We need to talk

She used to doodle. She’d sit with her coffee in the morning, take the newspaper and a pen, start in one corner, and push her way out to cover the margins. Sprawling patterns and intricate designs decorated the white spaces.

In the evenings, she’d phone her sister. The one in New York. Talk for an hour. Start sketching in the notebook next to the phone. A pretty girl’s hair would swirl and fill the page. Creatures would come alive in those curls. Cute, smiling imps. Grinning flame-eared pixies. But they’d only get lost. Sooner or later, I’d flick the page over, in a rush to jot down a name or a number. Something practical.

Then, it stopped. And she hardly talked. Certainly not for an hour. And she never doodled anymore. A pad of post-it notes – the smallest size – replaced the pages next to the phone. Rarely touched. Names. Addresses. Times. Dates. My writing. Mostly doctors appointments. Information. No beauty.

Pills began to fill the bathroom cabinet. It took a while, but they seemed to help. She’d get out of bed occasionally. Make a sandwich even. Drink some milk.

Sometime later, she started leaving short memos. Single words. Squeezed to fit the tiny yellow page. Shopping items. Rarely more.

SUGAr

CORN
FLAKes

SOAP

I could understand. Kind of. I tried, at least. But not talking about it wouldn’t help, I thought. I got impatient. I pushed. I even got angry. She didn’t like that. She never did. She withdrew even more.

I took a step back. Just tried to be there. And it got gradually better. For her. And between us, if I’m honest. Over the months, she gradually gave a little more in those tiny notes:

LET’S
HAVE
PASTa

Or:

HOW
aBOUt
a MOvie
TONite

I loved seeing those notes. Occasional dinner suggestions. Or movie titles. Mild comedies mostly. A few foreign films. Nothing too taxing. Certainly nothing violent. No blood. We did talk, but we didn’t say much.

Once, she wrote:

I MISS
YOU. I
MISS
US

My throat tightened. My eyes welled. I wrote

MISS
YOU
TOO

Those notes became our way of of communicating. It was a beginning. It was basic, but it was precious.

And we continued like that for a while.

One morning, after Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I found this:

HE
HURT
ME

I grabbed the pen. Held it in my fist. Thought of her and relaxed. I wrote:

WE
SHOULD
TALK

Later, she answered:

MAYbe.
BUT WIth
SOME
ONE

This was progress. I knew that. She wanted to say more, to finally tell me something, maybe even everything. She just had to find the right time. The right way. Until then, I could only imagine. I tried not to. I really did.

And then it came. Her words. Blunt and to the point. I didn’t have to imagine anymore

THE
RAPist
WES
RYER

A simple as that. Nothing more.

It was enough. Wes Ryer. An unusual name. Easy to find. She knew it would be, I supposed.

I had his address within an hour. One of those polite suburbs. A 40 minute drive. But I took the train. Then the bus. And I waited. Not long. He pulled up in his smart car. A Merc. A new one. It was a dark. Night. Winter. His kids were still awake. They leapt past the living room window, in their pyjamas, when they heard his key in the door. A barking dog. A wife too. Pretty.

She was a widow before morning.

The next day, we sat with our coffee. In silence, as usual. She had her newspaper. Her pen. Flicking through the pages. Scanning the headlines. Nothing touching her. Nothing of interest. And then she saw it.

She dropped the pen.

She dropped the coffee.

She dropped her whole body. Hard. Onto the table.

She wept. She wailed. The loudest noise she’d made in months.

I stretched across. I had to know. I tugged the paper free from under her. Turned it to face me. Read the headline

DOCTOR KILLED IN BRUTAL ATTACK
Popular psychotherapist, and father
of two, murdered while walking dog

Now, we never talk. Except through lawyers.

The only people that talk to me these days are lawyers.

Lionel Shriver

The bibliophiles turned out last night in their zip-up fleeces to hear Lionel Shriver say: ‘Poetry bores the shit out of me’. She doesn’t like the fact that form in poetry is often more important than the content.

Content is king, for Shriver. ‘Craft follows content,’ she said. She is inspired when she writes about something that matters to her. It’s the subject that makes her want to write well, that drives her to create characters that can explore the topic.

She is known as a writer of ‘issues’, especially after tackling school massacres in We Need to Talk About Kevin, and now health care in her latest novel, So Much For That. She feels it’s important that novels have a theme. There are already so many books out there, she said, that you really should have a reason before you give the world another.

