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The Other Jack
A book about books, mostly
... and bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas.
My granny used to say, when she saw me getting teary over a film we were watching on TV, ‘It’s only a story.’ When Robyn’s bike was stolen and I offered sympathy, she responded, ‘It’s only money.’ A woman once said to me, grinning from ear to ear, ‘It’s only sex.’ To someone despairing of the judges’ decision, I want to say, ‘It’s only a book.’ But it is never only anything.
Writer and reader meet in cafés to talk about books – that’s the plot. There are arguments, spilt coffee, deaths both in life and in fiction, and rain and laughter.
... and bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas.
My granny used to say, when she saw me getting teary over a film we were watching on TV, ‘It’s only a story.’ When Robyn’s bike was stolen and I offered sympathy, she responded, ‘It’s only money.’ A woman once said to me, grinning from ear to ear, ‘It’s only sex.’ To someone despairing of the judges’ decision, I want to say, ‘It’s only a book.’ But it is never only anything.
Writer and reader meet in cafés to talk about books – that’s the plot. There are arguments, spilt coffee, deaths both in life and in fiction, and rain and laughter.
192 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2021
20 people want to read
About the author
Charles Boyle
30 books5 followersBritish poet and novelist, also writing as "Jack Robinson", Founder of the publishing house CB Editions.
Also published one novel as "Jennie Walker"
Also published one novel as "Jennie Walker"
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 11, 2021
I've replied to Robyn's email. I explained about Jack, and I mentioned Jennie too. I didn't mention the bed scene I'm pretty sure I didn't write. So now she knows who I am, roughly. We are going to meet. Bookish blather in a bistro - what can go wrong?
Rewind. Someone was running, hard, behind me. Had I paid for my coffee? 'Stop thief!' people used to shout in the speech bubbles in cartoons. I'd walked off without paying, and the footsteps were those of the water chasing after me. I blushed and turned and she almost knocked me over. Grinning, out of breath, she handed me a book I had left on the café table. Had I read Recessional, she asked, by the same author? No, I said, not that one, although in fact I have read it. In fact I wrote it. But she seemed a little eager. She was young - younger than my children - and it was starting to rain and neither of us had an umbrella. You should, she said. It’s one of the early ones but it’s still his best.
The Other Jack is by Charles Boyle, a poet under his own name, and the founder and sole employee of the incredible publisher CB Editions, part-founded to publish, under two pseudonyms, his own novels, although also publisher of many other wonderful works such as the Wellcome Book Prize winning Murmur and a reprint of Agota Kristof's brilliant Notebook.
The 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize jury, of which I was part, gave him a special ‘The William Gass award for metafiction and for being the best person in publishing, like ever’ - Charles' own, rather bemused, take here
Under the pseudonym Jack Robinson, Boyle has written and published 7 books (see the bibliography below). He also wrote the cricket-novel-of-sorts 24 For 3 under the pseudonym Jennie Walker - href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... review, which caused some consternation when his unaware publisher wanted to enter him into the Women's Prize for Fiction.
Boyle has explained the two pseudonyms on his blog
Hence the "I explained about Jack, and I mentioned Jennie too". In this novel, Boyle has written it under his own name, and this is seemingly the last we'll see of Jack Robinson, Boyle saying recently "in The Other Jack I’ve let him sidle away, his time was up."
The opening of this book is also a direct and deliberate rewrite of the opening of by the same author which begins:
Someone was running, hard, behind me. Had I paid for the coffee? My mind was a blank. It was the waiter, I decided, and I hadn’t paid. I stopped and turned and he almost knocked me over. Grinning, out of breath, he handed me the book I’d left on the table. Had I read XXX, he asked, by the same author. No, I said, not that one, although in fact I have read it. He seemed a little eager. He was younger than me, in the way that she is older. You should, he said. It’s one of the early ones but it’s still her best.
That was based on a true story of sorts, although XXX in the novel proves to be a fictitious writer, T.S. Nyman, and one with seemingly multiple stories.
Here the mail waiter becomes female, Robyn, and the book Boyle is reading is his own, or rather, Jack Robinson's. Which story is closer to the real story - or perhaps neither - isn't clear, and indeed it adds to Boyle's aims that it remains that way.
The novel, or essay? or true story?, here is based around bookish conversations between Boyle and Robyn, an equally avid and well-informed reader. Pseudonymity is one key strand, with Boyle's beloved Stendhal (or rather Marie-Henri Beyle, as Stendhal was but one of his identities) and of course Pessoa, acknowledged as the masters, Pessoa so much so that he invented his own term and concept of heteronyms.
But there is much more here besides, with the lengthy list of books referenced speaking to the depth of the erudition, while the novel's concept, and indeed much of the writing, remains playful, further meta-fictional nods to 'by the same author' and other writing by Jack Robinson, alongside some honest appraisal of the state of the literary world and Boyle's own relative privilege.
Wonderful stuff. If this is the end of Jack Robinson's novels, I can only hope it is the start of Charles Boyle's.
