Throw,
the first stone, lover.
Who brought me from nothing
and to whom I have given less.
If I lie and promise sunlight,
would you understand.

And when I flail, through glassy words and porous silence.
Can I smile and say,
“That wasn’t me”?

Whilst the moon, calm and bare, reflects the inferno so honestly?

That three-tier phrase, the pyrrhic one,
that means one to the mouth
and two to the ear,
how far can you throw it?
Trust it thus.
Before love there was a feeling that needed a name.

We gathered today to live and love;
ever after there will be nothing ever was and what then to whom…
He thinks of his heart, and the thought combusts;
To do so is sacrificial.
Like a kite,
run with me.
I’ll do tricks for you.
Beneath a chorus of kisses that form constellations of wishes.

“I wish I had loved you more”, remain the worst words.

Instead, calculate the weight of a million nerves waiting for a kiss to the lips.
The core to the string to the skin to your sandpaper lips,
etched with a hundred wallpaper cracks that peel in winter,
to the tongue to the muscles that writhe like no muscle should.

And think no more of

Reality Hunger
by David Shields
Hamish Hamilton; Hardback;
240 pages; Price £17.99;
ISBN 9780241144992

Dan Eltringham

First, a series of radical pronouncements: narrative prose fiction has ‘never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself’; the ‘novel qua novel is a form of nostalgia’; and, more generally, ‘forms serve the culture; when they die, they die for a good reason: because they’re no longer embodying what it’s like to be alive.’ Having disposed of the novel Reality Hunger then announces, with a further valedictory flourish, that the writer as writer is dead, to be replaced by the ‘scissors-and-paste man.’ Meaning is no longer written as such, but arranged from found parts, and is ‘a matter of adjacent data.’ Such is the swinging tack that David Shields’ Reality Hunger takes, and made as it is of what are essentially fragments written by other people (more on which later), arranged into themed chapters but kept from any more cohesive argumentative unit by its principled eschewal of linearity, it is asking a lot of even the open-minded reader it is presumably aimed at.

The major difficulty with Reality Hunger as a manifesto is that most of its prescriptions for the future of the prose form are anything but new. Writing from life, importing uneven chunks of undigested ‘reality’ into the text, questioning the actuality of events and the nature of factual truth, interspersing the remembered with the misremembered, allowing free cross-fertilization between fact and fiction, doubting authorial possession of the text – these are now familiar signatures of the Post Modern. Reality Hunger recommends these strategies to the reader with the breathy excitement of the explosively new, but in reality its theoretical base is to be found in Theory of the 1960s onward. But despite the whiff of anachronism that accompanies some of the text’s contentions, there is something necessary about this recapitulation of certain liberties that have been, if not forgotten, neglected. The novel form does feel tired in places, and the neat compression of so much valuably sceptical thought and reading into these two hundred pages is an achievement in itself. The attraction lies partly in the freedom allowed by the alternatives Shields provides. The ‘lyric essay,’ the ‘anti-novel,’ the work of ‘non-poetry’ (instead of non-fiction) sound sufficiently capacious and untried as forms for the ambitious writer to make something genuinely new in testing them out.

Shields means ‘essay’ in the sense of Montaigne’s essai, a test or a try, necessarily partial and incomplete. Montaigne, as the example of the prose writer of pre-novelistic times whose freedom to import thoughts, phrases and ideas from his reading into his writing, is central to Shields’ defence of the unacknowledged quotation which lends not only the conceptual structure, but much of the actual body of Reality Hunger. This is because, as Shields makes explicit in paragraph 296, just short of half-distance, ‘Most of the passages in this book are taken from other sources.’ There are plenty of hints up until this point that awaken suspicion: this reviewer for one was alerted to Shields’ ‘taste for quotation’ by unacknowledged use of Eliot’s Four Quartets and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, implying that many more of these words were not ‘written,’ as the word is usually understood, by David Shields. From this realisation the reader’s attention is drawn to the book’s curious appendix, appended at the behest of Random House lawyers who ‘determined that it was necessary…to provide a complete list of citations.’ Once you know it’s there, the presence of an index-linked reference guide for nearly every one of Reality Hunger’s 617 paragraph fragments either ruins or augments the reading experience, depending on your mindset. The problem is that if you have a historicist bent, and you find it illuminating to know that, for example, ‘I need say nothing, only exhibit’ (paragraph 6) is derived from Walter Benjamin, then you are reading the book in the wrong way, according to its own prescription. Shields is adamant that the book be restored ‘to the form in which I intended it to be read,’ by excising the appendix with a pair of scissors in the name of the purity and communal ownership of the world of art and ideas, comprised of and belonging to the ‘reality’ from which they are taken, and which ‘cannot be copyrighted.’ Whether this is idealist, or a way of privileging a private club of readers who do get many of the references, depends on the degree of scepticism you bring to the reading.

