Notes on a Scandal is the tale of Sheba Hart (short for Bathsheba, and that adulterous name will portend something), an English schoolteacher who has an affair with a student, told through the eyes of her friend and fellow teacher Barbara Covett, a sixtysomething-year-old single teacher, the very stereotype of the aging spinster (she even lives with her cat). What Heller does well is absorb you in the world view of Barbara, who moves from what one thinks is an impassive, observant narrator with nothing worse in her than a schoolmarmish tendency to complain about the state of basic comprehensive education, to something altogether more disturbing as the story progresses.

Sheba needs her friend Barbara, of course, as a shield against the media hordes once her scandalous story breaks, but as Notes progresses it becomes clear that Barbara needs Sheba too, and Barbara’s loneliness increasingly is revealed as a sort of sinister neediness. It’s a story of twin obsessions: Sheba’s increasing sexual/romantic obsession with her student, and Barbara’s obsession with her friend, the former manifestly obvious, the latter revealed slowly. It’s a real page-turner, and Heller’s writing is incredibly fine, balancing between Barbara’s astute observations of the world and of the things people hide in their own accounts of the world, while simultaneously hiding things from us. On Sheba, Barbara writes near the beginning, that “even now she is inclined to romanticise the relationship and to underestimate the irresponsibility - the wrongness - of her actions”, although her factual accounts of the affair can be trusted - yet by the book’s end, we wonder just how much the same applies to the narrator we thought we knew, and we wonder just where she gets her confidence that she and Sheba share a “relationship de chaleur“, one of “uncommon intimacy and trust”. It’s a novel stalked by the doubts of relationships - whether of lovers, of friends, or of reader and narrator - and Heller pulls it off wonderfully.

It turns out Judi Dench has the Barbara role in the upcoming film version. Cate Blanchett will play Sheba. Sounds very promising. And very of the times, non, given what seems to be a spate of female teachers in the news for having affairs? And of course, looking the book up on Google for links, who should I find has also borrowed it from the library but my friend Michelle, who beat me to it by a year, and provides excerpts.

Excerpt from Notes on a Scandal.

Technorati Tags: book, reviews

Six is about fertility and fecundity: even the central physical characteristic of the city it is set in is its rivers overflowing. Yet it is hardly a celebration, a Tom Jones-style picaresque; instead focusing the encumbrance at the end of the erotic encounter. Lix - aka Felix Dern, celebrated actor, but one acutely self-conscious of the blemish that marks his face - is both blessed and cursed, having impregnated every single woman he has slept with (including one twice).

We begin with the conception of Lix’s sixth child, and the novel wends its way back to the parade of women in Lix’s life. From the unnamed woman he lost his virginity to, jilted by her lover, to his second wife Mouetta, a parade of strong-willed women overwhelm the ever-suppliant Lix, surprisingly shy for a man of the stage. Crace, as is his wont, sets yet another novel in an alternate world - this one, an unnamed city with strict authoritarian overtones. But while Crace writes lines that are filled with portent, they wilt upon closer inspection - the authoritarian nature of the city may call to mind the former Soviet bloc, but it seems as though much effort goes in describing something that ultimately does not seem to play too major an emotional role in the characters’ lives. In the end, the descriptions of love, conception, and loss, while vivid on occasions, hardly mark the birth of any seminal work.

Other reviews of Six

“They say that birds do it - bees do it -
Even educated fleas do it -
Let’s do it - let’s fall in love.” - Cole Porter

I finished reading Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love on the train, and it inspired all manner of thoughts. So this isn’t exactly a review: it’s just an assortment of thoughts inspired by the book. For one, I thought Enduring Love meshed very nicely with Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, which I’m also reading, since the narrator Joe is a science writer and thus Pinker’s subject of consciousness and of evolutionary biology plays a role in McEwan’s book. I was struck by that crossing of ideas between science and literature, then in the acknowledgements in the back, I noticed that McEwan acknowledges Pinker’s formidable The Language Instinct as one of his sources. Was well chuffed to have made the connection.

Enduring Love is a tale of erotomania, the complete delusion that someone is in love with you, which reminded me of the first time I heard the word: in Diane Ackerman’s excellent A Natural History of Love, where she discussed Stendhal - famously a victim of unrequited love. (Stendhal’s name in turn reminded me of the Stendhal Syndrome, the psychosomatic illness caused by an overdose of beautiful art, but that’s a concept I’ll discuss another time.) (Actually, come to think of it Ackerman is a fine translator of science for the general public: very much like Joe.)

