I’ve just read two recent books set in Texas suburbia – and they’re character-driven,
inventive and humane
Texan literature is nearly 500 years old. That’s if you
count the extraordinary adventures of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. He was put ashore in far-away Florida in
1528, along with other members of a Spanish expedition, charged with reaching
the modern-day Tampico in Mexico, which the expedition commander believed to be
only a day or two’s march away. It was of course closer to 1,500 miles.
Virtually no-one from the party survived, but Cabeza de Vaca did and left an
extraordinary account of his journey through Texas and his (cordial) relations
with the natives. La Relación y Comentarios del Gouernador Aluar Nuñez
Cabeca de Vaca was completed in 1537. Its author was later appointed
governor of present-day Argentina and Paraguay, where the settlers grassed him
up to Madrid for being too nice to the natives. But with La Relación, he
left us what is, I suppose, the first piece of Texan literature.
AnonMoos/Darwinek |
Not everyone who
has travelled through Texas has been as impressed as Cabeza de Vaca. According
to the Texas
Handbook Online, Frederick Law Olmsted – the famed landscaper whose
works include Central Park – recorded in
Journey Through Texas (1857)
“a grim picture of slavery-ridden East Texas, indicting the people as crude,
the food as bad, and the level of civilization as negligible.” But the 20th
century has, by all accounts, seen quite a vibrant literature emerge in Texas,
and it has produced distinguished pieces such as Katherine Ann Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and John
Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. The most prominent
Texan writer today is probably Larry McMurtry, known for the Lonesome Dove
series but also the joint screenwriter for the film version of E. Annie Proulx’s
Brokeback Mountain.
I’ve just read two recent books by Texan, or part-Texan, writers. Kevin
Cole was born in New York and now lives in Europe, but was brought up in
Houston. Kristin Joyce Stevenson is from Austin; she too lived in Europe for
some years, but has recently returned home. Their novels are rooted in their
home towns. Both books are highly intelligent and very character-driven, and
they are well worth your time.
It’s 1987. Sam Hay is a 17-year-old from a grotty part of
Sheffield in England. His parents are dead, his sister a recovering alcoholic.
Not a lot to lose really, so he enrolls as an exchange student and heads for
high school in Houston. Totally amoral and nihilistic, he means to make his
McMansion host family fund him through college. Along the way, he’ll slag off
everything about them, their suburb, his American fellow-students and Texas in
general while doing as many drugs as possible. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, as it happens. Over the course of this long but gripping book,
Sam’s going to be slammed up hard against his own cynicism, and forced to think
about values. But when he does, it might just be too late.
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like Kevin Cole’s Days of Throbbing Gristle. (The
title is likely significant, but more of that anon.) It is a tour de force on two levels. First,
it certainly works as a coming-of-age story. The story’s told entirely through
Sam’s eyes; it needs real skill to do character development that way, but Cole
can do it. You start to see that Sam’s contempt for others, and his monstrous
cynicism, come in part from anger. It takes Sam a long time to accept what an
utter shit he has been to those around him. In the meantime he uses someone for
sex and then rejects them in a way that will have awful consequences. He also
accepts the loyalty and friendship of others but despises them, and gives them
nothing in return. Only at the end does he realize they might have understood
him better than he thought.
However, the book’s not just about Sam. It is also a quite savage look at 1980s
Texas suburbia. Cole’s plot device of looking through the eyes of an English
exchange student lets him describe it from an outsider’s viewpoint. He serves
up a big parade of characters –a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a teenage gay
tortured by his sexuality, skinheads, metal fans, strippers, struggling workers
and assorted lowlifes, drug-dealers and drunks. The cast includes Sam’s
soulless hosts, Neil and Donna – the latter, especially, is an authentic
suburban monster. Yet in a series of casual conversations Neil has with Sam,
you get to understand what has formed these people. In general, no-one in this
book is two-dimensional. Seeing them, and Houston, through Sam’s eyes also
works because although he’s a shit, he’s a very funny one. He’s dragged to a
rodeo: “I
could think of better things to excite deranged senses
than wandering round an ammonia-scented fairground, gazing at cattle sporting
epic lengths of snot hanging from snouts.” He handles it by dropping acid.
