"Americanitis" by Miles Beard

Autofiction. In a book dedicated to his dead wife, Miles Beard, author, writes about the death of the wife of Miles Beard, narrator. 

This is a palimpsest of narrative layers. Much of the narrative is a memoir written for his therapist. Miles the narrator himself has an alter ego called Alazon who acts as an internet troll. Real people such as singer-songwriter Sophie Auster appear. 

There's a version of the 'Hero's Journey' in the structure of this book. It starts in the protagonist's home world of Scotland which he then leaves for a dream-like research fellowship in the US which culminates in a near-breakdown and a nightmarish journey (very On the Road, very Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, also autofictions) from East to West Coast before he returns home. In the US section (from which the novel takes his name: Americanitis being a nickname for neurasthenia, a nineteenth-century psychological exhaustion attributed to the stresses of  urban civilization) he faces trials and ordeals. But the ultimate tribulation assails him back in Scotland. At the end he emerges a wiser and perhaps a better man. 

The question of what happened to his wife is drip-fed through the first three-quarters of the book; it becomes a puzzle for the reader to solve. The narrative shifts into another gear once enlightenment dawns. So for the bulk of the of the book it is the challenges which create a stimulating and engaging read, whilst towards the end I was gripped by the story.

It's not an easy read. The author (who is also the narrator, who is also the protagonist) researches into and lectures on literature. This is reflected in a number of throwaway cultural references, many of which I found obscure. It is also, from time to time, modelled in the prose. But it is beautifully written with characters who were three-dimensional and complex adult humans and a protagonist who is a modern Everyman in his hypochondria, his double standards, and his moral weaknesses. His tortured journey is one with which we can all empathise, if not identify. 

A fascinating and brilliant exploration of some of the darker experiences of life.

Selected quotes:

• "The autobiographies of artists tend to present the quotidian sides of the practitioner as metaphors for their craft rather than deal explicitly with that craft." (Ch 3). I've noticed this. It frustrates me. Sometimes you read a biography of a writer than doesn't acknowledge the fact that they spent perhaps several thousand hours cooped up in a small room sitting at a desk writing each year.
• “Creativity isn't necessarily straightforward in its dealings with the world. To put it another way, no one has ever convinced me that the geniuses who have the lasting human touch we call art are either monsters or role models, or even that they should be. Shamans don't have to be horrible or nice.” (Ch 6)
• “What counts about artists is that they perceive reality differently. In any clinical sense they're not schizophrenics ... because they produce something coherent in its own terms that is valued by their communities.” (Ch 6)
• “Back at the house it was, indeed, cocktail hour, a misnomer they deployed in a casually ironic manner that failed to convey their drink of choice or the typical duration of imbibing.” (Ch 9)
• “Just because you wander in the desert it doesn't mean there's a promised land at the end.” (Ch 10)
• “When someone asks how we're doing we have to say ‘not bad’ because anything more positive than that and you'll get the shit ripped out of you for being so up yourself.” (Ch 11)
• “Sarah went on to talk about the parallax of narrative, how the introduction of distance between what the reader is told has happened and what the characters seem to experience as having happened had undermined not just our ability to tell stories with any objective understanding of what we wanted them to be about, but to tell stories even about ourselves in good faith. It has always been the case, of course, that narrative is a multifaceted thing. But the postmodern turn had submerged us beneath plunging depths of doubt, she said, and, like our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, it was irrevocable.” (Ch 15)
• “I had to inhabit her mind, become her, sink beneath her skin, and then ask myself questions only philosophers should ever have to ask. Questions like: what is the nature of being alive; what is it that makes life worth living; what is the process of death; and on whose timeline of it do we deserve to adhere.” (Ch 23)
• “Our utterances derive value not from their murky, ephemeral Intent but, latterly, their reductive interpretation, a recipient act we could only ever play the smallest of parts in shaping, mainly by attempting to precogitate that reductivity in the first place.” (Ch 23)
• “The key to living is accepting that we are monsters and yet lovable as well.” (Ch 24)
• “Heart is bursting. It's kind of sad that the human body only has so many ways of processing experiences. It feels exactly like I'm about to deliver a conference paper.” (Ch 25)

September 2024; 220 pages

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

Some of those cultural references:

• 'Alazon' is explained as a stock character, an imposter, in Ancient Greek drama, such as the braggart soldier, the Miles Gloriosus. 
• The protagonist's thesis is said to focus on "Nadar, Tennessee Williams and Charles Mingus" (Ch 1) I presume that Nadar is the pioneer of aerial photography (from hot air balloons) who died in 1910 althouygh I'm not clear how he firts with Tenessee Williams and Charles Mingus. In any case, Beard only seems to research Mingus.
• Is "Propp, the old Russki fool" (Ch 1) the writer of 'The Morphology of the Folktale'? 
• Is "Geoffrey Braithwaite" (Ch 4) meant to be the protagonist of Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes? 
• In New York Beard stays in a room on the thirteenth floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania; he believes "it was Frank Olson's room". Olson was a biological warfare scientist who died falling from his room on the tenth floor of the Hotel Statler, later renamed the Pennsylvania; there is a theory that his death was an extrajudicial murder by the CIA. 

Can anyone tell me the title of the essay by Tom Wolfe that the partygoer refers to in Chapter 5?