Books REVIEWS
SHORT STORIES ADAM ROSS Ladies and Gentlemen (Jonathan Cape) ●●●●●
In spite of a dark, comically cruel tone throughout, Ladies and Gentlemen makes surprisingly quick and easy reading. As with his 2010 debut novel, Mr Peanut, Adam Ross suffuses his prose with intrigue and offbeat humour. But these seven tales feel more mature and avoid the structural over- complexity that undermined the astonishing talent he showed in his first book.
Among the best in this collection are opener ‘Futures’ – in which an unemployed man attends a series of surreal job interviews – and ‘Middleman’,
a touching story of adolescent awakening that’s seemingly inspired by Ross’ own background as a child actor and student at New York’s prestigious Trinity School. In contrast, the eponymous final tale doesn’t match up to the intensity of those that precede it. But they’re all vivid depictions of modern anxiety and a lament to humankind’s waning attachment to commitment, deftly told by one of the most accomplished new writers working in the US today. (Yasmin Sulaiman)
ANIMATED TALES DOUGLAS COUPLAND & GRAHAM ROUMIEU Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People (Heinemann) ●●●●● Anyone who has glances at the cover of this book and believes they have spied a cute illustration for kids might want to look again. It suggests that reading this collaboration between Generation X writer Douglas Coupland and Graham Roumieu, the creator of faux Bigfoot memoirs, will render you paranoid and upset, possibly even leading to bouts of vomiting, trouser-wetting and defecation.
Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People is a set of seven stories filled with anti-heroes who lie, cheat, steal and hustle their way in life with little sense of natural justice in return. Among the central cretins are a terrible babysitter who abandons her charges, a weird internet-obsessed exchange student called Hans and a mean-spirited juice carton who only wants to smash up all other juice cartons. It’s a breezily entertaining enough read, but fans of Coupland will race through it in anticipation of his next proper book sometime next year. (Brian Donaldson) 68 THE LIST 15 Dec 2011–5 Jan 2012
SOCIAL STUDY MIRANDA JULY It Chooses You (Canongate) ●●●●● It’s OK to be a bit weird around Miranda July; in fact, she’d probably prefer it. She created her first play as a teenager, about her real penpal friendship with a jailed murderer, then wrote films and novels, starring in her first movie, Me
and You and Everyone We Know, which won the Special Jury Prize at 2005’s Sundance Festival.
Much of her inspiration comes from real encounters; she
grew up in California and spent her twenties shoplifting and dabbling in performance art in Portland, Oregon, no doubt inspiring the Pacific Northwest oddities that populate her short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You. But in 2009, when this book was written, July had run out of creative juice. She had a film script to finish (for The Future, recently in cinemas) but had hit a wall. To prise herself away from her computer, she started responding to classified ads in a weekly PennySaver leaflet. Her meetings with a facially- scarred leopard collector, a tadpole-selling schoolboy and a daydreaming housewife who collects photo albums of a couple she’s never met, all showcase July’s trademark ability to home in, guided-missile style, on quirk. The fact she’s probably omitted the more ‘normal’ and therefore less interesting people she meets is beside the point. What matters is July’s reactions to these people. Although teen Miranda would have befriended the tagged criminal selling kids’ books, now, ‘I wanted to grab the hand of myself at 16, and the hand of my future daughter, and run.’ A natural nosey parker, July’s housecalls let her expertly join the dots between casual autobiography, freakshow awe, and sweetly reassuring human truths. (Claire Sawers)
TRANSLATED POEM SIMON ARMITAGE The Death of King Arthur (Faber) ●●●●●
In 2006 Simon Armitage embarked upon the commissioned task of translating ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ for a modern audience. Encountering some resistance from the ‘lady on the desk’ at the British Library when he requested a peek at the original manuscript, he chose not to go down the ‘don’t you know who I am?’ line. Given the acclaim which he received upon the publication of those endeavours, it’s highly likely that he would have experienced few obstacles on researching ‘The Death of King Arthur’. Once again, the Yorkshireman renders medieval
prose effortlessly readable as he brings to life the ‘awesome adventures’ within this 4000-line poem while his caption footnotes help frame the tale (an Arthurian feast can take up to three pages while the slaying of Gawain requires just the one). Arthur may be a tough guy to love, what with his disdain for a ‘malevolent Scotland’, but Armitage’s work keeps you glued to his fate. (Brian Donaldson)
FICTIONALISED HISTORY MICHEL SCHNEIDER Marilyn’s Last Sessions: A Novel (Canongate) ●●●●●
By including the words ‘a novel’ in his title, Michel Schneider has bought himself a neat caveat: some aspects of this semi-biographical account of Marilyn Monroe and her psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson are true, while others are not. If that sounds frustrating, wait until you see the structure. During the course of almost 400 pages, we revisit the pair’s former haunts, flitting from Los Angeles to New York, London, Vienna and back again – rarely in any chronological order. The snapshots of Monroe’s troubled past and her dealings with
Hollywood’s leading figures are fascinating though.
Similarly, Greenson’s dichotomous personality – convivial party host one minute, empathic therapist the next – makes for interesting reading. But despite being an accurate metaphor for the kind of butterfly thinking that takes place in therapy, the novel’s relentless toing and froing serves little purpose other than to confuse the reader. (Kelly Apter)