INTERVIEWING FOOTBALLERS as a DISTRACTION from the INEVITABILITY of DEATH pt. 1: IFFY ONUORA

At the turn of the 2010s, Iffy Onuora was job hunting. Thoughtful, articulate, and with bags of experience as a journeyman striker in the Football League, Onuora would theoretically make an ideal candidate for a coaching position, having retired from his playing career in 2004. He even boasted the top coaching qualification in European football, the UEFA Pro License, then only one of only 111 coaches in the world to have it. His only opportunity to prove himself as a manager, however, had come in a solitary season at Swindon Town, after which he was shunted aside in favour of Dennis Wise. He went on to have stints in caretaker charge of Gillingham and Lincoln City; in September 2009, the latter club sacked him and Peter Jackson, whom he worked alongside as assistant manager, and he had been out of work since then.

“I’d gone for an interview with an academy in Nigeria,” reminisced Onuora, during a phone conversation in mid January, “and there were several people on the interview panel. It was done through the LMA - there were some gentlemen there who had set up an academy in Nigeria, and obviously with my family background that was appealing.” (Iffy was born in Glasgow to Nigerian parents). “I didn’t get the position for one reason or another, but there was a guy I got to know subsequently called David Emegi. When they gave me some feedback a few days later, he kind of said ‘look, I’d like to stay in touch, I have one or two other things, are you happy for me to do so?’ And I said yes, as you would, but actually didn’t think an awful lot of it cos you kind of hear that quite a lot these days. Whether anything happens is another matter.”

On this occasion, however, something did happen. That something would take him to the second largest country in Africa, and one of the poorest in the world. It would lead to a ten month odyssey of trying to marshal a football team on a shoestring budget, that had been banned from international competition for the previous two years, into taking on players from the richest leagues in the world. He would also have to instil some semblance of timekeeping into them, and not become the only professional football manager in recorded history to be sacked over a cow related dispute. At least on that final front, Iffy Onuora‘s spell as Ethiopia National Football Team manager was not a success. But it left him with some extraordinary stories to tell.

JACK REVIEWS BOOKS to DISTRACT HIMSELF from the INEVITABILITY of DEATH - WE NEED NEW NAMES by No

A BOOK FOR ALL AFRICA Master List

Book Review Master List

There were two books that kept coming to mind as I was reading We Need New Names. We Need New Names is not as good as either of them, but then, both of them are among my favourite novels ever, so that's not necessarily a stinging criticism.

The first that came to mind was Americanah by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie. I wrote my dissertation on Americanah. If I had to pare my bookself down to five titles, Americanah would still be on it. My subconscious will immediately compare any narrative about coming to America and finding it's not all it's cracked up to be to Americanah. To be perfectly honest, by that metric I don't think We Need New Names is that good.

Maybe this would be a good time to rewind a bit. We Need New Names is the debut novel by Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo. It was published in 2013 and proved a big critical hit. I was somewhat surprised to find out it made the Booker Prize Shortlist that year – longlist I could see, but it seems too slight to me to make the big six. Nothing that year was coming close to The Luminaries anyway, so I suppose it doesn't really matter.

We Need New Names is written from the perspective of Darling, a girl growing up in Zimbabwe during the late noughties. There are occasional, very brief interludes that do not appear to be narrated by her. They contain sentences like 

"we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God." 

So as you can tell, it's only Darling's parts that are worth reading, anyway. They follow her from her childhood through to her teenage years, by which point she has emigrated to America and lives in Michigan. What rattled me about We Need New Names, and limited the extent to which I could get into it, is that there's not much of a plot to speak of. Each chapter serves as a different vignette in Darling's life. The Zimbabwe chapters see her playing with her friends and getting into all manner of scrapes, against the backdrop of a nation on the brink of collapse. In America she hangs around with two other black girls, Kristal and Marina, only seems to sporadically like them, and generally projects an air of ennui. It wouldn't be fair to say that nothing happens in We Need New Names – at least, it wouldn't be fair to the half of the book set in Zimbabwe. Across those chapters, we have a high stakes guava heist, an exorcism, and a ten year old girl attempting to perform an abortion. There's a chapter dealing with Robert Mugabe's repressive government, a chapter dealing with the AIDS crisis, a chapter dealing with racial tension and violence. The problem with the book's structure, with each chapter almost its own short story, is that none of these issues get enough time to really hit home. The slow and painful decline of Darling's father after he returns home from South Africa with AIDS could be a book long sub plot. Instead it's tackled in a matter of pages. And all of these issues being rushed through in the Zimbabwean half of the story makes it all the more glaring that in America, barely anything happens at all.

