I’m a fan of the novel, and had the good fortune to work on the British edition; and while it’s always fascinating to meet authors, to read and hear interviews about their work, I was reflecting on how this experience changes my experience of their works. When I re-read Guernica in a year or two, I’ll be reading Guernica2, thinking about the excised material and how it could have informed the book. This is true in other ways, too: I can’t pick up anything by Clive James without hearing his voice read it in my head.

For me, this is a bonus; since St Jerome, reading has been a private practice, but having-read is public – it’s the most basic response to tell everyone about the latest great book you’ve read. But is this true for everyone? Does knowing about the earlier drafts improve or detract from your experience? (Do you watch the blooper reels and deleted scenes on the DVDs you rent?) Do you want to read in your voice or the author’s? Is the book you read yours, theirs, or ours?

This is a book that aims to take on the heavyweights, and win.

Well it seems I'm not alone in finding the prospect of tangling with this behemoth a tad daunting, as the infinite summer initiative has just been launched. The concept is simple: infinite summer is an online book group where week by week, in small easily manageable chunks, the community ploughs through Infinite Jest.

Not only does this break down the book's vast size and provide a neat social incentive for not stopping, it lets you discuss aspects of the work as you go.

This is how the project describes itself: "Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages¹ ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat."

The project went live yesterday so it's not too late to get on board and get reading - by the end of this summer you too could be an Infinite Jester! As a wannabe "endurance bibliophile" I'm there.

What with the wossy bookclub it seems the time of the online bookclub has come. There are a few books that could really work for this treatmen t- 266609 anyone? Any other suggestions?

The Swansong of Wilbur McCrum by Bronia Kita:

Dr Ragab's Universal Language by Robert Twigger:

And finally, Cliffhanger by T. J. Middleton:

Which one is your favourite?

Barnaby Gaitlin is a loser - just short of thirty he's the black sheep of a philanthropic Baltimore family. Once upon a time he had a home, a loving wife, a little family of his own; now he has an ex-wife, a nine-year old daughter with attitude, a Corvette Sting Ray that's a collector's item but unreliable, and he works as hired muscle for Rent -a-Back, doing heavy chores for old folks. He has an almost pathological curiosity about other people's lives, which has got him into serious trouble in the past, and a hopeless charm which attracts the kind of angelic woman who wants to save him from himself.

Barnaby's story is shy and sweet and very involving; Barnaby himself is loveable and you can't help cheering him on as he tries to re-discover and re-make himself. The driving force behind his recovery of self is Sophia, a woman who spots the kindness within him but loves him for his naughty side too. Martine, however, who is his partner at Rent-a-Back and eventual business partner (they buy a truck together), also looms large in his romantic consciousness. After some bad choices and silly mistakes, and too near the end of the novel for readerly comfort, Barnaby's love life is up in the air: is he with Sophia or Martine? Which of them really loves him?

The novel ends with Barnaby handing a message in an envelope to Sophia before she boards a train. And I initially took this to mean they are reconciled and when she returns they will be happy ever after.

But, I realized, it could also mean he's liberated himself from the angelic dream of Sophia and has turned to the more down to earth Martine, and will love her for evermore.

Help! If anyone else has read A Patchwork Planet, I'd love to hear what you think the end of the story means. What happens in the end, exactly?!

Grandma:
‘His black humour appealed to me tremendously, and of course I could identify with so many of his problems. I’ve always been terribly superstitious - if I was looking forward to something, I thought something bad would have to happen first before I could get to the good bit. And certainly if I did something that was against Jewish observance I felt the wrath of God would come down on me. Even to this day a lot of that still remains. Auslander’s fear of his wife and child dying as a result of his sins - that touched me greatly, that the nearest and dearest could be taken away from you if you do the wrong thing. That’s one thing I still find very frightening. In fact, I had to reassure myself by checking in his biography that he does still have a wife and child!

‘There’s so much of trying to reconcile contradictory feelings and to negotiate with God. I think of myself as a Jewish agnostic - I believe in something. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t necessarily want to call it God, but I do believe there is something outside of us that we don’t understand. When I read about the author negotiating with God about the results of baseball games, I thought, yes I have done so much of that in my life.

‘I too laughed at the part of the book where he’s in a taxi on the Sabbath and slides down in his seat as he’s passing Jewish people. When I was a child and wanted to get somewhere on Shabbat I would walk miles to other bus stops before I would get on the bus so that nobody would see me breaking the rules!’

As you can see then, Foreskin’s Lament has been a big hit with three generations of my family. Obviously for us there is a particular appeal in its resonances with our own lives, but beyond this we each enjoyed the book too purely as a piece of literature. It is both outrageously funny and achingly poignant, and will be an illuminating read for anyone less familiar with this way of life.

