Reading Diary: Eleanor Catton, more Trollope, and Bates in the woods

Eleanor Catton is not only longlisted for the Booker, she's apparently odds-on favourite -- and for a book, The Luminaries, that hadn't bloody well been released when the list was actually announced. Like AM Homes (see previous post), Catton is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is published in the UK by Granta, but she's ACRES better, with natural style and wit and a great sense of pace. Her first novel, The Rehearsal, was mind-blowingly self-assured, and my god does the fact that she's only about 28 make me depressed.

The Luminaries wasn't due out until September, though I suddenly received an email from Amazon suggesting I buy it and realised they had brought the publication forward. I have now obtained it and lugged it two miles in my backpack on a hot day -- man, it's a chunky beast. But hey, if even a bit of the £14.99 in Blackwells goes to Eleanor Catton, it'll make up for the piss-poor customer service Heffers offered, not to mention the inevitable carpal tunnel syndrome I will have after reading it.

Whilst on Mull this year, I read another by Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, a chunky semi-panoramic drama dealing with the rise of the City and the exciting possibility of spinning money from almost nothing, simply by investing in the right places. Trollope clearly sees Cityboys as a threat to his homely standards of decency and tradition, although, interestingly, the one exception to the 'new money = bad' rule is also the only Jewish character, which at least reminds us that Trollope was in some respects remarkably liberal. 

I say 'semi-panoramic' because the book lacks the social sweep of Bleak House or Middlemarch, which are rather more substantial as a result. Nor did I find it as moving as The Warden. But The Way We Live Now has one great advantage, which is that it's also, pretty much, the way we live now, where the very rich are almost untouchable unless those in power decide to allow them to fall (Murdoch, anyone?). I have a feeling that, were Trollope alive today, some things wouldn't look so very strange to him.

HE Bates's short meditation on the joys of woodlands, Through the Woods, attracted me instantly because I've recently expanded my nature interests to include trees, wildflowers and butterflies (I've liked birds for some years already). Bates draws out a languid, vivid narrative of how several of his favourite woodlands develop with the seasons, complete with a rant about gamekeepers and pheasants: "The pheasant is the lord of life, the almost divine sovereign of the woods. You must not ... do anything to upset his chances of ordained death." Bates is sarcastic and profoundly emotional by turns, and the book is beautifully presented with an elegant, well-spaced font and a gorgeous cover. It's part of a Little Toller series of nature writing -- Frank Fraser Darling's Island Years, Island Farm is going onto my list.

May She Be Forgiven: AM Homes's prize-winning disappointment

I was thrilled when AM Homes won the Women's Prize for Fiction. I have to admit, it's not a prize that has always filled me with joy: back when it was the Orange Prize, it was won by Madeline Miller, for The Song of Achilles (2011), a sacharine romance whose only saving grace was that it was based on The Iliad, and by Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), a self-justifying piece of narcissism if ever there was one.

However, I still cheered for AM Homes, because I read The End of Alice (1996) about five years ago, and remembered it as adventurous, beautifully-written and rather seductive. This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), her best-known since, didn't appeal to me, but I bought May We Be Forgiven (2012) shortly after her victory in the Women's Prize was announced, thinking it would be a safe bet for a great summer read. And hence I learned (as I learn regularly with the Booker) that there is no such thing as a "safe bet" in literary prizes.

The book is plastered with gushing gobbets and is marketed as a Franzen-esque "great American novel" (Jeanette Winterson's words). It certainly has some of the classic tics of one: an obsessive focus on Jewishness, race, presidential history and American branding, not to mention adultery, the failure of the nuclear family, substance abuse and gruesome scatalogical black humour -- to name but a few.

**SPOILERS ALERT** 

(Even Mark Kermode gets told off for this now, and I'm going way further than he does, so I feel bound to issue these warnings.)

The narrator, Harold "Harry" Silver, is kissed by his brother's wife Jane at a Thanksgiving Day dinner. His brother George, a just-slightly-stereotyped American big business type with penchants for sexual harassment, incest roleplay and violent tantrums, crashes his car and kills a couple (possibly deliberately). He is taken to a psychiatric unit, from which he escapes, comes home, and finds Harry in bed with Jane. He smashes his wife over the head with a lamp. Their two children are fetched home from boarding school just in time to see their mother's life support turned off.

