Still going...

Hello all,

Another one of those huge gaps, I'm afraid; I've simply been too busy with the old lecturing to put something up of late, even with the goading of the general election to tempt me. Of which, a pick'n'mix of observations:

1) Cameron's closing statement at that first televised debate - manifesto in a nutshell, or 80s power ballad in rough draft?
2) Surely the issue with Gillian Duffy was not the subject she raised, but how she raised it; that is, the rather loaded term 'flocking.' The first casualty of electoral war, it seems, is close reading.
3) Proofreading, too, took a bit of a pounding. D J Taylor wrote a nice piece in the Independent on inept political language, mostly pointing out the errors of the Liberal Democrats (my local council candidate actually managed to sneak a superfluous apostrophe into the name of my ward); the BBC was unusually dreadful, averaging one obvious mistake a day. The best one occurred minutes before the beginning of the final debate, with a spectacularly incoherent headline featuring 'Barak Obama'.
4) Once again, 'Victorian' gets wheeled out pejoratively, this time to describe the UK's electoral system. Excuse me, but something the Victorians were very good at was organising stuff. Electoral reform, too, was something of a recurrent Victorian theme, though no doubt we'll all be told that, like sex, it was invented in the 1960s.

More to follow, no doubt. For the moment, an admin note; comments are now subject to moderation, since about 50% of the comments being left seem to be Chinese proverbs that conveniently link to sites selling bargain trainers ("Wow! These are genuine Niks!") or crushed tiger essence that offers terrifying powers of potency ("Erectile dysfunction? Hip trouble? With just one pill, you too can become a peripatetic priapic!"). Ah, to think that by calling it "Plato's Pharmacy" they could attract a whole new poststructuralist market.

The Doughnuts 2009: End of Year Literary Awards

As always, not what's been published this year, just what I got around to reading. You think I'm made of money?

Best New Author: Don Delillo, Underworld

This was close - it was almost Salman Rushdie with The Satanic Verses. Both novels have their faults, although I suspect that with Rushdie I was at a disadvantage thanks to my frankly shaky grasp on Islamic theology. But Delillo edges it on the basis of some superb writing, not least the sixty page prologue to Underworld, describing a single baseball match. Of course, it helps that this particular baseball match is the final of the 1951 World Series, and that Delillo's cast here includes Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover.

Oddly enough, it's easier to point out Underworld's flaws than its strengths (or maybe that's just me). The most obvious is the fact that Delillo is a better literary stylist than a convincing delineator of character; the central pair of Nick Shay and Klara Sax are, well, just a little bit dull. Having now read White Noise as well, it's clear that Delillo's characters are really just mouthpieces for versions of Delillo (I'll probably have more to say on White Noise later in the year, but for now, I'll just note that he writes some of the most staggeringly perspicacious children in literary history). In terms of plot, since Delillo's somewhat expansive theme is the last 50 or so years of American history, it isn't the kind of novel that depends on the forward movement of narrative; in fact, the predominant movement of Underworld is backwards, opening (after the prologue) in the 1990s and ending (before a postmodern epilogue, of course) in the 1950s, the prose becoming increasingly fragmented as memory fades. This isn't a fault, of course, but those looking for a narrative hook to pull them through 827 pages will be disappointed. So, you're saying, if the characterisation of the main players is suspect, and the narrative diffuse, why does it scoop the big prize? Underworld is by no means perfect; it sometimes meanders and perhaps too obviously has its eye on 'greatness' (or possibly GREATNESS). But when it works - and that's most of the time - it's outstanding. Ironically, given the historical scope of the thing (and its physical presence as a book very definitely makes it a 'thing' - the physical mass of it is thematically appropriate), the best sections are those in which tiny moments of time come under extended narrative inspection. The aforementioned baseball game and immediate aftermath, about four actual hours, takes sixty pages; the thoughts of a street punk immediately after shooting a man, a second or two, take up a compelling page; and, in perhaps the best section, a couple of minutes of home video, potential evidence in a murder case and obsessively replayed on the news, is dissected with a detail that makes Barthes look like Littlejohn. Put another way, Delillo's theme is 'real time'; distorting it on the page, but also wondering about the 'real' time of history. Ultimately, Underworld is not consistent, but it can be awesome.

Best novel: John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

A crowded field this year, thanks to some excellent novels around March; Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Nausea is the runner-up here, a brilliant evocation of alienation (which also includes a hilarious moment about ordering cheese heroically). Objectively, it might even be better than Toole, but my instinct is to go with A Confederacy of Dunces, not least because whereas Nausea's origins are clearly in the intention to fictionalise existential philosophy, Dunces is less easily characterised. Put another way, whereas Sartre wrote a manifesto, Toole wrote a novel (I suppose I'm just suspicious of blatantly philosophical fiction, which is after all why Milan Kundera lost to Jonathan Franzen last year). Toole also has the edge inasmuch as while I don't remember Sartre's characters in any detail (although this is perhaps the point), Ignatius Reilly is still in here. I'm not as convinced as others are that the plot comes together that neatly (Burma Jones never seems that integrated into the whole, but then perhaps that's the point), but it's damn funny, not least Ignatius' sabotage of Levy Pants and his habit of shouting at the screen in cinemas. Baton Rouge will never sound the same again.

Biggest disappointment: Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City

A clear win for Franzen here, partially because of the ease with which The Corrections took the top prizes last year. The weak part of The Corrections was the Lithuanian sub-plot, the events of which seemed cartoonish and unconvincing; in The Twenty-Seventh City, the bad news is that it's all Lithuania. The plot is that the St. Louis of the mid-1980s appoints a female Indian chief of police, Jammu, who then gains increasing control of the city through a complex conspiracy of psychological terrorism, murder, local politics and the like. Sounds like a brilliant black comedy of city politics at the height of American conservatism, right? Sadly, no. It's scuppered by murky plotting and characters who can't bear the weight of the psychological scrutiny Franzen would perfect in The Corrections. It's never quite clear why Jammu acts in the way she does, or precisely how she manages to gain influence over city politics (I know little of how American cities are run, but I imagine that the chief of police has little to do with taxation decisions). Sequences of events are weirdly compressed; one character thinks he might apply to the police academy and a few months later, he's typing reports in the precinct. It's not quite clear if Franzen is trying to represent the actual St. Louis here, or some alternative world where things work slightly differently (not in the science fiction sense; rather, in the way that Iain Sinclair's Radon Daughters takes places in an 'alternative' London), but either way, it's unconvincing. Throw in a couple of sentences that shouldn't have escaped an MA seminar in Creative Writing, and you've got a bunch of perfectly good reasons why this went unpublished in the UK until after The Corrections.

(The closest competitor, incidentally, was Pat Barker's Regeneration. I understand that this is some kind of heresy, but I couldn't help but feel that it reduced the horror of the First World War to the status of truism (he had his head in a cow! Yuk!), while the final chapters crassly spell out the subtext for the hard of reading).

Coming up...

Last year, I predicted that 2009 would be when I finally got around to Delillo, and I was right; before I start congratulating myself for predicting my own choices, let's remember that I was wrong about Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Quantum Physics and Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which are still both waiting patiently. At the moment, 2010 most obviously looks set to be a revisiting of much of Dickens, with a bit more Delillo thrown in (White Noise, Mao II and Cosmopolis in particular). I'll probably also get around to Christopher Priest's The Dream Archipelago in the next twelve months, although the snippet I read immediately before Christmas didn't promise great things. But hey, perhaps I'll be wrong again.