Don’t ask me why I grew aware, from the earliest age, of living in more than one world. There seemed to be a strident world of what we said was happening, and a twilight world of what was really happening. I ended up liking and writing about the world of what really happens, because while all our seamless goal-driven plans are filling the air there’s this beautiful, whimsical, frail and often ridiculous world where we’re hapless and riddled with twists. The world of humanity. The backstage of laughter and tears. And for that, I present five outrageous old friends living in books from our strange human history.
On the outskirts of a sweltering Texan town among willows, pumpjacks, and peeling wood dwellings, a fifteen-year-old under-achiever becomes the prime suspect for a high school shooting. Vernon Little’s coming-of-age suddenly meets the media, the madness of crowds, and his mother’s unfortunate psychology, as he desperately plots to run to Mexico. This extremely black comedy is an explosion of triggers from early 21st-century culture spun into an adventure that asks: what the hell is really going on?
Being lured into another world by a strong first-person voice turns a book into a wide-open door, and I love going through strange doors. This one opens onto a richly detailed middle-class mess who’s also an exceptional host, recently widowed alcoholic single-parent Peter Jernigan. He takes us on a ride through suburban New Jersey as passengers in his mind, narrating his life’s unravelling with brutal whimsy and humour. This was one of the most helpless relationships I’ve had with a character in a book. A privilege and a reminder of the balancing act we all face.
Peter Jernigan's life is slipping out of control. His wife's gone, he's lost his job and he's a stranger to his teenage son. Worse, his only relief from all this reality - alcohol - is less effective by the day. And when the medicine doesn't work, you up the dose. And when that doesn't work, what then? (Apart from upping the dose again anyway, because who knows?)
Jernigan's answer is to slowly turn his caustic wit on everyone around him - his wife Judith, his teenage son Danny, his vulnerable new girlfriend Martha and, eventually, himself - until the laughs…
If we love high-functioning messes we may as well go straight to the top. I found a sense of real genius in these pages, also said by many to contain the best-written depiction of New Orleans and its cultures; you feel like a local by the end of it. Our host is the outrageous educated slob Ignatius J Reilly – hot-dog vendor, philosopher, and leader of insurrections – whose path from outrage to outrage is a comedic high-wire act of historic proportions. Only published a decade after the author’s suicide, an air of autobiography also adds poignance to this read. I came away feeling I’d been in a backstage of life, the one where tragedy and comedy share a couch.
'This is probably my favourite book of all time' Billy Connolly
A pithy, laugh-out-loud story following John Kennedy Toole's larger-than-life Ignatius J. Reilly, floundering his way through 1960s New Orleans, beautifully resigned with cover art by Gary Taxali _____________
'This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians . . . don't make the mistake of bothering me.'
Ignatius J. Reilly: fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much…
This is my recommended therapy against the expected and mundane, a complete inversion of values from late nineteenth-century France. Against Nature (from the French A Rebours) is a refreshingly plotless decadent novel about an aristocratic aesthete, Jean Des Esseintes, who, having grown disgusted with society, retreats into his house to contemplate higher things. These include a tortoise which he plates in gold and encrusts with jewels to highlight the colours on a Persian rug. This book made me want to give up wearing socks.
A doctor in early twentieth-century Trieste demands that an eccentric patient write his memoirs as a form of psychotherapy. These pages are those memoirs – the doctor calls them all lies – and form the fictional life story of one of my favourite misfits, the unreliable Zeno Cosini, with his horde of idiosyncrasies. Between proposing to three sisters within an hour and making a fortune on the stock market by mistake, he spends his time nurturing his hypochondria and trying to give up smoking, which means endlessly smoking ‘last cigarettes’. A seminal work of modernism, this is another novel with autobiographical ties to the author, and I left it torn between laughter and tears over just how complex, ironic and funny we humans can be.
A marvel of psychological insight from one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth century
When vain, obsessive and guilt-ridden Zeno Cosini seeks help for his neuroses, his psychoanalyst suggests he writes his memoirs as a form of therapy. Zeno's account is an alternative reality, a series of elliptical episodes dealing with the death of his father, his career, his marriage and affairs, and, above all, his passion for smoking and his spectacular failure to resist the promise of that last cigarette. A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination, Svevo's devilishly funny portrayal of a man's attempt to…
This work is a game-changer for our perception of history, as well as being a riot to read. Assembled from discovered fragments, the work is a form of a satirical novel from late first-century Rome, narrated by a certain Encolpius in the house he shares with his handsome sixteen-year-old slave and boyfriend, Giton. What I love about this work is how modern it is: the language, the satire, the comedy, and decadence are relatable today, and are still outrageous and funny. This book blew away any disconnect I felt with ancient history, where all matters are reduced to serious narrative; it did it by sending a voluptuary’s voice direct from Nero’s Rome.
`The language is refined, the smile not grave, My honest tongue recounts how men behave.'
The Satyricon is the most celebrated work of fiction to have survived from the ancient world. It can be described as the first realistic novel, the father of the picaresque genre, and recounts the sleazy progress of a pair of literature scholars as they wander through the cities of the southern Mediterranean. En route they encounter type-figures the author wickedly satirizes - a teacher in higher education, a libidinous priest, a vulgar freedman turned millionaire, a manic poet, a superstitious sea-captain and a femme fatale.…
My life and work have been profoundly affected by the central circumstance of my existence: I was born into a very large military Catholic family in the United States of America. As a child surrounded by many others in the 60s, I wrote, performed, and directed family plays with my numerous brothers and sisters. Although I fell in love with a Canadian and moved to Canada, my family of origin still exerts considerable personal influence. My central struggle, coming from that place of chaos, order, and conformity, is to have the courage to live an authentic life based on my own experience of connectedness and individuality, to speak and be heard.
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in the parish, Annie is tortured by her own dishonesty. But when “The Hands” visits her in her bed and when her sister finds herself facing a scandal, Annie discovers her parents will do almost anything to uphold their reputation and keep their secrets safe.
Questioning all she has believed and torn between her own gut instinct and years of Catholic guilt, Annie takes courageous risks to wrest salvation from the tragic sequence of events set in motion by her parents’ betrayal.
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