Snark by David Denby

Nastiness Is A Thing Called Snark

Sunday Business Post, 11th October 2009

What is the lowest form of wit? What has replaced the golden age of satire, spoof, burlesque and ingeniously dark comedy? According to David Denby, it’s something known as ‘snark’ -a phenomenon he ominously calls the ‘‘angry fanfare attending journalism’s decline’’.

Denby is a film critic for the New Yorker by trade, but here he turns his critical faculties to issues of style -specifically, the proliferation of a particular type of abuse, which he describes as ‘‘personal insult, low, teasing, rug-pulling, finger-pointing, snide, obvious and knowing’’.

One of Denby’s chief contentions is that snark -a term borrowed from Lewis Carroll -  has grown in popularity in recent years due to the internet.  He demonstrates how blogs and social networking sites like Twitter have become tools for those who simply wish to draw attention to themselves by being as vile and insulting as possible, often without substance or morality to back up their ‘argument’.  In cases like these, where abuse goes viral or becomes self-replicating, the object of the ‘snarking’ can fall victim to a sustained and widespread campaign of low insults – much of it dished out entirely anonymously.

Poe Little Puddy Tat

“I had walled the monster up within the tomb!”

I couldn’t help but shudder at the story of Richard Parsons, a funeral director from Ugborough, near Plymouth in Devon, whose builders uncovered a 400-year-old mummified cat in the wall of his cottage’s bathroom.   It immediately evokes the terrifying climactic twist of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale, The Black Cat, in which the narrator’s murderous deed is betrayed by his once-beloved ‘moggy’. Cheerfully, there was no human body within this particular cavity to go with the cat.

The Idle Parent by Tom Hodgkinson

How to bring up children without lifting a finger

Sunday Business Post, 29 March 2009

In your darkest moments, raising children can feel like a thankless task. You work your fingers to the bone to feed, clothe and shelter them. You spend the remainder of your waking hours ‘interacting’ with them. Then, by the time you’ve got them to bed, you’re too worn out to do much more than fall asleep yourself. Wake up the next day, and the routine begins all over again.

Well, Tom Hodgkinson is here to put an end to all that, with a book that should become essential reading for all prospective parents. Hodgkinson is the editor of The Idler, a bi-annual publication devoted to the ethos of idle living, and he sees no reason why being a parent should involve any hard work at all.

In his philosophy, we are at the mercy of tyrannical governments and adult-run interest groups who want to fill our children’s lives with tests, targets, lengthy school hours and myriad extracurricular activities – all during (as Hodgkinson puts it) ‘‘years that should be devoted to play and joyful learning”.

The Idle Parent begins with a manifesto to, among other things, ‘‘reject the idea that parenting requires hard work” and a pledge to ‘‘leave our children alone”. To do this, parents need to be selfish: don’t give in to consumerism, don’t waste money on expensive holidays or toys, carry on drinking alcohol without guilt, stop working so hard and, for heaven’s sake, have a lie-in.

They Is Us by Tama Janowitz

Cautionary tale of America’s apocalyptic future

Sunday Business Post, 01 March 2009

America may have elected its new president and laid the foundations of its future on a wave of hope – but, as Tama Janowitz’s fascinating and prophetic new novel warns us, its situation may already be hopeless.

Set at the end of the 21st century, a few years after the US has lost a major war with Palestine and Syria, They Is Us centres on one family’s existence in the polluted remains of what was once New Jersey.

An emotionally vulnerable single mother, Murielle is raising her young teenage girls in the rundown suburb, which now sits at the edge of a huge toxic swamp.

Fifteen-year-old Tahnee is the family beauty, but her younger sister, Julie, has all the brains and sensitivity, which she puts to good use in her summer job at a nearby biochemical plant. Here, she feeds and tends some of the bizarre mutant results of animal hybrid experiments, and even rescues some discarded or dying specimens, including feathered rabbits and a cross-bred dog which her beloved, but absent, father, Slawa, has trained to talk.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

Engaging Tale Of A Chilling Place In Time 

Sunday Business Post, 25th January 2009

Simon Mawer ’s powerful and elegiac new novel centres on mankind’s simple but vital need for a place to call home.On their honeymoon in Venice in 1929, the cultured, wealthy couple Viktor and Liesel Landauer meet a maverick architect called Rainer von Abt, who has an ambitious vision to build a rectangular house of glass.

