Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson

Author:Howard Jacobson [Jacobson, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-07-09T14:00:00+00:00

23

Less is Less

The day I’d earmarked for the visit north – I wasn’t able just to catch a train to Wilmslow, I had to fill my diary with red exclamation marks, as though readying myself mentally as for a trek into the Interior – I received a phone call from Margaret Travers, Merton’s secretary. Merton’s replacement had finally been appointed and wanted to meet me. Could I make lunch the following Wednesday at 1 p.m.?

You must never sound too eager. ‘I’ll just check my diary,’ I said, rustling paper. ‘Yes, if I move a couple of things, yes, I can make Wednesday at 1 p.m. Just. Who is it?’

‘It’s Margaret.’

‘No, who’s the replacement?’

‘There can be no replacement for Merton.’

I heard tears in her voice. Apparently she had wept every day since Merton did what Merton did. Had they been lovers? The word was not. Though she wore belted raincoats in the style of vamps from black-and-white films of the 1950s, and though her voice was suggestively husky, and though she had always pronounced the name Merton as if it were molten, Margaret Travers was a secretary of the old style, simultaneously faithful to her husband and her boss. When she said there could be no replacement for Merton she meant in her heart, innocently, as well as in publishing.

‘I know that. I meant who’s his –’ I couldn’t find the word, if the word wasn’t ‘replacement’ – ‘who will I be having lunch with?’

She lowered her voice, as though not to upset Merton. ‘Sandy Ferber.’

I knew a Sandy Ferber. He’d owned a highly successful minimalist gallery in Hoxton, providing one Turner Prize-winner after another, from which he went on to run a small but influential art press – Less is More – specialising in elegantly produced artists’ monographs in octodecimo, after which, quite out of character, he popped up as the fiction supremo at a bookshop chain that soon afterwards went into receivership. In the short time he was there he’d rationalised fiction so that there wasn’t any, boasting that he read at least one sentence of every novel published, deciding on its viability-or-not by opening it at page 100 and if there was too much happening in the way of words he wouldn’t buy. I had celebrated his fall from eminence with an article in the Bookseller, offering it as my view that he chose page 100 to sample because any novel that had a hundred pages in it was already too long for his exquisite concentration. The closure of the chain that had appointed him was, in my view, the logical extension of his credo. As was the disappearance of the book, and, not a moment too soon, the disappearance of him.

But that had to be a different Sandy Ferber. Under Merton, Scylla and Charybdis Press had specialised in novels that ran to six or seven hundred pages, each densely printed and packed with verbal incident. The one time Merton quarrelled with my work it was because the amount of dialogue in it made for too many white spaces on the page.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.