Lost for Words: A Novel by Edward St. Aubyn Read Free Book Online Page A

worker had simply got on his bike and gone back to repairing people’s telephones. No commercial fortune, or Nobel Prize, or knighthood for him, just the quiet pride of knowing that he had served his country in its hour of need. Marvellous, inspirational stuff, so unlike today’s attention-seeking, get-rich-quick culture, in which people did things they were completely unqualified for just to get their name in the papers. The novel’s portrait of Churchill was utterly convincing – you could almost smell the cigar smoke and the brandy on his breath!
    Apart from anything else, one actually learned something from such a well-researched book, which was more than could be said of the neurotic musings of a lot of writers stuck at home, reading, writing and thinking about literature. Why didn’t they get out and do something for a change? Work in public service, or in a factory, or teach in a school; get out of their narrow little worlds and meet some real people; anything rather than sit at home all day writing.
    It was a strange experience for Penny to be seeing Jo Cross in the flesh. Although she rather avoided Jo’s op-ed pieces, sounding off on every subject from Abortion to Zimbabwe, Penny was a huge fan of The Home Front , Jo’s weekly column complaining about her husband and children. Jo was a strong advocate of a novel called The Palace Cookbook , published by an Indian firm with only one other book on its list. That was enough to get Jo to take up the cudgels on its behalf, sticking up for the underdog. She appeared to have made a deal with Malcolm, winning his support for The Palace Cookbook in exchange for supporting wot u starin at . Jo was also keen on a book called A Year in the Wild ,a Canadian novel about a disillusioned hedge-fund manager who leaves his power-crazed life on Wall Street in order to build a log cabin in the wilderness of British Columbia. Jo said that with the financial meltdown and the state of the environment, it was one of the novels that had come top in her ‘relevance’ test.
    As well as wot u starin at , Malcolm had chosen The Bruce , an action-packed novel that really brought Scottish history alive, and The Greasy Pole , the story of a working-class lad from the Highlands who goes into politics and, without giving the plot away, ends up becoming Prime Minister of Britain, which was a remarkable achievement.
    The only member of the committee Penny really found it hard to take was Vanessa Shaw. She was so frightfully intellectual, but not in fact, in Penny’s opinion, really that clever. She was mad about a novel called The Frozen Torrent , which Penny had been unable to make any headway with. The whole thing was, according to Vanessa, ‘built and unbuilt’ on systematic self-contradiction, just as life was built on the contradiction of death (ugh!). Not only did the text (as if it had just popped up on her mobile phone!) show a deep reading of Beckett, Blanchot, and Bataille (whoever the last two were), but also brought to this ‘self-corroding sensibility’ (good God!), the richness of a profound and original psychological novel.
    In other words, the author had stolen all his ideas and didn’t just contradict himself by mistake (which, let’s face it, happens to all of us, now and again) but actually set out to contradict himself! It made her blood boil to think that this charlatan, with his second-hand ideas and phrases, and his absurd habit of self-contradiction, was going to get his wretched novel on to the Long List.
    Penny glanced at her watch. She’d better get a move on. It was no use dawdling at home daydreaming about past meetings when she was due at the most important meeting yet: the one that would finalize the Long List and take the prize into a whole new phase.

 
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    Now that it was his turn to sit hunched in her armchair, his collarless shirt bulging and contracting with the grief that shuddered through his body, Katherine realized how little she knew Sonny.