Book review: The Times, 2006
THE GIRO PLAYBOY by Michael Smith - Faber and Faber, £9.99; 222pp
Rousseau got there first. And how: 'So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend…the most sociable and loving of men has with one accord been cast out by all the rest.' Such was his opening to Reveries of the Solitary Walker, ten meditations stirred by ten walks through Paris in 1776.
The book, published after his death, is famously unencumbered by the complexities of plot, narrative or dialogue. Rousseau had a more engaging and pressing consideration: himself. How he was wronged, misunderstood, his zeal thwarted by others' cynicism. Some years before, piqued by charges that he was a writer with meagre integrity, he deposited a copy of another of his books, Les Dialogues, on the high altar of Notre Dame. Clearly, a man driven. By himself.
The first-person meandering narrative devoted to the all-seeing and all-thinking I is, of course, a staple of literature. It is both the easiest of styles to adopt but the hardest to achieve. The line between profundity and bathos, self-indulgence and universality is perilously thin.
Michael Smith is the latest to walk the line. His debut, The Giro Playboy, has already drawn comparisons to Jack Kerouac and Hunter S Thompson. The book has been represented to the trade by Kevin Conroy Scott of the agents Conville and Walsh. ''I read a passage where the narrator draws meaning about his unfulfilling life from finding pebbles on a beach in Brighton,'' he says. ''What a beautiful writer, I thought, little ephinanies here, there and everywhere.''
Like his heroes, Smith mainly roams the darkside, regaling us with scabrous tales of exorbitant drug use and the low-life he meets in his native Hartlepool and London. While he might imagine this proffers literary cachet, it is actually yielding to the conventional. Perhaps the greater challenge is to present a relentless first-person narrative without these clichés of seediness, to tell us nothing and everything slowly, or as John Updike termed it, 'Giving the mundane its beautiful due.'
It is a genre unbeloved of Hollywood because it mines that area most difficult to portray on film - thought. The voice-over suffices but the clocks ticks over. Any more than a few minutes' worth and they're at the nachos, bored. The film and TV drama people want fast, neat scenes; a shifting perspective; dialogue; and, most of all, a 'beginning, middle and end'.
The mainstream publishing industry has been ignobly compliant. The obsession, above all else, has been the story because the story makes the film makes the money. So the legacy of defiant self-indulgence and self-pity forged by Rousseau and developed by many others has been largely forsaken. No longer do writers wallpaper their soul. Tell an agent or commissioning editor that a book stands by its author's writing prowess alone and they'll book an appointment, for some time next year.
Imagine the pitch for Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
in 2006, eighty years after it was first published:
''Got this great book, about a drunk lying on a moonlit hillside staring at
a thistle.''
''Sounds quirky. Short story is it?''
''It's a prose-poem, actually - 2,685 lines long.''
''What happens?''
''It's a stream of consciousness thing, the thistle, the drunk, the human
condition…''
''Ah, we don't do that any more.''
The adjective 'quirky' is often used as a booby trap to stymie creativity. Writing that is not linear and transparent and which flouts the tyranny of the story faces this scorn. Jack London's The Star Rover, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (to name but three of thousands) might all have been suitable candidates for the death-touch dismissal of quirkiness. They are literary masterpieces precisely because of their idiosyncratic self-indulgence; the wondering and the wandering. Or 'quirky' if preferred.
Such works often frame writing in its purest state and define the notion
of 'books as friends.' They are the equivalent of someone sitting down and
telling their tale without the need to embellish, acknowledging that life
itself, or portions of it even, seldom has a beginning, middle and end. Younger
readers, teenagers and those in their twenties especially, are drawn to these
kinds of books. They imagine that writers like, say, JD Salinger or Elizabeth
Smart, are all their own because there is no periphery or stylistic veil between
the 'I' of the book and themselves.
It is heartening, then, that a large publishing house like Faber and Faber
is bold enough to support writers of Michael Smith's ilk once more and eschew
the formulaic Book Club approach with its fealty to plot and characterisation.
If The Giro Playboy is slight and self-conscious, it is also original
and restless; one man laid bare. This is the very raw material from which
cult status is often ignited. Little ephinanies are often more than enough.