Sharing his modernist viewpoint, the Landauers commission von Abt to create the work on their behalf. The finished house, situated in a Czech city called Mesto (or ‘Place’), is the realisation of a series of elaborate design specifications: a rectilinear structure of glass, concrete and steel, featuring a wall of golden onyx which reflects sunlight in the most colourful way.

On seeing von Abt’s rudimentary sketches, Viktor initially describes the building as ‘cold’ – and although von Abt rebuts his theory, coldness, in all its forms, creeps in and permeates the novel’s narrative. Despite the Landauers’ warmth and optimism, their relationship is undercut by unspoken needs and desires.

Book Review: The Numerati – How They’ll Get My Number And Yours, by Stephen Baker

Sunday Business Post, 16th November 2008

How the digital dungeon has imprisoned us all

We are all Winston Smith. We are the office functionaries in a new, global Ministry of Truth, where our phonecalls, purchases and blog-postings can all become important fodder for statisticians around the world.

These statisticians are known as the ‘Numerati’. Business Week journalist Stephen Baker has been communicating with them on our behalf for this highly-informative, enlightening and downright terrifying book.

Terrifying? Yes, because there is not, it seems, an area of our lives which cannot be measured and evaluated to a marketable end by these Numerati.

We are already familiar with the concept of the loyalty cards dished out by supermarkets, and how these companies subsequently tailor discount vouchers and ‘special offers’ to our specific shopping habits.

This information also gives them a basis for predictive analysis on future stockholding and marketing focus.

Now, apply that to practically everything we do in our daily lives, and you’re only beginning to see how the Numerati will operate in the new data age.

The Numerati aren’t simply prying into our private lives, they’re also watching what we do when we’re at work – and assessing our aptitude and suitability for our job.

Syrian-born mathematician and IBM researcher Samer Takriti is working on a project which will hone the company’s staff into a computer-readable portfolio of skills.

In effect, big companies such as IBM will be able to recruit job-specific staff by reading and scoring an individual’s suitability, adaptability, salary expectations and other minutiae of detail, in much the same way in which gamers buy players on Football Manager.

But the ultimate effect of this focused data will be to make billions of dollars for companies by rerouting tried and tested marketing devices. Conspicuous consumers will be a pushover, but even the most cynical among us will be susceptible to the new model.

If the Numerati have their way, every advert we inadvertently access in our daily lives will already be perfectly tailored to our needs, and work in tandem with our established habits, idiosyncrasies and lifestyle.

We will be tracked by our online activities, our visits to the GP, our shopping habits, and our mobile phones – there are even ways in which our facial expressions and pulse rates will betray signals we didn’t know we were transmitting. The net result will be a potentially sterile, clinical, entirely customised lifestyle.

Political preachings, retail choices, up-to-the minute insurance updates, even the details of potential soul mates, all of these will, in the Numerati’s grand design, be put in the way of each individual – and to that individual alone.

Even the smallest alterations in our behaviour or actions can be interpreted in dozens of specific ways; we could betray any potentially life-threatening illnesses before we even feel the need to visit a doctor, or be targeted as a potential terrorist before we’ve had the opportunity to cause any damage.

As a business writer, Baker is in supportive awe of these brilliant geeks and their technological and analytical advances which, to this reviewer, still seem too frighteningly fantastical to be real. The ‘Big Brother’ elements seem not to faze him and, as a piece of analysis, The Numerati, while brilliantly written and engaging throughout, too often fails to question the morality of this manipulation of our free will.

Still, it’s hard not to be charmed by the chapter entitled Lover, where traditional humanity and emotion come to the fore.

Baker puts the digital matchmaking programme Chemistry.com to the test – and fails to be matched with his wife, with whom he is very much in love. It seems that, at least in affairs of the heart, there may be some way to go before we can all live in mathematically-enhanced, blissfully suffocating ignorance.

If you are in business, this book will be a useful, future-proofing tool. If you are a conspiracy theorist who firmly believes the statisticians had your number aeons ago anyway, this book will confirm all your fears.

If you are sceptical that such laborious, clandestine shenanigans are calculated to give you a global rating or value as a human being, The Numerati will serve to make you one of the new illuminati, however you interpret the findings.

And part of the joy of this is that, if you buy it online or use your card to pay for it, they’ll immediately know you’re on to them.

