Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

A couple of years ago, I was working as an editorial assistant for a fiction publisher. It was a good job - a shimmering-holy-grail sort of job, really, for a literature graduate like myself - the kind of career-starter that other literature graduates would fight to their last bloodied gasp to secure. I was pretty lucky to have landed this job, this shining golden job that allowed me to read and edit and generally indulge my love of books for a living. And yet, in the middle of the cold black tidal wave of the recession, I decided to leave my job. With no other job to go to.

Quite a lot of people thought I was mad. I didn't blame them. I was a bit mad, I think. The thing was, I'd pretty much fallen into the job, and so it felt quite natural to just fall right on out of it again. There are a whole long and convoluted list of reasons why I resigned, which I am not going to go into on a book review blog, but suffice to say that one of them - definitely one of them - was the slush pile.

The slush pile was the deluge of unsolicited manuscripts I had to sift through on a daily basis. For months, every manuscript I picked up had some kind of depressing premise. Death, drugs, nihilistic sex, abuse. I used to take this stuff to read and make notes on during my train commute home, and oh my goodness, it was just about all I could do not to hurl myself onto the tracks by the end of each journey. I used to come back into the office complaining about it. "Why does nobody ever send us in anything funny?" I lamented.

With this in mind, as a parting gift, one of my colleagues gave me this book, Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon. It's taken me until now to read it, and I'm not sure why - maybe because it is partially about the business of publishing fiction, and I needed to distance myself from that for a little while. Anyway, once I started reading it, I ate the damn thing up. It is funny. It's got wit, slapstick, self-deprecation . . . It's also got death, drugs, nihilistic sex, and abuse - but they're done funny.

It's about Grady Tripp, a creative writing professor and novelist, struggling to finish an absolute behemoth of a book entitled Wonder Boys which he has promised to deliver to his friend and editor, Terry Crabtree. Crabtree has come to visit, and Grady is desperate to hide from him the fact that the book is actually still unfinished. On top of this, Grady's wife is missing, his mistress is pregnant, and his fucked-up student has killed a dog that Grady feels responsible for.

One of my favourite bits, where Grady is trying to work out how he feels about the prospect of a baby:

'Do you have any babies in this hospital, by any chance?' I said when she looked up. 'You know, where you can look at them behind the glass?'

. . . So the tuba and I went to take a look at the babies. There were only two on display at the moment, lying in their glass crates like a couple of large squirming turnips. A man I presumed to be the father of one of them was leaning against the observation window, an old guy like me, sawdust on his trousers, hair Brylcreemed, his shop foreman's face beefy and half asleep. He kept looking from one to the other of the babies, biting his lip, as if trying to decide which one to spend his hard-earned dollars on. Neither of them, his face seemed to say, was exactly a bargain, head dented, skin purple and crazy with veins, spastic limbs struggling as if against some invisible medium or foe.

"Boy," I said, "would I like to have me one of those." 

The whole thing is irreverent. Irreverent and irresponsible. And I'm not sure how funny non-writers would find it - a lot of the humour hinges on the paranoia of writer's block, and the gap between how the writer perceives themself and how they actually are:

For the one thousandth time I resorted to the nine-page plot outline, single-spaced, tattered and coffee-stained, that I'd fired off on a vainglorious April morning five years before . . . I reread with scorn the confident, pompous annotations I'd made on that distant day: Take your time with this, and This has to be very very big, and worst of all, This scene should read as a single vast Interstate of Language, three thousand miles long. How I hated the asshole who had written that note!

Personally, I found it hilarious. I'd recommend it to aspiring, failed and successful writers everywhere, and oh, how I would have loved to have found it in the middle of my slush pile.

Room by Emma Donoghue

I had been avoiding this book. I don't, as a rule, go anywhere near sensationalist literature, and as this book is based on real-life cases such as those of Jaycee Lee Dugard and Natasha Kampusch - young women who were imprisoned by their kidnappers for years - I was concerned that reading this novel would make me feel as if I were being voyeuristic and indirectly exploitative.

