The Sharp Side

I remember the first time I met Lee Rourke he enthusiastically mentioned a short American novel entitled The Human War, set in a dead end American town two hours before the outbreak of the war on Iraq.

I thought: now that does sound interesting. But at that time it was only available in an American small press edition and I could never get hold of a copy. (Lee by the way did a pioneering UK review of the US edition of The Human War on the Ready Steady Book site here, back in 2005.)

In those days the only fiction set in 2003 and relating to the Iraq war that was easily available was an acclaimed English novel about a wealthy professional man who spends the day of the great London anti-war march playing squash with a medical colleague, visiting his old mum in a home and cooking a scrumptious fish dinner – activities represented as far more worthy and interesting than joining all those gullible and self-indulgent people who were stupidly marching to maintain a monstrous dictatorship in power.

The Human War is at long last available in a British edition (Snowbooks, paperback, £7.99). And Lee was right: it’s a terrific book, which I very much recommend. And it makes a very interesting contrast to Saturday. Saturday is classic corporate literary fiction. By that I mean that it is an ordered narrative with carefully drawn characters, a suspenseful plot with amazing twists and a satisfying closure at the end. It is an artful novel, with a shiny surface – no one supplies the gloss of style better than McEwan. Most of all it is set in an agreeably affluent world of shared middle class values and commodities. The nice car. Travel by car, even for very short distances. Squash at a private club. Shopping at a marvellous fishmongers. Food, cooking, a fabulous meal. Consumption at its finest. The big, agreeable home in a desirable location. And the narrative reproduces the values of this class. The villain is a working class yob: uneducated, brimming with violence. No coincidence, I think, that he has a hereditary disease. But there are other forces out there. The yob is the local embodiment of violence which is now global, manifested as international terrorism. But the narrative is also troubled by those foolishly resisting any attempt to liberate the oppressed Iraqi people: self-indulgent marchers, Muslim extremists, intellectuals, pop singers. These people should be shopping and cooking, not marching and protesting. The values of Saturday embody those of a powerful managerial class who determine news values and cultural values. Interestingly, the BBC went into a collective swoon of rapture when it was published. Saturday is good product; good commodity. It comes packaged with the approval of powerful or prominent media figures who share those values. And it is a commodity which sells to those who want ‘a good read’ and whose consumer choices get the stamp of hegemonic approval. An important book. If you don’t read it you are culturally incomplete.

The Human War is everything that Saturday isn’t. That’s what makes it such an exciting and invigorating read. It’s also why you may have difficulty in finding a copy in a corporate bookstore and why you may not have read about it in the reviews section of the corporate press.

The Human War begins:

Two hours till war.
It’s six o’clock. Bush said at eight, people must die.
I’m going to Kendra’s.
I’ll hide out there. Are the terrorists coming?
I’m standing in my living room at my parents’ house. My dad is sitting on his special seat, my mom on the couch, and my brother on the reclining chair.
They’re watching the news.
The news isn’t saying much.

And this is how war is for the populations of those first world industrial states which launch wars on countries far away. It is all mediated by television. Cicero represents a short period in the life of a disaffected white working class young American in a dead end place in the two hours before the start of the invasion of Iraq and afterwards. The start of a devastating war is registered nowhere other than in the narrator’s head as he looks at the time and realizes the invasion has begun. This is, in other words, a novel where the presence of war is dramatized through its absence.

Whereas Saturday secretes copious spurious meanings as it speaks to and for power, The Human War gives us the world of the powerless. Some of the characters are for the war, others are against it, but none of it matters. Their opinions are irrelevant; nothing they say will make any difference. The Human War doesn’t come to any neat conclusions: it is a novel about confusion mixed with revulsion. Stricken by powerlessness and poverty, the characters retreat into sex, drugs, booze.

The style of the book is beautifully consistent with its subject matter. It is a spare novel (at 86 pages a novella, strictly speaking – the Snowbooks edition includes two stories as well). It is written in a bare, stripped down prose.

I think it is a beautifully crafted work but there is no flashy, artful striving for literary effect of the sort you find in prize-winning fiction. The prose is a brutal vernacular. This is how a huge American underclass talks. Reading The Human War I was reminded of the kind of world Kurt Cobain came from – marginalized, poor, dysfunctional. An American world far removed from Hollywood or John Updike’s fiction.

There is no plot, as that term is popularly understood. There are no little mysteries which are set up for the solving; no amazing twists at the end. This is a world where nothing much happens. Mark, the narrator, goes off to see a girlfriend, Kendra. They have sex. He drives off and goes to a coffee bar. He has a conversation with a black man who lives in the woods. An acquaintance named Jimmy comes in and they go off to a strip joint. They drink. Mark ogles the lap dancers. He pays for their services. He has a perfunctory conversation with one of them. A girl named Nicole asks him to fuck her. He agrees. Mark, who is on medication, gets more and more drunk.

I won’t spoil the ending, other than to say that in a novel where not a lot happens (in corporate narrative terms), in the final pages: not a lot happens.

Or rather, it does. Because The Human War is asserting that this fictional universe is as legitimate as any other. And its concentration is not on enormous dramatic events (what Steve once tellingly referred to as ‘event-glamour’) but on the inconsequential and everyday. The sex scene with Kendra is free of spurious meaning: it is simply sex plus conversation. Cicero’s impoverished characters are light worlds away from the ‘characters’ of novelists who feed us rich, complex interior worlds of memory and symbol. Mark can contemplate huge significant events, with himself at the centre of them, but they are literally all in the mind. All he can do is fantasize.

The living pulse of this novel is thus not in mystery, suspense and revelation but in its dramatic representation of alienation. Nothing happens, repeatedly.

Once again, let me advert to the form of the narrative. It consists almost entirely of one sentence paragraphs, most of them very short. On page after page it starts to look like poetry. This, too, is apt, because there was really only one text that came to mind while I was reading The Human War and that was Ginsberg’s Howl. And this novel too is a kind of howl: a convulsion of rage and despair at those who survive on the margins of a stunted society. But though it repeatedly philosophizes and asks questions, it never supplies cute answers. It’s a blizzard of questioning and doubting; in short, it’s also about what it is to be young and trying to work out a personal philosophy of life.

If what you want from a novel is a fast-paced drama of big events – bank robberies! shootings! extreme emotions and sizzling confrontations! – this book is not for you. It is not remotely escapist. Rather, it leads the reader back into the real.

It would be a mistake, I think, to assume that Noah Cicero just sat down at his keyboard when he was drunk and hammered the book out. It would also be a mistake to assume that the narrative endorses Mark’s position on life, the universe and everything. His attitude to women might well upset and antagonize some readers. But Mark is not exactly a role model. Best to remember, also, that his surname is Swift. He has something in common with Gulliver at the end of his travels, loathing the world around him. He also has a raw honesty about his quest for authenticity and truth. This is not a complacent book, which tries to put over a set of values on the reader.

I want to go out with a stripper.
I think it would be a cool
You know.
And it would never work.
Because I would be thinking about Dostoevsky.
And they would be thinking about coke.

The Human War is also, it must be said, a very funny book. It satires America, and I kept hooting with laughter at its deadpan wit. But it doesn’t disrespect or patronise its characters. So what is The Human War in the end? A satirical anti-war masterpiece. A study of the condition of a contemporary underclass. A working class classic. A hugely engaging read. A novel that will be read in one hundred years time, long after all that corporate liberal stuff has long since been forgotten.