Adam Haslett / Features / Untitled Books

"The pagan British. No churchly minders left to decry these wicked modern ways."

Adam Haslett

The author of Union Atlantic laments the corruption of our youth, ponders the rise of crystal meth and gives in to Twilight.

Monday

We arrive from overheated Naples in the late afternoon into Gatwick's north terminal toting too much luggage onto the train to Euston, where the cooler temperature comes as a relief and we walk down Gower Street, past the University of London, to a hotel where we're shown into a basement suite with a little garden at the back, a blown fuse in the bathroom, and a Channel Four program running on the TV, a show about sex education in which eleven, twelve, and thirteen year olds evaluate a line-up of five nude men, from whom they are asked the choose the gay one, fiddling and squirming as they do so, shocked to learn it is the chubby older fellow and not the young muscled one, this at 8:30 in the evening, children viewing naked men on primetime, most saying they expect gay people to be fit and fancy and a bit effeminate, until a boy in the first row says it has nothing to do with looks, the host then congratulating him on his correct answer, followed by applause. The pagan British. No churchly minders left to decry these wicked modern ways. Moral opprobrium reserved, instead, we learn, for the parents who've been discovered allowing their children to cycle to school.

Tuesday

You don't get many good reads. Not that you hear about. Friends can be enthusiastic, family supportive, publishers optimistic, reviewers damning or praising, but after years of labouring on sentences and scenes edited over and over to produce an interrelated whole, you don't often, or perhaps ever, have the pleasure of hearing a practiced, trained reader describe his or her experience of your work in depth. This morning, however, I'm given that pleasure by a reporter writing a piece for one of the Sunday papers. He wrote his dissertation on Keats.

He's not afraid to be moved by words. To most of his questions, I answer, simply, Yes, and then elaborate a bit on what he's noticed, amazed and delighted that he's read my book so carefully. We end up talking a lot about masculinity. The power and the prison of it. How's it ethos infuses the violent worlds of the military and high finance. How it doesn't seem like a coincidence that the credit bubble unfolded in the same decade as the American invasion of Iraq.

That evening I meet my British publishers for the first time at a dinner in Soho, along with some journalists, a bookseller, and the editorial assistant who first championed by novel. Though I come to Britain fairly frequently, this evening is a homecoming of sorts. I went to school in England when I was a kid; my father was English; I'm a British citizen; and half the stories in my first book were set here, along with many of my earliest memories. Walking back to my hotel afterwards, slightly drunk, I feel as happy as I have in months.

Wednesday

Wembley. Curry joints, prawn brokers, mini-cab dispatch offices, betting shops, and once you're off the high street, row houses with cement yards and drawn shades. Express trains shoot by at startling speeds. This morning I did an interview with the BBC and then we packed up and schlepped our luggage once more onto the Tube to this friend's empty flat. On the ride out I finished reading a book called Methland by Nick Reding about the devastating rise of methamphetamine in rural America, particularly in farming towns in the Midwest, where I went to graduate school. Though I've never done it, meth has always fascinated me for two reasons: (1) it doesn't fit the popular imagination of an American drug problem because it isn't chiefly urban, most of its users are white, and until the early part of this century, it was mostly manufactured in the US, not imported; and (2) it has the odd added feature of having flourished in two otherwise deeply disconnected places--dying small towns and the gay night life of New York and San Francisco. It strikes me as the most nihilistic of drugs with none of the soft charms of marijuana or the sensory fantasia of hallucinogens, nor even the initial muted bliss of opiates, the drug of choice, I would guess, after booze, for what the poet Roethke called the 'heavy bored' out here in Wembley.

Thursday

When you're travelling you're often left with random hours before or between meetings which at home would be filled by finally doing the laundry or buying food but which on the road sit their uselessness down in front of you with an accusing glare. There are always more books to read, but this morning my mind is remaining aloof from my brain and I'm good for little more than stimulus. Our absent host has an enormous television, a Blue Ray player, and a copy of New Moon, an instalment of the Twilight books-flicks franchise. The movie is bad--miserably written, deathly earnest, puerile--but what's more interesting is this Blue Ray thing, which by taking high-definition to the next level seems to have completed the move away from the textured richness of film at its 70mm apogee to the apparent transparency of film as video. Of course, it's chock full of CGI, but you apprehend the people in the picture as hyper-real floaters against that dream backdrop. In film, every era has a technology that it considers more realistic than the next (witness Hollywood's recent reinvention of 3D), and Blue Ray is in that same line. All content aside, New Moon Blue Ray edition makes Lawrence of Arabia look like a post-impressionist painting. The same evolving conception of what counts as 'real' can be found in literature, where Clarissa's epistolary confessions play to the same readerly desire for the transparent entry into lived experience as Infinite Jest's tunnelling into the mind of the addict. I believe in the power of words, I do. And yet Taylor Launter's chest looks awfully nice on Blue Ray.

Empty hours killed, I have lunch with an old friend of my parent's whose come down from the Lake District to meet me at the British Museum.

Friday

Down to West Sussex to visit my uncle and meet up with my mother, whose on her way to Scotland. My other uncle is up from Hampshire and along with a few cousins we all spend the gorgeous summer afternoon in the garden under the shade of an ash tree, drinking ice water and tea, before heading to dinner at the decaying manor house of some batty old aristocrats who've just taken an American couple for a visit to the recently opened Rolls Royce factory up the road. There is discussion about the company now being German-owned. Much opposition to the factory being placed where is was on the South Downs, though they have installed a grass roof where birds now nest. After dinner we take a walk in the gardens. There are weeds coming up through the tarmac of the tennis court and the wood of the arboretum is ancient and cracked. It doesn't get dark until after ten.

Saturday

The news is full of this manhunt in Northumberland. A steroids user--the photos tell the story--gets out of prison, kills his ex-wife's lover, shoots her in the stomach, and kills a cop before the police contain him in a village where he used to camp and hunt. Americans are so inured to this sort of gun violence that this story would come much later in the broadcast back in the States. Here, it's the lead on every paper and news update. My mother's flight to Glasgow is cancelled and so she returns from Gatwick to spend another night down here near Arundel. I've been coming to this part of the world since I was a boy, visiting my uncle, a former farmer, in all the various houses, cottages, and shacks he's lived in over the years, and it feels deeply familiar and calming. Another day of pleasant milling about with family in and out of the house and garden. At home, I am a scrooge of time, meting it out to myself with such spurious precision and worry. But here, on what is now pure holiday, it's as motionless as the blue sky and as plentiful.

Sunday

Our last full day before returning to New York. We get up early and my uncle drives us and my mother over toward Southampton. My father grew up outside the city, in Chilworth. We pass by my grandparent's old house on the way to the cemetery where my father's ashes are buried. In the twenty-five years since his death I have been here only once, on the day, twenty-years ago, when my grandmother was buried beside him. His plaque is a flat stone in the ground. We clear the grass away from its edges and brush away the dirt and leaves. The 'n' and 'l' of 'In Loving Memory' are peeled back. It seems the letters have been applied to the stone rather than carved in it. My uncle says he and his brother will do something about it, get it fixed somehow. We haven't brought any flowers. Frankly, none of us sees why one would.

On the way back, we drop my mother at the airport in Southampton where she's booked another flight to Glasgow. We have a drink at a pub before getting back to my uncle's house and after dinner we watch the end of the World Cup Final, where in the final minutes of overtime, the Spanish striker finally strikes.

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Union Atlantic is published by Tuskar Rock.

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Thursday, 5 August, 2010