than once.

The post Smiles and grimaces appeared first on The Spectator.

J.K. Rowling’s second novel under the Robert Galbraith moniker is a whodunit set in the publishing industry. This isn’t a rare set-up for crime fiction. Authors, no matter how grungy and streetwise they pretend to be, spend most of their time doing dreary things with people they dislike in the name of selling books. They are itching to put their agents, publishers and fellow authors on the page so that they can slay them.

Thing is, if you’re the most famous author in the world, bearing a grudge against publishing might look a bit ungrateful. Rowling realises this and adjusts her approach accordingly. The Silkworm is a soft, toothless, inept novel with a kind heart.

Our private eye Cormoran Strike is back. He’s a tough, burly ex-soldier with half a leg missing, but he also went to Oxford, so he can translate a Latin phrase before he dislocates your jaw with his fist. Following on from his successful sleuthing in the previous novel, which made him a minor celebrity, he has been tasked with tracking down a famous author called Owen Quine. This Quine has a habit of disappearing, but finally he seems to have gone for good, leaving behind an unpublishable novel stuffed with his most morbid fantasies. In it he eviscerates many of his friends and enemies, who are disguised as fantastical, often hermaphroditic, creations.

Now that Quine is missing, his novel is a compendium of suspects. These include a drunken editor, a fire-spitting agent and a self-published erotic fantasy merchant. Nevertheless, insider publishing gossip, for those who like that kind of thing, is sparse. This is a fatal flaw in a novel that has nothing else going for it.

There are so many problems with The Silkworm, least of all the complete lack of pace or intrigue. Galbraith’s use of language swings between a pinched, Golden Age style (‘He knew of what this adversary was capable’) to a mildly concussed English that will be familiar to those who read a lot of Scandinavian crime fiction in translation (‘The cold air bit their warm faces as the front door swung open while Strike shook hands with Chard’; ‘Oh, please God, let me get to King’s Cross on time, prayed Robin inside her head.’). At odd moments it reminded me of a Micky Spillane novel — if Rowling was actually a man called Robert Galbraith, she probably wouldn’t get away with describing so many women as ‘curvaceous’ and adorning them with ‘clinging’ dresses.

Each chapter begins with an epigraph from a pre-19th-century play (Webster, Congreve, Jonson etc). In a chapter where Strike’s assistant Robin feels underappreciated, for example, we get this from The Duchess of Malfi: ‘Let me know /Wherefore I should be thus neglected.’

It must have taken a lot of effort to find appropriate quotes for all 50 chapters, a feat that’s especially impressive considering its non-existent literary impact. Galbraith’s ample patience would have been better used in setting fire to the manuscript and starting from scratch.

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The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each book has a date, sliding from 1922 to 1979 to next year to 203 ad to last month. This might suggest an overly systematic novel in the mode of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning breezeblock The Luminaries. But Hensher has always been a writer with a wandering, curious eye (on its most exhilarating display in 2011’s King of the Badgers), and The Emperor Waltz is a novel that, despite its superficial restraints, won’t sit still.

It begins in Weimar during the period of hyperinflation, a time of bold new ideas and failures of conscience, when the competing energies of Bauhaus and National Socialism are starting to make themselves known. Christian, a young art student, is seduced by the promise of the city; a Berlin poster has informed him that in Weimar ‘everything would alter… for the better’. Meanwhile Klee and Kandinsky sit in cafés, paying 200,000 marks for coffee. In a key passage, Christian, who impresses his teacher Klee with his forward-thinking approach to art, is confronted by the casual anti-Semitism of his landlady. He vows to move somewhere else, before quickly and shamefully changing his mind. It would be too much of an upheaval, after all. He ‘despises himself for his cowardice’, but he ‘already knew that that was the easiest path for his mind to take’.

