The Digested Twenty-first Century

by John Crace

  Two: Her grandfather had emigrated from Moscow with his son Adam in 1920. Adam had married the ballerina Lanskaya, who took lovers mostly of Polish extraction. Three years after their daughter Flora was born, Adam filmed himself committing suicide while pining for a boy who had strangled another boy. Lanskaya was confused: what had been meant to be sensational was just tired and desperate. But having no other options now that she was past 16, she found a new lover, Hubert L Hubert, who had dropped the m’s from his name in a sad 20-year migration from Lolita while maintaining his penchant for pre-pubescent girls. Flora took exception to his caresses and kicked him in the testicles. ‘You naughty girl,’ her mother said. ‘Mr Nabokov – I mean, Mr Hubert – is a very nice man’. There is little to add.

  Three: Flora lost her virginity at 14 to a ball boy with an enormous member. She and her friends like to compare the dimensions of their lovers while bycycling. This, then, is Flora, the artistic enigma, the DELTA and the SLIT. At 11 she had read Freud and wondered how people could get away with writing so badly. But then, she had never read this. Perhaps we should mention the sweet Japanese girls and French writers beginning with M. Perhaps not.

  Four: Mrs Lanskaya died on the day her daughter graduated – a passage that for no earthly reason resembles the rythym of another novel, My Laura, and a hideously fat man stared at Flora’s white legs.

  Five: For no good reason, Flora determined to marry this immensely fat man, the eminent neuroscientist Dr Philip Wild, though she regretted her decision when she discovered he was a miser.

  Five – or should it be six?: The novel My Laura was begun soon after the end of the love affair it depicts. And, like this, was torn apart by every reviewer. The I of the book is a neurotic who set out to destroy his lover while annotating her. Philip Wild quite liked the descriptions of himself.

  Six: Suicide made a pleasure. It would be after this.

  D1, D2, Aurora, Wild 1, Wild 2: Philip Wild could no longer maintain any pretence of coherence. He could manage the odd well-turned phrase and repeated masturbatory emblazements, yet he could not yet persuade Mr Nabokov to abandon his attempts to impose an order when there was none. I, Philip Wild, he said, slipping into the first person, hereby begin a programme of self deletion. I hate my fat stomach and the noises I make on the lavatory, so I will start by cutting off my toes. Then my hands. Then my head. Till there is nothing left. Effacement. Annihilation. ‘That, too, is what faces me if anyone were ever to read this card index,’ cried Mr Nabokov. ‘Too bad,’ said his son.

  Digested read, digested: A reputation in fragments.

  Solar by Ian McEwan (2010)

  2000 He belonged to that Salman class of short, fat, ugly, clever men who were unaccountably attractive to women. But Michael Beard was anhedonic; his fifth marriage was disintegrating and he should have known how to behave as his philandering had ended the previous four. This time, though, it was his wife, Patrice, who was having an affair with Tarpin, a horny-handed Essex builder who knew nothing about cavity-wall insulation.

  Beard waited for Aldous to collect him. Gosh, how he hated the polar bear rug in the hall. Still, everyone would soon have one, he supposed, if the polar ice-cap continued to melt. Not that Beard was yet wholly committed to the climate-change agenda, but having won the Nobel Prize for his Beard-Einstein Conflation on Photovoltaics, an idea he was very thankful he was never asked to fully explain, he had been happy to head the New Labour Climate Change Laboratory.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not a Prius,’ Aldous said. ‘I’m not surprised, as they were only sold outside Japan in 2001,’ Beard replied. Aldous was one of his pony-tailed post-docs who was being forced into working on the New Labour cul-de-sac of wind turbine energy. Beard nodded off. He was very familiar with the McEwan Conflation of cramming loads of dull facts about climate change into a book and calling it fiction.

  ‘Tarpin hit me,’ said Patrice. ‘He hit me too,’ Beard replied as he went off to visit an endangered glacier in the Arctic for 30 pages. He returned to find Aldous in his flat. ‘I admit I’m having an affair with your wife,’ said Aldous, ‘but I’ve worked out that your Conflation can satisfy the world’s energy needs.’ At which, Aldous slipped on the polar bear rug and died, a victim of climate change.

  ‘I could make it look like Tarpin did it,’ McEwan thought. He had no real experience of writing comedy and the gags creaked as much as the plot. But it was an improvement on his previous books, so the judge mercifully sent Tarpin to prison.

