Alex Preston

I read Stuart Evers’ blog about Georges Perec’s  fabulous Life A User’s Manual with great interest (Evers adds a colon to the title of Perec’s novel that doesn’t appear in my copy). One of the bitter shades who haunt that journalistic Abaddon, comments sections, suggested beneath my review of Evers’ Ten Stories About Smoking on the New Statesman website that I gave Evers a good write-up because we were friends. We’re not, but after reading his piece on how we remember the books we read, I’m sure we’d get on. There is a blog to be written about why such a venomous streak of negativity runs through comments sections – Amy Sackville was torn apart by these faceless harpies for – as far as I could make out – having done a postgraduate degree at Oxford and some creative writing courses. I was assaulted here by some pseudonymic buffoon before my book was even published. I’m not against an open forum for criticism; it just seems sad that the anonymity conferred by the Web has spawned so many Ignatius J. Reillys firing their poisonous missives into the void. Anyway…

Evers’ blog picked up on a chain of ideas that I had been following since reading David Shields’ manifesto against the (traditional) novel, Reality Hunger. Shields values short fiction over novels because there is so much “padding” in  the longer form. “You have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.” At first Evers’ blog might seem to support Shields’ assertion (and Evers is, after all, a writer of short fiction). Evers’ argument is that the way we remember novels is as a kind of concentrated nexus of emotions encapsulated in an atmosphere (or, more exactly, a response to that atmosphere) whilst details of plot and character remain sketchy. This atmosphere could presumably, following Shields, be sharpened, distilled and condensed into a short story, a lyric essay, a photograph.

Delillo’s Underworld, all eight hundred and some pages of it, exists for Evers in the exquisite moment when Nick and Marian Shay view the vast installation of B52s in the desert, painted rainbow colours, an image of the postmodern sublime that rings through the rest of the novel: “The piece had a great riverine wash, a broad arc of sage green or maybe mustard green with brushy gray disturbances, and it curved from the southeast corner up and across the north edge, touching nearly a third of the massed aircraft, several planes completely covered in the pigment – the work’s circulating fluid, naming the pace, holding the surface together.” For me, Underworld is Cotter Martin catching the ball at a  baseball game with J. Edgar Hoover in the crowd. But Evers’ point holds true – ask me to describe in detail the plot of this novel, or almost any other, and I’d struggle. Ask me to talk about my emotional response, or moments of sublimity that moved me, and we’d be there till closing time.

Perhaps this says something about the kind of novels I like: labyrinthine, multi-layered, discursive. But I think it says more about how we remember novels. They are, as Evers says, unique – “the art form most attuned to life”. I recognise this as I’m writing. At about forty thousand words, it’s no longer possible to hold an entire novel in your mind. I was teaching at the Faber Academy with the writer James Scudamour recently and we discussed exactly this: at some point after the first thirty or forty thousand words, the novel becomes too sprawling, too variegated to pin down. You have to rely upon knowing the atmosphere you’re trying to create, and how your characters and your plot will work to build this atmosphere, and press on regardless. Indeed, when I start writing, I have less a plot or a theme in mind than a fully-formed idea of the atmosphere and the corresponding emotional response that this should engender in the reader. I judge my success on how true I can hold to this aim. The moments of sublimity – and that which surrounds them – should all be faithful to this original vision.

I think that novels often hang upon a series of moments of sublimity, revelation, violence, that energise and illuminate the surrounding text like flashes of phosphorescence in a dark sea. But to say that the rest of what goes into a novel is useless emballage is daft. The reason that Steve Reich’s music is so hypnotic and compelling is because we are constantly searching for the moments of stunning melody that emerge like lit arrows from the droning repetition. But without the repetition, without the background, those moments would lose their impact. Similarly in Beckett’s prose there are moments of extravagant Romantic lyricism that would be corny on their own. Only amid the wandering aporia do they work effectively – images of those rare moments in life when the sublime shines through.

I, like Evers, hesitate before re-reading books. I keep coming across novels whose publishers push them as “the new Secret History“. I haven’t read Donna Tartt’s book since it was first published and I sat up until the small hours aged thirteen, lost in the rarefied world of Hampden College. It could only disappoint me now. I just re-read Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, a book that was my Bible as a teenager. It wasn’t a total let down, but I found myself preferring the book the way I remembered it – a heady admixture of spirituality and adolescent high feeling. I cringed fairly regularly during the course of my most recent reading. And this is the problem: we don’t remember books as we would read them now, but rather we remember them through the lens of the person we were when we read them. Nostalgia is layered upon nostalgia.

I was thinking of Perec recently, having just read W, his bizarre and moving memoir of childhood and metaphor for the concentration camps. I almost posted it on the Guardian website as my favourite French novel (the Guardian are doing a literary tour of the world at the moment). But I hesitated, wondering if perhaps I didn’t prefer Michel Tournier’s The Erl King (my mental image of that book: a twelve-pronged stag charging through the Bavarian forest pursued by Hermann Göring). In the meantime, a hundred other comments had been made, and I felt my post would be lost, and I don’t like comments sections anyway.