Equally as significant for Reality Hunger is the impact of late Twentieth and Twenty-first century technology allowing the (primarily musical) artist the liberty to recycle, or sample, older pieces of music or other types of recorded sound. The excitement conveyed by the idea of embracing such changes of creative method, allowing that ‘the act of editing may be the key postmodern artistic instrument,’ is extremely convincing. In technology, too, is a partial solution to the surrender of authorship, as social media allows ‘reality-based art’ to be produced ‘at grassroots level, among nonexperts,’ making ‘user-made content…the new folk art.’ The exhilaration of this idea derives from its accessibility, and from Shields’ self-situation as one of ‘us “regular” people…pushing through like water, or, perhaps, weeds.’ Suddenly the writer or artist doesn’t seem so far removed from the rest of us. On these issues Shields is particularly knowledgeable, his cultural range deeply impressive, and the sense of his omnivorously curious mind clearest.

It may be historically naïve of Reality Hunger to proclaim the death of the novel without acknowledging that the form tends to be defined, eventually, by those writers working at its boundaries. Nor does Shields confront the view that story-making, the construction of linear narrative, might be an innate human activity similar to that of religious practice, and that there could be psychological and physiological resistance to its deliberate fracture. Most of the focus of Reality Hunger’s critique, the weekly torrent of newly penned and fairly conventional prose fiction, will probably be forgotten in ten years. It’s the kind of thing recommended by Reality Hunger, if not the book itself, that is future canon-material. But it is here, in the now, and by connecting a pre-capitalist world without copyright law with the present and immediate future in which sampling, file-sharing, and social media have loosened the bonds of authorship, that this intriguing, contentious book finds its most convinceing argument for its own plausibility.

The Loss Adjustor
Aifric Campbell
Demy Hardback
250 pages
ISBN: 9781846687303

Daniel Hudspith

The Loss Adjustor is a novel about disconnection, about how occurrences in one’s life can cause fissures in relationships, in perception and, ultimately, in oneself. The titular character, Caroline, is haunted by events in her childhood and has retreated to the relative safety of a mundane existence low on the ladder at an insurance firm. Her childhood sweetheart is now a rock superstar, while her mother exists only to read books about history and arctic exploration, abnegating herself from any normal child-parent relationship. Caroline essentially lives in her head, replaying and reassessing her feelings about how her life has panned out. She only experiences some proper human interaction when Tom, an elderly fellow visitor at a graveyard strikes up a conversation with her.

Novels concerning disaffected characters who struggle to connect with the society they find themselves in are not uncommon, but are executed with more control of their material elsewhere – one thinks immediately of Gwendoline Riley – and The Loss Adjustor suffers in comparison. Caroline has flashes of empathy – when one of her clients, desperate, admits to making a false claim, or when following Tom’s wartime reminiscences – but all too often she remains overwhelmingly self-reflexive and shows no real development. Of course, as good modernists, we don’t demand teleological characterisation or tidy resolutions from our novels, but if that is to be the case, the prose must have some kind of purpose and verve in and of itself.  Campbell may be making a statement about the unknowability of other people’s lives and the inherent disjointedness of human existence, but all too often ‘The Loss Adjustor’ reads like an exercise, or, rather, a series of exercises that have been strung together, as though the author had a list of things she wanted to write about – suburban banality, the Second World War, the collective reaction to fame, generational divides – and set about finding a framework into which she could slot them. Not only does this create a confusing amalgam of subject matter where the relevance of one to the other is obtuse, but each is given only cursory investigation. For instance, at one point, apropos of nothing in particular, a conversation between Caroline and her fellow payer-of-respects is interrupted by her recollection of a sexual encounter; the previously studied prose replaced by the vocabulary of pornography.

