LOST IN WORDS
Edward St. Aubyn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, #
978-037428091, 261 pp.
* * * *
Edward St. Aubyn was once short-listed for the Man Booker
Prize, Britain’s version of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Don’t look for
his name again in the near future—not after his acidly funny thinly veiled
take-down of the Man Booker in Lost for
Words. His is a whistle-blower’s satire of the award, one that says the
prize has less to do with literature than with boardrooms, bedrooms,
horse-trading, and horseshit. It’s a work of fiction, but just barely. Former
judge A. L. Kennedy called the Man Booker "a pile of crooked
nonsense" awarded according to "who knows who, who's sleeping with
who[m], who's selling drugs to who[m], who's married to who[m], whose turn it
is." A look at past winners certainly gives pause. Amidst the
distinguished—V.S. Naipul, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Nadine Gortimer––one
finds an awful lot of one-hit wonders and dross: Arundhati Roy, Anita Brookner,
Kiran Desai… And I've yet to meet anyone who thinks that Hilary Mantel's novels
are even readable, let alone worthy of winning two Man Bookers.
Those who know British culture will have great fun matching
the fictional characters vying for and judging the Elysian Prize to the
real-life characters that inspired them. For example, one of the Elysian judges
is a handsome young actor Tobias Benedict, a dead ringer for 2012 judge Dan
Stevens (Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey).
Other elements of Kennedy’s blast are also at play. The Man part of the Man
Booker is the investment firm that administers the prize, as is the Elysian
Prize corporate sponsor. Both prizes are often headed by politicians, Scottish
MP Malcolm Craig in the case of Lost for
Words. Other members of Craig's contentious committee include: Benedict;
social media guru Jo Cross; Oxbridge scholar Vanessa Shaw; and Penny Feathers,
the ex-mistress of both Craig and Sir David Hampshire, whose firm funds the
award. Everybody has an agenda. Craig is partial to wot u starin at, a foul-mouthed look at Glasgow’s working-class
underbelly; Cross seeks “relevance,” though what she means by that is anyone’s
guess; Shaw wants stellar literature, though one suspects she doesn’t think any
has been written since the Edwardian age; and Feathers––modeled after Dame
Stella Rimington, another Booker apostate—just wants a good read and good luck
with that. She’s also hysterically writing an execrable mystery of her own with
the aid of software that helps choose words and phrases. As bad as that sounds,
she comes close to being the sanest one of the lot!
Add to this unruly lot the writers on the short list, those
spurned, publishers, and hangers-on. Many of them circle like buzzards around
the gorgeous Katherine Burns, a writer of some renown, though it's not clear if
it's because she's really all that good, or if it's because she has no qualms
with sleeping with whomever she finds useful. At one point she's simultaneously
bedding her publisher, Alan Oaks; French rapscallion Didier Leroux; and
novelist Sam Black. Oaks loses her affection when one of his aides mistakenly
submits an Indian cookbook for the Elysian Prize instead of Burns' novel; and
Black loses out to professional jealousy when his The Frozen Torrent makes the shortlist. Leroux claims Katherine, though
he's a poor man's Foucault, a pseudo-intellectual happy to expound about all of
the major points and many of the minor ones from his postmodern work of theory What is Banality? Poor man—he could
answer that question by gazing into a mirror!
Lost for Words has its flaws. Like some of his
characters, St. Aubyn occasionally goes over the top. It contains one worthless
and ridiculous personality—solipsistic Indian aristocrat Sunny Bunjee who has
come to England to claim a prize he knows he should win, though no one has heard
of him or his self-published tome. He happens to be the nephew of the woman
whose cookbook is mistakenly viewed as literature. We really don't need much of
Sunny and St. Aubyn strolls into cheap satire when trying to flesh out Sunny's
tale. And, yes, St. Aubyn is open to charges of cattiness. Still, his snippets
of novels within the novel works well enough to show that the emperor has no
clothes. I roared over how Vanessa Shaw defended All the World's a Stage, a really insipid tale narrated from
William Shakespeare's point of view. If you've ever had the experience of
picking up a Man Booker Prize winner and wondering why on earth it was even
published, let alone honored, Lost for
Words explains it all. At its best, this is a laugh-out-loud farce. Rob Weir
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