  2005 As his plane stacked over New Mexico, Beard passed the time unnecessarily recalling his childhood before patting his gut. He had put on 35lb. He couldn’t stop consuming; it was almost as if his size was a metaphor for the world’s greed for natural resources. Still, there had been something in Aldous’s calculations after all, and he was looking forward to seeing the photovoltaic laboratory the Americans had built for him.

  Back in England, Beard looked angrily at the man who was helping himself to his crisps and snatched them away. Only later did he realise they were actually the other man’s crisps! ‘That’s the oldest comedy plot twist in the repertoire,’ said Melissa, his new girlfriend. ‘I know,’ Beard shrugged, ‘But Ian thinks that, like climate change, it may be old but it doesn’t mean it can’t happen.’ ‘Really,’ Melissa yawned.

  Beard reckoned it was time to move to the safer ground of rehashing large chunks of climate-change data and inventing an unlikely intellectual disagreement. ‘I don’t think the serious climate-change sceptics are fighting over feminism and postmodern relativism,’ Melissa said. ‘By the way, I’m pregnant.’

  2009 Beard had put on another 90lb and his belly was as overextended as the metaphor. Worse still, the plot was falling to pieces. One of his American lovers, Darlene, had rung Melissa to say they were getting married, and Tarpin had been let out of jail.

  ‘I took the rap for Patrice,’ Tarpin said. ‘I know she killed Aldous because he was beating her up.’ Beard looked quizzically at McEwan. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ian said. ‘I’m OK on the climate-change stuff, but I don’t really understand human psychology or comedy. Do you mind if Tarpin smashes up all your solar panels?’

  ‘We’ve had enough,’ said the New Mexicans. ‘We don’t mind you being sued for stealing Aldous’s ideas, it’s just we think David Lodge does this kind of story so much better.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Beard said. ‘Maybe I should go back to climate change. Perhaps nuclear power is the answer. Or how about a bit of pathos with my daughter?’ ‘Enough trees have died for this already,’ Melissa sighed.

  Digested read, digested: Solar Power: No Thanks.

  So Much For That

  by Lionel Shriver (2010)

  Shepherd Knacker, Net Portfolio Value: $731,778. Today was the day, Shep had decided. The day ‘The Afterlife’ would begin. He had three one-way tickets to Pemba in the Indian Ocean and his wife, Glynis, and son, Zach, could come or not. All his life he had been a salt-of-the-earth Man of the Manual, doing his best for his family, sweating 25 hours a day, selling his business at the wrong moment in 1996 and having to go back to work for the new boss as a toilet attendant, but now it was Me time.

  ‘Tough shit,’ Glynis snapped. ‘I’ve got terminal cancer and we need your health insurance.’

  Jackson wiped his 17-year-old daughter’s anus. Flicka had, of course, been born with a rare disability that meant she would die soon. ‘I hate my life,’ she spat. ‘Why did I have to end up in a Lionel Shriver book, where everything is always shit?’ ‘At least you are going to croak soon,’ said her sister, Heather. ‘I’m fat and ugly and there’s no way out.’ Jackson looked up. As usual his wife, Carol, was not paying any attention. Still, at least his friend Shep had arrived.

  ‘Thank God, I’ve got health insurance,’ Shep said. ‘That’s what you think,’ Jackson laughed. ‘Most company schemes are rubbish and hardly pay any of the bills. Shall I go into a long polemic about Medicare?’ ‘Oh shit,’ Shep cried. ‘It was bad enough before it turned
into a John Grisham saga.’ ‘Well, don’t expect anything that well written or pacey,’ Jackson said. ‘Sod this,’ said Flicka. ‘Now I really do want to die.’

  Shepherd Knacker, Net Portfolio Value: $721,778. ‘There are two sorts of mesothelioma,’ Dr Goodman said. ‘And Glynis has the worst.’ ‘Obviously,’ Shep answered. ‘It’s going to cost you $721,778 over and above your healthcare to keep her alive for a bit.’ ‘That’s typical of the way the US rips off honest people . . .’ Jackson droned for the 17th time. ‘Yes, yes,’ Glynis interrupted. ‘Mesothelioma is caused by asbestos so you’ve probably killed me, Shep.’

