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Dan RhodesDan Rhodes
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BiographyDan Rhodes was born in 1972. He studied Humanities at the University of Glamorgan and later returned there for an MA in Writing, which he completed in 1997. He has worked on a fruit and vegetable farm, in the stockroom of a book shop, behind the bar of his parents' pub, as a teacher in Ho Chi Minh City, and, sporadically, as a full-time writer.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Short stories
BibliographyAnthropology: And a Hundred Other Stories Fourth Estate, 2000 Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love Fourth Estate, 2001 Timoleon Vieta Come Home: A Sentimental Journey Canongate, 2003 Little White Car (as Danuta da Rhodes) Canongate, 2004 Gold Canongate, 2007 Little Hands Clapping Canongate, 2010
Prizes and awards2003 Authors' Club First Novel Award Timoleon Vieta Come Home: A Sentimental Journey 2004 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (shortlist) Timoleon Vieta Come Home: A Sentimental Journey 2008 Catherine Maclean Prize (shortlist) Gold
Critical PerspectiveDan Rhodes has claimed that the 1980s band, The Smiths, have always functioned as a soundtrack to his life, and that Morrissey’s songs have been a great influence on his writings. To Rhodes, The Smiths were the best band ever and 'it’s not often you come across a book that carries as much of a punch as something like "I Know It’s Over"'. Only fiction at its best, Rhodes argues, can rival The Smiths. Morrissey’s lyrics evoke 'a plundering desire for love' (The boy with the thorn in his side) which is destined to be frustrated: 'Last night I dreamt / that somebody loved me / no hope – but no harm / just another false alarm' (Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me). Dan Rhodes’s short-stories and novels display the same sentimental unhappiness and deep melancholy. The Smiths’ music is also notable for its combination of joy and sadness and for delivering distressing lines with an ironic edge. The same pessimism tinged of irony is present in Rhodes’s fiction as it is apparent in the 101 101-word stories on modern relationships collected in Anthropology (2000).
'Innocence', for example, focuses on a marriage that is dead before it even begins. The story starts with the sudden realization that the woman the narrator is about to marry is very different from what he believed: 'I thought my beautiful fiancee was innocence itself until I met her parrot. She had taught it to say terrible things. Wank. Beaver. Fist-fuck. Stick it up your Jap's eye.' The parrot is in the church the day of the wedding and 'when the man asked whether anyone knew a reason for us not to marry, it squawked, "Cunt flaps." My bride bent double with laughter, and even though we made our vows I knew that the marriage was over.' Told by a straight man who observes the absurdity of heterosexual relationships, the stories in Anthropology have been positively compared to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style for their obsession with a specific form. Although the form of each story is the same, thus pointing to a superficial similarity between all relationships, every piece in Anthropology tells of a different and unique aspect of modern relationships, exploring their imbalances, dysfunctions and distortions. Although Rhodes’s posture as 'an uncool writer' ('I would hate to be considered a cool writer. I'm a deeply uncool person, and this comes across in my fiction'), the blank style displayed in Anthropology and in his other fiction, points to a detached witticism in the face of even the most tragic events such as death and violence. In spite of Rhodes’s avowed sentimentality, there is nothing sentimental in passages such as 'My girlfriend died laughing at one of my funny faces' or 'My wife and I have not stopped kissing ... Our lips are four broken scabs, and our chins always covered in blood.'
A parody of Lassie Come Home, Timoleon Vieta Come Home (2003) is Rhodes’s first novel, which, however, still retains an episodic structure, especially in its second part. Timoleon Vieta is a mongrel dog living with his beloved owner Cockroft, a failed gay composer who now lives in the Umbrian countryside in Italy. Cockroft has given up on love since 'the boy in silver shorts', his last great love, left him for his once collaborator, now rival, Monty Moore. Cockroft’s loneliness is only enhanced by the many English expatriates that surround him and with whom he realizes he has nothing to share. The composer’s only sexual solace is his cruising sprees in Florence, when he invites young men to stay for free at his house in exchange of weekly blowjobs. Cockroft’s and Timoleon Vieta’s peaceful lives are disrupted when one of these men accepts Cockroft’s invitation. The man passes himself off as Bosnian, but is actually a middle-class bankrupt Englishman who has escaped to Italy from drug-dealers. He intensely dislikes the dog and his hatred is reciprocated. The Bosnian, who is brutal and unloving, forces Cockroft to abandon the pet in Rome.
The second part of the novel interweaves the narration of Cockroft’s and the Bosnian’s past with the stories of the people the dog meets on his return home. These interludes function as fables of love, loss and grief that mirror the main narrative. As in Rhodes’s previous short-stories, the episodes in the second part of Timoleon Vieta Come Home are tragic and, at the same time, darkly comic in tone, often because they are so eccentric and so unexpected in their developments. The journey of Timoleon Vieta and Cockroft has nothing sentimental about it, as the subtitle of the novel claims. By the end of the book, 'the boy in silver shorts' comes back to Cockroft albeit without silver shorts because he found that 'they didn’t go with a hopelessly receding hairline.' Cockroft finds again the love of his life. Yet, this makes his reunion with the dog definitively impossible. The Bosnian, who has just left the house with no complaints as the result of the new arrival, meets the dog on the track to his master’s house and slits his throat. Rhodes gives a political significance to the upper middle-class English villain masquerading as Bosnian: 'he’s a morally and emotionally bankrupt upper-middle-class wanker, and I’ve had dealings with more of them than I care to remember. Also, he’s an oblique political statement – those cretins have far too much say in running things.'
After the success of Timoleon Vieta Come Home, Rhodes announced his retirement from writing. Yet, the appearance of Little White Car (2004) by Danuta de Rhodes made people reasonably suspicious that Rhodes is now masquerading as a woman. At a time when chick-lit is being dismissed by women writers, Dan Rhodes has tried to resurrect the genre with The Little White Car, which describes the adventures of two French women, Veronique, who has just dumped her boyfriend, and Estelle, following the night Princess Diana was killed in Paris. The Little White Car has received less enthusiastic reviews than Timoleon Vieta Come Home, and some critics have dismissed it as 'just a limp joke'. Yet the novel has also been appreciated for Rhodes’s challenging irony and his skill in literary parody.
Luca Prono, 2005
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