If I were a writer in my twenties or thirties hoping to make a literary splash, I’d write a novel about writers in their twenties or thirties hoping to make a literary splash, confident that readers in that age group would lap it up.
Jem Calder’s second book begins with two such people, Chuck and Joey, meeting in a bar and quickly falling for each other. They both have publishing ambitions and the highlight of the novel is when he offers her a lengthy piece to read and she hates it. His response, while predictable, is amusing.
Chuck wants to write about “the kinds of experiences that he rarely saw reflected in contemporary fiction”, but if this is also Calder’s intention, he’s missed his target, as we have spent the past decade reading these exact same experiences in countless commercially successful but artistically mediocre novels. The problem is, unless a writer has something new to say on the subject, the book runs the risk of being quickly forgettable.
Chuck’s attitude to women in general, and his girlfriend in particular, left me struggling to engage with him. “Realistically, he should’ve kept her around a while longer,” Calder writes when Chuck regrets breaking up with Joey, as if she’s a car he traded in a little too early. Later he thinks about “picking up a new Joey”, as if she’s a pair of AirPods, cheap, disposable and easy to replace.
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Alongside this are poorly written sentences. “Next Wednesday she met Barbie for lunch,” for example. No, she didn’t. The following Wednesday, she met Barbie for lunch. “They sat in an instantiation of Barbie’s preferred restaurant chain.” They sat in a what? You mean a branch, right? Chuck and Joey “elevatored in silence” to his apartment, possibly in confusion at turning a noun into a verb, but later, when Joey “escalatored” up to a platform, she clearly hasn’t learned her lesson.
Calder describes Chuck’s novella as one with “no real depth beneath its muddled surface complexity”. His first book, a short story collection, was praised, but his graduation to the longer form is less successful and perhaps that’s the reason why.
John Boyne’s new novel is due out in October
