In an exchange with The New Yorker, Adam Thirlwell discussed his choice to include a glossary of all the literary allusions he makes in the back of The Escape, his second novel. He said it was part of his experimentation with ‘immaturity,’ which was the novel’s ‘subject.’ In this instance, exploring immaturity involved telling the story of Raphael Haffner, an irresponsible and irrepressible womaniser: one who is nearly eighty years old. Immaturity, Thirlwell is saying, sometimes can’t be shaken off. He is also saying that if you are a writer, immaturity takes a while to master.

Between Thirlwell’s novels; Politics and The Escape, came Miss Herbert, a non-fiction curiosity about authors, novels and the concept of style. Here Thirlwell tells us that Saul Bellow had to learn how to be artfully immature, and that Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke is ‘deliberately malformed and sarcastic’ – all about experimenting with how a novel can be immature and flippant.

The sarcastic, flippant treatment of form, the exposing of a novel’s modesty and mystery, was what reviewers had a problem with in Thirlwell’s first book: Politics. It described the moral scruples of young people involved in a ménage a trios, and it did so with an exhibitionist narrator who constantly told us which characters he liked and advised us how we should judge them. Sadly, not many reviewers paid attention to this narrator as a continuous character with an agenda, preferring to believe that it was nakedly Thirlwell, baldly linking a story together with demonstrations of his cultural knowledge. It wasn’t the device itself that they revealed themselves to have a problem with, but rather that in choosing this route Thirlwell was announcing himself to be a provocateur. He was only twenty-four.

Almost ten years later here is Kapow!, Thirlwell’s fourth book. The central story is that of a few people involved in the recent Egyptian Spring. Rustam, a taxi driver, and his wife Nigora are accidently drawn into the revolution. Their story is related by Faryaq, another cabdriver, this time in London, to the narrator of the novel we are reading. This narrator is a practiced apathete who heightens his disinterest in world affairs by constant marijuana-smoking and overeating. (‘I have no expertise in it. I’m only, after all, a very multiple sarcasm.’) He admits to being more concerned about texting his East London friends than listening to Faryaq’s story. But after a while he gets drawn in by a love story between Nigora and a young, hip filmmaker called Ahmad which occurs on the periphery of the political narrative. But here’s the rub: our narrator is in the habit of indicating which bits of the book are Faryaq’s germ and which bits he has embellished, imagined or added on. And all the bits between Nigora and Ahmad – the bits which made the narrator interested in the first place – seem to be the bits he’s made up. And yes, this unnamed narrator bares all the stylistic marks of Thirlwell’s pervious formally flippant, sarcastic narrators.

Has Thirlwell learnt how to be immature yet? He’s had four books to master it, and if he’s still using the old devices now, what type of immature does that make him? His persistence, the refusal for his treatment of immaturity to show signs of development could well be part of the joke’s sophisticated immaturity. But where does that leave the innovator? Why, out of all the fantastic routes he could go down, must he keep to the ones with the road works? If he does this for another book, he risks giving the impression he doesn’t know how to do anything else.

Luckily Kapow! has another couple of tricks in its dust jacket. It is a totally beautiful object, embracing the fight to invigorate the printed page. Part of this is to do with a form of typographical experimentation: the text is printed in various directions so you have to turn the book to read it, or unfold pull-outs of extra pages. The book is more of a novella, less than one hundred pages, so the ‘revolutions’ we have to make while reading don’t irritate too much (though the narrator tells us at one point he wants his book to ‘age’ us).

The typographical bits are, we discover, in pursuit of ‘a system where as many things as possible [are] visible at once.’ They are, in fact, parenthetical asides, and much more conventional and simple than they might appear when opening the book for the first time and seeing the text run in different directions. They are footnotes that occur in the middle of pages rather than at the bottom. But Thirlwell has already explained what he is doing with these pages. In Miss Herbert, his non-fiction curiosity, he spends time on Laurence Sterne’s typographical innovations with Tristram Shandy: the black, blank and marbled pages. But when compared to what Sterne was doing in the middle of the eighteenth century, some of Kapow!’s visual treats seem almost primitive or prototypical. Thirlwell comes out looking less current than Sterne. There is a polka dot page near the beginning of Kapow! because one of the characters is supposed to wear an (implausible) pair of polka dot track-suit bottoms. Having no clout next to Sterne’s black page of mourning, this spotty page doesn’t seem allusive; it seems derivative.

All a novel can do is teach you how to become a better reader of that novel. Miss Herbert is supposed to be a book about international style and the formulation of a secret heritage of the novel, but it is mainly about Thirlwell’s novels. It is a key to reading and better appreciating Thirlwell’s own fiction, as well as a statement of intent.

Miss Herbert discusses the ‘visible invisibilities’ in Madame Bovary – motifs and echoes that hold the novel structurally together. The example he picks is a recurring cupid in a few set pieces: on a wedding cake, in a garden and in a hotel room. Cupid, Thirlwell tells us, is ‘love’s kitsch.’ Reading Politics after consulting Miss Herbert, you will see the invisibilities of Thirlwell’s allusions to Flaubert made visible. Here, one of Thrilwell’s characters walks onto the balcony of a London nightclub, deeply in love and anxious about his girlfriend:

The balcony was a collection of black wrought-iron curlicues and florets. The floor was millioned with thin diamonds. There was some trio sharing a joint – two girls and a boy, a sarcastic cupid and his angelic hosts.

