the sense that the booker prize sucks

There are two book reviews I’d like to post, by way of com­par­ing great writ­ing with crap writ­ing.  My orig­i­nal thought was to inter­leave snip­pets from these two books, allow­ing one to make its own case and the other to dig its own grave, more or less unas­sisted.  But when it comes down to it I’d rather not besmirch Michael Chabon’s lovely new Tele­graph Avenue by using it to blud­geon and fla­gel­late the watery, pious and flimsy British novella we will now sub­ject to its due mor­ti­fi­ca­tion— a novella that inex­plic­a­bly won the 2011 Booker Prize.  This is the same prize for which Cloud Atlas, a novel of sur­pass­ing genius whose forth­com­ing movie adap­ta­tion I’m antic­i­pat­ing with equal shares of dread and ecstasy, was only short­listed.  At this point I’m assum­ing that the prize is either as cor­rupt as Wine Spec­ta­tor, or as lazy and chau­vin­is­tic as the Guide Miche­lin.  I’ll recon­sider when David Mitchell wins it.

Per­haps a dis­claimer is due.  The opin­ions below are purely my own, it would seem.  No, really.  Crit­ics at The New Yorker, The Guardian, The SF Chron­i­cle, The Wash­ing­ton Post, The LA Times, Vogue, The Wall Street Jour­nal, The Boston Globe, The New Repub­lic and many other fine pur­vey­ors of cul­ture, not to men­tion my Face­book friends (hello Sara and Car­los), all seem to love the book I’m about to cas­ti­gate.  Maybe when I’m of a cer­tain age the “great but invis­i­ble skill” with which Julian Barnes has ren­dered his “crys­talline truths that have taken a life­time to harden” will sud­denly become less invis­i­ble?  Or maybe the emperor has no clothes.

Let’s begin with the title: The Sense of an End­ing (appar­ently “lifted from a work of lit­er­ary the­ory by the critic Frank Ker­mode”).  Does it get any more half-assed than that?  Actu­ally, yes:

I saw it in his face.  It’s not often that’s true, is it?  At least, not for me.  We lis­ten to what peo­ple say, we read what they write— that’s our evi­dence, that’s our cor­rob­o­ra­tion.  But if the face con­tra­dicts the speaker’s words, we inter­ro­gate the face.  A shifty look in the eye, a ris­ing blush, the uncon­trol­lable twitch of a face mus­cle— and then we know.  We recog­nise the hypocrisy or the false claim, and the truth stands evi­dent before us.  (p. 150.)

Now we know!  If only this wis­dom had been writ­ten in the right decade, Carl Sagan could have had it read aloud by Peter Usti­nov and engraved on the gold record we sent into space, the bet­ter to pre­pare the aliens for dis­course with humans.

In case you’re won­der­ing, I picked this pas­sage because it’s about as writerly as it gets over the course of TSoaE’s 163 pages.  What, is this not “ele­gant, play­ful and remark­able”* enough for you?

(*Quoth The New Yorker and the book’s front cover, under an inex­plic­a­ble paint­ing of an egg per­haps ele­gantly and play­fully, if unre­mark­ably, in peace­able repose on a table.)

OK, let’s move on to the dia­log course, the bet­ter to observe Julian Barnes’s keen psy­cho­log­i­cal insight in action:

So I sent an email to Veron­ica.  I headed it “Ques­tion,” and asked her this: “Do you think I was in love with you back then?”  I signed it with my ini­tial and hit Send before I could change my mind.

The last thing I expected was a reply the next morn­ing.  This time she hadn’t deleted my sub­ject head­ing.  Her reply read: “If you need to ask the ques­tion, then the answer is no.  V.”

[yr. hum­ble crit.: at this point it’s hard not to imag­ine bring­ing in Beavis and Butthead as guest crit­ics.  “Try sex­ting her dude!  Heh heh heh.”  “Uh.. huh huh huh.. yeah, sext her.. like, let her know how you really feel.”]

It per­haps says some­thing of my state of mind that I found this response nor­mal, indeed encouraging.

It per­haps says some­thing else that my reac­tion was to ring up Mar­garet and tell her of the exchange.  There was a silence, then my ex-wife said qui­etly, “Tony, you’re on your own now.”  (p. 116.)

So what did it say about his state of mind the first time, and what some­thing else did it say the sec­ond time?  I like how there are four lay­ers here of real­ity, right— Tony in the moment, Tony at a nar­ra­tive remove, the infi­nitely inscrutable & pissy Veron­ica, and the infi­nitely wise & suf­fer­ing Mar­garet.  Chicks always know best.

