There are certain authors, that is to say certain books, that we are especially glad to have discovered. And when we discover something new and significant in our lives, the moment when it occurred is memorable. I discovered Todd Mcewen by looking up “happenstance” in the OED and finding an illustration of its use in a quote from one of his novels. Which itself was in instance of happenstance. I might otherwise have ended my days bereft of his soul, wit & verbal skills.
I wonder what impressed the dictionary compilers so much that they decided to scan McEwen’s works.* His entry in Wikipedia is brief, being accused of “multiple issues” and hence demoted to a “stub”: evidence of his modesty and/or disinterest in marketing. His wife is Lucy Ellmann, daughter of an illustrious biographer (Joyce, Wilde, Yeats), and a prize-winning novelist in her own right. Her Wikipedia entry is almost as terse, also dismissed as a stub.
Impulsively, I bought 3 of Todd’s books straight off and another soon after. Who Sleeps with Katz is surely his masterpiece to date. I’m not attempting a review here, just putting down my own thoughts on it to share with the few who read these pages.
It’s a proper novel, setting out as you might say “The Lives and Opinions of McK & Katz, Gentlemen”†: two old friends who love and hate “this our town” (New York), sometimes dreaming of escape. It’s a compendium, a “laugh-aloud bittersweet threnody”‡, of obsessions, fetishes, sex, tobacco, books, bars, Martinis and close encounters with women. Nothing lasts. The intricate plot with all its thoughts, flashbacks and insights emanates from looming awareness of McK’s lung cancer. The sense that nothing can last: everything we hold precious is doomed. We are in a masculine world where dignity is to be maintained at all costs. Our heroes clutch at personal exoneration, ulterior blame. McK likes to believe it was one careless cigarette out of an estimated 273,500 over 25 years which was solely responsible for his disease. He wants to rule out the pipes and cigars—too pleasurable, surely innocent.
But Isidor Katz, whose grief is no less, cannot seize comfort from such illusion. In the final chapter, Martini III, he cries out, in his cups and in extremis:
I mean, what I want to know is, WHAT IS THIS PLANT FOR? Does everything we like have to kill us? Loving something, and knowing that love, causes your death? Inevitably? Maybe that’s the way we all die, thrusting ourselves into the perfect drink, the girl with the highest heels, the best job, the best book . . . you eventually find the best book to read and it kills you.
Together or separately, McK & Isidor spend their days clinging—in fantasy, memory or deed—to whatever precious thing can be rescued from oblivion.
* A suspicion forms in my mind that the OED harbours someone who respects the literary judgement of Granta Books.
Here are the illustrative quotes it draws from Who Sleeps with Katz:
pastrami 2003 T. McEwen Who sleeps with Katz p187 People who think they ought to like pastrami since they now live in New York—in timid slices out of vacuum ‘paks’ from the supermarkets of suburb.
merthiolate 2003 T. McEwen Who sleeps with Katz p193 The sense of emergency in the park, the time of bandaging, the smell of tincture merthiolate iced their blood.
ice (to make cold, chill) 2003 T. McEwen Who sleeps with Katz p193 The sense of emergency in the park, the time of bandaging, the smell of tincture merthiolate iced their blood.
‡ From the front cover:
A laugh-aloud and bittersweet threnody … an exquisite Joycean prayer to the daily Gods of New York—Alan Warner
a wayfarer’s notes 