The big issue with this lack of narrative cohesion is that it makes it hard for We Need New Names to deliver its message on identity, immigration and the nature of home. Bulawayo has nuanced and interesting things to say on this topic. Moving to America is Darling's dream as a child, and her life in Zimbabwe is hard and unstable. Her life in America is comparatively serene, but it comes at a price. Because she got into America on a visitor's visa that has long since expired, there is no possibility of her leaving the country. She can't return to Zimbabwe and see her mother, or her friends. To Darling, it seems like the latter is the greater loss. Her interactions with Kristal and Marina are lifeless in comparison to the boisterous energy that defined her social life in Zimbabwe. In the book's final chapter, she speaks to her old friend Chipo on Skype, who criticises her for having fled Zimbabwe instead of staying to fight for it. 

"If it's your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to fight for it no matter what, to make it right. Tell me, do you abandon your house because it's burning or do you find water to put out the fire?" 

Obviously there's a degree of jealousy involved in Chipo making those comments, because it's patently unreasonable to expect a teenager to change Zimbabwe's political culture single-handedly. Still, I think it's impressive that Bulawayo brings up this issue at all. It's one of the most complex aspects of immigration in the 21st century. No one could blame Darling and her family for wanting to flee Zimbabwe, but there's merit in the argument that if those who had the means to leave the country stayed to fight for political change, they could have created a better Zimbabwe for everyone. Instead, they simply seek shelter on the margins on American society.

Ultimately though, while Bulawayo has plenty of worthwhile things to say, her lacklustre plotting means she struggles to find interesting ways to say them. It's not like Americanah, where Adichie can smuggle social commentary through the voices of likeable, detailed characters that you care deeply about. Everything in We Need New Names is much more surface level. One dimensional white people pop up specifically to say one dimensional white people things about Africa being a country where everything is war-torn and impoverished. Darling is the only character who features in every chapter, and is thus the only one that feels fleshed out. Zimbabwe comes alive in Bulawayo's hands, but Detroit might as well be any city in America. Late in the novel, Darling moves to Kalamazoo, and you would have no way of knowing this if she didn't tell you. Describing a comparatively wealthy area of Zimbabwe on the fourth page of the book, Darling says 

"it's like being in a different country altogether. A nice country where people who are not like us live. But then you don't see anything to show there are real people living here; even the air itself is empty: no delicious food cooking, no odours, no sounds. Just nothing." 

This is a neat bit of foreshadowing. It makes it clear that Bulawayo's America is at least boring because that's the point she's making, rather than out of lazy writing. But it's not all that rewarding to read half a novel set in a place like this, and at times Bulawayo's heart doesn't seem in it, either. A chapter in which Darling, Kristal and Marina all go to a shopping mall deals with school shootings, Islamophobia, and police brutality towards black people. All these issues receive about a sentence each, so it has the vibe of Bulawayo ticking off boxes.

The second book that We Need New Names reminds me of, however, is a more favourable comparison. A couple of months back in the shop, a woman came in and told me she'd named all four of her children after favourite authors of hers. She called the one in the pushchair Junot, after Junot Diaz. Now, this woman had a kind of smug and airy and middle class demeanour, and so I was tempted to remind her that Diaz had been outed as a sex pest. But I didn't, on the basis that I might have got fired, and it would have been a cruel thing to do, and I suspect Jack-sceptics might be inclined to accuse me of having an irritatingly smug and airy and middle class demeanour. Mostly though, I didn't because I've been there. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wonderful, completely enchanting novel. It's told in an exuberant and incredibly likeable narrative voice. It hums all the way through with kinetic energy and rude jokes and geeky sci-fi references. I couldn't disavow it, even if Diaz is a nasty piece of work. And there are moments in We Need New Names that really do evoke the best bits of Oscar Wao.

It's most obvious in the first half of the book, which focuses on Darling's childhood. The first chapter is called 'Hitting Budapest,' and was first published in 2010 as a standalone short story. It won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2011 and I can see why. It introduces Darling and her group of tearaway pals as they attempt to steal from people's Guava trees in the affluent suburb of Budapest. There's a real verve to this chapter. There's a strange intimacy in its more grotesque moments, like the description of Chipo's vomit being 

"like urine, only thicker,"

 or Godknows' 

"buttocks peeping like strange eyes through the dirty white fabric"

of his shorts, or Darling's needlessly detailed description of the mechanics of pooping when you've had too many guavas. It's all shot through with this really genuine, charming, childlike spirit. It doesn't shy away from the desperation of these children's situation. They're stealing these guavas because they haven't eaten all day, and the chapter ends with a particularly harrowing final image. The kids themselves aren't even that pleasant; the ringleader, Bastard, really lives up to his moniker. But there's life here. There's energy, warmth, compassion. It's a super bit of writing.

The next few chapters continue in this vibrant vein. As a child, Darling is a charismatic enough narrator that even mundane moments become pretty wonderful in her voice. She is completely irreverant in a way only a 10 year old with nothing to lose can be. But it's not just, for example, Darling's willingness to point out when Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro has got so sweaty that you can see his nipples through his shirt. It's the manic intensity of Mborro's preaching itself, and the mayhem of the chapter's conclusion, when a woman has an exorcism forced upon her. There's a breathtaking audacity to Darling encountering an obese foreman at a Chinese-run building site and saying 

"the fat man starts ching-chonging to us like he thinks he is in his Grandmother's backyard."

