Adam Mars-Jones's Blog, page 2

Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir by Greg Bellow review

Greg Bellow's memoir about his father Saul lacks literary weight

If the real children of great men and women are their deeds (their books, in the case of writers), where does that leave mere flesh and blood? Stranded, with a sense of profound but broken connection. This state is likely to become permanent with the death of the parent, but Greg Bellow got used to it early. His father left the first Mrs Bellow, Anita, when Greg was eight.

Greg Bellow is a retired psychotherapist, someone who has made damage and healing his life's work. He should be well placed to reconcile his father's contradictions, or to reconcile himself to them, though it doesn't work out that way. Therapists don't necessarily understand their own drives, any more than novelists, also traders in insight, necessarily understand theirs.

Maggie and Me by Damian Barr review

Adam Mars-Jones on a shrewd, sharp memoir of Thatcher-inspired escape

The death of Margaret Thatcher has put wind in the sails of Maggie and Me, but Damian Barr's memoir would have managed perfectly well on its own. This memoir of deprivation and survival is shrewdly constructed and written with a winning dry humour.

Barr's starting point is the night in October 1984 when Mrs Thatcher's escape from the bombs planted in her Brighton hotel dominated the television news ("this blonde woman rises from rubble again and again like a Cyberman off Dr Who"). It was the first night that Barr, then aged eight, spent in an unfamiliar flat after his mother left the marital home to live with her boyfriend Logan.

Film-makers need to trust the audience

Scarecrow and The King of Marvin Gardens quirky, unstylised films made in the 60s and 70s that refused to smooth their rough edges. This bravery, Adam Mars-Jones argues, is what film-makers are missing today

The label "independent film" doesn't mean what it once did, and the Sundance festival is part of the reason. The moment aspiring film-makers realised there was a potential shortcut to distribution and acclaim, they started smoothing off their rough edges consciously or without even noticing or at least they began to stylise themselves. Either way, the overall effect of the festival has not been to promote individuality but to erode it. So it's a mild beneficial shock to watch two American films of the early 1970s on re-release not because they're masterpieces, exactly, but because they give the flavour of a different set of assumptions.

Scarecrow, directed by Jerry Schatzberg, won a prize at Cannes in 1973 (the Palme d'Or) then more or less disappeared. Like Easy Rider (1969), the film that persuaded Hollywood to take a generation seriously (a reaction to brute profitability, not aesthetic distinction), it's both a buddy movie and a road movie, those quintessential 1970s genres. The buddy-road-movie is a sort of anti-genre, like the picaresque in literature, useful as much as anything for what it lets you leave out. Episodic structure, lack of development, plain miscellaneousness none of these counts as a defect. Many films of the period choose a tough ending over a sweet one, but would prefer to escape the tyranny of an ending altogether.

The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook review

A British colonel shares his home with a German architect in postwar Hamburg in Rhidian Brook's promising but thinly developed novel

Rhidian Brook's family history handed him The Aftermath more or less on a plate. His grandfather, Walter Brook, allocated a requisitioned house in Hamburg in 1946, took the unusual decision to share it with the owners, rather than dispossessing them.

In the novel the correspondingly altruistic figure is Colonel Lewis Morgan, who allows Stefan Lubert, an architect awaiting official permission to work again, to stay in his mansion on the Elbe. There's plenty of rebuilding to be done all round. Lubert's wife disappeared in the firestorm caused by allied bombing. His teenage daughter is beginning to challenge his authority. Meanwhile Morgan's wife, Rachael, and 11-year-old son Edmund are on their way to join him. An older boy was killed in 1942, by a bomb dumped by a plane returning from a raid on Milford Haven, without strategic intent. Morgan feels that Rachael is trapped in her grief. She can't understand why he refuses to express his.

The Sea of Innocence by Kishwar Desai review

Slack editorialising kills the tension in a topical tale of rape and murder in India

Simran Singh, the recurring narrator-heroine of Kishwar Desai's mystery novels, is an unusual mixture not exactly a rebel but very far from conforming to Indian social codes. She drinks both beer and whisky, and on her holiday in Goa (where this rather sombre adventure is set) sees the dilatoriness of the Indian government as a blessing for once, since a long-proposed ban on beach smoking hasn't yet come into force. She describes herself as a strong atheist but can be moved to light a candle in church for a missing girl.

