Tag: male writer

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER by Kevin Barry

It’s rare I loathe a book, but here we are.  It has many good reviews, and was longlisted for the Booker, so I am the minority in this view.  But really.  First of all, it’s all very lyrical.  This is always annoying.  Try how this potentially good piece of dialogue is ruined

Personally speaking, Maurice? My arse isn’t right since the octopus we ate in Malaga.
Is it saying hello to you, Charlie?
It is, yeah. And of course the octopus wasn’t the worst of Malaga.
…. They look into the distance. They send up their sighs. Their talk is a shield against feeling

Second of all, it’s all about tough men, and it pretends like it is supposed to show how terrible the consequences of violence are.  Meanwhile clearly this book is all about the romance of violence.  I don’t need to google the author to find out the author is a man.  It’s almost always men who like to spend their novels thinking about violence, and I don’t think we need to think that hard to find out why that might not be so interesting for women.  I just don’t need to live in their fantasy

CARRIE by Steven King

I picked up CARRIE because I read Steven King’s autobiography, and was curious to see what the book that changed his life was like.

It was his first novel,and he almost fainted when the publisher offered him $400K for it, because he was barely paying his bills at the time.  He’d actually thrown the first draft in the bin, and it only made it to the publisher at all because his wife fished it out and insisted he go on with it.  To read his autobiography, you’d think by this stage he was on the verge of past it, about to sink into a life of low income jobs, nearly missing his potential.  In reading the back cover I discover he was actually only TWENTY-SIX.  For god’s sake, Steven, I don’t think it’s even possible to waste your life already when you’re just in your twenties. It’s only in your forties you start looking down that particular barrel.  Unless of course you commit a murder and get caught.  I was listening to a podcast recently about a man who killed someone at 15, and is getting out now, 40 years later.  First thing he is going to do is have an omelette, he said.  Second thing is go to his parents graves to apologize for throwing his life away. 

It’s possible this post is going off course.  Back to CARRIE.  What I found surprising was how straightforward it was, how little plot it had, and how little real ‘horror’ was involved.  It’s essentially a “worm turns” story, though in this case the worm devours its hometown after turning.  For those who don’t know SPOILER ALERT the book is about a girl who is badly bullied at school and ends up blowing up her prom with her telekentic powers.

Apparently when this was written, horror was very much about shadowy alleys and old parchments, so it was revolutionary in its ordinary setting and conventional protagonists.  It no longer feels revolutionary, but is still a solid, engaging read, and captures very well what it was to be a teenage girl (not that surprising because Steven King you were SO YOUNG WHEN YOU WROTE IT I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT HOW YOU FELT YOU WERE WASTING YOUR LIFE.)

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS by Augusten Burroughs

Here is a book about what happens when there are not enough social workers.  Augusten Burroughs parents are getting a divorce:

My father grew hostile and remote .  . . And my mother began to go crazy.  Not crazy in a let’s paint the kitchen red! sort of way.  But crazy in a gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God sort of way.  Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax. 

She eventually give over her son to live with her psychiatrist, Dr Finch, who believes children over the age of thirteen should be completely free.  He also believes that he direction of his poop in the toilet bowl contains messages from god, as does choosing Bible verses at random.  His oldest daughter preserves his poops on an outdoor table, and checks the Bible for him for all sorts of questions.  The other children, some biological, some not, are left quite free, to knock sunroofs into the ceiling (by just making a hole), to eat dog food, and to get raped by adults.  Apparently when children are completely unsupervised it does not take long for predatory types to recognize this as an opportunity. 

At 14 he has a relationship with a 33 year old man that he believes is loving.  So too does the 33 year old, who makes such red-flag covered statements as the below:

I mean my feelings for your are so huge, I don’t think I can contain them.  Sometimes I want to hold you so tight it scares me.  Like I want to hold you until the life is gone, so you can’t ever vanish.

The book is comic, and he is close to some of his step-siblings, so it is not as bleak as the statutory rape would have you believe.  But I see from Google that the Finch family sued, arguing that much of what was in the book was fiction, and now the book  is marketed as a ‘novel’ rather than a ‘memoir’.  They are apparently amazed that someone they looked after at such a time should tell such lies about them.  So I guess it is sad either way: either it’s a sad childhood, or a sad set of lies about a childhood.  Anyway, I enjoyed it. 

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR by Daniel Defoe

I thought this would be pandemic appropriate reading.  Apparently this thought of mine has already been predicted at scale, because someone has emergency published a edition and put it on Amazon.  Truly, if people are looking to seventeenth century literature for their margin, then nothing is safe.  I’m going to go ahead and call it: this truly is late capitalism.  I don’t know what comes after this, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be good.

