一本也未讀過......
The top 10 novels about lost friendships
From JD Salinger to Jonathan Coe, novelist Chris Killen lists the favourite books he’s stuck by while failing to keep up with his real-life connections
Read the Guardian’s review of In Real Life by Chris Killen
Read the Guardian’s review of In Real Life by Chris Killen
Ian, one of the protagonists of my novel In Real Life, is just as useless a friend as I always seem to end up being. Depressed, unemployed and attempting to avoid the internet, he carries around a large brown envelope, stuffed full of unanswered letters from his friend Andrew in Japan, intending to reply just “as soon as something good happens” to him.
And in the meantime, he merely transports these letters from rented room to rented room, re-reading them for comfort, in exactly the same way I might carry around and re-read any one of the following 10 novels, instead of catching up with my own neglected friendships.
1. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
Berie and Sils meet first as teenagers in the 70s. They become fast, intense friends while working at a tacky amusement park called Storyland, and then again, years later, at a high school reunion. Like all Lorrie Moore’s work, this novel is elegant, sad and, best of all, incredibly, dazzlingly, pirouetting-ly witty.
2. An Unfortunate Woman by Richard Brautigan
This posthumously published novel-autobiographical-notebook-thing defies straightforward categorisation, but it is gentle, bittersweet, bleakly humorous, and very moving. It reads as a meandering conversation between author, reader, and – somewhat obliquely – two female friends of Brautigan’s, one who committed suicide and the other who died of cancer; both of whom he misses deeply.
3. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
Beautifully written and quietly playful in its mixture of lies, truth and shifting, dreamlike perspectives, the unnamed narrator of A Sport and a Pastime chronicles, among other things, his short and intense friendship with a young American expat during an endless summer in France.
4. The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe
House of Sleep spans a number of years in the lives of a set of friends-cum-acquaintances who meet first at university, and then reappear unexpectedly in each others’ lives, years down the line. And running through it all, Sarah and Robert’s almost-romance is especially touching and bittersweet. Intricately constructed and gently funny, it’s written with a real compassion for its characters.
5. Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie
Charles spends his days drifting and moping and remembering small moments of tenderness he once shared with Laura. Filled with tiny exciting details, and all the while effortlessly funny, this novel brings Charles and Laura’s lost friendship back to life with infectious warmth and humour.
6. Naïve. Super by Erlend Loe
The narrator of Erlend Loe’s novel is, like my character Ian, a directionless, displaced child-man who doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with himself. And one of the few things he does do is keep a fragile, long-distance relationship with a meteorologist friend alive via fax machine.
7. Travelling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker
Poor old Paul Chowder. Over the course of The Anthologist and this, its sequel, I’ve kind of come to regard the gentle, hapless poet-narrator of these novels as a personal friend due to the sheer warmth and confessional intimacy with which he addresses me. And in this novel, Paul spends the majority of his time missing and yearning for his friend (and ex) Roz.
8. How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Sheila and Margaux’s friendship becomes so intense it begins to buckle beneath the strain, turning the two BFFs (for a while at least) into enemies in this funny, wry and searingly honest portrait of a young woman making mistakes – and writing excellent, witty emails.
9. Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates
This is a ruthless, kaleidoscopic examination of failed dreams, brimming with excruciating moments of unflinching honesty. (Sounds like fun, right? Honestly, it actually is, in a really uncomfortable comedy-of-embarrassment way.) And in Michael and Tom’s friendship especially, what begins as good-natured rivalry ends up as something far more sour and uncomfortable .
10. Seymour: An Introduction by JD Salinger
I’m sure I read somewhere that Salinger stopped publishing because he didn’t want to put his most-loved characters, the Glass family, under the scrutiny of readers any more. And even if it turns out that that isn’t quite true, its still abundantly clear from this strange, lovely, touching and weird novel (OK, technically it’s a novella, but come on) that Salinger loves, misses and mourns for his friend Seymour every bit as much as Buddy, the book’s narrator and Seymour’s younger brother.
• In Real Life is published by Canongate priced £12.99. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop for £10.39
沒有留言:
張貼留言