Max Dunbar

For a certain kind of reader Michelle Tea’s Black Wave will be a very easy book to slip into. It takes place in a basement world you know or at least have dreamed of: long, drunken nights in soul kitchens and dive bars, laughter and beauty and familiar faces, the music and the feels. And you know the negatives, too: physical and psychic hangovers, strange mood swings, crying jags, and hours spent dodging sunlight and clinging to the walls. The glorious fractured world of the San Francisco bar scene is scaled up into the end times. Animals and plants die out, and are replaced by ornery adaptive species that thrive in the city’s broken streets. You find you can’t get identity documents, then that you can’t get basic staples. Rumours of environmental catastrophe do the rounds. Even this feels comforting in a strange way. For isn’t there a comfort in the apocalypse – isn’t that why so many people do apocalypse novels? Doesn’t part of you love the idea of all that space and free goods in a collapsed civilisation?

The plot is not that complicated. Protagonist Michelle is a downheels novelist who by day works in a bookshop and by night goes out, cops off with other women, and ingests drugs and alcohol in legendary volumes. The fundamental insecurity that most hedonists come to know takes hold of her, and she decides to flee 1990s Frisco for Los Angeles and a new start. As Olivia Laing writes, Michelle is simply ‘doing a geographical’ – and she arrives in LA with her old habits and old demons intact. She gets a job in another bookshop and goes back to her drinking – alone this time, in health-conscious Los Angeles. The world rolls on towards disaster with suicidal pile-ups on the freeways, and drug addicts stealing books from Michelle’s store. Michelle deals with the apocalypse by getting sober and banging actor Matt Dillon during slow days at work.

Black Tea is a postmodern novel, but it’s a exuberant and honest postmodernism far outside the confined academic version of that philosophy. Between the Mission and LA Tea’s narrative splinters in time. We see Michelle of the 2010s, writing about her druggy breakdown from the safety of sobriety and middle age. ‘For the crack narrative to succeed, the character has to be starting out on top, with a place to fall from,’ Michelle writes. ‘Crack wouldn’t work for Michelle’s character. She’s already sort of a loser’. She considers making the Michelle character male. ‘As a straight, male, middle-class man could she now shoot heroin and go on a literary crack bender?’

It’s an interesting point. Hedonism in literature was a club for men only. A male writer getting hammered and making a jackass of himself looks like Charles Bukowski, or thinks he does. A woman writer getting drunk just looks like a drunk. The hedonistic frontiersmen of American letters – Mailer, HST, Burroughs – seem terribly old fashioned now. In a famous hatchet job on John Updike, David Foster Wallace criticised the ‘Great Male Narcissist’ and his roster of author surrogates: ‘They are also always  incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone.’

DFW was writing in the late nineties but the drunken writer alpha males still provoke sensitivity, perhaps envy. Stephen King satirised the GMN writers in his novels, so did Scottish author John Niven. As late as 2016 a minor controversy broke out when John Banville confessed that ‘I was not a good father. I don’t think any writer is.’ That provoked a howling article from novelist Julian Gough, who complained that ‘the message that John Banville sent in that interview, and in that quote in particular, will damage young male writers, if they act on it; damage their lives, their kids, and their art.’ He talks at length about his own irresponsible past, and later redemption, and stresses that ‘if you’re a young male writer reading this: you do not have to choose between family and work. You need both. They feed each other.’ Or, er, you could just not have kids. It’s a free country.

We have wandered quite a way from the path, but I think Black Wave does have a lot to offer about representations of women and hedonism (only Lena Dunham and Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals has really gone there) as well as fantastic, seamless passages on the hedonism itself: the friendships, the accidents and compliments, the long drunken conversations, the flyer scrapbooks, the ash, the smell, the tastes and crazy lusts. A messy scene, but the prose is discplined, with bang-on insights into sex, race, class and the human condition. It’s an emotive, sensual romp, a fractured narrative of a fractured mind. In Black Wave there is always the possibility of other lives, other choices and other histories. The world doesn’t have to be ending.

Towards the end of the book Tea introduces a curious device: people start having plague dreams, but they don’t dream about the plague, they dream of love and happiness. People withdraw from the world altogether, to spend their last days asleep. Dating websites spring up to match each dreamer with their soulmate in life. Michelle herself doesn’t do this. By now she has a clear head, and wants to tilt her face towards the sun. Redemption in life, when it comes, isn’t a flash of lightning. Sometimes, the moments that change us are quieter. When Michelle’s getting wrecked in the Mission, she holds that ‘Nights she fell asleep before the sun came up were good nights. It meant that her life was under control.’ In the end, she ‘shed a tear for the sun, the poor demonized sun the humans had run from when it only wanted to shine and bring warmth, she hoped there was another people somewhere feeling its happy glow.’