  ‘Enough of you,’ shouted Beryl, Shep’s sister. ‘I need to sponge money off you and you need to look after dad because he’s broken his leg. I know you’ll do it because you’re such a pussy. I mean so nice.’ ‘Jesus,’ Shep moaned. ‘Not even a third-rate character would come up with that plotline.’ ‘Too bad I’m fourth-rate then,’ Beryl snapped.

  ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ Jackson muttered to himself, while fiddling with his apology for a penis. He had always known Carol wanted him to be better hung, so had undergone secret extension surgery – which, predictably, went wrong – leaving him with a lumpy tuber.

  Shepherd Knacker, Net Portfolio Value: $000,000. ‘Don’t expect me to be nice just because I’m dying,’ Glynis sneered. ‘Why would we?’ everyone sighed. It was time for the final meeting with the doctor. ‘How much extra time did spending my entire savings buy Glynis?’ Shep inquired. ‘A good 400 pages,’ Dr Goldman replied. ‘They weren’t good pages,’ said Glynis.

  Jackson showed Carol his new, deformed penis. ‘I’m not going anywhere near that,’ she shrieked. ‘Nor am I!’ screamed the prostitute he showed it to later. ‘Fuck the lot of you,’ Jackson wept, putting a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. ‘It’s sooo unfair,’ Flicka said. ‘How come Dad gets to kill himself and I don’t?’

  Shepherd Knacker, Net Portfolio Value: $800,000. ‘Don’t worry,’ Shep said. ‘None of you seem to miss him much, and I’ve had some luck. It turns out I didn’t kill Glynis, so she’s just lied to a tribunal and got an $800,000 payout from an asbestos manufacturer who didn’t kill her either. So I’m going to take Glynis, Zach – we can forget about my daughter Amelia, because everyone else has – and my dad to Pemba. And you, Carol and your ugly sister can come with us.’

  Six months had passed. Glynis, Flicka and his dad were rotting together six feet under the African soil, when Carol came into Shep’s room. ‘I bet you’ve got a huge penis.’

  Digested read, digested: We Don’t Need to Talk About Lionel.

  Imperial Bedrooms

  by Bret Easton Ellis (2010)

  The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. It was labelled fiction but most of it – the snuff movie, the gang rape – was true. The only bits that hurt were those that chronicled my relationship with Blair as the writer was in love with her himself, though too immersed in the passivity of writing and too pleased with his own style to bother with many commas to admit it so he wrote me into the story as the man who was too frightened to love. Make of that what you will, though the real message I want you to take is that I’m a smartass seller of banal meta-fictions.

  I went to the premiere in 1987 with Blair, Rip, Julian and all the other empty narcissists who had somehow dazzled the literary establishment. The movie had been a pile of shit. Bret had hated the movie too and what follows is, I guess, his revenge. Shame he involved you in it because the real Julian didn’t die in the movie, he died on the page more than 20 years later.

  The jeep had been following us back from LAX to my apartment in Doheny Plaza. It’s meant to be haunted by a boy who killed himself but you can probably do without that kind of banal symbolism. We’re in LA everyone is shallow and on the make. Wow what insight. I nearly do some coke drink a lot of vodka take Ambien put on the Eurythmics and answer my iPhone. Julian wants to meet.

  I’m back in LA to help cast The Listeners for which I’ve written the screenplay. I still think I’m being followed as I drive out to Blair’s Beverly Hills mansion but I’m too detached to care so I just drink five bottles of vodka and think about Amanda whom I flirted with in New York.

  ‘You’re looking very thin, Clay. I guess it didn’t work out with Meghan,’ Blair says. I’ve no intention of ever explaining anything so I shrug in a cool sort of way and hope the critics will love the empty unreliability of my narration.

  ‘Are you trying to fuck me?’ I ask.

  I meet Julian. We don’t really talk so I go back to my apartment on Doheney Plaza. I’m still being followed and I drink 20 bottles of tequila do some coke and go off to the casting where a third-rate actress is auditioning. Later that evening I meet Rip at a restaurant. He looks like he’s had too much surgery, then as he points out, this book hasn’t had nearly enough. The third rate actress is behind the bar. Her name is Rain. ‘If you come back to my place you might get the part,’ I say.

  We start drinking gallons of vodka and I bully her into having constant sex and she wants to know when she’s going to get the part. I look moody and hit her. Messages appear on my iPhone. I’m watching you. Certainly no one’s reading me. I get another call on my iPhone. Kelly Montrose has been tortured and killed. I yawn. I’d seen it on the YouTube app on my iPhone.

