Jenny Turner

Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes:

There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about . . . writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and . . . I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it.

Last year, Helen DeWitt posted this passage on paperpools, her blog: it ‘says everything I might have wanted to say about life, the universe, postmodernism and Your Name Here.’ Your Name Here is a 120,000-word novel; DeWitt is one of its authors, the category of authorship itself having been split. (At this point, it might have been appropriate to spin off into a footnote about its other author, Ilya Gridneff, an Australian journalist of Russian origin, born in Sydney in 1979 and currently working in Papua New Guinea for the Australian Associated Press, except that the DeWitt/Gridneff partnership doesn’t do much fracturing with footnotes. Epistolary structure and multiple avatars, yes, scans of original documents, including contracts, because ‘without the contractual details any book is just fogbound Jamesian kitsch,’ but not really footnotes: perhaps because, since it’s an authorship made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.)

Once upon a time, as Lorrie Moore begins, ‘there was a not terribly prolific American short-story writer who, caught ten years between books with things she called Life and others called Excuses, was asked to write an introduction to her own Collected Stories.’ Moore has not published a book since Birds of America in 1998; among much else, Birds of America contains a biting, unresolved debate about the point of writing fiction. And now, here she is, prefacing her own stories. ‘How to do this without sounding pompous or self-pitying or dying and doomed? … Could she imply illness and get sympathy? A mysterious malignancy on, say, the writing arm?’

So what would you do if you’d just killed a rich man’s housekeeper, when the bomb you set for her employer went off while she was still in the house? You might run, as Mary does, to a motel room in Lincoln, Nebraska, ‘practically the dead centre of the country’, because you’d expect them to expect you to head for one or another of the coasts. You’d probably rip up your address book, dumping it page by page in separate bins. You’d certainly dye your hair, discovering, as people generally do, that instead of the ‘liberated’ shade advertised on the L’Oréal packet, your hair turns ‘a daffodil yellow blonde’. And you’d think up a new name for yourself, working through lists of friends, childhood toys, pop stars, to hit, possibly, on Caroline, from the Beach Boys song.

Halfway through the second series of new-century Doctor Who, and it’s looking dicey. The problem became clear to me in episode five, ‘Rise of the Cybermen’, as the relaunched 1970s arch-villains stamped in their silver moon-boots across the stately home’s front lawn. Fundamentally, they just aren’t Daleks, are they? The first series, the one that was on last year, had Daleks, hordes of them, and what a delight they were: gliding like priests, talking like Nazis, chimerical yet simple, and with that unpleasantly ambiguous relation to the ground beneath them. I wasn’t aware I had missed them until, suddenly, they were back. And back, too, was that sound made when the Doctor is arriving or departing, the scraping, groaning contractions of the Tardis – so wonderful, warm yet terrifying, the sound of childbirth, I always think, as heard by the baby.

Early springtime, London, 1944: the Little Blitz period of suddenly redoubled enemy air-raids after the comparative lull that followed the Blitz proper of 1940-41. Two women sit drinking tea on a pile of sandbags on the Marylebone Road. The tea is grey, and probably made from chlorinated water; the powdered milk is lumpy; they nonetheless engage in ‘the usual women’s quarrel’ over who should pay. A sandbag splits, revealing its stuffing of earth, and bits of grass and flowers. ‘“Nature triumphant over war,”’ one of the new friends declares, ‘in a wireless voice: for it was the sort of thing that people were always writing about to the radio – the new variety of wildflower they had spotted on the bombsites, the new species of bird, all of that – it had got terribly boring.’ It is as though one of those muddy, confused old photographs has come alive and started to talk.