A short while ago I wrote a condensed piece calling for more lessness in novels. It seemed to me (it still does) that more can be said in the silences of a novel, the white spaces of a page than in most novels that rely on over-characterisation, plot, and descriptive narrative to drive and enlighten the reader: the precise failings, in my opinion, of the contemporary novel.
I am still left elated from my recent first reading and, more importantly, re-reading of Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes. After my recent celebration of JG Ballard many of my friends asked me: what about Gabriel Josipovici? How can you ignore him? Well, I haven't been ignoring him - I've been reading his literary criticism for years - but, admittedly, his novels were uncharted territory. Finally, though, I took Mark Thwaite's and Stephen Mitchelmore's word for it and picked up the copy of Everything Passes that had been lying at the bottom of my "to read" pile - and now, for the time being at least, I don't want to put it down. I've been carrying this book around with me, showing it to my friends, in the pub, round at people's houses, generally pestering them to read it. I'm starting to annoy people. I don't care.
Everything Passes is not only a damning insight into the state of contemporary writing (surely all the best writing is about writing?) it is also homage to a single piece of music: Schoenberg's String Trio, 1947. The violence of this piece of music sits uncomfortably with the calm on the page - heightening the tension contained within. It is that simple - but we know things really aren't that simple.
If lessness in a novel is, in fact, more - a whole lot more - then Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes has to be our contemporary measure, the mark from where we should now begin. Cutting-edge writers such as Tom McCarthy know all too well the impact of time spent reading and re-reading this most modern of British novelists/critics. And although I'm not insisting that all contemporary novels should be as short as this one - a mere 60 pages - I still think it shows how much can be conveyed with the most minimal of means.
In an epoch where literature has lost its gravity, as we continue to sink into a media-drenched cult of celebrity, a cult that creates the life-style fiction used to promote it, when the novels of chick-lit authors such as Anna Davis are considered literature, we know we're in deep trouble.
Josipovici has mentioned on more than one occasion that he finds British culture to be "narrow, provincial and smug". Walking into most high-street bookshops and looking at their three-for-two tables it's hard to disagree, hard to believe that modernism ever touched our shores.
Josipovici's writing continues the modernist tradition of undermining and refreshing tired, orthodox literary forms. His work acknowledges, as the novelist Ellis Sharp notes, the "bad faith of the novel" and highlights the mistakes British contemporary fiction continues to make. And in reading Everything Passes we begin to realise the severity of each mistake made.
