Jenny Turner

We all know of writers who just keep writing the same book, but what is sadder is when a true writer seems to run out of books. T.S. Eliot observed that to continue to develop stylistically, a writer had to continue to develop emotionally … It is a commonplace of psychology that human beings, beyond a certain age, find it difficult to supplement their personalities with new emotional understandings. If this happens to the writer, she is lost.

Douglas Coupland has a special relationship with furniture. A page in the March 2000 issue of Wallpaper magazine puffs his own designs for a target-shaped occasional table, a Damien Hirst-spotted desk and the ‘DNA Band’ standing light. A Sunday-supplement profile-writer caught him bulk-buying ceramic vases which he intends to ‘repurpose’ at a later date; when at home in Vancouver, we learn from the same article, he ‘rearranges his furniture weekly’. In his new novel, a big-shot Hollywood film producer explains how he goes about recruiting young assistants. ‘What I normally do is put ads in the paper advertising Eames furniture at ridiculously low prices … Anybody who answers that ad really quickly is de facto smart, alert, greedy and hip.’ ‘I turned into furniture,’ is what the characters in his first book, Generation X, say when they are intoxicated or exhausted and on the point of crashing out.‘

‘Can this beautiful young model be thinking?’ Tim Parks asks at one point in this book. ‘One hopes not,’ the argument continues, as Parks’s narrator looks through an airline magazine, ‘You do not think, I thought, seeing pictures of people pleasure-making on the beach, perhaps in an advertisement for rum or Martini … that for all the beauty of their surroundings and indeed themselves these fortunate people are nevertheless obliged to think, obliged to be conscious.’ Once said, it’s so obvious, isn’t it: people like to look at pictures of models because they imagine the models’ heads to be empty, which allows them to empty their own heads as they gaze. Some go for pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow. Some prefer that ad on the television with all the joyously bounding dogs.‘

The other day, I went to Water-stone’s in the Charing Cross Road to buy a copy of The Rules, the notoriously neo-conservative American dating manual which was a huge hit when it was first published in 1995. My excuse was that ‘The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing’, the title story in Melissa Bank’s short-story collection, has a Rules epigraph, and contains several Rules discussions, and is to some extent a Rules critique. On my way, I noticed that self-help books are kept next to philosophy, and when you see them close together, you notice how very much they are about the same great themes: death (Coping with Bereavement by Hamish McIlwraith), angst (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers), the limits of reason (Edward de Bono, The Five-Day Course in Thinking). The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do drive in Western culture is indeed ancient, and has surprisingly widespread roots.‘

‘Snow-balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware’ – that’s what it says right now in the window of my local bookshop. It’s been painted on the glass by hand. It’s from the first sentence of Mason & Dixon.’