So here’s the introduction about mimicry. It goes something like this. Ahem. Believe it or not, I am not a good mimic. I can only do one impersonation, an actually pretty passable stab at Mick Jagger, but only as he appears in the Simpsons episode in which Homer goes to rock and roll fantasy camp. It’s not much, I admit, but it’s mine, and when I pull it off, my children laugh – simply, I guess, because it sounds so like the original, rather than because I am doing anything funny. (I never do anything funny.) Some of the considerable pleasure I drew from Eliza Minot’s The Brambles was her enviable ability to capture family life with such precision that … Well, you don’t want to laugh, exactly, because The Brambles is mostly about how three adult siblings cope with a dying father, but there is something about Minot’s facility that engenders a kind of childlike delight. How did she do that? Do it again! One conversation in particular, in which a mother is attempting to explain the mysteries of death to her young children, is so loving in its depiction of the mess you can get into in these situations, and so uncannily authentic, that you end up resenting the amount of inauthentic claptrap you consume during your reading life. The Brambles isn’t perfect – there’s a plot twist that ends up overloading the narrative without giving the book anything much in return – but Eliza Minot is clearly on the verge of producing something special.
It’s been a pretty significant reading month, now that I come to think about it. I read a modern classic that took away whatever will to live I have left, discovered a couple of younger writers and then came across an unfamiliar genre that, I suspect, will prove of great significance for both my reading and my writing life. I recently completed my first novel for, or possibly just about, young adults, and my US publishers asked me to go to Washington DC, to read from and talk about the book to an audience of librarians. One of the writers on the panel with me was a guy called David Almond, whose work I didn’t know; a couple of days before I met him, his novel Skellig was voted the third greatest children’s book of the last seventy years. (Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights was top, and Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden came in second.)
I read Skellig on the plane, and though I have no idea whether it’s the third-greatest children’s book of the last seventy years, I can tell you that it’s one of the best novels published in the last decade, and I’d never heard of it. Have you? Skellig is the beautifully simple and bottomlessly complicated story of a boy who finds a sick angel in his garage, a stinking, croaking creature who loves Chinese takeaways and brown ale. Meanwhile, Michael’s baby sister lies desperately sick in a hospital, fluttering gently between life and death.
The only problem with reading Skellig at an advanced age is that it’s over before you know it; a twelve-year-old might be able to eke it out, spend a little longer in the exalted, downbeat world that Almond creates. Skellig is a children’s book because it is accessible and because it has children at the centre of its narrative, but, believe me, it’s for you too, because it’s for everybody, and the author knows it. At one point, Mina, Michael’s friend, a next-door neighbour who is being home-schooled, picks up one of Michael’s books and flicks through it:
‘Yeah, looks good,’ she said. ‘But what’s the red sticker for?’
‘It’s for confident readers,’ I said. ‘It’s to do with reading age.’
‘And what if other readers wanted to read it? … And where would William Blake fit in? … “Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright / In the forests of the night.” Is that for the best readers or the worst readers? Does it need a good reading age? … And if it was for the worst readers would the best readers not bother with it because it was too stupid for them?’
Now that I come to think about it, Mina’s observations might well summarize what this column has been attempting to say all along.
For the first time in the last three or four years, I read two books in a row by the same author, and though Clay isn’t quite as elegant as Skellig, it’s still extraordinary, a piece of pre-Christian myth-making set in the north-east of England in the late 1960s. And suddenly, I’m aware that there may well be scores of authors like David Almond, people producing masterpieces that I am ignorant of because I happen to be older than the intended readership. Is The Road better than Skellig? That wouldn’t be a very interesting argument. But when I’d finished Clay I read an adult novel, a thriller, that was meretricious, dishonest, pretentious, disastrously constructed and garlanded with gushing reviews; in other words, the best readers had spoken.
Meanwhile, the hits just kept on coming. Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese is a clever, crisply drawn graphic novel about the embarrassment of almost belonging; Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth is a novel about werewolves in Los Angeles, and it’s written in blank verse, and it’s tremendous. I can’t remember now if I’ve ever cried wolf, as it were, and recommended other blank-verse werewolf novels – probably I have. Well, forget them all, because this is the one.
I was sent a proof copy of Sharp Teeth, and when I saw it, I wished it well, but couldn’t imagine actually reading it, what with it being a blank-verse novel about werewolves and all. But I looked at the first page, got to the bottom of it, turned it over, read the second page and … You get the picture, anyway. You’re all smart people, and you know the conventional way to get through a book. All I’m saying is that my desire to persist took me by surprise.
