The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  I was so nervous, it was like I was Lucky Jim or something – stayed off the drink the night before as a precaution – and this smartly dressed elderly woman came up to me after the lecture, pearls and all, court shoes, hairspray, and she said, ‘I only have one thing to say to you young man’, and my heart was in my mouth, expecting some sort of disagreement over my interpretation of Empson on Milton or queries about possible variant readings based on other editions of the Lyrical Ballads, and then she said, ‘and that’s I noticed you were leaning back on your chair before you got up to speak and I had a friend once who leaned back on her chair, and she fell back and ended up in hospital being treated for spinal injuries, which eventually healed, thank God, but which cast her into a deep depression, which meant her husband left her, and she lost her home and her children, and I wouldn’t want something like that to happen to you.’

  Hmm.

  I feel like going up to my Student X, this Paul, my paradigmatic ill-fitting young man in the back row, and kicking his chair away from under him, inflicting spinal injuries, and standing over him and wagging my finger and shouting this lesson to him. That’d get his attention.

  But I don’t, of course. I just go meandering on.

  ‘Hmm’, I say. ‘A pencil clearly has a use as a writing implement. It has a function, or an application. But the novel is not a tool, and is not an applied art: it can’t be said, in the same sense as a pencil might be said, to have a point. The novel, in this crucial sense, is not a pencil.’

  I go on and on, quoting Dr Johnson, and quoting Milan Kundera, and George Eliot, and Henry James, and Kurt Vonnegut, and Bohumil Hrabal, and just about anyone else who comes to mind – Marilynne Robinson, I say, read Marilynne Robinson, and not just the novels, read the essays, I say, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and Roberto Bolaño, and Stefan Zweig, it’s worth learning German just to be able to read Stefan Zweig, I say, and Haruki Murakami, Kerstin Ekman, and anyone, everyone, who’s written anything and thought about anything for more than about five minutes, and in the end even I can’t remember what my point was, and before launching into the discussion, after about twenty minutes, I round up with something suitably stirring from Wittgenstein.

  And yes I know, I know quoting Wittgenstein really is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but it always sounds so good, and I can’t resist it, such a fine, pompous note to close on. You need to pick the right moment, of course, to drop it: it’s like if you’re a DJ at a wedding, choosing the right moment to drop ‘Y-M-C-A’, or ‘I Will Survive’, or ‘Lady in Red’. ‘W-I-T-T-G-E-N-S-T-E-I-N’ – you see, you’ve got to calculate the effect. It’s a case of holding back long enough to achieve the full impact of the foreign-sounding, name, and also recognising that what he actually says comes pretty close at times to Kahil Gibran or Dame Julian of Norwich, or Sting even: it’s compelling and vague, and conclusive. It’s totally disco. No disrespect to Wittgenstein: Sting is actually a very clever bloke, a lot of people don’t realise that. I mean, have you ever listened to any of the later albums?

  The rest of the class shall go largely unreported, for good reason: have you ever sat in and listened to a bunch of eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds in hooded tops and combat trousers, midriffs exposed – male and female – discussing The Point of the Novel? It was my own fault for bringing it up in the first place. I should have stuck with ‘An Introduction to Theory’, or some other nonsense. I mean, only a few years ago they were still learning their times tables and doing sex education in Biology, and falling in love with Leonardo Di Caprio. But anyway, mostly, mostly I end up talking about Philip Roth. Whenever I’m talking about the point of the novel, or The Point of the Novel, I always end up talking about Philip Roth.