Perhaps this is dramatic.  The past is not usually so very different from the future.   I learn from this book is that the last pandemic to hit London (the bubonic plague in 1664) is not so very different from this one.  Try this: 

We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now.

I see then as now they were shocked by how quickly things went viral.

The story is about a man who, unlike most wealthy people, decides to try and ride out the plague in town, rather than rushing to the country.  While Defoe did not actually live through the plague, his uncle did, and most people believe this is pretty fair evocation of what it was like.  Just like today, it was hardest for the poorest: 

The truth is, the case of poor servants was very dismal, as I shall have occasion to mention again by-and-by, for it was apparent a prodigious number of them would be turned away, and it was so. And of them abundance perished, and particularly of those that these false prophets had flattered with hopes that they should be continued in their services . . .

The rich meanwhile fled easily, carrying the plague with them all over the country.  Those left behind as today found ways to work through it.  Shops made you put your money in a bowl of vinegar before your touched it. 

Other things were not like today.    While this vinegar thing does not sound like a bad idea, they had some much worse ones.  Lots of people thought writing ABRACADBRA on a piece of paper and tying it around your neck would do the trick.  Perhaps I just need to clarify, for those people who believe that e.g., 5G causes corona, but that is does not in fact work.  Indeed they had ‘dead carts’ circling around eery night, and they would holler, “Bring out your dead,” so they could take them to the pits.  Let’s end on this long piece about the pits. 

I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, though not so freely as to run myself into apparent danger, except when they dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. As near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it, about nine feet deep; but it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the water; for they had, it seems, dug several large pits before this. For though the plague was long a-coming to our parish, yet, when it did come, there was no parish in or about London where it raged with such violence as in the two parishes of Aldgate and Whitechapel.

I say they had dug several pits in another ground, when the distemper began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began to go about, which was not, in our parish, till the beginning of August. Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week; and they could not well dig them larger, because of the order of the magistrates confining them to leave no bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water coming on at about seventeen or eighteen feet, they could not well, I say, put more in one pit. But now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging in a dreadful manner, and the number of burials in our parish increasing to more than was ever buried in any parish about London of no larger extent, they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug—for such it was, rather than a pit.

They had supposed this pit would have supplied them for a month or more when they dug it, and some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such a frightful thing, telling them they were making preparations to bury the whole parish, and the like; but time made it appear the churchwardens knew the condition of the parish better than they did: for, the pit being finished the 4th of September, I think, they began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1114 bodies when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then come to lie within six feet of the surface. I doubt not but there may be some ancient persons alive in the parish who can justify the fact of this, and are able to show even in what place of the churchyard the pit lay better than I can. The mark of it also was many years to be seen in the churchyard on the surface, lying in length parallel with the passage which goes by the west wall of the churchyard out of Houndsditch, and turns east again into Whitechappel, coming out near the Three Nuns’ Inn.

Okay, these pandemics are not that similar.  I am so grateful for modern science.  These anti-vaxxers, 5G-ers, climat change deniers: to the pits with them. 

MAGICAL THINKING by Augusten Burroughs

Finally someone with some success in the field of the personal essay!  I enjoyed this one.  Burroughs is a prolific memoirist.  Wikipedia tells me that:

Burroughs’ writing focuses on subjects such as advertising, psychiatrists, religious families, and home shopping networks

This is totally humourless but also pretty accurate. He’s an alcoholic and an advertising executive who is struggling to date in New York.  He has some serious #firstworldproblems, as below, but so do we all

Last weekend, I spent Sunday in a Starbucks writing Amtrak TV spots.  I was drinking double espressos and really trying to be positive instead of enraged and spoiled.  One of my problems is that I have completely disconnected those blue envelopes my paycheck arrives in with doing any actual work.

I particularly enjoyed his problematic love life

He’s blown me off and is hoping that I’ll just get the message and go away. It’s the modern, passive, gay way to be direct.  I know this behaviour because it’s something I would do.  This is how compatible we are. 

And:

I’m starting to go a little crazy, needing desperately to be in control of the situation and feeling terrified he won’t fall in love with me and knowing that I can’t even know what my own feelings are until I know that he’s safely in love with me so then I can decide. 

And:

He knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me.  I tseems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other sixteen.

I do always wonder about this.  These writers who produce a lot of content about their own lives, how do they do it?  Physicists I guess think a lot about physics.  Memoirists think about memories.  I’m torn.  Are they having deeper lives because they are thinking about them more deeply?  Or is it just all rather creepy and they ought to get out more? 

