Albert Angelo - B.S. Johnson

I will never understand its almost infamous reputation as the book with holes cut into its pages.


A long time ago, B.S. Johnson was recommended to me by a friend. As often happens (life getting in the way, is what people like to call it), I forgot about the recommendation, but then recently stumbled upon a collection of three of Johnson's novels in the university library. These are: Trawl, Alberto Angelo, and House Mother Normal. I decided to first read the novel which my friend had praised all those months ago.

And isn't it an unprecedented little corker of a novel. One thing that struck me instantly is that Johnson is amongst that category of writers to whom writing is such  a natural form of expression. I can't quite put my finger on what it is about the writing that makes me feel this way (perhaps it's to do with the syntactical/grammatical imperfections that allude to a genuine unedited (or minimally edited) creativity), but there is an unstudied, uncalculated feel to the prose. I'm thinking Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Kerouac, Foster Wallace, just in terms of the naturalness, the way the words sit. They seem sprung onto the page with little effort, yet his sentences cohere into some really fine writing, funny too:

          'When Jenny left me, betrayed me for a cripple whom she imagined to need her more, my mother said never mind, perhaps he would die and then I could have her back again.'

Being experimental, post-modernist, Albert Angelo shakes the eiderdown of conventionality from its shoulders and shadow-boxes its own reflection. We find ourselves being skipped along like a smooth stone between tenses, perspectives, even form. There is drama, prose and poetry; first-person, second-person, and third-; simple linear prose and this system of two columns, one following the action, the other following Albert's thoughts simultaneously; there is also a series of short notes written by Albert's pupils (he is a cover schoolteacher), replete with spelling mistakes and colloquialisms, outlining the things they hate about their teacher. It is a wild sort of freedom the author has on the page, which allows the story almost to tell itself through a fragmented rush of impressions.

Yet Johnson never loses us. Never tries to lose us. It's not an academic thing, this mad jolting of structure, but a very functional approach to the novel. I can't remember reading a livelier book. And yet Johnson's most important gift is for using his humour, his ability to experiment successfully with form and structure, to hit the mark in a much deeper sense than any surface trickery. His man, Albert, is looking for distraction to help him deal with a break-up that happened four years ago with which he is still struggling. He and a friend, Terry, cruise around in the evenings looking for lively bars and places to drive, and they 'talk, talk, talk, talk, talk,' about their shared heartbreaks, 'as though it could make some difference.' Thus is created a niggling sadness that runs through the narrative, being chipped away at slowly, burrowing into the reader's consciousness and three-dimensionalising Albert, who we come to realise is filled with an intense, obsessive cycle of suffering.

Ultimately, the novel is about identity, about truth and appearance. There is a point in the third chapter (titled 'Development') where Johnson himself jumps onto the page with an impatient cry of 'OH, F---- ALL THIS LYING!' From there the novel proceeds into the phase called 'Disintegration', in which Johnson pulls apart the facade he has created, bemoaning the inability of literature to reflect real life in an exact, uncompromising sense. Here the true identities of all of his characters are exposed in an aggressive tirade against fiction, also known as 'lying', and his fictional world is obliterated.

A great, great piece of meta-fiction that I cannot recommend highly enough, though I will never understand its almost infamous reputation as the book with holes cut into its pages. Only at one point in the book does this occur, through two pages, and the outcome seems more of a small joke than a revelation of future events, as Johnson tricks the reader into assuming they have had a glimpse into what is about to happen. The novel is so much more than gimmickry. Johnson saw himself as more of a modernist torchbearer descended from the likes of Joyce and Beckett. To me that seems a little misguided, though not by much. B.S. Johnson is perhaps the English answer to those two clever Irish fellows.


pp.180.
Published: Picador, 2004 (originally published 1964 by New Directions Books).