Portnoy's Defence

Today's column for the Sunday Guardian.

I remember laughing out loud when first reading Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, about "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor", and wondering at the same time: “How can he write like that? Is that even allowed?” In this, I wasn’t alone, as pointed out by Bernard Avishai in his new book, Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness. Roth’s funny, salacious novel was an immediate bestseller in 1969 but its content also meant that it was dismissed by many as a masturbatory fantasy, a work of no worth by a “self-hating Jew”. The author was pilloried and hounded -- in ways that were ultimately to shape his future fiction.

Much water has flowed under the Brooklyn Bridge since then and the book has survived and thrived, listed in more than one best-of-century list. It was followed by a body of work that, in a just world, ought to have won Roth the Nobel by now.

This is why one initially wonders what the point of Promiscuous is. Surely Portnoy needs no further defence? However, the merit of Avishai’s book is that it puts Portnoy in a social and literary context, offers interesting ways of reading it and contrasts it with the work of other writers accused of subversion, such as Joyce and Lawrence.

Avishai is a friend of Roth’s, and he says the author helped “to test ideas, telling stories”, although “he did not endorse the result or interfere in any way with the composition”. One of the more interesting things in Promiscuous is the inclusion of Roth’s own teaching notes on the novel, for a class he took in Bard College in 1999. Roth mentions that “the grotesque conception of [Portnoy’s] life and of the lives around him” is what’s being dramatized; this grotesqueness permeates “the satiric conception of a Jewish family, the son included”. Those last three words are crucial: the object of satire was not simply other Jews but also Portnoy himself, a nuance lost on those who savaged the book.

Related to this is the novel’s form, that of rambles in a psychiatrist’s office. This gave Roth the freedom to write his sustained rant: “the rule here is no restraint, the rule here is no decorum”. On the couch, Portnoy mocks his family, his relationships, his heritage –all the while mocking himself too. Here, Avishai makes another important distinction: “A novel in the form of a confession is for God’s sake not a confession in the form of a novel”.

He doesn’t shy away from discussing charges of misogyny against Roth, at that time and ever since. Vivian Gornick wrote that Roth, along with Bellow and Mailer, “hated women”, and Hermoine Lee, during a Paris Review interview, observed that “nearly all the women in the books are there to obstruct, to or help, or to console the male characters”. There is some truth to this, but in defence, Avishai says that Portnoy does not “objectify women until after he has objectified himself…misanthropy is not misogyny, except by implication”. He adds for good measure: “Grace Paley once told me that she didn’t trust women who refused to read Roth”.

The novel is also discussed in terms of being a satire of psychoanalysis; here, one feels Avishai goes a bit too far. Dr Spielvogel’s neutrality is seen as a “frightened holding back”, a comment on the entire profession, when it could well be that Roth simply uses it as a container for Portnoy’s diatribe. This also makes Portnoy’s Complaint very much a book of its time; as Adam Gopnik says, “Nowadays, Portnoy would go to Spielvogel and the doctor would… give him Prozac and Viagra and send him home”.

In a 1983 interview, Herman Roth, the author’s father, touchingly said: “It was a story about a boy and his conscience. They blew it out of all proportion”. Blowing things out of all proportion can also lead to fates worse Roth’s, as is evident from the former predicament of another allegedly satanic writer whose memoirs were published this week.

Immigrant Song

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge

THE NEWLYWEDS Nell Freudenberger

Details, dilemmas and domestic discord have been at the core of so-called novels of realism almost from the beginning. Despite huge shifts in the way we see the world, they keep coming, these everyday sagas of characters facing ups and downs and undergoing changes in their efforts to win through. In a 2008 essay, Zadie Smith had written that if the genre was to survive, lyrical realists would have to push a little harder and try and discover new ways of representation. Nevertheless, such explorations are few and far between, and Nell Freudenberger’s new novel can’t be counted as being among them.