And there are occasions where Darling's indifference to life's major dramas has a very interesting and strange effect. Take this sublime juxtaposition when she explains why she's going to try and perform an abortion on her friend Chipo: 

"one, it makes it hard for us to play, and two, if she has the baby, she will just die." 

Darling goes about gathering rocks because she thinks it might be helpful in some way for the procedure. In the background, her friend Forgiveness ominously straightens a coathanger. It's funny and haunting.

I was pleased to discover, when looking at Bulawayo's Wikipedia page, that Junot Diaz had in fact nominated her for the National Book Award's '5 under 35' award. Maybe he recognised a kindred, anarchic spirit. The difference between them is that Diaz's stories situate themselves in these raucous, dirt poor, angry, exciting immigrant communities in America, whereas Darling and her family are just sort of lonely and glum. Obviously it would be a terrible idea for Bulawayo to manufacture a tight knit community where one doesn't exist (according to Wikipedia there are just under 15,000 Zimbabwean-Americans currently living in the U.S, compared to over 2 million Dominican-Americans, who populated Diaz's Oscar Wao). But maybe the whole of We Need New Names should have taken place in Zimbabwe.

To use an old cliche (love a good cliche, I do), We Need New Names is a book of two halves. It's impossible to overstate how much better the Zimbabwean half is to the American half. It makes for an uneven and ultimately underwhelming read, despite the novel boasting some truly glittering highlights. You can read the first, award winning chapter, 'Hitting Budapest, online for free right here, and you should. It's super. Beyond that, I think 'We Need New Names' is a breezy and easy enough read that it's worth picking up for cheap second hand, but I'm hoping I'll be able to offer stronger recommendations than that over the course of this project.

JACK REVIEWS NOVELS to DISTRACT HIMSELF from the INEVITABILITY of DEATH: I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Book Review Master List

I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me, by Juan Pablo Villalobos, is a novel at once angry, profound, and silly. This is a book about casual racism, poverty, corruption, and a fashionable European city too complacent to think it needs to worry about such things. It's also a novel with lots of metafictional in-jokes, and gleefully immature bursts of foul language. It's an eccentric gangster thriller, but also not that at all. In short, it's a book of contradictions, and it's weird.

Villalobos' novels have won praise from the likes of Ali Smith and Roxane Gay, and he has been a judge for the International Dublin Literary Award. First published in Spanish in 2018, and now translated into English by Daniel Hahn, his newest follows a Mexican student named, amusingly, Juan Pablo Villalobos (to avoid confusion, I will follow Hahn's lead from his essay on the process of translating the novel, and refer to the author as 'Villalobos,' and the book's main character as 'Juan Pablo'). He and his girlfriend Valentina are about to move from Mexico to Barcelona, where he will write his thesis on “the limits of humour in Latin American literature of the twentieth century.” Unfortunately, before he can get there he runs into trouble with gangsters, who murder his sleazy cousin, known as 'Projects,' and then attempt to hijack his trip for their own nefarious ends. Juan Pablo finds this very stressful, and spends much of the novel insisting to people that the unsightly rashes on his face are a symptom of an obscure allergy, and not, as everyone else can see, Dermatitis Nervosa. Yet even had everything gone to plan with JP's trip, perhaps those rashes would have broken out eventually. After all, the Barcelona of this novel is not the Barcelona of the tourist board.

For a start, almost everyone is a bit racist, even Juan Pablo himself, with his belief that all Chinese people look the same, or his assumption that the Pakistani man he sees on the street will try and sell him hashish. Elsewhere, a character known only as The Chinaman' tells Juan Pablo that the rent is so expensive in the San Gervasio area of the city because “they haven't got Africans or gypsies there.” The chief of police brands homeless Italians as “trash” who think “Barcelona's a sewer where they can show up to dump all their crap, specially since Berlusconi started sorting them out.” When Valentina is browsing at a supermarket, a woman assumes that she actually works at the store and expects her to help her carry her shopping. Trying to justify her mistake, the woman makes “a gesture encompassing her face to indicate, metaphorically, (Valentina's) features and the colour of (her) skin.” Then, to add insult to injury, she attempts to compliment Valentina with the phrase “but you're very pretty.” There are many more examples I could list. The fact that everyone in the book is capable of behaving so ignorantly, including the character Villalobos has named after himself, prevents anyone from taking an irritating moral high ground. I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me will never be accused of being holier than thou. At the same time, the main issue with this otherwise impressive book is that the almost complete absence of sympathetic characters, combined with its frenetic pacing, makes it a slightly exhausting read.

