PL45 - Maze, daze, haze
Who would get out?
A few summers ago my younger cousin visited from Belfast and, out on a hot Thursday near London Bridge, said ‘I think if I could have a job where my colleagues go to the pub after work like that, I reckon that’s the dream.’ I laughed, because it seemed so realisable a dream, but in this last hot week I have thought – it is the dream.
Thanks so much everyone for bringing PL past two-hundred subscribers. I am really really thrilled.
I had marked that breaching it this Friday would mean the second hundred had come in half the time of the first. In the end it came on Thursday. If the period keeps halving, we’ll have the fabled five-hundred in early August. And the entire human race two weeks after that.
The timing is especially good because next week, with the International Booker 2025, my coolest gunslinging literateur enfant terrible anecdote, from the International Booker 2024, will expire – so thank you, new subscribers, for everything, and for justifying one last rehearsal of that glory, wherein I was blocked at the door from interviewing last year’s winner, and escorted out before my coffee had even arrived.
Coffee was in fact part of in the offending review. In one scene a character, initially nervous, warmed to another. That thawing was articulated by a progression of moka-pot mannerisms. First: “I’ll have my coffee black, without sugar, that way he’ll take me seriously.” More comfortable: “Nineteen, she says, and dips a sugar cube in her black coffee after all.” Yet more relaxed: “What makes you so sure, she says, and now helps herself to cream as well.”
What gauche scaffold! So amateur. Such devices may well structure an early draft, but they have to come out before publication. Your detail should stand on its own. There is that street performance you see on the Southbank, where four people sit in chairs, each lies back on another’s knees, and they all stay up when the chairs are removed. ‘BONEY!’, I scrawled on drafts, ‘DE-BONE! FILLET!!!’
A few snatches from talking with others of last year’s nominees:
Itamar Vieira Junior with Crooked Plow “My idea is that to write this book I had to invite the reader into the landscape, so it was very important for me to get all the details perfect.” “She is also able to communicate and to speak in a way with her own body. Even if she doesn’t have a voice she is still able to speak.”
Selva Almada with Not a River “Because the novel is very short, the characters had to be very concentrated in their elements in order to represent everything I wanted them to represent. But at the same time I’m not keen for characters to be prototypes. So in themselves they can be very contradictory or include very different characteristics.”
You might have seen James by Percival Everett took the Pulitzer fiction prize this week. When it was nominated for the Booker in November, I found it “nicely written, if not memorably so”. One for the shelf, sure, but not one for the podium.
Some weeks ago we asked the Saturday Read crowd what contemporary novelist they expected would join the canon. This was the summary and response:
I know we drift on in imodium haze – all is constipation! And sorry. But that’s only because the much-promised ‘biggest ever piece’ got way bigger at the last minute! So that is exciting and not too far off. And the big readathon pieces will start to flower next week.
Great to run into those of you I met this week. Again, thank you everyone, and I hope you have a nice weekend.
GM
