Cuckold comfort

So, I've finally read a novel by Howard Jacobson, the English Philip Roth, the dog's beytsim of Jewish fiction this side of New York. For some time now, his every new book has been announced by Jonathan Cape with hushed and vaguely messianic awe, along with a zealous conviction that this would be the year that he would be garlanded with critical approval and guaranteed a seat at every awards dinner.

He has, of course, been passed over by the Booker judges again this year, but I'm wary of the judgement of a panel headed by a man whose most recent media foray was a documentary which explored in hideous detail what might be the most painless way to execute someone without ever pausing to wonder if the utter barbarism of it all might just indicate it to be a futile search.

I was impressed and deeply so, but one is clearly meant to be. It is books such as this that make me wary of reviewing for the heavyweight supplements of Sunday's press.

Its conceit is that every man secretly desires that his wife take a lover and the machinations of its plot are those of Felix Quinn meddling surreptitiously in the affairs of his wife in order that she end up in the arms of the predatory voluptuary Marius.

I'm not really sure I'm able to identify to any useful extent with Felix's desire to be the cuckolded husband. I can't say I've much experience of situations analogous, but I think I know enough to say that my sexual predilections do not encompass the joy of jealousy at the thought of my partner with another. So my reaction to the scenario is necessarily dispassionate: I don't know the rules of the game.

Indeed, I think that's my feeling about the book as a whole. It drips with erudition and literary context, bandying about references to Dostoevsky and Dickens in such a knowing fashion, a fashion my paltry knowledge of the classics fails to illuminate, that I dimly suspect the whole affair might be some sort of pastiche, some sort of phantasmagorical test by Jacobson, to see who is worthy of his engagement. If so, I rather think I've failed. I admire the book and its author but no more than that.

Felix's grandfather is said to have been in Zurich at the same time as an Irish writer, who entreats him to sleep with his wife, for the mutual gratification of all concerned, an offer he seemingly accepts out of politeness before fleeing the city.

Whether that meant Joyce had to try again with someone else, or simply had to make it up, is one of those literary mysteries that no amount of reading and rereading Ulysses will solve.

Now that's wit. It's totally beyond me even to conceive of emulating him in this department, unfortunately, but better green eyes than green ink, I suppose.

It was actually quite a shock to find myself so stumped for a response after having engaged so completely with the previous book I'd read, Inside the Whale by Jennie Rooney. It's one of those debut novels which makes one impatiently excited at the prospect of having found a future star. It's narrated in alternate chapters by Stevie and Michael, whose night together before Michael is shipped out to fight in Africa results in a baby.

Traumatised by the horrors of war in general and by his accidental killing of a friend specifically, Michael stays away so long that Stevie gives him up for dead and finds another man to father her child. When he does return, they meet briefly, not knowing that each has warily observed the other in advance, but their lives have grown apart.

Michael's story is narrated from a hospice bed and in his last days he tells a nurse his story. She realises only belatedly that the woman he has mooned over is her mother. It's note perfect, full of fresh and uncontrived language and delicately shaded with historical context. Direct social commentary is not really attempted, but I feel that would have weighed the book down. It is self-contained in reflection of the isolation of its narrators, who know that the tragedy of their regret must be borne alone, not bequeathed.

Nicely enough, Jennie came into the shop to sign copies just a day or two after I read it, but I rather suspect the sight of my suddenly rising up from behind a stock trolley, whose lower reaches I happened to be sorting through when she arrived, and bounding over to her with puppy-dog enthusiasm to laud her for uncanny literary sensibilities was a little too startling to make the encounter one she'd wish to repeat.

I have a new role at the shop which takes me off the shopfloor several days a week. Unfortunately, I have been wedged into a corner of the accounts department, which means that I am subjected to a constant diet of Shite FM, or Virgin Radio as it proclaims itself to be with forceful frequency, a station so middle of the road I suspect it may be run by lollipop ladies. The Police, Queen, Oasis... oh Christ, so much Oasis. And you'd think 'Ashes to ashes' and 'Let's dance' were all Bowie had ever recorded.

And does anyone need to hear the the latest Coldplay single - I don't know what it's called and I'm determined to remain ignorant - twice an hour? This morning, when the chords of doom rang out, I went off to do a bit of shopfloor research to avoid listening to it for a third time: I came back fifteen minutes later and they were playing it again! If I wanted to hear Chris Martin bleating on incessantly, I'd be Gwyneth Paltrow and, frankly, there's very little evidence supporting that possibility.

