Growing Up At The New Yorker

This appeared in today's The Sunday Guardian

Whether you think of it as the urbane centre of American letters or a magazine designed to make suburban women feel superior to the Joneses, the New Yorker has always attracted more than its fair share of interest. For years, those associated with the publication have written books on their time there. Some have been vituperative, such as Renata Adler’s Gone: the Last Days of the New Yorker, which followed in the footsteps of Tom Wolfe’s infamous 1965 takedown in New York magazine. Others are affectionate and commemorative, especially about the magazine’s first few decades, such as Brendan Gill’s Here at the New Yorker, Ved Mehta’s Remembering Mr Shawn’s New Yorker or Ben Yagoda’s About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made.

In these pages, affairs have been discussed or denied, dirt has been slung or vacuumed up, and personal quirks have been criticized or celebrated. Their lure is irresistible, as they promise to shine a light on the activities of editors Harold Ross and William Shawn, writers such as Thurber, Salinger and Updike, and all the other allegedly neurotic, talented, egoistic, sensitive souls who contributed to the magazine.

The latest addition, published last week, is Janet Groth’s memoir, The Receptionist: an Education at the New Yorker. From 1957, Groth worked for more than two decades at the magazine, answering phones, taking messages and lending a helping hand and sympathetic ear to the magazine’s writers, editors and cartoonists. Lest you jump to the conclusion that this was the sum of her ambitions, it ought to be pointed out that she earned a PhD while at the magazine, left to teach at the University of Cincinnati, and has since published four scholarly books on Edmund Wilson.

The tone of voice she adopts for much of The Receptionist, however, is that of an ingénue, a wide-eyed girl from the sticks arriving in glamorous New York City. As the book progresses, it becomes clear that it’s more a coming-of-age tale than an inside look at the workings of the New Yorker. In a sense, the cover, with the distinctive Irwin typeface of the magazine’s masthead, is deceptive.

It starts with Groth being interviewed by the notoriously shy E.B. White and then assigned to the reception desk on the “writers’ floor”.  The chapters that follow aren’t strictly chronological, but deal with aspects of Groth’s tenure at the magazine – being proposed to by John Berryman, a suicide attempt following an affair with a caddish cartoonist, flirtatious lunches with Joseph Mitchell and assisting Muriel Spark. It’s also a record of her alliances with unsuitable men, and Groth is candid about her personal and sexual awakening, fuelled by lessons from the therapist’s couch.

Groth name-checks many others, but it’s clear that her interactions were limited: “When J.D. Salinger needed to find the office Coke machine (there wasn’t one), I was the girl he asked. When Woody Allen got off the elevator on the wrong floor – about every other time – I was the girl who steered him up two floors where he needed to be.”

Though she remained at her receptionist’s desk throughout – barring an ill-fated stint in the art department – without advancing to fact-checker or contributor, she never felt hard done by. Her several trips to Europe and “invitations to share the cultural, social, and literary life of the city” made her feel neither a victim nor beneficiary: “It seems to me a two-way street”. She also disingenuously glosses over casual sexism: “In those days, men who came up to meet New Yorker writers for lunch…often passed the time chatting with me at the reception desk. Sometimes they even convinced me to go out with them.” Or, speaking of a colleague: “These men had a good eye for beauty and they eyed Andy with evident pleasure”.

There is thus an awkward though endearing sincerity that pervades these pages. Groth’s memoir doesn’t quite belong on the same shelf as other books on the New Yorker, but acolytes of the magazine will probably give The Receptionist a warm reception.

Second Novel Blues

This appeared in yesterday's Sunday Guardian.

One of the characters in Rupa Bajwa’s second novel happens to be a novelist unable to make progress with her second novel. Any resemblance to the author is, one supposes, purely co-incidental. As Taylor Antrim wrote in a piece for the Los Angeles Times, “Is there anything worse than writing a second novel?...It's a standoff between creative depletion and rising ambition, the desire to attain more combined with the creeping fear that everything you had went into that first book”.

