what he was doing and she supposed it allowed him to maintain a cool, semi-detached style that would make the odd bombshell he dropped seem more remarkable for the ordinariness of its surroundings. Patty had been raped when she was 15, so she was understandably messed up when she went to college. There she spent a great deal of time with Eliza, a girl even more messed up than her.
‘I shan’t be offended if you forget me,’ said Eliza. ‘Part of the deal of the GAN is that there are too many distracting minor characters.’ So the autobiographer, as Patty described herself to differentiate herself from the biographer who was more obviously pulling the strings, let Eliza go, and concentrated on trying to get the charismatic Richard Katz, who played in a band, to go to bed with her. It was inevitable she ended up with his dull roommate Walter. It was equally inevitable that after 20 years of marriage and repressed lust, she and Richard should eventually fuck. ‘We can pretend we did it while we were asleep,’ she said. The autobiographer resisted the desire to point out that the biographer must also have been half-asleep at this point, so dutifully displayed signs of traumatised guilt.
2004. Joey had a great deal on his mind. He was struggling to believe Connie – a woman so passive she had locked herself in a cupboard at his request for five years – was a three-dimensional character, and only a session of anal sex half-convinced him otherwise. ‘Is this part of the GAN deal?’ she had asked. ‘No’ he had replied. ‘It’s just this year’s must-have transgression in serious fiction.’ Oh, and by the way, they had got married. But what was really bothering Joey was his obsession with Jenna, the sister ofhis roommate Jonathan, and the side-plot which saw him joining a Republican thinktank and procuring arms for the US military in New York.
That was an improvement on Walter’s situation. It was bad enough he hadn’t had sex for years and his marriage to Patty was falling apart, but now he too was locked into an absurd subplot that forced him to work on a scheme to exploit all the coal from the Virginian mountains in order to create a habitat for the cerulean warbler when it was mined out. He knew the GAN needed big themes, but this was too much. Still, at least the biographer had given him a twentysomething Indian assistant, Lalitha, who had fallen in love with him.
Richard was now a famous rock star and so desperate to sleep with Patty again he left her autobiography out for Walter. ‘Oh dear,’ said Patty. ‘We’ve got to have the big GAN conversation about how I always thought you needed me more than I need you and now I see it’s the other way round.’ ‘Get this straight,’ Walter replied. ‘It’s not the GAN, it’s the G-Middle-AN. There’s no real diversity here. Now get out.’ So Patty left to go and live with Richard for a while, before that fizzled out and Walter started sleeping with Lalitha, until she was killed in a car accident.
The biographer might have convincingly left it at that, but the GMAN demands a more forgiving, less realistic ending. So Patty and Walter got back together and stayed friends with Richard, Joey stopped being a Republican, Connie was miraculously transformed from being a doormat and they too lived happily ever after and were reconciled with his parents. And even Jessica was allowed back into the book.
Digested read, digested: Couples 2010.
The Stranger’s Child
by Alan Hollinghurst (2011)
George Sawle gathered his breath. It was the first time he had brought Cecil Valance home and he was keen to distance himself from his family’s petit-bourgeois gaucheness.
‘You must be Cecil!’ shouted Daphne, George’s 16-year-old sister. ‘George is so excited to have met someone so aristocratically bohemian as you at Cambridge. Please read me some poetry about Corley, my country estate.’
‘Come, now,’ said Freda, George’s mother. ‘We must let our
‘I shan’t be offended if you forget me,’ said Eliza. ‘Part of the deal of the GAN is that there are too many distracting minor characters.’ So the autobiographer, as Patty described herself to differentiate herself from the biographer who was more obviously pulling the strings, let Eliza go, and concentrated on trying to get the charismatic Richard Katz, who played in a band, to go to bed with her. It was inevitable she ended up with his dull roommate Walter. It was equally inevitable that after 20 years of marriage and repressed lust, she and Richard should eventually fuck. ‘We can pretend we did it while we were asleep,’ she said. The autobiographer resisted the desire to point out that the biographer must also have been half-asleep at this point, so dutifully displayed signs of traumatised guilt.
2004. Joey had a great deal on his mind. He was struggling to believe Connie – a woman so passive she had locked herself in a cupboard at his request for five years – was a three-dimensional character, and only a session of anal sex half-convinced him otherwise. ‘Is this part of the GAN deal?’ she had asked. ‘No’ he had replied. ‘It’s just this year’s must-have transgression in serious fiction.’ Oh, and by the way, they had got married. But what was really bothering Joey was his obsession with Jenna, the sister ofhis roommate Jonathan, and the side-plot which saw him joining a Republican thinktank and procuring arms for the US military in New York.
That was an improvement on Walter’s situation. It was bad enough he hadn’t had sex for years and his marriage to Patty was falling apart, but now he too was locked into an absurd subplot that forced him to work on a scheme to exploit all the coal from the Virginian mountains in order to create a habitat for the cerulean warbler when it was mined out. He knew the GAN needed big themes, but this was too much. Still, at least the biographer had given him a twentysomething Indian assistant, Lalitha, who had fallen in love with him.
Richard was now a famous rock star and so desperate to sleep with Patty again he left her autobiography out for Walter. ‘Oh dear,’ said Patty. ‘We’ve got to have the big GAN conversation about how I always thought you needed me more than I need you and now I see it’s the other way round.’ ‘Get this straight,’ Walter replied. ‘It’s not the GAN, it’s the G-Middle-AN. There’s no real diversity here. Now get out.’ So Patty left to go and live with Richard for a while, before that fizzled out and Walter started sleeping with Lalitha, until she was killed in a car accident.
The biographer might have convincingly left it at that, but the GMAN demands a more forgiving, less realistic ending. So Patty and Walter got back together and stayed friends with Richard, Joey stopped being a Republican, Connie was miraculously transformed from being a doormat and they too lived happily ever after and were reconciled with his parents. And even Jessica was allowed back into the book.
Digested read, digested: Couples 2010.
The Stranger’s Child
by Alan Hollinghurst (2011)
George Sawle gathered his breath. It was the first time he had brought Cecil Valance home and he was keen to distance himself from his family’s petit-bourgeois gaucheness.
‘You must be Cecil!’ shouted Daphne, George’s 16-year-old sister. ‘George is so excited to have met someone so aristocratically bohemian as you at Cambridge. Please read me some poetry about Corley, my country estate.’
‘Come, now,’ said Freda, George’s mother. ‘We must let our
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