As I hadn’t noticed the publication of Random Family, I caught up with the reviews online. They were for the most part terrific, although one or two people wondered aloud whether LeBlanc’s presence might not have affected behaviour and outcome. (Yeah, right. I can see how that might work for an afternoon, but a whole decade? Stick a writer in a corner of the room and watch the combined forces of international economics, the criminal justice system, and the drug trade wither before her pitiless gaze.) ‘I believe I had far less effect than anybody would imagine,’ LeBlanc said in an interview, with what I like to imagine as wry understatement. I did come across this, however, the extraordinary conclusion to a review in the Guardian:
It is only by accident, in the acknowledgements, that the book finally confronts the reader with the ‘American experience of class injustice’that is ostensibly its subject. So many institutions, so many funds and fellowships, retreat centres and universities, publishers, mentors, editors, friends, formed a net to support this one writer.
Nothing comparable exists to hold up the countless Cocos and Jessicas…
But the tougher question is why the stories of poor people – and not just any poor people but those acquainted with chaos and crime, those the overclass likes to call the underclass – are such valuable raw material, creating a frisson among the literary set and the buyers of books? Why are their lives and private griefs currency for just about anyone but themselves?
First of all: ‘by accident’? ‘BY ACCIDENT’? Those two words, so coolly patronizing and yet, paradoxically, so dim, must have made LeBlanc want to buy a gun. And I think a decent lawyer could have gotten her off, in the unfortunate event of a shooting. She spends ten years writing a book, and a reviewer in a national newspaper doesn’t even notice what it’s about. (It’s about the American experience of class injustice, among other things.) Second: presumably the extension of the argument about grants and fellowships and editors is that they are only appropriate for biographies of bloody, I don’t know, Vanessa Bell; I doubt whether ‘the support net’ has ever been put to better social use.
And last: if you get to the end of Random Family and conclude that it was written to create ‘a frisson’, then, I’m sorry, but you should be compelled to have your literacy surgically removed, without anaesthetic. The lives of Coco and Jessica are ‘valuable raw material’ because people who read books – quite often people who are very quick to judge, quite often people who make or influence social policy – don’t know anyone like them, and certainly have no idea how or sometimes even why they live; until we all begin to comprehend, then nothing can even begin to change. Oh, and there’s no evidence to suggest that Coco and Jessica resented being used in this way; there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they got it. But what would they know, right?
It’s not humourless, either, although of necessity the humour tends to be a little bleak. When Coco is asked, as part of her application, for an essay entitled ‘Why I Want to Live in Public Housing’, she writes simply, ‘Because I’m homeless.’ And a description of the office Christmas party thrown by Jessica’s major-duty drug-dealing boyfriend Boy George is hilarious, if you’re able to laugh at the magnitude of your misapprehensions concerning the wages of sin. (The party took place on a yacht. There were 121 guests, who ate steak tartare and drank twelve grand’s worth of Moët, and who won Hawaiian trips and Mitsubishis in the raffle. The Jungle Brothers, Loose Touch and Big Daddy Kane performed. Are you listening, Spree?)
George is banged up in the end, of course, so mostly Jessica and Coco are eating rice and beans, when they’re eating at all, and moving from one rat-infested dump to the next. Luckily we don’t have poverty in England, because Tony Blair eradicated it shortly after he came to power in 1997. (Note to Guardian reviewer – that was a joke.) But American people should really read this book. That’s ‘should’ as in, It’s really good, and ‘should’ as in, You’re a bad person if you don’t.
I warned you that this was going to be a non-fiction month. I started three novels, all of them warmly recommended by friends or newspapers, and I came to the rather brilliant conclusion that not one of them was David Copperfield, the last novel I read, and the completion of which has left a devastating hole in my life. So it seemed like a good time to find out about Coco and Jessica and Bobby Fischer, real people I knew nothing about. Bobby Fischer Goes to War isn’t the most elegantly written book I’ve ever read, but the story it tells is so compelling – so hilarious, so nutty, so resonant – that you forgive it its prose trespasses.