Moreover, if the debut novel is acclaimed, the burden of expectations can make the second one even harder to finish. It was nine years after The Virgin Suicides that Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex appeared; it was ten years after The Secret History that Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend was published.

Sometimes, though, getting a first novel out of the way can allow the author to discover a subject and style that sets him or her off on a new direction. Such was the case, for example, with Salman Rushdie, who went from the unheralded Grimus to the celebrated Midnight’s Children.

Then, there’s England’s Encore Award, which acknowledges the often-neglected achievement of impressive second novels. Presenting the inaugural award in 1990, Stephen Fry said that a first novel “contains all the experience, pain, stored-up artistry, anger, love, hope, comic invention and despair” of the author’s life until then. However, “the second is an act of professional writing. That is why it is so much more difficult”. Among the notable winners since then have been Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, Ali Smith’s Hotel World, Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag and Colm Toibin’s The Heather Blazing.

Two second novels published this year won’t, one fears, be on the Encore Award list. Nikita Lalwani and Rupa Bajwa’s first novels were well-received, and rightly so; their second efforts, however, are a let-down

Lalwani’s The Village is entirely set in an ‘open prison’ in north India – a community of convicted murderers and their families. The central character, Ray Bhullar, a fledgling BBC documentary director of Indian origin, arrives here with a crew to film their lives of the village’s inhabitants. An interesting set-up, but what comes in the way of its development are woolly characterization and awkward dialogue.

The lives of those in the village remain out-of-focus, and the motivations of others who influence the plot, such as Ray’s producer and presenter, remain unclear. There’s also much about India through a visitor’s eyes, which means heat, dust, colours, food and, inevitably, a bumpy camel ride.

Bajwa’s Tell Me a Story is bumpy, too, for different reasons. As with her first book, the protagonist is from the lower middle class: Rani, a beautician in an Amritsar salon living with a quarrelsome family struggling to make ends meet. There is empathy in Bajwa’s portrayal of her limited horizons, and the prose, though occasionally clumsy, comes across as sincere.

Halfway through, though, the scene shifts to Delhi and we’re introduced to Sadhna, a blocked novelist. This is when the enterprise begins to flounder. The shifts in the points of view between Sadhna and Rani are imbalanced, and the conflation of the storytelling skills of the two is uneasy, at best.

Both novels demonstrate what authors attempt to do with sophomore novels:  Lalwani tries to get away from the subject and situation of her first, while Bajwa tries to extend and deepen them. The reach of both exceeds their grasp.

None of this is to suggest that the first novels of these two authors were flashes in the pan. It’s clear that, despite the many weaknesses, there’s enough in their follow-ups to demonstrate talent. The jacket copy of Bajwa’s novel mentions that she’s at work on her next novel; one presumes that this is the case with Lalwani, too. And when it comes to third novels, it was after Dangling Man and The Victim that Saul Bellow wrote the classic The Adventures of Augie March.

When Writers ReJoyce

The next instalment of my column for The Sunday Guardian.

Last week, thousands gathered in Dublin and elsewhere to commemorate the Feast of Saint Jam Juice. Bloomsday, as it’s less jocularly known, marks the day during which the events in James Joyce’s Ulysses occur, and given the number of people carousing from morning till night, as Declan Kiberd observes, those celebrating the book probably outnumber those who’ve read it.

It’s a pity that Joyce’s Modernist jigsaw has such an intimidating reputation among readers. Its effect on writers, however, can’t be denied. It’s influenced John Dos Passos, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie, “and just about every modern writer who has chosen to experiment with the novel form”, as Gordon Bowker, author of a new Joyce biography, points out.

This isn’t restricted to the English-speaking world, as is evident from two recent novels in Spanish. The English translation of one was published last year, and of the second, last week, to coincide with the 90th anniversary of Ulysses’ publication. Both testify to the continuing impact of the novel Joyce called his mistresspiece, his best-loved work.