It's fair to say the novel starts with a bang. The rest of the narrative piles up subplot after subplot in a rather rambling fashion: Harry starts finding women to sleep with on the internet and becomes temporarily convinced one of them has been murdered (she later disappears, leaving him to look after her demented parents); he goes with another woman to an erotic party in a Laser Quest; loses his job as a Nixon scholar. George's children, Nate (12) and Ashley (11), suddenly awaken to an awareness of the world around them and convince Harry to adopt the dead couple's son, Ricardo; Ashley is sexually abused by a teacher at her boarding school; George, now in a wilderness-survival prison unit, uses the iPad Harry sent him to get into arms dealing with an Israeli prisoner friend, necessitating an utterly unnecessary sequence where Harry has to be cruel to be kind and help the FBI recapture his own brother.

The novel climaxes with a trip to a tribal village in South Africa for Nate's bar mitzvah (he has done work with the village), during which the local medicine man effortlessly points out some profound and noble truths about Harry and his family (my racism radar definitely started twitching in this scene), and gives him some mysterious tea which help him to expel the vile and putrid mess he has made of his life so far (as well as rather a lot of faecal matter).

Some of the facial expressions I
perfected while reading this book

There are some highlights. The glimpse of academic thriller (thing Byatt's Possession and Frayn's Headlong), when Harry is allowed access to some boxes of Richard Nixon's previously-unseen papers, is good fun. Homes uses a first-person present-tense voice, which I generally find incredibly annoying, but which she manages to keep light with a lot of dialogue and a fairly unreflective style. It's a pacy read, with no official 'chapters', only short breaks. And Ricardo, Nate and Ashley (if not Harry) are generally sympathetic characters, though all of them seem at least five years older than they're meant to be, and I started to feel some affection for them well before the end.

I can feel what Homes is trying to do -- it's a narrative about trying to live with guilt, and the impulsiveness and soullessness of modern life. But the book never stays in one place long enough to do any of this properly. None of the subplots are developed or add anything to the story other than a sense of how random and transient most things are; none of them, in fact, really qualify as subplots at all. And I was never emotionally drawn in, even during the inevitable breakdowns and outbursts of both Nate and Harry, which should be the climax of the book; instead they are dealt with in half a page, and "told" rather than "shown". The book is stubbornly non-visceral.

Not only this, the writing is uneven and even lazy. Homes has a weird habit of ending a sentence with a dash followed by a single word. "It's a denuded glass booth -- powerless." "... pieces of the lamp -- shards." "... to suck the hot mustard directly from the plastic packets -- self-punishment." WHERE DID SHE GET THIS FROM? It's such a self-conscious piece of stylistics that I was sick of it after literally one example -- saturated. There was never a place where I thought, ah, yes, this extra word adds a whole new dimension to this sentence -- clever. Either it repeated something already expressed, or it smacked us across the face with the subtext any intelligent reader would have been able to infer -- superfluous.

I actually started marking things that
pissed me off. She repeats the same
phrase twice in two lines, for
no obvious reason. ARGH.

And that pretty much sums up my twin problems with this book -- that Homes appears to trust the reader too much in the big emotional moments and plotlines she really ought to have taken a bit more time over, but can't manage to trust us to understand the simplest of things. "I can't help but notice," Harry muses, "that I've become close to Cheryl, that I share things with her, that I'm starting to think of her as a friend, a confidante." Oh my god, I thought, that's how we should be reading the intimate conversation you've just been having. My head was starting to bleed from all that puzzled scratching, but now I understand -- enlightened.

Basically, the skeleton plot of this book has already been covered by Nick Hornby's About a Boy: empty, materialistic man suddenly encounters crisis and learns what is really important in life, i.e. engaging with the people around you. It's a decent length at 480 pages, and yet the message of the whole novel has to be sledge-hammered home by what Theo Tait termed the "keynote speech" of the book. This is fine for a dick-lit-hit-cum-Hugh-Grant-film, but for serious, prize-winning literature, it did not live up to my expectations -- disappointing.

