‘Insufferable, insensitive, inconceivably successful’. This is all Javé de Lasse had to say about the young German novelist, Alan B Wightche – other than to ponder whether or not the B stood for Beelzebub. He was, of course, way off the mark. The B stands for Benedict. As for the rest, well, he was pretty much on the ball. Although one does wonder why de Lasse came to the conclusion that Wightche’s success was unfathomable. Has not the work of certified idiots always done relatively well in the modern marketplace? Wightche’s philosophy may have foundations as solid as a sugar sandcastle, but so long as he continues to string sentences together with suitable style, it seems probable that he will attract a multitude of readers. Admittedly, his ideas are of the type that charm for a minute or so only before revealing themselves as sickeningly hollow. On the other hand, since the majority of readers aren’t looking to the novel for enduringly thought-provoking ideas, a well-written quick fix will, for now, remain, emminently sellable.
De Lasse, incidentally, could count himself fortunate never to have met the author. For if his novels could be said to be full of tactlessness and cruelty, Wightche himself is oozing with impertinent bratishness. The long-necked only son of a chillingly affluent German merchant and his equally prosperous English wife (which explains the otherwise bizarre appearance of ‘Alan’) Wightche is said to sweat money. A spoiled monster, you would think – and you may be right. However, the trials through which this rich writer has passed are not those we would normally associate with the moneyed artisté. His childhood, for instance, was not littered with those pursuits to which a lot of bored, wealthy kids are drawn; nor was the relationship between his parents psychologically fractured: the typical tale of diamond blankets torn by the teeth of domestic turmoil. In fact, there were no obvious problems, the likes of which make up the source material of so many writers. And yet, Wightche hasn’t let this lack of crises stand in his way. After all, as he has said (albeit in someone else’s words) – ‘does not everybody hurt?’
Seeking out storm and stress in the most unlikely of places has always been Wightche’s priority – and also his major talent. In his first novel, The Kind of Condemned – which follows the exceedingly trivial struggles of a group of Berlin-based students – he writes: ‘show me a man that is not suffering’, before going to describe in detail the immense woe caused by a decidedly average mock test score upon a wimpering youth named Adolf Zöchter. Elsewhere in this same novel he examines the mammoth mental anguish that can be provoked by a small mouth ulcer, as well as the great tragedy of discovering that your best friend thinks that you need a haircut. In anybody else’s work this would be thought of as satire. Wightche, however, has the quite fantastic ability to deal with this sort of information in a way that is neither over-earnest nor ironic. In fact, the most embarrassing thing about reading this book is that you can very easily find yourself sympathising with its characters – undeserving though they are. When Adolf Zöchter misplaces his bus pass, one’s inclination is to weep heavily, as though a close relative had died in catastrophic circumstances. When Emelie Ratzberger wears a dress that almost clashes with her cardigan, we feel her pain no less than a dawdling beetle feels the boot of a careless walker. Why are we allowing this upper-class nincompoop to manipulate our emotions? Is Wightche’s sense of syntax so smart as to disable our sense of morality? Is there any good reason why we should make a rich man richer for telling us (most of whom are in comparison rather poor) that finding a hole in your socks amounts to nothing less than a terrible misfortune?
Make no bones about it, Wightche is monumentally, unambiguously, tempestuously selfish. And therein lies his success. Some of us, if we are humble enough, might even admit that his work leads us to breathe a sigh or two of relief. For is it not rare to come across someone who appears to be a little more selfish than oneself? It is almost as if Wightche is providing a public service. Who can deny that they too have made an unholy fuss over something that ought to have been greeted by no more than a momentary frown? Alas, we are as guilty as the feather-mouthed fox, the jelly-cheeked toddler, or the berry-lipped doughnut dieter. All faults considered, who can’t warm to the world of The Kind of Condemned, a world in which an itchy nose represents the very worst that a man or woman can go through?
