Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

The great New York Review of Books Classics series has a new edition out of Kingsley Amis’s 1969 The Green Man.

It is a strange book.  Imagine a cross between Fawlty Towers, a nudge-nudge swinging circa 1970 English sex farce, and James’ The Turn of the Screw interlaced with a matrix of references to English folklore and anthropology.  One in which the narrator’s quest to get to the bottom of the haunting of his hotel by a malignant 17th-century ghost is presented as not-necessarily more urgent than his well-thought-through (if ultimately not fully successful) plan to convince his wife and mistress to participate in a threesome with him. The novel’s narrator Maurice Allington is the Basil Fawlty figure, a witty alcoholic who runs a B&B-style hotel in the English countryside.  Kingsley cleverly updates James’ novella (among other classic ghost stories) by rendering his narrator’s heavy drinking and tendency to black out and, perhaps, experience hallucinations as a source of ambiguity about the strange phenomena he starts to see around his hotel: strange men and women coming up the stairs and appearing in the window, and a very creepy Wicker Man-esque primaeval forest creature comprised of branches and plants.  Or rather, we ourselves don’t really doubt that something supernatural is occurring, but Allingham’s reputation among his family and friends is such that no one takes him too seriously when he seems to be seeing things.

If you’ve read Lucky Jim you know that Amis can be hilarious; Allington is an extremely mordant, amusingly cranky and misanthropic narrator.  Here’s a favorite passage:

I missed out the artichoke, a dish I have always tended to despise on biological grounds. I used to say that a man with a weight problem should eat nothing else, since after each meal he would be left with fewer calories in him than he had burnt up in the toil of disentangling from the bloody things what shreds of nourishment they contained.  I would speculate that a really small man, one compelled by his size to eat with a frequency distantly comparable to that of the shrew or the mole, would soon die of starvation and/or exhaustion if locked up in a warehouse full of artichokes, and sooner still if compelled besides to go through the rigmarole of dunking each leaf in vinaigrette.  But I did not go into any of this now, partly because Joyce, who liked every edible thing and artichokes particularly, always came back with the accusation that I hated food.

This is true enough.  For me, food only interrupts everything while people eat it and sit around waiting for more of it to be served, but also casts a spell of vacancy before and after.  No other sensual activity must take place at a set time to be enjoyed by anybody at all, or comes up so inexorably and so often.  Some of the stuff I can stand.  Fruit slides down, bread soon goes to nothing, and all pungent swallowables have a value of their own that transcends mere food.  As for the rest of it, chewing away at the vile texture of meat, pulling bones out out of tasteless mouthfuls of fish or emcompassing the sheer nullity of vegetables is not my idea of a treat. At least sex does not demand a simultaneoius outflow of talk, and drink needs no mastication.

A truly committed alcoholic’s theory of food and eating.

The novel definitely feels somewhat dated or at least of its moment in its unapologetic sexual objectification of women.  It might be possible to explain this away as an effect of an ethically unreliable narrator whose attitudes towards women we are not invited to share — Allington does eventually get a kind of comeuppance and enlightenment — but you have to be able to deal with a lot of verbal ogling and the long-range planning of the intended threesome, etc.

What seems unique about The Green Man is the intertwining of its humor and supernatural horror.  It actually is kind of scary which seems a tough trick to pull off in the midst of all the dirty-old-man-innkeeper humor. Kingsley also offers some surprising and cool metaphysical developments late in the novel that you don’t see coming.

Oh wow — here’s an old paperback edition, from a t.v. adaptation?

Keeping it classy!  Relieved we can’t see the guy’s body. That is definitely something I’d be embarrassed to be seen reading on a bus.

And another, a cool one:

illustration from NYT Book review

James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked is a creepy and compelling story of a teacher-student relationship gone bad, a memoir of being stalked, and an investigation into reputation and identity within 21st-century internet culture.  It also touches on other topics including contemporary Jewishness, Israel, and anti-semitism, and a son’s reflection on his relationship with and to a famous father (Lasdun’s father was the architect Denys Lasdun who designed the Royal National Theater in London among other prominent structures).

The Chronicle of Higher Ed ran an excerpt from the book a while ago and I sometimes felt that this narrative’s proper length may have been somewhere between that short piece and this full-length book.  Still, it is gripping and smart throughout, with a canny self-awareness about this story’s resonance with a long literary history of Gothic doppelgangers and mysteriously implacable enemies (I thought of, e.g., William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Nabokov’s Lolita among other such tales).  The title of the excerpt, “‘I Will Ruin Him’: How it Feels to be Stalked” evokes one of Lasdun’s major themes: the vulnerability of reputation and personal identity today, its susceptibility to “ruin” through online means.  I thought also of the recent story (which on reading, prompted me to go through the minor hassle of setting up two-factor authorization for my Gmail account; you should probably do it too) by journalist Mat Honan that begins, “In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.”

I personally do find it terrifying to reflect on how easily a determined, malicious enemy — or random hacker — can target you and wreak very serious havoc on your life.  Lasdun’s story is one of a personal encounter that goes wrong, but part of the takeaway from his story is the ease with which anyone can today do you harm through digital means.  There are a lot of Iagos out there on laptops and smartphones.

The book ends with the situation unresolved: his stalker, Nasreen, is still hounding him, posting invented accusations on online sites (she claims Lasdun raped, abused, and manipulated her in countless other ways, including plagiarizing her writing and stealing her work), emailing employers and colleagues, and so on.  It’s irresistible to look for possible signs of her activity out there now that the book has been published.  For example, there’s this recent Amazon review: “This was such a boring book. It was awful. I can’t believe this guy teaches writing…and no, this is not Nasreen writing (although your paranoid and egotistical self will probably think it is).”

And I found this one fascinating:

As a recovering stalker, this has changed my life,March 13, 2013

By Buckshot – See all my reviews

I was never as menacing or hateful as Nasreen, I never was talked to by the police or given any threats about legal action, and I never smeared my professor’s name, but in most other ways, this story is shockingly parallel to my life experience. The stalking took place in Western NY with my creative writing professor, between the years of 2007 to (well, today I had to send him a blurb about this book as a goodbye). That’s several years of unwanted emails. Which, like Nasreen’s, came in ‘fevers’ between silences. Sometimes addressing him like an ‘ever-dependable mentor’ and sometimes in a phase of hyperbolic disgust, sprinkled throughout with coherence and self-reflexive apologies, even humor. I relate to Nasreen so deeply, her existence gives me some strange relief. The author treats the subject with the respect and humanity that I always hoped I would be seen with. The increases in frequency of these unwanted emails correlates to times in my life that are more stressful and filled with doubt, as they probably did for Nasreen. The chasm between how I seem in real life (coy, near-mute, clumsy) with how I am in the emails is similarly jarring. For christsake I even used to use the phrase, “intimacy terrorist.” At times, I thought this book was written under a false identity of my professor. He kept a solid silence up, that confuses me to this day, but reading this book I think I understand what it’s like from the other side, and I don’t want to inflict that on anyone. I don’t want to be pathological. Again, I was never as extreme or punitive as Nareen, but the frequency and intensity of my emails are similar, and the origins and reasons for the attachment, nearly exact.