Make Shit Up
Zadie Smith (ed), The Book of Other People, Penguin, 2007
If one could judge a book by its cover, weight, size and the visceral pleasure it delivers holding it in your hands, then I should say this is a very good book. At 9 ½ inches long, by 6 ½ inches wide and nearly an inch and a half thick, it feels like a book should. A promising mass of ideas pressed carefully in the textured pages, its dependable solidity is a rousing weight on my lap. But…
It isn’t a bad book; how could it be when it contains short stories by the literary darlings du jour. Indeed most of the pieces in the collection are alright, but therein lies the rub, surely written as it is by the cream of the crop this should dazzle in its ingenuity and inventiveness, mystify with linguistic acrobatics or a least beguile with tender humanity. This delivers merely craft.
I am puzzled by Zadie Smith’s command in her introduction, “The Book of Other People is about character. The instruction was simple: Make somebody up.” (rather like an exercise recommended to Creative Writing students) Aren’t all fictional stories about fictive characters? Where would any narrative be without agents, protagonists, antagonists? As F Scott Fitzgerald said “Plot is character and character is plot.” As these are not merely sketches of characters, doesn’t that make Ms. Smith’s instruction and indeed the raison d’etre of the book redundant?
A couple of stories stand out, Toby Litt’s ‘The Monster’ and Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Lélé’ for all the right reasons, and Chris Ware’s graphic short, ‘Jordan Wellington Lint’ is perfectly terse and evocative (with hardly any words!). But Aleksander Hemon’s ‘The Liar’ and David Mitchell’s ‘Judith Castle’ just made me groan with nausea. In the main the writers have stuck to stereotypes, revealing nothing about the characters chosen, and displaying lazy writing (Adam Thirlwell even inserts a little mini play just like an early Fitzgerald). The one stand-out moment for me was in Dave Eggers’ ‘Theo’, where he describes a group of men gazing at a magnificent woman as ‘unbreathing’, this one suspended verb carries the entire book, perfectly chosen, conveying a breathless entrancement with impressive verve.
Ultimately, I would buy this book as a gift for an unadventurous reader, someone who buys The Guardian and leaves it unread on the coffee table perhaps, or maybe your kid’s English teacher, perhaps even your dad’s new Art Therapist girlfriend…
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Heidi James is Arts Editor of 3:AM. Her novella The Mesmerist’s Daughter (published by Apis Books) was published in July 2007 and her novel Carbon (Wrecking Ball Press) is forthcoming. She has a column in Dazed and Confused and is a regular contributor to Another Level. Her essays and short stories are published in a variety of anthologies and magazines. She is the proprietor of Social Disease and a recipient of the Sophie Warne fellowship.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, February 8th, 2008.
