"Blue Ruin" by Hari Kunzru

The hook: During a pandemic, protagonist Jay is a gig economy zero-hours driver. He delivers groceries to a posh house in its own estate in the countryside. At the door is Alice, an old girlfriend, who left him for his best friend, with whom she is still living. Jay is sick and collapses, so Alice hides him in a barn on the land until he gets well.

As Jay recovers, he reminisces in an extended flashback and we learn about how he studied art in London and became a performance artist and how he met, loved, lived with and lost Alice to Rob, his friend, a fellow student who is now a successful artist.

As the book progresses, we start to discover more of Jay's story and exactly why he is no longer making art. And the pressures of both the pandemic and the art world combine to bring things to a frightening climax.

It's an fascinating exploration of a subculture that spans everything from starving in squats to multi-millionaire collectors. There is a huge amount of verisimilitude in the descriptions of the drug-fuelled lifestyle associated with that world. Sometimes, the narrative seems a little plot heavy, although it doesn't seem to actually go anywhere (which is perfectly consonant with the theme). There are intimate portrayals of the personalities within it, vulnerable and insecure like the rest of us, but obsessed by the idea that making marks on a piece of canvas (or videoing a performance, or building a sculpture, or ...) is perhaps more important than anything else. 

The narrator-protagonist is quite an impressive person for a casual worker in the gig economy. Not only is he a legend on the internet (and totally unaware of the fact, rather like the eponymous hero of Vernon Subutex 1) but he is an art-school graduate qualified to crew and navigate ships whose interior monologue is full of learned references, not just concepts with art (which suffuse the book):

• The ship of Theseus: a concept in classical philosophy (p 25)
• The (un)examined life: a concept from Socrates (p 30)
• The science of metabolism (p 33)
• Marlowe's Faust (p 123)

Blue Ruin is a painting of a "giant white cruise ship disgorging passengers into a semi-submerged city ... In the foreground, crowded into the frame, were the tourists, horrific semi-human figures, all wearing orange life vests." (p 230)

The pandemic context, the feeling that we are living in a dystopia, perhaps nearing an apocalyptic end of times, and the theme of  rootlessness and anonymity in a world (of art) where reputation is crucial, are the primary colours in this bleak portrait of the pointlessness of life.

Selected quotes: (page numbers refer to the Simon & Schuster 2024 edition)

"If people viewed me in a certain way because I was cleaning a toilet or picking up trash, that was on them, not me." (p 4)

"My beard is turning white and my eyes are sinking into their sockets like pebbles slowly dropping down a well. ... if I catch sight of myself in a mirror, on a good day I'm reminded of a piece of driftwood. Knotted, ground down by sand and water." (p 5)

"It's a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives - human ships of Theseus, each part replaced, but in some essential way unchanging. We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood." (p 25)

"Surrounded by students signaling distressed bohemia, all patches and thrift store irony." (p 29)

"Maybe she could live the unexamined life. Mine presented itself as an endless decision tree, a constant steeplechase of exhausting and difficult choices." (p 30)

"Later I would discover Rob's sponge-like quality, his ability to metabolise culture, efficiently and rapidly, to break down its sugars and use them to grow." (p 33)

"As I stepped inside, my feet sank into the deep-pile carpet of the vestibule and something metaphysical closed all around me, a feeling that my reality had just forked and the life in which I hadn't crossed that threshold was now utterly irretrievable." (p 97)

"If technique or craft wasn't what made someone a good artist, what did? The conventional answer was that a good artist was someone who had good ideas." (p 106)

"We smoked weed from the moment we woke up in the morning, moving about our pale green undersea world like unquiet ghosts. Occasionally the real world would intrude, but usually it felt as if we'd slipped through the cracks, the difference between inner and outer space collapsing until reality was purely a function of what we'd ingested that day. At first it seemed exciting, as if we'd found an illicit truth, a doorway in to a place that was inaccessible to normal people, but gradually the returns diminished, and instead of beauty and wonder, our artificial paradise began to feel like a trap." (p109)

"I looked at the face that had launched a thousand of my twenty-something ships." (p 123)

"It was as if I'd come upon a portal, a point where the world was touched by some other nearby reality. The birch glade had been sliced up like a vertical louvre, the filigree of branches and dappled light superimposed on another near-identical version of itself, segements of splinters of a second forest transposed or rhymed with the first, or - that was it - reflected." (p 130)

"I've worked alongside men for weeks, sometimes months, withouyt finding out a single piece of personal information, or being asked one question about myself." (p 145)

"The work of all artists - was an alibi for the desire to put a frame around a certain part of life, to declare that inside the frame was art, and outside was not." (p 161)

"Only in the system we have, where everyone is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, is anonymity a kind of death." (p 180)

"But I've been travelling for years. ... going somewhere isn't the point. The point is finding somewhere to stay." (p 213)

July 2025; 257 pages

Published in the USA by Knopf and in the UK by Simon & Schuster, 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

The Guardian review suggested that both characters and plots were stereotypes. 

