Booker longlist predictions

Last year, my predictions were dismal. I managed to get just two out of thirteen; a bad return considering the year before I'd got eight of the longlist.

This year is in some ways easier than last - a fair few big hitters are out, while some less familiar names have delivered interesting and prize-worthy novels - but in other ways more difficult. Will the judges feel able to go for two big London novels (NW and Capital), for example? Will the old guard, so conspicuous by their absence until the winner was announced last year, return to claim the prize for their own? Or is there a sneaking up of interesting, yet not exactly new, writers ready to displace them?

Personally, I think it's an incredibly strong year, and one that might lead to an unusual list, but probably won't. For what it's worth, here's my prediction - not necessarily what I would like to see on there, but what I think will make the cut. I hope it's a bit closer than last time - though not perfect, obviously.

1. Ancient Light – John Banville

2. The Yipps – Nicola Barker

3. Toby’s Room – Pat Barker

4. The Big Music – Kirsty Gunn

5. All is Song – Samantha Harvey

6. In the Orchard, The Swallows – Peter Hobbs

7. Capital – John Lanchester

8. Bringing Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel

9. John Saturnall's Feast – Lawrence Norfolk

10. Hawthorn & Child – Keith Ridgeway

11. NW – Zadie Smith

12. Merivel – Rose Tremain

13. The Deadman’s Pedal – Alan Warner

Joseph Mitchell's Secrets

Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould’s Secret is a book that has gathered dust like none I have ever owned. It stayed reserved for me for over a year in the cupboard behind the till in the bookshop where I worked; then lay stacked and unopened in my first London flat, before graduating to shelves as I afforded them. If anyone had asked me about it, the most I could have said was that Ian McEwan liked it – his quote, a rare thing, was picked out in yellow on the tiny, faded black jacket. About fifteen years elapsed between purchase and my eventual quick, rapturous reading, one bout of intense pleasure sitting on a 747 to join my girlfriend in New York.

Had I opened the book at any point in that decade and a half lull, I would have probably finished it just as quickly. Joe Gould is not like Catch-22, Beloved, or Housekeeping – other books that have had the same waiting fate – it spoke to me immediately, intensely. It is a miniature of exacting concision, on the face of it, simply written, but with a wonderfully crooked kind of logic – perfect, a word one is almost dared into using, for describing the strange world of Joe Gould.

Mitchell spent his working life as a journalist in New York, most famously at the New Yorker. He is often considered the originator of the profile: that essayist impression of a person or place that slips somewhere through the cracks of true journalism. In those cracks and margins, however, Mitchell wrote some of the best pieces the twentieth century produced. Take the opening sentence of the second half of the book:

“Joe Gould was an old and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for thirty-five years.”

This is a sentence of two halves that perfectly – that word again! – encapsulates Gould, but also Joseph Mitchell himself. Those opening words are scolding, condescending. One cannot write ‘Little man’ and not see it typed over the rims of your spectacles and down your nose. This is the man avoided on the street, the underserving poor. Penniless and unemployable: the twin sins of the American. It’s undeniably colloquial, almost barroom conversational. Gould came to the city, not to New York – that would give him too much in the way of ambition – and the only certainty is that he’s been on the streets for a long time. And that’s where Mitchell performs a tightly executed pirouette, just as 1916 is mentioned. The condescension is gulped back, the hauteur replaced word by word into something approaching grudging respect.

Ducked and dodge is a segue – after all, Gould could be a street hustler, a mugger, a vagabond thief, and ducking and dodging could include any kind of nefarious activity – but it’s the simple beauty of: ‘and held on as hard as he could for thirty-five years’ that changes the timbre of the sentence. Quite unexpectedly, the old man is a now cast as an almost hero, a battler against the tide, a survivor of fate and of bad fortune and of the city itself. In this one sentence, Mitchell’s own complicated relationship, with this, the most famous of his New Yorker subjects, is neatly – okay, perfectly – compacted. Are we supposed to look down on Gould, or admire his fortitude? Or are we to do both, all in the space of a single sentence?

Up in the Old Hotel, recently and thankfully reissued by Vintage, contains both Joe Gould pieces, as well as multitudes. It is a teeming confection of the kind of people you wish to meet in a city, but with whom one would never quite have the guts to spend time. On arriving in New York, flushed from the joy of Gould, I bought a copy from the Strand Bookstore and wandered around the city, trying as much as possible to visit the places Mitchell describes, and if not the exact same places, then the ones that seemed to have the same kind of atmosphere. I read ‘The Old House at Home’ in McSorely’s Tavern – the subject of that story – the past and the present colliding in odd junctures. The décor was clearly the same and the two braying men alongside me could have been from Mitchell’s piece had they not been wearing Abercrombie & Fitch jumpers and showing each other new apps on their iPhones. It remained a steady companion on my walks around the city, and a constant reminder of the place on my return home.