Recent Reading and Recommendations

Exhausted as I am from writing that absurdly alliterative title, I wanted to update with a brief note about what I've been reading in the last few weeks:

• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot - If you've read either of Eugenides's other novels (The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex), you'll know he's a writer of phenomenal imaginative power, very learned and very funny. These qualities are again exhibited in The Marriage Plot, though perhaps not to the same degree, or as consistently. The novel follows three undergraduates at Brown as they fall in love, graduate and attempt to begin their lives, confused about how to live in a post-modern where Derrida and Barthes dominate. I loved the satire of 1980s intellectual fashion -- it appealed particularly to my memories of stumbling through literary theory at university -- but in other places the writing feels a little lazy. The balance of narrative between the three characters also felt wrong, with one perhaps neglected compared to the other two; but overall it's an engaging and humane novel, if not quite as magnificent as his previous two.

• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone - This was another gap in my literary knowledge, and did not disappoint: I raced through it in less than a week because it is both gripping and highly readable, and the last part, in which the characters try to recreate the disappearance of the prized diamond in order to try to work out what happened to it, is particularly interesting. A recognisable prototype for a kind of forensic detective fiction which really took off with Sherlock Holmes. At times with Collins, as with his more famous friend Dickens, you wonder how much his misogynistic protagonist is simply ventriloquising his own views, but this wasn't so annoying as to destroy my enjoyment of the whole.

• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre - I reread this rapidly on a whim. There isn't much to say about its brilliance that hasn't been treated better and in more detail by others; but I had forgotten how comically dry Bronte can be at times.

• Ali Smith, Artful - This is a series of four lectures that Smith gave at St Anne's College, Oxford, dealing with 'time', 'form', 'edge' and 'offer and reflection'. As suggested by the title, the lectures are partially entangled with Oliver Twist -- Smith says she reread the novel whilst writing them -- but draw on a breathtakingly wide array of literature, film and music. She weaves thoughtful, but only lightly analytical, commentary on her topics into a narrative about a bereaved person finding her dead lover's scholarly notes (i.e. the lectures). The imitation of early novels where the authors had to invent an excuse for the narrative existing (e.g. in Moll Flanders, Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is presumably deliberate, and it adds a lightness of touch and a humour which is quintessentially Smithian. As inspirational pieces for students at Oxford, I imagine these went down a storm.

• Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination - After months of eyeing this up, first in hardback and then in paperback, I persuaded my partner to buy it for me for Christmas. I'm only a quarter of the way through, and am enjoying it immensely: it's readable and vivid, and made me cross when I realised I'd just missed the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate, which has now gone on tour to the USA and taken all the normally resident masterpieces with it. My only problem with the book is that it does treat some events and topics more briefly than I would have liked. It has the air of a work that was cut intensively before publication, and although paring down is a highly-encouraged habit amongst writers, in this case I think it has diminished the quality of the whole. My indignant letter to Faber and Faber will be in the post today ...

The final thing is that after March my commission for Mslexia will be finished and I'll be back blogging here more regularly. Thanks to everyone who said nice things about those posts!

Why Would I Want Alain de Botton to Help Me Think More About Sex??

Grey, nondescript cover to
convince us it's a Serious
Monograph

Alain de Botton and I are in an unhealthy love-hate cycle. It has lasted for many years, and every time I think I've come to the end of it, it just starts right back up again. Essentially it consists of the following: I buy or get given a de Botton book, start reading it, am temporarily overcome by how wise and lucid he seems, then gradually become frustrated with his smug French-yet-not-French pseudo-grandeur, and resolve, upon finishing the book, that I am done with him forever.

The bit of the cycle I hadn't identified until recently is the part where I forget that the cycle actually exists. Every time I start a new book of his, I kid myself that this time it will be different, that we can work through our disagreements like responsible adults. And so it was with an air of optimism that I succumbed to the 'School of Life' display in the Norrington Room at Blackwells in Oxford (a cardboard stand placed suggestively next to the philosophy section), picked up How to Think More About Sex by AdB himself, and spent the next half an hour finding two other books to reach '3 for 2' fulfilment. (One of them, by the way, was The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, which I'm rather enjoying.)

