A Sodding Update

Since graduating from the Napier MA (over a year ago now and STILL banging on about it!) I haven’t felt the need to maintain much of an online blog presence. Most of my online activities take place on Goodreads where I discuss what matters most to me—literature. Or, if you like, books. Discuss might not be the word. I write brief capsule reviews of the books I read and ten or so people ‘like’ my reviews without comment. If I feel like it, I leave inane comments on other people’s reviews. Still, I like it there.

My book group still meets on weekends, and the Ulysses meetup was extremely useful and laid-back. I sometimes feel inadequate as to how I dissect a text. I have strong urges to write extremely analytical closely-read essays on the books I read, but that would take up too much of my time, and who would care? I could spend over a fortnight writing one of those, all for the satisfaction of having autopsied the book so I briefly have “complete mastery” over it, only to forget the drivel I wrote in a few weeks. I did this for a spell between 2004-2007 with albums and made £300 on a reviewing site. Goodreads pays nada.

The best-friends-for-life writing-network-of-Napier-alumni thing hasn’t happened. Perhaps I was too naïve to assume people would want to start a collective for sharing and editing each other’s work with frequent meet-ups and so on . . . people do things, so I am told, in their lives, that make these things impossible. I did set up a semi-useful FB group which has already been forgotten about. My suspicion is people find publishers for their own work and forget to share, or think fuck it—I want to have the edge and don’t share on purpose. Does that sound embittered and envious of me? Possibly. I’m one of the few people who truffles for publishers and anthologies and then shares. I think people, especially writers, are inherently selfish and perhaps need to be to survive in this fucking horrible world. I don’t like it, but how many writers, upon winning a contest, will punch the air and say, in your face suckers! All of them? Writing is as predatory as any other business.

At the moment, I’m not writing with a commercial eye, I’m focusing on writing what I want to write. Arlene’s Atoms is, possibly, the closest to a mainstream thing I will produce. I recently sent the book, fatalistically, to a slew of small presses, skipping the big hitters. Realistically, if I have a small-press book, or maybe two or three in time, behind me, I will have more chance of being glanced at by the big fellas. So my hope is that one of the many fine small presses will pick it up. If they don’t, I will need to take up mainlining heroin into my knees. I think we were taught to be too ambitious at the Napier MA. Although the crushing futility of the endeavour of writing was repeatedly emphasised by David Bishop, I think I shouldn’t have been advised to sub to agents. It was a waste of time—I’m an unknown with no prizes under my belt. But what does that matter now?

I have a new novella on the go at the moment: the form and structure and content are cohering nicely. I write fairly quickly once these things are in place, so hopefully this will be finished early next year.

Letter to the Agent

Dear _____

I sent you my novel Sally’s Testament last month and received a complaint about the opening sentence: “Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.” Your complaint was that this sentence is the opening of Martin Amis’s 1995 novel, The Information. I would like to explain. My use of this sentence dates back to 1994 when my novel was originally a short story, ‘Cherries in Bloom.’ It appeared in New Fiction 8 in modified form: “Cherries at night, I believe, contain pips who cry in their sleep and then say Eat me!” When it came to composing my novel in 2010 I adapted portions of the above sentence for my own use, oblivious to this chance occurrence of the same line in Amis’s novel. I hope this clears up any error and you will reconsider my MS.

Yours obligingly,

Alice McCulloch

My Month in Books (Oct)

This month was devoted mainly to Dickens completion and re-reads of Gogol, Sorrentino, Nabokov, Ellison and Burgess.

1. Jonathan Franzen — How To Be Alone

Franzen hits the target when literature is being discussed. The career-making accidental cri de coeur ‘Why Bother?’ and ‘The Reader in Exile’ and the Gaddis love-in-cum-demolition ‘Mr. Difficult’ are all sublime pieces, if a little uncertain. The more reflective, personal essays show Franzen’s likeable man-on-the-street intellectualism, especially the Alzheimer’s piece ‘My Father’s Brain’ and the hilarious Oprah-era insight ‘Meet Me in St. Louis.’ He is less successful when broadsheet feature writing. ‘Lost in the Mail’ and ‘Control Units’ are niche articles written in a by-the-numbers journalistic style, with only a few flashes of insight. When it comes to presenting a non-personal alien experience, Franzen is no Foster Wallace. On the whole, a solid compilation of honest and entertaining (if unmemorable) non-fic licks.

