Read ‘Em and Weep
by Diana Jenkins
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was an aspiring novelist who was guilty of a devastating miscalculation: I tried to tap into the tortured. And the affectations showed, garish as stage makeup at the opera. One early reader wrote this piercing comment in response to one of my more ‘intense’ passages: Sydney is not New York and you are not J.D. Salinger.
I’ll never forget it. It remains the best, most succinct piece of feedback I’ve ever had. My reader was dead right, but the shock of those words – the shock of exposure, of being named and shamed for my pretensions – was thoroughly brutal at the time. Of course I was unnaturally fond of the very paragraph he singled out for tut-tutting; now I know any grubby enchantment with my own turn of phrase is always cause for concern. So there I was, caught red-handed. Attempting to be a Writer of Substance. And it was very uncomfortable for all concerned.
Now here I am, years down the track, and not much has changed. I’m still a jobbing freelance journo and I am still an aspiring novelist. Okay, so now I know that self-conscious writing inevitably leads to bad writing – no exception has ever made my acquaintance – but that truism hasn’t miraculously transformed my fate, because the manuscript in question still has plenty of other problems. On the other hand, I hope all the false notes are gone; I’ve worked hard to eliminate them. I’m a cold-blooded killer of darlings now. I delete without mercy or regret.
Deep down, everyone knows where his or her own fakeries lie. You absolutely know when you’re putting it on. Some might say, ‘How the hell am I supposed to invent a cast of characters and a fictional universe without “putting it on”?’ and to those writers I say this: come on, you know when you’re indulging a little bit of a crush on yourself as a writer. It goes something like this:
Look how serious of purpose I am, all hunched over my laptop in the café!
Ooh yes, since you ask, here’s my latest Moleskine notebook – naturally I take one everywhere!
What a picture I must be, scribbling away with such urgency – I never know when the Muse shall strike, but I am deaf to all but her bidding!
For me – and I think forgeries differ from writer to writer – posturing mainly occurs when I’m trying to go into a place of pure darkness. The language of angst is a reliable warning sign. I know I’m lumbering on thin ice when the mood gets deadly serious. It’s really easy for me to fall through the least crack and promptly drown in melodrama. It’s tricky, because bad things happen. Plenty of terrible things occur, in life and imagination, and it’s important to write about them with integrity and feeling in both fiction and non-fiction. Still, I’ve come to accept that in my own writing, no matter how dire the circumstances, at some point I like to let the light in. I’m not so good at writing with a straight face.
My natural style creates challenges that may prove insurmountable. Levity doesn’t tend to the lauded in the literary landscape…
Okay, let’s stop right there and take a look at that last sentence.
Exhibit A: excessive alliteration.
It’s an unfortunately common feature of my writing, but believe it or not, excessive alliteration does serve a purpose: it’s faintly ridiculous, so it succeeds in lightening the mood. There’s a shift in tenor: you know – because I have shouted it at you – I’m trying to make this piece fun for you to read. Some would say trying very hard indeed. Ahem. But excessive alliteration always runs the risk of making the sentence brash and borderline absurd.
Kathy Lette is a fan of this practice too, along with her endless conga line of arched-eyebrow puns. Whenever I encounter excessive alliteration in Lette’s writing, it usually drives me mad, which is why I would delete that sentence and start again were I not trying to illustrate a point about knowing one’s own worst writing on sight. Reading Lette, I always get this uneasy feeling that she’s not all that interested in showing me a good time, she’s just very keen to show that no one else has ever had as good a time as she’s having. The effect can be jarring, and while there’s nothing disingenuous about my own love of alliteration, and probably not hers either, it is a stylistic tick I’ve decided to manage with vigilance and restraint. Like I said, my writing is lousy with issues. Take your pick.