Other books about art and artists reviewed on this blog:

• Literary fiction:
• My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
• The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
• The Masterpiece by Emile Zola
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• Murder mysteries
• The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte: set in the world of art restoration.
• The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman: set in the world of New York art galleries.

And, unreviewed here but utterly brilliant in my eyes, is my own novel with an painting protagonist: Bally and Bro which only costs £1.99 on kindle.

"Long Island" by Colm Toibin

 This sequel to Brooklyn starts with a huge and brilliant hook when Irish Eilis is told by a cuckold that her husband has impregnated his wife and he intends to abandon the baby on her doorstep. Determined that she will not bring up the child of another woman, Eilis returns to her hometown in Ireland for the first time in twenty years and encounters Jim Farrell,  the man she abandoned. He's still single though having an affair with now widowed Nancy who had been best friend to Eilis. Will Jim and Eilis get together again? Or will she return to Long Island where her Italian-American husband, Tony, is waiting?

The situation is full of tremendous tensions. In Long Island Tony's family (parents, brothers and sisters-in-law) all live on the same street, making Irish Eilis an outsider. The Irish setting is even more claustrophobic: everyone seems to know the everyone else; it is difficult to keep secrets and the past is always there to haunt you. It's a recipe for emotional turmoil.

Perhaps because it would be so easy to slip into melodrama, Toibin plays it cool. Close to the end, someone tells Jim Farrell: "You seem very matter-of-fact for a man who's just got engaged." (7iii). In fact, every character seems to treat their predicament as an intellectual exercise: their options are carefully delineated. But no-one seems to feel anything. Their heads are engaged but not their hearts. 

For example: "And how would he live knowing that he had betrayed Nancy? How could he coldly inform her that he did not want to be with her? That was one side of the scales. The other was a question that was starker and more pressing: how could he let this chance to be with Eilis slip by?" (5iii)

New writers are told to 'show, don't tell' but Toibin's characters tell you everything they are thinking about, in simple, declarative sentences.

Looking back at my review for Brooklyn, I see that I said: "Eilis had a very pedestrian inner life as well. Every dilemma she faced was spelt out clearly. This actually was a brilliant feature of the book because it made you follow her uncertainties. Did she love the boy or not? Even at the end you're not exactly sure but isn't that the way we all are? We weigh up our options (perhaps a little less cold-bloodedly than Eilis) based on our perceptions (which are perhaps a little less clear than Eilis) and we come to a conclusion which we will never know is right or wrong and which we might in any case change later on down the line. This was a tremendous strength of the book." I'm revising that opinion. The words 'cold-blooded' and 'clear' are key. All three of the main characters - Eilis, Jim and Nancy - saw things too clearly (except for what the plot didn't permit them to see at all) and weigh up their options too cold-bloodedly. I was alienated by their levels of detachment. I was unable to empathise with the main characters and consequently I was bored. It was obvious that the plot was slowly - so slowly - leading up to a showdown but rather than waiting for the crisis with bated breath, I was wishing to get it over with. 

Toibin has also written (reviewed in this blog):

• The Story of the Night: A gay man grows up in an Argentina under the rule of a military dictatorship. I noted "a very staid prose style with short, mostly declarative sentences. It's very realistic and quite addictive"
• House of Names: A version of the Oresteiad. I thought the plot had been "emasculated" but thought it "beautifully written"
• The Testament of Mary: the elderly Virgin Mary reflects upon her life: I loved this and noted "the perfection of the prose".

So I'm inconsistent! Mostly,  like Toibin's style. But not this time. It was just too much. I wasn't engaged. I was bored.

July 2025; 287 pages

Published by Picador in 2024.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Uncanny Stories" by May Sinclair

Seven short stories with a supernatural theme told in a matter of fact way. There is no feeling that the supernatural might not exist. 

All stories are written in the past tense and third person, although they may contain first person perspectives. May Sinclair was the author who first used the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in a literary context when she reviewed the first volume of Pilgrimage (Pointed Roofs) by Dorothy Richardson. However, there is little hint of modernism or experimental writing in her style.

The stories are very much of their period in terms of the tension 

generated at a time when sexual transgression generated high levels of social disapproval. They are also contemporary in terms of the social hierarchies: the characters (except in The Victim) are well-educated upper-middle-class people who don’t really need to earn their living and have servants to assist them with the earthier aspects of life.

It's also of its time in the number of semi-colons the author uses.

