MEGAN ABBOTT'S GOT THE FEVER

Deenie Nash is a teen-aged girl in a cold, gray town in the northern USA. Her brother is a star hockey player, her father teaches at their high school, her divorced mom lives a few towns away. Her circle of friends is fraught with imbalance, the imperfect mixings along the chain, the way the emotions of love and sex intensify at different paces. So far so normal for small-town America. And then Deenie's friend Lise collapses in fits, struck, as if possessed by a mystery illness which, as it spreads, threatens to bring the whole town down into chaos.

The brilliance of Megan Abbott's seventh novel is the way it constantly shifts the ground from beneath you, the way it moves between tropes and genres almost effortlessly. What is The Fever? Is it a teen-aged thriller about the fragile psyches of girls on the brink of womanhood, in a society where sex is out front all the time, but still treated as a dirty secret behind the curtain? Certainly the adults of the earlier generation do nothing to ease their children through this ever-earlier ritual of so-called maturity? Is it a novel about the abuse of modern science? Were vaccinations to help prevent sexual infections responsible for these fits? Is it about mass-hysteria, a Crucible-like dissection of the weakness of adult society in the face of the power and threat inherent in young sexuality? Or is there a supernatural force at work, enacting a horror-movie's babysitter retribution against these girls when they hit sexual activity? At times Abbott seems to be writing a sharply literate take on the 'weird menace' stories from pulp magazines like Strange Tales, playing a very-knowing three-card monte trick with the enthralled reader.

This knowing approach should not surprise anyone who's followed Megan Abbott's career. Her first four novels, Die A Little, The Song Is You (see my review here), Queenpin, and Bury Me Deep were noir fictons, but with a difference; not so much told from a woman's perspective but with the classic sexual tropes of noir reversed. Abbott's first book, The Street Was Mine, was study of masculinity in hardboiled fiction and film noir; her early novels were filling in the other side of the story. It was something new to crime writing, something she made her own.

With her fifth novel, The End Of Everything, she switched gears. It's easy to see where the now-common comparisons with Gillian Flynn arose, especially once the book was named a Richard and Judy selection in Britain. But the story of a disappeared 13-year girl, told from the point of view of her best friend, reads like Flynn crossed with Vin Packer, a deft mix of coming-of-age girlhood, the spectres of paedophilia and incest, and the desperate intensity and doom of Fifties pulp. I wrote then (you can read my review here) comparing the novel to Lolita, about her fascinating obsessions, and I stand by that now. What I've written above may seem overly analytical, but the remarkable thing about Abbott's writing is how much it suggests and stands up to such analysis, and how engrossing it is on its pure story-telling basis. There is a dream-like sense in her prose, a fever-dream we follow through to the end. I marvel at the result. Megan Abbott may be the most original crime writer of the past decade, and she should be treasured by readers of all sorts of fiction.

The Fever by Megan Abbott

Picador, £14.99, ISBN 9781447226321

note; this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimtime.co.uk)

BERT STERN: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the photographer Bert Stern, best-known for his 'Last Session' shots of Marilyn Monroe, is in today's Independent, buy the paper paper or link to it here. Obviously, the Marilyn pictures are the big talking point--I avoided getting into detail about whether or not Stern, as I said in the piece a notorious womaniser, and Marilyn actually consummated a different sort of relationship, and Stern himself hinted but never said, but I probably should have mentioned that he laid on a lot of Dom Perignon along with the other acoutrments, and in many of the shots Monroe looks decidedly heavy-lidded.

The Smirnoff ad is indeed remarkable, and he also made a fantastic one with Buster Keaton for the vodka. There was a long essay on the bleeding into 'art' of commercial photography, and the way fashion is the cutting edge of that bleed. In the modern art world, where ironic commentary on one's own work is more important than the work itself, the advertising theme might well be considered part of the art--so the ironic commentary of the pun on 'dry' in dry martini is just as artistic as the representation of heat, or the geometric inversion of glass and pyramid. Stern, it should be said, appears to have been a master of using the emotional power of red--see the Lolita poster.

I would also have liked to have said more about Jazz On A Summer's Day, which is a truly memorable document. It is a very mainstream picture of the jazz world in 1958, as you might expect with Willis Conover emceeing, but the performances are brilliant, and it does include Thelonious Monk, in a trio with Roy Haynes on drums. Jazz in that period, particularly the five years following, might well be my favourite music, period, and watching the film puts you in the mood for a little bit of the harder revolution that was to follow. In terms of creating an impressionistic picture of Newport at the time, it's perfect, right down to the America's Cup races going on in the background. Beats the hell out of High Society.