Jack Robinson bibliography
Recessional (2009) - my review
Days and Nights In W12 (2011) - my review
by the same author (2017) - my review
An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B. (2017)- my review
Robinson (2017) - my review
Blush (2018) with Natalia Zagórska-Thomas - my review
Good Morning, Mr Crusoe (2019) - my review
Rewind. Someone was running, hard, behind me. Had I paid for my coffee? 'Stop thief!' people used to shout in the speech bubbles in cartoons. I'd walked off without paying, and the footsteps were those of the water chasing after me. I blushed and turned and she almost knocked me over. Grinning, out of breath, she handed me a book I had left on the café table. Had I read Recessional, she asked, by the same author? No, I said, not that one, although in fact I have read it. In fact I wrote it. But she seemed a little eager. She was young - younger than my children - and it was starting to rain and neither of us had an umbrella. You should, she said. It’s one of the early ones but it’s still his best.
The Other Jack is by Charles Boyle, a poet under his own name, and the founder and sole employee of the incredible publisher CB Editions, part-founded to publish, under two pseudonyms, his own novels, although also publisher of many other wonderful works such as the Wellcome Book Prize winning Murmur and a reprint of Agota Kristof's brilliant Notebook.
The 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize jury, of which I was part, gave him a special ‘The William Gass award for metafiction and for being the best person in publishing, like ever’ - Charles' own, rather bemused, take here
Under the pseudonym Jack Robinson, Boyle has written and published 7 books (see the bibliography below). He also wrote the cricket-novel-of-sorts 24 For 3 under the pseudonym Jennie Walker - href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... review, which caused some consternation when his unaware publisher wanted to enter him into the Women's Prize for Fiction.
Boyle has explained the two pseudonyms on his blog
I am, by the way, as well as being Charles Boyle (poetry and stories), Jack. And was briefly Jennie Walker (24 for 3, infidelity and cricket). Je est un autre. About the pseudonomy, just this: two of the first group of four CBe titles I published were written by me; I had no distributor, no plans to publish any more books; I knew that I was going to take these books into independent bookshops and say how wonderful they were and that the booksellers would ask who the authors were and that ‘me’ is not a persuasive reply, so the pseudonyms.
That’s about as pragmatic a reason as you can get, but of course it’s far from the whole story. (I doubt there is ever a story we can all agree upon. Or even a colour: it’s clear, as I discuss colours for the CBe covers, that one person’s blue is another person’s green.) The first pen-name was Jennie, and I can recall the tipping point exactly: writing a first-person narrative about a man between two women, I was labouring, but when – overnight – the ‘I’ became a woman between two men, the thing took off. It was liberating: suddenly, I was able to write in a way that I’d wanted but had previously been unable to.
...
Then Jack. Jack because it’s flat, Robinson because – well, the name came in a flash, ‘before you can say . . .’ It was only later that I realised, or remembered, that I was allying myself to a whole tradition of Robinsons in fiction, poetry and film, all of them ne’er-do-wells or suspect in some way: in Fielding, Dickens, Conrad, Henry James, Céline, Kafka, Muriel Spark, Chris Petit, Patrick Keiller, Weldon Kees, Simon Armitage
Hence the "I explained about Jack, and I mentioned Jennie too". In this novel, Boyle has written it under his own name, and this is seemingly the last we'll see of Jack Robinson, Boyle saying recently "in The Other Jack I’ve let him sidle away, his time was up."
The opening of this book is also a direct and deliberate rewrite of the opening of by the same author which begins:
Someone was running, hard, behind me. Had I paid for the coffee? My mind was a blank. It was the waiter, I decided, and I hadn’t paid. I stopped and turned and he almost knocked me over. Grinning, out of breath, he handed me the book I’d left on the table. Had I read XXX, he asked, by the same author. No, I said, not that one, although in fact I have read it. He seemed a little eager. He was younger than me, in the way that she is older. You should, he said. It’s one of the early ones but it’s still her best.
That was based on a true story of sorts, although XXX in the novel proves to be a fictitious writer, T.S. Nyman, and one with seemingly multiple stories.
Here the mail waiter becomes female, Robyn, and the book Boyle is reading is his own, or rather, Jack Robinson's. Which story is closer to the real story - or perhaps neither - isn't clear, and indeed it adds to Boyle's aims that it remains that way.
The novel, or essay? or true story?, here is based around bookish conversations between Boyle and Robyn, an equally avid and well-informed reader. Pseudonymity is one key strand, with Boyle's beloved Stendhal (or rather Marie-Henri Beyle, as Stendhal was but one of his identities) and of course Pessoa, acknowledged as the masters, Pessoa so much so that he invented his own term and concept of heteronyms.
But there is much more here besides, with the lengthy list of books referenced speaking to the depth of the erudition, while the novel's concept, and indeed much of the writing, remains playful, further meta-fictional nods to 'by the same author' and other writing by Jack Robinson, alongside some honest appraisal of the state of the literary world and Boyle's own relative privilege.
Wonderful stuff. If this is the end of Jack Robinson's novels, I can only hope it is the start of Charles Boyle's.
