yes, yes, i see. i mean, i don’t necessarily agree all the time. i do, mostly – but i don’t think i’ll be turning into john grisham overnight. interestingly, some of your comments are the exact opposite of those ventured in the review below. i wouldn’t normally point it out, but i just found it curious.
thank you for your review. certainly it was somewhat helpful. thanks, travis.
Novel Treatments / JACK SHIT 1.3 Content
Allie Park. Crowds part. Empires sway. Rooms stop – and then start again, and shape themselves to fit. She has always had this conspicuity. It’s not beauty – no, not quite. It’s not the reverse. But she has this ability to stop things – conversations, traffic, hearts – and it is difficult to know what to do with it, so she just carries it around. Other people have their stuff to haul about: their rings and their tats and their scars, which say marriage, masculinity, love, loss, fighting, fucking. Allie Park just has this, though; and it’s not much, but it’s a start. It’s a strange start, though. It’s a strange place to start.
So we start with Allie Park in a strange place: cornered, peering at her peers as they justify columns. She is condensing for the dense, concentrating for the inattentive, summing up for the ones who can’t add up. And there’s this, too:
‘Bitch is too fucking thin. Can’t use them. Too fucking thin.’
‘Let’s have a visual.’ They aren’t talking about Allie. They are talking about the girl in the photographs, some spindle-thin stray, splayed in contrived disarray, posed and draped, a Giacometti maquette or mannequin in maquillage, pouting and sulking her way through a shopfront of high-street frocks. ‘God, yeah. Too fucking thin.’
‘Who approved these? Who took these? What the fuck are we supposed to do with them?’
Allie doesn’t quite know their names, hasn’t quite assimilated them yet. It is dawning on her that she doesn’t want to, and might not ever want to. After two years of scrimping and scraping, tortuous, torturous tube trips and dead, dead days devoted to photocopying and fetching styrofoamed lattes for case-studies in nepotism and talentlessness, Allie has scrambled up the greased rope of dailies and weeklies to where we find her now, starting. She has a Real Job, on a Real Magazine, for Real Money. The money, actually, still seems slightly unreal: when she raised the vulgar question of salary expectations, the tired-looking man in slept-in shirtsleeves had named a figure that made Allie swallow, and still makes her laugh. And the magazine? Yes, it is real. It exists. However, it concentrates exclusively on fictionalising the real, elevating the ordinary to impossible heights, merely in order that it can shoot them down again like a kind of cranky Cupid. Week on week, it interpolates a narrative, imposes order and structure on the chaotic lives of the famous, who are really the infamous, and should really still be the non- or un-famous. And this narrative – the story, the meat, the interest – cannot concern anything in the public eye, because there isn’t anything happening in the public eye. It must depict, in excruciating detail, with granular, over-zoomed photos, the quotidian spiral into nothingness of whichever selection of vacuous, anti-talented zeroes will shift copies this week. Often, this is made much easier by these events’ taking place on television.
‘Hey – shit, what’s her name? Hey, Allie!’ She looks up. She is being flagged down by an effete Nigerian, in a pink T-shirt that bears the word ‘PAP’ from nipple to navel. ‘Are we still running that piece about bulimia? Whatever it’s called?’
‘“Thick and Thin”?’ says Allie. ‘Yes, we’re still running it.’ She is joking about the first bit, though not the second.
‘Nice. Use these photos for it, yeah? The girl looks well abject. “Thick and Thin”? Nice, nice. Yeah: good clevers, Allie Park.’ The Nigerian, fashion editor Keke Rikiki, isn’t joking about any of this. He means every word.
‘Allie?’ This comes from stage left, practically in the wings, from a man in dishcloth shirtsleeves with a cigarette in each hand. He has the look of a man whose fiftieth birthday has lain in wait for him all that time, grinning and scheming and gauging the heft and weight of its weapons, and then leapt out to assault him unequivocally. The cosh, the bat, the cue ball in the sweatsock of age: all that, all these. He is pointing across the room, at the door. For a terrible moment, Allie thinks he is ordering her out, though this seems unlikely. This man is Ambrose Forth, and he is the editor of Pap magazine. When he says, as he does now, ‘You’re not busy,’ it is a statement, not a question. And the follow-up – ‘Lunch?’ – is no less rhetorical. It cannot be refused, and so Allie does not refuse, and they leave.
