Sydney Writers Festival / Commonwealth Writers Prize 2011, Part 1

Our hotel, the Sebel Pier One

Yesterday was my first full day in Sydney. I went to the Blue Mountains along with the other two regional first book winners, Katrina Best (Canada & the Caribbean) and Cynthia Jele (Africa), for a session called “New Voices from Across the Globe”.

(The fourth regional winner, Mischa Hiller from the UK, was not able to come to Sydney due to health reasons and the three of us have decided it’s best he wins the overall best first book so we can hate him collectively and from afar, rather than it getting all awkward on Saturday when suddenly one of us are suddenly held up as being slightly better than the others).

The Carrington Hotel, Katoomba

 Our session was at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba. The session was packed out (the typical sea of grey; one particularly elderly audience member nodded off during the session – at least I hope she nodded off rather than dying...) and we each sold a goodly amount of books (though it was Bird Eat Bird > Happiness is a Four Letter Word > A Man Melting at the signing table if I’m honest).

I read from 'Oh! So Careless' (a risky proposition to read a story that ventures to South Africa next to an SA native...).

The chair for the session was author David Brooks, who’d clearly read and engaged with each of our books; his questions were good in a focussed, stage-managing way, while giving us space to get our own points and personalities across.

Main drag, Katoomba

A view from Echo Point

The 3 Sisters

 So yes, all in all a great start to our Sydney Writers Festival (despite being 1.5hrs drive from Sydney at the time).

After the session we were taken to the nearby Echo Point, and walked down to the base of one of the Three Sisters. A truly spectacular spot, and nice to get a bit touristy for once.

We arrived back in Sydney after dark and were joined for dinner by Aminatta Forna (winner, Best Book, Africa) who was fresh from Auckland, and a couple from the CWP entourage (we writers can’t be trusted by ourselves! We might get lost).

Writers at dinner

At one point, PR Man/Agent/Avid Phone Call Maker Benython asked Aminatta why some people pronounce the final ‘E’ in Sierra Leone. I was compelled to mention the classic 80’s Kiwi song by Coconut, which no one had heard of, so I ended up singing it... A weird, weird moment.

Today (Tuesday), the three first bookers (and entourage) went to Juniperina Juvenile Justice Centre (I always spell it Juvenal Justice Centre, which would be some guy yelling insults at you in Latin), which is a girls only facility. We did two sets of workshops with 6 girls per session, consisting of a brief chat and Q&A about what it’s like to be a writer / where we come from, then led them through a writing exercise. Cynthia and I had the girls imagine they were shipwrecked on a desert island with a celebrity and they had to describe what it was like 5 hours, 5 months and 5 years after arriving. “Celebrities” ranged from the dude who egged Justin Beiber to Vin Diesel, and the final fates of the various castaways included going mad, making friends with a coconut and living in the trees; becoming OCD about cleanliness after Vin Diesel died from an infected foot as a result of a spear fishing accident; to eating Orlando Bloom when the fish ran out.

Some of the girls were harder to keep focussed than others, but they were no worse behaved than your typical 16-18 year old public school girls. There were a couple of the group who seemed to get a particular kick out of our visit (one girl brought out her notebook during lunch and showed us her poetry). So plenty of positives, though it’s best not to think about what the future might hold for many when they return to the outside world and their families (if they return to their families).

After my stint in juvie

This afternoon we’ve been left to our own devises. Dangerous, I know. The more I’m around the bigger name authors (Howard Jacobsen and his wife are always stalking the halls and lobby of the Sebel) the more it hits home that writers can get away with a lot. I call it Pampered Writers Syndrome (PWS). In Auckland, David Mitchell said that writers at festivals were like seven year olds, liable to wander off in the middle of a conversation or become distracted by something shiny in the distance, with no idea of time or where they need to be, to have no concept of money (there’s always someone else to pay)... We three first bookers are slowly being corrupted, which I’m sure is adding to the CWP administrators sleepless nights.

I took a walk across the harbour bridge, which yielded a good view of the Opera House, but wasn’t that thrilling.

