Anyone's Ghost - August Thompson
A superb novel about first loves and how it doesn't always work out. It's nostalgic, troubled, emotional, and sad.
Sorry for going MIA for the past few weeks – life just seems to have become really, really busy. It should be much calmer post-Christmas, and I’m hoping to get back into a regular posting rhythm.
Loads and loads of trigger warnings for this book. There's an on-page suicide attempt, several characters with suicidal ideation, lots of drug use, a bad trip, an overdose, underage drinking, underage drink-driving, several car crashes, and the death of a main character.
Anyone's Ghost grabs your attention from the opening line: "It took three car crashes to kill Jake." From there, Theron, Jake's teenage friend and former clandestine lover, looks back on their time together. The story is told in three parts. There's the summer where Theron is fifteen and Jake is seventeen and they're working together. Theron is infatuated with Jake but can't bring himself to think about what that might mean about himself and his sexuality. Following that summer, there's a gap of a few years until part two, which covers a few weeks around Hallowe'en when Theron is living in New York and Jake comes to visit. Finally, Theron looks back at his life from the period when Jake left New York until he travels to Texas for Jake's memorial service.
The author captures so much of what we all remember about adolescence so well. Theron is really self-conscious and hard on himself ("I hated how I looked...I was an avatar of ugliness."). He has a distant relationship from his father, caused less by his father's unpredictable behaviour and temper during Theron's childhood than for what Theron sees as his father's "narcissism" and self-pity. But the writer also captures the sense of camararderie with other teenagers and the endless conversations you can have ("We turned our lives into a kind of permanent hang, interrupted only be sleep. And in it we always found new things to talk about."). There's also all the risky behaviour that they indulge in – constantly getting stoned, endless drinking, driving while under the influence, and the sense that no harm will come to them – until it almost does.
As the characters move through the story, their attitudes and behaviour change in ways that feel realistic but not cliched. So, for example, when Theron has just finished college and is living in New York, he stops talking about how much he hates his appearance, is much more comfortable with the idea of his queerness, but also finds sex with men is dispiriting and doesn't live up to what he wants from it. Similarly, Theron has moved on from a curiosity about drugs to an experimentation that verges on drug dependency: he even snorts Adderall when he's doing housework. Then, by the time he's in his late-twenties, Theron has given up much of his drug use, and has improved his relationship with his father, and is trying to spend as much time as possible with him so following his father's terminal cancer diagnosis. All these changes happen naturally in the narrative, and the author doesn't draw too much attention to them, they're just more symbols of time passing and the characters moving through different phases of their lives.
Up to the second section of the book, however, I thought this was just a good and well-written novel, but not one that particularly grabbed me. Maybe it's that I didn't see Jake in the same kind of hero-light as the infatuated Theron; maybe it's that I wasn't a risk-taking and rule-breaking sort of adolescent and thought a lot of their behaviour was dumb as hell; maybe it's just a failure in my empathy and that now that I'm in my forties, I just have more difficulty relating to teenage characters. But in that second section, after an afternoon of drinking and doing drugs. Theron and Jake head out, and their conversation in the bar becomes increasingly intimate. Theron talks a lot about his feelings for Lou, his best friend and girlfriend with whom he has an ongoing, though uncommitted relationship, and Jake talks about his plan to give himself "five more years" before he starts thinking about killing himself again. It's close and confiding in a way that I've rarely read about between female friends, and I can't think of another time when I've read about it between two men.
And then Theron relates the story of his suicide attempt. (It's related to us, the reader, in the first person, rather than as a conversation between Theron and Jake, which is an interesting narrative choice. I wonder if that would have been too intense a conversation, or if the author was worried about it turning into a monologue.) Shortly after that, the men have a moment of physical connection. Theron has been half in love with Jake ever since he met him, but he's always been convinced that Jake is resolutely homosexual. This moment of attraction prompts one of the most passionate inner speeches I can think of:
"I wanted to say: Build in me a lighthouse. Be guided by the love I feel for you, for the safety I want to offer. Put knives in your wheels and leave the truck until it's ticketed and towed. Move your bags into my room and stay. Find a job at a record store, become a security guard at the Met, don't work at all, and we can live off my tweleve-an-hour as you make every record you've wanted to. We can take it slow; we can move fast. You can leave me and come back. You can be exactly who you are or you can be what you've always wanted to be. You can sell that gold twisted band, and we can find a studio in Queens, and I can cut your hair every other month. Let's live off rice and beans, oranges when they're in season. Let's make friends and forget them for days and weeks at a time. Let's ward off all of the terror with talk. Let's make love over and over, until our ribs hurt and we think we're tired of it, then do it once more, just to see if there's still life to be made.
"It's all here, it's now if we want it to be. Time, distance, they're no longer the problem. The problem is courage. The courage I need and the courage you want. We can find it in each other, I swear. I swear, if you'll just let me show you."
Of course, Theron doesn't say any of that – who ever has the guts to say something like that? And even in literature, there are limits to what characters do. But these chapters where Jake and Theron are talking through until they first kiss are astonishing and elevated the novel to a different level in my mind.