Here is the Bovarys’ wedding cake as quoted by Thirlwell in Miss Herbert:

..on the upper platform, a green field with rocks and pools of jam and boats made out of nutshells, there was arrayed a little Cupid, perched on a chocolate swing, its two poles finished off with two real rose-buds…

It’s a crafty way to validate one’s artistic choices, this: obliquely showing their weightier referent. It would save critics a lot of bother if every novelist sent out a list of ancestors and intentions instead of a press release. In Miss Herbert Thirlwell tells us how Pushkin claimed first-hand social acquaintance with Eugene Onegin (– similar to the narrators of The Escape and Kapow! who know their characters ‘personally’) and how Tolstoy would ‘leap around [his] characters, happily, with his essayistic digressions.’ Miss Herbert could well be seen by some as a presumptuous anticipation of Thirlwell scholarship, but should also be seen as something very brave and, to me, admirable.

Not many modern authors who have only had one book published could expect to command an audience for a book-long defence or treatise on their art. Thirlwell’s self-belief fills me with hope. I want all young novelists to care about books as much as Thirlwell does. Miss Herbert says, this is my tradition: I am next after these authors. And why not? Somebody has to be next, and nobody else has claimed the tradition for themselves yet. Thirlwell says in Miss Herbert that nobody wanted to follow Gombrowicz’s experiment in sarcasm, Ferdydurke, and it seems Thirlwell does.

Thirlwell is possibly better equipped to judge who comes next in this tradition than a reviewer who has never been interested in Sterne, Svevo and Machado de Assis; or, as Philip Hensher calls them in his review for The Telegraph, ‘the usual suspects of the clever-silly pantheon.’ Such a curt dismissal of these authors demonstrates a fault in Hensher’s authority and a misapplication of his skill and energy as a critic. Why review a book primarily about authors like Stern, Svevo etc if you think them below your seriousness?

Anybody who claims to be a champion of, or has their wages paid by literature, ought be warmed by the prospect of somebody with Thirlwell’s post-Politics trumpeting these innovative authors at book length. It’s one thing wanting to be read by as many people as possible. But to want Italo Svevo or Bruno Schulz to be read by as many people as possible? Of course, this kind of thing will always involve small concessions, i.e accepting Thirlwell’s anti-style with its persistent reiterations, its one sentence paragraphs, it’s ‘And I like this’s. Let him sex-up eccentric books for people who don’t normally find them sexy. He’s not just writing for Philip Hensher and Adam Mars-Jones.

So where is Kapow! in Thirlwell’s tradition? Joining the quick, idiomatic sentences (the ‘I can maybe put it like this’s) is the use of contrived flatus (the ‘as they say’s), so now, when something is patronisingly flagged up to the reader, it can seem hesitant rather than (or, sometimes, as well as) over-confident: ‘no folks, he was, I’m afraid, kind of a sexist.’ At first I was disappointed that Thirlwell didn’t seem bothered how nuanced his characters appeared. In Politics, though they were targets or props for his narrative intentions, Thilwell imbued his characters with convincing interiority. In Kapow!, Nigora is possibly the only character who is given consistent inner life. The Egyptian men, with the slight exception of Ahmad – who acts as a kind of middle-eastern surrogate for the author and narrator’s tastes – are very underdone. But about three quarters of the way through the game he’s playing with his characters and his mannerisms becomes apparent.

Thirlwell’s preferred tone draws attention to both its pompousness and its affability. This was suited to the mixture of bungled sex and sensitivity in Politics; maybe even to Miss Herbert, and the way this literary treatise often allied itself with tricksters of the mock-heroic, like Cervantes and Sterne. But the tone’s repeated use across more books makes me unsure how seriously to take anything at all.

Throughout Kapow! we are told, with varying levels of seriousness, that Rustam is a hero. The first instance, which comes as he stops his taxi to help an unconscious man at the side of the road, is off-hand – so off-hand as to be tilted at 90 degrees to the rest of the text: ‘He had his virtuous principles. His nature was Heroic.’ But here we are firmly in the realm of the mock-heroic. Rustam’s actions were decent, but we don’t know enough about him for his nature to be ‘heroic.’ We are told soon afterwards that he had to flee Uzbekistan because he was a revolutionary. We now understand the ‘heroic’ epithet, but the first occurrence of it, rather than being justified in retrospect, devalues this new exposition. The effect is to make us sceptical of what Thirlwell has to tell us. In Miss Herbert he states (in parenthesis) that a reader of Flaubert ‘would constantly have to ask whether [he] was writing sincerely or parodically.’ Thirlwell, it seems, aspires to write similarly sceptic-making books. His irony seems intended to be taken as sincerity, too, as we watch the narrator of the book weigh his judgements casually, almost promiscuously.