She is aware, though, that issues can be as tedious to write as they are to read. So she is careful to give her work broader appeal. The latest novel is about a man who has planned to retire to a tropical country with his wife when they have enough money. That moment arrives when they are in their 40s, but at the same time his wife is diagnosed with terminal cancer, and his savings gradually dwindle away on her medical bills.

Shriver has made the story about more than just health care reform in the States. She considers death, and the idea that so many people die miserably. There is no enjoyment in death anymore, she said. In fact, she says she’s seriously considering becoming politically opposed to longevity. People present a long life as a purely positive thing, she says, and nobody considers the negative side, such as whether those extra years are always pleasant for the person. A few grey-haired heads in the audience shook when she said that.

As well as being provocative and extremely articulate, Shriver is also an excellent storyteller. She was very easy to listen to when she read an extract from her book. Her deep voice for the male character even worked. But there was something about that scene that just didn’t ring true.

She read the novel’s only sex scene, which is told from the main character’s point of view – Shep, a man. But from my male point of view it didn’t work. It felt a little too much like this was how a woman who’d just had cancer surgery and was dying would like her husband to look at her while they made love. I just didn’t believe it. A good few women in the audience did like it, and said she had captured a man’s thoughts perfectly. So, I suppose, from a woman’s point of view, Shriver does a man’s point of view very well.

Judging only by that short piece she read, and what she said about the novel, I don’t think this is a book for me. Although it was certainly well-written, the subject matter didn’t appeal. Which just goes to show that content is just as important for the reader as the writer.

Penetrating the enemy

James had never been curious about other men. He didn’t experience an experimental phase in university. Didn’t even glance at his army buddies in the shower. So he wasn’t pleased when he was given this latest mission. He knew better than to argue with Command though. He did offer a few excuses, even suggested an alternative. Fairy Farnham would be better suited to this type of work, he’d said. But he knew it was useless. He’d read the intel, and it was obvious that he was the only man for this job.

Dmitri loved women. He lived for women. Even during his two years in Siberia he’d never been tempted, as others had, to share a bunk with a male comrade. So, when he saw his new orders, he argued bitterly. No way, he said, not me. Get Bum-chum Boris to do it. He’s the man for this mission. But he knew his protestations were pointless. He’d read the file. He knew he was the only one who could do this job.

Boris Farnham sipped a dry martini as he looked back over his last month’s reports. Spy work could be so tedious at times, he thought, with all those fast cars and beautiful girls. But being a double agent, he smirked, is turning out to be such a laugh.

Jonathan Franzen

I went to see Jonathan Franzen last week, but then a big bad flu came and stopped me from writing about it. Until now.

Franzen said his new novel, Freedom, is his most autobiographical yet. On the surface of it, it’s the one that least resembles his life, but he points out that The Metamorphosis was very autobiographical, even though there is little evidence that Kafka ever actually turned into an insect.

Freedom, said Franzen, came after a long, five year, process of self-psychotherapy. Everything else he tried to write in that time, he said, came out like an imitation of The Corrections. With a few books behind him now, Franzen has realised that he has to re-learn how to write a novel each time. Or at least learn how to write his new novel.

While avoiding the topic of ‘The Great American Novel’ he did mention that he hated Phillip Roth, but that he admired the authoritarian, opinionated voice Roth has in much of his work. Phillip Roth, he said, is very good at being Phillip Roth. He is probably the best man for the job, after all. Franzen likes him now though, after reading Sabbath’s Theater. And so did I.

On the subject of freedom, Franzen said that, in the US at least, ‘cool is the enemy of freedom’. People are trying so hard to be cool that they don’t feel free to be themselves. Geeks, he said, and he pretty much considers himself a geek, are the true free spirits of this world.

Franzen was witty and good humoured for the full hour-and-a-half, even though he did spend a lot of the time talking about things he hated, but I’m sure you can imagine that if you’ve read any of his stuff, especially Freedom. In fact, he even named – in his opinion – the stupidest person in New York. I won’t repeat the name here, cos I don’t need anyone from the New York Times trying to sue me, and especially not their leading critic.

Bret Easton Ellis

American Psycho doesn’t work as a film, said Bret Easton Ellis. That doesn’t mean he thinks it’s a bad film, he just think it ‘doesn’t work’ as a movie; it has no meaning.

He finds Patrick Bateman, along with all his other protagonists, a very sympathetic character. Which is probably why he doesn’t think the movie works. There’s nothing sympathetic about the movie Bateman.

