Oh, the Cotswolds. To visit is to travel back in time.

Villages here are so immaculate and picturesque that they rival in beauty even that of the surrounding nature. Sand-coloured limestone, the primary medium used for its architecture, gives the area its distinct, almost fairy-tale look, be it vainglorious manor estates (of which there are many) or the ‘umble town chippy (fewer, but as essential to a town as its church 1).

It’s a rejuvenating place to be; a fine emollient for those, like you, weary-worn from dismal train journeys and technology-abundant spaces, questioning your entire life. When the world is feeling somewhat morose, seek out pretty things—it actually helps. It’s not, as it might sound, a frivolous pursuit but a necessary rebalance 2.

Two little goats are enclosed at the rear of the cabin you booked on Airbnb weeks earlier, a welcome surprise, for you don’t recall reading about them in the listing. When you pull the car up outside3 they come running excitedly to greet you, and it’s not because they intend to convince you to vote Reform, they just want their heads smoothed. You look next at a raft of ducks swimming the lake out front, going about their ducky business, inverting themselves occasionally, little webbed orange feet kicking air, and think none of these creatures has even heard of Bitcoin or ChatGPT. Incredible. Look how happy they are.

Elsewhere on the farm are more goats of varying size and hornedness, three woolly alpacas, a rather gormless-looking pig (bless him), plenty of sheep, cows, horses, Shetland ponies, and donkeys—not to mention the teeming wildlife, including shy Muntjac deer, rabbits, pheasants, grouse—all content to graze their grassy confines; none seem eager to discuss their innovative new web startups or sell you NFTs; none with smartphones playing TikTok reels at full volume.

In other words: heaven.

Inside, the cabin is quaint and open-plan 4. It is also swelteringly hot, the considerate hosts having switched on the heating in advance of your arrival. There is a small television and DVD player, but no Wi-Fi, and mobile reception on the farm is abysmal. But it doesn’t matter. You’re here to connect with something else. You want to be beguiled by someplace new, yet also reassuringly old, steadfast even, and to forget everything else for a while.

You’re here, also, for books. And, having stopped at a couple of towns on the way in, you’re already up seven.

In Stroud’s Borderless Books, you picked up Transcription by Ben Lerner. You know nothing about the author, who looks in his jacket photo like he’s been caught impersonating Jonathan Franzen again out in the back yard, other than seeing some recent social media chatter about this, his latest book. But word online was too vague and noncommittal to gauge its favourability (or otherwise). So you took the rather slim yet intriguing volume to the till, to “lerner” little something about him.

A brief look inside Fireside Bookshop—because the parking was running out— yielded two: The Dalkey Archive by Flann O’Brien and The Silence by Don DeLillo. Given DeLillo is your favourite writer, you have already read The Silence. Not only that, you own two copies of it. You justified the purchase by telling yourself that those at home are UK editions, whereas this is the US one, therefore different.

At Oxfam Books in Cirencester, and for the jolly good price of one pound, you said yes to Marry Me by John Updike. You are currently reading another Updike, a later one, In The Beauty of the Lilies, which you brought along.

You initially left Waterstones empty-handed but, after a meal at a nearby eatery, headed back and bought three books: Beasts of England by Adam Biles, House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O’Brien and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk.

After scanning a charity shop’s DVD shelves, you come away with Tombstone and The Constant Gardener.

Excited to watch Tombstone that night, you insert the disc into the player, but the picture output is 4×3, cropped for widescreen. You cannot, despite much fiddling with the remote, find a way to adjust the frame, and, so, not overly keen to see the escapades of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday play out through the equivalent of a door’s open letterbox, you instead put on The Constant Gardener, which is no Tombstone.

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Next morning. Eggs Benedict and coffee at Sheep on Sheep Street, an Italian restaurant in Stow-on-the-Wold, are enthusiastically consumed while waiting for Borzoi Bookshop to open. When it does, you go in and, half an hour or so later, come out with Skyscraper by Benjamin Wood.

From the Children’s Air Ambulance charity shop’s bargain bin, you rescue The Modern American Novel by Malcolm Bradbury. You’ve never read Bradbury, whose most famous work, The History Man, sits atop a stack of unread books at home. Though not typically prone to superstition, the book’s arrival in the post coincided with some awful news, and you cannot (for no rational reason whatsoever) bring yourself to read it until the matter is remedied.

Driving to and wandering around these gorgeous Cotswold towns confirms it is a place that prioritises the independent seller over the conglomerate. There are, for instance, no McDonald’s or Pizza Huts, no mini Tescos or Costa or Gregg’s (least, you don’t spot any), and the place is largely absent of vape emporiums and mobile phone shops, which seem to dominate most modern high streets.

You expect to see more flat caps and suspenders worn by residents than you do, finding, instead, a bias toward brightly coloured polo shirts (popped collar optional), cropped chinos and designer daps. And while there are the odd tractor and Land Rover to be spotted, the prevailing modes of travel roaming its windy roads are Porsche 4×4’s and plasticky-looking Teslas. It could be that they are all, like you, tourists, or it could be your current unsociable bent, but it is, you confess, a minor let-down, this discordance between people and place.

Sensing a rise of negative thoughts in you again, despite all the arresting sights, makes you think you are just a miserable, pernickety sod. You are looking forward to getting back to the cabin later, thinking perhaps you’d crammed too much into this trip and hadn’t factored in what was most needed—rest.

This regrettable misanthropy flares only higher when a loud marketing guru enters the pub you’re dining in and begins to spout the usual bullshit in all the typical jargon to his patient and mostly unspeaking companion. He gives the lecture of his life to this poor woman, prognosticating swift declines for new, much talked about rival products in his field, for those companies don’t truly understand what they’re getting into. On and on he prattles about how the industry’s landscape is simply untraversable without an expert guide such as he, all the hidden and insidious bureaucratic underpinnings, mark my word this, flash in the pan that, blah blah blah . . .

It is when you arrive at the next destination that this rotten mood reaches its zenith. By most measures, Bourton-on-the-Water is, in an area renowned for its spectacular beauty, the most spectacular of them all. The “Venice of the Cotswolds”, it is cutely referred, for the pristine river bisecting it, crossed by handsome stone bridges.

A “must-visit”, they insist, and so you do. Entering the town, a cheery sign-holder beckons you to turn left for all-day parking, and so you do. Further smock-wearing individuals direct you through an empty school’s gates. Go this way, they gesture, and so you do. Another, holding a roll of ticket stubs near a sign that reads, “Parking, £6”—Six bloody pounds!—approaches the car, smiling. There are other similarly swindled cars in line behind you. With no easy opportunities to turn around, you are all trapped. The ticket-woman, still smiling remorselessly, explains the system, then asks you to give them the six pounds, and so you do.

People everywhere. Swarms. You cannot see anything but people. Heads. Bodies. Cameras. Walking sticks. You look left and down, where a small girl is holding a telephoto lens that’s bigger than her. In front of you, oncoming old folks, who are moving in the opposite direction to most people in this hideous, shoulder-to-shoulder procession. Along the bridges, people are posing for photographs. They do not take a single snap and move on, but remain there, not satisfied until they’ve struck every pose in their arsenal. Everybody everywhere is taking photographs, but of what you cannot see, only imagine. If you squint past the horde, you’re able, in brief glimmers, to spy the famous water of which Bourton is on. The river, you estimate, is perhaps two feet deep, not a rock out of place. It looks human-engineered, as if freshly dug out using heavy plant machinery and, if you were to follow the water upstream, like you’d find a large tap dispensing it.

Whatever virtues this place may hold are no longer possible to glean. (This is the rather cynical thought you have as you return to the car.) They have been robbed by their own popularity. You check your watch as you get inside to find you only managed thirty-five minutes.

The next and last day of your trip to the Cotswolds begins with a final walk around the farm and woodlands. You say goodbye to the friendly animals, then pack up and hit the road.

You spend hours at the Cotswold Wildlife Park (much longer than you expected to), before stopping into Burford for food and to look around the Mad Hatter Bookshop, where you buy The Years by Annie Ernaux and The News from Dublin, Colm Tóibín’s latest. Colm is one of those writers whose work you haven’t read a ton, but you just enjoy hearing him speak. For a big, looming fellow, he has a soft, whispery voice and, with that euphonious Irish lilt, you can listen to him talk about books, the craft, other writers, endlessly.

Before returning home, you head back to Stroud to visit its eponymous bookshop, which you missed on the journey in. Not wanting to break the streak of purchasing at least one book from each shop you visit, you come across a Karl Ove Knausgaard book you hadn’t heard of before, A Time For Everything, which makes it into your tote bag, along with The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller.

Thirteen Books.

Why Self?

Seeing that Will Self has a new book out, The Quantity Theory of Morality, and I, somehow, have read all his published novels and short story collections prior (including a fair shake of his non-fiction), a top five is certainly in order.

Why, I hear you ask? (Not you, of course, the you I’ve invented, who curiously knows all my sordid literary blindspots.) Why have you read Self’s by no means meagre output when many lionised authors and seminal works, like those of Henry James, Tolstoy, Morrison, Chekov, Ellison, Wolfe1, Fitzgerald, Austen and Borges have yet to have a look in?—Proust, ferchristsakes!

It’s complicated. Well, actually no, it’s not complicated, it’s kinda silly. Or not silly, it’s just . . . Never mind, I’ll explain later.

My first Top Five plumbed the work of J. G. Ballard, who was a hero to Self and would, in later life, become both friend and mentor2. But unlike Ballard, whose work carries such an unusual, detached perspective and seems forged from his childhood experiences and strange societal behaviours he would come to witness, more so than specific writers, Self’s is the inverse; his works—certainly the early books—are indebted to literature that came before.

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Self Transformation

If a core theme could be pinpointed across Will Self’s fiction, it would be extreme change. Think Gregor Samsa, in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, who wakes one morning to find, without explanation, that he has been transformed into a giant insect. Now, pluck poor Gregor from his unspecified city and drop him into a yuppie Soho bar, put a wine glass in one of his eight hands, a cocaine straw in another, surround him with people as hideous as he, and you begin to get the picture.

