Wouldn’t it be great to be Deborah Levy? Wouldn’t we all love to fill a book with our most scattered feelings about this, that and the other? There’s no doubt that Levy is a fantastic fiction writer, nominated for the Booker prize three times, but her non-fiction has always hovered in the space between literary genius and intellectual navel-gazing. So far the balance has tipped in her favour, but with her latest book she has fallen flat. The Position of Spoons reads as though Levy has simply forwarded the ramblings of her phone’s notes app to her publisher.
Up until now I’ve been a big fan of Levy’s. I loved the South African-born author’s “living autobiography”, and devoured all three volumes. In Things I Don’t Want to Know Levy riffs off George Orwell’s famous essay Why I Write, elegantly foregrounding the struggles of a young female author: “I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me and I had to work out what it was before I cleaned the oven.” The Cost of Living, the best of the trilogy, speaks to the challenges of middle age: her mother is dying, her daughters are flying the nest and her ill-fated marriage has fallen apart. Even Real Estate, the weakest offering, was a worthwhile read. Delving into The Position of Spoons, I felt excited. What would I learn from her this time?
Although sparse, it’s not impossible to find that crackling Levy insight we’re used to. In the opening pages there’s an ode to her “beautiful brothel creepers”, in which she deplores those who don’t wear socks as “godless” people. Further on there’s a curious anecdote about a pesky downstairs neighbour who hoards her mail. She paints a frightening but relatable portrait of a shrinking mother at the school gates — “hyper-middle class, huge house, books on the shelves, art on the walls” — and tells the stark truth about grey afternoons in the city. “To stand in the centre of Russell Square Gardens, London WC1, in the November rain,” she writes melancholically, “is to summon all your losses in life.”
Levy’s best offering in this book by far is A to Z of the Death Drive, which is billed as “a perilous road trip through death, celebrity and the automobile” and examines traffic accidents in romantic detail. A is for anger. D is for James Dean, who was killed after crashing his Porsche 550 Spyder. H is for weekly horoscopes, which we read to “know what lies on the road ahead”. Straying slightly from the brief, O is for backseat oral sex, “a super sport that should be included in the Olympic Games”. Quite honestly, before Levy’s witty compendium, I hadn’t realised how many celebrities died in car crashes. Perhaps that should have been the entire premise of the book.
Mostly, though, despite the subtitle of The Position of Spoons, which promises “other intimacies”, intimacy is sorely lacking. Instead Levy writes analytically about writers and artists as if for a slightly pretentious ’zine. She analyses Marguerite Duras’ 1984 novel The Lover, commending the French author for tackling “memory, death, desire and how colonialism messes up everyone”. Hardly groundbreaking. Then there’s a review of JG Ballard’s Kingdom Come, as well as a painstakingly slow portrait-by-portrait guide to Paula Rego’s paintings and a succinct mini-biography for Lee Miller. Chekhov and Freud get a mention too.
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Instead of her usual originality, Levy spends a lot of time reflecting on other people’s reflections. We get Levy’s take on Simone de Beauvoir’s take on Violette Leduc. Levy’s take on Elizabeth Hardwick’s take on the Brontë sisters. It’s all a bit meta. And then, as if by accident, she chucks in a few short stories, such as an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland spin-off set in Woolwich, which is characteristically well constructed but feels out of place in this book of cultural criticism and first-person musings. Turning the page after an admittedly moving letter to her elderly mother, there’s even a nine-page long poem — shock horror!
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Levy claims that “when we write we are only as interesting as how we think”, but having waded through this book, I’m inclined to disagree. She’s evidently an intelligent woman with an abundance of curiosity; I didn’t need her to prove it. The Position of Spoons is an unpleasant glimpse into the sausage factory of her creative process when, really, I’m only after the final product. I don’t care that she has a “MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air and a desktop Mac” and that she is constantly transferring material between them. I simply want to read that material, to nestle into a café window seat with a cup of coffee and contemplate my womanly existence, just as I did with her other books. Levy-lovers, prepare yourselves for disappointment.
The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton £20 pp240). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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