68 The New York Review‘Everything Is Fiction’
James WaltonA Shock
by Keith Ridgway.
New Directions, 264 pp., $17.95 (paper)In 2012 Granta published a short story
by Keith Ridgway called “The Spec-
tacular.” Its narrator, Clive Drayton,
is—as Ridgway has acknowledged—a
literary novelist not unlike himself.
“The books I write are well reviewed,”
Clive tells us. “Nobody buys them.”
He therefore decides to abandon his
unprofitable high- mindedness and, by
writing “simply, easily, clearly,” pro-
duce a fast- paced thriller unashamedly
designed to “entertain the fuckers”
(or “readers,” as they’re sometimes
known). In the end, Clive’s would- be
best seller goes unwritten. Yet his ini-
tial dilemma raises—presumably de-
liberately—a central question about
Ridgway’s fiction: Is it too uncompro-
mising for its own good?
Around the same time, Ridgway
told an interviewer that he’s “very con-
scious of the tension between the desire
for coherent stories and the facts and
experiences of living, which are almost
entirely fragmentary.” But by then this
was a tension he was already seeking to
resolve by ignoring that pesky human
desire for coherent stories altogether
and flying the flag for a now possi-
bly unfashionable genre: the difficult
novel.^1 As a result, you generally know
where you are with his more recent fic-
tion: in a state of some puzzlement.
For lovers of his work, such puzzle-
ment appears to be part of his appeal.
His publisher has declared that “Keith
bamboozles you”—a verb also used by
Ian Rankin when choosing Ridgway’s
Hawthorn and Child as his favorite
book of 2012. For Ridgway agnostics,
however, there remains the possibility
that his lack of commercial success
isn’t solely due to the philistinism of to-
day’s readers with their lowbrow wish
to know what’s going on. A Shock,
Ridgway’s first novel in nine years (“I
just lost interest in writing” was his la-
conic explanation), seems unlikely to
cause either group to radically revise
its opinion.
Ridgway was born in Dublin, where
his 1998 debut novel, The Long Falling,
is largely set (hence its simile “as grey
as sky” for a shade of paint). By any
standards, not merely Ridgway’s later
ones, it’s a coherent story—and quite
a dramatic one. Grace Quinn is an En-
glishwoman ill at ease in rural Ireland,
where she lives with her violent hus-
band. Until, that is, she murders him.
She then goes to Dublin to stay with her
gay son, Martin. Of course, try as she
touchingly might, Grace isn’t much at
home amid the city’s gay scene either,
and Ridgway writes of the growing awk-
wardness between mother and son with
a psychological realism that combines
the funny, the sharp- eyed, and the ten-
der. Once the police close in, the novel
also becomes properly suspenseful.Looking back on The Long Falling
in 2012, Ridgway was impressed by
how the “naive little creature” that
was his younger self had written from a
middle- aged woman’s perspective and
included “lots of gay sex.” Nonetheless,
he had one major reservation—chiefly,
it seems, to do with the book’s narrative
coherence: “I felt...it wasn’t true...
that it was faked. Forced. Contrived.”
In the same interview, he was more
unambiguously scathing—and, I would
argue, even more unfair—about The
Parts (2003), which interweaves the
lives of six very different Dubliners to
what most of us might regard as bril-
liant effect. Ridgway writes about all
six with equal assurance, whether a
rich invalid, a rent boy, or a drunken
radio presenter. As the interweaving
intensifies, so does the depiction of
Dublin during the “Celtic Tiger” boom
years. And so, too, does the plot- driven
excitement, which wouldn’t have been
out of place in the type of fast- paced
thriller that Clive Drayton had in mind.
The result, in my view, is Ridgway’s
most satisfying novel. But not in
Ridgway’s. The Parts, he said, “is al-
most entirely fake. It’s a terrible book.”
Indeed, “it so shocked me that I had
written it that I completely stopped what
I was doing and tried to start again.” For
that reason, Animals (2 0 0 6) “ feels to me
now like my proper first novel,” when “I
stopped trying to write novels and just
wrote.” And with that, the bamboozling
began, as he bade farewell to contrived
coherence and lit out for the more au-
thentically puzzling and fragmentary.Animals opens with the unnamed
narrator wondering for five pages if he
should poke a dead mouse he finds on
a London street—and, if so, with what.