I was sorry to hear that author Jenny Colgan has deactivated her Twitter after a row caused by her review of writer and Bake Off star Nadiya Hussain’s debut novel. I don’t think she meant to cause offence by writing it. It’s rare that the Guardian books pages become a talking point as they often tend to be anodyne and unmemorable, so I think it’s good that she published the review to an extent.

However, in this para, I think Colgan gets a few things wrong.

It’s hardly a new phenomenon, celebrities turning up out of the blue with novels what they have most definitely wrote. Maybe it’s particularly upsetting me this time because I’m a fan. Hussain is just so brimful of talent; of happiness and grace and skill. From a traditional Muslim background, she grew up in Luton and ended up being universally loved and baking for the Queen. Does she really need to put her name to a novel, too, when there’s only so much shelf space to go around?

This last line sums up the piece. Publishing for Jenny Colgan is zero sum. She explicitly says it: ‘Books are a zero sum game. If you’re reading one, you can’t be reading another.’ The point Colgan wants to make is that in this zero sum publishing world, publishers should not be using their limited resources to publish novels by celebrities like Nadiya Hussain – however much Colgan personally admires her. They should instead direct what they have into promoting new authors and literary fiction.

But publishers spend enormous amounts of money publishing books of no literary merit at all. For example, most of the better known Bake Off people have published cookbooks. All of these books take up time and resources in printing, binding, distribution and promotion. Publishers also of course produce crap celebrity biographies and crap supermarket genre fiction, as well as ordinance maps, histories of railways and lots of other stuff that adds nothing to English letters in any way. Surely that money also could have been spent on Colgan’s hypothetical bookworm or on struggling libraries. Why begin the fight with Hussain?

One implication in the above quoted para is that Hussain, having excelled in one field, should jolly well stick to it. But most creative people have had other jobs at some point. How dare Mr Eliot, who has banking to fall back upon, try and dominate the poetry scene. Couldn’t Agatha Christie have stuck to helping out at archaeological digs? Wasn’t Camus neglecting his college football team?

The Secret Lives of the Amir Sisters is a family saga and from reading Colgan’s piece I still have no idea whether the novel is any good. But Hussain could have written the next Anna Karenina and she would have still struggled a great deal to get a book contract. Recently there was a brilliant piece by Andrew Dickson in the NS on BAME brain drain. Talented actors from ethnic minorities like Cush Jumbo and Archie Panjabi (the phenomenal Kalinda Sharma in The Good Wife) leave the UK because they know they have no chance of progressing their careers in the white, nostalgia-driven British TV world.

Publishing has a similar problem and publishers know this. A British Otessa Moshfegh or Colson Whitehead would have little chance of getting published here. YA author Alex Wheatle told the Guardian that he had switched from literary fiction because ‘I felt like I was this token black writer who writes about ghetto stuff… My books are seen as only for a black demographic’. He also said: ‘I didn’t go to university or on a fancy writers’ course, and so I think the respect is grudging – ‘Oh he is just serving his community.’’

As I have said publishing is aware that they have a diversity problem and I don’t doubt they are trying to fix this – although so much of the visible groundwork is coming from relative outsiders like Nikesh Shukla and Comma Press. But even in Colgan’s review – and I am sure that this is not deliberate – there is a sense of: haven’t we already ticked this box? She writes: ‘If you want to read warm-hearted sagas about second-generation immigration, Meera Syal is a wonderful novelist.’

Times are tough for career authors and no doubt publishers could and should do more. I know I sound like Lena Dunham at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop when I do this argument – ‘why are we being so judgy about popular fiction?’ – but I weary of the complaints about popular novels with big advances. The complainers make good points about the neglect of new fiction, lack of diversity etc but they never seem to address these problems in a meaningful way – they just complain about whichever individual author has got the latest big advance. I also think there are many mediocre novelists in the UK who think the world owes them a living.

At the end of the day I don’t think publishing is a zero sum game. The Bake Off tent is big enough. As Tony Soprano once said: there’s enough success out there for everybody.

Update: Bibliodaze has a good take on this.