Kill Your Darlings by
Terence Blacker
pbk out December 02
(Phoenix)
at £6.99
What do you do if your writing career is failing? If you're Gregory
Keays, you steal a dead man's manuscript. How do you deal with those
who threaten to expose you? You arrange their deaths...
But this is much more than a crime novel. It's a consistently sparkling
satire on middle class ambition and parenting. It's equally comic in
its exploration of creative writing groups with their wildly optimistic
how - to books. The different types of writer (such as the vicious book
critic who has never himself produced a novel) are equally well observed.
Most of Blacker's clear sighted observations fall on Gregory Keays who
has been one of Granta's finest young novelists but is now middle aged,
not so fine and reduced to writing a column for a writers' magazine.
He's also compiling a Book of Literary Lists and these cleverly break
up the chapters of Kill Your Darlings, looking at everything from famous
authors' sex lives to how they recovered from writer's block.
Several reviewers have described Gregory Keays as a monster, and indeed
he performs monstrous acts at the start and the end of the narrative.
But there are lengthy sections in the centre where we can see the sheer
extent of the man's downfall and loneliness and are able to pity him.
The novel takes a few pages to get going and the end, which involves a
sudden narrative shift, is slightly too ambitious but most of this book
is witty and knowing and streets ahead of the pack. It was my favourite
novel when it came out in hardback and now that it's out in paperback,
it's the first novel of 2003 I want to recommend on Tangled Web.