________
Outside, London is cold in a miffed sort of a way, like a room recently argued-in. Ah, what’s to say? You must have heard, or seen. London: cosmopolitan, crowded and cross, full of people much busier and much more important than you are. What’s new? London’s been done. Literature is tired of London, and pretty tired of life, too. So let’s assume you’ve read, and you know. Perhaps you’ve been; perhaps you are. If not, I recommend a tube map. The distances are all collapsed, true, but it has a regularity and a pleasing symmetry that structures that serried panic of streets, that alphabet of postcodes, that tone-poem of accents in a manner that is simple and beautiful and future-proof. Find one. You’ll see.
Lunch in London in Leicester Square. The tube stations have digital posters now, if you can countenance such a thing. Slowly but with ever-increasing surety, every process you can conjure up is becoming passive. Floors move. Stairs move. Posters persuade, pixelate, and all you have to do is turn up. Allie and Forth emerge, blinking, into what seasonal inflation would have them believe is December sunshine. It isn’t, though: no sun, no shine. The sky is white, and glows like television. This glow, this fluorescence: hospitals have it. Institutions generally – anywhere whitewashed and striplit and smelling of bleach. Skies don’t, or didn’t, or shouldn’t. This is a new thing. Lately, all everyone talks about is the weather. But there isn’t any. Or hadn’t you noticed?
Anyhow, Forth knows this place off Leicester Square, on Cranbourn Street. In manner of the Square, Cranbourn is still decked out in scribblers, hawkers, sunglass-wearing café-cruisers – but not so many, not so dense. The place is called Garlic & Shots – this is the first difficulty – and it is, if you can believe it, Swedish. Now, Swedish cuisine is right up there in the reliability stakes with Dutch wine and Algerian electrical goods: it’s not so much that it isn’t rated – it just doesn’t register. The Swedes eat it, sure. But let’s leave them to it. Or let’s leave it to them.
The menu is unbelievable, but does at least have the virtue of being Spartan or Zen-like in its simplicity. You get what it says on the tin – no question. In the air, a metallic miasma or allium funk hangs low, an oppressively olfactory atmosphere of ferrous nosebleeds. Allie can barely blink under it, considers flapping the double-sided menu to try and shift the heavy perfume about. On one side is a litany of vaguely familiar dishes, all adulterated, spiked, compromised, jolted and generally tricked-out with the addition of shovelfuls of garlic. It seems to have been composed and arranged on grounds of thematic consistency, rather than anyone ever having to eat any of it. The reverse side bears a century of inexplicable cocktails: violently alcoholic combinations to startle the most seasoned dipsomaniac. When their food is ferried to them, by a small, dark dumpling of a girl who looks, if anything, Czech or Polish or Balkan, Forth ignites another cigarette and exhales,
‘You’ve been hanging around the offices for a week, now. Tell me about your time at Pap so far.’
‘Well, it’s very fast-paced. And it’s is a privilege to be working on something so prominent – I mean, it’s young, it’s vibrant, it’s informative, and it commands a share of the market other magazines can only dream of. It’s challenging.’
Forth doesn’t say anything to this. The gloomy shutters of his eyelids sink slowly, and then rise again so he can look Allie in the eye as he says,
‘That was very good. That was the correct answer. That was almost a sales pitch. Why do you think I hired you?’ This is not a nice question to ask or to answer.
‘Because I can do the job. You know I’m a good sub,’ says Allie, pushing terrible food around her nasty terracotta plate.
‘True,’ Forth says. ‘But really it’s because you’re whip-smart and cute as a button. Everyone else in that office is a jumped-up, strung-out, twittering moron. They think ‘desk’ is a verb. You know this. I know this.’ Allie is lost again. Smoking and chewing, Forth does look remarkably like a middle-aged Mephistopheles.
‘Is this a test?’ she asks, after a pause.
‘No. This is, though. Do you know why Pap is called Pap?’
‘Yes – because it focuses on celebrity gossip. Paparazzi pictures, and so forth. It’s a cheeky nod to—’
‘No, Allie, it’s called Pap because it is fucking pap. It’s shit, about the shit perpetrated by shits, written about by shits for the delight and delectation of other shits. Shit in, shit out. Do you see how the title takes on a kind of metonymic resonance in view of that reading?’
‘I don’t understand. You started the magazine. It’s your thing. It’s incredibly successful.’
They eat, or Allie pretends to, and Forth smokes and orders pints of coffee. Then, unexpectedly, he tells her to go home.