Within her chosen genre, however, Freudenberger has proved herself to be an accomplished practitioner, as her debut short story collection, Lucky Girls, and subsequent novel, The Dissident, amply demonstrate. As with those books, The Newlyweds takes as its theme the predicament of a stranger in a strange land, of the cultural shifts and changing attitudes that immigrants have to undergo.

This is the story of Amina, a 24-year-old woman from Bangladesh, who comes to the United States to marry George, a “34-year-old SWM”, the two having developed an online relationship after George responded to Amina’s post on a matrimonial site. Far from home, ensconced in Rochester, Amina learns to navigate the contours of a new relationship and country. She meets George’s family, including his adopted free-spirited cousin, Kim, takes classes at a local college as well as a succession of jobs, including those of a shop assistant, yoga school receptionist and coffee shop barista. George turns out to be a conservative, Casaubon-like creature and her relationship with him, while not wildly exciting or disappointing, proceeds much of the time on an even keel as they discover each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

By providing particulars of Amina’s reactions to the food, surroundings, weather and her various adjustments and discoveries, Freudenberger thickens the narrative and adds verisimilitude. Inevitably, these put one in mind of other such fiction, notably by Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali -- in whose accounts of displaced lives, it must be said, one finds more intimacy and granularity.

George and Amina’s conflicting points of view on living with family versus living alone provide one of the novel’s main pivots, allowing Freudenberger to explore differences in Western and Eastern attitudes. Finally, after three years in the United States, Amina returns to Bangladesh to bring her parents back with her. (The gifts she takes for her family and friends show Freudenberger’s eye for detail at its most acute.)  Back in her own country, Amina is immediately plunged into extended family squabbles and less-than-ideal living conditions. Here, she once again meets and is attracted to Nasir, a childhood friend – in fact, there’s a too-neat complementarity between this relationship and between that of George and Kim. Conflicts, though, are handled in an unvaryingly low-key and leisurely manner, as equations between Amina, George and her parents are played out.

One of the strengths of The Newlyweds is its nuanced rendering of cultural displacement; another is that Freudenberger sticks close to her characters without feeling the need to make overarching pronouncements. The Newlyweds checks all the right boxes, then, but in doing so it also emerges as a story that’s all too familiar. “It is only by sharing our stories that we become one community,” writes Amina in the novel’s closing lines, and while there’s no denying this sentiment, it’s also true that the tales that make the most impression are those that throw fresh light, or are rendered in fresh ways.

The Experience of Reading Zadie Smith

Today's column for the Sunday Guardian

Anticipation

Here it is, at last. A Zadie Smith novel after seven years.  I’m sure NW isn’t going to be inspired by E.M. Forster the way her earlier On Beauty was – at least not given the evidence of her 2008 essay, ‘Two Paths for the Novel’. There, she contrasted Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland with Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, coming down in favour of the latter. “To read [Netherland] is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition”, she wrote, referring to a “breed of lyrical realism [which] has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked." So, is NW is going to be her riposte to such realism, pointing a way ahead? Let’s start. Okay, the first bit is fascinating. We’re in the mind of Leah, married, in her mid-30s, living in a run-down council estate in north-west London. But it isn’t in the first person: rather, as Smith’s written of a David Foster Wallace story, it’s third person as first person, a little bit Joyce and a little bit Woolf. Leah’s life unfurls: her marriage, her work, and her circumambulations around London where Smith reveals a great ear for mimicking the speech of those on the street. So far, so splendid .

Anxiety

Hold on, what’s this? We’ve segued into another section, and this one deals with the life of another Londoner, Felix, from the same area as Leah. This character is a recovering alcoholic trying to make good. The style is more familiar here, more realistic (whatever that means). But why are we following Felix around as he tries to profit from buying used cars, hangs around with his father and visits an old lover? What happened to Leah? What happened to Leah’s childhood friend, Natalie? Though the Felix section is great in its rendering of the section of London that the book deals with. People flicker brightly across the pages: higher-ups falling on hard times, street thugs, those trying to escape the noose of class. Still. Is Felix Smith’s version of Septimus Smith? Not sure. And has she left behind that stream-of-consciousness style she started off with?

