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.

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.