  I talk about his zest, and his grand elaborations, and his glorious vulgarity, and the combination of his zest with his grand elaborations and his glorious vulgarity. And his variety: the fact that he’s experimented with forms, that his work encompasses everything from realism to the fully post-modern, and from high to low and everything in between. And the fact that he’s funny, but not in a funny ha-ha kind of a way: asked in an interview about the influence on his work of stand-up comics like Lenny Bruce, Roth, I say, Roth famously remarked that he was ‘more strongly influenced by a sit-down comic called Franz Kafka.’ ‘That’s funny,’ I say – even though nobody laughs. ‘That. Is. Funny.’ And his clarity – I talk about his clarity, obviously – his rich, lyrical clarity. And his clear understanding – unlike, say, Saul Bellow – that you can’t improve your style just by using inflated words. And his abundance, obviously: the cascades of wit, and the fountains of bile, the vast rolling similes. And the way he uses the novel as a means of moral demonstration – or at least the demonstration of moral contradiction, and contingency, and consequences, and conflict. And the fact that in Sabbath’s Theater (1995), say, and certainly in American Pastoral (1997), and I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000), those three magnificent books bundled together by Roth and by his publishers and by the critics and often referred to as the American Trilogy, he has written what is pretty much the definitive statement on the emotional bankruptcy, the moral idiocy, and the intellectual dishonesty – the pure badness - which characterised the late twentieth century, same as any other century. And Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), of course, that gets a look in, that big soiled Kleenex of a novel, which has the best pay-off line of any novel. Read it, I say. Read the novel. Read all the novels. ‘But bear in mind,’ I say, ‘that these are not really novels. These things are bigger than novels,’ I say. ‘They are a moral reckoning. “What do novels do, then?” someone asked Roth in an interview, way way back, and he gave the best answer I’ve ever heard anyone give. “Novels,” he says – and I’m paraphrasing here – “Novels provide readers with something to read. At their best writers change the way readers read.” That’s it,’ I say. ‘That’s the right answer.’ ‘Read Philip Roth,’ I say. ‘And you’ll end up hating Philip Roth.’ ‘I loathe him,’ I say. ‘He’s left nothing for me.’ And I quote from Kafka’s famous letter to his father, quoted by Roth in his own essay on Kafka in Reading Myself (1975): ‘Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living only in those regions that are not covered by you or are not within your reach.’ Philip Roth should create a rage in you, I say. He should make you ashamed. ‘He makes me ashamed,’ I say. ‘He makes me ashamed to be human, and to pretend to call myself a writer, because in comparison to this sort of a writer, I am nothing: you are nothing.’

  At which point we’re way beyond the twenty-minute mark and almost up to the hour, and I can see them beginning to shuffle. ‘Just read the books,’ I say. ‘At least read American Pastoral,’ I say. ‘This is a book,’ I say, ‘that begins with possibly the most unpromising sentence in English literary history: “The Swede.” Or in fact, in my cheap English paperback edition – look! – it’s all in capitals, “the swede”, so it looks like it’s going to be a book about a giant vegetable!’ Cue laughter. ‘But it’s not,’ I say. ‘It’s about a man, Seymour Irving Levov, who looks Swedish. But he’s not Swedish. He’s Jewish. He’s not what he seems. Which is what the book is about – Seymour “THE SWEDE” Levov, “a human platitude” – slowly waking up to the way the world is, and what he is. As the Swede’s brother puts it, in one of those riffs which makes Roth one of the greats – let me read it to you. “You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false image of everything. All you know is what a fucking glove is. This country is frightening.”’ American Pastoral is frightening, I say. ‘The linguistic felicity. The inventiveness. And not just the inventiveness: the reinventiveness. The way he reinvents the cliché of the high-school reunion. The moral reckoning. And the stories – the torrents of story. If you take just one
story, just one little incident,’ I say, ‘like when the Swede’s brother, Jerry, is making a coat out of hamster skins. No, really. He’s trying to impress a girl. He dries out the skins, sews them together, and finishes it off with a silk lining made from an old white parachute. And this is what Roth writes: “He was going to send it to the girl in a Bamberger’s coat box of his mother’s, wrapped in lavender tissue paper and tied with velvet ribbon. But when the coat was finished, it was so stiff – because of the idiotic way he’d dried the skins, his father would later explain – that he couldn’t get it to fold up in the box.”’ You could write a whole PhD on the Point of the Novel, based on these sentences, I say. Why? Because this little incident tells a great truth – a truth about disconsolation. ‘And this,’ I say, ‘This I take to be the good of the novel.’

  And the next class is tapping on the door and waiting to come in.

  8 Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

  FRANCES WILSON

  ‘You may as well call it a fish’

  Separation is traumatic. It’s horrible to think that people have to part. Not only that they have to part, but that they may even hate each other before they part. And when you hate someone, you maybe behave monstrously towards them, which is a disgusting thought. And they hate you as well … Writers happen to write it down, which makes them bad.