I had suspected that Sharp Teeth might not be serious – that it would turn out to be a satire about the film industry, for example (sharp teeth, LA, agents, producers, blah blah). But the beauty of the book is that it’s deadly serious; like David Almond, Toby Barlow takes his mythical creatures literally, and lets the narrative provide the metaphor. It’s stomach-churningly violent in places (they don’t mess around, werewolves, do they?), and tender, and satisfyingly complicated: there’s an involved plot about rival gangs that lends the book a great deal of noir cool. The blank verse does precisely what Barlow must have hoped it would do, namely, adds intensity without distracting, or affecting readability. And it’s as ambitious as any literary novel, because underneath all that fur, it’s about identity, community, love, death and all the things we want our books to be about. I’m not quite sure how Barlow can follow this, if he wants to. But there’s every chance that Sharp Teeth will end up being clasped to the collective bosom of the young, dark and fucked-up.
It seems years ago now that I dipped into Joe Moran’s engaging Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime. Externally, I have only aged a month or so since I picked it up, but in the meantime I have endured an Altamont of the mind, and my soul feels five hundred years old. Post-McCarthy, it’s hard to remember those carefree days when I could engross myself in anecdotes about the Belisha beacon, and short social histories of commuting and the cigarette break. (Eighty-nine per cent of Englishmen smoked in 1949! And we were still a proper world power back then! My case rests.) And I suppose a sense of purpose and hope might return, slowly, if I read enough P. G. Wodehouse and sports biographies. I have nearly finished the Joe Moran, and I would very much like to read his final chapter about the duvet. But what’s the point, really? There won’t be duvets in the future, you know. And if there are, they will be needed to cover the putrefying bodies of our families. Is there anything funny on TV?
October 2007
BOOKS BOUGHT:
★ Weetzie Bat – Francesca Lia Block
★ Necklace of Kisses – Francesca Lia Block
★ Holes – Louis Sachar
★ The World Made Straight – Ron Rash
★ Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska – Michael D’Orso
★ Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin – Lawrence Weschler
★ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country – Ken Kalfus
BOOKS READ:
★ Weetzie Bat – Francesca Lia Block
★ Tom’s Midnight Garden – Phil
ippa Pearce
★ The World Made Straight – Ron Rash
★ Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences – Lawrence Weschler
The story so far: I have written a Young Adult novel, and on a trip to Washington DC to promote it, I met a load of librarians and other assorted enthusiasts who introduced me to a magical new world that I knew nothing about. I really do feel as though I’ve walked through the back of a wardrobe into some parallel universe, peopled by amazing writers whom you never seem to read about on books pages, or who never come up in conversations with literary friends. (The truth, I suspect, is that these writers are frequently written about on books pages, and I have never bothered to read the reviews; come to think of it, they probably come up frequently in conversations with literary friends, and I have never bothered to listen to anything these friends say.)
It was in DC that I met David Almond, whose brilliant book Skellig started me off on this YA jag; and it was in DC that Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat, first published in 1989, was frequently cited as something that started something, although to begin with, I wasn’t sure what Weetzie Bat was, or even if the people talking about it were speaking in a language I understood, so I can’t, unfortunately, tell you what Weetzie Bat is responsible for. When I got home, I bought it from Amazon (it doesn’t seem to be available in the UK), and a few days later I received a very tiny paperback, 113 large-print pages long, and about three inches high, and suspiciously, intimidatingly pink. Pink! And gold! The book is so short that you really don’t need to be seen with it on public transport, but I wouldn’t have cared anyway, because it’s beautiful, and I would have defended its honour against any football hooligan who wanted to snigger at me.
Weetzie Bat is, I suppose, about single mothers and AIDS and homosexuality and loneliness, but that’s like saying that ‘Desolation Row’ is about Cinderella and Einstein and Bette Davis. And actually, when I was trying to recall the last time I was exposed to a mind this singular, it was Dylan’s book Chronicles that I thought of – not because Block thinks or writes in a similar way, and she certainly doesn’t write or think about similar things, but because this kind of originality in prose is very rare indeed. Most of the time we comprehend the imagination and intellect behind the novels we read, even when that intellect is more powerful than our own – you can admire and enjoy Philip Roth, for example, but I don’t believe that anyone has ever finished American Pastoral and thought, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ Weetzie Bat is not American Pastoral (and it’s not ‘Desolation Row’ – or Great Expectations, while we’re at it), but it’s genuinely eccentric, and picking it up for the first time is like coming across a chocolate fountain in the middle of the desert. You might not feel like diving in, but you would certainly be curious about the decision-making process of the person who put it there.
Weetzie Bat is a young woman, and she lives in a Day-Glo, John Waters-camp version of Los Angeles. Eventually she meets the love of her life, whose name is My Secret Agent Lover Man, and they have a baby called Cherokee, and they adopt another one called Witch Baby, and … You know what? A synopsis isn’t really going to do this book justice. If you’ve never heard of it (and of the six people questioned in the Spree offices, only one knew what I was talking about), and you want to spend about eighty-three minutes on an entirely different planet, then this is the book for you.