When Fischer played Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 I was fifteen, and not yet worrying about whether anyone was pregnant. You heard about chess all the time that summer, on the TV and on the radio, and I presumed that you always heard about chess in the year of a World Chess Championship, that I’d simply been too young to notice the previous tournament. That happened all the time when you were in your early teens: things that only rolled around every few years, like elections and Olympics, suddenly assumed a magnitude you’d never known they possessed, simply because you were more media-aware. The truth in this case was, of course, that no one had ever talked about chess before, and no one ever would again, really. Everyone was talking about Fischer: Fischer and his refusal to play, Fischer and his demands for more money (he just about bankrupted an entire country by demanding a bigger and bigger chunk of the purse, and then refusing to allow the Icelanders to recoup it through TV and film coverage), Fischer and his forfeit of the second game, Fischer and his absence from the opening ceremony… You could make an absolutely gripping film of Reykjavik’72 that would end with the very first move of the very first match, and that would be about pretty much everything.
Tony Hoagland is the sort of poet you dream of finding but almost never do. His work is relaxed, deceptively easy on the eye and ear, and it has jokes and unexpected little bursts of melancholic resonance. Plus, I pretty much understand all of it, and yet it’s clever – as you almost certainly know, contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century. If something doesn’t give you even a shot at comprehension in the first couple of readings, then my motto is ‘Fuck it’, but I never swore once. They can use that as a blurb, if they want. They should. Who wouldn’t buy a poetry book that said ‘I never swore once’ on the cover? Everyone would know what it meant. And isn’t What Narcissism Means to Me a great title?
I cheated a little with What Narcissism Means to Me – I read it last month, immediately after my night on the town with the Spree. But I wanted this clean Copperfield line in my last column, and anyway I was worried that I’d be short of stuff this month, not least because it’s been a big football month. Arsenal lost the Champions League quarterfinal to Chelsea, lost the FA Cup semi to Man Utd, and then, just this last weekend, won the Championship. (The two losses were in knock-out competitions. The Championship is what counts, really. That’s what we’re all telling ourselves here in Highbury.) So on Sunday night, when I should have been reading stuff, I was in a pub called the Bailey, as has become traditional on Championship nights, standing on a chair and singing a comical song about Victoria Beckham. To be honest, I thought if I threw in some poetry, you might like me more. I thought I might even like myself more. Anyway, the standing on the chair and singing wasn’t as much fun as the consumption of contemporary literature, obviously, but, you know. It was still pretty good.
IMPOSSIBLE DREAM
by TONY HOAGLAND
In Delaware a congressman
accused of sexual misconduct
says clearly at the press conference
speaking
right into the microphone
that he would like very much
to do it again.
It was on the radio
and Carla laughed
as she painted, Die, You Pig
in red nail polish
on the back of a turtle
sh
e plans to turn loose tomorrow
in Jerry’s backyard
We lived near the high school that year
and in the afternoons, in autumn,
you could hear the marching-band rehearsals
from the stadium:
off-key trumpets smeared and carried by the wind,
drums and weirdly-bent trombones:
a ragged ‘Louie Louie’
or sometimes, ‘The Impossible Dream’.
I was reading a book about pleasure,
how you have to glide through it
without clinging,
like an arrow,
passing through a target,
coming out the other side and going on.
Sitting at the picnic table
carved with the initials of the previous tenants;
thin October sunlight
blessing the pale grass –
you would have said we had it all –
But the turtle in Carla’s hand
churned its odd, stiff legs like oars,
as if it wasn’t made for holding still,
and the high-school band played
worse than ever for a moment
as if getting the song right
was the impossible dream.
JULY 2004
BOOKS BOUGHT:1
The Invisible Woman – Claire Tomalin
Y: The Last Man Vols 1–3 – Vaughan, Guerra, Marzan Jr, Chadwick
I Never Liked You – Chester Brown
David Boring – Daniel Clowes
The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist – Michael Chabon et al.
