Blistering Reviews

Review by ROBERT MACFARLANE
Published: August 20, 2006

Every few years, as a reviewer, one encounters a novel whose ineptitudes are so many in number, and so thoroughgoing, that to explain them fully would produce a text that exceeded the novel itself in both length and interest. Faced with such a book, one wishes only to let it slip quietly to the seabed of culture, there to join thousands of other unneeded books in their slow, silent compaction into the limestone of literary history.

When such a novel is by Irvine Welsh, however, its buoyancy is guaranteed. Notice must be taken, reaction given. For Welsh’s cult-hit debut, “Trainspotting” (1993), has sold nearly a million copies, and since its publication he has built an international reputation as the shock-chronicler of late capitalism’s underbelly; specifically the lives of the depressed and dispossessed of his home city, Edinburgh. His fiction has won notoriety for its transgressive episodes of sex, violence and self-abuse, and for its adventures in the Scottish demotic.

Welsh’s extraordinarily bad new novel centers on two characters, Danny Skinner and Brian Kibby, both of whom work for the city of Edinburgh’s restaurant inspection team. Skinner is a hard-drinking, philandering and aggressive man, who we are asked to believe relaxes between bouts of drinking and casual violence by reading Hugh MacDiarmid and watching Fellini films. Kibby, by contrast, is a milksop mother’s boy, who drinks Horlicks before bed, collects model trains, plays computer games and suffers racking Presbyterian guilt about masturbation.

On first meeting Kibby, Skinner conceives a vast and inexplicable hatred for him. In a twist of black-magic realism, it transpires that this hatred manifests itself as a kind of pathological transference. When Skinner gets into a fight, the wounds appear on Kibby’s body the next morning. When Skinner binges on booze or drugs, the toxins flood poisonously through Kibby’s veins. So it is that while Skinner finds himself free to indulge in a merry orgy of self-harm, Kibby begins rapidly to age and degrade. The literary inspiration here, as Welsh is wearyingly keen to underscore, is of course Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray.” The novel describes Kibby’s struggle to free himself from Skinner’s voodoo influence.

Although it fails at every imaginable level — metaphysical, ethical, technical, thematic — it is at the stylistic level, the level of the sentence, that Welsh’s novel is most wanting. The prose throughout is lazy, cliché-ridden and exhaustingly repetitive. In the novel’s first 80 pages, for instance, we are introduced to characters who have, variously, “sensitive, even womanly” eyes, “penetrating dark brown eyes,” “intense blue eyes,” “busy, big brown eyes,” “bloodshot eyes,” “hard, penetrating eyes,” “big, camel eyes,” “dead, sunken eyes” and “sharp, clear eyes.” By this point, the reader is rubbing his astonished, appalled eyes in disbelief, convinced that some meta-joke must be occurring — that this must surely be bad writing with a higher purpose.

It is not. Even when he is writing about physical sensation, one of his specialities, the clichés multiply and the repetitions repeat themselves. Humiliation “twisted like a knife” in the chest of a character named Kay; 50 pages later, a dagger “seemed to twist deep inside” an anxious Skinner. Early in the novel, Kibby feels a “bolt of fear.” Fifty pages later a realization strikes Kibby’s father like a “stark, bitter bolt.” Nine pages after that, panic strikes Skinner like — what else? — “a bolt of lightning.” Welsh also has an unfortunate fondness for adverbs, such that each verb is consummated by its cliché-making qualifier: a report is “meticulously prepared,” a lover “dozed blissfully,” a person “took his cue gratefully,” someone else “doggedly persevered.”

None of this, it should be made clear, is evidence of the free indirect style at work. Nor is this flattened and hopeless prose mimetic of the flattened and hopeless characters it is describing. Nor is this what George Orwell fondly called good bad writing. This is bad bad writing. There are tautologies (offices that are “unobtrusively tucked away”). There are mixed metaphors (the “bull of a man” whose frame was “going to seed”). There are mistakes — the use of the word “diligently” where “carefully” is meant. And there are unfortunate ambiguities, as when Welsh describes Kibby’s erection as “poking through the material of his trousers.” We must assume either that Welsh means “showing through,” or that Kibby has an unusually sharp phallus.

