He was the kind of puppy that would lick any hand that he was afraid to bite.

The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald

The Way Some People Die is where MacDonald stops imitating Chandler and Hammet and becomes his own writer. It’s the best of the Lew Archer series so far (it’s number three) and it’s as twisted a piece of classic hardboiled as you could wish to read.

The cover above is the one I have, from Black Lizard which is a Vintage Crime imprint. It’s a great cover, and physically a nice book, but I couldn’t resist sharing this older cover with you which I also love.

Lew Archer is hired by a concerned mother to find her wayward daughter., Galatea. The daughter is “crazy for men”, and now she’s disappeared with one leaving a good job as a nurse behind and with the only news being a postcard from San Francisco. It’s not much of a case, girls leave home all the time, but Archer agrees to make some easy inquiries. Before he leaves the mother’s house he takes a look at a photo of Galatea:

Pretty was hardly the word. With her fierce curled lips, black eyes and clean angry bones she must have stood out in her graduating class like a chicken hawk in a flock of pullets.

As you’d expect, it’s not as simple as a young woman who’s grown up and left home. Archer isn’t the only person looking for Galatea and the man she ran away with may be as much a danger to her as the people she’s hiding from. All this and somewhere out there is a package that people are prepared to kill to find (yup, there’s a MacGuffin).

What follows is a byzantine web of greed, double-cross and murder with Archer painstakingly working his way through to unravel just what it is that Galatea has got herself mixed up in. Finding Galatea isn’t Archer’s problem, it’s keeping her alive once he’s found her. All that and Galatea herself is no maiden waiting to be rescued, she’s as hardboiled as the rest of them.

On the level of a detective story The Way Some People Die works extremely well. Archer’s methods make sense (mostly he talks to people, follows up connections, occasionally circles around to talk to someone again once he has new info, it’s dogged detective work). The plot though complicated isn’t needlessly so, by the end you can see why things played out as they did.

All the elements of a great hardboiled novel are present and correct. To actually be a great hardboiled novel though you need more than stock ingredients and snappy dialogue. You need to do something that others aren’t doing, or at least aren’t doing as well. You need to reach beyond the genre.

What raises this novel beyond just being solid genre work is MacDonald’s eye for psychological depth, mood, and description. The Way Some People Die is suffused with a pervasive sense of weariness and sadness.At one point Archer observes of Galatea’s mother:

She lived in a world where people did this or that because they were good or evil. In my world people acted because they had to.

Later, Archer finds himself in a motel room with a pretty girl turned junkie who makes a living conning out-of-towners into thinking they’re going to get lucky:

It was an ugly little room, walled and ceiled with cheap green plaster that reminded me of public locker rooms, furnished with one bed, one chair, one peeling veneer dresser and a rug the moths had been at. It was a hutch for quick rabbit-matings, a cell where lonely men could beat themselves to sleep with a dark brown bottle. The girl looked too good for the room, though I knew she wasn’t.

That’s great description, and it’s not the only example I could have used (there’s a brilliant blow-by-blow account of a fixed fight at one point). Good as it is though it isn’t where MacDonald becomes his own writer. It’s his characterisation that does that.

Take the character of Dowser. Dowser is a racketeer, a mobster, a rich man who lives  in a gated house surrounded by bought women and hired men. So far so standard, but as Archer comes to know Dowser he sees a pathetic and empty man terrified of his own extinction.

Dowser is short, so short that even when he wears sandals by the pool he wears ones with two-inch heels. He can’t bear to be left alone, when his men leave the room he insists Archer stays until one of them returns. He can’t live without the validation of an audience, someone to talk to, to talk at. His real communication is in money, he can’t trust anyone he isn’t paying because he doesn’t know what they want.

It’s an extraordinary portrait. Dowser is humanised, but never ceases to be terrifying. He’s a monster, a hateful creation, and  MacDonald brings out how pitiful Dowser is without the reader ever forgetting quite how dangerous Dowser is too and so without ever actually making him pitiable.

Dowser isn’t the only great character here. MacDonald is forensic, but also compassionate and in contrast to Dowser is Keith Dalloway. Dalloway is a failed actor, a man too good looking for his own good and a drunk. MacDonald takes what with most writers would be a minor supporting character and gives him humanity. What in a film would be almost a walk-on part becomes something much more here, a study of missed chances and a reminder of human frailty.

The reason great crime,  more than any other genre, overlaps with literary fiction is that great crime doesn’t just ask what, it asks why too. MacDonald could have just made Dowser another mob boss from central casting, and if he had this would still have been a very solid novel. He could have made Dalling another good-looking act0r-wannabee, and the plot wouldn’t have suffered any.

MacDonald though asks why. He makes Dowser, Dalloway, Galatea, into real people who become more than just a mob boss, a patsy and a damsel in distress/femme fatale. The result is a book that’s no longer merely influenced by Hammet and Chandler but, that stands alongside them.

the sweep of predication was more compelling than the predicated

Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner

I bought a copy of Prufrock and Other Observations recently. It’s a tiny book, containing one famous poem taught in schools throughout the English speaking world and a number of other poems that few of those schoolchildren will ever read. That’s the thing with poetry, most of us if we ever read it at all read it at school and never again. If we do read any later, we mostly read poets we already know (so only reading poems recognised as classics). The world of contemporary poetry is a tiny one, obscure to the point that by contrast translated literary fiction looks as popular as Fifty Shades of Grey. I’ve said this before I think.

Ben Lerner is a US contemporary poet. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel, and it’s a novel about poetry. It’s also almost certainly going to be in my end of year list as one of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s extremely funny, beautifully written and unlike many novels written by poets it works as well at the level of the entire book as it does at the level of the sentence.

Adam Gordon is an American poet living in Madrid. He’s on scholarship, supposedly researching links between poetry and the Spanish Civil War (links he suspects don’t really exist). In reality he spends his days on an extended slacker holiday, drinking coffee and getting stoned, each day much the same as the last.

As part of his daily morning ritual he goes to the Prado, to stand before Rogier Van der Weyden’s Descent of the Cross:

A turning point in my project: I arrived one morning at the Van der Weyden to find someone had taken my place. He was standing exactly where I normally stood, and for a moment I was startled, as if beholding myself beholding the painting, although he was thinner and darker than I. I waited for him to move on, but he didn’t. I wondered if he had observed me in front of the Descent and if he was now standing before int in the hope of seeing whatever it was I must have seen. I was irritated and tried to find another canvas for my morning ritual, but was too accustomed to the painting’s dimension ans and blues to accept a substitute. I was about to abandon room 58 when the man suddenly broke into tears, convulsively catching his breath. Was he, I wondered, just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he’d brought into the museum? Or was he having a profound experience of art?

Adam has never had a “profound experience of art”. He’s not entirely persuaded they exist, and if they do he’s jealous of those who have them. What follows is a lovely comic sequence as Adam follows the man and observes the guards’ reaction to him. The man is overcome in the next room too, leaving the guards with a quandary. Is the man having a profound experience of art, which is ostensibly why the paintings are there and what the gallery is for, or is he crazy in which case should they eject him before he damages something? If they do eject him and he was just being moved by the power of the art, have they just defeated the entire point of the gallery and their place in it?

Uncertainty is central here. Adam’s Spanish is terrible, he’s made almost no efforts to learn the language and can’t read the poets he claims to be researching.

But I couldn’t bring myself to work at prose in Spanish, in part because I had to look up so many words that I was never able to experience the motion of a sentence; it remained so many particles; never a wave; I didn’t have the patience to reread the same passage again and again until the words ceased to be mere points and became a line.

His conversations with the locals become comedies of part-understanding. A woman talks to him of home “but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn’t tell”. She says something about swimming in a lake as a child, or perhaps that lakes reminded her of being a child, or asks if Adam had enjoyed swimming as a child, or says that that something else she’d said had been childish. Adam catches words, but behind them spin penumbras of meaning, ripples cast outwards by fragments of language.

