Review: Sally Rooney, Normal People

This novel does get a lot better in its final seventy pages, but for a couple of hundred pages it is simply too normal and I did not want to turn those pages. It’s a regular, non-experimental novel, regular length, regular structure. It is dialogue-based between a small cast of main characters and the dialogue is fine, but not extraordinary. The characterisation is fine, but not exceptional. The plot is repetitive - that’s the point - though with  revelations introduced,  but perhaps not enough of them.

It’s a coming of age story or, more grandly, a Bildungsroman set in a contemporary Ireland from which the priests and the fascists have been eliminated and the currency is the €uro. It’s a novel which could only have  been written there in the fairly recent past; fifty years ago, it would have been banned even if conceivable and the author would have gone to live in a free country.

The core story of the on-off relationship between Marianne and Connell from school days to graduate studies is well developed, often delicately so, and only towards the end did I feel there were moments of authorial intrusion into their evolving consciousness - pages 198-99; p 221; p 239, for example. There are very few jokes and I suspect that the humour at page 235 where a man lays down the second half of a football match for his woman is unintentional.

For an older reader like me, there were a few puzzles. I get the bit about being interconnected via social media, but Rooney’s characters live in a world where gossip is the norm, and where people are very anxious about their current gossip-status. Is it really that bad? Is that what it’s like for normal people? Likewise, they cling to their groups, so that the school group lives on even after everyone has gone their separate ways. For some people, the rule is surely never to go back but rather to keep on moving away. In this novel, no one does that even if they travel and study in foreign countries.

The novel could be compared to Elif Batuman's The Idiot about which I wrote here on 24 June 2018, but whereas I did not finish Batuman's book, I did finish this one.

Review: John le Carre, The Little Drummer Girl

This is a very long book, 640 pages of reasonably spaced text in my edition. Published in 1983, the story is set within the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The setting remains much as it was, nothing much has changed there. The book does not have a dated feel at all, which is surprising given that it mobilises a great deal of then-current contextual information.

It is not the most popular of le Carre’s books and one can see why.  Though an enthusiast, my attention weakened during Chapters 6 and 7 which record an extraordinarily long and intense interrogation of Charlie, the main character, by agents of the Israeli security services. It is only much later in the book that the pace quickens and we are hooked into a Who will Survive and Who will Die narrative. I made it to the end. Like A Perfect Spy, it is a novel of great emotional intensity.

Google won’t tell me who it was who said that the same causes which make one person a Protestant on this side of the Pyrenees would have made them a Catholic on the other. I think it was Voltaire but maybe it was John Stuart Mill. But le Carre’s novel could be thought of as a prolonged, and profound, exploration of that theme. He finds a way of showing how one could believe at the same time both in Israel and the Palestinian cause. Know enough, learn enough, and you will find your loyalties totally divided. Only ignorance or accident of birth on this side or the other side of the Golan Heights could lead you to plump uncritically one way or the other.

He achieves this result by inserting his main character into both sides of the conflict. She is recruited into the Israeli cause, as their agent, partly on the basis of her public espousal of the Palestinian cause. This makes it possible for her to act credibly when she is inserted deep into a Palestinian terrorist group, but that then also puts her in tension with her sponsors and her agent-runner, Israeli Joseph who doubles as Palestinian Michel until both are totally confused in Charlie’s mind. All this is very well done, in detail and in depth. And I read the conclusion of the book as at best ambiguous and more likely as an expression of the view that, joker or thief, there is no way out of here. That’s the legacy of  what is now a long century of history.

Review: Tiffany Watt Smith, Schadenfreude

I bought this book on the same visit to Waterstones as yielded the previous book reviewed here, Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari. I was looking for short books that would take a few hours to read, having just failed to get stuck into two very long books which would each take twenty plus hours of my time. 

But their brevity aside, the two books are chalk and cheese. If McGarvey’s is a working-class book, this is a middle-class one - very much so. McGarvey tells us about his sharp-edged anger at the world; Watt Smith about her sharp-elbowed envy and jealousy. It’s hard not to imagine her as someone who would have voted for David Cameron.