In both The North London Book of the Dead, the story that opens Self’s debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), and How the Dead Live (2000), death is not an end to life; it’s merely a change of address. Cock and Bull (1992) comprises two novellas, led by a female and male protagonist respectively, and explores, in each, the sudden growth of the opposite gender’s reproductive organs on their bodies and the ensuing consequences. Ian Wharton, in My Idea of Fun (1993), has become a puppet to the violent ideations of the sinister Mr Broadhurst, surely an invention of his unravelling mind, but who Ian increasingly believes lives in the unborn child he and his wife are about to have. The Book of Dave (2006), one of Self’s better-known efforts, alternates between present-day cabbie Dave Rudman, who is writing a manic diatribe about his ex-wife for not letting him see his son, and the future people of 523 AD3, where those writings have been unearthed and form the basis of a new spiteful religion.

Self inspires a fair amount of animus4. Mired early on in drug controversy, many see him as this dreary figure, whose excessively polysyllabic speech renders him at best droll, at worst pompous and incomprehensible. I happen to like Self. (Well, I would have to, wouldn’t I?) Whether creating a bastardised English lexicon, à la Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, or reimagining Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in 80s London amid the AIDS epidemic, or turning towards Joyce for his modernist trilogy, alienating any reader who favours conventional novel structure, as a writer, he takes big swings, and even when he doesn’t completely hit the mark, the result is seldom boring.

Preamble out of the way, let’s move on to the list.

What Self (The list):

1. Great Apes

2. Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

3. Liver

4. Umbrella

5. Elaine

Note:

As with my previous Top Five, I’ve arranged this list chronologically instead of ranking-order. If you are reading this as a newcomer to Self and were to press me for which book to pick up first, I’m inclined to recommend Liver.

Self Explanatory

1. Great Apes (1997)

After a debaucherous drug-and-alcohol-tinged night out, Simon Dykes, in Great Apes (1997), awakens to a world where chimpanzees are the dominant species. These apes believe that Simon’s fervent claims of being human are the symptom of some strange delusion—after all, humans are those maladroit creatures found in zoos.

In this hilarious inversion, which draws obvious comparisons to The Planet of the Apes and Kafka’s A Report to the Academy, Self’s civilised simians wear clothes, but are still ape-in-appearance and tree-swinging ability. They don’t speak, of course, but sign, amid the typical vocalisations of their species, “HoooGraa!”. With the aid of maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner, Simon must come to terms with his inner chimpunity, if he’s ever going to get along in life.

2. Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998)

Two brothers strike up a plan to make it rich when they discover a gigantic rock of crack behind their basement walls; a man, alone in his country home while his girlfriend is away, makes a bizarre pact with the insects moving in; Two-year old Humpy’s gibberish begins sounding decidedly Germanic after businessman Herr Doktor Martin Zweijärig suffers a stroke; and what is the meaning of identity in a world where everyone is called ‘Dave’?—are just a few scenarios in Self’s third collection.

Self doesn’t so much break new ground in this assortment as he hones to their sharpest the trademark weird and horrifying short stories for which he made his name.

3. Liver (2008)

The four stories in this collection focus on the Liver, our body’s largest gland, under various conditions of ill health.

Foie Human takes us through the exclusive doors of the Plantation Club, where its alco-enthusiast members, including owner Val Carmichael, continue to knock back copious spirits, despite growing signs of cirrhosis—but is it a wilful descent, or is someone among their party instigating their fate?

In Leberknödel, a woman diagnosed with terminal liver cancer wishes to avoid the indignities of a slow death by travelling to a clinic in Zurich to be euthanised.

Prometheus, a talented and successful exec in Titan, a renowned London advertising agency—in a riff on the Greek myth—presents his liver to an insatiable vulture three times daily.

Birdy Num Num, this collection’s final story, is told from the vantage point of the hepatitis virus, an unwelcome guest, unwittingly chaperoned to a drug dealer’s flat—but by whom?

4. Umbrella (2012)

In 1918, Audrey Death, a munitions worker during the First World War, is deposited at Friern Mental Hospital when she succumbs to an unknown illness. Encephalitis Lethargica, the terrifying malady at this book’s centre which turns the afflicted into living statues, prisoners in their own bodies, and the drug L-DOPA, which miraculously reanimates them after decades of dormancy, are very real and will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the film Awakenings, based on the book by Oliver Sachs. Dr Zack Busner—Self regular throughout these three novels and many others—turns up in 1971 to administer this miracle drug. His patients spring back to life after nearly fifty years in this torpid state. But Busner finds, much like pulling the cord on a toy, the effects are sadly short-lived.

Umbrella, to date Self’s lone Booker-shortlisted work, is the first in a trilogy of modernist novels. Followed by Shark (2014) and Phone (2017), each book melds themes of war, technological invention and psychopathology.

The literary style, along with its title, is lifted from Ulysses. Written in the ‘continuous present’, the book eschews such niceties as chapters, paragraphs and common dialogue markers. The narrative often jumps decades mid-sentence, weaving time into its prose like threads of cotton.

Scanning the pages in a bookstore, you may be daunted by the unbroken walls of text and wonder if it’s not the work of an author wanting to be read so much as the rambling manifesto of a once-brilliant lunatic5. For this reason, Umbrella marked a significant change in Self’s writing, which continued on through the rest of the trilogy and beyond.

5. Elaine (2024)

Will (2019) marked another new turn, this time inwards. While many of Self’s previous works contained distorted visions from his past, whether it be a setting or former interactions with psychoanalysts, this was his most staunchly autobiographical. A memoir of sorts about his early life and narcotic misadventures, Will continues the stylistic tradition of his previous three novels, albeit reintroducing regular paragraphs, spacing between scenes and even—if you can believe it?—chapters.

His next book, Elaine (2024), goes even further back, to before he was born, to the woman who would become his mother. Partly based on diaries that Self’s mother kept for forty years, Elaine, whose own writing aspirations are constantly upended by housewifery duties and other such migraine-inducing banalities in her disastrous marriage, is left thinking, is this . . . it?

Featuring brief walk-ins from Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, Elaine is a remarkable feat of autofiction in which Self, briefly, much like Dr Zack Busner in Umbrella, conjures his mother back to life, and perhaps like the maverick doctor of his earlier novel, would have had to reckon with the moral implications in doing so.

And that concludes my list. Have you read any of Self’s fiction? If so, what would make your top five? If not, are you now tempted?

My Self

Daft this may sound but in my early years Will Self was the first writer I became conscious of, whose face I could put to a name. I would’ve had a couple of shelf-fulls of Enid Blyton, certainly some Roald Dahl, some Goosebumps (and I distinctly recall a set of shiny-foiled Bonechillers books, including Teacher Creature, Frankenturkey, Welcome to Alien Inn), and some of it I may have attempted to read. There were other books in our house too, my mother’s: Danielle Steel, Thomas Harris, Frank McCourt, Dave Pelzer, among others, and of my father’s: several large Haynes maintenance guides for cars and motorbikes, but none of these had author photos that I can recall. Those authors existed only as names printed across a spine.

Books at this point in my life were these handsome things I’d flick through for a few seconds, before getting distracted by another, more boisterous way to pass the time. I liked the idea of reading, the thought of being a reader (an aesthete of sorts), but, in practice, it was an insurmountable chore. My hyperactive mind simply wouldn’t allow it. A few words in, a page at most, and I’d be struck suddenly by the impulse to climb up or jump off or slide down something I shouldn’t. Television however was the opposite. TV was sublime; TV was everything. And, vitally, television didn’t require me to sit still to enjoy it. Be-doobie-deebie-deebie-deebo, the theme song to Hey Arnold! playing, I could dance about the room, practice head and hand stands, see how many times I could spin around on one foot; I could punch a cushion’s guts out or try that thing where you lie on your back and then kick out and land (hopefully) up on your feet.

Beginning to move away—but not entirely—from cartoons to live action programming in my early teens, the easiest path was through over-the-top comedy shows. I had an especial taste for the slapstick and surreal, and there was, to me, none better than a certain Vic and Bob fronted panel show.

Shooting Stars became compulsory viewing. While references in many jokes would soar way over my head—True or False: Jeremy Irons?—they were always plenty bolstered by immature behaviour, unintelligible singing, and enough visual gags to keep me, perhaps for the first time, pinned to my seat. It’s through this show that I first encountered Will Self, who took over ‘Team Captain’ duties from Mark Lamarr in season four. Notably more serious than everyone else on the show (not least man-baby George Dawes, played by Matt Lucas), he was announced to the audience as ‘Writer, Will Self’, before engaging in a bit of banter with the show’s loony hosts. There, Vic and Bob would remark, ‘Ooh, isn’t he wordy?’, asking him to demonstrate his sesquipedalian bank of words or perhaps cheekily accuse him of copying from Martin Amis’s books, but the stone-faced Self would never rise to their playground goadings. He was, in a sense, the adult among oversized children. And, somehow, Self’s incongruity with Vic and Bob’s juvenile antics made them all the funnier.

It’s now many years since the show first aired. Watching it back—not for the purposes of this writing but, rather, because I never outgrew my weakness for Vic and Bob’s brand of silly humour—the references and bawdier jokes land with me at last, while the physical gags, such as attaching eight sucking vacuums to Johnny Vegas’s face, burying racecar driver Damon Hill in a perspex box filled with mushrooms, strapping a tube to Michael Winner’s nose and asking him to sniff out the dirty boy hidden within one of five plyboard boxes or jettisoning increasingly larger fruit at a contestant never stopped being funny.

Self’s incongruity on the show, I would also come to realise, was not some happy accident but intentional. (Obviously!) He was the appointed straight man, just as Mark Lamarr before him, and Jack Dee years later. But all the same, caricature or not, Self had made an impression on young me. He represented the entire bastion of literature for a time—a club I wanted in but could never be permitted. As a child, I would ponder the cosy notion of one day being a reader in the same way I’d imagine a career as a secret agent after watching James Bond, or foresee rock stardom ahead after becoming enamoured with a particular band. And similar to how my love for Vic and Bob’s wonderful buffoonery never dimmed, neither did those readerly aspirations. When I eventually summoned the concentration to make it to the end of a book6, it wasn’t long before I was exploring Will Self’s back-catalogue and found, to my delight, a lot to like.

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Note: This Christmas and New Year’s, I’ve spent far more time eating mince pies than writing, so here’s something from a few years back. It was originally penned for Wales Arts Review in 2022 but, as I now see the website is defunct and linking to, ahem, bizarre pages, I thought I’d rehome it here.

Wrapped in heavy woollens, the under-seat heating firing up beneath our tuchis, we set off equipped with eager appetites to my parents’ house for dinner. It’s New Year’s Day, and we’ve been making the best of these cold, sunless evenings by seeing family as much as we (and they) can bear and filling our stomachs to capacity with rich, comforting food.

