This Is Not An Entry

The plot of Jessie Burton’s The Confession seems simple until you start reading it. It’s 1980 and a young woman called Elise meets a older woman, a novelist named Constance Holden, on Hampstead Heath. The two fall in love and begin a relationship. All goes well until the two women move to Los Angeles, where Connie’s latest book is being adapted for Hollywood. There the relationship falls apart with messy scenes and infidelity on both sides.

Flash forward to 2017. Rose Simmons is slipping along the currents of life. She’s in a relationship with a self employed dullard called Joe, who has left his job to start up his own business (‘Joerritos’). Her best friend is an Insta mother drifting away into a higher social world. Rose is Elise’s natural daughter but has never met her – her father has kept the circumstances a tight secret. Finally the old man reveals the relationship with Connie Holden, now an old lady living alone, raddled with arthritis. Connie is breaking a thirty-year silence with a new novel and needs someone to type up the ms. Rose invents a new identity for herself and hustles her way into the role, hoping to scratch together enough information to find Elise.

Like Burton’s debut The Minaturist, The Confession is a long book with a small canvas. The novel traverses a continent and a century, but the points of the drama are clearly delineated. Unlike The Minaturist, which to be honest I found a bit underwhelming, Burton’s new novel is a spectacular triumph. To start with a small point, much of the novel is set in cities – NYC, Los Angeles, London – and Burton is fantastic on the changing texture of the East End:

Every public wall I walked past on the way was flyered with achingly cool low-key club nights, whose bands and aesthetic I couldn’t even begin to understand. Elaborate and beautiful graffiti lined the brickwork and there were coffee shops with square footage the size of a postage stamp and wooden benches outside. I passed a shop that seemed to sell only black socks from Japan, its frontage rough around the edges, but artfully so. The coffees, I noted, were the same price as in Hampstead.

But the real victory comes from the effort and care that Burton invests in her story and characters. You feel everything: conversations between two people with strangeness and seriousness between them, the awkwardness of unfamiliar rooms and the feeling of destiny carried by certain of life’s movements. The weight of it all is ever present. Burton does the long hard haul into other lives.

One indicator of Burton’s talent is the way that our opinions of her characters change over the course of the novel. The LA scenes feature Connie getting into the film adaptation with stellar actor Barbara Lowden while the younger girlfriend Elise stews in inertia. I thought Elise was a little brattish during these chapters, rattling around in the California sun, but her decision to run off with surfer Matt paradoxically made me respect her more – Connie is wealthy and established, Elise could have lived off her royalties for years but instead had the courage to make a new life with a fellow insolvent dreamer. Connie is a constant diversion in both young and old incarnations, witty and indulgent and quite as clever as she thinks she is.

Rose is the real revelation here. She’s another character that irritates at the beginning, complaining about her aimless midthirties life while doing nothing about it, but her quest to find Elise changes her. The ending doesn’t give the big revelations Rose had hoped for, but at the same time it’s not an anticlimax, the story doesn’t fizzle out at all, it all feels so important and phenomenal. Burton has captured the feeling of stepping outside yourself, the realisation that there are other lives than yours. At one point near the end, Rose realises that her younger coffee shop hipster colleagues actually look up to her for help and advice:

‘There isn’t an endpoint,’ I said to them. ‘No arrival.’ At this, the expressions on their faces ranged from perplexed to despondent. ‘But you’re all so brilliant, and you’ve got so much going for you. And if you haven’t got to where you wanted by the time you’re twenty-five, you should probably thank your lucky stars. Seriously. Because if getting there is hard, holding on to your dream is possibly even harder. Nothing ever stays the same.’

I don’t want to give away any of the plot, but the passages on Elise’s motherhood are some of the most searing and true paragraphs I’ve read on the subject. At one point, she reflects: ‘Did he not realise? The tiny lungs, the heart, the stomach, the intestines, the little bones as frail as a chicken’s, the brain – and inside that a deep and endless chamber of music that none of them could hear.’

Jessie Burton opens our ears to a glimpse of the music that lives inside others.

The Old Curiosity Shop

One of my fun reads this year was D J Taylor’s The Prose Factory which is his history of writing and publishing since WW1. It’s a witty and enjoyable read, although for me the book was a bit of a letdown as it has absolutely nothing about Brutalism and 3:AM magazine, a glaring omission that I trust Taylor will rectify in future editions.

Taylor is a critic of the twentieth century old school. From his point of view, writers like David Mitchell and Zadie Smith are still ‘fashionable younger voices’. Martin Amis merits only a handful of mentions – which is interesting because his novel The Information is set around the same period of time when The Prose Factory tails out. Both novels in their way are a tribute to the twentieth century book world. Each takes you into a vast untidy cathedral of printed words.

