The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  For Amis, more than most, the passing of youth must have been especially painful. He had always achieved so much so young; he had always been the coming man, the writer with the youthful high-energy style and the cool, street-smart persona, the writer in search of the new rhythms. He always seemed to have so much promise, and he kept on improving: each new book seeemed at the time to be an advance on the one before – until, that was, he wrote The Information, and revealed how increasingly over-reliant he was on the same effects and satirical conceits, the same overheated tropes, how destined he was to repeat himself again and again, like poor Pincher Martin scrambling for survival on his blasted rock.

  Like Woody Allen, Amis is a comedian who wants to be a catastrophist. This may explain why no matter how much he labours to import seriousness into his fiction – through writing about the nuclear threat, the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulags or Islamism and the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington of 11 September 2001 and the cultural wars that followed – his novels never really move or, I think, succeed in conveying the textures of felt experience. There is something powerfully ersatz about them. They never carry us to the heart of the human muddle in the way that his non-fiction can. Largely this is because his characters remain trapped within the matrix of his style. They are ghosts orbiting, forever lost in the monotonous sublime of caricature. You cannot believe in them because their creator does not bestow upon them the gift of autonomous life nor does he want you to believe in them, and if you cannot really believe in them, you cannot care.

  ‘All writers,’ Amis once said, as noted, ‘if they mean business, if they’re ambitious, have got to think they’re the best. You haven’t got a chance of being the best unless you think you’re best.’

  Does Amis still think he’s the best?

  Much of his writing is about artistic rivalries, even if his ambition is to write about very big issues, not just middle-class mores. Yet this preoccupation with artistic rivalry, and the possibility of defeat in such rivalry, is intensely personal and rather parochial, echoing his own experiences in the smart, young literary set in which he moved in the 1970s. As a subject, it isn’t really the stuff of literature. It is too weak and flimsy, hence the need for all that additional heavy-duty intellectual support – for the scaffolding of astronomy.

  As Amis enters his seventh decade – his seventh! – what has it cost him, all this striving and effort to be the best? How does it feel nowadays to be Martin Amis, a writer who, in critical mode, long ago declared war on cliché, a writer who, after all this time, remains a self-appointed warrior of words?

  Early in The Information, as the narrator digresses to speculate on a future in which ‘the polar icecaps have melted and Norway enjoys the climate of North Africa’, he teasingly suggests future readers can ‘check’ the accuracy of ‘these words against personal experience’. Yes, he expects his work – this novel – to have a glorious afterlife, to continue to be read long into the future. It’s a nice joke. Will future generations, similarly, read Amis? Will his stuff last? The final cruelty, as Richard Tull and indeed Amis himself know only too well, is that ‘only time shall tell, if not real time then, failing that, certainly literary time’. And Amis, like the rest of us, is skewered on time’s arrow.

  7 Philip Roth, American Pastoral

  IAN SANSOM

  And anyway, anyway, it’s the first week of the semester, and I’m going with my ‘What Is the Point of the Novel?’ talk, part of the over-subscribed, and under-taught, and utterly intellectually bankrupt interdisciplinary Twentieth-Century Studies Honours degree Programme; it usually gets them going.

  And I’m standing there, waving my arms around, Leavis-style open-necked shirt, Eagleton-style hip-hugging cords, talking. (The clothes, I think, when I was younger, were intended to suggest both cultural mastery and social ease: now they’re not just what I wear, they’re what I am; they have eaten into my flesh). When I was starting out I tried to model my lecturing style on A. J. P. Taylor – casual, but authoritative; I saw some old footage of him on the telly once, in black-and-white – but recently one of my students told me that everyone calls me Mister Sharofsky, out of the TV programme Fame; the repeats have been running on satellite and cable.