Later, Duncan is setting up the first gay bookshop in 1970s London. He knows that he and his shop will be the target of spite, and so before the official opening he makes a point of regularly visiting all the other outlets on the road to foster goodwill. It is not until he spots a sandwich-maker — who has sold Duncan his lunch for weeks — spitting in his food before bringing it out with a smile that Duncan realises the futility of his politeness. The scene ends with a moment of tough resignation, as Duncan sees the struggle ahead: ‘In his wallet, he remembered, he had written down the number of a neighbourhood glazier, for the first time the shop window would be smashed with a thrown brick.’ After Christian’s lapse, Duncan’s courage is especially stark — the easy path is not for him — and Hensher is very good at emphasising these private shifts in thought against a vast background.

The novel has its oddities, however. A section entitled ‘Last Month’ is in the first person and appears to be at least partly autobiographical. The narrator is a diabetic novelist who finds himself in hospital with an infected foot. From his bed he observes the other patients, who are mewling and baying at the nurses, and for a few pages everything twists into a kind of despairing essay on friendship. ‘Was this all that human relations were?’, the narrator wonders. ‘To spread ideas that would benefit ourselves, to create a community in order to achieve what we wanted?’ The rest of the novel expands on that question, but this hospital interlude is a misstep, albeit an intriguing one.

Taken as a whole, though, The Emperor Waltz is rich and captivating, dizzy with memorable characters. And through it all is the mystery of Strauss’s own Emperor Waltz, which is poured out of distant open windows, selected on iPods, and played on the violin by Klee when he has put the paintbrush aside. Its meaning — and the novel’s — seems to change subtly with every repetition: it signals material transience; the constancy of art; the absurdity of grand notions; and the importance of rebellion.

The post Life as an outsider appeared first on The Spectator.

The American comic novel is going through an odd phase. Just lately it seems like anything funny must sneak in behind an abstruse metafictional edifice, deployed, I suspect, by insecure authors who want to retain their jobs as teachers of creative writing. 10:04, Ben Lerner’s lopsided but often electric second novel, is the latest example of the comic genre via subterfuge, sprinkled with tricks and played so deadpan you might not know when
to laugh.

The narrator, who shares a first name with the author, is a resident of a New York City that is battered by storms, vulnerable to hurricanes and hipsters. He has health concerns which require regular hospital visits: first he has a dilated aorta which he thinks could rupture at any moment; second he is planning to donate sperm so that his best friend can have a baby, although he has some doubts about the quality of his essence. He is also a successful writer, with an acclaimed debut novel to his credit and a recently published short story in the New Yorker. It might be important to note here that Lerner himself had an acclaimed first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, and afterwards published a story in the New Yorker (republished in full in this novel, but presented as the narrator’s story).

This is only the beginning of what could be called, depending on the reader’s temperament, either fruitful mischief or wanton reflexivity. Ben is working on a second novel — ‘the book you’re reading now’ — which he describes as ‘neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them’.Obviously this is nothing new. Some of the most highly praised authors of the decade — from Sheila Heti to Karl Ove Knausgaard — apply this method, unable to untether themselves from their own biographies.

It’s possible, however, to grumble about the tiredness of the formula while enjoying almost every page. Lerner is particularly good with dialogue and the pressures of social interaction, even when some of the conversations are imaginary. Exasperated with the needling questions of his potential child (‘What if you have to do IVF to make me?’) Ben eventually responds, ‘I don’t know. Ask your phone.’ Yet when faced with a real-life eight-year-old he finds himself tongue-tied as the young boy lectures him on Joseph Kony and the inevitable ice age:

‘When all the skyscrapers freeze they’re going to fall down like September eleventh,’ he said in his typically cheerful tone, but more quietly, ‘and crush everyone.’

Occasionally the novel tips into the farcical. A terrific scene where Ben finally makes his sperm donation is so much like a sitcom set piece that it made me wonder whether I’d misjudged the manner of the entire book. Later he winds up in Texas on a writers’ retreat, where he crafts an interminable poem rather than the novel for which he has been promised an enormous advance. This, I think, is supposed to be a self-deprecating portrayal of a writer’s wastefulness, but then why does Lerner quote so much of the rather drab verse? And is the verse even meant to be drab? The acknowledgements tell me the excerpts are from a genuine poem, published by Lerner, so I guess not.

Touches of frosty academese are just as disconcerting:

Whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body.

Something for postgrads to chew on, I suppose; the rest of us can enjoy the wittier, more invigorating passages.