The novel is full of language like: ‘Smash cut and I’m back in the kitchen’ and ‘A slow dissolve and Price is bounding up the steps…’. But Ellis said he never intended American Psycho to be a movie. When he wrote it he never considered it to be anything but a novel. He did say that, if nothing else, at least the movie version shows Christian Bale as a young, fun actor.

Generally, he said, good books rarely make good films. Bad books, especially ones that rely purely plot, make good films. Good books, with more layers and more to say, make bad movies.

On killing darlings
Ellis was promoting his new book, Imperial Bedrooms, a sequel to his first novel Less Than Zero.

The style of Imperial Bedrooms is quite different to his previous work. It has fewer words for a start. This, he explained, is because the main character, Clay, is now a screenwriter so its written in screenplay style. Not formatted like a screenplay, but the story is very focused, the dialogue is expository, and the details are sparse.

He said he had written one paragraph of perfect, beautiful, DeLillo-esque prose for one scene in the new book. It was set in a Hollywood restaurant, describing a silver wall. Four or five magnificent lines. But then he realised that Clay would never notice that wall, never mind take the time to describe it. Those wonderful lines had to go.

He added that there was no pressure to write a sequel to Less Than Zero. It didn’t come from any demand from publishers or public. It was a book he wanted to write. All his novels come from a need to write that particular story, which reflect how he’s feeling at that point in his life. Unrequited love was on his mind when he wrote Less than Zero in college. He was a lonely young man in New York when he conceived American Psycho. That story is about loneliness, he said. Not about serial killers, not about New York – it could have been set anywhere. For him it’s purely about loneliness.

If he had to conduct a poll and ask people what book he should write next, he said he’d end up writing a young adult novel based on Patrick Bateman’s teenage years.

Ellis was eloquent, entertaining, funny and insightful throughout his talk, despite the fact that he seemed completely distracted by the crowd watching him. I also thought he sounded remarkably like Mickey Rourke. If you closed your eyes and listened you could almost imagine Mickey Rourke talking. Maybe. A little bit.

Suspicious death

DI Anadem stepped around the neat little bedroom. It was never designed to have four strutting cops shoulder their way round the double bed. Not that Anadem, with the height, build and temperament of a rugby number eight, ever had much trouble making space.

He noted the skirt and blouse folded over the old wooden chair, the finger marks at two heights on the Ikea wardrobe doors. He took in the photos on top of the chest of drawers. One was a young kid, about 4-years-old, smiling through face paint. Five or six more pictures surrounded a small, unlit candle. They all showed an older couple at various events over the decades. The dead woman was with them in two pictures, a teenager in one, a bride in the other.

Anadem turned to a small stack of romance novels and self-help books on the bedside table. He looked down from the books, to the young women lying dead in her bed, her head encased in a matt-black scooter helmet.

‘She was pissed and puked in her sleep, sir.’

He kept his eyes on the woman.

‘Is that your professional opinion, Constable Ivans? After what? Nearly three years on the force?’

DS Mike Bell let his head drop back onto the patterned wallpaper. The other uniformed officer pinched his tired eyes.

Undeterred, Ivans pointed out the obvious facts. ‘There’s vomit crust round her mouth and chunks on the pillow, sir. The helmet’s a bit of a giveaway too. Nobody sober is going to bed wearing that.’

Anadem stepped towards Ivans, but still didn’t look at him. ‘The helmet is odd, I’ll give you that, but there’s two things you’re forgetting, constable.’

Ivans’s eyes scanned the room for the missing clues. Anadem got close to the young officer, deliberately filling his field of view.

‘There are two things you smell in a room, constable, when a drunk has choked on their puke. Apart from the puke. One is booze, of course. They reek of it. Do you smell booze, constable?’

‘No, sir.’ Ivans leaned back, trying to get away from his superior.

‘The other thing you smell,’ said Anadem, ‘is …’ He looked to Bell, let him give the answer.

‘Farts,’ said Bell.

‘Exactly.’ Anadem peered closely at Ivans. ‘Farts. Usually kebab farts.’

‘Or pakora,’ offered Bell.

‘Aye, or pakora.’ Anadem relaxed, got friendly. ‘You’ve worked enough weekends in Paisley, Ivans. You’ve seen the queues of drunks at the corner of Causeyside Street craving their midnight kebab. You’ve probably stood there yourself a few times, I’m sure. You know how those spices work their way through the system.’ He put his hand on the patterned bed cover, threatened to lift it. ‘Would you like to put your head under the quilt, constable, and sniff for kebab farts?’

