Backlisted - Karoo by Steve Tesich

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

Karoo (1998), a posthumously-published cult novel by screenwriter and playwright Steve Tesich is the subject of this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to analyse this dark and hilarious tale of a Hollywood script doctor's apocalyptic decline and fall are journalist and podcaster Sali Hughes and novelist John Niven (who previously guested on Backlisted ep. 09 discussing Martin Amis's The Information). Also in this episode, John enjoys This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England, 1760-1960 by Robert Colls, a social history of the English and their relationship to sport. Andy, meanwhile, has been reading Unquiet Landscape, Christopher Neve's recently-republished study of the English imagination in 20th-century landscape painting.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)21'11 - Karoo by Steve Tesich* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. nice glass sally oh yeah what you drinking so it looks nice i'm having a wee vodka and tonic Nice glass, Sally. Thanks. Yeah. What are you drinking, Sally?

It looks nice. I'm having a wee vodka and tonic because it's quite early evening, isn't it? Yeah. There's a slightly teapot towards the top of that glass. No, they're the Soho House ones. That's probably where you'll recognise. Oh, yeah. Bloody Soho House, is it?

Let me ask you, Sally, where are you calling from? Caller, line one. I'm in my home in Brighton, where I have been for what seems like an eternity now. We've got to say it's the site of quadrophenia. The alleyway. Yeah, that's all I'm saying. John Niven, where are you where are you i

am at my home in buckinghamshire have you been working working yeah yeah i am i've actually been quite busy it hasn't made a huge difference to my daily lifestyle really like most of us imagine it's reduced my restaurant bill substantially my son and i have had to put a lunchtime rotor on because we got we're so sick of bumping into one another at one o'clock when we're when we're both hungry that we've started that's become a flash point that's when we start fighting so so so like he has to make sure he's out of the kitchen by five to one and i'm not have to make sure i'm i'm i'm in after that the thing that really i mean this is nice because, because although I sort of feel I know you through your work,

as they say, Sally, I don't think we've ever met actually. I really hate the fact you don't meet new people. That's what I've isolated as being the thing that really, I can cope with most of it. It's fine. It's great not having to get on the train every day. You're a very gregarious man, John. Sally hates meeting people.

I'm wondering if I am gregarious. I don't know whether I want to go back to being that person. That's an interesting... Let's not do backlisted. Let's have a group therapy session. The implications of that. Don't make me go back to that guy. That's very Carew.

Well, it is very, very Carew. Great. Shall we crack on? Let's go. Shall I do the thing? Right. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us at a smart party in the Dakota building in Manhattan in late 1989.

It's packed, noisy and dim. Beethoven's fifth blast out of Bose speakers. We've drunk every species of booze on offer to no discernible effect, smoked everyone else's cigarettes, and we're now desperately trying to find a way to avoid talking to our son, who is waiting patiently for some quality time once we leave. There you go. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound,

the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we're joined by a new guest, Sally Hughes, and returning guest, John Niven, who last joined us on Backlisted number nine. Wow. Back in March 2016, nearly five years ago,

when we spent a lot of time laughing at and with Martin Amis' The Information. Hello, both of you. Thank you very much for coming. Brilliant. Hey, good to be here. Lovely to be here. I'm very pleased to be here talking about this.

Sally Hughes is a journalist, presenter and broadcaster specialising in beauty, women's issues and film. She's written for more or less every quality magazine and newspaper from Vogue and the Daily Telegraph to Cosmopolitan and Empire and has been beauty editor on The Guardian since 2011. She has published three best-selling books and at this point I have to say I've got to issue a very specific thank you to Sally because my mum, we had to move my mum into a care home in February 2020 and two weeks after she moved in the care home went into lockdown so I've only seen her two or three times in in the last year but I can speak

to her on the phone she's obviously not able to do much she's not able to leave her room very often she's got a telly she's got some books but she finds it really hard to read at the moment um but there is one exception and when i said i was going to be speaking to sally hughes she said would you say to her from me that her book our rainbow queen has been a lifesaver for me over the last year and she wanted me to thank you specifically because she can't concentrate on things, but she loves reading little bits of Our Rainbow Queen, your book about the Queen that was published in 2019. And so my mum, listeners, thoroughly recommends Sally Hughes's Our Rainbow Queen,

a colourful and witty journey, she says, through eight decades of royal style. And Sally has an untitled book on its way this year. Yes. Well, it was untitled until a couple of days ago. Reveal. Reveal. So the next book is called Everything is Washable and Other Life Lessons.

Will my mum enjoy that one um i don't know it gets it's pretty racy in parts i think the the queen book was like a sort of gift from god really it was like full kind of writer's brain dessert in that it was just given to me by penguin they'd read a column i wrote about the queen and said we can put all the assets together can you just write it so it was it was one of those that kind of didn't feel like mine but in the best way in the most kind of joyful way I really enjoyed writing it so I'm glad she enjoyed reading it. Let me the target market you hit you hit the bullseye well done soally's also a demon podcast the beauty podcast with sally debuted at number one across all categories john niven has no podcast by way of contrast was born in was born in irvin airship and worked in the music industry for a decade before leaving to write fiction his best-selling

debut novel kill your friends was published in 2008 and later made into a feature film scripted by niven and starring nicholas holt and j Corden. He has gone on to publish 10 novels including The Second Coming, Straight White Male and his most recent The Fuck It List which John I'm afraid my mum's still to get back to me on that one. You can be bored. He continues to work as a screenwriter and his latest film the trip starring uh nemi ripace is that right nemi ripace yeah yeah and axel henney arrives on netflix this autumn he also writes a long-running weekly column for the scottish sunday mail and i think we should say but mitch before i hand back to you that martin amos episode which is like five years ago, we still have people pop up on Twitter

talking about specifically that episode Do you really? Because how funny it was the actual recording of the episode, we just laughed and laughed and we didn't really edit any of it out we just put it out and so thanks again for that No, I remember a lot of laughter, of course this was in the old

world when we were all in the same room the prospect of the pub living at the end of it. But no, I remember a lot of infectious laughter that afternoon. It was great. I can't actually believe it's been that long since then. In my mind, it was three years ago tops. I haven't heard that episode, but are we talking about money?