Acceptance

The next section. Again, this one is completely different from what’s come earlier. These are short vignettes about Natalie, also known as Keisha (and her one-time crush, Nathan). There’s some doggerel, there’s a menu, there’s chatroom-speak, there’s aphorisms, there’s Natalie’s dealings with her husband, with the Internet, with her profession (she’s a lawyer with a chequered career, but doing way better than Leah). Confusing. Also fascinating. Maybe I’m reading too fast – these short passages lend themselves to such haste. Slow down. Accept this on its own terms, she’s trying something different. It’s like entering a fictional machine with different parts working in different ways; the occasional self-consciousness of the narrative means that the joints and gears sometimes stand exposed. It’s very clear, though, that Smith is more than living up to the implicit promise of her 2008 essay. Note to Ian McEwan: You can take what you called the “dead hand of Modernism” and suck its thumb.

Admiration

Yes, it’s too cleverly self-reflexive. Yes, some of the satire is clunky (“Everyone comes together for a moment to complain about the evils of technology, what a disaster, especially for teenagers, yet most people have their phones laid next to their dinner plates”.) Yes, there are too many styles crammed together. But at a time when other novelists are churning out works in the same tried and tested mode, Smith’s gone ahead and tried to show other ways of representation. She takes a patch of London and gives us its characters, their voices, their dreams and their downfall, and in a way that’s new. (Of course, the “new” part is relative; given that there’s much channeling of Woolf and Joyce.) So how do these parts mesh, now that I’ve completed it? There’s only one way to find out. Read it again.

American Destinies

This appeared in today's Indian Express.

TIGERS IN RED WEATHER Liza Klaussmann

There aren’t any live tigers in Liza Klaussmann’s debut novel, Tigers in Red Weather, which comes as something of a relief given the number of such creatures popping up in fiction of late. The title instead is a line from a Wallace Stevens poem, one that privileges a life of the imagination over the mundane. Mundane is a word that can’t be applied to the lives of Klaussmann’s characters as she follows them over the decades, from bright, shining promise to coming-to-terms with what remains.

The novel opens in the wake of World War II, as cousins Nick and Helena spend a hot September in their family house in New England, a location that they and their future families will return to over the decades. Helena’s first husband was one of the war’s early victims, and she’s getting married for a second time, to an aspiring Hollywood director. Nick, on the other hand, will soon travel to meet her own husband, a naval officer returning home from England, and they will start their married lives in a poky cottage in Florida. With the optimism of the young, both look forward to “houses, husbands and midnight gin parties”.

The novel follows their destinies over the decades, from 1945 to 1969, shifting between five points of view: those of Nick and Helena; of Daisy, Nick’s impetuous daughter, and Ed, Helena’s secretive, spooky son; and of Hughes, Nick’s husband. While Nick and Helena struggle with the roles that society and their marriages demand of them, a young Daisy tries to balance needs and desires; Hughes, meanwhile, comes to terms with an earlier affair while Ed’s early life moulds his nature into strange shapes. 

A large canvas, then, and Klaussman does it justice with, among other things, an artful cross-hatching of the same incidents witnessed by different characters so that the full picture emerges only gradually. On one too many occasions, however, her characters learn about secrets by simply happening to be in the right time and place to conveniently eavesdrop. The dialogue, too, can veer towards the lush: “I feel like a stranger in a house of the good and the golden and the heavenly. Which makes me the devil, I suppose”.

One of the considerable strengths of Tigers in Red Weather is that the characters are portrayed warts and all, with their conflicting desires and aversions on display, which makes them realistic and convincing. Then again, the discovery of a body by Daisy and Ed halfway through seems to pull the narrative into the grid of plot, and away from character development and exposition.

