I’ve read a handful of books by Philip K Dick, the author with the name most likely to make schoolboys snigger*. He’s terrific, but I know he wrote so much that the quality must be variable; and any time I look out more, reliable sources always seem to recommend the ones I already know. The Man in the High Castle; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Ubik. What I definitely thought I knew was that his non-science fiction wasn’t worth bothering with. Then that young turk Scott Pack came along and recommended this book, boldly suggesting that “anyone who has read and enjoyed the novels of Richard Yates would love Confessions Of A Crap Artist.” Challenge accepted.

Confessions of a Crap Artist was written in 1959 but not published until 1975, when Dick had made his name: he wrote a number of non-SF novels, and this was the only one published in his lifetime. It nonetheless retains the recurring theme of his better known books, questioning the nature of reality. The whole book purports to be the work of its main character, so the title page in my 2005 Gollancz edition looks like this:

Philip K. Dick

CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST

- Jack Isidore
(of Seville, Calif.)

A Chronicle of Verified Scientific Fact
1945-1959

This may be important, for reasons which will become clear. The story is narrated initially by Jack Isidore, the ‘crap artist’ whose grip on reality is tenuous: he believes in civilizations living inside the Earth, that sunlight has weight, that World War 2 began in 1941 when America joined, and seems unsure whether he lives in the 1950s or on the brink of the fourth millennium. Dick uses some lazy novelist’s shorthand to denote Isidore’s cookie-cutter dorkishness and distance from ‘decent’ society: porn; dandruff; BO; comics (I know, I know; don’t write in). His mundane job as a tyre regroover seems to exemplify his sociopathic values:

When I get done regrooving a tire, it doesn’t look hand-done by any means. It looks exactly the way it would look if a machine had done it, and, for a regroover, that’s the most satisfying feeling in the world.

Quickly the narrative gives way to the other characters, and what appears to be the story proper gets under way. This is why Scott Pack invokes Richard Yates: it’s unhappy families all the way. Jack, following a brush with the law, is forced to move in with his sister Fay and her husband Charley, who have problems of their own. Charley’s a violent thug - but who wouldn’t be, faced with Fay’s contrary selfishness? She makes perverse demands on Charley, nagging him to do housework and then accusing him of being unmanly when he agrees; money runs through her hands like water; and she adopts a unique brand of motherly love for her two children:

A child is a filthy amoral animal, without instincts of sense, that fouls its own nest if given a chance. Offhand I can’t think of any redeeming features in a child, except that as long as it is small it can be kicked around.

How much of this is characterisation, and how much Dick’s bitterness (the character of Fay is reportedly based on Dick’s first wife), is difficult to know, but it certainly makes for lively friction between Charley, Fay and Jack. The rift is deepened when Fay befriends a new couple in the town, Nat and Gwen Anteil, whom she finds irresistible because of their beauty: inevitable developments follow.

The book lacks Yates’s clear-eyed honesty - often it feels Dick is forcing the nastiness - and certainly his elegant prose, but I can see the similarities in subject matter. The family are forced together through social pressures which existed in the 1950s, which they are simultaneously trying to escape, and in the challenge to reality of Jack’s world view, and Charley’s misanthropy, I saw elements of Patricia Highsmith too.

The story kicks along at a fair pace, and Dick is brave enough to give a dramatic conclusion earlier than we expect (and it’s tense and gripping), leaving 50 pages for the consequences to play themselves out. It’s extraordinary and refreshing to see a writer so well known in one genre, take on another and give it such a good going over.

My main concern was with the integrity of the story: that title page I quoted above suggests that the whole book - Jack’s narrative, Fay’s narrative, even the third person viewpoint which tells Charley’s and Nat’s stories - is the creation of Jack, his “confessions”. This ties in with an element of the plotline, where Jack writes down an account of Fay’s secret indiscretions and presents it to Charley, but if it is really all Jack’s invention then doesn’t the whole story become fluid and meaningless? Perhaps I’m seeing what’s not really there, doubting the reality presented to me: must be reading too much Philip K Dick.