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State-of-criticism overviews and assessments almost always strike a bleak note —the critical mind naturally angles towards pessimism — so it can be worthwhile occasionally to announce that, against expectations, despite everything, literary criticism is still alive and in print. Recent technological and economic threats have not been as damaging as the so-called theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s, and while theory does colour some recent fiction (treated with ironic humour by Jeffrey Eugenides, say, or with cramped loyalty by Tom McCarthy), critics outside the academy now act as though it has been vanquished through institutional assimilation; the models are Edmund Wilson and Clive James, not Derrida and de Man.

In his brief, personal new book, adapted from a series of lectures, James Wood is diplomatic about what has been left behind. For him, the theory wars ‘have ended in a productive stalemate, in which, roughly speaking, both sides won’. He goes on to explain his critical ideal, which he calls ‘writer’s criticism’ or ‘writerly criticism’. ‘Such criticism… is situated in the world, not behind scholarly walls, and is unafraid of making use of anything that comes to mind or hand.’ It exists ‘as literature… and it is the kind of criticism that should give evaluation a good reputation’.

Part of Wood’s authority comes from a seriousness that is pre-theory, perhaps even pre-modernism. Literature is life and death, holier than God (his sole novel is titled The Book Against God). Reading fiction gives us ‘the uncanny powers of the monitoring Jesus, but the humane insight of the forgiving Jesus’, and a novelistic understanding of human nature ‘seems to put one at an almost priestly advantage over people’s souls’.

Wood elevates particular details above structure and form, sometimes to an ecstatic degree: ‘At least four times a week I think of Nabokov’s great defamiliarising joke in Pnin, about how the workmen come back day after day to the same spot in the road, to try to find the lost tool they accidentally entombed.’ This is a strange thing to write (the specific ‘at least four times a week’ feels like a joke) except it does show, in a disarming way, how these ‘bits of life’ return to fiction-obsessed readers, frequently and mysteriously.

In the introduction to his new collection of essays, Michael Hofmann, who is similarly unimpressed by theory, seems to follow the Woodian line: ‘I aimed to write an homage… to literature in something that itself approached the condition of literature.’ Beyond this, however, the two writer-critics have very little in common. Hofmann is primarily a translator-poet, for one thing, and he has a taste for spare and abstruse verse — Ian Hamilton, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler — instead of the thick cream of realist novels.

Where Wood is measured and tidy, Hofmann is rabid and profuse. Stefan Zweig is ‘an absolutely natural and absolutely dreadful writer’, and every page of his is ‘sodden, formulaic, thin, swollen, platitudinous’. Hofmann isn’t usually this aggressive, but when he likes something he can be just as breathless, reaching for his deep stock of adverbs: James Schuyler’s poems ‘take very small steps tremendously irresolutely’, then later in the same (long) paragraph a Schuyler poem ‘sounds potentially tremendously powerful’.This unruly way with language can slip into a regrettable fondness for puns: W.S. Graham’s ‘grahamiphone’ is a ‘fine’ pun, apparently, while ‘The bard will have flown’ is not so fine.

Of more concern than the prospective demise of criticism is the lack of fresh material to criticise — and here the pessimism creeps in. Hofmann’s essays deal mostly with the dead or the old — the Canadian poet Karen Solie is the only living subject who is not of pensionable age — and his recent, as yet uncollected reviews of Martin Amis and Richard Flanagan come close to despair (‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the novel in an advanced and showy state of dissolution’). When contemplating the decline of poetry since the death of Robert Lowell, Hofmann writes: ‘It’s as though the human reef of literature was not considering any more applications, or the escalator had ground to a halt.’ We can allow him this without taking it to heart. A critic is entitled to his share of misery, even when things could be a hell of a lot worse.

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Stuart Evers’ debut short-story collection was called Ten Stories About Smoking, but even readers who are aware of this might be astonished by the multitude of burning cigarettes in his first novel, If This is Home. His characters smoke constantly, as if they are in the Forties film noir Out of the Past, where Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer are apparently incapable of breathing except through cigarette filters.