The final section takes an elegiac tone of sorts. Jake's leaving devastates Theron, and it takes a long time before he finds some sort of equilibrium.
There's a lot more going on in this book, from an exploration of what it means to be bisexual, and how that fits with modern-day masculinity, to the search for the purpose of life and the difficulties of finding meaning in late-stage capitalism. The ending felt fitting too, but it's that middle section that will stay with me for a long time. I would absolutely recommend this, particularly if you want to see a writer do something that's still rare in literature and detail frank scenes of friendship and love.
What I've been reading since I last wrote
I've decided just to write about a few of the books that I've finished and which appealed to me for some reason.
Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly. The stories in this collection are more satisfying than the ones in the edition of Irish Ghost Stories that I read recently, being more atmospheric, tauter, and just more interesting and enjoyable. They're also surprisingly direct at times – there's a suicide in one story, and I thought that Le Fanu would employ some kind of Victorian euphemism, but no, it's just dropped into the text, in a way that we might consider quite triggering now.
Isaac by Curtis Garner, an excellent debut novel. It follows seventeen-year-old Isaac through his first sexual experiences, first relationship, and the transition from school to university. There's quite a lot of other stuff going on too, but it all fits together well in what's a relatively slim book. What's most impressive about it though is the way in which Garner creates complex characters and complex but believable dynamics between them. For example, Isaac is infatuated with his first boyfriend, Harrison. Harrison is kind, tolerant, intelligent...but also manipulative and cruel. He's a character that you as a reader come to hate, but you can also understand why Isaac is with him, even as their relationship is deteriorating. I look forward to seeing what Garner writes next.
All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot, the second book in the republished series of memoirs, and I started All Things Wise and Wonderful, which is book three. They're wonderfully comforting reads, and not because everything goes well. There's plenty of poverty in the story, and lots of suffering, particularly as vets in the late thirties/early forties didn't always have successful treatments, so in some cases, an entire flock of animals is wiped out by disease. However, Herriot has tremendous empathy and the ability to see the good in almost everyone. He's also incredibly appreciative of the natural beauty of the Yorkshire Dales, so there are passages where he simply stops to admire the countryside. I definitely want to read the final two volumes after this.
33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen an ARC about the inhabitants of an apartment block in Brussels, starting just before the Nazi invasion and continuing through until 1943. It was brilliant, providing a rounded picture of what life was like during the invasion. It avoids a lot of the cliches of WW2 writing (the rich Jewish family escape early on in the narrative, but their relatives in England aren't initially keen on helping them). Again, I thought that the characters in this were well-developed, in that there aren't simply good and bad characters, and the people who cosy up to the Nazis aren't always the ones that you would suspect would want to become involved. It's published on 11th March next year.
Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell's seminal study of Italian female saints, whom he argues displayed features of what we would recognise today as anorexia nervosa. I first came across this book twenty years ago when I was studying psychology, and it left a huge impression on my mind. He writes from a psychodynamic perspective, so he's very interested in the biographies of these saints and how as teenagers or young adults, they disavowed all power whilst actually amassing quite a lot of control in the relationships they had with the church establishment. It's fairly gruesome in places, though – these young women were incredibly inventive in their mortification of the flesh (at least two drink pus from flesh wounds, for example).
The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston. A lonely seven-year-old is sent from boarding school to spend the Christmas holidays with his grandmother at Green Knowe. There, he discovers the ghosts of three children who become his companions, not to say anything of the animals he befriends. I loved this, it's such a magical book. I also have the beautiful 70th anniversary edition by Faber, which has beautiful endpapers decorated with chaffinches (they're an important bird in the story) and reproduces the illustrations drawn for the first edition.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. A re-read for Christmas. I saw the film recently and wanted to revisit the book in the light of it. One of the things that stood out to me this time was the fact that the Magdalen laundries barely feature in the first half of the book at all, and yet, when you first read it, you tend to think it's a story "about" them because what happens to one of the girls there is so shocking. And yet, the first half is more about Bill's sense of discontent or misalignment. It's a brilliant book, only 110 pages and Keegan fits in a full life – when you finish, you have a better sense of Bill's life than you do with some characters in novels three times as long.
What I'm planning to read next
I'm in the midst of Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson, a collection of disparate short stories, all united by a Christmas setting. The stories are punctuated by 12 Christmas recipes and anecdotes. There's something about the writing style that doesn't really appeal to me – I think it's the combination of whimsy and matter-of-fact directness – so I doubt I'll keep this. It would potentially make a lovely Christmas gift for anyone who does like Winterson's writing though.
After that, I plan on reading a book gifted to me by the author, Gaius Is by Nathaneal Koah. I haven't the faintest clue what this book is about and I probably won't look it up beforehand. And I'm also planning to finish The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, which is the book that introduced neuroplasticity to the mainstream. I think I only have about 80 pages of it left. After that, I'm going to start Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors.
Have a lovely week, and Merry Christmas to all of you, I hope it’s a relaxing and peaceful time, whether you celebrate or not. I hope to be back on Sunday with a list of my favourite books from 2024.