It's better, as a rule, to spell out one's enthusiasms than to dwell on a particularly wretched cultural encounter. However, if blogging is a mirror to the varieties of human experience - it is, it is - talking about the appalling must occasionally have its place beside the celebration of excellence.
If there's a worse novel than Graham Swift's Tomorrow, which I finished reading last night, I'd like to know what it is. Tomorrow is unbelievably bad. It is toe-curlingly, stomach-churningly, throat-closingly, eye-wateringly, howlingly bad. As bad as that? You might then wonder how I could have read to the end. Grim fascination is my plea. This is car-crash fiction. You think: it must either get better or sink to a level where the writer himself starts weeping on to the page and begging the forgiveness of his readers. But no, it just continues on its dreary, sometimes twee, often cloying and comprehensively misjudged way, until finally you put the book down thankful that the agony is over.
Without worrying about giving out spoilers since this is a book no one could possibly spoil, I'll just tell you that a mother (Paula, aka Paulie) lies awake in bed beside her sleeping husband (Mike, aka Mikey), thinking in the early hours of the morning about the family secret he is to reveal on the following day to their twin children (Kate and Nick), just turned sixteen. The conceit is that she's talking to the two of them, going through the history of the marriage, and of how, more especially, Kate and Nick came to be. This misconceived narrative device has Paula telling the twins things they obviously already know, and has her being a bit hesitant when she writes about sexual episodes between her and Mikey - as she, equally obviously, doesn't need to be, given that she's merely lying in bed thinking about their lives and not actually talking to Kate and Nick. But never mind; these are passing annoyances, though there's no end of them. The enduring discomfort is in the sheer banality of nearly everything that's recounted, unrelieved by any nuance of feeling or insight such as good writing about family life achieves. Even the family secret fails to liven up the tale.
An inkling of how bad Tomorrow is can be had from John Crace and Adam Mars-Jones. But only an inkling. The full reading experience defies adequate summary. Paulie, passionately, devotedly, in love with Mikey, decides suddenly that she needs to sleep with their vet. The only time Mikey is heard speaking to his daughter Kate, he calls her Katesy. The mind reels. Or, as the TLS said, 'A triumph'.
Thank goodness Tomorrow is now yesterday.