Jennifer Hodgson

The Gustav Metzgers of Gentrification

2015-06-04T22:35:00.000+01:00

On any given day I am, you might say, somewhat susceptible to feeling like I've unwittingly waded into some Pynchonian metaphysical quagmire. And thus it follows that I've been trying to work out what's going on in this photo of a cottage 30ft away from the rapidly-eroding cliffs at Aldbrough on the Holderness Coast ever since I took it last Sunday.

What could move the occupier (or someone else?) to pin such a computer printout to their door? Have they been visited by prospecting gentrifiers eager to stake a claim on this overlooked patch of coast? There would have to have been a few of them, surely, to warrant a pre-emptive sign. And these must be gentrifiers of a pretty rare bent, since by my calculations this section of coast is disappearing at the rate of one house every two years and the cottage is only two doors from the cliff's edge.

Ingrid Meinz Syndrome

2014-09-29T18:54:00.000+01:00

So there I was, feet marinating in a puddle, bicycle turning to rust and I said WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THE SUMMER, ARE YOU GOING TO GET SOME SUN? and she said, No I'll be working at home, I have six deadlines for articles I'm writing and twelve books on my shelves I haven't glanced at and a major deadline for a peer reviewed journal so I guess I'll have to open a tin of soup and spend the summer on an uncomfortable chair at my desk with my head down. And I thought, you know Ingrid Meinz THIS IS REALLY NOT VERY SEXY. You are intelligent and this should make you sexy, you are an independent attractive woman earning your living and this should make you sexy but you are not. How are you ever going to grab your self some LOVE with that tone of voice and that tin of soup. How much SEXIER if she had said, even though it might be impossible... OH YES I WANT TO GO ON HOLIDAY MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, I WANT TO TAKE OFF ALL MY CLOTHES AND LIE IN THE SUN... now that's better, she might even stand a chance of someone saying gosh can I come with you? She could have said, I CAN'T GO TO THE SUN THIS YEAR BUT I WILL BE GOING TO KEW GARDENS TO MASTURBATE IN THE ORCHID HOUSE, now that would be evidence of some humour lurking inside Ingrid Meinz, or EVEN if she'd said, I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT CATCHING UP ON THE BOOKS I HAVEN'T HAD TIME TO READ - that would have been an improvement. But as it was she stood there SO INVOLVED WITH HERSELF she did not even notice I was soaked and by this time I was shivering and had lost the momentum that helps a girl cycle the last four miles in the rain so I said good bye and good luck with her deadlines and slowly turned the pedals up the hill, and I thought I will have to call this encounter the Ingrid Meinz Syndome. [...] The Ingrid Meinz Syndrome describes an illness that means every time you open your mouth to speak the world turns grey.

- Deborah Levy, "Conversations with Famous Artists"

INTERVIEW WITH JIM CRACE

2013-08-23T22:51:00.000+01:00

Jim Crace has just had a very close shave. ‘This time last year I abandoned a book. I’d sold it in America and in Britain, I’d spent the money, they’d want the money back. We’d lose the house. It was a really, really serious situation,’ he remembers. ‘You always think, don’t lose your nerve, persevere . . . And in the past it’s always worked.’ This time it didn’t. ‘I thought I’d lost my mojo. I thought, “I’ve got a copy date, I’ve got to deliver a book at Christmas. I haven’t got a book to write.” I was in deep shit. That was on the Tuesday. I started Harvest on the Friday.’ He mimes wiping sweat from his brow. ‘So I wrote that book in six months and I delivered it on the same day that I should have delivered the old one. Bloody hell, I thought, that was a narrow escape. I felt like some kid in a boy’s comic: “Phew! That was a close one.”’

In May, when we meet, sweating discreetly in the long garden of his Birmingham home on the hottest day of the year, he’s still in what he describes as ‘the bruised aftermath’. Harvest (due out in early 2013), is set in a feudal community during the farm enclosures that did away with traditional rights to common land. The novel is, as with almost all of his others, historically and geographically nonspecific. People can’t resist attempting to locate Crace (although it misses the point entirely); my hunch is Tudor-era and English. He is back in familiar unfamiliar territory here, after a sojourn in the (not quite) real world with his 2010 jazz novel, All That Follows.

This next book will be his last. ‘I’ve written eleven novels and that’s plenty. I know that the inevitable end of a career in writing is bitterness. You’ve written so many and people aren’t paying attention to you any longer. So I want to get out before that kicks in’. Although he’s still smarting, he thinks he’ll try drama next: ‘Big, blousy, highly-dramatised, National-Theatre-type things. Not Stoppardian dialogue-driven pieces, but spectacle-driven pieces . . . I want to try my hand at something more collaborative. Writing for the theatre, I’d have colleagues. All I see is people like you once in a while, and that’s no good.’

Crace would rather not pontificate about his art of fiction. On much of what we talk about when we talk about writing—influences, inspiration, practice and (especially this last one) autobiographical resonance—he flatly but amiably will not be drawn. He’ll talk at length about anything and everything, but when it comes to the writing life, he tends to rely on his patter. He apologises if I’ve heard it before.