A clear influence is the work of Scott Fitzgerald, but despite one character being called Nick and another Daisy, Klaussmann’s prose and treatment aren’t up to Gatsbyesque standards. Throughout, clothes, perfumes, cuisine and music are carefully described, being markers of changing tastes as well as of status over the years – but other historical signposts are simply tacked on, such as a token mention of the Kennedys or of Alabama civil rights activists.

At one point in the novel, Nick tells an aggrieved Daisy: “It’s so hard to be young and have all this wanting”. Young or old, it’s their wants that drive the characters of Tigers in Red Weather to make the choices that determine their lives, and Klaussmann – who, by the way, happens to be the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville -- delineates these in a smooth, polished manner familiar to adherents of conventional narrative fiction.

My Candidate For The Literature Nobel

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

Feverish speculation has broken out over the recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature and Ladbrokes have already set the odds, listing the usual and unusual suspects. Well, to the Roths, Murakamis and Cetebooms of this world, I say: pooh, pfft and pshaw. My nomination for the laurel is one that few have heard of and yet is the most deserving of the lot. On the appointed date in Stockholm, the person who steps up to the podium ought to be none other than Hansel Hochstapler.

Born in the Mitteleuropean state of Behroopia, which vanished after the convulsions of the Great War, Hochstapler began writing as a child, drawing up shopping lists for his parents. After these were proclaimed to be masterpieces of the genre, he moved on to other forms, especially corporate mission statements and, spectacularly, the minutes of an all-day meeting of the marketing department of the Behroopia Iron & Steel Company in which it was revealed for the first time that the state had no reserves of iron, not to mention steel.

Hochstapler was hounded out of his motherland when still in his twenties by angry shopkeepers demanding payment for provisions based on his shopping lists. Alone and destitute, he wandered all over Europe surveying the cataclysmic after-effects of a world at war, never ceasing to write about the dark side of humankind and the difficulty of finding a cappuccino with the right amount of foam. It was at this time that his sonnets devoted to deep-fried chicken caught the attention of an independent publisher on the Left Bank and first editions of these, in pale green binding covered by grease stains, are much sought after by bibliophiles.

He lives today in a room filled with recyclable fast-food wrappers off a dusty lane in a corner of a Parisian arrondisement, emerging from the back entrance on Sunday mornings to avoid the creditors who knock on the front door. What is thought of as his best work, a collection of short stories titled Why Whither Whence, was published in 2001; he writes in an obscure Pyrenean dialect, and none of his poems and tales has so far been translated into English. This, though, seems set to change: his old publisher, having moved from the Left Bank to the Right, has recently employed the services of a translator who has been endorsed by Hochstapler himself after he taught him to yodel.

About the influences on his writing, Hochstapler is reticent. He has sworn off interviews, as his last one two decades ago was a fractious encounter with a callow reporter that ended in Hochstapler tossing the contents of his coffee cup into the journalist’s face. “It is lucky that the cup contained nothing more than watered-down slivovitz,” the correspondent was to recall in his write-up of the meeting. “It was when I asked Hochstapler about the origins of some of his stories that he began to get aggressive,” the report continued, “especially his tale about a man being transformed into a beetle one morning after uneasy dreams, or the one about a character who sets out on horseback to tilt at windmills, imagining himself to be a knight-errant.”

As is well known, the reporter did manage to ask him whether there was an underlying theme or message in his work. Hochstapler drew himself up to his full height of 4’11”, and then sank down again on his overstuffed armchair. What he said next has long been debated in literary salons. According to the journalist, his tapes reveal the word, “floss”. Postmodern critics scoff at this, and maintain that what Hochstapler said, in his thick French accent, was: “Loss”. Whether Hochstapler wanted to impart a lesson on oral hygiene or on bereavement will go down as one of the burning literary questions of our age. Either way, it is time that this brave writer, who has fought so tirelessly against the forces of fascism and metabolism, finally gets his due.