The Information‘s Richard Tull is a one man prose factory. As well as complex modernist novels – for which he can’t find a publisher – he writes reams of copy for an obscure journal and also book reviews, on an almost daily basis. Significantly, the books Richard reviews are all lengthy biographies of twentieth-century, old school writers and critics. Richard’s life is books: ‘He had books heaped under tables, under beds. Books heaped on windowsills so they closed out the sky.’ His desk is a world in itself: ‘schemes and dreams and stonewallings, its ashtrays, coffee cups, dead felt-tip pens and empty staplers… books commissioned yet unfinished, or unbegun.’

It’s in the section on The Little Magazine, where Richard is literary editor, that Amis shows his debt to and affection for the old school publishing world. He evokes a world of ‘Dusty decanters, hammock-like sofas, broad dining-tables strew with books and learned journals: here a handsome philanderer in canvas trousers bashing out an attack on Heinrich Schliemann (‘The Iliad as war reportage? The Odyssey as ordinance survey cum captain’s log? Balderdash!’); there a trembling scholar with 11,000 words on Housman’s prosody (‘and the triumphant rehabilitation of the trochee’).’ One of Richard’s many unwritten books is a biography of one of the magazine’s legends, R C Squires, a real twentieth century character who was in the Spanish Civil War and pre Nazi Berlin (‘whoring in the Kurfürstendamm and playing pingpong in Sitges, as Richard had learned, after a month of desultory research.’) Amis is so taken with The Little Magazine that he features it in a short story, ‘Straight Fiction’, set in a parallel reality, and I like the idea of Little Magazines sprouting up all over the multiverse, like the magic shops in Discworld.

Richard is a throwback, but he thinks of himself as a pioneer. In his head he interrogates ‘the standard book… not the words themselves that were prim and sprightly-polite, but their configurations, which answered to various old-time rhythms of thought. Where were the new rhythms – were there any out there yet?’ And yet writing and publishing is changing, just not in a way an old school writer might like. While Richard’s novels are out of print, his oldest friend Gwyn Barry has recently found unstoppable success with his Amelior series. Gwyn has embraced the corporate and identitarian world with these novels: while Richard bangs on about the universal, Gwyn feels that ‘the art lay in pleasing the readers.’ Richard is recruited to write a profile of his old rival, and has to follow him around on an American book tour while trying to plug his own latest novel, which he sells out of a burlap mailsack. Critics at the time felt that the American section of The Information killed the flow of the book – but I’d argue that the US section is important because it emphasises the new world of corporate publishing that emerged from the ashes of the twentieth century cathedral of words.

Gwyn is praised for the plain writing and ‘deceptive simplicity’ of his novels, whereas Richard comes to feel that he is just too ‘difficult’ to make a living as a writer: ‘if you do the arts, if you try the delirious profession, then don’t be a flake, and offer people something – tell them something they might reasonably want to hear.’ And it is true that it is harder to make a living as a ‘difficult writer’ and time has been called for the old style literary magazines. I’m thinking here of this wonderful Little Magazine esque passage from Taylor:

Chief among these was Panurge, edited by the novelist John Murray from a farmhouse seven miles outside Carlisle, which managed twenty-five issues in a combative career that extended between 1984 and 1996. Although it published a fair amount of criticism and reportage, from the very first the magazine specialised in the short story; the more obscure the author the greater the chances of him, or her, being published – ‘brilliant work by people you’ve never heard of’ as one of the early editorials put it, with further showcasing of little-known talent provided by occasional anthologies (see Move over Waxblinder! The Panurge Book of Funny Stories, 1994) and compilations. If Panurge had a weakness, whether edited by Murray or, between 1987 and 1993, by David Almond, it was that very few of these discoveries went on to make distinctive careers…. [Murray] signed off with a bumper valedictory number nearly 100,000 words in length, arguing in a final editorial that such cottage industries were no longer economically viable, calculating that he had managed to pay himself £11 a week during his time in the editorial chair and thanking his wife, whose full-time job had kept him afloat.

A lost art. But is it any longer true that modernism and difficulty have been frozen out? Richard Tull would surely have applauded Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport, which consists of a thousand-page single sentence, sold well and was shortlisted for the Booker. Paying journals are hard to come by, but there are plenty of new indie publishers who are happy to shake a tin in your face via crowdfunder, a Little Magazine ethos in the digital age. The old curiosity shop will darken its windows but never really close.