Shortly I’m off to meet the CWP judges for the first time. The writers and judges are having a bevvie before rolling along to the Sydney Writers Festival Opening Addrees: Nation on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown by Fatima Bhutto, then on to the SWF Launch Party.

Tomorrow it’s two school visits/writing workshops, then another party for me (Random House Australia). I’ll also be recording a video interview for the SWF website and there’s a print interview with the Australian in the works. So yeah, ‘tis all go. But lovin’ it. Just lovin’ it.

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Post #2

You can read my first AWRF post here.

I am typing this in the International Terminal at Auckland Airport. It will, however, be much later by the time I’ve posted this online as I refuse to pay $10/hr for internet (wireless or a dummy terminal).

Anyway, to finish up on Saturday’s sessions...

At 4pm I went to ‘Antarctica’, where Steve Braunias and Jane Ussher spoke with Finlay MacDonald about their experiences down at ‘the ice’. It was interesting to compare the way a writer and a photographer might respond down there, and to also compare the famously grumpy Braunias’ reaction to other, more romantically inclined writers.

Braunias had to be nagged to go, and stayed for 10 days. At one point during the session he said that he finds Dannevirke beautiful and only finds Antarctica “ugly, childless and nihilistic.”

In contrast, Ussher had begged for the opportunity to get down to Antarctica and spent 5 weeks there. She spoke of the challenges of the Antarctic summer (24hr daylight for a photographer who prefers shadow and dimness). Fortunately, the huts of Shakleton and Scott provided the dimness. I recently read Shackleton’s “Endurance” about his ill-fated attempt to cross the continent and subsequent effort to return to safety, and found the images of the huts shown on the screens at the session beautiful and sad, and recommend her book: Still Life.

Next up it was The Best of the Best NZ Poems, chaired by Fergus Barrowman and featuring readings by Bill Manhire, Emma Neale, Vincent O’Sullivan, Elizabeth Smither, Cilla McQueen, Tusiata Avia, Paula Green and Robert Sullivan. Most read their poem that had been selected for the new book anthology (TBOTBNZP) from the 10 years of the Best NZ poems website, as well as two or three others of their choosing. Highlights were O’Sullivan’s ‘Domestic’ about having sex while peeling an onion, and McQueen’s ‘Soapy Water’ which begins by considering the impact of an economic downturn on poetry...

My final session on Saturday was ‘This One’s For Christchurch’, featuring Carl Nixon, Fiona Farrell, Joanna Preston, Tusiata Avia, Sarah Quigley and Charlotte Randall, and tag-team chaired by the directors of the Christchurch Writers Festival, Ruth Todd and Morrin Rout. The writers all addressed the earthquake(s) in various ways and it was interesting to compare the poets with the prose writers. The poets all had earthquake poems to trot out (some of them quite moving) while the prose writers’ response is likely to be ready in 2-3 years: Charlotte Randall spoke about her next novel which will take her character Halfie from Hokitika Town and follow the events of the 1904 San Francisco earthquake, while. Carl Nixon chose to read out an old short story set in the old, lost Christchurch.

Later in the evening I attended the Writers’ Party and got to meet such NZ lit luminaries as Emily Perkins, Sarah Laing, Steve Braunias and Laurence Fearnley (my time with them ranging from a handshake to a couple of lines of conversation before they found someone more interesting to talk to). I also spoke with most of the members of the Publishing Panel I'd attended that morning (and posted about in Part One) and caught up with some of writers I have met before, including Emma Neale (the nicest person in NZ books, I reckon) and Elizabeth Knox (we spoke about Australian writers festivals; she’s been to Sydney twice, Melbourne twice, Brisbane twice, and Adelaide and Perth once apeiece so she knows a thing or two).

I know this sounds like name dropping but I include these details because this was one of the most important, exciting and stimulating parts of my festival experience. I got a buzz talking to these people, being in that situation...  Being coy about this wouldn’t paint a true picture of my festival experience.

