One of the less obvious pleasures of spending a week in Egypt with my new wife, Charlotte, was the amount of reading I managed to get done. Hours on a sunbed, coupled with a range of lousy satellite channels in our room meant that I finished four books during our seven days away. All four were thoroughly enjoyable, and each inspirational in its own way.
'Drown' by Junot Diaz had a particularly direct influence, because it was whilst turning the pages of this wonderful collection of short stories (having already read Diaz's 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao', I knew I was in for a treat) that I reached for the small pad of hotel headed notepaper and tried to compose stories of my own.
It was at this point that notions of my identity: British, white, newly married, began to dive and splash in front of me, like the surrounding teenage tourists, poolside. In Junot Diaz's world, there was an innocense, a wit, a legitimacy even, to crafting prose that centred around getting laid, the joy of oggling women with big breasts and bubble butts. I was inspired by the simple yet sharp sentences and, emulating Diaz's seedy-yet-honest approach, tried to write some of my own.
What I produced was okay, I suppose. If you read my tiny scribbles (the hotel notepaper was in short supply) you might conclude it better reflected my love of stand-up comedy than my love of literature. Indeed, I'm quite happy to accept I'm not as good a writer as Pulitzer prize winner Diaz(!) yet i think there was also something else holding back my stories. I've already mentioned the word 'legitimacy' - perhaps it's simply not legitimate for an adult (and, let's not forget, married) man to write so directly about such base male instincts. Perhaps if there is a legitimate place for this kind of writing, it's to be found in the pages of Playboy.
But I think the problem goes even more deeply. The knowingness, the casual (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) irony of my writing, simultaneously protected me from accusations of misogyny, but also coated the very words I used in an odourless plastic: distilled, sterile, inoffensive. Just bear that word 'irony' in mind for a moment. Because Diaz is also a grown man who should know better. Sure, he writes about the experiences of those in their late teens/early twenties, but does so with vigour: graphic, gritty, explicit vigour. The divide between us goes beyond mere decency, and I think it is our old friend 'irony' which can take me to the root of these differences...
Morons in this world will tell you that Americans have no sense of humour because they don't 'get' irony. How on earth they could have produced The Simpsons, Spinal Tap, Frasier et al without irony, I'm not sure. But as I dwelt upon this ugly, crude maxim, I did discover a kernel of truth. It's not that Americans don't get irony - far from it. But perhaps it is fair to say that because American writers aren't so immersed in and asphyxiated by irony's iron clasp, they can reach out and touch the more innocent and fundamental areas of life in ways that us Brits (particularly us white Brits) find impossible. Indeed, rather than boasting about our sleazy, animalistic relationship with this (let's face it) old fashined and frankly rather boring literary device, we should actually be ashamed of the tawdry motel room it's brought us to, and dismayed by the fact that it turns away from us and snores the moment its dirty work is done. Diaz, (in mixing the literary styles of the US with those of his native Dominican Republic) could tap-in to a voice of innocense and desperation - I could only stand back and laugh at it.
This tumultuous relationship I have with irony - one of the supposed cornerstones of British culture and Britishness - could be seen to be a more general struggle with my own identity. This inner conflict was brought even more sharply into focus as I read Barack Obama's wonderful memoir 'Dreams of my Father'.
... to be continued.