When Rustam is arrested, his friend Mouloud, a more serious revolutionary – the one Rustam rescued at the side of the road – calls him ‘a hero.’ In prison Rustam contemplates his situation. ‘Yes, thought Rustam, grimly: this is what a hero has to do.’ This is a surprise, because it is the first evidence we have of Rustam actually thinking. He has never been allowed to think before. We are told prison breaks him, turns him serious and theological and kills his sense of humour. But we haven’t got to know him properly, and the announcement that he no longer has a sense of humour isn’t much of a loss. We weren’t given any examples of Rustam being, or finding things, funny.

Thirlwell wants to show us that he can flip his characters from stooges into humans with depth. He doesn’t quite achieve this with Rustam. But in the case of Nigora, who has had a bit of depth all the way through, we are made to feel her humanity squarely. Hence Thirlwell flips his experiment in immaturity into something more mature. One sees he can be crafty even though he announces what he is doing along the way. I suppose it’s to do with the contrived candour of his novels that puts you off-guard. You don’t expect to be taken in. For me, this was mainly because his previous books hadn’t managed to ‘take me in’, though Politics didn’t need to. Kapow! shows an alarming acceleration of seriousness in its last quarter, and Thirlwell reveals his storytelling and emotive gifts in high concentration.

You realise, almost with a sigh at wasted opportunity, that Thirlwell’s emotive talents outweigh his cloying habits. Why couldn’t we have had this all the way through? Maybe he’s self-conscious about his aptitude for sensitive, almost sentimental tension and hides it with nervous ticks. Or maybe he’s rebelling against the burden of a populist narrative gift. Either way, there’s display of immaturity, and the tender grasp of people that was evident in Politics is made to seem like it emerges in spite of itself.

Milan Kundera is Thirlwell’s most obvious influence, and reviewers often bring this up when they are disparaging his digressions and so forth. But Thirlwell is similar to Kundera more in his emotive style: nobody will deny the force of learning, casually, less than half way through The Unbearable Lightness of Being that the novel’s two emotional focuses will eventually be crushed to death by a truck. It is this kind talent for the near sentimental about turn which could become the focus of reviewers, if and when they get bored of taking him to task over digressions.

If, with Thirlwell’s fiction, there has been a temptation to ask where the heart is, then the answer is out of sight, and hidden safely beneath Thirlwell’s other recurring concerns. The effect of Kapow! on me is, I expect, different to many other readers. It makes me want to see and read more of Thirlwell – see what else he is capable of, now his immaturity has matured a little.

Richard Bradford’s biography of Amis has inspired some brilliantly damning reviews. Leo Robson’s review for The New Statesman was particularly acclaimed, being nominated for the Hatchet Job of the Year Award. And I have the feeling that if Robson’s review hadn’t been nominated, someone else’s review of Martin Amis: The Biography would have been. The most obvious candidate would have been Geoff Dyer’s, but then, his piece on Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending had already been nominated. It would seem Martin Amis: The Biography was only good for invigorating the standard of book reviewing. The majority of reviews focused on Bradford’s misinformation (– The Statesman devoted an entire article to correcting his inaccuracies). But, since the book fails on so many levels and in each with such articulacy – it is a polyglot of failure – there remains much unexplored territory.

But there is another way of looking at the book’s apparent failure: it seems the fault is ours. We’ve been reading it wrong. Just because Bradford has written biographies of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin doesn’t mean we should automatically assume that Martin Amis: The Biography is also a straightforward biographical work. Silly us! No, it is a Nabokovian novel in the form of a biography, one in which the subject, known for his forays into the post-modern, is punished for his tricksiness by having his biography written by an incompetent. Because, surely, the worst thing that could happen for Amis won’t be not winning the Booker for Lionel Asbo, or having second-rate authors strain themselves to give him a slamming. No, the biggest hit will be correspondent to his particular hubris: that of aspiring to literary immortality. This was his topic in The Information ( – the protagonist reviewed biographies of mediocre literary figures while nobody appreciated his own books). The worst thing for Amis would be a misanthologisation for future generations. Imagine literature students of the future looking for Amis biographies in university libraries. Even if better ones appear, the author of this one’s name begins with a B, so it would still probably be first in the catalogue.

What a brilliant stroke of cruelty this is on behalf of Richard Bradford the arch-author (as opposed to Richard Bradford the character: that feckless, fusty idiot)! The fates really have all turned out for the event of Amis’s rubbishing. But the joke is clearly on the biographer character, because despite his inadvertent efficiency in making Amis look terrible, his subject still manages to elude him. We laugh when it takes Bradford a whole paragraph of flatus to commend the ‘brilliant and wonderfully economic verbal choreography’ of his subject. Or when in the last few pages he sagaciously informs us (while giving examples of his own bad style) that Amis’s talent as a stylist helps him, as a reviewer, to differentiate between good and bad writing: ‘These are the comments of a ruthless, unsparing critic, a man who feels that stylistic laziness is an insult to the profession.’ Amis wins! And the triumph of subject over biographer alludes to this work’s clear ancestor: Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – another fictional biography in which the subject and his fictions are too tricksy for the biographer. V, Nabokov’s narrator, poses the question: ‘Would the biographee have found that special “Knightian twist” about it which would have fully compensated the blundering biographer?’