And let’s face it, when it comes to the subject of guilt, we’ve all been there: whether it be Jewish guilt, Catholic guilt, or even just parental guilt!  So read the book, laugh out loud, and pass it on to your family and friends.

Mum:
‘I loved the book, and found it totally absorbing, funny and poignant. I thought it was beautifully written, and I laughed out loud constantly, something I rarely do. I admired the author’s honesty, and related very much to his need to escape the constraints and pressures of the religious lifestyle and community as I too have felt compelled to do.

There are so many funny moments throughout the book. One that springs to mind is when, as a young boy, the author rebelled by taking a taxi to a shopping mall on the Sabbath - which is totally forbidden - and ducked down so as not to be spotted by families walking back from the synagogue! This resonated with my own feelings of discomfort at the thought of being seen driving on the Sabbath and religious festivals, and anger that in some way I should feel guilty about not conforming.

I am sure that this book would appeal to everyone, although observant Jews may find it an uncomfortable read! For non-Jews it hopefully provides an interesting and entertaining look at the whole gamut of Jewish experience.’

See tomorrow’s post for my grandma’s thoughts on the book.

Even before I’d read Foreskin’s Lament I knew that this would be one to recommend to the family - a glance at the title and a brief look at the synopsis were enough to convince me that this was going to be essential reading. Although my own religious upbringing was far less extreme than that of the author, nevertheless the concept of Jewish guilt is one that is seriously close to home. While many members of my family are very active in the Jewish community, and gain immense pleasure and satisfaction from this, on my mum’s side of the family in particular there resides a distinct sense of discomfort around organized religion.

While I spent my childhood for the most part happy to comply with regulations and participate in synagogue services, my younger sister Eve rebelled from the age of four. Not in the way Shalom Auslander rebelled - there was, I hope, no shoplifting! - but certainly she questioned and challenged every lesson that was taught and every rule that was enforced. Now aged seventeen, and armed with some impressive debating skills, she is a formidable critic of orthodox Judaism. Unsurprisingly, then, Eve was the first family member upon whom I foisted the book …

Eve:
‘I’m so happy that a book like this has been written – someone was braver than me! It’s great that people around the world, coming at it with so many different perspectives, will be able to read Foreskin’s Lament and be able to relate. I enjoyed it too purely as a brilliant read – it was just very very funny. Some aspects of the Jewish humour were made funnier because of my background knowledge and experiences, but in general I’m sure Auslander’s wit would appeal to everyone. It’s the kind of humour that we all love in sitcoms, as well as in films like My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

One of the funniest moments was when the author was desperately trying to post a note to the Western Wall online (‘Virtual Jerusalem!'). His increasing frustration as he tried to cut down the message to reach the limit of 200 characters was hilarious. I found it even funnier when I googled Virtual Jerusalem, and saw that it does really exist, 200 character limit and all!

When the author writes about the first time he tries to rebel and eat pork, but just can’t do it and end up throwing it up in the bin – I relate strongly to that bit. And storing his non-kosher sweets in his sock drawer … Someone brought some Haribo once to a party at our house (which is forbidden since it has gelatin in it), and instead of getting rid of it I hid it in a drawer in my bedroom for weeks. I mean, when you think about the things a fifteen-year-old could be getting up to … but I was terrified I’d get caught sneaking cola bottles!

I honestly think everyone in the world should read Foreskin’s Lament – they’ll see the funny and the traumatic sides of religion, which are truly impossible to separate.’

See tomorrow’s blog post for my mum’s reaction to the book.

So I wrote and wrote. And I loved the writing. I could have written Chris for hundreds of pages, following him for weeks, or years, rather than the day and the night covered by the book. I took wrong turns, because I’d doggedly allow the writing to flow, like water, where it wanted to go, waiting to see if a new scene or a new character would provide a solution to Chris’s, and my, dilemma.

There comes a certain point in a narrative when what you’ve written contains all the seeds from which an end can bloom. This is a bit like our conception of fate. A life begins and, right at that moment, huge events are set in motion by seemingly minor decisions, strokes of fortune and traits of character; and it is in this vision of life as an accretion of small significances that ‘gathers to a greatness’ that we find drama - both tragedy and comedy. I reached such a point in my written narrative a few years ago. I had what I was pretty sure was three-quarters of the book, and I was pretty sure that this three-quarters contained all I needed to ‘divine’ a dramatically satisfying end.

I use the word ‘divine’ because here was the point in the writing when I had to decide, rather as the Greek gods lounging in their cloudy hall in the film Jason and the Argonauts decide, what the fate of Chris and his best mate Arthur would be. I was hearing the great Nick Cave singing ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’, because against all my instincts as a writer of poems, I had then to become a writer who intervened and decided on the shape of a narrative based on an interpretation of what I had already written.