The problem is, Wightche really does believe in what he is doing. And he expresses this belief in a manner which is hardly endearing. Rather than confess that his novels represent a guilty pleasure, he is determined to convince us that there is something philosophical going on here: something which he calls ‘the law of comparative pain’. This is best exemplified through the following quote, coming from an interview with Wightche printed shortly after the publication of his second novel, Time is a Wheeler-Dealer. Accused of writing about ‘mostly trivial matters’ the author went on to make the astounding claim that ‘one man’s grazed elbow is another man’s dead son’. Later, when given the opportunity to tone down the effect of this statement, he chose to dig in his heels instead, explaining that ‘levels of sorrow cannot be judged according to a universal norm, but only in the context of each person’. In short: People who have been subjected to a lot of pain can develop the ability to withstand it, whereas those to whom the concept is a relatively foreign one will only be hit harder when the strike finally arrives. Therefore, to undermine the experiences through which his seemingly ‘fortunate’ characters pass, is to misunderstand the way in which the world actually operates.
Though Wightche has been questioned on this subject many times since, he has never made an attempt to throw the sand back over his clumsy footsteps. ‘We cannot choose our destiny,’ he once said, ‘and it is unfair, as a result, to employ our sympathies according to a rigid system by which those less fortunate deserve more compassion than those born into a supposedly providential situation’. Asked to elaborate upon his so-called ‘laws of comparative pain’ he made the extraordinary declaration that the effect of a sprained ankle upon his fourteen year-old psyche was comparable to that of a four hundred mortally wounded soldiers upon the psyche of an average German during the second year of the Second World War. After all, they were by then used to war casualties; whereas the injured ankle had been, for him, a exceptionally rare event (if not a little less damaging to his health).
A charming view of the world, as I’m sure you’ll agree. ‘What a prat’ was, however, how most people responded to Wightche’s philosophical musings. Still more considered his thoughts unworthy of any comment at all. Showing rare tact, though declining to change his opinions, he did at least keep silent for a while. But it seems that he was doing no more than planning his next move, or else his next book – the most recent product of much his derided values: the quite awfully great novel This Branded Love.
Well, it had to be love, didn’t it? And adolescent love at that. Once again, Wightche puts his fat finger on the very thing that most of us wouldn’t want to touch with a punting stick. For as all the best critics will attest, love hasn’t been considered a worthy subject for a novel for a long time – and why should it? What does it have to offer the contempoary writer? Back in the twentieth century, it was all the rage. You couldn’t open a novel without being bathed in a flood of soporific romance; massaged by the ill-defined tides of those poor bubbling love stories. But we’ve grown up since – and seen it for what it is: i.e. a bad excuse for self-pitying prose and predictable poetry. If love belongs anywhere, and I’d love to think that it doesn’t, it is within the rough but comforting patch-work quilt of popular music. Otherwise writers are best advised to steer clear of the whole shebang; to take a look instead into the dragon’s mouth of modern warfare, into the tiger’s lair of globalisation, into the manic spider’s web of technology: to do anything, indeed, but wallow like obese hippopotami in the chocolate chip mud pools of lovey-dovey-ness. For when it comes down to examining the real issues of our time, we may find that we can agree on one thing only – what has love got to do with it?
Wightche’s novel does not supply an answer to this question. It simply tells a story. Or to be more accurate, some stories. For once again, Wightche is dealing here with a relatively large cast of characters, each of whom is involved in some sort of love affair beset by some kind of vague, unexceptional difficulty. We’re not talking about Tristan and Isolde here, or Hamlet and Ophelia, or even Kristen and Euphenibia. We’re talking about a group of mildly intelligent twenty-somethings muddling through life in the kind of annoyingly haphazard way only mildly intelligent twenty-somethings can: misinterpreting here, misunderstanding there; generally acting with as much strength of mind as a young rabbit in a panic. These are not the seeds of an admirable tragedy. In any other hands, they would barely add up to an entertaining farce. And yet here comes Wightche, the arch-prince of prats, cunningly weaving the cotton of nothingness into a article of very diverting clothing. How does he do it?
