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My latest Sunday Telegraph review, of Adharanand Finn’s Running with the Kenyans, is online now:

Researching folk tales for my play about Bob Dylan (long story), I found this clever “tale of contradictions”:

Once there were five men floating down a river on a slab of marble. One of the men was blind; one was deaf and dumb; a third had no arms; another had no legs; and the last member of the group wore no clothes. All at once the blind man shouted: “I see a duck!” “He’s right,” said the deaf and dumb man, “I can hear it quack.” The man without clothes pulled a gun from his pocket and handed it to the armless man, who shot the duck. The legless man swam out and brought it in. The man who wore no clothes drew a match from his pocket, built a fire and roasted the duck. After the five had eaten their fill, they went floating merrily on down the river on the slab of marble.

Neat, eh? From Folk Tales of Britain by Katherine M. Briggs.

No.2 in an occasional series: It’s All About Confidence. After Monty “Python” Panesar dropped two painful catches during the first Test in Sri Lanka, Mike Selvey defended him. Panesar can catch, he argued, just not when he has time to think about it:

As the ball soared into the air a second time and he realised, in that split second of dread, that it was indeed going to head his way, imagine the thought process of someone whose confidence has been severely dented moments before: the flashback to the previous catch … why me … please don’t drop it … how should I get my hands positioned … oh God, it’s swirling about … No reflex catch this, just a way too much time to compute.

Even thinking about it brings back horrible memories of schoolboy cricket. (There’s one dropped catch I still remember as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. It was against the Hall U13s: I dropped him on 12 and, yes, he went on to get 50.) Harry Pearson sums up my feelings exactly:

As the delivery strikes the bat with that ominous hollow sound and the bowler emits the helpful cry of “Catch it!” time itself seems to move more slowly. The ball creeps up and up into a sky as blue and innocent as a baby’s eyes. You watch hopefully as onward towards the heavens it creeps, praying that the fact it appears to be heading in your direction is merely an optical illusion. Then, bitterly aware that this is not the case, you briefly entertain the thought that the malicious pill may be diverted by some sympathetic gust of wind, or bounce back towards the square off the downy breast of a low-flying goose.

There’s more. Read the whole thing.

My review of Tom Perrotta’s book The Leftovers is published in this month’s Literary Review. Too literary to have a proper website, apparently, so here’s the whole thing, starting with those crucial first lines:

‘What mostly struck her, reading the files, was how deceptively normal things seemed in Mapleton.’ Swap ‘deceptively’ for ‘boringly’ or ‘frustratingly’ and you have the whole story of this book. 

I don’t like writing rude reviews, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Read the rest after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

To celebrate Budget Day, the first in a new occasional series: It’s All About Confidence.

Last week three towns were given “city status” to mark this year’s Diamond Jubilee. City status doesn’t confer any official benefits – there are no tax breaks, no extra powers or functions – but Chelmsford, Perth and St Asaph still had to beat off competition from 22 other towns in order to become cities.

So why do it? Why do towns strive to become cities?

Quite simply, they want to feel good about themselves.

Becoming a city is all about local pride and the buzz created in communities

says Steve Masson, Lecturer in Political and Economic Geography at the University of Reading.

It sounds ephemeral, yet as always with these things, perception may well translate into reality. Of eight recently-named cities, only one (Wolverhampton) failed to see an immediate material benefit. Over the next ten years all the others outperformed their regional counterparts in terms of increasing investment and reducing unemployment.

You watch. In ten years time we’ll all be saying, “This was the decision that ended the recession.”

I’m working on something about Bob Dylan at the moment and reading Clinton Heylin’s biography Behind the Shades. Heylin is the Dylanologist’s Dylanologist, author of umpteen books, founder of Dylan fanzine Wanted Man, and chief obsessive chronicler of all things Bob.

I’m reading the 20th Anniversary edition of his biography Behind the Shades, which includes another 60,000 words on everything that’s happened since Behind the Shades: Take Two was published in 2000. No wonder if at times Heylin sounds peevish and frustrated.

Behind the Shades is definitive and comprehensive, often exhaustingly so. (For a Dylan novice looking for something more digestible, I’d recommend the excellent Q Magazine Bob Dylan Special Issue, which covers his career in a series of articles.) There’s endless detail about recording sessions (and Too Much Information about Dylan’s fondness for “well-endowed” girls), but little insight into Dylan’s psyche or creative drive, as this review notes:

Heylin’s narrative is sustained by a workable but perfunctory notion of Dylan’s life as the record of incessant challenges to “re-invent himself” in order to remain faithful to his demanding, difficult, ever elusive muse. Like his predecessors, Heylin acknowledges the teenage Dylan’s initial attraction to the world music opened to him as a means of escape from the stultifying imaginative confinement of his native Hibbing, but that’s the stereotypical story of millions of kids since the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll.