2. Charles Dickens — A Tale of Two Cities

Chris Sarandon saved me. His excellent performance as Sydney and Charles in this respectable 1980s TV adaptation helped me over the hump of a confused first attempt to engage with this splendid tale. Despite forever entwining Sydney to Nick Cave in my imagination (a bad thing?) Chris played the two heroes with plank-like charisma and bouffant hair. The novel itself is a quiet epic—for all the tumult, uprising and bloodshed, this a story of personal sacrifice and silent, sorrowful heartbreak. An exquisitely weaved narrative, hewn with rare Dickensian restraint and more quotable lines than at a blurb writers’ convention. Masterpieceish. [Madame Defarge has been reincarnated as Anne Robinson. If she could introduce a guillotining element to The Weakest Link, she would. One head per wink. She’d love that].

3. Charles Dickens — Great Expectations

It is frustrating being slapped around the head by classics that leave you trouserless in a lukewarm puddle. Because the failure, as Mr. Gass points out, is never with the book. You are to blame, always. I am to blame for not embracing Great Expectations with the same open-armed ever-lovingness with which I embraced Little Dorrit and David Copperfield and so on down the line. My reasons, thus: the second act loses the momentum and powerful perspective established in Part One, as Pip becomes a priggish late teen and the manoeuvrings of the cast of characters replaces the exacting and beautiful childhood reflections. The story doesn’t bounce, build or blow up for me. The plotlines hinge on a series of not-that-interesting revelations about Pip and Estella’s parentage. The characters (Joe excluded) don’t have that heaviness, that heart-crushing quality about them—instead, an all-purpose grimness pervades the novel, lending it a faux-gothic tone that doesn’t transform into swinging emotional lurches and surges. Also, Pip’s narration isn’t as interesting as an omniscient Dickens third-person panorama. Pip, as a writer, is a dull bugger. For me. Remember, I am at fault, always.

4. Zadie Smith — NW

This is the novel I hoped Zadie would write. Since On Beauty in 2006, she’s been brushing up on the post-Eggers American hipster canon, hanging with the Brooklyn crowd, writing dissertations on DFW. This structurally inventive, stylistically diverse and playful novel should have set my eyes aflame with love for the precocious stripling who wrote those three unwieldy social satires in her early-to-late twenties. But it didn’t. Divided into a series of cryptic sections with titles like ‘visitation’ and ‘crossing’ and ‘host’ that stink of French theory, and making use of rangy chapter-chopping devices (short numerical chapters improperly ordered, chapters arranged by locational specificity) with varying typographical quirks (en dashes for dialogue, then no en dashes, long v. short paragraphs, mixing up the narration with reported thought and dialogue) . . . I SHOULD F**KING LOVE THIS. But I didn’t. So what happened? Would it be reductive of me to say, and pardon this sense-lapse, I didn’t “like” the story? Or, and hang on to your hats, I didn’t “like” the characters? I respect the carefully observed micro-analysis of the four lives depicted here, but the style seemed to work contra to deepening our empathy for these inexcusably ordinary Londoners and their scrambled lives, and the passing-of-time-leaves-empty-lives-waiting-to-be-filled vibe that was working to provide the novel with a through-line of profundity seemed a little pedestrian. I should add an extra star for Zadie’s successful navigation around a wholly new fictional terrain and reupholstering (uphipstering?) her style, it’s livelier and fresher than it ever was. And I should have loved it. But I didn’t.

