As I recall the reviews, TAM was regarded as the Difficult Second Album that we had to endure before Smith entered her mature period. But what good are reviews? Murder on the Orient Express - 5 stars; War and Peace - also 5 stars: you see the problem. Even those comments along the lines of "007 meets Harry Potter - with a dash of PG Wodehouse!" are more useful: at least that gives you some idea of what to expect from the book.
For what it is worth, I thought that TAM was pretty good (at least until its later stages). But I can do better than that. Below the break, I set out some comments that I hope will give you a better idea of what the book is like, and then a postscript about London prompted by some comments in the book.
The biggest thing that struck me about TAM is quite how male it is.
Smith is a woman who writes well and sympathetically about men. Her father, for example, a man who appears in her factual writing and (in lightly disguised form) in her novels, is always someone we warm to and understand: compare the impressive but rather cold mother in Swing Time. And it is fair to say that Smith is a woman of broad sympathies: consider the affectionate treatment of the easy child-adult conversation of the educated middle classes in White Teeth or the careful elaboration of the virtues of a white, working-class single mother in Swing Time (as well as the affectionate joshing at her Argos-catalogue excesses). She is a great observer of people unlike herself. But even taking that all into account, the thoroughgoing maleness of TAM is peculiarly striking.
The maleness appears first from the characters. As we are told by the title, the main character in TAM, Alex-Li Tandem, is a man. The action, although reported in the third person, is told from his point of view. Not only that, but he is a man of a particular kind, well-known to the reader of literary fiction, namely a man of few qualities and many faults (a drinking problem, not being a great boyfriend or terribly reliable in any other way) whom we are nonetheless told to follow with concern. He deals in autographs (an early example of Smith's interest in celebrity - see latterly Swing Time) and his main interest that is not related to autographs is writing a book that is really just an over-extended riff on the Lenny Bruce routine in which he divides everything in the world into 'Jewish' or 'goyish'. ("Kool-Aid is goyish. ... Chocolate is Jewish ...".) You may be interested in that endeavour, but not many people in the book are.
Despite his lack of virtues, Alex nonetheless progresses through life finding interesting and/or attractive women (and ... but I won't spoil it all) throwing themselves at him. There is something rather male - something rather literary-male - about that.
And it is not just Alex. After you finish the book you will remember that Alex's girlfriend is beautiful and physically frail, but I doubt that you'll remember much more than that. You'll know and care far more about Alex's (male) best friend.
The story is also set in a man's world. The beginning - and the emotional heart of the book - sees Alex, aged 12, together with a couple of other boys, being taken by his father to a wrestling match at the Albert Hall (Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks of course - we are in Smith's era). That makes it sound as if it starts with with a testosterone-charged escapade. Not at all. None of our characters is a fighter: they are just going to watch some people who are famous on TV. But they are all men or boys, and their interests are male. The episode takes up the first 40 pages or so of the book, and a lot happens during it. It is a bravura performance from someone who bases so much of her work on closely-observed reality, but who could never herself have been in the incident she describes.
There are various other signs of maleness. I won't go on but I'll leave you with two. First, you have to know that Alex is Jewish: his father is ethnically Chinese and his mother is Jewish. So we have a book in which Jewishness is important and in which there is a Jewish mother. Cue: what? Intense mother-son relationship? Wise-cracking matriarch? Jewish mother jokes? No, cue nothing. Alex's father is an important character in the book; his mother gets exiled to Cornwall. The male-male relationship takes precedence.
Second, here is a bit of dialogue (about a woman that neither of them has ever met and who is now old):
"'She is the most beautiful thing,' says Alex sheepishly, 'that I have ever seen. That's it. I know that doesn't mean anything to you.'
'I think beauty, real beauty, is the realization of the divine on earth. [...] You're just talking about sex.'
'Look, I like trees too,' sighs Alex. 'And mountains. I like all of that stuff. But all I'm saying is that beauty in women is the realization of the divine in human life.'"
Here we have a woman described as a "thing" and then female beauty given divine status. These are things that would plausibly be thought - or even said ("sheepishly", as Smith says, and in male company) - by a young man. But would a young man ever have spoken like that to a woman? I mean to say: would Smith herself have heard someone say this? It seems unlikely to me. But let's suppose that some young poseur did say it to her, perhaps late at night at an undergraduate party: it is surely notable that she saw that it is something that a man might really believe and not just say for effect. What Alex says is not as snappily expressed as one would hope for from an epigram - Smith is not simply delivering a bon mot through a character's mouth - so this is a glimpse into how he thinks. A man in a man's world.
Let's leave maleness and move on. As I said above, Smith is a great observer of the world. Here are a few examples.