Did you do money? No, we did the information. John went deep cuts for the head, so. It has a slight Carew feeling because, oh, spoiler alert, I should say the book that Sally and John have chosen is Carew, the second and indeed final novel by the Serbian-born American writer Steve Tesic, a book he completed in 1996 and which was published posthumously in 1998 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US and Chateau and Windus

in the UK. But before we head uninsured towards the hills of Hollywood and the nemesis that inevitably awaits us, John, what have you been reading this week? Well, I've been reading this week, Andy. I've been reading a book by the historian Robert Coles. He's one of my favourite British historians. He wrote a brilliant biography of George Orwell, and it's called This Sporting Life, with the subtitle Sport and Liberty in England, 1760 to 1960. So now I see you've got a copy of it there,

because I think Oxford University Press rather forgetting that you're just the wrong man to send it. Forgetting I'd written a whole book about how much I hate sports. How much you hate sports. Spend it, send it to me anyway. Ever optimistic? Yeah. But it does look really good. I did say that, didn't I?

I did say that. Be fair. I genuinely think it's a brilliant social history. I mean, you don't have to be into sport really. It's about English culture. The start of the book, there's a brilliant quote from Orwell, social history. I mean, you don't have to be into sport really. It's about English culture. The start of the book, there's a brilliant quote from Orwell, which sets the tone of the book, which he said, so much a part of us that we barely notice it is an addiction to hobbies and spare time occupations, the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower lovers, but also a

nation of stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters coupon snippers darts players crossworld puzzle fans so it's eight chapters one of the things he is brilliant historian for going into primary sources he's been into huge numbers of libraries he's obviously got very good works with very good researchers so a lot you get that that real thrill of first-hand stuff he's finding stuff that's never been seen before. Opens with a chapter on fox hunting. He goes into poaching, which is, you know, poor man's sport. He goes into the Stanford bull running, this bad fucking thing where they used to chase a live bull through the streets of Stanford. He does boxing.

The stuff on bare-knuckle boxing, the stuff he's turned up on that is amazing and comes all the way through cricket, through university, sports and universities, through to football. And he stops, obviously, in 1960 because everything changes. Modern sport changes dramatically. Its cultural function changes dramatically. So I'm just rather weirdly, I'm going to read from the conclusion to the book, because I think if you're interested in it, he gives a better summary than I'd be able to give.

So I'll just give you a quick paragraph. I set out to write this book in order to show that sport had existed at every level, in every corner of the national life. All was to hand, never without meaning. Across eight chapters and a wide range of sporting experiences, from sport that cost a fortune to play, to stuff that, from sport that cost a fortune to play that cost nothing at all, I've demonstrated the depth and breadth of one of England's great civil cultures. I began thinking that sport was a minor subject, a national story no doubt, but not the only one or the most important one. Now at the end of the book, I think it's a minor subject, a national story, no doubt, but not the only one or the most important one. Now, at the end of the book, I think it's a major subject, not in itself, perhaps, but in the way it's woven into almost everything else we do. Everything that appears in this history has been

part of the ordinary life of English men and women. It might be that sport makes us happier. It might be that play makes us more sane. It might be that the Lego professor of play at Cambridge is a more important appointment than the Regis professor of history. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Jade Gatsby calls people old sport as a mark of endearment, as a recognition that they, like him, play the game. Playing the game, enjoying the land, sensing the liberty, respecting contestation, valuing home, showing a bit of heart, recognising it in others, knowing that not everything is political or has to be, that not everyone knows what they think or whichever comes first, how to say it, and understanding above all that sport is an enduring part of our liberty,

just as the we who play it is an enduring mark of our sovereignty. Writing this book has made me think our history over again. Sport has always been its own reward, and for the vast majority who have ever played it, nothing more. I see sport now as all the more extraordinary for its ordinariness, for how it has reached into every part of our imagination. London opened its 2012 Olympic Games by calling the place we live the Isles of Wonder.

This sporting life still stood for something wondrous. There you go. It's a really good book. You really reminded me when you were reading that of a thing that our guest last time, the comedian Stuart Lee, said to me when my book about how much I don't like sport was published. He said, when I read it i i it made me laugh more and more every time the word you use the word sport because i realized that

every time you typed it out it would have hurt a little bit more than the previous time right so when you were reading out robert cole's there the repetition of the word sport actually does trigger me it's quite but i was was looking at the blurb here. It's really good. Why does killing a fox mean liberty? What did parish rebels have to do with the Peterloo massacre? What did the Factory Act mean for football? So it's the relationship between English social history.

It's social history. I mean, a lot of sports books are very statty. This is totally the opposite. This is Orwellian. I think that's the reason I've never really get into football, is what you just said. Because when you meet people, they start talking about who threw the,

you know, throw in at the corner in the FA Cup. I just don't have room. I've got fucking all these movies, books, music, all this stuff. To know that, I'm full up. You get fucked. I just don't music, all that stuff. To know that, to fill up, get fucked, there's just no room for that shit. If I was going to sell it even harder for people who think they don't like sport, mentioning their names,

this would be a very, very good book for them to try. Ask me what I've been reading. I am going to ask you, what have you been reading, Andy? Well, when you were talking about a book about sport, I had to find the antidote. Vaccination against all sport. I've been reading a book by Christopher Neve called Unquiet Landscape, Places and Ideas

in 20th Century British Painting. How very Fotherington Thomas of you. Indeed. And this was originally published in 1990 by Faber and Faber, and it was republished last year by Thames and Hudson. And it's only 200 pages long, but it took me about 10 days to read it because it's so rich. I felt that at points I was losing my mind. It's so beautifully written, It's like it's so beautifully written, but also pursues its aesthetic beyond the logical extreme.

It's like it takes you on from a discussion of painting and landscape into like a proper derangement of the senses, to use the French poetry reference last time, into a proper. And so I'm going to start by just reading this bit of the acknowledgements at the end of the book. I am grateful to the first editor of this book at Faber, who was Giles de la Mer. The reason I am grateful is that he forbore to say it does not always make sense. But in the best possible way, that's true. And that is why it's such a wonderful, transformative book, because if it playedert, Joan Eardley, Graham Sutherland, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Lowry, Edward Burrough, the chapter on Edward Burrough, which is called Edward Burrough and Hysteria, is just an incredible piece of writing.

The starting point for Neve in this book is to say there is a tradition of English landscape painting stretching back several centuries in both watercolour and oil. But if we got two different artists to paint the exact same scene, we would have two radically different paintings. Because what they're really painting is not the landscape they're painting how they feel about the landscape and how they feel about their landscape will change from one day to the next and so uh he ends like the introduction by writing must we think of all landscape painting as subject to the often ludicrous esperanto of art history or all landscape was designated national parks paintings are about feelings not rationality about imagination not common sense the best i can hope to do is to

discuss some of the ideas that english landscape may have given rise to and then leave it to you to look at the pictures testing them against what you know of life and death the landscape commits suicide every day you know that's not mucking about christopher neve didn't come here to play nice right he's that i love books that lay down a challenge to the reader and the challenge to the reader is raise your game raise your game this isn't going to be um like little be like little cards that you might read next to paintings in the National Gallery. This is going to be trying to find a new and different way to illuminate things you think you already know. Anyway, I thought I'd just share a bit from here about Stanley Spencer, because I thought lots of people will have, first of all, know what Stanley Spencer's paintings look like,

and including his paintings of landscape and flowers and scenes in Cookham, but also because this gives you a real taste of the philosophical nature of Christopher Neves writing it. Have you read this book, John, by the way? Did you read this back when it came out? No, I have it, and I should read it. I know loads of people who are almost as manically enthusiastic about it as you are. This was a book I needed to read now.

