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Tim Parks' children have started reading his books ... and it's led to some deeply awkward moments

Friday February 17, 2006
The Guardian


The first copies of a new novel arrive in the post. My son Michele opens it - this was Judge Savage - and reads the first line: "There is no life without a double life." He must have been 19 at the time. He raises an inquiring eyebrow. "What's this about, Dad?" We both stare into the same grey-blue eyes. Then he sighs, shakes his head: "You write too much you know."

My 17-year-old daughter reads an old novel of mine called Goodness: just recently the older kids have started nosing round my work. In this book she will have read sentences such as: "For a while I surrendered to the most vivid erotic images, my tongue pressed against the blue cotton swell of a girl's plump panties, that sort of stuff."
She says: "I really like the bit where the narrator beats the shit out of his miserable old grandfather." "Yes," I say, "that probably was the strongest moment in the book."

And now Michele is tackling Europa.

It was of this book that some reviewer remarked that "Parks's nearest and dearest must tremble whenever another novel comes out". But actually the person who gets a little nervous is me. "Why ever would I teach at the university if not to have a constant supply of fit young women to shag?" my son has just read in the first chapter of this novel. His father, of course, teaches at a university, where, notoriously, 90% of the students studying languages are young women.

"Mick," I suggest, "if I were you I would have checked out one of the other books first. The one about canoeing maybe. The one about the Medici bank. About football."

"Oh no, this is OK," he says. "Pretty funny in parts. But the sentences are way too long, Dad. You should have shortened them."

And my wife? What does she think about what they're thinking about what I'm writing? Are they asking her questions that they ain't asking me? If so, what answers is she giving?

Maybe 15 years into our marriage, Rita opened a letter from the American publisher Harcourt Brace. (We open each other's business mail, but never private.) "Dear Mr Parks ..." They had just published a successful book, Women on Divorce, where women writers wrote about their divorce experiences. Now they wanted to do Men on Divorce. "Mr Parks, we have read your novels with interest and pleasure. Would you now be willing to share with readers your divorce experience? We will pay ... " etc, etc.

"Hmm," says Rita, "wonder why they assume we're divorced?"

"No idea," I shake my head.

"Height of presumption. Shame, though. The money was good."

Why do I - why do writers - insist on putting so much that is potentially compromising into their work? The lives of public figures, politicians and football stars are put under the most terrible scrutiny. Who could deal with it? Nobody, on the other hand, troubles to spy on a writer, and all the same he seems determined to arouse the most morbid curiosity.

While Dostoevsky's consumptive wife was coughing out her life blood, Fyodor Mikhailovich (not long returned from his European excursion with the beautiful young Apollinaria Suslova), was in the next room writing the final scenes of Notes from Underground: in a brothel, his narrator tells the prostitute Liza how she will no doubt die of consumption, coughing out her life blood, exploited by the maitresse until the very last day she is fuckable, and then: "They'll all turn away from you - because what good are you then? They'll even reproach you for uselessly taking up space and not dying quickly enough. You'll have a hard time getting a drink of water, they'll give it to you with a curse: 'Hurry up and croak, you slut; you're moaning, people can't sleep, the clients are disgusted.'"

The writer's wife didn't live to see the publication of Notes ... and one trusts Dostoevsky never showed her these words. But her son must have seen them. And Fyodor's brother. And his second wife, of course. What were they to think of the way he used his wife's suffering?

All this is anecdotal, but the relationship between the writer and his family goes beyond the personal and occasional, to the heart of this business of living a life together with other people in the modern world. And to the heart of the question: what are stories for? And why do they need constantly updating?

For a century and more now, in the west, we have all aspired to being individual. Nobody is just a wife, just a father. Everybody is someone. And we imagine ourselves as consistently the same someone. We want that from other people, too. We all need someone to lean on, Jagger told us. Yet the world seethes with multiplicity. The freedom we have won from fixed roles, the ease of travel, the virtual vastness of the net, the secrecies of the microchip, make it possible to play many parts as never before. And life is never more exciting than when separate worlds vibrate together, in tension. Nor more dangerous.

Nobody tells anybody everything, either about what they do or what they think. "Sincere" to different people in different ways, they develop intricate hierarchies of honesty - or perhaps it's dishonesty - elusive and allusive forms of communication. The language as we have it is hard put to describe the way we live now. But what if somebody sets out to tell the story of all these interactions? And what story is worth telling if not that? What is narrative if not a mental space where we can savour life's complexity and possibilities without immediate consequence?

Except that when you are the one doing the writing there are consequences. "This character in your husband's book," a pestiferous in-law remarks to my wife, "the one with the filthy ideas, affairs and so on. It must be him. It's Tim. After all," she adds with prim venom, "almost all the other characters are recognisably people we know." My wife, who knows me rather better than the in-law, passes on the comment to me in bed.

"Yeah and Shakespeare was Iago and Richard III," I reply.

There's a brief silence.

"Well, fuck her," I feel is the proper conclusion. "No thanks," my wife replies. "And actually, I haven't read the book," she adds.

My wife insists that she doesn't read my fiction. "Only the documentary stuff." Is she telling the truth? How can I know? But just her saying it gives me a certain freedom. It is generous of her. I am to write what I want. How to tell and never confess and never even make clear whether you really have anything to confess. That is the goal.

Because maybe I haven't. These things must not be known. I'm an upright man. The very private Italian poet Eugenio Montale wrote a wonderful essay on Dante which takes as its starting point the need to find a form that will allow the artist to express but not confess, to say it all and tell nothing. It was this desire, he was sure, that generated the renaissance convention of the sonnet sequence. You declare it's a convention - everybody is writing sonnet sequences - and fill it with private reality, or the reality - unreality - of fantasy ...

But I am more inspired by a different Italian tradition. The notorious depistaggio, or "giving of wrong directions". Upon arrest for all those impossibly complex crimes of corruption that Italy will never tire of, the respectable mafia man, or family banker, or politician of whatever colour, immediately begins to cooperate. He tells the magistrates lots of things that are true and many that are false, one or two perhaps that are quite fantastic. He wins sympathy for his openness and loses credibility during judicial proceedings, until, at the last, the line between fact and fiction is marvellously blurred: nobody can be cleared, and nobody can be condemned.

"No one ever accuses me of being the paedophile in Judge Savage!" I remark to my wife. "No one accuses me of being the murderer."

"They will," she warns.

"But you haven't read the book."

"Of course not. It's too long."

A final copy of my new novel Cleaver arrived four or five days ago and sits on the dining table. Nobody has touched it yet, but Stefi has left her mobile on the hard cover. At lunch it starts vibrating. Brr, brr. Everybody looks. Stefi's out of the room. Brr, brr. "Irritating," my wife remarks.

Nobody moves to answer. That's Stefi's life. Funnily enough, it's the kids who are strictest about this rule.

· Cleaver is published this month by Harville Secker.