Suffolk Writers' Studio

Eggers’ latest offering, A Hologram for the King, is a strange book.  It is deceptively simple in sentence and story and yet it packs a significant punch as it peels back the scabs of the body beneath.

The body is America and the book is a postmortem for the American dream.  This is a post-manufacturing, post-American imperial, post-2008 state of the national soul and its search for meaning and direction.  This is the nation on the couch.  And yet that would be too neat and the patient too eloquent.  Instead, we have Alan—shambolic, disappointing and disappointed. 

The basic premise of the book is that Alan has come to Saudi to land the Big Deal that will allow him to pay for his daughter’s college tuition.  He is bankrupt and the work of manufacturing he once knew (bicycles) has died and gone to China.

Much of the book’s draw is around Alan and the sense that this is a man on something of a downward spiral; he may or may not be ill and he is determinedly self-destructive in his relationships.  What surprised me is that over the three days I took to read the book I caught myself, not thinking about the book and its plot points as—for the most part—there are none that are distinguishable, but worrying about Alan.  Worrying about him in the way you might worry about a friend and then resolve to call them later, just to check in.

The book does to some extent read as a book of two halves through; as with everything in the book and the Saudi world it describes it is unclear where the line is.  The first part of the book has its geography firmly anchored to Alan’s hotel room and the conference tent of the proto-city out in the desert.  But then a shift occurs.  Alan is obliged to visit a doctor and from then on it begins to take excursions further into the Saudi interior and down the coast.  There is no particular change in register; we simply start to travel further and with the increase in plot points comes an inevitable rise in tempo. The shift from passivity to engagement feels a little forced, as if Eggers realised he couldn’t just leave Alan drinking in his hotel room or sweltering in a tent in the desert, so he had better give him something to do and sends him off sightseeing.  This is not to say that the chapter dealing with Alan’s trip to Youssef, the taxi driver’s home village isn’t wonderfully executed—it is, and has some of the most haunting and pitch-perfect writing in the novel.  It is simply its place in the sequence of events.

Characters too, in particular Youssef, drop off the page and while understandable in terms of the narrative, the fact that the Alan himself doesn’t give them a passing thought on the page is an oddity and leaves the reader feeling a little unsatisfied.  

Eggers’ sentences are frequently so simple as to appear naked, even to a point where it is easy to overlook some exceptional writing.  Everything is as clean and clear as the desert city they describe.  There are of course clever word plays on Alan the ‘hollow man’ trying to offer a ‘hologram’ for a king, The King, and so on.  Everything here has at least two faces, just like the society it describes.

Saudi, as portrayed by Eggers, has a surreal fluidity of lines—appearance and reality, lines of decorum and legality—and the book has a fluidity to it as well.  Reading it, one does have the feeling of suspension or limbo and yet, and here is the skill in the writing, you still want to know what happens to Alan.  Desperately.

Some of the most lyrical and soul-searching writing comes through Alan’s attempts to write to his much-loved daughter as he tries to explain his failures in marriage and money.  The voice shifts and softens every time Alan takes up his pen, and it offers a wonderful alternative to the spare lines that control the rest of the page.

It is the pull of this Everyman, infused with a good dose of cherry pie and almost whimsical optimism, that against all odds he is always looking for the next new thing, the next deal that could save him—as close as he is to financial and social oblivion. He still turns up in the tent every day in the hope that he will see the King and land The Big Deal.

Eggers is frighteningly intuitive with middle-management  language and habit and while it is easy to be distracted by the oddity of modern day Saudi Arabia being represented in fiction (where everyone seems to be drinking bootleg liquor and attending orgies at the Danish embassy and secret drag races deep in the desert) it is also easy to overlook how peculiar Alan and the slice of salesman America he represents actually is.  This is not necessarily rich ground for magnificent storytelling, unless, and this is surely intentional, we look to Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman.   This is the death of the American as a global salesman.

