Peter Carey Accused

I finished reading Peter Carey's new novel Theft at the weekend. It's good. It's a novel told in two compelling voices, that of the Australian painter Butcher Bones, who has fallen on hard times both personally and professionally (an acrimonious divorce and a heavy crash from a position of fame and acclaim), and that of his brother Hugh (for whom, by the way, I've just spent five minutes googling to find the current politically correct description. In the novel he's described just as "damaged", and the rich, strange, vulnerable logic of the voice given to him by Carey paints the rest of the picture brilliantly, but in the real world I guess he would be described as either suffering from a learning disability or as having special needs. By now there's probably some other way to put it. But you get the message. And he's one of the best and most memorable characters I've come across in a long time).

Anyway, Butcher (real name Michael Boone...the nickname is bestowed on him by his brother, who calls himself Slow Bones) has been pretty much banished to an isolated house in the country, where he spends his time looking after Hugh and not painting, and the tight writing of the first few chapters ably conjures up the resentment and boredom and bitter disappointment of this situation. It's depressing and uncomfortable and it seems as if one brother might kill the other unless something happens to puncture the tension in which they live. That happens with the arrival into their lives one storm-bludgeoned night of Marlene, a young American woman who has been stranded by the rising river while trying to drive to the house of their neighbour. She is the daughter-in-law of Jacques Liebovitz, the painter who was Butcher's greatest influence, and hanging on the wall of their neighbour's house, she reveals, is the priceless original of the very Liebovitz which made Butcher want to become a painter. And immediately afterwards, it's reported stolen, and the Bones boys find themselves carried along on, and soon helping to perpetuate, a complicated and brilliant piece of art fraud. Butcher begins painting again, Marlene keeps producing more surprises, and Hugh keeps thinking and watching and talking to us in his great big innocent-but-cuttingly-sharp voice, all CAPITAL LETTERS and unpleasant truths - a voice as perceptive and staggeringly true and unforgiving as that of a young child. Hugh is no comic relief or compassionate touch - though Marlene has the plans and Butcher has the paints, he has the stark, unfaultable logic which becomes, oddly but convincingly, the book's driving intelligence. Butcher keeps saying he can't go anywhere, do anything, take on anything, because he needs to be with Hugh. By the end of the book, we see why. Yes, Hugh is his responsibility - but he's also, in a sense, his eyes.

This book has only, so far, been released in Carey's native Australia - it'll be published by Faber in the UK next month and by Knopf here in the US this week (as I was informed by a former student of Carey's on the L train two days ago, who was horrified to see me reading an as-yet-unpublished book and demanded to know where I'd gotten it from. Slightly hysterical in his over-protectiveness of his professor, I'd say). But for a book that's yet to be published in most parts of the world, it has already found itself the object of controversy. This is because Carey's ex-wife, Alison Summers, has come out fighting to say that the character of Butcher's ex-wife in the novel is clearly based on her. Because it's not a pleasant portrait of an ex-wife (in the few places where an ex-wife is mentioned), Summers maintains that the novel constitutes a personal attack on her. She’s not the only one who believes this, but obviously her voice is the one with the most authority. She’s “devastated”, she has told journalists, by Carey’s giving to Butcher the phrase “alimony whore” to describe his ex-wife.

Rant below...



Now, cards on the table, first of all: I interviewed Peter Carey today, and we talked mostly about his new book and about his background as a writer, but the comments made by his wife and the publicity arising from them had to be touched on, and so I asked him about the accusations and he said nothing I didn't expect him to say and nothing I couldn't already have guessed. Yes, he's been through a divorce; no, it wasn't pretty, and no, the book is not about that divorce. He's written plenty of memoir-style literature, he pointed out, and if he'd wanted to write about this particular personal experience, that form would have been open to him. The novel is not the place, at least not for him, which was something I thought already blatantly illustrated by the weight and quality of his novels.

We only discussed this for a few minutes, because to be honest I was a little embarrassed to bring it up. I don't think any writer should have to face questions about his or her personal life. A novelist has a publicist to publicise a novel, not a divorce or a marriage or a baby or a retreat to a Namibian resort to have a baby. During an interview with a novelist, the subject of the conversation is very obvious. Often, it's sitting on the table between you, in the shape of the new novel. The subject is the work. I know this attitude is a little puritanistic, especially now that every single editor out there, no matter how "serious" the publication, is eager for copy with an element of lifestyle journalism to it. And it can really enrich a reading experience (at least, the experience of reading an interview) to know something about the novelist's house, or children, or his partner...and I have really enjoyed hearing about those things from writers I've interviewed. But to go rooting for these subjects, especially when they've become even more intensely private than they already were, because of divorce or loss or other bad experiences, is, I think, to debase the readings experience somewhat. See, I told you I was puritanistic about this. HIt me with reasons why I shouldn't be, if you have a view on this.

As for the verdict of one “friend” of Summers, that Carey has “trashed the ex-wife to clear the way for a popular welcome for his new partner”, Frances Coady…please. This is not Plum bloody Sykeswe’re talking about here. This is an author who has now published nine deeply original, intensely intelligent novels the range and strangeness and diversity of which is testimony to the strength of the literary imagination. He writes and researches for three solid years, working every day, until a novel is finished. He has won the Booker Prize twice. Of course, winning the Booker twice and spending a long time on a novel are not by themselves proof of the argument that a novelist has higher and more serious motives in writing a novel than “clearing the way” (what does that even mean?! Clearing the way with whom? Frances Coady is a very established publisher, formerly with Granta and now at Picador, and I doubt that she needs any way cleared for her on either side of the Atlantic at this stage. It's a petty and really quite dim assertion) for his new girlfriend, but anyone who has read any of Carey’s previous novels, and who reads this one, will see the fatuousness of this “friend’s” claim. This is not writing which has been created to impart a short and sharp shock, to make a point, to serve a low purpose quickly and crudely. It is careful, deeply-thought and felt, considered. It’s not pious or reverent, either -Theft, like My Life as a Fake is bitterly funny, sometimes disturbing, and ruthlessly frank. Butcher is no hero, no victim, no righteous ex-husband, but an unattractive man, flawed and quite stupid, but delivered with Carey’s typical compassion. Compassion is not the same as bias, which is the only motive or relationship with a character which could drive a novelist to write the sort of novel of which Carey is so ridiculously accused.

