Bed by David Whitehouse

A straight review this week. Those seeking humour and Cracked style images should jump right on down. Normal service will resume shortly.

Bed by David Whitehouse 

‘Asleep he sounds like a pig hunting truffles in soot.’

The opening sentence of David Whitehouse’s debut novel, Bed, is shocking. Whereas the book jacket blurb, in its few short lines, describes Mal as an impish, charismatic child prone to bouts of extremely demonstrative naturism, the reader is instead confronted by something far more unpleasant; the same character, seven thousand four hundred and eighty-three days into a self-imposed, bed-bound state of inertia.

From this moment on, it is clear that Whitehouse takes great pleasure in such feats of misdirection. Although many authors invite their readers to play armchair psychologist, Whitehouse takes this to an extreme. Throughout vast swathes of text he uses his considerable dexterity with language to paint, embellish and then repaint the scene. Descriptions and wonderful, witty word-play mask the fact that, aside from ever-accruing inches on Mal’s waistline, nothing much is happening. The image could almost be a still life. Almost, but not quite. Undercurrents of motive, emotion and desire course through every character in the book. As the reader mines these motives, the meaning of the novel shifts and changes, never quite merging into one clear explanation. This, then, is my reading of Bed.

It is clear that, on one level at least, Bed is a novel about greed. This is made explicit in the gratuitous descriptions of food that pepper the text. Mountains of this and slabs of that disappear into Mal’s gullet as he ingests everything in his path. But it is intimated that it is also his emotional greed that has brought the family into the situation in which we find them. The blandness of the narrator (Mal’s brother) is easy to understand when brought into contrast with Mal’s character. Mal’s personality, his flaws and his charm alike, dominate the life of the family and set the tone throughout their shared childhood. Like the unnamed narrator in Rebecca, our hero fades into the background when faced with such otherness. Mal wants to be different, to be special, and so the whole family succumbs to his bizarre desire, thereby facilitating the transformation.

However, as Whitehouse’s spotlight shifts and refocuses, another interpretation presents itself. It begins to seem as if it is perhaps Mal’s mother’s greed around which the plot is centred. Slavish devotion is rarely allied with selfishness, but in her case it certainly appears to be so. In the chapters dealing with Mal’s teens and early twenties his mother seems restless and unhappy. When he moves out she is inconsolable. But when he returns, vowing never again to leave his bed, her focus is restored and she sets about the task of caring for him, perversely accepting his choice and literally drawing a curtain on ex-girlfriend Lou and on a world which threatens to break up her treasured family unit. 

Bed is also very much a novel about love, and the need people have to channel and focus that love into some thing or some person that is theirs and theirs alone. In this way, the book’s themes are inextricably linked; love is greedy, selfish and potentially disastrous. When the book’s characters are left without a focus for their emotions they become shadows of their former selves. This is demonstrated, as previously mentioned, by Mal’s mother as she struggles to accept her child growing up and forming ties stronger than those she has to him (not unlike the character of Judith in Cold Comfort Farm), but also by Lou’s father who shrinks into a grey, listless version of himself when his idealised vision of love is shattered on two occasions by infidelity.

 Returning to the issue of the book’s ‘meaning’, no resolution is immediately apparent. It is certainly almost impossible to accept Mal’s proclamation of loving selflessness as he is hoisted from his bed:

‘You destroyed this family.’

‘No… I saved it.’

This has enraged some readers. Janet Maslin tore into the book’s apparent lack of message in the New York Times, bemoaning:

“As to questions like how Mal got into this situation and what might get him out of it, Mr. Whitehouse was at a loss for interesting answers.” 

But it seems to me (sitting in my temporary psychiatrist’s armchair) that, in looking for an explicit rationale, Maslin is entirely missing the point. Whitehouse’s novel is a tribute to the power which language has to amuse, to repulse, to suggest and infer. Fans of unusual narrative voices and darkly comic stories, such as those of Dahl and Saki, will appreciate that presenting the reader with easily digestible answers would transform the subtleties and clues buried in the prose into so many red herrings, thus depriving us of the satisfaction of drawing our own conclusions. 

