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Adam Mars-JonesAdam Mars-Jones
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Critical perspective
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Biography
Writer and critic Adam Mars-Jones was born in London in 1954. Educated at Westminster School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he studied and then taught Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. He was film critic for The Independent between 1986 and 1997 and for The Times between 1998 and 2000. He is an occasional contributor to The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, and a regular reviewer for The Observer. He was selected by Granta as one of its 20 'Best of British Young Novelists' in both 1983 and 1993.
His fiction includes three collections of short stories: Lantern Lecture (1981), his first book, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; Monopolies of Loss (1992); and Hypo Vanilla (2007). The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (1987) was co-written with Edmund White. Adam Mars-Jones' first novel, The Waters of Thirst, was published in 1993.
Blind Bitter Happiness (1997), a collection of essays, includes 'Venus Envy', originally published as a pamphlet in the CounterBlasts series in 1990. Adam Mars-Jones lives in London.
His latest novel is Pilcrow (2008).
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Criticism, Essays, Fiction, Non-fiction, Short stories
Bibliography
Lantern Lecture Faber and Faber, 1981
Mae West is Dead: Recent Lesbian and Gay Fiction (editor) Faber and Faber, 1983
The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (with Edmund White) Faber and Faber, 1987
Venus Envy: On Masculinity and its Discontents (CounterBlasts series) Chatto & Windus, 1990
Monopolies of Loss Faber and Faber, 1992
The Waters of Thirst Faber and Faber, 1993
Blind Bitter Happiness Chatto & Windus, 1997
Pilcrow Faber and Faber, 2008
Prizes and awards
1982 Somerset Maugham Award Lantern Lecture
2009 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (shortlist) Pilcrow
Critical Perspective
Adam Mars-Jones had the unusual distinction of being selected in 1983 as one of Granta's 'Best Young British Novelists', and then again by the same magazine ten years later, when his first and only novel so far, The Waters of Thirst, appeared. This might seem to indicate not just his continued air of youthfulness, but also of promise not yet fulfilled. But in his case the term 'novelist' is itself misleading: Mars-Jones' ideal fictional form has turned out to be the extended short story, and he is equally highly rated as an acute essayist and reviewer, where his ability to turn a wittily dissecting, always carefully-nuanced phrase comes into play. He continues as a very much in-demand arts journalist, often, but not exclusively, discussing gay issues; indeed, his purpose has been to bring them into the literary mainstream. He also works as a film critic of The Independent newspaper and is a regular contributor to periodicals such as the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
What 'happened' in his development as a fiction writer, from the virtuoso experimentation of his first collection of stories Lantern Lecture in 1981 to the more conventional narration of his one slender novel? Mars-Jones had initially seemed to be a satirical gadfly to the Establishment - his father being a prominent High Court judge - perhaps of a P.G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh-like type. 'Hoosh-mi' was the story in Lantern Lecture that bought him a fleeting notoriety because of its facetious conceit: the Queen catches rabies from a royal Corgi infected by an off-course fruit bat, and starts to behave increasingly erratically. The narrative is interpolated by a polemical speech by Dr John Bull to the Republican Society. The book's other contents were, in retrospect, far more impressive indicators of a real talent. The title story is written in parallel paragraphs about an eccentric aristocrat, Philip Yorke; one describes his christening, the other his memorial service. Ingeniously paralleling the old boy's lantern slides themselves, its order reverses half-way through. 'Bathpool Park' again uses a real-life character, the notorious 1970s' criminal known as The Black Panther, for much darker satirical ends. The focus is on the court trial, inter-cutting exchanges between lawyers and the judge with re-creations of his crimes, including the kidnap of a young girl. Discussion of motives and the poignancy of her death by neglect is tellingly counterpointed by watching the operation of the judicial system at work.
Mars-Jones' writing was greatly changed, one might even say determined, by full consciousness of the AIDS crisis affecting the gay community in London and the wider world from the early 1980s onwards. His story in that 1983 issue of Granta, 'Trout Day by Pumpkin Light', had been relatively hedonistic in portraying a party in Virginia: sex between men was a lifestyle choice, not a source of anxiety. His fictions thereafter, pre-eminently The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis, published in 1987 with Edmund White, obviously had a much more serious subject matter to deal with. The ongoing life-and-death social situation clearly deepened his stories. They continued, however, to be beautifully written, surprisingly unsentimental, and at times even absurdly funny. The narrator of 'Slim' almost dispassionately describes the restrictions and physical humiliations that illness inflicts on those living with the HIV virus: he imagines his life as a wartime ration book containing coupons for "One hour of Social Life, One Shopping Expedition, One short Walk". In 'An Executor', Charles' hospital death from full-blown AIDS is followed by the man's 'buddy' having to deal with a family anxious to keep the cause of death quiet, and then in a change to light farce, by the disposal of his leather fetish gear. (Mars-Jones' critical love of cinema shows throughout his work in amusing asides about movies, as in 'The Brake', where a promiscuous architect called Roger is forced to change his lifestyle, having 'contracted gonorrhoea twice for every time he had seen "Some Like it Hot"'). The gently deteriorating relationship between Bernard and HIV-positive Neil is the surprise resolution of 'A Small Spade' , following a weekend in Brighton during which a small accident underscores 'the demonic status of blood'. Monopolies of Loss (1992) is a further superbly crafted collection of stories concerning people living with the virus.
Mars-Jones' lightly satirical view of affluent gay lifestyles is more apparent in his novel The Waters of Thirst (1993). This has the sombre theme of love under the shadow of mortality, yet manages to be a kind of relishingly gourmet narrative. Its narrator, a voice-over artist suffering from kidney disease and awaiting a transplant, necessarily has an alcohol and salt-free existence. He is thus forced to have a rich fantasy life, to imagine pungent food and wine rather than tasting them; what he calls 'a tantalus'; in a wider emotional sense, something that the body craves and cannot have. A yearning between fantasy and reality extends in a wider sense: the mundane nature of his everyday relationships is contrasted to his endless fascination with a gay porn star, conducted entirely through obsessive interpretation of pictures in magazines. When summoned unexpectedly to the local hospital for the operation, he is freed mentally: to think through the actions of chance in human lives, and to think about the anonymous young biker whose death has brought him to wider human sympathies. If this sounds non-dramatic and even dry, in less dextrous hands it could be. But the narrative is studded with aphorisms which make it a sparkling read: on cooking ('stock cubes are the death of love'), sexual choices ('monogamy is a style of life, not a standard of conduct') and of course transplant surgery ('everything depends on the freshness of the ingredients').
One of Mars-Jones' critical maxims is that fiction can have 'the paradoxical property of shielding an author from his own opinions, allowing them to develop independently'. His own stories, superbly written though they are, don't always achieve this freedom and autonomy from the author. Their pleasures have to do with adroit arguments and turns of phrase; he is a kind of anthropologist, offering acute insights into male behaviours. As readers we find ourselves perhaps too aware of Mars-Jones the brilliantly diagnosing essayist. This is not an inadequacy of imagination or emotion: simply a statement about the kind of writer he has turned out to be, a scrupulously humane observer of the contemporary dilemmas of gay men in the tradition of E. M. Foster and Christopher Isherwood.
Dr Jules Smith, 2002
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