I think that Summers’ decision to go public on her unhappiness about the novel is ill-advised, and I think that she has talked too easily to an all-too-eager press without having any credible evidence for her argument. I have no doubt but that she is genuinely smarting from this episode, but then any divorceé reading the first novel produced by their ex after their divorce is bound to scrutinise it for references to marriage, divorce, love and sex. And there’s a good chance that such a person – who is, essentially, vulnerable – will find in such a novel exactly what they want to find, see what they want to see. In other words, they will project. And wow, does Summers seem to be projecting. She seems convinced, too, that everybody else will read the novel and see not Butcher or Hugh or Marlene, but her, and that nobody will talk about Carey’s writing or about the artistry or otherwise of the novel, but about her:

There is an audience over here in New York that has heard some of this from him before so you may think, 'Why is she dreading it so much?' Well, it might have been the gossip over here, but that has not been the case in Australia and Britain, so when the book comes out there is a whole other audience that didn't know what Peter had to say about. Then there are people like my children's teachers, neighbours. It is the fact that this is going to be out there in a much more widespread way, rather than through word of mouth, and none of it is true. When he said things in court papers I had a chance to refute it, but in this case I don't. And it's there for ever. I'm the mother of his children and it is there for them to see, their friends and my grandchildren. It is fixed in literary history.

But this is ludicrous. Why? Simply because the ex-wife is so slight and occasional a character in Theft as to be hardly noticeable. She’s mentioned maybe five times, and she is only seen as a face at a window in a scene which is not about her, but about Butcher’s paintings. I’m in no position to say whether or not she bears any resemblance to Summers, because obviously I have no personal knowledge, apart from what’s known about Summers from her own words in the paper, which would allow me to make that judgement, but here are two points. Firstly, she does not match up to that picture Summer gives of herself in any way. She does not live in NY. She is not a theatre director. She is not bringing up two teenage sons. She is not writing a novel (as is Summers, which may be the whole driving force, conscious or unconscious, behind this whole sorry fuss...is it just me, or is there a hopeless irony to the situation of Summers' complaining about the implications for her of a peripheral portrait of an ex-wife in Carey's novel while she, herself, is writing a novel titled Mrs Jekyll??). Secondly, and more importantly, she is so minuscule a part of this novel, so briefly and minutely glimpsed, that she cannot validly be said to bear a resemblance to anybody. She is dealt with in a matter of a few words, spread over the course of a long novel – she is not a character sketched in any depth, she is given little if any dialogue, she is not described physically in any memorable or startling way. This is not a criticism of Carey’s work; he has chosen to leave this character in the shadows for a valid reason. That reason being that this is not a novel about Butcher’s ex-wife. This is a novel about Butcher. And yes, it is a novel which deals in themes of sadness, disappointment, resentment, loneliness, fear, heartbreak, deception, betrayal, trust….but that these are themes which are also a feature of a divorce, and possibly of the Carey/Summers divorce, does not mean that this is a novel about divorce, or about a divorce. It is a novel which deals in the complexities of being human and being alone – and yes, being angry – but Butcher is alone and angry in a much more fundamental, much more existential, and thus much more interesting way than if these feelings were merely the offshoots of a recent separation.
Meanwhile, the comparisons between Carey and Butcher Bones pointed out by Anthony Barnes in his article for the Independent may be “inescapable”, but they are also pretty minor:

Its central character, Butcher Bones, is an artist born the same year and in the same town outside Melbourne, Australia. Their careers have taken them to Sydney, Tokyo and New York, but perhaps more crucially both have recently emerged from bitter divorces.

Barnes doesn’t point out that the novel is set in the early 1980s, ten years before Carey relocated to NY, where he has lived for the past 16 years. Carey’s trip to Toyko, meanwhile, was undertaken with his teenage son two years ago, to write an article for National Geographic, and produced a book which is as much about father/son dynamics as it is about manga and anime culture. When Butcher goes to Toyko, it is to see his paintings exhibited in a department store and to realise the extent of his lover’s trickery. And in Australia, while Butcher and Hugh grow up in the same town as did Carey, during the same years, there is nothing of the middle-class home in which Carey was born, the car-dealer parents, the boarding school at age ten. They are “raised in sawdust”, the children of a butcher, knee-deep all through their childhood in the blood of cattle. After his divorce from Summers, Carey did not go to prison for attempting to seize his own assets – what would he seize, copies of his novels? Manuscripts? – and he does not spend his days caring for a “damaged” brother. There are no similarities worth thinking about.

But that’s the problem. What’s “worth thinking about”, that is. Some readers prefer to think about, and to read for, similarities rather than for good writing, powerful imagery, rich language, skilful characterization. To dig for autobiography is to limit readings, to set out from a premise that is misguided because it refuses, from the outset, to appreciate that the work that an author does with autobiographical fact – the work of shading, reshaping, combining, elaborating, inventing, erasing – is the work that often lends to that novelist’s characters the complexity and richness which makes them characters rather than clichés or cardboard print-outs of life. Sometimes the argument for autobiographical resonances in literature does exist, of course, and sometimes it is a strong one. But in this case, I think, it’s a case of paper needing ink, just as much as of Summers' still-raw anger seeking a new outlet.