IS THIS HONEST?

I am, honestly, absolutely infatuated by this book. I stayed up way too late reading it and it gave me all kinds of odd dreams (including foretelling the Pope's death). Nicola Barker has crafted a masterpiece. If you enjoy eavesdropping on conversations and making comments about said conversations in your mind, then you are sure to adore this book.

I laughed. I cried. I pondered.

An easy 5/5 Stars. Many thanks to NetGalley and Granta Publications for the ARC.

Nicola Barker gives us a hilarious story about the pointless strife for authenticity, a Künstlerroman turned comedy of manners in the digital age - and all that in her super-recognizable voice. Everything starts with a free jazz concert starring trumpet player Sasha Keyes, whose show is, you guessed it, interrupted by art curator John Lincoln Braithwaite, who stands up an inquires: "Is this honest? Are we being honest here?" - which is filmed by teenager India Shore. Backstage, Sasha is furious about the incident, calling John (whom he doesn't know personally) "some dick-weed, small-town TonyInterruptor" and telling music professor Fi Kinebuchi who plays autoharp, lyre and guitar in the band to "shut the fuck up" - which is filmed by the band's pianist Simo Treen. Needless to say, both clips go viral.

What ensues is a butterfly effect that shakes up the lives of many of the rather big cast of characters, from India, her father and her stepmom (a professor for architecture and a lawyer), to Sasha, Fi, of course John, and some minor figures. The digital virality and how it functions is in fact the least interesting part and mainly employed for laughs and as a catalyst, it's more about questioning the line between life and art in the sense that we are all constantly playing, signaling, performing. And maybe that isn't so bad: Life is a work of art. A central conundrum the characters ponder is the tension between intuition/improvisation and control/concept: Is it all about the sprezzatura? The characters hold different standpoints regarding these issues, and they are in constant debate about them.

According to those themes, Barker refers to all kinds of art, from Yayoi Kusama (India has a sibling with special needs) over J.D. Salinger to Anders Danielsen Lie. In the text, the expression TonyInterruptor is attributed to Lionel Asbo: State of England by Martin Amis (which Barker reviewed here) and / or Mark E. Smith. It is great fun to read how the art serves as expression of positions, how viewpoints clash, and, most importantly, how relationships shift, all triggered by John's heckling.

The second, shorter part of the novel is set three years after the incident, and the many relationship constellations are now different - and it feels like this constant change, that is also represented in new attitudes towards making art, will continue. Barker has managed to package the debates, that do have heavily theoretical backgrounds, in a light, propulisve, funny, engaging, and highly intelligent story, and it's such a pleasure to read.

You can already read an excerpt of the novel here.

TonyInterruptor explores the fallout from a question shouted from the audience at a jazz improvisation gig which goes viral. The interruption is inadvertently filmed by sixteen-year-old India who posts it on her Instagram, thrilled by the number of likes and followers it attracts. Alerted to this in the backroom postmortem after the gig, Sasha Keyes lets forth a diatribe, dubbing the questioner TonyInterruptor, covertly filmed by a band member who hashtags his post with it. The usual hysteria, hateful comments and brief fame ensues from the posts sending fault lines through the lives of those involved. Three years later, several lives have undergone surprising transformations not least John Lincoln Braithwaite’s aka TonyInterruptor.
In her own inimitable way, Barker keeps us amused by smartly skewering artistic and intellectual pretensions while turning her book into a novel of ideas which gives her readers much to contemplate about honesty, the influence of social media, authenticity and relationships, at the same time making them laugh and wince in recognition.