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storytelling in its purest form, that is, to invented stories, and the strategies writers have devised to cheat the inevitability of closure, to chase away the demons, to keep them away for good.
    Don’t think I don’t like real novels, though, the kind of novel in which people drink tea and commit adultery – I
do
like novels! I do! In spite of my mother’s warning. Although, if a comic charlady obtrudes upon the action of a real novel, I will fling the novel against the wall amidst a flood of obscenities because the presence of such a character as a comic charlady tells me more than I wish to know about the way her creator sees the world.
    Because all fiction, all writing of any kind, in fact, exists on a number of different levels. ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale,’ said D. H. Lawrence, and he was right, even if he did not want this to happen to
his
tales. If you read the tale carefully, the tale tells you more than the writer knows, often much more than they wanted to give away. The tale tells you, in all innocence, what its writer thinks is important, who she or he thinks is important and, above all, why. Call it the sub-text.
    I don’t really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely,sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven’t seen anybody all day. But one or two of the people I’m writing about, here, have aspirations in the Messianic direction and I’m all for pretension; besides, I’m
glad
that Iain Sinclair did his bit to bring about the resignation of Margaret Thatcher. But, rather than the gift of prophecy, it seems to me that the times
shine through
certain writers, so that we think they see more clearly than we do, whereas in reality they are making
us
see more clearly. Calling such writers seers, or prophets, is a form of shorthand. I suppose I’d include John Berger and William Burroughs in this category, probably J. G. Ballard, certainly Christina Stead.
    Otherwise, I like to write about writers who give me pleasure. Pleasure has always had a bad press in Britain. I’m all for pleasure, too. I wish there was more of it around. I also like to argue. There is also a strong irascibility factor in some of these pieces. A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.
    I’ve divided up this mass of evidence of fifteen years writing about books into sections according to various enthusiasms. Storytelling, yes. Food and the semiotics of food. My country, this messy, post-imperialist Britain, which is not the country of my childhood in Atlee’s austere, dignified egalitarian Forties, nor yet of my young womanhood in the ecstatic Sixties but something much more raucous and sinister. And there is also Amerika. Note I have adopted Kafka’s spelling for the title of this section.
    Like most Europeans of my generation, I have North America in my bloodstream. It started with the food parcels we used to receive just after the war, with the sticky American candies all over nuts and the cans of peaches, each half-peach as round, firm, golden, and ersatz as (had I but known it then) a silicone breast. I remember, possibly a trick of memory but even so, copies of
Glamour
and
Mademoiselle
and
Seventeen
thrown in as makeweights that showed me a world, as pastel-coloured and two-dimensional as a
Loony Tunes
cartoon, where people with good teeth on permanent exhibition in wide smiles ate inexplicable food, hamburgers, hot-dogs, French fries, and there were teenagers, bobby-sox, saddle Oxfords.
    It was the bright, simple world of the post-War Eisenhower Utopia and I didn’t encounter it again until Pop Art, when I realised it had been a vicious fake all the time.
    But it was the movies that administered America to me intravenously, as they did to the entire generation that remembers 1968 with such love. It