My bogus reading could go on indefinitely: the ironies are all this glaring and Bradford’s unsuitability for the job can’t help but announce itself.

There is something about a modern literary biography that ought to inspire huge anxiety in the biographer. His subject would have spent his whole writing life practicing for this moment – the ultimate test of literary skill: the influencing of their biography through their corpus and their public actions. The job of the subject is to hide himself in his fiction. This is the ‘Knightian twist’ – the possibility that the author is the only one who can solve his puzzles. Imagine the headache the Philip Roth biography will give someone. But you can imagine, also, that a Roth biographer would relish all this; would be hip to Roth’s tricks. You’d expect an Amis biographer, likewise, to be full of guile as a reader.

Luckily for a biographer, Amis has repeated many of his maxims almost word for word in his reviews, fiction, newspaper and television interviews for at least thirty years. There are Amis sound bites. He very much likes saying the same things about himself. But still, you’d expect the Amis biographer to have a complimentary skill set to his subject: a mind that’s receptive to Amis’s attitude, sensibility, style and shortcomings.

Amis’s fiction and non-fiction, if anything, seek to teach us not to be Richard Bradford.

The ‘biography’ begins with an account of Kingsley’s escapades in Swansea and Cambridge, then Martin’s disinterest at school and sudden late epiphany where he ‘became an autodidact and went from nowhere to an Oxford First in little more than three years.’ This is followed by coverage of his time at The New Statesman and another epiphany, this time political, where previously apathetic Amis becomes preoccupied with nuclear disarmament, Stalinist cruelty and Fundamentalist Islam.

Alongside the above developments we have Amis’s fiction and his love life. The latter is what seems to interest Bradford most: he is so impressed by Amis’s success with women that all he can offer is slavering commendation. The admirer then becomes the defender of Amis’s love-ratting in the seventies and eighties, saying things like ‘few males would have behaved otherwise,’ citing the equally weak argument of Anthony Howard as moral authority: ‘any male who claims he would refuse such unsolicited opportunities is a liar.’ Bradford argues with the moral logic of a Coronation Street adulterer. ‘It was on a plate’ would have made his case with fewer words. The weightless appeal to ‘few would’ appears again and again in Bradford’s justification of his subject’s behaviour: ‘few would expect that in business nostalgic fidelity should overrule financial necessity.’ Who, we ask, are these ‘few’ to whom Bradford defers?

(Moral judgement aside, his capability for immoral judgement is also poor. I admit, I was interested in hearing about Amis’s love-life as a young man. But even on the level of trash or gossip, Bradford manages to squeeze any salaciousness from it. His ogling – the way he ogles: with the wheezing admiration of an old impotent living through his nephew’s exploits – gets in the way of our own ogling.)

This irresponsibility of both judgement and rhetoric is applied to the fiction as well. Reading Bradford, one often thinks one has missed a trick; that paragraphs of his argument must have been left out by a slovenly copy-editor. After quoting a number of negative critical responses to Yellow Dog, he shamelessly claims that ‘it is none the less a work of genius,’ without offering much in the way of a defence. On the topic of Amis as formal innovator, Bradford would have us believe that a novel with two narrators was ‘previously inconceivable’ before Success was published in 1978, and that this patented device ‘would later be borrowed by Julian Barnes.’

Not content with butchering Amis, Bradford wades, cleaver in hand, through the rest of the canon. He must specifically have it in for Nabokov, because he can’t stop talking about how Amis constantly surpasses him. Success ‘outranks’ Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. (Yes. He’s allegedly read The Real Life and still doesn’t get the irony.) John Self of Money is ‘more unsettling than Humbert [Humbert],’ while Xan Meo of Yellow Dog makes Humbert ‘virtuous by comparison.’ (Not true: Xan Meo, unlike Humbert, never acts out his pedophilic desires). The really disturbing thing here is that Bradford seems to be attempting to rip off an Amisism as a form of encoded crawling and fawning. In an essay on Lolita, Amis said that in terms of conscious cruelty, ‘all the Lovelaces and Osmonds turn out, on not very much closer inspection, to be mere hooligans and tyrants when compared to Humbert Humbert.’ This happens again when Bradford makes a comment about Amis’s first person techniques being the closest a prose writer has come to Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, which alludes to something else Amis said in the same essay about Nabokov ‘[Constructing] a mind in the way that a prose Browning might have gone about it, through rigorous dramatic monologue.’ I get the impression Bradford wants Amis to read these comments and raise an eyebrow in smug mutual congratulation. (This, one would assume, is meant as an offering to appease Amis for taking his name in vain and his other reviews out of context.)

Then there is the problem of the totally uninteresting, as well as inappropriate, personal voice that pervades the biography. If we don’t get a good impression of what Amis is like, we get an accurate portrait of Bradford. He can’t help interrupting to tell us what gets on his nerves ( – usually Modernism and ‘political correctness’). But this would be less irritating if he didn’t insist on demonstrating his ignorance by addressing these subjects as if he’d given them a second thought, rather than having dismissed them offhand as he so clearly has. After disclosing his ‘abiding contempt for all brands of psychoanalysis’ he goes on to give us his two cents on Robert Jay Lifton’s psychological study of Nazi guilt, The Nazi Doctors. According to Bradford, Amis’s research into the female psyche for his novel Other People amounted to questions like ‘why do you choose that kind of make-up, what do you do with your hair and so on?’ And so on? And so on, indeed.

