Philip Roth’s Everyman has many simple, devastating things to say about our mortality, and is one of those books that deserve to be read in their entirety in the course of a day (but not, I think, in a single sitting, as this is good for no one’s digestion). I acquired my copy somewhat fraudulently from the PR department of Jonathan Cape, on the proviso I would write a review, and though I am not about to do that, I consider this post, though several years late, my repayment of this debt, in full.

Some reviewers found fault with the novel for its plainness of style and lack of event, but to my mind this was just churlish disappointment at being denied some of the sexual fireworks that have ensured the popularity of his books (though there is, I’m pretty sure, at least one fairly hot scene slipped in between the lifetime of surgical procedures that are used to structure the book. This kind of thematic approach to structure is to my, and maybe other’s minds, a good approach to the question of how we tell the story of another’s life. One can imagine focusing on sex, betrayal, crimes, marriages, journeys, dogs owned, or great Russian novels, depending on one’s purpose).

Having just finished that, I serendipitously came across this article by RICHARD FORD, who is  without doubt one of the most charming and charismatic writers I have paid money to see. During a Q. & A. in Edinburgh in 2007 he digressed to say, “My grandfather was a suicide,” then proceeded to tell us of how his grandfather had lost the farm and the house whilst gambling, and then was so fearful of telling his wife that he shot himself dead. Ford ended the anecdote by saying, “But you’re probably not interested in that.”

The piece has some interesting points to make about Character, and makes me think that writing a kind of representative human depends precisely on emphasising that which is particular and specific, as without these elements, no character, however emblematic they are intended to be, can persuade us into identifying with them. And now, a picture of Ford, with dogs.

There were several forms of disbelief at the suicide of David Foster Wallace last November. First, there was disbelief at the basic fact of his death. Then, on learning the manner of it, there was a refusal to comprehend that someone so brilliant, so devoted to showing the richness of mental life, could be simultaneously  so exhausted by this richness that he chose death as a solution. Finally, there was our childish refusal to accept that there would be no more. The two novels, three short-story collections, numerous non-fiction pieces- maybe half a million words -just did not seem enough. And we wanted to think this was not just our greed. We could not imagine that someone so engaged, so gifted, would not be, in spite of their depression, at work on something.

Well, even we are sometimes right, albeit twice a day. It seems that, yes, there is more. The New Yorker has an excerpt from ‘The Pale King’ which DFW had been at work on for years; the unfinished novel will be published in 2010, and apparently runs to two hundred thousand words. Also in the same issue, a long piece on DFW’s life and death, the best of its kind so far.

I suspect that when the book comes out, it will makes us feel better and worse.

This was shouted by someone, around 6 a.m., at the Scala Cinema in Kings Cross, during the title sequence for Return of the Swamp Thing. The year was 1990. The titles- consisting of a montage of pages from the comic -were by far the best part of the film.

Then there was V for Vendetta; From Hell; The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. About which there is little worth dwelling on.

As for Watchmen, I do not know if I dare to see it. But then again, as Moore says in a recent interview in Wired

My books are still the same books as they were before they were made into films. The books haven’t changed. I’m reminded of the remark by, I think it was Raymond Chandler, where he was asked about what he felt about having his books “ruined” by Hollywood. And he led the questioner into his study and showed him all the books there on the bookshelf, and said, Look—there they all are. They’re all fine. They’re fine. They’re not ruined. They’re still there. And I think that’s pretty much the attitude I take. If the books are as good as I think they are, then they are the things that will endure. And if the films are as bad as I think they are, then they are the things that will not endure. So, I suppose we’ll see at the end of the day, whenever that is.

“You must- do you hear me, young man? -you must work harder… Too many whores! Too much boating!  Too much exercise! Yes, that’s quite right: a civilised man does not require as much locomotion as doctors would have us believe.”

This was Flaubert’s advice to the young Maupassant, who he acted as tutor to. “If you have any orginality,” Flaubert told him, “you must dig it out. If you don’t have any, you must get some.”

If only these excellent precepts had been drilled into me by my own writing tutors! How many diseases might have been avoided! Those foolish hours walking!

These, alas, were not the only snippets witheld. I should also have benefited from an injunction to subscribe to various publications, in order to be familiar with the kind of work actually being published. I should have been advised that a story once written, like a fine confit, improves from being left; that a sequence of well-crafted sentences is far from being a story; that some things are always a matter of taste and that I, though still a pup-in-arms, was a goddamn genius whose star was a light that bless-ed and bedazzled.

If only this had been the case! Then I would have gladly taken part in the preparations for my tutors’ burials. I, like Maupassant, would have bathed them in eau de Cologne, dressed them in silk underwear, then a suit complete with waistcoat, cravat and skin gloves. I would have brushed their famous moustaches, covered as much of their terrible wounds as powder and care might allow. I would have engaged a choir of sweet voices, bloodied my knees in prayer. But this, alas, was not to be. They are in their pauper’s grave, while I, who live, regret.

