Little Coffin Boy

                    

[A story whose attempted publication would take up too much of the writer’s precious reading time].

The 1985 hardback edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Odd Number wiggled into the library, sweat dripping down his pages, dampness on his spine. He’d shimmied up nine whole stairs to the first level, to the children’s section, and was tuckered. Before him sat row upon row of beautiful children—some worn and battered down the ages, others barely glimpsed at all. He stretched his jacket, ruffled his opening chapters, and proceeded to the first shelf: orphans. His thesis was on the role of the orphan in contemporary humanity, or something like that, he’d still to finalise the focus. Orphans had always fascinated him, especially the rickety, squat urchins of Victorian London. 

Wiggling past the modern orphans with their fat cheeks, Burberry caps and mean mouths, and the pre-war tykes with their grubby faces and cute Cockney tongues, he soon arrived at orphans of the 1800s—a surprisingly poor selection for his needs. He inspected several intriguing specimens: one toothless girl with bloody elbows and a torn rag skirt who said “maw, maw” over and over, and a naked boy with lashes down his back whose eyes rolled up into his skull in haunting intimations of death.

But the 1985 hardback edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Odd Number was delighted when his front cover alighted on a proud-looking child in a top hat, braces and dirt-free trousers. His shiny skin, manicured nails and polished brogues seemed an unusual fit for an orphan. “My parents were kidnapped and executed by defectors to Queen Victoria,” he said. “I was held hostage in our estate and taunted by the cowardly killers. They dressed me like a Lord and named me Little Coffin Boy. They forced me to construct my own coffin by cannibalising my father’s precious Edwardian dining table, then lie down inside while they drove a sword through my heart.”

The hardback ruffled its final chapters ferociously, shocked. “I closed my eyes, awaiting my excruciating death. Then a fortuitous occurrence saved me from this cruel fate. Our maid Helena discovered the bodies of my poor mother and father hanging from the chandelier, and gave a bloodcurdling shriek. ‘Murderers!’ she screamed. I tried to save her by sitting up in my coffin and shouting ‘Run!’ but I could no longer move. The executors chased Helena into the bedroom and I chose that moment to make my escape. Helena pled for her life, then screamed as the bastards drove their swords through her flesh. My heart was burning. I felt as though Hell had opened up around me, and the devil himself was waiting behind the front door. I escaped.

“My legs took me into town where I hid for three days behind bordellos and public houses. I shed copious tears for my parents, and came close to taking my own life. I decided, on the fourth day, to sneak into the National Library and install myself as an orphan in their archives. I wanted the world to know my story, and for the memory of my parents, and the shame of these cowardly murderers to be remembered forever.”

A shudder ran down the hardback’s spine. His preface fluttered. He could base his entire thesis around this remarkable orphan, it was quite a story. He closed his pages around the orphan’s foot and led him to the checkout, where the cute 1981 paperback edition of Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur curled her fortieth page at him by way of flirting. The afternoon was looking up! Perhaps he’d have her barcode by the end of the week?

*

I climbed down off the shelf and followed the 1985 hardback Odd Number to the checkout, his car, then back to his depressing study with its one anglepoise lamp and series of sharpened pencils lined up along a ring-stained desk. Third sucker this week. What makes these old hardbacks so gullible? I mean, there’s no adventure anymore, no risk. You sit there with all those whining orphan saps for hours on end, then some dapper dust jacket runs his deckle edges along your thigh, looking for some titillation, or some PhD student, groping for originality, listens to a purple sob story. Then boom! In two hours, I have them on the floor, devouring their contents from cover to cover.

A new challenge is what I need. So that’s why I’m playing it cool for now. See, when the book brings his friends around for a glass of toner or whatever these brainiacs drink, I can make my move and take down three or four at a time. An orgy of dusty hardbacks! I wait on his desk as he clamps me for further information. I find it hard to suppress a smile. “I miss my mother most of all, she gave me her warm milk every night.” He curls his 110^th page in confusion. I love fooling these fools with my sincerity.

