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No 27
Guest
Voila!I think that, as a possible topic of conversation, it has huge potential to generate the sort of vomit-inducing pretentiousness which should be hijacked or, better yet, ignored by all right-thinking people.
Still, we are where we are.
My time would be better spent graffiti-ing shit on an iron bridge.My Review of List of the Lost
(deep breath...)
I lent out my copy of List of the Lost not long after purchase, but I did read it. It would not be the usual topic I’d go for, and I think I felt somewhat baffled on finishing it, but a Cockney soccer-supporting friend ‘got’ the plot faster, and was enthusiastic about the setting and concept. I would not judge the merit of a book by how much I liked it anyway, being ‘just another person in the world’.
In Oscar Wilde’s essay, The Critic As Artist, Gilbert says, “the artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always,” while Ernest concludes, “it is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world; you have told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational.”
So let’s see.
Karl Smith of The Quietus reckoned List of the Lost was the most Morrissey thing Morrissey ever did, and noted it showed persistent disdain for its subject matter, as if boredom was being used as a device. Allowing for sex being hard to write, he compares that scene to “a description of two people playing on the stairs with a slinky.” But if one party is gay, could their point of view not be one of disorienting repulsion while going through with it anyway?
In Complaint!, Sara Ahmed points out that, “to queer use, to open up spaces to those for whom they were not intended often requires a world-dismantling effort,” This does not sound easy, either for those trying to assert their needs, or for those expected to make room.
One Barbie film review cites a previously obscure film from the same year Morrissey’s novel is set, which in a 2022 Sight & Sound magazine poll was nominated Greatest Film of all Time. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) has been called difficult, radical, austere and rigorous; a work that makes no concessions to the audience, but dismantling film form to tell its story of a housewife and single mother who is also a once-a-week prostitute. “Akerman transforms cinema, itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression, into a liberating force,”
There is enough merit in List of the Lost to imagine it will be similarly re-evaluated one day.
Recognition of states of tension, and of the novel form’s power to both elucidate and deceive. chime with the blurb Morrissey prepared for Penguin Books i.e.
'Beware the novelist . . . intimate and indiscreet . . . pompous, prophetic airs . . . here is the fact of fiction . . . an American tale where, naturally, evil conquers good, and none live happily ever after, for the complicated pangs of the empty experiences of flesh-and-blood human figures are the reason why nothing can ever be enough. To read a book is to let a root sink down. List of the lost is the reality of what is true battling against what is permitted to be true.' - Morrissey
The author’s warning that he was not playing it straight evidently could not over-ride expectations for something else.
Oscar Wilde again, this time from The Decay of Lying;
“One of the chief causes of the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction…He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything, and ultimately, between encyclopædias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of useful information from which he never, even in his most thoughtful moments, can thoroughly free himself. ‘The loss that results to literature in general from this false ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated.”
Sounds like Wilde would have poo-poohed sensitivity readers and the growing insistence on ‘authenticity’, happy to conjure up ‘the other’ free of guidelines! But he was half pulling our legs, while exercising his powers of thought and wit, because he did put a lot of his life into his art. Whether a little or a lot, any mix can work, I think. It’s not the decisive measure.
Kenn Sava’ likeable review in Nighthawk NYC stands out for knowledge of the author’s career and work from The Smiths era: the absence of music references is remarked on. Sava’s comments that Morrissey was a teenage runner and accurately described the sport, are funny because they refute the Quietus reviewer’s notion about Morrissey’s ignorance of his subject, for one. But the Nighthawk reviewer then finds the realism, or ‘coincidences’ a problem!! So Morrissey can’t win with most of his critics!
Sava identifies as extra characters both a novel Narrator, and also an Author, quipping, Narrator meets Author! They are very similar, liberally inserting fascinating views on many hot button topics, but they are not the same. Characters’ minds are given voice both from inside and outside, as if all is taking place in the same cosmic mind. The message from this very compact story is to watch out, even if doing so cannot save us!
Reviewing for The Times, Melissa Katsoulis defends Morrissey’s right to relate his tale in textual slipperiness: “What did the reviewers expect? An elegant disquisition on the pitfalls of modern marriage? A tragi-comic look at what can go wrong when you move to the country? ... [This is] a gothic fantasy ... there is a Joycean freedom to its playfulness ... [and] his writing on loss and ageing can be exquisite. ... It's a carnivalesque antidote to all those earnest, urban epics by the graduate trainees of the literary scene. ... Inimitable and irreplaceable. Long may he joyously jiggle his art in our faces, whether we like it or not.”
The Guardian reported Linda Sterling’s “somewhat philosophical take on List of the Lost, which reminds her of her mother’s pronouncements that the Irish are obsessed with death. “Morrissey takes us through the valley of the shadow of death at high speed. We’re all in a relay race with the ghosts of the past and the mewling newborns, there’s no time to dawdle.”’
(Speaking of The Guardian, the tendency of the British press to bad-mouth Morrissey no matter what he does is being tracked on folk-devil.com, which also covers the spiteful reviews for his fiction writing.)
In Morrissey’s unreleased song, By The Time I Get To Wherever I’m Going, the narrator reflects on the utility of knowledge and the passing of time:
Should there come a time
I make use of all of this knowledge
That I drag behind
Like traps, like scraps, like baggage
[Chorus]
There will be no time
There will be no time left with which to
Meet you and talk about logic
And have you on the lawn
He may still grieve over the handicap of limited schooling in the song, Because Of My Poor Education, so how interesting that the highest praise for his novel comes mainly from academic quarters! In his review for Times Higher Education, Uwe Schutte gushes: “In this, his first novel, he delivers superb prose fiction from start to finish. A spellbinding, gnostic tale about the world on a downward spiral.”
Writing a review paper in 2022 for the Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, subtitled ‘But what about me, and What I felt?’, the abstract reveals Brontë Schiltz’s regard:
“In one of the numerous negative reviews, Michael Hann described singer-songwriter Morrissey’s debut novella, List of the Lost (2015), as “an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey’s imagination,” yet from a queer perspective, it is pioneering. This article explores Morrissey’s innovative engagement with Gothic horror, building on his explorations of the mode during his musical career. Throughout the novella, Morrissey subverts numerous Gothic staples, from curative maternity and reproductive futurity to monstrously fragmented subjectivity to condemnations of Catholicism – the latter of which he retains, though to entirely different ends to his Protestant literary ancestors. Through such devices, Morrissey participates in Teresa Goddu’s concept of ‘haunting back,’ turning hostile Gothic tropes on their head to carve out a new space for queer experience within the mode – historically conservative as often as it is transgressive – and reveals the true specter of society to be not difference, but its suppression.”
Just because a novel is difficult and not everybody’s cup of tea is not reason enough to dismiss it. Just because someone knows nothing about brain surgery doesn’t mean they won’t appreciate the value of it.
The last book I read was Edward St. Aubyn’s novel, Lost for Words, published the year before List of the Lost came out. It mocks literary critics, and book award contests and judges, and makes no bones about how far from ideal the whole publishing system is. I felt ambiguous about it but it was smart and did well.
The uphill struggle of Ezra and his friends to find satisfaction in life is so common as to be normal, and the whole reason Buddhism was invented. There is suffering; there can be cessation from suffering. There is no one whose love will ever satisfy another completely but the lucky ones find they can be good enough. Maybe this is one of the messages to be taken away from the tragedy that is List of the Lost.