__________
Flummoxed but not fired, Allie is flat on the couch in her rented rooms. In her soft funeral of gentle curls is nestled a rude Bakelite receiver. It is late afternoon; the sun creeps and daubs. A copy of Pap is fanned flat on her lap. Allie is explaining her curious morning, over a telephone line that stretches from Walworth to West Dulwich, where Justine, a first-year friend that never came unstuck, is listening intently, alternating between whispered incredulity and wrecked cackling. Over the years, the two have shed syllables, so that Alexandra became Allie, which seemed to sit much better, and Justine was just Just. While history kept them close, geography did a good job of keeping them apart, until now: London has pulled them in, in a capital coincidence.
‘So the whole thing’s a nonsense. It was a spoof, a send-up. It was a kind of joke, and it just got out of hand,’ Allie is saying.
‘Good God. I suppose he can’t just stop it now?’ Just says, and then adds, ‘Probably wouldn’t want to. Probably pissing himself all the way to the bank.’
‘Well, I think he was at first, when everyone bought it, and then everyone bought it, if you see what I mean. I think he did it for a joke – a bet, or something. So it was funny, but – it’s not anymore.’
‘No, it’s not. And it shifts what – a million copies a week? Jesus. Makes the NME look like a comic.’
‘The NME is a comic. Looked at Pap lately, though? Makes the NME look like the Spectator. You know what happened today? They had this photo-spread of this model, but they couldn’t use the photos, because everyone’s obsessed with this overly-skinny-girls-in-the-media thing. So, instead, they used them to illustrate a think-piece on bulimia.’ There is silence at the other end of the telephone. Eventually, Just breaks it:
‘Are you going to stay?’
‘I’ve no option. I can’t go,’ Allie says. ‘The money’s too good. I think sticking by Forth might help, too. He knows people. Even if I just stuck it for six months, his name carries a lot of weight. So, you know, it’s worth it. Anyway. Sorry. Had to talk to someone about it.’
‘Your flatmate not in?’ Just asks.
‘No. Listen, Just – what are you doing tonight?’
‘Work at six. Delivering the uneatable to the unspeakable.’ Allie translates this. Just is a waitress, although she doesn’t want to be..
‘I thought the food was supposed to be really good at that place? What time do you finish? I’m going out. We should meet.’
‘So I can wander into some pub, stinking of food and fags, and find you fending off adoring boys? Oh, okay. I finish at eleven. I’ll ’phone you. See you later, Allie Park.’
Actually, Allie has every intention of finding some beautiful boy to bed, but this is precisely the problem: it never seems to work out like that. Sex, or rather the possibility of sex, in this overheated, overhyped sprawl of streets, is like modern television – infinite in variety and unstintingly unsuitable. And it is ever too close, perverse and perverted in its proximity. At one end, the lechers and leerers, the gropers and breathers and peerers, the sectioned and listed and ASBO’d and strictured: the desperate and fucked-up and broke and alone. At the other, beaming, baying, ruddy-faced stockbrokers, Estuary-vowelled estate agents and senseless buffoons in advertising or marketing or other specialised forms of lying. Lounge-lizard Lotharios and cut-price Casanovas to a man. And Allie Park stops them all, stops all the clocks: that stutter or stumble in speech, that pause or digital glitch – stopped in their tracks. So they talk, they try, with their ways and modes of trying: lines and cracks and tired strings of rehearsed pick-ups, and Allie has endlessly to put them down, put them off. She goes home, and she goes alone.
Sometimes, though – sometimes it happens that she does not go home, and does not go alone, and wakes wound in the sinuous sheets of some terrible error of judgement. This is the kind of stomach-tightening, occasional slip that she tries to quash or forget. It gets left, edited out. Dawn poems, aubades: they never feature the surreptitious sortie, the gathered clothes, the scribbled, apologetic, cancellatory note, the burglar’s crept steps to the door in the deathly light.