There are plenty of examples in this novel of characters inadvertently revealing their own prejudice, but fewer of them embracing it. One exception comes when the gangsters force Juan Pablo to shoot a private detective hired to tail them. Asked if he has any last words, the detective spits out, in front of two Mexicans, a Pakistani and a Chinese, “filthy cunt immigrants.” Daniel Hahn notes in his essay at the end of the book that after having translated 32 c-words into the book, he then decided to pare it down to just this one usage. When I asked him why, he said his decision came from showing the manuscript to an American friend - “the use in the US is different – not just that it's very strong and taboo, but it's used differently. So I had no problem with the offensiveness of it... but with the fact that US readers would not be offended but would actually be momentarily confused.” With the detective being a character that otherwise barely speaks in the novel, Hahn didn't have to worry about the consistency of his voice, and so he was chosen to drop the sole, precious C-bomb. It really works too, as a moment of pure venom in a novel where even the darker moments usually come with a surreal edge. Villalobos is an unsentimental writer, and he smuggles his most direct commentary on the racism simmering below the surface of Catalan society in a moment where you'd be forgiven for not noticing it, where the immigrants are ostensibly the villains – the detective is, after all, about to be executed by them.

The most enjoyably odious personality in the book is Juan Pablo's mother. She's represented by a series of letters she writes to her son, during which she exclusively describes herself in the third person as 'your mother.' Despite only referring to herself by how she relates to Juan Pablo, she is entirely self regarding, self pitying, and self obsessed. At the funeral of Projects, she claims that all people could talk about was Juan Pablo's move to Barcelona. She says that his cousins are “dying of jealousy now you live in Europe.” Mexico is seen as a dead end place to be, and Europe an entire continent of bounteous possibility - “they've stayed behind in this dilapidated old country, managing their car washes and their motels... and there you are living it up in Europe.” She makes things even more explicit when, in the book's epilogue, she complains that “it came as quite an unpleasant surprise to your mother discovering that even in Europe there are people with quite so little class, people who are common, coarse, uncultured.” As Juan Pablo himself wearily notes, “my mother would never believe European seagulls feed on garbage, too.”

This is intended to be a positive book review, but thus far I've mostly talked about how grotesque all the people are. It might be worth mentioning there are exceptions. There's Ahmed, a thoughtful, gay Pakistani atheist who is in league with the gangsters, but is mostly preoccupied by looking after the dead detective's dog Viridiana, Him aside, Valentina is comfortably the book's most likeable character. Her life ruined by Juan Pablo's erratic behaviour, she sinks into poverty when he breaks up with her, and takes a job at a Mexican restaurant. She quits after one shift because, in her words, “I didn't leave my family just to put up with people treating me like an under-developed cockroach because the food's too spicy.” Those of us who have worked customer service jobs will relate.

It's also worth mentioning that Villalobos is often whimsical and playful, which helps undercut some of the more intense aspects of the book. Juan Pablo may say things like “my ability to identify architectural styles goes all to hell when I'm stressed,” but alongside such pretensions, he has some superb observations. Commenting on Ahmed, who has started to believe Viridiana is talking to him in Catalan, he remarks “his survival strategy (disconnecting from reality) might actually be healthier than mine (suffering a nervous breakdown).” This suggestion seems particularly relevant considering at time of writing, we're at the start of an indefinite lockdown to halt the spread of Coronavirus. At one point, Juan Pablo tries to distract himself from the itchy rashes that have sprouted on his body by reciting the names of Mexican revolutionary writers, “as though I really believed in the power of the mind over the body, as though I didn't know that this power does exist but only the other way round.” This is a sublime, and hideously truthful joke. The first thing you're taught about literature when you start to study it seriously is never to equate the narratorial voice with the author, but Villalobos dares such comparisons by naming Juan Pablo after himself. As it turns out, Villalobos is not himself that knowledgeable about architecture or Mexican revolutionary writers. According to him, neither of them “have any autobiographical echo; rather, they're parodic, what one would suppose a character like Juan Pablo (and like me) ought to know.” I think that's an even better answer than the one about I was expecting, about Villalobos' long held obsession with Brutalism or something.

The area where the book best achieves an equilibrium between its impish humour and its intellectual seriousness is when it starts to deconstruct the novel as a form. While writing in her personal diary, Valentina observes “private writing is so deceitful that I'm already justifying myself as though these pages might one day be read by someone. Or worse, as though they were going to be published.” If Valentina is actually out there, reading this review, then I'm sorry about the turn this has taken. When the sheer absurdity of his new and not even slightly improved life starts to overwhelm him, Juan Pablo starts recording everything that's happened to him “as if I was writing a novel, as if my implausible life could ever be the material for a novel.” Eventually, Valentina breaks into his apartment and finds this document on his computer, with the title 'I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me,' a phrase she herself used in one of her diary entries. It all builds to a spectacular final chapter where Valentina attempts to convince a sympathetic detective, Leia, of the veracity of Juan Pablo's 'novel.' This conversation ends up obliterating the fourth wall and is a deeply enjoyable culmination of Villalobos' previous nods and winks. What all this implies is that someone has gained access to Valentina's diary, Juan Pablo's laptop, and the letters they have received from Projects and Juan Pablo's mother. They have then pieced them together into a coherent novel. Which raises the tantalising question - who could be doing this?