Safe Area Gorazde – Joe Sacco
Not Entitled – Frank Kermode
BOOKS READ:
Train – Pete Dexter
This Is Serbia Calling – Matthew Collin
The Invisible Woman – Claire Tomalin
Y: The Last Man Vols 1–3 – Vaughan, Guerra, Marzan Jr, Chadwick
I Never Liked You – Chester Brown
David Boring – Daniel Clowes
If you wanted to draw a family tree of everything I read and bought this month – and you never know, it could be fun, if you’re a writer, say, or a student, and there are several large holes in your day – you’d have to put McSweeney’s 13 and Pete Dexter’s novel Train right at the top.2 They’re the Adam and Eve here, or they would be if Adam and Eve had been hermaphrodites, each able to give birth independently of the other. McSweeney’s 13 and Train never actually mated to produce a beautiful synthesis of the two; and nor did any of the other books actually get together, either. So it would be a pretty linear family tree, to be honest: one straight line coming out of McSweeney’s 13, because McSweeney’s begat a bunch of graphic novels (McSweeney’s 13, edited by Chris Ware, is a comics issue, if you’re not from’round these parts), and another straight line coming out of Train, which leads to a bunch of non-fiction books, for reasons I will come to later. Train didn’t directly beget anything, although it did plant some seeds. (I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Well, if Train and McSweeney’s 13 never actually mated, and if Train never directly begat anything, then how good is this whole family-tree thing? And my answer is, Oh, it’s good. Trust me. I have a writer’s instinct.) Anyway, if you do decide to draw the family tree, the good news is that it’s easy; the bad news is that it’s boring, pointless and arguably makes no sense. Up to you.
Pete Dexter’s Train was carefully chosen to reintroduce me to the world of fiction, a world I have been frightened of visiting ever since I finished David Copperfield a couple of months back. I’ve read Dexter before – The Paperboy is a terrific novel – and the first couple of chapters of Train are engrossing, complicated, fresh and real, and I really thought I was back on the fictional horse. But then, in the third chapter, there is an episode of horrific violence, graphically rendered, and suddenly I was no longer under the skin of the book, the way I had been; I was on the outside looking in. What happens is that in the process of being raped, the central female character gets her nipple sliced off, and it really upset me. I mean, I know I was supposed to get upset. But I was bothered way beyond function. I was bothered to the extent that I struck up a conversation with the author at periodic intervals thereafter. ‘Did the nipple really have to go, Pete? Explain to me why. Couldn’t it have just… nearly gone? Or maybe you could have left it alone altogether? I mean, come on, man. Her husband has just been brutally murdered. She’s been raped. We get the picture. Leave the nipple alone.’
I am, I think, a relatively passive reader, when it comes to fiction. If a novelist tells me that something happened, then I tend to believe him, as a rule. In his memoir Experience, Martin Amis recalls his father, Kingsley, saying that he found Virginia Woolf’s fictional world ‘wholly contrived: when reading her he found that he kept interpolating hostile negatives, murmuring “Oh no she didn’t” or “Oh no he hadn’t” or “Oh no it wasn’t” after each and every authorial proposition’; I only do that when I’m reading something laughably bad (although after reading that passage in Experience, I remember it took me a while to shake off Kingsley’s approach to the novel). But in the nipple-slicing incident in Train, I thought I could detect Dexter’s thumb on the scale, to use a brilliant Martin Amis phrase from elsewhere in Experience. It seemed to me as though poor Norah lost her nipple through a worldview rather than through a narrative inevitability; and despite all the great storytelling and the muscular, grave prose, and the richness and resonance of the setup (Train is a golf caddy in 1950s LA, and the novel is mostly about race) I just sort of lost my grip on the book. Also, someone gets shot dead at the end, and I wasn’t altogether sure why. That’s a sure sign that you haven’t been paying the right kind of attention. It should always be clear why someone gets shot. If I ever shoot you, I promise you there will be a really good explanation, one you will grasp immediately, should you live.
While I was in the middle of Train, I went browsing in a remainder bookshop, and came across a copy of Frank Kermode’s memoir Not Entitled. I knew of Kermode’s work as a critic, but I didn’t know he’d written a memoir, some of which is about his childhood on the Isle of Man, and when I saw it, I was seized by a need to own it. This need was entirely created by poor Norah in Train. There would be no nipple-slicing in Not Entitled, I was sure of it. I even started to read the thing in a cab on the way home, and although I gave up pretty quickly (it probably went too far the other way – it’s a delicate balance I’m trying to strike here), it was very restorative.
