All three authors were such youthful ‘outsiders’ wanting in. Colin Wilson came from Leicester, the drab industrial midlands; Laura Del-Rivo from Cheam in the stuffy stockbroker belt of Surrey. Only Terry Taylor is an actual Londoner, born in Kilburn – but, in the persona of his novel’s 16-year-old protagonist, he breaks down the sprawling metropolis to its crucial hepcat constituency. The spark that crackles through all three books is the yearning for change and difference, of finding a way of living in the centre of all happening without resorting to the drudge of work – by far the biggest fault line in this generation was the one that opened up between the baby-boomers and their parents.
Cathi Unsworth takes a trip with New London Editions’ ‘Beats, bums and bohemians’ reissue series of novels.
Rosenberg is a fearless naturalist, whose ‘nice nihilism’ doesn’t imply that we can become nihilists. He disturbs the comfy domestication of the naturalistic world view. Evolutionism and physics gives us a nihilist universe, purposeless, meaningless, ultimately devoid of everything we think is important. But it has constructed us as having evolutionary reflexes that grant us illusions of freewill and purpose we cannot but believe. Of course, this is hardly the last word on the matter. There are plenty of people, naturalists and non-naturalists, who contend that he’s plain wrong. But the strength of his book is that it sets out his position clearly and therefore allows those who disagree to know what they must do to answer him. 
Alec, the Jew boy of the title, would not recognise his East End were he to take a stroll through the area today. He would be surprised to see queues outside the old Brick Lane beigel bakery late at night, when clubs are closing and party-goers need refuelling; the display of Singer sewing machines in the window of the nearby All Saints would look familiar to him, but definitely out of place – as a tailor he knows they belong in a sweatshop rather than a swanky clothes shop. All that glamour would come decades later; in the 1930s the area is firmly in the grip of poverty and the tension between workers and their employers is growing.
Writers often ask how a work made of words might acquire the force of an image. For my part, preferring grace over gravity, I wonder how a book could live up to the depthlessness of a dream, or the weightlessness of the cinema. I feel that if heaven exists it will be empty, sunbleached, blissfully superficial. Stasiuk’s art is one of, in his words, ‘tranquil annihilation.’ In Dukla a series of scenes simply appears, while never being ‘set.’ In this way, words should accomplish no more than a ‘pointing towards,’ a deixis. A book should just take the shape of what happens.
The peculiar experience of reading Fourier now, at this moment in human (and economic) history, is that both sides of Fourier speak to you – the constructor of utopian alternatives to the vapid ‘way things are’ and the ludic, sometimes explosively vituperative, sometimes self-mocking humorist. This suggests to me that, rather than Fourier being divided between the system builder – from whom later socialists such as Victor Considerant excavated a more sober system of thought – and the quasi-lunatic who spoke of lemonade oceans and mutant tails, both were complimentary strands, and were part of the same project. In order to set oneself against society in the way Fourier did, one had to take a risk and unfetter the imagination. Fourier is not our contemporary – he’s weirder and more challenging than that. Nevertheless, his work has something cryptic and discomforting to tell our faulty contemporary world.
His view is that playing it safe and sticking to traditions and conventions is hopeless. The contemporary world is no longer a world that makes such an approach reasonable. There is too much happening, too many different kinds of people, purposes, aims, too much difference, to suppose that we can in our day to day ethical decision-making have universal knowledge of what we should do. Sticking blindly to a general principle like ‘killing is wrong’ seems to give us stability but even seemingly rock solid maxims have exceptions. Westacott is arguing for a subtle and nuanced approach to moral matters, an approach that understands fully how conflicted and confused many people feel most of the time about ethical decisions.
Rather than being tacked on as an affectation, the sense of alienation from the past created by these narrative forms – the inability to unify the self as constructed by memory, the memory as constructed by self, the text as constructed by memory, and the self as constructed by text – is in itself the subject, and it is one to which we can relate. Just as Proust’s striving for a past that remains tantalisingly inaccessible is an essentially pathetic exercise, so Coetzee’s alienated autobiographies speak to a wider alienation from the self that transcends the works’ formal cleverness and elevates them way above the realm of pure technique.
I’d say embarrassability is the keynote of Boyle’s writing, rather than embarrassment, because it’s her uninhibitedness about inhibition that gives her poetry its energy and interest. It’s a bit like embarrassment is the backing track to which sometimes Boyle’s in tune, and sometimes she’s not at all, right down the opposite end of the keyboard, stomping out “unabashed”. So if ‘everyone i’ve ever had sex with’ is unabashed, all the ‘i probably sound stupid right now’ etcs are back in tune with the backing track.
Her late style is spare, sentences stand as their own stanzas/paragraphs, mesmerising rhythms propel her attempts to reckon with grief through words. In Blue Nights, she reads Auden, Eliot, Stevens and Quintana’s schoolgirl verse makes well-judged appearances. The child lists “Mom’s sayings” but Didion appropriates things her daughter said - “Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it” - and her questions - “Where did the morning went?” - acquire significance with hindsight. Lines recur, sometimes within inverted commas, sometimes in italics, sometimes in standard type, which makes us consider the fluidity of recollection, reverie and its representation. 