This Bleeding City was published a year ago today. I thought I’d try to write down some of the thoughts and impressions that occur to me as I contemplate this mad, fantastic year. Firstly, though, I guess I should look back two years, back to when my agent delivered the novel to Faber, and a terrible period of waiting began, and every telephone call had me leaping from my chair, and finally… well, you know the rest of that story. And whatever happens later in my career as a writer, whatever successes come, I’m not sure that I’ll ever again experience the same extraordinary rush of joy as when I stepped out of my office into a tentatively sunny early spring day, my phone still clutched in my damp hand, and said to myself I’m going to be published by Faber.

The lead-up to publication was full of excitement and trepidation, marked by mental oscillation between the certainty that the book would sink without trace and sinful dreams of success. The thrill of standing next to Andrew O’Hagan as he spoke about his next novel (Maf the Dog) at a Faber bash; the first time I saw that marvellous ff monogram on the spine of my book, with my name underneath; the foreign rights deals that started rolling in before the English edition was even published… There’s something precious in those early days before a novel is forced to enter the grubby marketplace. The faults that you know are there in the text recede, and you only think of those shining passages that really are the book. You allow yourself to dream without shame.

There were enough good reviews in the press to keep me sane, and you can read most of them here. The Financial Times review arrived in my inbox as I waited for my wife to give birth at UCH (a mere twenty-four hours after the book’s launch party). I tried not to let a grin break the expression of concerned sympathy I wore. The bad reviews tended to be obvious bash-a-banker rants, but I took them far too seriously and personally. Patrick Neate’s review in The Guardian was even more troubling, because – and this is every writer’s worst nightmare – much of what he said was spot-on. I still find it painful to read the review, although his words have helped me to turn my next novel into a far finer work than it would have been otherwise and so I must, through gritted teeth, thank him.

I wrote This Bleeding City in under six months, coming home from work in the evenings and eating in front of the computer, writing until my eyes felt like they would burst from their sockets, and then regretfully staggering to bed. No social life, no family life, just work. It was painful, but it felt necessary. The novel isn’t the masterpiece I wanted it to be, but I’m enormously proud of it, and delighted that – by and large – readers have understood the story I wanted to tell. To those who didn’t like it, I ask you to bear with me, and recognise that I wrote it in a mad rush, while still in my twenties, and, well, sorry…

I wrote a blog this time last year about how, given the economics of the world of publishing, the roulette-wheel nature of bestsellers and the hugely competitive market for fiction, it was unlikely that writing would ever be more than a hobby for me. I didn’t have the kind of City job that paid mega-bonuses, and had only a small amount put away for when the rains came. Two months later, however, I left my job and became that thing I’d only ever dreamed of – a full-time writer. Of course it isn’t as financially rewarding as the City – what is? – but I was wrong to write it off as a way of supporting a family. With foreign rights, and festival appearances, and the odd spot of journalism, it is just about possible to scrape a living as an author.

There have been many high points this year: seeing myself on the bestseller list as I walked past WH Smith on the way to work one morning; Edinburgh, Ghent and Cheltenham Festivals; winning the Spear’s and Edinburgh First Novel prizes; being selected for Waterstone’s New Voices campaign; meeting Diana Athill at the brilliant Shoreditch House Literary Salons… But what This Bleeding City’s success has gained me more than anything is time. I have been able to spend eighteen months writing the new novel – ten of them full-time. The Full Fathom Five will be published by Faber (although it’s now called The Revelations) in January next year – I recently signed a new, two-book deal with them. I have been able to craft it, rewrite it, iron out those faults that haste and chutzpah made me ignore in This Bleeding City.

I don’t want this blog to come across as self-congratulatory, but I remember reading so many depressing and downbeat descriptions of the writer’s life when I was staring out that I thought I’d try and mildly redress the balance. Of course there have been dark days this year, too. The worst, perhaps, a literary festival in the north-west where my mother-in-law and her (small) book group were the only people to come and watch me speak. Or the hype and excitement about a film deal that saw a lot of expensive lunches eaten but no film. Or the American publishers that came so close to taking on the book but then didn’t.

I’ve been hugely lucky. I’ve had a brilliant agent, a fabulous editor and Faber’s magnificent publicity department behind me. I was lucky that Oliver James, whose extraordinary evisceration of the boom years, Affluenza, prompted me to write This Bleeding City, agreed to read my novel and then support it far beyond the call of duty. I have a wonderful family, a grandfather whose wise words are a constant inspiration, a wife far lovelier than I deserve. It has been an extraordinary year, and what’s most thrilling of all is that this is only the beginning.