I am not a great reader of non-fiction: I don’t think I trust real life enough to enjoy its supposed facts. Mitchell seems to understand my wariness of this – something I think is not uncommon; I seem to remember Dave Eggers writing in A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius something along the lines of “if it upsets the reader to think that this is non-fiction, just read it as a novel” – and so the pieces for me come together to form a scrappy kind of novel, a dirty patchwork of place and character and story. It seems freer than non-fiction – is the restraints of fact what puts me off? – and in Joe Gould, Mitchell found a subject whose own relationship with the truth is at best strained. As a consequence, the resulting two pieces are as much an investigation into whether we can really know what is happening, or what has happened, as it is into the life of a former Harvard man now eating tomato ketchup in diners just to stave off his hunger.

In the Vintage edition of Up in The Old Hotel, the two Joe Gould stories appear hundreds of pages apart. In his introduction to the book, Mitchell explains that he has simply put the opening part of the story ‘Professor Sea Gull’ back where it belongs in McSorely’s Wonderful Saloon. This is a shame. The two profiles, I think, need to be read back to back, the commentary and interplay between them vital to its air of uncommon strangeness. Non-fiction it may be, but Joe Gould’s Secret is as slippery and as iridescent as any quicksilver novella or story.

For so long, Joe Gould was an unopened secret on my shelves; then a secret I briefly thought my own. Talking about it, though, as is so often the case, other readers and writers mentioned their admiration for Mitchell. Up in the Old Hotel was mentioned with as much reverence as the British can muster; Joe Gould's Secret even more so: its mix of the deadbeat and the uptown, the lithe and the lumbersome, the stench of the streets and the grease of the diner, the smile of deceit and the smile of genuine affection, swooningly irresistible. And with good reason. It is the perfect – one more time, for luck, and in toast – New York story.

A Christmas Smoking story

The Birds, The Man

After the fire, we moved in with my sister. The two of us cramped into her attic room, the smoke still burned into everything we’d salvaged. Julia said that she would never smell anything else but the fumes; that the memory of it would never be erased. I told her to stop being melodramatic, but she was right. A year later and still it clings. Occasionally I apologise for stinking out my sister’s house; she shakes her head and tells me not to worry.

My sister is a good woman. There is no doubting that, but she wears her goodness like a starched uniform. It feels somehow professional, and it does not make her popular. Alex’s warmth and civility, her commitment to others’ happiness is commendable, but Julia has never quite trusted her. We are thankful, nothing more. Twice, three times a week, Julia and I go back home, watch the builders at work and are reminded of her goodness. If she were in the same situation, would we do the same? It’s not a question we ask, for which, again, we are thankful.

Alex rents a small house – she calls it a cottage – in the outer stretches of the city: not quite suburbia, but close enough to give Julia hives. There is a small garden where we smoke, a living room where we watch terrestrial television, a bathroom that isn't quite adequate. In the winter it is too hot inside; in the summer too bright from the sun. We have come to tolerate it. I wish we could say more than that. It would be good to tell Alex that we have loved staying with her, that her house feels like a home. Instead we pore over catalogues and brochures, argue over splashback colours and the shape of door handles; imagine packing our three suitcases and putting them in the back of a taxi.

For all Julia’s disdain for the cottage, it is close to her work. A rail link gets her to the office in a little over twelve minutes. I am not so fortunate. I kiss her goodbye as she sleeps, dress in the living room, leave the house without coffee or listening to the radio. It is some distance to the bus stop, a meander through the estate and then through the park. There are several possible routes, but I always follow the same directions. I read somewhere that this is not good for the brain: that a lack of variation can cause dementia later in life. Despite the risks, I stick to the same streets, the same pathway through the park. This is for two reasons: the birds and the man.

The birds. By a stand of trees, just after the football pitch, a pair of magpies skitter each morning. Not most days, or the majority of the time, each and every morning. Or at least whenever I walk through the park. They peck at the ground, preen, flap wings. They look like lovers pausing after taking a morning stroll. I often wonder what would happen if they were not there, or there were just the one. It has never happened. There is always the two of them. Always pecking at the ground, preening, flapping wings.