The stories:
Where their fire is not quenched

Harriott Leigh is unlucky in love. Her father said she was too young for George Waring and, as she was waiting to grow up, George died. She is sure that Stephen Philpotts will propose marriage to her but instead he tells her he is in love with someone else. So she becomes the mistress of married Oscar Wade, an affair which has its moments of horror. But when she dies ...

The token

A man who can't express his feelings. A wife who longs to be sure of his love. They row about a paperweight. That night she dies. And her ghost haunts the room where he works, forever hoping to know whether he loved her.

The flaw in the crystal

The longest story in the collection. Agatha has the gift of making people well. But when she tries to cure Harding of his insanity, things start to go wrong. How can she help others and at the same time protect herself?

The nature of the evidence

A barrister’s adored first wife dies. Her ghost then prevents him having sex with his second wife.

If the Dead Knew

Organist Wilfred Hollyer’s mother who raised him from a sickly child, protecting him ... or over-protecting him and preventing him from being able to earn a decent living. As as result he can only marry love-of-his-life Effie Carroll when his mother dies which might be twenty years away. But he loves his mother. But ...

Guilt in the form of supernatural phantasms.

The Victim

Chauffeur Steven Ackroyd becomes violently angry if he perceives anyone coming in between him and his girlfriend, Dorsy, a fellow servant. So when she leaves Mr Greathead’s employ, he plans the perfect murder to revenge himself upon his master. What could go wrong?

The Finding of the Absolute

Mr Spalding develops his own metaphysical consolation in place of religion after his wife leaves him for an Imagist poet. Then he dies. Heaven seems remarkably like the role-playing computer simulation Second Life, decades before it started. With Kant.

Selected quotes:

“Women never seem to consider that a man can get all the talk he wants from other men.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“Sleep made him beautiful and innocent; it laid a fine, smooth tissue over his coarseness; it made his mouth gentle; it entirely hid his eyes.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“Then, suddenly, the room began to come apart before her eyes, to split into shafts of floor and furniture and ceiling that shifted and were thrown by their commotion into different planes. They leaned slanting at every possible angle; they crossed and overlaid each other with a transparent mingling of dislocated perspectives, like reflections fallen on an interior seen behind glass.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“The revolving doors caught her and pushed her out into the street.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“The strange quality of her state was this, that it had no time. ... She was aware of things happening and about to happen; she fixed them by the place they occupied, and measured their duration by the space she went through. So now she thought: If I could only go back and get to the place where it hadn’t happened.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“Their passion weighed on them with the unbearable, unescapable boredom of immortality.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

"All Milly's plans had been like that; they fell to dust; they were dust. There had always been that pitiful, desperate stirring of the dust to hide the terror; the futile throwing of the dust in the poor thing's eyes. As if he couldn't see through it." (The Flaw in the Crystal)

"The Easter moon, golden-white and holy, looked down at her, shrined under the long, sharp arch of the beech trees." (The Flaw in the Crystal)

"It was now as if her being drunk with every pore the swimming darkness." (The Flaw in the Crystal)

"This is the story Marston told me. He didn't want to tell it. I had to tear it from him bit by bit. I've pieced the bits together in their time order, and explained things here and there, but the facts are the facts he gave me." (The Nature of the Evidence) It seems a nice way of asserting that this is gospel truth while leaving room for an unreliable narrator. But I couldn't help feeling that the reader might have had more fun if they had been presented with Marston's incoherent jumble and had to organise it themself.

"He was one of those bigoted materialists of the nineteenth century type who believe that consciousness is a purely physiological phenomenon, and that when your body's dead, you're dead." (The Nature of the Evidence)

"The library was the room Rosamund liked best, because it was his room. She had her place in the corner by the hearth, and they were always alone there together in the evenings when his work was done, and when it wasn't done she would sit still with him, keeping quiet in the corner with her book."  (The Nature of the Evidence) Very few of the women in this collection have any agency in this world. Many of them achieve it in the next.

"Before they could marry, they would be fifty-five and forty-five; old, old; too old to feel, to care passionately." (If the dead knew) I'm 68. Hmmm. 

"His beliefs were always the expression of his fears."  (If the dead knew)

"He knew the joy that made Jerry, the black cat, dance on his hind legs and bow sideways and wave his forelegs like wings." (The finding of the Absolute)

July 2025; 197 pages

First published in 1923

The paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Magus" by Anthony Grafton

“This book traces the rise of learned magic, from its medieval origins to the synthesis that Agrippa created in 1533.” (Introduction)

I think it is written for the specialist rather than the general reader. I found it confusing. Part of the reason for this is the structure of the book: each chapter focuses on the work of one or more scholars, for example, Nicholas of Cusa, Roger Bacon, Pico della Mirandeola, Johannes Trimethius and Agrippa. This meant that the information on, for example, 'natural' magic was broken up as we considered, in turn, what each of these authorities felt about it. I gained the general sense that the issue facing each of them was how to distinguish 'natural' magic (which seemed to mean the marvellous effects that could be produced by science and engineering) which was somehow 'good' from the rest which were snares and delusions set by the devil and his demons. (I suppose this equates with the issue facing alchemy - usually just off-stage in this book - of how to distil what we now call chemistry from the dross of superstition.)