This over-abundance is a shame because one senses that there is a good meditative novel about grief and its various forms that could have been written here, but it is obfuscated by the scatter-shot approach. Campbell is capable of some interesting turns of phrase (she describes someone waving ‘as if he was wiping all traces of us clear from a window’), but as often her prose is awkward – why would one describe the word ‘fraud’ as being ‘amphibious’? Furthermore, the ongoing ascription of imagined agency to the actions of dogs is rather wearying and, it must be said that no one other than Greil Marcus has been able to write satisfactorily about rock music.

So, a novel that takes disconnection as its subject unfortunately ends up being disconnected itself.  To a degree, the author (or the publisher) seems to recognise this and has included an explanatory note at the book’s end describing the random confluence of events that led to the writing of the book. However this merely serves to highlight the disjointedness rather than justifying it.

THE LAST PATRIARCH
Najat El-Hachmi
Serpent’s Tail; Paperback; 306 pages; ISBN 9781846687174; RRP £9.99
Published April 29th 2010

Alice Kelly

Najat El-Hachmi’s debut novel, The Last Patriarch (L’últim patriarca in Catalan), is effectively three stories in one: simultaneously a trauma narrative of abuse, an immigration narrative and a female bildungsroman. As a bestseller in Spain and the worthy winner of the prestigious Ramon Llull Prize in 2008 – which, at ninety thousand Euros last year, is the most renumerative prize in Catalan letters –its UK publishers, Serpent’s Tail, are keen to repeat that success over here. The Moroccan born El-Hachmi emigrated as a child with her family to Catalonia, and her previous work, the autobiographical I Too Am Catalan (Jo també sóc catalana, 2004) shares similar concerns to The Last Patriarch: questions of assimilation and integration; hybridity and border transgressions; and the construction of diasporic identities.

Narrated entirely from the perspective of Mimoun Driouch’s unnamed daughter, who will eventually escape the violence and sexual abuse of her despotic father (the last patriach of the title), the text is also concerned with cultural and imagined histories, and the importance of origin stories. El-Hachmi satirises and plays with these modes as much as she imitates them: the opening chapter, entitled ‘A long-awaited son’, charts the birth of Mimoun and comically begins ‘On that day, after three daughters, a first son was born to Driouch of Allal of Mohammed of Mohand of Bouziane, etc.’.

Split into two halves, totalling thirty-nine vignette-like chapters, the first half tells the story of Mimoun’s birth, childhood including his fratricide and sexual abuse by his uncle, his marriage, and his emigration to Catalonia, detailing throughout the violence, sexual abuse and rape he inflicts on the women around him. His daughter makes explicit her unreliable narration and her imagined reconstruction of his past in her desire for a cultural history: the events are frequently prefaced with ‘probably’; ‘We expect…’; ‘it isn’t beyond the realm of probability that…’; and ‘He must have felt like…’. This deliberate fictionalisation later becomes a mode of repressing trauma: ‘As my memories seemed so unreal I have no choice but to turn it all into fiction’. The text is unstinting in its depiction of domestic and sexual abuse: Mimoun’s cousin ‘felt him lacerating her flesh with the chains they used to tie the dog up in the outside yard’ and he plagues his daughter with ‘those tennis-ball-thud kisses’. At times these unrelenting descriptions feel a little over-done and Mimoun risks becoming a caricature, detracting from the clear, concise narration and characterisation elsewhere.

The narrative details the problems Mimoun faces as a Moroccan in what he calls ‘Barciluna’. His patriarchal authority is considerably diminished by his estrangement in a different culture, where he ‘understood very little of what people said’, resulting in alcoholism and more adultery. After his boss can’t pronounce his name, he becomes ‘Manel’ and eventually starts a business in a culture he doesn’t understand: ‘Construcciones Manel SA. I don’t know what the S and the A stand for, but it’s what you have to put if you want to look like a real company’.

It is these questions of assimilation and the enaction of the cultural script that El-Hachmi is able to insightfully explore in the second half, when the narrator and her family join their father in Catalonia. Interweaving these two narratives of sexual and domestic abuse, and the oppression of the immigrant, along with the growing self-awareness of the protagonist herself, generates a rich hybrid text, replete with a litany of daily prejudices.