MEGAN ABBOTT'S END OF EVERYTHING

It might become a challenge to discuss Megan Abbott's books without reference to the words 'fever' or 'dream'. Her first four novels approached the world of noir from the inside, or perhaps, in a genre where the protagonists are usually men, often superficially attractive (qualities we're supposed to judge in women) but possessed of one-track minds and/or half track brains, we might better say from the other side. This reclaiming of the world of noir has been, for me, the most interesting and original work done in the crime field in this new millennium.

Although her fifth novel, 2011's, The End Of Everything, is, on the face of it, a novel about adolescence, whose 'crime' sits mostly offstage while Abbott provides a stunning take on the power of sexuality, and the even greater power of repression. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense, because that is at heart what noir is all about at heart—the feeling a child has, of being caught in the grip of a force he or she cannot control, a primal urge beyond understanding or coping-- isn't that exactly what noir protagonists wind up feeling? That they are adults merely intensifies the predicament, intensifies the temperature of the fever dream in which it takes place.It's why the best noir is filmed in shadow, in fog, in haze, in darkness, where no one can see what is coming.

Lizzie and Evie are best friends, with Evie's older sister Dusty their glamorous role model, and Evie's father, Mr. Verver, as the perfect dad, at least in the mind of Lizzie, who's being raised by her single mother, who herself has just begun an affair. Then, Evie disappears, and it soon appears she has been kidnapped by the Verver's insurance agent, Mr. Shaw. But nothing, it seems, is the way it seems.

Although the setting appears to be the 1980s, but the story has the feel of the 1950s—so much so that it reminded me of Thomas H. Cook at his best, the same sort of emotional undercurrent which reveals itself in its own repression, that same sort of quiet build-up which goes beyond noir, but still stirs the perfect surface in search of the imperfections underneath. Abbott, through Lizzie's teenaged eyes, builds an undercurrent of sexual malice which permeates virtually every scene, boiling just beneath the surface. And Lizzie's perceptions are modern, the only really modern thing in the story—she is the author's stand-in, seeing a Fifties noirish reality beneath that 80s world. The reader feels like a youngster who's stumbled across their parents' cache of steam-covered 50s paperbacks. So Mr. Verver, the seemingly perfect father, more and more takes on the appearance of a predator, an abuser, not so different perhaps from Mr. Shaw.

Except that Mr. Shaw is also not quite what he appears to be, and Evie's kidnapping is not quite that either. Without wanting to spoil the story, Abbott has also written a look back at Lolita, again, as I suggested at the start, told from the other side. After all, what is Nabokov's novel, if not a look at 1950s masculinity, and its fatal attraction to the unspoiled, perfect, uncomplaining, unthreatening femininity of the 50s teen, just starting to be sexualised in the post-war modern world.

It's a brilliant book, whose tone never falters, whose tension is wrenched tighter and tighter with each page, and whose vision is resolutely noirish. Megan Abbott's fiction remains fascinating in its obsessions, and in The End Of Everything, she takes them out of their classic setting, and proves she can make them work on a wider, more surprising canvas.

The End Of Everything by Megan Abbott
Picador, £7.99, ISBN 9780330518314

TALKING JD SALINGER: WHAT I DIDNT SAY ON THE STRAND

I'll be punditising about JD Salinger tonight on the BBC World Service programme The Strand, at 2232 GMT, immediately after the news. Stella Duffy was a guest in the studio, and they have taped contributions from quite a few writers. As always, I put my thoughts together and got far too few of them into the programme, but I start by saying how Catcher In The Rye was never any sort of an inspiration for me, explaining how it never struck that chord of alienation, nor of honest superiority to a world that didn't understand. Hell, I'd already read Lolita before I got to JDS; Humbert Humbert was way more alienated!

It occured to me that the success of Catcher may have had an Orson Welles effect on Salinger; re-reading 'Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut' today I was struck not only by how adult its alienation is (it's Richard Yates ten years before Yates), but how much it sets up the world against which Holden Caufield wants to rebel. One of my problems with the book was that for all the glamour of Holden's so-called rebellion, it gets him nowhere, he does nothing, and he winds up headed back to another prep school (I mentioned to the World Service producers that in school my football team beat the one from Salinger's prep school, Valley Forge Military Academy). Thinking about that sense of alienation being just a phase, it's no surprise that Catcher has been one of the most-taught novels in American schools, as well as possibly the most-banned. Holden's brief rebellion winds up with his settling for the diminished expectations of his trip to the zoo.

