December 16, 2021 75definition of art, Hawthorn and Child
raises another problem with Ridgway’s
later novels: for all his efforts, they
often feel a lot less like “our experi-
enced world” than his earlier novels
do. There’s clearly a case to be made
for trying to render life as it is before
the contrivances of fiction get to it. But
if a fragmented novel’s fragments are
too self- consciously weird (a religious
sect, say, that imagines Jesus during the
years not covered in the Gospels “fuck-
ing the strongest of women”), there’s
little sense of life as it is. Instead, the
supposed lack of contrivance seems it-
self contrived.Hawthorn and Child picked up admir-
ing reviews, with Zadie Smith joining
Ian Rankin among Ridgway’s celebrity
fans. Wider success, though, duly failed
to follow, except for the always equiv-
ocal designation of “cult novel.” And
after that he took his seemingly relaxed
break from fiction (“I was completely
content with the idea that I would not
write again”) until the sudden arrival
of the suitably named A Shock.
Like its predecessor, the book com-
prises chapters that could be read
as short stories. This time, however,
there’s more overlap, as all the char-
acters live in the same South London
neighborhood, some know one an-
other, and most drink in a pub called
the Arms. The novel also continues the
progress from the rather chilly mod-
ernism of Animals to a greater sense of
warmth. (“I really do love the charac-
ters in this book,” Ridgway has said.)
And while his fans needn’t worry that
it can be easily parsed, the same in-
creased warmth extends to the reader.
Or at least it does in the first half of
the book—because, as it turns out, A
Shock is pretty much a microcosm of
Ridgway’s career, with the battle be-
tween his narrative strengths and his
antinarrative anxieties ultimately won
by the anxieties. What makes their
victory especially vexing in this case is
that the strengths put up such a good
fight that for a while Ridgway looks to
have at last found a way to maintain an
equilibrium between the two factions.
In the opening chapter, “The Party,”
an unnamed gay male couple visit an
unnamed widow in the terraced house
next door to let her know they’re having
a party on Saturday. The woman seems
to them (and us) an identikit lonely
old lady, but after they’ve left, a subtly
shifting series of pronouns reveals that
she’d once been part of a lesbian cou-
ple until her much- loved partner tran-
sitioned into an equally beloved man.
On the Saturday night, still mourning
“two ghosts with the one face,” she fan-
tasizes that a bored girl from the party
might come round and ask to hear
her story. She then sees a dent in her
kitchen wall and wonders if she could
make a crack big enough to eavesdrop
on the fun next door. Before long, she’s
pulled off so much plaster that she can
squeeze into the gap between the two
properties, where a convenient hole
enables her to watch what’s going on.
Now completely trapped, she is spotted
by a girl very like the one in her fan-
tasy. “But wait. Wait until I tell you,”
the chapter ends. “This story I have.”
“The Party” appeared as a short
story in The New Yorker, but it also
works perfectly as an overture here.
The succeeding chapters introduce us
to several people who will later be atthe party, while also amplifying the no-
tions of being trapped, holes that afford
a glimpse of a different world, and the
need to tell stories.
Meanwhile, of course, Ridgway
doesn’t seamlessly move on to the
woman telling hers. Like most of the
chapters, the second begins with a pro-
noun referring to someone we haven’t
met before—although we soon discover
that this “he” is Gary, who’s drinking
in the Arms with his old schoolfriend
Stan. Here, it’s the “childhood loyalty
that had outlived their friendship”
which is both the trap and the story they
tell themselves, until they drift apart
for reasons that they, and we, only half
comprehend. Yet unlike in Hawthorn
and Child, the absence of a tidy reso-
lution seems less of a literary device (or
even part of a literary manifesto) and
more as if Ridgway were achieving his
aim of conveying the uncertainties in-
herent in life as it is.
The same applies to “The Sweat,”
the most “difficult” chapter so far, but
one in which the difficulty feels like
a natural (possibly the only) way to
express what’s happening, and does
so without leaving us perplexed as to
what actually has. Its initial “he” turns
out—nine pages later—to be Tommy,
who is tripping on various drugs as
he delivers pills to an older gay man
named Frank. The first few pages re-
flect Tommy’s state of mind—which
is to say they’re all over the place as
time slows down and his thoughts slip.
Luckily, Frank proves a kindly sort,
who shares his own extensive drug col-
lection while the two catch up on gos-
sip and languidly play with each other’s
genitals. There are moments of druggy
paranoia and of the ambivalence about
gay hedonism that occasionally sur-
faces in Ridgway’s work. Nevertheless,
this is a funny, warm chapter in which
his love for his characters is particu-
larly evident.
It does finish with a wildly rambling
three- page sentence spoken by Tommy,
but this comes across less as Ridgway
self- consciously seeking to bamboo-
zle than as a comically accurate rep-
resentation of someone high who has
suddenly grasped the meaning of life.
And maybe he has—because Tommy’s
epic sentence is the nearest thing in the
novel to an author’s message. Happi-
ness, Tommy (eventually) argues, is
like the experience cavers have when,
after being trapped in a tunnel with the
Earth pressing from all sides, they sud-
denly burst into “a huge and beautiful
cavern... with a beautiful shock.”
Sure enough, it’s precisely this sort
of shock for which most of the char-
acters are yearning, including the im-
mured widow in the first chapter, who
at one point murmurs to herself, “Take
off your life like trousers”: words from
Anne Sexton’s aptly titled poem “The
Wall,” which also contains the lines
“We are all earthworms.... We live be-
neath the ground.”“The Joke,” another deft blend of
the ordinary and the strange, features
Stan’s partner, Maria. Over coffee a
coworker, Anna, shares with Maria
the story of her husband, a historian
who, after suffering brain damage,
died laughing when a comedian friend
told him a joke. Only later does Maria
learn from another colleague that
none of this is true. “Why did you lie
to me?” she texts Anna. “I just like toentertain,” Anna replies. Maria ends
up undecided as to whether she should
forgive the lie but pretty sure that ev-
erything in life is “made up” anyway.
