The Digested Twenty-first Century by John Crace Read Free Book Online

who took lovers mostly of Polish extraction. Three years after their daughter Flora was born, Adam filmed himself committingsuicide while pining for a boy who had strangled another boy. Lanskaya was confused: what had been meant to be sensational was just tired and desperate. But having no other options now that she was past 16, she found a new lover, Hubert L Hubert, who had dropped the m’s from his name in a sad 20-year migration from Lolita while maintaining his penchant for pre-pubescent girls. Flora took exception to his caresses and kicked him in the testicles. ‘You naughty girl,’ her mother said. ‘Mr Nabokov – I mean, Mr Hubert – is a very nice man’. There is little to add.
    Three: Flora lost her virginity at 14 to a ball boy with an enormous member. She and her friends like to compare the dimensions of their lovers while bycycling. This, then, is Flora, the artistic enigma, the DELTA and the SLIT. At 11 she had read Freud and wondered how people could get away with writing so badly. But then, she had never read this. Perhaps we should mention the sweet Japanese girls and French writers beginning with M. Perhaps not.
    Four: Mrs Lanskaya died on the day her daughter graduated – a passage that for no earthly reason resembles the rythym of another novel,
My Laura
, and a hideously fat man stared at Flora’s white legs.
    Five: For no good reason, Flora determined to marry this immensely fat man, the eminent neuroscientist Dr Philip Wild, though she regretted her decision when she discovered he was a miser.
    Five – or should it be six?: The novel
My Laura
was begun soon after the end of the love affair it depicts. And, like this, was torn apart by every reviewer. The I of the book is a neurotic who set out to destroy his lover while annotating her. Philip Wild quite liked the descriptions of himself.
    Six: Suicide made a pleasure. It would be after this.
    D1, D2, Aurora, Wild 1, Wild 2: Philip Wild could no longer maintain any pretence of coherence. He could manage the odd well-turned phrase and repeated masturbatory emblazements, yet he could not yet persuade Mr Nabokov to abandon his attempts to impose an order when there was none. I, Philip Wild, he said, slipping into the first person, hereby begin a programme of self deletion. I hate my fat stomach and the noises I make on the lavatory, so I will start by cutting off my toes. Then my hands. Then my head. Till there is nothing left. Effacement. Annihilation. ‘That, too, is what faces me if anyone were ever to read this card index,’ cried Mr Nabokov. ‘Too bad,’ said his son.
    Digested read, digested: A reputation in fragments.
Solar
by Ian McEwan (2010)
    2000 He belonged to that Salman class of short, fat, ugly, clever men who were unaccountably attractive to women. But Michael Beard was anhedonic; his fifth marriage was disintegrating and he should have known how to behave as his philandering had ended the previous four. This time, though, it was his wife, Patrice, who was having an affair with Tarpin, a horny-handed Essex builder who knew nothing about cavity-wall insulation.
    Beard waited for Aldous to collect him. Gosh, how he hated the polar bear rug in the hall. Still, everyone would soon have one, he supposed, if the polar ice-cap continued to melt. Not that Beard was yet wholly committed to the climate-change agenda, but having won the Nobel Prize for his Beard-Einstein Conflation onPhotovoltaics, an idea he was very thankful he was never asked to fully explain, he had been happy to head the New Labour Climate Change Laboratory.
    ‘I’m afraid it’s not a Prius,’ Aldous said. ‘I’m not surprised, as they were only sold outside Japan in 2001,’ Beard replied. Aldous was one of his pony-tailed post-docs who was being forced into working on the New Labour cul-de-sac of wind turbine energy. Beard nodded off. He was very familiar with the McEwan Conflation of cramming loads of dull facts about climate change into a book and calling