Alan represents the American dream that absolutely refuses to believe that it won’t work out despite the fact that there are clearly other players on the court now.  For a writer concerned with the current American zeitgeist this is a generous, democratic book which allows for the proposition that this century will be about the effect of the globe on the American, and not the other way around, as in the previous century.  Alan is in some sense the archetypal frontier American.  And yet, Eggers renders him impotent.  The American frontier cowboy has lost his confidence.

Of course waiting for any king to return must speak to Christianity—America’s other great religion, after commerce—and the final line in the book offers the reader a bit of a gut punch to make the point.

Sometimes the form overwhelms the content but this is a clever and very beautiful book and is certainly worth much, much more than its purchase price.

The Departure halls at Heathrow are positively crawling with Handsome Men in Good Fabric.  Watching them roam free n their natural environment bring a tear to this girl’s eye.  Italian management consultants in the WH Smiths, American’s with Republican hair in duty free,  Germans in the coffee shop.  Goodness me; my safari holiday adventure has started early.  I observe the German’s the longest, simply because I have bought a coffee so that I can get semi legal squatting rights  in the relative quiet of the cafe and pretend to read.  The Germans are all in their mid thirties I suppose and chiseled to perfection; you could slice cheese in the taller one’s cheek bones.  Their turn out is impeccable and though they seem to know each other rather well, are polite to a point of parody.  One of them, in a laudable nod to mayhem, has a single red hole on his jacket cuffs.   

Eventually I move on and its after yet another circuit of the halls to pass time that things get really exciting.  I am pretending to be comfortable in one of those rows of immovable chairs that for some reason are always covered in dark green plastic.  Over the top of my Kindle and the next gripping installment of Cheever’s slump into alcoholism, one of the Americans gives me a rather dazzling “hey-there-hi-there” grin over the top of his FT.  I am  instantly and spectacularly winded because, a) men never smile at me, b) this is England, smiling at strangers will make you the subject of a BBC internal investigation and c) who still reads newspapers in physical format in public and d)  he is clearly a banker in which case he should have known the about the news he is reading well over 24 hours ago, so why is he reading it again?  I compute all this in a nano second and thus pretend I did not see the big American smile with Republican hair and anxiously clutch my Kindle to my chest.  This is all much, much more excitement this highly strung blue stocking can handle.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of safari I go off search of a couple more trophies to complete the big five.  Germans, Italians and Americans already in the bag.  I give some Australians a wide birth because they look as if they smell a little, ditto the four Nigerians as collectively, they are wearing more jewelry than I own, and I find this unsettling.  (They will later be on my flight to Johannesburg and flirt outrageously with the cabin crew.) 

I hit the jackpot with a a pair of bon-chic-bon-genre French boys eating frites in Giraffe and make it a full house with a silver haired Nordic fox who looked like me might design cup holders for gulf stream jets or “re-imagine” pencil sharpeners. 

The sheer volume and variety of Handsome Men in Good Fabric at Heathrow is as bewildering as it is encouraging.  It is true I spend much of my life locked away in the attic but hats off to Heathrow for the heady concentration of them all.  For the love of god and women everywhere, get this place another runway at once.

First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.  So opens Richard Ford’s Canada. 

The story, narrated by a sixty-something Dell Parsons, looking back at the events that began when he was fifteen,  begins in Great Falls, Montana , a town Ford has used before in his fiction and which he has evidently visited.  (I recommend Googling the town for a visual reference).  For Ford, the grinding mediocrity and sameness of the geography acts as the all-American litmus test for what is “normal” and “normal” is a word Ford uses again and again in this book.  In a town where nothing changes and the patterns are rhythms are so intrenched, you would think that any transgression was impossible.  And yet it is here that Ford sets his family and the course of events for their own great fall.

The descriptions of the family members leave us in no uncertain terms as to who these people are as Dell performs a methodical post-mortem on his family.  Ford draws them in aching, transparent detail, that each sentence work hard towards illuminating the workings of the family, not only for the laconic Dell, but for the reader too.  In a more sparse style than we might be used to from Ford, he walks us around the family home and through the lives of its inhabitants with a confidence that does away with any need for exhibitionism.  On his father, the charming, hapless Bev Parons, Dell speculates;

… he may have been in the grip of some great, unspecified gravity, as many GIs were. He spent the rest of his life wrestling with that gravity, puzzling to stay positive and afloat, making bad decisions that truly seemed good for a moment, but ultimately misunderstanding the world he’d returned home to and having that misunderstanding become his life.

