Notes on the Suburban Gothic

Blackwell’s bookshop in London hosted the Kitschies Gothic Evening on the 8th instant. In preparation Charing Cross Read, the Blackwell’s blog, ran several articles on Gothic fiction, including my “Notes on the Suburban Gothic”. Blackwell’s and the Kitschies also ran a recommended Gothic reading list on which S.L. Grey‘s The Mall and The Ward, along with work by two more South African writers, Henrietta Rose-Innes and Terry Westby-Nunn, featured shoulder to shoulder with Gaiman, Austen, the Brontës, Stoker, Le Fanu, Straub, Tartt, Meyer and Rice. A lot of deathly cheer, then.

Here are my brief synoptic notes on the suburban Gothic (original post here), with special reference to Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls:

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I’ve long been interested in the manifestations of the suburban Gothic in contemporary fiction, art and architecture. At first glance, there seems to be little to connect a grand Gothic cathedral and strip mall or a box house in any Western city’s suburban sprawl, but aesthetically they are on the same continuum.

Nineteenth-century Gothic fiction and the Gothic revival architecture of the same period – follies, faux ruins and mazes – is a reaction against the scientistic certainty of Enlightenment rationality. By setting their Gothic works in crumbling ruins of medieval cathedrals and in ancient castles, Coleridge, the Shelleys, Byron, Poe, the Brontës, Le Fanu and ultimately Stoker celebrate the invincibility of death and he inescapability of history. The bloody shadows of the Crusades cannot be expunged from Europe by Enlightenment politeness; the Gothic celebrates the rejection of scientific rationality and its neat polarities. In the gory darkness of the middle ages, life and death co-existed, good and evil, sex, love and hatred mingled in a heady, human soup that the clever scientists tried to strain. Enlightenment rationalists tried – and failed – to taxonomise the conflicts and contradictions out of human society. The nineteenth century Gothic delighted in showing how death and entropy would always emerge victorious.
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Note to my inner brat

Allaboutwriting is running a publishing month during November and have asked writers and publishers for guest blog posts on various aspects of the craft. Other pieces include posts by industry professionals like Janet van Eeden, David Chislett and Wesley Thompson. Here’s mine:

I’m in the middle of writing a solo novel and I’m having a bit of a wobbly at the moment. It was all going so well. I would get up, have ideas and batter out a couple of thousand words in the morning. For two days, that is. Before that was Monday and, of course, I had to reboot from the weekend. I’m a father of two young children, you understand. The week before was okay: a good day, a bad day, a mediocre day, two days lost to paying work. Don’t get me wrong, I like earning some money to help my wife pay the bills, but I really what I want to do is write. Except when I have the time to write, when I prefer to agonise.

Don’t you hate people who update you on their poxy word counts?

I work at home as a freelance editor, proofreader, general book-production guy, and this quarter I’m lucky enough to have two regular part-time retainers which allow me at least half my working days to write. I’ve jumped on this space to work on this solo novel, and realise that it may well be the last time I have the luxury of so much time to work on unsolicited, unpaying work.

It doesn’t always feel luxurious, arriving at the page in the morning knowing that time is finite and that I owe this draft to my family, who graciously allow me to idle at half-speed and indulge in my hobby instead of filling up my gaps with paid work, and to my writing partner, who’s patiently waiting until January to start our next collaborative novel – one that we’ve actually been paid an advance to write. It’s sort of like if you told your bank manager you were actually not going to repay that loan but were going to move to Tahiti and carve aardvarks out of coconuts. It’s utter self-indulgence, I know, and that knowledge often drives me to work on the novel rather than mess around.

But sometimes my inner brat rebels at all the pressure. It tells me in unconvincing hippie tones, ‘Chill out, what’s all the striving for?’ And despite the bad California accent, it’s rather compelling sometimes. Yes, I would rather play solitaire all day. Yes, I would rather treat my inner brat to a movie date. Yes, I would rather tweet and facebook all day and hope that people laugh at my jokes. Yes, I would rather lie on the floor and read my book.

NO, I wouldn’t. I’d like to write this novel.

More honestly, I’d like to have written this novel. I’m enjoying it. (I know there are lots of writers’ advice columns which warn you against enjoying your own work because it’s a sure sign that blah blah blah – but if you’re not enjoying it, I wonder, why will anyone else?) I wish I could read more than the half I’ve written. I want to know what happens. I can’t wait for my wife to read it, then my writing friends, then an agent who’ll fall off his chair because it’s so good and sign me up, then the publishers who will come to physical blows over it, then millions of fans and then the movie producers and then, and then, you know … and then.

Read the rest at Allaboutwriting

The Beggars’ Signwriters now out on Kindle

My 2006 debut novel, The Beggars’ Signwriters, is newly available to Southern African readers for Kindle. What a happy new lease on life for my book.

Get it from Amazon.com here. You can download a free sample there too.

You don’t need a Kindle to read Kindle books: you can install Kindle for PC, Mac, iPad and iPhone too.

Just before bursting into flames

Here’s my single memento from the Franschhoek Literary Festival: a happy pic of Lauren Beukes and Sarah Lotz at a session at the Congregational Church on Friday the 13th, just before they burst into flames.

PEG Fiction Editing Workshop, Franschhoek, 11 & 12 May

After the success of last year’s Professional Editors’ Group (PEG) fiction editing conference, PEG is holding
a more intensive two-day fiction editing workshop this year, at Klein Waterval Guest House on 11 & 12 May, just before the Franschhoek Literary Festival. I’ll be facilitating practical sessions, along with experienced editors and publishers including Louise Steyn, Linda Gilfillan, Helen Moffett, Nèlleke de Jager, Alison Lowry, Maire Fisher, Joanne Hitchens and Etienne Bloemhof.