The book aims to be lightweight and one can imagine a great deal of it emerging from determined googling, examples and anecdotes - many of them amusing - piled up fairly haphazardly. Uncertainty about its intended audience gives us “The Genealogy of Morals written by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche” (page 108), a bit odd in the context of a book which has a title in German, the English sub-title providing the translation. 

More surprisingly, the book is the product of a Wellcome Trust research fellowship attached to the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London - that bit of the blurb, read in the bookshop, made me expect some Foucault but he nowhere appears and Watt Smith looks to American psychologists for inspiration. Those psychologists though themselves mostly university academics also aim to be popular, the sort of academics who now make use of the fact that the internet is made of tubes (page 113 for the Schadenfreude story).

The theme of the book is the joy we take in the misfortune of others. The author suggests that the emotion is natural, universal and often desirable despite its poor reputation. The concept of Schadenfreude has acquired fresh relevance in a world where social media allows many millions of people unrestricted access to express their uninhibited joy at the misfortunes of others, and I can see that there is scope to take that fact seriously and to seek to understand it, however distasteful the work may be. Fortunately for Watt Smith, she finds her Twitter feeds and such like exciting. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Review: Darren McGarvey, Poverty Safari

This is a good book which held my attention right through though some of it seems cut and paste from what could have been free-standing articles. But I think it is about something more than what it says it is about, and I think there is a fault line in the characterisations.

In any stratified class society which nonetheless permits some social mobility, then the more differentiated the strata the more anyone who is mobile (up or down) will find that they become strangers to the class they have left and never quite belong in the class where they have arrived. Especially in the last two or three chapters, Darren McGarvey is beginning to live with those consequences of his upward mobility, culminating for the moment in becoming an Orwell Prize- winning author and published by a London house which I guess insisted that though in Glasgow it might be all right to spell it  fucking down here it is spelt f**king. Welcome to the world of middle class values, here comfortably hitched to the values of American-dominated corporate publishing.

But the body of the book is concerned with what it is like to begin life at the bottom and, in many cases, to remain there. For Marx, the bottom stratum of society comprised the lumpenproletariat easily mobilised by the forces of reaction and less easily by progressive social forces. Marx had nothing good to say about the lumpen.  Others have called this stratum the dregs of society and beyond ordinary political help. Others again have called it the rough working-class distinguished from a respectable working class which, at a minimum, gets out of bed each day to clock in on time and doesn’t spend all its wages on drink. But since the Thatcher years in the UK which created what we now call the Benefits Culture, the rough working-class has more or less ceased to work, even casually or intermittently.

McGarvey’s background is at least half rough or lumpen, his mother a violent alcoholic and worse, dead from her addictions at the age of thirty six. He writes movingly about this. But he is coy about his father, who is never (unless I missed something) assigned an occupation but who is acknowledged as a source of encouragement - his father does not pooh-pooh Darren’s dream of becoming a writer, but actively encourages it. So I am going to guess that McGarvey’s father is the respectable half of a dysfunctional pairing. This is important. 

Many years ago, for example, Colin Lacey in Hightown Grammar decided to ask the question, Why do some working-class boys succeed? rather than the question Why do most working-class boys fail? He discovered that in most cases of success you could identify a mentor or a sponsor who encouraged and supported at least some kinds of ambition. A typical case would be that of a mother who had married down socially, probably regretted it, and tried to redeem the situation by encouraging a son to push back upwards. D H Lawrence had described the scenario already in Sons and Lovers.

In the body of the book, McGarvey’s use of the term underclass obscures the important distinction between rough and respectable and the dynamic which exists between these groups who may often live cheek by jowl. The voice of respectability is heard very clearly at page 175 when McGarvey quotes the very, very left-wing Scottish militant, Jimmy Reid, addressing shipyard workers occupying their place of work back in 1971 and telling them that there will be no hooliganism…no vandalism. Yes, Sir!