But Days of Throbbing Gristle is also
dark. The darkness seeps in via Scott and Iris, two drug dealers who have
espoused a cruel form of film-making as a performance art and who preach a deep
nihilism. Their chief acolyte likes to listen to the English punk band
Throbbing Gristle. Cole doesn’t say so, but Throbbing Gristle were performance
artists before they were musicians. Is he trying to warn us, through Scott and
Iris, through Sam, that amorality, nihilism, selfishness and self-display are
dead ends? Each reader’s going to work this out for themselves.
The book isn’t perfect. There are some text errors here and there – words
misplaced or consistently misspelled (Cole writes very well and I think these
are software glitches, not mistakes). Also, the book is long. It kept my attention,
but some readers might flag a little.
Even so, Days of Throbbing Gristle is very
good indeed. Sam and his friends are going to stay with me for quite a while,
as will a lot of the scenes – the rodeo on acid; a tawdry lapdance; a day with
petty crooks and people-smugglers; and Donna losing it with her teenage
daughter. There’s also an unexpectedly lyrical sojourn in the Texas Hills; this
was one of the best chapters for me. This is a savagely observed and very funny
book, but it also has hidden depths, and a certain compassion for its
characters. I hope there’s more to come from Kevin Cole.
No book is easy to write. But for a thriller, romance or
genre book, there are probably ground rules a writer can follow. A novel that depends
almost entirely on characterization is extremely hard to do. In Frankie & Cash Kristin Joyce
Stevenson does pull it off, creating a small but vivid cast of characters; when
you think you’re done with the book, they stay with you and you go on thinking
about their motivations, what shaped them, and exactly what they meant to each
other and why.
The book opens in Austin, Texas. It’s the present day and narrator Anita, a
woman in her late 30s, is sitting in a bar with Cash, a man of about the same
age. They’re waiting for Frankie, who’s back on a rare visit after the death of
her father. Frankie knows she’s going to see Anita, after a gap of many years.
She doesn’t know she’s going to see Cash again. As the narrative of this
meeting proceeds, Stevenson skillfully interweaves it with the story of these
three people’s intense relationship when they were teenagers in suburban Austin
20 years earlier. This “back story” moves to San Francisco as the three make
their way through a haze of drugs and booze. One of them struggles with mental
illness. And throughout, there are underlying themes of thwarted ambition,
tangled friendships and jealousies, and shadows from difficult childhoods.
When the three come together in Austin after so long, we’re wondering how they
will interact, and whether each will recognize what the others have become. Meanwhile
there’s a series of vignettes from the trio’s lives. They experiment with drugs
and sex, first in Texas and later in San Francisco, where they face the forces
that finally lever them apart. When they come together years later, we see them
reverting to type, and see, more clearly, what went wrong. One of Stevenson’s
skills is that she knows what to say and what to leave out. This isn’t a long
novel (about 55,000 words – much shorter than Throbbing Gristle). But a lot is inferred rather than explained.
You’re not usually told “Frankie did X because Y”, and that’s why these three
stay with you; you want to know what was really going on, and you know the
answer is in there somewhere.
We’re also left asking about social media. Thirty years ago,
tracking down someone from your youth was a paper-chase or a series of phone
calls, and often the trail went cold. Unless you really wanted to find someone,
you probably wouldn’t bother. Today it takes seconds to enter a name. Even if
someone no longer uses the same surname, they can likely be tracked through mutual
acquaintances. So you can now find someone easily after 10 or 15 years. But
should you? Why did you part in the first place – and will anything really have
changed? At the end of the book, it turns out that that the three cannot all
handle these questions equally well.
Both Frankie &
Cash and Days of Throbbing Gristle
are striking in the way they depict people, the way they think of and relate to
each other, what they want from others, and why. Frederick Law Olmsted might have
been right in 1857. But the level of civilization, it seems, isn’t negligible
now.
Mike Robbins's novella Dog! is available as an ebook for just 99c (US) or 99p (UK), or as a paperback, from Amazon (US, UK, and all other country sites), Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Indigo, iTunes and more. Find all his books on Amazon here.
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