Inspiring Older Readers
Stars and Bars by William Boyd
Originally published in 1984, William Boyd’s third novel is a strange hybrid. Imagine a very British anti-hero in the Lucky Jim mould and then blend in a supporting cast of remarkable freaks and a weird American Gothic environment culled directly from Carl Hiaasen and you might get somewhere close to where this oddly intoxicating novel sits.
To be honest, when I started reading the book I thought I was going to hate it. It seemed to have all its component elements so obviously and crudely drawn that I couldn’t see how it wouldn’t inevitably drive me crackers. And while all of that remained true, somehow the writing, the plotting and the characterisation were such that I got pulled into this crazy confection and ultimately I surrendered quite willingly and was sad to see it come to an end.
Hapless Brit-abroad, Henderson Dores, erstwhile art market expert, has come to work in the US to help find himself. He desperately wants to develop the easy self-confidence he sees in his American counterparts but his mission looks doomed from the outset as his inherent Britishness keeps creeping through. Mind you, he doesn’t help himself in this quest because he not only constantly falls down a series of bear-pits, he seems to be engaged in digging them for himself.
When we join him in New York we discover he already has a failed marriage to the unlovely and plastic Melissa that for some unaccountable reason he’s hoping to resuscitate. But, just to add the necessary complication, this past and future wife isn’t the only romantic interest he has. He’s also got a mistress on the go – Irene – and there’s also a very odd relationship with his fencing instructor. The two women are ghastly but the never less than irritating Henderson seems trapped in his absurd love triangle.
His new employers, an art gallery agency desperate to cut it in New York, has employed him as their Impressionist specialist and when they get an offer to buy some special artworks from an eccentric collector from the Deep South, Loomis Gage, Henderson is dispatched to Luxoria Beach (nowhere near the sea) to seal the deal.
However, he has failed to factor in two things: Melissa’s precocious teenage daughter and the truly pyrotechnic weirdness of the folks in Luxoria Beach. What follows is a road trip and residency of epic farce as Henderson bumbles, stumbles, gets threatened, loses his car, gets insanely drunk, finds himself with a dead client on his hands and a psychotic pair of rival ‘art dealers’ prepared to get the paintings at any cost – including a threat to rip his nipples off with pliers. At one point he’s even on the run dressed only in a cardboard box to hide his modesty.
It is one of the conventions of this kind of modern farce that things never sort themselves out cleanly – although the central protagonist learns something we’re never sure just what. Every time something clears itself up, another disaster is just waiting around the corner and we have to leave Henderson at the end of this book doing what he’ll probably have to do time and again in the future – running for his life.
The novel tends to divide opinion and there are those who really don’t like it at all. Reviewing the book Kirkus, for example, had this to say:
Boyd's caricatures of American types, unfortunately, are far too cartoony (and off-target) to score points. More important, Henderson is a whiny, irritating wimp who passively, idiotically wanders from mishap to mishap. (Despite a minor subplot involving Henderson's search for the truth about his father's WW II death, there's no texture to this non-character.) So, aside from a funny line here and there, this is very disappointing work indeed--unconvincing as an exercise in UK/US culture clash, uninvolving as a comic character-study, and lame as sheer farce.
By contrast, British-based book critic, Mariella Frostrup, selected the book as one of her six most favourite and had this to say:
A hilarious account of a very British art dealer’s adventures with a bunch of eccentrics in America’s Deep South. There’s nothing to equal a book that brings tears of laughter to your cheeks and this early novel of William Boyd’s did exactly that.
You know what? You’re going to have to read it and make your own mind up.
Terry Potter
February 2018