The profound shallowness of The Great Gatsby

I’m still not sure what to make of The Great Gatsby, though I must have read it half a dozen times over the years for different reasons. It’s hard not to be distracted by the noise. For such a delicate thing it seems to be burdened with an awful lot of cultural clutter. Is it, for example, the Great American Novel? I’m not sure what kind of beast that would be, but if the phrase suggests anything other than a great novel that happens to be written by an American, I suppose it must be some sort of national epic. 

It seems to me that to fit that definition a novel would need a wider social range. I get that there’s a distinction between Old Money and New Money in The Great Gatsby, but No Money doesn’t get much of a look-in. The narrator Nick Carraway isn’t in the Tom Buchanan class, with the spare cash to transport a stable full of polo ponies at a whim, but he’s able to support himself in New York while he learns the bond business: “Everybody I knew was in the bond business,” he explains. “All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me.”

Nick is ironic at his own expense here, as he generally is about Tom and Daisy and the rest of moneyed class.  But that ironic tone is itself a mark of privilege, a style of slightly bored detachment that he shares effortlessly with other members of his narrow social set.

So if not the Great American Novel, is it at least a novel about the American Dream? Well it’s certainly about an American who has a dream. But it’s a peculiarly impractical dream that’s obsessively resistant to forward motion. Gatsby, in case you’ve forgotten, has made himself wealthy by unscrupulous means and bought himself a mansion, which he has thrown open to the whole of New York’s high society, all for the purpose of attracting Daisy, who once rejected him because he was poor. 

The only representative of that class of Americans who work hard in the pursuit of prosperity – or “happiness” as the Declaration of Independence has it – is the utterly hapless George Wilson, husband of Tom Buchanan’s mistress. Wilson struggles to run a garage, a business enterprise in which neither Fitzgerald, nor his narrator Nick Carraway, show any interest. Wilson and the other inhabitants of the “valley of ashes” that lies between Manhattan and New York’s Long Island suburbs are described as “ash-grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.” They hardly register as people, let alone as individuals with their own dreams and aspirations.

The other candidate for American Dreamhood is Gatsby’s mentor, Meyer Wolfsheim. Wolfsheim is definitely a self-made man and, judging by his accent, an immigrant, which makes him a representative of the old world’s huddled masses, who have been drawn over the centuries to make a new life in America. But Wolfsheim is also a gangster who wears cufflinks made from human molars, a grotesque, shadowy figure who needs Gatsby – “an Oggsford man”—to put a semi-legitimate face on his crooked deals.  Fitzgerald is uncomfortably complicit in this and other stereotypes accepted by the privileged insiders.

Of course Fitzgerald can see that his rich characters are indifferent to the lives of the working people on whom they depend. How else could he construct a sentence as brilliantly pointed as this: “There was machine in [Gatsby’s] kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.”

But Fitzgerald is no more interested in the Butler than Gatsby is. Work is not his subject. He’s fascinated by wealth, not by the pursuit of wealth, and certainly not by its creation. Class in The Great Gatsby is a static condition and to rise socially seems to depend on a kind of fraud. I think this is why I find references to the novel’s American-ness so unhelpful.

I’m more conscious of its European connections and, behind that , its archetypal resonance. I think of Great Expectations. Gatsby is a cousin to Pip, with Wolfsheim as his Magwitch, the criminal who has made him a gentleman. Pip too harbours the delusion that his social rise will allow him to win the beautiful rich girl who rejected him in his impoverished youth.

In his obsession with the past, Gatsby is related more distantly to Dumas’ Edmond Dantès, who escapes from wrongful imprisonment, acquires fabulous wealth and returns as the Count of Monte Cristo to haunt the lives of those who have injured him, including the beautiful Mercédès, now married to his enemy.

Gatsby’s story is a variation on Wuthering Heights, another tale of an impoverished and low-born lover who is rejected in favour of an aristocratic rival, but returns a wealthy man to brood in his desolate house, across the moor from where his soul-mate endures a life of decorous boredom.

It’s also a version of Beauty and the Beast, with Gatsby’s house as the enchanted castle. And it’s the story of Tam Lin, who lures Janet to his magic forest and then instructs her how she can liberate him from his captivity by pulling him from his horse as he rides with the fairies on Halloween, holding him while he shifts through many fearful shapes, until finally he will appear in his own person as a naked knight.