If you've been paying attention, it's hardly a spoiler to reveal that Villalobos has no interest in providing tidy resolutions come the book's conclusion. In this and many other respects, I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me is reminiscent of Paul Auster's spellbinding City of Glass. It is a supremely intelligent shaggy dog story wrapped up as a crime caper. Beyond that, it's also a raw examination of the dark heart of Barcelona, and the precariousness of life there if you're poor or an immigrant. Reading it is like watching, say, Uncut Gems – stressful, but pretty compelling. You won't read anything else like it this year.

JACK REVIEWS NOVELS to DISTRACT HIMSELF from the INEVITABILITY of DEATH: Stay Up with Hugo Best by Erin Somers

Book Review Master List

Have you seen Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? The answer is probably no, unless, like me, you're very susceptible to Aaron Sorkin's distinctive charms. For better or for worse, I am like me, and I am very susceptible to Aaron Sorkin's distinctive charms. As such, I have both seen and enjoyed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, though it's one of his more flawed works. The concept of the show is this; Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford play a writer and a producer respectively, hired to revive the flagging fortunes of Studio 60, which is a thinly veiled Saturday Night Live. Despite both of them being difficult people in their own way, their revamped version of the show is a big hit. This enables both to stick around long enough to get involved in the sort of scrapes appropriate for a comedy drama written by Aaron Sorkin.

Now, here's the problem with Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The idea that Perry and Whitford are these flawed geniuses, capable of turning round a failing American comedy institution, is undermined by the fact that none of the sketches they produce are funny. They're clearly meant to be, the show tells us often how highly regarded they are, but every time we get to witness excerpts from this revitalised program they're helming, you just cringe. And not in the good way that comedy sometimes makes you cringe. It's an irritating problem that almost ruins the series. Basically, Aaron Sorkin came up with a handful of shit sketches, and then based a show around how brilliant they are. It's outright obnoxious. There are plenty of examples of comedies about comedy that are funny, but when they misfire, they're fucked. It's a thin tightrope, and it's impressive how well Erin Somers walks it in her sparkling debut novel, Stay Up with Hugo Best. In Stay Up... characters do stand-up comedy, it actually sounds like stand-up real human beings would do, and the audience reactions are broadly in line with how funny the stand-up is. That's no mean feat.

There are novels that are funny, novels that are sad, and the best novels are those that are both. Some of my colleagues at the book shop I work at were under the impression that Stay Up with Hugo Best was a much lighter novel than it actually is. I don't blame them. It's hard to get a read on the book from its blurb and its front cover, which is vibrant blue, and has an approving quote from Vogue and a massive picture of an inflatable swan on it. Certainly, Stay Up... is a very accessible read, thanks to its crystal clear prose and steady stream of excellent one liners. But it's also a thought provoking book. It's about sexual politics, and watching your heroes grow old. It's funny, smart and jaded. I enjoyed it a whole lot.

The story is told from the perspective of June Bloom, a writer's assistant on the titular late night show. Hugo Best is ageing and bored and the show's ratings are slumping, so Hugo is shunted aside for a younger host. Wondering what to do with her career now the show is over, June performs a stand up set in a depressing comedy club. She's surprised to find Hugo waiting for her after her set, and even more surprised that he invites her to stay with him in his Connecticut mansion over Memorial Day weekend. The two of them barely know each other, and Best is a notorious womaniser. Yet his offer intrigues Bloom, not least because she adored his stand-up as an adolescent. So, against her better judgement, she accepts.

What unfolds over the course of the book is a fascinating cat and mouse game. Sometimes Hugo is the cat, and June is the mouse. Sometimes vice versa. No matter what, we're the mouse and Erin Somers is the cat. She toys with our expectations. She creates textured characters who never quite let their guard down and rarely behave entirely the way you'd expect them to. Most impressive is her portrayal of Hugo. The comedy circuit is hardly lacking in lecherous old white men, and it would have been simple to write him as one of them. Of course, Hugh is to an extent a lecherous old white man, but never to the point where he's a cartoon villain, or completely unsympathetic. He's a melancholic character. He's achieved everything he wanted to with his life, and now he's in his mid 60s, and it hasn't fulfilled him. His motivations for inviting June to spend the weekend with him seem less rooted in sexual desire, and more in the hope that she'll validate him by engaging in deep conversations on the art of stand up comedy. The most excited he appears in the book is when he asks if she wants to be his support act on a stand-up tour in the new year. There are some superb smaller details with him as well, like his love for Richard Pryor. I hope it won't come as a terrible spoiler to learn that, yes, he does use this love in a 'how can I be racist when...' way, but again, it doesn't feel like Somers is beating you round the head with his awfulness. Hugo is never malevolent. He's just a bit lost.

June Bloom is an excellent, and finely balanced narrator. Since June was a child, she has admired Hugo. She devoured his early stand up recordings, and working on his show was a huge source of pride for her, even if she's aware that it was well past its sell by date by the time she joined. For her to witness the ennui that has consumed Hugo is a warning of what might await her in the future. The message of Stay Up... is that you should never meet your heroes – not because they're bad people, but because they're normal, fucked up people. And if those we consider the best of us are messy and moderately unhappy, what hope is there for the rest of us? Through June's voice, Somers channels some lovely, understated, unpretentious writing. Her description of Hugo's fading good looks is particularly nice; 

“what wrinkles he had appeared calculated, left intact so he'd look like a reasonable facsimile of a gently aged human being.” 

