Anyone interested in writing good sentences proper should get The Reader Over Your Shoulder by the poet Robert Graves and his collaborator Alan Hodge. I came across it through a recommendation from the writer Bryan MacMahon on a Sunday Miscellany podcast earlier this summer celebrating 50 years of Listowel Writers' Week.
The book takes passages of poorly-written prose from lauded writers – TS Eliot, Daphne du Maurier and HG Wells, to name a few – and breaks them down according to the writing principles of Ancient Greece: orthology (a study of the proper formation of words), accidence (a study of the grammatical relation of words), syntax (a study of the grammatical relation of phrases) and logic, which is the study of the proper relation of ideas.
“Good English is a matter not merely of grammar and syntax and vocabulary, but also of sense: the structure of the sentences must hold together logically,” writes Graves. “Our contention is that each focusing of the reader’s mind on an eccentricity or error or ambiguity interrupts the continuity of his reading and distracts him from a clear understanding of what the passage means.”
The two main concerns of The Reader Over Your Shoulder – clarity of statement and grace of expression – come to mind when reading Rachel Genn’s second novel What You Could Have Won. Though there is plenty in the book to applaud (more on that later), the overall reader experience is marred by obscure prose that confuses the reader, frequently blindsiding us with information, character detail and setting shifts that result in a whirling, restless narrative that left this reader almost shouting at the page.
Unlikeable leads
Much of this is a deliberate choice by the author, who uses style to convey her themes of warped love and addiction. The story centres on a toxic relationship between Astrid, a famous singer – the publicity for the book cites Amy Winehouse as inspiration – and her calculating, ferociously unlikable boyfriend Henry. The latter's career as a psychiatrist is on the wane after a supervisor steals his breakthrough research. Henry sees an opportunity for a new study in Astrid, whose drug habit he fuels with a nauseating mix of pills and put-downs.
Genn is to be commended for choosing two such unlikable leads for her novel. It shows a fearlessness in her writing that is matched by her desire to go deep into the ugly parts of human nature.
The book is packed with sharp psychological insights, which is fitting for an author who is also an artist and a neuroscientist. Genn was the Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence in 2016, creating the National Facility for the Regulation of Regret, which spanned installation art, virtual reality and film. She has written for Granta, 3AM Magazine and Hotel, and is working on Hurtling, a hybrid collection of essays about neuroscience, art and abjection of artistic reverie.
Abjection is a key part of Astrid’s character. We meet her at a point in her life where she struggles to tell reality from fiction. This is clunkily relayed in frequent passages about The Sopranos that exclude the reader: “It was your first panic attack since Tony punched the wall instead of Carmella. . . Back home, Henry would always hold you responsible for withholding from him the freedoms Tony enjoyed.”
Addiction
Other parts of Astrid's experience fare better. The hardship of addiction and the mental drain of celebrity are vividly rendered, as is the joy that Astrid takes from performance: "Up on stage is the one place you don't feel like you are lying." Nods to the lives of other famous singers – Leonard Cohen on Hydra, for one – make for nice touches. The three settings – New York's music scene, a nudist camp on a Greek island and a rehab clinic in Paris – work as enticing backdrops, with choice details that bring each one to life: "The view of a shallow bight of sand edged by green waters, punctuated by a smaller wild-looking island across a lagoon."
But so much of the book gets lost amid the density of the writing and in trying to figure out where we are. When Astrid joins rehab she is “welcomed by a flurry of Plydos in a circle of clapping losers, who you finally see have faces that are well known enough to flip up instant bios for almost all of them”. Scenes frequently start in the middle and work backwards with key information. The same is the case with side characters.
A stint at Burning Man may only be recognisable to those familiar with the Black Rock City terrain. Elsewhere, the in-jokes and games of the couple’s relationship, “playing Zoot/Not Zoot”, wear thin to the point of self-indulgence. Perhaps this is Genn’s point, to convey the selfishness and self-involvement of her leads, but the reader is the one who suffers.
You finish the book exhausted, wondering what exactly it is you could have won.