The man. On exiting the park, there is a small parade of shops, always closed. I take a right, then a left and on the corner the man waits: a bag on his shoulder, his eyes on the road. His clothes are licked with paint; rips in his boots expose steel toe caps. He wears a hooded sweatshirt in all weathers and puts up the hood when it gets cold. Like the birds, he was there on the first day I walked to the bus stop, and has been there every morning since: waiting, I assume, for his lift to arrive. I never see a car approach.

When I draw near, he turns away from me and looks into a privet hedge. Then as I am about to turn right, he says, “You got a spare cigarette?” He asks me and I ignore him. I estimate that this has happened in excess of 250 times. Exactly the same, each and every working day. He never asks me to my face, never asks sooner rather than later. I never respond, never even turn around. “You got a spare cigarette?” Silence, a pull on my cigarette, the turn onto Hardwick Street.

I told Julia about the birds and the man and she thought I was making too much out of it. Don’t be so melodramatic, she said, wagging a finger, it’s not every day, you just think it is. But she was wrong about that. I was fastidious in looking for them, every time they appeared a little victory. I didn’t tell Julia about it. It was between me and the birds and the man.

On Christmas Eve there was snow and the birds’ wings looked bluish against the unbroken settling. I stood and watched them for a time, glanced back at my lone footprints on the path. The house would be ready for the new year; it was good to see them that last, final time. I walked through the park and out the other side. I could see him standing there, waiting.

The man had his hood up, his sleeves pulled down over his hands. I walked past him. There was a crackly pause and then, finally, he asked me for a cigarette. I relaxed so much I stopped. I smiled and turned around.

‘Why don’t you buy your own?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Every day, every single day, you ask me for a cigarette. Why don’t you just buy your own?’

‘I do what?’ he said. I put my hands deeper in my pockets.

‘You ask me for a cigarette.’

‘I do?’ he said. ‘Really?’

‘Every day,’ I said.

‘Really? I can't say as I've noticed that.’

I laughed.

‘You’ve not noticed that you ask me for a cigarette every time I walk past you?’

‘No. Never occurred to me.’

He smiled. He had chapped lips and needed a shave. His whiskers were grey and chestnut , slightly squirrelish.

‘Do I really?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well do you?’

‘Do I what?’

‘Have a spare cigarette?’ He smiled again. ‘After all, it is Christmas.’

I felt the packet and the lighter in my pocket. The cool steel of the Zippo, the bevelled edge of the pack of Winstons. A van turned the corner and beeped its horn. The cab door slid open and the man got inside. I took the pack from my pocket as the van lurched away. I shouted Merry Christmas to its exhaust pipe.

The birds were there in January. The man was there too. He asked me for a cigarette and I ignored him. They were there in February and March too. I don’t know who will disappear first: the birds, the man or me.

My Books of the Year

I’ve probably read fewer books this year than is customary. This is the fact of writing both a novel and having something published, or that seems like a fairly plausible excuse. I’ve also read slightly fewer new novels than I’d have liked – this is not due to their being enough interesting titles out there, but just the way things have fallen. Still, there has been more than enough to make it an interesting year, even if you discount the pettiness that surrounded the Booker prize.

American novel of the year: The Illumination – Kevin Brockmeier

My full review of this ran in the Independent (read it here) but some seven months after having read it, my appreciation of it has if anything deepened. A strange, quiet and wilfully opaque novel, it is a book that deserves a wider audience, the kind of novel you hope a stranger will press on you while waiting for a night bus in the rain.

Non-American novel of the year: Open City – Teju Cole

With echoes of Aleksander Hemon and WG Sebald set against the backdrop of a peeling New York, Open City already seemed destined to be a book I would admire. It did more than that; it enveloped me. The central character, Julius, is a flanuer with a taste for solipsism, for uncommon views on familiar architecture and intellectual ideas. The book that should have been this year’s Booker Winner. In another year, it may well have done.

Short stories of the year: The Angel Esmeralda – Don Delillo

No other book has made me seriously think about the nature and purpose of fiction more than this collection of nine stories. Collated from over three decades, this chart Delillo’s trajectory, map out his themes and shine a light on some of the best prose written in this and the last century.

Discovery of the year: Jernigan – David Gates

Gates’s debut novel was first published in 1991 and is a dark, downbeat yet always viciously funny account of a man heading for a very public breakdown. Like Yates before him, Gates tears lumps of his characters, all of whom are ignorant, unpleasant, deluded and yet utterly believable and real. At the centre of the book, however, is the voice: Jernigan’s. Short and shocking, it is a classic that deserves to be dusted off just as Yates was ten years ago.

