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 Vol. 30 No. 10, 15 May 2008
- Kieron
Smith, Boy by James Kelman
The
opening story in James Kelman’s 1998 collection, The Good Times, is
called ‘Joe Laughed’. It’s nine pages long and is told from the point of view of
a boy who plays football on a patch of waste ground among derelict industrial
buildings by the river in a large, unnamed city which British readers are bound
to assume is Glasgow. You don’t find out the boy’s name, or his age, although
hints and the boy’s style of reflection encourage you to guess he’s between 14
and 16. At half-time, the boy and two friends start exploring an abandoned
factory. After a bit, the boy’s friends hit him and run away laughing.
All
literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in
the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter,
and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is
more like an adolescent than a toddler. I might pass you a note at a meeting,
but a note is only a note if it can function in my absence. Writing, unlike
speech, is meaning that has come adrift from its source. Some bits of wr iting –
theatre tickets or notes to the milkman, for example – are more closely tied to
their original contexts than Paradise Lost or War and Peace.
I
quote too much. Give me a good line – what am I saying? Give me a good paragraph
– even a Proustian one – and I’ll shove it into my own prose regardless of how
tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do
you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris –
pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just
that I’m lazy.
Also
in this issue
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