I spent a long time resisting The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time because I got sent about fifteen copies, by publishers and agents and magazines and newspapers, and it made me recalcitrant and reluctant, truculent, maybe even perverse. I got sent fifteen copies because the narrator of The Curious Incident has Asperger’s syndrome, which places him on the autistic spectrum, although way over the other side from my son. I can see why publishers do this, but the books that arrive in the post tend to be a distorted and somewhat unappetizing version of one’s life and work. And what one wants to read, most of the time, is something that bears no reference to one’s life and work.
(Twice this week I have been sent manuscripts of books that remind their editors, according to their covering letters, of my writing. Like a lot of writers, I can’t really stand my own writing, in the same way that I don’t really like my own cooking. And, just as when I go out to eat, I tend not to order my signature dish – an overcooked and overspiced meat-stewy thing containing something inappropriate, like tinned peaches, and a side order of undercooked and flavourless vegetables – I really don’t want to read anything that I could have come up with at my own computer. What I produce on my computer invariably turns out to be an equivalent of the undercooked overcooked stewy thing, no matter how hard I try to follow the recipe, and you really don’t want to eat too much of that. I’d love to be sent a book with an accompanying letter that said, ‘This is nothing like your work. But as a man of taste and discernment, we think you’ll love it anyway.’ That never happens.)
Anyway, I finally succumbed to Mark Haddon’s book, simply because it had been recommended to me so many times as a piece of fiction, rather than as a recognizable portrait of my home life. It’s the third book about autism I’ve read in three months, and each book – this one, Charlotte Moore’s George and Sam and Paul Collins’s Not Even Wrong – contains a description of the classic test devised to demonstrate the lack of a theory of mind in autistic children. I’ll quote Paul Collins’s succinct summary:
Sally and Anne have a box and a basket in front of them. Sally puts a marble in the basket. Then she leaves the room. While Sally is gone, Anne takes the marble out of the basket and puts it in the box. When Sally comes back in, where will she look for her marble?
If you ask ordinary kids, even ordinary three-year-olds, to observe Sally and Anne and then answer the question, they’ll tell you that Sally will look in the basket. An autistic kid, however, will always tell you that Sally should look in the box, because an autistic kid is unable to imagine that someone else knows (or feels, or thinks) anything different from himself. In The Curious Incident, Christopher attempts to solve a murder-mystery, and one would imagine that of all the career-paths closed off to autists, the path leading to a desk at the FBI is probably the least accessible. If you are profoundly unable to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, then a job involving intuition and empathy, second-guessing and psychology is probably not the job for you. Haddon has Christopher, his narrator, refer to the theory-of-mind experiment, and it’s the one moment in the book where the author nearly brings his otherwise smartly imagined world crashing about his and our ears. Christopher talks about his own failure in the test, and then says, ‘That was because when I was little I didn’t understand about other people having minds. And Julie said to Mother and Father that I would always find this very difficult. Because I decided it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it.’
‘I decided it was a kind of puzzle…’ Hold on a moment: that means – what? – that every Asperger’s kid could do this, if they so chose? That the most debilitating part of the condition – effectively, the condition itself – could be removed by an application of will? This is dangerous territory, and I’m not sure Haddon crosses it with absolute conviction. The Curious Incident is an absorbing, entertaining, moving book, but when truth gets bent out of shape in this way in order to serve the purposes of a narrative, then maybe it’s a book that can’t properly be described as a work of art? I don’t know. I’m just asking the question. Happily, the detective element of the novel has been pretty much forgotten by the second half, and one description – of Christopher trying and failing to get on a crowded tube train, and then another, and then another, until hours and hours pass – is unforgettable, and very, very real.
In an online interview, Haddon quotes one of his Amazon reviewers, someone who hated his novel, saying, ‘the most worrying thing about the book is that Christopher says he dislikes fiction, and yet the whole book is fiction’. And that, says the author, ‘puts at least part of the problem in a nutshell’. It doesn’t, I don’t think, because the Amazon reviewer is too dim to put anything in a nutshell. I suspect, in fact, that the Amazon reviewer couldn’t put anything in the boot of his car, let alone a nutshell. (Presumably you couldn’t write a book about someone who couldn’t read, either, or someone who didn’t like paper, because the whole book is paper. Oh, man, I hate Amazon reviewers. Even the nice ones, who say nice things. They’re bastards too.) But Haddon is right if what he’s saying is that picking through a book of this kind for inconsistencies is a mug’s game, and I’m sorry if that’s what I’ve done. The part that made me wince a little seemed more fundamental than an inconsistency, though.