For much of the book then the bulk of Adam’s conversations are notional. Things are said to him, but whether what he understands is what was meant is far from clear. That sounds potentially annoying but instead it’s very funny, and something more than that – it’s a metaphor for poetry itself. Adam understands Spanish as a reader understands a poem. Sensed meanings, which may or may not be intended. Multiplicities of interpretations, those chosen coming as much from what Adam brings to the conversation as to what was actually said. Adam’s conversations exist in the space between him and the words he understands, like poetry exists in the gap between the reader and the words on the page.

Adam falls in with a group of Madrileños who introduce him to the Madrid art scene. One of them begins translating his poems, which he thinks are essentially fake works of no real merit (but he still becomes passionate when someone misunderstands what he’s doing with them). He starts to attend readings, including of his own works, and has to face his own disassociation and the feeling that at any moment he’ll be caught out as the charlatan he feels he is. Again there’s a mismatch of understanding, not now of language but of how others clearly view Adam and how he views himself.

Later, after the first reading of his work, he reflects on his poetry and on the relationship between poetry generally with Franco and to fascism, with the world:

I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without  even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I’d participated in that evening, then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.

When the Madrid bombings occur Adam finds himself present at history. He wants to be part of it, but really he’s at best an observer. He’s not a Madrileño, he’s just a guy who was in town when the bombings happened. What do his shards of poetry mean against dead bodies, shattered limbs? Nothing of course, they’re perfectly useless.

At risk of being political that’s what those who speak of cultural dividends, of the creative industries, of the commercial benefits to a thriving art scene all utterly miss. Art is useless. It doesn’t feed us, it doesn’t help keep the elderly warm or teach children employable skills or keep us safe from criminals or rogue regimes. Good art often isn’t even entertaining. If we try to justify art by reference to utility we always fail. Art is beyond utility, which is a problem for technocratic politicians who to a one cannot understand anything that cannot be monetised.

Ahem. Possibly I digress. Leaving the Atocha Station clocks in at under 200 pages. It’s full of tremendously written lines (Adam finds himself able to follow a bad Spanish poem because it is ”an Esperanto of cliches”, visiting an apartment he notes “… against one of the walls a low, Japanese looking-bed that was probably Swedish.”). It’s more though than just a collection of great sentences; it’s a comic novel that’s utterly serious.

Leaving the Atocha Station is as light or dense as you wish it to be, and while Adam may be one of the less sympathetic protagonists I’ve encountered in a while (steeped as he is in privilege and self-absorption) that in itself just becomes a reflection of the class that he, and of course Ben Lerner form part of. If art is useless, and it is, we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s dominated by the children of the well-off and by people convinced of the absolute value of their own introspection. Thankfully, they’re occasionally right about that value.

Leaving the Atocha Station has been very widely reviewed in the US, but less so in the UK. I learned about it through Just William’s Luck here (thanks Will). There’s another great review by the Guardian’s Jenny Turner here, a glowing Jeff Dyer review here and a depressingly skilled review by James Wood here (though I’m not persuaded of his Lermontov comparison). By way of contrast it’s worth reading this Amazon review by Paul Bowes, a Guardian book pages regular that I hold in huge regard (even if I do disagree with him on this occasion). In addition to all that, here‘s Tao Lin interviewing Ben Lerner (including a lovely exchange where it turns out that the art gallery passage, which was suggested to be essentially lifted from Bernhard, is actually from Lerner’s own experience making his life is an act of plagiarism).

On a final note, the title is a reference to a John Ashbery poem of the same name. The poem can be read here. Were I familiar with Ashbery’s work I could no doubt draw out some interesting conclusions about how the book relates to the poem (Adam, within the book, talks about Ashbery’s work). Since however I had to be told that’s what the title meant, I’ll have to leave that to others (Will makes some good points on that front). As Adam only speaks so much Spanish, I only speak so much poetry.

a rat became the unit of currency

Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo

Cosmopolis is a deeply quotable novel. Perhaps that’s its biggest flaw. It’s full of beautifully realised sentences, arresting slabs of prose, but taken as a whole it’s alienating and distant. It prefers idea to character, concept to situation. It has no interest in realism. It’s my first DeLillo, and apparently one of his weaker novels. If it is a lesser DeLillo that’s impressive, because even flawed it’s more interesting than many author’s at their peak.

The story, such as there is, is wildly improbable both in its overall scope and in its particular details. Eric Packer, software entrepeneur and billionaire, wants to take his limo across town for a haircut. He’s advised that the president’s in town and traffic is expected to be gridlocked. He insists though, and is carried glacially across Manhattan as around him whirl anti-capitalist riots, a Sufi hip-hop star’s funeral and what his security people tell him is a credible threat to his own life.

Packer’s limo is where most of the novel’s action takes place. The year is ostensibly 2000, but it isn’t really. It’s the future, the near future, just around the corner. The future that’s always just around the corner so close that we can see its outlines but not yet quite in view.

Packer’s limo is filled with screens, information, the highest of high technology. When asked why he’s not working in his office it’s evident that the question is a non-sequitur. His office is wherever he is; the concept of office is no longer meaningful. His staff come to him through the day, Packer receiving them like the contemporary royalty that he is. Sherman McCoy has been replaced by the new masters of the universe, born of internet IPOs and pure market speculation.

Packer has bet heavily against the Yen. It should be a good bet, because the Yen is at an unsustainable high. The Yen though, against all expectations, continues to rise. Packer is losing millions, tens of millions, more, amounts so vast they become meaningless. His wealth is beyond spending. It’s virtual, imaginary yet very real. 

I read an article once about the interest Bill Gates earns on his fortune and what he would need to do to spend faster than it accumulates. The answer was that practically he couldn’t. His wealth is now so vast it’s independent of him. It increases regardless of what he does. He is no longer necessary to it.

Conversations in the novel are far from naturalistic; thick with flat statements and answerless questions. This is a novel where the characters largely speak in monologues.

“There’s a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He’s supposed to resign any time now,” she said. “Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn’t even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing.”

Nobody of course speaks like that. That’s really not the point though. This is language as poetry, language as vehicle. Cosmopolis here is capturing that sense of a system become greater than its parts. Vast currents of capital and information eddy and flow around us, shaping our lives in ways that no single person is equipped to comprehend. Capital here is abstract, no longer a factory or farm but an algorithm spitting out trading strategies from a black box (and that’s not hyperbole, google black box trading).

By way of example, a scant few years ago I received an email at work that I didn’t understand. It talked about problems in the money markets, a sector I don’t personally work in and so only have a passing familiarity with. What it meant was unclear, but the sense of panic was palpable. I wouldn’t normally have received emails from that team, we did no business together, but this was firmwide.

Soon after the world faced fiscal armageddon. Five years on economies remain mired in recession. Youth unemployment in  Greece and Spain exceeds 50%. What happened? No factories burned down (except in riots, but they were an effect, not a cause). There were no unexpected wars. Instead vast abstract forces failed to operate as they had been expected to, and millions of lives came crashing down.

Returning to Cosmopolis (not that I’ve actually left it of course), it’s noticeable that DeLillo doesn’t care to give Packer much by way of inner life, nor to make him remotely sympathetic. Packer is an emblem, a vision of distant corporate elites, a fantasy rather than a person.  Packer lives in abstracts, reads Einstein’s Special Theory in English and German and poems composed mostly of spaces between the words. “He liked paintings that his guests did not know how to look at. The white paintings were unknowable to many, knife-applied slabs of mucoid color. The work was all the more dangerous for not being new. There’s no more danger in the new.”

Packer leaves the car mostly for sex, with his art-dealer lover, with one of his security team. Through the day he keeps coincidentally encountering his wife, equally rich but of old money (another strand of our new aristocracy, which has subsumed the old aristocracy).

She was in her mid-twenties, with an etched delicacy of feature and large and artless eyes. Her beauty had an element of remoteness. This was intriguing but maybe not. Her head rode slightly forward on a slender length of neck. She had an unexpected laugh, a little weary and experienced, and he liked the way she put a finger to her lips when she wanted to be thoughtful. Her poetry was shit.

Cosmopolis isn’t all high concept. There’s a comic strand running through it where after each of Packer’s extra-marital flings he runs by chance into his wife and has to explain why he smells as if he’s just had sex. The prose is frequently quite lovely as you’d expect of DeLillo,  and while it’s not a true representation of what the world of finance is actually like nor does it set out to be. Like Ballard, DeLillo isn’t trying here to show how things actually are, but rather to show what the experience of them is like.

