Significant
others
There’s
nothing like a striking cover to get me interested in a book.
And what better than this (left)?
Well, one thing that would be better is if the pink
bit across the middle was just a loose paper band which comes
off and leaves the cover devoid of any words at all. Of course
to show you that I’d have to stop just downloading cover
pics off the Net and actually photograph my own copy. Oh all right
then (below right).
Very handsome: very McSweeney’s, in fact,
and sure enough this is a production of Dave Eggers’ busy
literary community, or rather from one of its offshoots, 826 New
York, a non-profit organisation aimed at supporting students with
creative writing. (I had to search around for the link to their
site, as the one given in the book, somewhat embarrassingly, is
wrong.) In this good cause, Zadie Smith has edited a collection
of stories from, well, the usual McSweeney’s suspects plus
a handful of others. What “Edited by” means is not
quite clear. Would Smith really take the blue pencil to Colm Tóibín’s
prose? Or were they simply relying on her big list of Facebook
friends?
The concept of the collection is, in Smith’s
words, for the writers to “make somebody up.” Thus
each story is named after its main character, though the styles
are varied. Some, such as the great George Saunders, use the task
simply to write another story along their usual lines, and Saunders’s
‘Puppy’, while as funny as ever, risks seeming like
just more of the same from him. Others have stretched themselves
more: Andrew O’Hagan, whose novels I have never been able
to get along with, turns a neat trick in his story ‘Gordon’
which immediately sent me back to the beginning to re-read it
(no great task, as it was only four pages long).
The
writers who have made their characters live most vividly seem
to be those who have opted to create comic monsters. The most
entertaining story in the collection, David Mitchell’s ‘Judith
Castle’, is about a woman of a certain age, and particular
aspects of Englishness. She discusses her search for love with
us:
That Olly and I were intellectual equals
was no surprise. Soulmate Solutions don’t let any old
Tom, Dick or Harry sign up. But at our rendezvous in Bath, he
couldn’t hide how utterly enchanté he was with
little old moi on a carnal level. Once over fifty, most British
women go to seed, leaving the rest of us to arise, like roses
in a bombsite.
Hari Kunzru gives us something similar in ‘Magda
Mandela’, and like Mitchell’s Castle, there is more
than an air of sadness beneath the madness. And Jonathan Safran
Foer makes good on his excellent novels by giving us a tiny but
irresistible slice of ‘Rhoda’, a grandmother with
all the prejudices of her time:
When we came over, in 1950, I didn’t
even know there was such a thing as a schwartze. Nobody told
me. Nobody sat me down and said, By the way, there’s schwartzes.
Other stories, perhaps intended as comic, are less
successful, such as Toby Litt’s ‘Monster’, which
seemed to me predictably self-indulgent. A.L. Kennedy’s
‘Frank’ was, like the other books of hers I’ve
read, technically impressive but not really enjoyable.
The collection introduced me to several writers
I’d heard of but had never bothered to sample. Now I know
I simply must read more ZZ Packer, whose ‘Gideon’
was confident and mesmerising, and Aleksandr Hemon, whose ‘The
Liar’ was let down by its central revelation but otherwise
beautifully done, set in another time and reminding me of Jim
Crace (”The crowd had been looking at him all along, but
now it tightens, as if each man were a blood vessel and the air
has just become colder”). Similarly, Miranda July, whose
debut collection of stories was recently published, gives a story
both entertaining and Carveresquely touching in ‘Roy Spivey,’
about a woman who meets a Hollywood star on a plane.
Meanwhile, Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware break up
the text with their comic strips: Clowes’s ‘Justin
M. Damiano’ is a satirical look at internet geeks who think
anyone cares what they post on their review blogs (hey…),
and Ware is typically lacerating, and beautifully meticulous in
his artwork, with the tale of ‘Jordan Wellington Lint’
up to the age of 13.
The two most established writers on the roster prove
particularly interesting. Colm Tóibín’s ‘Donal
Webster’ is a typically sober and sonorous work, probably
one of the richest on show, but it looks oddly out of place among
the generally more showy performances which surround it. Nick
Hornby on the other hand is unexpectedly innovative, with his
‘J. Johnson’, which gives us a writer’s life
told through a series of About the Author blurbs (illustrated
by Posy Simmons), a teasing and clever portrait of frustration
and revisionism. It’s a work of reinvention - and brevity
- that some of these young whippersnappers could learn from.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