The first, Julian Rios’ The House of Ulysses, is more a piece of ingenious literary criticism than a novel. Stuffed with puns, it’s set in a museum exhibit titled ‘The Days and Works of James Joyce’. Here, among others, there’s a Joyce-like Cicerone who wears black, has a straggly moustache and “a blind man’s glasses”. There’s also a man with a Macintosh laptop (a nod to the mysterious man in a mackintosh in Ulysses) and three readers, known as A, B and C, who proceed to give us the ABC of the book.

It takes us, chapter by chapter, through what Joyce called in Finnegans Wake his “usylessly unreadable” work, explaining the prose style, references and Homeric allusions. In clearing such thickets, Rios also weaves in information connecting Joyce’s life to the book’s events and characters. Those looking for plot or character-development will have to search elsewhere; The House of Ulysses never pretends to be more than an inventive companion piece to Ulysses, best read in conjunction with it.

The man in a mackintosh also appears in Enrique Vila-Matas’ Dublinesque, a meditation on the effects of reading and writing. For the central character, reading is “a way of being in the world: an instrument for interpreting, sequence after sequence, his day-to-day life.”  This is Samuel Riba, a publisher approaching 60 who yearns to break free from his pigeonholed days in Barcelona, away from his parents, his wife and his publishing business, in decline in the digital age.

Following a vivid dream, Riba decides to visit Dublin on Bloomsday and, in memory of the funeral in the Hades section of Ulysses, plans to hold a funeral for the passing of the Gutenberg era. The current state of literature apart, the novel can also be read as a journey from the margins towards a nebulous centre, as Dublin and New York become Riba’s illusory lodestars.

Dublinesque favours style over plot and contains many references to other writers and artists – among them, Laurence Sterne, Georges Perec, Dave Cronenberg, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. Though Joyce is the presiding deity, it’s also haunted by Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin. As Riba goes in search of his private epiphany, the novel becomes increasingly dream-like and self-absorbed, “a commodius vicus of recirculation”, as Joyce would have gleefully put it. It’s all held together, though, by the desire of both author and character to explore the space between reading and reality, using Joyce’s book as a staging ground.

Both novels, then, have considerable differences but are united by a seriousness of intent shot through with an antic spirit. As Joyce said of Ulysses in an interview with Djuna Barnes, “there is not one single serious line in it”. The book that Edmund Wilson called “perhaps the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness” still inspires devotion, which is why tales of vampires and shades of grey will come and go but Ulysses will continue to be celebrated. 

Anomie And Bonhomie

This appeared in the latest TimeOut Mumbai

BLACK BREAD WHITE BEER Niven Govinden

In keeping with its title, Niven Govinden’s Black Bread White Beer traffics in opposites. This slim novel circles around the perceived differences between men and women, between the duties of husbands and wives, between parents and in-laws, between Christians and Hindus, between the city and the country – and, above all, between races.

The events that anchor the above musings have to do with a trip to Sussex by Amal and Claud, a London-based couple. Claud has just suffered a first trimester miscarriage, and they drive to her parents in the country who are as yet unaware of this mishap. The novel stays close to Amal’s thoughts throughout, as he obsesses over his ‘Indian gene’, his increasingly strained relationship with Claud and his fears and hopes for the future.

Thus, there are alliances between Black Bread White Beer and Ardisher Vakil’s One Day, which similarly deals with a day in the life of a London-based inter-racial couple in a fractious alliance. (In Vakil’s novel, though, it’s the woman who’s from India and the husband who’s British.)

Though Govinden’s prose has a thoughtful cadence, many of Amal’s thoughts come across as essentialist, if not outdated. (“Men do not have best friends the way women do. It…can overwhelm the basic masculine need for secrets and freedoms.”) One looks for elements of satire or irony, but there is little to be found. It’s not without moments of well-observed intensity, but the environment of the novel can be hermetic and airless, given Amal’s paranoid imaginings. Towards the close, there’s heavy-handed mention of a village square’s maypole, an evident symbol of fertility.