My guess is that for most people who love The Great Gatsby what they love is Fitzgerald’s ability to capture such a sense of enchantment. And when they talk about his style they mean his ability to spin one outrageously sumptuous sentence after another and most times get away with it. He’s a poet of the fleeting beauty of youth, a master of the melancholy cadence, always more than half in love with the life of careless indulgence that is the object of his satire. He exposes all that’s frivolous about the flapper generation, but it’s when he’s describing their frivolity that he’s at his most characteristically seductive:

All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor. Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed.

Nick Carraway says of Gatsby that “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.” Out of such gestures as this sketch of Daisy’s youthful life, in all its fragility and yearning, is constructed the gorgeousness of Fitzgerald’s novel. 

Footnote: For a bright and elegantly written review of Baz Luhrmann’s film, see the website of friend and colleague Claire Dyer, who liked it much more than me. A fan of the book, Claire confesses to reading it through rose-tinted spectacles, but doesn’t say whether she wore red and blue ones to see the film.   http://www.clairedyer.com/?p=369

Vicious but not very funny

In 1965, Julian and Sandy (played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) began to make their weekly appearance on the BBC radio comedy show Round the Horne.  In whatever role they were inserted into the narrative, they always announced themselves with the same mincing line: "Ooh ‘ello! I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy!"

The brilliance of the script (by Barry Took and Marty Feldman) was its ability to smuggle outrageous references past the BBC censors and into the consciousness of those who had ears to hear. When the pair turned up as lawyers, Julian said, "We've got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time". On another occasion, Sandy spoke of Julian’s piano-playing as “a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright".

These were subversive jokes. Private homosexual acts were still punishable by imprisonment. Most gay men had no choice but to stay in the closet. Did Julian and Sandy promote a stereotype? Of course. But a camp manner and a language of sexually charged double-entendres was the only style in which a gay identity could be made visible, or (for the radio audience) audible. Portrayals of gay life were either outrageously comic or suicidally grim. Normal was not yet an option.

Now a crack team of writers and actors are, for some reason, recycling a dismal version of the same old stuff – gay with all the gaiety knocked out of it. In Vicious, a new ITV sitcom, revered classical actors Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi play a couple who have been living together for 48 years, which means they must have met the year Julian and Sandy made their first appearance. Coincidence? Probably. But if we imagine them as Julian and Sandy grown old, they’ve also grown mean. Judging from the first episode, they’ve sunk into a state of mutual loathing and are reduced to addressing each other in carping put-downs.

In this case, context is all. Julian and Sandy were a force for progress. They were part of the cultural climate that made it possible for the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 to decriminalise homosexual acts in private. Who was offended by Round the Horne? Daily Mail readers, perhaps. Half a century later, I find myself harrumphing at the telly – screaming queen jokes just aren’t that amusing any more – while the Daily Mail declares the new show “an instant classic”.

I don't blame the actors. Actors have to work and must make the most of the script they're given. The writers are Mark Ravenshill, a respected playwright, and Gary Janetti, who was executive producer of Will and Grace. Both of them are gay, so I have to assume they know what they’re doing. I don’t.

Gay marriage? What would Jane Austen have said?

If there’s an urtext for the rom-com I suppose it must be Pride and Prejudice. Shakespeare influenced the genre, but didn’t lay down its essential structure. As You Like It and Twelfth Night are perennially enjoyable but, as models, they’re too specific to the Elizabethan stage with their disguises and identity confusions. In the eighteenth century there was Fielding. But in Tom Jones the emphasis is on Tom’s picaresque scrapes, including a luckily unconsummated encounter with a woman who turns out to be his long-lost mother – more romp-com, in fact, than rom-com.

It was Jane Austen who first took as her subject the struggle of two young people in love to overcome obstacles on their way to the altar, and who chose to embed that struggle in a realistic social context. This has provided the model for endless romantic stories in which the motivation is love, the goal is marriage, and the filling in the narrative sandwich is all the stuff that gets in the way. 

But Pride and Prejudice is actually more complicated than that, and the link between love and marriage is a lot murkier. For Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte, marriage is a practical arrangement, the only way to achieve some degree of independence in a world where other careers are closed to women. And if that means being hitched to the risibly pompous Mr Collins, she’ll take it, rather than sink into despised and impoverished spinsterhood. For Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who has long had her eye on Darcy as a son-in-law, marriage is nothing more than a system for cementing bonds between aristocratic dynasties. What's love got to do with it?

