Thanks to a combination of holidays and illness and general lack of intellectual ambition, my reading habits in recent weeks have been defiantly middlebrow. Not that any author would want his or her work defined as such: even the marketing wonks of Publishingworld don't seem to acknowledge such a genre. You've got your pile-'em-high blockbusters, the Browns and Ludlums and Grishams, not to mention the pinker, more glittery bits of chick-lit; and you've got your proper literary fiction types, the universe of I'll-say-nice-things-about-yours-in-the-New-York-Review-if-you-do-the-same-for-me-in-The-Observer. But what about the books that hover somewhere between? And how do they get there?
Take
The Understudy, by David Nicholls. The author seems to be doing quite nicely as a purveyor of not-very-laddish lad-lit, the narrow segment of the post-Nick-Hornby spectrum that doesn't much care for football.
His first novel, of course, had at its heart the noble sport of quizzing, a pursuit that's quintessentially male (competitive, anal) and yet at the same time utterly unmanly (girls don't swoon when you do it).
The Understudy brings us another decent-hearted, obsessive nerd, one Stephen C. McQueen, whose middle initial was added by a helpful agent, just in case of any confusion.
Stephen's an actor, you see, although his dreams of stardom are based on the offchance that the megastar for whom he's depping in a West End play about Byron might come to some misfortune. Immediately we're in the realms of the existential hero, watching his youthful dreams getting kicked to pieces, night after night (plus two matinees a week). Chekhov could have created Stephen, in all his tragicomic glory; Beckett and Stoppard have returned again and again to characters, like him, slightly to one side of greatness, literally and metaphorically hovering in the wings, waiting for the call that never happens.
But this is the middle ground, remember? You can throw a few big ideas around, but heaven forbid you toss in any allusions that are going to perplex or challenge your reader unduly. In fact, if you do feel the need to refer to another work of literature, it's better that you get it wrong than run the risk of disrupting the warm and sudsy bath in which your punter wallows.
An example. Josh, the expensively-dentisted pretty boy whose wellbeing obstructs Stephen's lust for glory, takes his underling out for a drink at a private club.
"Lead on, Macduff," he declaims as they step out onto Piccadilly and the reader is expected to know or infer that the quotation is from
Macbeth. Except it isn't, of course.
"Lead on, Macduff" is one of Shakespeare's three great misquotations, alongside
"Once more into the breach" and
"Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well". It's
"Lay on".
Now, if this were Dan Brown, the (mis)quotation wouldn't be there in the first place, or if it were, it would be glossed and footnoted, with detailed notes about the renowned playwright William Shakespeare and his place within the Priory of Sion. And if this were, say, Margaret Atwood or Tom Wolfe or Martin Amis or Don DeLillo, or Chekhov or Stoppard (especially Stoppard), the fact that Josh gets the line wrong would kickstart endless chinstrokery about the fragility of the Canon, or the persistence of solecisms, or an entire alternative literary universe would grind into gear, where Tom or Don or Tom would interrogate Shakespeare as to why exactly he wrote
"lay" rather than
"lead" and how he feels about everyone getting it wrong and, while we're at it, Will, this literary genius thing is the loneliest game, innit?
But this is David Nicholls, and David Nicholls isn't allowed to (doesn't allow himself to?) play those games. So a misquotation lies there on the page, and you never know whether it's a wry, smartypants dig at Josh's dimness, or a straightforward goof that someone should have picked up somewhere in the editorial process, but nobody did, cue shrugs and sighs all round as Nicholls signs the movie deal. (As with
Starter for Ten, it's screamingly obvious that
The Understudy was conceived with a movie version somewhere in the DNA. The main female character is American, for no apparent reason other than that this might make the product more saleable in Ohio.)
Maybe Mark Haddon isn't cut from the same cloth as Nicholls. After all, Haddon's own debut,
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, won the Whitbread Prize, a fact that seems to scream Proper Literature pretty loudly. And yet, for all its postmodern maths puzzles and clinically unreliable narrator, it was a confidently un-literary type of book, dealing with a small universe of small people who really didn't give a damn about the precise words Shakespeare put in the mouth of his anti-hero.
A Spot of Bother inhabits the same universe, as the principals bounce between London and Peterborough in the service of a bourgeois family farce that never quite tips over into the tragedy that hovers at the edge of the page. Infidelity, breakdown, cancelled weddings, mid-life crises, born-again Christianity and eczema add to a bubbling mix of dysfunction; but Haddon's implied message seems to be that, hey, aren't we all dysfunctional, when you look at it? And surely any book that can carry on its inside back cover the assertion that it's
"a crisp, light, effortless read" (Sunday Times) isn't seeking the same market that plays spot-the-allusion with the new Ian McEwan.
