“Your writing has punch, David. Punch is power!”
After all these years, this simple message, my first words of true validation as a fledgling writer, has never left me. It echoes in my mind like a long canyon scream each time I sit down to a blank page, and inspires me to fill it with my true voice. After a childhood of failed classes and dismal report cards (most of which ended with comments such as, “David has potential, but his hyperactivity and attention-seeking behavior are a constant distraction to the class!”), it was if I had pulled the proverbial red pen from the stone. No small victory for the delinquent son of a public-school teacher, but let’s be honest, I was never destined to become the next Bill Shakespeare (ask any of my traumatized English teachers). It only makes sense that this particular validation wasn’t given by any of the poor, frustrated educators I left in my wake. No, it came from a truly brilliant writer who shaped my love (and fear) of the written word. The man, the myth, the legend … my father, James Harper Grohl.
The idea came the day after Britain shut its pubs down. Flynn had left his pub behind three weeks earlier, but still wanted to provide something for the dedicated teams who turned up every Thursday night to The Crown. He created an event on Facebook for a digital pub quiz he planned to hold on a Saturday, and went about his weekend. Little did he know he had configured the event incorrectly, meaning that it wasn’t just Flynn’s friends who could see and join the event, but the entire world.
He was sat in his work at a car dealership on the following Monday when his phone pinged with a Facebook Messenger notification. The face of someone he didn’t know appeared in a circle on his screen; when he tapped it to open the conversation, they were asking for more details about the quiz he was hosting that Thursday. Flynn went on Facebook and looked at the event. There were 800 people interested. He showed the screen to his boss, who bet him he’d have a thousand people interested by the end of the day. When he left the dealership at 7pm, told by his employer that they’d be closed for the foreseeable future due to the coronavirus, it was 10,000. His boss then said it’d be 20,000 by the following morning. When Flynn pulled up outside his home – a 20-minute drive from work – it had reached that number. By Tuesday morning, it was 100,000. Later that day it was 250,000.
When I tell you that Roddy Doyle’s new novel, “Love,” is about two 50-ish men talking well-oiled talk in a pub, you’ll say you’ve heard that one before. You haven’t. When I tell you that the novel isn’t so much about what happens, or happened once upon a time, as it is about the mystically inaccurate nature of language, you’ll say you learned that lesson long ago. You didn’t, at least not the way Doyle spins it. When I tell you that in spite of these familiarities, you’ll wind up caring about a bond that seems to rely mainly on words, you’ll say you won’t. You will.
It takes a certain insouciance to write a novel about a group of Oxford graduates reminiscing about their Pimm’s-drinking student days in the current climate. Who really wants to peer into the hearts of privileged white women called things like Priss and Helena who employ Bulgarian cleaners and insist on calling themselves “middle class” when they surely mean upper middle class? It’s not as if this substrata of society has been under-represented in literary fiction.
However, Lara Feigel is quite aware of what she is doing – a homemade elderflower muffin, which appears on the first page, is carefully chosen. She is prepared to court dislike in her pursuit of the emotional truth of these women’s lives. As her omniscient narrator, Stella, reflects: “Perhaps that’s the biggest problem of being middle class and white and English and a woman, finding it embarrassing to take ourselves seriously. I’d have done so much more with my life if I hadn’t felt embarrassed.”
In an interview with LitHub, Shibli suggests that “maybe the realization of the repeated injustice that one cannot escape in the context of Palestine was the first force to push me early on into literature.” In this novel, this injustice is about only one event, recognized by one person many years after it occurred. But this does not lessen the horror of it, and by writing the horrifying event in the present, Shibli renders the viciousness in stark simplicity. Though a spare novel, Shibli’s work is powerful and this translation by Elisabeth Jaquette is rendered with exquisite clarity and quiet control.
we say, when someone’s
sensitive. So touchy. So
dangerous and delicate and
ready to tip. Touching,