  ‘What I want to do for the next twenty minutes’, I say, ‘is to offer some kind of answer to the question “What is the point of the novel?”, and if we have time we’ll move into some structured class discussion. Twenty minutes isn’t really long enough to develop an argument, but it is long enough to offer an opinion, or to make a point. So what I want to do in answering the question “What is the point of novel?” is – simply – to make a point, to offer a point, which we can then discuss. Hmm.’ Talk, talk, talk, and all the time I’m talking about The Point of the Novel, I’m thinking, What Is the Point of Talking about The Point of the Novel? Of course, this way madness and long-term unemployment lies, so I plough on, focusing on a flickering strip-light at the back of the room so as not to meet the eyes of any of the poor sufferers being subjected to this guff and so to spare both me and them the shame of mutual acknowledgement of our shared fate: a long slow stifling by boredom. I wonder, did Lloyd George ever feel like this? Did Roosevelt? Churchill? Martin Luther King? The great orators of the twentieth century? Or even the not so great. Like, did Billy Graham? All those people on television? Does everyone really know when they’re talking rubbish? I mean, deep down inside, down below? Do you?

  I also put my hand to my mouth and surreptitiously blow into it for a quick moment, the hot breath rising to my nostrils, like a blast from blocked drains, checking for the tell-tale signs of nerves. I always get bad breath when I’m teaching. And toothache. I really need to go and see a dentist.

  ‘Hmm. My point’ – I say, my tongue exploring the entrance to a tender little pot-hole in a molar up on top – ‘is simply this: the point of the novel – or a point of the novel – is that there is no point to the novel. This is not the same thing as saying that the novel is pointless.’ Ouch. The pot-hole is getting more like a crevasse. What on earth am I saying? Do I really believe this? Hmm? How come I’m spouting this sort of horseshit? And while I’m thinking this, or rather – let’s not flatter ourselves – while this thought is occurring to me, I stroke my beard and I find some pieces of croissant there, like little sugar-frosted flakes of dry scalp – another of my distinguishing features, as it happens – and I have to halt my flow and pause while I quickly brush the crumbs out and down onto my tank-top, which I notice is becoming a little ruched around the waist, and which I pull up and which in so doing drags up my shirt with it, leaving my untucked butter-gut and beer-belly exposed to the sight of the class for a moment before I can hurriedly retuck and rearrange myself and go on.

  I think, for a moment: this is a disaster, I am useless at this, I can’t go on.

  I go on. That’s life.

  No, actually, that’s Samuel Beckett.

  ‘Hmm.’ I don’t know when I started the hmming. It’s one of those academic affectations that just seems to have crept up on me, overpowered me, and beaten me senseless. It’s awful. I hate it. But I can’t seem to stop it. ‘Some things might be said to have a point - a sharp stick, obviously, containing a mixture of graphite and clay, what we call a pencil might be said to have a point, in a number of senses.’

  This usually gets a little laugh. And sure enough, there’s a faint buzz of laughter, like flies round a rotting corpse. The first rule of lecturing: make ’em laugh, make ’em cry. Give them something juicy to get their teeth into, a nice bit of carrion, something soft, something easy. Even A. J. P. bloody Taylor told jokes. ‘World War One? World War One? I’ll tell you something about World War One, missus. World War One was started by the railway timetables!’ Oh yes, very funny guy, A.J.P. He was a real cheeky chappie. He was like Arthur Askey. He was practically vaudeville. He was music-hall. And you can understand why. I mean, you’ve got to say something to get them on your side, to get their attention. You need a catc
hphrase. It’s all about riffs and tags and punch-lines. Because when it comes down to it, it’s all about winning them over: it’s rhetoric, the power of address. And you’ve either got it or you haven’t got it, the right address, or the right of address, as it were.

  And I haven’t.

  I live in the provinces, literally and metaphorically – not that it’s a cause for regret. Not really. It’s not that I once had it and then lost it, not as if I’ve moved from W1 out to the suburbs. I never had it, was never there. Never took up residence in the mental West End. Some people have it of course: the right of address. NW1, intellectually, a lot of people. SW11. But I started out in the suburbs, and now I’m in the provinces.

