DEATH TRIP
Oh, those wacky Brits. What's more fun than sitting down, pot of tea at your elbow, telly on mute, to take in one of those quintessentially plodding chunks of English fiction? (Faster pacing, it seems, is left to the rest of the U.K..)

In the case of Will Self's "How the Dead Live," a bizarre, ironic, "Beelejuice"-infused trip into the afterlife (with some healthy rip-offs of Jonathan Swift), fun doesn't really enter into the picture. Fascinating enough to read once, dense enough to read twice, and enough of a downer that you may never want to think about it again -- ever. Through Lily Bloom, a mouthy, 65-year-old breast cancer victim with two messed-up daughters and some nearly unforgivable prejudices, Self takes us on a journey of how he imagines the great beyond -- which appears to work a bit like the federal government, or the British health care system.

Beginning with the epilogue (so yes, you'll have to go back to it), we get Lily's version of dying, a sometimes unintelligible set of tangents from her past, and witty little asides on things like stockings and girdles. "In the sixties, spontaneous sex was unbelievably difficult to achieve. Any level of arousal whatsoever was bound to be damped down by the time he'd managed to insinuate a hand inside this lot, let alone a dick."

Lily's trip to the great beyond, which involves walking out of the hospital and into a cab, takes her to the London locale of Dulston; described not as a destination per se, but one of those places where you wind up when lost. Death, Self seems to say, is basically living in a worse version of the same suburb you lived in while alive -- but with more smokers. The suburb of afterlife has rules and jobs, and a giant bureaucracy -- to which you apply for benefits and the privilege of rebirth -- runs it. Like addiction, it's all based on attending support meetings, with twelve-step rules along the lines of "7. We waited for nothingness." Everyone gets some kind of death guide, usually "traditional" (i.e. definitely non-white) folks, because, apparently, the Brits just can't handle this death concept with the class and grace of indigenous peoples.

But the most disturbing aspect of Self's world of the dead is that if you've had an abortion or a stillborn child, it hangs out with you in the afterlife. Lily ends up with "Beloved"-type companions; a fossil-like baby, the angry, young son she lost, and all the fat she lost in her life.

Of course, what Lily does with her time is follow around her live children and watch the downward spiral of their lives, something she regrets when she finally gets her chance to be "reborn." "How the Dead Live" is certainly different than anything you're likely to find on shelves, but different doesn't always mean quality. Unique turns of phrase and thoroughly entertaining bits of description save Self from shame: "We only had Larry Olivier for a few matinees before he transferred to the provinces," Lily says of her afterlife. "But you can bet every star-fucker in the whole miserable joint did their splendid best to rub up against his commanding nothingness." These, unfortunately, are few and far between, and the question is whether it's worth navigating a couple hundred pages of depressing self-indulgence simply to catch those flashes of creativity.
Elaine Richardson

TUBE-TIED
A particular genre of literature -- "Tube Lit," I will call it -- was unveiled to me recently by a pair of Londoners on extended stays in our fine town.

"There's this phenomenon in London," my British friends explained, "because it takes so long to get anywhere on the Tube [London's subway], people will read just about any sort of thing with a quirky plot they can get their hands on."

I asked if Iain Banks figured into this new phenomenon, and was told, "Yes, Iain Banks -- the young London executive's favorite novelist."

Banks, author of the acclaimed "The Wasp Factory," as well as science-fiction work (which he writes under the name Iain M. Banks), presents his latest offering, "The Business," a would-be satirically comic journey of Kathryn Telman, a Level Three executive in a corporate entity known only as The Business. An entity thousands of years old, The Business once owned a good chunk of the Roman Empire and which, upon the narrative's inception, is now again in the running for a state of its own.

"The Business" starts with a comic blast: Mike Daniels (a lower-level employee) got drunk, only to wake up and find significantly less teeth than he had last night. He calls the novel's first-person narrator and protagonist Kathryn in the middle of the night to alert her to his dilemma. With Mike due in Tokyo the following day, Kathryn recommends the best dentist she knows. By the second chapter, which begins, "My name is Kathryn Telman," Banks has allowed Mike's toothless speech to take hold. An admirable trick for sure, one which will have you reading in a lishp yourshelf for pagesh to come.