The issue of homelessness and displacement is a common trope in immigrant narratives but the narrator’s solution to this is unusual: she ‘started to read the dictionary’, and Catalan words and their definitions soon come to punctuate the narrative and conclude chapters, such as ‘Daci, dàcia, an adjective, dació, an action and dacita, a rock’. Her progress through the dictionary becomes a means of delineating and learning to read her experiences:

I was probably at C in the dictionary when Father took us to meet Isabel. Ca is a dog. Or ca, the letter K. Or ca short for house, a ca l’Albert, for example, to Albert’s house, or a ca la ciutat, to the city.

As the protagonist is learning that ‘it wasn’t normal for your father to bite your knees when you’re growing up’, she is simultaneously becoming acculturated

to her new home. References to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, The Simpsons, and Whoopy Goldberg (purposefully spelt wrong?) in The Colour Purple start to appear, as well as references to the writers Víctor Català and Mercè Rodoreda, which root the text in the Catalan literary tradition. This voluntary hybridisation is entirely opposed to the discourse her father enforces on her and her brothers, making them ‘repeat what [he] forced us to say’, recording false testimonies of their mother’s alleged infidelity on tapes to send to their Moroccan grandparents. This acculturation increases throughout the second half of the novel, with chapters titled ‘Nocilla, Super Mario and sex’, and culminates in the daughter’s break away from her family. The well-written, shocking conclusion didn’t however convince this reader of the ‘revenge’ of the chapter’s title, but rather suggests the legacy of trauma that childhood abuse leaves behind.

The questioning of dominant discourses may well account for the book’s popularity in Catalunya. The resurgence of Catalan literature and the reclamation of Catalan, after years of repression under Franco, has marked Catalan as culture of resistance. El-Hachmi here forces Catalans to hold a mirror up to themselves, writing in Catalan and challenging them to imagine those subdominant, often immigrant discourses within Catalunya.

The story itself, of triumph over a domineering father figure and the difficulties of immigrant life, is not particularly innovative, but its resonances within a culture defined by its own cultural and linguistic oppression make this a particularly interesting immigrant narrative. The subnarrative of the story  – the legacy of Franco, known as the Patriarch – will not have passed Catalan readers by.  Equally they will be aware of the colonial history of Spain’s claims over Morocco. The history of oppression of Moroccan migrants in Spain here becomes a type of ‘writing back’, as Moroccan-Spanish authors claim a cultural inheritance.

The British publishers of this text, however, seem keen to reduce this complex text to simple polarities, as the back cover blurb tells us this ‘powerful saga of a Moroccan family’ is about ‘the conflict between duty and desire, set in rural Morocco and urban Catalunya’. This, combined with the faux-Arabic letters of the English chapter headings – a touch that will no doubt annoy postcolonialist critics – means the book is more likely to be read as a popular text of self-discovery and liberation, rather than as a nuanced postcolonial narrative of the impacts of domestic and sexual abuse, and of migration, both for migrants and host communities, and an example of how immigrants in Catalunya insert themselves into the dominant discourse, albeit it in what is considered a minority language.

Chemistry never rests. Something’s converted
each time, given time. I eroded

on the bench, under the organ pipes,
God’s own woofers and tweeters,

oxidizing lime tears,
sound’s empathetic breakdown.

Enter Miss Dennis, chiming: Mavis
check your posture. Straightening

my hymnal spine. Play
it open. Now stopped. Again,

stopped. Her fingering over mine:
a splint for weak music,

pacing the floor.
Now, from the top. Remember,

Jacob lost – despite his rock jaw
and herdsman’s fists –

his opponent had better wind.
Don’t slow down, she said.

The work’s like swimming,
or not drowning:

this stroke doesn’t count
without the next.

AMERICAN RUST
by Philipp Meyer
Simon and Schuster, Paperback; 384 Pages
ISBN: 9781847373960
Price:£12.99

James Tanner

A surprising amount of art, for want of a better word, is entitled ‘American…’ To name but a few: in film, we have Grafitti and Gangster; in literature, Pastoral and Psycho; in music, both Girl and Woman (not to mention Pie). It is a cliché of sorts. Why? Well, “American” is a big word with many emotionally charged meanings, both for Americans and for the rest of the world. Like all big words, it can be used cheaply. It is easy to tack the national adjective in front of a noun and get a title which suggests profundity, or at least ambitiousness. Such titles imply a promise to re-imagine their subject through the lens of the States, or to explain something about terrible and beautiful America herself. Such is the nature of a cliché: in order for your use of it to be not a cliché, you have to come up with something meaningful.