Though Simran is in her 40s, so that it's hardly surprising her mother (an offstage character here) should be keen for her to settle down, she's in no particular hurry to stop playing the field. Even so, she's not by any but the strictest standards a loose woman. It's hardly a question of her fearing commitment, since she has adopted a girl called Durga now 16 from a traumatic background. Getting a henna tattoo on the beach, Durga teases her that she should get one too, a dragon tattoo. The reference to Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander mocks Simran's "penchant for trying to solve difficult crime cases", though she's a social worker by profession.

The Sea of Innocence by Kishwar Desai – review

Slack editorialising kills the tension in a topical tale of rape and murder in India

Simran Singh, the recurring narrator-heroine of Kishwar Desai's mystery novels, is an unusual mixture – not exactly a rebel but very far from conforming to Indian social codes. She drinks both beer and whisky, and on her holiday in Goa (where this rather sombre adventure is set) sees the dilatoriness of the Indian government as a blessing for once, since a long-proposed ban on beach smoking hasn't yet come into force. She describes herself as a strong atheist but can be moved to light a candle in church for a missing girl.

Though Simran is in her 40s, so that it's hardly surprising her mother (an offstage character here) should be keen for her to settle down, she's in no particular hurry to stop playing the field. Even so, she's not by any but the strictest standards a loose woman. It's hardly a question of her fearing commitment, since she has adopted a girl called Durga – now 16 – from a traumatic background. Getting a henna tattoo on the beach, Durga teases her that she should get one too, a dragon tattoo. The reference to Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander mocks Simran's "penchant for trying to solve difficult crime cases", though she's a social worker by profession.

In practice, by this stage (The Sea of Innocence is the third in the series) the character's professional background has become a technicality. There are no details given of her work life and when she uses the words "case" and "investigation" they have only the standard detective overtones.

No holiday destination is as untroubled as the brochures make out, and Desai gets a little overheated (and a little incoherent) about the shadow side of Goa: "There was a looming darkness around the edges. Like a hungry nocturnal sea animal, it padded through the sand, seeking victims…" One likely victim is Liza Kay, a British teenager who seems to have vanished, though she turns up in sexually charged video footage sent to the authorities. Someone is trying to make trouble, and important people are beginning to wonder if they can take their immunity for granted.

Unlike her heroine, Desai can't seem to forget her day job (she's a columnist). She keeps relapsing into opinion-mongering in a way that works against the possibility of thriller tension. "Was it a larger problem that an apparently modernising India did not know how to deal with female sexuality, and assumed that normal, friendly behaviour and western clothes meant that the women were available?"

Desai has spent plenty of time in Goa (it's given as one of her places of residence in the biographical note) but rarely rises above a bland Lonely Planet note: "On the surface the state seemed so peaceful. But from all accounts it too was torn between the ghosts of its Hindu, Muslim and Catholic history and the dreams of the future…"

Journalism can enrich a thriller but it needs to be harder-edged than this, less slackly editorialising. The nearest approach to reportage is a description of a visit to an electronics store in Anjuna village, where an old woman matter-of-factly recounts the brutal treatment of her nephew, not only by criminals but the police. These pages come alive. Urgency fades with the return of the think-piece tone: "…in many ways vulnerable, poor and thus marginalised men in this country were as much at the mercy of the police as women were."

Desai's grasp of non-Indian lives is sometimes weak. Is Liza's 24-year-old sister supposed to be telling transparent lies when she says: "I'm just about to go to Oxford University – managed to get in…"? Apparently not. This academic coup is one of the few things she's not lying about.

The thriller isn't a high-minded form and resists being recruited for a social agenda. If, like Stieg Larsson, you go to extremes in your depiction of violence against women, you may achieve not sensitisation to the issues but simple numbness. In the case of The Sea of Innocence, the gap between the form and the imagined intention is impossibly wide. The cover copy teases with: a missing girl, a death in paradise and a race against time to uncover the truth. The book's dedication reads: "For Jyoti, Scarlett and the thousands of women who have been raped and murdered in India – in the hope that one day they will get justice."

Jyoti was the name of the girl raped on a bus in Delhi. No doubt this case dominated the headlines while Desai was writing but it doesn't earn its place in the book. Scarlett Keeling's name is a problem for the opposite reason, being all too close to the story, since this was the British teenager raped and murdered in Goa a few years ago (her death classified as accidental until her mother found evidence).

