The Independent just published a version of my review of Micheal Bywater's Big Babies: why don't we just grow up (Granta). I had so many problems with it, as a thesis, in its stylistics (never mind the barely suppressed patriarchalism-blending-into-misogyny). The newspaper version is a little cut-down, so I'm putting the original review in extended post below.
As an alternative to this 'Grumbulist Manifesto' - apart from The Play Ethic - let me point you to Christopher Noxon's growing empire around Rejuveniles. And for a youthful, creative, playful sensibility given its proper infrastructural due - rather than slagged off as consumer narcissism - I'd strongly recommend Charles Leadbeater's coming book, We-Think. I read his article in the FT this morning, and I half-thought I'd written it myself...
Big Babies: or: Why Can’t We Just Grow Up?
Micheal Bywater
Review by Pat Kane (unedited version of review published in the Independent, 15 Dec 2006.)
The Grumpy Old Men now have their Contract Sociale, their Art of War, a veritable Grumbulist Manifesto. Micheal Bywater believes we Britons live in an infantilised society, where our selves are so squishy, needy and lacking in spinal cord, that we are endlessly prey to manipulation by advertisers, politicians, regulators, health-and-safety officers, the ladies who make up your hotel room… It’s a tough world. And apparently, Mother is to blame.
Bywater’s literary persona is well-summed up by one of the endorsements on the back of the book – ‘the one genius I have ever fallen off a stool beside’. How many spluttering saloon ranters do you know who can use words like ‘hauntology’ and ‘commensality’ with precision, even as they’re spraying you with part-digested crisps? One presumes that, given his current post as writer-in-residence at Cambridge, the pubs there demand a higher class of ‘character’.
Woven through the argument is enough biography to explain some of Bywater’s not-entirely-blustering rage. This is a baby-boomer male who loathes the consumerism, the infantilism and the irresponsiblity of his generation, partly because he seems to have liberally partaken of it himself. He’s designed silly computer games; he’s abandoned his two-year old child to ‘find himself’ in an affair; he creates a fake religious altar with his drunken pal (only to be discovered by an appalled wife); he actually can fly a light aircraft but still has to wear an ostentatious “pilots watch” to show everyone he can.
Yet Bywater is also haunted by his memory of a childhood where men (and it is wholly men) are the solid authority figures, professionals who properly profess (his father and neighbour were both family doctors), undemonstrative males who can trammel their desires and find an identity in their tasks and skills: hells bells, they even wore Fedora hats in an entirely unironic way. He even rhapsodizes about his grandfather and his Boer War artefacts. It seems to be against these looming, stentorian figures that Bywater wants to measure the mewling maelstrom (as he perceives it) of current Big Babyhood.
You’re wondering throughout the book: is Bywater actually aware of how psychologically revealing all this is? Freud, as you would expect, comes in for the ritual roughing-up. But it’s a strange onslaught against modernity that takes early-sixties petit-bourgeois ‘quiet’ men as the basis for its critical theory – all those quivering psychopaths in suits that Kubrick assembled round his table in Dr. Strangelove.
Of course, as many will say, Bywater is a comic writer: and as many comics will confess, once you become aware of the root cause of your excoriating humour, you become unfunny (or John Cleese making office training videos, same difference). And it is always entertaining to see someone’s animus so unrestrainedly displayed: Bill Hicks’s collected routines sometimes come to mind here, though filtered through a very English, to-hell-in-a-hand-cart (or baby-pram, as Bywater would say) sensibility. Yet to risk a ruddy-faced charge of humourlessness might not be too dangerous, given that Bywater has apparently done enough research - there’s a proper bibliography, and a very witty index - to back up his foam-flecked rage. What exactly is his case?
It’s not Big Brother, but Big Mother that Bywater is most worried about. He isn’t the first to pour scorn on British consumer culture, on the advertisers’ engines of desire that turbo-charge it, on the cross-generational melee that results from forty years of rock-and-pop-defined aspirationalism – and he won’t be the last. Similarly, extreme distaste for the increasing regulation of daily life – his riffs on the fact that we are surrounded by warning signs and notices every moment of our day are enjoyable and accurate – is a solid, Burkean conservatism that David Cameron’s back-room wonks would undoubtedly endorse (‘there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same as the state’, is something you’d expect this writer to chime with).
In the midst of Bywater’s vaguely-theorised sit-down routines, you struggle to recall that there was once a critique of the ‘over-bureaucratised’ society that came from the New Left in the sixties and seventies – and how much we, and John-the-Baptist-types like Bywater, are lacking that kind of movement.
But what is relentless, and in the end more than a little creepy, is the way he bundles up all these issues – all of them amenable to reform and activism - and drops them in the lap of some gigantic, oppressive uber-Mother figure. An advertising pitch is “coaxing, deluding, suckering and wheedling with all the skills of Mummy trying to persuade her child (‘Who’s my goodest bestest baby?’) to eat its broccoli”. We divert ourselves from political responsibility with endless fun, “and someone will be there to blot the dribble from the corners of our mouths”. On and on the systemic misogyny goes – apart from a few nervously interpolated pages on women and fashion – and you’re wondering at which point, if ever, Bywater becomes aware of his own problem.
Yes, in a networked, highly semiotic age, where more people have more voice (and true, not always highly cognitive and lettered voices) than ever before, there will be a ‘softening’ of the boundaries between self and other, profession and passion, institution and culture. A growing majority do have the right (and with the Net and the expansion of further education, the means) to articulate their experiences in the public realm, however unaware of the “Roman virtue of discriminen” they might be.
There’s as much to celebrate in this messy world, in terms of concerted human agency (what role did those infernal digital mediums play in the downfall of the Republicans, for example?), as there is to agonise over. Bywater displays a particularly masculinist crisis about the changing nature of social authority in his writings – if it’s imprecise and emergent, it must be mother’s influence – and it’s only partly enjoyable that he seems to be partly unaware of it.
Saloon-bar rants can be a great spectacle, particularly ones as well-read as this. But thankfully, you can leave for a web-café at any time. And once there, drink edifying fruit smoothies with your mother. Hells bells, indeed.
Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic: a manifesto for a different way of living (www.theplayethic.com)
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