A Serious Post About Humour

In the past, many people have asked me what it is an Editor actually does. As a job description, it lies somewhere in the public consciousness alongside the Z-list celebrity whom no one can quite place.

Fame.

It's also a very hard question to answer. Depending on the company and the specific publication, working in publishing can entail:

 - hours of performing as a human spell-check
- untangling endless webs of copyright information which seem to suggest the original licencee may or may not have been fictional
- falling asleep at the photocopier
- gasping in horror at budgets
- screaming in horror at schedules
- recoiling in horror from suggested illustration concepts
- noticing a misplaced comma at last minute and interrupting the production schedule out of sheer bloody mindedness

An unreferenced quotation!

 There is also a certain amount of cajoling, threatening and hand-holding of authors through the process of producing a chapter or so's worth of work. And that's just for starters. Overall, however, I would say that the publishing industry's primary role is to make the finished book appear effortless. At any cost. I've always been sceptical of the story of Samuel Taylor Coleridge composing the epic poem Kubla Khan having dreamed it in full the night before. I would put money on there having been a tired and frustrated Editor somewhere in the background. Probably with a red pen. (Perhaps that explains the poem's missing finale?)

Personally, most of my experience has been gained in the educational market. Although this does mean occasionally ploughing through third revisions of thousand page physics textbooks, I enjoy the challenge. Educational publishing has a clearer aim than most. We try and turn this:

Into this:

Dead Poet's Society. Ah, man. They were just so inspired.

The challenge of taking a large chunk of information written by an expert in his or her field and attempting to make it engaging to a bored teenage audience should not be underestimated. When reviewing the text, it is often very tempting to try and slip in a bit of humour (especially if the Editor is me. I like cheap gags).

In the past, I did attempt to occasionally squeeze a joke or two into passages I judged to be excessively dry. My superiors brought me up short and I don't blame them.

A few weeks back, my boyfriend and I took our open water scuba diver's course. Although it might seem like a fairly easy concept (breathe through this, swim with this, don't tease the sharks), apparently scuba diving is complicated enough to require the reading of an entire textbook prior to so much as paddling in the shallow end.

Poke Poke

The world hasn't seen the level of procrastination I put into this task since the uni exam season of '08. For someone who occasionally reads text books for a living, I'm a very bad student. My room was impeccable, my dog walked to near-exhaustion, my Twitter page a riot of updates. Things only got worse when I succumbed to the inevitable and sat down to actually read the thing. IT TRIED TO BE FUNNY.

It started off small scale:

'You've probably noticed you can't breathe underwater'

Heh. Yes, yes I have.

It then warmed to its theme by seemingly getting increasingly irate about the fact that fish are genetically superior swimmers; 'Of course, fish wouldn't need to do this...' 'Since you're not a fish...' etc.

At this point, I started mentally writing a letter addressed to the Editors in which I would take the stance that, although sans gills, I refused to be made to feel belittled by a bunch of aquatic wannabes.

Just sayin'...

That's when I noticed the 'joke' answer.

'Does the BWARF of the predive safety chack stand for d: BCD, Wolverine, Releases, Air and Final OK?'

A safety wolverine, yesterday.

Although in hindsight it just looks like a harmless trick question, at the time - 150 endless pages in - I was genuinely annoyed that they had tried to make me laugh.

Things got worse on the course itself. Most of the classroom sessions were supposed to take the form of students sitting very still and watching an absurdly 90s video taking you through the various stages of controlled drowning. I searched everywhere for it online, but to no avail. It was, essentially, this:

The 90s encapsulated

Although it was a rare nice weekend (Sod's Law I'd pick that one to remain largely underwater), the group acquiesced readily enough. Bombarded with images of tremendously 90s people laughing in aquatic situations, things got a little tetchy after we were reassured for the second time that 'Yes! It is possible to dive whilst remaining stylish! We have it in red, too!' . Then the "comedy character" came into shot. In each section, an actor closely resembling Barry from Eastenders strode onto screen. There he proceeded to prat about, getting everything wrong, in the kind of slapstick previously assumed to have died with the cancellation of The Chuckle Brothers.