In these cold months, I crave only hot food. And food, even more so than usual, occupies a sizeable quota of my daily thoughts. I’ve decided it’s something redolent of the past, a sense-memory, a human-animal instinct, rather than my being a glutton. It’s this conclusion that rallies me through the day-long eating marathons of the holidays; we’re capable of incredible feats with a bit of resolve, and a little self-delusion doesn’t hurt, either. Time slows down—or at least appears to—and wills us to slow down along with it. Winter has refrigerated the flora, the bounty of our native crops has come and gone, and the hedgehogs and other small creatures become recumbent in makeshift holdings.

I look out the car window and, in our short four-mile jaunt, spot no fewer than seven joggers wincing in the damp, frigid air. These newly resolute (most at least) have togged up in packet-fresh running attire. One, I’ll single out, has stuffed himself into a Lycra all-in-one and is hugged by a slim backpack from which a tube protrudes, extending around his body and into his mouth. He doesn’t look real; he seems more like a 70s Bond henchman or a rejected character design from Michael Bay’s horrid Ninja Turtles reboot. The joggers elicit mixed feelings in me. A part of me admires them keeping their promises to do things better this year. But a more cynical side questions their longevity beyond this surge. I think it’s their faces, which already appear laden with regret. We’ve all done it before, resigned ourselves to intense regimens once the new year is upon us, bought a Fitbit with hopes to no longer be a fat-git, only to immediately rebel when faced with the punishing self-inflicted reality. It’s a fallacy of our future selves: we believe that while the prospect of reinvention is not possible today, our future self (that sucker) will somehow be able to shoulder the burden we levee upon him/her. Not only do we expect our shiny future selves to be disproportionately more active, we often expect they’ll happily chow down on spartan salads and other puritanical provisions.

Now, I’m not suggesting we abandon all plans for self-improvement and dive blindly into wanton hedonism, but rather that we don’t overload ourselves. That we should consider making lesser leaps and incremental changes that are more likely to become habitual—that we shouldn’t vilify ourselves if we struggle to live up to rigid expectations. It is also the lousiest season to start any outdoor activity. Although we all acknowledge it’s a new year, the earth carries on nonplussed to the significance we attach to the turns of a clock dial. Yes, it’s a reset, a blank canvas in many ways, but despite that, it’s also oppressively cold and languid; the landscape will not match your verve with new growth and warmth for a few months, and there are still colder days ahead. The mere idea makes me sink further into the toasty car seat and turn to thoughts of my parents’ log-burner imbuing their home with musky warmth and the steak that awaits me there: this, I feel, is a perfect start to my year.

In a time before supermarkets imported foodstuffs from around the globe, we’d sustain ourselves through this hibernal season with hardy root vegetables, bolshy brassicas and prudent preserves made from the abundant harvests of the summer/autumn months. These still feature on our plates and feel intrinsically right—especially when slathered in thick gravy alongside a choice of roast meats and tangy vinegared sauces. While there’s an apparent convenience in acquiring ingredients all year long, no matter how alarmingly out of season they are for this country, it is somewhat surreal seeing the likes of strawberries lining the shelves in January. Who eats fresh strawberries in January? It’s absurd. They appear among the fruit aisle like a mirage—the converse of seeing ice in the desert. I’m puzzled why they’re made available at this time of year because, clearly, it’s not for their taste. Is it done for the mere audacity? Have you ever picked a punnet’s worth of ripe berries in summer and the next day, after consigning them to the fridge, spotted how limp and bruised they’ve become overnight, like the cheeses, ketchup bottles, and broccoli all conspired to give them a good hiding? And those just came from the pick-your-own down the road, while the ones at Tesco’s made it here all the way from Egypt! It’s miraculous, really, but also confounding . . . why?

Seasonal eating is something food writers like to bang on about endlessly. Chances are a good portion of your cookbooks at home open with a heartfelt manifesto extolling the many virtues of this kind of temporal larder and divide their recipes between spring, summer, autumn and winter. It’s also a key criterion Michelin inspectors expect to see when evaluating our best restaurants. The underlying rationale is often sensible, convincing: when you eat food sourced locally and grown under their natural, intended conditions, you are getting them at their flavoursome best; the processes applied to make perishable food travel hemispheres intact hamper their taste and quality. In fact, from the moment fruit and veg are picked, they rapidly lose nutrients. The longer time passes between when it was plucked from the soil, branch or vine and makes it to your mouth, the less exceptional the eating experience becomes. Anyone who has bought and devoured veg picked that same day from a local farm store or pulled from their family allotment, or garden plot can attest to the difference.

While these are all worthy reasons to follow a more harmonious existence with what our landscape provides us, for me, there is a more compelling reason to take heed. It is that seasonality makes food into an event. You look forward to their arrival, and their limited sojourn prompts you to make the most of them while they’re here. In late April, when lines of asparagus spears have sprung into life and made it into the shops, I cannot eat enough of them. Dressed simply with some oil, salt and pepper before a brief but fierce burnish over hot coals, they are spritzed with fresh lemon juice and eaten hot alongside barbecued skewers of peppers, vine-ripened cherry tomatoes and halloumi: heaven. When the prolific courgettes appear in July, they do so like that mythical Greek beast, The Hydra, because whenever you cut off a young marrow, two more seem to grow back in its place. These find their way into a myriad of dishes: rustic ratatouilles, leek and courgette risottos, raw (if baby-sized) in salads and no end of pasta dishes. There are broad beans in May, gooseberries, and of course, the best strawberries in June, but Winter, I must confess, is the season my appetite covets the most. Swathes of happy-looking squash are roasted until golden or blitzed into soup. Celeriac and Jerusalem artichokes make marvellous alternatives to roast spuds in their own right, but are also a surprising treat in a mash. I’m even an unabashed sprout fancier, and while not everyone in my household shares my affinity for this maligned veg, they’ve consumed ample helpings disguised in cabbage and similar greens. Winter is also a time for homemade pies: crisp, buttery pastry encasing all manner of uplifting fillings. It’s for bountiful stews and braises simmered long for utmost tenderness. At their best, winter dishes are like a warm hug, and they are precisely the substantial, filling, and nourishing foods our bodies require to keep us solvent through these solemn months.

Now, we’re nearing the end of January, and everyone’s settled back into old routines. There are fewer joggers seen tottering along the pavements. And, although it’s easy to feel remorse for letting resolutions slip with the rigours of our daily life, try not to let it get you down. New Year’s Day may already seem distant in the rearview, but I hope you make the best of this year and listen to all those who wished you a happy one.

Fans often cite Colorless Tsukuru... as their favourite Murakami book and I can see why. Of those I’ve read, this fits most pleasingly in the hand. Size-wise, heft-wise, it’s faultless; zero strain from page one to the last. Vintage paperbacks are known for their floppy-yet-sound construction, and this one is no different—for no one likes overly stiff binding that feels like you’re as much battling in Ju-Jitsu as reading.

The paper is light tan. It’s both easy on the eyes and has a nice texture, not overly smooth, so your bookmark won’t slip out on a pilgrimage of its own.

Despite its title, there are a few colours on the jacket: a Venn diagram, no less. But it’s OK because the circle containing the words “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki” is transparent (i.e. no colour; colourless even) so it’s not false advertising.

The diagram is meant to convey that, while Tsukuru Tazaki is colour-less, there are those around him who do have colour. Colour here is used as a metaphor for personality (as in someone possessing or not possessing “a colourful personality”), it’s not a race thing. Supporting characters’ names, I once read somewhere, are the words for colours in Japanese as well. So this book has many levels to it.

One has to admire Murakami for writing such a protagonist. Frankly, there are too many books with interesting and memorable characters. It’s been done to death.

Another circle is red (back to the diagram). There is also one purple, one black and one white. Originally the background for the hardback was white, whereas the paperback edition is black. The black circle remains black on the paperback edition, making it sort of invisible. Black, also—if we're to get into the weeds of colour theory—is not a true colour, but the absence of colour. White, by contrast, is all colours in equal measure. So it could be said that the black circle is just as colourless as the transparent one, only in a different way.

It makes you think, doesn’t it?—and that’s what great literature’s all about.

When it comes to owning books, specifically physical books, how many is too many? Is it five hundred, a thousand, more? Or—you ask yourself—is this a daft question and there is no such thing? What separates a “collection” from a burgeoning disorder? Where’s the line and are you even aware if you’ve crossed it?

Like most other addictive pastimes, suspecting you have an issue means you probably have one. Admission, they say, is the first step towards recovery.

And so . . . [draws breath]

Your name is K and you’re a book-buying addic—Wait! Hold back that last airy consonant. You’re not quite there yet. Truly. Call it denial—or cope, as the kids now say—but it feels a tad premature. You still have some restraint. Some.

Of all the vices, losing one’s inhibitions in a bookstore every so often has got to be the mildest, right? Instead of feeding pound coins to fruit machines for a brief dazzlement of lights and excitable sound effects, you can (and do) spend that same coinage in musky second-hand bookstores, and come away with lightly-worn copies of, say, Dubliners and Herzog1 —Jackpot!

The town where you live has none. Well, there’s The Works, but does that really count? Even the WHSmiths where you did your school work experience is no longer around. All this is to say, these book binges are not a daily occurrence. Should you get the itch, the jitters, the hankering to get down with a bit of cheeky D. H. Lawrence, an outing needs to be arranged.

Just recently you were in Aberystwyth for a short camping trip. With the tent propped up and secure to the ground, you hastened off into town to grab some food but, more importantly, get to Waterstones before it shut. You made it there and so had the newly released book you were after: Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors. At the till you exchanged two small pieces of paper for the three-hundred-plus bound pages of paper and left the cheery vendor close up for the evening.

It rained all day, all night and sheep in the adjoining field bleated and baaed throughout. You watched Jaws 2 on the iPad and eventually (miraculously) got some sleep. By morning, the new airbed you slept on had deflated.

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The next day began with coffee, a full-English and a visit to the nearby town of Machynlleth where, between the charity stores and the quaint Literary Cat Books, you bought a few slim paperbacks: Fictions by Jorges Luis Borges, The High Road by Edna O’Brien and Strait is the Gate by André Gide, an old (but always preferable) A-format Penguin Modern Classics edition.