OK, two very specific points that place
A Spot of Bother closer to Nicholls than to The Proper Lit Crowd. First - and this might be worth a quick
SPOILER ALERT - near the middle of the novel, one of the characters attempts to cut off part of his body with a pair of scissors. Now, if the novel were identical in every shape or form with what Haddon has produced, except for the fact that the character cuts off another part of his anatomy - yes, well done, that one - this could be a Will Self or an Iain Banks or an Irving Welsh or, indeed, an early McEwan, and it would resonate with dark, sub-Freudian glowerings behind the psychic leylandii, and say something about Blairism into the bargain. But the character does not cut off his penis; characters do not cut off their penises in Mark Haddon's books; readers do not go to Mark Haddon in search of characters cutting off their penises. He's grim, but not
that grim, and that's what places him so precisely on the Grisham>McEwan spectrum.
A little later on, one of the characters has the following line:
"Sharing an ageing bisexual lover with my own mother... I think life is probably difficult enough already." In fact, it's just a wry one-liner, a droll response to the maelstrom of plot in which the principals find themselves. If it hinted at any kind of internal reality - if anyone really was sharing an ageing bisexual lover with his own mother - we'd be in Douglas Coupland territory. But we're not. We're in Haddonland, and again, Haddon doesn't play those games, and we wouldn't want him to.
Of course, any notion of placing Nicholls or Haddon somewhere on the length of a see-saw (whatever won the Booker this year on one seat, the sequel to
The Da Vinci Code at the other) depends on the point of view of the reader. Some people would find
The Understudy or
A Spot of Bother offputtingly literary, and will never stray from the safe ground of their blockbusters; others will dismiss my notion of 'literary fiction' as utterly lightweight and predictable, because it's not in Armenian and doesn't require intimate knowledge of string theory to make any sense of it. It's like the moment when George W Bush declared that John Kerry was on
"the far left bank" of American discourse, a comment that suddenly said far more about Bush's perception of reality and normality than Kerry's. Or maybe, as
Dave Hill suggests, it's all down to the colour and sturdiness of the cover.
And then maybe it doesn't matter whether Nicholls and Haddon are 'literary' or not. Maybe it only matters whether they're any good or not. If that's all you want:
The Understudy is a bit less good than
Starter for Ten, which was kind of ordinary in the first place;
A Spot of Bother is an equal bit less good than
The Curious Incident..., which was pretty damned special. So Haddon is better (and possibly ever so slightly more literary, if that matters to you) than Nicholls. Case closed.
And hey, he got through a whole post about books without once talking about dead French cultural theorists! Give the man a (middling) round of applause!
But recent releases make up only a small part of what I've consumed. Some of my happiest experiences have come from things I thought I knew, or things I've meant to watch: The Great Gatsby left me gasping with melancholy joy, a quarter-century after I should have read it; and Les Triplettes de Belleville is as weird and funny as everyone said it was when it first came out (in 2003), so I don't know why I left it that long. As for music, the album I've listened to most assiduously this year is a sampler of old Chicago blues and soul stuff that came attached to the front of Mojo magazine a couple of years back. Were I writing a "proper" review, that would be discounted on two counts: too late; and cobbled-together freebie samplers aren't "real" product (in the sense that you can't use them as leverage for selling ad space).
A few disconnected thoughts about the putative highlight of this year's sprout-coma TV. Most of these probably replicate musings on various Whoey talkboards but, hey, great spods think alike.
Want to know yourself a little better? Forget EQ tests, Scientology, all that time-consuming hassle. Just decide what your favourite Dexys Midnight Runners song is.
But Reynolds then goes on to argue that what a) unifies most of the music in the box and b) prevented its acceptance in the US, is its rejection of dance culture, rhythm, blackness. Inevitably, Morrissey's recent contretemps with the NME gets a mention. 
Didier Jacob in Le Nouvel Observateur (translated and quoted by Hugh Schofield on BBC News):
In which I go back to blathering about education policy.
Thailand is in the middle of yet another election campaign, with polling scheduled for 23 December, coups permitting. Because of the convoluted preferential voting system, candidates tout themselves in slates of three. To a Western eye, many of the posters rather resemble those lager commercials that have blokes going to pubs in groups of three, lest you think they might be homosexualists; or even reminders that you can't fit quicker than a KwikFit fitter. (Pic courtesy of 2bangkok.com)
I've been reading LD Beghtol's rather wonderful book about The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs, surely the greatest triple album ever made, or at least the greatest made by a gay ukulele player with a chihuahua. Beghtol includes polls of fans' favourite and least favourite tracks on the album: oddly, of my own five favourites, two are in the former Top 10 (at 2 and 6); and two are in the latter (2 and 8). This may have some kind of aesthetic or other significance, but I'm damned if I can put my finger on it.
Please excuse me if this post comes flecked with phlegm, but Small Boo and I have both been stricken by some virulent respiratory lurgy, involving much snuffling and hoiking and sinus pain and all manner of similar indignities. All the more reason to regret that my parents have departed for less sunny climes: despite my mum's temporary manual dysfunction, I'm sure she could have rustled up tomato soup and hot buttered toast, her magical cure for all known ailments since I was about three years old. And you thought chicken soup was the kosher penicillin? Meh!