Unreal Estate

Today's Sunday Guardian column

Shifty builders, corrupt politicians, and financial institutions ready to raise any amount of money in order to make more of it. All of them prowling about in a city being run into the ground so that a few can profit. That city could well be Mumbai, but in the case of Claire Kilroy’s just-published novel, The Devil I Know, it happens to be Dublin.

Aravind Adiga’s Mumbai-based Last Man in Tower deals with many of the same issues, but in a completely different manner. At times Dickensian, at times satirical, at times clunky, Adiga’s novel focuses on the greed of the middle-class hoping to profit from artificial property prices; Kilroy’s The Devil I Know, on the other hand, is a savagely farcical take on the malfeasance of those responsible for the bubble in the first place.

Set against the backdrop of the recent Irish economy boom-and-bust, this saga of unreal estate takes the form of a testimony given by Tristram Amory St Lawrence, the thirteenth Earl of Howth, who has returned to Ireland after years. The name, by the way, is that of a character in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as is clear from the novel’s epigraph.

It is March 2016, and Tristram is on the witness stand. Over ten days, he proceeds to tell an enquiry commission of his part in the events that transpired eight years ago. The voice Kilroy gives her character is distinctive, self-aware and self-mocking: this mode of telling, combined with the testimony-like structure, is immediately familiar, being used most notably by Nabokov.

An interpreter for institutions such as the IMF and the EU, Tristram is forced to stop over in Dublin, his ancestral home, because of a plane mishap. Overnight he finds himself entangled in a web of deceit and avarice involving malleable property laws, avaricious real estate brokers and bribable government ministers, which proves to be not just his undoing but also of the others around him. As he puts it, “this is something of a grey area. There are no white areas in my tale”.

Throughout, Tristram asserts, he’s been in thrall to the mysterious, Machiavellian character he calls Monsieur Deauville who’s been pulling the strings behind the scenes. It is because of him that Tristram goes from becoming a translator of languages to one of money. A shell company is set up, of which Tristram is a representative and, and he tells the judge: “It bought nothing, sold nothing, manufactured nothing, did nothing, and yet…it returned a profit of €66 million that first year. Huge sums of untaxed money were channelled through it out to the shareholders of its parent companies, which is perfectly legal under Irish tax law, as you know. I did not make the laws. You made the laws….Me? I was merely the conduit….Who better to direct a shell company than a shell of a human being?”

One of the main strands of the novel, it becomes clear, is that of how much of the character of M. Deauville is real, what he actually stands for, and the nature of the Faustian bargain that Tristram strikes with him. These are aspects juggled by Kilroy till the very end, with some apt foreshadowing.

Tristram’s vibrant voice is a pleasure to read, especially for those on a meagre diet of conventional, realistic fiction. However, Kilroy is not above overstatement, occasionally employing groan-worthy puns to make her point. “We were sole traders. We had traded our souls,” is just one example.

Her skewering of those whose greed for pelf led to Ireland’s contemporary woes, though, is clearly born of deep anger. As Tristram puts it in one of the more resonant passages: “[A]cross the country people were digging themselves into big holes…big holes were spreading across Ireland like the pox, eating away at the heart of the island. Nobody was interested in negative sentiments.” It’s not just in Ireland that those big holes are growing more numerous.     

Revisiting The White Hotel

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

Pornography and plagiarism. While soft-core versions of the former dominate best-seller lists, writers and commentators are increasingly accused of the latter. All of this in a literary environment in which the hard-won lessons of Modernism seem to be ignored, with English-language writers churning out pleasantly middle-brow novels. It’s instructive, then, to cast a look back at a novel published three decades ago that faced charges of both plagiarism and being pornographic – yet managed to maintain its reputation of being artistically challenging as well as satisfying.