At midnight, I found myself talking to Hal Wake, the artistic director of the Vancouver Writers Festival, as we were being ushered out of the Alelujah Cafe (HW: “I’m sorry, but we only get funding from Creative NZ to bring one NZ writer to Vancouver every year, and this year we’ve got Lloyd Jones coming...” CC: *fist shake at Lloyd Jones*) and we followed a crowd that included other festival and publishing types down into what turned out to be a pool hall. I was suddenly hit with a wave of fatigue after attending 5 sessions (6 if you count my own, which I probably should) and did the classic ‘Oh, my cellphone is ringing,’ move and went back upstairs so that I could hear the imaginary person on the other end, and kept on walking till I got back to the Langham.

Classy move, I know. (I’m not sure anyone even noticed at the time, so I should probably have just left that part out).

Ahem.

Sunday at the Festival

My first and only session as an audience member on Sunday was Aminatta Forna in conversation with Hal Wake (Mr Vancouver). This was probably the best session of the festival for me (one on one sessions always tend to be; though the panels always sound more interesting in the festival programme).

Some highlights:

Forna chose to structure her latest novel (the Commonwealth Writers Prize and Orange Prize finalist, The Memory of Love) so that it takes a long time to get to the horrors and atrocities Westerners may associate with Sierra Leone so that readers would experience the period the way her family and others in Sierra Leone had, that it was a slow decline; that there was beauty, and by putting it upfront, it made this more evident for Western readers.

She described the “layers of silence” at play in Sierra Leone (including the silence of trauma and the silence of oppression) and the challenge this poses for the Western character Adrian who goes to Sierra Leone to help (he’s a psychologist).

The novel in a nutshell: “In a country of silence, why is Elias the only one that is willing to tell his story?”
Another aphorism: “This is a book about people living in Africa, rather than a book about Africa.”
Forna was a fluent and engaging speaker (her history in broadcasting shows) and Wake was an able chairperson (clearly a festival pro).

After this session I met up with some whanau for coffee, and then it was time for my second session, which just so happened to be with Aminatta Forna and festival hot property David Mitchell. The session was framed by the fact we’d all won our respective categories (them: the big prize; me: best first book) for their regions of the Commonwealth (AF: Africa, DM: UK/South Asia; CC: SE Asia and Pacific).

The session was chaired by Nicola Leggat, a festival trustee and my publisher! No favouritism here though, as the reading order was determined by alphabetical order of first names (very utilitarian), so it was Aminatta first, then me, then David.

For my 10 minutes I read from the opening of ‘Unnatural Selection’, and with a bit of selective reading, got to include the section about it being a joy “to live in a world without Paul Holmes”, which got plenty of laughs. So much so, that when David came to the podium he asked, “So who’s Paul Holmes?”

The Q&A section felt a bit stilted (we all found it hard, I think, to talk about what the Commonwealth means, because it seems a very long way away from our books and the process of writing them) but the audience seemed pleased with the session overall.

And that, pretty much, was my first Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, my first ever festival as a participant. It’s a great thing to have a “swing pass” and be able to bowl on in to any session you like, and it’s great to see people buying your book and to get to have a chat with the few who ventured to see me at the signing table. The festival as a whole was very well run and very well patronised. My one takeaway as an audience member was the quality of the questions “we” came up with, which tops any festival I’ve been to anywhere in the world (including Edinburgh, the grand pubah book fest).

And now, it’s on to Sydney for a full on week. Here’s hoping there’s a ready stream of free Wi-Fi (I seem to remember reading something about it costing $20AUD a day at my hotel; fingers crossed I can blag something more reasonable).

Update


I have arrived in Sydney and am ensconced in my massive hotel room in the Sebel Pier One, which is pretty much under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Probably not a posh as The Langham, but definitely has the X-factor due to the location!

I've been promised free internet ("Don't worry when it says you're being charged $64 dollars...") so I'm even in a position to post some pictures! (I'm not sleepy and I kinda watching/listening to Eurovision).

Wee giftbag from my wonderful publishers that was waiting for me when I arrived at the Langham on Friday night.