Anyone with any sense acknowledges that not all social problems admit of a political solution. True, some problems are much less acute in societies which are more economically equal than the UK or the USA. This is the lesson of all the academic studies of inequality - Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level most notably. But for the problems of dysfunctional families and the cycle of deprivation which children born into them experience, there is no quick fix from even the most benign nanny state. As McGarvey repeatedly emphasises, there are problems for which you have to accept some responsibility yourself and deal with them as best you can.

Essay:The White Review and The Lottery

I

My local convenience store is always busy, the queue for the check-out snaking back into the aisles. It’s a shop for poor people, of whom there are many in English south coast seaside towns. I don’t stand out very much: I’m old, male, pale and overweight. I don’t have a posh accent though even when I dress down my clothes are better than the standard cotton- and wool-free issue in a queue where you will also search in vain for colours which aren’t drab or, in the case of the trainers, white. Even the young migrants and refugees seem to get the message; they dress pretty much the same though clear skin and groomed hair does often mark them out. As does the fact that they are rarely overweight.

I can see from my position in the queue that poor people buy white bread, frozen pizzas, alcohol and tobacco. On the last two, they take a considerable tax hit. They take another hit when they buy the lottery tickets and scratch cards prominently displayed, another tax on the poor to provide a pot called Lottery Funding..

II

A recent business trip found me in one of those cupboards which pass as London hotel rooms, this one located conveniently for Euston station. I had a few hours to myself and wandered down through Bloomsbury and into the Contemporary Ceramics Centre, opposite the British Museum, which is the shopfront of the Craft Potters Association. I’ve liked studio pottery since the 1970s when I lived in Devon and every village had a craft potter. It was a cheap outing to visit the Free Admission studios and come away with a modestly priced pot. Nowadays, I go to the Ceramics Centre when I need a nice present for someone and, sometimes, just to treat myself. I checked and the Centre does not seem to attract Lottery funding; it’s just the national retail outlet for serious, self-employed studio potters with a prestige location opposite the British Museum.

Then I went round the corner to the London Review of Books shop where I like to browse and have tea and cake in the small café which is really too cramped to be a pleasure  - London rents again and a bit of a challenge for the overweight. The clientele is very well-dressed here, stylishly so, and they are thin. 

I don’t hold it against the shop that when a couple of years ago I walked in proferring Sale or Return copies of my then-new book, The Best I Can Do (2016), the nice young man at the counter after handling a copy very gingerly, and without opening it, declared “It’s not really our sort of thing”:

Click on Image to Magnify

I had failed to realise that things have changed etc since the 1970s when I walked my first book into London bookshops and they happily relieved me of stacks of them: 

III

Browsing in the shop, I saw a copy of The White Review which looked rather nice at £12.99 for a couple of hundred pages and I thought I would be interested to read the opening round table discussion “On Universities”, a subject to which I return from time to time even though twenty years ago I quit universities for self-employment. I’d already come across a couple of favourable references to the magazine so I bought it, something to read later in my hotel cupboard.

On the back flap, the magazine claims to be a “space for a new generation to express itself, unconstrained by form, subject or genre” though not, of course, by generation. Then I went to the page of editorial details and found the little icon which tells you that it is Lottery funded through Arts Council England. It’s something the poor are paying for.

IV

I headed to the Roundtable discussion “On Universities” What will the new generation have to say about them, I wonder?

Around the table, four people are talking about pensions. They are excited because recently they have been on strike, actually handing out leaflets on picket lines. About pensions. Their pensions. Their employers plan to replace what are called Final Salary or Defined Benefit pensions with pensions which are a function of contributions made but where the final value of the pension cannot be guaranteed. This has led them to strike.

Now I cannot think of a case of a teachers’ union or a university teachers’ union in this country striking over anything other than money. It’s one reason why I think that teachers and lecturers are a fairly materialistic bunch, which is not much more than to say that they generally  have middle class values focused around things like home ownership, schools which will give their children a leg up in the world, foreign holidays, lottery-subsidised theatre tickets - and pensions. 