Of course real-life crimes can suggest thriller plots – the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby is there in the background of Murder on the Orient Express. But the references to Scarlett Keeling and her mother, Fiona MacKeown, are constant. Desai even quotes from an email of Keeling's (took sum md an lsd and xstasy I was soooo fuked man), certainly more vivid than the commentary: "It was the story of a young girl leading an artificial and very adult life, where she was seemingly pushed frenetically into one disturbing situation after another."

Despite the pious dedication, it's hardly respectful to exploit the sufferings of a real teenager to give your thriller more impact. Family tragedy in the headlines isn't something to be crumbled over a concocted story, like a stock cube, in an effort to boost the flavour.

Kishwar DesaiThrillersFictionIndiaRapeScarlett KeelingAdam Mars-Jones
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The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook – review

A British colonel shares his home with a German architect in postwar Hamburg in Rhidian Brook's promising but thinly developed novel

Rhidian Brook's family history handed him The Aftermath more or less on a plate. His grandfather, Walter Brook, allocated a requisitioned house in Hamburg in 1946, took the unusual decision to share it with the owners, rather than dispossessing them.

In the novel the correspondingly altruistic figure is Colonel Lewis Morgan, who allows Stefan Lubert, an architect awaiting official permission to work again, to stay in his mansion on the Elbe. There's plenty of rebuilding to be done all round. Lubert's wife disappeared in the firestorm caused by allied bombing. His teenage daughter is beginning to challenge his authority. Meanwhile Morgan's wife, Rachael, and 11-year-old son Edmund are on their way to join him. An older boy was killed in 1942, by a bomb dumped by a plane returning from a raid on Milford Haven, without strategic intent. Morgan feels that Rachael is trapped in her grief. She can't understand why he refuses to express his.

The material was intended for the screen as well as the page, even before Ridley Scott's production company commissioned Brook to write a script. Perhaps Brook worked on the versions in tandem. Certainly the book has some of the indeterminate quality of a screenplay waiting for a director. A scene in a novel can't be done from a neutral camera angle – not if it has started with a defined point of view. When Edmund, uneasily befriending some local trümmerkinder (feral "children of the rubble"), sees some "medicine for venereal disease" and "prophylactics" among their "measly but eclectic" treasures, we need to be told either how he recognises these objects or what he thinks they are.

Rhidian Brook thanks his father and uncle Colin for their memories of the period, when they must have been quite young themselves. Some, though not all, of the details are compelling, and some are oddly stranded between persuasiveness and tall tale: "Two children were dangling a boy upside down over a bridge in front of an oncoming train. The dangling boy was holding a golf club and for a moment it looked as though the engine would strike him, but the train passed under him, with feet to spare, and as it passed he knocked some coal off the top of the tender for the waiting women below to catch in their skirts." It's not easy to visualise this except in cartoon terms.

The dialogue takes no particular trouble to reproduce period speech. People refer to "mental health issues" and use formulas such as, "It's a posh thing" and "I'm just saying, that's all". When Morgan's deputy, Captain Barker, describes himself as a "stand-in. Or stand-up, depending on who you talk to", he's referring to something, standup comedy, that would have had no meaning in 1946.

Word choice is generally rather erratic. What makes a room arcane ("spacious and arcane rooms")? Normally "lithe" means something more physical than merely "adaptable" ("She'd once been lithe in times of changed circumstance, but here she seemed quite demotivated, found everything rebarbative"). Sometimes Brook goes for ambitious literary effects, and sometimes they work – "It was like being pulled apart by horses: the solid workhorse of duty and the skittish Arab of desire" – but making sure the floorboards are sound should take priority over laying down fancy carpet.

The film, if it comes about, should be able to tighten the period detail and to intensify the atmosphere. With luck the actor playing the hero may give him something more distinctive than worthiness. The director may feel a shortage of set pieces, apart from a satisfying confrontation on a frozen river. In April 1947 the Royal Navy detonated more than 6,000 tonnes of explosives on the island of Heligoland, making one of the biggest bangs in history. Though it took place outside the time frame of the book, Brook's fictional Colonel Morgan was posted there in the run-up to it. It's easy to imagine a director pleading to recreate it.

