M. J. Nicholls, Condemned to Cymru, Sagging
Meniscus Press, 2022
At the Husavík Research Institute, a paradise of Nordic perfection where the blemished are banished and the pretty are promoted, acne-ridden Magnus is sent on a bogus anthropological fact-finding mission to visit every village, town, and city in Wales to file "reports" for Iceland's upcoming colonisation. The reports he composes are fragments of snarky travelogue, highly suspicious tales of local folklore, unforgiving recaps of childhood trauma, and cris de coeur from a misanthropic outsider fated to stalk the wild Welsh countryside suffering squeamish erotic reveries about Helga Horsedóttir. Presented in alphabetical, achronological order, Condemned to Cymru is a comico-pimply picaresque, a digressive ramble into the dark heart of boredom, and the essential reference encyclopedia of self-hatred.
So funny, so bitter, so ingenious, so culturally literate (especially on rock music), so politically astute, so Swiftian/Sorrentinoesque/Flann O’Brieny, so lovelorn, so raunchy and gruesome, so outraged at the literary scene, so surprising an ending... so many high-calorie maximalist sentences, so many off-the-wall metaphors, so many show-stopping arias... so satisfying a read, so reaffirming that Nicholls is one of the cleverest metafictionists alive. Only he could pull off a study in despair in the form of a Welsh gazetteer. - Steven Moore
“Here’s a promise: the latest from M.J. Nicholls is like nothing you’ve ever read before. Set in an era of mass irradiation, Condemned to Cymru will be a big fat Quantum IV-level zit right on the nose of your otherwise airbrushed, plastically perfected reading list. Lean in and pop this sucker. Send a portentous pus of futuristic archaicisms and gorgeous grotesquerie dripping down the bathroom mirror. You’ll never reflect on the possibilities of fiction the same.”—Dan Tremaglio
An experimental comic romp encompassing Wales, literature, and mommy issues.
The setup for Nicholls’ novel is deliberately absurd: After a war between Liechtenstein and Wales, a group of Icelandic researchers have deployed the narrator, Magnus, to Wales to observe culture and society there. The novel is ostensibly a report of his findings, formatted as an abecedary, riffing on towns alphabetically. As a guide to Wales, it’s useless: Magnus writes that Sennybridge is home to the “World Interspecies Kissing Championships” and that the residents of Pen-y-clawdd “want more sheep.” But most entries emphasize Magnus’ own emotional territory anyway: His badly acne-afflicted face, which he discusses in putrescent detail, his contemptuous mother, and his strained relationship with Katrin, a fellow “repulsive freak.” In between are scatalogical jokes, riffs on 1990s alt-rock acts (including a funny, furious rant about PJ Harvey) and multiple interlocutors with Pynchon-ian names (Isadora Pledge, Greg Impasse, Aaron Swanlopp). It doesn’t add up to much of a story, but then “story” isn’t really the point; indeed, another extended rant about the cozy comforts of Ian Rankin mysteries implies that “story” is a kind of antagonist. (As Magnus writes, “Neatness and pith have no place in fiction.”) So Nicholls uses the abecedary format and repeated tropes to create a sustained mood of angry/funny dissatisfaction with the world, romance, and literature as we know it. The novel’s conceit is in league with works by the likes of Gilbert Sorrentino or David Markson, but Nicholls’ brand of absurdism emphasizes comedy, which generally works. Sometimes Wales is the butt of the joke: Of Elan Village, he writes, “If this village was lacking a particular concept, that particular concept would be élan.” But Magnus’ target is usually himself, and the self-deprecating approach somehow makes the project go down easier.
Free-wheeling, unconventional fun. - Kirkus Reviews
How do you go about describing a book by Nicholls? The trickiest thing is to describe it without giving anything away and ruining the reading experience….here goes nothing! Condemned to Cymru is a love letter from a struggling writer with body issues, whose biggest outspoken bully is himself, possibly down to the incredibly deep rooted over powering mother and absent father issues he has which leads to him being in an abusive relationship…I therapist’s wet-dream.
Our narrator is Magnus, he has Quantum IV level acne on his face, the pimples have enough presence to get their own names, Wales has been at war with another European country and Magnus gets sent over from Iceland to carry out a anthropological study…What Magnus returns with is not the results you’d expect from said study. There are a number of absurd local stories from people in pubs and random strangers who randomly get into his car, there are little snippets of overheard conversations, definitions of town’s names, poems from the biggest name in Welsh poetry and ya know those little blue plaques you see when visiting a town in the UK? well it has them too. For me my favourite part were those trips down memory lane remembering Welsh bands of the past…used to love Catatonia. You may think that the information that Magnus is providing is irrelevant but once you start digging deeper you’ll see just how clever the book is.
I’ve read a few books by Nicholls now to know what to expect, a proper onion of a book with so many layers that you can get lost in the dialogue and forget what the actual plot of the book is, there are always those little references to things that have already happened to keep you from completely losing your way. It’s like an abstract painting, he lays everything out on the pages and leaves your own imagination to unravel the book’s mysteries. If you live in Wales, or were born in Wales or have visited Wales or are an actual Whale then ya gotta get this books to see if your town/village gets mentioned…you might want to sue. - Jason
https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2022/04/23/condemned-to-cymru-by-m-j-nicholls/
M.J. Nicholls’ new novel Condemned to Cymru is Rabelaisian in every sense of the word: it’s gross, it’s droll, there’s sex and violence and jokes. It even affects the Rabelaisian flourish of an artificial structure—the story is mostly presented as one pathetic misanthrope’s alphabetized travelogue (of sorts) of Wales, written for a sinister Icelandic thinktank bent on world domination. And much like Rabelais, beneath all the playful language and grotesqueries is a story concerned with people, society, suffering, and justice (or the lack thereof).
A brief initial chapter sets the scene: in the near future, the aggressively aspirational ethos of Nordic living (hygge, market socialism, ruddy-cheeked statuesque Vikings enjoying outdoor winter sports) has been fully weaponized into a new imperial project for a catastrophe-ravaged world. Failed states are aggressively colonized and remade into little Icelands, affluent, prosperous, resplendent with new fjords. However, the selling of this New Icelandic vision requires careful curation—those who can’t project the youthful, vigorous beauty necessary for all utopias are shunned and kept hidden, relegated to basement offices or shipped off to far away war-torn lands. Like Wales.
Magnus, the antihero of this story, is one such undesirable. His pimples, pustules, boils, whelks, blisters, and blemishes have made him into a pariah, and for the crime of unattractiveness he has been sent to catalog and describe the towns and villages of war-ravaged Wales with an eye towards future Icelandic colonization and domination.
What follows, however, is far more than a travel itinerary. Rebelling against his exile, the bitter, vile, and cynical Magnus presents a stunningly useless account of his Welsh travels. His entries have little to do with anything, and include: false etymologies of tongue-twisting Welsh place names; brief misanthropic descriptions of Magnus’ feeling and opinions; sexual fantasies; his encounters with the giant mutated asses and elbows terrorizing the countryside (strongly suggestive of the old aphorism regarding the ability to tell them apart); excerpts from a counter-factual Alternative History of Wales; poems from the posthumously celebrated writer Barrie Bartmel’s magnum opus, Poems of a Poltroon; traumatic childhood memories; writing advice; long, rambling, discursive stories from locals; discussions of crime fiction and its dominance of the literary landscape; music criticism; and, most pungently, Magnus’ pining and lovelorn encomia to his erotic fixation, the unattainable and mysterious Helga Horsedòttir.
These occur as part of an alphabetical listing of Welsh towns; some are a single sentence, others stretch on and on for pages. There are repetitions and refrains and contradictions, and when read together a broad blackly humorous picture begins to come into focus of Magnus, his childhood, his life, his struggles and insecurities and perversities. Questions also arise from this list. Landscapes are not alphabetical, and so this travelogue could never actually represent an itinerary—what does this say about classification and taxonomy and the way transnational neoliberal ventures like the Húsavík Research Hive commodify place? If we could reconstruct a probable itinerary for Magnus from his achronological musings, would we begin to see a more structured narrative, his thoughts and experiences all in neat, ordered rows? This is the richness of these disjointed entries, the list as literature, a lesson learned first and best from Rabelais himself.
A final chapter sees Magnus, his abecedary completed and presumably submitted, back home just in time to experience a remarkable juxtaposition, the implications of which reorient the preceding chapters in a profound way. For all his posturing and misanthropy, the transformation at the end of Condemned to Cymru forces us to reconsider Magnus and his place in society, as well as the ultimate source of his suffering.
For all the stomach-churning descriptions of sebaceous discharge (and, to be clear: don’t read this book while eating) and the sour misanthropy of its main character, this book is a tremendous amount of fun, and even the bleakest parts have a core of playfulness to them. M.J. Nicholls has written a clever, surprising story, equal parts funny and despairing, sharp enough to keep you reading a literal alphabetical list of Welsh towns, parsing a tangled story overheard in a pub for deeper meanings, or trying to find the metacommentary behind a giant rampaging buttocks smashing the local sheep to smithereens. - Eric Williams
https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2022/05/02/condemned-to-cymru/
Nicholls' path-breaking new book is a stark and uncompromising account of the bizarre and regrettable period when the British government set about trimming England. In 2021, British Prime Minister Frank Oakface elected to rid each English county of its most irritating citizen, deporting them for a period of incarceration in Jersey's one-star Hotel Diabolique. From a ticket inspector whose sudden lust for zydeco music ruins his marriage, to a blogger who hangs around supermarkets seeking sympathy by the bananas, to a teacher who lobotomises an entire classroom to improve her son's life chances, Nicholls' fearless reportage brings together the riveting stories of these hapless discards into an ebullient and swashbuckling satire of our contemporary predicament.
M.J. Nicholls’ latest book, Trimming England, shows an alternate world where the population is slowly whittled away. The Prime Minister asks each county to nominate someone to be sent to a one-star hotel in Jersey. Thus begins Nicholl’s chronicling of the absolute worst that England has to offer.
Readers won’t need to know much about English regions or dialects to follow along with the despicable people sent to stay at the Hotel Diabolique. The concept will charm regardless of the audience and one can imagine how easily and well it would translate across other countries and continents. It may be slightly disappointing for those familiar with England as other than the county names and a few of the cities, the locations don’t feel authentically rooted. West Yorkshire could be swapped for Cornwall. The introduction sets up the initially absurd premise with ease and allows the case of each county to stand on its own. Essentially, this is a collection of flash fiction—some of the stories last less than a page and contain a single picture, others are more detailed and feel like an encompassing story. Nicholls’ is a confident writer who is rightfully unashamed of his modernist writing that may have some readers admiring his heights of creativity and others scratching their heads.
