FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Everybody's Right By Paolo Sorrentino, translated by Howard Curtis Harvill Secker, 340pp. £14.99
MEET TONY PAGODA, crooner and killer, the kind of delusional, in-your-face character to either listen to or simply run a mile from. The Italian film maker Paolo Sorrentino’s bombastic debut novel begins big and loud, and more or less continues that ramshackle way, not always making very much sense. Life’s like that sometimes – but fiction isn’t.
“Somehow, it just crept up on us. But it really started because one of us had talent, unfortunately, and that was me.” Tony is inclined to rhetoric. “What else is there to say?” he asks. “It’s almost never all right. And I’d stop right there if it wasn’t for this unhealthy vanity running around inside me, overwhelming me.” It is kind of him to tell us, but it is easy to guess. Tony’s chaotic yarn is sustained by ego as well as by a fair measure of guilt.
As the narrative begins Tony is “carrying 44 bitter years on my back like a burden”. He also informs us that he is a crooner and that he dislikes the label, but then he changes his mind.
Tony requires immense patience; so does this novel. Our mouthy anti-hero is waiting to go onstage. But first he may have to vomit and is possibly still a bit drunk. “I can feel my third gin and tonic rising into my throat. I don’t do coke when I sing. Mick Jagger might have been able to, because all he does is scream and run around and wiggle his hips. But I sing.”
Such a bundle of information, including a brief discussion of his soul – “flaccid, submissive” – and he’s not even out of the dressing room. Sorrentino is balancing everything on a narrator who is not easy to listen to – “Now the walls of my brain are knocking like shutters left open in a windstorm” – and becomes progressively more difficult and less sympathetic as the story, such as it is, proceeds.
There are some saving flourishes. One of them is having Frank Sinatra sitting in the front row. “He’s something else, is Frank, it’d take more than this to surprise him . . . Sinatra, although he’s very drunk, doesn’t fall asleep.” With a bit of luck the reader won’t either.
This is a busy book, cluttered by gestures, grotesque characters, excess and ageing women desperate for sex. There is an almost amusing encounter with a parrot that turns out to be a bat. Sorrentino does not want any empty space, nor is he interested in silence. At times it seems that the narrative may be intended as a confession, and it is obvious Tony has sins, lots of them. “I don’t lie. I don’t deal in bullshit. My songs are screams of fear. Basically, they are all about fear. The fear I’ll never again be able to love the one person I really loved. That’s exactly it. I get up on that stage and launch into those feelings. I bomb, I drive everyone crazy, knowing I have the power, the power to manipulate everyone’s heart, all except one, my own.”
Tony is many things, including irritating, crude and sexist. But he is not particularly real. Nor, come to think of it, is the novel. One of the many problems is the fact that Everybody’s Right has been hyped as a novel about modern Italy, but it could easily be set in New York or Tokyo or anywhere else. To compare it with The Tin Drum, as some have done, is outrageous: in Grass’s classic an entire historical epoch is evoked beyond, and by way of explanation of, Oskar’s self-absorption.
Sorrentino’s characters appear to exist only in a sexual context. Their identities are dominated by sex; sex and youth. Early in the narrative Tony makes his way home to his wife: he is utterly bored by her and her weeping, yet when she requests a divorce he is offended, even hurt, and very angry. “I give her a slap. A husband-and-wife slap, the kind you get in many families. A slap with the back of my hand. Italian theatricality. She tries to cry, but is too afraid and can’t. I’m like a thief who’s broken into a stranger’s house at night and that’s the tone in which I hiss: ‘Why do you want a divorce?’.”
When she finally manages to speak, she tells him that it is because he is shallow. His reaction is odd: “If she wanted to kill me, with these words she’s managed it.”
Within a few pages he embarks on another of his many pointless asides: “To talk about the soul you need something quite different, you actually need to own your own soul. I do, but I don’t think the others do. You have to be careful with the soul, if you keep nagging away at the concept, you’re gambling with your own self.”
Tony may well be one of the more obnoxious fictional creations, but far more serious is his failure to interest. His polemics consist of trite platitudes such as “We wanted poetry and all we got was aches and pains. We wanted emotion and all we got was lots of TV channels” or “Enthusiasm is a dirty word. It crushes me, saps my strength”. When not ruminating like this, he is recalling previous sexual encounters, including sexual initiation as a teenager at the whim of a nasty baroness.
Divorce does supply an incentive. While on tour in Brazil he decides to remain behind while his band members gather at the airport for the flight home. His sketchily described 20-year stay in South America ends when a rich man lures him back home to sing. Meanwhile his ex-wife has learned German and his daughter has, wisely, disowned both parents.
It would be wrong to think that this is a novel about a midlife breakdown. Nor is it a study of modern Italy, unless it is a limp attempt at a Berlusconi satire. At best it is an unfunny 340-page account of one man’s aggressively written argument with himself. At worst, well, it is a haphazard, pointless and disappointingly crude publication from one of the world’s finest publishers of international, particularly European, fiction.
For all its energy and/or lack of discipline, this indulged and indulgent display does a great deal of shouting without ever striking an original note. Unless, of course, Sorrentino was attempting to write the first bad Americanised Italian novel. If so, he may well have achieved that dubious goal.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
