IT ALL started with a garrotting. I told the class to read the opening pages of No Country for Old Men. This was long before the movie was released so they couldn't just rent the DVD. Second-year undergrads can quote endlessly from The Simpsons but I cannot find a contemporary novel that everyone has read. We've been talking about style: minimalism, less is more. But there's been some grumbling about the reading list and "all those short stories where nothing ever happens". I figure two murders in the first seven pages might just do the trick, writes Aifric Campbell
When we meet for the seminar, one of the girls says Cormac McCarthy makes her sick to her stomach. The guy beside her says, "You should go see Wolf Creek." Another one thinks McCarthy is completely amoral. I talk a bit about language, the juxtaposition of violence and beauty. The power of the verb, the absence of adjectives. And then K says he loves No Country, it's the best thing he's ever read, no question. Heads swivel. This is a breakthrough, because for weeks now K has been either absent or arrived late in the same black Metallica T shirt and busied himself with personal grooming tasks involving earwax, fingernails and the lid of a Biro.
Two weeks later we're reading Flannery O'Connor, who says writers need to spend time really looking at things, that good writing comes from the senses. K gazes dreamily out the fourth-floor window across the campus and says that what springs to mind right now is a story about shooting up the library.
I joke about this in e-mail to a friend in New York who's writing a book about guns and has just returned from a "Babes 'n' Bullets" weekend where blondes in denim miniskirts learn how to handle a Magnum (the gun, not the ice-cream). "Like, HELLO?" she replies. "Remember Virginia Tech? You know the shooter was writing these weird stories in class."
The chainsaw casually stowed away in the boot of the car on page two is an early warning signal. K's waxy pallor is illuminated by a pinkish glow as he reads his story aloud. The trademark slump is gone and he clutches the pages with a taut energy. The small matter of why the central character has just stabbed his entire family and how he has suddenly come to the attention of the police is brushed aside by a lengthy car chase involving a rustbucket, a cop on a Harley Davidson and a tornado screaming through countryside that resembles both Kansas and Suffolk and reaches its climax in an abandoned barn with chains suspended from rafters, dog collars with spikes and a leather hood. K doesn't flinch from the gory details. Despite any amount of blood loss and beating around the head, the first-person narrator remains stubbornly conscious.
The class reaction is a silence that is hard to read. Someone mentions Reservoir Dogs, that scene where Mr White is dancing to Stuck in the Middle with You after he's hacked off the cop's ear. Things are not going entirely to plan. I have the distinct feeling that K is uncovering a passion for writing sloppy torture porn.
I arrange a tutorial. I tell K it's great to see him finally working so hard. He says he's thinking of writing a graphic novel - this violence thing has really got him going and he's got a friend who's very good at drawing. I say he needs to focus on some key issues - character development and motivation, suspension of disbelief, not to mention sentence structure. He says he's already started on McCarthy's backlist and is toying with the idea of using Spanish dialogue even though he doesn't actually know the language. He's looking forward to reading American Psycho. Can I recommend any more of this kind of stuff?
I think back to 1991 when I defended American Psycho to an American colleague who declared it gratuitously pornographic. This was the same man who was trying to interest his girlfriend in erotic asphyxiation. I think of Ryu Murakami and that carve-up scene in a Tokyo nightclub and I wonder if I should just let K find these books himself.
And then K tells me I'm wrong about the seductiveness of suggestion. Sometimes you just have to spell it out. "You know that Raymond Carver story you gave us?" he says. "The one where the guy almost punches his wife and you said how much more effective it was that he didn't actually hit her. Well I think it would have been a much better story if he'd smacked her one and the reader got to see it."
Aifric Campbell's novel, The Semantics of Murder, is published by Serpent's Tail