For Darcy it’s a work in progress. When he first meets the hideously vulgar Bennett family, he persuades his friend Bingley not to get engaged to the eldest daughter, Jane, wanting to rescue him from this damaging connection. But he doesn't follow his own advice, because he can’t get Jane’s sister Elizabeth out of his head.

In fact marriage in Pride and Prejudice is in a state of dynamic instability. My favourite moment is when Lady Catherine visits Elizabeth to tell her to keep her hands off Darcy. The scene is memorable for purely dramatic reasons. But it also acts out the inter-generational struggle, when the old notion of marriage is confronted with the new and finds itself impotent in the face of change. Lady Catherine asserts her rights as a person of inherited wealth and power. Elizabeth is interested only in the news that Darcy might still be available. We take it for granted that Elizabeth should listen to her heart rather than to Lady Catherine, but it wasn’t always so obvious.

Today the institution of marriage is riding a new wave of dynamic instability. An unlikely alliance between the Conservative leadership and the centre-left parties has nudged it on its way. The Church of England, which lost its right to oversee English marriages in 1837, still clings to what remains of its moral authority. Tories in the shires hanker after traditional certainties. But Elizabeth Bennett stands up to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and the old hierarchies are subverted.

Mislaid in translation

In Windows on the World, a novel by Frédérick Beigbeder (published in French in 2003 and in English translation by Frank Wynne the following year), the narrator reluctantly joins a demonstration in Paris against the Iraq war. Agonising over how the West should respond to the attack on the Twin Towers, he asks himself, ‘Am I a coward, an appeaser, an anti-Semite, a cheese-eating surrender monkey, as the American newspapers say?’

The phrase ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’ originated on The Simpsons as a parody of Bush era Anti-French prejudice before it was taken up and stripped of irony by rightwing American commentators. I was startled to find it in a French novel and curious to know what it looked like in the original. Had Beigbeder translated it from Simpsonese only for Wynne to translate it back again? So I got hold of a copy. I was surprised to discover that the American phrase stood in place of a single word – pétainiste.

In cutting this reference to Marshal Pétain, who led the Vichy government and collaborated with the Nazis, and replacing it with a joke off The Simpsons, Wynne made the text more accessible, I suppose – at least in the short term, until surrender monkeys chatter off into obscurity. But he sacrificed the historical resonance of Beigbeder’s soul-searching.

I can’t help thinking that an English-language novelist attempting to capture the French experience, would be more likely to opt for Pétain. The novelist is focused on evoking the strangeness of the other place. The conscientious translator  presumably finds satisfaction in substituting the familiar. Nobody could accuse Wynne of shirking his duty. But sometimes, with translation as with other things, less is more.

Opening at random my copy of A Farewell to Arms, a novel set in First World War Italy, I find this conversation among members of the army ambulance corps about the families of deserters:

‘They are all without law to protect them. Anybody can take their property.’

‘If it wasn’t that that happens to their families, nobody would go to the attack.’

‘Yes. Alpini would. These V.E. soldiers would. Some bersaglieri.’

‘Bersaglieri have run too. Now they try to forget it.’

I’m guessing that when I first read this I had no idea who the bersaglieri were, other than a branch of the army reputed to be less courageous than the alpini, whoever they were – alpine types? So I knew quite a lot actually. Enough to follow the conversation, anyway. Hemingway might have called them the light infantry and the mountain soldiers. And I would have gained some factual information, but I would have lost some of the illusion of listening in.

The protagonist of Tahmima Anam’s novel The Good Muslim, set in 1980s Bangladesh, rescues her nephew Zaid from an oppressive Madrasa. She puts him on a boat while he talks compulsively about what he’s been taught.

Maya pleads with Zaid to eat something. He refuses, gazing through the thin bamboo netting arches over the boat, his eyes searching for the night sky. I know the Arabic alphabet, he repeats. Where is my mother? She isn’t here, Maya tells him, you know that. Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem, he begins, reciting the words he has been taught. Nauzubillah hira-shahitan-ir-Raheem. A small lizard has made its way on board, and scuttles back and forth among the curved roof slats. He settles for this, chasing it with his finger.

Zaid says two things in Arabic. I quickly find a translation on the internet for the first of them. For now, the second eludes me. But the meaning isn’t so important. It’s their dramatic significance that matters – fragments of rote learning to which Zaid clings in his anxiety. And the language is part of the soundscape, which takes its place in the scene alongside the bamboo netting and the lizard and the night sky. 