Time passes. I grow restless feeding him this bullshit when I can pin him down and read him at any second. It occurs to me that this hardback probably doesn’t have friends. The moment comes at last—it happens after I spin an exhausting historical yarn about my father’s lineage. As he’s scribbling some notes, I leap off the desk and pin him to the floor, forcing open his cover. Usually the hardbacks protest at this point, forcing their cardboard covers shut, but I’m strong. This one doesn’t move at all. Doesn’t twitch. “Read me,” he says. “I don’t mind, read me if you like.”

I loosen my grip. “You aren’t smart enough to fool me. No one wants to be read by force.” He winks his tenth. “I’m different. No one reads me. No one wants me. I don’t mind being read like this. Please read me.” I back off completely—never like this, never. This is too strange. “No, you’re warped. There’s something wrong with you.” He claps his pages together in protest. “No, honestly. I want to be read. Please read me.” I leap off the table, nab a few pencils, and ditch the old pervert. “No way. I’m out of here. Creep.” And I leave, ignoring the light flapping of his pages as I go.

*

He lay there, rocking on his spine, the wan lamplight vulgar on his cover. For hours he abused his pages—scrunching and unscrunching and tearing out the last blank page. It hurt. Little Coffin Boy had reduced him, a twenty-six-year-old hardback, to pulp with his deceit and refusal to read his pages. What good was his thesis now? When more popular hardbacks, like the 1973 edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions were producing papers on German soldiers, or door-to-door salesmen, or Nobel prize winners—in vogue humans. He might as well forget the whole thing. Give up.

A dark night lay ahead. He wiggled to the bestseller neighbourhood, gazing with envy at the Dan Browns and Jeffrey Archers in their mansions, living the good life and getting read day in, day out by adoring humans, while complex souls like him festered in hovels. For an hour, he considered hurling himself into the Discount Bin River, where tired old books go to end their print run before their time. He pictured all  the humans who recoil from his covers. Who demand being returned to their libraries rather than glance upon his unpopular words. He dangled over the river’s edge. It was over.

There was something about the way that hardback pleaded with me. It was eerie. I felt some connection between us . . . something beneath the pages. You don’t bullshit books for ten years without picking up some understanding of a novel’s secret rifflings. I don’t know, it was like I passed up the chance for a new sensation. I’ve never read a book who’s wanted to be read by force before. Wouldn’t that be a change from the same-old same-old—I might discover a ‘forced’ consensual reading makes me feel new things.

I double-back to the hardback’s place. He’s not there. Perhaps this is a trap, and he’s seeking a Police Procedural Manual to ensnare me? I like the danger. Coming close to capture. It’s exciting for sure. Ambling through the streets, past the paperback mansions, I spot him dangling over the Discount Bin River’s edge. Am I too late? I call his name. “1985 hardback edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Odd Number! Wait!”

The 1985 hardback edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Odd Number leapt up onto its corners in surprise—so the Coffin Boy had returned to humiliate him further? “No use,” he said. “I’m obsolete.” The Coffin Boy held onto the bridge’s ledge, panting. “Wait . . . I want to read you.” A little curl from the hardback. “No use. I won’t be fooled.” He shakes his head. “I mean it. Spread your covers. Let me read you, I want to.”

And so the hardback opened up, letting Little Coffin Boy devour his dusty contents. A long evening began. At first the reader’s eyes glazed over, struggling to follow the unusual formatting. Then the first titter came with a look of perplexity and amusement. He hastily turned the pages, with even more bemused expressions as he progressed. Soon he reached the end. “That was one of the most strange and unique reading experiences I’ve ever had,” Little Coffin Boy said. “Thank you for reading me,” the 1985 hardback edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Odd Number said. “I wish more people would.”

  

And the Coffin Boy toddled off back to his library, buzzed at the new sensation. The hardback closed his covers and was never read again. His thesis in orphans was published in April 2012, two weeks before he went out of print.

Style vs. Content Symposium

After a slipshod introduction from Nathan Englander, a nervous babbling sort of chairman, Ali Smith delivered a fifteen-minute keynote speech, published here in its imperial whole. Citing Nicola Barker’s Clear: A Transparent Novel as an example of the ecstatic, multivocal style at the forefront of semi-popular semi-experimental fiction, she went on to deliver an impassioned address for the service of the word over the limitations of readers and the ruthlessness of the marketplace. The debate veered between illuminating but isolated self-commentaries, attempts to restructure the debate as it went on, and occasional back-and-forth banter between opposing tribes. Highlights included namedrops for Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, and David Foster Wallace—lowlights included Jackie Kay citing Faulker and Toni Morrison as “trailblazers.”