Other reasons I was confused was that sometimes the author seemed to expect me to know more than I did. For example, in chapter 3 he states: “The established Latin magical library came from polyglot sources: Jewish and Muslim but also Greek. Some texts, such as the Latin Picatrix, derived their contents from even more exotic quarters.” What were these 'more exotic quarters'? I wondered. Unfortunately, he doesn't say, nor could wikipedia help.  (107) [It does n’t say where, which is frustrating. Wikipedia suggests that it is primarily Arabic; it doesn’t suggest it goes any further than Arabic, German, Greek, Latin and perhaps some early Christian]

I got even more confused about a polyglot called Samuel bin Nissim Abulfaraj who was baptized as Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada and used the pen name Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysis of Pontus. Having given all these names, Grafton then refers to him without warning as ‘Flavius’. Grafton gives no clue as to the identity of Flavius. I had to resort to Google to discover that Flavius was the first name of Mithridates. 

Selected quotes:

• “The masters of the art of hydromancy ... believed that God had not created water since the Book of Genesis described the spirit of God as hovering over the waters.” (Ch 2)
• “‘Meeting monks is generally considered an evil omen, and all the more if it takes place in the morning. For that sort of man lives mostly from the charnel house, as vultures live off corpses.'" (Ch 5, quoting Agrippa)

Heavy-going.

July 2025; 219 pages

First published in 2023 by Harvard University Press, USA

My paperback edition was issued by Penguin Books in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Tripticks" by Ann Quin

From the start of the novel, the anonymous narrator is being pursued across America by his number one ex-wife and her schoolboy gigolo. Following a lot of flashbacks including his ex-wife's father and his other ex-wives in a series of scenes satirising everything from conspicuous consumption to wellness communes, the chase climaxes with the end of the novel. 

Written in 1972 and determinedly of its time. The typeface with its errors and the way the words were mixed with black and white images reminded me of one of the underground magazines that proliferated in those days. The prose style is a cascade of thoughts that feels like the author has streamed her consciousness directly onto the page. 

The author has a penchant for lists, for example (on pages 22 and 23): “Ah those cabinets of dreams. always the hero to the rescue of wonder women who were continually being molested by
giant lizards
snared by dissolute white slavers aboard a baroque submarine
enslaved in an Albanian bauxite mine
sacrificed by a sacred polar bear
cultivated by a mad fungologist
hostess to a tupperware party in Kew Gardens
slain by a blind zen archer"
... etc [This particular list continues for another 19 items]

There were hints of Angela Carter, for example The Passion of New Eve but mostly it reminded me tremendously (though without the cut-up technique) of a William Burroughs novel such as Naked Lunch or The Wild Boys. I've always enjoyed those and I always champion novels that attempt non-standard narratives. But I felt buried under Quin's avalanche of words and immensely wearied. I didn't enjoy the experience. It was hard work and I ended up skim-reading. So I doubt I have given the book sufficient care. I must have another go sometime. But not yet!

Almost at the end comes this line: “He so ignores the canons of construction that at times he seems involved in little more than an engagement in a shaggy-dog story.” (p 181) That rather expressed how I felt. Already, I had encountered the line: “Admit you are getting tired of the whole works.” (p 142) I was.

Nevertheless, I stayed awake enough to enjoy some pithy and witty observations:

• “The first time we made love it was like entering a self-supporting garden city combining bucolic charm with big-city nerve.” (p 58)
• “I thought your letter was slightly less penetrating than the mouse that attempted to fertilize the elephant.” (p 92)
• “You grow on me like cancer.” (p 108)
• “Women's Lib Chick. The hand that refuses to rock the cradle.” (p 142)

There were also one or two super descriptions of which my favourite was: “His face looked as if it had been slept in.” (p 188)

But on the other hand there were lines that seemed to value spontaneity over careful construction. For example: “As soon as he turned up on the scene our family life from then on turned from a semi-circular urn of intimacy, a kind of womb with seats where mother and I had nuzzled together so comfortably, into battle scenes played in a refrigerator.” (p 77) The start of the sentence is a mess, with two 'turned's and two 'from's. Even though we reach a wonderful final phrase, it needs work.

