As a child, I was told that writing something down increases the chances of committing it to memory. When I first started writing, for fun, in my teens, I realised that this was as true for treacherous memories as it was for trigonometry. And so, one of the first stories I wrote was about a traffic accident, the aftermath of which I witnessed on my way to school one day: the climax of the story was a paranoid rant about how my shoes got stained with blood. I still remember the shape of the stain, and now I think this has more to do with my writing it down, rather than having the misfortune of experiencing it in the first place.
In a poignant flashback chapter in Tanuj Solanki’s debut novel, Neon Noon , the protagonist/ writerly alter-ego T spends the better part of a holiday ruminating on this phenomenon (as opposed to talking to his girlfriend Anne-Marie, the largely absent figure who haunts this book, much like Bob Dylan’s unseen Johanna in the song Visions of Johanna ).
“As I walk on in slight pain, I try to understand my dream by wrapping it in words and making a sentence out of it. Hot destruction, dreamt from a cold, dark, peaceful room. Once I make this sentence, I deliberate on the process of making this sentence. The desire to be a writer is probably the desire to compress reality into sentences. Or vice versa.”
To borrow a phrase from the recent film Brahman Naman, T is oddly likeable — or likeable, which is odd. Because although he is a solid writer (“Mountains leaking filamentous waterfalls” goes a diary entry during the aforementioned scribbler’s holiday), and a mostly stand-up guy (in the opening gambit of this novel, a drunk and clearly vulnerable girl literally asks him to come to bed with her, but our man refuses), T is haunted: haunted by memories of Anne-Marie, haunted by his own mounting insecurities as an author, haunted by the prospect of an escapist jaunt to Thailand, the land built on a bedrock of neon, cheap liquor and squalid sex. After he realises that Anne-Marie has no intention of taking him back, he eventually does go to Pattaya, trying his best to appreciate the city, as complete a conduit to hedonism as one can hope for.
In Solanki’s considered and audacious piling up of cliché plot elements — melancholy yuppie gets dumped and goes to Thailand in search of erotic distraction — there is a larger point made about our expectations from a novel. If, as is the case with the overwhelming majority of all novels everywhere, we’re only flipping the pages to find out what happens next, are we not guilty of something heinous? We’re not in love with the book, we’re checking out its ass as it walks by (apologies to Science Porn, the Vine account where a variant of this joke appeared originally). At the same time, if the novel treats its plot strands like one-night stands, doesn’t it deserve to be cock-blocked?
Luckily, Solanki balances the book’s anti-novel impulses (it’s no surprise that one of the books referenced explicitly here is an anti-novel about writing, Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vilas-Matas) with some good old-fashioned quality storytelling, most notably in the character of a wizened old sex worker, whom T befriends. This woman is T’s unofficial guide to the mysterious Noon, the titular Thai sex worker, whom T is enamoured with. In a hilarious scene, T asks the older woman why there were so many tourist families in Pattaya: after all, the place was almost exclusively geared up for middle-aged men looking for sex. The lady explains, inimitably:
“‘Pattaya is part of package for family,’ she said. ‘Family come to Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, Koh Samui. They stay here for two day, for three day. Family come, go to beach, go to big hotel, go to bar, go back. They go to bar, but no lady fun. But some family hap lady fun. Young couple sometime take lady. Take lady, take lady, f**k f**k f**k. Three people f**k. Sometime old couple take me. Sometime young couple take me. I like that. Three. But hey, family come to Pattaya ein.’”
Solanki’s writing is intensely cerebral, and he comes up with constantly surprising juxtapositions (“The town has many sparkling children. The town has many snotty stars.”)
Not surprisingly, it is believably authentic when he’s talking about two very bookish people squabbling, say, over the works of Slavoj Žižek. The Pattaya portions of the book, making up the second half, feature some extremely courageous writing. Most satisfactorily, the conclusion, spread out over the last 20 pages or so, feels both realistic and satiating at a poetic level.
Prior to the publication of Neon Noon , Solanki’s short fiction has been published widely in both print and online publications, including BLink , in its second anniversary special issue in January. He has a distinctive voice, strong but malleable, shifting subtly according to character. His protagonists are often troubled writers looking to break the shackles of the past, though not in a cathartic way. Their allure lies in their slow-burn towards either ruin or redemption, like a firecracker with a serpentine fuse. One gets the feeling that Neon Noon is just the first explosion.
(The article was first published in BLInk.)