As I’ve said, I don’t think you decide much in a poem. You might give yourself a scheme, like a rhyme scheme, but the fulfilment of such a scheme is only tangentially connected to where the poem is going. The scheme of a poem actually functions as a means to make decisions based, not on the content of a poem, but on the organisation of sounds; a means, in other words, of keeping the mind occupied by engaging the ear, in order to let one’s thoughts - and the poem - wander somewhere unexpected. In my novel, I was dealing with different schemes entirely: I had a time-scheme - a chronology over which the events of the book took place - and I found that, as I decided on the end, my time-scheme could be decided too, and compressed right down to a day and a night.

And at this point the real work began. I’d written and written, and I’d gone in wrong directions, once for fifty pages or so, but now I had to do what you never get to do in life, which is to go back over the ‘fate’ I had generated in the book and finesse the details, either by reducing what was no longer quite as necessary to the clear revelation of that fate, or by firming up the details of the ‘real’ time over which the book is set. Let me give you an obsessive example of this firming up: some of the book takes place on the night of August 31st, 1986, and it became vitally important to me that I knew at what phase the moon was on that night. I think this is probably a fairly normal writer’s obsession, and actually chimes with my experience of writing poems; for it was an example of writing with complete freedom around an immovable certainty, which in a poem’s case can be the inevitability of a rhyme word and, in the case of my novel, was the fact of the moon’s appearance on an imaginary night when my character, Chris, was hurtling in the dark towards a fate that had become as real and solid to me in the writing as the whole world.

Jacob Polley is the author of Talk of the Town, published this month by Picador.

You can watch Jacob reading from his novel and talking about his writing process on our YouTube channel.

A post on Lizzy’s Literary Life about The Wilderness describes the experience of reading this book much better than I can, and I encourage you to read it.

Although I struggled a bit with the book, I can happily say that I really loved the cover (how shallow is that?!). It took me about three days before I realized that the blossoming cherry tree on the front of the book is shaped like a brain, and that the trunk and branches and blossom all evoke the structure and cells of the brain. Clever.

Wow, if Sebastian Barry wrote that about me I'd have it framed and hanging on the wall in a flash, because I think if Sebastian wrote a shopping list it would probably move me to tears.
But am I right or not, is Deirdre Madden much less well known on this side of the Irish Sea?

It is Dublin, Midsummer's Day, the longest day and the birthday that Molly Fox never celebrates. On this occasion Molly is in New York and has loaned her house to a playwright friend who is struggling with her latest play. The pair met over a very successful play that made both their names and, whilst Molly has established herself as an actor of repute and great skill, things haven't gone so smoothly for the hapless playwright. Molly has refined and captured the alchemy of the stage, perfected and distilled the process into triumph after triumph, her recent Duchess of Malfi and the delivery of that seemingly simple line

'Look you, the stars shine still'

epitomising Molly's consummate stage skill.

Meanwhile the unnamed friend has struggled since that early fame with productions that have bombed in rapid succession.

'I spent the morning wool-gathering, staring out of the window into the back garden, reading over my notebooks, writing things down and then crossing them out again moments later...'
Whilst Molly transforms the final garment on stage it is the writer who is busy weaving behind the scenes and in the end I came to no firm conclusion about who had the hardest task.
But for all this Molly is an actor and with that comes the ambiguity of identity, that front of stage versus behind-the-scenes nature of the profession. I also found this perceptive biographical extract about Deirdre Madden very enlightening now that I have read Molly Fox's Birthday:

'Madden in her novels examines the state of individual consciousness in the fragmented and confusing late-twentieth-century world. Her interest in how individuals discern their place in the world leads her to examine institutions that affect people's lives: religion, geography, politics (particularly in Northern Ireland), violence, and women's rights. All of her novels rely heavily on conversation; in the tradition of Elizabeth Bowen's fiction, Madden's work uses in-depth conversations to advance characters' understanding of themselves and each other while developing her themes for the reader.'

That's exactly what I would have said if I'd thought of it first, because whilst the narrator remains anonymous it is through her vocalised thoughts and conversations with others that we learn all we ever know about the enigmatic Molly Fox. By never actually meeting Molly face to face she remains  a mass of contradictions and unpredictability and Deirdre Madden's character portrayals gave me so much to think about as I read.

I don't for one minute think I have unearthed all there is to find with a single read of Molly Fox's Birthday, this is an intricate warp and weft of multiple layers and threads here and a second read would doubtless unravel more. Especially when I look at that cover again and know I am being deflected by the third person, secretive and enigmatic Molly in particular who wants me to look outward from her house, when actually what's interesting is that within.

dovergreyreader

An edited version of a post on dovegreyreader scribbles April 8th 2009