Four years ago I reviewed Jean-Marc Ah Sen’s last book for The Walrus. I didn’t really know him at the time, but I was impressed enough to include one of his stories in After Realism. When I returned to Canada, we started hanging out, and I now consider him a friend. It is (of course) bad form to review books written by your friends, but as Oblomovism’s General Secretary and only party member, I can do what I want in the pages of this publication.
The introduction to Jean Marc Ah-Sen’s last book, a literary wunderkammer titled In the Beggarly Style of Imitation (Below the Level of Consciousness), starts out normally enough. It notes that Jean Marc Ah-Sen was born in Toronto in 1987 to two Mauritian emigrés, that he first tried his hand at cartooning, and that he has since written ten novels, eight of which—including Parametrics of Purity, Mystic Minder, and Kilworthy Tanner—are unpublished. Then things start to get weird.
The author of the introduction tells us that she and Ah-Sen had a brief but intense sexuo-artistic relationship during which the co-founded a literary movement called “Translassitude,” experimenting with exotic creative techniques like “kilworthying,” “draffsacking,” and “tuyèring.” Ah-Sen and the author published, respectively, the novels Grand Menteur and Sugarelly during this fertile creative period before things went south. Now, however, she comes not to introduce Ah-Sen, but to bury him. He is a corrupt ingrate, unfaithful to his friends and unwilling to acknowledge his creative debts; not only did he travesty her in “Swiddenworld: Selected Correspondence with Tabitha Gotlieb-Ryder” (included in the book she is introducing), he didn’t even have the courtesy to use her real name. The author enjoins Ah-Sen to “cease [the] parade of false attributions he has publicly advanced behind a monolithic selfdom of staged worry and mock principles.” The introduction is dated NYC 2020, and signed “K. Tanner.”
You don’t need to know any of this in order to read Ah-Sen’s latest novel, published last month by Véhicule Press. But if you are familiar with his previous work, the fact that the new book is called Kilworthy Tanner will provoke a little thrill. Nine years on from the publication of Grand Menteur, Ah-Sen’s bizarre project—part cultural critique, part literary performance art—continues. This time, we’re back at the scene of the crime: the heady years when Kilworthy Tanner took Ah-Sen under her wing and set off in a cloud of booze fumes down the highway to hell.
I should note at this point that “Jean Marc Ah-Sen” is…well, I suppose it’s a nom de plume, but that term seems a little inadequate. It is the name the man behind Ah-Sen uses for his many bylines in Canadian newspapers and magazines, but it is also a character, a role. This means there are several authorial layers present in any Ah-Sen book: Ah-Sen is the writer, but Ah-Sen is also a literary creation. It’s a bit like the man in the Borges story “The Circular Ruins,” who creates a son in his dreams only to discover that he himself is someone else’s dream-son.1
Because all of Ah-Sen’s work is metafictional, the prefaces and introductions are part of the larger fiction in which the smaller fictions take place. “‘Kilworthy’ Tanner Lepoitevin was my girlfriend from 2004-2007, roughly spanning the early years of my writing career,” Ah-Sen explains in the Preface to Kilworthy Tanner, before adding that she “besmirched my reputation in the introduction she penned for my second novel.” This, of course, is the introduction mentioned above, and Kilworthy Tanner tells the story of how their relationship began, went sideways, and righted itself. Though it stands alone as a novel, it is littered with characters, references, and ideas taken from Ah-Sen’s previous work. What’s different is the style: there’s a leanness and speed to his writing in this book which feels different from the baroque maximalism of some of Grand Menteur and Beggarly Style. It suits his subject matter. This is unashamedly a book of low-lifes, bar bands, unpaid rent, scenesters, overdoses, and vomit. It asks whether the best art can arise from the worst motives and answers with a resounding “yes!”
Which brings us to Kilworthy Tanner herself: “a dead-eyed redhead, this little thing done up in mystic leather gear,” a high-functioning drug addict who lives off her estranged father Artepo Lepoitevin’s money and trades off his fading reputation as the founder of “Sudimentarism.” Not so much Venus in furs as Venus in latex, Kilworthy has seduced and discarded so many young men they have created a devotional support group called The Worthyboys (identified by wristbands bearing the sign of the “pink clit”). She lives in a Wychwood manse called the Quail Pipe, watched over by her jealous husband Lovel Focillion, and her manic novels Variant and Sugarelly have granted her the status of cult writer. At one point, the narrator, Jonno (Jean Marc→Jonno, presumably), makes enough selling a used copy to pay rent. At once vacant and overflowing with life, Kilworthy is an exceptional creation, the unmovable winch that winds the novel. She reminds me, oddly enough, of Stavrogin from Dostoevskii’s Demons: a character onto whom everyone else projects their ambitions and neuroses, but who herself seems to entirely lack a moral core.
