PL51 - All the young dudes

Ciao to six fun new novels

I sustained an epic and savage diss on Monday evening when one of the authors from my young male novelists piece was asked about men and said “Yeah, some guy from a magazine asked me about it. I didn’t read the article though.” I had said hi before the talk!

But fair enough. You don’t just want your very personal work swept up in a “take”. It affirmed my plan to give each of those books a longer, more sensitive treatment here. Though I am grateful that the NS piece got listed on RCB and WRB and also to get me sent my first ever unsolicited book!

Ok here goes. You can also find me in this week’s NS on a meeting of the two highest miracles in the history of consciousness, Shakespeare and Radiohead, and in the TLS for the first time on a Lisbon novel, o Lisbon nights… But here goes.

Stop All The Clocks by Noah Kumin

An “an extremely efficient-looking woman in a lab coat” says, rather than yes, “That is in the affirmative.” The donut-munching coffee-swilling old school cop slouched across from her says “gonna have to unpack that one, doc.” He’s hunting a tech genius supervillain who has been leeching blood from young people’s bodies.

I am down for this book. It’s fun pulp. And some craft has gone into the plot: when the villain returns from the dead we recognise him for his “cold green eyes”, and when you search that phrase, you find it signalled in his first appearance too.

But Stop All The Clocks contains another book too, which is a sort of treatise on Elizabethan poetry. It’s fun when it’s silly, such as the oddball main character steadying her chase cadence by reciting dactyls. The sort of insistently meaningful passages were to me a little awkward, and I also didn’t always feel I caught the music the prose seemed meant to contain. For example:

For Mona it was clear what was ultimate, and when sham art or wordy morality tried to pass itself off as of ultimate importance, this not only offended her sensibility but hit her in the gut with a sense of impending doom—for she knew that in the battle between the world and the word the victor was not guaranteed.

To me, a little wordy and not totally devastating. – but I might just not know the intended melodies. I did think this a fun read and a good debut.

The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda

Wonderful dialogue. Often Gasda lets a conversation travel from mood to mood to mood without any annotation, and yet you are with him and his characters, knowing their thoughts, all the way through. Fantastic control and confidence. Perhaps a skill acquired from writing plays.

On what might be the other side of the same coin, though, I found the interior monologues quite a lot less convincing. It was hard to yield to the long narrations of a characters thoughts. But most of the other choices were very fine and the book felt very contemporary. If the single-character work can be raised to the standard of the multi-character scenes then I think some really good stuff could come.

I will definitely pick up the next book. I might do so a tad more eagerly if the language had a touch more play to it. But I also understand that the bareness was deliberate.

Shibboleth by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

A very funny satire of a woke Oxford campus. It achieved all the merits of the English campus novel, whose conventions it rests within neatly.

It seemed that near the end there was a bold attempt near the end to see and justify all sides of the live arguments. There are moments in Anna Karenina when you know that Tolstoy has decided to give a character their share of sympathy now. It definitely made the book more interesting and uncertain. But I felt the scheme enlisted the best character, Angelica Mountbatten-Jones, to lose her remarkable ambiguity for an implausible and instrumental act of antisemitism.

Other than that I laughed and swooned, and really enjoyed this.

Major Arcana by John Pistelli

I hear the woman who reviewed this in Compact is pretty nice but I do think reviewing this by “red-penning” the first few paragraphs was arbitrary and quite glib. The only “red pen” mark I have is that people do seem to “wave Xs off” quite a lot – but who cares!

This book is magnificently realised in so many places. The delirious vision of a delirious visionary at the book’s core – of the comic book artist Simon Magnus, his illustrator Marco Cohen, and the girlfriends Ellen Chandler and Diane del Greco – is so compelling and provocative. I really loved it. Stuff like this:

In Simon Magnus’s book, The Fool tries to persuade the morally rigid Ratman that he, too, with his verminous animal totem and his vengeful war on crime inspired by the senseless slaughter of his family, ought to join the villain’s rebellion against settled order rather than aiding the police in theri vain quest to exorcise Gothic City’s pandemonium.

When merely verbal persuasion fails, The Fool kipnaps and sodomizes the red-suited Sparrow, Ratman’s adolescent sidekick—this todemonstrate to Ratman the existential and even cosmic trauma that may strike any-and everyone at any and every time, as indicated in the line The Fool speaks to Sparrow before perpetrating the hideous act: “Let me show you what this world means.”

