Haydn Wilks's Blog - Posts Tagged "pandemic-fiction"

My new novel HIRAETH. is an autofictional account of the pandemic. This list contains the many books I obsessed over during the writing process and made explicit references to in HIRAETH.'s many many pages.

1. The Rules of Attraction

Read by The Main Character in the opening chapter, a hedonistic sprint through South-East Asia just before the pandemic hits in January 2020. The frentic Eurotrip chapter is also heavy inspiration for the opening nos and ket consuming debauchery in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Korea, and Amsterdam.

The (excellent) film adaptation is also referred to later:

"During our first year in halls, me and Giacomo told each other how we’d both hoped university in London would be exactly like Roger Avary’s film adaptation of The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. It was definitely close."

2. $hitcoin

My last novel - referred to in HIRAETH. as The Cryptocurrency Novel.



3. American Psycho

Another Bret Easton Ellis book that is referred to repeatedly in HIRAETH:

"Dad finishes reading his David Baldacci book. He says it was “alright”, but he strongly disliked Baldacci’s habit of listing what kind of dress each female character is wearing each time they appear.
I agree with Dad that this is “bad writing” because nobody pays that much attention to what other people are wearing, then immediately contradict myself by referencing American Psycho, where Patrick Bateman’s obsessive cataloguing of every character’s clothing makes the prose click.
I tell Dad he should read American Psycho, which I describe as “the best book written in the second half of the twentieth century.” I open my suitcase to take out American Psycho. Dad laughs when he sees I’ve transported a suitcase almost entirely filled with books back from Korea."

And another example:

"I rub the green gunk of L’Oreal Paris Pure Clay Purity Mattifying Eucalyptus Face Mask over my face after showering. I keep my face rigid for ten minutes after, as I make porridge with Greek yoghurt and almonds and walnuts and blueberries for breakfast. I think about how if I were to describe this skincare regime in literature, it would seem like it was aping Patrick Bateman’s in American Psycho; then I find American Psycho on the bookshelf, and read the opening as I wait for the 10 minutes recommended L’Oreal Paris Pure Clay Purity Mattifying Eucalyptus Face Mask time to elapse. Patrick Bateman attends an upper-class ‘80s NYC dinner party where sushi and Kirin beer are served as exoticities. I think about how Kirin is now regarded as a second- or third-class imported beer, while sushi isn’t seen as particularly weird in the West, though Dad’s almost certainly never eaten it. I wonder what Dad would think if he walked in to see me wearing this lime green face mask. Dad’s self-cleaning needs are entirely serviced by a bar of Imperial Leather soap, one of which remains beside the sink from when he lived here. I think about how comical these differences between us are, and how that could be the basis for writing something."

4. The Pale King

Suggested (unsuccessfully) as an alternative to American Psycho:

"Dad doesn’t want to read American Psycho, so I recommend other things. He tries reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, after I tell Dad that DFW is considered “the best writer of the last thirty years.”
Dad frowns as he reads, then gives up after a page, saying “These supposedly great writers have always gotta try and make things so bloody complicated.” "

5. The Old Man and the Sea

An accepted alternative to American Psycho.

"I tell Dad he’d probably prefer Orwell or Hemingway.
Dad reads The Old Man and the Sea."

Then later:

"Dad has read The Old Man & the Sea (I still haven’t), and expounds on how “great” it is, but “simple”, which becomes a very obvious disguised dig at me making the things I write “too complicated”. "

6. Dial M for Merthyr

The basis for a whole subsection in the chapter detailing the first lockdown:

"I order more books off Amazon, including Dial M for Merthyr by Rachel Trezise. The book is a true account of writer Rachel Trezise following local rock legends Midasuno on tour. The book takes me back to a distant world of gigs and life beyond the living room.

My favourite thing Rachel Trezise writes in Dial M for Merthyr is her description of why she likes Midasuno more than any other Welsh band: “there are ingredients in all Welsh pop music, in all music, which appeal to me; the basic map-plotting lyrics of the Stereophonics, the melancholy of the Manic Street Preachers, even intermittently the gloss of the Lostprophets, but there is something lacking in all of these bands’ approaches to their origins. The Manics wallow in their Welshness like misery. The Losprophets appear to deny it. Funeral for a Friend play on it. Midasuno do nothing more than accept it… for forty minutes every night they make the impossible seem possible - they turn being Welsh and desperate into something akin to sexy.”

