I have never read Siri Hustvedt. I think maybe I should. I will start with her first novel, The Blindfold.
I am invited to read at a new monthly live literature event in town. This is an event that in a few months has become unexpectedly popular. The first night was in the basement of a bar in the university district. The venue was tiny and it was packed. If you weren’t standing by the bar there was no way you could get a drink. The organiser was a young writer who had just won a two-book deal with a fashionable publisher, but he was so modest and self-effacing in his skinny jeans and crumpled shirt, no one was anything but pleased for him. Plus, he could write, which helped.
They held the second evening in the upstairs room at the same venue, which was much bigger with a proper stage, decent seating and a disco ball hanging from the high ceiling. Still, the crowds kept coming, creative-writing students mainly, but also each successive month seemed to draw in more and more characters from the north-west writing ‘scene’. Bloggers, debut novelists, literature professionals. Lecturers in creative writing. Across town, science-fiction writers and crime novelists soldiered on in readings at local libraries where they and the sad-eyed staff easily outnumbered the few people who had dragged themselves in off the streets to ask where the writers got their ideas from and how they had found their agents.
As I sit waiting to go on, I listen to the other readers. Girls with dyed hair and low-slung jeans read rough poems about sex and alcohol. Boys with pipe-cleaner legs and Converse trainers, and bookshelves back home full of Richard Brautigan and Charles Bukowski, tell stories about pool tables and girls and lonely men and failed sexual encounters and alcohol.
I go on and look out at the sea of faces twenty years younger than mine, their owners lifting expensive bottles of beer to their lips or rolling spliffs to stick behind their ears for later on, and I wonder for the first time if these reading nights have encouraged the formation of a particular school of writing marked by whimsy and flippant jokes and throwaway lines about sexual inadequacy. I wonder, if that’s the case, how my own stuff will play. But as I stand thinking, the murmuring falls away and the room is filled with a tense, electric silence, in case I have dried.
But I begin. I read an extract from my novel-in-progress. It’s a scene set in a pub. Dialogue between the narrator and two other characters, one more important than the other. While I read, I am aware of my attention wandering. When this happens, I am always surprised by my ability to stick to the script. Like flying by wire. Some back-brain function keeps the reading going while my mind fills up with unrelated thoughts. I look up frequently and at a table near the front I see Elizabeth Baines, her silver-blonde hair cut in a flattering new style, the lights reflected from the disco ball flashing in her spectacle lenses. I think of the barbecue at AJ’s. I briefly picture Lewis. Even that doesn’t put me off my stride.
When I have finished I leave the stage and the organisers call a break. Before I have a chance to sit down, I notice someone walking towards me. A woman, tall and angular, with heavy eye make-up and dark bobbed hair beginning to go grey. She’s familiar, yet I cannot place her. She offers her hand and I take it hesitantly. Her handshake is firm but brief. When she introduces herself I realise I’ve seen her photo on a book jacket. She lectures in creative writing at one of the other universities.
‘Nice reading,’ she says as she touches my arm and smiles from under her hair. ‘I just wanted to give you a heads-up.’
I realise that she is quite drunk. She goes on to say that the scene in the extract I just read — about the brace position and whether it’s intended to save lives or curtail them — had sounded very familiar to her and her friends.
‘Around our table,’ she adds, gesturing vaguely towards the back of the room. ‘We looked at each other and we said, “That’s familiar. That’s Fight Club.”’
I raise my eyebrows. At the same time I become aware of someone, another woman, standing close by, as if she wants to speak to one of us and is waiting for an opportunity.
‘I’m not saying you lifted it, of course. We’re not saying that. But it’s similar. I just, I suppose, I just wanted to let you know, in case, you know…’
‘That’s very thoughtful of you,’ I say.
‘In case, you know, anyone says, anyone else. You’ll know, you know.’
‘Yeah.’
She touches my arm again.
The other woman, whoever she is, will have seen that. I glance towards her, but that hand is still on my arm and I look back at its owner.
‘The book, I mean,’ she continues, ‘not the film. Definitely the book.’
‘Well, that’s good. I haven’t even read the book. I’ve seen the film. Everybody’s seen the film, haven’t they? But I haven’t read the book.’
‘It’s in the book, I’m sure it is. I just thought. We just thought. You should be aware of it. In case.’
‘Thank you,’ I say and I can see that she is finally backing off and as she does so I realise how close to me she had been standing. She smiles as she turns away to face the direction in which she is walking, with exaggerated care.
I look at the other woman properly for the first time. I recognise her, but I don’t know from where. I smile at her. Too late I realise it’s Grace.
‘She was winding you up,’ Grace says.
‘You think?’
‘She was definitely winding you up.’
‘She said she was just letting me know so I could check it out, so I’d know, you know. I’d be prepared should anyone else make a similar remark. I’d have had a chance to figure out what to say. Or I could cut the scene.’
‘Exactly,’ says Grace. ‘She’s playing with you.’
‘Either she is, or she isn’t.’
‘Believe me. She wants you to cut the scene, or to be uneasy about it.’
‘Or spend time and money checking to see if she’s right,’ I say.
‘Exactly. And you will, won’t you?’
‘Either I will, or I won’t.’
I experience a sudden wave of tiredness and glance towards where I’d been sitting. Grace seems to sense my need and nods at the table. I don’t invite her to sit down, but she sits down anyway. I take a long drink from my glass. I wonder how many more readers there will be. I wonder how long the break will last before they start again. I wonder how long Grace will sit there giving me her basilisk stare.
‘What did you think of what I sent you?’ she asks out of the blue.
I have to think before I know what she is talking about.
‘It was good. I liked the setting,’ I say. ‘Very vivid. I’ve never been to Zanzibar — never even been to Africa — but it felt authentic. And the detail about low flying and very low flying. I liked that too.’
‘Was there anything about it you didn’t like?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I think I liked it all.’
‘What about the ending?’
‘OK, the ending. I wasn’t sure about the ending.’
‘Wasn’t sure about the idea or that I’d got it right?’ Grace’s persistence lacked the charm of Helen’s. ‘You can see what I’m trying to do there?’
‘You are suggesting that his head is taken clean off by the undercarriage of the Hercules and you ambitiously have the POV switch to the severed head as it hits the ground and rolls across the beach. You describe what the eyes see as this happens, picking up on an earlier point about consciousness surviving for a certain amount of time after beheading.’