Room is narrated by Jack, the five-year-old boy who the captive woman has borne by her kidnapper. Because his mother is so fiercely protective of him, consigning him to the wardrobe each night before the kidnapper makes his appearance, the boy witnesses very little of his mother's rapist, and so details of the abuse do not make it into the novel. This was a wise choice on the part of the novelist. Reading it, I felt as though Donoghue was protecting the dignity of the female character (who we know only as 'Ma') from our scrutiny of her trauma. Although Ma is obviously a fictional construct, her story is based on those of real-life victims, and I did feel that Donoghue was writing with a respectful sense of distance.

Jack is an unusual and tricky choice of narrator - brought up alone by his mother, in an 11-foot square room, he has no concept of other people (apart from his shadowy impressions of the kidnapper, who he views as a kind of devil figure), or of the outside world. All his knowledge has been acquired from his mother, who was 19 when she was abducted, and from the television he is allowed to watch twice a day. His vocabulary is advanced, due to the intense relationship he has with his mother, but his syntax and sense of grammar is often childish - 'You cutted the cord,' he tells his mother, recounting the story of his birth. These inconsistencies of language have drawn criticism from other reviewers, but I'm not sure that I mind them. I work with young children myself, and even those with sophisticated vocabulary will often make mistakes with tense. I think Donoghue has pulled off something extraordinarily difficult in telling a dark and adult tale from the perspective of a very innocent boy.

That's not to say I think it's without flaws. The first half of the novel, bound as it is in the consciousness of a small child and a soundproofed room, is limited in plot. The minutiae of the mother and son's daily routine becomes tedious - as of course it would do to the two prisoners - and I found myself flicking forward to see if the whole novel was set in the room. It wasn't, and that was what encouraged me to keep reading - to find out how the escape was engineered.

This brings me to what I believe is the second flaw of the novel. The escape, 'Plan B', as Ma and Jack refer to it, was a hugely risky undertaking, and one that I am not convinced a devoted mother such as Ma would have encouraged Jack to attempt, even in the depths of her desperation. That said, she was clearly frightened that the two of them might perish anyhow due to the chilling caprice of their neglectful captor, and perhaps she saw this escape attempt as the better option. I felt that, as a woman with an awful lot of time on her hands, she would have been more meticulous and measured in her planning, rather than the sudden, panicked, fallible plot she went ahead with. I also felt that the escape itself was under-described, although this could be put down to the fact that it was Jack's first foray into the outside world, and he would quite naturally have been utterly overwhelmed.

A much larger portion of the novel than I had expected was devoted to the pair's recuperation after their escape and rescue. The bewilderment of the inevitable media onslaught is deftly portrayed through Jack's eyes. I did feel that some of the media reportage was too insensitive to be credible - I'm thinking of the newspapers' christening Jack 'Bonsai Boy', of the coldly academic discussion of the victims on television, and of the incredibly unsympathetic chat-show interviewer - but then, I read the Guardian and not the tabloids, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

Jack's story really came into its own at this point, as Ma struggles to negotiate the schism between the girl she was and the victim and mother she is now, and begins to succumb to depression, and Jack has to find his feet (literally: he cannot manage stairs, and he cannot walk in shoes) in the outside world without his mother's guidance. The relationships with Ma's family were portrayed with interesting complexity, although I did frequently lose patience with Grandma, who seemed to have no patience whatsoever herself with her very damaged grandchild, and who seemed to be exclaiming every five minutes that she 'couldn't cope' with his behaviour.

The ending, with Jack and his mother returning to the Room for him to say goodbye, felt appropriate and poignant. The difference of their reactions upon their return to their place of imprisonment - Jack's warm exploration of the place that was once so familiar, in comparison to his mother's physical nausea - is both striking and deeply unsettling. But Ma's  determination to allow Jack to say goodbye to what he sees as his former home, and her ability to put his needs above her own in this, is testament to her strength as a mother, and ends the novel on a real note of hope for their relationship.

I don't think I'd read this book again. The quality of the writing did not quite make the cut for me, and I am a little surprised that it made the Man Booker shortlist. However, I did sit up till nearly midnight reading the first half, and finished the rest of it the next morning, which says a lot for the page-turning quality of the story. Donoghue is sensitive in her treatment of the subject matter, so I would have no qualms in recommending it to someone who I thought might be interested in this kind of literary-light fiction.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

I bought this book in December while travelling in Kerala. It cost me 299 rupees - about £3.83 - and I read the majority of it in the fragrantly hot airport at Cochin, curled up in a slippery waiting room chair, desperately trying to stay awake to board my 4am flight.

