X20
A Novel of [Not] Smoking
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
'Beard is as good on the sensuality of smoking as on the philosophy. This is an unusually intelligent, funny and readable first book' Sunday Times
She offered me the cigarette like an apple. It was love and desire. It was knowledge and everything.
'Gregory Simpson is, after years of being paid to smoke a packet a day for research purposes, trying to give up. He decides to write to keep his hands busy and the resulting journal - combining memories of seduction, little-known facts about the tobacco industry and the comfortable camaraderie of the suicide club - is an elegant, witty and confident disquisition on smoking as desire and as a metaphor for desire' Observer
'Populated by a cast of well-drawn eccentrics-loaded with encyclopaedic detail on the history and iconography of smoking, this comic novel nevertheless aims at deep seriousness-Beard's writing can be breathtaking' Daily Telegraph
'Richard Beard's prose is dry, nonchalant and fluent-An accomplished first novel' Times Literary Supplement
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like Richard Klein's Cigarettes Are Sublime or Christopher Buckley's Thank You for Smoking, this witty debut from English writer Beard rolls together the great themes of love, addiction and hubris into a story about cigarettes and, in this case, giving them up. "My name is Gregory Simpson," Beard's naive protagonist writes in his first jittery jottings once he's gone cold turkey. "I'm 30 years old. I'm trying to keep my hands occupied." Taking up a pen as a substitute for the butt, he reflects on the ways that his life and friends have been affected by his habit. At college he loses his tobacco virginity to Lucy Hinton (who smokes to stay tantalizingly thin), then falls in love with the weed through his ambiguous friendship with Julian Carr, a charismatic medical student whose research eventually leads to a job with a tobacco company. Flashing back and forth through Gregory's scattershot reminiscences, Beard handily considers smoking as gesture, economic force and philosophical problem. The unfiltered seduction scene between Lucy and Gregory is a hilarious twist on femme fatality; equally twisted is the discovery by Carr's firm that it's easier to get clinical volunteers by offering free samples (a 20-pack a day, whence the title) than to engage in animal testing. Can Gregory untwist himself from his Faustian bargain with Carr and cancer sticks? That's the question that drives this edgily comic satire. FYI: X20 will be published November 20, to coincide with the Great American Smokeout.