You know, like a book at the moment you don't know you need until you stumble across it? Yeah. That's how I felt about Unquiet Landscape. So he's writing about Spencer and he's saying that Spencer tried to just make the source of his inspiration the village of Cookham in which he lived. But he had to go away from Cookham for a few years and when he came back he carried on painting the same stuff. Cookham had changed and he had changed. This was so much of a sadness to him that he simply chose to ignore it. The strange thing was that he could avoid without difficulty any reference to change because as well as his extraordinary memory he had a backlog of drawings and subjects from before the war that provided him with several years of work. This couldn't last indefinitely

and by 1923 he was aware that something was slipping. Never having had to question the source of his natural inspiration before because it had been around him since childhood he began to worry that his vision might desert him such a man stares harder than ever can a child avoid relinquishing his childhood vision by refusing to get older now that is a question that we might ask of for instance the pop singer morrissey you know if you simply decide to remain 15 forever, what will happen to you? Well, Morrissey is a warning to us all. But just to carry on with this thing about Spencer, towards the end of his life, it was still possible to see him painting in Cookham Churchill with a notice prop beside him asking that he should not be disturbed.

him asking that he should not be disturbed. One or two or five or seven weeks, he would say, as he stood on the same patch of ground. Do not be misled by the fact that he disclaimed his landscape painting, that when visiting friends he would sometimes ask to sit with his back to the window so that he did not have to look out at the view. His landscapes are the more beautiful for his contradictory attitude to them. It was the child's insistence on the continuity of the place, the refusal to let it go, that was his subject. As he said, he loved the chestnut trees for just being. To be rooted is a human need. On the evidence of the pictures, landscape was his long passion, a religious impulse quite as forceful in its way as that expressed by his notions.

To give your heart to a place to this extent means that you have given a part of yourself away and are no longer complete. But to scrutinise one place this hard is to make the world in some degree intelligible how amazing is that as a description of the artistic trade-off brilliant so uh yeah that's from thames and hudson that's called unquiet landscape by christopher neve if you fancy something you know no one's got much pressure on at the moment, have they? If you fancy something that's going to drive you even further into your own head, I strongly recommend that book. the sound of a 1980s olivetti electric typewriter brings us seamlessly into karoo by steve tesic

john i'm going to ask before i turn to our guests i'm going to say mitch had you read this before i had not read it before i'd been vaguely aware of it when it came out came out in 98 and i i just remember thinking i didn't i i just couldn't place what the book was it's a strange title never heard of the guy i hadn't at that stage put him together with the you know the film work that he'd done then the next time i thought about it was when i got an email from Mr Niven saying, have you thought about Carew for Backlisted? But you did read it, right? I read it in proof before it was published when I was 29 years old. It was an extremely strange experience to read it again at the age of 52.

And we'll talk about that later. So, John, you wanted to talk about this book when did you first read karu by steve tesic well the the vintage edition which i own was published i think 2006 which was the year i signed my deal with random house for the book that became kill your friends so when the first time i went into the office I'd already started doing a bit of screenwriting myself. And my editor, Jason Arthur, said, I think you'll like this book. And yeah, it was the shock.

Well, a bit like you just said about what you know now that you didn't know then. As I've got further into that career, the sort of resonances of the book have become, you know, overwhelming in places but it was just one of those novels that i just loved from the off you know from the moment yeah so you didn't really know anything about it you just i had seen breaking away which is the movie that steve test because he got the oscar for um and but but i think i was at university when I saw that so it was many years ago

and then I put him together with that and the novel but shamefully I haven't read his other novel Summer Crossing but it's just one of those novels that I became quietly obsessed with that a lot of people haven't read

so whenever you have the chance to sort of push it on somebody, do so. It's a book that some people absolutely love, but it's by no means an acknowledged modern classic. You know, a lot of people I know haven't read it. Yeah. I mean, we'll talk a bit about how it was originally published here because I can remember that.

I can remember how they tried and failed to publish it. So we'll talk a bit about that. Sally, where and when did you read Carew by Steve Teshitch? So I read the book probably a couple of years ago now. So I should say that my esteemed colleague on today's podcast, John Niven, is a very good friend of mine. quite an old friend now I was trying to work it out earlier maybe like nine years or something so I was booked to go on a good read on radio four and my fellow guest was a food writer who became very ill at the last minute and she had to pull out and so the producers said to me do you know anybody that you could invite on who would be really good? And selfishly, I thought, well, if I ask Niv, firstly, we'll definitely be able to go out for a drink afterwards.

And that'll be fun. And it'll make my trip to London worth my while. But secondly, he's probably going to choose a book that I will quite enjoy reading because we share we share very similar tastes in films and so we very much like the same film so I thought well Niv will probably choose a book that I quite fancy reading so that's how it came to me Niv chose Peru um and it was sent to me by Radio 4 and I only had a couple of days to read it and I thought well I'll skim it or whatever and I started to read it and I I literally didn't put it down until I'd finished it and I loved it so much that uh by the end of it I thought I'm loath to admit that the bastard has now selected one of my favorite novels I think after we did that program Sally they had a huge run in the book didn't they I think after we did that programme, Sally, they had a huge run in the book, didn't they? I think it's sold out.

Yeah. It's a big response, Radio 4. Well, if you look it up online, the number of people who say they bought it because they heard you two talking about it on a Goodreads. But me and Mitch, when you suggested it, we thought, well, they only had nine minutes to talk about it on a Goodreads. We can offer them an hour or more. it we thought well they only had nine minutes to talk about it on a good reason we could we could

we can offer them an hour or more so so that's why we were so pleased to to give you a a longer a longer chance on it but also sally you were saying that you found that also some people have read it because because of hearing you talk about it and they weren't so enamored yeah so so in preparation for this podcast I was I was trying to um look at various bits and pieces on the book and I stumbled across various people saying I bought this book because of John Niven and Sally Hughes and I hated it wasting my life um but but but but really gratifyingly there were also some people saying I bought this book because of them and I absolutely loved it and that was the joy because But really gratifyingly, there were also some people saying,

I bought this book because of them, and I absolutely loved it, and that was a joy. Because obviously if you just get one of those people who stumbled across it and feels the same way about it as you do, then that's more important. So there were definitely those people too, and I'm really pleased. They did have a bit of a run on it afterwards, as Niv says, and that's very pleasing because I think it's such an underread

book and i've passed it on to lots of friends myself the thing about karu is it is a proper cult novel and and there's so many attempts by publishers to create cult novels but actually real cult novels are the result of word of mouth more than they're the result of anything else and also they tend to be novels that not everybody likes. They're not for everyone. So I think you don't want kind of blanket three-star reviews. You want a lot of five stars and a lot of one stars. I'll tell you now, I found it a tougher read this time than last time.