I bought Claire Tomalin’s gripping, informative The Invisible Woman at the Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, London, which is full of all sorts of cool stuff: marked-up reading copies that say things like ‘SIGH here’, letters, the original partwork editions of the novels, and so on. The thing is, I really want to read a Dickens biography, but they’re all too long. Ackroyd’s is a frankly hilarious 1,140 pages, excluding notes and postscript. (It has a great blurb on the front, the Ackroyd: ‘An essential book for anyone who has ever loved or read Dickens,’ says P. D. James [my italics]. Can you imagine? You flog your way through Great Expectations at school, hate it, and then find you’ve got to read a thousand pages of biography! What a pisser!) So both the museum visit and the Tomalin book – about his affair with the actress Nelly Ternan – were my ways of fulfilling a need to find out more about the great man without killing myself.
Here’s something I found out in The Invisible Woman: the son of Charles Dickens’s mistress died during my lifetime. He wasn’t Dickens’s son, but even so: I could have met a guy who said, ‘Hey, my mum slept with Dickens.’ I wouldn’t have understood what he meant, because I was only two, and as Tomalin makes clear, he wouldn’t have wanted to own up anyway, because he was traumatized by what he found out about his mother’s past. It’s still weird, though, I think, to see how decades – centuries – can be eaten up like that.
Ackroyd, by the way, disputes that Ternan and Dickens ever had an affair. He concede
s that Chas set her up in a couple of houses, one in France, and disappeared for long stretches of time in order to visit her, but he won’t accept that Dickens was an adulterer: that sort of explanation might work for an ordinary man, he says, but Dickens ‘was not “ordinary” in any sense’. The Invisible Woman is such a formidable work of scholarship, however, that it leaves very little room for doubt. Indeed, Claire Tomalin is so consumed by her research, so much the biographer, that she actually takes Dickens to task for destroying evidence of his relationship with Nelly Ternan. ‘Dickens himself would not have welcomed our curiosity,’ she says. ‘He would have been happier to have every letter he ever wrote dealt with as Nelly…dealt with the bundles of twelve years’ intimate correspondence. [She destroyed it all.] He was wrong by any standards.’
Don’t you love that last sentence? The message is clear: if you’re a writer whose work will interest future generations, and you’re screwing around, don’t delete those emails because Claire Tomalin and her colleagues are going to need them. Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon and the rest of you, watch out. (I’m not implying, of course, that either of you is screwing around, and I’m sorry if you made that inference. It was supposed to be a compliment. It just came out wrong. Forget it, OK? And sue the Spree, not me. It was their sloppy editing.)
This Is Serbia Calling, Matthew Collin’s book about the Belgrade radio station B92 and the role it played in resisting Milosevic, has been lying around my house for a while. But when my post- McSweeney’s 13 research into comic books led me to conclude that I should buy, among other things, Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, I wanted to do a little extra reading on the Yugoslavian wars, and Collin’s book is perfect: it gives you a top-notch potted history, as well as an enthralling and humbling story about very brave young people refusing to be cowed by a brutal regime. It’s pretty funny, too, in places. If you have a taste for that hopelessly bleak Eastern European humour, then the Serbian dissenter of the 1990s is your sort of guy. You’ve got warring nationalist groups, and an inflation rate in January’94 of 313,563,558 percent (that’s on the steep side, for those of you with no head for economics) that resulted in a loaf of bread costing 4,000,000,000 dinars. You’ve got power cuts, rigged elections, a government too busy committing genocide to worry about the niceties of free speech and, eventually, NATO bombs. There are good jokes to be made, by those with the stomach for them.‘The one good thing about no electricity,’one cynic remarked during the power failures, ‘is that there’s no television telling us we’ve got electricity.’ This Is Serbia Calling is essential reading if you’ve ever doubted the power or the value of culture, of music, books, films, theatre; it also makes a fantastic case for Sonic Youth and anyone else who makes loud, weird noises. When your world is falling round about your ears, Tina Turner isn’t going to do it for you.