…the hospitalized Sparrow’s nihilistic sickbed monologue in the book’s central scene, his blue eyes staring wide onto emptiness:

“We’re jsut meat and bone bundled in a thin skin. It doesn’t take anything—the lightest touch—to break the membrane and get all the way inside. I thought I had secrets in there> I thought deep down I was someone no one really knew. I thought I would carry that little room inside me all the way through my life no matter what. I thought I would be buried there, warm and safe, in that little lighted room. But he came through the window, oh God, oh Jesus save me, he came through the door, and it’s his room now. And I don’t have anywhere to go, anywhere to live. I’m locked out in hte storm, and the night, the night, it goes on forever. It just goes on and on and on…”

For me, the last third lost pace. The central story wrapped up pretty early and I missed the heat of that creative inferno. It was a little hard to get excited to see through the remaining plots, which could hardly have burned so brightly. Nonetheless there were still great flashes.

Glass Century by Ross Barkan

A saga novel that would turn an alien into a New Yorker, that has Robert Moses and the Trumps and 9/11 and answers why there is New York rather than nothing, all the while sustaining detailed souls in its main characters.

Alas I can’t be so thorough here because right after I finished it my Kindle was snatched. But I can congratulate those bandits on their excellent taste in literature, because this book is – the critic said – “unflaggingly bright”.

By which I meant a sort of cousin virtue to the one James Wood said marks great novels: where great novelists go one level beyond in their detail and Kurt Vonnegut in Dresden’s wreckage observes that the rubble has little waterfalls of dust. Glass Century brings its full artistry even to throwaway descriptions of inessential moments.

Wish I had my highlights! But this is kept up across the 600 pages so there develops a relentlessness. An outlandish masked vigilante substory gets folded in without a beat being missed. Once you trust it the book becomes a real joy. It’s big and ambitious and successful.

Before meeting Mr Barkan I wondered how he produced so many political columns. Then I realised he spoke in perfect political columns and writing them might just involve turning on Voice Memos and counting to 1,200 words. It seems outrageous (maybe even unfair!) that such fluency could roll straight into fiction and just start lighting that up too, but it seems to have. I know this was written in an amazingly short time.

I can only offer an extremely vague and unhelpful note. But I wonder if somewhere reliable excellence needs to be transcended. Could some emotional escape velocity be breached? I might mean I wanted evidence of an immense internal pressure, and that the evidence would have to be something shattered, some kind of shrapnel or at least some kind of extreme strain.

The Boys by Leo Robson

I like this book, and I really like Lauren Oyler who was very patient when I was nervous speaking to her once, but I definitely disagree with her praise on the blurb, “Something delightful on every page”. I think this book has many merits, but I think they are sort of the opposite of that.

One Libertines song starts with the reverb of its own ending. So you always know where you are going. The Boys operates in the same weird zone of anti-suspense: Johnny gets attached to a new manic appetitive charisma, but we know the reverbs of this happening before and changing nothing. So the game seems to be to work up feeling in the absence of consequence, and sort of chart the hedonism of anhedonia, the colour of black and white, the flight of taxiing if you like.

The prose is extremely straightforward, especially for an author who knows everything prose can do. A friend ignorant of Robson’s huge knowledge said “This is just naming things! He doesn’t describe!”. And it does name lots of things, Fanta, Rooibos, Fast Mart, IKEA, Air Maxes, Umbro backpacks, canvas Vans, iPods. But I think that serves the above point. My evidence is this passage, I thought the best in the book:

When I was six or seven, my parents bought me a duvet cover printed with the London street map, the A-Z, stretching from Notting Hill in the west to St Paul’s in the east and from Highgate down to Waterloo, the area I later identified as Emily’s horizons. At night, listening to my father’s bedtime stories, I felt wrapped up in the city. But I struggled to recover that feeling in any other context. It somehow always eluded my grasp. The London in my head was bright and brooding, cosy and formidable, harboured all these conflicting attitudes to Europe and America and history and commerce and health, rendered you speck-like, ant-like, half submerged, and also proud and strong, personally historic. Yet looking at it felt so different from being there. I could watch the BT Tower for hours and occasionally did just that. But walking around its base was still to be lost in Fitzrovia.

I suppose the book is describing what it is like to know where you are but still be lost. Typically we praise the ‘life’ characters whose every action is potentially surprising and consequential – Rosaline, the Wife of Bath, the vitalists. The character in this book exists somehow ‘before’ that spiritual terrain: he is trying to work up the nerve just to break into that sort of life. He is struggling to be born, to construct a past or a future, let alone the interface that must be established between them in order to get someone really moving.

It’s interesting, but I must say I had to read it a second time to get any of that, or to notice the low-slung humour. Had I not admired the author so much I could have just shrugged and put it down.

Conclusion

Well that’s all really exciting team. Major Arcana and Glass Century were to me the most outstanding, but I say that you could be pleased to give any of these a try and hats off to all involved! Hopefully there will be another batch of such novels soon, and hopefully I will be in it.

So pleased that there are 250 of you now. An editor explained a rejection: ‘I like it but how many of us can there be? 500 in the whole world?’ Halfway there!

Hope you’re all having nice weekends. I’m in Italy ciao 😎

GM