Dickens and the Time Lords

I find myself thinking of a good plot as a kind of TARDIS. Partly because it’s a vehicle for time travel, but mainly because the inside is bigger than the outside. There’s no mystery about how to get in – the doorway’s staring you in the face – but it leads to something unexpectedly capacious.

Five people on a daytrip to Margate to scatter a dead friend’s ashes in the sea. That’s the neat exterior of Graham Swift’s Last Orders. You can walk all round it and take in its scope at a glance. But open the door and you get all these entangled life stories, decades of love and conflict and betrayal. Time travel is crucial in this case, but just as important is the capacity of the plot to open up and lead you in many directions without just sprawling shapelessly.

I realise this TARDIS image might have a potency for me that not everyone can relate to. I can’t say where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated, but I know that the following evening I was glued to the first ever episode of Dr Who. I think it was mainly exposition – no Daleks – but something gripped the childish imagination. Two schoolteachers follow one of their students home, a strange girl who is causing them concern, and they watch her walk onto a piece of waste ground and slip inside a police box. I remember their amazement when they followed her through the door and saw the style in which she and the Doctor were living (the white-haired William Hartnell, of course, before Who went hip).

I was hooked for a year or two. Then I probably just grew out of it. But I may have sensed that the plot was destined to be a sprawling mess because it lacked the most basic element, which is an ending. You can wander limitlessly inside, but there’s no outside to contain the journey.

I've just seen the new film of Great Expectations. I particularly enjoyed the young gentlemen Pip mingles with when he comes into his money. Those drunken dinners with the Finches of the Grove reminded me of the Bullingdon Club where I used to hang out with Dave and Boris in my student days (not actually). Dickens’ plot, necessarily stripped of peripheral material, shines through. The twists, revelations and reversals that punctuate Pip’s life provide the containing structure. What opens up inside is the whole of society from its wealthiest heirs to its most abject criminals and the secret networks of personal relationships, financial interests, and moral responsibilities that bind them together.  

In defence of blogging

Over the past few months, as I’ve let people know about this blog, a few of my older friends have expressed unease – they don’t get what blogging is for. One wonders why I don’t just write a journal and keep it to myself. Another struggles with a sense of disapproval that he can’t quite put his finger on.

When I moved to Los Angeles 12 years ago, I started writing an annual letter home, which I’d photocopy and mail to friends and family. A quaint process it seems now, but not so obviously antiquated back then at the turn of the century. Not everybody liked it. Rumours reached me of two separate recipients refusing to read it. One, I was informed (whether reliably or not, I couldn’t say), used to toss it in the bin unread. The other annually rejected his wife’s offers to read bits of it aloud (I like to imagine him sticking his fingers in his ears and humming). I half understood these reactions. I assumed they were rooted in a feeling that a duplicated letter is somehow fraudulent. What friends write to each other should be personal and spontaneous.

In an essay on the wonderful letters of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, Tom Paulin writes about this expectation: “Are letters not written… as throwaway, disposable, flimsy unique holographs which aim to flower once and once only in the recipient’s reading and then disappear immediately? The merest suspicion that the writer is aiming beyond the addressee… freezes a letter’s immediacy and destroys its spirit” (Tom Paulin, Writing to the Moment, Faber 1996, p. 216).

Perhaps the discomfort with blogging is related to this. Perhaps it’s an expression of the more general sense that the proper barriers between the private and the public spheres have been eroded. In Malcolm Bradbury’s 1972 novel The History Man, the radical sociologist Howard Kirk is writing a book called The Defeat of Privacy which anticipates this trend. He says, “It’s about the fact that there are no more private selves, no more private corners in society… There are no concealments any longer, no mysterious dark places of the soul. We’re all there in front of the entire audience of the universe in a state of exposure.” What seemed radical thinking in the 1970s – utopian or nightmarish according to your point of view – now sounds like an ordinary day in the world of Facebook and Twitter.

In fact, with lots of people updating their status hourly, the weekly composing of a blog post seems, in comparison, positively sedate, even old-fashioned. The technology would have been unimaginable to an Elizabethan pamphleteer or an eighteenth century essayist, but the impulse to develop a thought in public would surely have been recognised. I grew up, before the invention of the internet, with people who were forever firing off letters to the local newspaper, or the town council, or haranguing whoever would listen on whatever seemed important to them at the time.  