The individual stories work best at their shortest and funniest. Nicholl’s clearly knows how to set up a joke and doesn’t rely on the absurdity of the book’s premise to deliver laughs for him. This can range from names of characters to the reason they’re being sent away. Some of these people would be in prison if not sent away, others just commit annoying social faux pas. It’s easy to imagine that at the Hotel Diabolique Ted Bundy would ask Larry David to pass him the milk. The book has a focus on how writers can often be annoying and although this comes up often, the way it is handled is different enough to not become tiresome. Still, it may be slightly less interesting to people who have no hand in the creative arts. The highlight—a list of Letterboxd movie reviews that saw someone be sent to Jersey solely for their poor taste in films. Each chapter varies so much from the last that it’s almost like opening a random Christmas present, never quite sure what the next one will be. One interesting side effect is how much the reader may think about the book, wondering what criteria they would set for exile.
Trimming England is not a book that rests on its’ laurels and for the most part it pushes forward into new territory with each chapter. For ambition and execution alone, it’s something special. It’s easy to pick up, dip in and out of and find something to admire. Nicholl’s has a unique style and ambition that may not work for every reader, but those who resonate with it will love it and hold it close as they beg not to be sent to Jersey. - Jay Slayton-Joslin
https://babou691.com/2021/05/17/trimming-england/
M. J. Nicholls is a Jazz-Man Word-Smith or a Word-Smith Jazz-Man or a Jazz-Word Smith-Man…one of those at least, he has a unique way with words, he’ll use words that surely do not exist so you google them and yes “Bummershoot” is a word (even though Microsoft refuse to admit that and have done a red squiggle) and it is a word I shall be using whenever I can. He’ll reuse/rephrase words in a sentence and it gives the paragraphs (some rather long) a certain beat and that’s where the Jazz feeling comes in, you find yourself getting lost in the flow and really enjoying what he has conjured up.
I like the idea of the plot, find a crappy hotel and then take the worst person in each county and send them to that hotel for an amount of time determined by just how bad their crimes are. I have to admit that I was rather interested in who got sent from my county, the crime revolved around the pressure of getting that perfect opening sentence. A reoccurring theme of the crimes was to do with writers, the chaos they create, the stress they cause, the abuse they direct at publishers and of course that opening sentence issue…I thought I’d go back to the beginning and check out Nicholls opening sentence, was it a good’un or will he being doing time? It features underpants and all bran so gets a thumbs up for me.
The best in the book was about M. D. Thomas, an 82 year old from Warwickshire, a brilliant rant written on the side of a museum, I found myself agreeing with his words and was rather disappointed he was found guilty.
Another clever, absurd book by Nicholls, it’s not going to be for everybody but if you’re ok with letting go of reality for a bit then you’re going to get quite a few laughs from this…and if you don’t like words, don’t worry there are a lot of great illustrations here too, a bit like YouTube but on pause. - Jason Denness
https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2021/06/02/trimming-england-by-m-j-nicholls/
Trimming England, M.J. Nicholls’ latest work of satire, is a brilliant piece of character work. Not so much plot-based, the novel centers around one idea: “In 2021, British Prime Minister Frank Oakface elected to rid each English county of its most irritating citizen.” Those voted out by their community members receive sentences of varying lengths and are all committed to “Jersey’s one-star Hotel Diabolique,” which is French for Rubbish Hotel. Nicholls, writing to us in the introduction from the year 2023, tells us that “this work is an almanac of terror,” and he would be absolutely correct.
The introduction sets up the plot, as Nicholls has won a contest for a “FREE HOLIDAY” and finds himself amidst those imprisoned, listening to their stories. With an opening like this, I anticipated a frame narrative, but Nicholls does not revisit us in the end. I craved closure and a final bit of commentary, but to his credit, this might distract us from the amusing, frightening, and utterly ridiculous characters with whom we’ve just spent 256 pages. Nicholls, it would seem, wants to leave us reeling and sorting through our feelings without his own closing thoughts to dictate our reactions.
We are warned in the introduction that the stories are told in the prisoners’ own voices, and this choice highlights the strong characters Nicholls has crafted. As we read on, moving from county to county, we are thrust headlong into the character’s account and I found myself marveling at Nicholls’ ability to assume new voices so wholeheartedly. From the self-indulgent neediness of “Colin” (not his real name) who craves pity for pity’s sake (his real name evokes no pity), to the blabbering ambiguities of Crocus Nightshade MP, Nicholls slips seamlessly into each character.
Of particular note is Northumberland’s account, written by the prisoner’s former wife. Craig Scowly, sentenced to nearly twenty years for “verbal uxoricide” (the killing of one’s wife), does not get to speak. Instead, we are presented with “ten pages of notepaper mailed to the editor by Mrs. Scowly’s mother,” and her mental anguish and abuse sustained is evident in the short, repetitive sentences as she retells, and relives, the humiliation brought about by her husband. At six pages, Northumberland is one of the shorter long accounts, but it shows the emotional lifting Nicholls does while he excoriates society’s simultaneous demands for perfection and lust for schadenfreude.
Trimming England does have a particular audience, and Nicholls knows it well. He tells us in the introduction that, given the anti-intellectualism movement, most of those imprisoned in Hotel Diabolique are writers and artists. Those who have given any time or effort to writing will feel the stabbing delight of being seen, since Nicholls eviscerates the writing process with regular attention throughout the novel. Whether it’s Chesire’s prisoner being told by a smarmy editor that readers want “Victor, the man, not Victor the man-made construct through whom the author is channeling fuming frustration …” or the 75-year-old woman imprisoned for her repetitive, insistent, and sometimes offensive emails to agents, Nicholls seems to say to creatives out there: I see you. I feel your pain.
For good measure, there is a teacher thrown in, and as a former high school English teacher myself, I could relate to Sarah Yurt of County Durham, and her task of “teaching five classes of net-ravaged teenagers Shakespeare and Austen in a way that made me popular and likeable” and her desire to “open a crack of trust into which I could spelunk knowledge by stealth.” Nicholls does well at satirizing the state of classrooms today, both in terms of disengaged parents and those who are more invested and see education as a high-stakes game. Suffice to say, it was eerily believable that parents would be callous and cutthroat enough that it could to lead to the shocking conclusion of Ms. Yurt’s narrative.
Trimming England is a work of satire and a bit of a warning as well. It’s best not to read the entire book in one sitting (though you easily could); while there are highs of laughter and utter absurdity, there are just as many moments of exhaustive recognition that lead to, in my case at least, staring blankly at a wall (or out at the ocean, when available) to process the plight of society. This should be a point of pride for Nicholls; Trimming England resonates with biting accuracy.
If you choose to pick up your own copy, I’d recommend reading with a highlighter in hand to mark the notables and quotables. There were many that will, either to Nicholls’ horror or delight, be typed into status bars of social media accounts or, worse still, used as a caption on a picture-sharing site. Whether or not those posting seek the same “peer-to-peer validation” of Tyrone Pouch of Bedfordshire, Nicholls excels at condensing the relatable into something easily shared, and it is certain that you will find something that crawls into your head and proceeds to live there for an extended period of time. Be it the varying definitions of a career (is a career determined by finances, success, or just stubborn persistence?), the intonation that there is “only poetry in poetry,” or adopting the “maverick stance” of letting your hunger dictate when you eat, or any of the other gems with which Nicholls has populated the novel, rest assured that you are not alone. I’ve already posted a quote on the importance of books in society, and the peer-to-peer validation is exactly as rewarding as Nicholls and Pouch promised it would be.
Trimming England is a satirical “almanac of terror,” because it is terrifying to consider a movement against intellectualism and creative individuals. It is also a cathartic experience for those of us who overthinkand create our own lists of why we’d be bundled off to Hotel Diabolique. Nicholls purports to satirize England, but from my corner of South Carolina, I’d argue he does a solid job of bringing most of society to task. If his purpose in this satire is to show where his priorities lie, I’d gladly hand him the scissors for a global trim. - Nora E. Webb
https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2021/07/02/trimming-england/
M.J. Nicholls’ Trimming England takes the reader on a journey through an alternate England led by people who think it’s a good idea to “trim” the country of its more colourful inhabitants. The book opens with an introduction from Nicholls, writing in the year 2023. He has won a free holiday in Jersey from a Munch bar, but the hotel he will be staying in, the Hotel Diabolique, is famous for its “discomfort” and prides itself on giving its guests a terrible experience. Its only visitors are “masochists, sex tourists, and contest winners,” all of whom are apparently fine with paying £10.99 for an uncooked sprout.
There is, however, one other group who stays in this hotel. Contained within its walls is a “prison for public nuisance offenders,” which currently holds 47 people. Nicholls explains that, in 2021, British Prime Minister Frank Oakface devised a scheme to improve life in England’s 48 counties. The “largest irritant” in each county would be identified via online polling and then incarcerated for a duration dependent on the supposed severity of the irritant’s crime. Nicholls decides to accept his prize and go to the Hotel Diabolique. Once there, he meets all 47 inmates of this “irritant-cleansing scheme” and sets about recording their stories. The chapters that follow are those stories, recast in “more palatable and vivid literary styles.” Each chapter is named after the part of England from which the irritant was trimmed. The sentence is recorded, spanning a few hours to a few decades, and the crimes, which range from “seeking sympathy” to lobotomising children for profit.
In the opening chapter, Tyrone Pouch, a writer by trade, takes to social media to express his frustration with a bout of writer’s block: “I lapse into creative coma.” The post is well received – 50+ likes – and the next day Tyrone indulges himself again: “Verily, I sink into a trough of brain-mush.” But he loses his “core base of likers,” and the reason soon becomes clear to him: He expressed his “impotence in a creative way, hinting to the reader [he] was merely pretending” to have writer’s block. He then tries to salvage his reputation as a terrible writer: “I cannot write a single pissing thing.” But it’s too late, and the comment section is littered with “faux-concern.” Tyrone resorts to “writing lengthy retractions” but they fall on deaf ears. He then commits to stop being “a writer writing nonwriting about not-writing,” but before he can put his resolution into practice, he is incarcerated. Sentence: two years. Crime: “abysmal second status.”