Congestion on the road less travelled

Apparently, in the recent film version of Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker is seen reading a book called Love Letters of Great Men. This has provoked thousands of enquiries in bookshops, us included. The book, however, does not actually exist as anything more than a prop.

Or at least it didn't. Macmillan have announced that they will be rushing into print a book with that very title.

I suppose it could be argued that now hundreds of people will be delving into belles-lettres who wouldn't otherwise and that one shouldn't dismiss this as an opportunist piece of marketing designed to extract money from people who wouldn't recognise a well-turned romantic entreaty even if borne on the paws of a bear from Clintons with a heart on its tummy.

But I think cynicism is the correct response here. I'm reminded of when, a few years ago, Geri Halliwell was photographed reading Further Along the Road Less Travelled by M Scott Peck. Within days sales of the book had multiplied tenfold; sales of The Road Less Travelled, which would make reading the book Halliwell was snapped with make sense - in as much as that sort of woolly gibberish makes any sense at all - remained unaffected. So I think to describe people as sheep in such circumstances would be insulting to the ovine race.

Perhaps the publishing industry should employ the idols of the Heat magazine demographic to be seen in public reading books. It would be interesting to see how far one could push it. Ulysses? The Divine Comedy? The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine?

Of course it's wonderful that Richard and Judy can get thousands of people reading The Outcast or Cloud Atlas and that Oprah can push Anna Karenina to the top of the charts. But publishers have remarked, in the UK at least, that it doesn't help sales of many authors' other books very much. The fabled Richard & Judy 'bounce' is, if not a myth, a remarkable feat of marketing. Dorothy Koomson, Simon Kernick and 'Sam Bourne' (Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland's pseudonym for his sub-Da Vinci Code thrillers) have been almost as successful with subsequent books, but they are very much the exception.

Mind you, this difficulty of branding authors exists at the literary end of the scale too. Almost every Booker winner is disappointed to discover that their backlist doesn't really shift any more copies and indeed one got his publisher to rejacket his backlist three times, convinced that was the key. It wasn't, of course. But I suppose most readers even of a Booker Prize winner are more casual readers, who don't really seek out new authors, and they're just as likely to be led by what's hot as as any other sector of the market.

I remember just after I'd started out as a bookseller, a book entitled 'Flying Fishing by J R Hartley' was produced on the back of the rather endearing if a little overmilked TV ad for Yellow Pages in which a genial gentleman of advancing years was seen to phone around second-hand bookshops in search of that very book, of which it transpired he was the author. So inevitably it wasn't long before one gurning little twerp of a teenager came into the shop and, to show how his mate how terribly, terribly funny and clever he was, asked for Flying Fishing by J R Hartley. I reached over to a nearby display and presented him with a copy and will forever take great pleasure in his look of confusion and disappointment as he turned and skulked out of the shop, leaving his friend standing there, blinking mutely.

Another point to the booksellers there, I think. I'm sure we must be well ahead by now.

The importance of earnest Byng

The death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn last Sunday provoked immense interest, both in the press and in terms of sales of his books, which was heartening. I'm not sure I can think of a more worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I remember in the last days of the Major administration a poll of MPs was conducted to find the favourite book of the House of Commons. The surprising runaway winner was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a result which hinted at some desperate attempt by the Conservative Party Whips Office to depict its moribund representation as possessed of both moral integrity and intellectual sophistication. I wonder what a similar poll today would identify, with the Labour Party as unpopular now as the Tories were then? Probably The Kite Runner. I'm sure that would tick the right boxes: empathetic, multicultural, popular with people who have no taste of their own.


Solzhenitsyn's passing reminded me of one of the more questionable novels to have achieved Booker recognition, The Industry of Souls by Martin Booth, which made the shortlist in 1998. It owes a great deal to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, portraying life in a Siberian labour camp through the twenty-year ordeal of a suspected British spy. It's rather sparing on the unrelenting misery of it all and the sex scene, where some of the internees temporarily escape their guardians and run into some female prisoners in caves, is about as plausible as a description of a swingers' party in Ann Widdecombe's autobiography.

Aside from that, it's not a bad book, just an unnecessary one, doing moderately well what Solzhenitsyn had already done with rather more style and authenticity. Solzhenitsyn-lite, if you will, Sebastian Faulks goes to the gulag.