The title is an inversion of the name of an album by British band Scritti Pollitti, whose previous release was called Anomie and Bonhomie. There’s a lot of the former and just a late-stage glimmer of the latter in Govinden’s novel.

All The News That's Unfit To Print

This appeared in today's The Sunday Guardian.

Intrepid seekers. Naïve ingénues. And cynical hacks. In fiction, journalists generally fall into one of those categories, more often than not, the last one. Thus, the tone of novels about the newsroom is usually farcical, following the example set by Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Such was the case, for example, in Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning, set in the dying years of Fleet Street.  Last year, though, there was Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, an affectionate, nostalgic look at the staff of a struggling newspaper in Rome. That daily wasn’t bothered with setting up a website because, as one of the senior staffers put it, “The Internet is to news what car horns are to music.” It’s hard to think of anyone feeling that way nowadays.

A similar sentiment is voiced by one of the journalists in The Spoiler, a recent debut novel by Annalena McAfee. McAfee’s background is suited to such an enterprise – she’s had over three decades of experience as a journalist, the last six years at The Guardian’s Saturday Review supplement, which she helped set up. (By the way, the novel is dedicated to her husband, a certain Ian McEwan.)

Set in the London of the late Nineties, The Spoiler revolves around the past and future of news reporting, shifting between the points of view of the two central characters. First, there’s the 80-year-old Honor Tait, a feted former foreign correspondent and war reporter who’s been called “the newsroom Dietrich”. She’s visited every city of importance, from Madrid to Calcutta, has been married thrice, has won the Pulitzer, and has rubbed shoulders with “a procession of artists, poets, politicians and Hollywood panjandrums”  -- General Franco, Frank Sinatra, Jean Cocteau and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, to name a few. In the other corner is Tamara Sim, a 27-year-old reporter who works with The Monitor as a freelance sub editor and writes for Psst!, the paper’s Saturday celebrity gossip magazine. She’s a repository of show business trivia, “a grandmistress of gossip” with a knack for “What’s In/What’s Out, Going Up/Going Down, Good Week/Bad Week” lists.

To begin with, then, these two come across as archetypes, not as full-fledged characters. Improbably, Tamara is asked to interview Honor and the meeting – which occurs after too many pages of backstory – is a clash of opposites. When Honor mentions T.S. Eliot, Tamara thinks of the West End musical; when she makes a reference to the Library of Alexandria, the industrious Tamara makes a note: “Chk: who is Alexandria? What happened to her library?”

Great fun though this is to read, McAfee’s satirical mask starts to slip as the coiled plot unfurls. Tamara’s sleuthing turns up revelations that the tabloids pounce upon and the tone shifts to something darker. This, despite comic set pieces such as the defining characteristics of those who work in a paper’s news, sport, books, obit and other sections.

What colours the book like drops of black ink in clear water is Honor’s later predicament and her observations on the present. Speaking to Tamara of the rise in the use of the first person singular, she says, “Isn’t that what all you young journalists want to talk about these days? Yourselves, your pasts, your feelings, your relationships.” Reports in the popular press are dismissed as “imbecilic morality tales for an amoral age”. For an earlier generation, “the vulgar publicity, the public exposure, brought…by airing family business, private affairs, in confessional memoirs or newspaper articles would be completely abhorrent, unthinkable”. (Take that, Facebook.)

The Spoiler, then, is decidedly uneven in tone, yet worth reading for its enjoyable moments of high farce and the light it throws on the way we consume what we call “the news”. Some would dismiss Honor as elitist and hidebound but there’s much truth to her opinions. At one point, she feels, “The young were all gunslingers now, each one a little Goebbels, reaching for their revolvers whenever they heard the word culture”.  Ouch. 