For the reader the problem isn't the absence of explosions but something less easily remedied, a lack of subtlety. There's a sense of missed opportunity, with a promising situation thinly developed. Brook's family history may have handed him The Aftermath more or less on a plate, but it's still possible to have doubts about his cooking technique, presentation skills, choice of garnish.

FictionAdam Mars-Jones
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Film-makers need to trust the audience | Adam Mars-Jones

Scarecrow and The King of Marvin Gardens – quirky, unstylised films made in the 60s and 70s that refused to smooth their rough edges. This bravery, Adam Mars-Jones argues, is what film-makers are missing today

The label "independent film" doesn't mean what it once did, and the Sundance festival is part of the reason. The moment aspiring film-makers realised there was a potential shortcut to distribution and acclaim, they started smoothing off their rough edges – consciously or without even noticing – or at least they began to stylise themselves. Either way, the overall effect of the festival has not been to promote individuality but to erode it. So it's a mild beneficial shock to watch two American films of the early 1970s on re-release – not because they're masterpieces, exactly, but because they give the flavour of a different set of assumptions.

Scarecrow, directed by Jerry Schatzberg, won a prize at Cannes in 1973 (the Palme d'Or) then more or less disappeared. Like Easy Rider (1969), the film that persuaded Hollywood to take a generation seriously (a reaction to brute profitability, not aesthetic distinction), it's both a buddy movie and a road movie, those quintessential 1970s genres. The buddy-road-movie is a sort of anti-genre, like the picaresque in literature, useful as much as anything for what it lets you leave out. Episodic structure, lack of development, plain miscellaneousness – none of these counts as a defect. Many films of the period choose a tough ending over a sweet one, but would prefer to escape the tyranny of an ending altogether.

The heroes "meet cute" in Scarecrow, as hitchhikers competing for rides, though it's a benighted sort of cuteness, and they travel together from California through Colorado to Michigan. One of them – the charmer, Lion (short for his middle name of Lionel) – has been in the navy, saving money for the child he has never seen. The other – surly Max – has been in jail and has plans for a carwash business. Al Pacino, who plays Lion, had already appeared in The Godfather, but had made one of his first films for Schatzberg, The Panic in Needle Park, a couple of years earlier. Pacino would always have had a shot at movie stardom, by virtue of his prettiness rather than his intensity, but co-star Gene Hackman, with his theatre background and lumpy manner, has character actor written all over him, and needed a less formulaic approach to film-making (and specifically the breakthrough of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde) to get noticed.

Schatzberg's background was as a photographer, for fashion magazines (Vogue and McCall's) rather than anything more hard-edged, but he certainly responds to unglamorous surroundings. The interior of one bar is so red it gives William Eggleston's famous photograph, Red Ceiling, a run for its money.

Hackman has cited Max as his favourite role, though the aggressiveness of the character seems beyond him – he can do terrier but not pitbull. He did his best work as two Harrys out of their depth: Harry Caul in Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Harry Moseby in Penn's Night Moves (1975).

It seems odd that a buddy movie such as Scarecrow should offer such rich pickings to female actors (Dorothy Tristan, Ann Wedgeworth, Eileen Brennan), but there's a sort of logic to it too. In the absence of a stereotypical love interest, female characters can be more freely developed. Could actors such as Ellen Burstyn, Karen Black, Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, with their neediness, blankness, oddity, have become leading players in any other decade?

Penelope Allen, playing the mother of Lion's child, has only one scene – and it's a phone call at that, but she makes the most of it in terms of raw bewildered emotion. It is pleasing that Pacino kept in touch, casting her as Queen Elizabeth in Looking for Richard (1996). In the movies it is possible to share a scene without ever having met, as Bowie and Dietrich did in Just a Gigolo, and Allen and Pacino don't even have a scene together in Scarecrow.

The light presence of music in films is one of the striking features of the period, though Easy Rider itself was virtually a jukebox musical of surefire counterculture hits. There is barely 10 minutes of music in the whole of Scarecrow, though with current releases you can get 10 minutes of music in the first five. Much of the music on the soundtrack is being heard by the characters as well as us, even if the dialogue sometimes has to work hard to make this plausible. Elgar in a honky-tonk – really? Cue helpful dialogue to prepare us: "High school has its graduation here every year … they've even got Pomp and Circumstances on the jukebox."