I’ll let you into one of the storylines, if I may. There is a boy. His name is Dietmar. Then there isa girl. Her name is Karin. They get together, I forget how, and follow each other around like a couple of young ducks. Love blossoms, as it invariably does, the end result of which is that they stay up all night feeding each other strawberries with a long handled tablespoon. It’s a thoroughly unpleasant scene, but Wightche plays it as well as you’d expect. Were it not suspiciously close in tone to a fruit yoghurt advertisement, you might even be swept up by the sheer romance of it all. I don’t mind admitting that I (nearly) was. But this isn’t quite an ordinary love story. For these strawberries of which I talk were not, alas, in the best of health. Symbols of an almost tender lust perhaps, but symbols past their sell by date.
Thus it is that a night of romance ends in diarrhoea – in a flat where there is only one lavatory. Unwilling to take their desires as far to watch each other excrete, the lovers begin by taking it in turns. However, after hours of waiting for the other to finish his/her business, not to mention the ordeal of having to listen to the object of one’s love emit the kind of noises normally associated with farmyard animals, it may be said that all passion goes, along with everything else, down the drain. It’s not that they have any problem with each other’s personalities; simply that this tragedy, coming so early in their relationship, has cast a stain on all that is to come. Dietmar cannot look at Karin without thinking of human manure. When Karin sees Dietmar, her nasal passages confront the memory of a smell pitched somewhere in-between ripe strawberries and an incontinent cow’s backside. And so they split up. Boohoo.
Not that we should care. That is to say, in any other circumstances, I (for one) wouldn’t give a, well, shit. After all, are not adolescent lovers amongst the most pathetic creatures that ever walked upon this poor planet of ours? When they fall in love, we draw close to the vomit bucket. When they fall out of it, the contents of this satiated bucket spill out onto the floor. Please, we implore the writer/filmmaker/songwriter, don’t try and make us feel sorry for these chimps. Please don’t waste our time with their oh-so-very-minor angst-heavy predicaments; with their insufferable second-guessing, their self-indulgent self examinations and their fatal grasp of poetry. You may think that we’ve been through it ourselves, and you may be right – but nobody in their right mind should consider living through someone else’s middling and insignificant pain as well. I’m not denying that Dietmar and Karin weren’t hurt by their experience; merely that it is worth anyone’s while commiserating with them. If I can’t laugh at them (which, for some reason, I can’t) there is no good reason why I should care.
And yet I do. Not only do I care about them, but about all those other unfortunate lovers that turn up in This Branded Love. Helmut and Nelly, with the lost phone number; Friedrich and Kathinka, with the hot fork and the broken contraceptive; even Elrich and Durs, the tediously self-conscious homosexuals. At one point or another, I have broken the rules I set myself, and felt sympathy for them all. None of them needed it. Not only are they fictional, but they’re also a dull bunch of wining dupes. Luckily for them, however, they’ve been created by Alan B Wightche, not only the biggest fool of them all, but a highly talented fool, aggravatingly proficient when it comes to fooling other people. I’m not saying that I will ever subscribe to his belief that our reaction to pain should be in proportion to a particular victim’s pain barrier. Nor I am willing to think of him as anything other than a rich twit. But hell, it is awfully hard to read This Branded Love without falling, temporarily, for its characters; without reliving the minor pains of love – and without thinking (once again, temporarily) that they might, just might, have meant something.
We need not be victims of the trick, but it’d be unfair not to praise the trickster. He is delusional, chronically egotistical and fundamentally immoral. Nevertheless, he writes surprisingly well for someone who doesn’t need to make a living out of it. And though I’d rather not like This Branded Love, I am at least humble enough to admit that I do. For the bottom line is this: no one beats Wightche when it comes to the small things: those things in life which we shouldn’t get excited about but which, against all logic, we do. Changes of smell, the shade of someone’s shoes, the true effect of false rumours. Piddling affairs, all of them. Insignificant, but not yet invisible.
Yes, Alan B Wightche is the undisputed master of the small things. Can I say that? Perhaps not. For in Wichtge’s warped world, nothing is small. One man’s small thing is another man’s big thing. It’s all relative. There are no rules. If he thinks love is an important issue, so it is. But for the rest of us, well, we’d be foolish to go along with him. For outside of Wichtge world, we all know the things that really matter; the things that are really worth writing about… We know all of this… don’t we?
Review by Michael Rosinith
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