“When I got in she put her arms around my neck and brought my face close to hers. She knew I was a fool for this kind of encirclement. It made me feel that I belonged, that I was rooted and blessed.” - Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

McEwan puts in a fake “case study” Appendix at the end (which fooled quite a few scientists), and ends it with this (real) quote from Mullen and Pathe: “the pathological extensions of love not only touch upon but overlap with normal experience, and it is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology”. And the Mullen-Pathe quote in turn reminded me of Stendhal’s quote “People happy in love have an air of intensity”. Acts of real passion are often exquisitely intense. So what saves them from being classified as acts of delusion? How do you know you’re crazy in love, not just plain crazy? There’s the existence of reciprocity, for one - each “I love you” from a lover is an affirmation to the partner that he or she isn’t crazy, that this incredible emotion exists and that both parties can feel it. (The Gin Blossoms allude to this doubt in “Found Out About You”, addressed to a former lover: “Did you love me only in my head?”) And, for another, there’s the existence of acknowledgement: that is to say, the willingness of lovers to act as a couple to others, and/or the willingness of each lover in their individual capacity to tell others - verbally, or visually, such as the display of a wedding band - about the woman or man one loves.

“The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.” - Stendhal

And a final thought on Enduring Love. One of the most frustrating parts of the novel for me was when the narrator’s girlfriend Clarissa refused to believe that he was being stalked, or dismissed the stalker as harmless. Cassandra - the seer who isn’t heard, from the Oresteia - has always been one of the most compelling figures in fiction for me, and indeed film scenes in which people tell the truth but aren’t believed, and are in fact mocked or patronised for speaking the truth, get me so riled up. Even those old episodes of Sesame Street where no one believed that Mr Snuffleupagus existed frustrated the hell out of me. (If I recall correctly, that ended when the Children’s Television Workshop realised that the idea of adults not believing children - Big Bird, being, after all, just a big feathery kid - was not good if you want kids to report child molestation and other forms of abuse).

Come to think of it, this fear of not being believed shows up thousands of years later, in the cultural tic of suffixing sentences with “you know what I mean?” or “you know what I’m saying?” Having the unquestioned support of someone is one of the deepest signs of love, I think. Which is to say: it is very important for lovers to believe in each other; it is almost fundamental that they believe each other.

In response to a discussion over at a forum I frequent, here’s a list of the 10 books I would bring with me to a desert island (assuming I don’t need practical books such as the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook to teach me how to make fire without matches):

1. Shakespeare - Complete Works
2. James Joyce - Ulysses
3. Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
4. Nick Hornby - High Fidelity
5. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
6. Salman Rushdie - Midnight’s Children
7. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
8. Monty Python - The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words, Volume 1
9. Lenny Bruce - How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
10. Paul Krassner - Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

Which is not necessarily a list of what I would think are the 10 greatest works of literature of all time - after all, on an island one needs to balance art and the need to laugh. Books I would miss, in no real order:

• Thomas Pynchon - V
• Thomas Pynchon - Gravity’s Rainbow
• Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
• Raymond Carver - Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
• T.S. Eliot - Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950
• Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• Tom Wolfe - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
• Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London
• Anais Nin - Delta of Venus
• Luc Sante - Low Life
• Jane Austen - Emma
• Julian Barnes - A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
• Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway
• Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch
• Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities
  
• Kenneth T. Jackson - Crabgrass Frontier
• Richard Farina - Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me

Technorati Tags: desert, island, books, literature

So according to the Hollywood Reporter, they’re making a film version of On the Road, the classic Jack Kerouac novel, directed by Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries). I guess, thinking about it, the Motorcycle Diaries does parallel On the Road in that it tells the story through the eyes of someone in thrall to a much more charismatic real-life character - Che in the former, Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady in the latter - and that’s not always easy to convey in film. But despite liking that film, I remain skeptical of anyone’s ability to adapt On the Road. On the Road was one of those books that made me want to go see America: the book for me felt alive with sheer manic energy, reckless and on the brink, sort of the literary equivalent of amphetamines. And that last paragraph - thinking of Dean Moriarty - always gets to me.