* after Fanny Burney

As usual there are three stages in getting to read this book: wanting to, acquiring, and actually beginning. I wanted to read it when it was published, partly because I’d heard of the author but didion’t know much about her, and partly because I loved the way the cover of the hardback expressed the subject of the book - Didion’s grief over the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne - so cleverly and movingly.

But I didn’t buy it until last year, when the less beautiful paperback was on sale for half price in a local bookshop’s closing down sale. And there it sat on my shelves until the book came back into the limelight recently, with its theatrical production in London as a monologue starring Vanessa Redgrave. Depressing really to think how many factors must coalesce just to get me to read one book. How many others are going to the wall just because Vanessa Redgrave hasn’t got her finger out?

Didion tells us:

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed [John's death], weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of the words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.

There is no impenetrable polish in The Year of Magical Thinking, which often seems not so much an investigation of grief as an expression of it. Didion wrote it in the months which ended the first year of her life without Dunne, when the wound was still open. In the course of the book, Didion goes through several of the known stages of grief, beginning with denial: she throws out Dunne’s clothes but keeps his shoes because “he would need shoes if he was to return.” When she is given his personal possessions by the hospital, she organises the banknotes in the wallet in with her own, in order of denomination: “I remember thinking as I did this that he would see that I was handling things.”

There’s a sense that we are spying on someone vulnerable: Didion’s intelligence and the fact that she chose to write and publish the book do not cloud the clear feeling that even as the book ends, this is a woman who is far from through with the grieving process. Near the end she acknowledges this: “the craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. I look for resolution and find none.” Indeed she finds that she does not want to enter a recovery process, because

my image of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year. My sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote, even ‘mudgy’, softened, transmuted into whatever best serves my life without him.

In that sense, the book is an attempt to cheat this softening of the edges of memory, to fix in place forever the bright unignorable moments from his sudden silence as Didion was making dinner (”John was talking, then he wasn’t”) through to the dash to hospital by ambulance, where two people go in and one person comes out.

There is a complicating factor in all this, which is that at the time Dunne died and Didion was beginning to grieve, their adopted - only - daughter, Quintana, was in a coma in hospital. (On the night of Dunne’s death they had just returned from visiting her.) Didion writes a lot - too much - about Quintana’s illness through the course of the book, and these seem like a distraction. Then I learned that, after the book was completed but a few weeks before it was published, Quintana died also. The obsessive recounting of her illness now seems like the sort of foreshadowing which she discusses in Dunne’s case: she interprets various innocuous comments made by him in the days before his death as intimations of mortality on his part. Again these are presented straight-faced, and it’s hard to know whether Didion is knowingly acknowledging her own grief-stricken blindness, or just in a muddle in the middle of it.

One quote on the cover of the book suggests that it will “maybe comfort anyone who has lost forever the one they loved.” I doubt that, but it may provide understanding to those, like me, who have been lucky enough not to undergo - yet - even the ‘normal’ grief of losing parents, let alone a partner or a child. The Year of Magical Thinking cannot necessarily help that process, but it can warn the unwary up-front of the sort of ‘temporary madness’ that can arise, and that can be endured.

Curiously, what the book left me with most was a desire to read not only some of Didion’s other books, but also Dunne’s novels: both their books are quoted in excerpts throughout The Year of Magical Thinking, as it becomes as much a memoir of two writers’ lives together as it does of the survival of one. Titles like Playland were familiar to me already, and now I want to know more. And what greater purpose could this book serve than to enable Dunne - to enable any writer - to live again in the minds of others, who read his books long after his death?

Beryl Bainbridge - the ‘Booker Bridesmaid’, shortlisted five times but never a winner - is an author whose books I always want to love. About ten years ago I read a couple of her early novels - The Bottle Factory Outing was one - and I remember failing to get through two of her (then) latest titles, Every Man For Himself and Master Georgie. It was as though there was a sheet of glass between her writing and my reading: I could see what she was doing, but couldn’t make contact. Like Margaret Atwood, only shorter. Then I saw a copy of Young Adolf in my local charity shop, and thought I should give her another go.

