Nicola Barker is the kind of novelist to arouse a baffled envy in the reader: at the freedoms she affords herself, within parameters that appear to exist, but whose precise nature and location remain unclear. Her fourteenth novel, TonyInterruptor, opens in an experimental jazz club in “a moderately affluent southern English cathedral town” that seems a fair bit like Canterbury. Sasha Keyes and his Ensemble are midway through an improvised set that, in the manner of these things, no one is exactly enjoying – “to expect (or require) ‘fun’ [from such a performance] would be like going to a railway station (any railway station) and trying to book yourself onto a direct flight to Acapulco” – when Sasha’s freeform trumpet solo is interrupted by a heckler. “‘Is this honest?’” says the man. “‘Are we all being honest here?’”
Later, backstage in the artists’ changing room, a furious Sasha is discussing the incident with his bandmates when Fi Kinebuchi, his autoharpist and ex-wife, suggests that Sasha’s off-the-cuff nickname for his heckler – TonyInterruptor – is apt to make the man’s motivations for disrupting the “particularly devastating improvised trumpet solo” even less explicable. Sasha tells Fi to “shut the fuck up”. Both incidents – TonyInterruptor’s interruption and Sasha’s contemptuous dismissal of Fi – are captured on video, the former by the teenage audience member India Shore, the latter by Sasha’s bandmate Simo Treen. Alerted to India’s clip on social media by the jazz club’s hashtag, Simo likes it, appends the tag #TonyInterruptor and adds it to his feed, along with the clip of Sasha berating Fi. Both clips go viral, becoming a source, the narrator tells us, “of ferocious interest/contention/amusement/debates across at least three creative disciplines, the subject of four books – this being the third – and the root of approximately 2.5 million tweets and countless memes”.
The rest of Barker’s novel tracks the consequences of the interruption, not least for the interruptor himself – “John Lincoln Braithwaite to his mum” – an art curator, obsessive observer of the play of light and spit of the Norwegian musician and movie star Anders Danielsen Lie. Braithwaite is, moreover, a “staunch defender of the real”, mostly by dint of critical, deeply felt encounters with music, books and film, in defiance of the spoon-fed consumerism of a culture that has sacrificed aesthetic judgement to the algorithm. India, the “disgruntled Zoomer” who had accidentally filmed the interruption on her iPhone, is also implicated, along with her father, Lambert, a handsome, middle-aged professor of architecture; Lambert’s fractious, shaven-headed second wife, Mallory; and Fi, an academic colleague of Lambert’s who not so secretly reciprocates his crush on her, and who may or may not be “the profoundly mystical and otherworldly intellectual that she appears to be”.
The consequences play out largely in the form of comically intemperate debate. India, for example, is proud of filming, editing and posting a clip that has “earned over 1.6 million likes in just over 24 hours”. Lambert is less sure about his daughter’s actions: not only does posting footage of someone without their consent violate hard-won principles concerning “privacy, permission and who owns or controls content”, it has had immediate real-world consequences. Fi and Sasha have become the target of online hate campaigns. Sasha and Simo are at each other’s throats. And who knows what the effect on TonyInterruptor might be? India is unbothered. It is, she believes, a sure mark of cultural superannuation to bang on about ownership.
Kids are into sharing and expanding. You know: like the universe. The universe is infinite. But your generation is into guarding and owning; protecting, monitoring, policing … Ours is a totally different vibe. A different dynamic. A fresh dynamic.
Sasha, for his part, is beside himself. He would be anyway: his manager, Lacy, thinks of him as “an extremely unpredictable and intermittently vicious clinically obese 17-year-old Rottweiler with mesmerisingly yellow teeth and advanced arthritis living inside the body of an inordinately pale and skinny 45-year-old suit model”. Now the #TonyInterruptor meme has sent him over the edge. Not only has this most uncompromisingly, self-avowedly honest of performers been called out for not being honest, he is being “held in an online necklock by a load of opinionated, wet-behind-the-ears millennials” for being “too honest” – with Fi, after the show. Sasha despairs of a social media-fuelled, identitarian “New Fundamentalism” that feels “duty-bound to guard and police … everything: language, art, freedom”. The only response to the “baaing, the bleating, the digital fucking cacophony” is to meet it with an equally ungovernable commitment to improvisation. “Now, more than ever”, admits Sasha, “I long to grab my trumpet, slam it to my lips and just blow. There is … a kind of violent urge in me to spew out disharmony as a way of making sense and meaning out of what is irrational, contradictory, absurd, anomalous, irresistible.”