In retrospect, I owe big thanks to Tom Katzenbach, my former high school English teacher who let me go off and read whatever I wanted within the general topic area of “American literature of the 1960s” (with some generous stretching of the decade’s boundaries). I guess I was about 17 or 18 then, and in a span of a few months blew my mind reading Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Thomas Pynchon, and Richard Farina’s vastly underrated Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, among others.

I know On the Road isn’t necessarily the greatest work ever written (and yes, I know of Truman Capote’s sneering “typing not writing” quote); for that matter, the Dharma Bums is probably the better Kerouac novel. But it meant something to me when I was younger, and I’m certainly not the only one: the film’s going to have to live up to very high standards if it wants to touch the emotional core that the book did.

Technorati Tags: film, kerouac, books

The Guardian has a good interview/feature on Nick Hornby since Hornby’s about to release his new book A Long Way Down. The article uses Hornby’s dual life as a theme, such as the duality of being a Cambridge-educated football supporter at a time when football was equated with yobbery, and this bit:

Hornby’s history is rather complicated. One potted biography could read: age 48, son of successful businessman Sir Derek Hornby, graduated from Cambridge University, became a literary critic, then bestselling author and friend to the great and good. Another potted biography could read: lower-middle-class son of secretary mother Margaret, drifter, failed teacher, failed journalist, failed screenwriter, achieved surprising success with memoir of a football fanatic and loser. Both biographies would be equally true.

Interesting, I rarely think of Hornby’s novels as reflecting any sort of mix of identities, but the whole man/boy thing - that even armed with the knowledge that adolescent behaviour is faintly ridiculous, it’s still hard to actually grow up - is embedded as a central defining charateristic of most of the novels. Of course, How to be Good was very different in that regard, with a female narrator, but the whole idea of struggling with one’s behaviour in society, and learning to accept - or even embrace - the one’s limitations still remains present… in High Fidelity, redemption is found when Rob releases the record, thereby actually grappling with the world at hand and creating something. Learning to do something with the life that you have rather than trying to reach an idealistic life (whether it is a morally superior life as in How to Be Good or a shiftless life of indolence as in About a Boy) seems to be a central idea in Hornby’s novels, which might reflect an apporach for integrating the opposites in a dual life.

All in all, I’m excited about A Long Way Down, even if it sounds closer to the middling How to be Good than the inspired High Fidelity… will review the novel as soon as I get my hands on a copy.

By Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin
(The Harvill Press)

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle starts off simply enough, when Toru Okada and his wife Kumiko lose their cat, and turns into a masterful novel, spanning philosophy, Japanese history, and metaphysics, among other things.

Toru Okada - or “Mr Wind-Up Bird”, as his teenage neighbour May Kasahara calls him - has recently been unemployed, and tends the home while his wife Kumiko goes to work. Then elements of the surreal start creeping into his life. Two mystical sisters with the improbable names of Malta and Creta Kano appear and predict his future. A mysterious woman makes explicit phone calls. And somehow all this is connected to Okada’s nemesis Noboru Wataya, and to the history of Japan and Manchukuo, its puppet state in northern China.

In the world of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, women occupy a space akin to a dreamscape: it’s never fully clear whether they are corporeal or just apparitions in a dream. Even Kumiko leaves Toru, leaving only a mysterious missive. Yet this retreat into a dream world is unsurprising: the world of men in the novel is the world of war and politics, a world where people are skinned alive and brutalised with a baseball bat. It is the world of Nomonhon, of unfixed borders (that between Mongolia and Manchukuo, effectively the Soviet Union and Japan), where trespass causes punishment and hurt.

Indeed, the ways in which the past bears on the present form a constant strand of thought in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Much in the same way as horrific events set in place the irreversible path of fate in a Greek tragedy, the horrific past of the Japanese in China affects the present, intruding upon even the passive - and hence seemingly blameless - life of Toru Okada. Like a patient with repressed memories, the lack of acknowledgement of the facts merely leads to internalised conflict and pain, and at times haunting fragments of a collective unconscious inevitably escape. The effects of the past are felt either acutely - as in the psychic pains of the various women in the novel - or not at all, as seen in the numbed response to life of Lt. Mamiya upon his return to Japan from a Soviet labour camp. Eventually, Okada connects to a mother-son pair (named, naturally, Nutmeg and Cinnamon), and finds a bizarre job easing women’s psychic burdens. And finally, as though acknowledging that passivity is not an appropriate response to the shattered world, Okada is forced into a series of very definitive actions in order to bring his wife back.