The fundamental error, it seems, is that Bradford’s study shouldn’t be a biography. It should be the novel I was pretending it was earlier, a novel of the school Bradford invents for Amis’s works in the course of his ‘biography’: ‘Conservative Postmodernism’ (– after Bradford’s treatment, even something edgy enough to have a ‘post-’ prefix arrives with a portly gut). The concept would be slightly different from the one I suggested earlier: a biographer is so enamoured with his subject he not only misunderstands him; he not only loses any analytical ability or purchase, but becomes all the things his subject stands against.

In the early 80s Amis reviewed A.N Wilson’s The Life of John Milton. He attacked it for all the same faults Bradford shows in his book. As far as content goes, it ‘is not a scholarly biography; it isn’t popular either, or semiotic or psychohistorical. It is not a critical biography. It is, rather, an uncritical biography.’ As far as style goes, it ‘must set some kind of record as a thesaurus of speculation.’ The real sad thing about all this is that Bradford, as well as reading Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, must have also read this review in The War Against Cliché and not noticed himself. If it were a novel, this would form the axis of our sympathy and pity. But Martin Amis: The Biography is allegedly a work of non-fiction. If it achieves anything at all, it demonstrates how unsuitable Bradford is for the job of explaining his subject’s life and prose.

In a Youtube video from May 2010, Ned Beauman, the Author of Boxer, Beetle, suggested that readers aren’t entirely honest with themselves: that our motivation for reading novels and the way we talk about them may not be aligned.

There are lots of words that book reviewers use in book reviews that you and I never ever use talking about books, like ‘coruscating’, or ‘timely’, or ‘scandalous’… but there’s one word that you and I use all the time talking about books that book reviewers never use, which is ‘boring’: which is weird because we all know that lots of books are boring. Most books are boring. It’s a triumph ever to come across a book that’s not boring. And yet the biggest crime that a book can commit is to be boring… All I wanted to do when I started this was write a book with a modicum of intelligence that’s not ever boring, and if I’ve achieved that then I’ll be relatively happy.

One could take this as a preventative strike on his part, anticipating reviews whose only negative word about his debut would be something like ‘busy’, ‘convoluted’, or a patronisingly meant ‘ambitious.’

This is to be expected of a novel which features collectors of Nazi memorabilia; assassins; a gay, Jewish-Cockney flyweight-boxer; an aristocratic eugenicist; carnivorous super-beetles and a composer of atonal music. I am a reader who found the book to be constantly interesting without being convoluted. In fact, it is surprisingly well executed. Every circus-level curiosity gives the impression of being handled with subtlety, modesty and understanding. The slimness of it – only 250 pages – certainly contributes to its polish. But Beauman was dead right in expecting that some reviewers are suspicious of literary novels which make a concerted effort not to be boring.

The ‘Hysterical Realism’ debate may be old news now, but it is insistent enough to reassert its power every time a ‘busy’ novel is written. The essay of that name which appeared in James Wood’s collection The Irresponsible Self: Laughter and the Novel identifies and (in most cases well deservedly) attacks ‘The contemporary, big, ambitious novel’ – a long work, full of acrobatic plot-twists and multifarious coincidental, interlinking sub-stories. Wood’s main gripe was that the authors of these CBANs (and his list is formidable: Pynchon, DeLillo, Rushdie, Foster-Wallace) appeal to the reader’s hunger for storytelling, but neglect their duty to make their stories convincing. Boredom is avoided at the expense of seriousness. Wood believes this type of novel to be the enemy of nuance: ‘The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, overworked… it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself.’ The other author Wood mentions in his list of offenders is Zadie Smith.

It seems silly, patronising even, to return to White Teeth – a debut that was discussed exhaustively when it came out at the turn of the millenium – now Smith is a mature artist. But youth will always be topical. It is especially relevant to the discussion of novels which display – even advertise – their energy and verve. Apprentice novels are often overly conscious of delivering a specific kind of vivacity or voice; they might not get published or noticed otherwise. Wood spent most of his essay talking about White Teeth, even though he believed Smith to have offended far less than (and, actually, to be a far superior writer than) the established authors of the other CBANs he condemns. This favour is partly the result of him making concession to her youth, and to her ‘potential’ – to that type of energy and vivacity that is no longer present in the established authors who sit comfortably in their readership and acclaim.

One need only read Smith’s short story ‘Mrs. Begum’s Son and The Private Tutor’ to get a compact sense of this youthful vivacity, and of her promise in every other area of the craft. One obviously requires and expects more concentrated immediacy from a short story than from a novel. But this short story is one we can expect to have a double injection of verve. It was a showcase piece, written for The Mays: Oxbridge’s most prestigious and competitive creative anthology, which, every year, is judged by people like Seamus Heaney and Andrew Motion, and circulated to agents and publishers. Smith was a Mays success-story. ‘Mrs. Begum’s Son’ secured her an agent, publisher and large advance before she’d written her first novel. And all this while in her final year at Cambridge.