Typically ingenuous, he describes what he does like this: ‘I embark on this thing and hope I’m going to lose my way and that what takes over and what becomes the guide of the book will somehow be good.’ When I venture my own take on Harvest, he thanks me; tells me, ‘that’s very useful’. I think, for a moment, that he’s being sarcastic. He’s not. He can be, he assures me, but he’s not here. ‘I very often don’t know what I’ve got on my hands,’ he admits, ‘I can’t really describe it until I read the critics, then I’ll have a spiel, and then I’ll be able to read it in public’.

Crace, famously, doesn’t do research. He claims no kith or kin amongst the great and the good of the British novel. ‘Never knew anybody, never wanted any part of that,’ he says, ‘I prefer to hang out with jazzmen’. Nowadays he reads non-fiction. And it should come as no surprise to readers familiar with the fictional milieu Adam Begley neatly christened “Craceland” that he is a keen natural historian who, generally, would much rather be walking, caving or twitching than writing novels.

His books have a kind of autonomous existence; Crace maintains that there are elements of his novels that he cannot account for. The occultish grammar of objects—beetles, stones, cracks in wood—by which his disparate oeuvre hangs together, for instance. ‘My books are very schematic. It’s almost as if the novels have decided there will be running threads through themselves. I really couldn’t explain except that the books want them’. He recently discovered that he has a fictional kink: ‘Why do so many women get their heads shaved in my books? I don’t know where it’s come from, or what it means.’ It might be the product of reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls as a teenager, he thinks, or perhaps of taking a fancy to Jean Seberg in Saint Joan and Breathless around the same time. ‘But that’s only me trying to make sense of why my books do that.’

‘None of that is being cute,’ Crace insists, ‘why would you want to spend so much time alone in the house—with your neighbours avoiding you because you’re the mad writer—staring at the screen if it didn’t provide you with some kind of magic and some kind of awe. Now, this sounds funny but I think that’s why I love writing novels, and why I’ve chosen not to research my novels, to leave them entirely to the imagination. Because I find what the imagination provides so thrilling.’

Critics suspect that all this is strategic obfuscation. That Crace is being tricksy. That he’s cunningly guarding both his own privacy, and that of his strange and beguiling novels, by constructing this laconic and maddeningly matter-of-fact public persona. They’re fascinated, belabouringly so, by the contrast between the uneven, uneasy modernity of the unnamed hinterlands that provide the settings for his books, and his quiet, conventional (or mundane, as the ever-self-effacing Crace would have it) life in the arty suburbs of Britain’s second city. Like J.G. Ballard, curtain-twitching on suburban psychosis in Shepperton, they’re convinced that Crace, too, must be up to something.

As a nation of readers, Brigid Brophy characterised the British as ill-at-ease and bashful about the fictiveness of their fictions, equating stories with daydreaming and daydreaming with masturbation, and ‘believing both to be bad for the eyesight’. Perhaps it’s this puritanical streak that accounts for our mistrust of this arch fabulator. The Devil’s Larder (2001) is composed of sixty-four slices of bizarrerie that riff upon Britain’s changing relationship with food and consumption in terms carnal and grotesque and of manners and mores. Reviewers were perplexed to note that Crace’s recipes were not intended to be followed. One food writer took particular umbrage at his suggestion as to what one might do with an aubergine. They were astounded, he recalls, that he had ‘simply made it up’.

Crace doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. ‘This business of simply making stuff up is with what the traditions of literature are concerned. There’s no such thing as a Minotaur, they’ve simply made it up. Simply making it up is an ancient tradition, more ancient than the conventions we labour under now,’ he explains. If happy families are all alike then who would want to read a fiction drawn from his? ‘I’m baffled by what the critics say. It’s not like I’m ducking and diving. It’s just the way things are. You wouldn’t want to read the story of my life because it’s too smug, it’s too lucky. Literature prefers divorce to long marriages; it prefers ill health to good health; it prefers war to peace’.

In 2005, The Scotsman made reference to Crace as ‘the cult American writer’. There is some accuracy in their misnomer. Perhaps he sits rather more comfortably in the yarn-spinning tradition of Barth, Pynchon and Gass than in our own more sensible, empirical one. The non-places of late modernity Crace’s novels inhabit might just as well be Sydney as Singapore as Sacramento. But the short story with which he made his name as a writer of fiction, ‘Annie, California Plates’, with its hep talk and hitchhiking, is pure Americana, an out-and-out homage to the Beat Generation Crace admired.

Certainly, he admits, he enjoys a higher standing amongst readers and critics on the other side of the Atlantic. He was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 1999 for Being Dead; in 1992, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts; and the GAP International Prize for Literature for The Gift of Stones in 1989. He’s taken on what he describes as a cushy gig teaching creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. ‘The idea of going to Texas just seemed sexy and interesting . . . And it’s not really teaching is it? It’s half an afternoon a week chatting to talented novelists.’ Incidentally, he’s wholly in favour of the enterprise: ‘I think there’s something very elitist about denying that writing can be learned or at least that your skills can be honed.’