Stylistically, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force. Murakami excels, as always, in imbuing meaning into every little moment - the conversations between Toru and May seem to be bursting with a subtext of romantic and/or sexual interest, for instance. Throughout the novel, Murakami’s beautiful descriptions seem to capture pure undistilled emotions - pain, suffering, longing; the sense of disquiet of that pervades his work is especially notable here. Yet the feeling of unease does not mean The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is above humour. One of the central premises of Del Close’s Harold method of improv comedy is that you accept every proposition in the world, and this same bemused acceptance of the absurd is present here in Okada’s wry responses and the general flat tone in which surreal events are described. So Okada’s decision to rest at the bottom of a dry well and his subsequent passing through the wall of the well to an alternate world are no more and no less implausible in the novel than picking up dry-cleaning from the cleaners.

It’s true that the plot of the novel doesn’t quite cohere even at the end. Perhaps the various strands once unleashed were too numerous to pull together. But perhaps, too, feeling is first, and the inescapable aesthetic and philosophical responses to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle means the novel is one that sears itself into your consciousness.

Tom Waits is to music what Charles Bukowski is to books. Discuss.

“I was sad because I had no on-board fax until I saw a man who had no mobile phone” - New Yorker cartoon

Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety is about one of the fundamental paradoxes of modern capitalism and meritocracy. By making it possible (or at least trying) for anyone to succeed in a society, the corollary must be that those who don’t succeed somehow brought it upon themselves. It’s the troubling flip side of opportunity, perhaps because of the fundamental attribution error: people tend to discount the role of luck and fortune in judging success, and so create these assumptions of morality associated with success.

De Botton comes from a philosophy background (he wrote How Proust Can Change Your Life), but there are lots of strands of thought that parallel the economist Juliet Schor (whom I had the privilege of taking a class under). What I think is interesting is how their solutions to status comparisons tend to suggest individual action, either leaving society or becoming conscious of status comparisons in order to reject it (in The Overspent American, Schor suggests that as consumers we should be “conscious of the process (of being forced into consumption) and the insidious ways it ensnares us”). But is it possible to live in the modern world without some sense of anxiety, of “lack”, of desire? What if envy is a natural psychological reaction? The natural solution to envy, in the immortal words of William Devaughn, may be to be thankful for what you got. Easier said than done. De Botton taps into an unconscious awareness of status that resides in all of us, but the difficulty of finding a solution to status anxiety may leave a reader feeling, well, more anxious.

By Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton

Compared to The Ground Beneath Her Feet’s stifling view of popular music, I was glad for the breath of fresh air that was Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, which is all about the evolution of the DJ as a major force in hip hop, house, and other musical genres. (There’s a slight bias here, of course, since I do like to dabble with the decks.) Brewster and Broughton write about block parties in the Bronx in the early 70s with Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa - the three pioneers of hip hop DJing discovering there was certain portions of records that (the ‘breakbeat’), discovering how to mix songs together, modifying equipment and bringing huge sound systems to compete with each other. While they were local idols, all that time almost no one in Manhattan or in the media, knew this movement was going on a few subway stops away from them. So you never know what might bubble up and become a national music movement.

Hit the subway with a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet in hand: 575 pages – should do nicely for a few morning commutes. The back cover has a quote from the London Times, claiming it’s “the first great rock ’n’ roll novel in the English language.” And indeed, Rushdie is a linguistic genius, and his descriptions of Bombay are sublime. But it doesn’t rock.

Is this the way music history is seen by those who aren’t obsessive music fans? It’s hard to know, being a member of said group. The Ground Beneath Her Feet recapitulates rock’s history as a celebrity exercise, albeit with Rushdie’s interjection of a trio of protagonists from India. In the novel’s version of rock, stars receive their musical talent from the gods and ascend to their place in the pantheon of celebrities out of nowhere, without any sense that what comes out of the mainstream - good or bad - only represents the tip of the iceberg, while thousands of unsung (literally, sometimes) musicians lie around. And that’s why I dislike media obsession with AvrilJustinBritney. Regardless of what I think of their music’s quality, it seems almost disrespectful to say that these are the only forces at play in the world of music.