This first case establishes the book’s preoccupation with writers and their writing, a pattern that is acknowledged by Nicholls in his introduction, blaming it on the current social climate, which is a “time of deep-seated anti-intellectualism in the country.” In a later chapter, we meet Hector Lettsin, who is tired of being published in “small unprofitable low-circulation presses” and in need of an agent. He submits his “highly literary new novel” (entitled My Highly Literary New Novel) to several agents, and eventually bags Sam Ruple, who has no scruples about transforming Hector’s novel into “a breakthrough big whopper.” Hector agrees to abandon his plan to spit on “the tired conventions of the novel” and instead embrace “likeable” characters and the whimsical opinions of focus groups. Sentence: 79 years.
Further on, in Shropshire, Simone Slaph’s debut novel, Love Among Bedwetters, is about to be published, but there’s a catch. You see, for an author to survive in today’s market, she must have a “niche.” If Simone goes ahead with her debut, she will need to embrace the mantle of “that bedwetting author.” Simone weighs up the pros and cons: having recognition and an income vs. “having strangers think she is a bedwetter.” She decides to make her bed and, indeed, wet it. Her second novel, Bedwetters in Borstal, is about “prisoners who piss themselves.” Crime: “soul for hot piss.” Sentence: eight years.
These tales from the world of publishing will almost certainly bring a knowing smile to the face of any writer (They did to this reviewer.) But the wit that accompanies these observations should be enough to entertain even those who have never heard of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. Delving deeper, behind the charming absurdity, is a thoughtful analysis of the literary novel in modern publishing (For poor Simone, even the term “literary” is too literary and has to be replaced with “easypleasy.”) And because the starving artists and publishing establishment are both represented at their most excessive, one is not left feeling a bias in favour of one over the other. Both can be reasonable and irritating in equal measure.
For those not amused by scribblers and their scribbles, there are plenty of other characters being trimmed from England. There is the magazine editor who confuses “novelty teacosies” with “Heinrich Himmler action figures” (naturally, an easy mistake to make), and the man who starts a local campaign to turn a woman’s living room into a public toilet, all because she “tutted hard” when he bumped into her along Porthmeor Beach. A mystery criminal is sentenced for an unspecified time for daring to suggest, in a public forum, that Manchester might be renamed Squidgieroonienips, and Frank Fitch gets “11 furlongs” for letting the world know that he’s been to a tree that appeared in “Escape to the Country East Sussex,” along with several other insufferable YouTube comments.
Accompanying the text is a series of illustrations by Kathleen Nicholls that shows a map-like outline of the region of England under observation and, within the region’s parameters, the drawing of an object or character featured in the chapter. The simplicity of these drawings – nothing more than black lines against a cream background – adds to the sense of intimacy developed in the text. They are doodles of a kind one might make in a diary, little memorials to the bizarre. And Trimming England is, if anything, a monument to the bizarre, describing a world in which a mother tells her son that his father has died by texting “YR FTHR HD HRT ATTACK. DID NT SRVVE. PLS CM HM.” Understandably, she must have had a lot on her plate. Though some readers might find the lack of a single narrative disjointing (The book can seem like a collection of intriguing but independent short stories at times, which is of course the intention, hence the novel being presented as edited and introduced by Nicholls rather than written by him), the landscape of Trimming England is so well defined and consistently wound into the fabric of each mini-narrative that immersion comes naturally. Indeed, the episodic nature of the book, coupled with its quirky tangents and playful dialogues brings to mind John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. As in Toole’s satirical novel, Trimming England is not just a showcase of strange “irritants,” it’s also the documentation of a society. For Toole, the society is New Orleans. For Nicholls, it’s England. And for all its absurdity and inventiveness, there is, in a way, a quaint Englishness to many of the characters and their stories, underdogs struggling against the wrath of mundanity.
Trimming England presents the reader with a world that is both incredibly strange and all too familiar. The novel’s imaginative premise is its initial draw, but its cast of characters will take you to the end. One after another, these 47 prisoners keep the reader’s attention with their mannerisms and reasoning on subjects that combine the unusual with the everyday. It was a good thing Nicholls won that contest, thoughI wrote a novella that fits in one’s pocket. You could be sitting on a ski lift, preparing to slope down snowy tufts, and read page 28 of this novella that begins with the words “reason for making this trip”. You could be attending a cousin’s daughter’s clavichord recital, and in a break from the bumbled baroque boredom, read page 48 that begins with the words “my mother was pregnant at the time”. You could be erecting a supporting partition from drywall with seven other muscular builders, and in a lull, read page 12 that begins with the words “Paul was too vague to cause irritation”. You could be interviewing Sean Lennon about his latest album, and after making a barbed remark about his solo efforts never eclipsing the worst of his father’s avant-garde indulgences, read page 2 that begins with the words “of custard powder in a supermarket”. You could be in a chemistry lesson, feverishly trying to make the lime water turn cloudy with your carbon dioxide output, and read page 40 that begins with the words “in the lucrative trade of smuggling drugs”. There are 56 pages of text in this “sagging short”, so another 51 examples of moments in which this novella can be removed from a pocket for the purposes of reading can be provided on request. Otherwise, purchase here. - M.J. Nicholls one can’t help wonder if winning it was more than mere chance. Was Nicholls the 48th condemned irritant? If so, through writing this book, he has more than repaid his debt to society. - Robert Montero
https://www.litromagazine.com/reviews/book-review-trimming-england/
M. J. Nicholls, Scotland Before the Bomb,
Sagging Meniscus Press, 2019
In 2060, Scotland was annihilated in a series of merciless nuclear strikes from Luxembourg. In response to a curious public's growing hunger for a definitive history of the long-lost nation, M.J. Nicholls provides the most complete account available of Scottish life starting with the failed independence referendum of 2014. Reflecting how 21st-century Scotland split into numerous nation-states with radically different societies and systems of government, this work of painstaking research and archivism is divided into chapters corresponding with those several regions, whose fates, though ultimately conjoined in irreversible darkness, took divergent paths to the inevitable during the brief but colorful period of Scotland's ill-fated fling with freedom. This volume will unearth the enigma that was Scotland before the bomb.
See what I did there? Bomb. Blast. Get it? Tough crowd, I'll show myself out. Don't forget to tip your bookseller staff for the holidays--they are a long suffering lot what with ebooks and paper being anti-enviromental and no one reading anymore because of Netflix and etc. etc. But never mind all that I'm sure everything will work out what with the U.S. poised to re-elect a psychopath as President (as if we live in some kind of surreal mashup of Frank Miller's Elektra: Assassin in which a demon takes over the mind of a Presidential candidate who wins the election and <i>1984</i> in which half the country's minds are taken over by the fascistic Fox News and the other lying liars who lie). But nevermind the never minds, I'm reviewing this book Scotland Before the Bomb. The name is prophetic because we are all right now right before "The Bomb." Right before civilization falls. Right before global warming slams the lid down on us squirming frogs in a slow boiling pot.
To offer up some reference points that almost no one will recognize, I would describe SBtB as being a bit like the transgressive Stewart Home with a splattering of Mark Leyner, a sprinkle of Flann O'Brien and a smidge of David Markson. It's experimental but accessible. It's weird but entertaining. It's ridiculous yet kept me interested. It's unafraid to show its insecurities, if you follow me. But not too closely please. Nicholls takes chances, and I appreciate his courage. There are no sensitive characters here struggling with their relationships. There are no relatable relatables. There is no unexpected redemption in the end. There are no characters to root for nor did Ellen DeGeneres leave this book as a gift under your seat. She's too busy partying with that guy who started the Iraq War based on lies, you know the (weapons of) mass (destruction that don't exist) murderer guy? The prequel to Trump the Movie that we let go about his business afterwards like there was nothing to see here, move along?
Anywho.
If you enjoy word-play and absurd humor and violent illogic then this book might be for you. Nicholls probably didn't write it for you though. I think he wrote it for himself, which is the kind of book I love the most. Iconoclastic. Original. Fierce. Uncompromising. [Insert other words here that sound dramatic. Also, play dramatic music here. Dance a little perhaps. Eat something, you look hungry, don't you like my soup?]
In conclusion: the end. - David D. Katzman
“Over the last five years, Scots writer Mark Nicholls has published five novels that establish him as one of the best comic postmodernists of our day. Like the late, great Gilbert Sorrentino, he is a grandmaster of sardonic humor, a superb mimic of various literary forms, and a stylist in full command of the entire range and resources of the English language…. A goofy gazetteer, Scotland Before the Bomb evokes other novels in the travelogue mode, from the sublime (Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Sky Changes, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities) to the ridiculous (Chandler Brossard’s Postcards, Michael Martone’s The Blue Guide to Indiana). Scotland does indeed deserve bombing if readers there remain unaware they are harboring one of the funniest, most inventive writers living.” —Steven Moore
Scotland before the Bomb is a linguistically acrobatic novel that’s filled with zany wit and sheer randomness.
There’re heaping helpings of dystopia and absurdity in M. J. Nicholls’s Scotland before the Bomb, a sprawling chronicle in which a Scottish independence vote fractured the country into dozens of tiny nation states. Presented in the form of archived entries compiled by a researcher from the twenty-second century, each of the book’s entries documents the rise and fall of the nations. Rampantly imaginative, the book pokes fun at every sort of human folly and hubris.
The book is wild with wacky scenarios from the start, in which neighboring town states fight a cold war, with one deciding to raise itself to a 75-degree angle to spy on its opponent, only to be foiled when the other town buries itself under a tarpaulin to escape surveillance. The population of another town is inspired by a Violent Femmes song to adopt ocelots, with disastrous consequences. And here, Edinburgh has been taken over by Fringe Festival performers to the point where critics are executed and performance art clutters every street.
Like a stream of jokes in a deadpan stand-up routine, the book holds steady with its barrage of insanity, playing with forms. A transcript of an interview conducted with a surviving citizen from a lost nation becomes a laundry list of every chair his leaders sat on; it’s a bizarre riff that wouldn’t be out of place on a Monty Python skit. The tragedies of the nation town Dundee are shared via newspaper clippings detailing improbable events, man-eating ferrets, and spontaneously combusting PMs. A scrap of autobiography from the former prime minister of Selkirk reveals the secret to his success: he apologizes to the public for all of the failings of his stewardship in advance.
As might be expected given the sheer volume of these forays into insanity, some bits are more humorous than others. The book’s best passages are those that lean toward a semblance of narrative. One dark comic standout concerns the travails of an ordinary couple in the town of Clackmannan, where everyone is obligated to receive media transmissions while they work out; less than fit individuals soon find themselves hopelessly behind in current affairs. Another high point is an entry on the town of Echt, where every resident is required to assume the identity of a fictional persona, such as a “laconic” or “sympathetic” character. In a rare bit of pathos, the “likable” character in this scenario decides to follow his bliss and form a washboard band, resulting in a major hit to his likability.