Still, at the end of a twenty-six-year, eleven-novel career in fiction, Crace’s writing life remains mysterious, apparently even to him. He’s a nine-to-five only writer; no burning of the midnight oil for Crace, he likes real life too much. But he claims what happens when he sits at his desk is, more or less, out of his hands. He calls it a ‘form of abandonment’ to a narrative impulse that is, he maintains, ‘hardwired’ into all of us. When pressed, he’ll claim a fluke genesis. His new novel, for example, is product of happenstance: the ridge-and-furrow fields of the English countryside he’s always loved, and an exhibition of 16^th century watercolour landscapes he happened to attend.

He mentions an article by Jonathan Franzen published that week in the Guardian, in which Franzen addresses those perennial questions asked of novelists: ‘Who are your inspirations?’, for instance, ‘Is your fiction autobiographical?’. Franzen, with no less than Nabokov as his authority, disputes the idea that fiction has the ability to “take over”, to usurp the authority of its author. ‘I catch a whiff of self-aggrandisement,’ he writes, ‘the notion presupposes a loss of authorial will, an abdication of intent. The novelist’s primary responsibility is to create meaning, and if you could somehow leave this job to your characters you would necessarily be avoiding it yourself.’ Crace thinks this is all a bit rich, coming from Franzen: ‘Perhaps it’s true of him, but it’s not true of me. There really is an abandonment. There really is the belief that because fictional narrative is ancient it’s learnt a lot. It knows a lot, it’s wise and it’s generous and not to abandon yourself to that is a kind of arrogance as well. It’s a real friend to you.’

It’s ‘not a New Age thing,’ he’s quick to add, though at times it certainly sounds like one. On the contrary, it’s thoroughly and sensibly Darwinian: ‘All writers are doing is doing something formally, between hard covers, that all of us do informally as a necessary function of being human beings. We keep on imagining the future and reinventing the past . . . it’s a necessary function of human consciousness, to be a narrative person.’ Narrative, for Crace, is an evolutionary adaptation, ‘if it were not we wouldn’t still be storytellers,’ he insists. ‘People would be happier, and more sociable, and more attractive to the opposite sex, and have better relationships if only they could be more narrative . . . It’s how you get the girlfriend, it’s how you get the boyfriend, it’s being able to talk in pubs.’

The theory of narrative to which Crace subscribes—the idea the humans construct their own identities by writing and rewriting the stories of their experience—has, in recent decades, become fashionable, ubiquitous even, amongst fields as various as psychology, theology, sociology, philosophy, politics, medicine and indeed even finance. ‘We are all virtuoso novelists’, as cognitive scientist and philosopher, Dan Dennett, puts it, we ‘try to make all our material cohere into a single good story . . . that story is our autobiography’ and the ‘chief fictional character . . . of that autobiography is one’s self’. It is generally assumed that we self-tellers are, most of us, instinctive Realists; concerned with fidelity and veracity, with reason and probability. We might fib, exaggerate, misremember or gloss the detail but we do so in service of the unity and coherence of our own story.

For Crace, however, our narrative adaptation might just as equally be given to falsification, to confabulation, to all-out lies. He insists that to be a narrative person is not simply to make the fragments of contingent experience cohere, to graft on a beginning, middle and an ending. ‘The oil of the human imagination is fantastic,’ he insists. ‘The person who won’t embroider is the bore. The bullshit artist is the person we adore, as long as he doesn’t do any harm’.

The idea that we are all, by our very nature, tall-tale-tellers has proved rather troublesome for those proponents of the idea that crafting an autobiographical narrative is the key to the good life. Certainly, Crace is well aware that people are ill-at-ease with lies. ‘The kind of lying I do and always did was never to deceive you. It was to be amusing and entertaining and generous,’ he assures. ‘By nature I’m a liar. I was always a fibber. When I was a kid I would always tell stories. I could never understand why people didn’t like me telling stories. I thought that to take a little anecdote that happened and to add a few extra details was a generous act. I still don’t get why it isn’t.’

It is problematic, too, for literary critics, for whom this imaginative function is what makes literary narrative unique and valuable. I don’t think his insistence that we all share this capacity for fiction is just Cracian modesty. It’s an ethical thing, Crace’s bottom-up optimism about the world. And it’s political too. He’s deeply ambivalent about a British literary intelligentsia that he suggests—with apologies for being ‘a terrible Marxist’—remains peopled with ‘Oxbridge, white, heterosexual males’.

Crace comes clean: ‘I’ve got a class thing, you see. It’s ridiculous but I do believe in the class system, I do believe in class warfare, I do believe it’s a big issue.’ Crace is one of an increasingly lesser-spotted breed of Old Lefty. He was weaned on the (old) Labour Party, on trade unionism and social justice by his political activist, autodidact father. ‘I sound like a terrible Marxist, a Stalinist’—that caveat again—‘but I cling to things. I love my dad and I cling to the things that were important to him. That’s not a very good reason, that’s not a very intellectual reason for hanging onto prejudices, but it’s a good emotional one.’