Again, this is old news, but it gives a context to the urgency of her writing. She wasn’t just the apprentice: she was the intern. The prose is pretty good, but carrying that intentional, deferential awkwardness of a student writer, which is articulate and acute, but eschews pompousness and precociousness almost fanatically. This is the literary equivalent to broadening one’s accent in speech in order to seem humble or intellectually unthreatening. Smith embraces the unliterary, proclaiming her relevance with mentions of Barbie and My Little Pony. Having had a short story in there myself, I can testify that as well as whatever else the judges may have thought of my writing, my inclusion would have been reinforced by my lucky choice to depict the wedding of two young adults in Northeast England, with the possibility of a political statement about the war in Afghanistan hovering in the title (but not in the story itself.) I like to think that my style, voice, handling of character etc. were the reasons I was picked, but it was probably down to (what was seen to be) my ‘relevance:’ the things I consciously put into my story to fulfill the showcase’s criteria.

Zadie Smith came from this into writing White Teeth. She was still writing for a competition – an author’s first novel. The first few pages are obliged to be either the biggest of them all, or a promise of consistent massiveness for the rest of the book. And how massive Zadie Smith’s first pages are! They are some of the most massive first pages I’ve ever read. Wood identifies the sensationalism of Smith’s plot as an excess or ‘acceleration’ of storytelling. If Wood sees the chief vice of ‘Hysterical Realism’ to be a sort of nervous boredom: a rambling and sprawling listlessness, Smith has a nervous eagerness to entertain and to earn respect. The main difference between a CBAN in the hands of a first time novelist and in the hands of a seasoned one is that the former needs her novel to be interesting. And White Teeth reads like a first novel, and reads like it knows it is a first novel which must earn its place. Beauman’s debut, Boxer, Beetle reads like it needs to be interesting to survive, but also wants to be interesting for its own pleasure. Its vividness is not a strain on the reader. It is all interesting, and meticulously researched, but has an energy that is vital and worldly rather than academic and bookish.

White Teeth is designed in a different way. Smith said in an interview with The Guardian in 2000 that ‘to worry about whether a Bengali man of a certain age might say such and such, well, that’s very limiting.’ She would advocate not only using ones imagination, but trusting it above researched or received knowledge: ‘As long as you honestly believe that people can be, say or do anything, then you stop worrying about it.’ Therefore, her job as a novelist is to create a dialect from which her characters can convincingly speak. And for the most part, it is convincing. She generates a narrative folk-lore – a received wisdom where details seem exaggerated from generation to generation. But rather than being obscured by the path of time, family histories acquire more narrative vehemence the more unlikely or miraculous they sound. They take on such a life of their own that they seem independent of the characters produced by them, and are more often than not entirely superfluous to the action.

The effect created is one which has divided readers. James Wood believes that in the most part this detracts from the craft of the novel. I have a fondness for it as a structural curiosity – but this sort of fondness looks kindly on imperfection, and therefore reduces what it praises. When you read about Archie Jones’s first wife (the existence of whom is never mentioned again, and has hardly any bearing on his actions), you can’t help wanting to join in the fun of Smith’s ingenuity: ‘She referred to Ophelia’s madness, which lead her to believe, half of the time, that she was the maid of the celebrated fifteenth-century art lover Cosimo de Medici.’ It delights at the reading, but upon recalling it, seems put there for the author’s amusement rather than the validity of the work.

Smith’s interest in the provenance of everything, as well as being the premise of White Teeth, resigns her to a formula that any novelist would struggle to sustain over a long stretch. Every character must have an interesting genealogy. They must be approached through their religious leanings and backgrounds, rather than how they appear in the present and what they have gathered with them to that moment. One tires of going backwards rather than forwards, not because the many back-stories are uninteresting – on the contrary, they are all quite brilliant. But one gets bored of exercising the same readerly muscles over and over again. On the level of character, this process doesn’t enrich them. The narrator can go one hundred years into a character’s past without giving an impression of why they are who they are.

Smith’s novel is founded on the trite-ism that ‘everybody has a story.’ True – but those stories aren’t instantly available to the eye. They should be the reward of more study than the cursory, though ever-penetrative, glance. Smith tries to make her people wear their stories on the outside, which cannot be achieved. If anything, White Teeth is a means for other apprentice novelists to learn that a narrator doesn’t have to demonstrate her entire knowledge of a character at once. James Wood compares White Teeth to another ambitious debut – another lengthy family saga – Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. As one would expect, Wood finds a way of demonstrating that, though both authors use similar apprentice techniques for character – the leitmotif for instance – Mann’s characters ‘live!’ more convincingly that Smith’s.