I’m not unsympathetic to the anti-blog arguments, starting with the fact that there are probably more people writing them than reading them. On the other hand, here are five things a blog won’t do:

Create litter.

Trap you in a corner at a party.

Interrupt your evening with a loud ringing noise.

Stop you from sleeping on the train.

Drive you from the dinner table in tears. 

And questioning the answers

It’s all about publicising the book, of course. And I’m grateful for any attention it gets. I feel somehow more protective of Besotted, perhaps because it had a slightly more difficult birth. So I’m happy to tell the Glasgow Sunday Herald anything they want to know (see my previous posting on answering questions).

Some of the questions are easy – first book I remember being read to me as a child, for example. The answer is both true (I checked with one brother and one sister and they both came up with the same book) and interesting. Not Winnie the Pooh or The Wind in the Willows, but these peculiar stories about Catholic converts and unrepentant pagans in an African village and the struggles of one particular guardian angel to protect her young charge from naughtiness and bad men. How weird is that?

But what books are by my bedside at the moment? I find myself thinking of those photographic features on “where I work” – the desk artlessly cluttered with books and research materials and intriguing objets. Even if I tell the truth, it feels somehow fake, like someone working hard at just being themselves.

And overrated books? The Da Vinci Code obviously. And I did sort of read it – listened to it on tape, actually, while stuck in traffic in LA. But doesn’t everybody know that already?

Underrated books are harder to come up with. There must be thousands of them – decent books that sink without trace, probably before I got to hear of them, my sources of information being the same as everyone else’s. I enjoyed all Peter Benson’s books and learnt a lot from them, but he’s just one example of a good writer whose books go out of print to make way for other books that just happen to be newer.

I’m not actually complaining about the questions. I think they’re good questions. And at least they’re about books, which makes sense, books being what I write. It’s probably just that I don’t like committing myself, which is why I write fiction. It allows me to avoid making unambiguous assertions unless they’re spoken by made-up characters, some of whom are decidedly odd and none of whom are me.

Answering questions

I was sent these questions by the Glasgow Sunday Herald, and the answers were published last weekend. My thoughts on doing this kind of thing must wait for another post.

WHAT BOOKS ARE BESIDE YOUR BED AT THE MOMENT?

I’m halfway through Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, taking it slowly and savouring it. I’ve begun Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, and I’m enjoying its sensitive evocation of Nakasaki before the bomb drops. John Worthen’s biography of DH Lawrence is in the pile.

WHICH WRITER LIVED THE LIFE YOU MOST ADMIRE?

Graham Greene would be a contender, thinking particularly of his writing life. He was a troubled and difficult character, but he communicated a sense of so many different places around the world as he experienced them, and never lost sight of the business of telling a good story. Something in his restlessness appeals to me as well as his commitment to the craft.

WITH WHICH LITERARY CHARACTER DID YOU FIRST IDENTIFY?

Dick Dewy in Under the Greenwood Tree, a tongue-tied yokel who gets the girl. It launched me on an early romp through Hardy’s novels that included The Trumpet Major and Far from the Madding Crowd. My enthusiasm hit a wall when, still only 15, I reached the last few pages of Tess of the D’urbervilles and realized, with a sick feeling, that this wasn’t going to end well.

WHAT BOOK DO YOU FIRST REMEMBER BEING READ TO YOU AS A CHILD?

My father, a Catholic convert, read us stories about a guardian angel called Wopsy who watches over a little African boy. It was a dog-eared paperback, and no doubt anachronistic even then. My father took his religion very seriously, and the book had perhaps been recommended by some priest. The African boy’s mother has been converted by the missionaries, I remember, but his father is a pagan and gets drunk on banana beer.

WHAT IS THE MOST UNDERRATED BOOK YOU HAVE EVER READ?

It depends who’s doing the rating. I was far too young to read John Updike’s Couples when it hit the zeitgeist in 1968, but I read it a few years ago and found it moving, intelligent, and evocative of its time without being dated. But there are so many unjustly neglected books. A writer who seems to have dropped below the radar recently is Peter Benson. I’ve enjoyed all his novels, but perhaps most admire Odo’s Hanging, which puts the story of the making of the Bayeux Tapestry in the words of a mute underling.

AND THE MOST OVERRATED?