Still, publishing The Ground Beneath Her Feet gave Rushdie the chance to write a song with Bono. (To work pro Bono? Salmy and Bonno? Boy, all these awful puns are coming into my head.) Maybe we’ll soon see other writer-singer collaborations. I can see it now, J.K. Rowling and Eminem. Hey kids! Do you like violence?

(The Ecco Press)

In an era of talk-show hosts and the self-loving blather of the chattering classes, is the confessional mode of speech a vice? “The need to unburden… was a selfish need” goes a line in the English author Nicola Barker’s new novel, Wide Open, and ultimately the novel addresses the question of the line between the need for revelation and the desire for indulgence. Even as characters are drawn out of their shells, nothing is ever fully ‘wide open’.

Barker assembles a cast of Londoners, misfits all, for her novel. Lily, the girl born without fully-formed organs; Sara, Lily’s mother and a boar farmer; Luke, the former pornographic photographer who smells of fish; Ronny, missing his big toes. At the slippery heart of her tale are two adult brothers, Nathan and Jim (whose name is really Ronny – all will be explained later), and Nathan’s quest for redemptin at not forcing his brother to escape from their paedophilic father. The plot is driven by Ronny’s entry into Jim’s life, and how that entrance brings about revelations (opening up, as it were) and conciliations – between Nathan and Jim, Lily and Sara, Sara and Luke. Aptly enough for a novel about the neglected, Nathan works at the Lost Property office of the London Underground, the repository of the forgotten. Like the objects that pass through Nathan’s hands, the characters stand in limbo – existing but unrecognised.

If it sounds confusing, it is. Not many novels open with two people with the same name, as Wide Open does with two Ronnies: the Ronny without the big toes, and Nathan’s brother. Even fewer rename a main character some way into the text, as happens when Nathan’s brother is rechristened Jim by the other Ronny. Clarification is not high on the novel’s priorities, either. In the same way that all her characters choose to retreat from society to hide the awfulness of their pasts, Barker opts for layer upon layer of density. Perhaps some things are not meant to be known. Like Luke’s bizarre join-the-dots form of pornography, the strength lies in what is actually missing – to be wide open is to be exposed, to be “wide open as a can of worms”. Revelation, for the reader as much as the characters, is best in limited quantities.

Despite the initially complicated plot, the undeniable force of Barker’s style draws us in anyway. All throughout the novel, she excels in conveying an underlying rumble of disquiet, a feeling that something is imperceptibly off-kilter. Like Ronny’s missing big toes, there is a sense that something profoundly important lies just out of our sight. The cadences of the sentences resound at the level of a missed heartbeat – for instance, Jim’s reaction to being called a “skinny baldie runt of a man” by Lily, which has a palpable yet indefinite tension: “He turned and cut into the sandwich. The yolk was cold, and the blade was much sharper than he’d anticipated”. The resonances eventually swell to an emotionally intense climax, as Nathan and Jim’s secret about their awful father is drawn to the fore.

Somehow in the midst of the uneasiness and sadness, the novel sparkles with the humour of the surreal (in one exchange, Lily asks Ronny “What did you do to yourself?” and is met with “Oh. I caught fire.”), and with unusual imagery (Lily is called “every inch a Sea Monkey… Pale and alien and underwatery”). But while the bleak humour is generated by the peculiarities of the characters, there is a definite authorial love for the seemingly unlovable characters, a love which transfers to the reader. “No one loved freaks”, Lily learns early in her life when a sow gives birth to a deformed offspring, and certainly everyone in the novel seems hermetically sealed as protection against the lack of love. But as in Luke’s last name, “Hamsun - like handsome but back to front”, the aesthetics of beauty are reversed as we are engaged by the characters. Our judgmental instincts cast to one side, we become open. We love these freaks.

The engaging characters and the refreshing lines of description and dialogue of Wide Open have garnered high praise since its release in the United Kingdom about six months ago; this Stateside release is an excellent trans-Atlantic introduction to the ferocious originality of Nicola Barker’s work. It is a novel unique, a novel unto itself, and it is a novel into which, like Ronny listening to a story of Jim’s, we are “slowly, safely, surely, soundly” hooked.

This article first appeared in The Harvard Crimson.

