as completely bourgeois. The simulacrum was almost perfect but he lacked the arrogance and sheer stupidity of Anthony Powell. The broken relationships endlessly documented in Bracewell’s novels function as signifiers of his broken dreams. He was a pastoralist even when he wrote about the city. Bracewell’s second ‘major’ work was first published as part of The Quick End – works by three young novelists. When the time for reprinting came around, Don Watson and Mark Edwards were dropped and Missing Margate came out on its own. Bracewell was an 80s novelist. He lives on in journalism and TV appearances. Hotels, restaurants, designer clothes, a life-style organised around these objects of desire could never be sustained on royalties earned from moderately successful novels.
Bracewell had to fail in order to succeed. He’d a good reputation but hadn’t amassed the sales to justify 20-grand advances. It was the media that provided him with the readies to sustain a middle-class life-style. Many writers are tempted by the money to be made from journalism. Bracewell was smart, he didn’t strip-mine his subconscious by churning out confessional columns. Five-thousand-word features in the broadsheet press became his speciality, his name still carries connotations of quality. Bracewell hasn’t embarrassed those literary figures who backed him early on, he isn’t a Colin Wilson or Iain M. Banks. His early publishers are still proud of him.
The 80s have disappeared, most of the writers from that era are more or less forgotten. If Bracewell’s work as a novelist is compared to the musical achievements of Duran Duran or Culture Club, his fellow travellers in a decade that style forgot don’t even rank alongside the likes of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Alan specifically mentioned John Wilde in relation to this. A hack like Wilde could only be compared to a band that never made it, a name that meant nothing. Having travelled in Bracewell’s wake, the best a scribbler like Wilde could hope for was an afterlife interviewing burnt-out celebrities, a freelance fantasy without beginning or end. Wilde was voodooed, hexed, left trapped in the very nightmare Bracewell successfully escaped through acts of bewitchment.
Alan wanted to play a prank on Suzy. He called her from a pay phone and got himself invited to her pad. I had to round up a bunch of people Suzy knew. Suzy lived near the campus and loads of students passed her first-floor flat when they were making their way into the centre of town. Alan explained to Suzy that he’d always wanted to have sex with a woman while she leant out of a window conversing with her friends. Suzy was up for it. Alan kissed and cuddled Suzy, then took her knickers down and fingered her clit. Once the juice was really flowing, Suzy leant out of the flat to see who was in the street. I was talking to Jill beneath her living-room window. Suzy greeted us and asked us what we were doing. I explained that we were discussing Iain Sinclair’s novels and that we both thought the deliberate ambiguity in his prose had close affinities with Andy Warhol’s pop art.
Suzy was leaning out of the window, net curtains splayed down her back. I couldn’t see Alan but I knew he had Suzy’s skirt around her waist and that he was humping away. I’d arranged for a great many of Suzy’s friends to wander down the street and soon there was a crowd of 20 people talking to her. Suzy’s face was flushed and her conversation was incoherent. Suzy didn’t like Michael, the guy who lived above her because he played Bob Dylan albums late at night. Michael was in one of my classes at the university and I’d rung him before Alan and I headed our separate ways. Michael had agreed that once a crowd of us had gathered in the street, he’d go and knock on Suzy’s door. Alan whispered to Suzy that he’d deal with the caller. He walked out of the living room and into the hall. Alan adjusted his clothing, then let Michael into the flat.
Suzy didn’t know it was Michael when he took Alan’s place behind her. Michael had always fancied Suzy and was glad of a chance to fuck her. Suzy was trying to hold a conversation, so she wouldn’t have noticed the change of rhythm when the two men switched places. Alan made his way onto the street and joined our group. He looked up at Suzy, greeted her and asked if she remembered him from the previous night. Suzy did a double take, her face a mask of confusion. Then she screamed. After Suzy came Alan explained the trick he’d played on her and with Michael still humping away this provided sufficient stimulation to give my friend a second orgasm.
Suzy invited everyone up to her flat and got the guys present to gang-bang her. I was up for having an orgy but Alan restrained me. He insisted that it was Suzy’s turn to be the centre of attention and that I shouldn’t deny her this moment of glory. Alan was going through Suzy’s books, she didn’t have that many but he was impressed when he came across a copy of the Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Dick Howard and published by the Monthly Review Press. This was ‘a radical America book’ from way back when in 1971. Likewise, Alan was amused when he discovered that Suzy had a copy of I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. This book incoherently documents the author’s sexual obsession with Dick Hebdige, an English academic who was an intellectual celebrity during the 80s on the strength of Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
Subculture was Hebdige’s first book and it was published in 1979, at a time when students still thought a polytechnic lecturer incredibly hip if he could talk about youth culture. Alan had to explain this to me because by the time I went to university every campus boasted its resident experts on the subject. Alan was amused that 20 years down the line Hebdige was being consumed as an object of desire rather than an expert on consumer fetishism. Alan found trends in academic publishing an endlessly absorbing topic and once he’d had his say about Hebdige, he moved on to Judith Williamson. Either then or later I argued with Alan when he insisted that the true value of I Love Dick lay in the way it exposed the misery of academic life and dished the dirt not only on Dick Hebdige but also on the likes of Felix Guattari and Toni Negri. I insisted the section on Hannah Wilke was the most useful thing in I Love Dick, although I also appreciated it as a parody of post-modern theorising. Once all the guys present had given Suzy a shafting, someone suggested we go down the pub. People began to leave, drifting off in different directions.
Alan wanted to sell some of his books, so we headed to his place on Union Grove to collect them. Alan’s flat looked pretty much as we’d left it, a mess. He started throwing books around. Making piles of first editions. Shuffling paperbacks. He kept turning over works by Jean Baudrillard as though they were trumps. He told me that he’d been rereading Bracewell because he was interested in the way psychoanalysis had transformed and retrenched 19th-century notions of characterisation and literary depth. From there he’d got onto an 80s kick. Leafing through the copy of I Love Dick by Chris Kraus at Suzy’s place hadn’t helped. Kraus was married to Sylvere Lotringer, who’d played a major role in translating, publishing and generally foisting Baudrillard on English-speaking readers during the 80s. I Love Dick was a down-market American equivalent of Baudrillard’s Cool Memories where everything was allowed to hang out, including the fact that its author doesn’t hack it as a writer of aphorisms.
According to Baudrillard everything had become transparent, obscene, there were no longer any secrets. Alan wasn’t convinced by these claims, although Baudrillard doubtlessly provided Kraus and hipster hubby Lotringer with a theoretical justification for publicising their literary gang-banging. Alan didn’t want to live after the orgy, he didn’t even want to live out the death of the orgy, for Alan the orgy of history was without beginning or end. He wanted to deconstruct deconstruction. He wanted to sacrifice sacrifice. He wanted to seduce seduction and simulate simulation. He’d been reading Girard, Bataille, Marx, Hegel, Deleuze, Lukás, Hobbes, Virilio, Zizek and Irigarary. Alan wanted to be incoherent in his incoherence. The more he read the less he enjoyed reading. Derrida had been a huge disappointment. Having scanned Derrida’s disciples, he needn’t have troubled himself with Of Grammatology. He’d digested the contents before he consumed them, and after Derrida there seemed little point in rereading Rousseau or Lévi-Strauss. The more Alan read, the less he needed to read, it was an addiction.
I glanced at the ventriloquist’s dummy sprawled across a chair and whispered his name. Alan picked up a copy of Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science by Donna Haraway and screamed as he threw it across the room. It was a big book,