But that might be because it's 2021, not because I'm older and and wiser you don't mean stumbling over paragraphs because they're the sort of the way it was written you just mean the themes that were yeah yeah no no the i'm not i'm not criticizing the prose i'm just my my my uh my ability to read something quite so um mortifying for the main character which we'll talk about we'll talk about but yeah Et je voudrais parler d'un livre qui est un peu mon coup de cœur telling us in a nutshell what Karou is about. Script Doctor. Et ce Script Doctor travaille, lui, à Hollywood. C'est extrêmement bien écrit, c'est extrêmement drôle, c'est touchant, c'est déchirant, c'est en même temps un humour corrosif, c'est une satire énorme d'Hollywood,

et en même temps, c'est le grand récit de la vie d'un homme qui se pose des questions sur ce qu'il a réussi et ce qu'il a raté. yeah i love about the clip the french so hostile to english words except when they can't think of one themselves and come up with script doctor and this is interesting actually and explains a lot because in the run-up to uh this podcast because i'm in the middle of writing my own book at the moment i thought it'd be really lovely not to have to look at a book, a screen. I thought, I'll get it on audiobook, and this time I'll read it, I'll listen to it. And the only audiobook that is available of Carew is in French. So I had to read it again. Oh, God. John, let me offer an English pricey

of what the French film director Jean-Pierre Burtman said. Yeah, excuse my ear, excuse not to come off all Derek and Clive here. What kind of hellish podcast is this? Fucking comes up to me, gives it French. Basically, he says, this is a brilliant novel about Hollywood, but it's also a novel about a man's whole life, about the passage of a man's entire life. about the passage of a man's entire life. And, I mean, that is one of the things I found coming back to it was,

I think when I read it in the 90s, I took it very much as the kind of scabrous Hollywood film world, beautiful loser kind of text. And coming back to it this time, you know, there's so much, I mean, it's very funny, but there's so much pain in it. Yeah. Certainly the final third of the book, no spoilers, everybody. Yeah.

Well, we'll, we'll come on to this. If I, let me ask you both. It's an easy, difficult question. And I'll go to you first, Sally. What is this novel about? All of the things you just mentioned, but I suppose for me, it's about human beings' capacity for self-deception and the natural, or in this case, bizarre conclusion where that level of self-deception, when it is so high and so consistent and goes on for such a long time, where that self-deception can take you.

Carew, Saul Carew, the protagonist, really is a liar. And he is the most pained victim of his own deception. He is the most pained victim of his own deception. And there's something incredibly, as you say, painful and tragic about that for everyone around him, but mainly for him. Yeah, mainly for him. Yeah. Yeah. That's it.

Yeah. I mean, it's as dark a book. I'm thinking the only thing that comes as close to this is the Joseph Heller's Something Happened that we read. Which we did on this. Yeah. darker book i'm thinking the only thing that comes as close to this is the joseph heller something happened that yeah we read which which we did on this yeah that's a very good comparison i think there's something almost i don't know i'm fascinated but whether tesic because he was serbian and you know he's had to learn english there's something that this, you know, this is not a book where he's attempting to write clever, bellow-esque, you know, up-dykey paragraphs. There's a sort of clarity about the prose that's just terrifying.

The book just fell open on this thing. I was not, I realized, a human being anymore and had probably not been one for some time. I was instead some new isotope of humanity that had not yet been isolated and identified. I was a loose electron whose spin and charge and direction could be reversed at any moment by random forces outside myself. I was one of those stray bullets of our time. It's kind of a sort of terrifying vision of what could easily be, you could say it's a

midlife crisis novel. It is that, but it's much, it goes much, much further. Let me ask, Nivin, what is it about? What do you think it's about? Well, and it's simple, I think it's the pain of the absentee father and the failed husband and the realisation in late middle age

that those things can't be undone. That's what kind of drives the book i think it also puts me in mind of uptakes great statement i think in self-consciousness about how a personality can have its ways that a mind can observe and be conscious of and know that they are damaging but it's still powerless to change them yeah it can go along observing it and have witty and interesting things to say about that, but the behaviour that's causing the pain and damage will still continue.

I think, as you both made the point, he's somebody who makes the point several times in the book that when, as a writer, as a constructor of narratives, you try to make the corners fit and the sharp edges off and everything slots together

and life isn't like that and he i think he says oh sometimes he feels that all the fat and mess he spent his professional life cutting away from screenplays has found its way into his life until he's this sprawling unmanageable life that's kind of you know, life is messy and has no narrative thread in the way that art does, you know? I agree. I think it's a really brilliant novel on the topic of,

first of all, professional writing, but also just the day-to-day, how we tailor our own narratives to make our lives more bearable for ourselves, just in our day-to-day existence, right? The things that he doesn't want to have to deal with. He'll get to them.

I'll get to them. I'll think about those things when they need, but until then, I've got to keep going. I've got to keep trucking. I've got to just keep moving forward. Yeah, and the obvious, you know, the big obvious gag in the book is he's convinced he has this disease

whereby he can no longer get drunk, no matter how much he drinks. It's phenomenal, elephant-stunning amounts of booze. But, of course, you wouldn't go, he's paralytic. You know, he couches it like he does a convincing impression in the restaurant to sort of, you know, reassure everyone that he's the same old lovable drunk as no one. But he's still called sober as he smashes a glass

and falls over his chair. You're thinking, no, you're actually just completely pissed. I think he is one of the all-time great unreliable narrators. He is the least reliable of narrators in literature. Everything he says is a lie to himself and to everybody else. Yeah. You know, there's that scene, and it's not a spoiler, there's a scene where he's in the back of a taxi

with his son and he has decided that he can avoid taking his son home to his place and he's he's introduced a character he's brought in this woman he's brought in a taxi he's decided it's going to be the way he needs it to be but of course nobody else falls into place in the way that they need to because he thinks if he writes the script that how's how it will pan out. But, you know, you can't. Nobody else around him is in on it. They're all in on him, but not on this sort of narrative that he's always constructing. He's kind of like an undressed wound, I think.