  (Where do you live? London? New York? Edinburgh? Berlin? OK, well, let me explain where I live. We’re not talking a backwater here, we’re not talking Yonville, like in Madame Bovary; we’re talking Nowheresville, Anywhere, in the Kingdom of the Back of Beyond. We’re not talking backwater, we’re talking backwash; the grey frothing spittle round the lips of the big bad gaping City. You don’t live in a city? You live in the country? OK. Imagine a field. Good. Now imagine the ditch. That’s where I live.)

  And at the weekend we were at this party. And at this party I was eating stuffed mushrooms and drinking champagne, though not too much – I was the designated driver. But I figured one glass should be OK; I don’t need to worry about just one glass of champagne. I’m wearing my best trousers and an ironed shirt. It’s a fortieth birthday party – my demographic, my people, my constituency absolutely: middle-aged, lower middle-class, well-intentioned people with sensible cars and smart-casual clothes. The house is semi-detached. The kitchen is knocked through to a family room – toys, CDs, DVDs, prints of old film posters. The children are all crowded onto the sofa watching Shrek 2, which is a great film, us adults all agree, drifting through the kitchen and out into the garden. I like Shrek 2; everybody likes Shrek 2.

  ‘It’s one of those films, Shrek 2,’ says a man whose name I have instantly forgotten, ‘that’s a sequel that’s better than the original.’

  ‘Like Toy Story 2,’ says another man who I recognise vaguely from off the telly; I think he reads the local news.

  Outside, the men are talking about going to the gym, about five-a-side football, about summer holidays, and about the nice Indian restaurant over in Stranmillis. The women are talking about their children, and about secondary schools, and a good recipe for flapjack: ‘Dried cranberries,’ a woman wearing sunglasses and a wrap-around dress is saying. ‘Dried cranberries are the secret.’ I make a mental note of the dried cranberries, and also of her wrap-around dress.

  I’m talking to a man who works for Tearfund, and his wife, who works for Barnado’s. They are good people; there is no doubt about it: they make eye contact when they’re talking to you; they laugh when you say something funny; they nod their heads in agreement when you make an interesting point. We’re talking about Tearfund’s plans for the commemoration of the abolition of slavery, and government funding for after-school clubs – it’s an interesting conversation – and then they ask me what I do for a living, which is always tricky, a no-win situation and embarrassing for everyone, but I guess the one glass of champagne has loosened my tongue and anyway I like these obviously good people and so I swallow my pride and admit that I do a bit of teaching, but that really I’m a writer.

  ‘Oh, really?’ they say, and this is the bit that’s always tricky. ‘What’s your name? Will we have heard of you?’

  ‘No,’ I say, laughing. ‘You wouldn’t have heard of me. But that’s fine. Even I haven’t heard of me!’

  They laugh. They’re good people.

  Anyway, they’re in a reading group, these good people at the party who I like a lot. They love the reading group. It’s nice to meet with other people and discuss literature. They enjoy listening to other people’s ideas and opinions, although of course these days there’s always the Google problem, says the man.

  ‘The what?’ I say.

  ‘Do you pretend your ideas about the books are your own,’ explains the man, ‘or do you admit that you got them off Google?’

  I ask them what they’ve been reading recently in the reading group. They have been reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.

  ‘Wow!’ I say, genuinely impressed. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Well …’ they say, looking at each other.

  They certainly haven’t got their ideas about American Pastoral from Google. They absolutely hate American Pastoral – loathe it. Revile it. Despise it. They hate everything about it.

  ‘A really miserable book,’ says the lady.

  ‘And the sentences are so long,’ says the man.

  They couldn’t see the point of it at all. They’re much happier now with The Color Purple.

  On the way home in the car I say to my wife, ‘Can you believe it! How can they not like American Pastoral?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says my wife.

  ‘American Pastoral!’ I say. ‘Philip Roth!’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ says my wife.

  ‘Honestly, though, what are they, stupid?’ I say.

