Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry
by B.S. Johnson
I overwhelmed myself when it came to keeping up on blog postings about what I had been reading when I finished three books last Wednesday. I didn’t read all the books on one days, I just finished them all in one day. Actually I didn’t start and finish any of those three books on that day. But that is kind of normal for me, I usually have a few books going at a time.
This is one of the books that I finished last Wednesday. To be specific the second book finished.
B.S. Johnson is someone I had never read before, but had been on my radar to read for quite sometime. I think at some point I read that DFW really liked him, and then a few years ago Jonathan Coe wrote a very interesting looking biography on him. I don’t know what took me so long to finally try to read him, his books that are still in print aren’t too big, this one is only about two hundred pages, and a lot of those pages are filled with lots of white space. Yes his books are kind of expensive, I’ve yet to come across one in my used book scouring, and the new copies of the three books in print are a bit more expensive than the normal book, as they are print on demand copies. The real reason I think I avoided him was that he is English, and considered an experimental, or avant garde writer. I’ve read a few British avant garde writers before and none of them turned out to be pleasant experiences.
B.S. Johnson turned out to be an exception to the rule that British and experimental literature don’t mix. Instead of being the obtuse and near-impossible to find a hole in the text to get inside and figure out exactly what the author is even attempting to do, Johnson made it quite easy to at least get engaged in the book. His writing was more akin to early John Barth or DFW than to someone like Ann Quinn, and his sense of humor moved in what could now be classified as standard meta-fiction antics.
The book is about a man of no particular importance who realizes that the world as it relates to him is out of balance. Being a book-keeper, he understands the importance of keeping balanced books and with this knowledge sets out to even the debits and credits in his life. As I said the book is at turns quite humorous, and Johnson gets humor from both his post-modern playing with the text, and from the well regarded tradition of British humor (a genre the British are vastly superior in general to their American couterparts). The book in the end is an absurd look at modern day life, in an almost Monty Python sort of way.
Good stuff.