Why Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby Should Have Been Set In India

This appeared in today's The Sunday Guardian

Given Baz Luhrmann’s love of the flamboyant, it’s entirely possible that he’s going to miss the trees for the wood with his forthcoming remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The recent trailer does nothing to assuage this concern. As Ta-Nehesi Coates, senior editor at The Atlantic, tweeted: “The problem is The Great Gatsby probably should be an indie flick. The beauty of the book is its small quiet take on a big loud time.” That big, loud time was, of course, America’s so-called roaring Twenties, a riotous age of Art Deco, flappers, jazz and Prohibition.

(For those interested in Meyer Wolfsheim, the character played by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie, he’s described by Fitzgerald as “a small, flat-nosed Jew” with “two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril”. Some casting.)

Many have commented on how Fitzgerald’s best-known work is still relevant to today’s America, but what’s interesting is that there’s much about it that’s relevant to urban India, too. Consider what Fitzgerald casts his eye on: a worship of money, amorality, social climbing, an aggrandizement of surfaces -- and car accidents. In short, “the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men”.

Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, comes to New York to learn the “bond business” and profit from the financial boom. Books on finance stand on his shelf “in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew”. Such shining secrets are what newly-minted Indian MBAs in finance as well as feverish Dalal Street speculators hunger after, downturn or no downturn. How riches affect the way one sees the world is beautifully caught in Gatsby’s remark about Daisy, his long-lost love: “Her voice is full of money”.

Gatsby himself is a model of reinvention, rising from a penurious but confident James Gatz of North Dakota to the suave, affected Jay Gatsby of East Egg, a person who hosts resplendent parties where “men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars”. Gatsby’s shady past – from bootlegging to possible financial malfeasance – doesn’t bother his guests too much: they are “agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key”. Businessmen with dubious antecedents being feted by those around them, social climbers with connections: these are what one sees in the pages of the Indian papers every day. As for the media itself, newspaper reports are described in the novel as “grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue”.

Such social climbing applies in the novel to geography, too. Gatsby’s mansion is in West Egg, a former fishing village, while the old-rich section of Long Island lives in East Egg, looking at the arrivistes across the bay with a mixture of dismay and fascination. One can’t help but be reminded of the plush gated communities and business zones emerging on the outskirts of our cities, to rival and sometimes destabilise traditional city centres. (“Welcome to New Cuffe Parade”, say the advertisements, referring to a development off Mumbai’s Eastern Express Highway.)

Another theme that reverberates throughout the novel is that of heedlessness -- specifically, how the negligence of the privileged can be ruinous for the rest. As Fitzgerald writes of Daisy and her husband, the brutish Tom: “They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”. The vast carelessness of the rich and of the elected and the mess they make: surely, one doesn’t need to elaborate on how this applies to the subcontinent.

Baz Luhrmann’s hyperkinetic Romeo + Juliet transplanted Shakespeare’s play onto modern-day Florida. He should have transplanted Gatsby onto modern-day India: now that would have been worth waiting for.

What Writers Can Learn From Katrina Kaif

The next instalment of my column for The Sunday Guardian.

“What is the job definition of an actor? Technically, you must perform your scene, endorse products and do stage shows.”

      --  Katrina Kaif in the Hindustan Times

The Writer awoke with a start to the cacophony of the alarm clock. Bleary-eyed, he rolled out of bed, joints aching because of the unaccustomed use to which they were put at last night’s dance rehearsal. Next week, he would begin a series of stage shows to promote his new novel, and he had been put on a gruelling schedule. The phone trilled; it was the Writer’s agent. “Awake, are you?” the agent said.  “Hot, strike while the iron is.” “Listen –” the Writer began to protest weakly, but the agent cut him off, dropping the Yoda impersonation in the process. “Do you want to go back to starving in an attic, burning manuscript pages to keep warm, applying for grants and teaching unlettered English students? Writing doesn’t pay. Unless you’re Dan Brown.”