Headdesk

No one laughed. In diving's long and illustrious history, I can't imagine anyone has ever laughed at that poor man. Having sacrificed a weekend to learning to scuba, we were instead being subjected to someone else's idea of a joke.

Eventually, our instructor took pity on us and ushered us outside, where we proceeded to learn (and pass) what was needed by listening, asking questions and chatting. He turned out to be a dry, quick-witted man.

The problem, i suppose, is that learning isn't inherently funny. Unlike The Hitchhiker's Guide or Louis C.K, that isn't its purpose. Learning things can be fun when interpreted by a good teacher who understands his or her audience and can convey information in the right way. An educational book's purpose is to be informative, clear and to give the teacher all the tools needed to do their job - including making people laugh. As soon as it tries to cut out the middle-man, it strays from that purpose.


Insert Punchline.

Lost at Sea - or The Further Adventures of Mr. T-Rexposition

Last week, I introduced you to Mr. T-Rexposition.

Hey.

In hindsight, I feel that I did not do him justice. Like all freelancers these days, Mr. Rexpostion has had to come up with new and interesting ways to earn a living using his prodigious 'pointing out coincidences' and 'introducing plot points' skills. And despite this, there I was focusing on the least innovative of Mr. Rexposition's projects. 

She totally ignored my interpretive dance.

However, rather than getting mad, Mr. Rexposition decided to get even. And thus, whilst I was tinkering about with the next part of my book report, he appeared in a puff of smoke, told me to check Twitter, then disappeared. (Legal notice: Creative licence has been used liberally throughout this anecdote).

Eh, near enough.

The tweet in question was this:

Drives me nuts how @sylvia_browne has gone totally silent. I promise if I'm ever publicly shamed I'll be tweeting every five seconds.
— jonronson (@jonronson) May 8, 2013

How and why this was such a coincidence will become clear. But for now, please accept the second part of my April/May book report. 

Part 2: Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

I wonder how many times Jon Ronson has been compared to Louis Theroux – or vice versa. I wonder if it irritates him (or, indeed, him).

   

                            'My hair's floppier!'                      'No, MINE is. Also,You smell'

Fortunately for us, however, the fact that this comparison seems to be made so often shows that there are at least two investigative journalists at large who tackle their subjects with fair-mindedness, humour and genuine curiosity. It makes a welcome change from the Ross Kemp ‘gang-culture porn’ school of documentary making and an even more welcome break from Piers Morgan’s “Everything must have been so HARD for you… cry pretty for camera three, please” technique of interviewing z-listers.

Incidentally, the best rap diss I've ever heard was '...You're rap's Piers Morgan'

Lost at Sea is a compilation of articles written by Ronson covering a whole host of social issues, trends and interesting people. For someone so seemingly gentle, I cannot imagine how intimidating it must be for him to arrange interviews with some of his subjects. From the self-styled taxonomist whose penchant for categorising people has led him to develop software designed to target the most vulnerable in society and bombard them with payday loan and credit card junk mail, to Jonathan King, the ex-pop impresario accused of molesting young boys at the height of his fame. And yet he approaches each subject with a broad mind, or, at least, an openness about his prejudices which argues true self-knowledge.

Not all of the topics broached are as serious (for example, the chapter examining the extraordinarily bizarro world of competitive eating), but most have an edge to them.

My money's on the one on the left. That kid's got heart.