5. Louis Ferdinand-Céline — Journey to the End of the Night

A full-on misanthropic epic, like if E.M. Cioran met Thom Yorke for a fly pie in a Nigerian slum. Céline is a deliberately choppy, lawless stylist, Dostoevskian in his fondness for the nerve-racked ellipsis and the hysterical exclamation point (tics that would characterise his later, practically unreadable, work). Bardamu is the Céline stand-in whose detached cruelty acts as a necessary galvaniser for his adventures in WWI, French-occupied African hinterlands and a stint in a freshly industrialised American scream. His ranting adventures run on a manic, darkly comic energy, a teeth-clenching horror, a rubberneck’s glee at such innate human beastliness, and genuinely momentous plot shapes and shifts. Overlong and falling short of enduring classic status. But wild. Tortuously human. A writer to be experienced at least once—this is, no doubt, the best place.

6. Nikolai Gogol — The Collected Tales

First: this is not The Complete Tales. The unlearned distinction between Collected & Complete has angered completists the world over. Collected means incomplete: a mixtape of works that constitute, critically, the best this writer has to offer. Complete means the totted-up totality, depending upon what is being completed, i.e. Complete Works is ambiguous and open to omissions, depending on what is classed as a work—prose? plays? Just assume a fuller completion when it’s Complete, not Collected. Except in those rare moments when Collected means Complete. In the case of Gogol, Yale U Press have the one Complete Tales in print, in two volumes, incorrect lumped with the Collected Tales eds. This beautiful Everyman’s hardcover edition (and, presumably, the paperback equivs) omit a slab of material from Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, which only exists as an old Oxford paperback conflated with Mirgorod stories, suggesting the work is so lacklustre it doesn’t bear reprinting.

For the sake of tedious exactitude, this edition omits all the story fragments, and, from Evenings: The Fair at Sorochintsï, May Night or the Drowned Maiden, The Lost Letter, A Bewitched Place. From Mirgorod, Taras Bulba is omitted (available as a separate book from the Modern Library). These tales, presumably, are found in Yale’s Complete Tales. The tales in this Collected Tales perform the Gogol mixtape function perfectly, from the rambling horror of Viy and The Night Before Christmas to the hilarious sinister satire of The Nose and The Overcoat. Not all the tales spark and sizzle, like the slight St. John’s Eve and Old World Landowners, but the best of these, the bestest, are, at their bestestest, some of the premier examples of the Russian short story: chilling and macabre, thigh-splitting and mad.

7. Anthony Burgess — A Clockwork Orange

A favourite of my late teens, still a favourite now. The brutality of male blooming and the private patois of our teenhood . . . splattered across this brilliant moral satire, abundant in vibrant, bursting language and a structural perfection: Shakespearean, dammit. Goddamn Shakespearean! nadsat is second only to the language in Riddley Walker for a perfectly rendered invented language that is consistent within the novel’s own internal logic. This book is musical! This book sings, swings, cries and rages! Oh this book, this book! My first encounter with unbridled creativity, intelligence, elegance, thematic unity, this book made me weep for the future of poor sadistic Alex. Oh, he must grow up, he must! But he doesn’t Oh Humble Skimmer, he doesn’t! His nadsat is in place up until his story ends, and all that cal, so Alex remains a perpetual teen, like the boring little shit in Salinger’s unambitious literary haemorrhage (I forget the title). This book, this book! Oh my droogies, oh my Bog . . . nothing hurts so much on your stomachs and your heads and your hearts as this book . . . except maybe having Earthly Powers dropped on your tootsies . . . !!! [collapse into gibberish] !!!

8. Vladimir Nabokov — Pnin

I read Pnin in 2009 but reread the book today to decide whether my love merited buying an Everyman’s hardcover edition. Verdict? No. I’ll stick with Lolita in Everyman’s and, after a reread, possibly Pale Fire. Pnin is lighter, but by no means lexically less impressive, than Lolita and has more in common with the high-class comedies Pictures From an Institution or Lucky Jim than earlier, more cunning Nabokovs (the unreliable narrator twist isn’t as ingenious as Manny makes it sound). Updike’s Bech books seem to take this as their role model too, except in those books the arch asshole narrators are supposed to be lovingly embraced by the readers. Despite Nabokov’s claims to this work as a rounded novel, it feels sketchy, it feels like episodes in a classy HBO number. It is a novel, why can’t it be, but its insides feel all loose and stringy. Still. A laudable upper-minor work.