Nothing shows a lack of faith in the audience like a reliance on emotional signals from the music. By my reckoning, the arrival of the CD was the worst thing that ever happened to the cinema. As soon as it was technically possible for an original soundtrack album to be 70-plus minutes long, there was pressure on films to make it so. More often than not, film music claims to bring you closer to the emotions of the story while actually thrusting itself between you and your reactions. The film score, as we have come to know it, is like the "friend" who finishes your sentences for you.

If Hackman is an unlikely star of the sort the period made possible, the same goes double for Jack Nicholson. Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens, made in 1972 and consolidating the success of Five Easy Pieces, shows him in a rare passive role. Nicholson was an old friend of the director and co-wrote the 1968 Monkees vehicle, Head – not the most roadworthy vehicle, admittedly. He plays David Staebler, a confessional radio performer summoned to Atlantic City, at that time a decrepit resort catering to the decrepit, by his brother Jason (Bruce Dern), who claims to be on the brink of a big property deal involving a tropical island. Nicholson hoists those eyebrows only once in the whole film (most of the time they're hidden by his glasses), and retreats from the assertiveness right away with a rabbity twitch.

David is buttoned-down and buttoned-in. He drinks only milk, though for good manners he has it served in a wine glass rather than a tumbler. When Warren Beatty orders milk in a redneck bar in The Parallax View (1974), it's a provocation. Here, nobody mentions David's little foible. It's plausibly a bit of character-drawing, as if his troubled digestion needs soothing, as well as a gift to the director of photography, László Kovács, providing the maximum visual contrast with Jason's bloody mary.

Kovács had already worked on Easy Rider, and already been used by Altman and Bogdanovich. Vilmos Zsigmond, another Hungarian émigré, was the cinematographer on Scarecrow – having directed photography for Boorman and (again) for Altman. (He's still working.) The shadowed America of 1970s films was often being seen through European eyes, though these two films operate very differently. In Scarecrow, the landscape makes an unpredictable contribution. It is a character in its own right. The King of Marvin Gardens is more artfully constructed – there is a sense that real locations have been chosen to chime with what is in the script.

The narrative is elliptical, with gaps strongly signalled, so that, for instance, a daytime scene outside a hotel cuts to the same people in the same place, but at night. Perhaps the disorientation is integral to the script, or perhaps some fierce editing produced the effect. Emergency restructurings are commonplace in film-making – the first cut of Annie Hall, for instance, was three hours long, which seems inconceivable now (I learned this from It Don't Worry Me, Ryan Gilbey's book on 1970s American cinema). Perhaps there was round after round of high-risk work in the cutting rooms, Russian roulette a la The Deer Hunter over and over again, until the fatality of Heaven's Gate in 1980 and the end of the cycle of possibilities that started with Easy Rider.

In The King of Marvin Gardens it is touching to see the awkwardness of the embraces between the brothers, from a time when the manly hug was a new mechanism, a docking between two fragile structures. Dern is much the taller man. Nicholson half holds back, then seems to want the intimacy to be prolonged.

Dern's Jason is all wheedling confidence, though the Atlantic City setting can seem almost too ready-made a metaphor. Naturally, those like Jason who think they've got the game worked out, that they have a system for winning, are the greatest suckers of all. The varied outfits Jason wears paint his self-portrait in fantasy: the cricket jumper suggesting suavity, the Hawaiian shirt insisting on a relaxation that isn't really available to him. When he drapes his camel coat over his shoulders, in the style of an old-fashioned mobster, it's as if he's already seen Burt Lancaster's turn in Atlantic City (1980) and is paying homage.

The King of Marvin Gardens shares Scarecrow's parsimonious attitude to music. The great scene where Ellen Burstyn's Sally has a bonfire of the vanities on the chilly beach, burning her clothes and burying her cosmetics as a sign that she resigns from sexual competition, then cutting her hair, is done without any nudging from a score. A change of camera angle, showing her new loosely cropped hairstyle beside the flames, is all that is needed to summon up the sufferings of Dreyer's Joan of Arc.

• Scarecrow is showing at various cinemas in June. The King of Marvin Gardens is showing at the BFI Southbank from 31 May to 6 June.