Philipp Meyer has. The “rust” in his American Rust refers to the many related themes of stasis and decay which form its core. At the highest level, we have characters continually lamenting the decline of America and its dream: we have a country where “there are no jobs to be good at anymore”. Next we have the rust of individual people: whether in body, spirit or situation, everybody here is in their excruciatingly slow decline. Finally, just as Moby Dick at its barest really is a story about a man chasing a whale, there is actual American rust cropping up throughout the novel: the story is set amongst the skeletons of the dead steel industry that used to provide the a valley’s lifeblood. This omnipresent useless steel and its crumbling means of production are both a reminder and the ultimate cause of the afflictive abstract rust.

These connecting themes may sound just a little too neat, a fact of which Meyer is well aware. In an internal monologue, the sole educated character draws the real rust/abstract rust connection when returning to her Valley home only to castigate herself for its obviousness: “a thousand people must have thought that before.” However, the novel’s slow (at times crawling) pace, and generally believable characters, allow for an exploration on how these rusts affect different people and relationships in different ways. This provides a strong architecture on which to hang the plot.

The plot, in fact, is almost incidental to the book, which is one of the novel’s bigger weaknesses. So little actually happens that it is hard to summarize the book without spoiling it. In a nutshell, a savant-like boy, Isaac, decides to run away from the dying Valley. He and an underachieving jock friend, Poe, get into some serious trouble whilst saying their goodbyes, leaving one of them (and his mother, and her lover the sheriff) to deal with the consequences. Meanwhile Isaac’s sister returns to the Valley to try to make some sense of the practical and emotional messes she left behind when fleeing north to university. This is not a page-turning thriller, or a Thoman Pychon/David Foster Wallace energetic web of plotlines and digressions. At times it is frustrating how slowly anything happens, and how much time different characters spend complaining, reflecting and vacillating on the same few incidents, often entirely inside their own heads.

Such are the perils of the Faulknerian narrative style Meyer adopts. Like the southern master’s As I Lay Dying, as chapters change so too do narrators, the story told largely via their internal monologues which skip dizzyingly (but realistically) between the first, third and often even second person. It’s a difficult way to tell a story, and while it does create real characters rich in contradiction and imperfection, occasionally Meyer slips up. It is jarring when Poe, whom we know from his own thoughts to be a simple, uneducated young man, all of a sudden thinks to himself: “The truth was people died every minute. Were dying. The only real miracle was the human perception that it would not be him.” Most of the time, however, each character’s speech rings true.

Although the story is told as Faulkner might tell it, its content is pure Steinbeck (with a soupçon of Salinger in Isaac’s runaway and self-destructive hatred of perceived phoniness). American Rust is like a Grapes of Wrath in which the Joad family and their neighbours stay in Oklahoma as their lifeless farms gradually blow away. In Meyer’s book dust has become rust, but his storytelling ethos seems similar to Steinbeck’s, painting portraits of people suffering through a torturously slow crisis. At times he exhibits Steinbeck’s weaknesses as well: too often characters come up with nauseating simple-yet-deep reflections (“All the dead men in the world-they had once been alive.”), and there is the same questionable implicit assumption that all of everybody’s problems would disappear if only there were enough good jobs to be had.

These flaws, though, are flaws that come from ambition and earnestness, and are quite forgivable given the author’s bravery at tackling such difficult themes using such technically complex narration. This is all the more true given that this is a first novel. Not having done my homework, I had suspected that this was a semi-autobiographical work that the author had poured everything he knew into, a backwoods prodigy doomed to be mercurial à la John Kennedy Toole. Silly me: Meyer has been everything from a medical technician to a derivatives trader, living all over the States. This is no a roman à clef, culled from personal experience, exhausting the writer’s stock of material.

What it is is a promising and mature first novel, showing a clear knowledge of the American masters without coming off as too derivative of any one amongst them. Meyer has demonstrated a broadness of vision and a willingness to fully explore characters and their motives, albeit at some cost to pace and plot. His future work, which I look forward to reading, will, I hope, take similar chances on plot and narrative drive as he took here with theme and structure.

The largest pearl in the world was ruined when the shell was boiled open
– Prose note to Paterson, William Carlos Williams

‘Yes, yes, the salty Pleiades,
Language under your knuckles,
But there were hundreds of us.’
Toes deep, Tom, at the bottom of the fall;
Collecting dirt deep down in Paterson.
Sedimented grain by grain,
Echoes battered in the river bed among
Citizen body parts;
The eyes of Sam Patch, an ear from the Reverend’s wife.
Culled, hunting
For Pearls of the Passaic.