Back to Aberystwyth, now sunny, you popped into Llyfrau Ystwyth Books, a wonderful, higgledy-piggledy emporium, with a separate space upstairs for classics and hardback lit-fic. There you picked up Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, Selected Letters of James Joyce (edited by Richard Ellmann), and Everyman by Philip Roth, which you already owned—and might just be your favourite Roth book2—but its condition was simply too good to pass up.

After a pleasant walk along the seafront, another coffee, you decide to grab a baguette meal deal at the SPAR and head back early to the campsite to lounge in the sun and read. You zipped through Breeding Ground by Shaun Hutson, his follow-up to Slugs, which you read on your last camping trip. Hutson, you heard, was the basis of the character Garth Marenghi and, since watching the show, you can’t help but hear Matthew Holness’s voice narrating the pages of comically excessive gore3. With no third book in the series, you will have to find another bug- or woodland-critter-themed pulp horror title for the next outdoors getaway, for it’s oddly become tradition.

The noisy sheep were herded that evening to another field. You thought you’d have a better night because of this, but instead you were kept awake by the snores of a neighbouring camper. Since sleep wasn’t an option, you watched Misery, followed by The ‘Burbs on the iPad. Again the airbed deflated.

Seven books.

Upon returning home you sort the new, unread acquisitions into corresponding piles, all except the Gide which you begin later that night. No, you say to yourself, eyeing those inefficient bookcases, you don’t have a book-buying problem. If anything you have a space issue, i.e. not having enough. A better system is what you need—a better system and more spacious bookcases.

Just then you spot The Sound and the Fury, horizontally stacked alongside one of the units. It cost you 79p at an Oxfam somewhere4, and you have yet to read it (hence it being stacked horizontally). You take it down, open it and sniff its pages. Its scent is both sweet and rosy like Turkish Delight.

. . . The answer, I suspect, is very few.

Certainly, Mailer’s cultural notability (or notoriety, depending on your stance on the man) has diminished since he was alive, alternately releasing books of prodigious size and sparring both words and fists with his peers, along with the occasional headbutt, for good measure.

But why? What makes a figure like Mailer, once often touted as America’s greatest writer, fade into the annals of literary oblivion? Was he never that talented to begin with?1 Was the acclaim his books earned at the time justly warranted or inflated by celebrity and scandal? Or was it in truth the exhibitionism—between half-sloshed television appearances, his many public spats and feuds, a failed mayoral candidacy in New York, a lacklustre foray into film, and not to mention the hideous knife-assault in 1960 he levied at his then-wife—that totalled too much baggage to take Mailer-the-writer seriously and caused his eminence to wither?

Believing the reasons likely manifold, I went on the lookout among the shelves of second-hand bookstores for a not-too-battered copy of this author’s 1980 Pulitzer-winning work.

It took a while—a couple of years in fact—to chance upon one in the wild. Scouring the “M”s, I’d occasionally spot copies of The Naked and the Dead, but, alas, it was not the book of his I was after2.

An appetite to read The Executioner’s Song arose in me not long after finishing Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, another—decidedly more famous—account of a baffling murder spree and the capture, sentencing and death row proceedings for its assailants.

I’d first learned about it, and Mailer more broadly, in Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché and The Moronic Inferno, two incisive essay collections whose pages are filled with the appraisals of many literary giants, still luminous-as-ever and other’s who, for whatever reason, no longer shine so brightly.

In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song share many commonalities. Additionally, both . . .

• Were written by established fiction authors with larger-than-life public personas.

• Were labelled “non-fiction novels”.

• Are considered by many to be each author’s best work.

• Had film adaptations. I.C.B. in 1967, T.E.S. in 1982, and share a Rotten Tomatoes Fresh rating of 75% and 74%, respectively (at the time of this writing).

But while The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer—a lustrious prize Capote’s book failed to secure—it hasn’t seen the staying power of In Cold Blood, which now has been elevated to the status of modern classic.

In Cold Blood’s veracity was also heavily debated after its publication. Many questioned how faithful Capote was to his book’s subtitle, “A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences”, and how much it was reshaped and even fabricated by the savvy storyteller.

Take a look at this excerpt, for example:

Among Garden City’s animals are two grey tomcats who are always together – thin, dirty strays with strange and clever habits. The chief ceremony of their day is performed at twilight. First they trot the length of Main Street, stopping to scrutinise the engine grilles of parked automobiles, particularly those stationed in front of the two hotels, the Windsor and Warren, for these cars, usually the property of travellers from afar, often yield what the bony, methodical creatures are hunting: slaughtered birds – crows, chickadees, and sparrows foolhardy enough to have flown into the path of oncoming motorists. Using their paws as though they were surgical instruments, the cats extract from the grilles every feathery particle. Having cruised Main Street, they invariably turn the corner at Main and Grant, then lope along towards Courthouse Square, another of their hunting grounds - and a highly promising one on the afternoon of Wednesday 6 January, for the area swarmed with Finney County vehicles that had brought to town part of the crowd populating the square.

Within this passage, the only pertinent information is that a large crowd is formed at Courthouse Square—the crowd, we later find to be a furore of journalists, photographers, television reporters and cameramen, awaiting the arrival of Hickock and Smith, the murdering duo at the book’s centre.

The two tomcats are an obvious invention and entirely superfluous. They serve as a little whimsical blocking (to use a film term). By following these small, industrious creatures as they go about their daily rituals, the mass of activity at Courthouse Square, they—and we in turn—encounter, appears all the more monumental from the diminutive standpoint it's observed. Capote clearly also seeks to draw an analogy between the lives of the tomcats and Hickock and Smith, two other “dirty strays”—and two other opportunists who prey on the defenceless.

In Cold Blood, throughout, is perfumed with Capote’s insights. The narrative is mediated through a singular viewpoint (his own). He explains, he embellishes, he offers potential answers. Its prose is that of a conventional novel, and because of it, the line between fact and fiction, at times, blurs.

By contrast, here is an excerpt from The Executioner’s Song:

Next morning, Gilmore was brought from Provo to Orem, and Neilsen saw him in his office, and apologised about the crowd outside. There were TV lights and a lot of reporters and city employees in the hall, but what really embarrassed Nielsen was that half the police force including off-duty officers had also come out. People were even standing on chairs to get a look.

Mailer employs a more direct approach. His book’s prose is spare, almost utilitarian, and for the sheer amount of ground it covers, it needs to be. To Mailer, artful flourishes in language or extemporised pastorals were unnecessary to keep the reader rapt through the lengthy prospect of reading it. Facts alone were enough.

The book is engorged with testimony, transcripts, letters. Multiple viewpoints are afforded space to be heard. Because of this, it makes for a much different experience from In Cold Blood. As readers, we are not presented with a central thesis to follow but instead a panoply of material in which we must derive our own conclusions. Or not; the swathe of contradictory views, including those surrounding the death penalty, owing to the idea that wicked acts such as this are messy, chaotic, intrinsically (and lamentably) as much human as inhuman and perhaps not reducible to neat single-thread summations. Certain issues forever evade universal accord.

Going into The Executioner’s Song, I knew nothing about Gary Gilmore, the crimes he was accused of, and what punishment would transpire. Of course, given the book’s title, I’d assumed the nature of his crimes to be murder, but as to specific details—the victim(s), the motive(s), if Gilmore was indeed the rightful culprit, and whether he would see the chair, rope, rifle, injection or would eventually be acquitted—not a clue.

I was impressed by the book and by Mailer’s ability to sustain this complex, multifaceted story through a thousand-plus pages, never once succumbing to the urge to hypothesise. It’s a surprisingly quick read, too, full of lean, spaced-out paragraphs. The longest sections are often transcripts of Gilmore’s letters to his fiancée and others on the outside, which provide the closest, albeit still murky, insight into the way his mind operates.

Is it a novel, however? While in the tradition of In Cold Blood, the absence of its author’s own perceptions and the strict adherence to witness testimony made me struggle to designate it as such throughout this review-of-sorts. (Though, I hope I’ve been clear that I think it’s, in this instance, better for it.) Novel or not, it’s a book, and a book I feel is worth reading, particularly if you admired In Cold Blood, you’re able to find a copy and are not daunted by the prospect of lugging it around with you.

And with that, similar to the book’s revelations, my verdict on Mailer—and any conclusions as to why his work has not endured like some of his contemporaries, including Capote—remain, I suppose, inconclusive.

Perhaps The Executioner’s Song is the one shining exception in Norman Mailer’s otherwise skippable oeuvre; perhaps his other works are all crippled with outmoded ideas, which no longer vibe with today’s hapnin youth and their, like, values, maaaaaaaan!; perhaps I got it all wrong and Mailer’s still well-regarded, widely read and just as relevant as he ever was in the States and my antennae are attuned to his perception—or lackthereof—here in the UK, much in the same way most of us here couldn’t name a single NFL player (I can name only Dan Marino, and only because he appeared in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective); perhaps I ought to read another of Mailer’s books, just to be sure; perhaps; perhaps.

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.

Who doesn’t love a list?

Ballard sure did. From experimental works like The Index, a fictional bibliography for a book whose content is presumed lost or suppressed, or What I Believe, part prose-poem, and part sincere, part hyperbolic manifesto of sorts, his admiration of The Warren Commission Report—absolutely amazing stuff!—and Crash Injuries, the medical textbook he once referred to as his ‘Bible’, or how about Ballard’s curious appearance on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, promoting The Kindness of Women, where, among his selections, “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” features; Ballard saw the literary potential of lists to enumerate both meaning and bewilderment, often simultaneously.

The internet is littered with lists on everything from The 10 Best Fibre Broadband Suppliers to 25 Real-Life Ghost Stories That Will Terrify You, and equally loved by insomniac scrollers and search engine algorithms alike. Lists can offer a little footing for the uninformed, and for those already fluent in their subject, who may have compiled a mental tally of their own, they provide an opportunity to compare, to discuss, or lambast.

And so begins this new series: Top Five.

With this list, I’ve chosen to focus on the novels of J.G. Ballard, one of my all-time favourite writers. I have selected five that I feel are emblematic of his career. One to five is not a ranking but chronological. It also makes for a decent reading order.

The list:

1. The Drowned World

2. The Atrocity Exhibition

3. Crash

4. The Unlimited Dream Company

5. Super-Cannes

Explained:

1. The Drowned World (1962)

Where better to begin than with Ballard’s first novel (or at least what he refers to as his first real novel, having blocked reprints of 62’s The Wind from Nowhere).

