A slippered pantaloon
Helen Osborne
A SERIOUS MAN by David Storey Cape, £16.99, pp. 288 hat about me?' wails put-upon Etty, putative New Woman and daughter of Richard Fenchurch, the eponymous 'Serious Man'. Having scooped him out of a shambolic, reclusive life in London to clinical domesticity in Yorkshire, she runs out of patience: 'An author who writes books which no one reads,' she accuses, 'who produces plays which no one troubles to revive. A painter who paints pictures which are plagiarised by others.'
David Storey, too, is author, playwright and painter. This is his first novel for 14 years, and a disturbingly obsessive one. 'A humanist in an age of neurosis and romance is bound to go unnoticed,' says Fenchurch. True, but — ignoring the abun- dant autobiographical signals — let's hope that this has been a cathartic experience for Storey rather than a flagellating exercise.
Fenchurch, once acclaimed as the lead- ing writer of his generation, has been brought back to Ardsley Old House, a glowering mansion in a former mining vil- lage where Etty now lives, where Bea, his ex-wife, grew up and where, as a working- class lad, he had his first passionate affair with Bea's 52-year-old mother. All his women seem to have been preternaturally self-absorbed, but it is this initial Lawren- tial idyll which has haunted him ever since.
Back at Ardsley, his artist's eye marks the now silent pits, the stone walls and the trees under which he was 'vouchsafed' by his flame-haired future mother-in-law. In the real world, 50 years on, there is cold comfort. 'You're written out,' his psychia- trist tells him. 'Fame and fortune, let's face it, have gone for good.' You can't be left alone,' his kindly son-in-law admonishes. Bleakly, Fenchurch replies, 'I've been there all my life.'
We know that all writers and artists mope and chafe, and that some suffer depression almost unto madness. Fenchurch is one of them: 'My nerve, over the past five years, has gone, the feeling for line, the feeling for feelings, disappeared: there is nothing but dizziness, palpitation, dispiritation — and, worse than all these combined, dread.' If you've read William Styron's devastating Darkness Visible, you'll recognise this creative impasse.
Poor Fenchurch's pickle is not that easy to swallow. 'The world I would have wished to live in has now completely van- ished.' Alas, it has. But, by golly, he does bang on. Betrayed by his roots and his spirit, he embarks on a dour Joycean bus odyssey through the shrunken landscape of his childhood, a rambling, prematurely old man in carpet slippers, inadvertently exposing himself at the triggered memory of a woman's smile. The past is scrunched up in a refraction of ghostly rooms, bifocussed letters, doomed love and the mustiness of promise. Piteously, Lear-like, he comes down naked to breakfast, talks to himself, weeps without knowing why. 'And where is God, his Son and his Apostles in all this?' he cries.
Well, the publishers don't want to upset you and, inexplicably, describe A Serious Man as erotic and comic. I don't know about the eroticism, but if this is comedy I'm Max Wall, although there are occa- sional intimations of Alan Bennett's immortal North Country writer's slag-heap monologue: 'Where are those who sat on their haunches in front of the Miners' Wel- fare and the Labour Club? . . . They were the salt of the earth.' You have to laugh, I suppose.
On one of his better days Fenchurch most admirably declares, 'I've never had much patience with rectitude.' Less sympathetically, he believes that his per- ceptions and pains are more acute than other mortals with 'humdrum jobs and humdrum minds (with humdrum feelings and humdrum reflections) can possibly imagine'.
Come off it, Fenchurch. 'Scribe, plagia- rist, grovelist, and playwrong, friend of the grate and gourd, novelless, playless, plaqueless, friendless.' This sort of guff can be catching; insanity only a breath away. A Serious Man is serious, and ambitious, but I've never read a sadder novel nor, despite its undercurrent of passion, a more bloodless one. Not recommended for the beach.
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