Don't by Jenny Diski Granta 307pp, £9.99 in UK
Jenny Diski is perhaps best known as a novelist, but Don't is made up mostly of material first published in the London Review of Books, to which she is a regular contributor. Scattered among her book reviews in this volume are various essays or columns on subjects such as a creativity course for executives, her own burial plans, and life among the Carmelites and Poor Clares. It's all lively stuff. If the term "scintillating" isn't appropriate it's only because one can't imagine Diski deigning to use a word with such a bloated sense of itself. Her prose is direct yet deeply analytical, her style invigorating, her insights original and her barbs well placed.
There are a lot of the latter, because there are a lot of books Diski clearly hasn't liked. (There must be an essay to be written, maybe even by Diski herself, on the plight of the reviewer sent nothing but trash. An essay? Why not a musical?) Generally, they are biographies, of characters as diverse as Anne Frank and Robert Maxwell, Denis Thatcher and Howard Hughes, Anais Nin, Dennis Potter and Jeffrey Dahmer.
The latter is the American who had killed seventeen people by the age of thirty-one, and who kept severed heads, hearts, genitalia and other body parts in his fridge, freezer and bath, for unspeakable purposes. Dahmer is one of the characters who engages Diski's interest on psychological grounds - in this instance, whether or not it's worthwhile confronting extreme wickedness in an effort to achieve some understanding, or whether we may as well "look away", as many decide to do. In the end she is inclined to agree with Dahmer himself when he answers the question of whether or not he is of vital interest - "This the grand finale of a life poorly spent . . . How it can help anyone, I've no idea." Yet Diski's journey towards this conclusion is hugely perceptive. Brian Masters, who tells Dahmer's story, comes out reasonably well in the review of his book. Not so Elizabeth ("Betty") Maxwell, wife of the late and notorious Robert: she is properly skewered, her tale of married life with Big Bob made the target of Diski's withering scorn. But mocking Betty Maxwell's self-deluding tale is all too easy for someone of Diski's talent. In the end her review serves only to evoke sympathy - however mistaken - for the family of such a bully.
Regarding another oddity, the late Howard Hughes, Diski reminds us that he had to have exactly twelve peas on his dinner plate each day: any pea too big to be threaded on his fork was returned to the chef and replaced with another of standard size. Once you know this, says Diski, everything else follows. Well, it does and it doesn't; many people might be peculiar with peas, but not all obsessives would respond to a movie star's repeated refusals of intimacy by bedding, in front of her, a rubber doll made up to the star's exact anatomical proportions. This might or might not send one sidling off to buy Charles Higham's book, Howard Hughes, The Secret Life, but Diski almost finds Hughes himself preferable to his biographer, "whose moral fervour in telling this wretched story twangs with self-righteousness". Oh well, better get something else for the holiday reading, then. In her piece on the Roald Dahl biography by Jeremy Treglown, Diski herself could be accused on occasion of self-righteousness: "Dahl's gambling, boasting, sexual flightiness and public tantrums all point in the direction of arrested emotional development." There is almost a vindictive glee is retailing stories about Dahl's undoubted awfulness - though Diski asserts elsewhere that we should not care what people do in their private lives if their work inspires. With Diski you always get the sense of a woman searching for Meaning, but one who is contended enough even if she finds it with a small "m". Good humour infuses her work, though, like many a good reviewer, she can be ratty when the rat's response is the only one appropriate. She never loses her questing, optimistic spirit.
Brendan Glacken is an Irish Times staff journalist