HALF EMPTY by David Rakoff

Here is another example of how hard it is to write the personal essay.  Truly, it is a formidable form. 

I did enjoy this part, where he lays into the musical Rent for avoiding the inalienable fact that one of the hardest parts of being an artist is in fact paying rent.  He doesn’t like any suggestion that art is glamorous:

. . . the only thing that makes you an artist is making art.  And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out. 

. . . . . . most folks would opt for the old fantasy of the carnal chaos of drop clothes, easels, turpentine, ratafia-wrapped Chianti bottles  . . . forgetting momentarily the lack of financial security and the necessary hours and hours of solitude spent fucking up over and over again.

These essays may not be so wonderful, but he at least suffered over them.  Also this I  found this interesting.  Not many people will admit that children can be unattractive, and certainly not themselves as children:

Tight as a watch spring, skittish as a Chihuahua, when I wasn’t bursting into tears, I covered my over-arching trepidation with a  loud-mouthed bravura.  I was highly unpleasant.  I am not fishing here.  It dawned on me recently that even though I have published books and lived through a bout of cancer, barely a handful of people from my childhood have ever attempted to contact me, and I don’t blame them one bit. 

I did have to give up after a while though.  Try this sentence:

The House of the Future was simultaneously sleek and voluptuous; imagine a gigantic furturistic cold-water faucet: a lovely white plus sign of a building with the  mid-cetnry grace of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, gently inflated like a water wing. 

Indeed, art is hard.

AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON by Mikhail Sholokhov

Here is a novel that assumes you have a much more detailed knowledge of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks than in fact you do.

It begins in a Kossack village, and you learn all about the rural life and the casual rape of the early twentieth century.  There is, as befits any self-respecting nineteenth century Russia novel, a big cast of characters, all of whom have multiple names.  There is lots of bracingly Russian stuff. Here’s an old man:

It’s time – I’ve lived my days, I’ve served my Tsars, and drunk vodka enough in my day

Here’ a wife finding her husband drunk:

Daria thrust two fingers into his mouth, gripped his tongue, and helped him to ease himself

I mean I’ve heard of doing anything for love, but this is ridiculous.  All of this is all just very much prep for what the author wants you to know about, which is the First World War, the Revolution, and the ensuing Civil War.  The author was in involved in the two latter (from age of 13) and it shows.  Try this:

All the objects around were distinct and exageratedly real, as they appear after a night’s unbroken watching

I love the suggestion that we all know what it is like after a night on sentry duty.  He also appears to think we are all equally informed about Russian politics.  The end of the book becomes a haze of revolutions and counter-revolutions.  What was most interesting was to see how the idea that your class was more important than your country took over on the Russian side, and how many people escaped with their lives because of it.

The front broke to pieces. In October the soldiers had deserted in scattered, unorganized groups; but by the beginning of December entire companies, regiments, divisions were retiring from their positions in good order, sometimes marching with only light equipment, but more frequently taking regimental property with them, breaking into warehouses, shooting their officers, pillaging en route, and pouring in an unbridled, stormy flood-tide backto their homes.   

You so want it to end well for them. I guess we know it did not. But at least a good chunk of these young men got the chance to live long enough to see it all go wrong

TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIME by James Meek

I started reading this book in the glorious pre-pandemic days of one week ago when COVID was some Chinese problem.  It begins as a medieval quest, with an ill-assorted group of characters heading off to France.How jolly!  There’s a pig herder and a kinky sex scene with King Edward’s mother.

You hear a couple of things about the ‘qualm’ in France, but it is mostly dismissed as an invention of priests looking to get rich.  Then villages start to be empty, pits start to be found, and the first of the merry band die, and you realize that in fact this novel is not a story of a fun roadtrip but in fact an evocation of what is was like to see the Black Death take down England.  In almost exactly parallel time in real life COVID came to Italy and the UK went into lockdown. 

 I considered stopping reading but decided to keep going to see what lessons could be learnt.  What I mostly learnt was THANK GOD FOR THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE. These poor people are just busy fooling around with bunches of flowers and amulets.  

In a ballsy move this author decided to write his medieavel novel in medieval language.  Incredibly, it works.  And more than works, it is almost half the appeal.  The characters are from varied backgrounds and all speak different kinds of language.  Here’s a wealthy lady about her servant:  

“It’s Cotswold,” she tells Pogge. “It’s Outen Green. As if no French never touched their tongues. I ne know myself sometimes what they mean. They say steven in place of voice, and shrift and housel for confession and absolution, and bead for prayer.”