Other selected quotes

• “The man who doesn't reckon his pleasures on a silver platter is a fish who walks by night” (p 8)
• “Full of booze and passion for justice he sees himself as a law and ardour candidate." (p 9) I can't decide if this is clever or facile.
• “People rubbing people is always nice. People rubbing people with skill is an order of magnitude nicer.” (p 20)
• “When he bleeds, falls and dies, he does so in a beautifully obscene slow motion, a star swimmer in his own aquacade of blood.” (p 25) Love 'aquacade' 
• “Now I enjoy violence as much as the next guy, but enough is enough.” (p 26)
• “Her ears were sitars blown by my carved mouth.” (p 41) Is this profound or nonsense?
• “I believed in play now cry later.” (p 43)
• “I continually felt like the small boy who didn't get an invite the party and just wrote his own and went anyway.” (p 78)

Not worth the effort. 

July 2025; 192 pages.

First published in Ambit magazine and then by Calder and Boyars in 1972.

My paperback edition was issued in 2022 by And Other Stories

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Notes:

On page 8 the narrator says “my belly is a Golden Poppy”. The Golden Poppy is the California state flower; it is also the name of a burger bar in Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck's sequel to Cannery Row.

Quin adored Virginia Woolf's The Waves, another book I found heavy going, but hated Jack Kerouac's On the Road. 

Quin also wrote: 

• Berg (1964)
• Three (1966)
• Passages (1969)

They're experimental but nothing like as off the wall as Tripticks.

"The Dumas Club" by Arturo Perez-Reverte

 

A murder mystery set in the world of book-collectors. 

Lucas Corso is an investigator for booksellers and bibliophiles. At moment he has two missions: firstly to authenticate some manuscript pages of chapter forty-two of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas and secondly to track down the three extant copies of the Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book of occult and esoteric knowledge which includes nine prints reproduced from a another book supposedly written by the devil himself. Corso travels from Spain to Sintra in Portugal and then to Paris. But his life appears to be in danger from a man with a scar, the double of d'Artagnan's adversary Rochefort, and Rochefort's accomplice Milady. And who is the strange girl who follows him: a guardian angel or something else?

The mystery is compounded by the fact that the three copies of 'Nine Doors' have illustrations which at first sight seem to be the same but on closer inspection contain differences that may or may not be significant. The present day story repeatedly harks back to the storyline of the 'Musketeers' and we also learn about occult literature. There some interesting twists at the end, although one had been heavily signalled (from the first paragraph of chapter one) with bookish references. 

It's an entertaining read but there was a lot about books and this rather overshadowed the mystery/ thriller element of the plot.

I did enjoy the self-confessed cowardice of the sidekick.

Also by this author: The Flanders Panel, a murder mystery set in the world of fine art.

Selected quotes:

• "Although I am narrating this story after the resolution of the momentous events to come, the very nature of the loop - think of Escher's paintings, or the work of that old joker, Bach - forces us to return continually to the beginning." (Ch 5)
• "It's Julian the Apostate crying, 'You have defeated me, Galileo'." (Ch 7)
• "The art of locking devils inside bottles or books is very ancient ... Gervase of Tilbury and Gerson both mentioned it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As for pacts with the Devil, the tradition goes back even further: from the Book of Enoch to St Jeronimus, through the Cabbala and the Fathers of the Church." (Ch 10)
• "Like any intelligent being, the Devil likes games, riddles." (Ch 10)
• "In the real world many things happen by chance but in fiction nearly everything is logical." (Ch 14)

July 2025; 323 pages

First published in Spanish by Alfaguara in Madrid in 1993

My paperback edition (translated by Sonia Soto) was issued in 1996 by The Harvill Press

Filmed as 'The Ninth Gate' starring Johnny Depp and directed by Roman Polanski.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Vernon Subutex" 2 by Virginie Despentes

The sequel to Vernon Subutex 1, the middle volume of the trilogy.

Spoiler alert. Having lost his record shop, Revolver, and his home, Vernon is still living on the streets of Paris, although this time by choice. His friends from VS1 have all offered him shelter (the Hyena even joined him in the shower to clean him up) and now meet him every evening, in the park and the nearby cafe-bar, to feed him and buy him drinks and look after him. There is a sense of a guru and his disciples: Vernon has dissociative hallucinatory moments and hugs even his enemies, bringing them inner peace, stripping away their alienation and bringing them into the group. Sometimes he acts as DJs and they all lose themselves in the dance.

Meanwhile, we discover what is on Alex Bleach's tapes. It's a revelation that persuades some of Vernon's followers to take direct action in a #MeToo subplot (although VS2 was written in 2015, two years before the #MeToo hashtag began to be used on social media). This subplot gives the book a more coherent narrative structure. Both VS1 and VS2 have a bricolage construction being made from a tag-team of internal dialogues, often rants, but while what appeared from VS1 was a collage portrait of Paris, VS2 has a sense of a story with a purpose.

The sequel inevitably has less shock value than the original, and this defocuses some of the energy, but this increased sense that we are going somewhere  has made me eager to read the final part of this fascinating and original trilogy. 

