The Bluestocking, vol 97: Six samey novels about middle-class provincials
Happy Friday!
Thanks to an extended period of hibernation over Christmas, this edition is a BUMPER one. Yesterday I went to see SWEAT at the Donmar, and I would highly recommend it (hopefully it will transfer to the West End, as all the other critics loved it too). It's about steelworkers in a small town in Pennsylvania, and it made me think about how we have so little expectation of businesses to do anything other than maximise shareholder value.
I'm sure I've said this before, that I don't want to romanticise the paternalism of Bourneville etc, but it's astounding to me that firms like Timpsons (which makes a point of employing ex-offenders, who make up 10% of the workforce, and offers a free suit cleaning to anyone unemployed going for a job interview) are so rare. Having a job is, for many people, an anchor in their life - a source of pride, maybe; of identity; a link to their family history. The huge disruptions of the 21st century have really affected that model and we've asked very little of employers in terms of compensating for it.
I worry that when we leave the EU, it will be part of a "bonfire of red tape" and we'll see things here like the grotesque auction between US states for Amazon's second headquarters. (In Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in their Own Land, a book I kept thinking of while watching SWEAT, it becomes very clear that polluting firms in Louisiana get away with flouting environmental regulations by the threat of moving to another state.)
Before Christmas I interviewed a Deliveroo driver for a Radio 4 series I'm doing, and the mechanics of that job are fascinating. One of the unexpected things I learned was that for him, it offers something important - enough hours. At the bottom end of the labour market, one of the big problems is underemployment: what if you can only get a job that will give you 25 hours a week, but those hours are fixed? You're not making enough to live on, but also you can't get another 15 hours elsewhere because it would clash. The "gig economy" offers flexibility that, say, care home shifts don't. I enjoyed the two pieces on American metrics-driven jobs (delivery driving and cable installation) linked below for the same reason.
Helen
Keira Knightley: 'I can’t act the flirt or mother to get my voice heard
So if women don’t come on flirty or maternal, she thinks, some men get stumped. “Before motherhood, you’re sexy, but if we talk about the whole vagina-splitting thing then that’s terrifying; there’s no sex there, so what we do is go into the virgin-mother retrofit, that’s nice and safe. The problem with those two images is I think very few women actually identify with them. Women are meant to play the flirt or the mother in order to get their voice heard. I can’t. It makes me feel sick.”
On set, she was informed by a male director – not Westmoreland – exactly what she was: not passive-aggressive, but openly aggressive. Her eyes pop recalling the shock. “I thought that was extraordinary. I hadn’t raised my voice, I hadn’t sworn, I simply disagreed with a point. And this was someone I liked.”
Heavens be praised for an actor whose interviews don't make you want to lapse into a coma.
I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon
Delivering in El Sobrante one day, I popped into a convenience store on San Pablo Avenue. I bought an energy bar, but that was a mere pretext. “I wonder if I might use your lavatory,” I asked the proprietor, a gentleman of Indian descent, judging by his accent, in a dapper beret.
A cloud passed over his face. “You make number one or two?”
“Just one!” I promised. He inclined his head toward the back of the store, in the direction of the “Employees only” bathroom.
After thanking him on my way out, I mentioned that I was new at Amazon, still figuring out restroom strategies.
“Amazon drivers, FedEx drivers, UPS, Uber, Lyft—everybody has to go.”
But where? When no john can be found, when the delivery associate is denied permission to use the gas-station bathroom, he is sometimes left with no other choice than to repair to the dark interior of the cargo bay—the belly of the beast—with an empty Gatorade bottle.
Enjoyed this story about a journalist who got laid off from TIME, and now delivers Amazon packages. He decides he hasn't "come down in the world" - he's still the same - but the business model that sustained journalism simply doesn't exist the way it used to. I picked this extract because my friend Laura sent it to me, with the question: "What do female Amazon drivers do?"