He was a big reader as an earnest young man, of both the muscular, political novelists like Steinbeck, Tressell and Orwell that were deemed (almost) acceptable on the North London council estate where he grew up, and the Beat writers that weren’t. ‘I was a little squirt. If I’d come back talking about Jack Kerouac and Walt Whitman I’d have got a punch’, he recalls. ‘But politics and trade unionism and journalism were sort of acceptable and I think that was part of the inheritance I got from my dad. That that’s what I ought to do, if I was going to be a writer.’

Crace began his career as the “pet Lefty” at two British newspapers not exactly known for their progressive bias, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. ‘I had integrity, I hope, and I was reliable but I wasn’t a big writer, I was never going to make big waves as a journalist,’ he says. ‘Now this sounds very po-faced—I’m quite puritanical actually, as well as not being very puritanical—but when I was a journalist, I would never tell a single lie. I wasn’t puritanical about the truth because I thought that the truth had to be adhered to but it wouldn’t serve your purposes. I always believed that the truth provides socialism. If you tell the absolute truth about circumstances, the truth is left-wing, I think.’

In the end, it was this integrity that precipitated his departure from journalism. In the mid-eighties, Crace was sent to report on the Broadwater Farm estate in North London, a year after the Tottenham Riots. The paper already had its angle: Broadwater was a “hellhole estate”, sunk in racial tensions, mob violence and social problems, and on the brink of revenge riots. He found the estate wasn’t such a hellhole after all. ‘I’m from North London, and I know to call somewhere a “hellhole of an estate” is nonsense. It was a working-class estate, full of very good people who weren’t earning much.’ Crace had found his own angle: ‘It wasn’t a hellhole! It was a scoop, a bloody scoop!’ The feature—all 7000 words of it—was pulled the day before the issue went to press. ‘So I walked away from journalism and that was it,’ he recalls. Crace downplays the heroics of the gesture: ‘I had to be principled. Fortunately, I had just sold Continent for a lot of money in the States, so I could afford to be principled.’

Although he migrated with ease from puritanical truth to not-so-puritanical lies, it’s clear that Crace is a somewhat reluctant storyteller. Always an inveterate yarn-spinner—‘I was great to smoke dope with,’ he tells me—Crace ‘never intended to become a writer of fiction. I was a lover of fiction, but it seemed bourgeois to me and still does. Particularly the kind of writing I’ve ended up doing,’ he admits. ‘I think that the puritanical side of me, if I’d even imagined aged seventeen the kind of writing I would do in the future, it would have been leafleteering. It would have been banner-waving writing, in which the politics were not timid or obscure, in which the message was quite clear. Whereas in the kind of writing I’ve ended up doing, it’s clear there’s politics in there, but my books aren’t placards. If anything they don’t close down on a slogan, they open out.’

His first novel, abandoned before Continent (1986), his debut proper, was an attempt at such a novel. It was about personal politics, Crace’s response to living through the “radical” seventies; a decade when, he suggests, so much of what purported to be political was actually about making the “right” lifestyle choice. ‘My wife is a feminist, of course, and I’m a fellow traveller. One of the things that we didn’t like about the feminist movement was that it was all about “getting my shit together”. And of course that’s important, but it can’t exclude the other things.’ The novel did not come easily, however: ‘I didn’t know what the next word was going to be, let alone the next chapter, or how it was going to end. It was like pushing a huge boulder up a very steep hill every day.’

Then he was asked to review Gabriel García Márquez’s In Evil Hour. ‘I remember thinking, I can do that. I can do that in my sleep! And I started Continent. And I felt at home. I wasn’t being a puritanical journalist; I was just making stuff up—making up whole continents, making up languages, making up wildlife, inventing plants. That’s the mischievous side of me. I make the real seem unlikely, and the unlikely seem so convincing that you swallow it. That’s the trick I like to play.’

Even now, Crace seems to regret that he didn’t turn out to be a Steinbeck, an Orwell or a Tressell. He thinks his own novels tend to preach to the choir: ‘I’m not talking to people that don’t basically share the same attitudes as me,’ he says. ‘I think that if you’re a political person and if you want to contribute to agendas, then writing my kind of fiction is a waste of time . . . I know how my readers vote and I know their relationship to red meats. Basically, left-wing vegetarians of a certain age and attitude read my books.’ He often finds that his books don’t reflect his politics: ‘In many respects, my books are more reactionary than I am . . . If you allow the moment of abandonment to happen in principle, then you have to accept that it’s a real thing. The book can, very often, have an opinion of its own that won’t match yours.’

Continent, for instance, catches a neither-here-nor-there but startlingly familiar realm at the flashpoint of transition. Its seven stories are preoccupied with the struggle to reconcile the inheritance of a rural past that is felt to be more authentic and more cohesive, and yet stunted by quackery and superstition, with an encroaching modernity which promises an ambivalent sort of progress. ‘Continent always takes the side of the old ways of humankind rather than the new ways,’ he says. This “small c” conservatism is something intrinsic to the novel form for Crace: ‘Fiction tends to do that, fiction always prefers to wise old man to the come-uppity young man.’

