by Kirsty Gunn
‘I always loved the Gordonstons,’ said Emily Stuart’s mother, Margaret, on more than one occasion, both within and outwith the pages of Caroline’s Bikini. ‘I’m just so thrilled, Emily, that Evan has, you know, come home.’
Life as a Freelance Reviewer and Copywriter
Emily Stuart wondered for a long time if there was something wrong with her in not following in her family’s footsteps and ‘going down the history path’, as she puts it. Though she excelled at the subject in school, when it came time to select a subject for university study, she opted instead for English, a discipline which had always interested her and in which she had also always done well in examinations and essays, and continued to find curious and inspiring, both – a surprising combination of reactions that she had never felt pertained in that other humanities subject that so engaged the rest of her family.
The study of English literature, however, may not necessarily fit one for life in the same way other – even non-STEM – subjects might. After graduating, Emily spent time as a waitress and coat-check girl in very fancy restaurants, worked in bars and nightclubs serving cocktails, all the time thinking about and sometimes writing short stories that were rarely published. When she was well into her thirties, following some gentle persuasion by her friends, she took up freelance work for various magazines and journals, writing reviews and critiques, sometimes interviews, and also, as time went on, learned the skills that meant she could take on the copywriting work – at first filling in for close deadlines at the last minute, completing long copy work that had already been started in-agency – that would so absorb her. After gaining further experience, she was confident in taking on entire marketing projects herself, from the original ‘spec’, working straight off a brief and creating the headline, subhead, selling line, and all the rest of it. Her friend Marjorie is in the advertising business and has said on more than one occasion: ‘Emily would be great at this game if she would just commit to going full-time. She has what it takes – the imagination and good education – to fly. It’s just that she doesn’t want to. She loves being freelance and we all just have to accept that. It’s the way she is.’
As a result of this choice, though, Emily’s relationship with work is ‘perilous and interesting’, as she puts it in other terms on p. 12. There will be weeks at a time when she is doing nothing but writing long copy, ads and associated leaflets and brochures … The list goes on and on. And other times when there is little work around, and she considers going back to the old waitressing game – even though she is far too old for that, now, she knows. Those ‘thin’ times, as Marjorie puts it, are when she helps out at an art gallery over in Hoxton, manning the desk there while working on catalogue copy and indexing for forthcoming exhibitions. So there it is, her working week or month or year: ‘perilous and interesting’ indeed.
For there is no doubt that there is nothing boring about the texture of her day-to-day life as far as writing is concerned, and it provides more than ample scope and practice of basic skills that might allow her to embark on a longer writing project such as the one suggested by Evan Gordonston in this book. Her robust abilities as a day-to-day ‘jobbing writer’, as they say in the ad world, more than her list of fictional publications, which, it has to be said, is a very short one, serves her for the work in hand. When she troubles herself on p. 217 of this manuscript: ‘Might these pages ever “find a readership”?’ she speaks not as a capable freelance person with a top CV as far as working experience goes, but as a short story writer who would love, so very much, to publish a collection of work, or even a novel, with a distinguished house.
Advertising Work and Copy
Emily Stuart’s advertising work has been part of award-winning campaigns in the pet food and insurance worlds. She has also worked on leading brands in sports shoes, so-called ‘designer’ fruit juices and shakes, and personal banking, and created a ‘through-the-line’ presence, from billboard to fulfilment reward coupons, for a major supermarket chain. She is indeed ‘capable’, as indicated above.
The copy is always delivered ‘clean and on time’, by which advertising companies mean fully edited, finished, and to job ‘spec’ and deadline. She is thoroughly reliable in that way. Before the return of Evan Gordonston to London, Stuart tended to accept all offers of work that came her way, and continued to work to close deadlines in a reliable fashion. It was only later, over the writing period of Caroline’s Bikini in fact, that she started to, first, take longer with various projects than she used to, and then later set them aside altogether.
