A Project in Purposeful Failure
Miles Beard, Americanitis
Renard Press, 264pp, £10.00, ISBN 9781804471043
reviewed by Paul Abbott
In his 2005 review of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Christopher Hitchens refers to what he considers the ‘Amis test’ regarding Nabokov’s original: basically, who spots or misses the very early (pre-H.H.) reference to Mrs ‘Richard F. Schiller’ (‘dead on arrival’, as Amis had it). Tucked up in a fictional foreword, the detail is given ‘For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story.’
I’m pretty sure I don’t know anyone now who isn’t aware of the proleptic demise of ‘Lola in slacks’ if they’ve read the novel — or maybe even if they haven’t — and perhaps Amis and Hitchens, writing over a decade apart, combined to turn one of literature’s most poignant Easter Eggs into cliché. However, it was the idea of a ‘test’ of sorts, of ‘old-fashioned readers’ and those problematic nouns Nabokov couldn’t resist scare-quoting, that kept popping into my head as I read Miles Beard’s debut novel Americanitis. Or, to be more accurate, as I flicked between the dedication, ‘Acknowledgements’ and ‘About the Author’ pages.
Americanitis is, somewhat surprisingly, the first work of art to use ‘Americanitis’ as its title. The term popped up in the late 19th century, later popularised by William James; it is a sobriquet of the now dated condition neurasthenia, a nerve disorder associated with environmental factors (special emphasis on industrialised North America). Miles Beard’s Americanitis tells the story of Miles Beard, a 27-year-old PhD student from Scotland. Miles, a hypochondriac, has recently lost his wife Sarah on unspecified terms. He is seeing a therapist, who is female (we learn this is important to him: ‘I knew I would see a woman’), who has recommended that he ‘write down what had happened to me, everything that had happened to me, even events that weren’t true or those I wished to be true.’
Miles responds to this suggestion with a smirk: apparently, he teaches a course on ‘autofiction’ at an unnamed university (Beard — the author — we’re told on the book’s final page, teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University for the Western Isles). We too might smirk at the conceit: a not-too-subtle nod to narrative framing. We know what to expect from this novel, at least structurally: excerpts of exposition about what has led Miles to this point, analysed in the present moment through psychological dialectic and a self-conscious literariness. And that’s pretty much what we get, at least on the surface.
One might anticipate Americanitis to become something like a ‘novel of ideas’ from here, and in many ways, it does: sustained discourses follow on Roth’s ‘ambiguous fictionality’, representation of the self in the writing of Bret Easton Ellis and Charles Mingus (among others), Ray Bradbury, John Updike, the stock characters of Ancient Greek theatre, to name a few. It’s a deeply referential novel but, while the frequent digressions are in and of themselves interesting — and seem to tease at the novel’s ultimate preoccupations and provocations — they don’t necessarily prove to be the ‘source of the work’s energy, originating and shaping and maintaining its narrative momentum’, as David Lodge describes the genre. Rather, they pause, stall or even render implausible the narrative momentum — a risk one learns to suspect is a deliberate desire to obfuscate how one understands the narrator/protagonist.
We learn early on that, prior to her death, Miles and Sarah had been trying for a baby. They experience two miscarriages, and we see how empathy manifests for Miles: during Sarah’s second pregnancy, Miles gains weight and struggles with mood swings and nausea — sympathy pains, it seems. When Sarah’s reaction shifts from endearment to resentment, Miles, nobly, disguises the symptoms with ‘ostentatious displays of my prior eating habits’ despite burgeoning symptoms. Later he cheats on her multiple times (but not before she cheats on him first). Sarah’s pain is only lightly drawn out, mostly through actions that Miles struggles to comprehend — some teary moments; a shocking scene at a party, one of two very different but torturously funny sex scenes in the novel. But she is, of course, dead on arrival, a trauma-memory that slowly unfolds as Miles pieces together the weeks that led up to her death.
While the sinister edge to the story — Miles’s mysterious ignominy related to Sarah’s death — hangs over proceedings for much of the novel, it is undercut by the shaggy-dog nature of Miles’s ‘autofiction’, which mostly concerns a trip to America for an academic conference and research on Charles Mingus for his thesis. There are some excellent moments here — the writing on Mingus is, at times, not only fascinating but quite clearly credible academic work, while the conference itself is a work of immaculately excruciating comic realism. However, Beard can be a little stingy with both his comedy and realism, often favouring curiously and increasingly implausible interactions with women, who are mostly unnamed and characterised so minimally it borders on the perverse.