I like this because I like it when writers eloquently throw shade, like Rachel Trezise’s paragraph does to every major non-Midasuno Welsh band. I also like it because it describes Midasuno well, and it is how I would like my writing to one day be described. I would like to write things that make “being Welsh and desperate” seem “sexy”.

There’s another line in Dial M for Merthyr that resonates with me: Rachel Trezise writes that she’s “jealous of rock stars” because they get “triple the amount of attention” writers get “for a quarter the amount of work.”

I finish Dial M for Merthyr in two days, then Dad reads it. Dad thinks it’s well written, but “all they seem to do in this band is get drunk all the time.” "

7. The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky's masterpiece is a catalyst for the novel's first forays into existential struggle with the meaning of existence:

"I reach the most infamous scene in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan tells Aloysha tales of children suffering horrible abuse, and why this makes him think there is no God, and leads him on to a long poem about Christ returning during the Spanish Inquisition that I don’t really understand, probably because I don’t have a good enough understanding of The Bible."

8. The Holy Bible: King James Version

Naturally flowing on from The Brothers Karamazov:

"One of Dad’s books upon the bookcase in the living room is a Bible. I pour another rum & soda and return to the sofa and open The Bible. The first page says it was gifted to my Dad to “mark the beginning of [his] secondary education” at Cwmcarn Secondary School in 1963."

9. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

And from The Bible we arrive at this:

"I drink spiced rum & soda water and read two-thirds of Genesis on the living room sofa, thinking the story of Adam and Eve has clear echoes of the Agricultural Revolution and birth of settled civilisations described in another book I read years ago, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari says that humans discovered agriculture by accident, spilling grain and noticing it grew where it landed. Agriculture became a convenience trap, early human farmers giving up the nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers to settle in one spot, to eat a much more restricted but generally more dependable diet, toiling the land and regularly being obliterated by famine. It seems that Eve eating the forbidden apple to gain knowledge and being kicked out of the Garden of Eden is a metaphor for this, and The Bible is really fascinating if you see it as the human societies of thousands of years ago transcribing passed-down tales, trying to make sense of our world as best they could, rather than the definitive Word of God somehow directly transmitted into the minds of many different writers over a vast number of years, which is clearly bollocks."

And referred to again, later, during a pissed & stoned existential dinner preparation scene:

"I relight the spliff and swig Leffe and think about the Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens, where Harari argues the ability to construct and believe in shared fictions is what allowed human society to develop to the extent it has vastly outcompeted every other animal on the planet. (Google, or the Ford Motor Company, or the country of France, are not tangible things with clear physical definitions, yet we all believe them to exist; just as in centuries past, people became convinced of all manner of higher powers and things beyond the surface directing things; Harari argues this mutual belief in shared fictions is the single most important aspect of humanity’s intellectual capabilities and social structures.)"

10. Taipei

The genesis of the autofiction obsession that becomes the basis for the whole novel:

"I discover Tao Lin and a whole alt-lit movement that blew up on the Internet almost ten years ago. I realise I’m completely out of touch with the literary scene I’m imagining myself as the new vanguard of. I spam reviewers of Tao Lin books and read reviews and quotes about him. Tao Lin’s novel Taipei has a quote from my favourite writer, Bret Easton Ellis, on the cover: “With Taipei, Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation.” I order Taipei by Tao Lin off Amazon. Then I google the Bret Easton Ellis quote, and see his whole tweet says “...but that doesn’t mean Taipei isn’t a boring novel.” "

"Taipei by Tao Lin arrives from Amazon. I tell Dad that literary consensus considers Tao Lin “the voice of my generation”, which disappoints me, because I thought I would be the voice of my generation.
Dad thinks I’m joking."

11. A Clockwork Orange

Listed alongside the novelists that gave The Main Character a "cool & edgy" dominant goal to aim for after failing as the frontman of an emo band:

"When me and Jake and Mark formed our first band as teenagers, I was convinced we would follow Lostprophets out of the Valleys to global stardom. Soon after being kicked out of the band, I discovered Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk and Hunter S. Thompson and Irvine Welsh, A Clockwork Orange and Kerouac, and realised writing could also be cool & edgy. I’ve been trying to be a cool & edgy writer ever since."