While the Writer yawned, the agent spoke enthusiastically of how a writer’s job wasn’t just writing anymore. Publishing profits are down, he said. Old models don’t work,  he continued. Look at actors like Katrina, showing the way to professionals ready to embrace a brave new world of possibilities, he concluded. By this time the Writer had fallen into a light doze, which he snapped out of when the agent began to sing “Rise and shine! Rise and shine!” in a high-pitched tone.

Under the shower, the Writer thought longingly of the old days. A book tour, a few readings, some radio and TV appearances, and he could get back to writing his next book. Now, he barely found time to write, squeezed as he was between dance rehearsals and practicing lines he would have to recite in front of the cameras. He held up a shampoo bottle. “To give my best, I need to look my best,” he said, in a dull monotone. Why couldn’t the people who write TV commercials come up with better lines? He’d tried re-writing some scripts, but his efforts were met with hoots of laughter, especially the one in which a man finds himself converted into a giant beetle overnight and attracts beetles of the opposite sex  by judicious application of the right deodorant.

An hour later, the Writer was in a large room along with a dozen other scribblers moving to the music that blared out of large speakers. “No, no, no,” said the annoyingly fit dance instructor coming up to him. “Put more energy into your pelvic thrusts! This sequence is meant to capture the essence of your novel – that man is born free but is everywhere in chains. I want to see your hips trying to break free of those chains. Otherwise, how will your readers get the message?” He pranced off as the Writer wiped the sweat off his brow, meeting the sympathetic gaze of other authors who had similarly been instructed to embody the themes of their own novels, from loss of innocence to the discovery of hope under trying conditions.

Rehearsal done, the Writer was rushed to a studio to shoot a commercial for a new brand of chocolate. “Look,” the bearded director said, looking intense, “this is a scene where you’re sitting in front of your typewriter, hands frozen on the keys. Then, you look at a bar of Delish, your eyes light up, and you say: Whenever I’m stuck for words, I reach for Delish. Instant energy for instant ideas! We cut to another shot where you’re happily munching and typing away. Got it?”

“Er,” said the Writer, “I use a laptop.”

“We’re aiming for a retro feel,” said the director wearily, “so if you don’t mind, let’s just go ahead.” He turned away and the Writer heard him mutter to a passing light-boy, “Who does he think he is, Katrina?”

Much later, long after sunset, the Writer reached home and crawled wearily between the sheets. His last thought before he fell into a dreamless sleep was to wonder whether it was too late to follow his parents’ advice to become a chartered accountant.

On John Cheever, 'The Dante Of The Cocktail Hour'

The next instalment of my column for New Delhi's The Sunday Guardian.

An Indian city’s suburbs are, typically, squalid, overcrowded areas inhabited by those who can’t afford to live closer to the city’s centre. The notion of a suburb is very different elsewhere, particularly on America’s eastern seaboard, where they’ve been viewed as havens of homogeneity, places to move to when one has children, picket-fenced dwellings from where middle-management men in grey flannel suits emerged to commute to and from offices in the city. As John Cheever wrote in a 1960 piece for Esquire just before his own move to Westchester, “My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory, and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place-name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun”.

Cheever, whose 100th birth anniversary is this week, captured the malaise of suburban life like no other. Though he wrote five novels – of the last, Colm Toibin said, “If you ignore the upbeat, cheesy ending, Falconer is the best Russian novel in the English language” -- it’s his short stories that Cheever is remembered for.  He was to influence others such as John Updike, and Matt Weiner, creator of Mad Men, has cited him as well as Richard Yates as inspirations for the show. (In the first season, Don and Betty Draper live on Bullet Park Road, a reference to a Cheever novel.)  In a 1992 episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza’s to-be wife discovers a cache of amorous letters written by Cheever to her father, and in the same year there was a commercial for Levi’s directed by Tarsem Singh that was a take-off on ‘The Swimmer’, one of Cheever’s best stories, earlier made into a 1968 film starring Burt Lancaster.