Crace’s 1997 novel, Quarantine, a reimagining of the temptation of Christ, gained him an unlikely following (and one or two enemies) amongst America’s Christian Right. ‘It’s a much more religious book that you’d expect from a North Korean-style atheist as I am,’ he says. ‘I went on a Southern Baptist Radio show, and because I was a white, middle-class, chirpy chappy they were saying, “Jim, if I could get you back, Martha would cook you up some grits and we’d soon have you down in your own church home and you’d be a fuller human being, believe me, Jim,”’ he recalls. What raised hackles most, incidentally, was the novel’s uncapitalised “god”: ‘I used to get a letter once a month from America that would say, “Dear jim crace, now how do you like it, calling our saviour, the dear lord, ‘god’?” He thought this was really punishing me,’ Crace recalls. He didn’t keep this religious fanbase. I doubt very much that they were fooled by the retitling of his 2003 novel of sex and citizenship, Six, as Genesis in America. They would be long gone, after the wholly non-redemptive depiction of the “afterlife” in 1999’s Being Dead.

‘If I’d written Quarantine from my own viewpoint, it would have been an in-your-face, no-time-for-you, insulting-all-religions book. But what was interesting to me was that it wasn’t.’ If the fictions are more reactionary than their author, they are also less dogmatic, less sure of themselves—‘less bigoted’, as he puts it. ‘I wish I’d written those big, sloganeering novels that changed the hearts and minds of men and women—and there are novels that do that. Nevertheless, there’s something else that novels do that also matters. And that is to undermine thinking, to send you away. I hope the debate begins when you reach the last page of my novels.’ Narrative’s tight rope walk between the fictional and the empirical—its equivocation, its dissonance, its hybridity—‘reveals a whole raft of ambiguities and raises questions.’ He continues: ‘I think that the different kind of truth you find in fiction is also left-wing by nature, that’s what I feel. Narrative’s impulses are left-wing, is what I think.’

I hazard an attempt to pin Crace down: am I right in detecting the influence of another old Lefty, E.P. Thompson, in his novels? He, slippery as a fish, thinks he might have come across the British historian and socialist in his younger, more puritanical days. Is Crace, too, attempting to ‘rescue’ his protagonists from what Thompson called the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’? ‘It’s true. In my books existing narratives are confronted . . . Each of my books takes an existing narrative and tries to set the record straight . . . Working class people are not without blemish, but I try to make them the heroes and heroines, rather than the old heroes and heroines of history,’ he says. ‘One of the narratives about women that I hope my books confront is the Hollywood narrative that if you see a good-looking woman with flowing locks and a large bosom, she’s the heroine. And not only is she the heroine, but good things are going to happen to her, virtue will adhere to her. And of course that’s a lie: abandon all hope everyone else in the world that is not without blemish and is not entirely virtuous . . . The women in my books, I hope, are not seen as good-looking, because that’s a sort of irrelevancy, they’re seen as strong.’

Quite the opposite is true of Crace’s men, however. In Arcadia, protagonist Rook is described as a ‘firebrand turned to ashes’; such a description might apply across the board. The men of Craceland are reluctant protagonists, let alone heroes. Crace’s plots frequently draw to a dénouement that calls for direct action, but the men dither, they flap, they defer. They leave when they’d rather stay (Harvest), they stay when they want to leave (The Pesthouse). All That Follows’ jazz saxophonist, Lennie Lessing, is on sabbatical—and not only from music. This former political activist has, as his wife, Francine, taunts him: ‘gone decaf’. He pads around in a kind of domestic fug, niggled by his frozen shoulder, his off-the-boil marriage, his disappearing step-daughter, but never quite enough to anything about any of them. At length, his hand his forced by a hostage-taking involving a former comrade. Lessing is, finally, a protagonist—albeit an unwilling, and rather cack-handed one.

So, if the women are anti-heroines, the men are hand-wringers. By way of explanation, Crace offers me one of his spiels. It’s the writer’s prerogative, he says: ‘It’s probably because I’ve got no interest in the men . . . I’m sitting in a room with characters I’ve created. Now, to some extent, as a person who has never committed adultery, this is an adulterous relationship. I’m creating women that I love.’ But he does admit that there is more to it than that: ‘Part of the issue in my life—and in English life, actually—is the conflict between feeble weakness—which is polite, and has all the protocols, and doesn’t cause a stir, and doesn’t harm anyone—and flashy violence and suchlike. I like weak characters.’

These are not revisionary fairy tales that attest to the temerity of the human spirit, then. And neither are they consolatory fictions; Crace is a naturalist, after all. In novels like The Gift of Stones and Harvest his version of pastoral is sublime and awe-inspiring, but it is also brooding and sadistic or, worse, it simply is—impenetrable, indecipherable, and entirely beyond our reproach. Crace’s near-future urbanites, those of Six and of All That Follows, for example, take to flaxseed, yoga and unsuccessful attempts to give up smoking as insurance against the inevitable. Being Dead unfurls from a random act of violence which gives the lie to all of this. The novel begins with a lengthy description of the death and decomposition of Joseph and Celice, murdered in flagrante delicto. It’s delivered unflinchingly, and with biological precision. In these lives told backwards, structured according to an invented funeral ritual Crace calls ‘quivering’, there is redemption; but it’s resolutely of this world and not the next.