There’s a whiff of contrivance from the outset, of course, in the form of the female therapist who not only sets up the narrative conceit but is more than willing to engage in pat literary theory throughout. Then we have a sequence of women that lead Miles essentially everywhere and nowhere: an attractive academic who’s not only researching Philip Roth (the earlier, pre-Counterlife Zuckerman novels may be an influence of sorts) but is an authority on the idea of the ‘narrative self’ (and is keen to give blow jobs in public spaces); a woman at a party who is dressed up as Annie Hall and quotes Joyce in a takedown of Tom Wolfe (her hand suggestively on Miles’s arm the entire time); a tattooed rock star barmaid who’s also a fan of Updike (who takes Miles on a sex-fuelled band tour); an elderly lady at a diner who turns out to have a personal history with Charles Mingus (no sex here, although Miles does ask if he can meet her mother); the daughter of a famous postmodern author who not only represents her father’s work with the register of a critic, but solicits a relationship with Miles apropos of (almost) nothing; a high-school tutee with a PhD thesis-like take on the work of Fitzgerald (does he flirt with her?). In a conventional novel, this would be less a problem than a disaster.
There’s something compellingly anti-modish about Beard’s insistence on disruptively clunky fictionality. One of the most engaging passages of the novel — a harrowing account of adolescent drinking and potential sexual assault — is concluded with a pompous footnote, insisting on a bathos that overrides the moment. However, Beard constructs such a pattern of absurdity that it's impossible not to see it as a kind of hybrid function: on one hand, it's an interrogation of academic hypermasculine narratives, on the other a more febrile insistence that the narrator we have is not the one we need. What we're left with is something curiously captivating: a project in purposeful failure. By the novel’s end, or at least where one might be inclined to cease reading, one is left to reflect less on plot than on form.
When I teach The Handmaid’s Tale to students, I have to remind them to read the ‘Historical Notes’ chapter at the end because they always mistake it for an afterword and skip it. An afterword is apparently a skippable feature for many, an addendum that presumes legacy and interest after the fact. Nabokov, famously, added an afterword to Lolita, in which he disagreed with his own fictional foreword: no moral lessons here! I don’ think it was his primary intention, but it created a kind of metafictional loop: the author interpreting his own work, even disagreeing with it, resists the idea of finality, perhaps; the narrative is ultimately inconclusive if the author doesn’t quite let it go.
It’s a different kind of inconclusiveness that we’re left with at the end of Americanitis, not the consequence of an afterword, something extra- rather than intra-narratological, and one that I’ll refrain from spoiling here. But those abstract nouns so synonymous with the novel — ‘test’, ‘real’ and ‘true’ — keep nagging away.
I’m pretty sure I don’t know anyone now who isn’t aware of the proleptic demise of ‘Lola in slacks’ if they’ve read the novel — or maybe even if they haven’t — and perhaps Amis and Hitchens, writing over a decade apart, combined to turn one of literature’s most poignant Easter Eggs into cliché. However, it was the idea of a ‘test’ of sorts, of ‘old-fashioned readers’ and those problematic nouns Nabokov couldn’t resist scare-quoting, that kept popping into my head as I read Miles Beard’s debut novel Americanitis. Or, to be more accurate, as I flicked between the dedication, ‘Acknowledgements’ and ‘About the Author’ pages.
Americanitis is, somewhat surprisingly, the first work of art to use ‘Americanitis’ as its title. The term popped up in the late 19th century, later popularised by William James; it is a sobriquet of the now dated condition neurasthenia, a nerve disorder associated with environmental factors (special emphasis on industrialised North America). Miles Beard’s Americanitis tells the story of Miles Beard, a 27-year-old PhD student from Scotland. Miles, a hypochondriac, has recently lost his wife Sarah on unspecified terms. He is seeing a therapist, who is female (we learn this is important to him: ‘I knew I would see a woman’), who has recommended that he ‘write down what had happened to me, everything that had happened to me, even events that weren’t true or those I wished to be true.’
Miles responds to this suggestion with a smirk: apparently, he teaches a course on ‘autofiction’ at an unnamed university (Beard — the author — we’re told on the book’s final page, teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University for the Western Isles). We too might smirk at the conceit: a not-too-subtle nod to narrative framing. We know what to expect from this novel, at least structurally: excerpts of exposition about what has led Miles to this point, analysed in the present moment through psychological dialectic and a self-conscious literariness. And that’s pretty much what we get, at least on the surface.