  My wife, like the Tearfund man and his Barnado’s wife, is a good person. Like the Tearfund man and his Barnado’s wife, she works in the public sector. She gets up every morning and goes out and tries to make the world a better place.

  ‘They are not stupid,’ says my wife. ‘I would have thought,’ she says, ‘that they’re just coming at it from a different angle.’

  ‘What angle?’

  ‘Just a different angle,’ she says.

  ‘A reading-group angle,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe,’ she says.

  ‘The wrong angle,’ I say.

  I do not belong to a reading group. I think I’m not temperamentally suited to being a part of a reading group. I have a fear that reading groups might be secular versions of Bible-study groups – what churches call ‘home groups’. In home groups the Bible, and literature, becomes reduced to a kind of moral top-up, like anti-freeze or echinacea: books as strengthening and as consolation and encouragement; literature as healthy exercise, a way of warding off infection. But personally I find reading the Bible, or books, usually has exactly the opposite effect on me: depletion, drainage, and weakening. And not just the rubbish books, all the dross you have to wade through to get to the good stuff. Even the classics get me down. Shakespeare. Totally depressing. George Eliot. Totally depressing. Chekhov. Kafka. Flaubert. Ditto. I know why. Do you want to know why? I think I know why. I think I’ve worked it out. Do you want to know what’s my grand theory? My angle? Do you want to know what I think is the point of the novel, indeed of all great literature, including the Bible?

  ‘Do you know what’s the point? If there was a point?’ I ask the class. They just look at me, obviously. ‘People are bad,’ I say.

  That’s it. People are bad; they’re bad. I’m not telling them anything they don’t already know, obviously. I mean, what are the figures? Four million men, women and children dead in the Congo civil war and seventy thousand dead in Darfur, and that’s just one year, picked at random, 2007 – a year which also featured, by the way, around about five million children dead of hunger, three million dead of Aids, and tens of thousands slaughtered in the various little skirmishes, and civil wars and whatever it was America and her allies thought they were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even in my home town last year – my useless, uninteresting, utterly insignificant scabby wee seaside town in the middle of the middle of nowhere – there were two murders, any number of assaults and beatings, one reported rape, and a family from Pakistan were burnt out of their house because they were from Pakistan. On a clear day when I look out of my front window I can see the swastikas spray-painted on the bandstand in the park opposite, and two weeks ago, on a Sunday night, a gang of people broke into the little pets’ corner there in the park and killed all the birds, slitting their throats and stamping on them – dozens of them, including rare
-breed chickens and canaries and two peacocks. The birds were all lying there broken and bloody the next morning as people walked their children to school. ‘The fact of sin,’ I say. ‘What G. K. Chesterton calls “a fact as practical as potatoes”.’

  ‘A fact as practical as potatoes,’ I repeat. ‘People are bad,’ I repeat. ‘That’s the point. If there is a point.’ I’m assuming they all know Roth’s essay, ‘Writing American Fiction’, first published in Commentary in March 1961, where he muses that ‘the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.’ And in case they don’t, I quote it.

  And then I notice this one guy sitting towards the back of the class. He’s called Paul. He’s a third-year. He’s always there, at the back, like the metaphorical and holy ghost at the sacral feast, or in this case, another beggar at our sad, long, mind-numbing intellectual fast. He obviously thinks he’s a pretty cool customer: little round glasses, big coat. He looks a lot like I used to when I was a student. There’s a particular way of wearing the clothes that never changes, I’ve noticed that, like they’re too long in the arm and too broad in the shoulder, like they don’t fit, even when they do fit. And he’s leaning back on his chair, staring up at the ceiling, disinterestedly, and I think, how can I get this bloke’s attention, this overcoated young man, this Paul, this notional and literal Student X, the very audience the University of Y is setting out to reach in its quest to bring higher education to the masses? (I’m paraphrasing our mission statement here.) And it reminds me of the time I gave my first public lecture, at the special open day, a couple of years back, just a few months after I’d been appointed.