Big stack of A Man Meltings early on Saturday morning which was somewhat diminished when I left on Sunday avo.

And I was like, 'Where's my fricken banner?'

And she was like, 'When you have a signing queue like David Mitchell's...  you might get a banner!'

Me at the Commonwealth Writers Prize session on Sunday

Marisa got David to sign my copy of 1000 Autumns that she's now reading... DM took the whole signing thing to another level. (I would have spelt it 'Bonza', but what do I know?)    

My humongous room at the Sebel Pier One, home for the next 7 days.

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Post #1

My Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2011 (#AWRF) so far has been great.  The out-of-town festival participants are all being put up in The Langham, which you must pronounce with a plum in your mouth and the pinky finger on your tea drinking hand extended. So the pampering began last night when Marisa and I arrived around 9.30pm.

This morning I attenedd the Publishing Panel at 10am, which was chaired by ex-Penguin NZ big kahuna Geoff Walker, and featured Nikki Christer (Random House Australia), Tom Mayer (Norton, US), Alvina Land (Little Brown, US) and Alexis Washam (Random House US).  As you might expect the hour was focussed on the future of publishing: paper vs electronic books, self-publishing vs traditional publishing houses, the author's responsibilities when it comes to self-promotion. In all, the mood was optimistic: the book will endure, the paper-based book will endure (though the proportion of print and eBooks will clearly change), and there are new opportunities out there for writers and publishers (and readers) that have been opened up by technology.  As an example, Tom Mayer spoke about publishers willing to 'publish' 15-20,000 word pieces of non-fiction as stand alone eBooks, which would have otherwise only had the option of being published in magazines and/or extended/padded out into a 'book-length' book.

Alvina Ling suggested that it wasn't just writers who needed to be on Twitter and Facebook and everything else; that editors also need to be "a brand" to help attract talent and forge links in the publishing world (it's no coincidence that Alvina has a blog).

Tom Mayer said that writers had to make their own luck, and gave the example of the tireless Emily Perkins: "She doesn't just sit around writing books!" (Cue uneasy laughter).

Speaking of uneasy, the otherwise stellar Q&A session was derailed by the final question from the floor: "You mentioned how hard it is to get your books read as a new writer and how you have to be innovative and persistent [I'm paraphrasing slightly], so my question is: will you please read my book about reality TV shows and growing up the child of a holocaust survivor."

Um...

Next up for me was Inside Stories at 11.30am. Frances Walsh, author of Inside Stories: A History of the New Zealand Housewife 1890-1975 spoke with chair, Anna Miles, for half an hour about the book, domesticity and women's magazines more generally for half an hour. Then, the floor was opened for questions with a full 30 minutes left to run. This could have been a recipe for disaster but thankfully it wasn't. In fact, the erudite questions from the audience were probably better than those posed by the chair, ranging from birth control, Maori, politics, design and culminating in the best question of the session: 'You [Frances Walsh]' have said you tried to avoid nostalgia with this book, but if you could take a gap year in any one of the years in your time period, when would you choose and why?"  To which Walsh replied: 1895, and she'd work on Day Break magazine...

Walsh should be commended for being able to field every one of the wide ranging questions in an engaging and informative way, as, I guess, should Anna Miles for running the risk of handing the show over to the audience.

Up next it was my session with Hamish Clayton and Tina Makereti called "Emerging Writers", which was chaired by Iain Sharpe.  We took turns reading for about 8 mins each, then chatted about how we got here and where to next ("the difficult second album").

For the trainspotters: I read from 'The Spirit of Rainbow Gorge' and brought some levity to proceedings after Hamish and Tina were poetic and powerful.

Come question time, there was a good split of questions from the auidence: each of us got a question directed at us.  Mine started off rocky when the audience member called me Cliff, and by the time I'd formulated a response to the possible racism inherent in on line in my reading, it wasn't really worth correcting her. But be warned Aucklanders, if you call me Cliff tomorrow, I may start singing 'Living Doll' and you don't want that!