I read Tom’s Midnight Garden because it finished one place above Skellig in a list of the greatest Carnegie Medallists of all time. (Philippa Pearce’s classic came runner-up to Philip Pullman. I’m sure the Pullman is great, but it will be a while before I am persuaded that sprites and hobbits and third universes are for me, although I’m all for the death of God.) Like everything else in this genre, apparently, it is a work of genius, although unlike Weetzie Bat or Skellig, it is unquestionably a story for children, and at the halfway mark, I was beginning to feel as though I might finish it without feeling that my life had been profoundly enriched. I mean, I could see that it was great and so on, but I was wondering whether my half-century on the planet might be cushioning me from the full impact. But at the end of the book – and you’ve been able to see the twist coming from miles away, yet there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop it from slaying you – I’m not ashamed to say that I cr—
Actually, I am ashamed to say that. It’s a book about a kid who finds a magic garden at the back of his aunt’s house, and there’s no way a grown man should be doing that.
They’ve been very disorienting, these last few weeks. I see now that dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence I’ve discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that’s filled with masterpieces I’ve never heard of, the YA equivalents of The Maltese Falcon and Strangers on a Train. Weirdly, then, reading YA stuff now is a little like being a young adult way back then. Is this Vonnegut guy any good? What about Albert Camus? Anyone ever heard of him? The world suddenly seems a larger place.
And there’s more to this life-changing DC trip. While I was there, I learned about something called the Alex Awards, a list of ten adult books that the Young Adult Library Services Association believes will appeal to younger readers, and I became peculiarly – perhaps inappropriately – excited by the idea. Obviously this award is laudable and valuable and all that, but my first thought was this: ‘You mean, every year someone publishes a list of ten adult books that are compelling enough for teenagers? In other words, a list of ten books that aren’t boring? Let me at it.’ I bought two of this year’s nominees, Michael D’Orso’s Eagle Blue and Ron Rash’s The World Made Straight, having noticed that another of the ten was Michael Lewis’s brilliant book about American football, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, and a fourth was David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, which I haven’t read but which friends love. Whoever compiled this list knew what they were talking about. Who else might have won an Alex Award? Dickens, surely, for Great Expectations and David Copperfield, Donna Tartt, for The Secret History, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, probably Pride and Prejudice and Le Grand Meaulnes. This Boy’s Life, certainly, and The Liars’ Club, Roddy Doyle for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha … In other words, if a book couldn’t have made that list, then it’s probably not worth reading.
Like every other paperback, Rash’s book comes elaborately decorated with admiring quotes from reviews. Unlike every other paperback, however, his Alex nomination gave me confidence in them. ‘A beautifully rendered palimpsest,’ said BookPage, and I’d have to say that this wouldn’t entice me, normally. You can see how a book could be a beautifully rendered palimpsest and yet somehow remain on the dull side. But the Alex allowed me to insert the words ‘and not boring’ at the end of the quote. ‘Graceful, conscientious prose,’ said the Charlotte Observer – and yet not boring. ‘Rash writes with beauty and simplicity, understanding his characters with a poet’s eye and heart and telling their tales with a poet’s tongue, and not boring people rigid while he does it,’ said William Gay, almost. You see how it works? It’s fantastic.
And The World Made Straight really is engrossing – indeed, the last devastating fifty-odd pages are almost too compelling. You want to look away, but you can’t, and as a consequence you have to watch while some bad men get what was coming to them, and a flawed, likeable man gets what you hoped he might avoid. It’s a satisfyingly complicated story about second chances and history and education and the relationships between parents and their children; it’s violent, real, very well written, and it moves like a train.
When I was reading it, I ended up trying to work out how some complicated novels seem small, claustrophobic, beside the point, sometimes even without a point, while others take off into the fresh air that all the great books seem to breathe. There would be plenty of ways of turning this book, with its drug deals and its Civil War backstory, into something too knotty to l
ive – sometimes writers are so caught up in being true to the realities of their characters’ lives that they seem to forget that they have to be true to ours too, however tangentially. Rash, however, manages to convince you right from the first page that his characters and his story are going to matter to you, even if you live in North London, rather than on a tobacco farm in North Carolina; it’s an enviable skill, and it’s demonstrated here so confidently, and with such a lack of show, that you almost forget Rash has it until it’s too late, and your own sense of well-being is bound up in the fate of the characters. Bad mistake, almost. There is some redemption here, but it’s real redemption, hard-won and fragile, rather than sappy redemption. The World Made Straight was a fantastic introduction to the Not Boring Awards. I was, I admit, a little concerned that these books might be a little too uplifting, and would wear their lessons and morals on their T-shirts, but this one at least is hard and powerful, and it refuses to judge people that some moral guardians might feel need judging.
Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences is never going to be nominated for an Alex, I fear. Not because it’s boring – it isn’t – but it’s dense, and allusive, by definition, and Weschler’s thinking is angular, subtle, dizzying. I feel as though I only just recently became old enough to read it, so you lot will have to wait twenty or thirty years.