Thus, the local controversies converge, over the course of this novel, into a larger argument, a presiding set of binaries, between artifice and authenticity, “pussy-footing” and honesty, individual rights and collective ownership. Later, India muses on a lecture Lambert once gave her, with characteristically offhand affectation, on the Italian concept of sprezzatura, that quality of apparently effortless excellence, “apparent” because “there must inevitably … be immense amounts of effort involved in doing something (anything) extremely well”. India sees this idea as toxic: “a cynical, surreptitious, passive-aggressive projection of simplicity and ease”. TonyInterruptor seems at times to be gesturing towards a definitive statement, or at least a laying out of terms, on precisely this question, on the tension in art (and life) between ease, looseness and improvisation on the one hand, and effort, structure and artifice on the other. Inasmuch as this tension is productive, Barker seems to ask, can it survive in a digital youth culture that valorizes instantaneity and shared ownership? Are India’s fellow TikTok stans and Snapchatters liberating themselves from an exhausted model of media production and consumption, or are they just the useful idiots of a tech industry that would destroy human creativity by appropriating its fruits and handing them out for free?
Barker is too playful a novelist to come down hard on either side. Instead, the conflicting positions adopted by her characters are underwritten by a prose sensibility and plot structure – if it can be so called – that enact the very tensions they describe. The author is quite hard to excerpt. Lacy’s description of Sasha, quoted above, in fact goes on for another two clauses, the second a digressive parenthesis. A more conventional comic writer would have been content to end the sentence where the gag lands, logically and rhythmically, on “45-year-old suit model”. Not Barker. The suit model, we also learn, has “a powerful jaw, giant hands and Superman-style spectacles (whose only real purpose, surely, are to be hurled off during a life-and-death crisis)”. To prune the quotation as I have done arguably falsifies a defining tendency in Barker towards what might uncharitably be called garrulity, but isn’t, quite: hers is a maximalism that earns its keep by virtue of its easygoing openness to risk. The same goes for her aversion to single adjectives when five might do (“irrational, contradictory, absurd, anomalous, irresistible”). She delights in noun lists of thesauric length: Sasha, for instance, believes that excellence in improvisation “demands focus. Self-control. Restraint. Persistence. Fortitude. Sacrifice. And practice. Yes … practice”.
It shouldn’t be so much fun to read, but it is. The author gets special dispensation from the Gods of Good Style, perhaps because, just as Sasha weighs his improvisatory freedoms against the need for self-control, so her unrestrained prose is offset by a plot structure that is – though far from conventional – gratifyingly shapely. A kind of crackpot balance is achieved: the novel is both loose and tight, at its ease and willed. Towards the end of TonyInterruptor, following an accident that lands her in hospital, Lambert’s estranged wife, Mallory, expounds to Sasha on a Buddhist idea that she finds uniquely appealing: the “Lineage of Mis-Steps” – “In this particular tradition, it’s not the things we get right which somehow, miraculously, lead to enlightenment, but the things we get wrong.” The setbacks experienced by our protagonists in their restless search for authenticity were, we realize, the point all along. We proceed through life and art by “persistently but sincerely falling arse-over-tit”. The novel ends where it began, amid an anticipatory buzz at a music venue, and, thanks in large part to the pact Nicola Barker strikes between freedom and structure, it resolves, or rather beautifully half resolves, on a realignment of its characters’ loyalties that is as elegant as it is quietly moving. TonyInterruptor is an eccentric triumph.
Nat Segnit’s most recent book is Retreat: The risks and rewards of stepping back from the world, 2021
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