I've just been to the session on Antarctica with Jane Ussher and Steve Braunias, and it's time to head to The Best of the Best NZ Poems. Will write about those (and more) in due course.

The Long and the Short of Success

Congratulations to Lawrence Patchett (a.k.a. Mr Long) and Kirsten McDougall (a.k.a. Ms Short) for coming up trumps in the Long and the Short of It competition run by Unity Books and Sport.

From the press release:

The judges – Elizabeth Knox, Bill Manhire and Emily Perkins – comment that both winning stories ‘deal with difficult things and find their way to various kinds of human decency’.

Of Lawrence Patchett’s long story: ‘This remarkable—apparently artless, apparently old-fashioned—story strikes a quiet new note in New Zealand fiction. “The Road to Tokomairiro” shows us how ordinary human fortitude and decency can be, even in the most troubled circumstances. The story has moral seriousness, but feels “lighter” than its subject matter, perhaps because it is so beautifully and sympathetically written.’

Of Kirsten McDougall’s short story: ‘“Clean Hands Save Lives” is about how families work; it’s about generational power struggle; it’s about how to be a functioning mother. There’s lovely pacing, and yet we get a real story, not just a quick sketch of family dynamics—and there’s also a nice sense of comic circularity (the snake with its tail in its mouth) courtesy of some supermarket biscuits.’

...

The stories are published, along with four highly commended stories – ‘Anchorage’ by Sylvie Thomson and ‘When We Were Bread’ by Anna Jackson in the long division, and ‘The Orienteer’ by Rachel O’Neill and ‘The Waikato Farmers’ by Craig Cliff in the short division – in The Long and the Short of It, which is available from Unity Books, RRP $20.

My story is inspired by this story from the Waikato Times; or more correctly, the farmers in my story seem to have been inspired/corrupted by the story in the news.

The wordcount is exactly 1000, counting the title. So yeah, just squeaked in.

There’s a grand event (or a "petit finale" according to @FergusVUP) at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Sunday 15 May, 5.00-6.15pm. The two winners will read from their stories and be interviewed by Emily Perkins. It’s free and all are welcome. Unfortunately I’ll be checking in at the airport for my flight to Sydney at that time (my first Sydney Writers’ Festival event is in the Blue Mountains on Monday morning). Excitement.

Aucklanders can still come and see me do my thang at these two Auckland events:

Emerging Writers session, with Hamish Clayton and Tina Makereti, Saturday 14 May at 1pm  (FREE!!)

Commonwealth Writers Prize session, with David Mitchell and Aminatta Forna, Sunday 15 May at 1pm  (ALSO FREE!!!!)

Okay, enough spruiking. I'm off to further pare back the wordcounts and whip up a 150 word short short story for the BNZ Literary Awards. Entries close 16 May.


UPDATE

5 Hours Later...

I have written one 150 word story, as well as a few things that turned out to be poems. I also went for a walk and when I got back there was a copy of Sport 39 and several copies of the Long and the Short of It book. Score!

That's my plane reading sorted for tomorrow!

Playlist for the non-grunge nineties, Or: It wasn't all sex and candy

I've been plunged 13-18 years in the past with my recent YouTube watching. I blame Marcy Playground. Now you can blame me.

1. Marcy Playground – ‘Saint Joe on the School Bus’ (1997)

2. The Refreshments – ‘Banditos’* (1996)

Fun fact discovered while Wikipedia-ing the year this song came out: The Refreshments also did the theme tune for the TV show King of the Hill.

3. Spacehog – ‘In The Meantime’ (1996)

(I always just thought of pigs in space when I heard this band’s name, but the other day I said, ‘Stop being such a space hog’ to a friend as we walked along the footpath and realised the second (and probably primary) meaning of their name.)

4. Smashing Pumpkins – ‘Today’ (1993)

I don't want to get into an argument about whether Smashing Pumpkins were grunge or not, okay? I don't think this song is grungy at all (it's kinda proto-emo, don't you think) and it's so good and it has an ice cream truck in it and it's my playlist and if you don't play along I'll take my blog and go home!