In this she has an ally in Ridgway, who
has written that he believes “every-
thing is fiction. Absolutely everything.”
And as if to prove it, the subsequent
chapter returns to the Arms, where
Anna is with a man known variously
as Stoker, Yves, Yan, and Yanko (i.e.,
somebody with at least three fictional
identities). The two exchange stories
purely for the fun of it, trying to work
out how best to make them sound true.
But it’s at this halfway mark, I’d
suggest, that Ridgway’s antinarrative
impulses begin their march to victory.
From here on, A Shock no longer feels
like the book that will finally recon-
cile his early coherence and later frag-
mentation, won’t strain too hard for its
strangeness, and will have enough re-
gard for its readers not to leave us feel-
ing at times trapped in a tunnel longing
for a sudden bursting into light. Instead,
we seem to be back in the presence of
a writer who sees it as his primary task
to challenge both us and the customary
satisfactions of fiction—largely by ban-
ishing them in favor of literary tricksi-
ness, a principled indifference to the
reader’s desire for understanding, and
lots of “just writing.”
It’s with a sinking of the heart, for
example, that we agnostics realize that
most of the stories Anna and “the man
she is calling Yves” swap are variations
on the book’s other chapters (such as
a slightly different woman trapped in
a slightly different wall): a somewhat
clunkily meta means of confirming
that all is fiction—including, unsur-
prisingly, fiction. It doesn’t help, either,
that the next, and longest, chapter is a
punishing reminder that the willfully
boring is still boring.
David, a young gay man, moves into a
new apartment. Now and again, there’s
some sex to liven things up. There are
also strong hints that David is not well.
But for far too much of the time we get
an endless series of sentences, mainly
beginning with “he,” that detail all his
activities, however dull:He dresses in boxer shorts, a blue
shirt, grey trousers, socks, black
shoes. He goes back to the bath-
room. He curses, then he comes
back to the bedroom and combs
his hair in front of the mirror there.
He goes back to the bathroom. He
comes back again with a bottle of
hair gel. He squeezes a small drop
in the palm of his left hand.We’re also kept fully up to speed on
how many flies are in any of David’s
four rooms at any given time—al-
though, in an unwelcome return to the
willfully baffling, Ridgway occasion-
ally refers to a hidden fifth room, with-
out explaining what or where it might
be. And, just to complete the revival of
his less beguiling habits, the following
chapter brings us a character named
Pigeon whose dreams are related with
due thoroughness.The novel hits the back straight with
“The Meeting,” in which Harry, the
Arms’s publican, has news of a party
being held by a local gay couple on
Saturday night. Even so, the scene that
most readers are likely to remember—
and that might even act as a handytest of where you stand on Ridgway’s
work—is the one in which his interest
in the ambiguously revelatory power of
mice reaches its apotheosis.
After Harry locks up and goes to bed,downstairs a mouse called Trou-
badour Anx improved the scurry
tunnel under the north wall....
Obscured by a crate of empty bot-
tles was the entrance to the system
of ramps both Troubadour Anx
and her brother Altar Phen had
designed and constructed over the
past several weeks.The next night, when the lights are
mysteriously turned on and off, Harry
heads downstairs to investigate and sees
“a mouse bounce off his chest, and then
another, and another, and [he] looked
up, and saw that they were legion and
untold, impossible, endless.” And these
mice, it appears, are on a mission: “They
seemed to present to him petitions and
requests, and they seemed to him to
know a different aspect of the world.”
Eventually, Harry’s eyes are “squirm-
ingly covered,” and he wonders “if
the whole world was ending this way,
drowned in mice, or if it was just The
Arms, or just him... and he wondered
then, and the mice wondered with
him... what the difference was.”
True Ridgway believers will no
doubt simply enjoy the vivid wildness
of this image. Readers less sure about
him may find themselves stuck with the
troublesome business of striving for
meaning. As we’ve seen, mice showing
“a different aspect of the world” aren’t
new in Ridgway’s fiction. But how are
we supposed to take this scene? Lit-
erally? Symbolically? As another of
Ridgway’s dreams? (After all, Harry
is alive and well when the party takes
place a few days later.) Or is this more
of his “just writing”?
The final chapter returns us to
the opening party, now seen from
the inside, where we catch glimpses
of Tommy, Maria, Stan, David, and
Stoker / Yve s / Ya n / Ya n ko, who’s now
calling himself Michael, acting like a
stage Irishman and singing a song in
the living room when Maria spots an
eye glinting in the kitchen wall. The
book finishes with two one- sentence
paragraphs:Perhaps it should have started
this way.
Perhaps it does.According to the publishers, this is
“a knockout punch of an ending.” But
for those of us still on our feet, more
questions pose themselves—mostly
about what the “it” refers to. The obvi-
ous answer is the book itself, but since
A Shock did start that way, this doesn’t
seem a particularly stunning twist.
“I am filled with uncertainty about
everything that seems to happen in
anything I write,” Ridgway has said.
“It’s very difficult to get that on to the
page without... boring the reader.” Un-
fortunately, the second half of A Shock
rather confirms just how difficult it is.
Moreover, Ridgway’s prizing of autho-
rial uncertainty as a badge of authentic-
ity now seems in some danger of leading
him to a dead end. After all, using his
abundant talents to butt up with such
determination against the limitations
of fiction has so far succeeded mainly
in suggesting that some of those limita-
tions are annoyingly real. QWalton 68 75 .indd 75 11 / 18 / 21 12 : 18 PM