9. Ralph Ellison — Invisible Man

A powerful, energetic tour de force: timeless, breathtaking, politically ablaze, tremendously comic. I only have one more thing to say: Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Read this. Please.

10. Gilbert Sorrentino — Red the Fiend

The thing about Gilbert Sorrentino is that he is, only occasionally, a metafictional pioneer and postmodern innovator. Half the time he wrote books like Red the Fiend which, although conceived in his usual book-as-useless-artefact style, is a work of bloody-minded breakneck realism, spliced with a world-weary comedy and an ever-present tenderness. Tenderness came to define Sorrentino’s later work, especially in the beautiful and haunting memory novels Little Casino and A Strange Commonplace—both rich in spectres at once tragic and screamingly funny. Sorrentino, perhaps more than anyone, understands the precarious, perhaps nonexistent line between comedy and tragedy. Split into forty-nine chapters, Sorrentino’s glib narrator coolly describes life among a dysfunctional Brooklyn family, focusing on only-son Red and his sadistic Grandma, a superb Dickensian villain of (somewhat) exaggerated Irish-Catholic cruelty, where any minor violation of proper behaviour results in Red being ladled, whipped, bashed and clobbered. There is no Dickensian moral equilibrium for Red in this novel. He’s trapped in a Depression-era reality—all he can do his endure his pain and steal occasional looks up his teachers’ skirts. As Sorrentino said, Art cannot save anybody from anything. It certainly won’t help poor Red here. Red the Fiend is a heartbreaking and blackly comic book, and also doubles up as an effective satire of those Dave Pelzer-inspired, Please Daddy No books clogging up British airports.

11. Charles Dickens — Our Mutual Friend

Better to read Dickens in week-long rushes—serialised readers, without the aid of Wiki or plot recaps, will have to summon the heroic powers of recall commonly the resource of Victorian bookworms. How torturous to be put on tenterhooks for months as to John Rokesmith’s identity enigma, to think of the vagabond Wegg ruining the sweet old Mr Boffin. Perhaps now, at the end of my Monster Dickens reading, it is pertinent to ask of these novels—page-turners of their day, morally instructional entertainment, or works of art? Answer: all three and more. These are omninovels that defy snubbing. In his last completed work before a long novel-wards sabbatical, Dickens once more chips away at an old theme: the corruption of money, how it seeps into society, and poisons everything. Not that Chaz was a raging anticapitalist, quite the opposite, but there’s no point in being a millionaire if you behave like a spoilt child hoarding all the sweets. In an age badly in need of strong moral fiction (hurts me to say, but tis true), this message still needs to be drilled into the heads of the moneyspinners of the free world. Our Mutual Friend is a brilliant (complete) swansong from Chaz, full of collectively captivating plots and subplots, and some more complex personnel than usual (Wrayburn and Headstone) and your usual vivid, striking and compassionate prose mastery. Farewell, big Chaz!

12. Javier Marías — Written Lives

My alternative to pumpkin soup and pop-culture clichés on this, The Halloweenshire of Hollowness. Bitesize essays on a limousine of luminaries, plus some titbits on unknown promiscuous darlings of the demimonde. The final essay, ‘Perfect Artists’ is an illuminating gloss on famous author portraits. Marías plucks out the pertinent data and serves his musings in a coulis of wit and irony. A charming ickle stocking filler for the literate pater in your life. See Mike’s review for some scrumptious selections. Published in the Brattish Isles by Canongate, who sometimes sprout a set of balls and print something original.

Next month: Steven Moore’s encyclopedic Alternative History of the Novel, Vol. 1.

Haggis-Waggling McKiltism

Oftentimes I ask myself the question: how important to me is my Scottishness? Usually, my knee-jock reaction is to dismiss my nationality as irrelevant to my writing. I dislike contemporary Scottish novels that make a song and dance about their rampant McKiltism with exaggerated dialect or extremely specific place-dropping or characters that are overly Scottish, to the point I want authors to repress their personnel’s Scottishness so they appear more universal and less like haggis-waggling novelties.

