This article was originally published in April 2020.

A writer introduces his three go-to reads – short stories by JD Salinger and Denis Johnson, and a volume of essays and reviews by Martin Amis

For almost every author, writing fiction is not a commercial proposition. There are a few, household names, who make a good living, but every other novelist can only dream of swapping his or her daily scrabble for the spacious workdays of the big-name brands. Even for authors you know quite well, it is largely a labour of love: self-imposed stress feeding the publishing maw, pay per hour below the minimum wage, the number of copies needing to be sold to pay for a pint barely worth thinking about.

I live in Bristol and combine writing fiction with working as an editor in London three days a week. Reading novels shortens long journeys. I go through about 60 a year, which is probably more than the average commuter but less than the average novelist; this includes slack periods when my own writing reaches a critical stage. There are times in London therefore when I’m not reading a novel or I finish a book earlier than expected and find myself with nothing to read at bedtime. I keep three books beside my bed for such moments, and as the editor of the Property Chronicle asked me to write about “any book”, I thought these were the place to start.

They are: Nine Stories by JD Salinger, published in the UK as For Esmé, with Love and Squalor; Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson; and The War Against Cliché by Martin Amis. None are novels, though all are by novelists. Nine Stories opens with ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, published in the New Yorker in, I think, 1948 but which reads as if it had been written yesterday. Those who only know Salinger through the genre-creating The Catcher in the Rye will recognise the precociousness of Holden Caulfield in the brittle protagonist of ‘Bananafish’, Seymour Glass, a regular in Salinger short stories. His name – ‘see more glass’ – hints at a transparency the talented but troubled war veteran cannot achieve.

The tale covers a day at the beach. Glass, in crisis, probably suffering from PTSD, has recently married a vapid consumer who remains in their hotel talking on the phone to her mother, who is worrying about the groom. He meanwhile takes a young girl to look for the mythical bananafish. Those familiar with Catcher will know that Salinger has a way with a defining metaphor, and the ending is to die for.

The point about Salinger’s short stories, for example the novella Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter, or ‘De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period’ in Nine Stories, is they are often absurd and laugh-out-loud funny, which is not something the Catcher-only reader would expect.

So too are Denis Johnson’s stories. His title, taken from Lou Reed’s song ‘Heroin’ – “When I’m rushing on my run/And I feel just like Jesus’ son” – gives the game away. This is 11 connected short stories with an unnamed junkie narrator. He struggles with a series of surreal situations, finding himself in a pub one lunchtime with a man about to be sent down for armed robbery, as a hitchhiker in a vehicle that crashes killing the driver, in a car with an unknown deaf mute who needs dropping home but is unable to explain where that is, and so on.

It isn’t only the narrative that compels, though every tale is delightfully off-beam, it is the obliqueness of observation, the turn of phrase. The narrator, primarily as a result of his ingestion of alcohol and proscribed substances, is bewildered by the people he meets and the situations he faces. 

Opening it entirely at random I find: at a party he realises someone is the host because “he gripped the handle of a green beer mug almost the size of a wastepaper basket with a swastika and a dollar sign painted on it”; one story, ‘Work’, begins, “I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin”; in another, in a bar, “And with each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who’d love me. And then I would remember I had a wife at home who loved me, or later that my wife had left me and I was terrified, or again that I had a beautiful alcoholic girlfriend who would make me happy forever.” In Johnson’s world, forever never comes.

Martin Amis is a famous novelist, admired and reviled in equal measure, though possibly less of the former these days after a fallow period. For my shilling Money (1985) was his apogee, an epochal work that perfectly captured that shiny hollow decade.

Amis’ strengths are well known: wit, prose, intelligence, an encyclopaedic knowledge of, and love for, literature; his weaknesses (far be it from me, etc) are plots and, on occasion, characters, which incline towards the emblematic, played for savage laughs. It stands to reason therefore that his essays and book reviews, collected in The War on Cliché, display his wit, prose, intelligence and encyclopaedic literary knowledge but have no need for plot or characters, other than the essayist himself who patrols his pages like a gun for hire.

Of John Fowles’ Mantissa, one of that author’s later, weaker works, Amis concludes, “Such talent as survives stands there naked and trembling in the cold. Few writers have ever blown the whistle on themselves so piercingly.” Of Norman Mailer’s The Essential Mailer, “On every page Mailer will come up with a formulation both grandiose and crass … He isn’t frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn’t afraid of making a fool of himself; he isn’t frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses.” In the introduction, “These days you can become rich without having any talent via the scratchcard and rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon) … But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.” 

“Fail better,” Beckett said. Between them, they had the last word.