Bell sniggered into his moustache.

Ivans looked at his uniformed mate, wondering if Anadem was serious. The mate rolled his eyes, shook his head, made it clear Ivans had brought this on himself.

Anadem let go of the quilt. ‘Or shall we wait for the pathologist? Let him pick through the puke and sniff the sheets.’

Ivans nodded. ‘Let’s wait, sir.’

Anadem stood with his hands deep in his pockets. ‘I heard you’d put in an application for the detectives course, Ivans.’

‘Yes, sir. I take it I might as well stick it up my arse, sir?’

‘Just tearing it up will be good enough, constable.’

Manhattan in the morning

It’s Manhattan. Early in the morning. Daylight. Sunlight even. Very unusual.

He’s just sideswiped a little boy. A ten-year-old. Clapped his head against a pebble-dashed wall.

No, it’s not pebble-dashed. It’s worse. It has that jaggy, white grit cemented to the surface.

The boy’s head was already dripping red. God knows what had happened, what Manhattan had already done.

Whatever it was he isn’t finished as he twists to face a second boy.

He swoops his foot, and cracks the lad in the nuts. The boy’s upper-half snaps forward, hands clutching his crotch. His pained face falls into the perfect spot for a volley shot. Manhattan takes a step back into a kicker’s stance, ready for the up-and-under … just as our bus pulls away.

The bloke behind me sprays a puff of disgust through his lower teeth, spraying my neck with a nightshift full of coffee breath. The old dear in front gawks back, tutting spittle onto the tempered glass. The horoscope page of her paper hadn’t prepared her for this.

I rest my head against my hand, and block the view out the window. I close my eyes and pretend to sleep, projecting the scene into some negative space. It’s not happening if I don’t see it. Although I’m sure it won’t be that bad. Manhattan’s hardly a killer. He’ll give the boys a few bruises. And if he ends up breaking something he’ll take them to get help. There’s a doctor’s surgery nearby. No need to worry. Not really.

city-pick Amsterdam

The runway lights of Schiphol lay in the fields like a fallen Christmas tree. I thought: this is where I want to die.

- Marcel Möring‘s sentiments as he returns to Amsterdam from a trip overseas. They’re taken from his book In Babylon, and appear in a new anthology of writing about the Dutch capital – city-pick Amsterdam.

I don’t usually write reviews (no reason why not, I just don’t), but this new book combines two things I really like – Amsterdam and good writing.

Beginning with Möring’s arrival, this collection guides the reader through the city in the words of over 70 writers. Clive, in Ian McEwan‘s novel Amsterdam, takes us from the airport by train to Centraal Station. We get lost with South African born author, Richard Mason, as he wanders along the Herengracht. And Dirk van Weelden shows us the Amstel River as it ‘glistens in the wintry light’.

Van Weelden’s piece, from his novel The World of 609, is one of several that have been translated especially for this anthology. As well as discovering the city, the editors – Heather Reyes and Victor Schiferli – hope to introduce ‘an often translation-phobic Angolophone readership’ to some highlights of Dutch literature. There are certainly some excellent excerpts from the work of Martin Bril (a personal favourite), Abdelkadi Benali, HM van den Brink and Flemish writer, Stefan Hertmans.

This carefully considered book is divided into sections including Must see…, Art seen in Amsterdam, old Amsterdam and World War II. And while it’s not a guide book – there are no listings for accommodation, museums or entertainment – David Sedaris does consider moving in to the Anne Frank house, Stav Sherez takes us on a tour of the Jewish Historical Museum, and Sean Condon ends the collection with a cognac in a typical old ‘brown cafe’.

All 100+ stories are fairly short – most little more than a page long – making it easy to dip into, even for those on a short weekend visit. But this panorama of views from such a selection of world-class writers will surely show born and bred Amsterdammers a new angle on their city.

If I was a tourist, I might like a map showing some of the main highlights mentioned, but then again this isn’t a travel guide. These tantalisingly short snippets might just lead you to discover some writers you might never otherwise have encountered. I’ve certainly got a few new names to look out for the next time I wander through one of the city’s bookshops.

co.uk/amsterdam.htm

An evening with Yann Martel

Novels are communication, said Yann Martel. Even those manuscripts stuck at the bottom of the proverbial drawer are trying to say something. Every author hopes that someday, somebody will read those words and understand their message.