Book Review: The Complete Book of Mothers-In-Law – A Celebration by Luisa Dillner

The Sunday Business Post, October 26, 2008

A witty and overdue celebration of the uncelebrated

‘There was a knock at the door; I knew it was the wife’s mother, because the mice were throwing themselves on the traps.”

So said the late, great Les Dawson, a man whose name was practically synonymous with the mother-in-law joke, which was ubiquitous among comedians during the politically incorrect 1970s.

This was, of course, the humorous extension of an age-old tradition – the fear and vilification of one’s spouse’s mother. Through the ages, men have lived in terror, and often loathing, of what they saw as a future projection of their wives; their contempt for their in-law acted as a misguided warning to their betrothed on how not to grow old.

However, in writing The Complete Book of Mothers-In-Law, the Guardian columnist and former doctor Luisa Dillner has largely, and cleverly, spoken up for a group who have, for too long, been living in relative silence – the daughters-in-law.

To them, their husband’s mother is a much more complicated character than simply the ogre who runs a disapproving finger over unpolished surfaces or makes judgments on how her grandchildren are being mothered. This book is a subtle, painstaking and anecdotal instruction manual on how two women from different generations can smooth over their differences and celebrate their similarities.

Dillner has gathered together a mind-boggling array of stories from history, fiction, personal experience and celebrity culture, on this mythological figure of womanhood, in an attempt to eradicate stereotypes and put its modern incumbents into context.

She introduces the book with a fond ‘‘celebration’’ of her own mother-in-law, Maggie, an actress, magician’s assistant and Pearly Queen, who has gone some way to breaking down stereotypes. All the same, Dillner makes the salient point that, despite her mother-in-law’s pride in Dillner’s career as a writer and newspaper columnist, she still refuses to buy the Guardian.

The potted history and cultural round-up of relationships between mothers and daughters-in-law is brilliantly researched; from the servile daughters-in-law of old China and Japan, to the Indian tradition of meting out beatings, ridicule and hard labour to girls who got too close to their husband, and therefore threatened his mother’s position.

On the other hand, in Italy, where men who aren’t mammoni (mummy’s boys) are practically social pariahs, jealous mothers-in-law are being blamed for the rise in divorce rates. A Milanese psychologist warns that, ‘‘when a mother is crying at the wedding of her son. . . it is from the sorrow of losing him rather than the joy of seeing him happy with another woman’’.

To that end, Dillner makes a point of celebrating famous mothers-in-law who went beyond the call of duty; like Mrs Clemm, who somehow managed to adore her tortured, drunken son-in-law, Edgar Allan Poe, and Queen Victoria, who never underestimated how hard life was for Alix, who had married her ‘‘weak-willed’’ son, Bertie.

There’s even a recipe for ‘‘Mother-In-Law’s Chicken Soup’’ – it would be a brave daughter-in-law who’d attempt to better it.

Faber clearly has an eye on the Christmas gift market with this book, but I’d sound a note of caution; if daughters-in-law are to present this from under the tree, will there be an implication that all is not rosy? This is a marvellously entertaining book – but it could well lead to some uncomfortable moments.

Book Review: The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

The Gargoyle is a stone-cold classic
From The Sunday Business Post, September 28, 2008
Readers in possession of a pitch-dark sense of humour will find much to adore about Andrew Davidson’s magnificently wicked debut novel of love, death and redemption, The Gargoyle.

From the first page, it wastes no time in arresting our attention and gaining our sympathies as the unnamed narrator describes, in graphic and gruesome detail, his terrible car crash and consequent injuries that have all but destroyed his once much-admired body.

Driving under the influence of cocaine along a dark road, he swerves to avoid a sudden ‘‘volley of burning arrows swarming out of the woods’’, resulting in his car plummeting down a mountainside.

Trapped inside the burning vehicle, he tells of how his ‘‘flesh began to singe as if I were a scrap of meat newly thrown onto the barbecue’’ and how he could ‘‘hear the bubbling of my skin as the flames kissed it.” He then candidly suggests how the reader might show empathy, by laying the side of their face on a hot cooker hob until they too can hear the ‘‘snap, crackle and pop’’ of their flesh.

The cynical self-confessed drug user, murderer, womaniser and porn star may not be the most sympathetic character ever created, but it’s impossible not to feel for someone who, when faced with such disfigurement and medical treatment involving maggots and the flesh of dead humans and pigs, feels forced to devise for himself quite the most horrific suicide ever described in print.

