A mild digression, first. Me and some friends went seeing the new Wes Anderson film at the weekend (Asteroid City). I liked it, even though I didn’t understand everything on a first watch (I’m happy with watching it again at some point, with reading about it, with finding out what I can find out to answer the questions that I have); other friends hated it. They said it was arty farty. I’ve always found this approach to things a little problematic. If all art is an interaction, then dismissing art that isn’t for you as being arty farty is akin to saying it’s not me, it’s you. When in fact it’s only ever you. Much better to say, when faced by things you don’t get along with, ‘yeah, it’s not for me’.
I mention this because I suspect that the friends who had a problem with Asteroid City would more than likely have a problem with Corey Fah Does Social Mobility too.
What we have here is a relatively short (160 page) novel about a writer called Corey Fah who “didn’t know shit about collecting prizes”. She wins the Award for the Fictionalisation of Social Evils and has to go pick up a trophy, which turns out to be a sort of beige UFO that continually eludes her. While she is trying to pick up the trophy she crosses paths with an eight-legged Bambi figure (that is, a cross between the Disney Bambi and a spider, best seen in Nicole Eisenman’s 1993 picture, Bambi Gregor), hereafter referred to as Bambi Pavok (as Corey Fah explains to us:
“…he had multiple sets of eyes, like that seraph-filtered kitty on Instagram, or most common spiders: pavouk, in one Euro language.”)
Without snagging the trophy, Corey Fah and Bambi Pavok return home to Drew Szumski (Corey’s other half). The next day they watch their favourite TV show, St Orton Gets to the Bottom of It – in which a figure who may or may not be a legendary 60s playwright once thought to have been beaten to death, only he wasn’t beaten to death, he escaped through a sort of wormhole into the semi-present (2014) and became a TV presenter who explores sort of wormholes (which he calls Červí díra). He has people on the show who feel they have experienced something similar and he usually calls them out about it.
We get Bambi Pavok’s back story which might in some ways reflect Corey’s own back story. We hear from the awards people who don’t seem able to do something straightforward, like give an award winner their award. Which of course has all kinds of implications for the prize money. Corey and Drew have their ups and downs, figuratively and literally. As the novel progresses, things get gradually more involved, as you’d expect (Bambi’s old forest chum, Thumper – hereafter known as Fumper – makes an appearance, only to be – shall we say rudely – dispatched) – and those infuriating Červí díra have characters tumbling from one place and time to another. It’s fair to say it all gets a little bit Everything Everywhere All At Once (as “the redistribution of cultural capital lead(s) to irregularities in the space-time continuum”), by way of say a writer like Daren King (see Boxy an Star and Jim Giraffe).
“The world moved on at lightning speed, time waits for no man, et cetera, we did not give a fuck about those who’d come before in the international capital during this distinct era.”
When it comes to reading Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, the following advice is worth bearing in mind:
“…events were repeating themselves like in a classic timeloop setup, we could identify patterns, work out how to disrupt or control them, and, eventually, based on what we’d learnt, force a different, more positive outcome, or not.”
The fact it’s published by Penguin will hopefully make a few people on the wrong side of the culture wars get all hot under their collar too thereby expediting their early deaths, and we’re all for that.
Any Cop?: It’s fair to say, as with most things, this won’t be for everyone. But those people who take it to their collective bosom will love it ferociously.
Bookmunch 