Evers’ novel, also in common with Out of the Past, deals with grim secrets and failed personal reinvention. When Mark Wilkinson flees England and his non-descript northern town for New York City he seems at first to be leaving only the scraps of a misspent youth behind. He makes one close friend in New York and eventually changes his name to Josef Novak. A whole new identity is constructed on a notepad. We are unsure why, except that Mark seems disconnected somehow, possibly callous or even crazy. His story is told in the first person, but we don’t feel the usual invasive privileges. For all we know he could be another Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.

The two friends move to Las Vegas and start a business that aims to comfort the rich, a hedonistic hideout in the desert. Grandly titled the Valhalla, it is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s highrises and holiday resorts. Its atrium is ‘modelled on the set design for a film about Atlantis that had never been shot’.  An underfloor pond filled with exotic fish adds the kind of tackiness that magnetises the rich, and the east wing, comprising 55 floors — where the restaurants and prostitutes reside — is mostly empty.

‘No one had the imagination to populate such places,’ we are told; ‘it was the impression that was important, the suggestion that only a closed, locked door could imply.’

But Mark’s mask of composure is about to slip. He is haunted by memories of his small-town teenage life 13 years earlier. His first love, Bethany, whose narrative alternates with Mark’s throughout, was supposed to go with him to New York, and their sundering forms the central mystery of the novel.

Miraculously the story pivots on its axis without losing momentum. When Mark returns to England — spurred on by an outbreak of violence at the Valhalla — the nostalgia of his teenage landscape after the otherworldly playhouse of Vegas is deftly handled. Mark is returning to fake gas fires, dodgy pubs, ‘the mazy sound of a tractor’ — a universal state of adolescent ennui. ‘Go back to America,’ he tells himself. ‘Home is where real life happens.’

If This is Home begins as a chilly take on greed and ambition and gradually softens to become a more sentimental tragic romance. What’s surprising is that Evers manages to land every dramatic punch, with a final twist that has devastating implications. Some readers may prefer the teasing and austere SF-style set-up to the later emotional denouement, but this is a fresh and eccentric novel that isn’t afraid of attending to the broader pleasures.

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Since his suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, David Foster Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature has expanded to the point where even writers who haven’t read him struggle to keep out of his shadow. Traces of his style can be found every time a young writer uses a compound conjunction, or a comically extended footnote. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the first biography of Wallace, has the difficult task of chronicling his life and work while we are still coming to terms with their impact.

Born in the American Midwest to liberal and academic parents (the kind who read Ulysses to each other before bed and tolerated their teenage son’s pot-smoking), Wallace was unusually clever from the start. D.T. Max doesn’t dwell on Wallace’s well-known talent for tennis (a successful player, though never close to world class) and spends more time on his intellectual precocity. Wallace’s father, who is a teacher of philosophy, said that his son’s mind was faster than that of ‘any undergraduate I have ever taught’. At Amherst College he won ten academic awards and regularly argued against the cherished ideas of his elders. One teacher responded by calling Wallace’s early attempts at fiction ‘philosophy with zingers’.

With adulthood came trouble. He was a man of obsessions and dependencies. Not just drugs, but also television, therapy, pop psychology, writing. Most of all writing. Max claims that Wallace could type 24 pages in three hours, and a substantial short story over a weekend. ‘He was so excited that when he wasn’t writing he would go to the gym and do sit-ups until he puked.’ This vacillated over time, in rough parallel to his horribly consistent dips in mood, which he began to medicate with the anti-depressant Nardil. But Wallace was always worrying about the next book.

For Max, too, the work is what’s important. Despite the advance press for this biography, as well as the dopey dust jacket comparing Wallace to Kurt Cobain and James Dean, this is not a book about a celebrity martyr. While Max doesn’t neglect the drama — addictions, messy relationships, family conflict — the book pivots on Wallace’s creative turnaround between his first novel, The Broom of the System, and his masterwork, Infinite Jest. No other major novelist in recent memory fought so hard to be original. He started as what Max calls ‘an odd combination of mimic and engineer’, in love with postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon and John Barth. Yet he grew to reject his earlier influences, as well as his earlier writing, to become a ‘full-fledged apostle of sincerity’. The quest was to get outside the ‘ironic loop’ that infected the cutting-edge fiction of his time.