He's sort of, you know, he kind of, he's like a wound of a person who it's gone too far. It's now gangrenous. And, you know, there's you know there's nothing there's no antibiotics there's no kind of ointment or balsam that can be applied to this wound and it just gets worse and worse and worse there's no turning back so steve teshich had been a very successful screenwriter in hollywood he won an he won an oscar in 1979 for his script for a film called Breaking Away. And he basically had a script produced, one a year, including an adaptation of The World According to Gart by John Irving, from the late 70s to the mid 80s.

And then let the record show that he doesn't get any more screenplays produced. And he gets plays produced. And he's writing this novel in the 1990s and he he finishes it in um 93 94 he dies in 90 dies in 96 right and then 98 so so we can infer though we don't know for sure, that his later experience in Hollywood is the thing that's feeding into Carew. But I thought it would be really nice to hear

him on top, because if Carew is evidence of him, his decline, as he saw it, of his career, I thought this is him being introduced by Neil Simon at the Oscar ceremony in 1979. Oh, Mason.

The nominees for the best screenplay written directly for the screen are All That Jazz, story and screenplay by Robert Alan Arthur and Bob Fosse. And Justice For All, story and screenplay by Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson. Breaking Away, story and screenplay by Steve Tesich. The China Syndrome, story and screenplay by Mike Gray, T.S. Cook, and James Bridges. Manhattan, story and screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman. The winner is Steve Tesich for Breaking Away. Oh, God.

Where's Sam? I need Sam up here. God. There's absolutely nothing I love as much as writing. To get an award for doing something you love, it seems like a luxury I never expected. Long before I actually saw America, my first glimpses of it were in a movie house in Yugoslavia. It was a Western stagecoach. And it seemed like a wonderful, endless frontier of a country where these good and evil characters

fought it out for the soul of America. And after all these years of being here, I'm just so grateful to be given an opportunity to send back a film and to tell them that I find it very much like the place I had seen originally. The good and the bad still fight it out. The good still tend to win in the end. Thank you very much. Jesus Christ hardly a slack year Manhattan I was just going to say

that's an exceptional year it's a beautiful beautiful film, I watched it this week I've never seen it before I haven't seen it in 30 years I must see it again An exceptional year. It's a beautiful, beautiful film. I watched it this week. I'd never seen it before. I haven't seen it in 30 years. I must see it again. It's on Amazon Prime. But also, here's the thing.

So he wins the Oscar in 1979. He's up against all those incredible other films. Listen how positive he sounds in that. And listen how positive he sounds about Americaica in 1979 that's not how he feels about it when when he's writing karoo so whatever happens to that guy here's the thing about the the racket out there the game you can go through a very long stretch where you won't have a film made for absolutely no nothing to do with you the quality of it. You know, there's so many factors that have to come into play to make a movie happen.

And some of the best paid guys in the business have it in a film made in 10 years. Yeah. There's so much money and industry to be had just from the rewriting game that the movie doesn't have to be made. As Carew says himself at one point, I consider the possibility as I regard the 118-page screenplay that I'm currently rewriting, that in the near future,

rewriting one screenplay will provide a lifetime of work for a team of rewriters like myself, the way the building of a single gothic cathedral did for generations of medieval craftsmen i mean i've done work in scripts where there's like six other writers names on it before it comes to you and you know and you're getting fairly nicely remunerated i'm sure we're not getting anything like as nicely remunerated as he was post-Oscar. But you can still go through all that and not have a film made. When you write a novel,

it's a fully realised piece of art in and of itself. When you're writing screenplays, you're basically designing blueprints for buildings. And if the buildings are never made, how does that feel after so long? So I think you're right in that sense um andy that a sort of corrosion of the soul does start to creep in you know one thing i wanted to say about crew is that it wasn't uh widely reviewed when it was published right and um you can find it in sort of things

like paperback roundups saying it's it's I found one that literally said this is a very funny novel but also sad yeah which is criticism criticism at its finest all right John update this is the opening paragraph of the review that appeared in the New York Times by Bill Kent and Sally I might ask you to pick this up because he says, to appreciate the devious timeliness of this posthumously published novel by the screenwriter and playwright Steve Teschich, we have to think back to a previous decade when the redemption story and the Hollywood hate letter had not yet become entertainment industry cliches so he's talking about the 80s here and he's writing in the 90s back then robert altman's film the player

and the coen brothers film barton fink and elmore lennon's novel term movie get shorty hadn't told us yet how wonderfully ghastly but ultimately useful hollywood creeps could be now that is a really fair point i think with career that that when steve teshech is writing this that template that thing that becomes a thing in the 90s didn't didn't really exist i think that's really true i think yeah i think that's a really good point we're so we're so used to it now and I think as well just generally we're more cynical because we have more information at our fingertips I think at that point I I imagine so what are we talking 98 there was um 88 there was still quite a lot of mystique still around it um and no I don't think there had been such a kind of a disgusted sort of hate letter to Hollywood at that point.

Yeah, I think there was a very different picture by the end of the 90s to what it was in the end of the 80s in terms of seeing behind the car. I think I think it was a combination of Robert Altman, but also Heidi Fleiss and all of the guys in the Heidi Fleiss world. in the Heidi Fleiss world. And then we started to get the sort of Robert Evans books and all of that stuff. I think all kind of came maybe five, six years later. And yeah, at that point, I don't think there was anything in culture about that. While we're talking about screenplays and Hollywood,

this is a clip from Teshitshon being interviewed by David Letterman in in 1982 it's a bit hissy i'm afraid but um here he is talking about what it's like writing your own stuff but adapting other people's stuff too how does one keep from getting uh miserably discouraged when you've written something you've got it neatly typed i would guess and it lays around for eight years uh well you you you really keep writing other things, because if you're going to wait for that one thing to be made, and actually I was positive nobody was going to make it, because everybody had read it. It was like a library book. I would meet people and say, that's a great screenplay, why don't you write this other thing for us? And you kept wondering, if it's so great, why don't they make it? But somehow nobody could see a film in it.

Now, Garp was, was of course not written by you was that difficult to adapt to somebody else's novel to a screenplay uh i i would love to say how hard it was because you know people want to hear that and i i then i come off sounding really good but it was easy it's a terrible thing to admit it was just wonderfully easy to write it i saw how to do it, and I'm so excited. I sat down, next thing I knew it was finished. Did you have lengthy discussions with the author of that or the people producing the movie?