Cover art: Charles Burns!

On the face of it there are several reasons why I could dislike ‘Zadie Smith’, by which I do not mean Zadie Smith, the actual person who has loves and hates and passions just like mine, but ‘Zadie Smith’, the construct presented by the media in the form of articles about her, pictures of her, reviews of her work, her blurbs on the back of books, the object of publishers’ noble quest to ‘find’ the next ‘Zadie Smith’.

There is first of all, White Teeth, which though a good book, with much fine writing, was not the Great London Novel we were asked to worship. Perhaps its chief fault was the way its plot lurched towards an unconvincing moment of violence.

But this is something even Zadie Smith (the person) has admitted (reference when I can find it). Zadie Smith (the person) is also not responsible for ‘Zadie Smith’. This is the fault of people who do something called Publicity & Marketing. By way of a disclaimer, I should also like to say that I read the book after several years living in China, when I was, of course, quite out of my mind.

Another possible cause of dislike is her (‘Zadie Smith’) editorship of incredibly patchy anthologies such as The Burned Children of America and The Books of Other People, both of which rely heavily on already published work, some of which may have been included for extra-textual reasons (because they, like ‘Zadie Smith’ were ‘big names’, or because they were willing to waive their fee, or because they were friends of her which made it awkward to reject their work).

But then there is also the fact that I, as an editor of several incredibly patchy anthologies (whose names I forget), know something of extratextual factors. Like the need to have the names of well (or at least better) known authors on one’s funding application. And that even ‘Zadie Smith’, in her efforts to persuade a major publisher to publish and promote an anthology whose profits support a (lack of inverted commas) good cause, could conceivably have similar concerns. Also, that an anthology, by its very nature (multiple styles, concerns and forms) is doomed to be uneven (has anyone ever read an anthology and liked everything in it?)

The final potential cause of dislike of ‘Zadie Smith’ was her inclusion in a piece by Robert McCrum entitled ‘Sebald, Hughes and Smith: three modern greats’. Leaving aside the oddness of pairing Ted Hughes and W.G. Sebald (poet and prose-writer respectively), it made little sense to include her, a young writer, with such luminaries from a previous generation, whose work is similar to hers in neither style nor concerns.

Zadie Smith was one of the first to decry her inclusion.

I would never place myself anywhere near either Hughes or Sebald. I’m 33. I’m just starting out. I’ve written three comic novels and a handful of criticism.

And it occurs to me (because it is obvious) that there is something extremely suspect about me, ‘Nick Holdstock, Edinburgh-based writer’, almost wanting to dislike ‘Zadie Smith’. It can only be some species of envy, if not of her undoubted ability as a writer, then of the status (and the opportunities afforded by it) of being ‘Zadie Smith’. One of the few solaces afforded to struggling writers (those poor souls who have to add their own inverted commas) is the act of trying to topple the great statues under whose shadows we write, even if it means burying ourselves in their rubble. If there is comfort in denigrating such figures, it is of a scuttling kind.

How much better, for all concerned, if we could simply focus on the writing. After all, this is what we, as readers and writers, ultimately care about most. Let us ignore the blurbs and reviews (unless they are actually reviews- see below, and previous post on Gass) and see what Zadie Smith is saying.

These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.

This is from a piece in The New York Review of Books entitled, ‘Two Paths for the novel’. It continues:

Yet despite these theoretical assaults, the American metafiction that stood in opposition to Realism has been relegated to a safe corner of literary history, to be studied in postmodernity modules, and dismissed, by our most famous public critics, as a fascinating failure, intellectual brinkmanship that lacked heart. Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, David Foster Wallace—all misguided ideologists, the novelist equivalents of the socialists in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. In this version of our literary history, the last man standing is the Balzac-Flaubert model, on the evidence of its extraordinary persistence. But the critiques persist, too. Is it really the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most?

At this point, I was no longer eating my egg salad sandwich. I was nodding, and humming a little, thinking about the seductive pull of lyrical realism. The piece, whilst providing a proper review of the books in question (Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder) frames this discussion in a meaningful way, asking us to consider not only what gives us pleasure as readers, but how important it is that such pleasure is effortful.

It also reminds us, lest we forget (and yes, we do, always) that there is nothing so artificial as Realism. That this too is constructed, through precise and concrete description, through the presentation of rich and coherent selves with lyrical inner lives. This is what we try hard to believe.

At a certain point in his Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek passes quickly and dismissively over exactly this personal fullness we hold so dear in the literary arts (“You know…the wealth of human personality and so on and so forth…”), directing our attention instead to those cinematic masters of the anti-sublime (Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, David Lynch) who look into the eyes of the Other and see no self at all, only an unknowable absence, an abyss.