‘There was a reviewer who said I take a boyish delight in disgust and I couldn’t work that out,’ he remembers, ‘what she didn’t get was that I’m not disgusted by that.’ He explains: ‘The optimism you can get by telling yourself lies is so easily achieved . . . It’s so mawkish and it’s a kind of comfort, but it’s an optimism that is taken from a bright place, which is only inhabited by daffodils and tulips and rainbows. Whereas, my kind of optimism wants to find its place in the dark, in negative and difficult places, in dark corners of the universe.’

In Being Dead, Crace says he found his own ‘narrative of comfort’. But he admits that he, too, is susceptible to the stories we tell ourselves. ‘My father died in 1979 and he’s dead, he’s not anywhere. He was a walker and he was a birdwatcher and when I’m out walking I fantasise I meet him and we take a stroll together’. In fact it was this that was to be the subject of that final, abandoned book, Archipelago. Again, the novel was the product of unlikely coincidence: two old photographs of Crace and his wife with their now-dead parents at the seaside that made an impossible pair. ‘We both keep these pictures that seem to belong in the same landscape, we keep them in our diaries. I saw this and I thought I could invent somewhere, somewhere on the coast were you could find your mum and dad and it would be like Gulliver’s Travels. I’m excited even describing the book to you.’ It would have made a contrary swansong; an autobiographical novel with a spiritual hook from this fibbing atheist. ‘It was a case of real hubris, because I’m far too secretive a person to bring that novel off. I’m so secretive I couldn’t even tell my wife,’ he admits. It might reappear at some point, as an ‘80-page Borgesian novel’ (truth redacted, I presume), or as the natural history book his publishers want him to write next. Perhaps, for Crace, this is as fitting an ending as any. ‘I’ve got the opposite of closure . . . I’ve got the adventure I was looking for.’

ON THE FUTURE OF BRITISH FICTION [NONE MORE PORTENTOUS]

2013-03-25T23:26:00.003+00:00

Totally beside myself with DELIGHT to say that THIS is happening. Pat Waugh and I have brought together some excellent dudes, inc. China Miéville, Stewart Home, Jim Crace, Maureen Freely and Vic Sage, to argue the toss about the future of the British novel. There's finger pointing, doomsaying, soothsaying and some enthusiastic repping of the GOOD LADS. And it has an extremely delectable cover by Jamie George. Buy here.

IT GOT A BIT LIKE BIBLICAL

2013-03-25T22:54:00.000+00:00

THE KING OF A RAINY COUNTRY

2012-12-03T14:14:00.000+00:00

Look at this! Total thrills! Friday was the launch of Coelacanth Press' brilliant reprint of the novelist and critic Brigid Brophy's raucous and rangy 1956 forgotten classic, The King of a Rainy Country, afterword by yours truly, chiz chiz. Details here.

BRITAIN'S FOREMOST LITERARY SHREW

2012-11-14T22:09:00.000+00:00

Honoured (honoured, honoured) to have been asked to provide an Afterword for The Coelacanth Press' brilliant republication of Brigid Brophy's 1956 novel, King of a Rainy Country. She's a right one, that B.B. Here's what they say at The Coelacanth:

The Coelacanth Press, founded in 2008 and having released seven issue so far of its cult journal, releases its first book title in November 2012. Continuing the press’ ethos of uncovering the forgotten (either in the present of the past) their first book is Brigid Brophy’s “The King of a Rainy Country”.

As Ali Smith writes in endorsement of this edition, ‘This pitch-perfect novel, an inquiry into romanticism and disaffection, is witty, unexpectedly moving and a revelation again of Brophy’s originality. Entirely of its time, it remains years ahead of itself even now, nearly 60 years later, in its emotional range and its intellectual and formal blend of stoicism and sophistication.’

The Coelacanth Press has commission one of today’s best visual artist, - Bonnie Camplin – to provide the perfect package for the reintroduction of this text now ripe for re-evaluation.

It's out on Monday 19th November and available, as they say, in all good bookshops. More here.

UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY

2012-10-25T21:47:00.000+01:00

I merrily dashed the last dregs of from a magic pot o' cash across the Indian subcontinent. Because: sheep/lamb, etc. Other, less magic, pot arrived mercifully quickly. Writing of the tooth-extracting and non-tooth-extracting kind continues, of course. Details to follow.

But! In the realisation of several girlhood dreams I am a radio announcer, now. For a bit. It's all these flat vowels ever wanted. Listen to or-bits.com's 128 kbps objects here 'til Sunday.

IF I COULD JUST MEET KATE MOSS (I FEEL YOU, HONEY)

2012-05-16T17:33:00.002+01:00

QUITE

2012-05-10T20:23:00.000+01:00

IT'S AN IDEA

2012-05-07T23:45:00.000+01:00

Phew! Back just in time for the dawn of a new socialist Europe and a showboating moon.