Like chapters of a travel guide, this often nonsensical, sometimes indulgent, and entertaining work is best enjoyed in short bursts. Scotland before the Bomb doesn’t climax so much as collapse in exhaustion, and the book concludes with a lengthy passage from a Glasgow author’s unwritten non-novel. The final parade of non sequiturs and abandoned scraps of conversation and plot are metafictional and daunting.
Scotland before the Bomb is a linguistically acrobatic novel that’s filled with zany wit and sheer randomness. - Ho Lin
https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/scotland-before-the-bomb/
In Nicholl's new novel, Scotland has become independent and fragments as individual counties secede. Then, what used to be Scotland is wiped off the map by a hail of nuclear missiles launched by the furious Prime Minister of Luxembourg. Writing in the early 22nd Century, Nicholls pieces together a portrait of Scotland from 2014 to 2060 using whatever scattered fragments survive – and we see counties which, allowed to go their own way, become increasingly individualistic and eccentric. Ross & Cromarty undertakes a massive civil engineering project to tilt itself 75 degrees so it can spy on Invergordon; Festival performers take over Edinburgh completely; Nicholas Parsons invades Braemar and imposes a permanent game of Just a Minute on the inhabitants. Packed with everything from bogus Trip Adviser reviews to memoirs, interviews, haikus and a densely-packed seven-page list of reasons to be miserable, Nicholls’ latest is an impressive outpouring of imaginative, seemingly inexhaustible absurdity pitched somewhere between Alasdair Gray and Spike Milligan. - Alastair Mabbott
In February of last year we reviewed M.J. Nicholls’ The House Of Writers a novel concerned with writers, writing, and all that goes with it. In June his next, The 1002nd Book To Read Before You Die, was published and was also reviewed on these pages where we said, “It is a love-letter to literature, but one which casts a delightfully cynical and often incredulous eye over all the hype and hoopla which surrounds the publishing industry.”
In the space of those two novels it felt that Nicholls had addressed his thoughts and concerns about being a writer, making his points in a pertinent and artistic manner which challenged the reader to consider their own relationship with literature. The question to ponder when approaching his latest, Scotland Before The Bomb, was where he was going to go next. As always with M.J.Nicholls the answer was never going to be straightforward.
This time around he turns a keen and coruscating eye on the state of the nation, or rather the states. Continuing to mix fantasy with reality, the premise of Scotland Before The Bomb is decidedly more towards the former, one hopes. In 2060 Scotland is destroyed by nuclear strikes from Luxembourg for reasons unknown, although it is possible some persistent trolling was to blame. As time passes the rest of the world wants to know more about Scotland’s history, especially the time between the independence referendum of 2014 and the country’s fatal destruction.
In that time Scotland not only achieved independence but became so enamoured of the idea that it continued to split further into individual nation states each with their own social, political and cultural systems. Scotland Before The Bomb promises to bring you “closer to understanding the enigma that was Scotland before the bomb.” Of course the writer/editor of this book is one M.J. Nicholls (writing in 2113). Who else?
If you haven’t read Nicholls before, and if the above paragraphs don’t make it clear, this is a writer who likes not only to play with the content of his books, but with the form itself. Having Scotland broken up into these fiefdoms dictates the structure, dividing the chapters into short stories which allows Nicholls full rein to turn his hand to different styles and literary devices. As a result we have journalistic reports, diary entries, Senryu poetry (often called human haiku), virtual tickertape, Q&A interviews, Trip Advisor reports, emails, transcripts, and even concrete poetry.
In doing so Nicholls tackles current obsessions and concerns, such as climate change, immigration, zero hour contracts, racism, fake news, nationhood, the failure of political systems, and so much more. While doing so he has Ross & Cromarty bankrupt itself to the World Bank, Edinburgh’s festival becomes permanent, the sovereign nation of Perth threatens to launch their own nuclear attack as a result of royal disharmony, Stirling is plagued by a dangerous and debilitating fog, Lothian’s skies are black with delivery drones, and Glasgow & Renfrew seem to exist only on the pages of a notebook of an unnamed “disillusioned fiction writer”, whose style seems strangely familiar.
Nicholls’ humour is really to the fore this time around. He revels in the absurd, both in the possibilities his writing allows and in the world in general – the former perfectly serving the latter. No other writer would have Nicholas Parsons enforcing a never-ending game of Just A Minute on the villagers of Braemar, or have Alasdair Gray as one of the earliest First Ministers of Scotland, post-independence – (except perhaps Mr Gray himself).
If his previous novels put a wry smile on your face, Scotland Before The Bomb will have you laughing out loud. At times it’s Jerry Seinfeld meets Laurence Sterne meets Kathy Acker, at others it’s like Samuel Beckett’s Alice in Wonderland, but it’s also impossible to define fully. To attempt to do so would be like writing a parody of M.J. Nicholls, something which I think he would admire and abhor in equal measure, so much so that I’m tempted to give it a go.
Scotland Before The Bomb is that rarest of literary beasts – a satirical, witty, and considered comic novel which is deadly serious at its core. Coming near the end of a varied and vibrant year for Scottish writing, Nicholls has delivered one of the very best examples of just why this is. While you’ll find your own touchstones it’s unlike any other novel you’ll have read before unless you have read M.J. Nicholls. And if you haven’t you absolutely should. He could just be your new favourite writer – you just don’t know it yet. - Alistair Braidwood
M. J. Nicholls, The 1002nd Book to Read Before
You Die, Sagging Meniscus Press, 2018
Marcus Schott, sacked from serving succour to suckers and loans to losers, leaves the office life to luxuriate in literature. His plan is to read every title featured in Dr. Peter Boxall's notorious compendium 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Motoring toward a small pre-purchased cottage on the Orkney Isles, Marcus soon encounters fatal hiccups in his scheme to compress a lifetime's reading into three years. These hiccups include skittish librarian Isobel Bartmel, self-cauterising critic Raine Upright, and the unpredictable happenings of the characterless Orkney peoples, too long trapped in their bothies of banality, each pushing Marcus further from his ecstatic vision of total list completion.
A light comedy with a sunny paradisiac quality, rich in verbal virtuosity, Rabelaisian lists, and the occasional outburst of cheerful, cathartic violence, THE 1002ND BOOK is the ultimate summer novel against summer novels: an anti-crowdpleaser with a tidy, cinematic plot that should please both crowds and all those thoroughly depressed by them.
“Overarching and embedded within the pacy, racy and often hilarious novel-in-the-novel, M.J. Nicholls offers the reader (and writer) sustained and timely reflections on the state of literature today. The compendious range of literary references, coupled with vigorous comment and critique regarding both the works themselves and the institutions through which they are produced and circulated, make this, the 1002nd (or even 102nd) book you should read before you die, a rich and an intellectually rewarding experience.”– Michael Westlake
“A bibliophile’s delight. If I were as clever as Nicholls, I’d describe it as ‘A sensational performance that takes the theatrics of a Morricone score and ties them to Sir Patrick Moore’s monocle.’ But I’m not, so I’ll just say this is a hilarious look at the literary life from both ends—reading and writing—paraded in a maximalist style with all the postmodern bells and whistles one expects from this ingenious author. Beneath it all is a deep knowledge and love for language and literature, despite Nicholls’s antic mockery of some of its creators and consumers.”—Steven Moore
“A brilliant companion for anyone who needs to read, particularly fiction, and muscular encouragement for you who wants to begin. Wry wit and intelligence unfold this original novel, an unparalleled advocacy of the written word. When you look back through the brambles of the last paragraphs you will see that you have been swanked onto the literary playing field by a major player, a strong new innovative voice full of the joys of reading and writing.”—Steve Katz
“M.J. Nicholls splices Laurence Sterne, Douglas Adams, Robert M. Pirsig, and J.P. Donleavy with a Scottish twist. The 1002nd Book To Read Before You Die should be read while drinking a very good bottle of blended Scotch.”—Chris Scott
M.J. Nicholls’ previous novel The House Of Writers was, as the title suggests, a book on and about writers and writing, but it was so much more. He has followed it with The 1002nd Book To Read Before You Die which, as the title suggests, concentrates on readers and reading, but to say it is so much more than that would be understatement of the highest order. It is a love-letter to literature, but one which casts a delightfully cynical and often incredulous eye over all the hype and hoopla which surrounds the publishing industry. From writers, through agents, festivals and their organisers, literary panels and prizes, book sellers, publishers, and critics, to you, dear readers, (and me), Nicholls is coruscating in his condemnation, but remains droll and darkly comedic throughout, his tongue just far enough in his cheek for us to get the joke.
It begins with a Legal Disclaimer which reads, “The Scottish Arts Council strongly repudiate all the claims made in this novel.”. This sets the tone for a fantastically inventive novel where fiction meets fact, and while the lines between the two are mostly clear, it is surprisingly exciting to read a novel where living and breathing writers mix with each other, and with Nicholls’ characters, building to some unforgettable scenes. In lesser hands the amount of referencing of authors, writers, and other cultural touchstones could have been a distraction, or an exercise in showing how clever the writer is, but here it all feels a necessary part of the bigger picture.
The novel introduces us to Marcus Schott who, after leaving his job at E-Z Monee Loans, decides he is going to immerse himself in literature, not entirely for reasons of his intellectual betterment. Moving to Orkney to make his way through the novels named in Dr. Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, he works out in detail the time, budget and itinerary required, as long as there are no hidden costs to complicate matters. Marcus soon discovers that life is little but hidden costs. As Marcus’ story continues ‘the author’ makes regular appearances in chapters which are there to explain the greater whole, in a manner not dissimilar to Alasdair Gray’s appearance in Lanark. Both strands work together where they could have pulled the reader in different directions, and it is to Nicholls’ credit that he succeeds.
The 1002nd Book To Read Before You Die asks you to consider just what it means to be a reader. Can it be called a pastime? What, if anything, can a writer expect, or even demand, from readers? Can you experience “reader’s block”? It also asks questions about why we read, (I can recommend early nights with The Brothers Karamazov for taking your mind of a broken heart. Well, perhaps “recommend” is the wrong word.) Do you read more keenly when the rest of your life is less than satisfying? If the pram in the hall is the enemy of good art, does the same fate befall the ‘good reader’? And, ultimately, does it matter? While reading The 1002nd Book To Read Before You Die I was reminded of Bill Shankly’s quotation, “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.” Nicholl’s novel seems to take a similar fundamentalist stance towards literature, and how you feel about that will go a long way to deciding what you feel about Nicholls’ novel.