There is more, to which I shall not do justice. Please ascend this page, then click.

“To perpetuate the ethos of consumption the products of mass culture demand an identification with the status quo which produces the very smugness and intellectual passivity that seem to fit in with totalitarian creeds, even if the explicit surface message is anti-totalitarian.”

Theodor Adorno, The Schema of Mass Culture

My story ‘Amy’ has been shortlisted for the Willesden Herald Short Story competition.

Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), The Blessed Ranieri Rasini Freeing Poor People from Prison in Florence, 1437–1444.

Aaron Schuster considers The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future in Cabinet magazine.

Whilst it is both predictable and a cliche to bemoan that a film, whatever its very different goals, does not ‘succeed’ to the same extent as its source material (usually a book, but I suppose this could apply to all sorts of things. For example, few would disagree that the film of Street Fighter was a huge disappointment compared to the beloved arcade game) in this case I’m going to bother, because the film adaptation of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road clearly reveres the 1961 novel and wants to do right by it. The screenplay preserves much of the dialogue, and makes few (if any) deviations from the book’s main narrative, other than to omit the opening chapter where the Laurel Players prepare for the play (more on this later).

The problem is that as in Sam Mendes’ previous films (American Beauty, Jarhead, Road to Perdition), the director’s approach has mostly been to try and shoot the film as if it were theatre (yes, even in the Iraq-based Jarhead). In concrete terms, this means he rarely moves the camera, and relies on close ups or medium shots of the actors.

During dialogue, Mendes’ preferred tactic is often to use a series of reverse angles, much as if the heads of an audience member in the stalls were turning first this way, then that, to track the conversation on stage.

We might excuse this kind of thing if it was actually a play that was being filmed (due to physical and temporal limitations) but in the cinema, where, let’s face it, anything is now possible, the task of the director is surely to do more than merely present events. His or her job, I would argue, is through their control of mis-en-scene, to comment on the events of the narrative, whether it be to reinforce or undermine what appears to be taking place. This, I think, is one of the reasons most adaptations (though perhaps not Street Fighter, whose reasons for failure must remain elusive) fail to live up to their origins. While the general sequence of events is easy to preserve, much of a novel’s colour and mood depends on those passages (usually descriptive, either of external details or internal states) where little may appear to be happening. It is precisely the task of the director (and perhaps the screenwriter) to find a way of translating these elements to a primarily visual medium, whether that involves radical structural changes (as in Mike Nichol’s version of Catch 22) or minor (but cumulatively significant) choices of shot that suggest an attitude to the material (as in Kubrick’s painterly tableuxs in Barry Lyndon, one of whose effects is to contribute to the overall sense of the characters being fixed in their social places. It also reminds us of the artificiality of what we are watching, which in a Brechtian manner reduces the possibility of us engaging with the subject matter on an emotional level.

It also suggests to me a new way of looking at the Old Masters, to in a sense unfreeze the picture, to think of what led to the moment depicted, what might unfold from it.

In the case of Revolutionary Road, there seems to have been an implicit trust that the virtues of the book were so instilled, so estimable, that they could not help transfer (perhaps through the ether) to the humble screen, and that to alter the material greatly could only endanger this process (which did not, however, prevent the screenwriter from giving April Wheeler the line, ‘You’re the most beautiful thing in the world- a man’).

For a further review (which has its doubt about the novel as well): A Better Life: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker

I also have my doubts, though I think there is much to admire on the whole, especially its delineation of the charcters’ “postures of controlled collapse” (the phrase belongs to Richard Ford, from his introduction to the novel). My own uncertainty surrounds the general voice of the book, whether it is at times too direct in its attempt to convey the hopelessness of practically every character. The novel’s opening chapter, which the film omits, is so effective in conveying the atmosphere of futility of the novel, that I almost felt the rest was redundant. Even the opening has this marked sense of disappointment:

The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium.

Another difficulty (though obviously not the fault of the novel) is that we have been presented with so many suburban dramas about unhappy couples in the 50s and 60s that it is difficult to muster much enthusiasm. The success of Mad Men is that it functions on both a historical and individual level, and of course is able to do so because of its distance from the period it depicts. There we can understand something of the complex interplay between the changes (or lack of) in both people and the society they inhabit.  Whilst Revolutionary Road, in its title, and and the aspirations of April Wheeler, alludes to the lost innocence of 1776 (when America declared independence), for me the novel fails to work on a symbolic level. If Yates wished to argue that the dream that was America had not only run aground, but foundered (alright, maybe we don’t need convincing of that), the novel perhaps needed a broader scope (which Mad Men is more sucessful at, and, in future seasons (thank you!) will no doubt build on).

Finally, for anyone whom the film has put off Yates’ work, let me implore you to consider The Easter Parade, which I found both more subtle and compelling. It begins, “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life…”