This is definitely a contender for my book of the year.

Selected quotes: (page numbers from the English ppbk edition)

• “No-one likes old people, not even their own children.” (25)
• “Men are supposed to just put up with things and not bleat about being sensitive. Everyone proceeds from the assumption that they're obviously up for it. No-one bothers to ask whether they mind having their balls busted all the time, same as no one gives a damn whether they are not they want to be fathers.” (63)
• “Just because you're prepared to sell your arse on the streets, doesn't mean you'll make your fortune doing it.” (65)
• “A lot of people claim that they grow wiser with age. The truth is that they shrivel, they slow down. They lose their importance. They get trapped in quicksand and sink in good faith.” (79)
• “What was he thinking, back then, that stopped him talking to his last friend when there was still time to grab his arm, shake him hard and say, let's make the most of it, mate, let's make the most of it while we're still alive.” (108)
• “We entered into rock music the way you enter a cathedral ... there were so many saints everywhere we didn't know who to worship ... we didn't give a fuck about heroes, all we cared about was that sound.” (109)
• “Money is much better than drugs. It's the same basic principle, but overwhelming. And people say there are no side effects.” (118)
• “Compliance quickly becomes the ability to look the other way when you walk past the slaughterhouse.” (120)
• “A mind like hers should not be denied books, nor prevented from embracing complexity on the pretext of following some obscurantist mumbo jumbo.” (137)
• “It's hard not to feel a bit sorry for old people. They act like they're still young. Except they’re shriveled and mouldy. ... They’re still living in the steam age when everyone else has moved to touch-screen.” (182)
• “She had thrown herself at him, like a third-world country at a sack of rice.” (198)
• “It is not a cock that makes a man but the impetuousness of his desire.” (220)
• “Gaelle feels like a light bulb on its last legs, when it starts to sputter, to warn that it is about to fail.” (226)
• “How does a guy who's likeable enough but a bit short of change when it comes to charisma turn himself into the Messiah of the Buttes-Chaumont? The guy is homeless, stinks of sweat and wears trailer trash boots, but everyone treats him like he’s baby Jesus if he'd skipped the bit with the cross, he's surrounded by dozens of Magi who bring him gifts every day.” (232)
• “When urban hipsters start dabbling in spirituality, you know shit’s going to get real.” (233)
• “To be happy in love, you have to make do with what’s on offer.” (258) 
• “Penelope ... she’s a girl. Which means she takes everything hyper-seriously. If he makes one of his dumb jokes, she goes ballistic. It's like she's paid by the PC brigade to make sure no one has any fucking fun.” (259)
• “He died for me too, didn't he? You think I get lumbered with my sins just because I'm a blowjob goddess?”

July 2025; 334 pages

First published in French by Editions Grasset and Pasquelle in 2015

My paperback edition, translated into English by Frank Wynne, was issued by Maclehose Press in 2018

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Spoiler Alert: a detailed synopsis of the plot of Vernon Subutex 2
Vernon has been very ill. He had a high temperature. He was terrified that he would die. He has been cared for by Charles, a retired alcoholic who has won the lottery and uses the money to drink with the down and outs living, like Vernon, in the parc de Buttes-Chaumont in north Paris. 

Following his illness, he regularly experiences moments of hallucinatory dissociation.

Vernon's friends (Xavier, recovered from his coma, Patrice, Emile, Lydia Bazooka, tranny Daniel and porn star Pamela Kant) have all offered him a place to stay but he prefers living outside with fellow down-and-outs Olga and Laurent. For the moment he has disappeared again. 

Pamela Kant visits Emilie who realises at last that the tapes of Alex Bleach's last interview that Vernon left with her might be valuable but before she can hand them to the group they are stolen by the Hyena who has been working for Laurent Dopalet, the film producer. However, the Hyena (who is now having a lesbian affair with Dopalet's assistant Anais) decides to play the tapes for recently-found Vernon and his friends (including the Hyena's friend, devout moslem Aicha) and at last we discover what is on them. Alex claims that his ex-girlfriend, porn star Vodka Santana, Aicha's mother, had been raped by Dopalet and that when she threatened to expose him he had her murdered. Alex himself has been threatening to expose Dopalet (and now Alex too has died 'from a drug overdose'). 

Vernon goers back to the park but now his friends regularly meet him there and take him for a few drinks at the nearby bar-cafe. New disciples join, such as Aicha's father Selim, and have their angers and sadnesses and frustrations eased; they become reconciled within the group. Not all are certain. Xavier, who now owns a rescue dog, a poodle called Joyeux, has his doubts, but Vernon seems to lift the weight from his shoulders. Celeste the barmaid who also works as a tatooist (and met Vernon in VS1 when she told him she used to go to his record shop Revolver with her dad, a cop) is sceptical. 