A few unattached thoughts about recent travels:
Just returned from a relaxing long weekend with parentals in Hua Hin, holiday resort by appointment to the Thai royal family, and many lumpy Scandinavians in inappropriately skimpy swimsuits. Highlights: excellent seafood restaurant; cool waterfalls; the temporary loss of my mother's undergarments in the hotel pool, gamely retrieved by father (how they ended up there is a mystery that may never be fathomed); the vain search for the world's largest stone frog (well, that's what it said on the sign); and, best of all, watching two bright cerise dragonflies duelling like a pair of Regency bucks, at least one of them played by Stewart Granger.
I submitted the following piece to Comment is Free yesterday, but I just received a very nice e-mail saying they weren't able to use it; not because of the content of the piece itself, but because somebody might identify the mystery royal in the subsequent comments. I quite understand their difficult legal position, and I don't blame them at all for playing safe. But there's more than a dash of irony here, since the piece isn't really about the blackmail case or about the identity of some minor aristo, but about whether there's any point in the mainstream media being prevented from mentioning something that's bouncing around the interweb like a picture of Lindsay Lohan's naughty bits.
In which I sort out all Britain's environmental and socio-economic problems in one go.
And in that same sort of area, I'm trying to work out a pitch for a new book. The thing is, I've got two competing ideas: find a new twist on the saga of the Beatles, and add to the long and illustrious list of tomes on that subject; or do something a little further from the epicentre of ordinary but, by definition, potentially less commercially viable. Like, for example, a pop cultural reappraisal of Dire Straits. What do you reckon?
No, I didn't watch England losing pluckily in the rugby, or Lewis Hamilton arsing up, but maybe still winning because someone else used the wrong flavour petrol. As far as I'm concerned, rugby and Formula 1 are only of any interest when stuff goes wrong: a match that descends into a blood-and-mud-bath (the Swamp Thing at the top is ex-England prop Fran Cotton, surely the hardest man ever to have a girl's name apart from maybe Shirley Crabtree); or a race that features a massive pile-up, preferably involving innocent spectators. And neither of those things happens any more, it seems. So I'll stick to croquet, ta.
In any case, while all those manly men were driving nowhere in Brazil, I was at the Joe Louis Theatre at the Suan Lum night bazaar here in Bangkok, watching a traditional puppet show about Hanuman the monkey god. Who's a friendlier bloke than the monkeys of Delhi, it seems.
In which I kick apart the hornet's nest of racial politics in an effort to destroy my least favourite Shakespeare play.
In which I pretend to identify the socio-economic discrimination that underlies all forms of censorship, but really I'm just taking the piss out of Ben Affleck.
In which I annoy Bob Swipe.
I've been reading Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case, and came upon this sentence: "She finished off a horrible mauve dessert before she spoke again."
But this is the first one that's specifically asking for inclusion in Cultural Snow. It's about a film called Redirecting Eddie, which stars the one who played the totty in orange knickers in Slaughterhouse-Five and the wife of that strange-looking shock jock who said nasty things about some basketball players. Oh, and Drew Barrymore's mum. Drew Barrymore's mum's in it, I mean, that strange-looking shock jock didn't say anything untoward about Drew Barrymore's mum. Moreover, the director, one Laurence N Kaldor, has one leg, one eye and a law doctorate, which is something you can't say about Tarantino, can you?
And then he disappeared to the States, and then I heard some vague news that he was back and presenting music shows on some satellite channel, but nobody I knew had satellite back then. That was pretty impressive, and I felt a slight pang because I'd applied for one of those jobs, and they never even replied, and I think it was because I must have seemed too enthusiastic about De La Soul, or maybe I wasn't quite enthusiastic enough, or maybe it was the Soup Dragons. And now I'll probably never know.
In which I compare Thom Yorke to Damien Hirst, kinda.
I've long regarded Nigel Slater as our greatest living writer on the subject of food. In fact, let's scrub those last five words: I'm starting to get the feeling that he might be the best writer in English alive today, on any subject, in any medium or genre. He has an eye for the essence of Englishness that would make Orwell envious; his understanding of the lonely terrors of childhood, and the little things that might banish them, rivals that of Roald Dahl. And, without ever getting flowery or pompous, he knows how to do words. In his latest book, Eating for England, he discusses Marmite:
First, a note about the terminology. The BBC, and most Anglophone media, refers to the country as 'Burma', and its largest city as 'Rangoon', as distinct from the junta-approved 'Myanmar' and 'Yangon'. The implication is that the junta is in the wrong, and Aung San Suu Kyi and the various pro-democracy organisations are in the right. It's a view that probably ties in with the target audiences of these media organisations, but it remains a view, an opinion, a bias. It's exactly the same problem that arises when dealing with Northern Ireland or the Middle East; any term for a particular geographical entity is going to rile somebody, somewhere, and be perceived as an example of bias. The next time some right-wing wonk demands that the Beeb should be impartial in all things, can we agree that 'impartiality' is a myth; the best we can hope for is some kind of consensus.
Yup, you heard it right. We’re not just talking about the world’s greatest singer here, with Pavarotti and Callas and Ella and Aretha and, by all means, Tata and Bird all coming to pay tribute on bended knee. She’s The World’s Greatest Artist, in any field of endeavour. Picasso can kiss Ms. Bradford’s arias. Shakespeare can hurl himself into her high C. That lame charlatan Dickens can stick her microphone up his Barnaby Rudge.