Jonno and Kilworthy meet at a party thrown by Jonno’s friend and bandmate Mope Hullerin (the names in this book are great). Mope is Kilworthy’s flavour of the month, but Jonno is smitten, and immediately begins scheming to replace Mope in her affections. These schemes ultimately succeed, but being Kilworthy’s lover is literally a full-time job, and even as Jonno begins his drug- and alcohol-fueled rise through Toronto’s literary firmament, he knows that knives are being prepared for his own back. Enter Gatlin “Gash” Pussmaid, creator of the Worthyboys, who, having been cast into the darkness, dreams of basking once again in the light of Kilworthy’s beatific scowl.
The book romps along at a rare clip. Characters get laid, get high, sober up, write books, play gigs, go on tour, betray each other, and take revenge with such endless, manic energy one cannot help but admire their stamina. The sense of the novel as an endless parade of parties and antics is enabled by the quality of the prose. Ah-Sen is adept enough as a plotter, but what really makes the novel work are the stylistic flourishes—his fondness for slang, the way he drops in words like “grok,” “scrotal,” and “kecking,” but also “dalliance,” “prognostication,” “fisticuffs.” This mixing of registers perfectly captures the gutter sophistication of Jonno et al., and it flexes the English language in ways it likes to be flexed. Like Martin Amis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Ah-Sen knows that lexicon is the key to world-building; find the right words, and everything else will follow.
I’ll take a moment here to share a handful of the gems I came across while quote-mining for this part of the essay:
“I could already tell that Gash clawed hard on the pockmarked back of existence, and was hanging on for dear life.”
“My second lucid thought of the night was how much of a privilege it was to watch her eat a jicama slaw salad.”
“The fairer sex always got the upper hand with me and that was the way I liked it. I didn’t have the right moral constitution for anything else.”
“To hear Tanner tell it, I was the sexual equivalent of a pet rock. I just sat there and didn’t do anything. I knew how to get fucked, but not how to give good times. I burst into tears when I came too quickly. I had a clumpy cock that had the consistency of pancake batter. Having sex with me was like watching public access TV between the hours of three and six in the morning. I had all the substance and personality of pond scum. I was not unfamiliar with auto-sodomy.”
The word choices, here, are perfect (Existence having a pockmarked back. Not just a salad; a “jicama slaw” salad. The repeated hard k sounds in the fourth and fifth sentences of the last quote. “Not unfamiliar”). But so is the rhythm: Ah-Sen likes a long line, where the syllables can stretch out and feel their joints, so when he goes for the short jab (“I burst into tears when I came to quickly”) it lands with a satisfying pop.
Because we are living through a hideously commercial era in the writing of fiction, it is nice to read someone whose style is always developing. Kilworthy may be his most accessible book yet, but Ah-Sen hasn’t yet lost the sense of play that made his earlier work so noteworthy.
Okay, that’s all well and good. But what about all the other stuff literary critics are supposed to talk about, like truth, meaning, goodness, and the fierce urgency of now? Isn’t writing a book about sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll a little questionable at this particular moment in history? Shouldn’t we be concerned about the power imbalances depicted in this novel? Isn’t addiction a serious issue? Isn’t all this carry on basically immoral?
Ah-Sen has anticipated these qualms. One of the most telling moments in the book arrives toward the end, when a publicity agent asks Jonno to opine about what “the most pressing question was for writers working today.” He uncompromisingly rejects the premise in a passage I will quote at length:
A lot of readers can’t conceive of the novel as anything but a social-realist document born of the world it is about; I get it—who wants to read sympathetic depictions of bankers? But the result has been a kind of inescapable politicization of a lot of fiction, which has cheapened both works that do and do not engage along this dimension—like a suburban melodrama making perfunctory judgements about homelessness. Not every book has to be The Road to Wigan Pier. The idea that a work only has value if it is morally instructive is outdated. I really doubt publishers are looking for the next Samuel Richardson. It smacks of dilettantism to me. This is how you get bourgeois writers sympathetically talking about the working class by throwing their politics around like they’re returning a glass of wine at a restaurant. I would much rather see a text unabashedly apolitical without peppering platitudes about in a bid to be relevant.
