Not just one story after another
Joshua Rey
THE LADY WITH THE LAPTOP by Clive Sinclair Picador, £12.99, pp. 183 by a book of short stories? Granted, after reading Forster's novels it's interest- ing to see what else he did; and a short story as a thing in itself is fine, ideally in one of those natty Penguin editions. But a book of short stories verges on the oxy- moronic. The problem is, one is meant to read a book more or less by starting at the beginning and going to the end, but, where- as a novel has a plot, there's nothing in a collection of short stories to give one a reason for reading the second after the first.
Clive Sinclair's latest book is an elegant and pleasing solution. To begin with, the same people crop up in different stories. In the first a Mexican dragoman helping an English couple adopt a baby recalls an ear- lier client, 'a minor Egyptian playwright . . . rhymes with Conan the Barbarian'. In the next, Yonnan Wassef, a translator and `playwright manqué', guides an Israeli feminist around Cairo for the UN Popula- tion Conference. They meet an English academic holidaying with his daughter who turns up in the third story — in which a dis- affected North London Jewish boy turns to armed robbery to finance his escape into the gentile beau monde — as the anti- hero's cousin.
It reminds one of Evelyn Waugh, where the walk-ons by Lord Metroland and the rest reinforce the sense of being in a partic- ular world. Granted, this is a device; it could have been obtrusive, but Sinclair handles it lightly enough. It's like a Hitch- cock film — whether or not you spot the director's cameo, you're always expecting him to show up and it draws you in.
The other clever thing is what the book is about. It progresses from a story about gentiles through one with a muslim narra- tor and Jewish characters to one told by an Anglicised Jew; then, after a pearl of a detective story in which a man recovers his Jewishness when the police begin to perse- cute him, Israel at last takes the stage wearing a light veil in a brace of satires set in `Ashkenazia' and founded on the conceit that guilt over the war in Ishmalyia' (an equally thinly veiled Lebanon) makes all male babies miscarry.
So it turns out that all this time the book was really about the intriguing question of what it is to be a Jew in the secular West- ern world. Can you enjoy the cultural and social riches of the gentile world whilst remaining Jewish? What do you do when your genes commit you to a state that is acting in a way that horrifies you? There are of course all kinds of other preoccupa- tions running through these stories, but this is what gives them their unity in diversity. The clever thing is that these questions are allowed to emerge slowly and organically as each story puts in its two penn'orth, A less skilful author might have written a novel and been reduced to hitting us over the head with them.
My only complaint is about the title. 'The Lady with the Laptop' is neither the first nor the longest story and, a friend who knows the boffin-knight having confirmed that the author is not that Clive Sinclair, I must conclude that the echo of Chekhov is simply a ploy to catch the attention. Any- way, a collection of short stories that suc- ceeds in being a book surely deserves a name of its own. I propose Chosen Persons, though Mr Sinclair is such a pithy aphorist that I'm sure he doesn't need my help.
Wo, Vincent — I said you should take a year off'
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