Every so often I pick a book on the bestseller list and read it. I don’t know why as I rarely enjoy it and it always, ultimately, leaves me feeling at fault. Why can’t I enjoy it? Why can’t I see in this book what everyone else does?
A case in point: I fell about laughing at Where The Crawdads Sing - the sheer nonsense of it, the clunky plotting, the toe-curling poetry. Yet it was on the bestseller list for about a bajillion years.
Rabbit Hole, by Mark Billingham, was irresistible-sounding. It is a murder mystery set in a psychiatric ward and told from the viewpoint of Alice, a patient who has been sectioned. Such a brilliant premise! I hugely enjoy reading about people who can or choose to live on the edge or outside societal norms, (as I am such a conformist, bourgeois scardey-cat), in whatever form that takes.
But I read the whole book mainly waiting for it to get going, waiting to get to the good part that justified its place on the bestseller list. And when the book limped to a sort of random, apologetic end I shrieked “WHAT?” The writing is just about okay, Alice’s voice is lazy colloquial cliché - she is constantly “mooching around” - and, unforgivably, Billingham fails to create any sort of atmosphere.
I think I know what’s happened and that is that he doesn’t want to fall into a trap of taking us on some sort of gawping safari of all the “mad people”. He has been assisted in his research by what looks like at least one psychiatric nurse and, I get it, he wants to be respectful to her for sharing her experiences and respectful to those suffering so badly that they need to be held in a secure unit, often against their will.
But you don’t need to create a dark and gruesome bedlam in order to create atmosphere and Rabbit Hole is neither dark and gruesome nor atmospheric. I finished the book feeling cheated and sad but also, again, personally to blame. Why? Why can’t I make these bestsellers work for me? Although I suppose I was unable to make Game of Thrones, Squid Game or Bridgerton work for me either, so it shouldn’t be such a surprise.
Hopping on over to Hare House, though, Sally Hinchcliffe has no such qualms about making things as spooky and bonkers as possible. Our narrator is a woman in her 40s who flees to Scotland, having left her London teaching job in disgrace. She rents a tiny cottage on the estate of a “big house” and things rapidly start getting weird. There are visions, witches, hauntings, people going stark-staring mad in front of our very eyes. There are lolloping hares and coops full of hens dropping dead with no explanation, foggy mornings and cruel frosts and snowings-in at every turn. It’s fabulous. This is how you create atmosphere, this is what an unreliable narrator looks like, this is the kind of book that ought to be on the bestseller list.
Although, wait. On reflection… maybe not.
One mainstream ocean liner I can get on board with is Queer Eye on Netflix. I can sling my eight-piece matching luggage set on that sweet ride and sashay up the gangplank in my wedge espadrilles, smoking a cigarette in a silver holder, NO PROBLEMO.
I could not care less how formulaic QE is or how each subject is, at the end of each show, basically forced to cry and tell the Fab 5 how they have changed their lives. It’s amazing and just keeps getting better. We live in such McCarthy-ish times, a sort of circular firing squad and even people who have done literally nothing wrong, never told or even overheard a Holocaust joke, feel kind of hunted and ashamed at least 3% of the time. The idea that one day four glamorous men (and one non-binary person) might swoop down and say “I see you and I'm going to take all your shame away, queen” is kind of an ultimate washing-clean. It’s wonderful to watch. My favourite used to be Jonathan Van Ness but now I can’t decide between Karamo Brown and Antoni Porowski. I would chat pop psychology all day with Karamo and when Antoni noted in one episode that he hadn’t spoken to his mother in “like, five years” I nearly died. PSA! Antoni Janusz Porowski, call me. I will be your mumia. And I can make golabki.
I hadn't listened to Lena Dunham’s podcast The C-Word because I thought it would be boring-ass pseudo feminist blah that I get enough of from my husband. But in fact it is an absolutely fascinating look at notorious women through time and I am grateful to Hannah Swerling for the recommendation. The tagline is, “We will never call you crazy.” Episodes of note are Marie Antoinette, Judy Garland and Eva Rausing. But they’re all good.
Dunham’s so-presenter, the former model Alissa Bennett, is a genuine valley girl and her accent takes a little bit of getting used to. There is no real phonetic way of rendering her speech but when she says, empathising with a subject, “You’d be mad,” it comes out like “You’d be ma-yahd.” She also often adds an “M” to the end of the word “Yeah” making it sound like she’s saying “Yeahm”. Thinking about it, I think this is possibly a contraction of the phrase “Yeah, mm hmm”. But it is still totally bizarro. Listening to her trying to pronounce “Cadogan Square” made me pinch my nose in distress.
But Dunham and Bennett have many, many extremely fascinating and insightful things to say about these women and, particularly, Lena is very open to sharing her horrible-sounding experiences with fame and notoriety. The way that everyone loved her for being such a prodigy, so young and new and fabulous and physically shameless. And then those that turned on her, did so for exactly the same reasons - the massive, grinding envy people felt at her unstoppable success didn’t help.
Fame has always looked to me like a really nasty thing and even more grim is that once it is out of the box, as it were, you can’t stuff it back in. Trust me, have your face in the paper even once and there will be little eddies all over the internet talking shit about you for 6 weeks straight. But actual fame, fame? Jesus Christ. No. Thank you. People are driven to seek fame by the same things that make them fundamentally badly-equipped to deal with it and it inevitably sends them situationally crazy, but the whole world wants them and expects them to be completely normal. Sucks, as Alissa would say.
The C-Word is on Luminary and is a paid-for podcast, which I must say I very much agree with as I think you really ought to pay for good content.
Speaking of which, there will be a new paid-for section coming soon to this very Substack. It will be a kind of throw-back to my first blog Recipe Rifle, featuring new recipes and old ones from the archive, plus the traditional manic instructions and stories from home. It’s not ready yet but it’s coming soon. Long card number at the ready!!!
Queer Eye - just the most LOVELY show. Proper feel good. I love how honest and raw the Fab 5 are with their own pasts and emotions, homophobia, racism, parenthood etc. It feels about as 'real' as a formatted show like that can feel. The 'makeovers' are all very gentle and careful, no one has all their own teeth filed out and replaced with veneers, it's more like 'look, you can't wear the cargo shorts you wore when you were 23, because you're now 43'. Sensible stuff. Even my husband loves it. PS. Hare House sounds great.
As a librarian I raid Booklists Adult General Fiction category on occasion for hidden gems https://www.booklistonline.com/SearchResults.aspx. I recently read a very odd speculative fiction book that you might quite enjoy Esther (and others!) called You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Its sort of like if a David Cronenberg film and an Estee Lauder advert had a very weird baby.