In his essay ‘What Is Literature?’, Jean Paul Sartre writes about “committed literature”, specifically prose, which should always be engaged with the present day. Does this mean the reader is required to be equally as committed for this to exist? Surely it must, otherwise there seems little point. That idea gets to the heart of The 1002nd Book To Read Before You Die. It will make you examine how you read, why you read, and even who you read for. There is no doubt a combative and challenging edge, (there’s a surprising amount of spitting encouraged), and you’ll find yourself disagreeing as well as agreeing, often in the same sentence. That is part of the point. Nicholls makes you confront your own truths and prejudices, asking if you really believe or are simply falling in line with the consensus.
The 1002nd Book To Read Before You Die is a comic novel which takes its subject matter very seriously, and demands to be read in the same manner. It is a literary undertaking which needs the reader to engage fully. To do otherwise would be to miss out on what is, at times, an exhilarating experience. Although there are other Scottish novels which come to mind, such as Kevin McNeill’s The Brilliant & Forever, Alice Thompson’s Burnt Island, and Graham Lironi’s Oh, Marina Girl, M.J. Nicholls is doing something which feels and reads as new and exciting. If you love books then The 1002nd Book To Read Before You Die is one to read, before it’s too late. - Alistair Braidwood
Glasgow-based author Nicholls has had two novels published in the US, but this is his debut here. And what a calling card it is. Straight off the starting blocks, he skewers writers, readers and the publishing industry in a savage postmodern satire written with the fervour of a true bibiliophile.
Having saved up enough money to buy a cottage in Orkney, Marcus Schott quits his job to spend the next three years working through a list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. But it turns out he’s only a character created by another Marcus Schott. This one is an unsuccessful author whose previous book prompted his mother to suggest that if he really had to write “metawank” he could at least emulate Jasper Fforde and make some money out of it. Against all his expectations, he has won a £10,000 award to write a novel set in the Highlands, its publication to coincide with the tourist season. But Marcus has no intention of turning in the lightweight dross demanded of him, insisting that he will follow his muse and write instead about a man named Marcus Schott who goes to Orkney to read 1001 books in rural seclusion.
The storylines of the two Marcuses run in parallel. The “real” one battles with philistines from Highland Council who try to enforce their strict stipulations on the book’s content. Meanwhile, the “fictional” Marcus is in a surreal Orkney where sad men sit in pubs nursing violently colourful cocktails. In the library, he meets the eccentric Isobel Bartmel, who sees something of George Orwell’s Gordon Comstock in Marcus and believes that seducing him will inject some much-needed hot sex into Orwell’s oeuvre. Marcus has a rival, however, in Raine Upright, a fierce contrarian who scoffs at the classics and dismisses the literary canon. Both Isobel and Raine speak in the most preposterous, flamboyant manner, and Isobel warns Marcus that if he wants to survive in Orkney he too must become a “character”.
Essentially, they’re misanthropes who have lost faith in the wretched human race to escape into books, and insist that everyone should take literature as seriously and as all-consumingly as they do. “For me, composing a postmodern novel about a writer composing a postmodern novel is a more sincere form of emotional expression than the I-love-you,” says Marcus, and Nicholls’ novel is postmodern “metawank” cranked up to 11. It could hardly be more indulgent and self-referential, and the narrative, naturally, comes with built-in self-criticism. Luckily, Nicholls is wickedly funny and wildly verbally inventive, which does help to offset the unlikeable characters and their bombastic, fanatical chatter.
There are some glib touches that feel too obvious for this level of sophistication, as when Marcus receives an angry letter from the Society of Bland Authors, representing Tony Parsons, Ben Elton and Nick Hornby. But in a book which has you wondering whether even the typos are deliberate, it’s hard to know if the occasions when Nicholls swaps a rapier for a sledgehammer aren’t part of the grand design too. - ALASTAIR MABBOTT
M. J. Nicholls, The House of Writers, Sagging
Meniscus Press, 2016
THE HOUSE OF WRITERS is a playful novel set in 2050, when the publishing industry has collapsed, literature has become a micro-niche interest, and Scotland itself has become an enormous call center. Those writers who remain reside in a dilapidated towerblock, where they churn out hack works tailored to please their small audiences. The novel weaves together individual stories of life inside (and outside) the building, where each floor houses a different genre, as the writers fight to keep the process of literature alive with varying degrees of success. THE HOUSE OF WRITERS is a feast of wit: a surreal entertainment, a bracing satire, a verbal tour de force, and a good-spirited dystopian comedy; it is also a loving homage to language, literature, and the imagination, and a plea that they remain vital well into the dubious future that awaits us.
“I could be wrong, but I believe this novel was transmitted into the author’s mind by the illegitimate love child of Bill Hicks and David Foster Wallace. Like a proverbial middle finger to the middlebrow, M.J. Nicholls has given himself the Herculean task of making fiction matter. Usurped by hacks and the hyperactivity of hyperlinks, meaningful stories have become exceedingly rare. Or, even worse, are rarely read because who got time for dat? Enter this rare novel that wages war on corporate mediocrity in a fantastical future where books are reduced to ego strokes commissioned by rich fucks. Fiction to match your sofa. Fortunately, Nicholls shreds the commoditization of our existence like a literary Tasmanian devil with razor-sharp wit. Fierce, original and delirious, The House of Writers is a comedic masterwork that defies convention.”—David David Katzman
“The author photo in the back of the book depicts the human host environment for M.J. Nicholls the author, who looks more like the mid-1500s painting ‘The Librarian’ by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, more like a construction of books. For nearly a decade, I’ve known the author as a young Scottish reader of Dalkey Archive titles, primarily, who posts perfectly phrased, amusing reviews on a popular book-reviewing site. His novel is a loyal representation of the spirit of this omni-admired/‘liked’ online manifestation. Perfectly sculpted sentences, awareness of every reaction a reader might make to the author’s every action, and a general willingness to err on the side of exaggerated good spirit, to coax way more amusement than tears, and to eschew the conventional formula of fiction (conflict, rising drama, poignancy) in favor of carrying on in a canonical manner from Tristram Shandy and Quixote on down to Borges and Christine Brooke-Rose’s Textermination and the like. Like Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual more than Danielewski’s House of Leaves, M.J. Nicholls concocts a funhouse for readers wiling and able to live in an Escherian library stocked with mirror-bound books. But the parts this reader loved best were the first thirds of the sections titled ‘This,’ those bits where there’s a sense of a melancholy human slouched in bed with laptop, addicted to the internet, needing to fill blank pages with text in the tradition of all those books that make the silent solitary reading life seem meaningful.”—Lee Klein
After societal, economic, and technological collapse rocks Britain, authors stubbornly ply their (mostly obsolete) trade crammed into a high-rise in the north.
In this debut novel, set in the mid-21st century, digital culture has proved ruinous for writers. First, publishers dictated that only the simplest, bottom-line pablum be produced. Second, a socioeconomic meltdown, precipitated by widespread tech failures (bad screws in the motherboard cooling fans), left Britain a wasteland, roamed by artificial intelligence appliances gone feral and starving digi-pets. While the principal economy and infrastructure center on the lone surviving big business, a Scottish call center (itself just a minor subsidiary of a U.S.-based, Rupert Murdoch-like multinational), authors stubbornly pursue their craft and egos in a communal high-rise, sometimes for just a couple of paying readers. Cal McIntyre, a narrator perpetually working—or not—on a “meta-novel” called The House of Writers, compiles formidable lists of silly, nonexistent books and offers a tour of the building, with different genres on each floor. There are name-dropping details of a “Farewell Authors Conference”; lists of fictitious sexual positions; descriptions of flash-in-the-pan literary movements seeking relevance (the gender-bending Anti-cis-heteronormativists); and entire catalog entries oriented toward Scottish shortbread. Real-life, dust-jacket celebrities (Ian Rankin, J.K. Rowling, Jodi Picoult, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, graphic designer Chip Kidd) blend with the invented scribblers and cranks, who still follow their muses and remain vain and self-centered loons, despite conditions wherein their products serve practically no purpose. Comedian and writer Spike Milligan would certainly approve of Glasgow author Nicholls’ novel, a piece of literary goonery (or, to Yanks, Monty Pythonism) that lacks a particularly strong plot. As with Monty Python and The Goon Show, the audience either gets the dense barrages of absurdist humor or not. At one point, Jesus even returns, but, after being largely ignored by House of Writers occupants, the Savior departs, leaving an angry, obscene note behind (though Cal theorizes the message could have been one author’s idea of a practical joke). The encouraging theme beneath the satire seems to be that, no matter what, writers and writing (and all the attendant aggravations and pretensions) will persist. Perhaps Cal’s meta-novel will turn out to be the Best Book That Ever Existed.
