Harlan Ellison, Web of the City, 1958

Rumble was Ellison’s first novel which, after he was drafted and underwent Ranger training, he says was mostly written while sitting on the john with his typewriter on his knees. He drew on his experiences (call that ‘research’) with teenage gang culture in New York, and it’s quite apparent from just the well-written first chapter that Ellison had a way with both atmosphere and plotting: you immediately get on-side with Rusty Santoro, a teenage Puerto Rican street thug who wants to make good on the streets of Brooklyn, yet constantly gets dragged back into the gang and the gutter to settle one more score, and big scores they are too. How has the novel fared after more than fifty years? Now back under it’s original intended title Web of the City, it’s still very readable and maintains a believable level of authenticity, though with the higher tolerance for violence we have today it may now work better as a rather informative and cautionary Y/A novel than an adult read. The recent 2013 Hard Case Crime edition also comes with three of Ellison’s short stories from the same period that paint the same kind of picture; I have no great admiration for Ellison’s writing throughout his career (and I’ve read a great deal of it), but Web of the City doesn’t hurt his reputation as the enfant terrible of his era and still commands the customary grudging respect. As is so often the case.  PY

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Don DeLillo, The Body Artist, 2001

Lauren Hartke is a performance artist whose husband, a film director, dies unexpectedly in the company of his first wife. Then at the New England summer house they were renting, a mentally disturbed man appears who has little ability with language but who is somehow channeling her late husband. What is she to make of this? DeLillo extracts extraordinary depth from this simple situation, his post-modern style seeming well-suited to a novel replete with half-finished thoughts and sentences, casual grammatical slips and odd rhythms of speech, culminating in a language that blurs the edges between Hartke and the unknown man. It’s haunting and clever, and DeLillo makes creative use of the in-built flexibility of English that, while being entirely self-conscious, seems to be the right technique to portray a woman who is detached and remote from herself. Recommended as a rather challenging read.  PY

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Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers, 1997

This bizarre novel has a superb opening sentence that takes up two pages, in which the highly unreliable and self-deceiving narrator Doug introduces his ninety-nine brothers (aged from 30 to 93) and explains what they plan to do over the course of a single night in the collapsing library of their late philandering father’s decrepit mansion. Of course, it doesn’t go exactly according to plan, instead it ends up the way these gatherings always do, in a squall of fights, exhibitions of puerile insecurities and generally asinine behaviour. It’s a black comedy of manners in which little gets resolved, a skillfully crafted and often surreal work that’s set in the present day, although at times it’s given a historical feel largely through the Rabelaisian extravagance of the brothers’ caricatures, done in a way that makes it feel as if one’s viewing an animated Hogarth sketch. But The Hundred Brothers is also as conceptual as it is comedic as the brothers’ childish antics are played out in sections of the library that allude to the loftiest aspirations of Western thought, and it will inevitably appeal to fans of Robertson Davies largely because of the comic intelligence with which it’s written. The cover notes go in for things like “the Marx Brothers - times twenty-five - performing a Harold Pinter play”, but the most succinct is the pull-quote “A mad wrestling match of a book”, because that feels exactly right. We could certainly do with reading a few more erudite comedies like this largely because they set a very high watermark indeed.  PY

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Paul Auster, Man in the Dark, 2008

August Brill, an insomniac and retired book critic, composes in his head a story of a parallel America to fill the early morning hours. It’s a world in which 9/11 never happened and the US never went into Iraq (instead being preoccupied by the bigger nightmare of a secessionist civil war), and it’s a world in which he himself plays a remote but defining role. The science fictional element can’t be ignored but for the book to work in the way Auster probably intended, it ought to be (and of course others have done this particular kind of parallel world thing so much better). It’s just August Brill’s particular distraction, while his real preoccupation is his fractured family, defined by divorces and the violent death of his granddaughter Katya’s boyfriend in Iraq. Another sizeable part of the book is taken up with August and Katya’s eloquent discussions of movies – another deliberate distraction. If not set in darkened rooms or out in the night, most of this book takes place at least with a dark aura of regret and atonement, with everyone wishing to be somewhere else, and the distractions are coping mechanisms that help them occasionally look away from painful truths. I wouldn’t say this a brilliant book by any stretch of the imagination – the parallel world thread isn’t rigorous enough, for one thing – but I like the fact it’s not burdened by too much structure, feeling loose and improvised instead even though Auster clearly knew where he was going with it. It’s also a book that offers up many of the wisdoms of hindsight, and is all the better for that.  PY