I would not call them lengthy. It's like stealing, isn't it? Actually, we didn't have a discussion. They do know you did it though when I finished the screenplay I sent it to John Irving but I really couldn't see having a discussion with anybody until I finished writing it

it is a wonderful film I've seen it eight times and George Roy Hill I have because I kept waiting for it not to be as good as the last time and it's just a gorgeous film. It's a pleasure meeting you.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Stephen Perkins. We'll be right back with a tour of NBC. Ah, the days when we had novelists and screenwriters and primetime talk shows. I was just thinking exactly that. I was thinking, what the hell?

What the hell is a screenwriter doing on David Letterman? That's such an enigma now. I can't imagine it. And now some fucker who fires ping pong balls out their anus on YouTube. Time permitting, Oscar winning screenwriter. But I'm having real difficulty trying to fit the Teshitch who wrote Breaking Away.

He seems like a kind of modest, well-adjusted, positive human. It's quite hard to think that somewhere lurking in that human being is Saul Carew. But actually, I found it fascinating because it reminded me how brilliant Letterman was. And it still can be, in fact, but he's so good at that. He's so nimble in that. Sally, do you want to read us a bit?

Yeah. So Saul, our protagonist, Saul Carew, is having lunch with his ex-wife. I say ex-wife. They separated two years ago, and they're now in this sort of new kind of marriage where they are separated, but they meet up all the time. She absolutely loathes him. He thinks she finds it sort of charming and she cares. And then they're both stuck in this very dysfunctional dynamic. So they meet in the same restaurant a couple of

times a month, I think. And they share this adopted son called Billy. My bourbon arrives. I don't need this drink. What I need is to get drunk. But since I can no longer get drunk, it would be very easy for me to give up drinking altogether. Although I no longer love Diana, I haven't got the heart to hurt her.

And it would hurt her if I stopped drinking. She has invested so much time and energy popularising the myth that it was my alcoholism that was responsible for our wrecked marriage, that to give up drinking now would almost seem vindictive. For me to show any personal improvement after our failed marriage would border on being spiteful. Although I'm riddled with diseases and reprehensible traits, spite is not one of them. So I know that the best thing I can do for her is to uphold the myth that I'm a hopeless drunk. I feel I owe her that much.

So I drink my drink. It's like, do you know that phrase angry logic angry logic i was thinking that a lot while we while i was rereading this you know the bit you just read that's what that's all about it's going i think this therefore i think this so so this is the thing that the knots that this character ties himself in to get to something to get to get to a truth that his palate will accept is really painful. As one of you said earlier, it's sort of, it makes me feel quite tense sometimes to kind of see his workings of how he gets, because you do, this book shows you his workings

at all times, and to follow his workings to get to a truth that he can live with it makes you squirm and that's obviously very funny, he's convinced himself that he could easily stop drinking he can't stop drinking because that would be mean to the ex-wife who was destroyed by his drinking it's so mental but he does this all the time

I think the kernel of truth in it is we don't like other people to change, when you meet your friend who's a renowned party animal, the last thing you want to see is that guy sober, drinking a glass of mineral water, having lost loads of weight and looking really healthy, while

you're sitting there a reeking wreck. You want him in the pit with you, you know? There's that scene at the very beginning that the first part of the book, there's an extended scene. With Guido at the Russian tea room. Yeah so there's that scene at the very beginning that the first part of the book there's an extended scene with guido at the russian tea room yeah there's there's this amazing extended scene of a new york literary party and i'm it's one of the best openings to a novel ever i think absolute bravura kind of every brilliant brilliant first chapter i think niv similarly to

me i'm just a real sucker for that new york literary kind of 70s and 80s in particular kind of woody allen nora effron bit bit eastern ellis and carl bernstein and tina brown all of that i you know i love that stuff i'll take all of that you've got so there's a party scene that's very much in that world the berlin wall has come down chichesco's den and all of that stuff. And he talks about the fact that he gave up smoking yesterday, and he's definitely, definitely, definitely given up smoking. And then, of course, he starts smoking at the party,

and everyone is relieved, as Nibs says. Everyone is relieved he's smoking again. And now, you know, the truth that they know, they can continue to look down their noses at him, at what a terrible reprehensible usury he is. It's a 30-page opening scene, we should say. It's a cool, as John says, very bravura sort of open, this enormous, jungly apartment in the Dakota building.

It's Steadicam, isn't it? It's a Steadicam single-shot kind of opening to it. You want to be there, don't you? You just want to beam yourself into that party. It's like the ultimate thing. When Saul Carew is, even at his most dysfunctional, for the vast majority of the novel, even at his most morally reprehensible,

his ability to read a scene is absolutely right. He can see how it will play. It's like the screenwriting discipline has eaten into his face, isn't it? It's like eroded his ability to form meaningful human relations. I think one of the most powerful things about the book, and you can say this without it being a spoiler, is that Saul sets in motion a chain of events, which the reader can see the tragedy

of a hundred miles down the road before he can I mean very early on they're on the holiday in Spain or whatever and you're kind of going oh god oh no no no I can see where this is going this cannot happen and the character

yeah the character is oblivious for at least another 150 pages of where he is the reader can see it from space right so of course you know what's going to happen but as it dawns on him way way way too late he almost literally goes la la la can't hear you yeah yeah oh he goes into extreme denial, doesn't he? He makes the decision to stop himself from finding out what we can all see coming to devastating consequences. Yeah.

There's a brilliant essay, which we're going to put a link on the website to, by Michael Bywater, which I'll just read you one paragraph of, which talks about the thing, just the thing you've both been talking about. The idea of Carew for something that starts off as kind of like a flip Hollywood comedy

and ends up as an Aristotelian tragedy, right? And Michael Bywater says, not only is Carew in truth a tragedy and distinguishing tragedy from comedy by mere plot delineation is one of the hardest tricks in the critical book. It's also a meta tragedy. It's a tragedy about a tragedy. Yeah.