Synopsis

The polar icecaps have melted; seas and temperatures have risen. Most of the Earth is now uninhabitable. The few surviving humans are forced to the North and South poles, which have become tropical, redolent of the Triassic era. There, Dr. Kerans and the others must contend with not only the futility of their surroundings but also the threat of sociopathic pirates.

The Drowned World has remained popular for its bleak and prescient depiction of global warming devastating the Earth. But as with all Ballard novels, it is neither censorious nor a cautionary tale. The unsolvable and worsening situation drives the narrative. Ballard is not so much concerned with cause as he is with effects. His characters are known to embrace catastrophe, to seek the path of their ruination and head towards it.

Ballard followed up The Drowned World with its inverse, The Drought (1964), and later capped off his trilogy (or quartet, if counting The Wind from Nowhere) of natural-disaster novels with The Crystal World (1966).

2. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

Ballard’s next novel would not only break from the formula of his previous three but also strip away the conventions of the “novel” altogether. The Atrocity Exhibition is a Morbius strip of non-linear fragments. It is fractured, detached and routinely unsettling in its clinical exploration of aberrant behaviours.

A notorious book, infamously pulped by American publisher, Doubleday, when their CEO saw one of its chapters was titled: Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan. (Grove Press—a print house synonymous with boundary-pushing literature—later released it in the US.)

The pivot was rather astounding. But as with the rest of Ballard’s work, its genesis can be pinpointed. In 1964, while holidaying with his family in San Juan, Mary, his wife and mother of his three children, became seriously ill with an infection that led to severe pneumonia. Three days later, she died.

My direction as a writer changed after Mary’s death, and many readers thought that I became far darker. But I like to think I was much more radical, in a desperate attempt to prove that black was white, that two and two made five in the moral arithmetic of the 1960s. I was trying to construct an imaginative logic that made sense of Mary’s death and would prove that the assassination of President Kennedy and the countless deaths of the Second World War had been worthwhile or even meaningful in some as yet undiscovered way.

- From Miracles of Life

Rather than attempt a synopsis here for The Atrocity Exhibition, it is perhaps more instructive to list further examples of its chapters:

[2] The University of Death, [4] You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, [8] Tolerances of the Human Face, [12] Crash!, [15] The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race, [Appendix] Princess Margaret’s Face Lift.

3. Crash (1973)

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident.

The origins of Crash, by which I mean the sexual metaphor Ballard conjured between colliding automobiles and their drivers, began in The Atrocity Exhibition. But whereas the chapter titled Crash! exists as an introduction to this theory, Crash, the novel, is Ballard’s dissertation.

Synopsis

James Ballard—yes, he used his own name—driving home, loses control of his car, where it skids into oncoming traffic and smashes head-on into another vehicle, carrying a young woman doctor, and her husband, who is catapulted through the windscreen, killing him instantly. While James and the doctor, Helen Remington, are barely injured, the ordeal imprints itself in their psyche. The two begin an affair, consummated exclusively in cars. Soon, they meet a contingent of variously impaired crash victims who share their newfound fetish, led by Robert Vaughan, a man who catalogues photographs of road accidents and stages recreations of infamous celebrity car crashes, and whose ultimate fantasy is to die in such a wreck, taking the life of actress Elizabeth Taylor in the process.

Crash is an audacious book. Of all his works, Ballard called it the most important. Martin Amis, reviewing Crash in ‘73, seemed perplexed by the material and the author’s new direction, at one point writing What is Ballard getting at? In later years, Amis came around, saying It took me a long time to get the hang of Crash, and while reviewing David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation, wrote:

The novel is indifferent to the passage of time and has lost nothing in twenty-five years. It is like a clinical case of chronic shock, confusedly welcomed by the sufferer.

4. The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)

For readers already well-versed in Ballard's fictional hinterland, The Unlimited Dream Company might be the most curious and remote of these five novels I have selected.

Anthony Burgess would agree with its inclusion, however. He once wrote This is perhaps the best novel that Ballard has written, in Ninety-Nine Novels (OOP, but now a podcast), a selection of his favourite English-language novels published between 1939 and 1984.

Synopsis

A young man named Blake steals a plane and, ten minutes after he is airborne, it erupts in flame and crashes into the Thames. Water quickly fills the sinking aircraft as he struggles to release himself from his harnesses. He escapes—or so we’re told—and finds himself in Shepperton, a quiet suburb outside of London notable for its film studios. Blake, having miraculously survived, soon discovers he has supernatural powers. He also cannot leave. The townspeople regard Blake as a kind of God, whom they follow as he transforms their town with spectacular flora and fauna, and fuses with them through impetuous acts of sexual congress.

Blake is an unreliable narrator, so we don’t definitively know if the book's events are real or if they’re visions from the afterlife of our actually drowned protagonist. But due to the explicit scenes in the novel, erring on the side of it being imagined (or at the very least, warped) will be the most palatable for the majority of readers.

It is undoubtedly Ballard’s most surreal novel. And while as an author, Ballard was known to write three or more books around a similar theme, The Unlimited Dream Company stands alone in his bibliography.

Aside: I also find it rather funny that Ballard, who himself lived in Shepperton, wrote this demented tale of a man with supernatural abilities around the time the nearby film studios were shooting interior scenes for the Christopher Reeve Superman movie.

5. Super-Cannes (2000)

Synopsis

Eden-Olympia, the ultra-modern ultra-exclusive business park for society’s elite situated in the hills atop Cannes, has just received two new residents. Paul Sinclair quit his job to follow his wife, Dr. Jane Sinclair, who was offered a six-month secondment there after her once-amiable predecessor went on a killing spree with an assault rifle before taking his own life. While his wife begins her practice, Paul Sinclair, flush with free time, attempts to uncover the reasoning behind the shocking massacre and why Eden-Olympia may not be the paradise it first appears.

Much in the same way that Ballard’s first four novels shared thematic similarities, so did his final four: Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), which all deal with, namely, suburbanite and/or yuppie unrest among small townships and gated communities.

Super-Cannes bears an especial likeness to the novel that preceded it, Cocaine Nights, swapping the sun-scorched Spanish enclave of Estrella de Mar for the uber high-tech Eden-Olympia. But, while it is longer (I believe it’s actually Ballard’s longest novel), Super-Cannes is somehow inexplicably tighter, more engaging; the premise was, in this reader’s opinion, perfected on the second go round.

Wait, no Empire of the Sun?

Empire of the Sun is Ballard’s best-known book. It is, if you didn’t know, an autobiographical novel based on his boyhood experiences in Shanghai, interned at a Japanese prisoner of war camp during WWII. Steven Spielberg adapted it for the “big screen” in ‘87, starring a young Christian Bale as “Jim”.

It’s a remarkable book. Certainly, read it—do. Its absence from this list is not due to any lack of merit or to dismiss the book that most people have heard of. I simply believe it, its sequel, The Kindness of Women, and Ballard’s marvellous autobiography, Miracles of Life, are best read later.

Many themes and recurring images throughout Ballard’s work can be traced back to his youth, what he saw and experienced. These sights knitted into the grey matter of his fertile mind, which later gave birth to elaborate, distorted allegories of catastrophe and characters with an emotionless—almost workmanlike—attitude to violence.

Empire of the Sun isn’t a typical Ballard novel, but it is indicative of what came before and after its writing.

Closing

And with that, I am curious about you, reader. Where is it you fall on the Ballardian continuum? Have you read none, some or all of his work? Do you favour a certain period or format, say his short stories or non-fiction, or even perhaps his avant-garde advertisements during his tenure at Ambit, over his novels? What is your favourite, or favourites? And, if you have a top five list of your own, do share it below. I’m interested to see how yours differs from mine and why.

I am not a fan of Robert Crumb or his work. While his talent is clear, and I can easily respect the man’s dedication to his craft, his art, in both thematic and aesthetic terms, does little for me.

But this statement should (I hope) hold little weight for those who get something out of Crumb’s work, and many do. You see, comic books were never my thing.

It might then seem odd that I would not only choose to watch but—some ten-plus years later—rewatch a two-hour documentary for which he’s the subject. But that’s just it: I don’t believe he is the subject; at least for me, he isn’t.

Crumb’s first words in the film are about how depressed and suicidal he becomes when he doesn’t get to draw. He says this, scribbling away at a self-portrait. Drawing, for him, is about exploration. He doesn’t know what it is he’s working on until it reveals itself. This particular drawing depicts him nauseous in bed, a large TV camera looming over his distressed pate; the subtext is none too subtle.

“I enjoy drawing, that’s all. It’s a deeply ingrained habit. It’s all because of my brother, Charles.”

We’re about three minutes into the film at this point. The next shot shows Crumb in a hotel in Philadelphia, his hometown, speaking to his mother on the phone about the crew possibly coming by to interview Charles. It was funny watching this back as it seemed director Terry Zwigoff was keen to quickly shift the film’s focus from the famed Crumb to his older brother in the shadows1.

Alas, his mother says Charles doesn’t want to be involved. Crumb doesn’t force the issue. He says Bye, putting down the handset, then turns to the crew and says, Well, that’s that, raising his hands in swift defeat.

Thankfully, for the documentary’s sake, it wasn’t.

While in Philadelphia, Crumb was asked to give a speech at an art school, which provides a glimpse of what the film might’ve been like if he were the sole figure.

On stage, Crumb treats his young audience to a half-arsed slideshow of his work. When he speaks, it’s the voice of a petulant teen, mopishly describing the acclaim his comic strips have received, how this’n’that person screwed him over and how he was so peeved by Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of Fritz the Cat that he later killed off the character in spite.

Am I being too mean? Since rewatching Crumb and thinking about writing a brief review, I have seen many—including a few clips of present-day contentious figure Jordan Peterson—heralding the artist and this documentary as an instructive example of someone who escaped a fraught upbringing and managed, through dogged perseverance, to become a success not only financially, but also crucially in their relationships with the opposite sex, where, before, there was flatly zero. That is a take, for sure, but for me, it is far too simplistic and idealised; it suggests a fairy tale ending that trauma seldom allows.

Ostensibly this is what the film is about: trauma and its varying and continuing effects on three brothers. Those who have as a child experienced abuse from a grownup know only too well the shattering impact it has on their development and self-worth. Depression and mistrust of others are almost a given and tough to reconcile. It is common, also, for those abused to be drawn towards creative pursuits, whether it be painting, music, writing or similar. These outlets offer a private space within their control, and the act of creativity (of bringing something new into this world) gives meaning and validation to a life once splintered by the selfish mistreatment of an adult2.

