Category: Rereading the 90s

I’m re-reading some of the books I loved in the 90s to see what I make of them now.

What I remember

It’s hard to untangle my memories of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides from the iconic movie and its Air soundtrack. Incredibly, that film came out in 2000, which feels strange since my impressions of it are so vivid despite it being more than twenty years ago. Every time I consider the book’s details, it’s the film I think of.

One of the most interesting things about the novel is that it is written from a second-person plural viewpoint (something it has in common with Josh Ferris’s Then We Came to the End – another book I should re-read). I don’t remember the group narration from when I read it in the mid-90s, but I’m looking forward to seeing how the book is constructed.

I’m curious as to how well the book has aged. The novel is based around objectifying a group of young women, and I wonder if that will feel less comfortable nowadays. Either way, this book has an advantage over The Secret History of being a short read.

What it was like

Despite being a short book, I struggled to make progress with The Virgin Suicides. It’s very well written, almost a textbook piece of creative writing, but I didn’t like it very much. The book describes the lives and deaths of four teenage girls from the point-of-view of the men who grew up around them. The book is very much about male gaze. I kept imagining an audiobook read by Hannah Gadsby, and how little time she would have for the often-creepy objectification of the teenage girls in the book.

Eugenides’ writing is exquisite, and the opening paragraph is a good example of this, with a mix of summary, imaginative details and foreshadowing. I could imagine it being discussed in a classroom. The book builds its story about the sisters and the boys watching them through subtle, exquisite details.

The book is suffused with longing and nostalgia, as a group of middle-aged men investigate the life and deaths of the five Lisbon sisters. The men have collected exhibits from the time, as well as interviewing some of the people involved.

The book made me feel impatient and I found the tone less pleasant than I had on first reading. the Guardian published a review of the book by writer Dizz Tate, who gives a more enthusiastic view.

While I didn’t enjoy my re-read of The Virgin Suicides, maybe it just caught me in the wrong mood I can imagine returning to it in another 20 years or so to see what I make of it then.

I’m re-reading some of the books I loved in the 90s to see what I make of them now.

What I remember

I remember very little detail of this book. I recall it was about a clique of college students formed around a charismatic classics teacher. I know that the book features a Bacchanalian rite where the least popular member of the group is killed. I remember enjoying this book but not much more than that, so it will be a good one to revisit.

What it was like

The Secret History is a long book. Tartt’s writing is good, but I prefer minimalist fiction. This story begins with what what Holden Caulfield referred to as “all that David Copperfield kind of crap,” telling us about the main character’s background. It all felt a little dreary – particularly when the prologue was heavy foreshadowing, promising the reader a murder if they were patient with the set-up.

The book immerses you in the life of narrator Richard, a Californian who has come to a small college in Vermont. He joins a tiny classics tutor group on a whim, under a charismatic teacher called Julian. He gets to know the five other students, who have all been raised in privilege. Tartt does a lot of good work in establishing this world, where the 80s college experience interfaces with the more timeless world of Julian’s tutor group.

Richard is an unreliable narrator. We see him casually tell lies about himself and, almost as casually, dismissing being caught in those lies. There is a darkness in Richard – at one point he refers to ‘crushing an easter chick’ as a child. However, Richard’s lies never really become part of the plot.

I remembered the novel doing much more with the classics than it did. I also remember it as containing much more about the bacchanalia, when this took up very little of the text. I’d have liked the book to be less restrained than it was.

The Secret History is a good book, but a long one. It’s well-written, but wasn’t really what I was in the mood for. I longed for the death that was promised in the prologue to take place so that things could get moving. By about two-hundred pages in, I was ready to push that character off a cliff myself.

I’m re-reading some of the books I loved in the 90s to see what I make of them now.

What I remember

The main thing I remember about American Psycho was the tone. The same detached narration was used throughout, whether the topic was skin care routines, the music of Genesis, or shocking accounts of murder. I’ve never watched the film of American Psycho, since that could never have maintained the dull tone that I thought so important to the book. Filming the scenes would be unavoidably spectacular, losing that feeling of detachment.

As a younger man, I felt sorry for Patrick Bateman, who was unable to feel anything, even as he committed appalling acts. This is a problematic reading of the book – although one echoed by Manic Street Preachers’ song Patrick Bateman. I didn’t think too deeply about the murders, having been raised on splatterpunk and other ‘extreme’ art of the 90s. While I certainly didn’t like Bateman, I never loathed him, rather I felt sorry for him.