Jack NicholsonAl PacinoFrancis Ford CoppolaFilm industrySundance film festivalCannes film festivalFestivalsAdam Mars-Jones
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Maggie and Me by Damian Barr – review

Adam Mars-Jones on a shrewd, sharp memoir of Thatcher-inspired escape

The death of Margaret Thatcher has put wind in the sails of Maggie and Me, but Damian Barr's memoir would have managed perfectly well on its own. This memoir of deprivation and survival is shrewdly constructed and written with a winning dry humour.

Barr's starting point is the night in October 1984 when Mrs Thatcher's escape from the bombs planted in her Brighton hotel dominated the television news ("this blonde woman rises from rubble again and again like a Cyberman off Dr Who"). It was the first night that Barr, then aged eight, spent in an unfamiliar flat after his mother left the marital home to live with her boyfriend Logan.

Barr's mother was five foot nothing, his adored father "six foot everything", not exactly a New Man but still the only dad in the village who would push a pram. He worked at the Ravenscraig steel works, making the sun set twice every night, as young Damian understood it, when he emptied the furnaces at the end of a shift, sending a "bigger brighter cleaner light" through the porridge-coloured curtains of Damian's new home.

In his acknowledgements Barr describes the slow accumulation of manuscript pages, and sees his breakthrough in finding his way through as the need to remember rather than imagine. It's not memory, though, that supplies the Dylan Thomas note in this evocation of his father: "My dad is always minerals. The whites of his eyes and his smiling falsers sparkle out from the coal-black rest of him."

Barr's father worked in just the sort of heavy industry that was on the way out in the Thatcher years, while Damian and his mother ended up living as part of a ramshackle extended family dependent on benefits, petty crime and drink. They seem to personify respectively the respectable and unrespectable poor, at a time when the government was making poverty itself unrespectable (though difficult to avoid in a place like North Lanarkshire).

The schoolboy Damian's choice of another path wasn't necessarily high-minded. For a tall asthmatic boy aware of his gayness, and not particularly adept at hiding it, schools and libraries were natural places of refuge. Tweaking Blanche Dubois's celebrated line, he says he has always depended "on the kindness of teachers". Even the Scripture Union had its value, more on account of the absence of bullies than the presence of Jesus.

Barr specialises in the understated effects of double-take. When, still a schoolboy, he answers a small ad and meets his first potential partner, the man's car smells of "something that isn't Lynx". And how's this for an account of Scottish funeral manners – "All the women are crying and the headstones are more expressive than the men." With a statement such as "I'm not naturally clumsy but I've learnt to be", the implication is grimmer. Logan was brutally abusive, and when Damian's mother was hospitalised with a cerebral haemorrhage his opportunities were unlimited. Injuries during PE or on the sports field could camouflage other marks. As for why Damian protected his abuser, Logan threatened to give his little sister Teenie the same treatment if he said a word to anyone, a threat that was effective even though Damian could see that tomboyish Teenie was no natural victim. She would never be caught in the same trap as her brother. Logan hit her just the once. She kicked his shins. He laughed and learned his lesson.

Abuse isn't dwelt on, but dealt with almost lightly ("and that's the last of my baby teeth"). Logan imposes an arbitrary and inconsistent discipline: "Just when I think I've mastered eating – no clanking cutlery, no seconds, no complaining of feeling hungry – I'll chew the wrong way and …" Those three dots used to be the code that signified a sex scene, now it's a scene of abuse.

Damian's father took up with Mary, auxiliary nurse by day, country singer by night, whose taste in bright clothing earned her the nickname Mary the Canary. After a short-lived charm offensive she set herself against the children and did all she could to block access to their father. Even so, there must have been times when communication was easier than Barr lets on, if Mary helped him dress up as Alexis Colby from Dynasty – Joan Collins – for a school sponsored walk. He came to school fully made up, changing at lunchtime into a lacy black two-piece suit with pencil skirt and shoulder pads to totter round the reservoir at Strathclyde Park.

A better refuge even than the giftshop of the Lourdes Grotto at Carfin was the home of Damian's schoolfriend Heather. It was the first "bought hoose" he'd ever been in ("I thought only the council built houses"). Here he sampled such exotica as garlic chicken – he had thought garlic only came on bread, and then only on telly. There was even a dining table for formal occasions ("I stroke it like my dad would a shiny new BMW"). Chastely he and Heather play the roles of boyfriend and girlfriend, with Damian feeling guilty that he is misleading her, though it suits her to be respectably out of circulation. When the two of them lead their school team to the national finals of the Young Consumer of the Year Quiz it's a glimpse of the promised land for him, since the finals are held in Brighton. He barely has time to see young men queueing outside a nightclub, some of them blatantly holding hands, before he's back on the train home, with nothing to show for it except a Tales of the City video.