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Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy, 2007

Picked up on a whim, I was rather impressed with this collection of shorts, mostly because it was a discovery that the Woody Allen you read in print bears little if any resemblance to the Woody Allen you see on the big screen, or even the Woody Allen who used to do stand-up. It’s still absurd neurotic comedy, intellectually engaging and (often very) linguistically dense, and throughout he adopts the style of his feuilletoniste literary hero S.J. Perelman who preceded him as a humourous writer for The New Yorker, where most of these pieces first appeared. He has his moments: some stories are well thought out if too briefly explored to do them justice and might even benefit from being longer; some are even science fictional, the cleverest by far being ‘Strung Out’, if you can overcome Allen’s tendencies towards female objectification. As this is his first collection of short fiction for more than a quarter of a century it would be interesting to see how it compares with one of his previous collections, but as Allen seems so immersed in the feuilleton style I suspect this must be something of a continuation.  PY

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Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!, 1966

A word about Ondrea Barbe’s great photograph that appears on the cover of this recent Penguin Modern Classics edition: it’s the perfect accompaniment to the alliterative nature of both Harrison’s name and the book’s title, and at the same time reflects the oppressive heat and claustrophobia contained in the book itself. Make Room! Make Room! occupies the other end of Harrison’s spectrum in relation to his satire and humour: a murder in an overcrowded and riot-prone New York in 1999 forms the backdrop to some good characterisation and a serious overpopulation message. What you get are characters to care about, a decent police-procedural plot and a strong dose of feminism; what you don’t get is the grafted-on horror aspect of the movie adaptation Soylent Green. This sits comfortably alongside some eco-conscious literature of the 1960s, published just a few years after the environmental preachiness of Silent Spring and at a time when overpopulation was not the major global concern it is today. Also, interestingly, it appeared seven years before Roe vs. Wade, and puts up a strong defence of the need for access to birth control which some at the time specifically wished to remove. Still a very good book indeed that always deserves to remain in print.  PY

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Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, 1948

This was described by Anna Haycraft (better known as Alice Thomas Ellis) as ”One of the funniest and most significant books of the century”. The friction that drives it is the awkwardness of British cultural attitudes in post-war Los Angeles, set mostly in the Whispering Glades Memorial Park – a kind of Disneyland for the dead – and involving a young British poet who falls for a young American corpse beautician while he himself works secretly as a mortician at a pet cemetery. Waugh is funniest when he lets his characters’ veneer of civility slip to reveal something far more feral underneath, and I can almost sense how he filled in some laugh-free zones with just that kind of unexpected viciousness to keep the humour levels up. Some mocking characterisation and a few very memorable turns of phrase make this a wickedly funny book.  PY

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Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, 2008

In the latter days of the Bush presidency Little Brother possessed that aura of a book that needed to be written, and is also Doctorow’s self-confessed “Orwell fan fiction”, involving a small group of tech-savvy teenagers who, after a terrorist attack on San Francisco, fall foul of the Department of Homeland Security in a very bad way. Beyond the pervasive surveillance and counter-hacking it deliberately veers towards a believable extreme – at its most uncomfortable points it involves Americans torturing American children. A country’s government using torture on its own youth in the name of state security isn’t new, and in the light of the US’s recent cultural nadir it’s certainly fair play to line it up alongside countries like Burma, Iran and South Africa, at least in fiction. You also don’t find many new genre books published these days with an Afterword, let alone the two that Little Brother contains, including one from Bruce Schneier. This is pitched perfectly as counterculture teenage fiction, it somehow feels right from cover to cover even though the protagonist Marcus is often talking with the know-it-all hindsight of maturity. Interestingly there is now a project under way with Burmese Americans to get Little Brother translated into four Burmese languages, but there is certainly knowledge here that could be applied by politically active citizens confronting any suppressive government around the world, democratically elected or otherwise. Unreservedly, this is a book to recommend widely.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892

