Adam Mars-Jones is a professor of creative writing at Goldsmiths. His novels include Box Hill and Batlava Lake, which are quite brief, and Pilcrow and Cedilla, which are intended to be part of a million-word sequence. An early version of some of Kid Gloves: A Voyage round My Father appeared in the LRB. His latest novel, Caret, was published in 2023. Box Hill has been adapted into a film, Pillion, which had its premiere at Cannes.
The campus novel is a sub-genre with an inbuilt tendency towards navel-gazing since literary fiction is by and large written by graduates for graduates. Setting this one in Iowa City, home of the Writers’ Workshop, risks an inflammation of this tendency. Sensibly, Brandon Taylor pulls away from roman à clef territory and a hall-of-mirrors effect by ignoring practitioners of...
James Purdy’s literary career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of its journey...
Readers are comfortable with the notion of the unreliable narrator – although it’s not clear what a reliable one would be. A narrator without blind spots and a certain degree of myopia would be like Superman in his guise as Clark Kent, only pretending to need glasses. Namwali Serpell’s narrator is in a different category – does she even qualify as a narrator if she isn’t present at the story she is telling?
Katherine Mansfield's wonderfully wrong-headed criticism of E.M. Forster was that he was a dab hand at warming the pot, ‘but there ain’t going to be no tea.’ Readers of Hernan Diaz’s new novel get their first sniff of a tea bag about halfway through the book’s 400-odd pages. Trust is made up of four sections, the first presented as a complete novel (Bonds...
Gay men beginning to act on their desires in the 1950s faced any number of difficulties and dangers but could benefit from a certain invisibility. Their status was unspeakable, but at least it was unspoken. Middle-class men might live in a world of hints about being different, or sensitive, or musical, rather than face outright abuse. Working-class men might or might not encounter rejection: friends calling for the miner’s son Tom Wakefield at his family home in Cannock in the early 1950s might be told that ‘our Tom’s down by the canal, trying his luck.’ Shuggie Bain, Damian Barr and Eddy Bellegueule are all labelled faggot, homo, poof, queer, jessy and so on, creatures that have no characteristics other than debasement, long before they have a chance to condense an identity around their actual desires. The young Barr is aware that Logan’s violence has a deeper purpose: ‘He knows I’m different and sets about making me hate myself before I know myself.’ James in Young Mungo understands that if his inner life becomes known he will lose access to it: ‘They would have a hundred names for him before he had a name for himself.’
Adam Mars-Jones reads his review of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy.
Adam Mars-Jones describes his relationship with his writing, and the origins of Kid Gloves, his acclaimed memoir of his father.
In 1948, Tennessee Williams published a short story (and collection of the same title) called ‘One Arm’. It is about Oliver Winemiller, a magnificent young navy boxer who lost an arm...
Seventy-four years ago a viral pandemic began in America, most likely on a pig farm in Iowa. Fifteen months later it had killed over eighteen million people, 1 per cent of the world’s...
It sounds like it’s something to do with helping, but that is very far from its meaning. I can’t remember when we first started hearing it; no more than five or six years ago, surely....
William Trevor is bewitched by childhoods and by second childhoods: the ‘grown-up’ bit in between is for him a dullish swamp of lies, commerce, lust and things like that. For Trevor,...
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