Writing in this space recently, Hadley Freeman examined the "voyeuristic appeal" of celebrity novels, claiming that the cloak of fiction allowed the authors more license than insipid biography. Freeman might have added that to discover the true nature of disgrace, shame and humiliation we must turn to fiction at another level. It takes a highbrow to deliver the low-down on our cupidity and excess.
The claustrophobia, cattiness and callous morality of young girls living in close quarters are laid bare in The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark. The author's diamond-sharp prose dissects the dreams and desires of the residents of the May of Teck Club, a hostel in west London which has just about survived the ruin visited upon the city by the Luftwaffe.
The young women's meagre resources prove to be physical, financial and, crucially, ethical. It's not a long novel but it carries a psychological payload heavier than any stout airport potboiler. At the heart of the novel are Joanna Childe, wholesome, pious and doomed, and lissom Selina whose physical beauty leads those around her to think it must be matched by an inner integrity - wrongly, as it turns out. Between these poles, the other girls in the hostel oscillate, forming friendships, falling out, and sharing a coveted Schiaparelli dress, which will prove to possess a demonic influence.
The chief victim of the girls' inadequate principles is, of course, a man - Nicholas Farringdon, who is so traumatised by the events he witnesses at the May of Teck Club that he takes holy orders and meets a grisly fate in a Haiti.
Pithy and profound, Spark's prose delights with small details. If Ziggy and Brian had read this novel before entering that 21st century bear-pit in Elstree, they might not have fallen prey so easily to the machinations of Chanelle, Charley, Amanda and Sam.
The next time you see a photo of a famous couple rolling out of some hyped-up nightspot, a trail of paparazzi in their wake, think of these lines:
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made ..."
This is the voice of Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, as he begins to grasp the amorality that characterised the Jazz Age in the US. The novel is F Scott Fitzgerald's greatest achievement and gains cohesion from his crucial decision to divide his own personality into the two main male characters. Carraway is the articulate chronicler of gilded but damaged lives; Gatsby is doomed dreamer, a self-invented servant of a "vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty". Superficially a semi-satire on the excesses of "new money" in 1920s America, the novel has a deeper preoccupation with the poisoning of the founding father's vision of an Arcadian new world. Before he succumbed to alcoholism and an equally disabling belief in his own celebrity, Fitzgerald, propelled by his determination to capture American beauty before it vanished forever, was responsible for some of the most exquisite English ever published.
At some point this week you will pick up the discarded tabloid of a colleague and find yourself shaking your head over the account of some wretched murder. How can people allow themselves to sink to that indecent level? you'll wonder. Thomas Hardy knew.
Tess of the D'Urbevilles charts the series of wrong turnings, betrayed dreams and bad luck that leads a good soul like Tess toward a murderous state of mind.
I thought of Tess when I saw the recent pictures of a Britney Spears attempting to hold her life together after losing custody of her sons. I'm not saying Britney is going to kill anyone, but boy, I bet she knows how Tess felt when the Wessex girl's mind and life unravelled in that seaside boarding house.
Hardy makes it clear from the outset that his heroine is an innocent victim whose fate is to be sacrificed at the altar of Victorian morality. Tess's exemplary nature brings out the worst in the men in her life. Raped and impregnated by Alec Stokes-d'Urberville, abandoned by the passive-aggressive Angel Clare, Tess struggles to retain an inner rectitude despite the degradations visited upon her. At the close of the novel Hardy reveals that her efforts were futile, the dice loaded: "'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess."
Today's fallen women are humbled not for the amusement of pagan gods, but for the gratification of heathens.
A shared theme of these novels is the destruction of innocence. Read young, they can inoculate the mind with a concern for the human condition and encourage empathy with the marginalised and vanquished. There is no vaccination against acumen. Once exposed to great writing, young readers are likely to find the thick glossies offer thin fare.
.png?w=600)