The concept though is never far away. Cosmopolis is, in a very real sense, a science fiction novel. Not just because it contains items of technology that don’t actually exist yet (a gun with built in voice operated security system is the most obvious example, or Packer’s screens which start showing events before they happen), but because of it’s desire to explore not who but where we are. If only though more science fiction had prose like this:

He saw a police lieutenant carrying a walkie-talkie. What entered his mind when he saw this? He wanted to ask the man why he was still using such a contraption, still calling it what he called it, carrying the nitwit rhyme out of the age of industrial glut into smart spaces built on beams of light.

In the end it’s the traditional elements of Cosmopolis that are it’s weakest (a point made by John Updike in his NYT review, which mostly I think misses the point of the book, but which does have the unnerringly accurate summation of Cosmopolis as “Nouveau roman meets Manhattan geography, under sci-fi moonlight.”).  As the novel draws to its close Packer’s encounter with his would-be assassin gains importance, but of course I don’t care. Packer’s not real, what does it matter if he lives or dies? The book comes to focus on an existential sense of becoming oneself through a flensing away of the extraneous, but other books have said that and said it better. Here it risks becoming trite (“Now he could begin the business of living.”)

Pacing becomes a problem. For such a short novel this is a very slow book, and that’s fine until it comes near its destination. As Packer’s day begins to close there’s a sense that the novel’s already done. A violent encounter between Packer and one of his guards feels almost tacked on, physical violence almost tasteless in this context or in any event irrelevant. The action is abstract, the descent into the real almost trivial (which is likely the point, but even if it is that doesn’t mean it works).

The end result is a book that doesn’t entirely succeed, but one which despite its failures has stuck with me after reading it. It’s provocative not in a cheap way, but because it forces the reader to think. When Packer contemplates the foreign exchange markets he finds “… beauty and precision here, hidden rhythms in the fluctuations of a given currency.” 

There’s a truth in that line about beauty and precision, because in a way the markets are beautiful in their summation of so many patterns of human effort and desire into a number or set of numbers, elegantly expressed. At the same time, it is not a human beauty. DeLillo shows us the language of the markets, which is the language of our time, and if it is alienating it is because the world it depicts is alienated.

“You know what anarchists have always believed.” “Yes.” “Tell me,” she said. “The urge to destroy is a creative urge.” “This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed. Old markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future.”

I mentioned a John Updike review above, which I didn’t personally particularly like (criticising Cosmopolis for implausibility is a bit like criticising Revolutionary Road for not being funnier, it’s missing the point). A better review to my mind is Blake Morrison’s at The Guardian, which can be found here. I’ve not found reviews of this at my usual blog haunts, but if I’ve missed one please do let me know in the comments. Also, prior to this post I wrote a post about the state of contemporary Anglo-American literature. That post was inspired in part by my thoughts on Cosmopolis, and is here.

Finally, for the curious, the flaws of the film are the flaws of the book. It changes a few details, but by and large it’s incredibly faithful. Perhaps too much so. Robert Pattinson is actually very good as Eric Packer.

Packing was always a good time.

Factotum, by Charles Bukowski

Some authors just resonate. Not for everyone. But for their readers. It turns out that I’m one of Bukowski’s readers.

Back in December 2009 I read Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office. I wrote about it here and I ended that review by saying that Post Office was good art. Looking back I’m comfortable with that. It is.

Factotum came four years later and there’s a sense in which it’s more of the same. Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter-ego, wanders through a series of jobs and women not doing any too well with either. He’s mostly broke, mostly drunk and for a smart guy he’s none too smart.

Here’s the opening of the book. If this grabs you the rest will. If it doesn’t then it may be he just doesn’t resonate for you.

I arrived in New Orleans in the rain at 5 o’clock in the morning. I sat around in the bus station for a while but the people depressed me so I took my suitcase and went out in the rain and began walking. I didn’t know where the rooming houses were, where the poor section was.
I had a cardboard suitcase that was falling apart. It had once been black but the black coating had peeled off and yellow cardboard was exposed. I had tried to solve that by putting black shoepolish over the exposed cardboard. As I walked along in the rain the shoepolish on the suitcase ran and unwittingly I rubbed black streaks on both legs of my pants as I switched the suitcase from hand to hand.
Well, it was a new town. Maybe I’d get lucky.

Is it a spoiler to say he doesn’t get all that lucky?

Chinaski isn’t just smart, he’s educated too. He has two years of college behind him (which in one bakery job means he’s instantly promoted to being the guy who shovels coconut flakes into a machine that then sprinkles them over the cakes coming down the line).

For Chinaski though work is just something you do to make some money. If one job doesn’t work out you just do another (you can tell it’s written in a time of full employment). As far as Chinaski can see all those people around him working hard are just making money for some other guy up the chain. In one sense he’s right. In another sense not so much. They go home after all to something better than no dinner and wine so cheap you have to hold your nose to get it down.

The problem is the price paid. As Chinaski observes, “… it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.” That still holds true. Chinaski’s willing to trade his time for money. What he’s not so willing to do is trade who he is for it.

Like Post Office before it Factotum doesn’t have much of a plot. Chinaski gets a job, lazes around or turns up drunk and gets fired. He hooks up with women, but he doesn’t treat them too well and they don’t treat him much better. One, Jan, recurs through the book and is the closest he has to a serious relationship. Neither is faithful.

What makes all this more than just depressing is the writing and the honesty. Bukowski can write. Here’s two examples. In the first he’s ill and just been brought some soup to feed him back up:

I took the salt and pepper, seasoned the broth, broke the crackers into it, and spooned it into my illness.

In this second he describes a woman in a bar.

She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.

What struck me about that first quote was its economy, coupled with that lovely and slightly poetic final image. The prose starts matter of fact, transparent and flat. Each action is clearly described and then there’s a burst of movement as broth flows down into an illness-fuelled appetite.

The second quote caught my attention for its pity and unsparing understanding. It’s desperately sad. There’s a certain compassion there, but more there’s a recognition of fact. A lack of sentiment.

Lack of sentiment is critical to Bukowski. I grew up, as I’ve probably mentioned before, on a council estate in London with my immediate parents (mother and step-father) unemployed. Bukowski writes about things I recognise from those days. He and Jan make what they call “pancakes” which are just flour and water mixed together and heated up. When I was a kid they were heated on the back of a frying pan. They’re cheap. Better if you have any butter left at all.

Chinaski and Jan use newspapers as lavatory paper, something else I remember from childhood. It saves money and you can collect them free as people throw them out. One of their big treats is a stew they make when they have a little bit of spare cash. They get vegetables, a bit of meat, and make up a huge pot of broth which lasts them for days. We did those. I looked forward to them hugely as you’d eat well for a good two or three days and the whole house would be filled with the rich smell.

The point here isn’t merely to describe what it’s like to be poor (more precisely what it’s like to be what was once called the undeserving poor, and is now called different things though the concept remains very much with us). The point is looking straight at what is and writing it down.

Bukowski’s gaze isn’t objective. No gaze can be. It is though honest and it’s as much so when examining Bukowski himself (Chinaski I should say, but the line is a thin one) as it is when it looks at anything else.

This doesn’t have the raw power of Post Office. It doesn’t have quite that intensity and insanity. If you were to read one before the other it should be Post Office. That said if Post Office had never been written this would still have got Bukowski recognised. It’s good. As I said of Post Office, it’s true.

On a final note, among the many things I read as a teenager were the Beats. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and of course Burroughs. Bukowski didn’t regard himself as a beat writer and I wouldn’t argue that he was wrong in his self-assessment. There are clear links though. A continuation of a conversation perhaps.

There’s a sense in modern mythology in which guys like Bukowski are heroes. He refused to compromise, on paper anyway (I have no idea if he did in life, though my impression is not a huge amount). His novels are highly autobiographical and the contempt Chinaski shows for his jobs and bosses is born of that refusal to settle for what he’s supposed to do and think. In the end Bukowski became an author, poet, screenwriter. That gives his life a narrative. It’s that which makes him seem heroic.