(In the afterword, Ellis talks about his identification with Bateman: “Nothing fulfills him. The more he acquires, the emptier he feels. On a certain level, I was that man, too... I was also writing about my life and how empty it was.” Bateman’s alienation was intended to be sympathetic. The 90s were a glib time, when irony went too far)

Ellis defended the book as a satire, but there is a question of whether this justified the extreme misogyny. The murders were brutal, and some incidental details of these have stuck in my head. While I re-read some of the book’s chapters of music criticism, I’ve avoided the murders, and I’m not looking forward to revisiting those. I would not be surprised if I skip bits or even give up on the book. Having said that, I am curious about my return to American Psycho, given that my original reading of it was fairly shallow, missing a lot of the subtlety and ambiguities.

What it was like

The edition I read, sold cheaply on Kindle, included a dreadful intro. At one point it claimed that “The feminists who hated American Psycho were generally polemicists or activists rather than artists,” and that “many of the criticisms of American Psycho stem from an immature view, or even a complete misunderstanding, of what a novel actually is”. Reading it, I wondered who was writing such an awful defence of the book and at the end I learned it was… Irvine Welsh.

My main response to American Psycho was disgust. For all its good qualities – including some excellent writing – the book’s unpleasantness is overwhelming – extreme racism, homophobia and misogyny. I’m not convinced that the book’s satire or characterisation quite justify its extremity. The book would be better without such vile descriptions of murders, but it would not have sold as many copies without the controversy. Misogyny pervades the book, and sometimes the gratuity of it blurs the line between Bateman’s character and Ellis’s writing.

American Psycho was also funnier than I remembered, with some fantastic comedy, such as the scene where a dinner is overwhelmed by free Bellinis. In the midst of a manic episode, Bateman decides to eat at McDonalds, but needs to sound like an insider when he orders milkshake: “(’Extra-thick,’ I warn the guy, who just shakes his head and flips on a machine)”. His diatribes about music are funny, with Bateman’s observations being pretentious and trite: The Genesis song Invisible Touch is “an epic meditation on intangibility”. He has no idea who Earth, Wind and Fire are, and Bateman’s favourite CD is The Return of Bruno, the 1987 album by Bruce Willis. Then there’s the discussion of Phil Colin’s cover of “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “which I’m not alone in thinking is better than the Supremes’ original”. Bateman is hilariously ridiculous.

The best comic scene is when Bateman and his friends get front row seats for a U2 concert at the Meadowlands arena in New Jersey. They talk through the gig and have no idea who the band are, trying to work out which one is “the Ledge”. Bateman suggests he is the drummer, only for his friend to ask “which one is the drummer?”

For a novel whose characters define each other through their jobs, there is very little discussion of work. It’s not obvious why Bateman is working, or if he needs to. It’s said that Bateman “practically owned” the company where he works, and comes from an incredibly rich and powerful family. There is one scene with his mother, which takes place in a room with barred windows.

Bateman is an exaggerated character. His skills at recognising brands seems supernatural. Reading it now, the text is obviously hyperbolic, intended to make no sense. He is an unreliable narrator, who at one point claims he is “drinking close to twenty liters of Evian water a day“. It’s hard to tell if Bateman is out of contact with reality, or if the world he lives in is out of kilter – for example with characters seeming unable to recognise other characters. There are also little odd moments of insanity, like when Bateman says “there is music playing somewhere but I can’t hear it”, or one over-the-top sequence where the narration drops into third person.

One of the strengths of American Psycho is that I have found so much to say about it. But we come back to the main point. This is a book of appalling violence and racism. If I was approaching it as a new reader I would not have finished it. I suspect the book will endure as a historical curiosity, but I cannot imagine it being published nowadays.

I’m re-reading some of the books I loved in the 90s to see what I make of them now. House of Leaves only qualifies on a technicality, since it was originally published in 2000. However, there was an earlier hypertext version ontline. This post contains spoilers.

What I Remember

House of Leaves is an impressive-looking book – partly for its size, and partly for the typographical tricks it uses. It’s one of the scariest books I’ve read, but in places reading it felt like a trudge.

The book covers multiple storylines. There is the account of Johnny Truant, who discovers a set of notes made by a blind academic about a documentary that does not exist. Then there is the story of the documentary, about a photojournalist with a problem – the inside of his house seems to be expanding. I clearly remember scenes about exploring the house, and the awful scale of it. Then there are the Whalestone letters, sent between a mother and her son, which I never really placed alongside the rest of it.