With all hope of redemption gone, and an evil serpent taunting him from within his spine, he concludes that ‘‘Heaven is an idea constructed by man to help him cope with the fact that life on Earth is both brutally short and, paradoxically, far too long.”

Thankfully, into his life walks the bewitching Marianne Engel, a mysterious sculptress of gargoyles with ‘‘riotously entangled hair’’, chameleonic eyes, and angel wings tattooed on her back.

She instantly recognises the narrator in spite of his condition – and all too convincingly explains how she and he were once lovers in medieval Germany. She captivates him with lively, horrifying stories and fables from her past, taking in Germany, Italy, England and Japan, complete with her skills in text translations and Icelandic folklore until, gradually, his cynicism evaporates and love takes hold.

So far, so preposterous, but Davidson weaves these disparate elements together with such enormous elan that his seductive prose removes the reader’s own cynicism and disbelief. Certainly, it’s a novel about the redemptive and undiminishable qualities of love, yet even when the protagonist utters the saccharine line, ‘‘being burned was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it brought you,” we are still willing him on to a beautiful conclusion.

Davidson employs device after device to continually surprise and haunt the reader throughout the novel: tales of doomed lovers, a tourist trail through Dante’s circles of hell, complete with an array of fascinating type fonts and recurring characters, and a peppering of secret messages with which to enthral and amuse the reader to the final page.

The characters of the hideous burn victim and the gorgeous Marianne, with whom we cannot help but fall in love, are a modern Quasimodo and Esmeralda, every bit as unforgettable. ‘‘Love is as strong as death, as hard as Hell’’, we are told; would that we could all explore such a mad, enticing and rewarding Inferno for ourselves. The Gargoyle is a rich and glorious first novel from an imaginative talent who is destined to be found on bestseller lists for many years to come.

Bits Of Me Are Falling Apart by William Leith

Confessions of the ultimate hypochondriac

Sunday Business Post, 17 August 2008

We are all doomed. Or, at least, those of us unfortunate enough to be born male now know how doomed we are.

After 202 pages of Bits Of Me Are Falling Apart, a day in the life, body and head of William Leith, we’re certainly suffering: there are twinges in places we never knew we had feelings, a freshly dark pessimism about the state of world has overcome us, and we can just about feel the first scatterings of soil falling over our heads.

Bits Of Me Are Falling Apart could be the most profoundly miserable book this reviewer has ever read – or at least it would be if it weren’t so hilarious, clever and downright entertaining.

As a journalist, Leith has written about a huge variety of subjects in his time, from Middle Eastern politics to Hollywood glitz – but perhaps none with such stark honesty and clarity as his own self-deconstruction. For men either side of Leith’s particular vintage – he is, he reminds us regularly, 47 years old – he offers an incisive terror about the health hazards awaiting each part of our bodies in future years, no matter how we’ve treated ourselves thus far.

Wherever we look, whether in the street, the newspapers or, most terrifyingly, in the mirror, there is decay; and, though there is little in the way of optimistic charity here, it all begins at home.

Leith’s previous book, The Hungry Years, was the tale of his own overindulgence, ending as a salutary warning against eating and drinking too much, and taking too many drugs. Sadly, having put us off all of that, Bits Of Me Are Falling Apart doesn’t find him in much of an improved physical state.

Despite curbing his food and drink consumption, avoiding drugs, going for long walks and taking up pilates, he is now confronted with the awfulness of his middle age, his tenuous mortality, his estrangement from his son and his post-relationship poverty.

His potential ailments seem limitless: he worries about his prostate, so checks it by stopping his urination function in mid-flow, even though it’s not a foolproof method, and it duly fails to reassure him; he worries about his knees and whether lumps and bumps appearing all over his body are or can be cancerous; he writes in wince-inducing detail about the state of his teeth, their varying types of filling and the fact that they are about to crack.

Most pertinently and poignantly, Leith analyses the deaths of both his grandfathers from separate smoking-related illnesses and, as a former smoker himself, worries that his lungs’ recovery from such abuse may be too little, too late. His feelings of mortality are compounded by an encounter with the body of his grandfather in his own house; in fact, with only five senses at his disposal, he seems to see a lot of dead people.

Many of his analogies, although grim, are marvellously and humorously inventive. He continually compares the body’s resistance to illness and disease with the German soldiers at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan – relentlessly pounding their advancing enemy with deadly weaponry until, eventually, Tom Hanks gets through and their resistance, bit by bit, crumbles.