The truth is though that there are many, many Bukowskis. Many Chinaskis. Many people of both genders who go through life not compromising and accepting poverty and failure as the price of that. The difference is Bukowksi had talent, and of course a degree of luck. Chinaski is partly him, but he’s also all the Bukowskis who didn’t make it but who lived the same life anyway.

Lloyd opens a French current-affairs magazine in hopes of stealing a story idea

The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman

Ever since I saw His Girl Friday (easily among my favourite films) I’ve been a sucker for newsroom stories. I think of them in black and white – clacking typewriters, hot metal presses, and a host of other images all of which ceased to be relevant back when I was still in school.

What can I say? At heart I’m a romantic.

Today of course newspapers are in steep decline. Circulation numbers are plummeting and the competition from new media sources (24 hour rolling news of course, but above all the internet) is fierce. The days of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are long behind us.

The Imperfectionists is the story of one particular newspaper – a fictional English language daily based in Rome. Think The European (if you remember it) or the International Herald Tribune (where Tom Rachman used to work). It’s not quite either, but it’s in that territory.

Over eleven linked short stories (each with a different viewpoint character) and a number of brief intercalary chapters The Imperfectionists tracks the sixty year history of the “newspaper” (it’s never named). Back in the 1950s it was the creation of a rich American named Cyrus Ott who started it as a sort of hobby. In the early years of the 21st Century it struggles to pay its way and the Ott grandchildren wonder what the point of it is. For those who work there though the point is irrelevant. What else would they do? Where else would they fit in?

It’s obvious that The Imperfectionists is written by a newspaper insider. Its characters are convincing, it’s affectionate and it’s full of little details that make it easy to see how everything works and how all the fights, compromises, inspiration and desperation all come together so that another deadline is hit and another issue (good or bad) is produced.

The book opens with Lloyd. He’s notionally the Paris correspondent, he’s in his 70s, short of money and short of story ideas. His estranged wife has moved in with a man living across the hall and his twentysomething son barely speaks to him. He calls the paper:

‘Good time for a pitch?’ Lloyd asks. ‘I’m a tad busy, actually. Could you zing me an email?’ ‘Can’t. Problem with my computer.’ The problem is that he doesn’t own one; Lloyd still uses a word processor, vintage 1993. ‘I can print something and fax it over.’

Lloyd needs cash, but the paper wants stories with bite and he doesn’t have any. He pitches feature pieces, that old excuse for a long article with no news content, but the paper’s not buying. Back in the day Lloyd was a heavy hitter, but like in many industries you’re only as good as your last byline and Lloyd’s not had one of those in a while.

‘You know our money problems, Lloyd. We’re only buying freelance stuff that’s jaw-dropping these days. Which isn’t saying yours isn’t good. I just mean Kathleen only wants enterprise now. Terrorism, nuclear Iran, resurgent Russia – that kind of thing. Anything else we basically take from the wires. It’s a money thing, not about you.’

I won’t say how the story turns out. It’s funny though and neatly crafted. The same can be said for most of the stories here. What stops it being a short story collection rather than a novel is the strength of the links between them all.

Lloyd pops up again. The intercalary chapters show how major a player he used to be in the paper. Other characters feature in their own story, then come up later as supporting parts in somebody else’s. In at least one case you can see a career crash and burn and in another a career take off, both through background asides in later tales. The result is a whole that’s greater than its parts.

As well as Leo there’s a copy editor, a reader, the current proprietor, the corrections editor, the CFO, the obituaries writer and others. Each one works individually as a story and character portrait but over time they form a mosaic in which the whole paper can be seen. Here’s a quote from Arthur Gopal, the obituaries writer, which I rather liked:

And nothing is worse than obit interviews. He must never disclose to his subjects what he’s researching because they tend to become distressed. So he claims to be working on ‘a profile.’

…

He draws out the moribund interviewee, confirms the facts he needs, then sits there, pretending to jot notes, stewing in guilt, remarking, ‘Extraordinary!’ and ‘Did you really?’ All the while, he knows how little will make it into print – decades of a person’s life condensed into a few paragraphs, with a final resting place at the bottom of page nine, between Puzzle-Wuzzle and World Weather.

There’s a lot that works here. Even little details like starting each chapter with a headline from the newspaper that comes up in that story (kooks with nukes, world’s oldest liar dies aged 126) add to the enjoyment. There is though for me one serious flaw with this novel.

Put simply, too many stories end cruelly. I’ve nothing against cruelty in fiction. I don’t expect to sympathise with characters and I don’t care if terrible things happen to them (if they didn’t there’d be a lot fewer books around). Here though the problem becomes a certain predictability.

Not all the characters meet twists in their particular tales, but plenty do and the twists are generally vicious. Some hit hard, and I welcome that, but even where they work well there’s just too many. Near the end as yet another character had a nasty comeuppance I found the effect lessened. By then I was expecting bad things to happen to not particularly good people.

For me that became a serious flaw in the book. I loved the wit of it, I loved the detail and the way the structure bound together all those personal stories into one wider account of the entire newspaper, but I didn’t love the sense of Rachman playing with his own characters. It’s ironic given my love of noir and existentialist fiction, but at times I found The Imperfectionists simply darker than was really consistent with its general tone.

The Imperfectionists is a comic novel with a dark underbelly. That’s not bad territory to be in. I’ll be writing up The Troubles soon (summary: it’s brilliant) and that’s bleak and funny in almost equal proportions and all the better for it. Somehow here though those two elements didn’t gel for me and a novel that in large part I found hugely enjoyable was let down by its penchant for twists that it just didn’t need.

Even with that criticism, and I appreciate it’s a serious one, I’m glad to have read this. It’s consistently entertaining, it’s very insightful and given it’s a first novel it’s actually a pretty impressive achievement. It’s flawed, but it’s original too and I’d rather flawed ambition than perfect mediocrity every time.

Finally, I have to extend some thanks here to Kevinfromcanada. It was his review, here, which alerted me to this one and it’s a definite find. Kevin’s an old newspaper hand so I strongly encourage anyone reading this to read his own insider’s take on it.

He was more a man of preferences than assumptions.

Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville

It’s a daunting sort of name Herman Melville. Not intrinsically, but because of Moby Dick of course. Like the names of a fair few great authors Melville’s comes with a slight expectation that reading him will be some kind of worthy, possibly improving, labour. One feels one should, but somehow the prospect never looks much fun.

Well, that’s how he’s always been for me anyway. I still haven’t read Moby Dick, but I have now read Melville’s infinitely shorter and less intimidating Bartleby the Scrivener and even though John Self of The Asylum, Trevor of themookseandthegripes and Kerry of Hungry like the Woolf all told me it was great, I was still surprised at how great it was.

The narrator is a lawyer on Wall Street. He employs two scriveners (legal clerks basically) and a copy boy in a small office which has nothing much by way of view. He’s a sensible and solid sort of man. Reliable. The sort you’d want if you had some tedious piece of property conveyancing to do and wanted it done meticulously but didn’t need any particularly creative thinking being put into it.

His first scrivener is nicknamed Turkey and is dependable before lunch, but has a tendency to return red-faced and irascible after it. In the morning Turkey has a careful hand. In the afternoon however it’s smudges, dripped ink and a more incautious approach than is perhaps entirely appropriate.

Alongside Turkey is Nipper. Nipper has poor digestion. In the mornings he’s irritable and difficult and his concentration is poor. After lunch though his stomach settles and his work is as good as Turkey’s was in the morning. Here’s Nipper struggling with the table he works at:

Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this table to suit him. He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting paper. But no invention would answer. If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk:–then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back. In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted. Or, if he wanted any thing, it was to be rid of a scrivener’s table altogether.

That final sentence contains a world of frustration.

Ginger Nut is a young boy who mostly goes out to buy ginger nut biscuits for the others. It’s a well ordered office, but an extra hand would be useful. Bartleby is hired. He’s a pallid and reserved fellow who turns out at first to be highly efficient. He works quietly behind a screen stolidly ploughing through his documents without complaint. He’s a model employee.

All goes well, until one day the narrator asks Bartleby to help check a document:

It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener’s business to verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original.