As well as its teeming clichés, the novel contains curious metaphorical flourishes that range in implication from the banal (“sometimes going outdoors in Scotland could be like stepping into a cold sauna”) to the inexplicable (a pungent bit of flatulence is “as poignantly weeping as a lover’s last farewell”). There are hokey literary asides (Kibby at his desk is described as a “Dickensian figure, sitting there alone, working in the lamplight”) and unsuccessful pastoralisms (“Spring settled cautiously into Edinburgh, as unsure of its tenure as ever”). Welsh cannot even write well about drinking: one of Skinner’s pub crawls is effortfully evoked as “a besotted voyage of drunken camaraderie with friends and sneering antagonisms with foes ... a muddled, timeless passage, a sweating foray through different lands and states of fevered being.”

Irvine Welsh would, it seems, like to think that he has updated Oscar Wilde’s fine novella for the new millennium. But “The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs” possesses neither the lush dreamy strangeness of “Dorian Gray” nor its unsettling black humor. The plot of Welsh’s novel yaws from implausibility to would-be obscenity — its prose is always bereft of insight, and frequently of competence.

Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the author of “Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed Into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit.” His new book, “The Wild Places,” will be published next year.

“Imagine my satisfaction,” reads the Scribner publicity office’s form letter that came with an advance copy of this book, “when I found myself immersed in a dark love story that was all at once sensual, moody and elegant.” Imagine my dissatisfaction when I found myself not in the least immersed in a love story to which none of these adjectives apply, not even “dark.” For this is a novel that ends as follows: “He wanted to find answers to other questions, too, some of his own, some of hers, but they would answer those later. Together.” This is a fair sample of Anthony Swofford’s prose in his first novel, “Exit A,” prose that befits a Harlequin romance novel more than functioning as (to quote the publicity office again) “confirmation of Swofford as a major literary talent.”

Do you want more? “They ate in silence. He could ask: Hey, sweetheart, what’s going on?” And: “ ‘What’s the number?’ She dialed the phone and ordered. They went downstairs to wait for the delivery.”

I hate to write reviews like this. I especially hate to disparage the work of someone who, like Swofford, has put his life on the line for the ostensible purpose of preserving my freedoms and civil liberties, such as they are. In the hope of finding something more constructive to say, I decided to read Swofford’s first book, the memoir “Jarhead.”

“Jarhead” deserves its acclaim. The reason it does is made plain right on Page 3, in sentiments of which Hemingway would approve: “What follows is neither true nor false but what I know.” This expert knowledge is precisely what makes the book believable, valuable: “Our days consist of sand and water and sweat and piss.” Moreover, Swofford takes the trouble to observe and analyze the context of his experiences: “By late September the American troop count in Saudi reaches 150,000 and the price of crude oil has nearly doubled.” From a strictly literary point of view, this last is not an impressive sentence, but it does not need to be; the implied connection between its two statements is important; we Americans owe it to ourselves and our country to decide whether it is valid and, if so, what the implication may demand of us.

“Exit A” deserves no acclaim because it doesn’t convey life vividly or believably. It analyzes nothing. Whatever distinctions and connections it makes remain superficial at best. Swofford’s ability to create character is vastly inferior to his capacity to describe reality as he himself experienced it. He frequently commits the error of trying to amuse us with grotesquerie while simultaneously expecting to engage our empathy. For instance: “General Kindwall sat in his office, constipated and paranoid.” General Kindwall is the heroine’s father. It is his impending death from cancer that will bring about the reconciliation of all parties. (Never mind a few loose ends: “They would answer those later. Together.”) For this wrap-up to be at all effective, we need to feel sorry for Kindwall, but he remains sufficiently constipated and paranoid to make that impossible.

“Exit A” is about a pair of neglected children raised on Yokota Air Base on the outskirts of Tokyo. They come briefly together, separate for a long time and, as has already been revealed, come back together at the end. Severin is a callow football star whose innocence, rendered by pedestrian sentences, makes him dull. Virginia is a privileged half-Japanese girl who gets into crime because she is bored. She seduces him with the aim of employing his athletic body in the strongarm business. He falls in lust with her, and at some hazy point in the book we seem to be expected to call this love. (More immortal prose: “They were lovely breasts. His heart rate climbed. His mouth watered.”) “Exit A,” already crippled by this temporary union between dislikable Virginia and uninteresting Severin, now commits hari-kari by foisting on us a mind-bogglingly implausible stretch of thrillerdom: Virginia becomes part of a North Korean kidnapping ring! Severin has already bowed out. Virginia gets caught and goes to jail. Years go by. Here’s what happens when they meet again: “He removed her shirt. No bra underneath. ‘Small,’ she said, referring to her breasts.”