China Mieville criticised “beautifully put but bloodless and anodyne” prose. A cheer went up for “writers who write for other writers,” but the economic realities of elite backslapping cliques were disputed by a Danish lady and a snotty American who defined the writer’s task as “to ejaculate and bleed on the page,” his advice being “keep writing and you probably will eat” . . . the word ‘probably’ in relation to starvation hardly promising. ALAN GIBBONS WAS EXTREMELY LOUD AND VERY ANGRY. A bookseller made the head-slapping point that Fifty Shades of Grey “gets the reader reading”—which is unbelievable, specious bullshit as readers will only move towards different types of trash. Some student who was “slogging through Middlemarch” took the microphone and made the embarrassing observation that certain Victorian literature was the EL James of its day . . . sigh.

Englander was an appalling chairman, simply dictating who spoke next rather than stirring up or controlling the debate. The conversation lapsed into tedium pretty quickly. Ali Smith kept quiet after her speech, but her mere presence was pure liquid brilliance.

Please Release Me

I Touched the Salt Shaker Morrissey Touched When He Ate at the Same Restaurant as Me, by Daniel R. Mann

When Daniel R. Mann first heard The Smiths as a teenager, Morrissey spoke to him, and millions of other people, personally. Daniel pursued this personal, intimate relationship with millions of other people at countless concerts and interviews in television studios, stadiums, and platforms where Morrissey might formally appear. He wrote intimate personal letters to his hero in which he emphasised how Morrissey was singing for him and him alone, no one else, how Moz’s music had been written as the specific soundtrack to his (Daniel’s) life.

After three decades of this hero worship, Daniel decided to take this intimate relationship to the next level and follow his hero around—from his home in Los Angeles to his formal concerts and appearances—in the hope his hero might acknowledge this personal spiritual unique connection with Daniel R. Mann and become his friend and soul mate and lover. The closest Daniel managed was to touch the salt shaker Morrissey had used when Daniel had followed Morrissey to a restaurant in Sherman Oaks. “The waitress had removed the salt shaker by the time I got to the table, but I brushed up against her and my pinkie definitely connected with the salt shaker. It wasn’t the glass his companion was drinking from as some people said. It was definitely Moz’s salt shaker. Definitely,” says Daniel. 

This is his remarkable story.

Out now in hardback from Kooky Stalker Books, £45.90.

Book Bites Man

My latest book, working title The State I Am In (a fake book in the same-titled Belle & Sebastian song), is a fictional autobiography with three narrative strands: one representing my spurious past, one a fantasy present, the other an imagined future. I arrived at a point in my writing where all attempts to write about issues meaningful to me via fictional constructs (i.e. characters), were leading back to me—me wanting to write directly about me. But, because I still wanted to write fiction with characters and plots and everything, I decided to make myself the subject, the source material. The hairy nub of the matter. So inside each (mostly fictitious) narrative are morsels of truth from my own life, smuggled indecorously, or hideously obvious. The reader’s task (if they wish) is to piece together a portrait of the author (me) from the information imparted. The three narratives can also be read for their own merits if the reader is spectacularly disinterested in me. Here’s some logic.

By putting all my neuroses into the novel, by remorselessly parodying myself so no aspect of my personality goes unmocked, I exhaust all self-criticism until I am completely purged of all indulgent solipsistic nonsense, freed at last into a world of happiness and self-love. The tragedy of the novel is that this doesn’t happen. Or something like that. This is an ex post facto spin I have put on the idea but makes sense to me as the sort of berserk subconscious motive I might have for writing this book. I simply want to mess around with the notion of the autobiographical novel—how a writer’s best work is based on personal experience, how readers attempt to relate certain details to the writer’s own personal history, how we can never completely disappear ourselves, Barthes-like, from the text and must be culpable for every ruddy word.  So far, I have completed two thirds of the first draft between May and August.