Snowy wastes are also the setting for this year's unlikely Booker candidate, Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. The press as usual had little more to say on the announcement of the longlist than installing Salman Rushdie as de jure favourite, what with his being the only one the average news reporter seems to have heard of, despite the fact the Prize's most notorious previous winner, John Berger is also on the longlist. Odds are usually first given by Graham Sharpe of William Hill, who always cheerfully admits that he has almost nothing on which to base his initial figures. I suspect this year the bookies have been prowling blogs, as Netherland is now shortest priced and it's the book which probably received the most pre-longlist Booker tips.

So we in the trade are grateful to Jamie Byng at Canongate who, in typically rambunctious style, let rip on the Booker website with a tirade, dismissing Child 44 as "a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that".

I'd like to defend Child 44. Not as a Booker choice, because Byng is right that it shouldn't be on there. But it's a fantastic thriller, with the brilliant premise of trying to track down a serial killer in Stalin's Russia, where - officially - there is no crime. It has characters to believe in and care about, monstrous villains and a spectacular descriptive backdrop. But by whichever criteria one might define literary fiction, Child 44 is isn't. The writing is purposeful but never poetic, effective but never ethereal.

But Byng's beef was that it had been chosen over The Spare Room by Helen Garner, which he says is "is a modern classic that will continue to be read and enjoyed and appreciated long after all of us are dead".

Considering the fact that most shortlisted titles from the 70s, a significant number from the 80s and a surprising number from the 90s are out of print, I think that's a ludicrously optimistic assessment of the life of a novel. But a few other posters on the website concurred, if not in quite so fulsome terms, so I thought I'd give it a try.

And I'm certainly glad I did, as it's a truly memorable piece of writing. I do wonder, however, if it was omitted on the grounds of length. At 175 pages, it's scarcely longer than On Chesil Beach, the book on last year's shortlist which some felt should be excluded on the grounds of its being a novel, rather than a full length work of fiction. The Spare Room too might reasonably be described as a novella: the story is simple, linear and brief and and its first person narrative obviously limits its perspectives.

But much of its power resides in its simplicity. It is account of friendship, told from the point of view of Helen whose friend Nicola has come to stay with her while she undergoes a radical new vitamin C treatment in a desperate attempt to fight off the cancer which only Helen has conceded is terminal.

Bravely, the book focusses on how difficult it is, both physically and psychologically, to provide care for a terminal cancer victim. Their long-standing friendship obliges Helen to devote herself to her friend, draining her utterly, but the pain that Nicola endures makes it difficult for her to object. Only when another friend challenges the doctor who has hoodwinked Nicola is Helen finally able to confront Nicola with the truth: that she cannot cope and that Nicola must accept what is happening to her.

Curiously, Peter Carey's jacket quote that this is 'a perfect novel' and the earnestness of Jamie Byng's defence made me analyse the prose with far greater scrutiny than I might otherwise have done. It reminded me a little of Plainsong by Kent Haruf, another book which doesn't waste a word and which relies on the unadorned authenticity of its account to draw the reader in.

The Spare Room isn't quite so effective: its very occasional purple flowering jars, but that is in part because of the great care with which it has been put together. One sequence ends with the phrase "...she pedalled away in a westerly direction": the last four words add nothing to the meaning, but its particularly significant position means that one cannot help but analysing it and thereby finding is flawed.

There were perhaps no more than a handful of these instances and I'm sure that were I to pay to such attention to something more sprawlingly conceived I should find The Spare Room to be far more consistent. I've just read Therapy by Sebastian Fitzek, a diverting enough thriller with an interesting variation on the 'I woke up and it was all a dream' trope; it's translated from the original German and a couple of times, the word 'corpse' is used where 'body' would be more idiomatic. It caused me to pause, but on the whole the undemanding style meant that its slightly stilted and repetitive phraseology did its job.

The Spare Room achieves what it sets out to do almost unerringly, managing to confront its theme with a directness which is remarkable given the potential sensitivity of the topic. But I'm not sure it does anything much more than that. The book and its characters don't live on in my thoughts.

It should have made the longlist. But, then again, I feel just as strongly that The Outcast, In God's Country and One Morning Like A Bird should have made it. All of which proves nothing except that commentators dismissing 2008 as a bad year for fiction have either been reading the wrong books or are obsessed with established writers.

So Helen Garner has some way to go before achieving immortality, despite the vehemence of Byng's protestations. John Ruskin wrote, "All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time". The achievements of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn show quite how far even someone as talented as Helen Garner has to go in order to make that leap.