-the beach was like a battlefield.
It was like we were taking over the country." The quotation was later
reproduced on the sleeve of The Clash's first single, White Riot
(1977) . . .
NORTH AMERICA
. . . which brings us back to Douglas Coupland , whose heroes are Vaclav
Havel, Joan Didion, Morrissey and Andy Warhol, and whose latest novel Miss Wyoming, has just been published by Pantheon in
the US and Flamingo in Britain.
Dave Eggers , a "staggeringly talented new writer"
according to The New York Times , has already been compared to James
Joyce and William Burroughs. His first novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Simon &
Schuster), is based on the author's experience of raising his younger
brother after the death of his parents when he was in his early twenties.
The novel is preceded, among other things, by a
preface, a list of "Rules and Suggestions for the Enjoyment of this Book,"
twenty pages' worth of acknowledgements and a drawing of a stapler. Yes,
it's that kind of book!
Legend has it that Eggers wrote his magnum opus
between midnight and 4 am almost every day for a year. He rejected a $2
million offer for the film rights, because a film version would be too painful. He
penned a review of his own novel for Spin magazine and panned it.
He has also launched a competition on Amazon.com's website
(http://www.amazon.com) : the aim is to write the best review of A
Heartbreaking Work without having read the novel. He edits a quaterly
journal called McSweeney 's (http://www.mcsweeneys.net). Yes, he's that kind
of guy!
BRITLIT
The literary new year has started not with a whimper
but a bang on this side of the pond, thanks to the likes of Toby Litt , James
Hawes and Zadie Smith .
Toby Litt (born in 1968) plays his Fender Telecaster
"very loud" and writes in similar fashion. He achieved instant cult fame in
1996 with Adventures in
Capitalism (Secker & Warburg), a collection of cutting - edge
short stories, and went on to publish his first novel the following year.
Beatniks (Secker & Warburg), set in 1995,
revolves around a couple of English neo-beatniks - called (of
course) Jack and Neal - who are caught in a time-warp of hip
hepcatness. But living the beat dream in 90s Bedford is no mean task. You
can hide away behind sunglasses to get that authentic, pre-1966 feel,
but people still see you in colour. Driving from New York to San Francisco
with a dog-eared copy of Kerouac 's On the Road as your Baedeker
won't get you very far either : there's no escaping the modern world.
Appropriately enough for a novel which is subtitled "An English Road Movie",
Beatniks is being turned into a film by no other than our very own
Jarvis Cocker , lead singer with Pulp , scourge of Michael Jackson and
all-round man of the (common) people.
Unlike Jack and Neal, Toby Litt is no luddite. The
reader of his collection of short stories was encouraged to visit a web site
where s/he could find "further adventures in capitalism." More recently, the
author has contributed to Babylondon , a hypertext novel, along with
James Flint , Penny Cotton and Darren Francis . Check it out
on Pulp Faction's site (http://www.pulpfact.demon.co.uk).
There are quite a few short stories by Toby Litt
knocking about. One of them is featured in the Girlboy (1999)
anthology published by the aforementioned Pulp Faction (a publisher Jeff
Noon described as the "literary equivalent of an indie record label"). "A
Higher Agency" was included in Neonlit 1 (Quartet
Books, 1998), Time Out's annual book of new writing (for weekly
Britlit news and two new short stories every month visit the Neonlit
site (http://www.neonlit.co.uk/). "My Cold War : February 1998"
appears in Fortune
Hotel (Hamish Hamilton, 1999), a collection of alternative
travel-writing (which also includes, among many others, Douglas Coupland , Geoff
Dyer and Will Self ), edited by Sarah Champion who brought you Disco Biscuits
(Sceptre, 1997) and Disco 2000 (Sceptre, 1998), the two best-selling
anthologies of "new fiction from the chemical generation." The
Disco Biscuits site (http://www.discobiscuits.org) has not
been updated since 98, but features stories by Irvine Welsh
(http://www.irvinewelsh.com) the author of Trainspotting ,
and Alex Garland of
The Beach fame.
Toby Litt's latest offering, Corpsing (Hamish
Hamilton, 2000), is a gory, plot-driven thriller written in the pulp
mode which owes as much to Tarantino as to Spillane. Litt has described it
as "a kind of pulp homage." The narrator, Conrad Redman, who works for cable
TV, is having dinner in a fashionable restaurant in London's Soho with Lily,
his glamorous ex-girlfriend. A hitman dressed as a cycle courier shoots
Lily and wounds Conrad. When he comes out of hospital, Conrad tries to
solve the mystery of Lily's murder. Was the real target the man Lily was supposed
to have dinner with initially . . . or was it Conrad himself?
Some of Litt's most
interesting themes such as the cult of youth reappear here. The hitman, for
instance, looks like "a vision of the future - a future where everyone
is concerned with keeping their bodies fit and dodging between fastnew
technologies of damage." This theme - which is at the heart of
contemporary fiction since Thomas Mann 's Death in Venice (1912) and Witold Gombrowicz 's
Ferdydurke
(1958; an English translation will be published this year) - was best
expressed by Litt in "Why Gabriel ?" : "All of this intellect stuff is fine
as a consolation (which is how it developed in the first place : Socrates
not being Alcibiades) but it doesn't make up for lacking the real
modern stuff - the stuff that allows you to live in an up-to-the-minute world."