By Bret Easton Ellis (Knopf)

(Note: right now I’m putting out a lot of material that was previously published in the Harvard Crimson, so apologies if the reviews are sounding dated. “Proper” reviews will follow shortly.)

Combining the world of celebrity and conspiracy theory, Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis’ first full novel since 1991’s American Psycho (1994’s The Informers being more a series of vignettes), takes on the classic Ellis topic, the amoral world. This time, that world is not just New York (as in American Psycho) or Los Angeles (The Informers, Less Than Zero) but that of international celebrity, taking in the glitterati axis of New York-London-Paris. Woody Allen’s visited this world recently in Celebrity, but more lightheartedly – Ellis is cold, cold, cold.

No vampires populate this particular Ellis work, but then it’s hard to believe that any warm blood flows in Glamorama’s characters. Victor Ward, fashion’s latest “It Boy of the moment”, is the novel’s memorable protagonist, an überstereotype of the male model. “The better you look, the more you see”, goes Victor’s pithy saying, and he believes it. His lifestyle is the extreme of everything the current culture worships: he can’t avoid thinking in brand names and image and speaks with lines from pop songs (“do you have the time to listen to me whine?”). Even honesty to him is merely another image – “The ’90s are honest, straightforward. Let’s reflect that”. Obviously not too bright (the opening page has a hilarious scene of him asking “Who the fuck is Moi?”), Victor is obsessed with attaining celebrity, debating for hours “the best angle a designer beret should be tilted”. This is his world, where “beauty (is) considered an accomplishment”, where the deepest act is his double-crossing of his partner Damien by setting up another club, where no one has any emotions beyond the visceral response. All the sex scenes are described in purely pornographic terms.

This is funny enough, but gets tired easily. Celebrity by itself teeters so often into self-parody it seems too easy to bash it. Fortunately, Ellis does more than that, injecting Glamorama with a sharper plot than earlier novels, which kicks in about a quarter of the way into the novel. Victor, for a $300,000 fee, is sent by the mysterious F. Fred Palakon (whose name echoes G. Gordon Liddy’s neatly enough to hint at the web of deceit to follow) to London to look for a former Camden College friend, Jamie Fields, now a model. Slowly, he gets entangled in a much larger plot, where models are really the terrorists, responsible for bombings of the Institute of Political Studies and other major buildings. Uncharacteristically for an Ellis protagonist, Victor is terrified by all this cold-bloodedness. It’s the perfect nexus of all that is newsworthy, where celebrity and politics are inextricable. Given how little the models seem to care of people, this makes perfect sense. As Jamie Fields says, “basically, everyone was a sociopath… and all the girls’ hair was chignoned”.

This is the conspiracy theorist’s tempting conceit, the assumption that someone is behind all the awful events in the world. The true terror is, of course, that no one is, and we live in a world of random horror. Still, the premise is intriguing. Unfortunately, it gets spoilt by Ellis’ penchant for proper nouns. For a book whose main character is so desperately au courant, the anachronisms and inaccuracies are enough to disturb. References are still made to the late Michael Hutchence, Winona Ryder still dates Dave Pirner, and the de rigeur Startac cellphone is misspelled. A deeper problem is the namedropping. Supposedly meant to satirise Victor’s obsession with looks, one cannot help but feel that it just reflects the author’s attraction to glamour. At heart, Ellis is a moral satirist torn by his attraction to what he criticises. There are scenes which are nothing more than masturbatory lists of famous names – “Brooke Shields, John Stamos, Stephanie Seymour, Jenny Shimuzu [sic]”. And so many brand names make an appearance, from Alaia to Prada to Yohji Yamamoto, you’d think he had a product placement contract. It seems to be Ellis’ convenient shorthand for character sketches. When Victor undergoes a transformation to a law student, we know he is different because he now wears a Brooks Brothers suit and drinks Diet Coke. London and Paris become nothing more than a different collection of recognisable proper nouns (Notting Hill and Irvine Welsh in the first case; Chez Georges and Yves Saint-Laurent in the second). And Ellis’ annoying habit of naming the songs that are playing in the background, or even quoting them, as he does with Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova”, comes across like an effort to give a soundtrack to the entire book. Perhaps this is all a parody of how celebrities or people in general think in the modern world, but surely the point could be made with less. As it stands, all the names merely detract from Victor’s troubles.

