Self-Help, by Edward Docx
This is Edward Docx's second novel: his second published one, at least. And it's an excellent one. I have a slight hunch it was the first he wrote, though. It's the story of Gabriel and Isabella Glover in the aftermath of their Russian mother's death. Masha's life, like Russia, was full of mystery: what was it brought her to England? What was the truth about her marriage to Isabella and Gabriel's father, Nicholas, estranged and fucking men in Paris? What took Masha back to Russia? And what will become of Masha's abandoned Russian child?
Don't talk to me like that. How dare you? Not one thing you ever started have you finished. You've never done anything. You've spent your entire adult life swanning around. You're a total fraud, Dad. A fraud, a failure and a small-time bully.
The novel begins with Gabriel travelling to St. Petersburg to pick up the pieces after his mother's death, and from there The story isn't quick out of the blocks: it accumulates with the emotional history of the Glover family that unfolds gradually, as the reader is taken from St. Petersburg to New York, where Isabella lives, to Paris where the toxic Nicholas, her father, seems to spend life and money as though neither had value, to London, where Gabriel edits an absurd magazine, Self-Help, in spite of the efforts of his less-than-helpful staff. Each of the characters faces a particular challenge: Gabriel must choose between his legitimate girlfriend, the funny, squeaky Swede, Lina, and Connie, with whom he conducts an affair in parallel. Isabella must face down her father. Arkady Artamenkov must leave St. Petersburg for a new life of survival on the less-than-legal margin in London while his friend Henry Wheyland, a traveller adrift in Russia, must survive that secretive country and his own morbid needs.
He knew well that it was in these dead hours (when Petersburg slipped off its creamy European robes and revealed itself as a mean and swarthy peasant once more) that the real business of Russian life got done. Boy and man, he had seen it: the black Mercedes rolling down the half-lit street, the tinny police car idling, smear-faced street girls slipping like sylphs along the railings of the canals, and the drugged and the drunk always watching from their darkened doorways, glass-eyed and desperate; crawling back and forth between heaven and hell, one scabby knee at a time. And all of it dangerous.
Docx builds up a convincing, semi-satirical, always affectionate vision of post-Communist Russia; and I'm seriously impressed by the way knits all this variety of people and places into an increasingly compelling family drama of blood and truth, and of something oddly like suspense. I love his writing, too: sentence by sentence this is a fine, unfussy read, and on well-judged occasions he intensifies his prose into something memorable, something you want to dwell on.
I would say that sex and love are like... like the two principal dancers of the ballet: sometimes they are magnificently, beautifully, indissolubly together - through the great centrepieces of the pas de deux - and, make no mistake, this is what the audience pays to see; but sometimes the one will dance while the other watches in the wings.
I also liked his tone, both in terms of language - he gets away with a way of speaking that sounds at times informal, like internal monologue - and in the way he treats his subjects. I've already mentioned the affectionate-teasing depiction of Russia, and you could say the same about London (though New York and Paris seem more forbidding, colder places). And through the peregrinations of Arkady and Henry through what cliché insists on calling Russia's underbelly, Docx deals with the all-too-serious issue of drugs, crime, and what's happening to Russia.
And when it came, it was like the pure-pure-purest relief and the tranquil-happy surge of every good thing in the world, every sweet taste, every scent, every sound, and then an ever-flooding and perfect absence; and the music played and he didn't care, and his breathing slowed, and he really didn't care, and he lay back, and he felt himself going going going and he didn't care.
The only reason I say I suspect this was in truth his first novel is that it has that youthful, coming-of-age feel about it that you often find in first novels by serious writers. A parent's death sets the story in train, and the rest of the novel is about the children's coming to terms with it and discovering the truth about their origins. There's the anger against the father, the unmasking of his secrets and the question of reconciliation. And the use of twins, too, makes one suspect a device for fragmenting and disguising an autobiographical narrator.
And this is how hot news comes. A before, when you don't know. An after, when you do. A moment's glimpse of real life naked between its disguises. And stupid stupid stupid to look for it on the tops of yogic mountains, or on your knees in the church or mosque or temple, or staring at the setting sun, feet in the sand. When here it is all around you - in every view, in every instant.
It's outstandingly done, though. If I have one criticism, it's that the Glover family seems to exist in a socially protected, artificially rich zone where intercontinental, multi-partnered lives seem normal, and everyone has a nice house or flat whatever their job or non-job. None of their apparent financial or other struggles ever feels real. But to be fair to Docx, much of British fiction is peopled by this class - and life is very different, and convincingly so, among his Russians. His characters are great, too: Gabriel and Isabella are real and distinct, in spite of what I've said about their being twins. Masha and Nicholas are terrific, strong and convincing characters although both highly unusual people. And some of the supporting cast are marvellously drawn - Henry Wheyland, especially, whose sad and selfless story (like all really good fiction) makes you look at an old issue with new eyes and is as affecting as something from Dickens, though Docx steers well away from Dickensian sentimentality.
Going by this, Docx is a novelist of both achievement and talent, and he's one to watch.
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