I tend to set my fiction in Scotland since I live here, that’s all. Apart from an embarrassing attempt at dialect in the first draft of my latest novel Arlene’s Atoms,  my characters speak plain English (with minimal Scots vocal tics to denote accents) and inhabit Scottish cities. The strongest Scots trait I demonstrate is the impulse to ridicule, esp. ridiculing one’s place of residence if it isn’t in a plush conurb in Burgh or Glasgow. In Arlene’s Atoms, my depiction of Cumbernauld as a small town ruled by ruthless gossips is a satire of the mentality (though Cumbernauld isn’t that small) that little places are horrible, uncultured drug-dumps for workshy illiterates. The place I was raised, Armadale, was touted thus by everyone who stayed there, to my childwide bemusement.

So is place inexplicably linked to identity? Probably. But it shouldn’t consume one’s identity.

A Postmodern Belch Released

My first fully furbished novel, A Postmodern Belch, was slated for publication in 2010 at Goldfish Press. Due to an overwhelming outcry of despair from interns and meddling writers wanting their own books published, unforeseen car accidents and traitorous editors, the book never got printed by this small Californian boutique press. Years later, my enthusiasm for this super-silly, overindulgent work of youthful exuberance has not diminished, so I have decided to self-publish the novel via Lulu. It’s available via that fine crankshaft for the pocket-scorching fee of £7.06 + P&P. Here is an interview with myself, pertaining to:

Interview with The Author

MJ: You are The Author of this undergraduate folly, correct?
MJ: I am.
MJ: What did you hope to gain by self-publishing a no-holds-barred tricksy embarrassment like this?
MJ: Love and acclaim.
MJ: Ha!
MJ: Just kidding. I hoped to free myself from the self-conscious novel. From the tiresome limitations of self-reference.
MJ: Did you succeed?
MJ: Once you let doubt and awareness creep in you’re never free.
MJ: Tell us about the novel.
MJ: Three characters, Harold (based on me), Lydia (based on the woman I would like to be), and Greg (based on boring normals) wrestle for control of the novel, A Postmodern Belch.
MJ: Is that it? For 367pp?
MJ: Yep.
MJ: Uh . . . .
MJ: There are different fonts! Larger fonts! Footnotes! Sometimes fonts fluctuate in size mid-sentence.
MJ: God, you are so crazy. Such a fucking innovator.
MJ: This is turning into self-abuse now.
MJ: So?
MJ: A Postmodern Belch is all about self-abuse. It’s about being locked in a mind so paralysed by the reality of the self (don’t snigger) that it cannot tame its characters, cannot escape the solipsistic hells of the hyper self-aware long enough to create a decent story.
MJ: Who needs a decent story?
MJ: Exactly.
MJ: Who needs characters, plots, emotional sustenance, depth and intelligent discourse?
MJ: Exactly.
MJ: When you can have three unpleasant bastards shouting at each other for 367pp about how much they hate being products of the M.J. Nicholls imagination and fonts that expand mid-clause and crazy kerning and childish swear words every four lines in place of actual substance, thought, creativity, excitement, humour, energy or meaning?
MJ: Exactly.
MJ: You have written the least readable book in the galaxy.
MJ: I hope so.
MJ: Who will read it?
MJ: The self-loathing. People who hate me.
MJ: That’s your audience?
MJ: Works for Martin Amis.
MJ: Thank me for my time.
MJ: Thank you. Me.

One can acquire A Postmodern Belch here.

Next Big Thing Chain Post

Tagged by Alison Summers

What is the working title of your book?

Arlene’s Atoms.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Hard to pinpoint. I started with the surreal conceit of the protagonist birthing a series of unusual objects—a car, a cow, etc. I tend to use strange images as a springboard for fiction.

What genre does your book fall under?