Read­ing this trea­cly tale of late mid­dle age clue­less­ness, one does get “the sense” that the Eng­lish pub­lic schools of the 50s and 60s didn’t do much for the devel­op­ment of emo­tional intel­li­gence in male youth— at least not for straight boys like Tony and, pre­sum­ably, Julian.  This reminds me how grate­ful I am that, although love and inti­macy lost are such cen­tral themes in TSoaE, there are— praise small mer­cies— no actual sex scenes in this book.  Our good for­tune is under­scored by the fol­low­ing close call:

I wasn’t exactly a vir­gin, just in case you were won­der­ing.  Between school and uni­ver­sity I had a cou­ple of instruc­tive episodes, whose excite­ments were greater than the mark they left.  So what hap­pened sub­se­quently made me feel all the odder: the more you liked a girl, and the bet­ter matched you were, the less your chance of sex, it seemed.  Unless, of course— and this is a thought I didn’t artic­u­late until later— some­thing in me was attracted to women who said no.  But can such a per­verse instinct exist? (p. 25)

I know, I know.  The book is like ambrosia, but strained through the cheese­cloth of an unre­li­able nar­ra­tor.  It’s post­mod­ern!  The prob­lem is that for us to care about and become invested in an unre­li­able nar­ra­tor, such that we can be all shocked and upset later on when the bub­ble bursts, we need to be drawn in enough to inhabit his per­spec­tive early in the book.  This is hard to do in Tony’s case, because he’s so obvi­ously an ass.  One feels frankly insulted that Mr. Barnes would find it plau­si­ble for the reader to find this schmuck and his philo­soph­i­cal mus­ings a good imped­ance match.

Even leav­ing this issue aside, the unre­li­able nar­ra­tor trick requires not only tech­ni­cal skill, but also excep­tional sen­si­tiv­ity on the part of the (real) author, in order to bring the “reveal” into focus at the right speed, at the right time, and with the right force.  It’s a demand­ing feat of ven­tril­o­quism, beyond even the usual rig­ors of free indi­rect style, and to pull it off the author needs to be work­ing at a far sub­tler level than the unre­li­able nar­ra­tor.  Of course when one writes one also becomes emo­tion­ally close to and invested in the char­ac­ters— even more so than the reader; it’s nec­es­sary to do so in order to make the voices true.  How­ever, it’s equally nec­es­sary to become close to the char­ac­ters who are not doing the nar­rat­ing, to invest the text with their voices— maybe obliquely at first, then more clearly in the endgame.  Oth­er­wise the “real­ity” under­gird­ing the story will be just as lame as the unre­li­able narrator’s real­ity.  And we won’t care.

And this is just what hap­pens.  My recur­ring feel­ing, when read­ing TSoaE, was that Julian Barnes and Tony Web­ster were too nearly the same per­son.  It got pretty claus­tro­pho­bic up there in Tony/Julian’s head.  When the Wise Women made their appear­ances, they came off flat and gnomic, deployed more in the man­ner of unyield­ing bol­lards along the side­walks of the plot­line than as real voices that could per­haps have turned this story into some­thing more three-dimensional.  In the absence of other voices, the shifts in per­spec­tive afforded by the series of big insights and real­iza­tions expe­ri­enced by Tony him­self really failed to pro­vide the nec­es­sary stereo separation.

Let’s end with a “Royale with Cheese” moment toward the end of TSoaE— on page 158.  By this late stage, the story is as senes­cent as Tony him­self; all invest­ments in char­ac­ter growth etc. are made; the chips, as it were, are on the table:

One day, I said to the bar­man, “Do you think you could do me thin chips for a change?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know, like in France— the thin ones.”

“No, we don’t do them.”

“But it says on the menu your chips are hand-cut.”

“Yes.”

“Well, can’t you cut them thinner?”

The barman’s nor­mal affa­ble­ness took a pause.  He looked at me as if he wasn’t sure whether I was a pedant or an idiot, or quite pos­si­bly both.

[yr. h.c.’s: “both!  Heh heh heh.”  “Huh huh.. yeah dude.. both.”]

“Hand-cut chips means fat chips.”

“But if you hand cut chips, couldn’t you cut them thinner?”

“We don’t cut them.  That’s how they arrive.”

“You don’t cut them on the premises?”

“That’s what I said.”

“So what you call ‘hand-cut chips’ are actu­ally cut else­where, and quite prob­a­bly by a machine?”

“Are you from the coun­cil or something?”

“Not in the least.  I’m just puz­zled.  I never real­ized that ‘hand-cut’ meant ‘fat’ rather than ‘nec­es­sar­ily cut by hand.’”

“Well, you do now.”

“I’m sorry.  I just didn’t get it.”

I retired to my table and waited for my supper.

And there’s the moral of the story: Tony Doesn’t Get It.  Pretty “adroit han­dling”, right, to use hand-cut chips as a metaphor for, you know, other stuff?  Like how you can’t turn an Eng­lish lover into a French one?

What really made me smile over this lit­tle pas­sage was how clearly it was drawn from life.  I’m will­ing to bet that it was actu­ally Julian Barnes who one day had this exchange with the bar­man at his local pub.  Barnes and Web­ster: just too cozy with each other.  Chips cut from the same potato.

OK, now I feel soiled and guilty, like Alex after beat­ing up the old guy in A Clock­work Orange.  It’ time to move on.  I’m going to try not to let my new con­tempt for the Booker pre­sump­tively color my opin­ion of Hilary Man­tel, whose Bring up the Bod­ies was already on my to-read shelf before the recent announce­ment that she’s won the prize for 2012.