12. What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life

Nestled alongside Tao Lin as one of the cool & edgy hipster NY autofiction superstars The Main Character desperately seeks to emulate:

"Through Tao Lin, I discover Marie Calloway, who wrote a controversial short story called Adrien Brody, which Tao Lin published on his website. The story was controversial because it seems to tell the true story of this precocious young writer Marie Calloway contacting a real New York journalist via email, then travelling to NYC to fuck this married journalist and also fuck some younger guy who pays for her hotel room. (The New York literati identified the pseudonymous journalist immediately.) The short story opens with an email exchange between Marie Calloway and the real journalist, who she gives the fake name Adrien Brody. The writing feels as fresh as Tao Lin’s but the story is inherently more interesting. The story ends with Marie Calloway asking Adrien Brody to cum on her face, and to take a picture of her with his cum on her face, and this photo is published at the back of Marie Calloway’s book What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life. I search for the book on Amazon (because I want to read it, not just because I want to see the cumshot) but I don’t buy it because it’s out of print, and second-hand copies are selling for upwards of £20, and I don’t really want to buy a second-hand book that climaxes with a photo of a real-life cumshot."

13. Lionel Asbo: State of England

Shit upon at several points as The Main Character desperately attempts to establish himself as a cool & edgy literary superstar:

"I write a line that I can use somewhere in my autofictional pandemic novel, a note to self, to comically illustrate the protagonist author’s self-obsessed ego-driven angst at his latest stupid book being another resounding commercial failure: “You are not Bret Easton Ellis, you are not Ryu Murakami, you are not Jack Kerouac, or Charles Bukwoski, or Hunter S. Thompson, or Irvine Welsh, or even Don DeFuckingLilo or Martin Amis - you are just a talentless misguided dickhead.”
And I think this is cool & edgy because of the shade it throws at Don DeLilo and Martin Amis. "

"I think about how empathy and understanding of others is a vital part of being a good writer; the empathy Tolstoy and Dostoevsky display in their depictions of vast swathes of Russia’s social classes, versus worthless shite literature like Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis."

14. The Communist Manifesto

As The Main Character's delusions grow increasingly grandiose, he seeks to make his Lockdown Novel something as world-changing as Karl Marx's riposte to capitalism:

"In the park, I ranted about Brexit, and how Karl Marx was “just a guy”, and “we are the educated class of our generation,” and are just as likely to generate world-changing ideas as Karl Marx did.
Jay laughed.
The German girl said “Do you really think we are the educated class of our generation?” "

And later:

"I talk out loud to myself about what I'm trying to write.
“I want to be a prophet,” I say to myself.
“A prophet receives a vision from God,” I reply.
“I know.”

But Karl Marx was in a sense a prophet, as was Sartre and Nieschze and Kant and Einstein and Hawkings and Jobs and Beethoven and Lenin and Lennon: they transcended human limitations and distilled divine intuitions on the essential nature of things and shared them with humanity.

But how the fuck are you supposed to write something which does that?"

15. Ulysses

One of several James Joyce novels referenced in response to an irritating regular in a beer garden once pubs are permitted to re-open:

"Karl is a podgy balding bloke in a local rugby top. He has a peculiar way of talking, like he’s trying to prove he’s more intelligent than you.
“So you’re a writer?” Karl says when Yannis tells him I’m “a writer”. (I haven’t yet sold enough books to feel validated in introducing myself to people as “a writer”.) “Have you ever read anything by James Joyce?”
I tell him I have: I studied Ulysses at university and I’ve read The Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist... and ordered Finnegan’s Wake off Amazon but haven’t read it yet.
Karl bombards me with other writers.
When I try to talk about the writers or their books, Karl throws another writer at me.
Karl venerates the writers I haven't read and denigrates the ones I have, telling me Thomas Hardy is “absolutely brilliant” while Charles Dickens and George Orwell are “massively overrated”. "

16. Infinite Jest

The Main Character's delusional narcissism is on full display as he picks this up, having failed to find any copies of his own novels in a recently reopened book shop:

" I walk to the local authors section, scanning it to see if they’ve stocked my book. (They obviously haven’t.) I look at the W section of the alphabetized general fiction shelves. (Obviously it isn’t there either.) I pick up a copy of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and join a short queue to the counter, wondering whether the girl at the till will be impressed when she sees what book I’m buying; but she doesn’t react to Infinite Jest (obviously), and I chastise myself for allowing my thoughts to become those of such a pretentious dickhead."