Still, Victor’s sense of terror in being unable to distinguish the true from the false is unmistakable. The world of celebrity in Glamorama really is inescapable, not just because Victor is too shallow to comprehend anything beyond it, but because everything – from the public spheres of politics and religion to the private sphere of sex – is part of this world. The plot twists more often than Chubby Checker on speed. Reality alternates with the constructed so often that the constructed becomes real: “everything is altered… everyone will believe this”. Even the novel itself borrows Jay McInerney’s Alison Poole character (from McInerney’s Story of My Life). Altered photos of Victor supposedly at various parties and photo shoots appear, and he is threatened with edited photos of him ostensibly in the act of murder. It’s the ultimate payback for someone obsessed with looks. This ‘real truth’ is less shallow than the original world of glitz we are used to – and at the same time purely superficial. All the action, all the blood and gore of bombings is really just more material for the cameras to take in. It’s the book as snuff film, real pain made distant by the act of filming. At one point, the apparent master terrorist-supermodel Bobby Hughes commands the killing, and then turns to his associate with the camcorder and says “Keep rolling”. Glamorama is a book that reads as movie, and its constant references to Victor’s life being filmed (“I think the look they exchange is overdone; the director, surprisingly, does not”) without any specific motive is a tidy commentary on the creeping increase of observation. After all, when we put down the book, we can return to the ‘real’ world and watch When Animals Attack and Cops on prime time television.

Has the world become just like Ellis described – one of sheen and brands? The temptation is to respond to Glamorama in a superficial way, merely enjoying the great lines and the action, not seeing it as real. And Ellis, for all his critique of style, is a master of it, using especially cutting lines to describe Victor’s shallowness. As one character says, Victor thinks the “Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes”, while Alison tells him “the only pet you ever owned was the Armani Eagle”. “We’ll slide down the surface of things” runs the constant refrain of the novel, and while Glamorama’s 482 pages of vacuous characters provoke a desire to surface, to break out of the trap of celebrity, it also points out the pervasive nature of glamour. Ellis is often more interested in being cool than actual meaning (the novel opens with a Hitler quote); with Glamorama, he seems to be saying that this is the only truth we all share.

By Helen Fielding

Friday March 3

1½lb (v.g.; resembles v. intellectual tome, in manner of Henry not Helen Fielding, once the cover is taken off. Also, cover removal allows male reviewer to preserve semblance of being macho). Number of times faux-Bridget style intro must have been used in other publications by the time this review is published: probably 500 (ugh). Alcohol units consumed while pondering previous fact: 1.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Bridget Jones novel that begins with “Hurrah! The wilderness years are over” must be setting up a false dawn. What fun, after all, would it be seeing the same woman whose diary invented a whole support vocabulary for Singletons turn into a Smug Going-Out-With-Someone? Fortunately, while Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason begins where Bridget Jones’ Diary left off – i.e. in happily-ever-after mode, with Bridget making goo-goo eyes at newfound beau Mark Darcy – the heroine reverts back to her neurotic type, convinces herself that Mark secretly is in love with the evil slim Rebecca, and jeopardises her relationship. Another chance to bring the two together. Hurrah!

Having topped the UK book charts for weeks, The Edge of Reason lands in the US in time to dethrone that other recent British publishing colossus Harry Potter. Popular reaction to the original Bridget Jones’ Diary, who like Potter was initially feared too British in character to sell in America, was overwhelming and the book eventually sold 4 million copies worldwide. (Confession: I am among a coterie of people too impatient to wait for the US release. Good thing Amazon has a UK division.) It wasn’t solely a publishing phenom, either; the surprise felt by critics when what seemed to be merely a Cosmo Beach Book of the Week actually turned out to be a well-crafted piece was palpable. Indeed, the back cover contains an endorsement from Salman Rushdie (”a brilliant comic creation”).

