FictionFileAnna Carey rounds up some recent fiction
Three novels, three very different characters: a music-loving, girlfriend-wanting teenage boy in early 1980s Belfast,who dreams of one day escaping to a more glamorous place; a fading Boston beauty trying to make up for lost time by sleeping with as many people as possible; a terminally ill man revelling in the city he loves. The first two figures aren't very good company, but the last is so engaging that this reader found herself wishing he wouldn't die, if only because there should be another book about him.
Music for Boys, music journalist David Cavanagh's début novel, never really rises above its determinedly adolescent title. Its narrator, Doug, is (like the author) a Dublin-born, Belfast-bred boy, who's doing his A Levels and obsessing over music, girls and fickle friends. Political tensions are rising - the novel is set in May, 1981, and the H-block hunger strikers are in the news - but the pupils of Belfast Grammar School are more concerned with their dodgy bands and forthcoming exams than with the Troubles. Doug is also working on what he calls "The Manuscript", an exhaustive account of his musical obsessions which is quoted all too frequently throughout. Doug is a scarily convincing teenage narrator, but who, apart from pretentious teenage boys, wants to read something that could have been written by a pretentious teenage boy? And for a book whose theme is supposedly the power of music over teenage lives, the narrator's passionate love of music never really comes across (unlike in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity). Music for Boys is intermittently funny, but mostly it's boring.
Tama Janowitz's supposedly comic novel, Peyton Amberg, is also underwhelming. The eponymous Peyton is a frustrated 50-year old Manhattan travel agent from a bizarre, impoverished Boston family, who is now married to a "nebbischy" New York dentist. We meet her first in Amsterdam, where, in a particularly grotesque sequence, she pursues a handsome young man only to be humiliatingly rebuffed. Her whole life, she decides, has been "one long low-rent f**k trip". "When had it begun," she wonders, "that women had taken over the man's part?"
This rather dubious premise - that women are now emotionally stunted sexual predators - is not the only bad thing about Peyton Amberg. Peyton herself - very beautiful, not very clever, not very funny, not particularly nice - is an utterly uncharismatic central character. With the possible exception of her cartoonishly mad mother, none of the other characters are very interesting either. They're not made any more appealing by Janowitz's love of scatological grotesquerie, which makes itself evident throughout. A book may be both revolting and great at the same time (for proof, see Martin Amis's Money), but Peyton Amberg is merely revolting.
Janowitz is, however, able to successfully erect a complex narrative structure. Peyton Amberg's story leaps all over the place, from Peyton's innocent teenage years to her marriage to Barry to her current European adventure and back just a few months to the business trip that led, in a convoluted way, to her arrival there. So many narrative strands could have made for a mess, but Janowitz deftly weaves them into a coherent whole. Her dexterity is probably the only admirable thing about this tedious book.
Thank the many gods of Manhattan, then, for Todd McEwen, whose magnificent fourth novel, Who Sleeps With Katz, is a belligerently witty, dazzling and oddly touching homage to New York. Theo MacKenzie - known throughout the novel as MacK - is an NBC radio announcer diagnosed with lung cancer, a disease he doesn't want to fight. Instead, he roams New York's skyscraper canyons with his friend, Isidor, and wonders which single cigarette sparked off the cancerous cells, hoping it was one of the good ones rather than some random Marlboro cadged from a stranger.
There's no plot to speak of - it's enough to follow MacK around a city which McEwen evokes with such fizzy tenderness. MacK praises the many small gods of the city, from Central Park ("in classic and agreeable fashion, \ is a god and also the abode of a god") to the No. 1 train, with a sardonic but genuine love. MacEwen's firecracker prose is a pleasure - the book reads like a delicious mixture of Jay McInerney, Martin Amis and James Joyce, with a bit of Nigel Molesworth thrown in. He plays with language with evident joy and the result is a book as refreshing as a dry martini on a hot New York night.
Anna Carey is a writer and critic
Music for Boys By David Cavanagh 4th Estate, 325pp. £15.99
Peyton Amberg By Tama Janowitz Bloomsbury, 336pp. £9.99
Who Sleeps With Katz By Todd McEwan Granta, 279pp. £14.99