She squats, ladylike under thundering;
A cool American at four hundred
Grams just kissing Tom Carson’s big toe.
This was Solomon’s strong jaw
At long last witched by boiling,
Loosened with screaming.
Lips split under Tom’s duress
And then the thing achieved:

Elfish light leaking out
To dead verb.
‘That’ll show him,
And the other ninety nine.’

Hunting the Passaic for things.
Eyes wide, Tom, toes deep.
Remember where you step.
I think there is thought in a thing Tom,
I am young but I watch my step.

By Anna McKerrow

Opposite a block of control / Him to make him / a woman / Crowded on a table / Protest that she is not /

In fact / A-real / And next door to / a garage! / She picks up smile /Says, help / Talking / Help with the papier mache /

She says, / It’s actually a dummy / Or at least that’s what I think / She says, / Actually made of rubber / Isn’t that interesting /

Dress, monkey, she says, / That does not awaken her / Exposed closer / Examination reveals these / Small furry Victorian night- / With her you have the says, /

The onset of the fire / place you see dead / at night / model like, says / like a kind of paradise / she lifts her skirt /

Ice cream / movies every day / all of them / shadow of the nursery / she bows her head / does not / did not use oils /she says / I arrived here /

Forces the jaws apart / the pleasure / the pleasure / she says, as if she is / stroking them /

With her you have the sense / faces in the fireplace / the corridor death / sheeted / pregnant rabbit / sucking! / to learn early / they were hurts / nails in his leg /

She says / dollies and props / “What I love / doing prints,” / seated on a stool / figure’s parted legs / panels like stations on the cross / is a collection of plastic / saints and plastic virgins /

You do oil painting / she says she is not / is evasive when it comes /

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
Faber and Faber; Hardback;
464 pages; 9780571253296;
Price £18.99

Annie McDermott

First of all, this is not a book about America. The book about America is what the French aristocrat Olivier, sent to investigate the prisons of the new democracy, is dictating to his secretary Parrot. Peter Carey’s book is about what happens in the meantime.

Parrot and Olivier in America tells the story of Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont (Lord Migraine to his secretary), a short-sighted young nobleman living amidst the dangers of post-revolutionary Paris. His overbearing and staunchly royalist mother, who ‘has saved my life so often I have almost died of it’, sends him to the relative safety of America on the pretext of writing a report on the penal systems of the ‘new democracy’. Olivier’s companion and the novel’s second narrator is Parrot, an Englishman of many lives and many names (John Larrit, Perroquet, Monsieur Perroquet, and even Mr OK when Americans mishear the French) and the servant of a Garmont family friend.

Throughout the pair’s travels, these two opposing pairs of eyes remain firmly trained on each other. Any insights into America are as glimpses at the edge of their vision: the substance and shape of the narrative is drawn from the developing relationship between master and servant. This provides the fuel for the novel’s most touching moments and entertaining set-pieces. It is a pleasure to watch Olivier’s stiffly elaborate voice bend itself to the foreign subject of what might be going on in his servant’s mind, a question which, at one point, ‘became more pressing when, after a dinner of fatty goose, Master Larrit carried a bottle of brandy to my room and made it clear that he and I should shoot the breeze.’

As the reader follows their sentimental journey, however, it is difficult to escape a slight feeling of frustration. Carey has sketched out an ambitious plan that spans the globe and raises key political and philosophical issues – we are taken through England, France, Australia and America, and faced with such questions as the fate of art in a democracy along the way. And yet this formidable body of subject-matter feels more skeleton than flesh. Carey’s efforts to build his novel not from a single comprehensive account but from multiple perspectives, fragments, memories and speculations is an attempt to give it life – yet they feel too sparse and too shallow, and the promise of the novel is unfulfilled.

In Salem, Parrot encounters an engraver whose ambition is to produce a book of all the birds of America. He draws not from life but from death: his wife has become a skilled shot, and brings him back examples of each species which she then wires into lifelike poses and piles up in his studio to wait for their close-ups. The finished prints are posted in copper cases to England and France, where they sell for the highest of prices and furnish the libraries of noblemen who will never see such things in the flesh.

