If a friend says things are fine, you might worry. That friend needn’t be a dog in a burning room with a tiny hat – we are far beyond that. Paul Reverb, the character study in playwright John Patrick Higgins’ witty debut novel, says “fine” a lot. When a bar server asks if Paul’s chaotic, drunken companion is alright, Paul excuses it: “He’s fine.” When a youth on a bus rejects Paul’s apology for racial profiling, Paul sums it up in that passive-aggressive English way: “Fine.” Meaning “Okay, have it your way.” Paul says he is fine. Paul is not fine.
Higgins established himself with his 2016 play, Everyday I Wake Up Hopeful, in which 43-year-old Malachy slouches alone through depression, suicidal ideation, and terminal illness. It’s a comedy, but one that courts despair and recognised pain. Across more plays, short stories, and podcasts, Higgins has continued to explore the quiet desperation in which Englishmen just about hang on. Even his own, in the hilarious memoir of socialised dental care gone wrong, Teeth: An Oral History. The lives of middle-aged men are to John Patrick Higgins as the statue of Ozymandias was to Shelley: epic, broken, and tragi-comic. Monuments to loneliness that nobody visits. Now, almost a decade after Malachy, he introduces a new pooterish non-hero, one who is almost a decade older.
Paul Reverb is a 57-year-old Londoner. He is single. He is an orphan. He is alone. His favourite band is the Smiths. None of this is anything to be proud of. Paul would love to be proud of something, but it is difficult now that the time to achieve anything has almost passed. He used to be in a band. He’s trying to write a novel. It’s going fine.
He tries to write in a cafe, where he might capture verisimilitude, the way people speak. This is for his novel about a vampire hypnotist living in modern Belfast, a city he’s never been to. It’s not going well and it’s the cafe’s fault. These places used to be full of real people and now they’re full of middle-class posers. He thinks this while trying to write a novel in front of everyone.
When a woman asks Paul to watch her bag, he is thrilled to be recognised as responsible and capable. Thrilled to be recognised at all and relieved to take a break from the uncooperative novel. However, he doesn’t believe the person who returns to claim the bag is the same woman who left it with him, so refuses to let her take it. He sees himself as a principled gentleman, but the rest of the cafe thinks he’s just an arse. It is like something out of the British sitcoms that Paul watched as a child: The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, Sorry, Dear John. There were lots of them. In each one, a man over 40 slowly loses his mind and, like the master of the genre, David Nobbs, John Patrick Higgins stage manages hilarity from this middle-aged befuddlement. Paul Reverb should have seen this all coming – he watched all the shows – but his generation thought they were different.
He was born in 1967, on the day Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, conceived through the sex that the Beatles and D.H. Lawrence brought to England four years earlier. He used to tell people this at parties. Like Saleem Sinai, who, in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, is born at the moment India gains independence, Paul Reverb’s life is in step with Britain’s liberation from stuffy conformity, respectability, and bowler-hatted office men. He will witness punk and post-punk. He is Generation X. He shouldn’t end up like Reginald Perrin leaving his clothes on the beach and escaping, but it’s growing very tempting. He doesn’t mention this Beatles fact at parties anymore. He doesn’t go to parties anyway and his coworkers don’t know the Beatles.
Paul doesn’t say much to anyone. It is easier to say “Fine.” Coming from the Latin, finis, it suggests an end, a finishing up. On sheet music, it denotes the finalé. Stop. This is how Paul uses it, to stop the conversation or give up on it. Paul can’t argue the youth on the bus into absolving him of white guilt. Fine. He can’t acknowledge his friend, Brendan’s alcoholism. He’s fine. Just stop. Stop the conversation. Paul’s not in control of it anymore. Not the cultural conversation. Not interpersonal ones.
The only person he meaningfully talks to is himself and it’s all stuff he can’t articulate, things he’s afraid to say, that he feels he can’t say. Not like the fallen, former hero, Morrissey, but the inner monologue of constipated thought. He has lived alone so long that he is backed up with reflections and self-analysis. If he were to share these thoughts with anyone, it would just isolate him further. He can’t tell drunken Brendan what he really thinks of him. He is stumped for the right thing to say to the youth and just makes things worse. So, he deploys “Fine”, like Fin at the end of a French film.
In a pub, as he tries once again to write, Paul observes the pretty server and her useless musician boyfriend. What good would it do to tell them what he really thinks about them, about the world? Why they shouldn’t bother. It just coils up back inside him, unsaid but thought, long and unbroken: “The planet’s on its arse, mate, and you’re fucking about in a band? I don’t mind – I’ll be dead by the time it all goes properly to shit, but you and your children will be sailing the swollen seas in a coracle made of human skin and drinking each other’s wee, and not for pleasure either, though he looks the type. He’s in a band.”