As Wallace once wrote, ‘The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “how banal”.’ He was constantly caught between twin desires: what he called the ‘physics of reading’ (the need to entertain and engage readers) and the sweeping maximalist impulse to include everything. After his first novel he realised he also wanted to redeem the reader in some way, rather than just confuse or beguile. Dostoevsky replaced Derrida as his literary model. ‘The last thin patina of rebelliousness has fallen off,’ he wrote in a letter to Jonathan Franzen. ‘I am frightfully and thoroughly conventional.’

Max’s approach is clean and methodical, and when he interjects it is neatly done. He has read widely enough to be able, for example, to follow a quote from Wallace — his definition of great fiction as ‘making heads throb heartlike’ — through Lester Bangs, to its possible origin in Gravity’s Rainbow. But mostly he stays out of the way and keeps his judgments to himself, so that the experience of reading Every Love Story is cocoon-like, a highly pressurised echo chamber that gets somewhere close to what it must have felt like to know Wallace. It turns out that he was perhaps one of literature’s last great letter writers, and his casually intense and self-deprecating voice is all over the book.

Anyone who has read the unfinished final work, The Pale King — ‘the novel that would defeat Wallace’, according to D.T. Max — will know he never resolved his vision. The problem of adventurous fiction in a digital, commercialised age stayed with him until the end, but what he produced in the struggle will continue to grow in truth and relevance. In Max’s words, Wallace ‘suggests a way to somewhere else’. This is a magnetic book, one that left me wishing for more pages, more life.

The post A way to somewhere else appeared first on The Spectator.

It is rare to encounter a writer whose work can be so neatly divided into two halves. George Saunders is known as a satirist with an interest in consumerism and the technology of the near future, but occasionally he will publish moving, sometimes brutal social realist tales. Early stories such as ‘Christmas’ were like strange, dirty artefacts among the glossier SF-tinged material.

Tenth of December is such a strong collection because the wackiness is mostly kept at bay. These are stories about people who are trying to do the right thing in an ungrateful world, and there is less of the shrill goofiness that comprised much of his previous collection, In Persuasion Nation. 

But there is still a spectrum: near the crazier end is ‘Escape from Spiderhead’, about a drug that administers a feeling of immediate love (‘Can we stop war? We can sure as heck slow it down!’). The drug, at its experimental stage, causes a Milgram-esque ethical tangle for the test subjects which recalls the paranoia of Philip K. Dick.

‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ is even weirder. Told as a series of diary entries by a man dealing with the mundane tasks of paying bills and pleasing his kids, while promising to himself that he will lead a better life, we gradually learn that there is something off-kilter about his terrain. So-called ‘Semplica Girls’, who are women from deprived countries looking to make some money, are being hanged — by a ‘microline’ running through their brain — as decorations in the gardens of the wealthy, and those who aspire to be wealthy. The story becomes a twisted examination of moral blindness without being flat-footed and obvious.

At the other end of the spectrum is ‘Home’, told from the perspective of a soldier returning from conflict. The narrator is haunted by a past transgression, but we never find out what it is, and no one else seems interested (‘Thank you for your service’ is all they can muster). The story avoids the stale device of the soldier who is happier in a warzone — this soldier is utterly deracinated, struggling to contain his violence and unable to articulate what is driving him towards it.

As always Saunders’ prose can be slangy and idiosyncratic. Often he uses one-sentence paragraphs, like a thriller writer, but his skill shows in how he can make a rather clipped style carry so much. He is comfortable relating the thoughts of a 14-year-old girl, for instance: ‘Mrs Roosevelt was quite chipper in spite of her husband, who was handicapped, while, in addition, she had been gay, with those big old teeth, long before such time as being gay and First Lady was even conceptual.’ But he is also capable of more refined sentences, inserted stealthily: ‘A dense ball of birds went linear, then settled into the branches of a lightning-blasted tree.’

There are enough moments like this to settle the hearts of people who have a low tolerance for his usual tics. The far-out fabulist has given way to the consummate craftsman, and the result is Saunders’ most involving collection yet.