 Ronson tackles each head on, injecting enough of his own participation and personality into each for us to be well aware of his own conclusions without forcing us to take the same view. Only a couple of times does his anger seem to take control of his journalistic impartiality. In the first instance, a small Christian sect (cult?) has begun donating kidneys en-masse. Ronson arrives to investigate this apparently incredibly charitable tendency before realising that he is being used by a senior figure in a truly stomach-churning way. I won’t reveal the denouement here, but safe to say it leaves an extremely sour taste in the mouth.

In the second instance, we are introduced to Sylvia Browne, TV 'psychic' extraordinaire.

The worst bit is, she predicted that make-up

In a breathtakingly uncomfortable chapter, Ronson takes to sea in order to try and nail an interview with this doyenne of magnificent frauds. ('To sea? What?' I hear you ask. Why, for a psychic cruise, bien sur! Isn't that every traveller's dream?)

Sylvia Browne, it transpires, is a particularly malevolent strain of the psychic bacteria. Although she does dabble in the traditional art of making hysterically inaccurate predictions for the future...

...Browne's particular specialty is holding nationally publicised consultations with the parents of missing children. 

It's people like this that really test the concept of the fundamental decency of human nature. What really boggles the mind is how often she has been proven wrong in the past. Now, if I were to go against every single inclination  in my body and decide to consult a psychic, I'm fairly sure I'd want to find one with a good track record of accurate readings. Wouldn't you?  But then, we live in a world where Tony Blair has built up a secondary career as a peace envoy to the Middle East.

Any. Single. One. of these people would have been better qualified. And that includes the clock.

So perhaps it's no surprise that despite repeated proof that Browne has the psychic capabilities of a pile of gall-stones, her career flourished.

All of these things are more psychic than Sylvia Browne

Until recently. As Ronson's Tweet posted above suggests, Browne went a bridge too far in her assessment that Amanda Berry, one of the recently rescued abductees from Cleveland, was dead and 'in water'. An assessment given on national TV - to the girl's mother.

Suddenly, the American media is full of scepticism. (In one clip, ABC charmingly admits 'You can't always believe those psychics'... No. No you can't, can you. What is the world coming to?) Browne has had to take down her Twitter feed and her career looks to be as good as dead.

What confuses me is why it is this particular case that has caused such spectacular damage to her reputation. Amanda Berry is not the first child to turn up alive after Browne has pronounced otherwise, and the opposite has also, sadly, happened on many occasions. But for whatever reason, this particular vulture on the carcass of grief has finally been exposed. Ronson and anyone who has read the article in question must be heaving a sigh of relief. 

Lost at Sea is, like all of Ronson’s books so far, an occasionally disturbing and uncomfortable read. It does, however, grant you incredible access into worlds hidden away from the spotlight, and to characters in major news stories who’s points of view have been ignored by the mainstream media. 

Above all, however, the draw to Ronson's work is his sense of the ridiculous. Even in a chapter as horrifying and depressing as that devoted to Sylvia Browne, one of the passages that stayed with me is the description of Browne in the cruise ship gift-shop, spotting some of her fans and wheeling away at high speed, suddenly publicity-shy. 

Sylviaaaaa!!!!!!

As a psychic, she should have seen it coming.

(The full Ronson article can be read here: HERE!)

In Which We Meet Mr. T-Rexposition

Let us begin this blog post with a tortured simile. Ready? Begin.

Opinions. They’re very much like bags of frozen spinach. (Go with me on this). Sometimes you just keep stocking up on them without doing anything much. You just keep piling them on into your freezer/brain, never keeping track until you suddenly realise you have 10 bags/units of opinion of the stuff.

'There's loads of food in the freezer' 'Yes, Mum. Mainly Spinach...'

So whilst my family and I have been eating spinach parfait, spinach crumble, roasted spinach and (the misleadingly named) spinach surprise over the past few days, I’ve realised that I’ve read book after book since the last blog post without very much to say. Apart from some choice spinach-based expletives.

Ach. Ya leafy bastard! (He seemed to say).

After ploughing my way through the 20^th century seminal work of feminist theory that is The Rules, some people suggested that I should write a companion piece based on The Game, a similarly sickening guide to courtship for humans of the male persuasion.

