In order to write the monograph on Wallace I had to re-read Infinite Jest. I'm not a fast reader, and I don't trust people who are. Stalin told Churchill he could read 400 pages a day and he was a notorious teller of porkies.
(For instance:
'Where have all the peasants gone Kolya?'
'Oh, the peasants? They went skiing.')
I have an average pace of anything less than 30 pages an hour, so that a novel like IJ requires a raw hours investment equivalent to a working week of pure reading.
Anyway, that's why I haven't posted about books for a while. But now I can read other things, and since these days I'm shuttling back and forth with the strap-hanging army, west to east, east to west, morning and evening I reckon I will have finished this biography of Sweeney Todd before the week is out.
I also went to see Joe Dunthorne give a reading at Willesden Library last week. I don't often go to Willesden because well it's shit isn't it?
Joe Dunthorne wrote a book called Submarine, out of the UEA creative writing course. I saw an announcement for the Dylan Thomas Prize last year (first person to write something before the age at which Dylan Thomas died wins) and tried to read as many of the nominees as possible. I managed Submarine and Ross Raisin's book God's Own Country before I gave it up as a pointless and ultimately dispiriting exercise. Submarine is much better than God's Own Country, although they're similar books, coming of age stories, told in the first person by unreliable narrators with distinctive voices (if you talk to agents, and I know a couple of them, that's what they go on and on about. 'Voice'. If I write a novel, the narrator will have a high, squeaky voice.) Ross Raisin's gone for this pared down writing school style, studded with Yorkshire dialect and occasionally these flashily low-key bits of poetry. The narrator of Joe Dunthorne's book has the mind and vocabulary of an adult pedant, but the emotional range of a child – he is the half-in half-out submarine of the title. His book is much funnier, and, oddly, more realistic. He claimed, in the Q&A not to have read 'The Curious Incident..." And I reckon I probably believe him.
Dunthorne clearly does a great many of these readings and book signings, since that's what publishers make you do to sell your book, particularly if you're a young author, handsome at medium distance and charming, in a gangly way. He also read some of his poetry, which is facetious and demonstrated that the style that he uses for the novel is by no means a million miles from his own personal preferred mode of writing.
So during the Q&A I asked him, you know, 'Can you do anything else?'
I took this picture just before I asked him.
I didn't say:
'Because there are at least two kinds of talent. There's talent that can do lots of things and talent that can do one thing.
So if you realise that your preferred written style is that of a precocious 15 year old (which is a laudable piece of self-knowledge that it might take a while to get to) you write a novel about a precocious 15 year old. And it so happens that at this particular moment there is a market for just this kind of work. So cometh the hour, cometh the man. And you get to be the man. But the timekeeping is murder.
You see what screws loads of people with your sort of talent, is that they keep trying to do the same thing, they might even improve at it, but the times move on and they are trapped by ego. The pain of changing is insupportable, especially against the counter-current of resentment they doubtless feel about the fickle nature of public approval. Which resentment is really just a denial of the fact that it was the fickle nature of public approval that got them there in the first place.
The relative advantages of the two kinds of talent can be seen in a comparison of the careers of Guy Ritchie and Madonna.
You might also notice the way that certain veteran advertisers propound the theory that the recession will inevitably lead to a return to the hard-nosed, persuasive-argument-based advertising of the 1970s.'
2 comments:
there'll always be a market for people able to write those kind of lines though surely? just as there will always be people idly walking between one place and another with little time to stop and read.
It's interesting to think about what makes people, or their style enduring. Like you say, a flash in the pan is probably linked to a certain mood for something at certain time, not able to be reproduced without seeming tired.
But even enduring artists / indulgent communicators come back to same themes again and again. They'll comment and you can see in their work that they are interested in the same set of ideas throughout their career and return to them again and again, almost like that's what propels them to create: trying to express and explore those obsessions.
I suppose it just depends on how superficial those obsessions are as to whether they can be refigured again and again....i dunno.
Did he say his talent was to endure? You'd have to really wouldn't you?
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