The book that is about America – Olivier’s On the Penitentiary System of the United States and Its Application in France – has, we are led to believe, much in common with these engravings. The reconstructed poses of the lifeless birds mirror the objects of his research – carefully controlled interviews with inmates of prisons that Parrot collects ‘as his lordship’s servants must once have collected moths and butterflies’, followed by ‘nightly dinners whose guests had been clearly selected to provide me with every statistic I could ever wish to know’. The book about what happens in the meantime – Carey’s book – aims to be closer to Mrs Watkins stumbling through marshes, shotgun in hand, splattered with American mud and blinded by the American sun.

At points, it succeeds. Olivier’s contempt for the rocking chair, ‘the inevitable machine, that awful monument to democratic restlessness’, is an individual encounter with America worth a thousand statistics. When presented with the offending seat in the deluxe cabin of a ship, he has it replaced with ‘a comfortable wing-backed reading chair’ and reflects that in a democracy you will ‘never find, as in aristocracy, one class that sits back in its own comfort and another that will not stir itself because it despairs of ever improving its status. In America, everyone is in a state of agitation: some to attain power, others to grab wealth, and when they cannot move, they rock.’ Such moments show the narrative at its best, but they are too few to flesh out such a formidable skeleton.

For a novel keen to withhold answers, it is perhaps too empty of questions as well. One of Olivier’s treatises that we never read attempts to answer the question of the role of the artist in a democracy. Carey’s novel does not attempt to provide any such answer, but the incidents, characters and views through which we are encouraged to explore the issue do not even surprise us with new insights into the problem or different ways of formulating the question. As postmodern readers, we have learnt to live without answers, but living without questions is more difficult. Peter Carey can, of course, live perfectly well without postmodern readers, but he nevertheless strays far enough into their territory with Parrot and Olivier that his Heart-Warming Tale of their trials, tribulations and unexpected friendship is not quite – almost, yes, but not quite – enough by itself.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Hamish Hamilton; Boxed Set Paperbacks; 672 pages;
9780241141823; Price £18.99

Michael Sopp

It seems that if you open any novel written by a man in the last decade there’s a good chance its protagonist will be a prepubescent genius. It’s difficult to trace the origins of this phenomenon. In England at least it may have something to do with Mark Haddon’s best-selling The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and its autistic, prime-number-obsessed narrator, which seems to have spawned a literary virus that has since spread across the Atlantic and beyond. Oskar, the nine year old narrator of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a vegan, tambourine-playing inventor cum private detective; the nine year old Saul in Adam Foulds’ The Truth About These Strange Times can (among other feats) reel off pi to a bespoke number of decimal places; and the twelve year old T.S. Spivet, whose Collected Works formed the subject of Reif Larsen’s debut novel last year, is a world expert cartographer. A preteen protagonist with anything less than an Ivy League phD must be considered a chronic underachiever in this context. Indeed, the child genius character has become as ubiquitous a postmodern device as mad fonts or rambling footnotes. It was therefore with early anxiety that I learnt on page one of Paul Murray’s second and most recent novel Skippy Dies that its teenage protagonist, Ruprecht Van Doren, is ‘an overweight genius’ with a penchant for Yahtzee and ten-dimensional superstring theory. Unfortunately, early fear quickly turns to palpable disappointment as Murray’s novel, which is lazily written, very loosely plotted and just plain too long, gestures towards ‘tragicomedy’ (to quote the blurb) but ends up being neither serious nor funny.

Disappointingly, our physicist hero is just one of many cardboard cut-out characters that populate Seabrook College, the exclusive Dublin boarding school that is the setting for the novel. The staffroom consists of a collection of pedagogical stereotypes that, were it not for their being at least nominally Irish, might have been dragged directly off the set of Dangerous Minds. Thus in addition to the prematurely cynical history teacher Howard, there is the harmless old blunderer Jim Slattery, the attractive, enigmatic Miss McIntyre, and the erstwhile teenage rugby star Tom Roche who, having been cut off by injury in his prime, now runs Seabrook’s games department and, bitterly single, is married only to the school. Of course one cannot set a novel in a Catholic Irish boarding school without, at the very least, intimations of either physical or psychological abuse. In Skippy Dies the staple coupling of Catholic catechism and deviancy is found in the figure of Father Green. He teaches French (making him a literal Père Vert), and has a habit of publicly interrogating Skippy and his peers with regard to their sexual proclivities. One scene in the first book (the novel is divided into three parts – entitled Hopeland, Heartland and Ghostland) in which Skippy is induced to vomit over his classmate under Father Green’s interrogation is one of the book’s rare highlights, successfully combining farce with horror. However, this is not a Lord Dismiss Us sort of institution; Seabrook is very much a twenty-first century boys’ school, i.e. a neurotically heterosexual one. Nor is this Joyce’s Clongowes Wood, and aside from the dubious Father Green, the Paraclete Fathers at the school take a back seat, and the Catholic element in the novel remains largely incidental.