HULLNESS

2012-04-26T17:01:00.000+01:00

If nothing else, at least I've located the sweet spot where West Hull meets downtown New York:

LEARNING TO LIVE ON YOUR OWN

2012-04-26T05:30:00.000+01:00

Should you ever find yourself on a month-long research trip-slash-wild goose chase in the Midwest in pursuit of a forty-years dead writer from whom your critical distance has lapsed to such an extent that you are convinced that, like Oedipa Maas, you are being subjected to an elaborate web of posthumous booby traps, wherein you remain in almost total isolation for four weeks, attempt to read 47 novels (mostly all at the same time), become addicted to the Food Network whilst eating mainly stale taco shells and wasabi peas and spend much of your time tramping up and down freeways since that’s what you like to do when you are in America, and you find that Glenn Branca plus Fox News does not rouse you sufficiently enough to take it all out on the gym’s elliptical machine, then I recommend silencing the rattling inside your head by listening to Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson which, like alchemy, will soundtrack the up-lit marble atria, limestone and Frank Lloyd Wright-lite of your temporary home into a tense Soderbergh corporate thriller of your very own creation.

Then you’ll be like Catherine Zeta Jones or something rather than this hot, mildly-coddled woman who has her photocopies, her 27 new polyester thrift-store scores, her sunburn and far more esoteric paperbacks than will ever fit in her tiny broken suitcase, and would like to bugger off home and scoff a whole block of mature cheddar and enjoy some actual human company as soon as possible, please. Ta.

2012-04-21T03:08:00.002+01:00

PAGING ROBBE-GRILLET

2012-04-16T22:11:00.001+01:00

Typical. Cards of Identity* is, quite lidderally, disintegrating between my very fingers.

*Some excellent British post-war weirdness from the back bedroom of the house of fiction, to be filed alongside Rex Warner, William Sansom, Rayner Heppenstall and those lads. Available, I am duty-bound to add, in full and pristine condition at Dalkey Archive Press.

BECOMING RICHER AND DEEPER

2012-04-09T05:10:00.001+01:00

So, I'm doing that thing again where I go to the Midwest and gawp at things for a bit. It's a bit like academic orienteering, or, well, Challenge Anneka. I'm here to dig through the archives of publishers Calder and Boyars, and, you know, seek inner peace in near-total monastic isolation, probably/most likely polish off the 70,000 remaining words of my PhD thesis, concoct half-baked cultural generalisations, complain about the food and the rest. Items in my "America is So Weird" dossier thus far include Deepak Chopra on the Fox News breakfast programme, advising viewers that the best defence against the global financial crisis is to ask oneself: "What makes me a unique human being?". Yesterday morning I was roused gently from my slumber by a television infomercial for the Brazilian Butt Lift fitness DVD, comprising the "Bum Bum" and the special bonus disc of the "Bum Bum Rapido". You can imagine the effect the tagline Higher! Tighter! Rounder! Perkier! had on my delicate hypnagogic state.

Spent Easter Sunday like a crochety toddler in flip flops, chewing my editor's red pen and squirming in my seat. Making a yah-boo-sucks face at Microsoft Word, letting the Chicago Manual of Style "have a rest" in the microwave (I'm a really excellent editor, though. Honestly. Employ me!). Wondering, idly, will this ever end-slash-will this ever start. And, as usual, now it's past eleven and I'm macro-photographing my extremely picturesque (if, like me, you're an incorrigible perv for a well-lit staircase) towel rail and thinking, yes, I could probably-definitely re-read the entire oeuvre of Jim Crace before bed. More as it comes in...

THE ABSOLUTE RESOLUTION TO GET ON WITH THE TASK IN HAND

2012-03-10T17:08:00.000+00:00

Fred Inglis on Raymond Williams:

Williams' prose, as the last pages of The Fight for Manod bring out, registers the deep difficulty of knowing what to do: of keeping your being and your culture, your feelings and your history in sufficient union, for you to be able to shake off sheer fatigue and bitter frustration, and know what your purposes are. Williams' power is to bring out the real meanings of that experience without glossing its obscurity, indeed at times insisting with a rare and moving honesty that it is the obscurity of experience which has to be lived with, in your body and soul, and sorted out, a bit at a time and as best you can, in terms of everyday life and work and encounter. The grappling with obscurity in his work is always brave and sustained, even if what he takes for granted as the clarities and certainties look a lot less convincing to others than he takes them to be. But it is far more than expressing the self-importance of the over-theoretic and powerless intellectual in the still comfortable West to say that Williams is one of the trio of men whose attention to the possibilities of understanding and action made imaginable by Marxist Socialism, with its tense claims to the status of science and redemptive doctrine, allied to their living a real, visible life in the polity, who mark the spot at which thought becomes valid and valuable action - that sequence of moments Marxists themselves call praxis.

And a reminder:

...the idea of the university is powerless without the material realities of membership and friendship, as well as the rather harder and more wintry virtues of solitary independence, resistance, doggedness, and the absolute resolution to get on with the task in hand and are not to be bought out by the cosy privileges and soft snobberies which are still amply available to bright young-to-middle-aged academics.