House of Leaves is a postmodern classic. It’s a novel whose textual games drive the plot forward. It’s an elegant horror novel. But, in re-reading I’d like to have a clearer idea of how all the elements hung together.

What it was like

House of Leaves was as great as I remember. It infiltrated my dreams, and I’d find myself inside buildings which were larger than they ought to be. I’ve never had such awful nightmares from a book. The dark warnings about obsession with the Navidson record turned out to be true. This is a book so metafictional that it leaked into my life.

The text has mostly aged well although the scenes with Johnny Truant sometimes grate in their treatment of the female characters. Truant’s narration is one of the book’s weakest points, although it would not work without that layer of framing. Related to the issues around misogyny, it’s notable how the book’s references to Harvey Weinstein now take on a different tone.

The main text of the book works incredibly well, with its dense academic critiques of a movie that does not exist. The labyrinth of the footnotes was effective, using every typographic trick it could.

The thing I found most frustrating with House of Leaves were the texts that followed the main story. The Pelican Poems seemed indulgent, a poetic sequence originally written by Danielewski while travelling in Europe. The Whalestoe letters provide context for Johnny Truant, as well as leading to some fascinating theories about who wrote the text – but it just felt like a party that had gone on too long.

Will this book survive to become a classic? Maybe some of the references to real people will fade, but there is possibly enough to carry this book far into the future. And I can imagine a new edition, published in the 22nd century, with an additional layer of annotation, both explaining the references and making the book darker.

I read House of Leaves alongside my friend Katharine – we have a little 90’s book club between the two of us. It was great to have her responses as a newcomer. There’s a joy to sharing a book with someone else that, these days, is all too often missing. House of Leaves promotes such interactions. In the same way that Truant found himself connecting to people to investigate the original text, Danielewski’s novel pushes people into investigating it – through discussions online, or Katharine’s colleague recognising the book when she had it at work and stopping to talk about it.

I can imagine reading House of Leaves again in the 2030’s, and getting just as rich an experience from it.

I’m re-reading some of the books I loved in the 90s to see what I make of them now. First up: Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland. This post contains spoilers.

What I Remember

I enjoyed reading this book, but my recollection is short on details. I know there were a group of friends in the 80s, one of whom becomes the titular girlfriend in a coma. Years later, she has revived and the world has ended, with the group of friends somehow untouched. They live on in an empty world, talking about their lives. A couple become obsessed with jewels and drugs. There are some powerful reflective passages, where Coupland speaks through his characters about ageing and youth.

The main thing I remember about this book is being entranced by it, even if the details have all slipped away. I once lent it to a lover, who returned it with her dismissive review that it was “gash”.

I was looking forward to re-reading it, but not sure whether I would find it entertaining or superficial.

What it was like

Girlfriend in a Coma is a book filled with wise and startling observations, and the story often feels like it’s only there to hang these observations on. It’s also a profoundly weird book, with several strange elements co-existing – Jared’s ghost, the coma, and the end of the world.

The book divides into three sections, with the first part following the characters from adolescence through to Karen’s return from the coma. I found this part of the book wearing, often too quirky, and didn’t feel as if I knew the characters; but when Karen awoke from the coma I found myself moved so I guess something was working.

Just as the book settles into Karen’s return, it takes another abrupt lurch, with the end of the world arriving. It transpires that Karen’s coma was because she had somehow glimpsed the coming apocalypse. People begin falling asleep and dying around the world, and Karen and her friends are the only people untouched.

Coupland’s first novel was 1991’s Generation X. He’d been given an advance to write a handbook about GenX, but instead wrote a novel (which the publisher rejected). Traces of that handbook remain in Generation X as the box-out definitions throughout the book. I feel like Girlfriend in a Coma is similar, in that Coupland is using this novel to give us his observations about ageing and cynicism. I’d love to read a compilation of Coupland’s best sentences and paragraphs, but I’m not sure how well he works on the level of a novel.

Re-reading this, I’m not sure why I had it as one of my favourite novels. The abrupt turn to the plot comes late, and doesn’t work well. The combination of ghosts, apocalypse and the miraculous reawakening make the book feel overstuffed. A simple novel about a girl from 1979 emerging into the 90s would have been powerful enough.