Biggest disappointment of the year: IQ84 – Haruki Murakami

I finished it. Some of it I actually enjoyed. Some of it was well written; some of it utterly wretched. Finishing it was shrug-inducing. I wanted to love it. I wanted to proudly say it was better than the Wind-up Bird. Instead, it made me wonder whether my memory of his work was in any way reliable…

For what it's worth, pt 2

Last year I correctly predicted 8 out of 13 of the Booker Longlist. Last year was, however, a somwhat leaner year that 2011 and I'd be surprised if I got anywhere near as many. Anyway...


1. At Last – Edward St Aubyn
2. Chinaman – Shehan Karunatilaka
3. Gillespie and I – Jane Harris
4. Last Man in Tower – Aravind Adiga
5. Mr Fox – Helen Oyeyemi
6. Open City – Teju Cole
7. Pure – Andrew Miller
8. Snowdrops – AD Miller
9. The Blue Book – AL Kennedy
10. The Stranger’s Child – Alan Hollinghurst
11. There but for the – Ali Smith
12. Waterline – Ross Raisin
13. What they do in the dark – Amanda Coe

Tell me the Truth About Roth

I didn’t think I, or indeed anyone else, would ever be in a position where it seemed somehow necessary to defend Philip Roth's literary worth.

Not that he has ever engendered consensus: his 50-year writing life has been soundtracked by accusations: misogyny, the most prominent and most persistent; anti-Semitism, at least at the beginning; mining other people's lives, and his own, for his own literary purposes. But amongst all the white-noise of white-hot controversy, doubts were rarely, if ever, expressed about his abilities as a novelist.

Roth’s sentences, his precision, his acute eye for masculine hubris and weakness, his feral rage and comic timing always proved the counter-balance to those who were firmly, staunchly against him. Now, in the wake of Carmen Callil’s protest at his winning of the Man International Booker, even this seems up for debate. A host of commentators over on the Guardian are queuing up to thank Callil for voicing the opinion they always knew was right: that Roth is an overrated bore, a writer with whom readers today, let alone in 20 years, should not bother. It is a position I find both laughable and indefensible.

American Pastoral was the first of Roth’s books I came across, and it remains, to my mind, his defining work: intelligent, fierce, beautiful, sad and deeply felt. I’ve gone on to read almost everything he’s written and no matter how bad (The Humbling, Our Gang, The Great American Novel) there is always something to be gleaned, a few scattered moments where the dormant, sleeping grandeur of his style shines through. In his best work (The Counterlife, Sabbath’s Theater, The American Trilogy), however, he seems to be writing at another level entirely; as though he has access to something that other writers – other people – do not.

In his essay published in Faber’s The Good of the Novel, Ian Sansom recounts a creative writing course he is teaching. He tells his students to read Roth, to read American Pastoral: ‘Roth should create a rage in you,’ he says. ‘He should make you ashamed. He makes me ashamed to be human and to pretend to call myself a writer; because in comparison to this sort of writer I am nothing: you are nothing.’

Roth can do that to you, you can read a passage, a chapter and just wonder how the hell he did it, and how he made it look so simple. But that comes later, much later; what happens  first is you marvel at the sentences, their weighty construction, their perfect word choice, then fall headlong into his characters and places. And in his best work he sustains this alchemy over the course of an entire novel; characters yawning into life, their own lives blasted and buffeted by a world that neither understands them, nor cares; men and (the occasional) women who have the complexity of authenticity, who rage and fight and fuck and cry just like real people do.

Roth writes almost solely about middle-class white American Jews – this is a common criticism – but his concerns are the human experience, the effect of place on personality, the pressure of family, love and tradition on the individual, and also the dark power of aspiration and the delicacy of contentment. These are not exclusive to New Jersey, not exclusive to Semites – but their exploration, depiction and examination are exclusive to Roth.

To call Roth a bad writer is to be a bad reader. It’s perfectly possible to not like his books, absolutely justifiable to dislike his portrayal of women, but to accuse him of a lack of talent is just being willful. Read the reunion party at the beginning of American Pastoral, and the dinner party at its end; the scenes by the graveside in Sabbath’s Theater, the reveal of Coleman Silk in The Human Stain . . . read them and tell me you’re not in the cradling, wrinkled hands of a master; tell me that they don’t delve into the heart of what it is to be human, to love, to hurt, to die; tell me that the prose doesn’t swell and burn, that you can’t almost smell the warm, slightly sour breath of his characters as they speak; tell me that he doesn’t confront the darkness of our lives with candour, rage and vigour; tell me that there is no beauty; tell me you don’t want to read on; tell me that this is average, run of the mill, boring, solipsistic tripe; tell me, show me, explain it to me. And I’ll call you a liar. And mean it.

Here is my German jacket. Comments very much appreciated