Oscar Jelley is a master’s student at the University of Oxford. He has written for student papers such as Cherwell, the Oxford Blue and the Oxford Review of Books, and has a Substack, Adventures Close to Home.
“Life should be full of strangeness/ like a rich painting,” declares the protagonist of the Fall’s How I Wrote Elastic Man, a song about a writer whose success ruins his life. It could just as well be the credo of Isabel Waidner, whose latest book, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, concerns a novelist named Corey Fah whose world is upended after they win an “award for the fictionalisation of social evils”. When Fah goes to collect the trophy, it flies away, leaving them with nothing but the strange half-deer, half-spider hybrid that has inexplicably appeared beside them. They take him home and call him “Bambi Pavok”. The subsequent narrative eschews realism in favour of the rich strangeness of a chatshow about wormholes presented by a man in boxing shorts, a retelling of Bambi in terms of working-class ressentiment, and hints of a world in which most things are broken and reality is taking on bizarre new shapes.
Waidner is a political moralist and doesn’t care about seeming didactic: their novel intends to make unambiguous points about genuine social injustice. Its flights of vivid fancy are largely held together by an argument about how exclusive our cultural institutions remain, even when they’re falling over each other to trumpet their inclusivity. Truth-telling is the novelist’s prerogative, of course. But Corey Fah sometimes feels a little scholastic, as though it were written to be taught at universities; as with Waidner’s previous work, it ends with a short list of references.
The best parts of the book are those that capture an aspect of our reality in a scenario or an image while retaining an irreducible element of oddness. One example is the passage that deals with Bambi Pavok’s unhappy childhood in “the forest”, where he’s abused by his deadbeat dad, a mendacious spider, and bullied by his friend Fumper, a rabbit whose life sounds equally grim. Compared with Nell Zink’s recent novel Avalon, which also dealt with the unwritten rules that govern the often suffocatingly bourgeois world of prestige culture, Waidner places more emphasis on the ways in which working-class people are pitted against each other by their circumstances and social institutions. On their telling, Disney’s Bambi was an affluent naïf; when his mother is shot, we pity him for losing the innocence that is the privilege of a sheltered upbringing. Bambi Pavok is forced to adopt defensive postures of vicious self-interest. He’s harder to root for, but more interesting, and ultimately more sympathetic too.
The novel’s style comprises a weird melange of idioms, sprinkled with foreign words that further deterritorialise the anonymous “international city” in which it takes place. Despite a subplot about the playwright Joe Orton and a character with the surname Hölderlin, it often reads like literature for a post-literary age, one whose habits of expression are largely shaped by TV, video games, marketing and social media. Several times Fah deploys the phrase “what a concept”, which I’ve never encountered outside the notorious Smash Mouth single All Star. Overall, it’s an interesting approximation of the way people often talk and think now – in a stream of unmoored phrases and references, sporadically dispensing with extraneous prepositions and articles. If it makes for generally lively and distinctive prose, it sometimes falls short in the novel’s especially imagistic sections, where a more self-consciously artful style might have been called for.
Today’s bookshops are so glutted with tedious, well-behaved novels that it seems slightly churlish not to extol this one. Yet for all its ostentatious convention-bucking, it’s not clear how much of an alternative Corey Fah really offers. Near the end, Fah recalls days spent in public libraries “reading as if my life depended on it, and it did, it did”. This small moment is a nice reminder of why literature should not be the preserve of a moneyed elite: it has the power to liberate people from the fetters of circumstance. The surreal happenings in this book, however, are primarily allegories for the hard facts of systemic disadvantage, suggesting that imaginative literature can help the underprivileged to better understand the restrictions placed on them by accident of birth, but not to overcome them.
Yet this view fails to do justice to the world-expanding potential of art. Countless cultural artefacts, including the aforementioned How I Wrote Elastic Man, testify to the ability of working-class people to defy their unfair lot and discover new ways of being through acts of imagination. Waidner’s novel uses estrangement to make an all too comprehensible case against bourgeois cultural gatekeeping. But can’t there be something equally radical about strangeness for strangeness’s sake?