Dell acts as some sort of emotional windsock for his parents, something he is quite good at.   Ford allows Dell some desperately structured interests through which he likes to negotiate his experience; chess and bees.  The juxtaposition of his these little hobbies and the reality of his world unravelling all around him create a terrible anxiety in the reader as who Dell is and what the world is, constantly collide. 

In Canada, or rather a hollowed out shell  of a town in Saskatchewan, he has to try and make sense of the chaos of the adult world.  He is in a fundamentally dangerous environment shot through violence and transgression . Once he gives up on his futile attempts to get back to school, he understands that he is no longer the boy he was and that his plans for the future, if not derailed, need to be shelved for the time being;

It seemed to me, cast off in the dark, that I was not exactly who I’d been before: a well-rounded boy possibly on his way to college, with a family behind him and a sister.  I was now smaller in the world’s view and insignificant, and possibly invisible. All of which made me feel closer to death than life.  Which is not how fifteen-year-old boys should feel.

As Dell, in older age, asks himself questions about what came to pass, how and why and when it all began to go wrong, his question instruct the reader how the story should be approached.  The structural function of the questions forces the reader into the temporal circularity of memory that Dell himself is in as he exhumes the bodies for investigation.  It is testimony to the confidence of Ford’s story telling that, given we already know what happens in a bank in North Dakota, the “why” of the story keeps the reader gripped.   Moreover, while the writing is speculative and self reflexive for the character it stops well short of being self obsessed.

This is because much of the book’s seduction is from Dell’s voice.  It has a medical, articulated coolness, which is not to say it is cold, far from it, each chapter reveals another level of unspoken, intimated heartbreak.  Any calamity which is taking place in the plot is mediated through the masterfully controlled voice of Dell’s older self who is also censored through the book’s form-  the retelling of a story after many years of clarification.  These are not adolescent outpourings.  

It is this distilled voice and the beautiful specificity of the physical description which save the book from becoming a fictional version of a misery memoir. 

…the iron cot I slept on (…) and the ‘kitchen room,’ with the bumpy red linoleum and a single fluorescent ceiling ring and a two-burner hot plate where I boiled tar-smelling pump water in a pan to make my bath at night.

As one would expect of a big name author writing a big American book, there are big American questions here too.  As a running thread, and as a natural binary to the quest for what is “normal”, is the issue of “otherness”.  Dell’s mother, Neeva, is Jewish and, we are constantly told, looks different, which is accepted in the Parson’s family as explanation enough as to why she never has friends or fits in and then is in some way is offered up as explanation for her actions.  Dell doesn’t fit in at school and has no friends and his twin sister, the beautifully rendered Berner, is lanky, awkward and otherwise - to the end.  The American Indian community are all implicated in the story’s trajectory.  They too don’t have anywhere to be in the world, apart from the scrap heap reservations, and they too transgress legal norms.  Those who don’t fit in, have no way of fitting in because what is “normal” has no place for them.  They must by default, transgress.   Who they are, simply by their existence, has already crossed a line, national border line or other.

In Canada, the mercurial Arthur Remlinger wears his otherness proudly even though it has ultimately lead to his ruin.  He, like Dell is exiled in Canada which Dell tells us is like America, but not.   It is America-lite.  There is room for the strange and the transgressive even if they are consigned to the amoral apolitical no man’s land of Saskatchewan.  Case in point, Ford offers up Charley, the make-up wearing Metis.  He shoots geese and digs pits and yet we and Dell are under no illusion that he presents some sort of sexual threat to the boy.  This is the exile that awaits those who do not toe the American line. 

We need to bear in mind that this book, six years in the writing, was born in an America where “you are either with us, or you are against us.” America, as Dell Parsons finds out, has no room for any “otherness” that does not endorse the status quo and what the good folk of Great Falls can be quantified as “normal”.   “Canada”, might just as well have been “America” as it again scratches as the scab of the pioneer insecurity and asks what it means to be American.