Like that story, the others possess an autumnal melancholy akin to what Orhan Pamuk referred to as huzun in his book on Istanbul. The titles themselves are revealing: ‘O City of Broken Dreams’, ‘Torch Song’, ‘The Season of Divorce’, ‘The Sorrows of Gin’. Most are set in the 1950s, that period of American promise after World War Two and before Vietnam. Cheever satirises and sometimes mythologises the lives of men who are anxious not to betray their potential, drinking too much, conducting casual affairs, observing their wives and children with an equal mixture of pride and helplessness. Sunday evening shadows lengthen over the lawn in the suburb of Shady Hill as they brood over disagreements and disappointments, trying to rise above them by attending one party too many. Not for nothing was Cheever referred to as “the Dante of the cocktail hour”.

As a repressed homosexual in a loveless marriage for most of his life – as well as an alcoholic – Cheever’s treatment of women in his fiction is problematic, a charge also levelled against other writers of his time. They stay at home; they shop; they exchange gossip; and, when they aren’t tender objects of desire, can be vain and demanding. It’s not as easy as calling Cheever a misogynist; rather, most of his women – in ‘A Country Husband’, for instance – exist to valorize or oppress the men. At the other end of the scale, in stories such as ‘Reunion’, ‘The Five Forty Eight’ and ‘Goodbye My Brother’, is Cheever’s consummate ability to portray the anxiety beneath the artifice in sonorous, graceful sentences that are, in Hanif Kureishi’s words, “intelligent and resonant, poetic and ineffable”. Cheever himself once wrote, “The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being”.

In one of his early stories, ‘The Enormous Radio’, a couple in a Sutton Place apartment finds that their radio has the ability to pick up the conversations of others in their building. All is revealed to them: bitterness, jealousy, heartbreak and the difficulty of keeping up appearances. In the same manner, Cheever was able to tune in to the frequency of quiet desperation and broadcast its voice to the rest of us.

In Greeneland

This appeared in today's DNA.

THE MAN WITHIN MY HEAD Pico Iyer

It’s not often that a writer composes a book-length homage to another. Offhand, one can recall Nicholson Baker’s quirky U and I, about his fixation with John Updike; Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, about his attempts to grapple with the life of D.H. Lawrence; and, more recently, Tom Grimes’ Mentor, about his relationship with Frank Conroy, erstwhile director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Typically, such work is designed to reveal as much about the writer as the person being written about, and this is also the case with Pico Iyer’s new book, The Man within My Head, a meditation on Graham Greene. (The clever title is a take on Greene’s first novel, The Man Within.)

In his autobiography of his early years, A Sort of Life, Greene writes that part of the motive that made him a novelist was the “desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order”. In The Man within My Head, Iyer tries to impose order on his experiences of travel and early life by examining them through the prism of his relationship with Greene’s work. As such, it’s not a book that one can easily slot into pre-fabricated categories of memoir, travel or literary criticism. In a loosely-overlapping series of intensely personal chapters, he explores the question: “Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?”

Thus, this is no Norman Sherry-like obsessive quest; the focus is internal. As Iyer says to a friend, “I’m interested in the things that lived inside him. His terrors and obsessions. Not the life, as it were, but what it touched off in the rest of us”. With Greene installed as his “adoptive father”, Iyer is also free to also talk of his actual father: the early signs of brilliance in Mumbai, the move to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and the final shift to California. Iyer himself would spend many of his growing years between England and America, no doubt planting the seeds of his interest in geographical displacement, and what it does to a person.

While travelling to places such as Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Vietnam, Mexico and Cuba, Iyer sounds a note of self-analysis again and again: “Freed from usual routine and small talk, I was away from the sense that I had to play a role, or to choose one self over another; I could find what lay at the heart of me, my core….” He dreams of meeting Greene, writes obsessively, grafts his fictional characters onto the people he meets and, on occasion, visits the locations that Greene himself went to.