Heather doesn't come to Damian's house, or she in her turn would witness exotic habits of consumption. He lives in the centre of the Buckfast Triangle, the 10-mile area of western Scotland where 90% of "Buckie" is sold and where "countless men disappear" – Buckie the cheap strong caffeinated red wine, made for their own obscure reasons by Benedictine monks in Devon. Buckie isn't quite Proust's madeleine, but Damian's mother was prescribed it when pregnant, to build her up, so it's almost a memory from the womb. "When vomited up – as it always is – it hangs in glossy molasses-like strings, reeking like turpentine, that you've got to pull from your mouth." His mother's lover passes out, white T-shirt stained with black drool, not just a trickle of it but (typically adroit pop-culture reference) "thick sticky strands like the stuff that comes out the fat Baron in Dune".

Each chapter of Maggie and Me has an epigraph from Margaret Thatcher, such as "I am extraordinarily patient … provided I get my own way in the end." JK Rowling did something similar in The Casual Vacancy, using the seventh edition of Charles Arnold-Baker's Local Council Administration. It's a neat formal device, until near the end of the book when Barr leans too hard on it. An indictment of Thatcher's negative achievements ends with "You also saved my life … You were different, like me, and you had to fight to be yourself."

In what way "like"? The temptation to go for a big finish and a direct statement squanders a lot of the subtlety that precedes it. To claim Thatcher in a one-line paragraph as "My other mother" is a hollow shock effect. As his first mother paid him less and less attention as time went on, and delivered him up unwittingly to abuse, there should be some irony clinging to Thatcher as her deputy, but it's hard to spot.

Elsewhere Barr's control of irony has been very sharp, perhaps most of all when he's treating irony itself – indispensable adolescent ketchup splodged freely over every dish – back when he was annotating his copy of The Catcher in the Rye: "'I feel sorry for Holden. He is just SUCH a damaged individual,' I write at the end of chapter ten, my biro exhausted by empathy."

In the final pages there isn't just a forced Thatcherism but something alarmingly close to on-your-bike Tebbitry. "Be strong, Maggie told us all. Get educated. Get away. That's what she said. I listened. Heather listened. Mark didn't." The ersatz urgency of those short tabloid sentences seems imported from a smaller, weaker book.

Mark was Damian's best friend at school, at odds with his gayness, partly because by virtue of being handsome and sporty he had the option of fitting in, though at a cost. He was understandably more conflicted about the need to "get away". There will always be gay people for whom all roads lead to Brighton (where Barr now lives), or San Francisco. Others don't see uprooting in such positive terms. In that sense, if no other, the desolation of Barr's family life may have been an advantage, making his choices clear.

Barr seemed to understand this when he gave an angry address at Mark's funeral (after he had finally succeeded in killing himself), blaming the bigots who had made his life impossible. It's a shame that this admirable reluctance to blame the victim doesn't survive to the end of the book, and the brassy finale it would be better without.

Autobiography and memoirBiographyAdam Mars-Jones
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Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir by Greg Bellow – review

Greg Bellow's memoir about his father Saul lacks literary weight

If the real children of great men and women are their deeds (their books, in the case of writers), where does that leave mere flesh and blood? Stranded, with a sense of profound but broken connection. This state is likely to become permanent with the death of the parent, but Greg Bellow got used to it early. His father left the first Mrs Bellow, Anita, when Greg was eight.

Greg Bellow is a retired psychotherapist, someone who has made damage and healing his life's work. He should be well placed to reconcile his father's contradictions, or to reconcile himself to them, though it doesn't work out that way. Therapists don't necessarily understand their own drives, any more than novelists, also traders in insight, necessarily understand theirs.