Sandwiched between older brother Charles and younger brother Maxon, Robert Crumb appears to be the least affected by what they went through as children. Either that or his success as an artist has afforded him some footing to climb out from the wretched pit their past left them in. Again, I’m asking myself, am I being too mean about Crumb? Earlier I criticised his teenage-like demeanour—well, it’s hardly surprising that his personality is somewhat arrested in adolescence, is it? Though I find his general personality in the film irritating, I should perhaps give him some leeway there.

But just because someone’s experienced a horrible upbringing doesn’t exempt them from criticism. Crumb’s work is frequently (and blatantly) racist, sexist and juvenile, and though it has indeed brought him success, adoration and the attention of women who before would not look twice at him, there’s a hateful cynicism he has towards it and everyone in turn3.

It’s with Charles’s introduction that the documentary becomes something much more than a fluff piece for its namesake. Crumb credits Charles with getting him into drawing. Immediately we picture a young boy emulating his older brother, seeking his approval. Together they would work on home-spun comic books—many of which Crumb has kept and are intercut throughout the film, charting over time the advancement of one brother and the deterioration of the other. Even now—1994—Crumb tells the crew he still thinks of Charles when he works on his comics and whether or not he’s gonna like ‘em.

But Charles is no longer an artist. It’s not that he became something else; it’s that he has become nothing at all. We meet Charles at the home he still shares with his mother. The interview is conducted in his room, where he’s sat, legs folded at the edge of his bed, his celebrated brother on the armchair next to him. Behind Charles we see double stacks of horizontal paperbacks atop units. He has read them all and is now reading them over since there’s nothing else to do. Charles speaks in a similar cadence to his brother, but his voice is duller, more muted, due most certainly to the tranquillisers and anti-depressants he takes. From this setting, we get to know the person, Crumb’s idol and saviour, in many ways.

They were once competitive with one another. They both wanted the same things. Crumb, we gather—despite his insistence that his brother is much funnier and smarter than he is—prevailed with art, with women, and with life overall. Charles’s animosity is ever-present, softened only by the breathy chuckles that punctuate his frankest statements.

But that animosity existed long before his younger brother eclipsed him. Crumb shares a story of them as children, rooting around the trash for mislaid treasures. Charles found a beautiful toy, a wooden ice cream truck. Crumb was envious and wanted to play with it, but Charles wouldn’t let him so much as touch it. Crumb complained to his mother, who then told Charles he must share with his brother once he’s through playing. Fifteen minutes later, Charles came into the house and said, “OK, Robert, you can play with it now”, and when Crumb ran outside, he found his brother had smashed it to smithereens against the wall of the house.

Crumb tells another anecdote of the time Charles confessed to him that, when they were teenagers, he had to fight the urge not to run a butcher’s knife through his heart. Charles confirms this, adding, “Or go down in the basement and get an axe and bash your skull in with it.” He and Crumb both laugh at the remembrance. Charles, playing analyst, says that he knows where his homicidal tendencies stem: an excessive degree of narcissism. Terry asks him what the connection is between narcissism and homicidal tendencies, and Charles, quick to reply, says, “When narcissism is wounded, it wants to strike back at the person who wounded it.” Crumb turns to his brother and asks if he has ever wounded his narcissism. “Many, many times,” Charles replies, saying it twice. Crumb laughs, a big guffaw.

We learn much more about Charles, who he was and is now in 94. We learn that he once was considered handsome—there was just something wrong with his personality. Sex was all he thought about in his late teens and early twenties. Crumb later tells the crew that his brother has never been with a woman. Now, Charles says, his sexual desires are completely dead. He speaks frankly about the masturbation habits of his youth and how now he can no longer achieve an erection, which he attributes to the medication, a lack of external stimulation (for he seldom leaves his home), and ageing. We learn about Charles’s multiple suicide attempts and that it’s because of these that he was put on medication. He once drank a bottle of furniture polish and took an overdose of sleeping pills. “There were about two or three other attempts besides that one,” he says.

In one of the most remarkable sections of the film, Crumb pulls from his archive a whole history of Charles’s comic book work. Progressing through the years we see an almost willed (or unwilled) withdrawal from that world. It’s like seeing an artist’s mental unravelling rendered pictorially. First to manifest is a new obsession with lines, odd wrinkles that cover his characters’ clothing and later their faces, often running discordant to the rest of the styles in the zine. Then, his text bubbles grow and grow, taking up more room in each panel, and the illustrations shrink, relegated to thin slivers before being squeezed out entirely. The panels eventually become text-only, and soon after, the text becomes non-sensical. Next, Crumb pulls out notebooks that Charles filled out, where he has moved away from actual words with meaning to a dense scribe resembling words. It’s quite the metaphor. Entire books are filled end-to-end in this minute scrawl. It suggests the habit—the compulsion—was still there, but whatever message or story Charles once wanted to convey was now missing.

Crumb is an incredible documentary. There is simply too much to unpack, so I suggest watching it if this review has piqued your interest. (It’s now available through Criterion.) I didn’t even get onto Maxon, Crumb’s younger brother, who is an enigma in his own right. Maxon is mostly seen barefoot, sitting in the lotus, compulsively fidgeting with a bullet. At one point, he pulls out a homemade nail bed and describes his process of using it. “It gratifies your intestines,” he says.

Downstairs in my kitchen as I write this, a bowl of exceedingly wet bread dough is coming to life. The bowl, a big white Mason Cash, was a kind gift from colleagues for my thirtieth and has since birthed countless loaves, both sourdough and yeasted, as well as rolls, flatbreads, pizzas and bagels.

Today’s dough will either end up as focaccia topped with halved cherry tomatoes, lashings of olive oil and punchy herbs or a sheet pan pizza coated with fresh tomato sauce, a blend of cheeses and whatever goodies the fridge holds. I’m still deciding which. But due to the high ratio of water to flour, I know a bread that is flatter and bubblier and chewier is on the cards.

I first deposited all the ingredients—flour, water, salt, yeast and olive oil—into the bowl and mixed them into a still-yet unmanageable slop with a Danish whisk, a wonderful little tool that makes this a two-minute job and saves my hands from getting sticky1.

This dough is also novel in that it contains fresh yeast. Getting hold of some requires searching beyond shop shelves—either ordering online from a specialist or talking to someone in the bakery section of a supermarket, who will often break off a nice chunk for you gratis. Fresh yeast looks like a block of crumbly beige Play-Doh but smells far nicer, headier2, and I swear—though this could be a level of fey romanticism—produces tastier baked goods than the dried variety that comes in pre-portioned foil sachets.

There’s something seemingly illicit about collecting an unmarked baggy of this substance to take home and cook up into food that might soon send you into blissful sleep if you eat too much in one go. A gluten high, if you will. Sublime.

I keep a timer next to me while I write. Every hour or so I head downstairs to check on the dough, give it a few quick folds to help build its strength, before returning to my desk to write some more. It takes no more than a minute—longer only if I also brew coffee. Typically, for most bread I make, these brief intermissions are between one and two hours apart. But I tend to leave my desk when convenient. If, say, I’ve finished a paragraph I’m happy with or have reached a minor impasse, which might clear up after stepping away from the desk for a moment.

This main proofing stage3, whether for sourdough or long-yeasted bread, is around six hours.

Sourdough is typically a three-day event. First comes feeding the starter (a mixture of rye flour and water, in my case) the night before. Then, day two is for making the dough, which requires those occasional folds over six or so hours before shaping the loaf and placing it overnight in the fridge to bake the following morning (day three).

This may all sound like an ordeal, and in a sense it is, but it quickly becomes habitual and provides for me these perfect mini interludes to a day’s writing. I find I get more out of myself by allowing my mind to switch between whatever I’m working on and performing simple dough maintenance. Doing this, I somehow forget entirely to look at social media, which could lead me into a deep warren of wasted discovery.

Even on days like today when I make yeasted bread, which can be taken from mixed to fully baked in around three and a half hours, I tend to lower the normal amount of yeast, so the times become comparable with sourdough. The process can even be extended further and, in turn, improve a bread’s flavour by employing pre-fermentation methods such as a French poolish or Italian biga4. As with the sourdough, this can also be put in the fridge overnight prior to baking.

I think that’s partly the joy. Experimenting. That and making the process flexible for you (rather than you it). While there are certain breads I make again and again, trying different recipes and techniques keeps things fresh. There’s also something to be said about eating bread with fewer ingredients. Bread only requires flour, water, salt and yeast5, but the store-bought stuff is seldom so pure. Some of it can hardly be called bread at all.

I’ve never used the popular Pomodoro technique (nor any productivity systems for that matter), but I suppose this is quite similar. Except, unlike the Pomodoro technique, not only will I have hopefully written some semi-readable sentences, but at the end of the day, I will have something delicious to tear into—the spoils of a good day’s work.

My timer has just gone off and I, through writing this, have decided pizza to be the destiny for this dough. There’s mozzarella that needs using, plus a few pizza slices will see us for dinner this evening and our lunchboxes tomorrow.

I liberally oil a large sheet pan, pour in the dough, and gently coerce it into shape. The more you bother the dough, the tenser and more stubborn it gets, so it’s often best to give it time to relax rather than trying to force it into a perfect rectangle. Another twenty minutes or so will do.

Because we’ll want to eat the pizza hot from the oven, I’ll actually stick it in the fridge at this point to forestall further rising and will remove it again an hour or so before dinnertime, where I’ll layer the bare dough with sauce, cheese and various other toppings and pre-heat the oven to full-whack to help it blister and char slightly.

Yum!

Out of the oven.

I’ve been making bread on and off for years. My first loaves were all hand-kneaded, fast-risen and required much more attention. Nowadays due to the slower, more laid-back approach outlined above, it’s become a weekly, if not twice-weekly, practice.

Of course, I don’t make a loaf every single day I write, but I tend now to favour breadmaking on days I do.

Every last crumb

Real bread has a life cycle. There’s nothing better than wolfing down slices of a just-cooled boule slathered with salted butter and good jam. In the first few days, there are sandwiches and toast topped with mushrooms or egg (or both). Inevitably, the loaf begins to stale, but this isn’t cause for despair. It instead opens the door to a wealth of new delights: French toast being a personal favourite; croutons for salads and soups; baked with cabbage, leek and cheese as a rustic panade; soaked in custard for a cosy pudding; or a thousand other uses as breadcrumbs.