This actually carried on until right into the 1980s (possibly the 1990s). A colleague of mine as a trainee used to have to sit in a room with a copy of a bond prospectus in one hand, a bottle of seven-up in the other and another trainee holding another copy of the prospectus. One read it out. The other checked what was read against his copy. The seven-up kept throats moist. If that had still been going when I trained I doubt I’d have made it to qualification.

Bartleby doesn’t like the idea much either. He’s asked to help check a document. It’s a perfectly routine part of his job. He doesn’t come into the narrator’s office so the request is repeated, more loudly. The answer comes:

“I would prefer not to.”

And that’s where things suddenly get much less funny.

I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, “I would prefer not to.” “Prefer not to,” echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a stride. “What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me compare this sheet here–take it,” and I thrust it towards him. “I would prefer not to,” said he. I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors. I stood gazing at him awhile, as he went on with his own writing, and then reseated myself at my desk. This is very strange, thought I. What had one best do? But my business hurried me. I concluded to forget the matter for the present, reserving it for my future leisure. So calling Nippers from the other room, the paper was speedily examined.

We all live by social contracts, by expectations of what is and isn’t permissible. We may dream of telling a boss to go stuff it, but mostly we don’t. Everywhere I’ve ever worked the underlying reality is that employees must do what they are told or look for another job. Employers though still mostly dress orders up in polite clothing. “Could you type this up for me please?” “I’d like you to take a note in this meeting.” “If you could turn the draft by tomorrow morning that would be great.” They’re expressed as requests, but we all know they’re not really.

What happens when someone doesn’t care about the unwritten rules? If I say to someone “could you let me have those deeds please?” and they reply “I would prefer not to” what do I do with that answer?

Actually, that one happened to me once when I was a junior lawyer, with a senior partner’s PA. I had no idea what to do. The social contact was simple. I was a fee earner. She was a PA. It was her job to give me those deeds. When she said no I was lost. I couldn’t go back to the partner and say I hadn’t been able to get the deeds because his PA didn’t want to give them to me. I had to negotiate with her. The truth was that when she broke the social contract there wasn’t actually much I could do about it.

That’s what particularly interested me here. There’s a lot in this story. There’s a great many possible interpretations (and I’ve linked to three different blogs to show some different takes). What struck me most was that it asks precisely that question of what happens when someone just doesn’t care about the social rules we all live by?

I won’t say how the story develops or what answers it has, but I will say that for a novella that opened with comic scenes worthy of The Diary of a Nobody to then go onto questions of that difficulty is no small achievement. To stay funny while doing so is simply brilliant.

In the end there’s something profoundly disturbing about Bartleby as a character. His passivity becomes both sinister and pathetic. At one point he is asked to be at least a little reasonable:

“At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,” was his mildly cadaverous reply.

And why should he be? Why should any of us be? Why should we do that which we prefer not to? Mevlille examines pity and despair and purpose and meaning (and much more besides), and he does so while being funny and without even breaking the 100 page barrier. He leaves me wanting to read more by writers such as Beckett and Kafka, and maybe even one day when I’ve finished Proust I’ll read Moby Dick itself.

It is still quite daunting though.

V, by this time was a remarkably scattered concept.

V, by Thomas Pynchon

V is a confusing novel. It’s a dense near-500 pager which ranges across continents, decades and an awful lot of characters. It has at least two main plot strands, but plot here is a generous term. It’s rich with symbolism, references and outright puns only a fraction of which I expect I got. That’s ok though, even Pynchon probably doesn’t get all of them.

Where to start? Probably where Pynchon does – with demobbed sailer Benny Profane. Profane’s a schlemihl and human yo-yo who falls in with the Whole Sick Crew in 1950s New York and through them with Schoenmaker (beauty-maker) the plastic surgeon, Dudley Eigenvalue the soul dentist and perhaps most importantly Herbert Stencil who is on a quest to track down V.

Profane’s chapters intertwine with the story of Stencil’s quest for V and the narrative soars back and forth in time between Profane’s exploits in the novel’s now and the history of V as discovered and interpreted by Stencil. Put that way it sounds almost straightforward. It’s Pynchon. Nothing is straightforward.

The obvious question is this: who or what is V? Is V a place, a person, a condition? For me V is the questing beast and Stencil its Pellinore, but your V, and his, may be very different.

As spread thighs are to the libertine, flights of migratory birds to the ornithologist, the working part of his tool bit to the production machinist, so was the letter V to young Stencil. He would dream perhaps once a week that it had all been a dream, and that now he’d awakened to discover the pursuit of V. was merely a scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the mind, in the tradition of The Golden Bough or The White Goddess.

But soon enough he’d wake up the second, real time, to make again the tiresome discovery that it hadn’t really ever stopped being the same simple-minded, literal pursuit; V. ambiguously a beast of venery, chased like the hart, hind or hare, chased like an obsolete, or bizarre, or forbidden form of sexua delight. And clownish Stencil capering along behind her, bells ajingle, waving a wooden, toy oxgoad. For no one’s amusement but is own.

I felt terribly clever when I thought of that questing beast analogy. Mostly I felt clever because I read that passage shortly after thinking of it and it seemed confirmatory. I had cracked Pynchon!

My triumph was short lived, though for me that remains a core metaphor. Before too long what had seemed to make sense no longer did. I could see tracks, but only dimly. I was confused and increasingly lost. I was Pellinore.

V is an incredibly confusing novel. It is full of lengthy digressions which may well be relevant, but to what isn’t always clear.

Profane hunts alligators in the sewers with a shotgun and learns of a priest who went mad and set up a ministry to rats (including the voluptuous Veronica) among the tunnels. In the 19th Century an English explorer despairs after perhaps seeing the horrors of Vheissu. But what is Vheissu? A hidden kingdom that only he knows the location of? A code name as some believe for Venezuela, or for Vesuvius? A young woman named Victoria gets drawn into a web of conspiracy and espionage with Vheissu at its centre but does Vheissu even exist or are the agents of the various powers each seeing shadows on the cave wall with nothing to cast them?

There are art heists in Florence and revolutionaries arrested for the wrong revolution, there is chaos and intrigue and death. The Stencil chapters form a sort of overview of the horrors of the 20th Century and the patterns and events giving birth to them, but with one notable omission that I’ll return to.

Profane’s adventures, at least at first, appear to belong to a different novel. He careens through New York with his old Navy buddy Pig Bodine, the beautiful Rachel Owlglass and a host of others. As the novel continues the Stencil and Profane chapters start to come together (forming yet another V within the novel’s structure itself) but at risk of writing a spoiler this isn’t one of those books with a great aha! at the end making sense of all that went before.

Several themes run through the novel. The conflict between the animate and the inanimate is a key one. Profane, a schlemihl, is forever at war with the inanimate world. It seems perpetually to frustrate him – devices fail, objects protrude in his path, but ultimately we are all schlemihls because the truth is that the inanimate is indifferent to us and so frustrates our ambitions without even the kindness of enmity. A bus’s brakes fail and a dozen people die – colliding with the unthinking obstinacy of the inanimate.

The quest for V is in part a quest for logic, for reason in a world that ultimately is reasonless. Stencil’s father is one of the spies involved in V’s earlier history and he has a theory of “the Situation”. A circumstance where various factors outside our control combine to create chaos and destructive change. The Situation is shaped by the heat a crowd face as they pour out of their homes to protest a hated law. Is there a cooling breeze? Is there moonlight to see by? Historians will later find human causes for whatever happened, but the truth is blinder.

The conflict between the animate and the inanimate is one sided. The inanimate merely is. It has no agenda. We, being the creatures that we are, impose meaning on a universe conspicuously lacking it.

Living as be does much of the time in a world of metaphor, the poet is always acutely conscious that metaphor has no value apart from its function; that it is a device, an artifice. So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto’s kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the “practical” half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.

Poets have been at this for centuries. It is the only useful purpose they do serve in society: and if every poet were to vanish tomorrow, society would live no longer than the quick memories and dead books of their poetry.

It’s not all serious. There’s a lot of humour in this book. At times it’s downright farcical though the absurd is rarely far from the tragic. On a page by page basis it’s a very easy read and if I had one tip for approaching it then it would be that. Just read it. Don’t worry about what it means or about what’s really going on. Relax. You’re not going to find V so you may as well just enjoy the journey.