Carew is himself in many ways the perfect Aristotelian tragic hero. Neither quotes preeminent in virtue and justice, nor guilty of vice and depravity, but rather of hubris, which in turn leads him to an act of hamatia a simple mistake a missing of the target and all the tragic plot developments fall out from that and what's so interesting is the difference between if you look at steve testich's screenplays they're all pretty much in the kind of new cinema social realist bracket what they aren't is anything like this novel no right the depth of the novel and the range of reference in the novel is not something that so what happened to him between 1985 and 1990 is the biographical chunk which we which we don't

know but but clearly there's a kind of a summoning of, even if it's dark energy, in that time to then pour into Carew. Yeah. I think, as you alluded to earlier, he might have had this novel in him for a long time and had not attempted it for either the fear of not being equal to it or because he was making a lot of money doing other stuff. And the cost of that comes through the book too, doesn't it? I get a strong feeling that he knew he was dying

when he wrote that final... That final section. What was it, a heart attack? What was it? Yeah, well, maybe, I don't know. That's even more remarkable because it feels laden with existential kind of settling of scores and this is what I really think, finally. Yeah, you got to the end of that final

chapter and you found out he'd had cancer for a year and you'd have been like oh yeah, I get it. Niamh, have you got a bit to share with us now? Yeah, I was going to read a bit from quite early in the novel where he sort of describes to us what he does for a living

and there's a couple of little things in here I think that sort of explain help us what he does for a living and there's a couple little things in here i think they sort of explain help explain part of his character um okay i have never written anything of my own a long long time ago i tried but after several attempts i gave up i may be a hack but i do know what talent is and i knew knew I didn't have it. It was not a devastating realisation. It was more in the nature of a verification of what I'd suspected all along. I had a PhD in comparative lit. I was a doc to begin with, but I didn't want to teach. Thanks to some contacts I made, I segued painlessly into my true calling,

where for the most part, I rewrite screenplays written by men and women who don't have any talent either. Every now and then, very rarely of course, I'm given a screenplay to fix that doesn't need any fixing. It's just fine the way it is. All it really needs is to be made properly into a film. But the studio executives or the producers or the stars or the directors have other ideas. I am confronted with a moral dilemma. I am capable of having a moral dilemma because I have this mascot within me called the moral man. And the moral man within me wants to stand up for what's right. He wants to defend the script that doesn't need fixing from being fixed.

Or, if nothing else else he wants to refuse to be personally involved in any way in this evisceration but he does neither the moral man within me feels uncomfortable and pretentious at these times he feels as i do the burden of precedence we have set for ourselves why should we stand up now for what's right when we remain comfortably seated and other much more crucial occasions. In this way the moral dilemma becomes diluted and rationalised and I accept the assignments and the money that comes with it, huge enormous sums of money, knowing ahead of time that my contribution, my rewriting, my cutting and polishing could only cause harm or ruin to the work in question. These occasions when

I'm giving something I admire to ruin are fortunately very rare. In the last 20 years or so, I have eviscerated no more than half a dozen screenplays and of those, only one still haunts me. It's so good. It's like all the rhythm of the comic prose as well, you know. Oh yeah, it's perfectly weighted, you know.

And that realisation in there that, you know, and there's perfectly weighted you know um and the kind of that realization in there that you know and there's another point late in the book where he sort of compares what he does to um nazi doctors that you're kind of you you have the term a script doctor but sometimes you're performing unnecessary surgery and completely healthy patients we probably should say that you know for people who haven't read the book and we haven't we're not doing it well we're not doing a blurb are we ending i'll read the blurb right now we've pretty much covered it oscar-winning writer steve tesic masterfully creates and destroys the sad mad world of saul carew uh carew is an alcoholic who can't get drunk a loving father who can't bear to be alone with his son a fixture of film scripts who admits that he ruins every one of them calamity and comedy accompanies Saul oh dear on his odyssey

through sex death and show business as he seeks to fix both the master director's greatest film and his own broken life at the same time I'd like to ask Sally about something to do with this book the stuff about family in here i found it hard to diagnose his problem unlike him what's his problem that he can't form intimate connections with people that that he's drunk all the time but no he's drunk all the time because he can't form intimate connections with people i think you know the intimacy is the real issue isn't it his total inability to to relate to other human beings, especially other human beings with whom he has a kind of emotional tie.

He has this very strange dynamic with his son where he sort of worships his son and boasts about his son, this incredibly handsome boy who's at Harvard that all women fancy and all men love. And he really boasts about him, but cannot bear to be in his company without yeah we'll do anything not to be alone with his son we'll we'll do anything to the point where he is incredibly abusive and cruel um in his in his avoidance of his son obviously his

marriage is wrecked um the the the romantic relationship he has in the book is a sort of fetishistic and vain relationship really from his point of view it's really got nothing to do with the woman um involved and so he's just completely in in unable to form connections with people I suppose from my point from a family point of view I I find the family stuff really really moving in it um I had an absent uh parent I was raised by my father and that you know and that was a very difficult thing not my father but but the absent mother and um I you know you I really feel for Billy I I really really feel for Billy but then I also feel for Karu when he goes home as well um it it's very it's complex. His relationship with family and intimacy generally

is really complex. And his fear makes him very abusive, which doesn't excuse his abuse in any way, shape or form. He is cruel and he is abusive. But as the reader, you're privy to the fact that that is completely driven by fear and ineptitude on his part. And he chooses to overlook his cruelty as his coping mechanism. Yeah, as his coping mechanism, right. And also he's always looking for the way to frame it. That's the thing, isn't it? That's the Hollywood, or may not be. It might be why he's good in Hollywood,

rather than the Hollywood thing working the other way around. Yeah, he always the editing, that's for sure. So I'm going to ask Sally to read what all right-thinking people agree is the prose high point of this excruciatingly distressing novel. I'd like to ask Niven. Niven, is the, John, is the, I'll ask, no, all of you. When I came back to this, rereading it, thinking this is such a strange novel,

because in some ways it's very of the 1990s. I think there are things in here which are not fatally dated, but they are quite dated. And some of the things that Sally was speaking about there, certain attitudes I think are more problematic now than they might have been back then. How do you mean? I think there's a kind of male-centredness about the novel,

about Saul Carew's, and I appreciate this doesn't come without many layers of irony built into the novel. But that kind of post-Roth de Lillo updyke, poor me, the poor middle-aged man, poor me, using all these people. And I'm playing devil's advocate here because I'm not saying that we should consign it to the 90s. That's not what I mean. As I often say in my own writing career, who will speak for us?

We just haven't had a voice in the novel for centuries. But I guess what I mean is I don't think it would be written quite like this now. I think it would be harder to write this novel now. I hear what you're saying i don't think it's the most offensive novel you could pluck from that time period it was published within a few years of american cycle let's don't forget it was probably at the tail end of that universe you talk about andy which if you say began with the likes of up they can bellow went

all the way through to john irving. Richard Ford. Richard Ford. It's the end of that straight white male period of domination. Things are about to change, you know? If I may, as the woman on this podcast, I do not find it problematic. The reason I don't is that for me, well, first of all, at no point are you not on the side of the woman in any scene involving crew. You're always on the side of the woman.