When James Hawes ' A White Merc With Fins (Jonathan Cape) was
published in 1996, it was described as "super-mentholated Zeitgeist for
the most coked-up metropolitan nose." Another critic, for some reason,
was prompted to write that the novel "sizzles like spit on a pancake
griddle." It's a Gen X classic about what happens - or rather what does
not - when the "MC [middle-class] ladder" of social mobility gets
stuck, when the "long vacation of extended adolescence" is over. The
protagonist wakes up at 28 with fuck all to show for it but a receding
hairline. He has "to do something radical" to "save" his life . . .
If the first chapter of A White Merc is
entitled "How to Get to Moscow," Hawes' second novel, Rancid Aluminium
(Jonathan Cape, 1997), takes an ordinary Brit bloke and dumps him in the
middle of the Russian mafia. Buy it, if only for this extract where the
narrator, caught in an early-morning traffic jam on the M25, feels a
sudden urge to buy "one of those little printing-stamps":
I would stamp it in bright red ink on every page of my filofax and on yellow
sticky notes. I would plaster these notes all over my office and on the
screen of my VDU; I would put them on the milk-bottles in my fridge and
the remote-control of my telly and all the mirrors in my house; and
especially I would stamp it on Sarah's forehead, so that wherever I go, and
especially whenever I look at Sarah and find myself not listening to her, or
hear myself droning on to her, I will always read :
this is not a rehearsal
this is not a rehearsal
this is not a rehearsal.
Hawes' new novel, Dead Long Enough (Jonathan Cape, 2000), takes
up the "second chance" theme : "Our religion is : Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of a second chance. We spend our days in mere rehearsal for the
time, the great day, when we will iron it all out and start to really
live." Here, as in A White merc, the "second chance" paradise
is a paradise lost :
I just want to sleep for a week and wake up in clean linen sheets in a nice
flat with tall windows and a garden, and find out that all my blood has been
changed and my liver transplanted from out of a sixteen-year-old
teetotal virgin and my hair grown back and my clothes washed+ironed and it
is Monday, and I have got The Job, and a fully powered-up legit
Mastercard in my own real name, in my pocket, in the bag, and in the evening
I have a date with this wonderful, nice, normal MC girl, and everything,
everything is all right, all right ?
I just want to be like everyone else !
I just want to be what I was supposed to be !
I want another chance !
On 29 January 2000, DJ Taylor slammed the
"British Bloke Novel" in The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk)
while reviewing Litt and Hawes' latest novels side by side. He accused both authors
of "writing by numbers" and "pulling their punches in pursuit of slightly less clever boys."
Zadie Smith made literary history almost three years
before publishing a single line. In 1997, at the age of 21, she allegedly
sold her novel on the strength of 80 pages for an advance of some £250,000.
More than 380 pages later, White Teeth , was published by Hamish Hamilton.
It revolves around the friendship between a Bengali Muslim and a working-class
Londoner (Zadie herself comes from a mixed-race background : her
father is English and her mother Jamaican). The novel has earned her
comparisons with Salman Rushdie > and a commission to write an article for
The New Yorker 's millennial fiction issue. Smith is already working on
her second novel, "The Autograph Man."
Alain de Botton was born in Switzerland in 1969,
educated at Cambridge and lives in London where he has become very successful indeed.
The titles of his novels Essays in Love : A
Novel (Macmillan, 1993) or The Romantic Movement : Sex, Shopping and the Novel
(Macmillan, 1994) testify to their hybrid, genre-bending nature
: a constant oscillation between narrative and theoretical musings.
In 1997, Alain de Botton broke new ground with his
best-selling How
Proust Can Change Your Life (Picador) which is best described as
literary criticism-cum-self-help manual. A TV adaptation of the
book was recently broadcast on British television (BBC2) to great acclaim.
Alain de Botton's latest offering, The Consolations of Philosophy (published by
Hamish Hamilton in Britain and Pantheon in the US), uses philosophy rather
than literature as a guide to self-improvement. Schopenhauer can improve
your love life, according to de Botton, who prescribes a dose of Seneca as
an antidote to road rage. The publication of The Consolations of
Philosophy ties in with a six-part TV programme entitled
"Philosophy : A Guide to Happiness" (Channel 4).
David Mitchell (31) teaches in Hiroshima and is
currently working on his second novel. His first one, Ghostwritten
(Sceptre, 1999) has just been published in paperback (Sceptre, 2000). Tibor
Fischer described it as an "astounding novel," and A.S. Byatt was so excited
by this fresh, new talent that she insisted on reading with him at London's
literary festival last year. Subtitled "A Novel in Nine Parts,"
Ghostwritten is composed of ten interlinked stories set in different
locations (Japan, Hong kong, London, Mongolia, St Petersburg) and written in
different styles. Well worth checking out.