Back to the actual point of the sentence: I’ve learned my natural style is accessible and fundamentally irreverent, two features that aren’t oft’ cited in reviews of literary fiction and/or judges’ reports of award-winning writing. I’ve been told my writing is funny, or can be, which is the highest compliment, but it may not bode well for my future prospects. I’m still not sure where my writing fits – and if I’m not sure, well…no one is going to pat my hand and graciously find a place at the table for my work. I need to be able to clearly speak its name.
I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that funny writing by women is still often immediately categorised (dismissed?) as ‘chick lit,’ a label which in turn all but guarantees it will never, ever be a literati favourite and will never, ever be nominated for, much less awarded, any major literary awards – awards which, everything else aside, buy writers more time to write. Madeleine St John’s Man Booker nomination for The Essence of the Thing (1997) is an exception to this rule, but even so there was quite a stink about the novel’s so-called ‘slightness’ at the time. On the other hand, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) rightfully won the Pulitzer Prize (admittedly, Toole’s novel is an outright comic masterpiece) and the black humour of Kingsley Amis’s tragically repellent titular anti-hero in One Fat Englishman (1963) has been robustly debated in critical circles for decades. Much more recently, everybody wanted to heartily clap Graeme Simsion on the back after The Rosie Project (2013) and its sequel, The Rosie Effect, so perhaps funny writing by men isn’t quite so beleaguered by its use of humour (how about we call it dick lit? Will that fly?).
Still, I often wonder if there’s an institutional, ingrained unease about recognising the literary credentials of funny books, irrespective of the author’s gender. Prizes and press often seem to favour fairly grim fare. Hannah Kent’s widely celebrated debut Burial Rites was no picnic on the Icelandic ice and it certainly isn’t the only success story of the past few years to leave this reader in need of a blanket and nice cup of hot cocoa. Put it this way: there was zero possibility of last year’s Miles Franklin winner being called All the Birds, Laughing.
My mother-in-law has a very active book club, full of intelligent older women insatiably hungry for Australian authors and their stories, and every month she comes to me with the complaint that today’s home-grown literary novels are conspicuously joyless affairs.
“Rape,” she’ll begin, counting them off on the fingers of one hand, glaring at me as though I’m personally responsible. “Incest. Poverty. Domestic violence. Addiction. Madness. Trauma. It’s all so miserable. Why?”
Why indeed. I don’t have a good answer for her, but I do wonder sometimes if we aren’t still a bit culturally insecure, determined to show our gravitas, embracing a grittiness in our creative endeavours that attempts to undermine our comparatively comfortable lives and mostly full bellies. Sometimes the challenge is overt, and the expressed aim of the artist is subverting cultural norms, but I have read enough Australian short and long fiction in recent years to know some of it is just determined to be bleak, as if such bleakness has inherent literary merit. I’m not convinced it does.
The publishing scene in Australia is changing, but it’s still predominantly white, middle-class and…well, fairly snug as a bug from what I’ve seen at numerous industry functions, so I do wonder sometimes about this stubborn attachment to writing trauma. I wonder if on some level we abhor our country’s pronounced privilege and want very badly to be taken seriously as survivors. Maybe all the misery is misplaced apologia. I know I often feel really weird about my good life, despite working my way over high piles of shit during the course of my childhood and adolescence, so what must it be like if you’ve always had it good? Do these books that my mother-in-law’s book club calls “downers” serve to imaginatively disown us from the abundant prosperity and opportunity so commonly cited as part of life in Australia at large, or do they merely serve to emphasise it?
I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer for you on this point either, but I do firmly believe Australians and Australian writers are some of the funniest people going around. Personally I’d like to see far more abundant evidence of our rich, wonderful, life-giving humour expressed in our cultural output across the arts.
There are always exceptions, bless ‘em, like Richard Roxburgh’s award-winning ABC TV series Rake in recent years, and the viral YouTube web series The Katering Show, but take a look at Australian cinema in recent years and you tell me if there’s something funny – as in peculiar – going on.
As for me, I’ve accepted that my own best writing isn’t remotely academic, earnest, gothic or Joycean. And I guess that’s a start.