Canada is a novel with big lungs and soft poetry.  It will excite you and break your heart and it should take its place among the great books of the decade.

Book review

50 Shades of Grey - EL James

A diligent reviewer would start with a brief precis of the plot.  Alas this one is so thin that there is nothing to offer suffice to say the characters are based on those in Twilight, supplant Anastasia for Bella, Christian for Edward and some BDSM for all that naughty vampire stuff.  Edward lives in an apartment, which, from the description, he bought from Frasier Crane when the TV show ended.  I could continue.  I won’t. 

The writing is so glaring awful as to defy critique.  The endless repetitions are waring to a point of narcolepsy and if Ana continues to “bite her bottom lip” as often as Author EL James describes it, she will soon require a skin graft.  Everything is “delicious”, “exquisite” and “divine”, a few times over, in every chapter, to a point where the tedium of the writing overshadows any eroticism this book proclaims to offer. 

If the sheer grinding incompetence of the writing does not bore or anger you it might reduce you to giggles.  I’m afraid the sex is not worth giggling over.  Every “divine”, “delicious” experience renders anything vaguely off-piste, strangely pedestrian.  Somewhat giggle-worthy are the bizarre asides which seem to double as product placement.  Exhibit A: baby oil, “such a versatile liquid”.  Exclamation point.  Much less a sexual awakening than a good house keeping tip that Martha Stewart would be proud of.  Proud too are the producers of the film, (yes, it is true), as they negotiate the product deals.

But for all the inanity and guff this book, and its two, even uglier sisters, encapsulates, we ignore it at our peril.

We must acknowledge it for two reasons.  The first its success as a publishing case study.  As a publishing phenomenon the book defies belief and hats off to EL James for doing what writer’s have done for centuries and made a mint from peddling porn.  Sex sells.  She knows it and she sold it.  It is also heartening for ePublishers to know that books do have a viral appeal and can operate in a market place outside of traditional publishers.  Kate Mosse has opined the fact that because the book is now published in traditional form, this means people do still want “proper books”, but the truth is the traditional publishing industry was playing catch up on this one and saw a  retrospective quick buck. 

The initial success of the book had much to do with the anonymity an e-Reader offers.  No one knows what you are reading on your tablet and commuters everywhere can enjoy a helping of BDSM with their Latte on the way into work.  In broader terms, chick lit has run its course, and the “female light read” market was looking for a marketable successor.  This is just economics, and James got their first. As a genre it has already been branded as “mummy porn” and if that term is enough to make you retch, you should probably stop reading now as you aren’t going to like what comes next.

The second reason we cannot ignore this book and its offspring is that it is another nail in the coffin of gender equality, and in the worst way possible. 

Here is a girl, apparently a graduate student who decides that her sexual education at the hands of a narcissistic, damaged, violent man, trumps any need to educate her mind.  Perfectly, she is a virgin. 

Christian’s fetishisation of virginity and her inability to own her sexuality are the basis of this profoundly unequal relationship.  ON a very basic level, James has Ana, an educated erudite girl, unable to name her genitalia other than with a vague “down there” allusion.  Her innocence is so profoundly ingrained that she quite literally has no sexual vocabulary.  Some would say James has no vocabulary either, but that is another matter. Here, in Ana, we have the same old virgin/whore dichotomy that is as banal and obvious as any.  Ana is reduced to an archetype of child like feminine mystique or sexual degradation at the hands of her lover.  He decides which role she fulfills in his eyes, not the other way round.

And here is the clever illusion we are under with regards point of view.

The trick of a first person account from Ana’s point of view means we are diverted, lulled into thinking this is a sympathetic, nuanced approach to female sexuality.  It is a break from the typical full frontal male gaze so often associated with pornography and erotica.  Far from being objectified to a body part or two from Christian’s perspective rather we are treated to Ana’s perspective on the proceedings.  

