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| Jon McGregor |
New kid on the block
Matt Seaton
Tue 20 Aug 2002 01.55 BST
Among a Booker Prize longlist notable chiefly for containing a great many established writers and few surprises, the name Jon McGregor stands out as refreshingly unfamiliar. And there is a good reason why we haven't heard of him: McGregor's entry, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, is his first novel. Another good reason is that he is only 26.
Vogue magazine has included him in a line-up of new literary talent; his fiction has appeared in Granta, and, young though he is, he has already undergone that quintessential writer's rite of passage - an appearance at the Cheltenham literary festival. But if the buzz was already beginning to build before the Booker announcement, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is still the longlist's left-field choice. Even McGregor was taken by surprise: the first he knew of it was when his dad called early yesterday morning to say that Jon's name was in the paper. So did he go straight out and buy one?
"I got dressed first," he says, with his quietly dry sense of humour. "I was pretty shocked."
Published by Bloomsbury this month, McGregor's novel has caught most arbiters of literary taste unawares - it has scarcely been reviewed to date. The notable exception, besides inclusion in a round-up in the Observer, has been a rave from Erica Wagner, literary editor of the Times, who hailed it as "a dream of a novel" and an "assured debut". The fact that she is also a Booker judge this year may have had some bearing on the fact that If Nobody was "called in" (which is what happens when the judges decide they want to read a book that a publisher has not made one of its statutory two submissions). Still, McGregor finds the idea that his name is now bracketed with such literary big-hitters as William Boyd, Anita Brookner Will Self and Linda Grant, "quite alarming".
"I need to justify that," he says. "Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published."
A graduate in media production, McGregor became used to seeing his friends from Bradford university going to London and earning proper money in the television or internet industry, while he lived in Sheffield doing a series of shift-work jobs to support his writing: in bakeries, postrooms, textile factories. Since he moved to Nottingham with his wife, Alice, a mental health worker with homeless people, he has worked part-time in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. He may be only 26, but perhaps some dues have been paid. "Yeah, I reckon," he says.
"Now that I've had a book published, it is quite validating," he says, "but a bit embarrassing."
McGregor is decidedly not the type of author to be his own publicist. About 5ft 11ins, he is slim (a vegetarian since he was 12), freckled and bespectacled. With touches of grey in his hair, he looks a little older than his years and could easily pass for a youthful Ian McEwan - to whom he bears a rather striking resemblance.
He was born in Bermuda in 1976, where his father, a vicar, had a posting as a curate. The third of four siblings, most of McGregor's childhood was spent in Norwich (he is still a keen Norwich City supporter and can now afford to go and see the games). The family moved to Thetford, in south Norfolk, when he was 12; it was a rural upbringing, he says, "but with an edge of urban decay".
"There was very little to do in Thetford: no cinema, no nothing," he says. "As a teenager, you could sneak into pubs, but that was it."
He describes himself then as a "typical Thetford teenager", but one suspects that making films on Super 8, writing poetry and playing guitar were not quite typical.
"I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool," he recalls, "so I was quite up front about it."
He was still making films (video shorts) while at Bradford, but it was there that he began writing in earnest. Inspired initially by Douglas Coupland's Generation X, he started on short fiction. The breakthrough came in 1998 (his final year at university), when a series entitled Cinema 100 was published by Pulp Faction in an anthology called Five Uneasy Pieces. The following year, he decided he needed a literary agent and sent some stories off to Rose Gaete at the Wylie Agency. A friend advised him that a good question to ask a prospective agent would be who else they represented. The answer - Borges, Bellow, Roth, Amis - impressed, but fortunately so did he and Gaete took him on. On the advice that there was no future in short stories, McGregor set about a novel.
"The sparking point was the whole Diana thing," he says. "It was thinking about the contrast between the reaction to her death and the reaction to everyone else's deaths. I knew a woman whose granddad had died on the same day as Diana did, and she was very upset about how everyone was talking about Diana but nobody wanted to hear about her granddad."
McGregor's only personal experience of death was witnessing his own grandfather dying in a hospice a few years ago. "I felt very privileged and somehow it was very helpful for us all to be there. I found it very interesting."
Death, or a death, you can gather from this, is at the centre of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. From the outset, the reader is aware that something bad is going to happen, although McGregor maintains a degree of suspense about precisely what until the final pages. But it is actually much more a novel about life; the presence of death in the story is counterpointed by the narration of one of the main characters, a young woman who reveals that she is pregnant.
The novel presents a "day in the life" of an unnamed inner-city street. Like one of the characters, a young man who collects litter and junk and obsessively documents his existence with Polaroids, McGregor records people's ordinary lives through a series of snapshots on a late summer day. While the style is avant-garde, a kind of collage, rather than realist (McGregor doesn't like quote marks to denote dialogue, for instance, and his prose dips into a strongly poetic idiom at times), there is a drive to render the direct experience of the characters who populate the street: the "remarkable things" of the novel's title are very much the everyday. With its strongly visual and aural sensibility, its short scenes and rapidly edited changes of focus, it is easy to see the influence of filmmaking on his writing.
So how will the new literary status change things for McGregor?
Not much, he says. He is already signed to Bloomsbury for a second book. He will continue to live in the small, terraced house in Nottingham he shares with Alice. He will go on meeting friends for the weekly pub quiz at his local, the Frog and Onion; and he plans to grow peas and beans on the allotment he has recently taken on.
But he has quit his washing-up job at the veggie restaurant.
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