A psychological horror story that owes much in style to Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator, whose name may or may not be Jane, keeps a journal while she herself is kept in a room with disturbing yellow wallpaper, all as a way of curing her post-natal depression. During her descent into madness her husband only sees the situation without seeing the struggle of the woman inside; this aspect of the story I still find unnatural as, being a doctor himself, he would surely notice something unsettling going on with his wife. Gilman’s own experiences and the disastrous ‘resting cure’ she was proscribed by the renowned doctor S. Weir Mitchell for her own depression are the origins of the book; Mitchell, named in person in the story, took Gilman’s criticism seriously and to his credit abandoned this form of treatment for depression. The medical and Victorian family traditions that inform the story are the real mental confinements of the tale with the wallpaper a clever if slightly vague metaphor. Not a story I’ve ever actually enjoyed, but there are elements here that can apply as much to men as women when it comes to medical treatment that somehow ignores the needs of the patient.  PY

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Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, 2005

Out-of-his-depth Llewelyn Moss stumbles across a drugs deal gone horribly wrong, makes off with a case containing $2.4 million and engages the relentless pursuit of the toweringly bad Anton Chigurh. This is not a book that’s especially complex with its plot, and McCarthy makes it a relentless ride because it feels so completely testosterone-driven. It might be trite to say that his idiosyncratic grammar and punctuation is what carried this story for me: commas only when absolutely necessary, no quote marks, in fact nothing that detracts from the punch of his storytelling. McCarthy has his own way with written English; and why not, for him it’s a toolkit, he uses it as he wants but with precision.

The story itself is direct enough not to be bogged down with (or even need) much in the way of descriptive passages, although the rambling observations of Sheriff Bell on the decline of common decency gradually gain the upper hand in the reader’s mind over the the amoral violence of Chigurh, and you end up sympathising, if not completely then at least with a degree of respect for his outdated point of view. Bell may also be something of a Jubal Harshaw: McCarthy’s point seems to be that violence such as this needs to be considered minus its modern, fake, grafted-on glamour (à la Natural Born Killers) and seen once more in a properly moral context. In No Country For Old Men he embeds the men – and only the men – all at different levels in a culture of violence from the top to the bottom – the women, all but invisible in background supporting roles, can never upset the balance of machismo by getting in the way of the guys figuring it out for themselves, the hard way. A mostly excellent and memorable read despite its overtly masculine trajectory.  PY

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William S. Burroughs, Junky, 1953

For the proper experience this is one of those books that ought to be read as a first edition, with its cheap cover illustration that was meant to inspire a degree of horror towards heroin use in those who picked it up. Starting life as one half of an Ace Original double paperback, with fifty years hindsight it’s easy to see how Junky took the road from cheap pulp fiction to cult novel, and while Burroughs didn’t intentionally romanticise heroin use, today, like heroin itself, this kind of book or film is now mainstream. Under the thin disguise of ‘William Lee’ Burroughs is unapologetically confessional, yet Junky probably wouldn’t have made publication at all if he didn’t also display the redemptive element of repeatedly trying to kick his heroin habit (and instead fall back on the lesser social evils of morphine, coke, alcohol and petty crime), first in New York, later in New Orleans then Mexico City. Junky isn’t an alienating experience because Burroughs does not take you on that journey; instead his alienation arrived here fully formed with the everyday world already rendered meaningless – including his wife (who he killed between drafts of this book) and, for the most part, the law – and in replacement his junk habit was promoted to the almost everyday activity of a natural bodily function like sex, a mere extension of himself stripped of its negative and antisocial connotations. Burroughs’s writing is for the most part deadpan and functional yet he occasionally indulges in wonderfully descriptive and concise analyses of what’s going on beneath the skin – not his own skin or his own experiences while under, but the skins of those exterior horrors, other people, and these passages were an early root from which were later to come the excesses of Naked Lunch. This is a relatively safe book now, but it’s lost none of its immediacy.  PY