One of the most famous young debuts of European literature – upon its publication both esteemed and popular – Buddenbrooks was allegedly the reason for Mann’s winning the Nobel years later. And it was written when he was only twenty-five. But however casually damning it can be to say of White Teeth; ‘Well, it’s no Buddenbrooks,’ it is an undeniable elevation. And I would assert that Buddenbrooks and White Teeth have more in common in terms of quality than Wood would like to acknowledge. Smith’s and Mann’s characters often live at the same rate. Mann’s novel is ultimately (very slightly) finer because it displays more evidence of authorial duty than Smith’s: Mann’s eye is trustworthy because it doesn’t show favouritism. He has been given a town to observe and dedicates himself to depicting each inhabitant – knowing them – even if they are not immediately rewarding. Whereas Smith’s authorial eye is that of a magpie. A fickle, impatient observer, it moves quickly, only attracted to garish curiosities that glitter with irregularity. Characters must court authorial attention in order to be noticed. But just because Mann’s eye is diplomatic where Smith’s shows favoritism doesn’t mean that he never errs on the side of hyper-exuberance. Herr Permaneder, with his verbal tick ‘pain in th’ ol’ (said even as he is forcing himself on the maid, and then as he apologises to his wife for doing it,) is no more respectable than something by Smith at her most flagrant.

But it must be Smith’s serial hyper-exuberance which gives the impression not of idiosyncrasy, but difficult conventionality: what philistinism would term ‘quirkiness.’ Smith’s character list often reads like a roll call of Big Brother contestants in the later years. There were two types of idiots there: ones with a single massive trait, who said things like ‘say it to me face, don’t go slagging me off behind me back;’ or the people deemed misfits by the production company – an amputee with pretensions of clairvoyance and an unapproachably complex sexual identity would be a typical contestant: typical because of her atypicality. The object being to imply a diversity and range in the national populous through such particularity. But doing so is a fallacy. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, this is done to enable a story in the easiest way possible. Ned Beauman’s debut would appear to give a similarly berserk cross-section of characters if one was to read a blurb or a synopsis, but not if one were to read the novel itself.

Boxer, Beetle is realised through repellent consciousnesses: the repressed homosexual eugenicist with his 1930s homophobia (the cold rejection of homosexuality as an illness, as opposed to the modern hot fear of it as a threat); and the collector of Nazi memorabilia who constantly examines and justifies his hobby in light of his conscience. Where a character that has a disease making him smell like fish could conceivably appear in White Teeth without attracting too much notice, Beauman treats such a garish abnormality with respect and responsibility, rather than as a gimmick which advertises the narrative. This treatment is evident in all of the creations which could easily be made into flashy curiosities. Where Smith has a host of characters which she has thoroughly inhabited, she hasn’t accessed the true potential for their ironies, or if she has, she hasn’t become comfortable enough to handle them with affection. Beauman’s scientist Philip Erskine has none of the endearing exuberance of Smith’s scientist, Marcus Chalfen: he has less showy mannerisms that say ‘I am Philip Erskine!’ but nevertheless vivifies his own substance far more convincingly than all of Smith’s characters (excluding Samad, who would be a credit to any novelist).

Characters in White Teeth have a tendency to appear as advertisements for themselves as well as for the novel, in a similar fashion to the way Ricky Gervais writes the celebrity cameos in his comedy. They move as if the thought ruling their interiority is ‘I am X – I must remember to be X,’ and the effect is that they seem, at some stage, to have forgotten who they are – forgotten they have a self at all. They announce themselves as if they aren’t thoroughly convinced: ‘I’m Ben Stiller!’ ‘I’m Clive Owen!’ ‘I’m Liam Neeson – I was in Schindler’s List!’ The effect is one of curious tentativeness and disassociation. But in a Ricky Gervais comedy the actors are playing themselves. It is knowing self-parody.

It takes a feeling novelist to know his characters so well as to play irreverently and affectionately with their inner ironies. Beauman has Philip Erskine’s sister Evelyn (an ingenious character in her own right) say to him ‘I really don’t understand why anyone is interested in children,’ to which he responds ‘no.’ What a great thing for a Eugenicist – somebody who’s primary interest is the preservation of the species – to say! One couldn’t imagine even in Joyce Chalfen – the creation who demonstrates some of Smith’s most scathing and at the same time sensitive work – the same lightness of touch that has gone into creating Philip Erskine and the conflicting loyalties of his conscience and consciousness. Where Beauman is backed by his research, Smith protests to be comfortable without it. But it is Beauman who is more comfortable in the very essence of his characters. And it is from the essence that Smith believes she speaks when she trusts her imagination over research.

Buddenbrooks is economical in the way it allows characters to survive and demonstrate their essence. The leitmotif, though initially helpful, is a troublesome way of keeping a character afloat. Remember what Humbert Humbert says in Lolita, about a novelist writing a character with a dog and being lumbered with the prospect of finding new ways in which the dog can be brought into the action. Mann has to constantly find new opportunities for his characters to exhibit their one or two idiosyncrasies. They live the same, they don’t need to change, but they have to busy themselves to be believed. The fraud Benedix Grünlich is a relatively brief but significant contributor to the book’s action. A dandyish conman posing as a merchant, he is a master of economy in social and emotional matters as well as in business. Full of gestures that connote ‘flourishing’ and elegant prosperity, he is constantly aware of the price of the effect produced – getting value for money – and in doing so never ceases to demonstrate a certain lack of sense, a meanness of spirit; a meagreness. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than his verbal tick, ‘I have taken a couple of rooms at the City of Hamburg Inn.’ This phrase comes in even when he is begging for Antonie’s hand in marriage. Putting it here would naturally seem crass and needless, as is the case with Antonie’s second suitor Permaneder’s verbal ticks, but the effect produced here is acute:

I could bear it no more. I threw myself into the next coach. Hastened here as fast as I could. I have taken a couple of rooms at the City of Hamburg Inn… and here I am.