The post A consummate craftsman appeared first on The Spectator.

Harry Christmas, the central character of this bitterly funny debut novel, is a middle- aged, overweight alcoholic, with no friends and no prospects. After marrying a woman and running off with her money, he flies to Venezuela. He justifies this in two ways, the first sentimental, the second pragmatic. He wants to visit the country of his deceased first wife’s family, and he wants to escape the Rot.

The Rot can be defined as everything that Christmas doesn’t like about England (or, we soon learn, about the world in general). This turns out to be a long and varied list. He despises the indoor smoking ban and sport, but he also can’t stand scatter cushions and people who make quotation marks with their fingers.

Most of all, he hates the internet and everyone who uses it; ‘an electric Gulag’, as he puts it, ‘a network of lonely children indulging in communities of self-surveillance’ (this appears more masochistic if you know that Gibson is co-founder of thepoke.co.uk, a popular humour website). The first few chapters, as Christmas does his best to deflect and avoid everything that irritates him, can be read as pure observational comedy. These passages mostly take place in airports or on planes, and are reminiscent of David Lodge’s early, globetrotting campus novels, although with a sharper edge.

But this is more than just a stand-up routine. Once in Venezuela, and after a couple of heroic binges, Christmas meets Judith, a lonely Englishwoman with a big house and a pottery habit. He lies to her as he has lied to almost everyone and pretends to be a novelist with writer’s block so that she will provide him with money and shelter.

A subscriber to the view that being English is about displaying ‘a mix of good manners and utter sadism’, Christmas seems only to have affection for his dead wife, whose favourite poetry book he carries around in his jacket pocket. It’s not long, however, before the people he’s defrauded and betrayed are too numerous to escape from. The greatest threat is William Slade, the mother-obsessed son of his second wife, who has followed Christmas to Venezuela. Slade loves knives and Anglo-Saxon re-enactments. He is both an inept assassin and an opaque psychopath, sizing up everyone he sees, imagining cinematic fight sequences with strangers, ‘a blizzard of punches and kicks, balletic moves executed with a serene face’.

Every character is broken, disappointed, let down by others or accustomed to letting others down. There’s a vein of sadness throughout that enlivens, and eventually overwhelms, the comedy. Gibson is very skilled at manoeuvring the narrative across different emotional plateaux, often switching between slapstick and tragedy within a single paragraph. This is, in effect, a simple tale of redemption. Yet the prose is so limber and the atmosphere so hallucinatory that Gibson has created something much more than that. Few first novels are as bold or as haunting as this.

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Thick, sentimental and with a narrative bestriding four decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings feels above all like a Victorian novel, one which finds itself as comfortable in our time as it would have been 150 years ago. It’s an American story ruled by classic English themes. Fate, coincidence, class and envy are what bind — and in some cases disperse — the six central characters.

It begins in the mid-1970s, in Spirit-in-the-Woods, a summer camp for young people interested in the performing and visual arts. Run by a couple of bohemians, the camp is supposed to be an approximation of utopia, or, as one character
remarks, the opposite of Lord of the Flies. Here the six teenagers meet and eventually label themselves ‘The Interestings’ as a sarcastic tribute to their only half-joking hubris.

Julie — or Jules as she is rechristened by her new friends — is particularly enamoured of the camp. A ‘dandeliony, poodly outsider’, she sees greatness all around her. There’s Ethan, a bright cartoonist filled with unreciprocated love for Jules, and Jonah, an introverted musician who is somehow unwilling to pursue his craft. Highest in Jules’s affections is Ash, a pretty girl with a rich family in New York. Ash and her brother, Goodman, represent a hip city life which seems to beckon Jules, while also causing her to glance regretfully at her own small-town mother and sister.

To the surprise of everyone Ash later marries Ethan, and Ethan takes on the potential of all six friends for himself — his own television cartoon makes him a millionaire. But he’s the exception. Much of the novel is about failed ambition and the burning desire to be special, and how this desire can flicker to nothing under a range of forces, not least economics, disposition and ‘the most daunting and most determining force of all, luck’.