The White Tiger won the Booker in 2008, and I remember skim-reading the first few pages when one of my lecturers brought a copy to the pub that year. Ostensibly it is an epistolary novel, written as a series of unanswered letters from a young Indian entrepreneur to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of China, and I think that when I first flicked through the book the set-up somehow struck me as an awkward conceit, and so I didn't bother chasing down a copy of my own.

Three years later, standing in a bookshop in the south of India, looking for a novel that would complement the experience of being outside of Europe for the first time in my life, my eyes alighted on the bold spine of Aravind Adiga's debut. I opened it at random, read a little. It was better than I remembered. Quite a lot better. Whether this was because I was reading it in a different mood, or because I had now spent some time in India and could better identify with the tone of the book, I'm not sure. Either way, I bought it (along with an authoritative-looking, pictureless Keralan recipe book, which has gone on to provide hours of amusement in my cold English kitchen, as I try to work out what I can substitute for ingredients that are unobtainable in my local Co-op).

The White Tiger is an uncomfortable read. Written from the perspective of Balram Halwai, the son of a rickshaw-puller, it shines an uncompromising light onto the 'India of Darkness', where a dip in the River Ganga will fill your mouth with 'faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids.' As a small boy, Balram watches his mother's body burn in a pyre on the banks of the river, and is appalled to watch her become part of the 'black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed, and was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here.' Thus begins Balram's quest to liberate himself from this desperately inevitable cycle, and to emerge into the second India, the 'India of Light'.

Balram goes to great pains to learn to drive, whereupon he wins himself a job as driver for Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam, the son and daughter-in-law of one of the three malefic landlords from his home village. Through his rear-view mirror, Balram is introduced to the seamier underpinnings of middle-class India: bribery, abuse and prostitution. A traditional fictional hero would rail against such practices. As an anti-hero, Balram becomes complicit in them. In modern India, he tells us, 'there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat - or get eaten up.'

Balram is not a character with whom it is easy to sympathise. Yes, like many a downtrodden protagonist, he is given a miserable start in life, and yes, he aspires to greater things. But he is cold-blooded in his attitudes and his actions: he wants sex, he pays a whore; he wants job security, he hounds his Muslim colleague out of town; he wants a new life, he slits the throat of his boss with a broken Johnny Walker bottle and steals his suitcase of bribe money. At times, his crude turn of phrase made my skin crawl -  'dip my beak into her' was, for me, the most repulsive of these. But then, this unlikeable crudeness is the whole point. Balram is a tea-wallah turned driver turned entrepreneur, a 'half-baked' semi-urchin from a lowly sweet-making caste, and all he has been exposed to in his short life is filth, corruption and greed. He is unshakeable in his belief that if he is to improve his lot in life, he must be ruthless. And ruthless he is, and improve his lot in life he does.

At the close of the book, Balram reflects on the decisions he has made and the damage he has wrought, and decides that even if he is caught and punished, 'I will never say I made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master's throat. I'll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant.' He is morally bankrupt, but he is exultant. To me and to the reader, it seems a hollow triumph, but Balram sees it as the pinnacle of all achievement: to have tasted life on the other side of India, the India of Light.

As a novel, The White Tiger is not a conventionally satisfying read. Balram's crimes are never resolved: the last page leaves him in Bangalore, hiding in plain sight as a successful businessman who also happens to be on India's 'Most Wanted' list. The brilliance of the book is in Adiga's acute observations of India's serving class - and, nested within that, the servants' own gimlet-eyed observations of the middle classes who employ them. Theirs is an India of air-conditioned cars and cut-throat ambition, where religion is played for advantage, and the accrual of rupees is the ultimate goal in life. It is not the India I saw in December, which was one of canalways festooned with water hyacinth, impeccably turned-out government workers, and cheeky-faced village children running along the river banks soliciting 'one pen, one pen' - but then, I was an affluent tourist, with pale skin and a return ticket to England. I am quite certain that there was plenty that that was hidden away in entirety from my foreign eyes.