The best books I never wrote

Anne Kennedy talks us through the books she wishes she’d written.

How I Became Stupid by Martin Page

This book was how I became interested in comic novels. Translated from the French (Comment je suis devenu stupide )in

2004, the story concerns 20-something Antoine, a brilliant scholar who never doubts his powers of perception, but has one big problem: he’s miserable. Looking around, he decides that intelligent people are more likely to be sad, so he sets out to make himself less brainy by a series of tactics including becoming an alcoholic and trading on the stock market. Nothing works, of course. We are left with an achingly absurd satire on self-regard and privilege.

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

Reading this hilarious meta-novel of art criticism and relationships turned out to be dangerous for me: for a while, everything took on the self-reflexive, zoomed-out, deadpan tone of the Chris-Krausy

protagonist. Really infuriating, and I don’t know if I could stand to read this novel again (even though loved books should be read over and over). But the memory of its ingredients – the fiction, the autofiction, the crit bit – remains like an eye-floater; in some way, fiction will never be the same again.

Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey

A novel about art that is full of slapstick, calamity and farting. Butcher, an artist from small-town Aussie, is down on his luck like a noir detective, and has his mentally disabled brother Hugh in tow. Both

are narrators; Butcher is hysterical, Hugh sanguine (a la Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala). Everything goes wrong, but still, somehow, there is the miracle of art. All Peter Carey’s novels are my favourites (and are so relevant to New Zealand), but this one is the funniest.

Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation by Marie Darrieussecq

An unemployed woman finds work in a massage parlour and slowly turns into a pig. As she snuffles, wallows and chomps in the most pigly way, she drolly narrates her gradual – and ultimately

triumphant – transformation into a refusenik. Animal Farm meets Metamorphosis, yes. But this absurdist anthropomorphic novella from the 90s could also be a poster for the #MeToo movement. (In fact, we were always a movement.)

The Jolly Christmas Postman by Janet and Allan Ahlberg

Like all the Ahlberg picture books, this jolly book is a rhythmic, irreverent, code-switching masterpiece. As ritual Christmas Eve reading to children over the years, it’s among my most-read books. (I was still trying to read it to them when they were 14.) I know this book off by heart, and I think it influenced my poetry. By the way, replacing ‘‘jolly’’ with ‘‘f...ing’’ seems exactly what Allan was on about. Anne Kennedy is a poet, novelist and screenplay editor who lives in Auckland. Her novel The Ice Shelf (Victoria University Press, $30) is out now.