When it was published in 1981, most reviews of D.M. Thomas’ The White Hotel in the UK were lukewarm. In the rest of Europe and in the United States, though, reviewers were ecstatic. “Heartstunning”, “haunting”, “dazzling” – and, of course, “lyrical” -- are just some of the adjectives on the first few pages of my silverfish-ravaged paperback copy. The novel went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, losing narrowly to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

The White Hotel isn’t exactly a book to take with you to the beach. Set mainly in the middle of the last century, it deals with the life, neurosis and visions of Lisa, a budding young opera singer, who is treated by Sigmund Freud for – in the language of the time – “severe sexual hysteria”. The novel’s six parts contain erotic fantasy, poetry, letters, postcards, a case study in the style of Freud’s ‘The Wolf Man’ and finally and most strikingly, the barbaric reality of Nazi atrocities. Each part is connected with the other, but without concessions: the reader has to work to make the links.

Some of the fantasies described are indeed sexually explicit, and uncomfortably so; and the latter part of the book that depicts the behaviour of Nazi soldiers at Babi Yar is extremely disturbing. What catapulted the author to the front pages, however, wasn’t this as much as the charges brought against him for appropriating sections of Anatoli Kuznetsov’s 1996 book, Babi Yar, which was termed “a document in the form of a novel”.

Thomas tried to explain this away by pointing to the publisher’s note at the beginning that “gratefully acknowledged” the use of material from Kuznetsov’s book, but many weren’t convinced. In time, however, the originality and strength of the rest of the book won out, with the controversial sections being seen as a postmodern ploy. I’m not so sold on the postmodernity of Thomas’ intention, but the note before the book’s text clearly indicates that there was no intent to pass off the Babi Yar passages as his own.

One of the things The White Hotel sets out to do is to capture the life behind the statistic: to show how, when individuals are barbarously done away with, there are entire real and fantasy worlds that vanish. The specific life in this case is represented through its polar opposites of intense passion and a death wish – that is, through Eros and Thanatos, to return to the language of the Viennese doctor whose case study features so vividly in the novel. This is the artistic choice that led to scenes that were dubbed pornographic, matched by later sections that are unbearable to read. The book’s coda, a redemptive imagining of lives after death, is an effort to mitigate some of the novel’s harsh sting, with the message, as Lisa writes in her fantasy, that “…nothing in the white hotel but love / Is offered at a price we can afford”.

Whether you think of it as very effective or very overdone -- or both -- reading The White Hotel all these decades later makes the ambitions and vision of today’s novels seem painfully circumscribed. It’s time for more writers to take to heart the dictum quoted by Freud in Thomas’ novel: do not turn away from “what, unknown or neglected by man, walks in the night through the labyrinth of the heart”.

Revisiting Chandler's Mean Streets

My column for the Sunday Guardian.

According to a recent report, John Banville will be picking up Raymond Chandler’s mantle to write another Philip Marlowe novel under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black – with the blessings of the Chandler estate. At first glance this may seem like an odd choice, despite the series of Black mystery novels that marvellously evoke a seedy, shifty Dublin of the Fifties. Consider, however: when it comes to Chandler what stays behind is not plot but style; what remains in memory are not events but atmosphere. Such prose, said one critic, “is a peculiar mixture of harshness, sensuality, high polish and backstreet poetry”. To recreate this mixture, Banville may just prove to be an inspired choice.

That style was supreme was something recognized by Chandler himself. To re-read The Big Sleep is to find a muddle of events featuring, among other things, pornographic rings, blackmail, absent spouses and missing corpses, but holding all of this together is Chandler’s distinctive, cool voice, with Marlowe as world-weary, incorruptible knight-errant walking down the mean streets of 1930s Los Angeles. As Chandler was to write, “In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time…the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off”. For Chandler, it paid off in spades.

After a chequered career as poet, reviewer, teacher, accountant and oil company executive, he tried his hand at writing for pulp magazines, finding success with The Big Sleep in 1939, when he was 51.  He followed this up with other novels featuring Philip Marlowe – notably The Long Goodbye and Farewell My Lovely -- giving rise to the genre of noir thrillers that have dominated shelves since. (Though mention must also be made of Dashiell Hammett, a clear influence on Chandler and to whom he paid tribute in his essay, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’.) Later writers such as Ross McDonald and Elmore Leonard and movies such as Double Indemnity and Chinatown, to name only a few, all took forward the brooding atmosphere and wise-guy dialogue Chandler was known for. The influence extends further: as Pico Iyer has pointed out, those from Brazilian novelist Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza to Haruki Murakami have all, at one time or the other, fallen under the spell of Chandler’s almost affectless prose.