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Thomas M. Disch, 334, 1972

This is the novel (or more correctly, set of linked stories) which for many showed how Disch was often too clever by half for the rest of us. The novella ‘Angouleme’ included here was the subject of a book-length critical essay by Samuel R. Delany, who argued that despite the absence of scientific themes its speculative setting made it inherently science fiction. A snapshot of the 21st century lives of the people who live in 334 East 11th St, New York, it ranges from being at turns darkly comic and farcical to sharply realistic and unfailingly sympathetic. The science fiction is there in places but played down to the everyday while the social realism is played up, to the point that 334 takes the reader into immersive layers of intricacy, and with a Dickensian eye for detail that shrugs off the fact that this is all meant to be about ‘the future’. Neither was it ever meant to be a fun read in the way that Camp Concentration could be, and if Disch’s last posts on his Live Journal Endzone were indicative of the direction his thoughts were heading in his last weeks, he’d been there already in fiction with 334’s closing sentences. Someone – and really I can only mean Terry Gilliam – could probably make a very decent film of this.  PY

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Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration, 1967

Thomas Disch was never as fashionable within the science fiction community as he deserved, and at the time of first publication Camp Concentration was perhaps (to take a very long view of things) outplayed by Daniel Keyes’s slightly more reader-friendly novel Flowers for Algernon which had been published some months earlier, explores the same theme of artificially enhanced intelligence, is hard-hitting in its own way but then is also, undeniably, outstripped by Disch’s combination of erudition, creativity and political cynicism. Camp Concentration also contains ideas that might look unnervingly close to the present dystopia: America has declared war on the world and its government is experimenting on conscientious objectors. Maybe now that Disch has sadly left us this deserves to be considered a classic of 20th Century fiction: forgive the superlatives but it’s a masterpiece of understated black comedy and still a deliciously wicked book.  PY

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Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain, 2008

Being one of those people who sees dogs as having distinct personalities if we only bother to look, this kind of imaginative take on a dog’s point of view is actually the type of book I like to find. Like all dogs, Enzo thinks and feels like a human and he considers this incarnation to be a trial run for being reborn as one. Now at the end of his life and looking back on his time with his Seattle motor racing master Danny, he considers his karmic track record particularly when Danny’s family falls apart after the death of his wife. This is a very likeable book indeed and Enzo’s first person story actually adds to its authentic feel, because Stein’s aim is to put him across as being essentially the same as us and deserving of a human rebirth. Sad in many places but also pretty uplifting, I’ll probably be thinking back to this haunting book for weeks to come.  PY

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Jack Kerouac, Beat Generation, 1957

A play that Kerouac wrote around the time of writing On the Road, but was only discovered in 2005 in a New York attic. The entire play is just a group of friends mostly “shooting the shit”, easy dialogue that rarely scratches below the surface, though Kerouac’s weighing up of his Catholicism against his interest in Buddhism finds a voice in the third act. A minor piece very much of its time and place, the most useful inclusions in this edition are the brief bibliography and biography of Kerouac that, when combined, succinctly sum up his life and not inconsiderable troubles in just fifteen pages.  PY

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Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957