Some recommendations

If you’ve ever wanted to give breadmaking a go, a great book to start your journey is Jack Sturgess’s Bread Every Day. In it, Jack shows you everything from making a simple sandwich loaf to brioche, ciabattas, baguettes and sourdough, and he also has some fab recipes for using the remains of your bread. Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast is another fantastic book whose recipes all produce a similar-looking artisanal loaf, but each uses different timings and methods to fit your schedule. Baking School - The Bread Ahead Cookbook by Matthew Jones, Justin Gellatly and Louise Gellatly is perhaps a little more advanced but includes many varied bread recipes from around the globe and desserts worth whipping up for special occasions.

The businessmen sat around the table conducting business, this being the biweekly get-together for general business development, initiatives to drive new business into the business, and a forum to comment on business done since the last meeting.

They all wore suits, the businessmen, but the brand, cut and craftsmanship varied greatly based on each businessman's personality and stature.

The most important businessman was the President—he owned the business and made all the key decisions for the business to adopt—and he was wearing a custom-tailored suit from the most highly touted (and expensive) suit business in Saville Row, London. Sitting next to him was his second-in-command and recent father, a businessman whose newly appointed daddy duties were displayed throughout his attire: a creased, dishevelled shirt and tie strangulated underneath a collar discoloured with baby-spittle. The youngest of the assembled businessmen wore an eclectic tweed ensemble, tailored, and though neither the same expense nor provenance as the President's, came from a hip new startup, making proverbial waves in the suit scene. The rest donned suits presumably pulled straight from racks at the business suit aisles of megastores and mid-tier clothing establishments.

These were not the most comfortable of clothing to wear. Throughout a long day, the starchy material chaffed at the inside of the thigh and the top buttons were always too tight and uncomfortable, restricting air in the inadequately conditioned rooms. But, alas, it was the only appropriate clothing to do business in.

One businessman, let's call him Buster, had trouble focussing on the meeting at hand. Before entering the room, Buster had been in the men's room taking care of another kind of business and, in his haste to arrive on time, had inadvertently left a small scrap of toilet tissue—no more than you'd tear off to apply to a shaving cut—stuck to his posterior. It was opaquely there and felt like a finger's constant prodding.

He'd estimate that around sixty-eight per cent of discussed business was lost to thoughts of his buttocks. All Buster could do was listen for audible rises in the room and ape his colleagues' responses while covertly clenching each cheek, in turn, to try and unhitch the paper that clung there.

But Buster was accustomed to tuning in and out of these meetings. The discourse was often so dry and repetitive that, for sanity's sake, his mind was forced to wander and invent its own agenda.

Buster knew that business talk was cyclical and that the finer points of this meeting would be all but forgotten by lunchtime and considered anew at the next one. In his four years with the business, he had not seen any new business discussed at these meetings come to fruition. The inner workings of the business have effectively remained unchanged despite many hours spent debating novel new ventures, campaigns, mergers and rebrands.

It could be said (though not aloud for risk of breaking the spell) that the costs incurred in the twice-weekly business meetings, between the portentous salaries of each businessman and the exquisite fine dining provided to them, weren't exactly good for their business's bottom line.

Lobster bisque, steak tartare, grilled calamari, souffle, confits, and other gastronomic delights were lavished upon the businessmen. Buster hadn't known food like this before in his humbler, working-class beginnings. He'd often jest with the missus that the less work they seemed to do, the more generously they rewarded themselves.

Soon, Buster thought, they ought to stop showing up to the offices at all. Why continue with the endless rigmarole of business talk when they could instead frequent illicit bathhouses and massage parlours together? Why blather on with marketing campaigns that would never be seen when they could partake in the finest spa appointments, pedicures and espresso enemas? Why scrutinise the same unchanging financials when they could slacken their ties and smoke cigars that have been dipped in angel dust? Why analyse the business's competitors when they could be dining at exclusive underground restaurants that serve pan-fried foie gras and endangered animals? And why worry about the business's health when they should be prioritising their own, each treating themselves to their very own slave child whose organs they could harvest when the richness of living had finally caught up to them and effectively live forever like parasites off the lowly workers who manufactured the business's products.

When he got home that night, Buster's missus asked again what his business actually did. But for his life, he couldn't remember.

Part One of this short jaunt into the work of Hubert Selby Jr. covers Requiem for a Dream and its author’s unique but immensely effective writing style. If you’ve made your way here after reading that then welcome back. (Hugs.) But if you haven’t read Part One, I want to briefly reiterate that while I and many others hold Selby’s work in the highest of high regard, I’m sure we’d all be quick to insist his work isn’t for everybody. These aren’t stories you read your children at bedtime. Hell, I’d caution anyone who prefers untroubled sleep from reading Selby before bed. And if for any reason you are liable to be negatively affected by frank depictions of violence and worse, then there’s no shame in ducking out. Honestly, it’s not so much a trigger as a landmine warning needed when it comes to Selby.

Despite this, and despite Selby in seven books having committed to print some of the most harrowing, traumatic and uncomfortable scenes I’ve ever read, I do not believe any of them to be gratuitous.

His books leave me with a pain in my heart but not a bad taste in my mouth.

One of the things I have become aware of through the years is how much I love the people I write about.

- Hubert Selby Jr.

Back to Last

Last Exit to Brooklyn is a gut punch. It changed me, that book. Forever changed the way I viewed literature and art more broadly. I cannot overstate the effect it had. It was the first book that made me realise fiction could have this sort of impact—could shape us—the way firsthand experiences do. It’s the book by which I valuate all others, not so much for its subject matter or style but for its unflinching commitment to itself.

With death at bay

But before reading Last Exit I read its introduction, which left an indelible impression of its own. In it we discover how improbable it was that any of these books came to be. Here’s Selby:

I had gone to sea when I was 15, as a merchant seaman, and at the age of 18 I was taken off a ship in Germany and the doctors said I couldnt live more than a few months. I had TB and both lungs were extremely diseased.

He’d contracted the tuberculosis from infected cattle that his ship was carrying, which had to be jettisoned overboard1. Selby returned to the US and was placed in a sanatorium. His entire tuberculosis ward died. Selby’s mother had got hold of streptomycin, an experimental drug that frizzled and destroyed his mind, turned him wacko but kept him alive:

By the time I got out of the hospitals I had spent 3 years in bed, had 10 ribs removed, one lung had been permanently collapsed and a section had been cut out of the other one. And then things got worse.

Having miraculously survived his treatments and surgeries, Selby came down with asthma 5 or 6 years later and was back in hospital with doctors issuing similarly bleak prognoses. Selby lived. Again. But for much of his life, death was always looming. And having faced his mortality many times at such a young age, Selby came to this realisation:

I experienced the fact that some day I was going to die, not almost, as had been happening, and managing to survive, but I was really going to die, and just before I died two things would happen: One, I would regret my entire life; Two, I would want to live my life over again, and then I would die. This experience terrified me. The thought that I would live whatever number of years and look back on it and see I hadnt done anything with my life, had wasted it, was something I just could not live with. So I decided to write.2

The “absent” author

Last Exit to Brooklyn took six years to write. Selby first had to learn how to write but, more crucially, how to get out of the way.

Get out of the way?—I remember this notion stumped me when I first read it. How could he get out of the way—the book didn’t write itself, did it? (I recall being rather indignant on this point.) And when Selby expanded on what he meant by this, I still couldn’t grasp what he was saying:

. . . The primary responsibility of the artist is to get free of the human ego. I have no right to impose myself, in any way, between the reader and the people in the story.

About midway into The Queen Is Dead, the second part of Last Exit, I finally understood.

The Queen Is Dead

Last Exit to Brooklyn is an unconventional novel. Instead of a single narrative thread, it is split into six parts (or five parts and a lengthy coda): I. Another Day Another Dollar, II. The Queen Is Dead3, III. And Baby Makes Three, IV. Tralala, V. Strike, Coda. Landsend. While each part is self-contained, many of the cast reappear throughout.

Another Day Another Dollar is short, ten pages long. It takes place at an all-night diner, a regular haunt for local thugs and off-duty soldiers stopping in from the nearby base. It’s here we meet, among others, Vinnie and Harry, and it’s here we dive headlong into the book’s piquant prose and discover violence to be a routine solution to boredom for many of its denizens, whether it be friendly roughhousing between the gang or savage beatings handed to foes.

The Queen is Dead introduces us to a new character. Georgette was a hip queer, it begins:

Georgette was a hip queer. She (he) didn’t try to disguise or conceal it with marriage and mans talk, satisfying her homosexuality with the keeping of a secret scrapbook of pictures of favourite male actors or athletes or by supervising the activities of young boys or visiting turkish baths or mens locker rooms, leering sidely while seeking protection behind a carefully guarded guise of virility (fearing that moment at a cocktail party or in a bar when this front may start crumbling from alcohol and be completely disintegrated with an attempted kiss or groping of an attractive young man and being repelled with a punch and - rotten fairy - followed with hysteria and incoherent apologies and excuses and running from the room), but took pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who werent gay . . .

We soon learn Georgette is in love with Vinnie. It is a desperate, yearning love, one she knows deep down could never be reciprocated by him, but one that feels so potent and vital she must hold onto the thinnest thread of benzidine-fuelled hope. She follows Vinnie everywhere (when he’s not in jail), showers him with affection, tries to get him alone, away from the others, pleading with him to succumb to her advances. He would refuse and tell her theres plenty of time sweetheart. Maybe later. Vinnie, it should be said, enjoys this adoration and even lets Georgette buy him coffee, sit on his lap and play with his earlobes.

It wasnt fear of being rebuked or hit by him (that could be developed in her mind into a lovers quarrel ending in a beautiful reconciliation) that restrained her, but she knew if done in the presence of his friends (who tolerated more than accepted her, or used her as a means to get high when broke or for amusement when bored) his pride would force him to abjure her completely and then there would not only be no hope, but, perhaps no dream.

While Vinnie remains chaste, Harry is quick to show he’s amenable. But when Georgette dismisses Harry (who happens to be married and has a child), he turns vicious:

I wont charge ya nothin Georgie, grabbing one of her ears. Dont touch me Harry, you big freak, pushing his hand away and slapping at it. Im not about to have sex with you. Harry took his pushbutton knife from his pocket, opened it, locked the blade in the open position, felt the blade and tip and walked toward Georgette as she backed away shaking limp wristed hands at him. Stand still and I/ll make you a real woman without goin ta Denmark. He and Vinnie laughed as Georgette continued to back away, her hands limply extended.