At the moment, Martel has a 140 page essay on artistic representations of the Holocaust in his ‘drawer’, but I don’t think it’ll stay there for long. At a talk last night in Amsterdam, he explained how the essay came about as part of the writing process for his new novel, Beatrice and Virgil.

Martel had clearly done a lot of research for the novel, including staying at Auschwitz for two weeks. The essay helped him work through the thoughts and questions that swirled in his mind at that time, and gave an outlet for the ideas that wouldn’t fit in the novel.

The novel started out as a play with a donkey, Beatrice, and a howler monkey, Virgil, but written as a novel. Parts of that play are still in the book, but contained within the story of an author who is struggling to write a novel about the Holocaust.

This author, Henry, has already written two novels, the second of which was very successful. Sound familiar?

But Martel played down the autobiographical aspects of the book, pointing out that, unlike Henry, he doesn’t play clarinet or speak German. Instead, Henry represents the Jewish people who, despite being a minority population in most countries, have played an influential role in the arts and commerce.

Animal magic
Martel also told us about his next book, to be set in northern Portugal and currently entitled ‘The High Mountains of Portugal’. Since northern Portugal doesn’t have any mountains, it sounds like this will be another Martel metaphor.

The novel will feature monkeys this time. Three of them. And is about wisdom, and what happens when a great mentor disappears. Where do the people get their wisdom after that?

Some critics have said his new novel – and the fact that he uses animals to tell the story – trivialises the Holocaust. He defended his method by explaining that art can often touch people where facts and bare history cannot.

He gave the example of George Orwell‘s Animal Farm. Anyone who has read that book, he says, might not know much about Stalinist Russia, but they will have some understanding of why such systems of power fail.

Martel also gave a great explanation of why animal allegories work so well, and why he uses them:

‘People care about what happens to an animal. They care about what happens to a person too, but it depends on what kind of person.’

An evening with David Mitchell

David Mitchell writes letters to himself. Or rather, the characters from his novels write to him.

Jacob de Zoet, the main(est) character from his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, wrote several letters discussing work, religion and what he thought of other characters in the novel. These letters, Mitchell says, usually begin:

Dear David,

My name is Jacob de Zoet, and I am a character in a novel.

It’s an old technique, taught in almost every creative writing course, but Mitchell swears by it and highly recommends the method for getting to know your characters.

Character, along with plot, ideas and structure, said Mitchell, are the most important features of a novel. Hardly a surprising revelation from the author of Cloud Atlas.

At his talk last night in Amsterdam, Mitchell added that writers shouldn’t concentrate too much on theme. At least not artificially incorporating a theme into a novel. ‘The periodic table of human relationships’, as he called it, is not so big. There are only a few main themes in life – power, love, spirituality, etc. If you write with honesty, authentically and describe the world realistically, then the novel will take on one of these main themes all on its own.

One of the themes of Thousand Autumns, for example, is miscommunication, but he said he only noticed that later. And was pleased with it.

This is also the most difficult book he’s written so far, he said, mainly because it’s a historical novel. It can’t be too historical, he explained, because it shouldn’t be an academic work – it’s a novel. But it can’t stray too far from the facts otherwise it won’t be believable. Getting the right balance is very tricky, he said.

Influence of film
Mitchell also spoke a little on how 20th century authors have been influenced by movies. The example he gave was a scene from his new novel – tiny SPOILER here:

While playing billiards, Jacob de Zoet makes a bet with his opponent, Dr Marinus. Marinus offers to triple the bet where, if he lost, Jacob would have to work in Marinus’s garden for 3 days (weeks? no matter).

Marinus had been playing badly, so it was an easy bet for Jacob, and the chapter ends with him feeling optimistic about winning.

The next chapter begins with Jacob shovelling horse shit in Marinus’s garden.

That technique, of cutting from one scene directly to the other without any explanation of what happened, comes from films. Dickens, said Mitchell, would never have written like that.

New book
Mitchell gave a few teasing hints about his new novel. He’s still working on it, but it will be set in a ‘non-specific but recognisably local’ place, and each chapter will cover a year from 1969 to 2039, which sounds a bit more like Cloud Atlas style. And, somehow, Dr Marinus, from The Thousand Autumns novel, will appear in it – in modern day times. He wouldn’t say more on that, we’ll just need to wait and see.