One might anticipate Americanitis to become something like a ‘novel of ideas’ from here, and in many ways, it does: sustained discourses follow on Roth’s ‘ambiguous fictionality’, representation of the self in the writing of Bret Easton Ellis and Charles Mingus (among others), Ray Bradbury, John Updike, the stock characters of Ancient Greek theatre, to name a few. It’s a deeply referential novel but, while the frequent digressions are in and of themselves interesting — and seem to tease at the novel’s ultimate preoccupations and provocations — they don’t necessarily prove to be the ‘source of the work’s energy, originating and shaping and maintaining its narrative momentum’, as David Lodge describes the genre. Rather, they pause, stall or even render implausible the narrative momentum — a risk one learns to suspect is a deliberate desire to obfuscate how one understands the narrator/protagonist.
We learn early on that, prior to her death, Miles and Sarah had been trying for a baby. They experience two miscarriages, and we see how empathy manifests for Miles: during Sarah’s second pregnancy, Miles gains weight and struggles with mood swings and nausea — sympathy pains, it seems. When Sarah’s reaction shifts from endearment to resentment, Miles, nobly, disguises the symptoms with ‘ostentatious displays of my prior eating habits’ despite burgeoning symptoms. Later he cheats on her multiple times (but not before she cheats on him first). Sarah’s pain is only lightly drawn out, mostly through actions that Miles struggles to comprehend — some teary moments; a shocking scene at a party, one of two very different but torturously funny sex scenes in the novel. But she is, of course, dead on arrival, a trauma-memory that slowly unfolds as Miles pieces together the weeks that led up to her death.
While the sinister edge to the story — Miles’s mysterious ignominy related to Sarah’s death — hangs over proceedings for much of the novel, it is undercut by the shaggy-dog nature of Miles’s ‘autofiction’, which mostly concerns a trip to America for an academic conference and research on Charles Mingus for his thesis. There are some excellent moments here — the writing on Mingus is, at times, not only fascinating but quite clearly credible academic work, while the conference itself is a work of immaculately excruciating comic realism. However, Beard can be a little stingy with both his comedy and realism, often favouring curiously and increasingly implausible interactions with women, who are mostly unnamed and characterised so minimally it borders on the perverse.
There’s a whiff of contrivance from the outset, of course, in the form of the female therapist who not only sets up the narrative conceit but is more than willing to engage in pat literary theory throughout. Then we have a sequence of women that lead Miles essentially everywhere and nowhere: an attractive academic who’s not only researching Philip Roth (the earlier, pre-Counterlife Zuckerman novels may be an influence of sorts) but is an authority on the idea of the ‘narrative self’ (and is keen to give blow jobs in public spaces); a woman at a party who is dressed up as Annie Hall and quotes Joyce in a takedown of Tom Wolfe (her hand suggestively on Miles’s arm the entire time); a tattooed rock star barmaid who’s also a fan of Updike (who takes Miles on a sex-fuelled band tour); an elderly lady at a diner who turns out to have a personal history with Charles Mingus (no sex here, although Miles does ask if he can meet her mother); the daughter of a famous postmodern author who not only represents her father’s work with the register of a critic, but solicits a relationship with Miles apropos of (almost) nothing; a high-school tutee with a PhD thesis-like take on the work of Fitzgerald (does he flirt with her?). In a conventional novel, this would be less a problem than a disaster.
There’s something compellingly anti-modish about Beard’s insistence on disruptively clunky fictionality. One of the most engaging passages of the novel — a harrowing account of adolescent drinking and potential sexual assault — is concluded with a pompous footnote, insisting on a bathos that overrides the moment. However, Beard constructs such a pattern of absurdity that it's impossible not to see it as a kind of hybrid function: on one hand, it's an interrogation of academic hypermasculine narratives, on the other a more febrile insistence that the narrator we have is not the one we need. What we're left with is something curiously captivating: a project in purposeful failure. By the novel’s end, or at least where one might be inclined to cease reading, one is left to reflect less on plot than on form.
When I teach The Handmaid’s Tale to students, I have to remind them to read the ‘Historical Notes’ chapter at the end because they always mistake it for an afterword and skip it. An afterword is apparently a skippable feature for many, an addendum that presumes legacy and interest after the fact. Nabokov, famously, added an afterword to Lolita, in which he disagreed with his own fictional foreword: no moral lessons here! I don’ think it was his primary intention, but it created a kind of metafictional loop: the author interpreting his own work, even disagreeing with it, resists the idea of finality, perhaps; the narrative is ultimately inconclusive if the author doesn’t quite let it go.
It’s a different kind of inconclusiveness that we’re left with at the end of Americanitis, not the consequence of an afterword, something extra- rather than intra-narratological, and one that I’ll refrain from spoiling here. But those abstract nouns so synonymous with the novel — ‘test’, ‘real’ and ‘true’ — keep nagging away.