In pensive passages, Iyer points out how Greene deftly escapes easy categories of being a “Catholic” or “English” writer; besides, he states that his reaction to the novels is more visceral than reductionist. The inability to slot the novelist is brought out more than once: “Sometimes Greene called his books ‘entertainments’, but they were always shot through with a sense of sadness and being lost; the ones he called novels often had scenes of such riotous misunderstanding and knockabout poignancy that professors would refuse to take them seriously”. At times, though, Iyer can skirt dangerously close to the woolly: “All Greene’s books are, deep down, about the shaking of the heart and not the body”.  (By way of contrast, one thinks of Colm Toibin’s always-trenchant assessments of writers’ relationships with their families in his recent collection of essays, How to Kill Your Mother.

At its best, Iyer’s analysis of Greene’s flawed heroes in novels such as The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana is sensitive and intelligent, and his accounts of interactions with his parents are affecting and poignant.  It turns out that this act of paying homage to another writer and exploring the nature of kinship – both genetic and elective – enables him to be more revealing about himself than ever before.

Ignoring Writing Advice

The next instalment of my column for The Sunday Guardian.

Over the years, a cottage industry has arisen around books that offer advice on writing fiction. These come in all stripes, from the folksy (Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird) to the insightful (Mario Vargas Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist) to the inspirational (Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write).  Writing schools have published anthologies on craft and novelists have weighed in with opinions and experiences, among them, Stephen King, Norman Mailer and Ray Bradbury.

Volumes promise to make you finish writing a novel in the next year, the next ninety days, the next thirty days and even the next ten days, should you be in a hurry. There are books on dialogue, plot, characters, subtext. There’s even one titled How Not to Write a Novel, with examples of the mistakes that novices make.

Most of these assert that there are no rigid rules for writing – and yet, certain pieces of advice crop up time and again. These have been repeated so often that they’ve come to be taken as hoary truths. This is far from the case. Here, then – speaking as someone who’s never written a novel – are five common pieces of advice you’d be better off not to follow blindly.

Keep it Simple.  George Orwell said it. Strunk and White insisted on it. So it must be followed, right? Not necessarily. What if, by subject and inclination, one needs a prolix, wordy style? In that case, the important thing, especially at a rewriting stage, is to be clear about what you’re aiming for, and then make sure you’re communicating it. Not convinced? Two words: William Faulkner. Still not convinced? Two more words: Henry James.

Write What You Know. On every novel written by a Vietnam veteran describing the horrors of conflict, there falls the shadow of Stephen Crane’s classic The Red Badge of Courage, which he wrote despite having no Civil War experience. If you have first-hand knowledge about your subject, great; if you don’t, and it’s something you need to write about, find out what you have to and let your imagination do the rest. Kafka never visited the United States, which didn’t stop him from making it the setting of his first novel.

Show, Don’t Tell. This makes sense on the face of it, considering that a large part of the art of fiction lies in dramatizing characters in action. Yet, almost no novel can rely on only showing and not telling. There has to be a balance between the two – and what that balance favours depends on the needs of the novel in question. Look at how much Milan Kundera tells instead of shows, underlining his ideas. (Polemical novels, though, face the danger of being more polemical than novel, but that’s the subject of another column.)

Murder Your Darlings. This one originated from Arthur Quiller Couch, who wrote in 1916: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” Ever since, it’s been held up as a way to banish passages that are “clever”, “literary” and otherwise not plain enough. While I’m certainly not advocating purple passages and overwritten prose, I don’t think that one ought to kill those poor darlings at all. Rather, examine them scrupulously and, if they’re there for a reason and make the point you want them to make, let them live and breathe.

Write When You Have Something to Say. Scott Fitzgerald, somewhat confusingly, once said, “You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say”. The need to have something to say has stopped many fledgling writers in their tracks and is one of the leading causes of furrowed brows among their tribe. Here’s a more worthwhile way to look at it: write to find out what you have to say. Scribble, explore, go down blind alleys, take U-turns and then emerge onto the highway of meaning. And don’t forget to thank me in your novel’s acknowledgements.