TAM is where we find her famous line about seeing the "best minds of my generation accepting jobs on the fringes of the light entertainment industry". It's meant to be a thought of Alex's, but I'm afraid it is all too obviously the thought of someone who was turned down for Footlights by Mitchell and Webb. (Although I don't think M&W are the best minds of Smith's generation.) A good line nonetheless, although perhaps from the vantage of 2020 concerns of this kind appear charmingly dated.
Of women seen on a tube: "They were placed at regular intervals along the melancholy arc of sexual maturity and they knew it. They laughed frenziedly, jiggling on the hand-straps, demonstrating what three women having fun looks like. They did not like each other, Alex thought."
On seeing an unattractive man: "One of the many things TV does not show you is the potential range and horror of the human form. For this alone, thought Alex, it is rightly celebrated."
On eating a biscotto: "She ... chewed around the edge of it with that unique ineptitude we bring to food we do not recognise."
A glamorous old lady speaking: "'... my dear, everybody should marry a homosexual at least once. It robs a pretty girl of all her sexual vanity. It is very healthy. ...'"
On a man: "He had rented a smile off somebody and it was the wrong size."
On walking about one's home while drunk: "Most decoration is future obstacle."
On the observed response to someone saying the wrong thing: "[He] had on a certain kind of English face which is that island's mild substitute for the wordless disgust of the Spanish fist, or the excoriating Italian glare, or the French gasp, or the Russian wail. The face that says: That's not really on, now, is it?"
And there's more, which I will leave to you.
So that is TAM. For those of you who like that sort of thing ...
POSTSCRIPT: LONDON
TAM is, of course, largely set in north-west London. But at one point we get Alex's thoughts on being in south London. Those thoughts are, to the non-Londoner, surprisingly strong. But as an honorary or adopted Londoner, I feel that I might be able to explain.
We are told that Alex's instinct (and, one suspects, Smith's) is to detest any of the various groupings we tend to divide people into, but when it comes to north vs south London, he feels "that irrational something which enabled him to almost understand why people behave as they do in the contentious, blood-slick places of the world". This is how he sums it up: "I think it's because nobody knows me in South London. And I don't know anyone. It's like being dead."
This struck a chord with me. I thought about it for a bit, and now I think I know why.
In order to explain what I think Alex is getting at, I first need to explain what I mean by "Normal London".
"Normal London" is not East London: East London is certainly London but it is sui generis. Nor is it West London, which is really just a collection of villages hiding from real London behind charming river views, vast open green spaces or both. Richmond, for example, is on the Tube, but the Richmond Tube is not the London Underground Tube we all know and love, but rather a trundling little branch line that somehow escaped the Beeching reforms.
Normal London is the rest of London, the echt London of either north or south that was built by the Victorians and Edwardians, added to between the wars, and then overlaid with post-war estates that people don't want to live in.
If you grow up in Normal London then London (i.e. the world) makes sense to you. All human life is here, familiar and legible: all races, all ages, all everything. There are the streets where the rich live and here are the streets, only a few roads away, where the poor live. There are the local shops, and then there is the high street, and over that way lie the big shopping centres that you have to drive to. There are the little local parks with the swings and here are the bigger, wilder parks with old stories to them. There are schools for children of all incomes and faiths. All the places of worship are here. Everything. And beyond all that there is, in one direction, the countryside and the world outside London (as if that matters) and, in the other, central London, where the museums are, and the West End shops, and the places where they run the country and make money and do all those other things that one can read about in the papers - the parts of London that, one instinctively understands, support the Normal London that people live in. In short, the world seems to be wholly complete and comprehensible.
But then, if you happen to make the tortuously long journey necessary to venture to the other side of the river, you will go through the looking-glass and find this bizarre other London, a London that at first sight looks just like your own but turns out to be subtly and disturbingly different. The high streets have the same modern frontages with those Victorian flats above - but the shops are in the wrong order. The red double-decker buses look the same - but their numbers are unfamiliar and their destinations obscure. They have their own, weird versions of your own familiar schools and parks and shops and .... And so on. And the people who live there think that these strange places are London, even though you don't know any of them. How can there be another London?, you think. Your London was all London - it was everything. This place is London, but yet, not-London too.
I would put it this way. The experience of going from North to South London, or vice versa, is like being in one of those stories where someone wakes up and although the place they are in is familiar to them, noone knows them, or it turns out that they are in the future, or the past. Or, as in Alex's take on it, they are dead.
This is of course all very silly. But we must recall that Alex is comparing a journey of a few miles to dying and saying that it gives him some insight into the "contentious, blood-slick places of the world". (The book was published in 2002. He means, for example, the Balkans.) So we are looking for something quite strong. And I think that is what it is: the very existence of this other Normal London radically undermines the Normal Londoner's entire comprehension of the world.
Or at least, that is my theory.
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