This leads to a cruel game—Harry and Vinnie take turns throwing the knife at Georgette’s feet, yelling think fast, watching her leap and dance out of harm’s way and screaming at them to stop—before the inevitable happens, the blade is found sticking in her calf. Vinnie fixes her up, fetching a bottle of iodine from the diner, pouring it over the wound and securing a handkerchief around her leg.

She wants to be taken to the hospital, but this is out of the question for Vinnie:

Ya cant go to the hospital. When they see that leg of yours theyll wanna know what happened and the next thing yaknow the lawll be knockin on my door and I/ll be back in the can.

They call a cab to take her home. She pleads and pleads to instead go to the hospital, promising she won’t tell them anything.

Please! My brothers home. I cant go home now!

At home, we’ll soon learn her brother Arthur isn’t so accepting of Georgette’s lifestyle. But I’ll leave it there for recounting story beats in hopes that, if you’ve made it this far, you’re sufficiently tempted to track down the story and read it yourself and will now shift back to the impression it made on this—at the time very green—reader.

On Exit

The greatest lesson I’ve learnt from this story and the book as a whole is that fiction offers prime terrain for empathy and honesty, provided the author is willing to not only tread that ground but abandon themselves to it. Selby clearly was. He takes us places we wouldn’t dare go alone, where we meet people who say and do things that scare us witless. But I feel the true power of his work is that no matter how hellish things get, humanity remains. It may get ravaged, beaten or torn up, but humanity is still there, a little flickering light, and somehow extra alive in our minds, seeing how vulnerable it is to being snuffed out at any moment. Selby’s work exists on that humanity. When humanity comes to an end, so does the story.

Before Last Exit, I’d mostly read gargantuan genre novels—you know the type, heavy in pages, light in any residual thought once closed—and perhaps this is why Selby’s work appeared so different, why it affected me so. The style, of course, was exciting, new, but beyond that was the rawness of the experience. There is a confessional aspect about it—a sense that you’ve tapped into the most impermissible thoughts of its characters, and these have been presented to you unobstructed, undiluted, uncensored. This, I realised, was what Selby had meant by getting out the way. He didn’t sanitise the language or foist any message or stance, and he didn’t contrive the plot towards some redemptive arc or justice people might find palatable. And for that, Last Exit to Brooklyn truly is a pound of pure.

Postscript

What a delight it has been to revisit Selby, reread parts of Last Exit and others and find they're still as I remember them. This has been equally easy and difficult to write. Easy because Selby’s books feel so foundational to my reading and writing4 that I can recall with decent clarity not only the events of his books but how I felt when I first read them. Difficult because his novels and short stories are filled with unpleasantries, so it’s easy to come off like a loon praising them so. By those who knew him, Selby seemed to be a loveable curmudgeon. It’s interesting isn’t it, how sometimes artists whose work features the most disturbing, abhorrent material turn out to be endlessly endearing while those whose work is of the more family-friendly variety are the ones often found to be monsters in real life5—exceptions, of course, but certainly odd.

I didn’t have any goal for wanting to write this beyond sharing my gratitude for the writer and his work, and I allowed it to unfurl as it has, drifting between books, style and the man himself. It’s for this reason I haven’t covered The Room, The Demon, Song of the Silent Snow, The Willow Tree and Waiting Period—not because I’m not willing, I just figured two parts are plenty for now.

I may return to writing about Selby again here. But for now, I’m simply wanting to reread his back catalogue—just to read it. And if that is the grand result of this blog, I for one am happy with that.

“I started writing because I did not want to die having done nothing with my life.

This is Selby’s opening line from his 1994 introduction to Last Exit to Brooklyn, his first novel, published in 1964 (US), and ‘66 (UK), where it was banned for obscenity in ‘67, and later absolved in ‘68.

We/ll begin halfway

Requiem for a Dream, comes smack dab in the middle of Selby’s chronology, and is arguably his best-known work today, due in large part to the Aronofsky film adaptation starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connolly and Marlon Wayans. The film version often tops internet lists named such things as The most harrowing movies of all time, and Films too upsetting to watch twice. Given its reputation, it’s unlikely the general filmgoer would go on to pick up the paperback and relive the ordeal anew from the source. And I’m not here to change their minds. Selby’s work is brutal—there’s no getting around it. He’s not a writer you recommend; he’s one you must seek out.

But hey, you’re reading this of your own free will, so I'll assume you are doing precisely that.

Requiem depicts the slow and tortuous unravelling of its main characters’ dreams, along with the disintegration of their health, sanity and freedom. For most, where the book begins would be rock-bottom. Harry1 Goldfarb is a heroin addict who’s taken to routinely pawning his mother’s TV so he and best friend Tyrone can afford a fix. But they’re no longer satisfied scrounging around to feed their habit. Selling, they decide, is where it's really at, and so the duo hatch a plan to buy, cut and offload dope, with an eye to make some real money:

All we gotta do is cool it with the shit, you know, just a taste once in a while but no heavy shit - Right on baby - just enough to stay straight an we/d have a fuckin bundle in no time. You bet your sweet ass. Those bucks would just be pilin up till we was ass deep in braid jim. Thats right man, and we wouldnt fuck it up like those other assholes. We wont get strung out and blow it. We/d be cool and take care of business and in no time we/d get a pound of pure and just sit back and count the bread.

Sounds promising, eh?

Meanwhile, for Harry’s mother Sara Goldfarb, the two best things in life are television and chocolate; they help plug the void left by her deceased husband Seymour. She receives a phone call one day asking if she would like to appear as a contestant on her favourite quiz show and, clutching the top of her dress, feeling her heart palpitate, can scarcely believe her luck:

Sara Goldfarb blushed and blinked, I never thought that maybe I would be on the television.

And then, soon after:

O my God, television. What will I wear???? What do I have to wear? I should be wearing a nice dress. Suppose the girdle doesn’t fit? Its so hot. Sara looked at herself then rolled her eyes back and up. Maybe I/ll sweat a little bit but I need the girdle. Maybe I should diet? I wont eat.

She heads to her closet and finds the dress, the one she will wear on television, the gorgeous red dress and gold shoes she wore when her Harry was bar mitzvahed . . . Seymour was alive then . . . and not even sick.

That was a long time ago. Now of course, the dress no longer fits. But Sara’s mind is set:

She loved the red dress. She should be able to lose the weight. She could always let the seams out a little maybe. The library will have books. Tomorrow I/ll go and get the books and go on a diet. She put another chocolate covered cream in her mouth and let the chocolate slowly melt and savoured the flavour of the chocolate mixing with the cream center then slowly squeezed the chocolate between her tongue and the roof of her mouth and smiled and half closed her eyes as her body tingled with tiny shocks2 of delight.

It's a simple premise. We understand from the outset these characters’ lives and how realising their dreams would benefit them: Harry wants a future with his girlfriend Marion, Tyron wants to escape squalor for a better life, Sara is lonely and wants to be seen; but we are suspicious of their ability to achieve what they set out. Many temptations are afoot and, as we’ve learnt from the story of Eden, they are sometimes too strong to deny.

Selby’s books are filled with trials. They seem to explore the malleability of the human spirit while under duress. The Edenic image, I believe, is a useful one, for, when I read his novels or short stories, I can’t help but picture them as modern-day bible stories.

I plan to circle back to this notion when discussing other works, but first, I want to write a little about his—

Words on the page

Open any Selby book to a random page and you will quickly realise this writer’s work is like no other. You may at first be struck by the total absence of apostrophes and speech marks. Then, peering closer, you find certain words like dont or wont make do without any punctuation at all, whereas others, I/ll or he/ll for example, have a slash where the apostrophe usually goes. You look elsewhere and spot a line that reads like dialogue but find no attribution to a character, nor any line breaks between interlocutors. Depending on the book, and the random page, you may see walls of text3 without paragraph breaks or see paragraph breaks that are spaced and tabbed unevenly. Were you to stop here and close the book, you’d likely be daunted from reopening it, even regretting your purchase, if it found its way to your home.

Don’t (or dont!)

Believe me, it’s not formatting peculiarities that should make you second guess your choice to read Hubert Selby Jr. (That’s what the subject matter’s for). Each of Selby’s choices to eschew literary norms were deliberate. And while the framework of conventional grammar and punctuation exists to help the writer convey a story to the reader in a way that can be easily comprehended, it is by no means law.

Selby argues that for dont or wont (or arent or isnt) punctuation is unnecessary because they are perfectly understandable without (so why include them?). However, a mark is needed for the likes of I/ll or he/ll because, without them, they become different words with different meanings. (I/ll becomes Ill, he/ll becomes hell.) As for why slashes and not apostrophes, it’s for practical reasons, economy. A slash could be delivered with a single keystroke of his typewriter4, whereas an apostrophe required holding shift with one hand to raise the hefty carriage and then striking the number 8 with the other, and when the words were flowing, this action would only slow his rhythm.

Rhythm really is the keystone of Selby’s prose; It also explains his inventive use of indents, spacing between paragraphs and lack of dialogue attribution. Although he read and was influenced by the likes of Joyce and Melville, Selby was keen to cite Beethoven as his main inspiration in how he approached writing and how he built his own ruleset.

His work is beautifully inevitable, yet never predictable, no matter how many times you hear it.

Alike a musical score, fiction is predominantly5 linear. We proceed from page one line one onwards. However, music prescribes pacing with time signatures and Beats Per Minute. Notes have additional meaning, also. There is a note's pitch (where it appears on the five-lined stave) but also its length: whole note, half-note, quarter-note and so on. To achieve a similar effect in his writing, Selby’s solution was to vary the spacing between paragraphs and even words within sentences. Assuming you read at a steady clip, longer breaks are employed when Selby wants the previous sentiment to linger, while shorter ones are to get you trucking onto the next line.

Rhythm also factors into his dialogue. Selby would assign unique speech patterns (and pronunciation) to each character. For instance, some speak in short staccato sentences and might drop the g from words like foolin or breakin, while others are articulate, enunciate every letter and even alliterate.

He would apply further “eye dialect” tricks, such as spelling words different ways to convey accents. Selby was also a frequent user of full caps, for he does not write, '—shouted Harry', Harry simply SHOUTS, and also of Joycean portmanteaus like sonofabitch or screwem, which, when you think about it, seems the more sensible spelling for how they roll off the tongue in a single unbroken glissando. It's with these distinctions that Selby charts the change of speaker.

Selby’s syntactical decisions were not only sound but married perfectly with what he elected to write.

Continue to Part Two