5. Toad The Wet Sprocket – ‘Good Intentions’ (1995)

6. Deadeye Dick* – ‘New Age Girl’ (1994)

* I was a bit iffy about including this song, but they are named after a Kurt Vonnegut novel, so...

7. Cracker – ‘Low’ (1993)

8. Fastball – ‘The Way’ (1998)

.

Bonus Track (because it wasn't a single and there's no video, not even just an audio track with an album cover)

Nada Surf - 'Amateur' (originally 1998; this acoustic live version 2010)

Archival Footage

It's less than a week till I fly to Auckland for their Writers and Readers Festival and break my seal, so to speak, as a festival participant. Then on Sunday I fly straight to Sydney for a week of being on stage or in front of workshops or school groups. The ABC has already sought permission to film one of my sessions (the bromance one, of course), and there'll be a c.10 minutes video interview with me posted on the SWF website at some stage during the festival.

My cover will well and truly be blown.

Until now, I've managed to escape the world of video. Well, not completely. There'll be a two minute perve insight into my writing space on the final episode of season three of The Good Word (screening 7 June on TVNZ, and online thereafter).

And I (or eagle-eyed friends) have caught glimpses of me in two YouTube clips.

One: Gordon Downie, lead singer of the Tragically Hip, touches my head at 2:36. My head explodes at 2:37.



NB: That's not my singing you can hear on the video, I assure you.

Two: Best sporting event, ever. Brief glimpse of me in the crowd at the All Whites vs Bahrain at 5:10.



I told you it was brief. Still can't find me? Yeah, well.

I'm pretty much the Sasquatch in terms of verified video sightings.  The only other hits you'll find on YouTube are for dudes named Craig, cliff diving... poorly.

Maybe I should change my name to Acapulco...

Bricks and Bracken

I'm going to be spending less time at paid work and more time at unpaid work (ie writing fiction ie "the novel") in the coming weeks and months, which means I'm going to be listening to a lot more music and getting tired of the same old stuff on my hard drive and seeking out new and exciting albums that I can kinda sorta ignore as I create a fictional masterpiece (and write insanely long sentences).

But until then, I will settle for going on brief kicks with old bands I haven't listened to in a while and find pleasingly good upon re-listening, a la The Proximity Effect, On Avery Island, Grind...

*

As if on queue, Richard Ford has a piece in the Guardian about "The Writing Life". He nicely sums up the pros of being a writer:

[You] run your own operation; you have at least a chance to admire what you do and feel a kinship with the greats; you get to make excellent use (by sticking it in your work) of the constant flood of life's jetsam – the daily freshet that drives most people crazy; and you have a chance to please total strangers with your efforts, and at least potentially, marginally make the world a better place.

Okay, so in isolation that sounds quite schmaltzy.

*

Non sequitur of the week: I think Bricks and Bracken would be a good name for a law firm. Or a crime fighting duo (did Thomas Bracken, who penned God Defend New Zealand have superpowers? Probably not, if he was expecting God to step in and save the country when saving was called for).

*

Frances Mountier has a short story, 'Bailout', online at Renegade House... WITH PICTURES. I was the external assessor for Frances' MA manuscript in 2009 ('twas a book of short stories) and it's nice to see this story come to life, so to speak.

*

If you're in Wellington and you're looking for a younger-crowd book club OR you wanna hear me talk about myself (rather than just reading what I write about myself here...) you should come along to the Capri Bar Eatery next Tuesday, 10 May, at 6pm. Details here.

*

Something I didn't know until I started taking photos of birds:

A flock of starlings looks like this...

But at any one point, there'll be birds that look like a pair of lips...

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Okay, so I’m about eight months behind the rest of the world, but I’ve now finished Freedom.

I began reading it over Easter as it's the sort of book that benefits from long hours spent on the couch while nothing much needs to be done. It needs immersion.

Having said this, it took me a good while to get sucked into the narrative – in fact, I thought about giving up after 50 pages and again at 100.   Ah, at least I finished The Corrections...