The most important questions remain unanswered:

Why has Dylan – like perhaps no other pop music devotee and like precious few artists of any kind – remained so stubbornly faithful to his muse for so long, and why has he kept this faith – as Heylin himself observes in his book’s somewhat grim final chapters – at the apparent expense of every other relation in his life? Why has Dylan’s commitment to his art always been so combative? So solitary? So perverse? So primal? Who is this guy anyway? 

Who knows?

But if Behind the Shades doesn’t have The Answer, that doesn’t stop it being appalling, mesmerising, weird and funny. It is Bob we’re talking about, after all. A taste of him is richer than a meal of anyone else.

I particularly enjoyed this anecdote, from 1985. Dylan had written a new song – another feather-light piece of fluff, Heylin calls it – and offered it to a country-punk band his new girlfriend liked. As the lead singer relates:

He came down to the studio when we were recording our first album and taught us the song. And he stayed around. He brought Ron Wood with him and they played on it … We ended up working on it a very long time because he didn’t like the way I sang it … It got to the point where finally I just did my best Bob Dylan imitation – and he said, “Ah now you’re doin’ SOME REAL SINGING!”

Asher Lev is born into a strict Hasidic family in 1950s Brooklyn. (I’ve been there, although obviously not in the 1950s. You walk ten blocks where everyone is Jewish, then you cross a street and everyone is black.) Asher has a prodigious artistic gift: he’s driven to draw and paint, even doodling in the pages of a sacred book. Yet Asher’s father believes that his son’s artistic passion is not a blessing but a curse. The novel follows Asher’s struggle to realise his talent while negotiating the demands of family and faith.

First things first: it’s good. (I’m not sure it deserves to make the Guardian list of 1000 novels to read before you die, but then 1000 books is an awful lot.)

It just wasn’t good for the reasons I expected.

Reason 1: religious tourism. Chaim Potok (or One Buttock, as I think of him) is a Jewish-American author and rabbi. I was recommended this book by a friend who’s training to be a rabbi – not an Orthodox rabbi, but still – as an authentic depiction of Orthodox Jewish life. But it’s actually too authentic for to make good religious tourism. It’s a genuine view from the inside: everything we might see as unusual is taken for granted and mentioned only in passing.

Reason 2: “hindered narration”. Asher Lev was published in 1972, but as Leo Benedictus observes in a (paywalled) recent essay in Prospect magazine:

This kind of novel, told in the first person by a character with a limited ability to understand the world or write about it, is the genre that defines our times. Every story told by an “I” implies some limitation, but books like Haddon’s [The Curious Tale of the Dog in the Night Time] take this further. These narrators are conspicuously powerless, often children or disabled people; usually their prose is full of (what the reader hitherto had thought were) errors. They are, in short, the world’s least likely authors. The poet and novelist Nick Laird has used the phrase “hindered narrator,” which describes it well.

An Hasidic, artistically obsessed boy – Asher Lev is a classic hindered narrator. What makes this book different from its present-day equivalents – Black Swan Green (a stammering boy), Vernon God Little (an outcast boy), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (an irritatingly precocious grieving boy) – is its calm, even placid authorial style. There are no writerly tics and tricks, no “errors”. The material is presented, if not quite straightforwardly, then certainly without too much “surface”.

It’s a good, old-fashioned first-person novel. After all those agitated narrators, I found it quite a relief.

From the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s “Black Ceremony Explosion Event” in Doha in December:

Amazing. He does it with microchips embedded in the shells.

Via Isabella Lauder-Frost on artstack, a new social network for art. If you’d like to join leave your email in the comments and I’ll send you an invite.

Geoff Dyer in an interview with Guernica magazine:

Fiction is not really about anything: it is what it is. But nonfiction—and you see this particularly with something like the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction—nonfiction we define in relation to what it’s about. So, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. It’s “about” Stalingrad. Or, here’s a book by Claire Tomalin: it’s “about” Charles Dickens. And what I’m really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is this idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its “about”-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you’re interested in the subject.

Benjamin Alsup has a complaint:

Today, many writers have largely abandoned sex as an area of concern … The contemporary American lustscape is populated by the sexually unlucky, unhappy, and/or uninterested.

It’s true. In contemporary American novels, everyone has bad sex, especially in relationships, where in real life you have the best sex. Alsup names Gary Shteyngart and Sam Lipsyte – I’d add to that list Jonathan Frantzen and Tom Perrotta, whose book The Leftovers, which I’m reviewing at the moment. Here’s a typical sample:

She’d complained on a couple of occasions about the way he used to just shove her head down toward his crotch – no words, no tenderness, just a silent command – and he’d made a show of listening carefully, promising to be more considerate in the future. And he always was, for a little while, until he wasn’t anymore. It reached the point, near the end, where the whole act got poisoned for her, and she could no longer tell if she was doing it because she wanted to or because he expected it.

Is this a “deep” point about the shallowness of American culture? Or just the idea that bad sex is more “literary”  and “realistic” than good sex?