This comes up again in Patrick Hamilton’s brilliant Hangover Square, where the central character suffers from some kind of schizophrenia. At periodic intervals he kind of blacks out, even though he remains conscious throughout the attacks. (‘It was as though a shutter had fallen’; ‘as though one had blown one’s nose too hard and the outer world had become suddenly dim’; ‘as though he had been watching a talking film, and all at once the sound-track had failed’ – because George Bone cannot properly recall the last attack, he searches for fresh ways to describe each new one.) And of course it doesn’t quite make sense, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing when the attacks occur, except he does, really; and he doesn’t know who anyone is any more, except he manages to retain just enough information to make Hamilton’s plot work. And it really doesn’t matter, because this book isn’t about schizophrenia. It’s about an exhausted city on the brink of war – it’s set in London at the beginning of 1939 – and about shiftless drunken fuckups, and it feels astonishingly contemporary and fresh. You may remember that I wanted to read Hamilton because my current favourite rock-and-roll band is naming an album after one of his books, and if that seems like a piss-poor (and laughably unliterary) reason to dig out a neglected minor classic, well, I’m sorry. But I got there in the end, and I’m glad I did. Thank you, Marah. Oh, and George Bone in schizophrenic mode has a hilarious and unfathomable obsession with a town called Maidenhead, which is where I grew up, and which has been for the most part overlooked, and wisely so, throughout the entire history of the English novel. Bone thinks that when he gets to Maidenhead, everything’s going to be all right. Good luck with that, George!
I bought Mark Salzman’s True Notebooks a couple of months ago, after an interview with the author in the Believer. I am beginning belatedly to realize that discovering books through reading about them in the Believer, and then writing about them in the Believer – as I have done once or twice before – is a circular process that doesn’t do you any favours. You’d probably like to read about a book you didn’t read about a while back. Anyway, as the interview implied, this is a pretty great book, but, boy is it sad.
True Notebooks is about Mark Salzman’s gig teaching writing at Central Juvenile Hall in LA, where just about every kid is awaiting trial on a gang-related murder charge. Salzman’s just the right person to attempt a book of this kind. He’s empathetic and compassionate and all that jazz, but he’s no bleeding-heart liberal. At the beginning of the book, he lists all the reasons why he shouldn’t get involved in this kind of thing. They include ‘Students all gang-bangers’, ‘Still angry about getting mugged in 1978’, and, even less ambiguously, ‘Wish we could tilt LA County and shake i
t until everybody with a shaved head and tattoos falls into the ocean.’ Towards the end of the book, he attends the trial of the student he loves the most, listens to all the extenuating circumstances, and finds himself going to bed that night with a broken heart, just as he feared he would. However, his sadness is engendered ‘not because of what the legal system was doing to young people… I had to wrap my mind around the fact that someone I had grown so fond of, and who seemed so gentle, had been foolish enough to go to a movie theater carrying a loaded gun, violent enough to shoot three people with it – two of them in the back – and then callous enough to want to go to a movie afterwards.’
I don’t want to give the impression that True Notebooks is unreadable in its grey-grimness, or unpalatably preachy. It’s consistently entertaining, and occasionally bleakly funny. ‘“How about describing a time you helped someone?”’ Salzman suggests to a student who is struggling for a topic to write about.
‘Mm… I never did anything that nice for anybody.’
‘It can be a small thing.’
‘Mm… it’s gonna have to be real small, Mark.’
This is one of those books where the characters learn and grow and change, and we’ve all read countless novels and seen countless films like that, and we know what to expect: redemption, right? But True Notebooks is real, so the characters learn and grow and change, and then get sentenced to thirty-plus years in prison, where God knows what fate awaits them. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Salzman thanks the students for making him decide to have children of his own. It might not be much when set against the suffering and pain both caused and experienced by the kids he teaches, but it’s all we’ve got to work with, and I’m disproportionately glad he mentioned it: when I’d finished True Notebooks, Salzman’s kids were all I had to keep me going. I’m enjoying The Long Firm, Jake Arnott’s clever and vivid novel about London’s gangland in the 1960s, but I think perhaps True Notebooks spoiled it for me a little. Gangland, gangs, guns, murder… none of it is as much fun as you might think.
Next month I’m going to read David Copperfield, the only major Dickens I haven’t done yet. I’ll probably still be reading it the month after, too, so if you want to take a break from this column, now would probably be the time to do it. I’ve been putting it off for a while, mostly because of the need to read loads of stuff that I can use to fill up these pages, but I’m really feeling the need for a bit of Dickensian nutrition. I don’t know what I’ll find to say about it, though, and I’m really hoping that Jose Antonio Reyes can help me out of a hole. Are thirty-yard thunderbolts better than Dickens at his best? I’ll bet you can’t wait to find out.
