Tuesday 11 June 2019

A few book non-recommendations

It's been a hectic week or so since my last substantial post. Two unexpected days in Ireland for a wake/funeral, and all the admin associated with the end of term: sample scripts, moderation, moderation forms, module statistics, module statistics pre-board response forms, organising resits, the formal boards, appraisal planning, workload planning: it all mounts up and much of it is necessary, if not efficient.

Next year promises to be efficient without necessarily being progressive: the move to compulsory online marking means I won't be chasing people for scripts, photocopying them, filling padded envelopes and posting them to external examiners to puzzle over gnomic crabbed comments: everything will be instantly visible in some low-rent typeface on a computer screen. I know there are a lot of arguments (starting with the environmental) for online marking, but I think my department's current compromise (handwritten marginal comments, typed substantial feedback on a coversheet) strike a happy medium between organic artisanal response and ease of comprehension. It bodes ill for me too: having decided not to have an internet connection at home so that I don't live on my favourite sites 24 hours a day (Moulton Bikes, Librarything, Jobs.ac.uk – and The Guardian, obviously, because I'm a stereotypical bleeding-heart liberal) and because I wanted a complete separation between work and home, I'll now have to stare at a screen, in the office, for even longer. I think this means I'm old.

Anyway, it wasn't all work last week: I managed to read a couple of books at least. One of them was Zadie Smith's Swing Time. Having left it on the shelf for a couple of years, I took my second-hand copy on the flight to Ireland with me. Thoroughly engrossed, I read it there and back, finishing it in the air on the return leg. Or rather, not finishing it. Some absolute rotter had removed the last page! It's not exactly a murder mystery, and there's no whodunnit to be revealed in the closing lines, but it left me utterly bereft and helpless. Thank heavens for Twitter and the numerous kind people who sent me photos of the missing paragraphs while I was on the train home: closure was achieved. Though not for the central protagonist. I heartily recommend it. Can't believe Madonna didn't sue though.

I also read and enjoyed Alison Plowden's zippy In A Free Republic: Life in Cromwell's England - lots of good detail and useful quotations from letters and diaries (mostly Royalist) but weirdly unedited: chapter titles had little to do with the content, and pages could swing between examinations of the Rump Parliament to details of common dietary or skin complaints. After that I read Gary Shteyngart's  Lake Success, which I thought was much less successful than his Super Sad Love Story: it tried to be a Travels With Charley/Tom Sawyer/On The Road encountering-the-real-America, plus The Big Short and Bonfire of the Vanities and American Psycho all at once, while simultaneously signalling its author's and protagonist's hyper-awareness of this literary tradition (the central character, an awful hedge-fund trader who has a mid-life crisis and travels across the US seeking his lost love, his spiritual progress measured in the number of women prepared to give him a redemptive shag, recalls his university creative writing class assignment, which featured a banker seeking redemption through rediscovering his lost love). It pulls its punches: you can't critique the damage caused by and inner emptiness of the 0.1% and make sure that your hero lives happily ever after without changing his fundamental views or behaviours at all, despite having gone on a literal and metaphorical journey. He ends up with $100 million in the bank and a strong relationship with his ex-wife and autistic son. The son - convincingly on the extreme end of the spectrum for most of the novel – miraculously turns out to be highly-functioning, loving and intellectually-gifted by the end. It's almost as if Shteyngart is deliberately parodying bad writing. But he isn't, unless I've completely missed the point, which is always possible.

(As a side-note, I automatically don't read anything described as The Great American Novel: size and significance don't correlate, and any attempt to represent a large and complex polity is pretty much bound to be a form of cultural imperialism, usually of the macho variety. I'd far rather read a lot of short novels covering less ground with less confidence written by people who aren't rich white men who went to Harvard and think that gives them a panoramic view of the country).

I'm obviously alone in this view though: my paperback copy is stuffed with august reviewers' declarations that Lake Success is a work of satirical and comic genius. I thought it was fatally wounded by sentiment and smugness. Not sure what I'll read next. Probably a Course Specification Template or two.

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