Many years ago as a university lecturer with strong leftist views I would not join the Association of University Teachers. To my way of thinking, I had a pleasant, taxpayer-funded job which had no great social utility but which left me with a lot of time to read, think and write – things which interested me, as did teaching though I rather doubted that anyone benefited much from that. To have joined an organisation dedicated to improving my own pay, to strike even - well, I would have needed a much stronger sense of entitlement than I possessed.

I have to declare that, despite this, I am now in receipt of a Defined Benefit pension, paid by the Universities Superannuation Scheme, and have been a beneficiary since I took early retirement at fifty. Equally, I can honestly say that I had no idea before that age of just how privileged I was. Thinking about my pension was not something I did. Now it seems that the  new generation thinks about pensions from the very beginning, and feels they have to.

I want to tell two stories.

There were lots of university jobs available in the 1960s and 1970s because of university expansion. Salaries were modest but I think there were plenty of applicants. I was sitting in a circle one day and a political comrade was telling us that he had just been interviewed for a job at LSE. He was scornful. They kept going on about pensions, he said. They even told me that there was a widow’s pension. Pause. I told them I didn’t yet have a widow in prospect. Laughter.

Between graduation aged 21 in 1968 and a university lecturer appointment in 1978 which became long term, I did one thing and then I did another. They did not add up to a career path. I had to go back to a Record of Work to complete the following chronological list of things done: two years as Ph D student in Philosophy, a grant supplemented by some teaching; one year as university temporary lecturer in philosophy; one year in Paris on a Leverhulme European studentship; one year as a Liberal Studies lecturer in a technical college; a few months as a British Film Institute research fellow in television studies; a few months being ill (hepatitis); working  as a waiter for a summer; one year teaching history and social studies in a comprehensive school; nine months as a youth and community worker; nine months writing and completing an M Phil dissertation, partly funded by part-time university teaching of political theory; a year as a senior lecturer in Communication Studies - the salary from that when added to my partner's big enough to secure us our first mortgage, aged thirty.

In this period, I also edited one book (Counter Course, Penguin Education 1972), wrote another (the Language, Truth and Politics of 1975) and published a small research monograph (Television and the February 1974 General Election).

One of the generally recognised positive features of not settling straight into a defined career path (and lots of people didn’t), was that every time you changed job you could TAKE OUT YOUR PENSION, all that money they had taken off you against your will and which you could now reclaim and use to pay down debts or go on holiday. It was wonderful. It’s only now, coming across the thinking of the new generation in The White Review, that I realise I should have been thinking of myself as belonging to some Precariat, not knowing where my next meal was coming from. I should have been afraid for the future and angry in the present. I am not quite convinced. I was young and making the most of it and I hope there are people still doing that. But let’s briefly look at what else the Roundtable can come up with “On Universities”.

V

The discussion goes off into a series of complaints about the marketization of higher education, the casualisation of labour, students as consumers, failures of diversity and equality policies, and quite a lot about sexual harassment. There is nothing about the curriculum, where maybe they think Problem Solved, and really only Beaumont tries to integrate the discussion into something resembling a theoretical discourse (in Beaumont’s case, broadly Marxist). Yaqoob takes the role of hands-on union representative.

I found the content unremarkable and conformist, except in interesting remarks made by Capildeo. Capildeo challenges the religious language of “vocation” but also says about sexual harassment that, in contrast to some other approaches,“a straight down the line witch hunt would be a progressive move”. In a context where Twitter is spoken of in positive terms - something quite new to me - (“It’s that thing of following the right people” - Charman), I hope that Capildeo is simply being provocative.

Two academics from Cambridge (Charman and Yaqoob), one from UCL (Beaumont), and Capildeo from Leeds didn’t come across overall as a strong university challenge team. Disappointing. I think the poor deserve better for their lottery tax.

Review: Anna Burns Milkman

Now I couldn’t have made it up and you couldn’t have made it up which is two reasons why Milkman ought to have won the Man Booker Prize, which it did and no thanks to the prognosticators who said that it couldn’t and wouldn’t but it did so there’s justice in the world even if it is a rare thing and not to go unnoticed which this book won’t because now there will be a lot of construing of it, not that the construers will be any better than the prognosticators.