— On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

The big deal about On the Road was mostly lost on me when I read it back in the 1970s, at a time when its prominent reputation meant it should have made much more of an impact. After a recent second reading and having since learned more about Kerouac I can understand what set him off on his road back and forth across the US but the excess of stimulants still leaves this reader non-plussed. Neal Cassady, incarnated here as Dean Moriarty and being both the heart and tao of the book and the whole Beat Generation, was the focus around whom the more observant Kerouac bracketed his own search in the character of Sal Paradise. There are some great passages and the last trip into Mexico feels like an encore to an already epic story, the whole of which is written in rather sentimental style compared to his later ‘stream of consciousness’ approach. I still think he was intellectually lazy in comparison to Burroughs or Ginsberg but On the Road – or more specifically Dean Moriarty himself – still takes you on a fast and thrill-seeking ride, the impetus of which is hard to shake off.  PY

MORE ON JACK KEROUAC :  BEAT MUSEUM  |  PENGUIN 'JACK KEROUAC' MINISITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 1991

Esperanza Cordero is a young Mexican girl growing up in a 1960s Chicago tenement, not exactly on the wrong side of the tracks but poor nonetheless, and desolate Mango Street is the place she needs to escape from. This series of forty-six first-person vignettes captures defining moments and experiences often with pinpoint sharpness, and it’s also noticeable how the writing increases in sophistication as Esperanza becomes more mature, as her family and friends move on and her perception of her own young life becomes gradually more muted and melancholy under the gentle weight of added layers. A book that has sold three million copies worldwide, vibrantly written with prose that often captures the time and place with a near perfect clarity.  PY

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Mark Salzman, Lying Awake, 2000

Sister John, a Carmelite nun in an austere Los Angeles monastery, has over thirty years gained some notoriety for experiencing a lucid and emotional connection with God, and yet after a fall her dilemma comes when she’s diagnosed with a form of curable epilepsy: have the mystic visions been a real experience of the divine or are they in fact more pathological and explicable? Salzman performs the admirable act of giving the reader a genuinely religious perspective on Sister John’s problem, and clearly he has a clear gift for being able to 'write the other'. Believably, Sister John also has no external life with her depiction being almost entirely internal, and Salzman doesn’t attempt to answer her paradox by taking the side of either science or belief. A sensitive, delicate and quietly impressive read, and not without its edginess when the nuns are confronted with the conflicts and vagaries of the outside world.  PY

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James Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, 2009

In 1945 the US Navy developed a top secret biological weapon: giant mutant fire-breathing iguanas bred to stomp Japanese cities. Hollywood monster-suit actor Syms Thorley is drafted to put terror into the hearts of a group of visiting Japanese diplomats with his depiction of what might happen if Emperor Hirohito doesn’t surrender; and if that doesn’t work there’s always the Manhattan Project. Shambling Towards Hiroshima takes the form of a suicide note written at a 1984 horror movie convention in Baltimore, but outside of that frame this is a lovingly crafted satire that is also a tribute to Hollywood’s monster movies, with educated nods in all directions. The first three quarters of this novella feels self-consciously ridiculous because Morrow is depicting military life imitating what is essentially a pretty ridiculous art, but he has serious points to make and there comes a well crafted moment towards the end at which he wants you stop laughing and consider a few things. Morrow is interviewed on video about the story here, but it’s worth indulging in this wry, clever book first.  PY

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Peter Adolphsen, Machine, 2006

I had doubts this novel could be made to work without also giving off a whiff of pretentiousness. Well it does, slightly, but it’s only the moment the narrator is revealed towards the end that saves the novel in its entirety. Machine is the story of the heart of a prehistoric horse, which over millions of years eventually becomes a drop of oil in a car’s engine, which then goes on to become the cause of something else. I wouldn’t call this metafiction, not quite, but the novel curves in on itself sufficiently enough to indicate that Adolphsen is trying to subvert something. He writes with a voice that could remind the reader of Joseph Heller when being both direct and enigmatic; his characters are believable and the minor digressions and infodumps are perfectly crafted and entirely relevant. Breathtakingly good overall, brilliant in places.  PY

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