I also was thinking about the influence of Thomas Wolfe on Salinger; I read Look Homeward Angel before I read Catcher, and noted the debt even when I got to Salinger as a 16 year old. I wondered a bit about The Turn Of The Screw as another inspiration, certainly in the relationship between the expelled prep school boy and his adoring younger sister, if not the ghosts.

Of course this is all archetype. The bildungsroman predates Salinger, though Salinger might be said to have re-invented it by giving it the 'modern' teenager's point of view and vocabularly, at a time when these were being formed into a 'market' different from adults, or miniature adults, as teens had always been. It's odd that this teen genre would explode among a generation who were just a little younger than the teens who had fought in a World War. It's also odd how many readers miss the fact that the world through Holden's eyes isn't the world as it is; even the title shows how he gets Robert Burns wrong, and builds a lovely adolescent fantasy from it; a metaphor, a veritable metaphor Watson!, for the book itself.

And frankly, as I said in the show, albeit in more discreet language, my reaction to Holden was to tell him to get his thumb out of his preppie ass. A lot has been made of Catcher's influence on David Chapman or John Hinckley or their like; it's like a losers' convention, or Salinger as an L Ron Hubbard of teen angst. Except that's not what Salinger wanted, and that's probably why he sued the Swede Fredrick Colting for producing a sequel to Catcher --after watching legions of readers misinterpret what he wrote, why would he want them to read someone else's misinterpretations? I'm sure the only reason he tried to stop publication was a selfish one, so he wouldn't have to live in a world where there was yet another Holden in the public eye. On the other hand I wonder how Salinger would have felt had Howard Roger Garis, creator of Uncle Wiggily, sued him for using his character's name in the title? (We used to play the Uncle Wiggily board game incessantly when I was four or five...that and Candyland.)

I would have liked to discuss My Foolish Heart a bit more; it's Mark Robson at his most turgid (he never does well with subtle emotions) and Dana Andrews at his most wooden, and it's a great example of losing the impact of the story when you try to widen it out, and fill in the backstory. It defeated the Epsteins, precisely because they were filling in, rather than adding to (see the original film of 3:10 To Yuma and Elmore Leonard's short story, as a good example of how that can be done).

The final interesting thing in the programme is hearing Joyce Maynard imply Salinger was a habitual stalker by letter, persumably of younger literary women. But that rather misses the point of Salinger's approach to her, when she was an 18 year old Yale freshman just out of Phillips Andover, who'd written an article for the New York Times magazine called 'An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back On Life', which was later republished as 'Looking Back: A Chronicle Of Growing Up Old In The Sixties'. I can still recall the Mary Tyler Moore pose on the magazine cover, but the essay rang false to me then in almost exactly the same way Holden Caufield did, as self-indulgent moaning. Yet it's not far-fetched to think that Salinger recognised a fellow alienated spirit. What this suggested to me was that he had internalised the Caulfield character, his alienation, and that had shut down, gradually, the adult writer inside him.

Salinger wasn't a recluse in the sense of, say, Howard Hughes, to whom the Independent compared him, nor Greta Garbo, again used by the Indy and Charles McGrath in the New York Times. Reclusivity appears to mean something entirely different in New York than in New Hampshire. Here's McGrath, writing about Salinger and his life in Cornish, NH: He seldom left, except occasionally to vacation in Florida or to visit William Shawn, the almost equally reclusive former editor of The New Yorker. Avoiding Mr. Shawn’s usual (and very public) table at the Algonquin Hotel, they would meet under the clock at the old Biltmore Hotel, the rendezvous for generations of prep-school and college students. The question is how William Shawn could be said to be 'equally reclusive' when he was going to work at the New Yorker and eating lunch every day at a (very public) table at the Algonquin?

Gore Vidal called Salinger's choice 'exile' and as usual he got it right. It was not just exile from the New York's literary world, cocktail parties and small talk, careerism on the make, but also, I think, from the self who had done all that, written Catcher, and perhaps found the idea of trying to top that, within that hothouse environment, too daunting. Or maybe just not worth it. And of course the nature of his reclusivity may have served as the model for other authors, most famously Thomas Pynchon, who found their reputations enhanced by their unwillingness to join the publicity machine. How odd it must seem these days...