the outlier
hello,
This week, paid subscribers receive an audio version of this letter! The voiceover should be at the head of this week’s issue.
(Everyone should be able to read the entire text so please let me know if you can’t!)
Buyer be warned, it’s not a full word for word reading of the letter but a commentary on it including a few deep cuts that didn’t make it (a DVD extra if you will).
the books📖
I’m away this week so have had a couple of days off work. It’s been lovely, although I’m also assailed with freelancers guilt (this must surely be an actual affliction?) I do have an ongoing theory I must have mentioned that the UK should make like France and properly down tools for August rather than pretend to do things, or at best, do them very slowly.
Nonetheless, I’m fielding a few interesting proposals which will make the autumn exciting. One relates to one of my favourite books ever while another is an extremely intriguing offer to create something for a new, tech-led storytelling platform. As long as everything stacks up, I’ll say yes to both of these things.
The next week or so, I’ll take advantage of my quieter countryside surroundings to get the Superstrengths audio recording done. Then while I’m rigged up and have the audio engineer engaged, I might make a start on a few of the narrations I mentioned in last week’s letter.
for your interest
in-between moves, coyotes and intimacies
in-between moves
Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo is coming out in September and I think it might be her best book yet.
I was lucky enough to get an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC), after making some fun, pathetic TikToks about how I didn’t have it, and after a bit of a slow start, the book really takes off, its tale of two brothers forced to reconcile their relationship in the wake of their father’s death flying to the finish. I thought it was brilliant.
In chess, an Intermezzo, or ‘in-between move’, is an unexpected move that poses a severe threat and forces an immediate response. The younger brother Ivan is a chess prodigy, his progression on hold after a prodigious teenage career, (elder brother Peter is a lawyer) and the Intermezzo of the book is their bereavement. The narration of Peter’s early chapters is very stilted, staccato prose showcasing his emotional state, his faculties battered by and dependent on various drugs, alcohol and what Dublin society would regard as aberrant sexual behaviour. Ivan’s chapters make for easier reading but he’s considered a bit of an oddball, perhaps mildly autistic, uncomfortable around people and happier playing chess. Nevertheless, chess puts him on his own romantic path, falling into a relationship with an older divorced woman, another move that puts him at odds with Peter.
There’s some strict limitations on what I can share about the book before its release but in general, I found it an enormously empathetic work, with Rooney getting you to sympathise with and care for two initially quite dislikable male characters, a true act of empathy for people unlike herself.
Stylistically Rooney has moved on, trying something new in many respects, and this is no clearer than in her jettisoning of the extended email conversations that featured in all her previous books. I liked these conversations but they always felt a little forced, their hyper-literacy belying the characters themselves and betraying the hand of the author, using them as a shortcut for explaining intentions and feelings. Intermezzo manages without this crutch but loses none of the intimacy which particularly with Peter, arrives in introspective moments where his precarious self-image is laid bare to the reader. I was fascinated to find where the book would go given the open threads later on but Rooney nails the conclusion. It’s a nuanced, caring and challenging piece of work.
Overall, Intermezzo is a triumph, deserves its doubtless enormous success and I can’t wait to read again.
coyotes
A couple of years ago, and don’t ask me how I discovered this, I was fascinated to learn about the artist Joseph Beuys’ 1979 piece of performance art I Like America and America Likes Me. Beuys flew into New York to spend three days trapped in a room with a wild coyote.
The idea was to broach the various divisions present in the nation, with the coyote symbolising America’s wild nature, its Native American past and the animal’s own reputation as a subversive power or trickster. It was also a wild animal, which posed its own very real physical dangers to Beuys and in a recent online viral version of this locked room problem, women were asked to choose between being alone in the woods with a man or a bear. Most people chose the bear. Men are now considered more dangerous than wild animals.
To be fair, statistics say harm is more likely to befall you (whoever you are) from an intimate partner than any animal – The Office of National Statistics say one in seven men (13.9%) and one in four women (27%) will be a victim of domestic abuse in their lifetime – while the National Parks Service says there are about 40 bear attacks per year but if people believe huge swathes of men are universally to be avoided, we have a problem.
For Joseph Beuys, his three days locked up with a coyote passed without incident and were described as ‘ambiguous but not meaningless’ and ‘a valuable absurdity in a world that is locked into the status quo.’ While division remains the status quo, you could say art like Rooney’s, that reaches for understanding, is a valuable absurdity we need.
intimacies
Uniting last week’s theme of free speech and the idea of the coyote is the idea of perspective and in books, there is a perspective that’s missing. Book critic Barry Pierce said,
‘The fact there is no major UK or Irish male novelist, no household name, aged between twenty-five and thirty-five at the moment is immensely strange.’
And that is strange isn’t it? Given the historical preponderance and dominance of famous male novelists people, you’d expect there to be someone. But there sort of isn’t.
I would say Sally Rooney is our preeminent novelist, mixing critical and audience acclaim, chart-topping sales, well-regarded adaptations and perhaps most importantly, having no other media ‘presence’. Like Zadie Smith, Rooney can move the market by merely doing the work, free to do as little media as she wants. Most novelists are somewhat beholden to feeding the beast and many clearly owe some of their success to their social media accounts rather than the quality of their work.
And on her work, Rooney says,
‘I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy, and the way we construct one another.’
Intermezzo is certainly about our continual constructing of one another and while there are a lot of younger, female, sometimes Irish novelists published and marketed in a similar vein to Rooney, this piece by Imogen Knights-West discussed the lack of straight men writing personal pieces about relationships, perhaps due to the ‘hostile reception’ this sort of thing would encounter, driven by what Vogue dating columnist and author of a very good book Annie Lord says is ‘the obvious power imbalance’. To rephrase comedian Stewart Lee, who says the last taboo is ‘a man trying to do something sincerely and well’, perhaps the last taboo is a younger man trying to tell you in writing how he feels, sincerely at least. Male perspective on intimacy is the coyote we refuse to cuddle.
So where are the young male writers and why aren’t they the big names of literature like in the past? Boy Parts (a book I LOVE) author Eliza Clark says,
15-25 years ago boredom with men’s literary writing was totally justified, but now, it feels like we’re tarring every single male writer with the same brush […] If we wish to truly champion diversity, we must include men.
There are talented, young male authors working today – the extraordinarily distinctive Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze and Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, both writers from ‘nontraditional’ backgrounds, are two of my favourite books of the past few years – but perhaps they need to be marketed to men, who are more likely to be reading nonfiction if they are reading or playing games if they aren’t. Nonfiction and games both offer a kind of ladder to climb, easily recognisable levels, benefits and prizes that appeal to the attitude of constant competitive getting ahead demanded of young men in the various markets they find themselves participating in. Fiction’s promise is unclear, each book offers someone else to someone else, but the very greatest thing it can do is help you to understand your world. As James Baldwin (see my quick intro to his work here) said,
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.
This is why reaching out to young men and offering them literature from people they can recognise is important. It helps them understand what intimacy is. The other thing they need is a man to take a risk, cuddle the coyote and write the sort of thing that’s missing.
a book
Rooney’s Intermezzo isn’t out until the end of September but you could preorder your copy.
a listen
I hadn’t heard this old one from Joy Crookes. She’s great.
a quote
The world reveals itself to those who walk
— Werner Herzog
lastly
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