For all the comedy though and the constant in-jokes and puns at the heart of the book is horror. Stencil’s search brings him to the story of Mondaugen – a German in South-West Africa in 1922. A rebellion is feared among the local populace and he holes up in a plantation surrounded by ravines -an impregnable castle against the Red Death stalking the land outside. As the days pass the occupants fall into the decadence of an endless party and the recreation in small scale of the aftermath of a previous uprising in 1904.

The Herero rebellion of 1904 saw what may be the 20th Century’s first genocide. A german general, von Trotha, sought to extinguish the Herero people entirely. All were to be killed, women and children included. The Germans made use of concentration camps, death marches, carried out medical experiments on prisoners, and became obsessed with the threat the Herero presented to German racial purity. One of the scientists involved later became Chancellor of Berlin University where he taught a student named Mengele.

I mentioned earlier a notable omission in this book. That omission is the Holocaust. The Mondaugen chapter explores, in frankly difficult to read detail, a conflict now forgotten which looks all too much like a dry run for what came later.

We remember the Holocaust, but in the West at least not what happened to the Herero people. Even in the face of absolute horror we create narratives and impose a pattern, a beginning and end, to events which may not be anything so tidy. History itself is a form of narrative. To make any sense of what happens we have to choose a point where it starts to happen. In doing so though we obscure as well as illuminate. The same is true for where we choose to say something ended.

We can say the Final Solution started on January 20, 1942, and that’s true and sheds light on what happened. We could say too though that it started in 1904 and that has a degree of truth also. Truth is another narrative, but truth is also millions of brutal murders. There is the logic we find in events, but also the irrevocability of the events themselves which remain the same however we interpret them.

Pynchon later came to see his equation here of the Herero genocide and the Holocaust as superficial and there’s perhaps some truth to that. Even so, he does manage to use that earlier slaughter to cast light on the later one, and that I think has merit.

I’ve talked about the imposition of narrative on history, about the human desire for meaning where really there is none and about the attempt to grapple with the Holocaust. All that is present but I could equally have picked other elements. Those themes are all present, but there’s plenty of others too.

I could have talked about the history of Kilroy and how Profane at one point becomes a human version – hanging off a rooftop with only his face and hands visible as he prepares to rob a dentist of a valuable set of antique dentures. There’s also the powerful theme of the animate incorporating elements of the inanimate – a whole article could be written (and probably has been) just about the symbolism of prostheses in this book from implanted tv remotes to glass eyes with horological designs.

I could have talked too about jazz. The whole novel is infused with the stuff even though it’s only referenced briefly. Pynchon has a core structure from which tangents fly out seemingly without reason, yet somehow manage to return to the central theme just when you thought it impossible. What’s that if not jazz? A book this dense has many interpretations. The only certainty is my failure to capture more than a fraction of them.

This is the second Pynchon I’ve read. To be blunt I thought The Crying of Lot 49 a better novel – tighter and better controlled. It’s not flawless, in particular like many great American authors Pynchon struggles with women whom he tends to reduce to plot elements rather than characters. Note this quote and its assumptions as to the reader’s gender:

Standing before his old door he knocked, though knowing from the sound of it (like we can tell from the buzz in the phone receiver whether or not she’s home) that inside was empty.

The key overall to reading V for me is to treat it like jazz. There’s no point trying to make it all fit into neat progression. All you can do is go with the flow and see where it takes you. In the end your impressions and the narrative you make from it is what’s there. The answers such as there are aren’t in the detail but the overall piece. The reader is in the position of the audience to jazzman McClintic Sphere:

He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4-1/2 reed and the sound was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual divisions prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average of 1-1/2 sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig. “I am still thinking,” they would say if you asked. People at the bar all looked as if they did dig in the sense of understand, approve of, empathize with: but this was probably only because people who prefer to stand at the bar have, universally, an inscrutable look.

If you read this there’s a good chance you won’t dig and a good chance too that if you try too hard to dig you’ll end the evening still thinking (and that might get in the way of digging too). You’re best just standing at the bar and letting it wash over you. You might still not dig, but you’ll probably at least enjoy yourself along the way.

V

By way of postscript I originally had another title in mind for this piece. It’s McClintic’s life philosophy and in the face of an insensate universe it’s as good as any other I’ve come across.

“Keep cool but care.”

The young man with a scenic cravat…

The Sexes, by Dorothy Parker

I always expected Dorothy Parker’s writing to have a sort of arid intelligence. I knew there would be clever lines, but I thought they’d come with an overpracticed quality and a rather brittle cruelty.

Parker then was a writer I’d decided not to read. What changed my mind was the current Penguin Modern Classics pocket editions. I saw the range in Waterstones on a three for two offer and there were five that I really wanted. The deal meant that a sixth one was free. I saw the Parker and thought I’d give it a try. If nothing else I thought it might have historical interest.

I haven’t heard any explanation of the logic behind the Penguin Modern Classics pocket editions but my guess is that the idea is to tempt readers into trying writers they might not otherwise take a risk on. If that is the point then for me it succeeded. Parker’s a delight and I’m a convert. I wouldn’t have read her but for these pocket editions. The way I figure it I owe the team at Penguin a drink (probably a cocktail in the circumstances).

The Sexes is a collection of five Dorothy Parker stories. The first and title story is exactly the sort of thing you might expect of Parker. Here’s how it opens:

The young man with the scenic cravat glanced nervously down the sofa at the girl in the fringed dress. Sher was examining her handkerchief; it might have been the first one of its kind she had seen, so deep was her interest in its material, form, and possibilities. The young man cleared his throat, without necessity or success, producing a small, syncopated noise.

What follows is the smallest of incidents. It’s an argument between a young couple. There’s no great metaphoric weight to it. It’s just brilliantly observed. Literature as cameo portraiture. Here’s what follows that opening:

‘Want a cigarette?’ he said.
‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you ever so much just the same.’
‘Sorry I’ve only got these kind,’ he said. ‘You got any of your own?’
‘I really don’t know,’ she said. ‘I probably have, thank you.’
‘Because if you haven’t,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t take me a minute to go up to the corner and get you some.’
‘Oh, thank you, but I wouldn’t have you go to all that trouble for anything,’ she said. ‘It’s awfully sweet of you to think of it. Thank you ever so much.’
‘Will you for God’s sake stop thanking me?’ he said.
‘Really,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know I was saying anything out of the way. I’m awfully sorry if I hurt your feelings. I know what it feels like to get your feelings hurt. I’m sure I didn’t realise it was an insult to say “thank you” to a person. I’m not exactly in the habit of having people swear at me because I say “thank you” to them.’

It goes from there. Him trying to mollify her and work out what he did. Her making him work for his apology. Like I said, it’s nothing world changing but it’s very neatly done.

The next story is The Lovely Leave. It’s well chosen because it’s an immediate change in tone. It’s a wartime story of a woman whose husband is coming home on a 24 hour leave. She wants it to be perfect. Last time he was home she was so conscious of how brief his visit was that she got too anxious and messed everything up. They ended up rowing. When he left they were barely speaking.

This time she’s determined that their time together, however short, will be lovely. She buys a new dress that she can’t really afford; makes all kinds of preparations. When he arrives though they almost immediately start to quarrel. He even tells her how much he always liked that dress on her…

There’s something very adult about The Lovely Leave. It’s impossible not to sympathise with the woman. She cares so much that she can’t stop herself from being angry at how little time they’re given and she can’t understand either why he doesn’t seem to feel the same way. As the story progresses though Parker shows that both of them merit sympathy. It’s not as simple as it seems. When is it ever?

Their problem isn’t unique to wartime. Anyone who has ever planned a special evening only to have their partner come back tired and preoccupied and barely noticing all the work that’s been done has been there. So too has anyone who’s ever come back home just wanting to unwind and turn off for a little while only to discover that their partner has made all sorts of elaborate plans. Parker here is exploring the mismatch between love and everyday life that can sometimes be so painful. It’s domestic fiction, but in the main we all live domestic lives.

