FictionThe risk Toby Litt takes in his new novel, Finding Myself, is to pretend it's actually the work of somebody else, the work of a bad writer, an annoying bestselling chicklit author with the suitably annoying name, Victoria About.
Probably the most successful aspect of this prolonged joke is the book's presentation, from its garishly flowery cover to Victoria's biographical note (her previous works, we are told, include Incredibly Well-Hung: A Satire of the Art World) and a text that is supposedly a pre-publication manuscript, spattered with crossings-out and stern handwritten notes from Victoria's editor, Simona ("this is all P.B.B. - from now on P.B.B. equals pretentious beyond belief"), who is also one of the book's main characters.
This presentation, along with the simple diary structure, provides a kick-start for an idea that only gradually, and then with increasing relentlessness, reveals itself to be insufficient to sustain a 400-page novel. Victoria's plan is to gather together a dozen or so friends and acquaintances for a month in a country house, at her publisher's expense, where she will observe their behaviour (largely through hidden cameras and microphones) and act as an agent provocateur, breaking up existing relationships and engineering new ones, all the while taking notes for the Virginia Woolf-like book she hopes to write about her Big Sister experience.
To start with, all this seems quite clever and contemporary and an opportunity to take satirical aim at some relatively easy targets. The crass Victoria first chooses a pretty standardised group of characters to people her project, almost interchangeable in their Bridget Jones-ish attitudes, manners and way of talking. The exception to this is the black, disabled, lesbian, working-class Denise, grudgingly invited along as a token representative of all the "minorities" and then sentimentalised for her wholesome kind-heartedness. The twist is that Victoria's plans and predictions for these people prove, unsurprisingly, to be wildly misjudged, and it is she who ends up the victim of her own machinations.
But where has Toby Litt disappeared to in all this? The author has, it seems, quite quickly evicted himself from the household he has created. He has grown a little too comfortable with his Victoria impersonation, and is happy to let her get on with her bad writing, her dull characterisations, her less than startling plot "revelations" about ghosts, sexuality and terminal illness, her worry that she is trivial and that the whole project was not worth embarking on in the first place. The point of the parody has been forgotten and it rolls on and on without any distanced, alternative voice to add fresh humour or insight.
As the story meanders to its end, the interest peters out; the book has become just a bad example of the thing it is imitating.
Toby Litt is a product of the University of East Anglia's creative writing course and is on the Granta list of Best British Novelists Under 40. His previous books, including the highly-praised deadkidsongs (compared by some to A Clockwork Orange) and the thriller, Corpsing, have ranged across genres, and Litt has had various labels pinned on him, from New Puritan to postmodernist. One peculiar detail is that he starts the names of his books with successive letters of the alphabet (from Adventures in Capitalism through to Finding Myself); it is clear that he is interested in exercises, games and formulas. But after this experiment in chicklit, it would be good if an authentic Littlit would make itself known, before the alphabet trick gets to be a zzz.
Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist
Finding Myself By Toby Litt Penguin, 425pp, £14.99