It’s not that the reception to Marlowe was completely uncritical. Edmund Wilson claimed to have liked Farewell My Lovely, but then added waspishly that Chandler was “a long way below Graham Greene”. Borges was more dismissive, stating, “The atmosphere in Chandler and Hammett’s stories is disagreeable”. And Martin Amis, some years ago, said that Chandler’s The Big Sleep hadn’t aged well. In this, there is some truth: to read expressions such as “if you want to pick lead out of your belly, get in my way” – to take just elements of the prose, not the setting -- is to find sections of the book amusingly irrelevant. Other Chandlerisms, however, still endure: “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” is a lovely sentence for a detective novel, as is: “She gave me one of those smiles that the lips have forgotten before they reach the eyes”.

The Chandler estate has tried to continue his legacy before, calling upon mystery writer Robert Parker in 1989 to complete Chandler’s unfinished manuscript, Poodle Springs, followed by another Philip Marlowe novel, Perchance to Dream – both of which met with a lukewarm reception for their tepid recreation of Chandler’s prose. Something that ought to illustrate for Banville the perils of refurbishing a much-loved voice. Another trap, of course, is the descent into parody, something that the Chandler style has lent itself to over the years: look at Woody Allen’s piece, ‘The Whore of Mensa’, for example, or Jason Harrington’s ‘The Man who Repaired Laptops’ published in McSweeneys this month. If Banville, a master prose stylist, steers clear of these pitfalls, his Marlowe novel will be well worth waiting for.

Reading While Travelling

My column for the Sunday Guardian.

On a recent two-week work trip, the Kindle resolved at least one dilemma: that of how many books to take along.  It was, in any case, stuffed with new e-books I hadn’t begun, innumerable samples of others, and recent issues of a few periodicals. More than enough. But because old habits die hard, I also carried some paperbacks: John Lanchester’s Fragrant Harbour (as it was set in the city I was going to be in); Heinrich Boll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (which I needed to re-read in order to write last week’s column); and Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (which I’d been putting off reading for some time).

Much to my surprise, I finished the Lanchester and the Boll, as well as new issues of the London Review of Books and the NYRB -- and downloaded Pankaj Mishra’s new book before departure, making inroads into it on the flight back. This is quite unusual: before most trips, for work or otherwise, I spend more time deciding what books to take along than actually reading them, and return with almost all unread. It’s not that I don’t feel the need to read when away from home – it’s more to do with being able to devote more time to reading when in familiar surroundings. This time around it was different, probably because I was away for longer than usual.

 

Reading while waiting for a flight at an airport is another skill I have yet to master. Walking up to the flight gate and spotting others immersed in paperbacks or e-books causes a twinge of envy. I’m more likely to seek something fattening to eat, or to wander around the bookstore looking for more to add to the unread pile. And every time there’s an illegible announcement on the PA system, I imagine it’s to inform me that my flight is either delayed or on the verge of taking off.

It’s better once I’m on board; after all, what else is there to do during a flight, especially if you’re travelling alone? Watching movies on that little screen has never been very satisfying, and as for the food, the less said the better. Although on one flight, when I was immersed in the Kindle -- after they’d announced that it was OK for electronic devices to be switched on – a passing attendant raised her eyebrows and asked me to turn it off. (Perhaps she’d assumed it was a giant phone?) When I indicated that the wireless wasn’t on, her eyebrows shot up further, so I hastily went ahead and turned the device off, anyway. Visions of being handcuffed to my seat without any reading matter had arisen before my eyes.