That success was in large part due to the consistency of Bridget’s character and voice. Whether Bridget is a postfeminist heroine or an antifeminist throwback seems secondary to that fact. At first glance merely flighty and airy, the actual brilliance of that comic voice can be seen by the pale attempts by other authors in the intervening years to replicate that light tone successfully. While this is too detailed at points to read like a diary (”7.32 a.m. Except do not have any mushrooms or sausages. 7.33 a.m. Or eggs.”), as interior monologue it’s genius. The punning title may bring to mind Augustan seriousness, but Bridget continues to radiate glorious energy, and that sheer energy propels The Edge of Reason. Like Austen’s Emma (it’s hard to avoid referencing Austen when a novel includes elements such as the aforementioned Darcy, the scheming Rebecca and mislaid letters), a large part of the book’s humour derives in part from the deluded conviction of a heroine who ‘knows’ what should be done in love. Bridget’s precepts come humorously from her new source of inspiration, self-help books (”a new form of religion”), and Fielding’s description of the conflicting advice (Bridget owns both Happy to be Single and How to Find Your Perfect Partner in Thirty Days) manages to simultaneously send up the heroine and increase our goodwill towards her.

Fielding knows when she’s on to a good thing: this sequel avoids making Bridget relationship-bound, and duplicates many of the elements of the initial diary, incomplete sentences and all. The diet books of the first diary may have been replaced by self-help ones, but Bridget’s pick-and-mix approach, choosing only the advice she enjoys, remains, as do the dynamics of her tripartite friendship with Jude and Shazzer. As they work their way through their various relationships, that friendship is both funny and genuinely warm. The casual acceptance of smoking, alcohol use and sex (aside: could Renee Zwellweger, recently cast as Bridget, duplicate this very British aspect of Bridget?) shows that Bridget is less high-strung than Ally McBeal, the inevitable object of comparison. And some genuinely hilarious moments pepper the novel: going to Mark Darcy’s house and finding a “lithe oriental boy, stark naked, smiling weirdly, and holding out two wooden balls on a string and a baby rabbit”.

In some ways, Bridget resembles a latter-day version of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, caught as she is a picaresque series of adventures and winning goodwill from both other characters and readers by dint of sheer charisma (and some aid from Mark Darcy). Admittedly, those adventures include perhaps the weak point of the novel, when Bridget is framed for smuggling drugs in Thailand, which seems to be the excitement-and-terror locale du jour (see Brokedown Palace or The Beach). Out of urban London, Bridget’s neuroticism seems hopelessly out of context: for all her moaning in her diary, a lot of the humour of the novel derives from the fact that her life is rather good, actually. And her performance of “Like a Virgin” in a Thai prison is the stuff of bad comedies.

Still, Fielding undercuts criticism by employing a bit of self-parody. Recognising the potential silliness of Bridget’s obsession with Colin Firth (Mr Darcy on TV’s “Pride and Prejudice”), the author exaggerates it by giving Bridget an over-the-top interview opportunity with the man himself (part of the in-joke is that Bridget is writing for the Independent, the same newspaper where Bridget herself was created in a spoof column by Fielding). Bridget falling over herself to ask Firth about the diving scene in “Pride and Prejudice” (”what I mean is did you ever have to take the shirt off and… and put another one on?”) is yet another laugh-out-loud moment. And Bridget achieves success as a freelance TV journalist in the novel because viewers relate to her nervousness, just as the whole Bridget phenomenon was in large part due to an instant empathetic relation to Bridget’s foibles.

It’s true that The Edge of Reason is not going to convert any non-Bridget fans with its self-indulgent length (421 pages? How does a busy woman like Bridget find time to write more than a page a day?) And even fans will notice that the plots of the novel don’t tie together as neatly as its predecessor. Whereas the relationship between Bridget’s mother and her unctuous Portuguese suitor Julio was the plot lynchpin of the first novel, this time around the mother’s adoption of Wellington, a Kikuyu tribesman who is much wiser than the muddle-headed, annoying mother, seems superfluous, included merely for the humorous possibilities. Moreover, the diary’s focus on 1997, complete with references to the election of Tony Blair, dates it a bit, although it does allow Bridget to react to the death of Diana–leaving us relating to a fictional character who herself relates to a real-life character whose life was equal parts fairy tale and tragedy.

Still, that the book revolves around 1997 reminds us how long the wait for this sequel has been, and how much Bridget’s unique tone was missed. (Bridget Jones, you’ve been gone too long.) The Edge of Reason will probably not engender any new angst-ridden debates about the state of the modern career women, but it does continue Fielding’s fine form. In the tradition of comic novels, there’s even a marriage at the end, although this reviewer is not about to say whose. Grab a chardonnay; it’s time to keep up with this Jones.

This review first ran in the 3 March 2000 issue of the Harvard Crimson.