Part of the problem was I’d previously read the opening section, ‘Good Neighbours’, in The New Yorker. This 23 page section is the obvious chunk to exhibit in other settings, but it is not a short story. The main characters – Walter and Patty Berglund – are at too great a distance, as events are told from the perspective of their Ramsey Hill neighborhood, often narrowing down to neighbours a fews doors down, Seth and Merrie Paulsen. Nor is this the standard opening to your typical contemporary social realist novel, which would start much less jauntily and also have the main characters in much closer focus.

The novel then shifts to the first manuscript within manuscripts: Patty Berglund’s autobiography, Mistakes Were Made... (composed at her therapist’s suggestion). Part way through this section I found the wormhole into Franzen’s fiction and could finally empathise with his characters and I was away laughing (or sighing at the state of the world, as the case may be).

At page 190 there’s another structural shift. This section is called '2004', and deals with events which all climax in said year of our lord. Each chapter takes a main character’s perspective, and we often circle the drain of one nadir from two or more perspectives over two or more chapters. It is during this section that the POLITICAL MESSAGES are set forth in a manner so overt that one can’t quite call the author out. Surely this is meant to be over-the-top? Surely this character is has moved beyond an authorial mouthpiece to become another extremist to be avoided?

In the end I didn’t have a problem being bludgeoned with stats about overpopulation or declining numbers of songbird species (and Franzen did manage to make me feel a bit bad that I care more about the latter than the former). I even forgive the heavy handed ‘You want freedom? You can’t handle freedom’ strand that shouted THEME, THEME, THEME, every time it appeared. That’s fine. In fact, a book like this should come with some social commentary chops. It demands it. The love triangle stor line demands something broader, just as the social commentary demands examples on the micro level.

As Emily Perkins put it on The Good Word (watch the episode online here), the Walter-Patty-Richard Katz love story “acts as a Trojan horse for the author’s moral outrage.”

After '2004', we have a second instalment of Patty’s autobiography in the third person, composed six years later, which is followed by a brief denouement section that mirrors ‘The Good Neighbours’, told from the perspective of Walter’s neighbours in the newly (and appallingly) named Canterbridge Lakes Estate.

On a structural level then, there’s a lot going on. I am undecided whether the palindromic structure is a stroke or a stunt of genius. It’s clear J-Franz has IT, whatever it is we’re all looking for in our writers: cajones, verbal alacrity and something to say, a deep moral vein and a finger on the pulse of kids these days... but there’s always the push and pull of his fiction and his FICTION, of the story he’s telling and the book he’s writing, of the look at my characters and the look at me.

For example, there are scenes that are just plain bad. Like, so bad they couldn’t work anywhere else except buried midway through a 600 page novel. Like the scene between Walter, his assistant and wannabe lover, Lalitha, and Richard Katz that starts on page 215 (NB: I think I have the version that was printed from the earlier proofs so my page numbers may be off; if not, they still missed some howlers in the final final version). We get nine pages of dialogue so ludicrously content heavy (explanation of the Cerulean Mountain Trust and Walter’s overpopulation hobbyhorse) that Katz is reduced to, “Incredible,” and “That does sound tough” and “This is all sounding more familiar.” Way to turn the brooding, Byronic anti-hero rocker into a compliant interlocutor and shunt this here reader from your fictional coil, if only temporarily.

But I don’t want to get too down on what is a good-great novel and will surely make my top ten books for the year. It didn’t make me weep on the last page like it did the usually stoic Steve Braunias (as per the above Good Word episode), but it packed plenty of heart-punches (those moments of utter, instant sadness when you look up from the book and say to yourself, ‘How could this middle-aged American author possibly now what it feels like to be me?’). I'm glad there's a writer like Franzen out there writing novels like The Corrections and Freedom and I'm glad there's a big readership for what he's doing. On a day like today, with the uncomfortable scenes coming out of the U.S. after the death of Osama bin Laden, I feel there's plenty of fuel left for the fire.