booklit

There’s an old idiom that states you can’t compare apples to oranges but in the case of Belinda Webb’s A Clockwork Apple (2008) you can’t help compare it to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, purely because it follows the source so closely. However, there are wholesale changes for the sake of parody, notably the inversion of genders, so that rather than teenage boys running amok, Webb’s dystopia is populated by teenage girls.

Alex, and her three Grrrlz - Petra, Georgia, and Mid (”Mid being really mid”) - live in Moss Side, a deprived area in the city of Manchester, referred to as Madchester. The people are weaned on addiction therapy, shown on the Recovery Channel, and left without the opportunities that the middle classes, nicknamed the Blytons, are privy to. So, as teenagers are wont to do, they lash out in anger, doling out beatings and kicking in windows with their ballet pumps:

…we aren’t sponsored by the state to fight, only by our own H.P.’s [higher powers]- to fight to honour our Phrontisteries. Or, at the very least, to avenge the dismissal and frustration of said Phrontisteries.

The obvious target of Alex’s rage takes in the current fascination with the world of celebrity:

Most of our fellow Gutshot Rebos patrons, girlies and boys alike, are loafing around reading, not proper stuff, but looking at pictures, tabloid barathrums that they are, like theyz still in the ickle wickle nursery school. Theyz hypnotised by pictures of girls and boys who have made it and who are saying with their new capped smiles, ‘Look at me, aren’t I clever, don’t you want what I’ve got?‘

The “proper stuff” is what marks Alex out from the rest. Where A Clockwork Orange’s Alex would lose himself in classical music, A Clockwork Apple’s Alex keeps under the bedroom floorboards her “stash of mind power” - books. In literature she plays with Nietzschean aphorisms, or references the likes of Raymond Carver, Richard Yates, and Jack London. But it all seems little more than name-dropping as, while Alex may revere them, they don’t seem to have enhanced her character in any way. Indeed, it seems strange that someone smart enough to enjoy literature should speak in such a way. Where Burgess plundered the Russian language for his nadsat, Alex’s voice is a tiring concoction of urban slang, obscure words, and something approaching nursery rhyme patois, all punctuated with, or variations thereof, braying laughter: hee hee haw haw. If this is how the smart ones talk, then Webb’s dystopia is certainly a grim future.

After breaking into Mrs Gaskell’s Academy for Girls, Alex finds herself in prison and with an option to enter a twelve step rehabilitation programme. This brings up the question of Alex’s anger, of how to accept it and address it. She’s angry at the state, she’s angry at her drunken mother, she’s angry at everything, and has chosen to show it:

Coz, you see, inwards meanz you are creating more problems for yourself, on behalf of THEM, whereas OUTWARDS meanz you’re creating problems for THEM, where it belongs. Where it longs to be. Depression or expression? Which is it to be, my dear sistaz? Which?

It’s hard to care about Alex as her opinions on literature come off quite flat, and her presence lacks a third dimension. As a narrator, however, she does express a certain flair for the English language, playing with words and dropping in cultural references, although sometimes dwelling too long that they become stretched. Sadly, where part of the joy of A Clockwork Orange was coming across a nadsat word and understanding it from its context, in A Clockwork Apple referring to the enclosed glossary is necessary.

Were Alex’s vocabulary relaxed from the tirades of swearing that spew from her filthy mouth, A Clockwork Apple could perhaps have cut itself some slack as a teen novel. It’s the book of an author who has graduated from the nineties and, finding the 21st Century a disappointment, wants to shout about it. At its heart there’s an obvious love for Burgess’ novel, A Clockwork Apple, shadowing it all the way, with punchy inversions and sly references. But while oranges are not the only fruit, there really is no comparison.

Having read a novel by John Fante a couple of years back I was interested in reading something by his son, Dan. From what I understand, Fante fils is more in the mould of Charles Bukowski, who was apparently inspired to write by Fante père. With an output spanning novels, plays, and poetry, the lazy comparison is there. And having not yet sampled Bukowski, I’m afraid I’ll have to remain lazy on that.

But what better way to introduce oneself to an author than by diving into a collection of short stories? Corksucker (2005), or Corksucker (Cab Driver Stories From The L.A. Streets), to give it its full title, is Fante’s first such collection (published as Short Dog in the US) and follows the thread of Mickey Di Salvo’s life, which centres around, as the title implies, taxi driving, as he goes from one scrape to the next, grasping each day by the scruff of the collar and trying to hold on, despite alcoholism, rocky relationships, and a perennial lack of cash.

Hack driver is the only occupation I know with no boss and because I have always performed poorly at supervised employment, I returned to the taxi business. The up side, now that I was working again, was that my own boozing was under control and I was on beer only except for my days off.

Di Salvo, an alter-ego of Fante, first person narrates each of the eight stories in Corksucker. While he wishes he weren’t a cab driver and depends on alcohol to get him through the day, he’s always working on his novel or scribbling down a poem a day. With literary dreams never being realised and a tendency to the bottle, Di Salvo isn’t the most stable of characters and this comes to the fore, often providing the stories’ impetus. And his style of narration is wonderfully crude, with good humour, and the occasional epiphany draped in expletives that, despite their frequency, never seem excessive.