  Hanif Kureishi, Guardian, 17 November 2003

  ‘I have been reading an account by a contemporary author of his break-up with his partner. It is relentless, and, probably because it rings true, has been taken exception to.’

  ‘Strangers when We Meet,’ Hanif Kureishi

  Every so often a popular author writes an unpopular book. This is not the same thing as a good author occasionally writing a bad book. A bad book is a temporary tumble, and after a suitable period of shame the writer will pick himself up, dust himself down and begin the business of wooing the reader back into his world. The unpopular book is not so easily forgiven. It appears less frequently than the bad book, but some significant examples stand out: neither Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Byron’s Don Juan, nor Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses were welcomed on arrival. Strachey insulted our ancestors, Byron insulted everyone, including his wife, while Rushdie insulted Islam. The unpopular book is something whose existence the public does not want; it is received as a samurai attack, a biting of the hand that feeds.

  Given that serious writers generally set out to question and provoke rather than to gratify and sooth, it is surprising that as many books are as popular as they are, and that so few writers succeed in outraging their readers. Hanif Kureishi is a writer whose value has been precisely his capacity to provoke. ‘Each piece of writing should be a risk,’ he says, ‘it would be worthless otherwise,’ and until his 1998 novel Intimacy his risks seemed to pay off, increasing his value as a writer. He is celebrated for his post-colonial tales of suburban aspiration, desire, and transgression, for rescuing second- and third-generation Asians from the image of ‘premature middle-age’, for giving them back their youthfulness. He was, at the time of his Oscar-nominated screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette (1984) and his prize-winning novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), ‘a talismanic figure for young Asians’, wrote Sukhdev Sandhu in an elegiac essay in the London Review of Books. ‘We had previously been mocked for our deference and timidity. We were too scared to look people in the eye when they spoke to us. We weren’t gobby or dissing … Kureishi’s language was a revelation. It was neither meek nor subservient. It wasn’t fake posh. Instead it was playful and casually knowing … He seemed to lack all fear.’

  Because he ‘didn’t try to be liked’, Hanif Kureishi used to be a very popular author indeed. He was that unheard of thing: a cool Paki, a dope-growing, cunty-fingered, rock’n’roll Asian enfant terrible. With his mantra, ‘If you think “I shouldn’t say that”, it’s always the thing you should say,’ he was the Byron of suburbia, a cocky upstart, on the make and on the move. He didn’t have coconut oil in his hair, he wore great clothes, he was iconic: his image was so much a part of the writing that his handsome face with its scrutinising gaze (he is one of those authors whose photo graces the front cover, not the back flap, of his books) became synonymous with the cultural moment of the late 80s. When Intimacy was published, Kureishi was still doing what he did best: saying the unsayable and making British Asian lives recognisable. Only now it was the very recognisability of the story he was telling that was the problem.

  Intimacy is about a man’s decision to leave a comfortable bourgeois family home in order to sleep on the floor of his friend’s flat, which shows how far Kureishi has moved on: his first screenplays begin with characters being evicted from their squats. Because he is interested in conflict, the idea of home has been central to Kureishi’s work. Homes – your country, your parent’s country, the house where you live, the house where your mother lives – provide the complex political and personal roots of identity. They are what we must have in order to be free and what we must leave in order to become more free.

  Kureishi’s subject has been restlessness and mobility in a community which, as Sandhu writes, ‘craves stillness’. He filled his earlier works with a picaresque range of characters – cheating businessmen, corseted mistresses, queers, skin-heads, con-men, adolescent entrepreneurs, wheelers, dealers and pushers – all snorting, licking, sucking, buggering or rutting as much as they could. His family hated what he did, but finding ways of pissing people off gives Kureishi inspiration: ‘The film brings to light your total lack of loyalty, integrity and compassion,’ wrote an aunt from India after the release of My Beautiful Laundrette, in which a white skinhead and an Asian boy fall in love: ‘We didn’t know you were a poofter.’ When it was only the conservative values of Asian parents and grandparents – his own and other peoples’ – that Kureishi was provoking, we were unconcerned. Until he extended the range of his ‘total lack of loyalty, integrity and compassion’, we didn’t much mind how irritating he was.