It is possible to faintly make out a central narrative to Skippy Dies, one which surrounds Skippy and Ruprecht, improbable roommates who are brought together by their search for love and extra-terrestrial life respectively. Both prefer to engage with life from a distance: whilst the physics Wunderkind Ruprecht uses the telescope in his room to monitor UFO activity and inform his painstaking work with the global SETI project, Skippy is employed in more terrestrial pursuits, directing the lens over towards the neighbouring St Brigid’s School, and getting various close ups of the girls in its courtyard. One of these girls, Lori, becomes the object of his affection, and much of the novel is concerned with their burgeoning, prescription-drug-fuelled love affair, a relationship which is complicated in no small part by Carl, the maniac sometime boyfriend of Lori, who spends his evenings terrorising restaurateurs with his Vietnam-War-obsessed droog, Barry. The gravamen of the problem with Skippy Dies is thus the fact that, despite its considerable length, there are too many characters and too many stories. After an eventful prologue, in which the titular death mysteriously takes place following an eating competition at the local Doughnut emporium, the novel divaricates all over the place. In the first book alone, Howard’s infatuation for the staffroom femme fatale Miss McIntyre, Carl and Barry’s knock-off pharmaceutical dealings, Ruprecht’s experiments with his Velocity Accelerator in the school’s basement, and a calamitous Hallowe’en party make up multiple narrative branches that are, at best, half-heartedly pleached together. Nor is the novel grounded in any sense of place, and readers who know Dublin will scour their copies for evidence of the city in vain. The social milieu is very much south of the Liffey, but you could change a couple of place names and transpose the novel to Reading without too much difficulty. With the exception of the occasional pejorative ‘spa’ or phatic ‘alright so’, the language of Dublin is equally absent. The nuances of boys’ school vernacular also seem to elude Murray’s reach – “Von Blowjob, find a dictionary and look up ‘interesting’” is, I think, more of an imagined playground insult than something a fifteen year old would actually say – though the perma-use of the word ‘gay’ is spot on, and made this reader, at least, breathe a nostalgic sigh for his schoolboy years.

Readers who enjoyed Murray’s debut An Evening of Long Goodbyes will be disappointed by this follow-up effort. Whereas Murray’s first novel, a much funnier book, is held tightly together by its epicurean protagonist Charles Hythloday, who at his best combines Ignatius Reilly’s manic indolence with the caroming debauchery of a Sebastian Dangerfield, the narrative of Skippy Dies is too diffuse, and its central pairing of Ruprecht and Skippy cannot hold. Beyond these structural flaws however, there is just too much bad writing in this book. Naturally, there are all the writerly devices that some readers will love and others will find distracting, such as heavily worked zeugmas – ‘It is tomorrow. Skippy’s bare-legged at the edge of the pool, chlorine and earliness stinging his eyes’ – and similes, as well as Murray’s constant shifting back and forward, via Skippy, between the second and third person. But worse than these are the dud passages of clichéd interior monologue. This is Howard: ‘when the initial sting has abated, he admits to himself that Farley might have a point. Yes, Miss McIntryre is beautiful; yes, what happened in the Geography Room was exhilarating. But did it actually mean anything?’ Or the snowballing tropes that run on for lines and lines without showing any sign of relenting. ‘Frozen in a moment he drifted into’, Howard thus begins the novel phlegmatically stringing together the ‘clouded necklace of imitation pearls’ that make up the ‘pale torpid days’ of the ‘grey tapestry of okayness’ of his existence. Phew. A few paragraphs of this are enough to leave the reader’s head spinning from some sort of metaphor motion sickness; unfortunately, the novel goes on for over six hundred pages. Ultimately, Skippy Dies is overwritten, overlong, and under thought-out. If you haven’t already, read An Evening of Long Goodbyes instead.