Got to the end of it, and thought 'hmmm'. And 'mehh'. And other non-commital (in-my-head) noises.
I agree, it's impossible to divorce the narrator from Cummings himself - which is unfortunate, because I rather like his public persona, and the two things uppermost in my mind as I neared the end of Tommy's Tale were 'does he really take this many drugs?' and 'is he this annoying?'
I thought Tommy got increasingly unsympathetic as the story progressed, to the point where I really didn't give a shit what happened to him on his return from New York, and only really carried on reading to find out how (in irritatingly Terry Pratchett stylee) the various relationship scenarios resolved themselves - and they pretty much did resolve themselves as they'd developed themselves ie. without much input from the main character, who seemed to drift through the narrative like flaky, fence-sitting scum.
There was one bit of the New York chapter where Tommy meets an ex-soldier in a NYPD POLICE t-shirt, and comments that he'd mythologised essentially crap aspects of himself in order to suit a perceived target demographic. Thing is, I felt this was exactly what the narrator was doing with the whole 'going to New York to get (chemically and physically) fucked' thing. He half-successfully attempted to reinvent it as a bullshitty 'rite of passage' to Being A Man, but it seemed like a serendipitously self-indulgent binge to me, which Tommy neither initiated nor attempted to control in any way.
If anything, the 'I wanna have a baby' contrivance became less convincing, impressing upon me nothing so much as Tommy's childish go-with-the-flow superficiality (from 'I'm a father!' to 'yes, an abortion was the right thing' in about five minutes).
Candyfloss. Slightly more diverting than most by way of being queer candyfloss, but candyfloss nonetheless. |
