Creatures, Christ is risen!
Over Easter week I read two novels. They’re both about a queer man of color navigating twentieth-century fears, desires, and ambitions, but otherwise they couldn’t be more different. Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 The Buddha of Suburbia is just as comic as I remembered, as Kureishi somehow manages to hit the anger keys on the piano at perfect intervals without ever letting his souffle sink; Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter, from last year, is a hallucinatory journey into the underworld. They’re both excellent but reading them together definitely made me aware of their lacks as well as their strengths.
It’s the first novel from the screenwriter for “My Beautiful Laundrette” (those who remember my queer film canon post will know that this is, objectively, the best gay movie ever made) and it’s about a young man much like the author, who is “an Englishman, almost.” Karim is glib, itchy, sardonic; he thinks he’s ruthless but he’s gentler than he intends to be. He’s desperate to escape the suburbs and get famous. His father Haroon becomes a local guru, wafting out platitudes about finding yourself and following happiness.
I first read Buddha in my own glib, queer 1990s. It’s a vulgar book and, as Zadie Smith notes, freeing. She calls it “irresponsible” and that gets at a lot of its charm. Karim encounters a lot of racism, and there’s racist violence all around the edges of this novel, but Kureishi is also (lightly) adamant that art isn’t a political intervention. This is a very 1990s argument and I appreciated the chance to rediscover its forgotten wisdom! If art has to be politically responsible, if it has to satisfy the constituencies, uplift the race etc etc, then there really is no refuge.
Like, this is from a long passage that dips into cliché here and there, but I really enjoyed it:
I liked Terry more than anyone I’d met for a long time, and we talked every day. But he did believe the working class—which he referred to as if it were a single-willed person—would do somewhat unlikely things. “The working class will take care of those bastards very easily,” he said, referring to racist organizations. “The working class is about to blow,” he said at other times. “They’ve had enough of the Labour Party. They want the transformation of society now!” His talk made me think of the housing estates near Mum’s house, where the “working class” would have laughed in Terry’s face—those, that is, who wouldn’t have smacked him round the ear for calling them working class in the first place. I wanted to tell him that the proletariat of the suburbs did have strong class feeling. It was virulent and hate-filled and directed entirely at the people beneath them. […] He asked me to join the Party. He said I should join to prove that my commitment to the ending of injustice wasn’t all hot air. I said I would sign up with pleasure on one condition. He had to kiss me. This, I said, would prove his commitment to overcoming his inbred bourgeois morality. He said that maybe I wasn’t ready to join the Party just yet.
You’ll be shocked to learn that Haroon the happiness man swiftly ditches the wife of his youth. There’s a late bit where Karim recalls witnessing his father’s adultery, “my introduction to serious betrayal, lying, deceit, and heart-following.” And this all takes place in the 1970s, on the glittering razor edge of the Thatcher era, giving a real Gen X flair to this bildungsroman by a guy born the year rationing ended. But then toward the end we get this:
“I’m leaving my job. I’ve given my notice. The years I’ve wasted in that job.” [Haroon] threw up his hands. “Now I’m going to teach and think and listen. […] I aim to encourage people to think, to contemplate, to just let go their obsessions. In which school is this valuable meditation taught? I want to help others contemplate the deeper wisdom of themselves which is often concealed in the rush of everyday life. I want to live intensely my own life! Good, eh?”
“It’s the best thing I’ve heard you say,” I said gently.
Karim takes his father’s wisdom more seriously than I think it deserves, which makes the book’s final paragraph a bit of a letdown—it ends on optimism, the flimsiest ideology of them all—but overall I respected the book’s forgiving ending.
The Sleeping Car Porter tells the story of Baxter and his terrible journey from Montreal to (maybe?) Vancouver on “the fastest train across the continent.” Baxter is grieving a lost love; he’s only ever had furtive sex, the kind of sex where woods and alleys become torchlit by remembered and projected desire. He’s saving up money for dental school. He’s terrified of being fired. The book tick-tocks relentlessly through the miles and the possible demerits: demerits for noticing a passenger’s adultery, demerits for getting coffee spilled on you by a passenger.