She's also really funny, even during her bleaker moments; at one point, overwhelmed by the reality of a whole weekend with Hugo, she remarks

"you know how things aren't fun?... how everything that seems like it's going to be fun ends up being tense and sort of terrible." 

But her best line, maybe the best line in the whole book, is her description of what Best in his prime represented to her;

"here, for the first time, was a way of living. You could move to New York, be urbane, wry, ironic. You could be a wit and hover above the whole sad, gasping fracas."

It's not a radical idea to suggest comedy exists as a defence mechanism, but this is one of the best ways of phrasing it I've ever read. It's shot through with defeat. Hugo's defeat is June's defeat is all our defeat. We're all doomed to live in the fracas. Stay Up is a novel about coming and not coming to terms with it.

There's a nice supporting cast as well; one of the simpler pleasures of this book is its commitment to its world. Somers has put thought into everything. We get the name of the host who's replacing Hugo Best, a brief description of his comedy style, and how it differs from Hugo's (more contemporary, more political). We get hints of the utter contempt Bony Suarez, the band leader on Hugo's show, holds him in. There's an enjoyable riff on Cruise Ship, a movie of questionable quality that Hugo starred in in the 90s. We hear about Hugo's love of cars. We hear about his short lived TV show, Car Hunt. We hear about his co-host Jazz Sherman, whose complete lack of knowledge about cars charmed audiences and led to her hosting the show on her own. None of this feels gratuitous, like Somers is filling us in on background details because she doesn't have anything else to say. As I've already mentioned, everyone who needs to be in this book is a layered and believable character. These little glimpses at the alternate universe entertainment industry they inhabit makes them even more plausible.

What I would say, for all that Stay Up... has to offer, is that it's a book you can read once and be done with. Going through it a second time for this review felt a bit more of a dull process than it does for some other books I've written about. Its insights into the machinations of the entertainment industry are on full display, and once you've taken them in, that's it. That's not a terrible thing though. There are lots of books in the world. I'm almost suspicious of people who find the time to re-read in a world of limitless choice, where there are an endless array of novels to be curious about. Stay Up... tells its story and gets the heck out of there. In a way, it's admirable.

There was a brief period in my life when I thought I could be a stand-up comic. At the age of 18, I did three gigs. The first took place in the backroom of a pub, and went astonishingly well. I left feeling completely elated, like I had found my life's calling. My second gig was in a LGBT+ bar, which I thought would be the natural home for the aggressively politically correct humour I was a fan of at the time. I wrote a new set which was much worse than the first one, and bombed. The people at the bar were polite about the disaster unfolding in front of them, which was the only thing which makes the memory tolerable. The third gig was in the same backroom as the first, and went OK. I gave up performing immediately after. TL;DR, my experiences in the comedy world are limited at best due to my complete lack of resilience. Yet even I found something resonated with me about Stay Up with Hugo Best. I suspect that's because it's just a truthful novel. Truthful about embarrassment, social awkwardness, regret, being young, growing old. It's a book that might be doomed to be slept on, but it really shouldn't be. Anyone who has existed in the 21st century should find something of value in Somers' fine debut.

Why You Too, Should Give Over Your Life to the Random.org Number Generator

These are difficult and unprecedented times for us all. There's a myriad of things to worry about; job security, the health of you and your loved ones, whether you have adequate supplies of peanut butter, the king of spreads, to last a 14 day self isolation period. In these circumstances, you shouldn't feel guilty about doing what's necessary to relieve the burden on your shoulders. That's why I'm advising you to give over all your decision making power, in every area of your life, to the Random.org number generator.

I entrusted my decision making to the Random.org number generator after a frank conversation with my obsessive compulsive disorder. The disorder pointed out that I am shambolic, and left to my own devices, I would devote all my free time to my favoured hobby of 'carefully curating my Netflix watch list in lieu of actually watching anything.' “What if...” whispered the OCD seductively... “what if there was something else that could decide what to watch on Netflix for you? And then also take care of all significant life decisions going forward as well? That would motivate you to clean the bathroom? And finally read something by Alice Munro?” Suffice to say, my interest was piqued.

Here's how it works – I pay the Random.org number generator a respectable salary of $250,000 a year. Note: this does not go to the website itself, just the generator. This is unsustainable and it will lead me to financial ruin in the long term. However, the beauty of the system is that I don't need to worry about this; when it gets to the point where I might lose my home, the generator will decide what to do. And in the mean time, the generator decides everything else as well. It never persuades me to make gutsy, life altering decisions, because I'm not Luke Rhinehart. I will never use it as an excuse to take hard drugs, or eat 19 cakes. But it does help me deal with average day to day quandaries of what to have for lunch, and how best to balance work with pleasure. All I have to do is assign each of the options available to me in any given situation a number, and hit the 'generate' button. Like a magic 8-ball, the generator illuminates the way. Except 8-balls are kids' toys, and the generator is for adults, like me. I am an adult.

