born slippy (tom lutz)

As much as I love literature for its ability to move me, for its capacity for transcendence, for its philosophical artistry, I also love literature as a means of being informed. Of knowing what’s going on in the world. Literature has the capacity to disembody history, to remove the limbs and put them back together again in a fashion which allows one to see it, history, anew. Or, to overdo the metaphor, to provide a bird’s eye view. To alert one to things that one didn’t know existed. Literature, no matter how recherché it might aspire to be, emerges from a culture, and a political-cultural perspective. I might suggest that in these feverish times, Anglo-Saxon literature seems too often to me to drift towards a neutral ground which does not exist. A means of avoiding and escaping the political realities that underpin Anglo-Saxon society. To put it simply, in order to get by in such an age of mass hypocrisy, it’s easier to look the other way, and it feels as though the publishing industry, which is a part of the socio-political culture, is far too often complicit in this. Particularly when it comes to the art of fiction. 

Which was part of the attraction for picking up Born Slippy, whose intentions appeared to be to tackle in part some of the banal hideousness of the wealth machines which make the world go round. A hideousness personified by Dmitry Heald, a Liverpudlian born trader who works for the big banks and sets up his own shadow scheme to rip off a percentage of the dark money which he manages. Names like Putin are bandied around. The story is told from the point of view of his distant friend, Frank, a North American builder whose fascination with Heald is akin to Faust’s fascination with Mephistopheles. Indeed, Frank makes his own Faustian pact, and one of the curious choices the book makes is that it allows Frank to sail off into the distance in the end, rich on the back of Heald’s depravity. The novel’s set-up is effective, flipping between timelines as it constructs the story of the two men’s friendship. But after Heald manufactures a fake death, one which Frank believes in although the reader doesn’t, the plausibility of the tale begins to wane. Frank is too much of a boludo to be a viable central character and it feels as though, for all its strong-minded intentions, the novel fails to address the issues it sets out to. Lutz has a crack at demarcating the socio-cultural hypocrisies of our times but seems reluctant to follow his own logic towards the kind of resolution it demands, one which Elroy, for example, whose praise appears on the cover, would not have shied away from.