And I think at no point is the character offered up as any kind of hero other than an anti-hero to you. And it also shows the havoc that is wreaked by a bad man, right? A bad white man with a little bit of money and a platform can wreak absolute havoc in people's lives. And he does. And it also shows that, you know, the danger and destruction of an absentee father as well. So I actually think, although it is very male centredcentered I think it focuses on the uncomfortable things um yeah about men in a way that is quite important I think and it doesn't I don't find it problematic yes you're absolutely right it would be written differently now but that doesn't mean to say there's anything wrong with how it was absolutely um well then please please read us the heartwarming

scene with his mother so so this bit is in the last third of the book. So the first passage I wrote was written in the first person. This is written in the third person because there is a big gear change. And this is when Saul Carew, after a fairly life-changing event, retreats to his mother's house where he never, ever, ever visited. His father has been dead a couple of years, I think, and just his mother is there living alone. Saul sits at the dining room table eating his lamb stew out of a deep soup bowl. His mother stands not far away and watches him eat. It was still light when he arrived and now it's dark. Through the windows of the dining room illuminated by street lamps and the headlights of passing cars, he can see the snow falling, swirling,

accumulating. It's really coming down, his mother says, which is what he was going to say. Looks like it's going to snow all night, he says instead. You think so? Sure, looks like it. The TV, which had been on in the living room when he arrived is still on. He knows if he weren't here, his mother would be there watching it. The lamb stew is terrible. He can't figure out what makes it so terrible. It's tastelessness or some subtle taste that it has. But something is terribly wrong with it. She goes back to looking out the window to watching him eat.

How is it? The lamb stew? It's wonderful. There's plenty more. There was a time, Saul thinks, when his mother was a wonderful cook and an immaculate housekeeper and a woman who took great pride in her appearance. Now she's no longer any of those things. Saul wonders as he eats his lamb stew if she's aware of this decline or not. Signs of neglect are everywhere. You don't have to look for them to see them. You have to keep looking away in order not to. His silverware and his soup bowl contain remnants of former meals upon them. The dish towel his mother is now worrying with

her hands as if it were a rosary is filthy. The furnace keeps coming on and each time it does, the air out of the registers blows little clumps of lint across the floor. Little lint creatures scurrying about like mice. The house of Karoo, Saul thinks to himself. He drains the dirty glass of water and his mother, eager for an activity, almost snatches it out of his hands and heads towards the kitchen to refill it. Although he has enough unresolved problems in his life to last him several lifetimes, he casts a scholarly glance at his mother's departing feet and attempts yet again to figure out how it's possible for this wisp of an old woman to make such a racket when she walks, and on slippered feet. The closest he can come to an explanation

is that his mother snaps her feet downward at the last split second prior to contact with the floor, the way a baseball slugger snaps his wrist to crush a grand slam home run, impossible to see with the naked human eye. She stands by the sink, glass in hand, and lets the water run, feeling it with her finger. Saul looks at her, at his mother, in profile, at the dirty bathrobe she's wearing, bought in some It goes on for another couple of pages and it's amazing. It is utterly brilliant writing. It's the grimest moment in the book up to that point, isn't it? It goes on for another couple of pages and it's amazing. It is utterly brilliant writing. It's the grimmest moment in the book up to that point, isn't it?

And I think because you're kind of praying at that junction without any spoilers, a lot of bad stuff's just happened. And internally you're praying that this scene with his mother will offer some kind of warmth or redemption. But I've got to say say anybody who has elderly relatives the clarity with which he sees that is so precise and unforgiving and clear-eyed this this for me is why that passage is so brilliant because everybody who is of a certain age and has been away from home for decades everybody knows that you catch yourself right on moments you go home you catch yourself being disapproving or critical or slightly appalled

by something in the house or something you're eating and you catch yourself and you're kind of disgusted with yourself right you catch yourself hating the stew or whatever it is or noticing that the dishes are dirty and and and you know in moment, how disgusting and appalling and ungrateful you see. And it's mortifying. And it's such an uncomfortable feeling. And then in that passage, I did one and a half pages there, but there are maybe five pages of it. And it's so forensic in its observation. And it all feels so true true he wishes she wouldn't watch him eat he wishes she had to go to the bathroom he wishes she would get one of her phone calls i mean that's the laser like specificity of it when i read this in the late 90s i

loved the first two thirds three three quarters of the book. And then I thought the ending didn't work. We won't spoil the ending. That was not my experience reading it again now. Good. I had a totally different experience this time. That the gear change for me really makes the novel coming back to it as an older reader.

And I wondered how you felt about that change of tone and pace towards the end of the book. He does a thing that a lot of great novelists do. He reaches for his high style in the final 20, 30 pages. And it really is someone at full stretch. You know, you see it in Update, you see it in Richard Ford. The last sort of, for example, Bratis Nelson's Lunar Park, the last sort of half dozen pages are written in this

at your absolute maximum sort of pitch and it's just the book becomes something else. And as you say, Andy, it's a completely different experience reading that in your 50s to what it is reading it in your 20s, you know? What's very interesting about that last third is

and again, I'm not spoiling it but when saul is at his most broken and most vulnerable i feel that tesic becomes his most vulnerable as a writer he absolutely gets his ball he gets his balls out and puts them on the table and it's and i there's something really wonderful about that because whereas career can never face up to that kind of vulnerability and highs from it, I feel like the writer hands his vulnerability to you to do with it what you will. And I think that it's incredibly admirable. I love the gear change.

I love the switch. And as Niv says, that very kind of high style, I admire the courage of it. We can sail on no longer. Huge thanks to Sally and John for taking us on the wild, increasingly sad, but also increasingly magnificent ride of Steve Tesich's final creation. To Nicky for doctoring our individual scripts into a seamless whole, and to Unbound for hiring the stretch limo. You can download all 129 previous episodes of Batlisted, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting

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they get two extra lot listed a month. Our very own writer's room where we hang out, drink, pretend to smoke and shoot the crap about movies, tunes and even sometimes books. Lot-listers also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's batch are... Fletcher, Mary Grace McGeehan, Molly Harbage, Mark Jerry, Katie, Robert Summers,

Karen Cooper, Janice McGrath, Julie Crofts, Joe DeBank, and Jackie Morris. Thanks, Jackie. Oh, Sharon Lipvin, Matthew Horton, Poppy Fee, Falconer, capital letters, Eric Gaines,

Beth Bonini, Kim Tester, Michelle Churcher-White, Michael Walters, Laura Wirtz, capital letters eric gaines beth bonini kim tester michelle churchill white michael walters laura wertz angela sykes rosie edsor gabe cortez and mike shuttleworth thanks very much all of you yeah and we'll be back in a fortnight thank you for listening and thanks again to sally and john i mean if we haven't made the case i i think we, I hope we've made the case. This is, I do think this is an absolutely magnificent novel. Sally and John, thank you so much. Thank you guys. That was amazing. Thank you for having us, man. It was brilliant.