But Celeste is recruited by Aicha to go to a lecture given by Dopalet's son, Antoine, and disrupt it by coughing. Celeste takes more direct action, going home with Antoine, sleeping with him, and scrawling graffiti over his walls before she leaves. But Antoine hates his father. When Dopalet dismissed Anais in front of him, Antoine follows her to the nightly meeting with Vernon (via a meeting with Gaelle who seduces Anais away from her lesbian affair with the Hyena) and is recruited to the group, telling Aicha and Celeste how to gain access to Dopalet's apartment. 

The girls go to Dopalet's apartment and terrorise him, tattooing his back with 'RAPIST' and 'MURDERER'. His interior dialogue reveals that he arranged for Vodka Santana, Aicha's mum, to service other powerful men and then, when she threatened to expose them, looked the other way when she was murdered. “She had no idea of the gravity of the threats she was making. Certain situations necessitate extraordinary solutions, there are brilliant careers that cannot be derailed over some vulgar sex scandal. He warned her. She persisted. She had left him no room to maneuver: he had to let his friends know what was happening. But, honestly, when some minor bigwig had said ‘alright, then, she's left us no choice,’ he had not understood. ... He had thought they might ask some Chinese gangster to break her leg. ... She had to be made to see reason. ... When they had asked him to arrange to meet Vodka Satana, he did so, and when he saw the suave playboy they had sent to chat her up ... he had felt reassured ... She had been found dead the next morning. Accidental overdose or suicide. There was nothing to prove it was anything other than a terrible coincidence.” (247)

Loic, the neo-Nazi who put Xavier in a coma, is heart-broken that his best friend Noel has broken up with him over a stupid joke he made. He has contacted Xavier to apologise (he adores the one film Xavier made; he even loved going to Revolver, Vernon's record shop). He becomes reconciled with Xavier and is taken to meet Pamela Kant (he adores porn too) and, despite himself, starts dancing as Vernon DJs. But the next day he is ambushed in the Metro by Noel and the other neo-Nazis. his ex-mates, and beaten to death.

The Hyena, afraid of Doplaet's power and revenge, has arranged that Celeste and Aicha disappear. She knows she will have to flee too. 

They all meet at Loic's funeral but few of them actually enter the church. Instead they end up in the bar opposite, toasting Loic with champagne, and starting an impormptu dancing session. 

The Vernon crowd is now in Corsica. They travel around France arranging 'ceremonies'. As for Vernon: “He is making them all dance.”

"Sweet Thursday" by John Steinbeck

The sequel to Cannery Row.

The intervention of the Second World War has changed things. Gay is dead. Lee Chong has sold the grocery (and, Mack fears, the deeds to the Palace Flophouse) to crooked Joseph and Mary. Dora has died and bequeathed the brothel to Fauna; a new girl called Suzy has joined the team of girls. Doc wants to contribute something to science but can't write the paper and his dissatisfaction with life casts a gloom over the Row. The general diagnosis is that he needs a dame. Is Suzy the one?

The characters are all there, the wise observations are all there, it is as funny as Cannery Row. Perhaps the main difference is that the plot is more prominent; the interchapters that made Cannery Row such an anarchic pleasure are fewer and further between. There seems to be less observation and more device. It's not such a great book as Cannery Row but that is like saying that Ben Jonson is not such a great writer as William Shakespeare. Sweet Thursday is hugely entertaining and the main newcomer, Suzy, is one helluva dame.

Selected quotes:

