From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about the books shortlisted for the 2014 Prize, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Stuart Evers on Jernigan by David Gates (1991)

JerniganThe resuscitation of Richard Yates’ reputation at the turn of the last century was, in itself, close kin to a classic Yates story. A some-years-dead writer, largely forgotten by readers and critics alike, suddenly fulfilling all the dreams he held dear in life: a review in the New York Times, a story published in the New Yorker, a movie made from his most celebrated novel. A decade too late, Yates had arrived. It might have been nice, of course, if he’d been around to see it.

The author of Jernigan (originally published in 1991) is still around, still living, though whether he’s still writing I don’t know. His last book, a collection of stories called The Wonders of the Invisible Word, came out at around the same time as Yates was taking his posthumous bow. Since then a couple of stories and nothing more. It’s when you read David Gates that you understand what kind of a loss this is to American letters. And this goes double when you read Jernigan.

Like Yates’ Revolutionary Road, Jernigan is an auspicious debut, one that distils the frustrations of a generation into an incandescent narrative. It’s a relentless, combustible mix of high literary art and low humour, wisecracking profanity and shellac dark glimpses into a man’s wilful self-annihilation. Narrated by Jernigan himself, we see the world through his gin-bloomed eyes, playful and funny one moment, appalling and offensive the next. His is a narrative of moments – from one drink to the next, from one gag to the next, from one terrible decision to the next – but it’s not just a character study of one man’s descent into hell: it’s about how he drags others with him, gladly. The beautifully rendered and observed relationships between Jernigan and his son, and between Jernigan and his girlfriend, suggest something more to life than jokes, booze and nihilism.

In many ways Jernigan is character in the grand American tradition – Huck Finn, Moses Herzog, Holden Cauldfield, Willy Loman, Rabbit Angstrom – in others, he is more like a Beckett character lost in his own bleak world. Which I suspect is a way of saying he’s unique. I certainly haven’t read anything so affecting and well written, so evocative of a time and a society, that works on the levels on which Jernigan operates. If there is one book that deserves to come in from the cold in the way Revolutionary Road, Alone in Berlin and Stoner have, it’s David Gates’s Jernigan. And with any luck, he’ll be around to see it.