Back home, I still have on the bookshelves a bulky, yellowing paperback edition of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, which has been my companion on at least three journeys so far.  However, I’ve only managed to read the first few paragraphs of Justine, the initial volume; in fact, I’ve started the page over so many times that I can offhand recall portions such as “the thrilling flush of wind”, “sky of hot nude pearl” and “I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child – Melissa’s child”. It’s a great opening which promises much, but so far I haven’t been able to go further, distracted every time by thoughts such as: “Should I turn down the air-conditioning? Should I go outdoors and explore instead of lying here reading? Is this pillow too soft? Should I turn up the air-conditioning?”

Too much of this, and I achieve the state captured in a quote attributed to baseball player Satchel Paige: “Sometimes I sit and think and sometimes I just sit”. After which, I just sleep. Now that it’s Durrell’s centenary year, I’m firmly resolved to finish the tetralogy before December. If I manage to regulate the temperature, that is.

Words, Labels And Heinrich Böll

Today's column for the Sunday Guardian.

Consider, to begin with, the following scenario: Women whose morals are questioned because they leave home alone and (gasp) dance with men at parties. Sections of the media falling over themselves to report what they consider to be scandals as well as threats to national values. Suspicion and fear of anyone who espouses left-leaning and radical causes. Those who think this environment is unique to today’s India should pick up Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, written in 1974, which satirises and dissects these very tendencies – in barely 140 pages.

The book, published two years after Böll won the Literature Nobel, deals once more with his chosen themes of institutional abuse of power and its effect on the common man and woman. As Salman Rushdie has written of The Safety Net, another one of Böll’s novels, “...the real tragedy, for Böll, is the replacement of the old kindnesses, of human values, by the remorseless, amoral world of the technologists.” By technologists, he refers to the press, the police and others in positions of authority imposing their views on the rest by the use of force.

The story of Katharina Blum’s lost honour is narrated in the book’s first few pages, being cast in the form of an objective report stitched together after consulting a variety of sources. Thus, the structure of this “polemical parody” itself is ironic. Overnight, the eponymous Katharina, a good-hearted, hard-working housekeeper, is first picked up by the police and then picked upon by a malicious newspaper. Her crime? At a party one evening, she befriended a young man under suspicion of being a terrorist, and subsequently helped him evade the law without realizing what exactly he was wanted for.

After the police release her from incarceration, an unscrupulous reporter continues to write scurrilous pieces, twisting and distorting both facts and interviews. (“Murderer’s Moll Won’t Talk!” is a typical headline.) Katharina’s life turns upside down; among other things, she begins to receive anonymous postcards with offensive and derogatory messages – the equivalent today of being hounded by trolls on Twitter and Facebook. Driven to desperation, she seeks out and, rather dramatically, shoots the errant reporter, after which she coolly surrenders to the police.

It’s a subject that Böll was drawn to because he himself was pilloried by the press and by right-wing sympathizers in 1972 after he expressed doubts over the treatment of Ulrike Meinhof. Böll’s opinion was that slanted newspaper reports on the activities of the Baader-Meinhof extremists had deprived her of a fair trial, and for this he was harassed to the extent of having his house searched by the police. (Meinhof was to later die in prison, allegedly a suicide, though more than a few have contested this.)

It was from such a background that Boll’s late novels such as The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and The Safety Net emerged. This also explains why, in the former, Böll is explicit, and acidulously so, about the damage that irresponsible media can cause: “Here is a young woman, cheerfully, almost gaily, going off to a harmless little private dance, and four days later she becomes (since this is merely a report, not a judgment, we will confine ourselves to facts) a murderess, and this, if we examine the matter closely, because of newspaper reports”.

In a Paris Review interview a few years before he died, Böll memorably said, “Behind every word is a whole world”. This draws attention to another important concern in his work: the proper use of words, awareness of their meanings and of what happens to individuals when words turn into labels. What, then, is fact, what is fiction, and what lurks between the lines? All these years later, it’s a still a message worth paying close attention to.