This was published in January, so I come to it a little late. This means I picked up the paperback to find it already weighed down with big-name endorsements, like the chains draped around Marley’s ghost—‘magisterial’, ‘singularly brilliant’, ‘caustic, comic and clever’ -- this last from James Wood himself. All of which interpellate me into a grumpy, contrary place: because I really didn’t like it. It seemed to me an arch, laboured and frankly irksome piece of work. But when the praise is as big-gun as this, it’s hard not to feel that I’m missing something.
What though? Does literature really need yet another big, baggy Foster-Wallace-wannabee, faux-Franzen novel about the eccentric interactions of a narrow clique of patrician New Yorkers? Not, I’d hazard, if it’s as hit-and-missy as this one. But, look: why would you trust my judgement? Look at all the big name critics who have praised this novel. I daresay your own experience will align with theirs rather than mine.
& Sons is based about a Salinger-y writer at the end of his life. In his youth A. N. Dyer sold millions of copies of his novel of adolescence Ampersand (hence the ‘&’ of Gilbert’s title); but now he's a creaky, cranky recluse. He has a couple of sons from his marriage, and a much younger third son from a late life dalliance with a much younger woman, and the book is about these father-son relationship (hence the ‘sons’ of Gilbert’s title). The narrator of this rather strenuously tricksy narrative is a different son, the offspring of Dyer’s best friend, Charles Henry Topping. The novel starts with Topping’s funeral, to which Dyer has been coerced into attending to deliver the eulogy. But Dyer, panicky and hating being out in public, fluffs his speech badly. From there the narrative spirals out into a variety of filial stories. Philip Topping, our narrator, has a rather unhealthy fixation on Dyer, whom he hopes will endorse and otherwise facilitate his own stalled literary career. Dyer’s oldest biological son is an ex-druggie, now drug counsellor moving into the world of cinematic screenwriting; which gives Gilbert the opportunity to write scenes set in the world of movie pre-production, about which I could—as I believe they say in America—care less. The second biological son Jamie is wilder, more damaged individual with a fixation on death and disaster. The teenage third son Andy is fixated upon losing his virginity before he hits eighteen, since losing it after that landmark birthday would be, somehow, demeaning.
It aims, as I say, at a certain Foster Wallaceness. It does not hit that elusive target. This is partly because what it has to say, beneath the flurry of its look-ma-no-hands! prose, is pretty banal: ‘when you have grown up sage and comfortable, you often find yourself admiring the poor and desperate, as if they are somehow more honest’ [76]; ‘so much happens to us without our knowing’ [153]; ‘you can never really know something’ [309]. OK then. But what sank the novel for me were the similes. Occasionally these are good, like this one:
The windshield carried the grimy aftereffects of snow, the wiper blade describing an arc similar to an open book. [71]Others were less so (‘Richard kicked the ground with his breath’, 382. Say what?). And most were bad, poorly judged or ill-thought-through, straining for that comedy zing but instead of zinging only zanging, or zoinging, or sometimes zzz-ing. ‘Andy and Emmett jingled the ice [in their drinks] like a nest of exotic but short-lived creatures’ [278]; ‘his face was colored with almost exotic damage, like a psychological tan. He. Had. Lived.’ [50]; ‘The fire said Fuck you and Richard said Fuck you back before he laid the wet towels on top and there was a hiss and a mini mushroom cloud’ [411]; ‘one of those awful airport restaurants that reeked of disinfectant, as if Mr Clean were decomposing in the corner’ [149]; ‘Eyes so shrunken a blink might tear the skin’ [233]; 'his expression [was] so flinched as to be flinchless' [206]. They keep coming, say-what? after say-what? Since the whole novel depends from the hook of Gilbert’s chatty, simile-sprawly style, too much of this kind of thing slayed it for me. There’s also, as a bonus, some genuinely dreadful sub-Updike descriptions of vaginas: ‘her pussy—Jamie wondered if this was being disrespectful to the dead or if the dead begged for these memories—but her pussy was perfect, with its mitten of dark blond, its interior the impossible smooth of a conch.’ [146] We get long quotations from Ampersand, and Dyer’s other books, none of which leads me to believe his literary reputation would have been what Gilbert repeatedly tells us it is. It turns out Topping is an unreliable narrator, with a distinct streak of curlywurly-cuckoo about him. All in all: Bellow's Seize the Day this is not.
Philip Larkin used to review jazz records for The Daily Telegraph through the 1960s. I have no interest in jazz, but enough interest in Larkin to have at least browsed these pieces, collected in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985). One review particularly struck me: it was of an early Beatles LP, and it read (I quote from memory) ‘the jazz content of this record appears to be nil’. I love that, and am tempted to re-apply it in modifed form here. I can't, though; because the SF/F content of this novel is not actually nil. There's a [SPOILER, I suppose] midpoint revelation about paternity that draws on some mildly speculative genetic engineering, very handwavily introduced. Little is made of the 'palingenesis' pseudo-cloning point; some characters refuse to believe that it explains Andy Jr, others use it to riff on the same-but-different nature of the whole pater-filius dynamic. And actually, if I think about it, there are clearly some jazz inflections, howsoever faint and background, to early Beatles records. Taste the SF mouthfeel of this novel: the Larkinesque judgment still holds.
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