The New York Review of Books - USA (2021-12-16)

68 The New York Review

‘Everything Is Fiction’

James Walton

A 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 friend

Michael 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, we

think 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.^2

There 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 serviceable

Keith 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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