The Tangled Webs We Weave

Nick Laird’s Glover’s Mistake might masquerade as a cosmopolitan psychodrama with one foot in the internet and the other in the art world, but don’t let that put you off. It’s really a beautifully written novel of manners every bit as politely savage as Barry Lyndon or Age Of Innocence, transposed to 21st Century London.
“I was trying to do something a little bit like a small chamber drama,” Nick Laird, a dark, quietly spoken 35-year-old, says over morning coffee in Brooks Hotel in Dublin. “ The first book (Utterly Monkey) I felt was too much stuff: too big, too fast, too silly, too comic, and I wanted to slow it all down and make very little happen and give a wee bit of room to the style more. I’m interested in writing sentences, and the style in the first one seemed tacked on top of the story.”
It may sound silly when authors talk about writing sentences, but it’s at a sentence level that Laird’s magic happens. A poet to the core, he is the master of the perfectly plucked image. A weekend-bound businessman wrenches his tie off like he’s pulling a cobra from around his neck. Early evening in December is collapsed into “the hour when the newspapers were skimmed and ineptly folded like road maps, abandoned on the vacant seats of tubes and trains and buses.”
Laird, who currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York, where he currently lives with his wife Zadie Smith, is being a little hard on Utterly Monkey. A first book should be overambitious. Plus, it’s no small achievement to charm the notoriously draconian New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, who praised its pace and style, likening it to a (good) Guy Richie film. But Glover’s Mistake is a whole other story, one that has the same relationship to love as an atheist does to god.
“It’s a dark wee book,” Laird admits. “I get so fed up of people saying there’s no characters they like in books in general. Some of my favourite books, there’s no one in it you’d like to actually know, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not good books. I kind of like David anyway!”
That’s the unsettling thing. The reader only gradually realises what a sad and sneaky character the main protagonist David Pinner is, and by that time, we’ve come to empathise with him way too much for comfort.
“You’re supposed to corrupt the reader,” Laird says with a laugh. “If you recognise base impulses in the character within yourself, then you’re in some way implicated. Everyone has their little moments of jealousy or anger or duplicity. Books in which heroes are heroes are children’s books really.”
Laird’s novel also raises the rather scary idea that there now exists a generation of nerdy maladjusted loners who spend their lives addicted to blogging, MySpacing, Facebooking, Twittering and surfing for porn. The abyss is online.
“Absolutely. I was thinking, what could I write about that couldn’t have been written about ten years ago? Not in a zeitgeisty way, but you always think, ‘What is happening now, to my people?’ And the internet’s changing everything. You can sit in a room and have some form of connection that is mediated, and in a way it seems to lack consequence because of anonymity and these various shields that are put up in terms of distance. And I think the book suggests that these things always have consequence, whether it’s what it does to you, or for other people. David has been compromised in lots of ways by it.
“All the impulses anyone has, which in another time you couldn’t follow up on, the internet has allowed you to become obsessive about. Googling your ex, commenting on websites, looking at pictures and accumulating friends on MySpace, pornography, whatever it may be. You objectify yourself as a thing, so you give yourself status updates in the third person and then you send this image of yourself out to other people. It’s a presentation of yourself, which we all know about now we’re so attuned to advertising and everything else.
“Whenever I was living in Kilburn I found I could not work, my concentration was just getting shot by the internet, constantly looking at property websites, checking my email, and eventually I got a pair of nail scissors and cut through the internet cord. I could not fuckin’ do it anymore – but now I’ve got wireless in this flat in New York. I think the internet has become this wee guy sitting, tapping on your shoulder the whole time, and you have to try and banish him.”
It’s also a new area of intrigue, one with grave potential for false intimacy and deceit. Despite the technology, it’s a very human subject.
“Yeah, because of what it’s doing to humans. And the answer is it’s changing the way they read, the way they focus, the way they understand things, the way they skip from thing to thing. To sit and read a book now is difficult for some people. It’s a weird machine for indulgence of every kind; it’s very dangerous. And it’s changing the nature of how we speak to each other. My wife had a Blackberry for a while there, and it was deadly. It was the first thing she looked at in the morning, the last thing she looked at at night, and every fuckin’ meal she would be on it, and I’d ask her to turn it off and she’d say, ‘I just have to do this thing.’ And then we had an argument and she threw it against a wall and broke it. I’ve never been so glad. And she herself will now say it’s great that she doesn’t have it, she feels freed in a way from it. You’re always on a leash, people can tug you when they want to.”
Shades of Wim Wenders’ Until The End Of The World, in which people become addicted to watching recordings of their dreams on hand-held monitors. They’re only freed when a rogue satellite knocks out all telecommunication systems, and they learn to heal themselves through storytelling, a return to narrative. A traditional and maybe sentimental idea, but…
“I was about to say, that is a such an old trope, and it’s a good trope, but nothing is more interesting to people than themselves. And even Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, this idea of something of something that’s so attractive and amazing that once you go towards it you’re sucked in and you can’t get away. The joke that’s so funny that it kills you. Or even those Ring movies, the idea of a new technology that’s so compelling that one is drawn into it. I’m sure there’s an old myth that has the same kind of thing.”
The story of Narcissus perhaps?
“It’s Narcissus. Of course it is. It’s Narcissus. You look at your own reflection in the water – which is exactly like looking into a laptop – and next thing you’re rooted. We’ve solved it!”

Glover’s Mistake is published by Harper Collins