WHAT BOOK..?
...are you reading now?
I AM re-reading Adam Phillips’s wonderfully challenging and wholly brilliant collection of aphorisms, Monogamy.
My own recent novel, Isabelle In The Afternoon, is about a 30-year affair between an American man and an older French woman. It throws up all sorts of questions about the very nature of conjugal love and how passion might be more intense (and emotionally profound) when conducted outside the promise of sexual fidelity.
Phillips, a London psychoanalyst, nails the fact that monogamy is, for all of us, an endless moral dance in which we are engaged in constant self-justification (whether we breach the ‘forsaking all others’ frontier or stay stubbornly, guiltily true to our ‘significant other’).
It’s a book that invites you to examine the fact that, when it comes to the thorny subject of faithfulness, we are all in an endless hall of mirrors in which there is never a definite moral right or wrong.
And how can you resist an observation such as: ‘A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime. sex is often the closest they can get.’
...gave you the reading bug?
I GREW up in a small apartment in a very middle-class corner of Manhattan (back when Manhattan actually had a middle class).
There were five of us in this cramped flat, and my parents had what could be politely called an unhappy marriage.
When I was eight years old, and they were in the midst of one of their frequent marital meltdowns, I asked my father if I could walk to the library myself for the first time. Permission granted, I negotiated the five blocks north to our nearby branch of the New York Public Library on East 23rd street.
A very nice woman there saw that I was a newcomer and guided me to the children’s section. she gave me my first library card, questioned me about what I liked to read and helped me choose three books to take back home.
When I asked if I could read them in the library, she said: ‘Of course,’ and directed me to a quiet corner and a comfortable chair.
Reading and libraries have been a source of refuge ever since that saturday afternoon in October — a mere 57 years ago.
...would you take to a desert island?
IT WOULD have to be F. scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Line for line, has there ever been a better American novel?
Put down on paper when Fitzgerald was nearing 30 but already fearing himself a literary has-been (after far too much corrosive celebrity in his 20s), it remains for me the perfect distillation of the tragedy lurking behind the very American belief that money is the ultimate form of self-realisation.
It is a marvel of narrative compression and social observation and lyrical precision — and one which also speaks volumes about the inherent loneliness at the heart of material excess.
...left you cold?
TRY as I have (several times), I can never find my way into anything by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Back in my adolescent years, everyone of my generation was captivated by The Hobbit. I tried it then, I tried it again a few years ago. Fantasy is a fictional universe that remains one beyond my imaginative reach.
Maybe my feet are far too firmly planted (as a writer) on the pavements of quotidian life. And maybe I react against any lead character named Bilbo Baggins.
Isabelle In The afternoon by Douglas Kennedy is published by Hutchinson on January 9 at £13.