Kilworthy Tanner may be set in the scummy and amoral aughts, but this paragraph is clearly a response to the ethical temperature of the late 2010s and early 2020s, and it falls like a missile from the future into a book that up to that point has felt wonderfully contained by its historical moment. Kilworthy Tanner exists before smartphones, and before reality-as-presented-on-social-media became the only reality worth attending to. “I picked up the receiver and punched the last known number I had for Tanner,” Jonno says at some point. Receiver. Punched. Last known number. This is the architecture of a lost world. Reading it, I felt overwhelmed by nostalgia, and in a circuitous way I think this nostalgia is part of what the book is about.
Recall that Kilworthy Tanner is part of a larger universe of fictions; recall that, according to the previously established timeline of this universe, Kilworthy’s brutal review of Ah-Sen’s book was published in 2020—fifteen years after the events of the current novel take place. What explains this disparity? Probably, this is simply a matter of Ah-Sen realizing that the timeline set up in an earlier book didn’t work for this one. Which is fair enough. Things won’t always line up neatly when you’re doing metafiction.
But at the risk of engaging in unfounded conjecture and psychological projection, I wonder if something more is going on here. Ah-Sen and I both came of age in the mid-aughts, and we lived through the cultural sea change that took place with the arrival of smartphones and the particular type of social media discourse they facilitated (as, perhaps, did you). Our formative experiences took place on one side of that divide, but our work as writers was done after the chasm had already started to open. This is hardly a unique experience—it was probably the case for millions of artists working today—but it has created some widely-acknowledged challenges. I, for one, still find it hard to know how to incorporate the experience of scrolling into a work of fiction, because the Internet is its own thing, and the best art about the Internet is made on the Internet. Writing about the digital world using the analogue medium of the novel is a bit like making a woodcut about a movie. And yet the ubiquity of digitally mediated communication means “the Internet” as a literary subject cannot easily be ignored. Perhaps the decision to set Kilworthy Tanner in the aughts was both a nod to Ah-Sen’s own Millennial experience, and an attempt to avoid the awful fact that, ten years later, all these bohemian artists would be spending a good chunk of their time on Twitter, trying to one-up each other in the game of symbolic politics.
Jonno calls the notion that art’s main job is to be morally instructive “outdated,” but I wonder if it isn’t more complicated than that. There are periods—sometimes very long periods—when moralism becomes fashionable, and then the wheel turns and rakes are all the rage again. In time, the morals so passionately expounded come to seem problematic (or even worse, lame), but the moralistic impulse is still there, biding its time until a new moment of crisis gives birth to a new set of certainties, a new generation convinced that this time they really are going to establish the Rule of the Saints on earth. For my part, I suspect these cultural shifts toward moralism arise in response to shifts in the society’s material base, where a previously stable middle class feels simultaneously squeezed from above and threatened by a newly militant lower class…but now I sound like one of those social-realists Jonno is complaining about.
Kilworthy Tanner doesn’t escape moralism completely, however, as evidenced by its rather surprising ending. I won’t spoil it, but I will say that while a measure of comeuppance is dispensed, it is far happier than I expected it to be. It is an ending in which the chaos and turpitude of youth mellows into something richer and more quietly rewarding. If I liked it, maybe that’s because I am a thirty-six-year-old married man whose back hurts when he skips yoga. Hedonism and the creation of good art aren’t bedfellows in my house. And yet while I don’t really miss 2006, I do, sometimes, miss what it felt like to go out on a Friday night and think: Yes, this is it, fuck me up. Art is life and life is art. Anything can happen. “Rose petals let us scatter/And fill the cup with red wine/The firmaments let us shatter/And come with a new design.”2
Rather than trying to wade through the moral questions around what artists should or shouldn’t do, and how they should or shouldn’t behave (questions not without value, but not substantially different from questions about how dentists should behave), Kilworthy Tanner luxuriates in the aesthetics of seediness. Ah-Sen depicts a literary scene full of back-biting, status-obsessed, sexually deranged narcissists and says “isn’t this a riot? Aren’t these people kind of sad, but also kind of funny? Aren’t they alive? Isn’t their pettiness entertaining? And isn’t this really what it felt like sometimes—or at least (on autumn nights, coming home from work, when the light spills out from the bars, and there’s music thumping in the distance, and your blood is running hot, and for a moment you forget that time only moves in one direction) what you remember it could have felt like?”
Ah-Sen has noted the comparison himself: In the Beggarly Style of Imitation includes a literary “cover” of the Borges short story “Borges and I.”
From Ghazal 374 of Hafez, trans. Shahriar Shahriari