Among the burn-outs the most peculiar is Goodman, who is accused of assaulting his girlfriend but disappears before the law can deal with him. Where has he gone? Wolitzer handles our expectations with flat calm; Goodman isn’t dead, in prison, or damaging other women — he’s in Iceland, doing nothing much. It’s as if, in a novel based around quiet diminuendos, a character who threatens to disrupt the tone must be quarantined in the deep freeze of northern Europe.

Wolitzer is much better at conveying the sweep of time than she is at relating specifics. Some of her phrases strain to be particular but end up vague or pedestrian, such as: ‘Foosball was played, that perplexingly popular game with all those knobs.’ Or, ‘the dazzling truth of his success was indisputable.’ Somewhere around the halfway point, though, the writing settles and the characters take over. Previous Wolitzer novels, such as 2011’s The Uncoupling, ended before seemingly anything happened. But now, with all this extra space, she has written something that is more absorbing as it goes along. Like the great baggy monsters of the past, The Interestings asserts its power through a slow but irresistible momentum.

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In calling their book Art as Therapy Alain de Botton and John Armstrong have taken the direct route. They’re not waiting for us to interpret their motive: their title tells us everything.

Art, the theory goes, can help us improve our psychological state in a way that’s progressive and cumulative. It can assist our relationships, our careers, our money concerns. Art is a tool which ‘compensates us for certain inborn weaknesses, in this case of the mind rather than the body’. It is a ‘therapeutic medium’, and it should be treated as such. This means that galleries, instead of arranging works by period or style, should place art in emotive groups, based around how they can reform and enrich our own lives. An illustration in the book shows a re-imagined Tate Modern floor plan with the ‘Gallery of Suffering’ on the first floor, the ‘Gallery of Compassion’ on the second, and so on.

This may not sound too radical, even if it risks seriously narrowing the possible responses to a work of art (how many works communicate both suffering and compassion, for example?) But this is merely the thin end of a very substantial wedge. Galleries should also include ‘therapy rooms’ which ‘one might need to pass through before getting to see any works for sale’. Who will be the therapists in this scenario? Art dealers, of course. They will ‘help clients live better lives by selling them the art they need for the sake of their inner selves’.

The authors seem to have a rather specific idea of who their audience is. You will be a fully employed professional, middle-aged, married, secular and quick to reveal your feelings to others. I don’t tick many of those boxes, which possibly explains the detached feeling I had as the authors’ ambition overflowed and spread into almost every crevice of modern society. By the end they are sketching a new kind of ‘enlightened capitalism’ and making tentative steps towards a didactic form of art, where artists work to parameters laid down by some vague social body. They also want to restructure the physical landscape and, with a twist of Roger Scruton’s aesthetic philosophy, wage gentle war on ugliness.

Even though many of its schemes are idiosyncratic, Art as Therapy has its pleasures. The pictures are diverse and well chosen. A cracked and mottled Korean moon jar is elevated by being in close proximity with work by Cy Twombly and Joseph Cornell. Captions will often reflect the nervous responses of someone entirely new to art, so beneath Sebastiano Ricci’s ‘The Vision of Saint Bruno’ is written: ‘I don’t do weird religious stuff.’ Beside a Sargent portrait we find: ‘Snobs make me feel sick.’ This will annoy some readers, but the point is to pre-empt these responses and explain how the works might retain value for the uninitiated.

Still, this couldn’t be described as a coffee-table book, because no one would keep a book called Art as Therapy on their coffee table. It would send the wrong signal, like offering guests a tour of your medicine cabinet (a practice which the authors, with their thirst for self-revelation, might advocate). No, this is a book you keep under your bed and read before sleep, when its aperçus and confessions feel satisfyingly irresponsible.

But as fun as it is to watch an argument accelerate through the barriers of good sense, at some point the contrary feelings have to kick in. Isn’t great art — excuse my generalisation here but de Botton and Armstrong have given me the bug — about blowing apart our complexes and fears, rather than reflecting them? Or isn’t it about that sometimes, at least? The suggestion that the limits of our perspective define the limits of the universe, that we must see the work of others through our own mesh of anxieties, cuts off the opportunity for submission and transcendence (as rare as those opportunities are). To gaze at Manet’s asparagus and see a reflection of your struggling long-term relationship is not objectionable by itself, but I’m not sure it should be endorsed as the best way to approach a painting. Solipsism is already in plentiful supply outside the world’s galleries; we don’t need two philosophers recommending more of it.

