Habitus
James Flint
Fourth Estate pbk, 468 pages
Reviewed by Gerald Houghton (1999)
And it all started so well. Really well. It only wanted to tell us about three people. That Jennifer Several, born in a mental asylum in Stratford-upon-Avon, who will soon bloom as a sexually precocious schoolgirl. About Judd Axelrod, the half-caste son of a Hollywood starlet, marooned in England by his mother's career. And about Joel Kluge, a young New York Jew who discovers not simply an aptitude for mathematics but a positive genius for numbers. A talent that cannot be indulged anywhere except Cambridge. A talent that will involve him in faking his own death to make the journey.
First-time novelist James Flint has fun with his trio. He moves them around and about each other, until Jennifer seduces first Judd and then the virginal twenty-something Joel. And then falls pregnant - as much by plot twist as actual science - to a child fathered by them both. But that's where things start to go awry. It's easy to forgive discursion in the opening passages because we know Flint will eventually conspire to knit the disparate elements. Except he doesn't.
Once the procreational deed has been seen to be done, the book seems less and less interested in having its prime motivators interact. They go back, largely, to leading separate lives. Judd falls under the gaze of sinister psychoanalyst Dr Schemata and into high-stakes gambling. Joel decides that he can rationalise The Holocaust, no less, and that the solution must lurk somewhere within all those statistics: dimensions, sizes, totals. And Jennifer? Jennifer is a plot device.
What technology journalist Flint is attempting here is obvious: like Joel, he thinks he sees connections, a web enmeshing and explaining maths, Roulette, the Final Solution, and the space race (there's the limp gimmick of having seemingly eternal space dog Laika observe events from her capsule high above the Earth) into the one narrative. Unfortunately he's given the space (all 468 pages of it), but not the dexterity to pull it off. He clearly thinks he's writing both a satire in the spirit of Jonathan Coe's marvellous, monumental What A Carve Up!, and a profound, political text somewhere akin to Don DeLillo's recent and quite brilliant Underworld. Flint, though, has neither Coe's wit nor DeLillo's weight.
Habitus is a novel stretched far beyond meagre means. And for a book so taken with facts, having Jennifer shoplifting CDs (page 325), and seeing Joy Division (who finished in 1980) on the same day is just plain clumsy. Properly structured and about half the length and it might have been in with a fighting chance, but this just feels gassy, heavy-handed, under-edited and frequently preposterous.