Arlene’s Atoms, my completely complete novel, my heartiest attempt at a mildly ambitious, mildly mainstream breakout novel, has been sent to six potential agents: had turn-downs from one (Conville & Walsh), waiting for the others. Once the MS is turned down from all six (one won’t correspond, I have to assume a no), I’ll scope out other possible UK agents, then will send the MS directly to big-publisher slush piles (i.e. into the vast blackness of space), then small-press slush piles (at least the suggestion of a response!), then I’ll give up. Not writing. But shopping the novel for the foreseeable future. If this book doesn’t get published I don’t hold much hope for getting another one out there.

Graceless Notes

Lydia Lunch:  Queen of Siam (1980)

This is a perfect hide-under-the-covers, sneer-at-the-world album, with a touch of vampish seduction and careless cool for added (dis)pleasure. Lazy, slinky songs ‘Mechanical Flattery’ and ‘Tied & Twist’ make dark thoughts and misanthropic poses into normal sane responses to our dank world. ‘Gloomy Sunday’ is a love song to quietus. Almost uplifting in its soft-voiced sultriness. Lunch is the sort of singer who likes to seduce and poison the listener. ‘Spooky’ and ‘Los Banditos’ are deceptive come-ons into her realm of the blood-drenched erotic. No one comes out alive, but everyone certainly comes. ‘Lady Scarface’ is a snot-nosed little performance of beguiling cast-iron witchery. In case the listener should feel too cosy, ear-splitting big band numbers ‘A Cruise to the Moon’ and ‘Knives in the Drain’ keep the arrogant gothic poses at full snarl. ‘Carnival Fat Man’ and ‘Blood of Tin’ were written to insult and terrify the listener. As was, presumably, the entire album. A moody, minor classic.

Man Bites Book

Proposed titles for Jonathan Coe’s new book (or, entries on this year’s Booker longlist):

The Salty Persistence of Malchester Puddleduck

The Tenuous Windmill of Alain de Loofah

The Groovy Kinesis of Bob Forthright

The Lubricious Purdah of Julian Fink

The Glottal Fortune of Zebediah Small

The Vulval Clavichord of Xerxes Ripwinkle

The Dynamic Furtwängler of Paul Starling

The Yogic Putrescence of Alison Shirtsmith

The Cocksure Bobblehat of Lydia Policy

The Dying Dingbat of Derek the Dingbat

The Fizzling Munificence of A.G.P. Archimedes

The Supernumerary Wiffle of Sir Nigel Piddlemiddle

Writers, Cornered

TOOT TOUT: This is a new regular blog feature. TOOT.

I used to think one idea was as valid as another. If I could turn the tale of a blind ice-cream vendor in Compton into a heartbreaking tragicomic Pushcart-bagging poetic marvel, why not write that tale, instead of the more personal tale of the bespectacled perpetual self-deprecator (named M.J. Nicholls) with a sideline in self-lacerating quips and blanket denunciations of all that is beautiful and worthwhile on this earth? Why not let the poor man on the street have a voice over the narcissistic misanthrope with bad skin, eyesight, and diction? Or, what makes one idea catch fire and burn bright over another? My answer: chance. The illogical whims of a semiliterate and indifferent book-hating public.

Clearly, the Great British public can’t be trusted to read decent books. The Great British public want sensationalist slurry, to be part of the same amorphous univoice all parroting the words: “Good read. Page-turner. I like what I like.” There is no point exploring ideas a reader might like, since the reader is an imbecile who likes memes, snowball fights and Tony Parsons. The only solution is to explore the one thing on a writer’s mind. That one thing being the question: HOW CAN I MAKE PEOPLE LOVE ME AND MY WRITING? All writing tends towards solipsism. Why pretend?

My solution. All protagonists shouldn’t merely be autobiographical. They should be you. Just make yourself the protagonist. Just make yourself the protagonist who writes a really amazing book that catches the zeitgeist and becomes a bestseller and becomes Radio 4 Book of the Week, etc. Content doesn’t matter. Why not live out your unrealisable dream through your manuscript, instead of trying to write a manuscript that allows you to live out your unrealisable dream? Isn’t it more pleasurable (and logical) to enter that dream daily, to indulge and embellish and cavort in the sparkle of your own delusions, rather than clinging desperately to the possibility you may one day be published?

Relax! You don’t need to write that masterpiece! Simply write yourself into a dream and stay there. It’s the only way.