Are they any downsides to this system? Critics say that it leads to a complete loss of free will and self agency. They say it feeds into a cycle of mental illness that has marred my life for many years, and at this rate will continue to do so long term. They even point out that I once spent six consecutive hours unwillingly playing video games, in theory a designated 'fun' option, just because the generator wouldn't stop giving me its number. But to those critics, I say, you don't understand how desperately I need to believe in something. You don't understand how the prospect of an indefinite amount of time confined indoors with only my own impulses for company scares me. I need something to guide me, to tell me what to do. I don't have the tools for adulthood.

So if you too are a hapless dweeb with an anxiety disorder, why not give the Random.org number generator a whirl? You have some things to lose! But maybe you also have everything to lose by not doing it! Better use the generator, just to be on the safe side.

JACK REVIEWS NOVELS to DISTRACT HIMSELF from the INEVITABILITY of DEATH: Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

OK, right, so I have no idea where to begin with this one. Maybe... OK. On the whole, I really liked Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan. Also, there were many moments during the process of reading Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan that I thought “this book is really, really, really intensely annoying.” About two thirds of the way through this tremendously irritating novel, I realised to my surprise that A) I had made it two thirds of the way though this tremendously irritating novel, and B) I actually cared quite a lot what happened to the three main characters and was turning the pages compulsively. So you will see why this is quite a difficult review to start. From what angle do you approach a novel as baffling, frustrating and occasionally sublime?

I feel about Exciting Times how I think some people feel about Sally Rooney's writing. I am,a Sally Rooney acolyte. I have been profoundly moved by her writing, depressed and uplifted in equal measure, and would hector friends into reading her until the runaway success of Normal People made that quite unnecessary. But it has not escaped my attention that Sally Rooney has her critics. Some of those critics are Will Self and thus can be discounted immediately, but I've heard enough people say they find her characters vapid and self absorbed to understand that it's a legitimate opinion. A wrong opinion of course. They're vapid and self absorbed, in the way that most young people are vapid and self absorbed, but they're also funny and self deprecating and engaged in the messy process of being better people. If you don't like Sally Rooney's characters, you're probably being dishonest with yourself about the way you were in your late teens and early twenties.

But I digress. That's not the point. The point is that the characters in Exciting Times are, in fact, vapid and self absorbed. The book's narrator is Ava - Irish, in her early twenties, doing TEFL in Hong Kong, consumed by varying intensities of despair and self loathing. The plot centres around her love triangle that's not a love triangle, with English banker Julian, and Hong Kong born trainee solicitor Edith. Both are from wealthy backgrounds, while Ava is not. Ava loves and admires Edith, and... to be honest, I'm not sure what she feels about Julian. Like many aspects of this novel, I can't decide whether that's intentional, whether it's because their relationship is nuanced and complex, or needlessly vague. She sort of has a thinly disguised contempt for him but finds his company perversely enjoyable. They fuck semi regularly, and Ava doesn't particularly enjoy it, but doesn't outright dislike it either. They end up living together, an arrangement that more or less works. Julian is a reasonably likeable character and largely avoids the cliches of the privileged banker archetype. He's capable of self parody – at one point he suggests that he'd be more inclined to worship Jesus if he'd founded a start-up. At the same time, he's quite cold and ignorant, and actually, there just isn't much to him. He's not much of anything. He's a bit blank. This might be subtle characterisation from Dolan, it might be bad writing from Dolan, I don't know, I DON'T UNDERSTAND. THIS IS REALLY BLOODY HARD.

I don't understand why Ava loves Edith so much either. Again, she's not much of anything. During her first encounter, we learn that she carries soy milk cartons in her handbag, that she gets very animated when she attempts to explain Chinese geography to Ava on napkins, that she goes to watch plays and then spends her time in the theatre answering e-mails on her phone. Ava slowly becomes smitten. Why? It's not that Edith is unpleasant or anything, and she certainly cares more for Ava than Julian does. There are also glimpses of how Edith's eclectic range of enthusiasms could be charming. Take this sweet observation about Instagram - 

“she said Instagram made her look at everything more closely. Whenever she felt sad, she had a wall of happy memories to look back on.” 

Such sincerity runs counter from what you expect from a novel as frequently cynical as this one, and it does demonstrate that Edith brings something into Ava's life that she's missing. But again, on the whole, there's just not much there. Ava sleeps with Edith and marvels about how little room they take up in bed when their bodies are intertwined. She then observes that 

“she's just spent half a year having quite a lot of sex with a vertically bothersome man. It was all very interesting.” 

It's not. It sounds clever, means nothing. Everyone in this book is the sum total of the sarcastic quips and shallow personality quirks they're allowed. There's no depth to it. Dolan's writing captures the mechanics of liking someone and wondering whether they like you back, but the characters involved feel half formed, and so it's all not quite right. It's like watching incredibly impressive robots flirt.