The Great Gatsby. Not that there isn’t plenty to enjoy in it, but it doesn’t deserve its exalted status. US publishers, Modern Library, rated it second only to Ulysses in its 100 best English language novels of the twentieth century. I re-read it recently, along with A Farewell to Arms, also written in the 20s, and I was struck with how much better Hemingway is. The tone of Gatsby is quite uneven and some of the writing is cloyingly sweet.

DO YOU HAVE ANY RITUALS OR SUPERSTITIONS AS A WRITER?

I’m wary of dissipating the energy around a book by talking about it before it’s written. That’s a kind of superstition. As for rituals, I wouldn’t mind a developing a few. My life has been rather transient since I’ve been writing seriously. But I’m lucky that I’m able to write in lots of different circumstances. Perhaps because I grew up with eight brothers and sisters, I’m able to shut out distraction.

WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE THEME OF NATIONAL IDENTITY THAT APPEALED TO YOU?

I grew up in England, but my mother was Irish. I was an altar boy and went to Catholic schools. We were taught, catechized, sermonized, admonished and absolved of our sins in a variety of Irish accents. We were also very connected to my grandparents and our other relatives in County Cork. I’ve never felt unambiguously English. I’m appreciative of the increasingly rich mix of cultures and ethnicities represented in Britain, and I wanted to touch on the complexity of that.

WAS EVOKING THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE THATCHER YEARS BASED ON PERSONAL EXPERIENCE?

I lived through the Thatcher years, and some of what I remembered found a place in the novel. But the progress of the story, as it took shape, determined what kind of period details were needed and I sometimes found myself turning to research for these. But I never thought of that section of the book as a portrait of an era. It’s about two brothers, their girlfriends and family relationships, their yearnings and ambitions. The period is incidental to most of this, though it does have a significant impact at certain moments.

Salinger's anti-hero

J.D. Salinger’s death in January prompted me to take another look at The Catcher in the Rye. It strikes me that the book’s been overrated in some ways and underrated in others. Readers, male readers particularly, encounter it during adolescence and find it speaks to their sense of alienation. A couple of the obituaries I read in the American press seemed to have been written from that same space.

I didn’t read the book until I taught it in my twenties. I found the narrative voice exhilarating and funny, was moved by Holden Caulfield’s predicament, but didn’t identify with him. I’d come to it too late to endorse his exclusive claim on authenticity. Maybe he’s right, that he’s surrounded by phonies, but he’s far too insecure and demoralized to get anywhere close to offering an alternative vision.

The novel was infamously cited as an inspiration by John Lennon's killer. Boy, did he ever miss the point! Someone should have told him that Caulfield is an unreliable narrator. In telling his own story he buries the lead, because he hasn’t enough perspective to know what the lead is. He’s not morally deranged like Humbert Humbert obsessing over Lolita, nor as disabled as Christopher struggling to make sense of the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But his view of people is significantly distorted by his own pain.

I see it more as a satire on the teenage sensibility than a celebration of it. I'm not sure, though, that Salinger would have agreed.

Parallel readings

I've been reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. Making slow progress. Not because I don't love it, which I do, but only because it's a bit bulky for journeys and certainly can't be slipped into a pocket (I was curious to read it and didn't wait for the paperback). So it's a stay-at-home book. It's also a sitting-up book -- preferably with lumbar support.

These days I tend to have more than one book on the go, sometimes because I'm reading them for different purposes. I've been reading Moll Flanders and Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood, for example, because there are oblique connections with something I'm trying to write (and I'm a big fan of The Handmaid's Tale). Sometimes the reason is technological. I listen to books on CD, but only when I'm driving. So there are also car books and train books.

For a couple of weeks in February I had Sebastian Faulks' A Week in December in the car, and William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms in my pocket. This was confusing. Both novels are set (more or less) in contemporary London. They're both (roughly speaking) thrillers, third person narratives that follow a variety of different characters not obviously connected. I found myself experiencing a composite novel about a hedge-fund manager, a climatologist on the run for a murder he didn't commit, a Polish footballer, a policewoman, a terrorist, etc, and wondering how the hell Sebastian Boyd was going to pull all these threads together.

In the end, Ordinary Thunderstorms survived this mangling better than A Week in December. Partly because it's a better book. To be fair to Faulks, he got the raw end of the deal. Inevitably there are moments of blankness in the car when the business of driving grabs your attention, and your accelerated heartbeat has nothing to do with the latest twist in the plot.