Recent first novels
Albert Read
he objectivity of the reviewer is tested to the limit when presented with Peter Mayle's first novel along with a pile of hopeful unknowns. All thoughts of his pre- vious success, his unwitting devastation of the Luberon and his cheerful grin from the back cover have to be put aside in favour of a cool, detached opinion of his work. That said, Hotel Pastis (Hamish Hamilton, £15.99, pp. 313) is still a dull novel, full of bad jokes and long, indulgent descriptions of food and drink. We just can't get enough of the Mumm Grand Cordon Rose and the terrine of aubergine with a coulis of fresh peppers.
Simon Shaw, an advertising executive, decides to give up the stresses and strains of his successful career in London to go and find peace in Provence. If this all sounds a bit familiar, Mayle gives it a fic- tional twist by adding Shaw's new enter- prise — the Hotel Pastis. He also adds an unnecessary sub-plot involving Provencal criminals plotting to rob a bank. The story reaches a suitably unexciting denouement with the kidnapping and retrieval of an American millionaire's son.
Mayle, perhaps understandably, has a thing about journalists: Ambrose Crouch, the most unattractive character in the novel, is a sour British journalist who lives in the same village as the hotel. He com- plains that it is people like Shaw who are ruining the rural mystique of the area by building new hotels. Mayle leaps to his hero's defence: tourism is inevitable, and the villages are being depopulated anyway. This one's from the heart.
The other characters are fairly absurd: Ernest, his camp assistant, takes care of him and talks to him with the air of a patronising nurse (`the state of our trousers is not what it should be for this evening.') Caroline is the ex-wife cliche, always talk- ing about money and lawyers. The girl who serves Shaw his pastis is a 'ripe young Provengale with dark eyes and olive skin'. His girlfriend, Nicole, is a beautiful French woman of a certain age with a 'perfectly tanned cleavage'. You can see Mayle's glasses steaming up as he writes.
Simon Shaw drives not just a black Porsche but a 'Congo-black Porsche con- vertible'; he travels by private jet, eats in the best restaurants, stays in the best hotels, and so on. In the end Mayle is sell- ing us the same goods for a third time: the loving descriptions of Provencal food and scenery make you feel the way you do when standing on a crowded tube platform at 7.30 in the morning, staring reproachfully across at a French Tourist Board poster. This is a book designed to feed mid-life fantasies, to evoke a continental idyll while we all slog it out in the cities.
To have one child commit suicide is tragic, but to have five daughters doing away with themselves implies careless parenting or, as the author would have us believe, a sign of global moral decay a world not fit for the truly good. This is the world Jeffrey Eugenides creates for us in The Virgin Suicides (Bloomsbury, £15.99, pp. 249), a bizarre, near-magical world where there is clearly something wrong with this smalltown American suburbia, but what it is no one quite knows. The story is told by a group of middle- aged men looking back to their youth, trying to piece together what really hap- pened to the daughters of the Lisbons. Characters are interviewed for their ver- sion of the events and exhibits are num- bered. Near the beginning, after a failed attempt, the youngest, aged 13, succeeds in throwing herself out of a window and impaling herself on a railing. Near the end of the book, the others find other ways of taking their lives. In between is their story, the failed attempts at integration with their peers, the fascination in which they are held, the outrageous promiscuity of Lux, the 14-year-old sister, and the progressive isolation that their parents impose on them.
In its way, this is an extraordinary novel. Throughout there is the same sense of creepiness as there is in Donna Tart's The Secret History, of characters very slightly removed from reality. The mass suicide is put down to 'a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws'. Others suggest the loosening of sexual morals, godlessness and the misfortune of living in a dying empire.
Despite its subject matter, Eugenides' writing is funny and romantic, as well as hypnotic and disturbing. The deaths of the teenage girls have a strange elegance about them and those left behind, the narrators, feel grief but also a respect for what they did. They look at other girls and are reminded of the squalid ugliness of human- ity:
Inside, we got to know girls who had never considered taking their own lives ... Some of us held their heads as they vomited, then let them rinse their mouths with beer ... Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child- rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived bound, in other words, for life.
Kissing through a Pane of Glass by Peter Michael Rosenburg (Simon & Schuster, £14.99, pp. 235) begins as a young man's fantasy and slowly unfolds into his night- mare. Michael Montrose, aged 21, is aver- age looking, with a small chin. While sitting on a hill in India, feeling 'horny as hell', the most beautiful girl he has ever seen approaches him and falls into his arms; her name is Liana. This is all too good to be true, we say to ourselves, and it is.
Liana's strange behaviour begins sporad- ically and develops into a pathetic schizophrenic dependence on Michael as the book jumps forward to the present day. The writing is light and undemanding, occasionally crass (`She oozed sexuality from every pore'). It is a surprisingly touch- ing story, not so much about those suffer- ing mental disorders but more about those who love them. The book came second in last year's Betty Trask Prize.
Christopher Petit's Robinson (Cape, £8.99, pp. 204) is set in the seediest of Soho worlds, and is centred around the narra- tor's relationship with Robinson, a suppos- edly mysterious figure and an object of veneration and respect. They meet in the twilight world of media and go on to make pornographic films together. The book rambles on, describing a hazy druggy world of reckless midnight drives and waking up in doorways. Urban and moral decay are seen through the eyes of the weak and characterless narrator who seems unable to extricate himself from his appalling sur- roundings. His weakness undermines our sympathy for him and his obsession with Robinson is bewildering, resulting in an indifference to him and to the book as a whole.
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