But could that be the point? The running theme of Exciting Times is that Ava doesn't like herself and is committed to sabotaging her own happiness. She pronounces herself "a bad person" who “could not correctly process emotions.” 

Edith points out to her that 

“you keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special... but you won't allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you're especially bad.” 

It's quite wearisome spending the entirety of a novel in the head of someone like that. Perhaps it doesn't matter who Julian or Edith are as people, and Ava could pick two random strangers (or incredibly impressive robots) off the street and still find herself in the exact same impossible situation; living with someone she on one level despises, falling in love with someone else, and then doing her best to clog up the gears of their relationship. In that case, the vagueness surrounding Julian and Edith's personality makes sense. They're blank canvases for Ava to project her neuroses onto. There's a funny line when Ava sees a picture of a toddler in a mortar and gown at Edith's family home, and immediately (and incorrectly) assumes it's “Edith at a ceremony for child geniuses.” As long as she is capable of making Ava feel insecure and out of her depth, Edith can be absolutely anyone at all.

Anyway, the other key thing to point out is that there are lots of magnificent one liners and observations in Exciting Times. The problem is, roughly 75% of Dolan's sentences are trying so hard to be magnificent one liners and observations. You could flip to any page and find exquisite sentences. To prove my point, I used a random number generator to pick a page in the book. I got page 36, which features the following:

“That night I spent longer than usual pretending not to want him in ways that made it obvious I did. It wasn't as much fun as I usually found it, or as satisfying as I knew slicing a machete through a row of his shirts would be, but I enjoyed the clarity of the exercise.”

And then, the very next sentence is:

“There was something Shakespearean about imperious men going down on you: the mighty have fallen.”

And then, this dialogue at the bottom of the page:

“'In Victorian times,' I said, 'women cut off a lock of hair and gave it to men to keep.'
'I don't want your hair.' '
I'm just describing the practice.'
'Right. Good description. I still don't want your hair.'”

Now, all these excerpts are pretty brilliant. The image of Ava taking a machete to Julian's shirts is hilarious; the Shakespeare joke is oddly profound; the exchange about locks of hair is a winning example of the bone dry sense of humour that courses through this book. The problem, though, is that these sentences don't exist in isolation. They swim in a sea of other, similar sentences that are also trying to stop you in your tracks, on every, single, page. Every single character's voice is laden with this odd mixture of eloquence and expertly executed sarcasm. The cumulative effect is exhausting.

And yet. And yet. Exciting Times is special. It's distinctive, it's brave, it's like nothing else you'll read this year (obviously I think the comparison with Sally Rooney earlier is valid in the macro, but the experience of reading this and, say, Normal People is totally different).. It might be a work of genius. I'm almost certain it's not, but I'm not discounting the possibility. At times, Dolan's writing is exhilarating, and as abrasive as she is, Ava is so engaging that I suspect the texts I sent to my friends while I was reading Exciting Times sound a bit like her. She can be extremely funny; look out for the conversation at the start of Chapter. 15 when she tells her mother she's dating a banker. Or her rationale for not reading the poetry Julian wrote at university; 

“I was worried the poems would be bad and I'd have to keep living in his apartment.” 

Even the self loathing has its moments, such as her insistence that Julian finding her attractive is 

“a hideous miscalculation given that (I am) in fact the worst human on any conceivable axis.” 

And I don't want to discount all her sadness as mere navel gazing. For example, there's a heartbreaking observation about only wanting to be seen holding Edith's hand by people who won't hurt them for it. Even as one of those awful cis het white men they have now, lines like that always stop me in my tracks. The combined effect of all this, the jokes and the pain and the strangeness, is magnified by the curt chapter lengths. If you're like me, the effect of being able to blast through 10 chapters in 50 pages will be that you try and do exactly that. But perhaps this novel is best enjoyed in little fragments, one or two a day. That's the best way of appreciating each joke, each carefully crafted sentence, without the unrelenting intensity of Ava's voice wearing you down.

Ultimately, what I will say for Exciting Times is that there is not one single sentence in the book that is boring. The fact that Dolan is straining to do something quirky with every line is its most glaring flaw, but I'll always prefer a novel that is bad in interesting ways to a novel that is outright boring. And for all its faults, Exciting Times is a million miles away from a bad novel. It is addictive, laugh out loud funny, and curiously moving. If/when Naoise Dolan writes a new novel, I suspect I will buy it on the day of release. I just wish it wasn't such an effort to get to that realisation.

Some Stuff I Wrote What Got Published.

Hello. From Jan. 2018 until its closure in August 2019, I wrote reviews and articles for Uncooked Media's FSM, what was at the time the UK's leading professional wrestling and mixed martial arts publication. FSM was a nationally distributed print magazine, available on the shelves of WHSmith and, in Ireland, Easons. These are scans of a couple of the pieces I had published over the course of those 18 months.