But getting older is not all about decay, it’s also about the changing ambitions of males. Leith reflects upon how, when you’re ten, you want to be a professional footballer; at 20, you’d like to be Casanova; at 30, it’s back to being a football ‘‘veteran’’; but when you’re 40, all you want is a well-made, perfectly-ordered bookshelf.

If there is any hope in a book which states that ‘‘everything falls apart because it’s supposed to fall apart’’, it comes right at the end.

Not only does he have an unexpected encounter with a chain-smoking busker, whose life Leith had prematurely written off, there’s a heart-stopping and life-affirming scene where he momentarily loses sight of his young son in a public park and experiences ‘‘the happiest moment of my life’’ in their speedy reunion. We are so wrapped up in the destruction of everything we hold dear that it’s a victorious moment for us all.

Leith’s fundamentally miserable collection of thoughts are powered by snappy precision and darkly fatalistic humour. Like societal collapse, tooth decay, lung failure and, ultimately, death, resistance to Leith’s persuasive and hilariously downbeat analysis is useless.

We may put up our defences, deny that our lives in any way resemble the author’s, and resolve that it could never happen to us – but in the end, we can’t ignore its inevitability and the knowledge that we will all submit. In that sense, we, the readers, really are the Germans.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

Thundering journey into the mind of man and dog       

Sunday Business Post,13 July 2008

Debut novelist David Wroblewski spent ten years crafting The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle and it was worth every minute of his time. It is a giant and captivating work of old-fashioned storytelling, a family saga based around a child’s deep love and understanding of man’s trusty canine friend.

The story takes place in a small Wisconsin town where Gar Sawtelle and his wife Trudy train their own unusually intelligent breed of dogs, Sawtelles.

After a string of miscarriages, Trudy eventually gives birth to Edgar, an otherwise healthy child who cannot make any sounds, but who develops an immediate and almost telepathic relationship with Almondine, one of the female Sawtelles.

In an especially moving early scene, the dog awakes in the night, knowing instinctively that the baby is in distress, and wakes the oblivious Trudy from her sleep.

From this point forward, boy and dog become almost inseparable soulmates. Wroblewski imbues the novel with a rare and beautiful insight into the lives of dogs and the unspoken love between animal and owner; page after page of beautiful prose leads us through their training techniques, the dogs’ innermost thoughts, feelings and even Almondine’s dreams.

Like the humans in this tale, the dogs are fully realised, multi-dimensional characters, and far more than mere devices to carry along the emotional development of the plot.

The peaceful countryside farm setting changes dramatically with the return of Gar’s brother, Claude, who had left the family seat in mysterious circumstances some years earlier. With echoes of Cain and Abel and Hamlet, Gar soon meets an untimely end in the midst of an argument.

In an intensely emotional and terrifying scene, his ghost appears to Edgar during a terrible storm, after which the boy is convinced his father was murdered by his uncle.

As Claude takes control of the family business and wins Trudy’s heart, the distraught Edgar retreats from everything he knows and loves, including Almondine, to plot his revenge.

After a disastrous attempt to exact justice, Edgar flees into the Wisconsin wilderness with three young dogs, beginning an incredible adventure which is, by turns, harrowing, thrilling and shrouded in mysticism.

Yet even the most far-fetched supernatural elements of the young gang’s plight are brought vividly into the realms of credibility by Wroblewski’s stunning descriptive prose and his realisation of Edgar’s formidable, heroic heart and spirit. But Disney this is not.

When it becomes clear that Edgar must go back home (having learned the hard lesson that, “life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive”), the reader should brace themselves for a furious, shocking and stormy finale.

It unfolds, at a thundering speed, to a conclusion that is best read through gaps in interlocked fingers.

At over 500 pages, The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle is a lengthy but incredible journey that seems to have everything going for it; the beauty and flair of a great literary novel, the scale and pacing of a fantasy epic, and the absorbing thrill-ride of any glorious rites-of-passage adventure from our collective childhoods.

Wroblewski’s love for his subjects – in particular dogs and the bewitching Wisconsin swamps and forests – shines through in every sentence, rendering each new page more thrilling than the last.

For a debut novelist, he has hit the literary jackpot; for the reader, this is a sumptuous and rewarding experience.