Chaser:
This funny, disturbing piece about the life of a female "cable guy" has the answer: spend valuable work time - time that you will be penalised for using for this purpose - looking for public bathrooms. (Also worrying: all the pervs. Of a guy who groped her, the author (who is over 6ft and has short hair), writes: "It’s part of why I didn’t mind most people assuming I was a man. Each time I had to calculate the odds of something worse against the odds of getting back to my van." The world of casual work is moving towards these metric-driven jobs. But are the metrics accounting for the hazards women in particular face, like not wanting to go into a house because they fear for their physical safety? Hmm. We've barely got to grips with sexual harassment by colleagues, let alone the customer, who is always right.)
"That’s the thing they don’t tell you about opiate addiction. People are in pain because unless you went to college, the only way you’ll earn a decent living is by breaking your body or risking your life — plumbers, electricians, steamfitters, welders, mechanics, cable guys, linemen, fishermen, garbagemen, the options are endless. They’re all considered jobs for men because they require a certain amount of strength. The bigger the risk, the bigger the paycheck . So you take a couple pills to get through the day, the week, the year. If painkillers show up on your drug test, you have that prescription from the last time you fell off a roof. Because that’s the other thing about these jobs, they all require drug tests when you get hurt. Smoke pot one night, whether for fun or because you hurt too much to sleep, the company doesn’t have to pay for your injury when your van slides down an icy off-ramp three weeks later."
Martin Amis: Jane's World
Beside me sat Salman Rushdie. For various reasons—various security reasons—we had to stay. Thus the Ayatollah Khomeini had condemned me to sit through “Four Weddings and a Funeral”; and no Iranian torturer could have elicited a greater variety of winces and flinches, of pleadings and whimperings. One was obliged to submit, and absorb a few social lessons, in agonizing surroundings. It felt like a reversal of the Charles Addams cartoon: I sat there, thoroughly aghast, while everyone about me (save the author of “The Satanic Verses”) giggled and gurgled, hugging themselves with the deliciousness of it all. The only good bit was when you realized that the titular funeral was going to feature Simon Callow. I clenched my fist and said yes. At least one of them was going to die.
From the New Yorker's archive, this piece about Jane Austen from Martin Amis dates from 1996. Come for the diss of Four Weddings, stay for Amis describing Austen's oeuvre as “six samey novels about middle-class provincials”, presumably before going to write another novel with a cold male protagonist assailed by two-dimensional nagging frigid cows.
Sally Rooney Gets In Your Head
The Internet isn’t Rooney’s subject, any more than the letter was Austen’s, but she has assimilated online communication into a new kind of prose. “She does it in a way that’s totally natural,” Bohan, her agent, told me. “Whereas, if it were someone in his or her forties or fifties, it’d sort of be, like, ‘I Am Writing a Novel About the Internet.’ ”
Rooney told me that in “Conversations with Friends” she was interested in exploring “e-mail voice,” the way that Frances and her friends “curate their styles of communication online.” This isn’t a flashy conceptual move; it’s just that e-mails, texts, instant messages, and Facebook posts are an unquestioned part of her characters’ everyday routines. A novel without them would be like a novel without chairs. After an illicit kiss, Frances receives an e-mail from Nick, and forces herself to wait an hour before responding. “I watched some cartoons on the Internet and made a cup of coffee,” she recalls. “Then I read his e-mail again several times. I was relieved he had put the whole thing in lower case like he always did. It would have been dramatic to introduce capitalization at such a moment of tension.” Reading our lives, we are all New Critics.
This profile of the novelist Sally Rooney captures what I liked about Conversations With Friends, one of the few fiction books I read last year: her ability to capture the rhythm of texting, her ability to write about sex, and the way she captures recognisable characters who are slightly awful but half in on the joke of that. I said on Saturday Review in December that I had saved Normal People and was going to read it over Christmas as a treat. I did not do this. I read Break-in by Dick Francis instead. But I will.
