irritable vowel syndrome . Why a Best Books list is just humbug

It’s the end of 2018 and time for Best Books of the Year lists and such like. In other words, it’s the time of year when authors can legitimately give a plug to their friends’ books. Again. There’s a formula to this: In a list of five, include three by your friends (which you have already blurbed), and add two ‘safe’ titles, not by your friends (to maintain the façade of fairness). In the latter category comes titles (usually door-stoppers) that few might have read but about which a non-negotiable herd consensus has formed over the past year.

I’m not going to give you a list of my favourites this year because I’ve realised I have no real writer friends left. I have no one to plug. Is this lack a deliberate self-inflicted wound? Perhaps. I lost interest in the romantic concept of the writer-friend (a kind of life-traveller and companion) ever since he/she transformed into the ceaselessly networking MBA writer. If literary friendships are about scratching each other’s backs for professional gain then I have no spine for it.

These days, my friends are mostly underground bands. While Indian musicians rarely read, there’s honesty to what they do. I get my creative fix from them. The lack of an audience — both for books and music — gives us a shared vacuum that, in the absence of gravity, binds and unites us.

There’s a second reason for my inability to provide you with a year-end list. I’ve been too obsessed with Donald Trump to read anything other than books and articles on Trump. Eliot Weinberger’s ‘piece’ in London Review of Books , ‘Who Won’t be Voting for Trump’ — a handpicked collection of Trump’s ‘aphorisms’ — makes for an illuminating tragi-comic read.

The current American presidency is so exciting that even Siddhartha Mukherjee tweeted that if he doesn’t go off Twitter, he won’t be able to write his next. Aside from reasons of beauty and truth, one reads books for leisure and escape. There’s so much leisure and escape in Trump (and on CNN), that novels have kind of lost their raison d’etre. (Unless it’s a Trump novel; that novel is still being written.)

The end of the year is also when the writer takes stock of her own work and worth. Did I do enough? In calculating this, the convenience of having one’s birthday in May cannot be overestimated. For, if one feels that one’s productivity has been below par until December 31, one can always issue an official statement (to oneself): “I measure my annual achievement by the date of birth.”

If your birthday falls in December, you’re screwed.

It’s not easy for a writer to take stock during the course of a working day or night, let alone a year. With writing, one just doesn’t know. Is writing a certain number of words a day enough? Should one trust ‘the flow’, that magical time when it all seems to happen effortlessly? Writing is, in many ways, the opposite of a sport. For a sportsperson, ‘the zone’ is a state of mind one can trust. When you’re in it, good things will happen.

A writer, on the other hand, should always be sceptical of ‘the zone’. The 3,000 words that flowed from a possessed keyboard or pencil might not look that magical after three months and have to be eventually discarded. The 10,000 words that flowed effortlessly over the course of a week are dross. What looked a test match innings turns out to be mere (though invaluable) net practice.

As the year hangs up its boots, it’s difficult to be satisfied with what one has done; it’s not clear what the worth of one’s writing is, the distance one has walked barefoot. It’s impossible to gauge. Writerly satisfaction, in such uncertain circumstances, is an elusive entity. One writes because one has to write, the rest be damned. This is great in a way, because it takes the pressure off.

A writer cannot ever be satisfied. Even external validation, including prizes, and the number of literary friends one has, and fans, are not reliable indicators. Nor is the size of the advance. The three Ds of depression, drugs and drink lurk round the corner. The fourth D — the demons of the soul — taunts the writer, until the fifth D, doubt, creeps in. And self-doubt, we know, can be crippling.

In cricket or football, gratification is instant; there’s a certainty to the validation of one’s efforts. A goal scored is a goal scored. A century is a century, an external fact that cannot be argued with.

With writing, the gratification is delayed, and rarely ever comes. If and when it does, it comes from within. It’s an impalpable thing, which manifests itself as brute confidence (the humble itch) to write more. Years after one has written a book, one picks it from the shelf again. One turns the pages and is filled with a belated sense of achievement: Hey, did I really write this myself. It’s not so bad! That’s the moment of satisfaction (and inspiration, and validation) one lives for.

And so, annual stocktaking is a fairly pointless exercise for a writer. One will write a little on the last day of the year, like one has all the other days, and go to bed on a full stomach. One will wake up hungry in the New Year, and write a little more.

As Janis Joplin sang, ‘It’s all the same f*****g day, man.’

Palash Krishna Mehrotra

Palash Krishna Mehrotra is the author of Eunuch Park and the editor of House Spirit: Drinking in India