This is an excellent book even at a fairly demanding 348 pages and ten or twelve hours of my time and I don’t know about yours. The temptation will be to reduce it, annex it, to preferred themes which already existed before it was written and so it didn’t really need to be written except to illustrate those themes which it does. The smarter move is to avoid the reduction and look at what the author does and does not do.

First, the author sustains a hypnotic style which is original, quirky and a bit cracked, a bit demented and in order to give voice to a narrator who is all those things. But in case you should think the author  at one with her narrator, the author supplies the narrator with a sense of humour which could not at all belong to someone a bit cracked, a bit demented but is just very funny but of course in a way which is quirky, a bit cracked, a bit demented but does make you laugh so that really the author must be completely sane and thus in full control of whatever insanity her narrator may or may not evince which in any case is rather less insanity than manifested by the cast of characters assembled around her, notwithstanding their bogus claims to greater sanity.

Second, in anonymising place and characters – the city does not have a name and nor do any of the significant characters – the author succeeds in escaping from direct social history and political commentary, turning her very small geographical enclave– a few Catholic streets of one city Belfast – into that grain of sand in which we can see the whole world. This is where she may remind you of Kafka (mentioned once in the novel) and reminded me a bit of Ishiguro who also likes to abstract from precise details of time and place in order to produce something more let’s say imagined and leaving to the imagination.

Third, in addition to the claustrophobic band of core characters – the narrator, her ma, her maybe boyfriend, Milkman, real milkman, … who are locked in different ways into their world of perpetual conflict, the author who knows about Greek and Roman things, provides a contrast, a counterpoint, a chorus maybe in two grouped sets of characters: the narrator’s own wee sisters who are on some other planet entirely based on shrewd child understanding of the planet currently on offer, and later in the narrative the issues women, early 1970s second wave feminists, also as if on another planet where the issues are different to those recognised by the host community which they baffle. Both wee sisters and the issues women provide a great deal of the laughter which this book will yield.

Well, I don’t want to do a plot summary. The book is well-worth reading. I would have made it shorter and I would have very occasionally been a bit more careful about anachronism writing now about the 1970s. But read it, go with its flow, and don’t plonk it into one of the moulds insisted upon now by those always with us wanting to make our worlds claustrophobic, as if novels are written to illustrate trending hashtags. *

* Added 13 December 2018: As if to disagree, here is Writing Magazine (January 2019) commenting on the work of  "bestselling Irish novelist" Celia Ahern: "the stories, written with charm,kindness and empathy, are well-timed for the #MeToo climate" (page 16)

Review: Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens, Philosophy and Conceptual Art

When I reviewed Sara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking on this blog ( 22 April 2018) it got me thinking again about conceptual art, something I hadn’t really done for twenty years – my last serious engagement, a long piece I wrote in response to the 1997 Turner Prize exhibition, the prize won by Gillian Wearing:

 http://www.selectedworks.co.uk/turner1997.html

So now I wrote a short essay setting out my principal (and non-original) objection to conceptual art, that you don’t need to experience it first hand to talk about it – a fact which makes all the expenditure of time and effort and use of (expensive) gallery space seem rather pointless. A version of this essay appears in the bi-monthly Philosophy Now (Issue 129, December 2018/January 2019).

Then I thought I ought to find out what others had been thinking since I did my thinking in 1997 and Amazon pointed me towards the 2007 book I am now reviewing. For a collection of essays by professional philosophers, it’s really quite readable. Most contributors proceed charitably, trying to find a way or ways to accommodate conceptual art (whether narrowly or loosely defined) within the traditions of mostly gallery-based visual art. If anything, they bend over backwards to give it legitimacy.

If it is accepted that conceptual art is an art of ideas, then for example it’s possible to argue that the ideas have aesthetic value rather in the way that a mathematical proof can be elegant or a chess move beautiful – this is an argument developed by Elisabeth Schellekens (page 85 for the specific examples I have given). But this leaves the question open, Why do we need anything more than the ideas? Why do we need the installation or the performance, the bit that costs money and takes up our time and  a gallery space?