Power Walking
Around the age of five I began to borrow my brother’s clothes. Boys’ clothes afforded a greater practical freedom, were better for sliding down banisters, climbing trees, even the simple act of sitting. There was a lot of focus when I was growing up on making sure I sat properly, that is with my legs closed. My brother didn’t have to sit that way, which seemed odd to me, given that he had something far more prominent to display. I wondered why, if what girls had between their legs needed to be so closely guarded, we were the ones to wear skirts.
This article, by Aminatta Forna, is really thoughtful on walking and public space, and how gender and race both affect the way we move through the world. And it has introduced me to the phrase "manslamming" (although one of the people in the article, a black American man, says that white women do it to him).
Anne Applebaum on Poland: A Warning From Europe
Eventually, they stopped writing about me: Negative international press coverage of Poland has grown much too widespread for a single person, even a single Jewish person, to coordinate all by herself. Though naturally the theme recurs on social media from time to time.
In a famous journal he kept from 1935 to 1944, the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian chronicled an even more extreme shift in his own country. Like me, Sebastian was Jewish; like me, most of his friends were on the political right. In his journal, he described how, one by one, they were drawn to fascist ideology, like a flock of moths to an inescapable flame. He recounted the arrogance and confidence they acquired as they moved away from identifying themselves as Europeans—admirers of Proust, travelers to Paris—and instead began to call themselves blood-and-soil Romanians. He listened as they veered into conspiratorial thinking or became casually cruel. People he had known for years insulted him to his face and then acted as if nothing had happened. “Is friendship possible,” he wondered in 1937, “with people who have in common a whole series of alien ideas and feelings—so alien that I have only to walk in the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment?”
Jay Rosen called this the best article he had read in 2017. I can see why. It's about how Poland, like Hungary and the Philippines (and Russia under Putin) is turning into an authoritarian one-party state on the model trialled by Stalin, where advancement comes not from high birth or merit, but from "loyalty". That's attractive to people who don't have high birth or merit.
Applebaum also writes about the "Smolensk conspiracy theory", which is unique to Poland but also emblematic of currents elsewhere. In April 2010, the president Lech Kaczyński died in a plane crash. (Records show that his entourage demanded that the plane land on a crappy air strip in bad weather.) This did not please the president's twin brother, head of the Law and Justice party, which is behind the recent moves to restrict judicial independence and abortion access.
Here's the killer line: "Perhaps, like so many people who rely on conspiracy theories to make sense of random tragedies, [Jarosław] Kaczyński simply couldn’t accept that his beloved brother had died pointlessly; perhaps he could not accept the even more difficult fact that the evidence suggested Lech and his team had pressured the pilots to land, thus causing the crash."
It's common to suggest that religion gave pre-Enlightenment humans a way to deal with the randomness of the world they lived in; with floods, and plagues, and crop failures. Everything was ordained, and if this life was rubbish, then at least the next one would be great. Now, religion remains strong in Poland (still a heavily Catholic country) but that particularly strain of Christian ideology has withered. And now that we know so much more about the world, it intuitively feels as though everything should be explicable. It's one of the reasons I think that conspiracy theories are so attractive now. They make sense. Life, with its awful, unjust randomness, does not.
Quick Links:
Dorian Lynskey's great piece on the Beatles' White Album, 50 years on (which SURELY I discovered through Ian Leslie's newsletter, the Ruffian) led me to his equally great piece on OK Computer, 20 years on. His piece about Be Here Now - containing the quote, "flattened by the cocaine panzers", isn't bad either.
"You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book you get." I love the rhythm of James Baldwin's writing, so I'm here for his writing advice. His Autobiographical Notes are definitely worth reading in full.
“I was fighting for a period in a period movie.” Josie Rourke on her new film about Mary, Queen of Scots.
Guest recommendation:
I love Far Cry 5, but I can't handle the fact that the final boss appears to be Terry Richardson
Also, I found this on Tumblr with the caption, "When you're halfway through a stealth mission and you get detected" and I feel SEEN.
See you next time. . .