  In Intimacy Kureishi transformed himself from the chronicler of Anglo-Indian identity who kept dutifully to his patch, to a satanic Milord more at home in the subterranean world of Romantic introspection than the squats and semis of south London, and the book was received as a literary affront. It is a very brief novel to have caused such a stir, sparingly set during the final night that Jay, a restless, middle-aged, award-winning British Asian writer, spends with his partner, Susan, and their two small boys. ‘It is the saddest night,’ the novel begins, ‘for I am leaving and not coming back.’ But Jay is not especially, or not simply, sad. Those of his memories, thoughts, and philosophies we share as the night progresses express fear, relief, sentiment, desire, anger and, only on occasion, sadness. In a claustrophobic interior monologue we are given Jay’s feelings about Susan (‘I want to say the smell of mimosa reminds me of her. I want to say she will always be with me in some way. But it is gone, and she is an unmourned true love’), about his sons (‘they are ebullient and fierce, and people say what happy and affectionate children they are … tomorrow I will do something which will damage and scar them’), about his mother (‘Most of the day she sat, inert and obese, in her chair. she hardly spoke – except to dispute’), and about his two best friends, Asif and Victor. The former is happily married to a woman with whom, ‘when they are not discussing their children or important questions of the day’, he will read Christina Rossetti; the latter has left his wife and children in order to live out of suitcases, despite his son’s subsequent suicide attempt. And there is Jay’s idealised hippy girlfriend, Nina, who allows him to eat strawberries and cream off her buttocks.

  Intimacy is a painful read, especially for women, particularly for any woman who has ever been left. ‘Tomorrow we will kiss and part,’ Kureishi says. ‘Actually, forget the kiss.’ But is it a good novel? Whether it is good or bad has been of little critical concern because Kureishi has been judged a Bad Man (he is ‘the ambassador of the Bad Bloke,’ wrote Cressida Connolly in the Observer). Th
e aggressive ordinariness of his style and the artless transparency of his prose were not commented on by most of his critics, any more than the novel’s wincingly awful opening line (‘It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back’). It is either liked or disliked, but mainly disliked, regardless of its artistic merit, which at least makes it an effective novel. ‘I wrote a book that was intentionally horrible … The book worked because people got furious,’ Kureishi told Robert McCrum in an Observer interview, ‘so I felt that I had written a book that was, on its own terms, successful.’ If the strength of a text can be measured by the repetitions it inspires, by the way in which its central concerns – in this case, falling out of love – are re-enacted by the response of its readers, then Intimacy is a very strong text indeed. A novel about separation, it resulted in a violent separation between Kureishi and his once loyal public.

  The contents and critical reception of Intimacy are themselves something of a repetition: we have heard this story several times before. Byron’s own leaving-home poem, Don Juan, written in 1819 when he separated from his wife and went into exile, was likewise thought too aggressively personal to be literary, too honest to be readable, a manual of offensive thought and distasteful experience. ‘So now all things are damned,’ Byron wrote, ‘one feels at ease.’ Don Juan was, one reviewer said, the product of an ‘unrepenting, unsoftened, smiling, sarcastic, joyous sinner’. The portrait of Lady Byron was vindictive (‘But – oh ye lords of ladies intellectual! / Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?’), the picture of contemporary England was cynical, the descriptions of home-life and relationships were bitter and jaded. Byron’s readers were appalled: this is not want they wanted at all. The poet should have stuck to the East for his subject matter and kept them satisfied with another round of formulaic tales about a melancholic hero. Byron, once the most popular poet in the country, was described as ‘no longer a human being, even in his frailties; but a cool, unconcerned, fiend’. As for the descriptions of his abandoned wife, ‘To offend [her] love … was wrong,’ wrote a reviewer in Blackwood’s Magazine – ‘but it might have been forgiven; to desert her was unmanly – but he might have returned and wiped forever from her eyes the tears of her desertion; – but to injure and to desert, then to turn back and wound her widowed privacy with unhallowed strains of cold blooded mockery – was brutally, fiendishly, inexpiably mean.’ Byron’s response? ‘I shall not be deterred by an outcry.’