It needn't be a stumbling block that Bellow junior doesn't himself have a literary background. True, he reads novels as if the personal impulses that have gone into them could be reconstituted without difficulty, though you might as well try to turn cider back into apples. But then so do many literary biographers. He does go badly wrong when relaying a conversation he had with his father in Chicago in 1980. They ran into a former professor who had once greeted Saul chafingly with the question, "How is the romancier?" As Greg recalls it: "Even decades later, Saul remained mystified that Leites could have so mischaracterised him as a romantic. To the contrary, I was mystified that my father could not see, or could no longer see, that his youthful idealism had been readily apparent to his teacher." Even quite a small French dictionary would have told him that romancier means only novelist, having no direct connection with romanticism.

Still, that's the book's thesis, that Saul Bellow was a young rebel, a political and social radical, who turned into an authority figure, after which he spent a lot of effort erasing from the official picture such youthful follies as a flirtation with the ideas of Wilhelm Reich. Greg remembers an orgone box installed in the hallway of one apartment, like a telephone booth where all calls were made naked.

This isn't a worthless reading of Bellow's development, from "a young man full of questions to an old man full of answers". There's certainly a shift in world-view between Herzog in 1964 and Mr Sammler's Planet in 1970. It's just that Greg's need to claim the Saul Bellow he remembers from his childhood (or has reconstructed from it) as the essence of the man overwhelms any nuance of interpretation. It's all very well to talk about "the young father I loved and wanted to preserve" but that impulse denies more of the past than it respects. Both Bellows saw the armed conflicts of the 1960s as crucial, for instance, but for Greg what mattered was Vietnam, while for Saul it was the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Rewinding the tape isn't a possibility.

The tone is suspect from the first paragraph, a memory of a "terrible argument" Greg witnessed as an eight-year-old, conducted in Yiddish, between Saul and Saul's father while on a visit to Chicago, after which Saul wept bitterly in the car. "I knew his heart was breaking. I knew because of the bond between my father's tender heart and mine." That's not how any eight-year-old could feel about family anger and a parent's loss of control. Besides, if Greg was eight then the argument is likely to have been about Saul's imminent departure from his marriage (Yiddish wasn't a household language in Greg's childhood, though knowledge of German later enabled him to follow it). A poignant or else preposterous moment to claim a connection with your father's vulnerability, when he's on the point of abandoning you.

Greg refers to Bellow "raising" three sons, but that's just what he didn't do. James Atlas in his biography refers rather patly to Bellow leaving a wife when he felt displaced by the arrival of a son, and could no longer himself be the child. The other sons, Adam and Daniel, had an even shorter time of nurturing than Greg.

If softness was at Saul Bellow's core, then it follows that he needed to keep it out of sight as much as possible. The only letter from Saul to Greg in the published volume of Bellow's correspondence is caustic and needling, after Greg (aged 16) had protested against his father paying less than the full alimony to Anita: "I've never billed her for the pain she caused me. Or is it a one-way street?" Greg presents a soft-focus version of this in Saul Bellow's Heart – "he asked me to be fair to both parents" – and plays down the pain that made him write his own letter, which included the line "Don't make me ashamed to admit I'm your son".

Greg is proud of having struck out independently from his father, making his own decisions, but his independent status is a paradoxical thing if he craved his father's approval for it. He was deeply hurt when Saul, near the end of his life, failed to attend the wedding of Greg's daughter, and though he claims to have minded on her behalf it's hard to imagine that the bride's big day was spoiled by Saul's absence, as her father's was.

The strangest thing in the book is its unacknowledged hostility towards Janis, Bellow's fifth and final wife. In the account of Bellow's funeral at the beginning of the book, Greg mentions that he stood up, without being prompted, to praise Janis for her devotion. Yet by the time the funeral is referred to again at the other end of the book, references to a "coup d'etat" by her and even a "kidnapping" of Saul have intervened. Greg's own eulogy is forgotten. Instead he criticises the rabbi's tribute for romanticising the relationship between Janis and Saul.

The title of the first section, "Awakened by a Grave Robbery", at first seemed to express in a rather overpitched way Greg's sense that he was marginalised when his father died, by the way so many people claimed the privilege of bereavement. By the end of the book it seems to refer more directly to the fact that Janis had Saul buried in Vermont, far from where he had earlier wanted to lie, next to his parents.

Even without these manifestations of the anger he denies, Saul Bellow's Heart would be a forlorn project. It's just not possible for Greg Bellow to win the race he insists on running, when he's up against the athletes on his bookshelves, ink in their veins instead of blood – the books that have usurped him.

Saul BellowAutobiography and memoirAdam Mars-Jones
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