Spike Magazine (http://www.spikemagazine.com)
has published a very interesting interview
with Alan Warner , one of the finest representatives of the new Scottish
literary scene. Warner (born in 1964) published Morvern Callar
(Jonathan Cape) in 1995, These Demented Lands (Jonathan Cape) in
1997 and The Sopranos
(Jonathan Cape) in 1998. Warner claims to have been influenced by
French existentialism. He describes Morvern Callar as "an existential
novel" and writing as an "existential act" : "I see writing as an
existential act, an axis between how you live and literature." He
rejects Scottish literary nationalism (". . . there is good writing and bad
writing and those are the only two types"), and points out the limits of the
chemical-generation genre (a "whole literary movement" cannot be based
on "writing about nightclub life and ecstasy use"). Warner also talks about
the future of the Gutenburg galaxy ("the tactile immediacy of a book in your
greasy palm will never die"), regrets the dumbing-down of contemporary
British society and evokes his abstract paintings. Both Morvern
Callar and The Sopranos are being turned into films. Alan
Warner is working on a new novel, originally entitled "At a Fair Old Rate of
Knots" but which is now called "The Man Who Walks," about a vagrant "who has
no choice but to travel."
In February 2000, Nick Cave , Ian Sinclair, Ken
Campbell, Michael Moorcock and Stewart Home appeared at
King Mob's launch show. King Mob is a spoken-word record label,
created by Paul Smith - no, not the designer, the one who brought Sonic Yout
h to British audiences through Blast First. On 11 February 2000, Smith told The Evening Standard (http://www.thisislondon.com) that King Mob not only
chooses people they like, but also people "who can perform" : "There has to
be a mixture of quality and punk attitude." King Mob also aims "to archive
London voices that have been lost, people like Alexander Baron and Emmanuel
Litvinoff."
ITALY
The Cannibals are Italy's answer to America's Generation X and Britain's
Chemical Generation. Enrico Brizzi 's first cult novel, published in 1993 at
the tender age of 19, started the ball rolling. Brizzi was followed by other
young authors like Niccolo Ammaniti , Aldo Nove, Isabella Santacroce or
Tiziano Scarpa, several of whom were included in the seminal anthology
Gioventu cannibale (Einaudi) which marked the birth of the movement.
Like most literary movements, the Cannibals are a very
loose collection of young writers who are lumped together for commercial
purposes. Besides their youth, they share a certain number of features : a
rejection of their elders' academicism (Moravia is a frequent target), a
penchant for Bret Easton Ellis along with a desire to break free from the
constraints of literary conventions and theory through post-modernist
relativism.
Tiziano Scarpa , whose novel and collection of short stories have
just been published by Christian Bourgois in France, is eagerly-touted
as the best of the bunch. Scarpa writes for television (RAI) and the
left-wing daily Il Manifesto . The most controversial aspect of his
fiction is the juxtaposition of highbrow (obscure literary references) and
lowbrow (a study of pornographic cartoons) subject matter which is often
construed as dumbing-down. Those of you who speak French can check out
Scarpa at the website of the cultural magazine, Les Inrockuptibles (http://www.lesinrocks.com).
FRANCE
If you need an introduction to the new wave of French writers and can't
speak the lingo, your best bet is to check out XCItés : The Flamingo
Book of New French Writing (Flamingo, 1999) which includes all the
big names (Marie Desplechin, Virginie Despentes, Michel Houellebecq,
Guillaume Dustan, Agnès Desarthe, Lorette Nobécourt, Frédéric Beigbeder,
Vincent Ravalec et al ).
Michel Houellebecq , the enfant terrible of the
French literary scene, is once again the talk of the town. He has just
released his first album, Présence humaine , which is best described
as museak : a poetry reading with a lo-fi, easy-listening
accompaniment. You can download two tracks free of charge at
Peoplesound.fr (http://www.peoplesound.fr).
Houellebecq, who had wanted to meet Bret Easton Ellis
for a long time, was interviewed with the American writer in Les
Inrockuptibles (14 March 2000).
Houellebecq returned to his favourite theme of sexual liberalism ("I get
depressed whenever I look at pictures of glamorous models in magazines"),
and stated that, being a European writer, his characters were only
"moderately good-looking, young and rich" compared with Ellis's. He
defined himself as a "moralist" despite having become "the embodiment of
political incorrectness" in France.
Houellebecq's first novel Whatever was
published by Serpent's Tail (http://www.serpentstail.com) in 1998. You can
download the French version at 00h00 (http://www.00h00.com). For information
about the film version go to the following site :
http://www.lazennec.com/extension. Houellebecq's second novel, Atomised , will
be published in May 2000 by Heinemann. Les Amis de Michel Houellebecq is an
interesting site devoted to the poet laureate of sexual squalor
(http://www.multimania.com/houellebecq/).
ZaZieweb (http://www.zazieweb.com) and Paru.com (http://www.paru.com)
are two interesting French literary sites.
Inventaire/Invention (http://www.metafort.org/inventaire), a newcomer, is
also well worth exploring.
TOP OF PAGE
COVER