• “Mack could tell a ghost how to haunt a house.” (Prologue)
• “How few men like their work, their lives - how very few men like themselves.” (Ch 3)
• “The end of life is now not so terribly far away - you can see it's the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch - and your mind says, ‘Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?’All of these, of course, are the foundation of man's greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. ‘What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me ... What how I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth? ... Men seem to be born with a depth they can never pay, no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man.” (Ch 3)
• “What can a man accomplish that has not been done a million times before?” (Ch 3)
• “Doc threw himself into his work, hoping, the way a man will, to smother the unease with weariness.” (Ch 3)
• “It's always hard to start to concentrate. The mind darts like a chicken, trying to escape thinking even though thinking is the most rewarding function of man.” (Ch 6)
• “She had a fine walk, thigh and knee and ankle swinging free and proud, no jerk and totter the way so many women walked as they fell from step to step.” (Ch 6)
• “You never feel real good if you never been a sucker.” (Ch 7)
• “There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.” (Ch 8)
• “I want to take everything I've seen and thought and learned and reduce them and relate them and refine them until I have something of meaning, something of use.” (Ch 10)
• “It's a fact that if he's left alone a guy practically always marries the wrong kind of dame.” (Ch 11)
• “The injustice in the theory of private ownership of real estate was descending on them.” (Ch 14)
• “The delphiniums were like little openings in the sky.” (Ch 19)
• “There aren't many days like that anyplace. People treasure them. ... Old people sit looking off into the distance and remember inaccurately that the days of their youth were all like that. Horses roll in the green pastures on such a day and hens make a terrible sunny racket.” (Ch 19)
• “There ain't never been no dame went out first time with a guy she liked that wasn't scared.” (Ch 22)
• “You look back at every mess you ever got in and your find your tongue started it.” (Ch 22)
• “They ain't nobody was ever insulted by a question.” (Ch 22)
• “The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you.” (Ch 22)
• “Thing people like most in the world is to give you something and have you like it and need it.” (Ch 22)
• “He probably knows more secrets than any man in the community, for his martinis are a combination of Truth serum and lie detector. Veritas is not only in vino but regularly batters its way out.” (Ch 23)
• “S-l-o-w-ness - It gave meaning to everything. It made everything royal. She remembered how all the unsure and worried people she knew jumped and picked and jittered. Just doing everything slowly, forcing herself, she felt a new kind of security.” (Ch 23)
• “Of all our murky inventions, guilt is at once the most tedious, the most comic, the most painful. Was it planted by the group pressure of the tribe to keep the potentially dangerous individual off balance?” (Ch 30)
• “He watched life as a small boy watches a train go by - mouth open, breathing high and light, pleased, astonished, and a little confused.” (Ch 30)
• “Mack ... considered life hardly worse than a bad cold.” (Ch 30)
• “She has all the convictions of the uninformed ... not only sure for herself, but sure for everyone.” (Ch 33)

July 2025; 206 pages

First published in 1954 by William Heinemann

My Pan paperback edition issued in 1958

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog can be found here.

A detailed synopsis of the plot

Doc is dissatisfied with life. He is experimenting on octopuses but he’s finding it impossible to write his paper. The other residents of the Row reckon he needs a dame.

There;s a new girl in town. Suzy joins the brothel, now run by Fauna, even though she isn't really cut out for that kind of job.

Fauna does Hazel's horoscope and predicts that his inescapable destiny is to become President of the United States. Eddie offers: ‘We’ve weathered some pretty bad ones.’ 

Mack realises that the Flophouse belonged to Lee Chong and then Lee Chong sold his business to Joseph and Mary who perhaps doesn’t realise that he owns the Flophouse but when he gets the tax demand for it he will at which point he will want to collect rent from Mack and the boys. Even if they kill Joseph and Mary, someone will inherit their house. Mack comes up with the plan to raffle the Flophouse to buy Doc the big new microscope he needs and make sure that Doc draws the winning ticket.

Every time Doc and Suzy meet, they end up shouting at each other. Nevertheless, Fauna persuades them to have dinner together (she'll pay) at Sonny Boy's. She also persuades Mack that the raffle will also be an engagement party with a fancy dress (Snow White) theme.

The Night Out: When Doc sees Suzy, whom Fauna has decked to the nines, he scarpers back home to put on a next-tie. Doc and Suzy dine at Sunny Boy’s. Sunny Boy has been primed, the table is ready, laid perfectly, the cocktails ready mixed. The menu sorted. Fauna has organised everything and they fall in love.

At the party Doc wins the Flophouse ... and then reveals (but only to Mack) that Mack already owned it. Lee Chong deeded it to Mack and paid ten years tax on it. He didn’t tell Mack because he was afraid Mack would sell it. Mack asks Doc never to tell anyone and to hold on to the house because otherwise Mack would sell it. Doc agrees to rent the house to Mack. 

DSuzy makes her appearance as Snow White, the bride. Doc tries to react well but Suzy reads his face and runs off. Fauna follows and Suzy reveals she loves Doc.

Suzy goes to the Golden Poppy and asks Ella for a job, she’ll work for free. She buys some furniture and moves into the boiler that Sam Molloy and his wife used to live in.

Hazel consults everyone he can to try and get Doc and Suzy back together. Suzy says she wants no part of Doc unless he gets sick or busts a leg. 

Joseph and Mary decides to 'have a whack at' Suzy but she slams the door on him, catching his hand in it. Doc fights him and almost throttles him to death. J&M and Doc have a drink and then they gather flowers. Doc dresses smart and pays a formal call on Suzy. They talk and she tells him she is over him. He says he’s going to La Jolla to collect specimens.

Hazel realises what he must do. He gets a base ball bat. Doc wakes up with a broken arm.

Suzy offers to drive Doc down to La Jolla. She goes to Mack for emergency lessons on how to drive.

Mack presents Doc with the scientific apparatus bought with the takings from the raffle ... but instead of a microscope it is a telescope. 

Doc and Suzy drive away from Cannery Row.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God