And he can’t sleep. Baxter jerks awake after micronaps to see hallucinated men with faces made of teeth. He’s underslept when the trip begins and the novel’s prose mirrors his slipping, skidding mental state: “He half steps into the lavish room, Punch and Judy recoiling, the Spider bolted to her seat, so many bodies staining this room, and he quickly scans the ceiling and panelled walls because that is what they seem to want him to do, as though he could just sweep away any phantasm with an ostrich feather duster, like a long, looping cobweb draped over the washstand.” Over the course of the train’s harrowing transit, the secrets of the passengers as well as the porters are revealed: there’s crossdressing and seances, sexy photographs and (if I understood this bit right) unexpected racial ancestry.
As I try to find an agent for the new novel, I’ve been thinking about what other novels it might be “like.” I don’t think the reading experience of my thing is that much like the reading experience of Mayr’s, but we do share an interest in the collision of realistic depictions of socioeconomic humiliation and hallucinatory genre-adjacent half-realities. You’ll wonder if Baxter is an alien, a robot, a giant scarab beetle in a man’s body; a ghost. My book’s title is sort of a nod to Orlando Patterson’s book, Slavery and Social Death, and Mayr is working that same symbolic vein in which Blackness in conditions of racial violence is dreamlike and deathlike.
Porter’s prose is extraordinary, all these mismatched surreal verbs: Baxter “irons his face flat,” he “kicks himself into a jagged half-sleep.” Reading Buddha, whose prose is bouncy but more normal, made Mayr’s stylistic fireworks even more pleasing. But reading a comedy alongside this self-serious book made it feel more lugubrious than maybe it would’ve felt otherwise. Baxter suffers quite actively. He almost cries; he almost faints; he is stoic and degraded. It’s got a whiff of whump, is what I’m saying, and it made me think about whether and why that would be a bad thing.
I think what gives me the feeling that I’m reading whump is the implicit audience identification and self-pity. Oh, Baxter, I too am misunderstood! I too have suffered! Oh! When the suffering in whump is the result of homophobia (it’s almost never the result of racism because lol fanfiction culture loves it some white men), there’s a greasy feeling that injustice is being treated like, idk, consumption in a Victorian romance—an illness that doesn’t make its sufferer unpleasant or ugly. Comedy is when the sufferer has the right to be unpleasant or ugly, maybe. I don’t think Baxter does anything the authorial voice considers wrong, and there is something a bit too comforting about that kind of narrative, to me. But this actual novel didn’t feel self-pitying, it just reminded me of other things that did. So this whole paragraph has been my attempt to make the strongest case I can manage against what Mayr is doing here, in order to explore my own biases, when in fact I found her book strange and moving. If you like books about humiliation that play on the borderland of genres and realities (and if you don’t like that, this newsletter will frequently bore you!), definitely check this one out.
icymi
Speaking of whump… I regret to report that “The Passion of the Christ” really worked for me. And I wrote about Spy Wednesday of Holy Week and my own long history of fantasizing about being a double agent (free to read if you register your email).
Now Playing
Pet Shop Boys, “Suburbia.”
Dead train photo by Rosino and used under a Creative Commons license.
Sleepless in Suburbia
Actually, I think if I was going to raise the specter of whump at all here, I should have spent more time gnawing on why Mayr's novel DIDN'T feel like whump to me. The strangeness is a big part of it. The inventive, horror-film weirdness of her imagery, and the genre-bending elements, both create an openness to mystery. You can't solve the book by having its emotions, if you see what I mean. This sort of gets at what I said about Whit Stillman in that post about "wholesome" art: comedy and mystery are both ways of puncturing sentiment. Exposing the reader's inadequacy/lack/longing in a way that is exciting, instead of irritating.