It's a void that's always left me wanting

My late-breaking gift from my parents was a long out-of-print paperback of Dennis Potter's Blackeyes (1987). It was a novel that had gotten away; I had noted it in the basement of the Harvard Book Store in the winter of 2019 and meant to go back for it after the holidays and first my health got in the way and then everyone else's did. I mentioned it wistfully to my mother months ago and did not expect it to arrive suddenly from the UK.

I loved it. Both structurally and stylistically, it is a three-handed wrestle for control of a narrative which is also a life which is also an open field of questions about what the novel does not name but recognizably depicts as rape culture. After decades of increasingly reclusive and disreputable, marginal literary relevance, long-fallow author Maurice James Kingsley has achieved an unprecedented critical and commercial success with his novel Sugar Bush, the zeitgeist-magnet tribulations of a tragically beautiful model known only by her professional name, Blackeyes. What is not known to its gushing general audience is that nearly every incident in the book's tell-all of the fashion industry has been fictionalized if not outright plagiarized from the experiences of the author's niece Jessica, a former model who was cynically content to feed her uncle's greed for material when she thought the project would flop if it ever came to fruition and is now understandably furious that he has transformed the reality of her career—especially its ambivalence, its exploitation and her own contemptuous complicity—into a sort of sad plastic fantasy who commits suicide with the same irresistible pliancy with which she was photographed and fucked. "How many times, she wondered, would allegedly sympathetic accounts of the manifold ways in which women were so regularly humiliated be nothing more than yet further exercises of the same impulse, the identical power?" Her counter-plan to rewrite her uncle's overwritings and thereby rescue her shadow-self from this latest, grossest round of appropriation and commodification, however, is complicated by her own literary inexperience, by the event horizon of metafiction, and finally by the emergence of an apparent authorial "I" into a narrative previously controlled or at least filtered through the competing perspectives of uncle and niece. Invented by Maurice as a white knight for Blackeyes, repurposed by Jessica as the instrument of her intended liberation, nice-guy Jeff Richards ultimately embodies the novel's deep pessimism about not just dismantling the master's house with the master's tools but even getting a look out the master's windows at any other way of being: "Well, sort of free, anyway, for it is me that is waiting outside her door, ready to claim her." I did not expect my first experience of Potter as a novelist rather than a dramatist to remind me of, in order, Angela Carter, Boyd McDonald, and Dorothy Arzner, but I'm not complaining. With those recommendations in place, I can't tell if it's not supposed to be pleasant to read. It might not be: the sexual violence is pervasive even when it isn't escalating from microaggressions to assault, it's acutely observant of the corrosions of machismo and toxic masculinity, it doesn't implicate its reader so much as it assumes a level of damaged self-recognition on one side or another of the socially programmed debasements on offer. I don't know if I would have guessed from reading that Potter was himself a survivor of sexual abuse, but he certainly understands it as part of a continuum of power rather than an isolated monstrosity. In other words, don't pursue this novel if you don't feel like encountering these themes in your non-summer reading, but it didn't even occur to me to think of it in terms of content warnings until I was describing it to third parties after the fact. It's so intelligently and inventively done that my immediate reaction was to want to read as many of Potter's scripts as I can get my hands on, to see if he writes his plays like his prose. "And never mind the coral, Jessica added, with no trace of a smile, stranded on the jagged reef that encircled the fiction."

On finishing the novel last night, I had thought that outside of a visit to the BFI, there was no chance of my being able to watch the 1989 BBC serial of Blackeyes adapted and directed by Potter, but when I looked again this evening all four parts seem to be on YouTube. For years I counted on the HFA to run some kind of retrospective of his work so that I could catch up on everything that wasn't Brimstone and Treacle (1976), Pennies from Heaven (1978), and Dreamchild (1985), but I think I am going to have to rely on internet piracy instead. I have not watched Blue Remembered Hills (1979) for at least fifteen years now and I don't have the excuse of grad school anymore.

ETA: The Colin Jeavons situation is officially out of control. He has a highly recognizable voice and I believe it to be providing the sex noises that introduce the opening sequence of Gina Bellman's Blackeyes pursued through an after-hours stage of mannequins by an inexorable camera and the dry, knowing narration of Dennis Potter. It does set the tone. That's something I've heard now.