From this wildly comic opening, Banks follows Kathryn as she flits around via various methods of travel and communication. Banks is at his best with feelings of displacement, deftly capturing our narrator's travels, and the subsequent rendering of her paradoxical sense of (up)rootedness. Kathryn floats through physical spaces, locales, and in none does she feel really at home -- or in all she feels just the same amount of nothing. She feels most comfortable, as she states, in a kind of suspended animation, i.e., in airplanes.

After the raucous opening, the narrative proceeds to a classically comic end. Kathryn works through interoffice conspiracies and subversive plots coming straight from Level 1. She makes grand choices about her future in the structure of The Business. We proceed to an end, which, if you're reading for the brilliant flash of a plot welding together, will not let you down.

I wanted to enjoy "The Business." Taking heed of the Londoners' advice, I read it on the train; I tried it at work; finally, when nothing seemed to be helping, at home. The writing clearly and lucidly spills from the page, but the dialogue often feels forced; indeed, almost too real. In a valiant attempt at capturing the blur of contemporary corporate communication, Banks transcribes Kathryn's Instant Messenger sessions and telephone conversations without even cutting the greetings. In a literary novel driven by intrigue, by plot (as this one is), this would seem an appropriate way to present information, a form of the writing teacher's directive to show, not tell. But "The Business" suffers from what may be, oddly enough, an overload of showing. We are too close to these conversations. The banal reality of much of the novel destroys the magic, the beautifully invisible (or highly visible, whichever be the case) artifice that seems to mark great writing.
Todd Dills

FLOWER POWER
Jeanette Winterson's curious new work of fiction, like many of her past efforts, celebrates passion while performing experiments upon it. In this foray, at once a historical novel and a futuristic one, Winterson pares poor passion down into binary code and zaps it through fibrous wire, tests to see if love and lust can breathe in the cold, zero-gravity vacuum of cyberspace.

Because this is Jeanette Winterson, love makes it: Shaken and tired, but still very much alive, love's voice remains steady at the far end of the line. What gives life to "The Powerbook," what keeps us reading, are the various transformations along the way.

"The Powerbook" is a striking, queer (in every sense) little novel. At its foundation, it's a series of unconnected stories, with a single grand narrative of a furtive, adulterous lesbian e-romance, threading its way towards a -- classic Winterson -- ambiguous finale. "The Powerbook" moves with a deceptive simplicity, the unelaborated diction masking a forceful, wide-ranging imagination. As in this excerpt from the opening tale, in which we hear of Ali, a Turkish girl heading home to deliver a fateful tulip, secreted in her pants to protect both identity and valuable cargo. Deftly, author and narrator dart from the mundane to the profound: "While the Captain pissed extravagantly overboard, I pleaded seasickness and squatted behind a coil of rope. I know about disguise... But what if my body is the disguise? What if skin, liver, bones, veins, are the things I use to hide myself? I have put them on and I can't take them off. Does that trap me or free me?"

It's a maneuver typical of "The Powerbook." The novel, despite the framing device in which two lovers fight for love via AOL accounts, despite the title's sly wink to the computer savvy (and despite Winterson's much-published efforts to defend www.jeanettewinterson.com from a nefarious cyber-squatter), is finally not about the wires, but about desire. The book as a whole, like Ali's story and many of the others, takes us to the places where lust and love and passion run into economic desires, cultural desires, all the churning engines of civilization.

There is something defiantly disconcerting about "The Powerbook," as it lurches from the staccato bursts of emailed conversation to comical/historical scenes, like those that chronicle Ali's journey (with precious tulip lodged firmly in crotch) to fairy tales of discontented childhood. But everything works towards a whole: Imagine a sort of Bible (not, to be sure, in any religious sense, though at least one small chapter explicitly links divine love with secular passion) in the way that a collection of very disparate scenes and conversations all drive towards a single, epic message.

Winterson's message-not original, not shocking, but no less welcome: "What does a person need in this life except a roof, food, work and love? Here was the person I loved. I am able to work. Where the roof is and where the food is doesn't matter."
Ben Winters

How the Dead Live
Will Self
Grove Press, $24

The Business
Iain Banks
Simon & Schuster, $25

The Powerbook
Jeanette Winterson
Knopf, $24

(11/30/2000)


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