There are parallel streams in English and Afrikaans editing. The cost is R975 for PEG members and R1250 for non-members, with an early-booking special before 18 April. Places are strictly limited to keep the workshop intense and practical so book now to avoid disappointment.

Here’s the workshop announcement and registration form
and here’s the full programme.

See you there.

Misplaced poem

I’ve had my interview-anniversary-graduation-public-appearance haircut.

After that, it’s back to the grizzly cave with me

until I get paid.

My PhD thesis in a nutshell

I’m very pleased to report that I’ve passed my PhD. Here is a synopsis of the thesis. I had some very constructive feedback from the assessors and it will help me improve the work into a book or some articles, if that’s on the cards.

Faith at the Edge: Religion after God in four of Douglas Coupland’s novels

Douglas Coupland’s novels offer a broad critique of specific cultural conditions on the North American west coast. His primarily suburban characters suffer from identity crises, social fragmentation, family dysfunction, uncreative working conditions, a lack of meaning and a lack of political agency. In Generation X, Life after God, Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus!, the four novels on which I focus in this thesis, Coupland positions his characters on the edge in manifold ways: on the edge of madness, on the geographical margin of the continent, at the threshold of the end of time, and on the verge of great, transcendent truth. This thematic liminality defines the specific culture about which he writes: middle-class, young, North American, disillusioned suburbanites. The central questions this thesis raises are primarily psychological and political rather than religious. What, after God in this culture is dead, can replace the cathartic and transcendent psychological functions that religion once filled? What can stand in for the sense of agency and social connectedness that ideology founded on religious certainty once conferred? In teasing out Coupland’s answers to these questions I examine the multiple layers of spirit in Coupland’s imaginative universe: tendencies to romantic notions of environmental paganism, the residual effects of dominant and hierarchical religion, and his tentative probing into an altogether new basis of belief and agency. I regard Coupland’s hesitance to express post-religious religion and his lack of definitive religious answers, due either to deliberate avoidance or an inability to express them, not as an imaginative weakness, but as an appropriate stance towards the subject in the postmodern culture he reflects.
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Review: Just My Type by Simon Garfield

This review first appeared in somewhat edited form in the Weekend Argus on 6 February 2011

I’m a vociferous defender of fiction above all, so it may come as a surprise that my favourite book at the moment is a non-fiction volume, Just My Type: A Book about Fonts by Simon Garfield (Profile Books, 2010). Just My Type is what it says on the cover (in ten fonts): a book about fonts, and might appeal to graphic designers, typographers, readers and writers, and anyone who has read a sign.

After a brief diversion past Comic Sans, the book starts in the 1440s when movable type was first used to mass-produce books. For the first time, the same physical metal letterforms could be reused, rearranged to make up a different page of text. The technology remained fairly unchanged for 500 years – moulded metal, ink and paper – until it was swiftly revolutionised by phototypesetting and then digital typesetting.
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Rewriting the End

Those who are so inclined can now read my article, “Rewriting the End: Douglas Coupland’s treatment of apocalypse in Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey, Nostradamus!” which has just been published in English Studies in Africa 53.2.

Here’s the abstract:

Hey, Nostradamus! (2003) is in many ways a rewriting of Girlfriend in a Coma, published in 1998. The change in ideological tack these novels display is pivoted around two high-profile North American cultural traumas which took place between their writing: the Columbine High School massacre of 20 April 1999 and the terror attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. of 11 September 2001. In Girlfriend in a Coma, a group of listless bourgeois characters is exhorted by a variety of mystical means – prescient visions, ghostly visitations and the end of the world – to snap out of their self-absorbed and directionless lives and effect a radical spiritual-political revolution. The solution to the cultural ennui from which they suffer is figured primarily in evangelical Christian terms of witnessing and testifying, of shouting out the unfashionable truth to a self-absorbed, secular world which has lost all sense of the sacred, of social cohesion or political agency. In Hey Nostradamus!, written in the shadow of the trauma of Columbine and 9/11, Coupland withdraws his macropolitical revolutionary experiment in favour of interpersonal micropolitics, moving from what Marlene Goldman calls an apocalyptic tone to a prophetic one. With specific focus on Julia Kristeva’s concepts of abjection and the chora, this essay shows how Coupland rewrites the depersonalized and fetishized Columbine High School massacre, and charts his retreat from macropolitical fervour to repersonalization in the face of real trauma.

You can access it through your university library, or drop me a line and I’ll send you a copy.

Some notes on delving

This article first appeared on LitNet as #18 in the Big Book Chain Chat on 10 November. Read the original article and connect to the other links in the chain here.

As the next link in this Big Book Chain Chat, I’m very lucky to be following Craig Higginson’s piece “Is it possible to do too much research?” because I agree fully with him and won’t have to build a compelling counter-argument.

Higginson’s approach to research in fiction is brave for a historical novelist. As he notes, many writers in the genre are so keen to show off how much they’ve read about the period that they bog their stories down in detail. Readers get a painstakingly drawn (and painsgivingly taxing) account of the carriage that someone drove in 1896, the cut of his cloth and the provenance of the leather on the horse’s reins. If this information is well researched, the result might be more like history in disguise as a novel: too much attention spent on drawing a picture and too little on channelling characters. Higginson’s sort of contemporary, thoughtful take on crafting historical fiction promises to refresh the genre.

Drawing a picture in words can be a mind-boggling affair. When do you stop? When is enough enough? » read more