  Someone is still following me as I have more meaningless sex. Rain says she’s got to go to San Diego to see her mom. I don’t believe her so I rape her but she goes anyway. Rip calls. Or is it Blair I’ve lost track. Rain is still going out with Julian and Julian runs a vice-network and Rain is one of his girls and she also used to go out with Kelly and Rip. Rip tells me to stay away from her but I’ve fallen in love in four days even though I’ve shown no sign of it.

  So what else can I tell you? I could say that I drove Julian to be killed by Rip who had killed Kelly that Amanda lived with Rain that Rain didn’t get the part that I sodomised a boy and a girl and that it was Blair who had been following me and gave me an alibi. But I guess you don’t really care any more and frankly I don’t blame you. If I don’t give a shit about anything why should you?

  ‘Don’t worry about anything,’ Blair says. ‘I won’t,’ says Bret. ‘I’ve come to realise I don’t like anyone. Especially my readers.’

  Digested read, digested: Still Less Than Zero.

  Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (2010)

  Patty and Walter Berglund were the middle-class pioneers of Minnesota – Patty making the cakes, Walter driving the Volvo 240 – and the very image of perfection. Yet their neighbours had always thought there had been something not quite right about them. They had two children, but we can forget about Jessica right now and concentrate on Joey, the apple of Patty’s eye. Joey was 11 when he started fucking Connie. Neither Patty nor Walter were best pleased, especially when Joey moved in with Connie, and by the time the Berglunds moved to Washington it was a surprise Walter and Patty hadn’t separated.

  Autobiography of Patty, composed at her therapist’s suggestion: Patty was unsure why she had started writing about herself in the third person, though she was woman enough to trust that the Great American Novelist knew what he was doing and she supposed it allowed him to maintain a cool, semi-detached style that would make the odd bombshell he dropped seem more remarkable for the ordinariness of its surroundings. Patty had been raped when she was 15, so she was understandably messed up when she went to college. There she spent a great deal of time with Eliza, a girl even more messed up than her.

  ‘I shan’t be offended if you forget me,’ said Eliza. ‘Part of the deal of the GAN is that there are too many distracting minor characters.’ So the autobiographer, as Patty described herself to differentiate herself from the biographer who was more obviously pulling the strings, let Eliza go, and concentrated on trying to get the charismatic Richard Katz, who played in a band, to go to bed with her. It was inevitable she ended up with his dull roommate Walter. It was equally inevitable that after 20 years of m
arriage and repressed lust, she and Richard should eventually fuck. ‘We can pretend we did it while we were asleep,’ she said. The autobiographer resisted the desire to point out that the biographer must also have been half-asleep at this point, so dutifully displayed signs of traumatised guilt.

  2004. Joey had a great deal on his mind. He was struggling to believe Connie – a woman so passive she had locked herself in a cupboard at his request for five years – was a three-dimensional character, and only a session of anal sex half-convinced him otherwise. ‘Is this part of the GAN deal?’ she had asked. ‘No’ he had replied. ‘It’s just this year’s must-have transgression in serious fiction.’ Oh, and by the way, they had got married. But what was really bothering Joey was his obsession with Jenna, the sister of his roommate Jonathan, and the side-plot which saw him joining a Republican thinktank and procuring arms for the US military in New York.

  That was an improvement on Walter’s situation. It was bad enough he hadn’t had sex for years and his marriage to Patty was falling apart, but now he too was locked into an absurd subplot that forced him to work on a scheme to exploit all the coal from the Virginian mountains in order to create a habitat for the cerulean warbler when it was mined out. He knew the GAN needed big themes, but this was too much. Still, at least the biographer had given him a twentysomething Indian assistant, Lalitha, who had fallen in love with him.

  Richard was now a famous rock star and so desperate to sleep with Patty again he left her autobiography out for Walter. ‘Oh dear,’ said Patty. ‘We’ve got to have the big GAN conversation about how I always thought you needed me more than I need you and now I see it’s the other way round.’ ‘Get this straight,’ Walter replied. ‘It’s not the GAN, it’s the G-Middle-AN. There’s no real diversity here. Now get out.’ So Patty left to go and live with Richard for a while, before that fizzled out and Walter started sleeping with Lalitha, until she was killed in a car accident.