Similarly, this point of view allows for little one dimensional forays in self doubt that are meant to assuage any concerns we may have for this poor beset upon virgin.  Ana’s see-sawing through “should I, shouldn’t I” have nothing to do with Ana’s intelligent, self-reflexive musings of the power at play, rather, it is James’ futile stab at a plot line.  The only reason to keep reading, one assumes, is to see if they get together and her decision towards the end of the interminable Volume One is so that James has a reason to render us stupid with Volumes 2 and 3.

But, for all the pseudo-psychology, the most damaging and dangerous aspect of this disaster of a book is that, yet again, we are subjected to another lurid example of sex and violence packaged as entertainment.  There is absolutely nothing neutral about sexual violence.  I cannot express enough that this is not a complaint against BDSM at all, but rather its representation by this particular author in this particular context.  In the hands of a more accomplished, intelligent writer it could be offered context and interrogation.

In this book, with is grade school grammar and giddying floor show of hyperbolic adjectives, sexual violence against a woman is offered up as titillation and what is worse, the abysmal quality of the writing adds to the sense that this representation is weightless.   As it stands, the temptation is to dismiss this little tale as a trifle.  It is not.  It is a signal to millions of women, and let’s be clear, another entire generation of women and men, that sex and violence are entertainment.  This serious, damaging, and to some women, life threatening assumption, can be lobbed in to your shopping trolley for £3.50.  50 Shades of Grey may work well as a title but the assumptions it endorses result in other shades of black and blue for thousands of women, every day.  There is nothing trifling about that.  

  I am aware that other popular fiction does just the same thing.  Crime novels are rife with sexual violence, romance fiction endorses much the same and apparently more literary writers such as Houlbec disguise blatant gynophobia under the veil of intellectual naval gazing.  This is not a problem specific to this book or this writer. 

In relation to this book, defenders will of course point to the tired old adage that these are two consenting adults.  Let’s put that into perspective.  She is a virgin, he is sexual sophisticated.  She is a penniless student, he a millionaire, she is 21 , he is 27.  I terms of experience, class and sex the inequalities are glaring.  If you are still don’t get it, lets make it a full house.  What if Ana were a young black woman?  Bound, and beaten by and older, wealthier, white male and all written in light frothy tones. 

Exactly.  

This is a retrogressive, vicious book.  I doubt this was its intention.  Its author is clearly too stupid to know any better, but her publishers should, and so should you.      

Copyright 2012  Fiona Melrose

I recently moved home and in all the accompanying chaos, my effort to get my digital TV subscription was repeatedly postponed.  The same was true for my internet connection for at least a month.   I decided not to renew my TV subscription and cancelled my TV license.  After some initial anxiety which manifested as a near pathological restlessness something interesting happened. 

Having nothing else to do and the quiet of the new house at times overwhelming, I started to hear voices.  Noisy ones, quiet ones, thoughtful ones and all of them familiar.  They were the voices of my characters thinking through their next move or holding conversations with one another.  So, there was nothing for it but to start writing down what the voices were saying.  One character who had been rather retiring started demanding a few chapters of his own.  Another decide he was still to angry to resolve his argument with another character just yet, and in the middle of all this a girl with a long red pony tail wandered up a dirt track in the snow and installed herself in the story. 

They may have done all of this anyway, but I can say with certainty that I would have had to make it all up, instead of just write it all down. 

Writing aside, I am drawing again, creating endless mad arrangement with all the wonderful flowers and foliage from the summer fields, stitching cushion covers and building rose arches.  

I do belief our lives and we ourselves will always find our balance and once the discord of the missing television had been registered, the gap had to be filled. So, there will be no television for me until my novel is complete or the clocks change for Winter time, which ever comes first.  I suspect they will happen at about the same time. 

These rules were first published in The Guardian.  They are extremely sensible- enjoy them…

1 Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide. 

2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph –

3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it’s the job. 

4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy. 

5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don’t go near the online bookies – unless it’s research. 

6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”. 

7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It’s research. 

8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments. 

9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven’t written yet. 

10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – “He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego.” But then get back to work.

“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.”

From On Writing by Stephen King