In his characteristically seductive way, de Botton begins by saying some things that need to be said, briefly satisfying the image we might have of the public philosopher. "It is rare to get through this life without feeling ... that we are somehow a bit odd about sex." Yes! my mind cried. Yes, that's true! Oh, AdB, keep going. Society's problems await your perspicacity! He points out, quite correctly, that we don't think much about sex as a puzzle any more, that the liberal age is, theoretically, one that has assimilated sex quite happily, despite its overwhelming tendency to shatter all steady, rational things, to meddle with the minds of the most educated, analytical individuals in truly shocking ways. We are falsely complacent about it.

And then it all starts to go wrong. Promising ideas -- that most of us find erotic arousal in things considered shameful by society -- are briefly discussed and then dropped, only to be contradicted later on by AdB's optimistic imaginings on what a pornography for an enlightened future might look like:

... based around such qualities as intelligence (showing people reading or wandering the stacks in libraries), kindness (people performing oral sex on one another with an air of sweetness and regard) or humility (people caught looking embarrassed, shy or self-conscious).

This sentence made me laugh out loud because of its naivety. If the erotic urge comes, as he suggests earlier on, from the breaking-down of formal conventions, the release of all the strictures we hold ourselves together with, then how could we be expected to find excitement in these utterly harmless, virtuous scenes?  One can't solve the problem of trying to integrate sex into the rest of life by 'persuading' people to find only laudable things erotic.

These utopian musings are pretty typical of AdB at his most broad-brushed and infuriating. (See Religion for Atheists.) In the same vein, he imagines a future in which all couples go to weekly therapy sessions to thrash out their disagreements minor and major. I can't really decide on the point of this bit. Does he really believe this possible for the future? What about the expense, in terms of both money and time? Doesn't he think couples would prefer to become better communicators without needing a third person to open the channels for them? Does he have some undeclared vested interest in The Rise of the Age of the Therapists?

Also, for someone so well-read, AdB doesn't half get simplistic. He argues that what we find attractive is a reflection of what we were lacking in our childhoods. He actually prints two photos of Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman and attempts some kind of analysis of why we might find Scarlett attractive ( her face suggests "just a little too much of a taste for excitement and melodrama") rather than Natalie ("the steely, practical resolve we detect in Ms Portman's forehead"). Hmmm. This is the intellectual equivalent of AdB leaving the toilet seat up. Perhaps, I thought in a spurt of silent sarcasm, this book should be renamed Pig Freudianism, and How Not To Use It.

Not that he uses a psychoanalytic approach all the way through, however. In the conclusion, he attempts to get evolutionist on yo' ass by arguing that all artistic activity, all desire to educate oneself or to design and produce beautiful clothes and food, is ultimately directed towards satisfying the sexual urge. We do all this to impress potential partners (i.e. the potential parent of our child).

Look at me, I'm practically Foucault!

Whether or not you believe this, it kind of scuppers large chunks of the rest of the book, especially the beginning, where he points out how many of us are essentially deviants. Fetishes, bestiality, incest and paedophilia fantasies (all of which exist and have been chronicled amongst emphatically 'normal' people) don't go any way towards ensuring the perpetuation of the species -- so why don't we all find them utterly alarming, rather than, for many, irresistibly exciting in the context of fantasy (or indeed reality)? If conventions exist to prevent someone meddling with the Furtherance of Mankind, then why are we desperate to break them all the time?

De Botton is sporadically convincing when he's discussing what sex 'is' in the modern world, though not consistently. But he always has to go too far and try to persuade us that not only can he see with startling clarity the problems of our age, he knows how to fix them, too. Now, if he's right, the biggest problem only lies in our failure to recognise him as the greatest Western thinker of the 21st century and to appoint him our lord and emperor. But, as you may have noticed, we haven't done this. Perhaps one day he'll realise that this is because the problems of mankind are real, knotty, impossible-to-get-hold-of problems, and that, if all the philosophers of the last three millennia can't solve them, it's unlikely that a milky-faced Swiss millionaire can either.

Taking a break

Thank you to everyone who's been following my blog so far. I'm delighted to say I've got a commission to be a guest blogger for Mslexia, a writing magazine, so you'll find me here for the next three months. My posts there will have a slightly different focus -- how you can use what you read as a way of critiquing and improving your writing -- but it's not impossible I'll find the odd couple of hours to post here as well.