Cascades of absurdist, knowing nonsense about the writing profession. - Kirkus Reviews
How shall I say this? You may consider it hyperbole. The flattery of a fool unschooled in either High Quality Literary Fiction (HQLF) or, even worse, a soul lacking a sense of humor. You may say, Lentz, go back and hide on the First Floor of THOW with the other poor devils possessed by the obsession -- I say it boldly and without reserve or shame -- to write HQLF. By what other name shall I call it than obsession? Clearly, there's no money in HQLF. It would be laughable to imagine anything resembling fame emanating from the paltry exercise of egoism, which is HQLF. Where did "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" get Laurence Sterne? Or what became of JP Donleavy after "The Ginger Man" came to see the light of day? How the groundlings spurned "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift. I do truly weep to imagine David Foster Wallace at the end of his rope. Don't get me started on what the comedies of Oscar Wilde did for him. His gaolers must have laughed their heads off throughout the incarceration of that gifted writer of HQLF. Immortality, you may ask? Please, do grow up. So it begs the question: why does anyone in their right mind write HQLF? No one really has the time to read it. No one is prepared to invest the most paltry sum for an e-book of even the most brilliant work of HQLF. Fortunately, in the future for those addicted to the unholy oppression of writing HQLF there is "The House of Writers." And Nicholls may not be in his right mind. How could any writers of HQLF possibly be of sound mind? At least, if the prophecy of the scriptures are fulfilled, then the writers of HQLF will have somewhere safe and warm to take them in (prepositional ending). Somewhere to commiserate with others of their petty and miserable ilk. It sounds like Paradise to me. How I yearn for it. Grant me the steaming porridge, the zesty and savory intellectual comfort food of The House of Writers any day. What an upgrade it would be to anyone writing HQLF in this age. Ah, but this isn't about me, is it? It is about serious literature. And its place in the civilization of humanity well after we've been put out to pasture. Will humanity in 2050 miss HQLF? Don't make me laugh. The genre will be long since gone. And its writers will be exposed for the egoists they most surely were. In 2100 will the intelligentsia long for the Golden Age of HQLF among the overgrown ruins of The House of Writers? Surely, we are blessed to have the prophetic vision of Nicholls to imagine it. For is he not the Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Zechariah of all writers of HQLF wandering aimlessly among the heatherclad heaths and heathcliffs of the highlands of ScotCall? But let me circle back to my first point, if I may. I hope to, by now, have convinced you that, normally, I am not a purveyor of praise: far from it. I am, after all, a CRITIC. (If you don't believe me, ask my wife.) I take the title of Goodreads Critic with desperate solemnity. So I will risk that I may throw-up a little in my mouth when I report this to you. This critical qualitative description of sangfroid, when misapplied, is a malapropos utterly sickening to give or take. It offends the intellectual ear with its saccharine ring. I use it only sparingly and as a last resort. And like profanity in my HQLF I eschew it out of hand. However, well, here it is. Ahem. I find that one pervasive literary quality resides in the comic wit of the HQLF of MJ Nicholls. I found this quality first in my reading of "Post-Modern Belch," which I could not put down as I laughed my head off throughout (double prepositional ending). Furthermore, this most elusive literary quality resides in "The House of Writers." And that quality is: G...Sorry. Gee...Harrumph...Pardon me. Genie...Forgive this brief respite and bathroom break: this word does give me pause. And triggers grand disquiet in us all. Let's try, again...The word is...Genius... There now, that wasn't so hard. I'm feeling better now, having belched that out. The wit that resides in "The House of Writers" is comic Genius. This book is world-class. It is one for the ages. So if you give even a brass farthing for the state of the quality of serious literature to be read by your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, then take a lesson from "The House of Writers" and support HQLF wherever you may find it, like here. Then go out to your favorite independent bookstore or, if necessary, online and buy this genius, masterpiece, possibly immortal, literary novel. - Wordsworth @ amazon.com
Who knew an anti-novel could be so propulsive? Or have such a handsome cover design!
The House of Writers removes the starved reader from the bland buffet-line that is the contemporary dystopian novel—vehicles that exist primarily for teens to explore their hormones while wearing skintight leggings and sticking it to mom and dad, i.e., the scary adult world—and happily plops her back into the realm of unnerving parables about the smooshing of the human spirit. A country made brain-dead by the false comforts of technology? A society peopled with boors who demonize the dwindling few who strive to create and/or appreciate works of art that challenge and engage a person's heart, brain and soul? If you bristle or scoff at the plausibility of that scenario then please put down your smart phone, pause the never-ending Netflix stream and consult a mirror beneath some sobering lighting.
Economic disaster has turned Scotland into a hellish nation-sized call-center, a pseudo government which maintains control by humoring every idiotic question, opinion and prejudice of a populace that constantly calls-in seeking personal validation for all their idiotic questions, opinions and prejudices. This is clearly not an ideal environment for that rare, thoughtful creature known as the author. So stands The House of Writers, a shoddy towerblock which shelters the few writers remaining in Scotland, and wherein they are farmed out to different floors, each level dedicated to a particular genre, and each genre catered to the tastes of the few wealthy individuals who fund the HoW.
But all of this scene setting really doesn't do justice to the real experience of this novel. The pleasure of The House of Writers is not to be found in its plot (though the book is rife with bite-sized narratives), but in the brio of its confident writing, the black hilarity of its unhinged imagination, the sincerity of its love for books and those sickly few who still love writing and reading them. With a large cast of cartoonish outcasts failing to keep their s*** together by pumping out hack works that mostly no one will ever read, THoW burns through one scathing satirical concept after another, sparing no kind of writer or reader along the way as it rollicks toward the inevitability of dystopian despair; but in the wake of all its imaginings—a star-studded literary convention ending in mass suicide, primates with better tastes in art than humans, the eating and breeding of electric sheep, the takeover of a village with a bazooka fashioned out of toasters, bestsellers boasting pages laced with heroin, an assortment of strange lists, even a few ads from sponsors—the game reader is left with a unique reading experience that is as invigorating as it is affecting. It’s not necessary for what is written about to pass as humane—writing is humane. Get me? - Anthony Vacca
Although it's presented as an experimental novel, House of Writers is at heart an enjoyable literary romp through a future Scotland where writers have become persecuted and reviled. "By 2040, writers were perceived in society as intellectual snobs and treated with casual contempt by the public. To clamp down on hate crime, the Tories introduced Artists' Licences, whereby every work was made to conform to two rigid dicta: 1) make it wholly understandable to even the dumbest, most bumbling alien. 2) Make it funny and light and utterly unthreatening to even the most delicate flowers." One of the book's many ironies is that this has already happened; publishers already make sure that novels conform to standard types; Nicholls somehow managed to slip through the net. This isn't a book for the dumbest alien and it helps if you know who Des Esseintes is and what happened in Mirbeau's Torture Garden. But not much. If you don't, just enjoy the ride as you watch the literary scenery go by.On the other hand, if you do know and love this kind of thing, you might relate Nicholls' book to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, where books are burnt, Marisha Pessl's metafictional romp Special Topics in Calamity Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted, about a group of writers locked in a house, or Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds, a novel by/about a man writing a novel about writing a novel. Nicholls book isn't as good as O'Brien's but what book is? Discuss. Nicholls would be happy to debate it with you. He seems to have had fun writing this novel and it shows. Enjoy. - Francis Booth
M. J. Nicholls, The Quiddity of Delusion,
Sagging Meniscus, 2017
In an obsessive monologue vaguely after the manner of Thomas Bernhard, a socially inept writer, in an attempt to deflate or defeat the humiliation of seeking to impress the smooth-talking, self-important sorts of people he loathes but envies, tries to get to the bottom of an embarrassing incident from his childhood, with entertaining but refreshingly anti-climactic non- results. In THE QUIDDITY OF DELUSION, both barrels of Nicholls' word-gun are, as always, loaded, and the ego gets it hard in the nads.
“Needing social approval from his pompously intellectual inferiors, our hero suffers how to present a self-compromised pseudo-version of a traumatic childhood embarrassing incident in a self-failed attempt to ‘belong.’ Later he tries to research what really happened by traveling to the assumed spot. He interviews the memories of sister & parents who all prove their reactivated mocking indifference to our pathetically verbally self-conscious hero who’s an exactitude slave to literary integrity that attempts to pierce the fiction/reality divide to which he’s a writerly insider/outsider tumbled by word-beset rectitude. All this wrings humor to its highest note.”—Marvin Cohen
I wrote a novella that fits in one’s pocket. You could be sitting on a ski lift, preparing to slope down snowy tufts, and read page 28 of this novella that begins with the words “reason for making this trip”. You could be attending a cousin’s daughter’s clavichord recital, and in a break from the bumbled baroque boredom, read page 48 that begins with the words “my mother was pregnant at the time”. You could be erecting a supporting partition from drywall with seven other muscular builders, and in a lull, read page 12 that begins with the words “Paul was too vague to cause irritation”. You could be interviewing Sean Lennon about his latest album, and after making a barbed remark about his solo efforts never eclipsing the worst of his father’s avant-garde indulgences, read page 2 that begins with the words “of custard powder in a supermarket”. You could be in a chemistry lesson, feverishly trying to make the lime water turn cloudy with your carbon dioxide output, and read page 40 that begins with the words “in the lucrative trade of smuggling drugs”. There are 56 pages of text in this “sagging short”, so another 51 examples of moments in which this novella can be removed from a pocket for the purposes of reading can be provided on request. Otherwise, purchase here. - M.J. Nicholls
M. J. Nicholls, A Postmodern Belch, lulu.com,
2014
This edition of A Postmodern Belch has been discredited. Pending article 9.6 of the Creative Commons Licence, portions of this work contain improperly brushed syllables taken from a 1978 edition of A Postmodern Belch and inelegantly buffered clauses taken from a 1997 edition of A Postmodern Belch. This edition of A Postmodern Belch is adapted from the 2007 edition of A Postmodern Belch and reinstates all the irritating and unlikeable qualities of the 2010 edition of A Postmodern Belch, including the missing correspondence between Luca Brasi and Lionel Blair that never made it into the 1808 edition.
A delightful exercise in self-referential humor in which a novel's characters fight for supremacy over the text. This prolonged joke, however, is not the only factor at play; caught in that infinite labyrinth, it eventually becomes apparent that time passes, and a meta-narrative emerges outside the confines of their literary battlefield. Juvenilia, the author calls it, and certainly there is no shortage of juvenile humor, just as there is no conscience in the recourse to the most insultingly absurd forms of continuity. But it is a jolly ride nonetheless. - Jacob Smullyan
Thanks to this blog, I “met” M.J. Nicholls in a course of what some people would call destiny, others a happy coincidence, and some other others (the vast majority, to be more precise) simply wouldn’t see a reason to call it anything. To cut the long story short, Mark liked one of my blog posts and wanted me to write a similar article for a publication he was editing, so we engaged in a collaboration that happily ended in me offering him to read my book of stories translated into English, and him reading it and saying that they want to publish it. When this wonderful thing happens, I’ll let you know.
Contrary to what this might look like thus far, this is not a post about me. This is about “A Postmodern Belch”, a novel that M.J. wrote in his twenties, I believe. Too young to be envied for his literary skills, yet he is. The “Belch” is a novel which fascinates the reader with incredibly fresh language, ripe literary style and confident experimenting with metafiction; a primer for all who wish to refresh their language with smart and completely new word coinages, puns, similes, and humorous reflections on the relationship between an author and his/her work of art.
GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL POSTMODERNISM
This is only a fraction of what you’ll find in “A Postmodern Belch”: pages divided into 2, 4, 8… parts to accommodate different voices created after a character has been split into 2,4,8… parts; an onslaught of letters G that threaten to subdue the voice of the character and turn all his consonants into G; an advertisement for a product called Macroshit Ghostwriter that helps users choose from tons of different pre-written story templates, freeing them from the need to use their brains ever again; a variety of narrative formats, each more imaginative than the previous, all the while following the search of three fictional characters for their true author self or for their true narrative that will dazzle the world.