Jack Robinson bibliography
Recessional (2009) - my review
Days and Nights In W12 (2011) - my review
by the same author (2017) - my review
An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B. (2017)- my review
Robinson (2017) - my review
Blush (2018) with Natalia Zagórska-Thomas - my review
Good Morning, Mr Crusoe (2019) - my review
September 24, 2021
Charles Boyle has written several books, a lot of them under a different name. As Jack Robinson he has published 7 books and then there is one by Jennie Walker which is also by Charles Boyle really. This last one is very reminiscent of Don Delillo because it is about cricket and Boyle is English, and Delillo wrote a book under a feminine pseudonym (Cleo Birdwell) about baseball and Delillo is American. I only mention this because it is discussed in this book.
Pseudonyms are important in this book. It is framed as conversations between the author and a woman called Robyn. And it discusses Jack Robinson and Jennie Walker along with Boyle’s other go to character Stendhal (one of Marie-Henri Beyle’s many pseudonyms) and some other people known for their pseudonymity.
Also important here are books. The author and Robyn talk about books, about authors, about publishing, about plots etc.. David Markson is referenced a number of times and the book has a sort of Markson-like feel to it as it sets one idea after another in front of the reader sometimes seeming to jump fairly randomly from one to another but somehow making the connection. (At this point, I should probably acknowledge that Markson’s books that appear to simply list one unconnected fact after another are among my favourite books of all time: it amazes me how someone can simply catalogue facts and create an emotional impact).
There isn’t really a plot to this book. But it is a delight to read and anyone who loves books will, I think, take a lot of pleasure in reading this, probably with a smile on their face most of the time. I understand that Boyle has indicated that Jack Robinson will not write any more books. That may be true, but I hope that Charles Boyle will write some more.
Pseudonyms are important in this book. It is framed as conversations between the author and a woman called Robyn. And it discusses Jack Robinson and Jennie Walker along with Boyle’s other go to character Stendhal (one of Marie-Henri Beyle’s many pseudonyms) and some other people known for their pseudonymity.
Also important here are books. The author and Robyn talk about books, about authors, about publishing, about plots etc.. David Markson is referenced a number of times and the book has a sort of Markson-like feel to it as it sets one idea after another in front of the reader sometimes seeming to jump fairly randomly from one to another but somehow making the connection. (At this point, I should probably acknowledge that Markson’s books that appear to simply list one unconnected fact after another are among my favourite books of all time: it amazes me how someone can simply catalogue facts and create an emotional impact).
There isn’t really a plot to this book. But it is a delight to read and anyone who loves books will, I think, take a lot of pleasure in reading this, probably with a smile on their face most of the time. I understand that Boyle has indicated that Jack Robinson will not write any more books. That may be true, but I hope that Charles Boyle will write some more.
July 30, 2021
Sort of like a British version of David Markson, with a Stendhal fixation, a metafictional dialogue (not presented as dialogue) between a pair of readers, an older male pseudonymous author/publisher and a young female aspiring writer waiter (the same words save the second letter), sitting in a cafe, a very loose framework for a collection of literary quotations and anecdotes, book/reading impressions and experiences, the participants' privacy settings pretty firmly set against revealing much (author reveals that he's married, has a child older than the woman he sits with, went to Cambridge, used to write poems, never "dropped acid," worked on the Collins Dictionary and a sort of encyclopedia, lives five minutes from west London, had a stable childhood, but not much more). Although Boyle has self-published this under his own name instead of Jack Robinson, the man arranging the quotations, as in the Markson books, is at best only suggested -- an abstract, acutely angled autobiography, to be generous. Read this in less than a day, in two summertime weekend sittings while sick for first time since just before pandemia. I'd recently read the author's book on Stendhal published under one of his pseudonyms, enjoyed it well enough, so ordered this one, always up for a book about books. This didn't disappoint. Served its purpose. Covered some of the same ground as the Stendhal book. (Updating this review after reading Jack Robinson's by the same author from 2016, which is like this book's shadow book, its first draft, unless there's another book that came before that one -- Robyn is a man named Eric and the book they meet over is not Jack Robinson's Recessional but XXX by T.S. Nyman. If "by the same author" is XXX, "The Other Jack" is YYY, and I look forward to ZZZ in five years.) Easy, self-aware reading (eg, twenty pages to the end there's a bit about quitting a book twenty pages to the end). Suitable bathroom reading, although I read it reclining on the front porch, super-congested. Interesting in terms of an older literary fellow who grew up pre-critical theory, when white male literary professors smoked pipes, coming to terms or acknowledging or addressing contemporary woke twittersphere theory. But before too long it's back to another Stendhal quotation. Admitted self-loathing related to self-publicizing on social media makes me want to write a better version of this and do some publicity work for him. Will continue to keep an eye out for books under this author's real name or any other.
June 27, 2024
A fascinating and insightful reflection on literary life. Even better, Boyle writes from the margins, not from the main stream. I did the following in-depth video review of the book: https://youtu.be/gCzX2q7HcOw
January 1, 2024
review tbc
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews