Tim Adams takes up the challenge posed by Tibor Fischer's new collection of stories, Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid
Sunday January 9, 2000Observer
Don't Read This Book If You're StupidIn one of these stories, Tibor Fischer's narrator works part-time as a book reviewer (his full-time occupation is a personal quest to read every book ever written in English: to guarantee maximum efficiency, he devours them two at a time - in his right hand Three Weeks in Mopetown, in his left If I Were God). 'A book to review,' he notes flatly, 'that would be 300 words saying what it was like and 300 words saying what it wasn't like: fine.'
If you were to apply the same critical technique to Fischer's own collection, you would probably note that these stories read a lot like Martin Amis subplots: the terrain of minor Keith Talents and Nicola Sixes, whose currency is apocalyptic metaphor and deadpan hyperbole. 'London wasn't a city,' Jim, former bag-carrier, drink-buyer and taxi-caller for small-time gangsters, flourishes. 'It was a war.'
Or (pondering the big questions): 'Death wouldn't be cocky. Wouldn't be a dandy... Death would be the last to be picked at football. Death would have a peanut-sized dick... Death would take the bus and not make any interesting comments in the queue...'
What they are not like is most of contemporary British short fiction. Fischer invests acutely in the comic surface of his tales, which tend to start in misery and hurtle blackly towards despair. He packs more scabrous one-liners into a paragraph than many thirtysomething novelists manage in a book.
In the most ambitious of the stories - 'We Ate the Chef' (which takes Jim, now a wannabe dot.com mogul, on holiday to the French Riviera with investment bankers) or 'Then they say you're drunk' (the extended soul dredging of Guy, south London's least lucky solicitor's rep) or 'I Like Being Killed' (the murderous fall from grace of a sex-obsessed, stand-up comedienne) - he sustains a level of savage invention that makes Irvine Welsh seem like Joanna Trollope.
The collection bears the authentic voice of the vacuous Nineties, a kind of Canterbury Tales for 'defuckers of computers' and the employees of consultancies that consist of 'a designer, a goatee beard and a school leaver'. It revels in the absurdities of the century's fag-end decade.
In one story, a conceptual artist ('failurist') overcomes the difficulties presented by his nonentity name - John Smith - to persuade a dealer to take him on: 'I began to look for a new medium to conquer and it took me only 45 minutes to create a whole new art form...'
He christens his new art form the Grabby - it consists of fragments of impossible conversations overheard in pubs and interrupted by the artist. Thus to a man about to be posted to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, he explains that he 'lived there for two years' and enthuses about the quality of the cooking and the beauty of the scenery; to a gay beefburger scientist he argues that fat can be beautiful. 'A Grabby isn't a porky,' he confides; 'it's a personalised fabulation, a bespoke tale.'
The idea is a neat metaphor for Fischer's own method - the bespoke tales here are real enough to have been dreamt up by drunks and surreal enough to ring almost entirely true. As the book's title might have had it, you'd be stupid not to read them.