So: now to the lengthy bath, the half-hour scrutiny of the mirror, the wand and brush and palette of preparation. The process is careful and understated, one of outlining and describing. But it is also a process of examination, not so much critical as analytical, as Allie Park gauges her gifts and their possibilities, their potency. What the mirror reflects is part of it, true, but what it cannot is the greater part. It goes like this: Allie may not know exactly what she is doing, but she has a good idea, and she knows she is doing it. Guys like to spin themselves a lot of lines, a lot of lies about girls, and one of them is this ideal of beauty unaware of its own power. Of course, it isn’t true, but that tendentious masculine tenacity where power-balances are concerned bludgeons its way in here, still marching around as if it owns the place. Of course, innocence is conventionally attractive, and that matters too. Allie folds the mirror and disappears: illusions to shatter, delusions to flatten, flatterers to despatch. Settling about her even as she leaves, coming to rest like a cloak or fever, is a curiosity that has coalesced throughout the day, catholic and encompassing in its remit: the day’s work of thinking, heavily telescoped and compressed.
It is this: she wonders what might happen next.
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yesandno reviewed Version 1 -
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What a wonderful way to introduce a character. I am very curious about Allie Park—what is the source of and what will be the result of her ability to stop things. The contradiction between this ability to ‘stop’ and the repetition of the word ‘start’ at the end of the first paragraph and the beginning of the second—well, I just like it. You have such an ability to create pleasing juxtapositions of words and ideas—combinations that stimulate and set one up for the “pretty patterns” that will follow. I won’t mention much about the language after this, because I didn’t find anything to gripe about. Okay, maybe one thing: I think there is maybe one more of the patterns that you do so well but which I don’t know what to call them (e.g. “Skies don’t, or didn’t, or shouldn’t.”) than would be most effective. I like it very much as a variant, but I think you could cut it by one. I wouldn’t know which to suggest to cut, so I won’t.
The descriptions starting with the model and continuing into the culture via the magazine are fantastic. There is a solidity to them that takes them beyond pithy into, I don’t know, what is beyond pithy? Anyway, they are good. They just get better with the arrival of Ambrose Forth. I love him already. He’s questionable ethically, perhaps, but oh, what an entertaining boss he would make. I don’t even care why he has a cigarette in each hand, really. It just seems right. You could lose the Swedish cuisine gag without losing anything, I think I may have mentioned.
The conversation between Allie and Just is adept. I got a sense of real affection between the two women—the hint of an understanding that is hard to pull off in such short order. The dialogue is amusing, but not so much that one is stopped short at their cleverness.
And then the explanation: some more about Allie Park’s ability to stop things, another start. Very well done. Perhaps a bit more than is needed, if anything? Nonetheless, the ending is perfect. I’m sure she does wonder what might happen next. So do I.
Which brings me to the strongest point of this section: Allie is intriguing. The language you use is, as usual, exceptional—but oddly toned down from the first two sections. It seems appropriate somehow. At first, I was concerned that you were going all soft, but after re-reading it, I can’t deny that there is something about Allie that demands a different kind of attention than Black or Dice. It might be something to keep an eye out for in later sections though. There are different ways of achieving a sharp portrayal, and I do think it’s important to give Allie the same amount of sharpness as your other characters, even if the quality is somewhat different.
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trav8434 reviewed Version 1 -
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Prose – I like the prose. I’m not sure what the general opinion is of the alliteration, but i find it kind of annoying when it stretches on and on.
You have several quick descriptions that give useful if not humorous insights into the characteristics of [thing].
”...where Justine, a first-year friend that never came unstuck,...” This is another lovely line.
“I’ll ’phone you. See you later, Allie Park.’”
In all honesty, i had to use my dictionary quite a bit. Though tedious, it was nice to learn a few new words and, finally, understand your adjectival splurging. But its hard to work through a paragraph with 4 appositives and twice as many outlandish terms (we both know more simple synonymns are available).
Character – We don’t get to know Allie a whole lot in this chapter, but i suppose that has been taken care of in the first installment(s)? Her boss is the best written character so far. The reference to Faust made him jump off the page.
“Of course, it isn’t true, but that tendentious masculine tenacity where power-balances are concerned bludgeons its way in here,...” This sentence doesn’t get on very well.
Dialogue – It’s perfect. I want more.
Plot – I can’t really see where the story is going so far, but i can’t say i’m terribly interested – nothing grabbed me. I’m curious about this strange, traffic-light quality she has.
Hope this is somewhat helpful.
Travis
bittersweetmemory reviewed Version 1 -
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character:you’ve given an immediate “sense” of each player/allie comes to life on the pages, i can ‘see’ her
dialogue:very real/not contrived
plot:intriguing, full, a tease for more
one suggestion:
...the public eye,(because there isn’t anything happening in the public’s “mind”
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