What baffles me about this lifeless failure of verisimilitude is that “Jarhead” — a triumph of verisimilitude — reveals the following: Swofford lived on an Air Force base in Tachikawa from age 4 to 7, and not long after his enlistment he was on base in Okinawa, where he enjoyed a brief infidelity-romance with a restaurant owner’s daughter named Yumiko. In short, there is no reason why the Japanese scenes of “Exit A” couldn’t have been better.

What makes things all the more peculiar is that parts of the second book are reworkings of the first. For instance, near the beginning of “Exit A,” Virginia entices Severin off base and into an alluringly, intimidatingly alien warren of alleys. They arrive in a preordained tattoo parlor. In “Jarhead,” Swofford, who must have been much younger than Severin, gets lost in just such a labyrinth when he seeks a birthday present for his sister. He wanders into a tattoo parlor where a couple are getting each other’s faces pricked into their chests. The setting is vividly achieved. Swofford judges the man “lucky” in this, because he is ugly and the woman is beautiful. “I didn’t understand the permanence of the shared act.” In “Exit A,” this very permanence becomes vital to the plot when Severin gets Virginia’s Japanese middle name tattooed on his arm, an act that will help destroy a marriage and bring about a future in which Virginia and Severin will answer all questions “later. Together.”

In other places, “Jarhead” gets not so much reworked as recycled. In further evidence I cite the once slender soldier who now scarcely ever exercises, and the tricky heartbreaker named Lisa.

Interesting sentences can in fact be found in “Exit A,” but they are as rare as four-leaf clovers in a field of Astroturf. Here are three of them: “First she heard Severin’s English, the sound of two boards being beaten together in an empty concert hall.” “He thought of his hands as a cave.” “She focused on the road and the traffic, a puzzle made of pavement and rolling metal.” The three-page prologue and parts of a longish episode about an adulterous affair show signs of life. But nowhere do we meet with the grimly powerful aphorisms found in “Jarhead” — for instance, the assertion that “through profanity and disgrace” the grunt “has communicated the truth of his being.”

It is only my admiration for “Jarhead” that impels me to express my disappointment in “Exit A” so bluntly. I hope and believe that Swofford, who has many books ahead of him if he chooses to write them, can achieve true greatness on a future occasion.

William T. Vollmann’s new book, “Poor People,” will be published in April.

Thank you Michiko for your groundbreaking conclusion

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/books/19book.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

As he puts it: “As a devil, I am obliged to live intimately with excrement in all its forms, physical and mental. I know the emotional waste of ugly and disappointing events, the sour indwelling poison of unjust punishment, the corrosion of impotent thoughts, and, of course, I also have to engage caca itself.”

holy shit this is a murder https://t.co/CwsF0sZ9sZ

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) January 1, 2022

ILX posting style fifteen years ago: a blistering review is quoted in full.

ILX posting style today: a six word tweet referencing a blistering review.

some things, however, never change

C’est toujours la même rengaine.

among the worst book reviews i've ever seen:

UPSIDE DOWN
A PRIMER FOR THE LOOKING-GLASS WORLD

Galeano (The Memory of Fire Trilogy, etc.) has set to paper an astonishingly straight-faced indictment of yanqui capitalism that—for all its freshness and wit—could well have been freeze-dried at about the time of Che Guevara's assassination.

The author views the world as essentially a matter of conflict between North and South, rich and poor, First World and Third World, big business and the small guy, and man against nature. Big business pollutes the Third World, uses their cheap labor, and sells them Big Macs, unleashing its power (and power is everything to Galeano) on the poor and voiceless. Galeano sees the US as heavy-handed and heavily armed—using its might to quell any uprising it doesn't like and to impose any government it prefers. The North he holds responsible for most social injustices—“free trade" being his euphemism for the slave trade. He also believes that whites were responsible for the annihilation of Jews, Gypsies, blacks, and gays during the Holocaust. Hitler, he points out, sterilized Gypsies—not very different, he believes, from the sterilizations performed in America during the 1930s on criminals, blacks, and alcoholics. Yet Americans, he believes, feel inexplicably superior. Blacks have been treated poorly in both the northern and southern hemispheres; dark-skinned black or Indian Brazilians form an underclass, rarely seen in the media or at universities. The author writes of the Argentine death squads, and he sees drug trafficking as a plot of the banks and gun manufacturers: "An illegal industry of death thus serves the legal industry of death." Galeano brings an almost Manichean dualism to his disquisitions on stock markets, capitalism, unemployment, nuclear arms—-and much, much more.

Old-time agitprop from south of the border.

show me the lie, asshole

Did unperson write this?