Magic realism. Surreal comedy.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Shirley Henderson as Arlene, Stellan Skarsgård as Magnus.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A hairdresser falls pregnant with a universe in an appalling Scottish town.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The element of choice implied in this question is misleading! I believe my book is as entertaining and worthwhile as any other work of contemporary fiction being produced by writers my age (i.e. barely out of nappies). The only impediment between me and an agency is an overwhelming nation-wide indifference to my writing and ideas. In that case, self-publishing is our friend.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Approx? Six months. 

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Gertrude Wilmot’s Children of the Brown Things. Frank Dervish’s Crank.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I wanted to write something that both celebrated and reined in my tendency for extreme imaginative digression over cohesive plots or satisfying emotional encounters with “well-rounded” characters. To transform the horribleness of reality with the power of the surreal and comic is my mission.  

Other people doing this today:
Gill Hoffs
Chris Allen
Jane Riddell

My Month in Books, Part Two (Sep)

9. Arthur Rimbaud — Collected Poems

My forays into the canonical French poets continues with Rimbaud’s collected works. Poems 1869-1871 collects his “early” verses—all politicised fury, snotty swagger and clunky line breaks. Assorted Scribbles (not its real title) collects his vulgar heretical rants, cheeky fantasies and anti-other-poet slapdowns. A Season in Hell reads like the ravings of a melodramatic teenager after his first dumping in the McDonald’s car park. Illuminations is an incredibly mature, visionary work of symbolist poetry that influenced most French poetry that came after, the American Black Mountain poets, and (sort of) Bob Dylan and (definitely) Patti Smith. And this. And this. This volume from Oxford Classics contains the parallel French text, which is useless to me, but might be useful if you . . . speak French. (But then why would you need the English text?) Wondrous.

10. Charles Dickens — Little Dorrit

Having not fallen fully under the sway of Dickens’s longest, Bleak House, we’re back to the savagely impressive corkers with this satirical and tender effort from the Immortal Blighty Scribe (IBS—unfortunate acronym). On a less grandiose scale than the preceding tome, Little Dorrit is much quieter, funnier, more powerfully affecting novel throughout than BH. In two parts, Poverty & Riches, the novel charts the progress of Amy Dorrit, (the token spirit of purity and goodness), and her family from Marshelsea debtors’ prison into a shaky life of infinite riches and never-ending Italian holidays. Central to the novel is her father William, who replaces his memories of destitution with violent hauteur, and whose mental collapse is rendered with masterful swings of wrenching drama. Clenham is the more complex, reticent hero, almost frustratingly dim in spots, but no less than impeccable on the moral scruples front. Apart from a sudden gallop into action-packed melodrama in the last 100pp or so, and a byzantine final-reveal sequence to out-Lost Lost, Little Dorrit goes straight atop the essential-Dickens pile, along with all the others. [And a final warning to Oxford World’s Classics: if you make your fonts any smaller, I will send in the midget assassins].

11. Howard Jacobson — Zoo Time

Are you a suicidal novelist clinging to the hope the power of your debut novel will knock the socks off people who have read it all before, know nothing new has been written post-1980, and will reap you enough profit to quit that grinding office job you haven’t got yet because it’s a recession and no one works anywhere doing anything? Then boy howdy, is this not the novel for you! A scathing satire on the state of contemporary publishing, Jacobson is brutally honest about the futility of it all, and also reassuringly humorous about our slow sad slump into suicide at the same time. Panacea for those quiet nights sobbing into your laptop.

12. Fyodor Dostoevsky — Humiliated & Insulted

A bracing early novel from the most unflinching of the Russian Titans, (The) Humiliated & Insulted is the only Dostoevsky novel with a writer-as-narrator, but not the only based on autobiographical material. Vanya is an up-and-coming literary talent whose first novel—cough not Poor Folk cough—has been critically lauded. He is chummy with Natasha, who is overly chummy with the indecisive blithering imbecile Alyosha, who can’t choose between marrying Nat or a less-attractive Countess with a large fortune. His father, the Prince Valkovsky, the villain of the novel, wants to get his seedy mitts on the money to spend on debauchery and immorality of disgraceful proportions (although nothing you wouldn’t see outside an Essex pub on a Friday night). Toss into this the mercurial orphan Nelly who the narrator takes pity on, and you have an extremely gripping and wrenching novel from a writer who you always forget is so damned entertaining. Ignat Avsey’s controversial translation of The Brothers Karamazov (which he re-titled to The Karamazov Brothers) was not entirely lauded for its sympathy to the Russian original. But this is a very readable, decent translation, albeit with the odd Anglicism and Americanism creeping in here and there.