In plain words: in this novel nothing and everything happens, while Lydia, Harold and Greg engage in conversions with the narrator, whoever he or she is – it’s never clear and always a battle of who’ll earn the role, and in conversations (quarrels, rather) with each other. What I love love love about this work is 1) its unending artistry (not that I understood half of it – too lazy to consult the dictionary every three words), 2) how predictive the author is of any possible criticism, anticipating, addressing and dissecting every imagined “issue” with plot, style, form, tone, character, voice, point of view, or whatever creative writing programs teach us is important, before any critic gets the chance to try the same, 3) the humorous parts where it’s hard not to laugh out loud, 4) the obvious fact that he is enjoying and loving writing with all his heart, 5) the confidence with which he dives into the most postmodern of all postmoderness without losing the reader’s respect.
Finally, I want to point out that the author of this post is NOT being compensated for this favorable review by having her collection of stories published. All occurrences of published books or books waiting to be published are purely coincidental. The author kindly advises all lovers of a good postmodern novel to go and treat themselves to “A Postmodern Belch” before it changes form and becomes something else (got your attention now, didn’t I?). - Ana S.
https://waitingfornobel.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/postmodern-belch/
M. J. Nicholls, Violent Solutions to Popular
Problems. Sagging Meniscus Press, 2023
Extracted from the maw of a resting shrew, these ten cankers reek of huff and qualm. A librarian teams up with a weeping bus-dweller to suppress a talentless writer. A man attempts a perfect equilibrium of pain and pleasure to forge a life of matchless keel. A triumvirate of Dans spiral into oblivion with operatic panache. Two sub-people struggle for ascension to the normal realm in a heckish caste system. Various narked sods explain the violent solutions to their popular problems in a tale that Butch Vig might call “titular”. Someone explains the complex sociological web of mayhem that is the modern coffeehouse. Postmodernism makes a shocking return in a classic postmodern tale about postmodernism shaking its postmodern bahookie. In future Texas, women attempting abortions are held captive and forced to whelp at gunpoint. And in a finale one Dutch arborist has called “a botched stew”, the world’s unwritten characters mingle in a bardo where their untold stories flex and throb in painful collocation. For the first time in his life, the unacclaimed novelist M.J. Nicholls has written a collection of prose fit for hexagonal man.
“Through absurdist world-building (and then toppling), urbane cringe-humor told with the dead-eyed stare of a master provocateur, and the kind of metafictional flourish that’ll have you seeing stars as though a Chuck Jones anvil fell on your head, Violent Solutions to Popular Problems pulls the wings off literary convention with anarchic glee. M.J. Nicholls is contemporary literature’s greatest prankster, and we’re all the better for living in a world where he’s laughing at us, rather than with us.”–Jeff Chon, author of Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun and This Is the Afterlife
In “The Pomo Martyr”, one of the ten short stories in this collection, a narrator who sounds very like M.J. Nicholls enthuses over how postmodernism “chimed with my fondness for attention-seeking and making a fool of myself in a comedic way to drum up readerly affection for me through my prose”.
He goes on to lament that being both Scottish and postmodern are somehow mutually exclusive, and that any writer with ambition would have to jettison one or the other. In the story, a chaotic panel at a conference kickstarts a literary revolution that makes metafiction Scotland’s genre of choice. In real life, Nicholls’ recklessly inventive books have made little impact on the mainstream but have earned him critical plaudits as a writer who is playful but political: an absurdist with one foot planted firmly in the real world.
He’s a comic novelist at heart, so his fascination with postmodernism is impish, provocative, irreverent. If there’s one thing Nicholls doesn’t seem to have time for, it’s realism. Why make do with dreary naturalistic dialogue when a character grandly declaring her home to be “the topological crumbs of Orkney” is so much fun?
In “Librarian of the Year”, the Orcadian librarian Isobel (who can’t resist pomo namedropping of both her creator, M.J. Nicholls, and her former flatmate, Marcus Schott, protagonist of a previous Nicholls novel) is preparing to receive an award from Liam Neeson to mark her transformation of the populace “from a subliterate mess of rustics, fondling ewes in sheepcotes” into book lovers. But she encounters Clara from Wick, whose partner has just left her, taking the manuscript of Clara’s novel. Isobel promises to help track it down, but changes her mind when she reads extracts from it.
Some will find Nicholls’ whimsical verbosity smug and grating, but beneath the frivolity there’s a sharper edge. In the title story, written as five separate dialogues, interviewees justify using violence to alleviate problems caused by squatters, disobedient voters, pro-lifers, far-right MPs and plummeting viewing figures. “The State of Texas: a Travelogue” brings a Scottish writer to the USA to speak to several “disruptors” – Texan resistance movements – such as a group smuggling pregnant women out of the state and the self-explanatory Libtriggers, who have progressed to livestreaming school shootings in 4K HD.
The titular character of “Heath’s Ledger” keeps a journal to help him balance the pain and pleasure he receives into equal amounts, consequently drifting into an S&M lifestyle. Elsewhere, in the highly stratified society brought into being by the Social Re-order, gay people have to pass themselves off as straight couples to get housing, a process that involves having sex in front of examiners.
Sometimes the dizzying rush of ideas stalls. The formally experimental “Downfall of the Dans: A Comic Opera” is fine, but carries with it the deflated feeling one associates with a disappointing edition of Inside No. 9. “A Fool in the Froth”, in which an alienated young student’s search for his perfect coffee house doubles as a philosophical quest, limps along behind its brasher siblings.
There’s a sense of winding down in the final section, “The Bardo of Abandoned Characters”, a tour through the liminal space inhabited by the likes of the Self-Satirising Character, the Character who Bedded Keith Richards for the Noblest of Reasons and the Lavatorial Revenge Character, all briefly toyed with before being set aside. The ideas are thinning out as we watch. But these glimpses of unwritten stories show that this fertile, febrile imagination is constantly in motion, and there are no signs of it slowing down. —Alastair Mabbott
“They had no idea that I was actually satirising a satirist trying desperately to satirise himself, taking my satire to whole ‘nother pleasingly recursive level of cleverness.”
Violent Solutions to Popular Problems, by M.J. Nicholls, is a collection of ten short stories that employ high levels of irony in an attempt to tease out humour from the various threads. Much as many modern stand-up comedians cut to the bone with their offensive language and insults, what results here is not, to my mind, funny. I did not enjoy reading this book but there will be others who will and I will attempt to explain my thinking that the author may find a more appreciative audience.
The collection opens with Librarian of the Year, in which a Scottish librarian, Isobel, is travelling by bus from Orkney to London in order to receive her award. She strikes up a conversation with a fellow passenger, an author, whose girlfriend has stolen the manuscript of her unpublished novel. Isobel decides to help retrieve it. What follows is Nicholl’s first sally on his fellow writers.
Next up is Heath’s Ledger which I found distasteful due to the graphic descriptions of violent sex acts – broom handle up the anus, anyone? The author is building on the idea that pleasure must be balanced with pain. This was certainly painful to read.
Downfall of the Dans was a bleak tale in which Nicholl’s choice of writing style was to riff on musical instruments. I didn’t feel this added anything to a plot in which a man loses his job, his family and then his freedom.
I paused here to consider if I should continue. The book is an obvious social critique but I found it base rather than humorous. The use of language comes across as an attempt to be clever – this may be the author’s deliberately chosen style.
Other authors are named and insulted with abandon, their popular work derided along with readers who enjoy such books. This is caustic humour with elements designed to shock. Aborted foetuses are mentioned in several of the stories. A dog is casually killed – I pondered if this was to deliberately break one of the ‘rules of writing’.
The titular story left a sour taste. I was by now questioning if my reaction to this work was what the author set out to achieve. He was channelling so many writerly conceits, oozing disdain.
“This notion of writers as far gone crazies squabbling for love, understanding, and teaching posts in a stifling matrix of insane saboteurs and bile-stirrers was the truth hammered home to me by my MA tutors”
The level of vitriol on display was disturbing, suggesting contemporary readers were sheep, with the attention span of a goldfish, and authors played to this. The stories here are, of course, fiction so Nicholls retains full deniability that this is how he actually thinks.
I almost enjoyed Story for Carol until a shower scene with unnecessary description of breasts and nipples, although thankfully not at Murakami levels.
The State of Texas provided a depressingly accurate evocation of contemporary America yet was somehow one of the more palatable stories.
I was beginning to suspect Nicholls was trolling his readers. An author wants a reaction to his work and he achieves this. Perhaps my dislike of the content was intended, a middle finger to readers of my ilk.
“This chimed with my fondness for attention-seeking and making a fool of myself in a comedic way to drum up readerly affection for me through prose”
What was it about the writing style that regularly sickened me? Another book put out by this publisher, Lake of Urine, employed some similarly distasteful elements yet somehow worked. It is possible I was simply in the wrong frame of mind for Violent Solutions.
The final story in the collection, The Bardo of Abandoned Characters, defeated me. Around halfway through I realised I was bored, flicked through to the end and, not finding anything further to pull me in, stopped reading. Abandoning the abandoned characters brought relief.
So who might this collection appeal to? Perhaps a reader who relishes: sex scenes, cutting satire, bitter critiques of literary tastes and habits, the veneer cultivated by the publishing industry. The prose is convoluted – why use a simple word when several more complex ones may be inserted? Another ‘rule of writing’ broken.
On the back cover a reviewer describes Nicholls as a literary prankster. He may well consider me the fool. - Jackie Law
https://neverimitate.wordpress.com/2023/09/08/book-review-violent-solutions-to-popular-problems/
George Salis: You’ve done plenty of admirable work to shine a light on obscure writers, an endeavor close to my heart. What’s one novel that’s obscure-squared and deserves more readers? The “crème of the under-read. The stuff flattened under fat fashionista arses, forgotten in the waft of mainstream farts,” to quote you to yourself.
M.J. Nicholls: Tom Mallin’s Erowina or L’Eternelle Blessee, first published by Allison & Busby in 1972. Mallin worked as an artist until the last ten years of his life, when he produced a flurry of plays and novels, each marked by a restless stylistic experimentation that left him isolated by the British literati, which has always been predictably sniffy about the avant-garde. (Kingsley Amis once waged a one-man war to ride the avant-garde out of town). Erowina remains one of the most unique, thrilling, and challenging novels I’ve read—a homage to Ulysses that properly honours the scope and dexterity of Joyce’s language in a way that is fresh and underivative. I reissued the novel for Verbivoracious Press in 2015 with the help of fellow buried book enthusiast Nate Dorr.
GS: While it’s defunct now, Verbivoracious Press started about a decade ago and reprinted many notable works, including books by Marvin Cohen, Chris Scott, and Michael Westlake. Can you talk about the history behind this press and your involvement in it?
