“AN OB-LEEK SENSE OF HUMOUR”

“Born Standing Up” is the autobiography of the massively and multi-talented Steve Martin, and narrates his years doing stand-up comedy around the United States, prior to his major success as a film actor.

This is a fine story full of insights, not least when Elvis (the real one) attends one of Martin’s early shows and comments, in ”his lovely Mississippi drawl” : “Son, you have an ob-leek sense of humour”.

The Importance of Being Shocked (and Stocked)

 A L Kennedy had an important and urgent message on receipt of  the Costa award for best novel this month. She contrasted the kind of marketable books increasingly found on the shelves of high street booksellers, and those works with the power to change lives. Kennedy also strongly emphasised the importance of public libraries in preserving stocks of the latter, and providing life changing opportunities for self-education. Libraries are themselves now threatened with re-packaging as Information Stores etc, and their own book stores in danger of break-up.

The “shock of the new”, libraries and the issue of marketing are all relevant to a book I picked up the other week in Worcester City Library : still, but probably for not much longer, a pleasantly traditional version of this public institution, albeit with computers/ Internet access etc. I vaguely remembered the film version of “Last Exit to Brooklyn” from the 1980s, and was interested to “re-discover” this novel by Hubert Selby Jr, who in a retrospective forward notes the importance of the local library to the development of his own self-education and writing. The book also had a controversial UK debut in the 1960s as the publisher’s introduction explains.

It has to be said that “The Queen is Dead”, Part II of “Last Exit to Brooklyn” remains a deeply shocking narrative, even today where the issues with which it deals  – street violence, “Queer” baiting and bashing, homosexual prostitution, drug-taking – receive regular factual and fictional coverage. The novel is also works much “better” as creative art than my memory of the film version, the content of which I now have no recollection of at all, that’s how memorable it was ! Perhaps in their adaption to the New Media Age (and I’m not totally knocking this !) public libraries may suffer something of the same fate. Let’s hope not !

Novels that do “The Business” (& Those that don’t)

Head of the London Business School, former Bank of England Deputy Governor, and current Chairman of the Booker Prize Panel of Judges, Howard Davies recently complained that contemporary British novelists are not doing “The Business” ie not covering the worlds of commerce and industry like, for instance, their US counterparts.

Mr Davies pointed to the finalists for this year’s Booker Prize, the premier UK award for novelists, as an example of this. Amongst these is the eminent British writer Ian McEwan. Now I have to confess to having read only one of McEwan’s books, “Saturday”, and this technically accomplished novel left me more than a wee bit cold, I’m afraid.

Contrast this slight chill with my feelings about Tom Wolfe’s “hot” novel “A Man in Full”, which certainly does do “The Business”, for me anyway, on more than one level. This is a much fuller novel in all senses, and a much more satisfying experience for the reader. Like Mr Davies, I’m also asking why we Brits aren’t up to a work of the same scope !