From there the collection goes on to The Little Hours which is the only story I didn’t like. It’s a nightime monologue by someone who can’t sleep and involves a great deal of quotation and namedropping. It’s clever but for me it’s not more than that. In truth it’s what I expected from Parker but the good news is that it’s only one story of five and no doubt there are others who like it far more.

The remaining two stories return to what I saw as Parker’s strengths. Glory in the Daytime is about a little mouse of a woman in love with the theatre who gets a chance to meet one of her idols at the house of a more sophisticated friend. The woman’s husband is a sour man and when she shares her excitement at meeting a celebrity he sits there and snips away the joy from her, undramatically but effectively.

‘It – it isn’t so awfully nice,’ she said, ‘to spoil somebody’s pleasure in something. I was so thrilled about this. You don’t see what it is to me, to meet Lily Wynton. To meet somebody like that, and see what they’re like, and hear what they say, and maybe get to know them. People like that mean – Well they mean something different to me. They’re not like this. They’re not like me. Who do I ever see? Who do I ever hear? All my whole life, I’ve wanted to know – I’ve almost prayed that some day I could meet – Well. All right Jim.
She went out, and on to her bedroom.

Naturally the encounter isn’t all she hopes, but there’s a chance here for something more in her life than she has. It’s a chance her husband has no interest in. Parker doesn’t beat the reader over the head with the point but she captures the way some men can suffocate their wives without ever raising a hand against them. There’s many a disappointed man has taken vicious solace in ensuring that his wife’s life is no better than his.

Lastly comes Lolita (no relation). It’s the story of an aging southern Belle (“Seen from the end of a long, softly lighted room, Mrs. Ewing was a pretty woman”), her dowdy daughter and what happens when the most eligible man ever to visit their town takes an interest in that daughter. It’s a bitter chocolate of a tale with a distinct sting in its final sentence. It’s funny, but it’s back on what now seems like Parker’s territory of the way people can be cruel to each other in ways too small to easily complain of but which are no less damaging for that.

While writing this review I had to type out the various quotes I’ve used. As I did so it struck me how deceptively simple her prose is. The dialogue is all he said, she said – nobody asseverates here. Descriptions are flat and to the point, nobody is discalced. The language seems just there, transparent and unadorned.

Sometimes when I go to a new restaurant I order something very simple. Grilled chicken say. It’s hard to hide with something like grilled chicken. The quality of the ingredients and of the chef can’t help but show through. There’s no room for distracting the diner with sauces or unexpected flavours. The best chefs, a Daniel Boulud or Gordon Ramsay (back when he cooked instead of making tv programs) can make grilled chicken as fine a dish as ever you’ll eat. The mediocre ones just grill a chicken.

What makes Parker so good is her observation, her wit and (surprisingly to me) her compassion. She uses language in what seems a very simple way, but with tremendous precision. Here’s one final quote, chosen partly to demonstrate those skills but mostly just because I liked it:

Miss Noyes’ living room was done in the early modern period. There were a great many oblique lines and acute angles, zigzags of aluminum and horizontal stretches of mirror. The color scheme was sawdust and steel. No seat was more than twelve inches above the floor, no table was made of wood. It was, as has been said of larger places, all right for a visit.

There’s a recurring debate sparked by the growth of ereaders about what publishers contribute in an age where authors can self-publish electronically and readers can directly download their books onto their Kindles. Whenever it comes up some ebook advocates always argue that what’s happening today is the death of the publisher as gatekeeper and that this is a good thing. I’m not persuaded by those arguments for a number of reasons.

I’m mentioning this here because I think publishers are much more than gatekeepers. Publishers are also highlighters. They hold out a book from the vast mass of works out there and say hey, read this, we think it’s good. When a book gets chosen for the Penguin Modern Classics range that doesn’t mean I’ll like it, it doesn’t even mean I’ll think it’s any good, but it does mean I pay some attention to it. Penguin, and publishers like them, aren’t standing across a gate barring me from great books. They’re standing at the gate welcoming me inside.

The Penguin Modern Classics pocket editions are a great idea. With them Penguin effectively stopped me and said Max, we know you’re not keen to try Dorothy Parker, but this is only a little over 80 pages and it costs only £2.99. How about giving it a go? For £2.99 I discovered a new writer that I enjoyed and was surprised and impressed by. I don’t know what the future holds, but I hope it holds a place for publishers in one form or another for a long time yet.

As for Dorothy Parker, I plan to read more. Thank you Penguin.

The Sexes

He was doomed to ambivalence and desire.

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy

One of the joys of blogging is that it makes you part of a community of other bloggers. That’s good for a number of reasons not least of which is the opportunity to talk about books with like minded people. Another one of those reasons is that sometimes it exposes you to books you might otherwise have passed by.

There’s no way on my own I’d have read Maile Meloy’s short story collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It. Starkly written tales of quiet emotional desperation set in the American mid-West? That’s not my territory. I leave it to others better suited.

Sometimes though it’s good to read outside one’s normal range. Sometimes it’s good to be challenged. When both Kevin of kevinfromcanada and Trevor from themookseandthegripes praised Meloy as one of the finest writers they’d read in a fair while I had to pay attention. Unsurprisingly they were right. This is a largely excellent short story collection.

I talked above about challenge. The truth though is that this isn’t remotely a challenging read (particularly when compared to writers like Pynchon, Quin or Burn). Meloy writes prose that slips down with deceptive ease. Her stories are like cocktails where you can’t taste the alcohol. They’re smooth drinking but there’s a kick at the end.

Isn’t that a dreadful cover by the way? It makes it look like a life affirming beach read. Ugh. It hugely frustrates me how so many women writers are packaged as light entertainment regardless of their content. I wonder how many great books I’ve missed out on because they were marketed as chicklit. The US cover which you can see at Kevin or Trevor’s is vastly more apposite with its stark imagery of ice and night.

Anyway. There are eleven stories in this collection. Each is quietly and unshowily written. By and large they deal in the gulfs between people. Sometimes as in Travis, B these gulfs are physical. A young man falls in love with a teacher who takes an evening class which he attends on a bored whim. Montana is a big state though and she took the job from desperation. She has a nine hour drive each way to get there.

The problem he has isn’t just one of mileage. They’re separated by class and education too. His loneliness is like a hunger, and Meloy makes it a physical pain. I could taste his yearning. Trevor has some choice quotes from this story in his review so I won’t repeat them here but it’s excellent.

It’s a compliment to the collection to say that wasn’t my favourite tale. I’ll come back to which one was.

In Red from Green a girl goes on a camping trip with her father, her uncle and a client of her uncle’s new law firm. That client is the plaintiff in a lucrative class action lawsuit – a suit that will likely collapse if he pulls out of it.

The client shows an interest in the girl despite her being really a bit too young for that to be appropriate. Her father seems to let it slide, just as he lets slide various breaches of hunting etiquette. Just how far is the father prepared to let things go to keep this guy happy?

In Two Step a woman, Naomi, visits her best friend Alice and finds her distraught and believing her husband is cheating on her. Alice is right. Naomi knows that because she’s the one he’s cheating with. While she and Alice talk he arrives home…

In The Children a man is having an affair with the girl who used to teach all the neighbourhood kids how to swim. She’s young (compared to him anyway) and uncomplicated and vulnerable. His wife is smart and tough. Smarter and tougher than he is. He talks to another local girl with whom he nearly had an affair.

“You’re leaving Raye,” Jennie said.
He felt a surge of adrenaline, and steadied himself on the closet door. “Does it show?” he asked.
Jennie smiled. “I’ve known you since I was born,” she said. “You think that means you know me inside out, but really it means I know you.”
He thought of correcting her: he had known her before she was born. He;d watched her mother, hugely pregnant and happy, floating in the lake with her belly at the surface. Her father so proud you’d think no one had ever knocked up a pretty girl before. The two families had done everything together, before Jennie’s began to disintegrate. Jennie was his daughter’s age, two years younger than his son, and he remembered her at six in just a bikini bottom, darting in and out of the water. Or bundled in a snowsuit in winter, riding a plastic sled on her stomach across the ice. She was twelve when the marriage finally ended, and her father had sung drunkenly, here in the lake-house kitchen, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, don’t make a pretty woman your wife,” and then cried over what the divorce might do to Jennie.