LIVE FROM PERRIN'S

2012-01-08T15:59:00.000+00:00

THE VARIED FATE OF THE LAST BATTERY HEN IN PITY ME, CO. DURHAM

2012-01-06T19:34:00.000+00:00

If it was true that when last night before his desk he sat head on veiny forearms, a very young man though ordinarily as capable as most people at that moment as helpless as most people, until Honey called from the other room – the bedroom – it was the third time, Come to bed, without getting an answer for the third time, and again, Come to bed, and he raised his head, roared, NO, then lowered it onto his fist propped elbow on desk, staring at his blank page with an expression that looked like the mask of misery, saying to himself, it’s like being in space so empty you don’t even know whether you’re there, trying to describe what was happening so it would stop happening, this paralysis, to call it a paralysis, because he would know what to think about it and more important, what to feel about it, and she came to the door of the bedroom and moaned, What are you doing? In her blue pyjamas and the single long braid of thick brown hair that she slept in coming over her shoulder, falling like a brush between her breasts, sleepy, cranky, eyes half closed and cheeks flushed from the warmth of bed, and he answered, I’m laying an egg, she opened her eyes to a wide fuzzy, unfocused, sleepy, guileless brown, asking, You’re what?

-The Permanent Crisis, Ronald Sukenick

(Because I am too eternally grateful and delighted to be here to bitch n' moan about the minor inconveniences incurred whilst playing football for a living.)

THE BLOSSOMEST BLOSSOM

2011-11-07T22:46:00.000+00:00

Below my window in Ross, when I'm working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.

With H. to see George Shaw show n' tell at the Baltic on Saturday. What to do when a Turner Prize nominee shares your fugitive visions? Les Dawson, Lady Godiva, Kenneth Williams, Rita Tushingham: Me too, George, me too! Must Matthew Collings act as one's go-between when attempting to invite a Turner Prize nominee on a fact-finding mission to the disused Humbrol Factory on Marfleet Lane? I expect we'll commune privately. Anyway, for now, he reminded me of this, about which, fucking hell, I cannot say a single thing.

THE RUSTLE OF THE REAL

2011-07-19T00:03:00.000+01:00

Bloody hell. I think it might be time for me to dust off the old tinfoil hat...

COMPLEXITY-AS-SUCH

2011-04-19T13:35:00.002+01:00

The uncanny has, as it were, been domesticated as yet another version of "an ethic" of better living through ambiguity, the ethic that of course continues to underwrite a wide range of literary studies.
- Mark Seltzer, "The Graphic Unconscious: A Response"

I was there during the Great Uncanny Goldrush of the mid-noughties, and for this diffident taught postgraduate in search of a lexicon with which to talk about "what makes weird stuff weird", that thing "The Uncanny" was a gift. It made "woooargh" legit. I'm still here, five years later, though, 'cos it's not quite as simple as that. That's the thing, with chasing the ball over the hill - you can't catch it, no, but neither is it enough to just stand there and point as it rolls away.

HONOUR

2011-03-28T18:52:00.001+01:00

One day, this thing's going to be more than a simple repository for disbelief, but until then here's a thought: sometimes the only thing to do when you're over a barrel is to fall on the sword.

EDIT: Or, indeed, to issue a swift rebuttal on your website.

THE GREAT HUG

2011-03-24T13:03:00.001+00:00

Pin Lady has the Pin of Tomorrow Night - a wicked pin, those who have seen it say. That great hug, when Balloon Man and Pin Lady roll down the hill together, will be frightening. The horses will run away in all directions. Ordinary people will cover their heads with shopping bags. I don't want to think about it. You blow up all them balloons yourself, Balloon Man? Or did you have help? Pin Lady, how come you're so apricklededee? Was it something in your childhood?

Balloon Man will lead off with the Balloon of Grace Under Pressure, Do Not Pierce or Incinerate.

Pin Lady will counter with the Pin of Oh My, I Forgot.

Balloon Man will produce the Balloon of Almost Wonderful.

Pin Lady will come back with the Pin of They Didn't Like Me Much. Balloon Man will sneak in there with the Balloon of the Last Exit Before the Toll Is Taken. Pin Lady will reply with the Pin of One Never Knows for Sure. Balloon Man will propose the Balloon of Better Days. Pin Lady, the Pin of Whiter Wine.

It's gonna be bad, I don't want to think about it.
(cont.)
------------
Because of this bloody article, and his idiotic "Contract", Jonathan Franzen's face became pinned to the bullseye in the dartboard of my imagination. (Before then, it was Zadie Smith for this bloody thing and yes, you're right, perhaps I shouldn't be pursuing my academic research in the manner of of Wile E. Coyote packing an Acme anvil - though I've a 5-page square-up as to why prepared, if you're askin'.)

This question of "consolation" and fiction is not quite as simple as bluster, though, is it, as the copy of Donald Barthelme's "Sixty Stories" on my bedside table indicates.

EPHEMERA (THAT'S THE NATURE OF RESEARCH)

2011-03-24T12:32:00.000+00:00

Yes, Youtuber, that's pretty much what I'm getting at. And The Fall soundtracking "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" would have been a bit pat, a bit so just so. So, thanks!