We no longer court difficulty partly because the reader–writer relationship has ceased to be even remotely cooperative. Whatever you do, don’t expect the reader to deduce anything. I learnt that the hard way with my eleventh novel (2006): one of its protagonists, an American girl called Venus, is black, and her ethnicity is shored up by so much internal evidence that somehow I felt it would be ham-handed to spell it out (surely Venus Williams was doing the job for me). The result? Not a single reader I’m aware of has ever doubted for a moment that Venus is white.*2
Mark my words: every piece of vital information has to be clearly stated in plain English; when it comes to inferring and surmising, readers have downed tools. The unreliable narrator (once a popular and often very fruitful device) has given way to the era of the unreliable receptor. The unreliable narrator is dead; the ‘deductive’ novel is dead.
There used to be a sub-genre of long, plotless, digressive, and essayistic novels (fairly) indulgently known as ‘baggy monsters’. Humboldt’s Gift, with its extended asides on such things as theosophy and angelology, is a classic baggy monster; and when it was published in 1975 (before Bellow’s Nobel) it spent eight months on the bestseller list. Forty years on, the audience for such a book has dwindled, I would say, by 80 or 90 per cent. The readers are no longer there – their patience, their goodwill, their autodidactic enthusiasm are no longer there. For self-interested reasons I like to think this sub-genre retains a viable pulse; but broadly speaking the baggy monster is dead.
In brutal summary, then, the ‘B’ novel died, the deductive novel died, and the sprawl novel, the baggy monster, died. They are fondly remembered, at least by novelists, who by definition revere all diversity.
Still, tucked away among these literary obituaries we glimpse the proud announcement of a birth. Actually the new arrival has been with us for some time – since around the turn of the century – and the child has steadily thrived. I mean the aerodynamic, the streamlined, the accelerated novel. More in a moment.
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You know, it was only when I was revising the two chapters devoted to her (‘The Business’ and also ‘The Night of Shame’, which is forthcoming) – only then did I realise how ‘novelistic’ Phoebe was: a being of strong lines. If she ever woke up and found herself in a roman-fleuve, say, or a comedy of manners, she would effortlessly find her place and hold her own. Because in her person she contained themes and patterns, and she had the necessary energy, the binding energy, and the vehemence (and the mystery – the ever-present question mark). These were all qualities she was destined to lose, over the course of a single season in 1980…
As a character she did what so few of us do: she cohered. Consider the following item in her CV (dramatic enough but comprehensively dwarfed, at the time, by three far more startling disclosures). It concerned itself with the apparently blameless sphere of poetry; and you need that wilfulness, that self-exaggeration – if you’re going to combine poetry and prison.
Aged fifteen, a class-topping pupil at Spelthorne High School for Girls (It was good, too, she often stressed. A proper grammar), Phoebe had an affair with her English master – her poetry master (his name, misleadingly, was Timmy). And before that got going she became a terrific memoriser of verse. I did it to please him, naturally. But I could do it. And I liked doing it.
Their half-year affair included orgies of quoting and reciting. And he fancied himself as a poet, too. He wrote me love poems, Martin, that were quite frankly obscene…Timmy was thirty-six and had a wife and two toddler daughters. One spring Sunday he and Phoebe were spotted – by the deputy principal – as they frolicked together on Richmond Common. Timmy had a blind panic. And he ended it.
Now Phoebe, in shirt and tie and bobby socks, though shattered, completely choked and gutted, did manage to accept this loss – out of love for her Timmy. Ah, but then the following term he began to move in on one of my classmates! Not at all pretty and an utter hick. Well of course I went straight to the headmistress. I made a detailed statement and the next day I handed over all the rhymed filth he’d sent me. Timmy was first sacked (and instantly banned from the family home), then arrested. He got thirteen years. Serve him bloody well right. Moving in on another one like that. I ask you. I mean the nerve…
All this happened in 1957. Category A – for his own protection. Yeah, they banged him up with all the other nonces, she said, adding (with some licence), and they only let him out the other day. Serve him bloody well right. Phoebe then, as an addendum, punished the yokel classmate. How? Oh, nothing much. I just made her have a crush on me. And then I dropped her cold. In public, mind – in the yard during break.
1957. In Swansea, South Wales, clad in short trousers, I celebrated my eighth birthday. And fifteen-year-old Phoebe Phelps, school-uniformed in the Home Counties, banged up Timmy, her pastor of poetry…
Vengeance was hers – vengeance was always hers. Phoebe prosecuted her feuds to the point, perhaps, where the average Corsican cut-throat would throw up his hands, roll his eyes, and call it quits. Or so I came to believe when she took her revenge on me: September 12, 2001. And to be fair, Phoebe had another reason for blowing the whistle on Tim – and a very terrifying reason…
As for poetry, Phoebe renounced it: not so much as a single word, a single iamb or trochee, for two decades