In Wifebeater Bob, Di Salvo metes out justice to a hotel doorman who always wants a cut of the taxi drivers’ takings, while at the same time trying to raise the cash to retrieve his manuscript, which his girlfriend is holding to ransom. Then, in Mae West, our narrator leaves the taxi alone for a bit and deals with his relationship his girlfriend, a different girl from the previous story. If he’s going to go on living with her then she wants him to sort his drinking out, to try rehab, which he does, learning a trick or two along the way. And if he’s going to continue living with here, there’s the matter of her dog, Banana, which plain doesn’t like him:

In the beginning, the month I first moved in, I’d made up this game: I would hold up two fingers to the animal in a sort of ‘V’ for victory Nixon-type signal, then whisper his name. “Ba-Nana.” “Ba-Nana.”

It pissed the dog off. I knew it pissed him off, but I did it anyway. Mostly it was when I was on the juice that I did it but, in retrospect, I can see that I’m responsible for instigating our mutual hatred.

Caveat Emptor and Marble Man, one a story where sexually transmitted diseases are an occupational hazard and the other where Di Salvo takes a break from cab driving, tries telemarketing, and ends up taking his boss’s wife (”blond, silicon-titted”) to view a potential sublet. These were rather lightweight and, truth be told, I remember little of the latter merely hours after reading it.

Of the other stories, Princess is memorable for its tale of a junky couple feeding an insatiable python whose appetite for food isn’t affordable, especially when they’d rather spend it on getting high. And Thebobby lapses into an enjoyable screenplay which, given that a character mentions that Di Salvo should write a screenplay about him, is a nice little trick. Renewal, where he comes round from a blackout in a cinema, with trousers round his ankles and a transvestite nearby inspires a Did I? moment, but soon slips into a visit to City Hall to get his license renewed. And closer, 1647 Ocean Front Walk, brings Di Salvo the closest he’s been to love, ending on a sad, optimistic note, which takes him away from cab driving for good:

I hated being stuck driving a cab. Since taking the gig again, my life had been drained of meaning. Stalled. The taxi business extracts the vital fluids from a man’s body twelve-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week, a drop at a time. L.A. cab driving isn’t useful work. It is human refuse relocation, the transportation of decomposing flotsam from one plastic fast food neighborhood to the next.

While I prefer the US title due to its dual meaning - a cheap drink or Di Salvo, himself, who is touchy about his size - it’s no matter as it’s the contents that ultimately matter. And each page of Corksucker is a fun, booze-soaked exploration beneath L.A.’s shiny facade, showing, even amongst all the oddballs he encounters, the humanity within. It’s worth jumping in for a ride, and while I wouldn’t usually advocate it, it’s probably the safest you can ever come to recreational drink driving, from one book neighbourhood to the next.

Road Story by Julienne Van Loon is not a novel I would have ever picked up by free choice. I’d never even heard of it when it was given to me. And as the cover proudly proclaims, it was the 2004 winner of the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, Oz’s largest prize ($20,000) for an unpublished manuscript, previously launching the career of Orange Prize winner, Kate Grenville. So it has some pedigree, at least.

It begins, where else, but on the road as Diana Kooper abandons her best friend, Nicole, in a car crash. Without looking back she hitches a ride west of Sydney and, determined to start over, finds employment at a truckstop called Bob’s in the heart of nowhere. Serving food, stocking fridges, bantering with drivers passing through. She soon assimilates into this life but as the days go by a series of events occur (a butchered dog, an “accident”) reminds her that she has a past and it demands to be dealt with.

While I was never really convinced that Diana’s character could just leave her friend (even after the closing revelations) I was also suspicious of the time it took for the consequences of such an action to catch up on her. Perhaps that’s the way it is out in the middle of nowhere, but with people passing through all the time, surely someone had seen a news report, heard something on the radio. But it just felt like the time elapsed since car crash and closure was drawn out only to add event to Diana’s life. She does, after all, find a partner for casual sex, and develop suspicions about the depth of her new employer’s gambling habit. But other than what seems a temporal anomaly in this day and age, I couldn’t find much to grumble about.

The prose is light and pacy, perhaps too just-the-facts for my personal tastes, although it shows the occasional stylistic indulgence, and Van Loon uses this to conjure up some decent images, notably of the truckstop life:

Inside the little restaurant truckies congregate along the length of the orange laminex bar, coming and going at irregular intervals. Their conversation is scant, limited to short complaints and the occasional bad joke, which Bob immediately adds to his collection. Mouths never open all that wide. If Diana comes around the front of the bar to wipe the tables and mop the floor, she can see a whole row of boots twitching uneasily on the stool rests, knees flicking up and down, up and down, up and down. The drivers are nervous, preoccupied. This place is only ever some place on the way to somewhere else.

The dialogue is convincing, characters repeating phrases, their words short and snappy. It’s obviously a strength of Van Loon’s writing, although I did think sometimes that some characters were given vocal motifs that were used too often (Bob’s “mate”, her friend’s “you know”) but this didn’t really become noticeable until near the finish line. And the characters felt alive in their own way, whether it be Andy West, her sometimes lover, employer Bob, or, in flashbacks, Nicole. But the main focus was on Diane and while there was action in her life at Bob’s, and much musing on the nature of stories - indeed of becoming a road story herself - I found the central premise and her concern for Nicole to be the least believable aspect. Maybe I just didn’t accept her reason for running in the first place.

Road Story, however, does have much going for it. I particularly liked the notion of it, the narration feeling like someone was just sitting somewhere - at Bob’s perhaps - on the road relating it to me. It was a story of friendship, of new beginnings, both tinged with the darker worlds of drugs and addiction, and how they impact on others, but where it worked best for me was in the evocation of the truckstop life, stripping off the overalls smothered in grease and oil, and showing the lonely nature of the road and how stories connect. It was a satisfying enough read, quick like a meal you’d enjoy at Bob’s, but it was just another story on the way to somewhere else.