Young Adolf [1978] was Bainbridge’s first foray into the type of historical fiction which has now become her speciality: reimaginings and extrapolations of real events. In this case, however, the event is putative only. Bridget Hitler - a name not easily forgotten - lived in Liverpool with her husband Alois (Adolf’s half-brother), and in her memoirs, she told of Adolf Hitler’s stay with them in 1912-13, when he was in his early 20s. Whether this really happened is unknown, but it didn’t stop Bainbridge from using it as a springboard for a diverting piece of fiction.

It’s a title that will carry a lot ahead of it, and rather like Connell’s The Diary of a Rapist, it seems certain to bring about equal forces of attraction and repulsion in the bookshop browser. In that sense it has a knowing quality - you cannot write a book and call it Young Adolf and expect people to approach it without preconceptions - but I am quite sure Bainbridge wrote it with the best intentions, of intellectual curiosity and a desire to show that fiction can explore truth even where historically the facts are not known.

In the novel Adolf - one of the curious sensations the reader is going to have to get used to is being on first name terms with Hitler, if only to distinguish him from his half-brother Alois - is little more than a youth, weedy and feckless, “looking as though a good wash would kill him.” His arrival in Liverpool is the result of stealing the passage money which Alois had meant for their sister Angela, and pretty soon it’s clear that the whole Hitler clan is touched with undesirable qualities. Their father, ‘Old Man Hitler’ is a brutal thug, and Alois himself is not above a little unbalanced behaviour:

Once, before the birth of darling Pat, Alois had won on the National at Aintree and had taken [Bridget] to Monte Carlo for a holiday. His restaurant in Dale Street had been doing moderately well. He was pleased at the thought of his coming child. Strolling along the road above the bay he had been full of good humour, idly swinging his stick and murmuring on his his expansive way about the vastness of the sky above, the smoothness of the Mediterranean below. She was so accustomed to his chatter that she hardly distinguished his words from the droning of the bees in the wild flowers that grew beside the path. Turning to her, he had inquired: ‘What colour, do you suppose, is the sea?’ ‘Why, blue,’ she had answered. ‘Why, blue,’ he had mimicked, and squeezing her arm viciously had shouted: ‘The water is a composite of white and blue and green. It is a reflection of the earth and the sky, you docile bitch.’ For several days after this correction he had ignored her. She sat alone in their hotel room, with its view of the absorbent sea, and looked at her bruised arm in the dressing table mirror. Had he cared to ask, she could have told Alois, without stammering, that her skin in one particular patch above the elbow was turning black and blue, ringed with a faint tinge of mauve.

However the general tone of the book is comic, as Adolf struggles to find his feet and friendship in Liverpool, and exhibits paranoia in fear of a bearded man he believes to be pursuing him. Bainbridge is shrewd enough to limit his anti-Semitism to one outburst, so it cleverly seems an aberration rather than a defining characteristic (and indeed his best friend, Mr Meyer the landlord, is Jewish). However she can’t resist a couple of nuggets of dramatic irony, which sit uneasily and show too much of the novelist’s hand:
Mary O’Leary, another tenant in the building, gives Adolf a length of linen to make himself some clothes (”‘Brown?’ Bridget said dubiously. ‘It’s an odd colour for a shirt’”); and at a hostel, when he is assigned a number rather than a name, Adolf

longed to make a scene, to insist they brand these same numbers on his forehead or his wrist, thus drawing attention to their own lack of humanity.

Geddit? Bainbridge writes well, and in this case undoubtedly the presence of real people as characters gives the book an added weight which its often whimsical tone and brevity wouldn’t otherwise have. Whether that’s enough, however, I’m unsure, and I can’t say I’ll be rushing back to Bainbridge unless I see another of her titles for a knock-down price in a charity shop (though of course I’m always open to recommendations). A word of warning: the back cover blurb in the edition I read (pictured above) gives away the glib but neat last line of the book. Could have saved 218 pages then!