I received a small book for Christmas. Hardback, its cover reminded me of the elegant wallpaper of some Bloomsbury salon: dark green leaves and what might be sloe berries against an ecru background. The book tells the story of a girl called Sally Waite, the precocious daughter of a well-off Southern couple, whom we first meet as an eleven year-old girl, and follow her until, pregnant by her Yankee husband, Kevin, she leaves Alabama for a life in New York. The book – tantalisingly – leaves off just as Sally’s hero, Henry Rountree, an upright local lawyer and friend of the Waite family, has confessed his love for her. We know what happens, though, because Sally is – more or less – my grandmother, Elizabeth Igleheart Hynes.

The novel’s manuscript was found in a drawer by my grandfather when he was going through the possessions of his wife, my grandmother, who died in December 2008. My grandfather and my Aunt Jo spent a year sorting through the various drafts, forming the text into a coherent narrative whilst always keeping faithful to the words my grandmother used. They had the book printed – by the ‘Morgan Women Press’ (Morgan was one of my grandmother’s family names) – and distributed as presents almost two years to the day after my Granny Liz’s funeral. The novel bears a short preface and a postscript – the former explaining the origins of the book, the latter recounting a trip we made to the Birmingham, Alabama neighbourhood in which my grandmother lived. My grandfather writes: “After the funeral, a group of family mourners drove across town to Norwood, the neighborhood where she grew up, to pay a last visit to the family home. All of Norwood was gone: where there had been houses and apartment buildings and little stores there were only weed-grown lots and rubble, with here and there the derelict shell of a big house still standing, uninhabited and unpainted, staring at the wasteland around it through broken windows.” It was indeed like something out of The Wire: menacing youths glared at us from street corners under the brims of their baseball caps, cars slowed to look at us – suited, sombre – as they passed. But, somehow, the spirit of the girl who had lived there so many years ago was with us, and we felt invulnerable because, despite the decay, her presence was in the stones upon which we walked.

The book is beautifully written. Reminding me most of Eudora Welty, it captures with extraordinary clarity something very difficult – a happy youth – and revels in a very particular form of Southern nostalgia. A Small-Boned Woman is the opposite of a misery memoir. This is not to say that it doesn’t deal with weighty issues – racial tension bubbles beneath the surface with occasional violent eruptions. When Sally hears Orrin Butts, a local wheeler-dealer looking for political advancement, reeling off racist cant, she feels “the same sense of unreality I had felt once when I saw a man smashed in a car accident, and expected him to get out of his grotesque, twisted position and walk away whole.” The novel sings with hope, though. Problems, it tells us, can be resolved by intelligent people working together. There is no evil that cannot be beaten through education, discussion and a good Southern sense of fair play.

Whilst Kevin, the Yankee husband, hardly features in the novel, we see Sally’s joy when he returns safe from the war, her excitement at the prospect of their life together in New York. It makes for an extraordinary stereoscopic history when this fictionalised account of my grandparents’ early life together is read alongside my grandfather’s war memoir, Flights of Passage. Just as, I am told, jewellers know when they set stones whether the ring will last, simply from their sense of the integrity of that initial setting, my grandparents’ more than sixty years of happy marriage is unsurprising when you read of the love they felt, all those years ago, as the war ended and their lives began.

It is the beginning of the book that I keep coming back to, though. Sally and her best friend Anna go to Mobile Bay for their summer holidays. It’s an exquisite piece of writing, wonderfully conjouring up the endlessness of those surf-tossed days. I was reminded of my own version of Mobile Bay – a stilted house on North Carolina’s Outer Banks where we’d go with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle and I’d walk along the tide-line looking for jellyfish and shells and then throw myself down on the hot, damp sand. Sally recalls one morning in Mobile Bay like this: “The whole morning we stayed in the blue bay water, sometimes stretching out on the weathered boards of the wharf. A big beam had floated in on the tide, and we played it was a boat. We pushed it out past the boathouse, holding it with our arms and paddling our feet. Then we got astride it, letting the gentle waves propel us to shore.”

It was an extraordinarily moving experience to read the book. My granny’s soft, Southern voice sings on every page. It was, for a moment, like having her back. It is now difficult to unravel the twines of conflicting emotions that the novel has inspired in me. Firstly, a reader’s dissatisfaction at an unfinished book. For I spent two days in the sunny company of Sally Waite and – more importantly – my granny who whispers through and around Sally. Then a kind of sadness that such a good novel was abandoned – I presume when children and my grandfather’s successful literary career got in the way of finishing it. Particularly the first section of the book suggests that my grandmother could have been a very fine novelist; certainly A Small-Boned Woman would have been published, I imagine to some success. But then I sorted through photographs of my grandmother taken in Princeton and Hampstead in the last twenty years of her life, and I saw how happy she was, how proud of her family, her husband, and I knew better than to wish changes to the paths of life’s great binomial tree. We have the novel, it is wonderful, it is enough.

My grandfather sent a copy of A Small-Boned Woman to the editor of the Sewanee Review: the first 25 pages of the novel will be published in the journal later this year.