The Autograph Man
Sadly, a new record for low attendance at the book group was achieved yesterday, with only me and the person selecting the book turning up. I had received emails from other members telling me that they had not liked, or finished, the book, and the person who chose it said that had it not been her choice she might also not have read it to the end. My sympathy was slightly reduced by her taking the unwanted record away from me, and then fortunately much more reduced by the very interesting conversation that we had about the book.
There's not much to say about the plot, in which a young man finally comes to terms with the death of his father. There's not much to say about the characters, no-one liked them, several people thought they were poorly realised. My favourite was the father, who was very interesting (as a Chinese man settled in a north London Jewish community) until his brain tumour kicked in after about forty pages.
What interested me, and kept us going for more than forty minutes, with the inevitable digressions, were the structure and the method of composition, and what they said to me about Zadie Smith, and possibly the nature of modern novel-writing.
The main character's surname is Tandem, and with a Chinese father and Jewish mother he is created from two cultures. The book too is a combination of the two, the chapter-headings of the first half being taken from Jewish mysticism, those of the second half from Zen Buddhism. I noticed that certain events, such as an auction, happened once in each half, but didn't put much effort into working out how much of that sort of thing was going on.
A mildly diverting intellectual exercise, until I put it together with something else, namely that there were repeated statements in the book that it was not film or television. Most of these were attempts to get Tandem to take more control of his life, but one stood out. Being given in my edition an entire page and being surrounded by a speech bubble, it felt very much as though Tandem was talking directly to the reader. On one level this could be about real life not having clear structures or resolutions, and the (literary) novel being more willing to reflect this messiness. But Smith was writing this book at precisely the time that her first, widely celebrated book was being adapted for television. Could she have been trying to write something that was different, even unfilmable? How many of her contemporaries, with their multiple or unreliable narrators, their huge or alinear timespans, are carving out a space for the novel in reaction to the current dominance of the visual, realist form?
There's not much to say about the plot, in which a young man finally comes to terms with the death of his father. There's not much to say about the characters, no-one liked them, several people thought they were poorly realised. My favourite was the father, who was very interesting (as a Chinese man settled in a north London Jewish community) until his brain tumour kicked in after about forty pages.
What interested me, and kept us going for more than forty minutes, with the inevitable digressions, were the structure and the method of composition, and what they said to me about Zadie Smith, and possibly the nature of modern novel-writing.
The main character's surname is Tandem, and with a Chinese father and Jewish mother he is created from two cultures. The book too is a combination of the two, the chapter-headings of the first half being taken from Jewish mysticism, those of the second half from Zen Buddhism. I noticed that certain events, such as an auction, happened once in each half, but didn't put much effort into working out how much of that sort of thing was going on.
A mildly diverting intellectual exercise, until I put it together with something else, namely that there were repeated statements in the book that it was not film or television. Most of these were attempts to get Tandem to take more control of his life, but one stood out. Being given in my edition an entire page and being surrounded by a speech bubble, it felt very much as though Tandem was talking directly to the reader. On one level this could be about real life not having clear structures or resolutions, and the (literary) novel being more willing to reflect this messiness. But Smith was writing this book at precisely the time that her first, widely celebrated book was being adapted for television. Could she have been trying to write something that was different, even unfilmable? How many of her contemporaries, with their multiple or unreliable narrators, their huge or alinear timespans, are carving out a space for the novel in reaction to the current dominance of the visual, realist form?