MAY 2004
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx – Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
What Narcissism Means to Me – Tony Hoagland
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (twice)
BOOKS READ:
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress. What’s that chinking noise? It’s the sound of the assiduous creative-writing student hitting bone. You can’t read a review of, say, a Coetzee book without coming across the word ‘spare’, used invariably with approval; I just Googled ‘J. M. Coetzee + spare’ and got 907 hits, almost all of them different. ‘Coetzee’s spare but multi-layered language’, ‘detached in tone and spare in style’, ‘layer upon layer of spare, exquisite sentences’, ‘Coetzee’s great gift – and it is a gift he extends to us – is in his spare and yet beautiful language’, ‘spare and powerful language’, ‘a chilling, spare book’, ‘paradoxically both spare and richly textured’, ‘spare, steely beauty’. Get it? Spare is good.
Coetzee, of course, is a great novelist, so I don’t think it’s snarky to point out that he’s not the funniest writer in the world. Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you’re doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they’re the first things to go. And there’s some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don’t get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words – entirely coincidentally, I’m sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I’m sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there’s nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound like manly, back-breaking labour because it’s such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It’s also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers – treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won’t mind! Have you ever looked at the size of books in an airport bookstall? The truth is that people like superfluity. (And, conversely, the writers’ writers, the pruners and the winnowers, tend to have to live off critical approval rather than royalty cheques.)
Last month, I ended by saying that I was in need of some Dickensian nutrition, and maybe it’s because I’ve been sucking on the bones of pared-down writing for too long. Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town! If you want to talk about books in terms of back-breaking labour, then maybe we should think about how hard it is to write a lot – long books, teeming with exuberance and energy and life and comedy. I’m sorry if that seems obvious, but it can’t always be true that writing a couple of hundred pages is harder than writing a thousand.) At one point near the beginning of the book, David runs away, and ends up having to sell the clothes he’s wearing for food and drink. It would be enough, maybe, to describe the physical hardship that ensued; but Dickens being Dickens, he finds a bit part for a real rogue of a secondhand clothes merchant, a really scary guy who smells of rum and who shouts things like ‘Oh, my lungs and liver’ and ‘Goroo!’ a lot.
As King Lear said – possibly when invited into Iowa as a visiting speaker – ‘Reason not the need.’ There is no need: Dickens is having fun, and he extends the scene way beyond its function. Rereading it now, it seems almost to have been conceived as a retort to spareness, because the scary guy insists on paying David for his jacket in halfpenny instalments over the course of an afternoon, and thus ends up sticking around for two whole pages. Could he have been cut? Absolutely he could have been cut. But there comes a point in the writing process when a novelist – any novelist, even a great one – has to accept that what he is doing is keeping one end of a book away from the other, filling up pages, in the hope that these pages will move, provoke and entertain a reader.
Some random observations:
1) David Copperfield is Dickens’s Hamlet. Hamlet is a play full of famous quotes; Copperfield is a novel full of famous characters. I hadn’t read it before, partly because I was under the curious misapprehension that I could remember a BBC serialization that I was forced to watch when I was a child, and therefore would be robbed of the pleasures of the narrative. (It turns out that all I could remember was the phrase ‘Barkis is willing’, and Barkis’s willingness isn’t really the book’s point.) So I really had no idea that I was going to run into both Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber, as well as Peggotty, Steerforth, Betsey Trotwood, Little Em’ly, Tommy Traddles and the rest. I’d presumed Dickens would keep at least a couple of those back for some of the other novels I haven’t read – The Pickwick Papers, say, or Barna
by Rudge. But he’s blown it now. That might be an error on his part. We shall see, eventually.
2) Why do people keep trying to make movie or TV adaptations of Dickens novels? In the first issue of the Believer, Jonathan Lethem asked us to reimagine the characters in Dombey and Son as animals, in order to grasp the essence of these characters, and it’s true that only the central characters in a Dickens novel are human. Here’s Quilp, in The Old Curiosity Shop, terrifying Kit’s mother with ‘many extraordinary annoyances; such as hanging over from the side of the coach at the risk of his life, and staring in with his great goggle eyes… dodging her in this way from one window to another; getting nimbly down whenever they changed horses and thrusting his head in at the window with a dismal squint…’ And here’s Uriah Heep: ‘hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he went to sleep… high-shouldered and bony… a long, lank skeleton hand… his nostrils, which were thin and pointed, with sharp dints in them, had a singular and most uncomfortable way of expanding and contracting themselves; that they seemed to twinkle instead of his eyes, which hardly ever twinkled at all.’ So who would you cast as these two? If the right actors ever existed, I’m betting that they wouldn’t be much fun to hang out with on set, what with having no social lives, or girlfriends, or prospects of working in anything else ever, apart from Copperfield 2: Heep’s Revenge. And once these cartoon gremlins take corporeal form, they lose their point anyway. Memo to studios: a mix of CGI and live action is the only way forward. True, it would be expensive, and true, no one would ever want to pay to watch. But if you wish to do the great man justice – and I’m sure that’s all you Hollywood execs think about, just as I’m sure you’re all subscribers to the Believer – then it’s got to be worth a shot.