13. Percival Everett — Glyph

A sublime satirical romp, as if Ishmael Reed had been reincarnated as an angry young grammatologist. Glyph features the nine-month-old mute intellectual Ralph, whose ability to write lucid, illuminating responses to his parents’ requests sends a local doctor spinning with career resentment and rouses the sinister forces of the American government, eager to use the silent poop machine as a robotic appendage of espionage. Told in short, punchy chapters with headings cribbed from Derrida and Barthes (who appears as a character), and full of dazzlingly inventive high-theory spoofery (or homage?), the novel is a wonderfully comic exploration of the world within the word and how literary theory both replenishes and dismantles the possibilities of literature.

14. Mikhail Lermontov — A Hero of Our Time

An early Russian novel, arbitrarily patched together, but still regarded as a canonical work in the Steppes and the Westies. Pechorin is the titular hero, the time being 1840, and the hero being ironical. The most engaging part of the novel is the long epistolary Mary section, an early stab at a society tale mixed with a bracing duel scene. The other parts seem sloppy attempts to reproduce the Walter Scott tradition in a Russian idiom, especially with the spurious preface larks and the chopping and changing of narrators. As a whole, the work is compelling and entertaining but by today’s standards requires a stronger cohesion and purpose. If this were the 1840 Goodreads, my star rating might be five, but alas, we can criticise an older work for what it’s lacking as the novel had already evolved lightyears ahead of this in 1840, if not in Russia, certainly France, England and America.

15. Don Delillo — White Noise

So White Noise seems to divide people entirely on matters of literary style, which is understandable. Once you accept the skewed reality of Delillo’s world, which isn’t particularly hard to do, you can take pleasure from the “unrealistic” dialogue and the surrealistic happenings as they happen, surrealistically. Otherwise, this is a straightforward book “about death”—theme-wise, this about as simple as they come. Delillo’s style for me was incredibly original, utterly engrossing and extremely funny and pleasurable for the duration, especially during the ‘Airborne Toxic Event’ section, when it passed from highbrow social satire into something dreamlike and beautiful. Into ‘Dylarama’ the story becomes more Bergmanlike in its warped moribundity and builds to a sensationally lurid and haunting climax. Then again, your experience may differ—it’s that sort of book.

16. Philip Roth — Sabbath’s Theater

Nerves of steel are required for this 450pp assault on decency, indecency and all things neither decent nor indecent, but which probably involve sexagenarians masturbating a teenage girl’s knicker drawer. Mickey Sabbath is a monster with an unstoppable capacity for sex, lechery and outright molestation, plus a proclivity for sledgehammering all relationships between human beings who aspire to behave like semi-respectable grown-ups. Like Simon Lynxx in D. Keith Mano’s Take Five, he has a convenient knack for speaking in extremely unlikely literary sentences at a level of polished erudition no Harvard graduate-cum-Oscar Wilde descendant could possibly achieve, and is also such a prick of such catastrophic prickliness, your patience and tolerance levels are pushed to absolute snapping point—at no point would this man’s painful death be anything less than welcome. Instead of being locked up within five minutes for being a dangerous sexual deviant, Sabbath has reached his mid-sixties with a backlog of lovers with whom he has fulfilled all his perversions, and is currently lamenting the death of his East European fantasy lover and his sacking from professor of puppetry. A grotesque comedic reverie (and revelry), Sabbath’s Theater should be read as little more than an audacious, linguistically explosive piece of outré comedy. If you read it as a serious novel, you will no doubt aspire to strangle Mr. Roth.