Her stance in the great nature/nurture debate remains ferociously against any sentimental pragmatism about being born like it. If you bring up a child to be an idiot, chances are it will become an adult with symptoms of idiocy. It wouldn’t be fair then to turn round and say the fault was genetic.Smith’s contention is that gender dimorphism – the wilful polarisation of the ladies and the gentlemen based on the slender imperative of their secondary sexual characteristics – is a mere conceit. Apart from time out wondering whether sheer determination wouldn’t make us gay, there is little respite. We underestimate the militancy of the sexually timid at our peril.
Different for Girls jumps some big guns, as well.

Joan Smith’s well-received Misogynies – the scape-nannygoats’ catalogue for 1989 – necessarily missed a thousand targets. Even the most vigilant recorder of patriarchal hostilities is obliged to wrap it up once in a while The sniping carries on, and you’ve never said it all. Now we’ve had eight years’ worth of scape-billygoats’ manuals. They have instructed blokes to bang drums in the woods and blame their mothers, or warned of dire consequences if we fail to mug up on our girlie wiles so that our half-arsed mates can go pretending they’re king of the hill There’s no amnesty in the sex war. Nor should we be surprised when Jasper relates a personal experience previously encountered in the pages of Arc d’X.To read Amnesiascope – as with all of Erickson’s work – is to be constantly astonished by his powers of invention, by an authorial imagination which plays with time and space and the conventions of fiction as if they were rubber toys If you buy only one novel this autumn, make it this one Amnesiascope is quite unforgettable.. Although set in a post-cataclysmic LA, Amnesiascope does not subscribe to any existing eschatological tradition. Its intentions and curiosities have little in common with the dystopian visions of science fiction.

We learn about S’s relationships with women and his friendships with men, his views on art, his thoughts on mortality and America. He agrees to help his girlfriend Viv make a pornographic film about an artist who paints nudes.Running low on inspiration, S (one of whose jobs is to write the script) sits in a bar where he talks to a big, blonde woman called Jasper, who tells him about the time she and another woman made love to a bound, blindfolded man, thereby gifting S his story line. In the Ericksonian universe, there can be no surprise when, during casting sessions for the film, Jasper turns up to audition for the part of .. herself. But the people who only read reviews and never see the movies are only one of Erickson’s satirical targets; his others include critics, publicists and himself.
When S overhears people discussing Marat, its specific lighting and camera angles, he knows it’s gone beyond a joke, especially when they start criticising his review. The business with Marat is only one strand in a busy narrative, but fairly typical. As a joke he writes a piece about The Death of Marat, a long-unseen silent masterpiece by the legendary French auteur Adolphe Sarre.

Sarre doesn’t exist and neither does his film, but S assumes that either his editor or the fact-checkers will kill the story. They don’t, of course, and soon people are talking about Marat as if it were a real film. The new novel represents an exciting new development in an inspired series of fictions. Quartet is effectively relaunching the career of this most courageous and adventurous American novelist. Amnesiascope is Erickson’s funniest and most accessible novel to date.

The narrator, S – not a million miles from the character of Erickson, the American writer who featured in the third novel, Arc d’X – is a film critic for an LA newspaper. But I would take issue with Pears’s Venetian physician in one instance. The despised British medical usage of powdered worms perhaps had a practical base. Dawn French, in her TV foodie series Scoff!, was taught survival techniques by an SAS expert. One of his recommendations was to dry worms on a convenient rock and pound them up.