17. Kanley Stubrick

An inspiration for the (unsuccessful) marketing campaign The Main Character launches for his Cryptocurrency Novel:

"I roll a joint and open a Punk IPA and get on the laptop to spam Goodreads reviewers. Some of the reviewers I click on are authors, and some of them seem interesting. There’s an author called Mike Klein who has written a book called Kanley Stubrick that has a trippy video trailer, and I think “I should really make a video trailer,” and look on Amazon for Kanley Stubrick (which isn’t in stock) and end up buying Arafat Mountain by Mike Klein (which is)."

18. Loveboat, Taipei

A catalyst for self-reflection as The Main Character desperately seeks to emulate Tao Lin:

"I search for Taipei on Goodreads, to spam Tao Lin fans, and realise the top result for “Taipei” isn't Taipei by Tao Lin (3.29 stars from 6,030 ratings); it's some young adult romance book called Loveboat, Taipei (Loveboat, Taipei #1) by Abigail Hing Wen (3.78 stars from 7,825 ratings).
Lol. "

19. Fight Club

A cornerstone of '90s culture referred to in the writing of an unpublishable mess of an article for Medium - Only ‘90s Kids Will Understand This:

" I read back through the article, and realise it lacks something uniting its many disparate ideas with some wider context. I write a paragraph about the quintessentially late-90s film adaptation of Fight Club, a cult classic which discovered mainstream acceptance on DVD, with Tyler Durdern’s proclamation that “You are not a special unique little snowflake” then later becoming a favoured label for Boomers and alt-right shitheads to apply to liberal/left-wing pro-gay & anti-racist Millennials. I think about Tyler Durden’s other iconic line in Fight Club, about Gen X realising they weren’t going to grow up to be rockstars, and being very very pissed off about this,"

20. All The Places We Lived

Read on a train, with both irritation and admiration:

"I take the new book from my bag: All the Places We’ve Lived by Richard Owain Roberts. I bought it because the author is Welsh and Goodreads reviewers say he’s similar to Tao Lin. As I read, I’m annoyed that I’m not the first Welsh writer to do the Tao Lin hipster lit thing. Richard Owain Roberts even explicitly mentions Tao Lin’s novels and Marie Calloway’s short story Adrien Brody. "

21. We Don't Know What We're Doing

Following directly on from the bit about Richard Owain Roberts - All the Places We've Lived:

"I think about being similarly annoyed by reading We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris and realising I wasn’t going to be the first Millennial writer from Caerphilly to write something contemporary set in Caerphilly. But both are good writers, and after I finish a chapter, and the train nears Rhymney, I wonder if we might make some hipster Millennial Welsh literary clique, like Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs’ mid-century Beat Generation, or Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney’s ‘80s Brat Pack, or Tao Lin and Marie Calloway’s NY Hipster lit scene."

22. Big Sur

A perfect illustration of the perils of becoming your own protagonist:

"I think about autofiction: about Jack Kerouac, Marie Calloway, Tao Lin. The perils of being the protagonist of a piece of autofiction. The need to shape a narrative from real-life events, to craft a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. The need for some kind of satisfactory climax.

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. Kerouac goes to a cabin in the woods on California’s Big Sur Coast (a fact I’ve referenced in real estate copy for the communities of Monterey County) where he drinks heavily and eventually sees a vision of Christ. I wonder if Kerouac really did drink and write until he saw the hallucination of Christ, living and writing an autofictional account of a famous writer drinking himself into hallucinatory stupefiction out of the necessity of giving his novel a satisfying conclusion. "

23. Maggie Cassidy

Kerouac is the autofiction king. This novel also provides a moment of reflection of the artform:

"I write the outline for a stupid romance thing where characters that are clearly me and Emma Jones meet during the lockdown, and rekindle old whatevers, and it’s like an interesting contrast between teen obliviousness and jaded adulthood, like in Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac when Kerouac’s autofictional protagonist returns to his highschool sweetheart as a wizened uni lad and roughly attempts to initiate fucking with her. "

24. Women

The basis for further reflection on wtf autofiction is:

"I think about how writing is a bit like method acting, especially writing autofiction, and writers of autofiction typically become the characters they create, like Bukowski the alcoholic dirty old man..."

25. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Following on directly from the bit about Bukowski - further evidence of the pitfalls inherent in being your own protagonist:

"...gonzo pioneer Hunter S Thompson, who wound up getting drugged out of his mind alone at his hotel pool instead of covering the Ali/Frazier fight, because the character of gonzo fuckhead had consumed him. "

26. How to Be a Footballer

A counterpoint to autofiction - the (presumably) ghostwritten celebrity autobiography:

"I think about celebrity autobiographies, and how they’re always framed around the development of the celebrity’s public persona (probably, I haven’t read any of them.) Peter Crouch’s autobiography (probably) starts with him as a young kid with an aptitude for football, then talks about him joining a youth team, then joining the senior squad, then being transferred to different clubs and playing for the national team, and finally retiring. Celebrity autobiographies are almost all ghostwritten anyway. It’s the ghostwriter’s job to interview the celebrity about their life and shape the content of these interviews into a cohesive narrative. "

27. Trainspotting

Referred to many times in HIRAETH., most notably in this lengthy bit from the depths of The Firebreak Lockdown:

"I smoke a spliff and read Trainspotting.

I read reviews of Trainspotting (the book) on Goodreads. A five-star review says Trainspotting is so enduringly popular because its central friend group is universally relatable. I think about how the boys align with the main group from Trainspotting.

I am most clearly Irvine Welsh’s avatar of Mark Renton: a confused but cunning mix of intellectual refinement and destructive impulsivity, creating an unstable mentality fluctuating between overconfident arrogance and self-loathing. (Thomas also most closely aligns with Renton.) The most likely to write a book about everyone else, and the most likely to rob everyone else of their money after doing a big heroin deal.

Both Jake and Mark align with Sick Boy: charismatic, cunning where necessary, the second most likely to rob everyone of their heroin deal money, socially adept in any situation, but finding a particularly powerful rapport with the Rentons of the world.

Spud is definitely Yannis: naive, well-meaning, always looking to see the good in people, the least likely to rob the heroin money but also the most likely to fall victim to the impulsive selfishness and manipulative personalities of the Rentons and Sick Boys of the world. (Smithy is also a Spud type).

Fatty is the Begbie of the group: nowhere near the psycho that Begbie is, but still by far the most likely of us to fight, and win fights, and quickest to anger, and the most purely driven by emotions at the moment he experiences them.

Briff most closely matches Tommy: probably the most mentally balanced of the group, and likely the last of us to become a smackhead if we all started shooting up heroin all the time. (Briff settled down with the girl he fell in love with during the teenage emo days; they have a son together, and Briff now drinks far less frequently and heavily than the other boys, which is why he’s barely mentioned in The Lockdown Novel.)

I wonder how common it is for friendship groups like this to form.
I wonder if The Lockdown Novel will achieve a Trainspotting level of cult success.
I am almost 100% certain it will, despite this certainty being an obvious manifestation of delusions of grandeur.

I think about how our group would’ve fared in the tribal hunter-gatherer times.

Mark and Jake would naturally want to assume the role of group leader.
Like happened with the bands, this could easily cause a schism within the group, splitting us into two competing tribes.

Yannis and Smithy would be the most dependably loyal group members. They would fight to the death to save any of us, never leave a man behind, give their all to ensure the group’s success.

Fatty would’ve been the most useful in fights with other tribes. His practical skills would’ve been useful in all kinds of tribal situations.

I would’ve been the most useless at practical matters, but also the most likely to come up with abstract solutions to our tribal problems, e.g. if fire hadn’t been invented yet, I’d be the most likely to invent it.

I genuinely believe this.
I genuinely believe I would’ve invented fire.
Fucking hell.
What an absolute dickhead. "

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