He’s caught between them all. Between the safety of home and a wife who does still love him. Between the escape of a younger woman and the fantasy of the life he had when he was younger. He wants it both ways. As he bitterly reflects: “What kind of fool wanted it only one way?”

That question was answered earlier of course in Travis, B. There’s plenty of folk here would be fine with it one way. There’s plenty too who want it both though.

Meloy has a knack for the simple yet telling sentence. Lines like “Children were experiments, and his had failed.” have an almost visceral punch. I loved too “She was so young and untroubled by guilt, she could tell everything and be forgiven.” It’s a line I understand better than I would wish to.

In a sense of course that’s what this kind of fiction is often about. That beautifully crafted sentence on which a story turns. It’s a style of writing that tends not to appeal to me because it can often become technique over content. What I think takes this higher than mere form though is a knack Meloy shows for putting discomfort on the page.

Several stories feature encounters between young women and old men. There’s that daughter with the important legal client I mentioned above. There’s a man talking to the youthful girlfriend of his own daughter’s murderer. There’s the man in The Children pursued by a friend’s daughter and pursuing in turn his own children’s former swim teacher. In each of these the situation is awkward, but who it is awkard for varies.

Not everything is perfect. Spy vs. Spy, a tale of two warring brothers, I found obvious and even trite. The otherwise polished story Liliana contains a massive infodump detailing who the narrator’s grandmother was. It’s needed because she turns up at his door after her funeral, not dead after all. It’s still pretty blatant though and sticks out in a collection which is otherwise so polished. By contrast this is as clean a piece of writing as I could wish for:

Jennie Taylor sat at the kitchen table with her legs crossed, in jeans and a sweater. Her dark hair was brushed straight and smooth. Fresh air and her mother’s looks had served her well.

Unusually for me I spaced these stories out over a period of weeks. The benefit of that is that I gave each one space to breathe – something I often fail to do with short stories. Being absolutely honest when I came to write this piece up I found that I didn’t actually remember all of them. Some I had to reopen to recognise. Not every story is as good as the next. That said, different readers could easily differ as to which were best.

In the end this collection to me was about the quote I’ve used to title this review – ambivalence and desire. With its quiet desperation and middle class angst this is classic literary fiction territory. Thankfully it’s good though, and in the end that’s all that really matters.

Kevin’s review is here. Trevor’s is here. I strongly recommend both.

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It. If you’re curious, The Children was my favourite.

Keep cool, fool

The Real Cool Killers, by Chester Himes

I read (and wrote about, here) the first of Chester Himes’ Harlem detective novels back in March 2009. It was a larger than life portrait of 1950s Harlem that showed it as an absurdist abyss of poverty and violence. It was lively, funny and ultimately very angry. I liked it.

Himes didn’t just write genre fiction, in fact he didn’t even mostly write genre fiction, but it’s the Harlem detective novels for which he’s (not very well) remembered. That’s probably unfair, but serious works about the impact of racism on labour relations just aren’t as easy a sell as fast moving crime novels with oversized guns and frequently comic mayhem.

Well, it’s a year and a half later and here I am reading another of his genre novels, and I still haven’t read one of the serious ones. The funniest thing about The Real Cool Killers though is that for all it’s lurid excess and mordant humour it comes with a sucker punch. It’s hard hitting, exciting and grotesque but by the end of it all it makes real points about Harlem life. It’s a serious novel after all.

Here’s the setup. A white cola salesman named Galen is in a black bar in Harlem watching the locals dance to the jukebox. A black man takes exception to Galen’s presence and tries to cut his throat with a knife. The bartender protects Galen, and ends up cutting the knifeman’s arm off with a short-handled axe.

Galen leaves the bar, but outside gets chased down the street by another black man named Sonny who’s firing a pistol after him. Soon after, Galen is killed, shot dead in front of a teenage street gang called the Real Cool Moslems (none of whom are moslem). It looks like Galen was killed by Sonny, but Sonny’s pistol only fired blanks – he was high and looking to give someone a scare. That means there was at least a third person after Galen. It also means it really wasn’t Galen’s night.

By the time Harlem detectives Grave Digger and Coffin Ed turn up there’s a huge crowd gathered. Matters get out of hand with the teen gang. Coffin Ed opens fire and kills an unarmed gang member and shoots a bystander in the leg. It’s chaos, it’s Harlem in the 1950s and it sets the tone for a novel the entire story of which takes place in just one night.

It takes a while for the police to realise that Sonny’s gun wasn’t loaded, so when he escapes from custody they set up a dragnet over the whole area and start house to house searches for him. Nothing can get in or out. Meanwhile, Grave Digger carries out his own investigation using his local contacts and street knowledge. He has to work alone. Coffin Ed is under suspension for his two shootings and it turns out that might be for the best because as Grave Digger digs deeper he starts to realise that Coffin Ed’s own daughter may be somehow involved.

I have to admit, I rather groaned when I found out that Coffin Ed’s daughter might be involved. Even in the 1950s it must already have been a cliché. Thankfully it’s the only one and it’s at least used well.

The novel follows two main strands. One is Coffin Ed kicking down doors and beating up anyone who might know anything, determined to find out what went down. The other follows the Real Cool Moslems – black teenagers who dress up as fake arabs and who luck into hiding Sonny after he gets away from the police. Both strands get steadily darker as the night goes on. Coffin Ed finds out that there were good reasons for Galen to have enemies. Sonny finds that he might have been better off in police custody than the gang’s as their leader Sheik starts thinking of ways to amuse himself with his captive.

This is the opposite of the traditional cosy crime novel. Here the criminals aren’t cold blooded, they’re hyped up on drugs, furious or just plain malicious for the sake of it. They act on impulse and try to cover up afterwards and generally they’re not particularly competent. Grave Digger too is no Sherlock Holmes. He’s not stupid but his way of finding out whodunnit mostly involves beating people up until they tell him what they know. The whole picture is one of savage brutality and casual violence. The only white faces present are the police and the occasional visitor from outside Harlem come to enjoy an illicit thrill that they can’t get back in their part of town. Here, a white club goer complains about Grave Digger roughing up a witness in front of him, and Grave Digger responds:

“I’m just a cop,” Grave Digger said thickly. “If you white people insist on coming up to Harlem where you force colored people to live in vice-and-crime-ridden slums, it’s my job to see that you are safe.”

Grave Digger is no politer to other black men. Later that night he returns to the diner where Galen’s evening began. A couple of seats are cleared for him. The men previously in those seats object until they realise they’re dealing with a cop.

Both rose with alacrity, picked up their glasses and vacated the stools, grinning at Grave Digger obsequeiously.
“Don’t show me your teeth,” Grave Digger snarled. “I’m no dentist. I don’t fix teeth. I’m a cop. I’ll knock your teeth out.”
The men doused their grins and slunk away.

Grave Digger spends the whole novel angry. What’s fuelling that anger though is something more than the lies he’s told and the ugliness of what led to Galen’s death. What really makes Grave Digger angry is Harlem itself. It’s a place born of inequality, a place where he’s assured by someone that Galen wouldn’t have been killed for sleeping with a man’s wife because sleeping with a white man doesn’t count as infidelity – it’s just an easy way to bring some more money into the family home. Harlem is the zoo and the whites are keepers or visitors, all of them wondering why the animals behave so badly while making sure they don’t get out of their cages.

As the novel reached the end, the pointlessness of it all became inescapable. This is a book in which a fair number of people die and in which a lot of others go down for some serious time. It’s all meaningless. It’s just another night in Harlem and that’s the sucker punch I talked about at the opening of this blog entry. Everything that’s happens during the long Harlem night is exciting, it’s hardboiled, but it’s also futile and ugly and Himes wants the reader to know that. As dawn breaks the tone shifts and it’s suddenly apparent that all this adventure adds up to is some ruined lives and some ended ones. Crime novels are exciting to read, but Himes wants the reader to know that living in one isn’t nearly as entertaining.

Uptown in Harlem, the sun was shining on the same drab scene it illuminated every other morning at eleven o’clock. No one missed the few expendable colored people being held on various charges in the big new granite skyscraper jail on Centre Street that had replaced the old New York City tombs.

The Real Cool Killers