Of course, Paul was in a band once. Now he’s writing a novel. A debut novel. At his age.
It’s not a good novel. This much he knows, as he stares at the sentence he has managed to squeeze out: “Robinson pushed his hand into the belly of the sofa and met something warm and solid, something hairy and lively with jagged little teeth.” What ends up on the page is nowhere near as eloquent as his own thoughts. Paul envies the precision of Calvino’s sentences, the comic craft of Wodehouse. If Paul could step outside himself, he would no doubt be jealous of the writing of John Patrick Higgins, whose high-fibre sentences flow like burnt umber on a fine artist’s brush: “I pulled my phone from my pocket and started swiping through pages, my thumbs oozing like the belly of a gastropod, trailing across the screen.” It doesn’t come so easily for Paul. There’s a gap between thought, feeling, and action.
He communicates nothing with the novel. It just stands in place of communication. Paul writes in the cafe to be seen to write. He writes in the pub to impress the server by writing there bright and early. Another bar patron is tapping at a laptop – maybe he’s writing a novel, too, and maybe they can bond. They don’t.
The book is an excuse to act, not action itself. It is an effort to be perceived in a way Paul can control, but we can never control how we are perceived. Here, the novel moves from catalogue of failures into transformative narrative. Paul can’t avoid being perceived and correctly identified as what he is: a middle-aged man. Not the principled hero who saves the woman’s handbag. Not the right-on elder who recognises the racialised problems of London youth.
The freedom from respectability into which he was born has done nothing to change this. Even at home in his flat, he cannot escape perception. A window cleaner catches him masturbating over internet porn, and as Paul clambers trousers down to close the curtains, he falls flat on his face. The window cleaner calls an ambulance. They wouldn’t do that for a younger man.
Paul is not delusional. He is all too aware of his faults, perhaps too aware. Neither, however, is the public wrong: he is middle-aged and lost and out of touch. Surely, though, there is a middle ground, some meeting of self- and public-image that they can agree on. Paul foolishly thinks he can craft this happy space in a novel – anovel about a vampire hypnotist.
This is hardly surprising. His life has run in step with youth culture and pop consumption. His flat is a “landfill of dead media” – two thousand vinyl LPs, one thousand DVDs, five hundred CDs. Consumption has stood in place of identity, personality, and action. These things – jacket badges, trendy duds, hairstyles – communicated who he was when the stick couldn’t stir the thick reservoir of inner monologue. But what to do when those stand-ins no longer have cultural currency, when they are as obscure as ogham markings? Paul thinks to write a book precisely when nobody reads books anymore. Does anyone still read Wodehouse? he asks, foreshadowing and futureproofing his own literary failure.
It is this constant questioning that saves Paul from being merely a middle-aged self pitying drip. Still, the constant questioning also gets in his way. Stops him from acting.
It’s hard to blame him. We see what happens when he acts – he gets humiliated. Acting, like speaking, only confirms the victory of public perception over self-image. So, of course, he won’t finish the novel. It’s too big a risk. He doesn’t know if it is any good. “I wish I had someone to ask,” he confesses, “someone I loved or trusted or both. Someone to talk to.”
That is the real purpose of the novel, but he can’t even be honest with himself about it: he writes a story about a vampire hypnotist in Belfast instead. The novel stands in place of the thing that Paul really needs and wants: an intimate relationship or a friendship. Someone who could confirm that Paul, not the novel, is good. That he’s fine. “Stop talking, Paul,” they would say, “stop thinking, just be.”
Subconsciously, Paul must know this. That his novel is set in Belfast is an excuse. An old friend and eternal flame lives there now. It is “research” that takes Paul to visit her, but really, it is the drive for companionship, someone who will perceive you in good faith, not just as you see yourself, but as who you can be, a midpoint between yourself and others. That is what love is, whether romantic love or platonic.
This gambit does not work out for Paul, but the answer comes to him in a fashion. It is the fashion of a 1970s sitcom, of course, where the various threads of a-, b-, and c-story return and intertwine. Nothing happens without purpose or consequence. A novel that appears at first as one man’s monologue is, in fact, a tightly plotted intervention and rescue plan by the author for the hapless character. The lines of action are as invisibly elegant and neatly crafted as any one of the writer’s beautiful sentences. Both gut-bruisingly funny and achingly sad. The line between the tragic and the comic is, of course, a fine one.
John Patrick Higgins, an author as well-versed in British comedy as Paul Reverb, has learned his lessons from those old sitcoms: a middle-aged man will find himself lost in modernity as respectability and relevance drift out of reach for us all. However, one sitcom convention has gone: the world does not reset and revert at the end. In a novel, the character and the world must change, however little, and, ideally, for the better. Paul Reverb was correct in this much: a novel was the right medium for him. He comes out of it a somewhat better man.