Her general copywriting work – chiefly that for Prinn Arts in Hoxton – suffered in the same way. At one point, around the Easter period in this text, she received a call from the gallerist there, Samantha Prinn herself, asking, ‘Do you even want to come in and work with us any more? It’s been so long since we’ve seen you, and we had to give the Bill Henderson show to someone else. Let me know, will you, what you want to do?’
Use of Current Language, Idiom, Idiolect in Contemporary Prose
Many of Emily Stuart’s expressions derive from her range of copywriting work, her links, if you like, with the world of popular culture and media. Though she has never worked on any campaigns related to mobile phones or social media, she has a serviceable vocabulary of various expressions that may function in a youth-oriented market, or might do for persons around her age who are still interested in contemporary fashions and mores. ‘Go hang’ is one such example, as used on p. 72 of Caroline’s Bikini; others might be ‘I’m not bothered’, ‘move on’ and ‘index’ as well as the more oldfashioned ‘groovy’, ‘cool’ or the compression of English in the appearance of a text or Instagram message: ‘Where u at?’, etc.
In the same way, when constructing this text, Stuart is aware of those moments in the ‘narrative’, as she continues to call it – despite Evan’s suggestions and, later, demands, that it may be something else, a ‘novel’ and so on – that she might give shape and tone to certain sentences by letting her own, more literary, sensibility shine through. The short story writer in her then comes out to play, for example, when she suggests, in the same page referred to above, that Caroline’s medication may take the simile of a ‘pulse’ in the paragraph – one of many, many examples.
She is also keen to let full pieces of dialogue sit complete in the text, giving life to the pages, she believes, but also letting the rhythm and sound of its interlocutions be heard by the reader. This kind of awareness of idiolect, in the crafting of a character in fiction – short story or novel – is something that Stuart, the aspiring fiction writer and literary reviewer, has ‘a lot of time for’, as she says. ‘A character is created in the words he or she says. Not nearly enough writers pay attention to that, but I want to.’
Reflexive Moments in Caroline’s Bikini
There are many, many moments, throughout this text, when the reader becomes aware of the writer being aware of the overall project in hand. A fancier way of putting it would be to refer to the ‘countless incidents of metatextuality’ – as a dear scholar I know put it recently about another book – that we see on show as the narrative progresses.
At first, this is a subject that preoccupies Stuart as the writer of Evan Gordonston’s story – there’s that reference to herself from the first pages of the work as ‘amanuensis’ and so on – but gradually, and perhaps almost imperceptibly, the notion of self-consciousness is displayed as a growing theme of the story. Emily Stuart is a copywriter, not a novelist, so she must ask herself, over and over again: Are these pages ‘good enough?’, ‘interesting enough?’ etc. etc., to be a novel. ‘I’d had opinions from the outset, truth to tell’, as she puts it so declaratively and boldly early on in the first section of the proceedings. This is a theme that must and will be explored fully in the reading of Caroline’s Bikini. See for further examples of reflexive text, pp. 12, 15, 26, 66, 104.
Linguistic Variations in Caroline’s Bikini
As has already be
en observed, there is a deal of tonal range in the text that makes up Emily Stuart and Evan Gordonston’s conversation about the latter’s great love for Caroline Beresford. This range is accounted for by the fact that much of the narrative is rendered in dialogue, or in notes and remarks that have the vocabulary and rhythm of both parties’ speech. This much is obvious, of course. No two people will sound exactly alike on the page – no matter how close their friendship or how used they are to each other’s habits of behaviour and expression. It should never be the case any more in reading than in life that one might mistake one person for another when one is in close proximity with both and listening intently to what they are saying. Such is the effect of a novel that it may bring the reader as near to the people in its pages as one might be to the range of personalities and figureheads and strangers and employers, friends, family, and whoever one comes across in life.