(Spoiler alert: he does, with a pen.) He
then spends eight more pages staring
at it. Over lunch, his architect friendMichael tells him about a four- story of-
fice block that’s “haunted” by the three-
story building it has replaced. (“The
first manifestation... was the inability of
the lifts to reach the top floor.”) During
an afternoon swim in his local pool,
he reflects on how he and his partner
have been having very similar dreams,
the details of which take another four-
teen pages, despite his knowing—as
Ridgway must too—that nobody likes
hearing about other people’s dreams.
At which point the pool’s ceiling falls in.
And from there the oddness never
lets up. In one scene, the narrator is
threatened by feral animals in a park
at night, describing them with terri-
fying vividness before adding, “None
of this is true.” In another, a famously
glamorous actor, Catherine Anderson,
invites him to her house, where he hap-
pens across boxes of films, labeled by
date, of her defecating in split- screen:
the first camera on her face, the second
aimed upward from inside the toilet.
Yet while Ridgway undeniably suc-
ceeds in casting off coherent realism,
Animals hangs together more closely
than it might appear. Thinking back on
the mouse (as he regularly does), the
narrator feels that, for all its “elaborate
menace” it supplied him with “a kind
of breakthrough. As if... some veil had
lifted from the world... and that I had
acquired a kind of wisdom.” Charac-
teristically, he has “no idea” what this
wisdom is, but the notion that animals
represent the elemental world lying be-
neath the human one recurs through-
out the novel.
After that sighting (or nonsighting)
of the feral creatures, for instance,
there’s a passage that now has a dis-
tinctly Covid tinge:We believe... that the world is
ours...but...we have forgotten
what the world is, we have forgot-
ten the terror and the threat, wethink we are solid, but we could be
flung to the ground in a second, by
any one of a million sudden things.Understanding the book this way also
explains why even “Catherine Ander-
son’s... anus is a pinched glimpse of
truth”:All we see is this layer that we have
thrown over the world, like a carpet
put down on a floor. And all that
Catherine Anderson is trying to do
with her hidden cameras and her
filmed shitting, is to rip up the car-
pet... and see what’s underneath.^2There is, however, a twist. Ridgway’s
newfound commitment to bamboozle-
ment means that understanding the
book this way (or any other) might well
involve misunderstanding it—because
Animals firmly suggests that “under-
standing” is itself just another carpet
we throw over the world, “a conspiracy
of convenience... as invented as the
wristwatch.”
Fortunately, then, hubristic under-
standing is not something likely to af-
flict many readers of his next novel. Not
only does Hawthorn and Child take the
narrative fragmentation still further—
filling its pages with Chekhov guns that
go defiantly unfired—but it also does
away with any obvious thematic links.
In the first chapter, the two eponymous
London policemen investigate an ap-
parently random shooting. For sixty
pages—when Ridgway isn’t telling us
about Hawthorn’s dreams—they fol-
low up clues in the approved manner,
leading the more naive reader to expect
that at some stage we’ll find out what
happened. In fact, the shooting is never
mentioned again, and instead Ridgway
gives us seven more discrete chapters,
some featuring other Hawthorn and
Child cases (unsolved, naturally), oth-
ers in which they’re barely glimpsed in
the background.
One or two are surprisingly straight-
forward. A tale of teenage love, in par-
ticular, provides a slightly frustrating
reminder of how good Ridgway remains
at old- school psychological realism. In
most, his policy of “just writing” means
we get a mixture of the intriguing and
the flat- out baffling. “I don’t know
what’s going on,” he’s said of the novel
with apparent satisfaction—perhaps
agreeing with the publisher character
who narrates an especially mystifying
chapter that “knowing things... kills
them.”^3 Ridgway has said that he en-
joys “crime fiction a great deal”—but
only the first two thirds of each book.
The last third generally “ceases to have
anything to do with our experienced
world and becomes... a kind of neu-
rotic tidying of life’s mess.”
Yet even leaving aside that a kind of
tidying of life’s mess—neurotic or oth-
erwise—might be a fairly serviceableKeith Ridgway; illustration by Leanne Shapton(^1) “‘We like difficult books,’ littérateurs
used to claim; and this supposed pref-
erence turned into a rallying- cry for
the cause of High Modernism. Perhaps
we did indeed once like difficult books.
But we don’t like them any more. Dif-
ficult novels are dead”—Martin Amis,
Inside Story (2020).
(^2) Perhaps similarly, Philip Larkin called
defecation the daily “contact with
nature.”
(^3) In that chapter, the publisher luridly
describes several murders he’s commit-
ted. He also informs us near the end
that “I have never killed anyone in my
life.”
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