These little snippets give a sense

 Ness’s deaf eldmother, Gert, who when she was young had seen the king ride by at a hunt like a giant, on a white horse, with gold stars on the harness, sat and span by the backdoor.

 And

 He told me truelove things, and made me laugh, and I would kiss him; but to kiss him were wrong.  And it was like to when I was a little girl.  Mum made an apricot pie, and left me with it, and forbade me eat even one deal of it. But I ate one deal, because it needed me a sweet thing, and after I’d eaten one deal, I was already damned, and might as well eat the whole pie. 

The characters are very varied. One is a priest, who is busy shrifting and houseling like there is no tomorrow as people die.  They don’t know too much about hygiene but they are very big on confession.

 I said that in the circumstances I would confine myself to mortal sins.  He need only confess to sacrilege, homicide, adultery, fornication, false testimony, rapine, theft, pride, envy and avarice.                  

There was silence.  Hornstrake inquired if I had finished, as he had expected there to be at least one sin he had not committed.

I gestured to the furnace. . . I did not opt, I said, to compel a confession by reminding him of the alternative, but eternity was of a very long duration. 

People often praise historical novels for being topical.  I can’t fault this one for that: it was super topical.  Topic being, pandemic.  However I think it was the non-pandemic, apricot pie parts I liked the best

 

ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT by Stephen King

Full disclosure, I haven’t actually read very much Stephen King.  I may be minded to after reading this book. It’s charming and unpretentious guide to writing, mixed up with his life story, which is similarly charming and unpretentious. 

Interestingly for someone whose reputation is based on thrillers, he is not a big believer in plot as the engine of the story.  He says he tends to start with a setting, a theme, or a ‘what-if, and just go from there, trusting the plot with find him as he goes along.  He believes you should write the first draft fast

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub.  . . .If I write rapidly . . . I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that’s always awaiting to settle in.

He advises when you begin at least 1000 words a day, with only one day off a week (no more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of your story if you do.), though he does 2,000. He also has advice on re-writes

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,; he said.  ‘When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story’

He even has an equation for this, being second draft = first draft – 10%

Also of interest was the story of his life.  He has always been a big reader, and even today he carries a book whereever he goes (“You just never know when you’ll want an escape hatch.”). He grew up working class, and worked as a high school teacher, struggling to cover the bills for his wife and the two kids he had within five minutes of graduation. This is a tough time.

If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then.  I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. . . . and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk.  If asked what I did in my spare time, I’d tell people I was writing a book . . . and of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty.  Probably plenty of them. 

Then he writes CARRIE.  He hopes he might get a $10,000 advance if it is accepted. He nearly blacks out when they offer him $400,0000.

He struggles with various substance abuse issues (he doesn’t really remember writing CUJO apparently), and has a hilarious take on a number of different writers, who:”largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair”  He doesn’t think it is co-incidental that they are mostly alcoholics.  This seems a pretty good description of the emotional environment of much of the twentieth century literature, and I never considered that is was just because all the big writers were even bigger drinkers.

THE SECOND SLEEP by Robert Harris

I rarely read thrillers, but this came up on a lot of ‘best of 2019’ lists so I gave it a try.  It was fun.  The cover screams ‘book for boys,’ complete with stupid gold font for the author’s name, while the name itself sounds like it could have been created by some kind of generic best-selling-man-name generator. 

It begins with a priest going to bury another priest, who was a noted antiquarian.  You think at first it is set in the medieval period, SPOILER ALERT, but then when he gets to the dead priest’s house, he examines his collection of antiquities and you find it is lots of bits of plastic and glass, and one smooth and shiny box, with “on the back the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy –  an apple with a bite taken out of it.”

BOOM! That’s right, it’s not the far past, it’s the far future, and my particular favourite far future, which is the post-apocalypse.  Side point, it’s interesting how no one ever calls the present day the pre-apocalypse, even though that’s clearly what it is. 

This setting is so fun that it triumphantly carries us through the book.  These future people are so mystified by  our leavings – the concrete pillars that supported motorways; an item which:

 opened like a book.  A pane of glass on one side; on the other, squares of black plastic, each inlaid with a letter of the alphabet. 

It makes you see the modern world in a whole new way. 

That said, I can’t say the book exactly went anywhere.  There was a lot of plot, but not to very much effect, and the author at the end clearly recognized his difficulties and without shame SPOILER ALERT randomly killed off everyone in a mudslide. That’s what I call efficiency in novel writing.