The leitmotif here is used not to amplify the character but to restrain him; to regulate his emotional expenditure. It is not just the minor characters who are made full by skilful use of this device. Christian Buddenbrook, one of the leads, after coming to work for the family firm, often dismays his family at the dinner table with explorations of his sensibilities; how he sometimes dares himself not to swallow, for instance. And then when it appears that he has settled into bourgeois respectability, he delights by transforming the solid, satisfying, dynamic routine of a businessman into something his brother Thomas would call, ‘unusually obscure or supremely refined,’ by describing the way his hand feels satiated and tired after a day’s writing. This perturbs the family just as much. Witnessing a character resist development and expansion here yields equal pleasure to seeing a character develop, and is in itself an appropriate kind of expansion. Deriving sophisticated pleasure from a static character is reliant on that character being subtly static. Smith’s static characters afford the reader much pleasure, but often the shallow pleasure of merely laughing at them. Yet how deep a pleasure can one really afford  through observing Mann thoroughly master a shallow technique? One easily gets bored of Mann, increasingly so as he gets better at writing his big novels.

The more rigorously I probe the hasty impulse of characterisation in White Teeth the more I have a niggling sense that my approach is wrong, and that James Wood’s philosophically-aware seriousness, rather than being too high for the novel’s shortcomings, is in fact of no use to this novel and its goals. After Wood, I am frustrated by the tasteless economy of some of Smith’s descriptions. A spotty face is a ‘join the dots enthusiast’s wet dream’, Clara’s father’s chair is ‘bug infested.’ These are the luminous, hasty brushstrokes of the idiomatic voice which has read Martin Amis and believes the world to be its oyster. There is nothing wrong with learning how to capture modern urban life from 80s-90s Amis, and there is everything to gain from learning about style from him. The problem comes when Amis’s innovations of voice, originally a quest for freshness, are lazily reproduced. This is excusable in White Teeth, however, in that it runs on unoriginalities. They are the novel’s fuel. Just as James Joyce constructed characters’ interiorities from the refuse, the unoriginalities of the mind in Ulysses, Smith constructs an exterior narrative out of trite-isms. She gets the tone of her debut right for its day. The narrative voice is enabled by its endorsement of public hearsay. This is what Wood doesn’t seem to understand: hyperbole is part of the process by which the narrative voice has collated her story. It engages directly with a semi-urban climate of storytelling. Transmission happens everywhere, sometimes across continents, so it is no wonder details find themselves ‘hysterically’ altered: ‘So the legend went back in St Elizabeth.’ The narrative embraces the possibility that the tales may be too wonderful to be true. Where for Wood this cheapens the novel, for Smith it makes the story possible. This is how the narrative sources its information, and this is a reason why Wood and Smith can’t get along here.

One can’t imagine James Wood readily investing himself in a narrative process so close to blind faith. And when a novel asserts that ‘It couldn’t be, but it was. That is how people describe a miracle,’ it is to be expected that the steady mind of the knowledgeable, tested atheist may demand a little more ‘seriousness’ from the book. He has written a collection of essays about the intersection of Theology and Literature; it is his subject, and the axis of his one novel: The Book Against God, which establishes it’s narrative / reader bonds on mistrust. One could imagine him seeing the ease of miracle as a shirking of responsibilities on the part of the logician, the craftsman and the self-respecting reader. But Wood himself, in How Fiction Works, asserts that the success of a novel should be judged by how well it teaches you to follow its rules: to believe its texture and grammar. A novel fails, ultimately, when it ‘has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level.’

Smith allows her narrative provincial and blind belief as well as scientific caution because such an argument is the crux of her creation: Chalfenism versus Bowdenism – the determinism of science versus the determinism of God. I believe in the texture and grammar of her book, and for me, it very rarely fails on its own terms. But when it does, it happens drastically. Smith turns on her conventions and her whole creation in the very last two pages, abandoning the tension between the unbelievable and the determinable to a disenchanted logic. She imagines her reader as a focus group who ‘would no doubt tick the box that asks to see all these things played to their end,’ and goes on a little parade around the hypothetical, then condemns the hunger for storytelling which she has (up until now) been satisfying. It seems she has run out of steam and wants her novel finished: ‘But surely to tell these tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. And as Archie knows, it’s not like that.’ One thinks, now you decide to reject the sentimental elements of story-telling? – for exaggeration is a function of the nostalgic: the sentimental. That is what White Teeth teaches us.

It isn’t the novel’s busyness that defeats it; the way it bristles with information actually holds it together. After reading it all, we realise that although we might have felt overwhelmed by the novel’s fullness, it was the way it voided itself in the end that damaged it. Zadie Smith was trying so hard not to let her novel get boring, and she was doing so well. But then the novelist got bored of the novel.