MJN: In 2013, I read Christine Brooke-Rose’s exceptional novels Textermination and Amalgamemnon alongside Goodreads member G.N. Forester. She suggested setting up a small press to reissue Brooke-Rose’s earlier works, and after several shonky reissues, we expanded into making festschrifts of unsung supremos à la Raymond Federman and Rikki Ducornet, and reissues of other classics unearthed through my own reading. The production of the books improved as we progressed—Forester was pumping her own money into the press so we relied on the generosity of contributors to assist for free—however, her time was needed elsewhere, and I ended up having to run the press solo with nothing more than my rickety laptop and flair for penning begging letters, which was untenable, making the press chaotic, unprofessional, and unfair to the authors and artists. I’m deeply sorry to everyone involved. I hope they’ve recovered. I love the reissues we produced of Steve Katz’s The Exagggerations of Peter Prince and Marvin Cohen’s collected stories in How to Outthink a Wall: An Anthology. All our books were published as print-on-demand, so everything’s still available.
GS: Speaking of verbivoracity, what are some of your favorite uncommon words and why?
MJN: I’m inordinately fond of clishmaclaver (Scots word for idle talk), have a strange attraction to growtnoul (Middle English for blockhead), and a lust for quinquennial (recurring every five years). Any word that frolics and gambols in your mouth and makes a sentence even sexier is a winner for me.
GS: There’s a truism that states, “You can have too much of a good thing.” Even if it’s not necessarily bad, what’s a book you’d torture someone with by forcing them to read it day and night?
MJN: I’ve been responding Mulligan Stew to that question for years, and my ardor for Gilbert Sorrentino’s novel hasn’t cooled since a strange man turned me on to his work many yonks ago. It’s an entire university seminar in creative writing in itself, with its uproarious parodies of bad writing and thickets of sizzling prose performing boundless imaginative cartwheels across the page. It’s a carnival of sheer readerly bliss, as are most of Sorrentino’s singularly distinctive and unappreciated novels.
GS: On the whole, how do you view your relationship with readers in theory and in practice? Is it with indifference, hostility, or what? Also, who is your ideal reader?
MJN: When I launched my novel The House of Writers in an artisan café frequented by the literary poseurs of Edinburgh, a friend of mine ill-advisedly went around trying to interest the eaters in my novel and was uniformly brushed off. This cemented my belief that the reader is a treacherous, disloyal bastard…or merely people who take umbrage at having weird comedic novels thrust at them when trying to wrap their mandibles around kimchi and bean veggie smash burgers. This queasy launch experience is detailed in 1002nd Book. My ideal readers are almost certainly creatures like yourself, George, those with an unquenchable lust for the written word. As a writer, having an imagined reader of that calibre makes it impossible for me to slouch when crafting a sentence—a robust method of quality control, if daunting when laying that stink of a first draft.
GS: “Those who can’t do, teach,” the adage goes. One could also say: “Those who can’t write, critique.” Yet a certain species of online troll can’t write or critique. Instead, they lob ad hominems and excoriate in an attempt to fill the talentless void in their skulls. What are your thoughts on this troll, and what have you found is the best method of pest control?
MJN: The troll is no longer a fiendish firestarter on the internet’s fringes, lurking with their jerricans of kerosene awaiting the perfect moment to crisp up the orphanage. The troll is now a mainstream banality—as much an establishment no-mark as the besuited corporate politicians of yore. In America, you made a third-rate troll the president, and in Britain, we are governed by a party who repeatedly troll the electorate by out-icking themselves with every phony policy announcement. My hope is that the troll, stripped of the ability to startle and appall, will merely lapse into the shadows, leaving only the talented and sane people to lead us into a less moronic age. But I’ve made the mistake of hoping for things before, so I should probably put the kibosh on such reckless behaviour.
GS: If the literary system and landscape are as broken and ass-backward as we seem to agree it is, why write? As your protagonist in The 1002nd Book to Read Before You Die suggests, is it a way to worship at the altar of literary gods and perhaps futilely fight against the deluge of dross? Is it the revenge of producing a work that nano-brained readers could never tackle, sweating and shivering anytime they see it judging them from the highest ledge of their bookshelves?
MJN: I’ve striven to write the sort of books I would pounce upon if written by another bespectacled Scottish author completely at odds with his country’s prevailing cultural landscape. In the realm of offbeat, low-reader literary fiction, there’s no purpose in writing for any reason except to amuse yourself, or to purge yourself of various hiccups of despair and inchoate rage. In my new story collection, there’s a story where a writer tries to tailor his writing to one specific woman named Carol by imagining the sort of prose she may appreciate based on his own assumptions, having never even met her. It’s a comment on the futility of imagining an audience, and the closest thing to a rom-com I’ve ever written.
GS: Speaking in general, the label “postmodern” tends to be used amorphously by readers and writers. Obviously, there’s a strong element of self-awareness, of knowing a story is being told, or at least attempted, by a storyteller (even though this can be traced back to very premodern works, such as Don Quixote and the One Thousand and One Nights). How would you define postmodernism in literary terms?
MJN: I’ve heard the self-referential elements of those texts being described as “postmodern before postmodernism existed”—attributing prescience of a cultural label in the 20th century to classic texts is a head-scratcher, a form of backtracking by writers unaware of the rich history of the meta moments of yore. As for postmodernism, you either accept that any text knowingly weaving elements of other genres or older texts into its fabric (i.e. everything now being published) will have the label “postmodern” appended, and concede that postmodernism is a form of cultural endgame from which no one can escape, or you can choose to untether all contemporary art from that trap and view the sum of all art being produced today as part of one long cultural tapestry. The latter is more appealing to me.
GS: Speaking of postmodernism, your first novel is titled A Postmodern Belch. It’s something of a cliché for writers to loathe their debut novels. Looking back, how do you feel about it, and in what way does it fit with your oeuvre?
MJN: I wrote A Postmodern Belch before I’d really explored metafiction, so I thought I was being highly amusing and original. I also hadn’t learned to discipline myself to write properly by paying attention to the rhythm of the sentence, I was merely having a blast sending up my own crippling self-awareness, which had kept me from experiencing any basic pleasure up until that point. It’s a hoot of angst in the form of a frolic from a young man yearning to leap into life’s bazaar and continually butting heads with failure. I dreamt up an imaginary carnival into which I could insert myself as I worked to overcome my social anxiety and shyness issues. And yes, it’s shit.
GS: Fast forward to today and your publisher, Sagging Meniscus Press, tells me you have a new book coming out in March of next year, a short story collection titled Violent Solutions to Popular Problems. What can you tell me about it? Are these all relatively new stories, or have they been collected after a long period of time? Which of the stories is your favorite and why?
MJN: Half new, half older. I’m quietly fond of the story “man/woman” [subscript sic]—here I managed to compose a dystopian yarn with a straight face. I’m perpetually exasperated by my own stylistic tics, so whenever I have the stamina to override my tendency to lapse into freewheeling punny comic prose, I always pat myself on the head. The last story, ‘The Bardo of Abandoned Characters,’ is the cowardly version of a very long, very indulgent, very unfinished novel consisting of a maddening cycle of stories from unloved, undeveloped characters at war with themselves and the author. In The Dirty Dust by Irish modernist Mártin Ó Cadhain, the residents of a cemetery spend the afterlife kvetching at one another from their coffins. I’ve always wanted to compose a similar novel where the world’s discarded characters commingle in a Battle Royale-style limbo, furiously competing for page-space. It’s precisely the sort of unreadable, overindulgent novel I’d write if I had the patience and the infatuation with my own hilarity, both of which I lack.
GS: Going back to postmodernism and metafiction, here are the words of your character Marcus Schott: “For me, composing a postmodern novel about a writer composing a postmodern novel is a more sincere form of emotional expression than the I-love-you.” Is this true for you? Either way, do you think there’s a limit to this style, a point at which any ounce of sincerity disappears or is revealed as shallow, another smokescreen, as it were? This seems to be one of the main theses in Gerald Murnane’s novel A Million Windows, for instance, particularly when he criticizes Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. To be more specific, Murnane writes: “I admit that I was dazzled at first by If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino, but I did not fail to note soon afterward how little I could recall of its intricate contrivances or of the seeming-qualities of its glib narrator, not to mention its stock characters, and if I think of the book nowadays I think of its author as someone for whom writer and reader are opposed to one another as the players on either side of a chessboard are opposed. Even the undiscerning reader of this fiction of mine should have understood by now that I, the narrator, would dread to feel that we were separated even by these sentences.” For the record, Calvino’s novel is one of my favorites.
MJN: I’m fully in agreement with Marcus. Metafiction has been a necessary (and arguably safe) tool with which to limn the various lamentations of my own personal difficulty as a writer seeking a way to accurately represent my difficulties as a writer. In my novel Trimming England there’s a section, ‘The Novel Inside You,’ which moves away from overt metafiction to try and more witheringly poke away at that canker of self that has increasingly restricted my creativity over the years. It’s inspired by Calvino’s second-person address in that metafictional milestone, which was the first OuLiPo text I read and still the most definitive. As for Murnane’s remarks, as I move away from writing metafictional prose, I’m more inclined to agree with him, although I lack his ability to feel any emotional fusion between my sentences and a hypothetical reader. This, I expect, is because Murnane has readers, whereas I’m still groping blindly for some of those.
GS: Among other things, The 1002nd Book to Read Before You Die raises this vital set of questions: “Should a reader have a ‘conscience’ about what is read in their lifetimes? Does someone serious about literature have an obligation to read the books less conscientious readers will never think to pick up? Or is the reader, regardless of their powers, allowed to read whatever takes their fancy, neglecting lesser-known books in favour of franchise sci-fi or other popular brands?” What are your answers?
MJN: Why not immerse yourself in the warm caramel of every conceivable art form at the very pinnacle of its possibilities? Why settle for Bob Ross on YouTube when there’s a pre-Raphaelite exhibition one bus-hop away? I conducted my cultural life thusly for a long squirt, but over time, I’m less averse to such an arch and arrogant stance, mainly as I’m not listening to Mozart on Spotify, I’m listening to The Fiery Furnaces. I’m not watching Robert Bresson, I’m watching Bob Byington. I’m not reading Vasily Grossman, I’m reading Irvine Welsh. I would politely encourage any consumer of culture to periodically dip their wick into the unknown, the uncomfortable, and the unconventional, as they will almost certainly unlock new kunstkammers of artistic wonder that will allow them, to paraphrase Michael Silverblatt, to endure greater degrees of suffering.
https://thecollidescope.com/2023/09/30/canker-of-self-an-interview-with-m-j-nicholls/
