The leading character in Zoe Heller's first novel, Willy Muller, is a convicted wifemanslaughterer who has been released on appeal. Of German extraction, reared and married in England, he goes to LA after being released from prison because `they're nicer to people like him over there'. Muller carves out a career as a ghost writer but lives primarily on the income from a scandalous memoir which capitalised on his gruesome criminal celebrity status.
The memoir - To Have and to Hold - occasioned a falling out with his two motherless daughters, Sadie and Sophie, from whom he has become estranged during 10 years in LA. His younger daughter Sadie commits suicide, and her diaries end up in his hands a few months after her funeral, having been delayed for a time by the Californian postal system. A heart attack requires Willy to take a break in Mexico, where he is supposed to be working on a redraft of his memoir screenplay - "is a free rewrite in my contract?" - for a schlock Hollywood producer, maker of First Tango in Rome. Instead, he confronts the question of personal good and evil.
Willy is a chronically unpleasant man. He is racist, misanthropic, and very bad-tempered. He is physically revolting and not very wealthy. Yet he has this miraculous way of attracting women, in the manner of Hollywood film characters played by Jack Nicholson.
Willy's regular girlfriend of five years Penny, "the lovelorn tarantula", is delayed in following him to Mexico, yet he has no problem producing a young substitute at short notice, Karen, who is "pale and unhappy as veal". We receive diligent anatomical descriptions of the two women, filtered through Willy's misogynistic mind. Penny arrives unexpectedly and ousts Karen but not without a credibility-defying quickie before she catches the plane.
Willy's agent, Art Man, is also a boor: "you two young lovebirds haven't fucked yet? Whassamadda, Willy . . . put her on top for Chrissakes!". Art is very interested in pornography. He cajoles and goads Willy into getting his work done. Willy's old friend from England, Harry, arrives at Casa del "Gringo" and he too is a boor, staggering off to the loo and declaring his intention to "take a dump". The landlady Sissy Yerxa is a "lipsticked ferret", and the German director of the film, Hans Stempel, leaves fetish books and Sadeian literature scattered about his "Casa". He is referred to throughout as "Krauty".
As Willy lurches through his recuperation period, he reads intermittently from Sadie's diary, the sad, lonely and honest tale of a teenager and young adult negotiating her way around the little tragedies of growing up orphaned. Willy's own mother, Mutti, dies, necessitating a trip to London and some family confrontations there and finally, Willy accepts some of his moral responsibilities.
This is a smart well-written book, often cruel and very funny in places. Heller is especially good on cultural difference in a detached disrespectful way. But the focus is more on cleverness than insight: "Penny is wildly out of place [at Heathrow Airport], with her cantilevered tits and mincing gait. I had forgotten the way that English women stomp about like navvies". In the strain to make a clever generalisation, truth gets lost.
The unpleasant world view of Willy Muller pervades the book. A contemporary fiction readership that has been broken in by the likes of Bret Easton Ellis and has acquired the stomach to handle the excesses of Irvine Welsh shouldn't flinch at the general tone of misogyny and racism to be found here. But I do. Recoiling at a surfeit of excremental references and derogatory descriptions of old people dribbling is unfashionable. We're all supposed to be post-PC now. And certain writers do get away with it - Martin Amis, for example. But to carry off this level of reader alienation with credibility, the performance has to be spectacular. The part has to be played by Jack Nicholson.
Katy Hayes is a writer. Her short story collection Opening Nights has recently been reissued.