However, it may also be noted that there are points in this text when both voices, due to the quantity of gin taken by the protagonists, perhaps, on some occasions, or the fact of physical positioning at certain sizes of pub table, or because of the amount of reading of notes that has taken place, or number of questions asked and answers given, may seem to merge, somewhat, on the page. There are times, it is true, when Emily Stuart and Evan Gordonston may sound, almost uncannily, alike. As though they might be brother and sister, twins, even. To use an old cliche often used for family members who are very close to each other: They may well be on these occasions ‘two sides of the same coin’.
Finally, it is also observed throughout the ‘novel’ under review that others also enter the story with their voices, so to speak. There is that ‘Coffee?’ of Caroline’s, so bright, sometimes, it seems to ring off the page. There is that early memorable line from Rosie Howard, early on in the story, entailing the information that the house in Richmond comprises ‘a fun scene’. These are just examples of a quality displayed in each of the sections of the narrative that might ‘people’ the text further in the way just described.
These additional personalities, in the way they are closely accounted for and reported by Stuart, contribute further towards a literary experience that the reader may feel is busy with variation and range, while continuing to return to its central preoccupations with the quality of its content, its duration, lack of plot, sense of repetition, etc., etc.
Evan Gordonston’s Vocabulary, Cadence and Syntax
When Evan Gordonston returned from living in the United States, after some three decades (actually, a bit more than that, too) away from Britain, the country to which he returned was vastly different to that which he had left – in all kinds of ways to do with an overturn of a political conservatism and the permission of rampant capitalism to predate and determine personal and social outcomes in ways that had not been able to dominate in a prior era – but these notes here focus specifically upon terms of speech, language use and syntax adopted, as well as tonal differentiation and vocabulary in everyday communication.
For that reason, certain Americanisms that Evan Gordonston had picked up while living over there, certain words and phrases that were part of his everyday speech, could also be observed in use in the wider culture. ‘Do you want that to go?’ a barista now asks a customer at a cafe or coffee bar. ‘Hi guys’ is the way most British mothers will greet a number of their daughters’ and sons’ friends.
Other phrases and words, though, as Emily Stuart is seen to observe frequently in Caroline’s Bikini, seem to jump out at her, and arrive on the page fully formed from Evan Gordonston’s talk, striking her with all the force of an American baseball player hitting a home run. ‘The mood in Richmond just “said summer”’ might be an example of this sort of variation, ‘and some’ … Not to mention various remarks and so on taken straight from Evan’s personal notes and journals that display an easy familiarity with lingo from ‘across the pond’, as some may describe it.
Though, as the story goes on, we see Gordonston’s speech start to modulate, through the influence of environment – he is back ‘home’ in London, after all – and due, as well, and perhaps to a larger extent, to the close contact he has with Emily Stuart over the course of the book, we can nevertheless identify an individual who has a degree of transatlantic accent, or more, tone, as well as vocabulary when he speaks.
As we read in the text itself, towards the end of the story, near the beginning of the last section on p. 243: ‘He had these American phrases that still came out every now and then, sentences and words that had been generated by years living in New York and Chicago and Boston, all those years he’d had away that I couldn’t imagine, not really, not think about, nor believe in.’
It’s a moment in the story where we see Stuart’s writing, her simple report of a fact or feature to do with her friend, seem to open up into a wider observation, one that we might be aware of when considering the ‘account’ of Evan Gordonston’s love that is Caroline’s Bikini: that is, that she can’t ‘imagine’ any other Evan, ‘not really’, other than the one who is sitting before her, familiar to her as she is to herself, nursing a gin and tonic. Language in that sense, both hers and that of the man she describes, is all.
It takes little for her, so accustomed is she to his mood and presence, to take in, by gesture, tone and word, fresh variations of Evan Gordonston’s ‘turn of phrase’, a ‘turn’ that, as the phrase itself suggests, is both surprising and capable of taking her thinking in a new direction, bending her thoughts towards the musicality and appeal of American spoken English. So we have, then, on the same page as referred to above: ‘… on the basis of Evan’s American turn of phrase, the mood in Richmond “said summer”. It was hot enough. People were outdoors and on the streets, voices were raised. Clothing worn was light and careless. The mood did indeed, all over London, say summer’ (italics, editor’s own).