Schellekens uses the word “boldness” and another contributor speaks of the audaciousness of conceptual art. The founding work for conceptualism, Duchamp’s Fountain (a male urinal) is endlessly talked about, even now, because it took nerve and cheek to put the urinal into an art gallery, and nerve and cheek often get us talking. Lots of people could have had the ideas which conceptual art occupies itself with; very few people would have dared do anything about them in the fashion done by conceptual artists. So the embodied bits of the ideas are provocations, though it may be very unclear what they are meant to provoke. In contrast, an anarchist who throws a bomb or a terrorist who plants one usually has a clear idea of what they want to provoke.

The invocation of boldness and audaciousness is meant to give point to the installations and the performances. But Schellekens realises that this move effectively links conceptual art to things like jokes and satirical cartoons (page 86) and Margaret Boden references (page 228) the rather embarassing case of Alphonse Allais, a nineteenth century Parisian prankster who got there before the po-faced artists of the 20^th century, already in the 1880s exhibiting a canvas painted entirely white and titled Anaemic Young Girls Going To Their First Communion Through a Blizzard.

I think the Allais case allows a different take on conceptual art. I think most of it belongs in the broader category of Pranks. Pranks usually involve someone in quite a lot of prior thought, maybe mixed in character and motive, and are realised by means which are intended to discomfort or shock some individual, group or institutition. The pranks performed by conceptual artists can, however, generally be grouped into a distinct sub-category of pranks  by two important features:

(1)   Humourlessness

(2)    A sense of entitlement to public funding and/or access to public exhibition space

So Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) is a contemporary prankster but not a conceptual artist because he aims to make people laugh. And only as a prank would a prankster seek public funding or an academic job or space in the Tate Gallery, but conceptual artists feel entitled to all those things. This is consistent with the claims of an institutional theory of art , which is also used  several times in this volume as justification for treating conceptual art as art (for example, by Lopes at page 241).

The obvious counter-example to my claim (1) would be Banksy’s recent auto-destructive prank at Sotheby’s which was indeed very funny. But that is in great contrast to most of the stuff the contributors to this book are labouring over.

*

My puzzlement about conceptual art dates back to the early 1970s when Michael Corris and a colleague from the US Art & Language group visited me in my rural Devon cottage and solicited a contribution for their new journal The Fox of which three issues appeared and are now collectors’ items. Well, I didn’t really have anything which I felt appropriate but I mentioned a draft study of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which would have been my cover story for a second year in Paris as a student with Roland Barthes had I stayed on after my first year. But I had decided to return to England and a job, and so it had never been worked up or shown to Barthes though a version in French existed. Anyway, to my surprise it was accepted for The Fox and appeared in issue 2 with small editorial additions which irritated me. But for the life of me I did not understand how my essay fitted into their project.

That digression does lead to a final point. Perhaps the core weakness of most conceptual art is that the links between ideas and embodied work are so weak or so opaque, and the ideas themselves so often confused, that really all we are offered (in most cases) is an invitation to free associate. So I think it likely that I got an essay published in The Fox for no good reason because there was no editorial clear thinking about what they were about and free association was the order of the day.

It is notable that in this collection, even though contributors have been asked to reference at least some among a number of selected works of conceptual art, that no one attempts a serious, say, thousand word piece of criticism which brings to life and understanding a particular piece of conceptual art in its specificity. It’s my belief that most  works of conceptual art could not bear the strain of sustained critical reflection and that is a main reason why it does not happen. Of course, there is plenty of humourless prose produced around conceptual art, some of which ends up in Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner.

Sometimes people know exactly what they are doing. At other times, they haven’t a clue what they are doing. For an artist, not quite knowing what you are doing is not such a bad place to be. It can mean that you are in the middle of some genuine exploration. Part of my problem with conceptual artists is that I'm not convinced that they are not quite knowing. Either they know exactly or they don't know at all.