Book review: [SIC]

PEOPLE writing on the experience of sickness often rage against the portrayal of disease sufferers as examples to us all: brave angels engaged in tireless but uncomplaining “battle” against their ailments.

The late John Diamond subtitled his memoir Because Cowards Get Cancer Too; Ruth Picardie, during treatment for the breast cancer that would kill her, wrote buoyantly about splurging on expensive beauty treatments and bitterly resenting friends who failed to visit her.

Joshua Cody takes the rebel-patient trope a tad further. His memoir commences with him leaving his seventh chemotherapy session to barhop, down innumerable Martinis, snort cocaine in a public bathroom and pick up a stranger on the way home. When they undress, the girl notices the catheter implanted into his chest. He explains about the aggressive tumour in his neck; the girl – who’s Korean, beautiful, “very New Asian cinema”, with a “perfect body” – cries. They have sex – or rather, “first we tried to scale a sheer wall; then we were flying over a miniature city, on a carpet in the air; then we dove down alongside the city wall and all at once we were swimming together...”

During this odyssey, the girl displays a “kind of wholesale devotion to, and fervent absorption in, a certain praxis”.

There’s a lot of this kind of thing in Cody’s book. A lot of sex, that is, and a lot of gorgeous weeping women; but also a lot of massively self-conscious language, which prompts the odd double-take on the part of the reader (What did that mean? Did that actually mean anything?).

Influenced, like virtually every other thirtysomething American writer, by the late David Foster Wallace, Cody favours a florid stream-of-consciousness style and a promiscuous referentiality: pop culture up against classical culture up against the intimate and subjective. He’s trying hard. Sometimes he hits on profundity; more frequently, his writing errs on the side of pretentiousness.

Perhaps serious illness is a good excuse to let loose one’s inner adolescent; but the over-writing is wearying, and so too is Cody’s attitude to women. Physical beauty is the key characteristic attributed to the females in Cody’s life. He’s particularly proud that some of them are sex workers (“Caroline wasn’t the only stripper I’d dated…”).

And all the high-flown cultural references in the world can’t conceal the fact that the whole book appears to have been written partly as a bitter rebuke to a particularly appalling ex-girlfriend (not a sex worker, this one, but one of his doctors, apparently unburdened by integrity either personal or professional but, of course, beautiful) – and partly as a coy billet-doux to an unnamed female friend for whom he has long carried a torch. Turns out that being party to someone trying to pull via a book is no less cringey an experience than observing it in real life.

Certain passages, certain parts of the book fly. Particularly effective and moving is Cody’s account of his mother’s stoic response to his illness; and his reproduction of curious and intriguing writings by his eccentric late father. His honesty in detailing his own petty and childish episodes and ill-judged emotional decisions is impressive. But his loftiness grates (he unhumbly apologises for the “old-school, unfashionable literary education… for which on some level I’m afraid you, reader, will hate me”), and so do his more flowery stylistic quirks. (“I don’t have time to go into this,” he writes at one point, “I’ve got to go and meet a friend of mine…” No you don’t. Don’t be silly. You’re writing a book, not performing a monologue.)

The awed response to this book from elements of the high-end American literati looks likely to establish Cody as a significant man of letters. We must hope that along the way he stays healthy, gets his girl – and eases up a bit, on himself, on “the feminists” he dislikes so much, and on his readers.

[SIC]

Joshua Cody

Bloomsbury, £16.99

HANNAH McGILL