Further Details of Speech, Embedded in Evan Gordonston’s Past
Gordonston’s levels of articulacy and expression had been influenced, of course they had, by his years, both as a teenager and young man, growing up on the Eastern Seaboard, as they call that part of America between New York and Boston, and then, as indicated above, settled into a particular pattern and diction often described as transatlantic English.
Where, as a young boy living in London, going around to Emily Stuart’s house he might ask her something like ‘Do you want to ask your mother if it’s alright to come with me and Mum to the Victoria and Albert Museum?’ he would, by the time he was a teenager living in Connecticut, greet friends with a ‘Hey! Wanna go into the city with my mom and me, to see some show at the Met?’
In the same way, certain words were replaced by others. Though he would not refer to his own parent thus, he would suggest to friends that various activities might be ‘run past your dad’ or in a phrase like ‘check it out with your mom’. Tom and Helen were ‘Mum and Dad’, they always would be, but the variation just noted was revealed when out with his peer group, at school or in various recreational contexts that applied when he was much older as well.
Other changes that were made in vocabulary can be suggested, in part, by the following list:
Soccer – football
Cool – great
No brainer – not worth even thinking about it
For sure – yes
Trash – rubbish
Cookie – biscuit
Eraser – rubber
So long – goodbye
In addition Evan Gordonston’s lifestyle and pastimes would naturally dictate a whole new dictionary. He played ‘baseball’, and went out for a treat to the ‘diner’ or ‘that takeout place that does really good fries’. He wore ‘shades’ in the summer when they all went to the beach at Cape Cod or the Hamptons, he ‘stood in line’ at the post office when sending a card or package to his friend Emily Stuart in London; at some point he nearly forgot what a queue was.
Later, once he’d started working in legal firms around Wall Street, inhabiting a much more interna
tional world and surrounded by a good number of ‘Brits’ as native New Yorkers called them, some of the old words and expressions returned. This pattern of course – of returning to the past – was at its most marked in his relations with Stuart, when he physically made the return to his homeland, carried out in various pubs across West London. As noted in the text, we then see the return to ‘Fancy another?’ or ‘Let me get another round in’, the kind of expressions that, though he’d been too young to use them when he still lived in London, now returned to him as though deeply embedded in his DNA.
Finally, what may be added is the matter of Gordonston’s dress. Careful readers will have noted those ‘polo shirts’ he referred to, when unpacking his things in Richmond; there is also the disruption in the text when Stuart notes his adoption of ‘sweat pants’ as he calls them, indicating a level of carelessness with his personal appearance she is not used to seeing that concerns her; as though the very term itself describes a way of being, feeling, that she is not accustomed to and that seems alien and peculiar to her. ‘Tracksuit bottoms’ is one thing, as she notes in an aside on p. 123, and bad enough to be wearing them outside the house, but ‘sweat pants’ brings his idea of trousers to a whole new level of squalor.
What’s interesting though, despite the general sorts of variations indicated here, their persistence in some places, along with that slight softening or slurring of speech a British person can hear in an American voice – as noted in the narrative, ‘ciddy’ for ‘city’ say, or, we could add, a kind of ‘rilly’ for ‘really’ or a ‘no WAY’ for ‘no way’ or an occasional insertion of an unnecessary question mark: ‘You’re kidding me?’ for ‘You’re kidding me!’ – in general, though these patterns tend, in many people, to become fixed, Evan Gordonston, upon coming back to London and meeting up again immediately with his old childhood friend, Emily ‘Nin’ Stuart, seemed to lose, for the most part, those traces of American syntax and sentence order retained by most. ‘He sounded’, as Emily says on p. 10 of Caroline’s Bikini, ‘just the same … as though he’d never been gone.’