Ugh.

 I declined. Honestly, after The Rules my brain became a sort of porridge. Everywhere I looked, people were either following the rules or flagrantly disregarding them. It was tiring. It was boring. The prospect of repeating the exercise with The Game appeared as unappealing as willingly putting myself through a marathon session of Michael Bay’s back catalogue. Whilst wearing a hair shirt. With itching powder down my pants. Furthermore I remembered that The Game is, if not the source, then at least a propagator of the flirting technique known as ‘negging’:

Negging (V): ‘ To offer low-grade insults meant to undermine the self-confidence of a woman so she might    be more vulnerable to your advances.’

The world is not ready to see me that angry. The End.

Although not quite, as although I chose to give myself a break and avoid dating manuals for a while, I have been busily tucking into a variety of other books. And although I would struggle to come up with a theme so universal and all-encompassing as to knit them all together in a neat parcel, they do deserve some screen-time. Please accept the first part of my April/May book report, and imagine the doodles in the margins that got me into so much trouble at school.

Part 1: Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys

Josie Moraine is a prostitute’s daughter. Raised in the French Quarter of New Orleans, she yearns for a life outside of The Big Easy, and will stop at nothing to make her dreams of college come true.

Although the prudish side of me baulks at a YA novel set predominantly in a cat house, there is nothing gratuitous in Sepetys’ writing. The predominant characters are (for the most part) sympathetically drawn and the plot was compelling, if occasionally melodramatic. It raced along at a fair old clip and never quite reached the point where the Eastenders theme tune would have become adequate background noise to the action.

I did have two major reservations regarding this book, however. The first is that those African American characters that did make it into the plot seemed ever so slightly forced. Both were cast as servants who just adored their white boss, and cared more about the ups and downs of the Caucasian characters’ lives than they did their own. It was all just a bit eh…

To illustrate the second issue, please allow me to introduce you to the much overlooked bit-part character jobbing round many novels these days, Mr. T-Rexposition.

Hey...

Mr. Rexposition has very little luck, professionally.  Although he is cast often, and in a variety of productions, he has not yet ascended to that pinnacle of a jobbing character’s career: a decent back story. The parts he (or his sister, Ms. Rexposition) are given serve to move the plot forward when the narrative style will not permit otherwise. They are the literary equivalent of ‘Sword Carrier 1’ in historical plays. Two minutes of screen time, an uncanny ability to time their entrance bearing crucial knowledge with the exact moment that plot development requires it, then it’s goodbye to watch the action from the wings. 

Quick! Your family are in danger! Goodbye....

Mr. Rexposition does not bemoan his fate too much. Rare are the novels (other than those by Michael Crichton) calling for a character actor specialising in the Jurassic Period. But he does resent being cast simply for his limitless availability rather than for his merits. He often feels that authors would happily send anyone in wearing a fedora/cowboy hat/monacle regardless of their suitability.

Allow me to introduce myself. Smith's the name. Your house burned down. Goodbye...

This certainly applies in his appearances in Out of the Easy. Mr. Rexposition feels that with all the description that went into his character, he may as well have forgone the effort he made finding a greaser’s wig and spats in size XXXXXXXXL and just appeared as himself, a giant scaly reptile from the land before time, spoken his page-worth of lines then pissed off.

Grr.. RAAAR. ROAAAR. CHOMP... Goodbye...

Poor Mr. T-Rexposition. I hear he’s applying for a role in the new Jurassic Park film. Good luck to him.

I am aware that I’ve devoted over half of this review to a dubious metaphor, sorry. But although this really does get on my nerves, if anything else about the book intrigues you, please do not let my whining about narrative style put you off. Young Adult Fiction is on the up these days following the success of Twilight, The Fault in our Stars and The Hunger Games, and very much deserves to be. Out of the Easy is one of my favourites in the genre so far. But then I do have a weakness for novels set in the 50s.