The post The healing art appeared first on The Spectator.

The troubles of Richard Pryor’s life are well known — from his childhood in a brothel to his self-immolation via crack pipe — but arranged in a biography their impact is renewed. So grotesque was his upbringing that an early encounter with a dead baby in a shoebox warrants but a single sentence in David Henry’s and Joe Henry’s addictive, frenzied book (Furious Cool, Algonquin Books,£17.99, Spectator Bookshop, £16.19).

The authors are fans who have the tendency to swoon, and they hold back from condemning Pryor’s numerous wrong turns (he was a serial wife-beater who fled responsibility wherever he found it). But that hardly matters when there’s so much to pack in. Enlivened by the 1960s counterculture, Pryor absorbed everything and made it his own. Even among Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce and Nina Simone, he was a giant.

What’s especially striking is how literary his stand-up style was — much sharper than the post-Beat poetry that was being recited in the hippest New York bars in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a shame he starred in so many bad movies, but showbiz is intoxicating even for an artist, and Pryor’s second greatest talent was for sabotaging his own potential.

Rich in incident and anecdote — every page carries something either appalling or amusing — Furious Cool is an energetic contribution to the written history of stand-up comedy.

The post Cracking up appeared first on The Spectator.

Readers familiar with Nicola Barker’s hyper-caffeinated style will be surprised by the almost serene first few chapters of her latest novel. It’s 1984 and we are in Pett Level, Hastings, a marginal location even by Barker’s standards (previous novels have been set in Luton, Ashford, and the Isle of Sheppey), and a well-travelled man named Franklin D. Huff is investigating a series of events that took place there many years earlier.

The events themselves are nebulous. Something about miracles, romantic affairs, and a saintly child deformed by thalidomide. Before Huff can find any answers, though, countryside serenity is replaced by the quirks of Barker’s reckless imagination.

As is usual with Barker’s fiction, the story is a blurb-writer’s nightmare. She prefers a constellation of seemingly banal symbols freighted with meaning — a cryptic number, a coat, a hair-clip — to plot. Above all else, she enjoys spooky, ungraspable forces attached to ludicrous situations. Posting an envelope becomes a supernatural catastrophe; a pilgrimage to Douai Abbey leaves Huff with painfully sealed buttocks; sudden landslips swallow sheds and bungalows.

Characters take turns narrating chapters in the fervid first person — exclamation marks and italicisations are used as blunt instruments to signal their agitation — except for a few interludes that are in a cracked kind of third person from the perspective of a parrot.

Weirder still is a country bumpkin called Clifford Bickerton, who is perhaps the furthest Barker has ever gone in her quest to cajole her audience. He is a dull, sidelined figure who finds himself conscious of his plight as a work of fiction, and begins railing against (what he sees as) the flaws of the novel. ‘The book’ll bomb,’ he remarks (meaning In the Approaches). ‘It’ll be remaindered two days after publication and I’ll be remembered as one of her most unsuccessful characters, ever.’ Later he disparagingly compares Barker to Edna O’Brien, a ‘real writer.’

This kind of trickery can be as annoying as it sounds, just as the non-stop shuffling and re-emphasising of words can get out of hand (‘The envelope was gone. Of course it was. It was gone. The envelope of cash was gone. It was gone.’) Barker is not a very careful writer, and all of her characters seem permanently to have either a grimace or a ‘wry’ smile etched on their faces.

There is, however, a curious energy to In the Approaches that picks up speed as the narrative becomes more preposterous — contrasting with many of Barker’s previous novels, which tend to run out of steam about halfway through. I read it quickly, and I smiled (though never wryly) more than I grimaced, but I’m certain Barker had much more fun writing it. This is her tenth full-length work, and clearly she is wedded to the divisive pungency of her own voice. The consistent lack of compromise is admirable, even if it means no sensible person would want to read any of her novels more than once.

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