In another few days, every town and street corner will be hosting a Big Literature Festival. It is natural then, around this time of year, to hear murmurings about smug, back-patting, liquor-guzzling intellectuals. Along with some less-than-tasteful suggestions: it may be remarked, for instance, that a giant Godzilla foot squelching down on the Jaipur festival lawns on a weekend evening would wipe out our literary community in one swell foop. Importantly, most such comments come from insiders themselves and therefore have a certain amount of wistful self-loathing built into them — the last time I heard the Godzilla one, it was said at Jaipur on a weekend evening, and by someone who is himself sometimes regarded as being part of this putative “community”. (He, of course, denies it vigorously. He also denies being the present writer.)
Creatively executed, such self-commentaries – litterateurs sniffing or whining about litterateurs – can be a form of metafiction, and metafiction is all the rage these days. Much contemporary literature is explicitly about writers and writing (in the same way that much contemporary cinema is explicitly about cinema), giving the impression that the Novel is not so much dead as trapped in a giant hall of mirrors. Self-reflexive writing of this sort can become tedious, but heading into December I found it almost comforting to read Howard Jacobson’s new novel, Zoo Time, with its comically apocalyptic vision of the publishing world — a vision that almost makes our lit-fest and book-launch season seem stable and sane.
Here are some of the things that happen in Zoo Time’s hysterical universe. A publisher shoots himself in the mouth shortly after a meal with an author (during which they talked about a literary world forever altered by Twitter, blogs and vampire-replete bestsellers). Terrified agents lock themselves in lavatories “rather than have a manuscript handed to them personally like a subpoena”, and one of them is lost on the Hindu Kush with a manuscript in his backpack. (“Had the novel itself sent him mad? The question wasn’t much discussed. A literary agent going missing was much too common an occurrence to attract speculation.”) The marriage of the book’s narrator – a novelist named Guy Ableman – is in trouble, partly because the sound of his writing drives his wife to madness. (“But so did the sound of my not writing.”)
In this strangely familiar dystopia, literary parties are like funeral wakes (“except that at a wake there’d have been more to drink”) and a car exhaust backfiring might cause passers-by to wonder if another publisher had taken his life within their earshot. The few remaining readers quiver with rage whenever they meet a writer (“was it because reading as a civilised activity was over that the last people doing it were reduced to such fury? Was this the final paroxysm before expiry?”) and the best chance a young author has of producing a hit is to write a memoir about losing his sight when his adoptive mother’s silicone breasts exploded in his face.
Beyond all these things, the book’s threadbare “plot” is about Ableman’s deep attraction for his wife’s mother, Poppy, but he uses a literary analogy to describe even this: is sleeping with your mother-in-law like stealing your own book? Throughout, he is a self-conscious wordsmith in the act of constructing his own story, correcting himself mid-sentence, giving us glimpses – whether reliable or not – of how his real life intersects with his fiction. And in doing this, Mr Jacobson’s novel asks that pertinent question: should a writer exist (for the reader) beyond the page? It is a question that was raised memorably in Jaipur two years ago, when J M Coetzee – among the last of the truly taciturn big-name authors – read a long extract from his work but didn’t otherwise say a word. Mr Jacobson may or may not have had Mr Coetzee in mind when he writes about a Nobel-winning Dutch author who simply sat on the stage in front of his festival audience: “So the hour would have passed, each staring at the other in silence, had someone not thought of showing slides of the bridges of Amsterdam. When it was over they gave him a standing ovation.”
Zoo Time is among the most tongue-in-cheek doomsday books I have read. It is about the long-awaited demise of writing and reading (and therefore about the end of everything, since it is narrated by a man obsessed with these things), but it is also a reminder that good metafiction can help keep literature alive in the very process of sounding its death knell. If writers absolutely have to write solipsistic books about writing (and really, one wishes they wouldn’t), this is a good way to do it. One hopes, though, that Mr Jacobson is careful in choosing what passages to read at his many impending appearances at clubby literary festivals.
