Bits of Me Are Falling Apart: Dark Thoughts from the Middle Years by William Leith 208pp, Bloomsbury, £10.99
What's Going On? The Meanderings of a Comic Mind in Confusion
by Mark Steel
256pp, Simon & Schuster, £12.99
The lack of a proper bed brings it home, it seems. So when comedian Mark Steel and journalist William Leith find themselves sleeping (separately) on a settee in the living room and a mattress in the office, the parlous state of the world synergises with the meaning of being over 40, and each bursts into publication. There are the kids, wife or girlfriend, house and proper bed on the one hand; and there's Steel and Leith cut loose from the bosom of, back to square one, personal inadequacies, the Iraq war, entropy, greed, the failure of socialism, the implacability of biology, on the other. And time - marching onward.
Exactly how the state of the world bleeds into their personal pain differs according to each author's general relation to the world. Leith's self-obsession - his hypochondria, his lack of sustained relationships or continuing professional success - overwhelms current events, so that the state of the world serves mostly to point up his private miseries. He details the minute interior deaths within the body (ageing, that is), cellular misreadings, dramatising them as the heroic and dastardly doings of goodies and baddies, citing Saving Private Ryan and The Great Escape. His favourite books by the likes of Richard Ford, Amis and Updike have the kind of loser heroes a man can surreptitiously look up to, and Leith's own loserness reads more like strutting than real self-hatred. He rants against the world (ventriloquising Philip Roth), tries to meander into metaphors of science and war mildly and insidiously (like Vonnegut), pontificates (like Bellow) and makes broad and shallow sociological and political observations (like Tom Wolfe), all in a parroty, man-at-the-end-of-his-tether stream of consciousness.
Leith suggests that Mel Gibson has summed up the human situation in Apocalypto, when a one-armed sage announces that man's essential problem is that "he wants too much, and eventually the earth has no more to give". How miserable must the human situation be if Mel Gibson has the answer to it? Leith's own need for a mortgage sets off a disquisition on the history and nature of capitalism (a busted flush, apparently); his own perceived lack of moral fibre gives us an excessively admirable Nelson as a contrast; his physical self-absorption references the late John Diamond's public dying; and his present homelessness (though is possession of an office to be entirely homeless?) instigates a description of John Cheever's 1964 short story, "The Swimmer". He tells us what Archimedes did and why Amundsen beat Scott to the Antarctic. The book is meant to be an interior cri de coeur, but it reads like old hat, and clumsily confected old hat at that.
Mark Steel is more a stand-up comedian than a writer. His book shouts, rather as he does, and depends too heavily on the absurd exemplar and over-logical conclusion to make his point. "It's as if. . .", "I wondered if. . .", "Maybe when. . ." is how he repeatedly brings out the underlying ridiculousness of a situation. It's a bit clunky, and it feels as if the need to make a joke overrides the more difficult simplicity of just being funny. But he presents the relation between his problems and those of the world in a sharper, less wallowing perspective than Leith. He too is appalled to be confused at 40, but in addition to the failure of his marriage, his political certainties have fallen apart.
Steel situates his personal angst beneath the civic confusion of the mass of disgruntled voters who have discovered that they're helpless to change anything. A million people marched against the war in Iraq and no one took any notice. The gap between rich and poor has grown enormously under New Labour. Blair's and now Brown's party is obsessed with wealth and turning a profit. Steel and the rest of us are baffled.
As a paid-up member of the Socialist Workers party and Respect, he used not to be baffled - at least he was part of a group with shared convictions. The radical left was even starting to pick up some of those disgruntled voters. Then George Galloway pussy-catted on Big Brother, and Tommy Sheridan sued the papers about alleged visits to a swingers' club - and the left in England and Scotland became a joke. At least in other parts of the world, Steel moans, the left "comes to grief because they're shot, imprisoned or exiled". He can no longer avoid the fact that the left is in denial. When Steel doubts the SWP claim that the party has 10,000 members, he's told: "We have to redefine the definition of member."
Time to cancel the subs. Time, too, to recognise that his bad marriage can no longer be sustained. Unlike Leith, Steel does some serious rethinking, and does not just suffer loss. He wonders, against his former SWP judgment, if small-scale, personal dissent against the local McDonald's or Tesco doesn't have more effect than he'd thought. If the organisation and networks of the old left were grafted on to the new popular forms of opposition, there might still be hope for a new socialism in which the young can participate.
Both men are writing in and of their late 40s, complaining about finding themselves stuck in the human condition, suddenly aware that, quite possibly, there's less time to come than there has been already. For my money, Mark Steel whines better. It used to be that men went all weak-kneed and mortality-conscious in their 30s, but it takes longer to grow up these days. Just imagine how those of us in our 60s are feeling, and man up, guys.
·
Jenny Diski's new book Apology for the Woman Writing will be published by Virago in November
Comments