Egg-Lemon Soup

Fiction​ about creative writing programmes is always vulnerable to accusations of navel-gazing. Camille Bordas has, however, provided her new novel with an alibi. The Material follows the staff and students on the ‘MFA in stand-up’ at an unnamed Chicago university over the last day of the autumn term. It’s a clever conceit, giving the eternal question about writing programmes an unusual twist. Can you really teach someone how to be funny?

Bordas published her first novel, Les Treize Desserts (2009), when she was 22, between completing a degree in archaeology and art history at the Sorbonne and beginning one in ethnology and social anthropology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Three years later she moved to Chicago with her partner, the American novelist Adam Levin, and began writing in English. Her stories have been appearing in the New Yorker since 2016, and the first novel she composed in English (her third overall), How to Behave in a Crowd, a comedy about a group of precocious teenage siblings, was published the following year. Bordas was puzzled by creative writing programmes when she first arrived in the United States (‘we didn’t have MFAs in France’). ‘“Creative writing” as an academic discipline,’ she recently told an interviewer, ‘meant absolutely nothing to me.’ But she soon began teaching on the fiction programme at the University of Florida, and the experience left its mark. Her story ‘Colorín Colorado’ is narrated by a professor of writing who describes herself as ‘mostly a writer’, although she isn’t sure on what grounds: ‘I spent more time teaching than writing. I made more money teaching than writing.’ She drums into her class the importance of ‘causes and consequences’, until a student points out that ‘in your stories the consequences of language and thoughts are always just more language and more thoughts.’ The narrator ends up plagiarising the student’s work.

None of the professors in The Material suffers such a dramatic loss of pedagogical faith, but then none of them has much pedagogical conviction in the first place. ‘The job of teaching comedy … consisted almost exclusively in sitting there, not laughing, while your students tried something,’ one of them reflects. ‘It could be painful, for all parties involved, but that was how they learned.’ Nor are the students confident enough in their own ideas to question their teachers’ methods. ‘They were halfway through their degree and hated everything they’d ever written.’

The plot revolves around the ‘traditional end-of-year battle’, an event which promises to be enlivened by the arrival in Chicago of the middle-aged enfant terrible Manny Reinhardt (‘if he didn’t say things that shocked even himself, then he was failing’), who’s due to take up the role of visiting professor of comedy in the spring. A student association has ‘raised concerns’ about his appointment. The first red flag was an incident in which he punched a younger male comedian at a club; since then, allegations of ‘borderline behaviour with women’ have emerged. We are presumably meant to think of real-life American stand-ups who’ve spectacularly scuttled their own careers (Louis C.K., Michael Richards), but the veniality of Manny’s ‘emotional misconduct’ (he slept with each of his accusers once, proposed marriage, then never called) suggests we’re not to dwell too much on them. Bordas wants to give him the trappings of disgrace without forfeiting his claims on our sympathy.

If it would be hard to imagine someone like Manny teaching on a fiction programme, that’s partly because it’s hard to think of a contemporary American novelist so disagreeable – in either their work or their conduct – to institutional mores. James Ellroy perhaps? The Material suggests that the professionalisation of writing via graduate programmes is directly related to this shortage of renegades and heretics (which Bordas clearly sees as a bad thing), and it’s true that there are more of them in countries that don’t have an established MFA culture. Consider Michel Houellebecq, who last year attempted to block the release of an experimental porn film in which he’d starred. (His defence was that he’d been drunk when he signed the contract.)

Manny’s new colleagues on the stand-up MFA aren’t inclined to blame him for the trouble he’s in, although that doesn’t mean they share a view on his appointment. Ashbee, the head of the programme, a listless figure who neither writes nor performs any longer, looks forward to riffing with a bona fide star. Dorothy, a cult comedian whose air of imperturbable cynicism is all part of the act, slept with Manny a handful of times when they were both starting out in the 1990s (when he proposed marriage, ‘she’d known to laugh in his face’) and finds the prospect of seeing him again bittersweet. For Kruger, his ego bloated following the release of his Hollywood debut, Manny’s fall from grace is a rich source of schadenfreude. (‘He was pretty sure Manny disliked him. Years ago, when asked in an interview who the most interesting young comedians were, Manny hadn’t named Kruger, an omission Kruger had interpreted as intentional.’)

Bordas provides the A-listers among her characters with motives – not altogether convincing ones – for subjecting themselves to the indignity of a teaching job. Manny wants to reconnect with his son, who works for a Chicago law firm; Kruger’s father has been moved to a nearby nursing home. No such explanations are needed for their colleagues on the fiction programme. One of the novel’s best running jokes is about the transfer of cultural capital between the two lines of work:

Everyone on the fiction faculty was trying a little too hard to befriend them, probably hoping for some TV connections. Vivian Reeve had cornered Kruger at his first department party back in September, to flatter him, to share with him her idea that comedians were to the 21st century what novelists had been to the 2oth, the artists that the public turned to for enlightenment, for comfort and understanding. They were the new social critics. More Americans had streamed Kruger’s special the week it had come out on Netflix than would read a novel that year, she’d told him, numbers that Kruger had been flattered by, but unable to verify.

American universities now run MFAs in everything from game design to musical theatre – but there aren’t, just yet, any degrees in stand-up. It must be one of the largest areas of anglophone cultural production to remain wholly independent of the academy. Putting it at the heart of a campus novel allows Bordas to highlight the awkward fit between the modern university, with its risk-averse corporate structures, and creative work. Professor Sword, the head of the English department, is struck by the comedy students’ lack of interest in reporting his missteps to the management hierarchy. ‘It was like they didn’t know deans existed.’ The main objection faculty members have to Manny’s appointment is that it’s a ‘PR nightmare’. The teachers on the stand-up MFA have to weather the animosity of their colleagues in the wider English department (‘comedians belonged in performing arts, if they belonged anywhere at all in academia, was the thought’), although since it won’t amount to anything beyond ‘whispers in the hallways, or petitions no one read’, they aren’t overly concerned.

The Material is thoughtful about the specific demands of stand-up. ‘Questions were right at the root of comedy, as they were in many other disciplines,’ Dorothy reflects, ‘except that in comedy you were never looking for the real answer, but for the funniest answer, and in order to find the funniest answer, you had to first go through all possible answers.’ But there’s no getting away from the sense that everything it has to say about teaching stand-up is really about teaching fiction. There are moments when the tone becomes almost arch:

As the founder of stand-up as an academic discipline (the Chicago MFA had been the first of its kind), Ashbee could’ve been first on many jokes to be made about the job, but he’d refrained. Now that comedy programmes had opened all over the country, teaching comedians went for it, used their students as material, and used their colleagues, too – the campus setting in general. They made fun of the concept onstage, the concept of teaching comedy, teaching people how to be funny. They all presented it as an impossible task and threw their own students under the bus as proof, quoting their worst jokes, all the while cashing the university’s biweekly cheques. Ashbee believed that using your students as comedy fodder was an abuse of power, but he’d come to understand that the kids actually sought it, the onstage nod. Better to be made fun of by a famous comedian than never mentioned at all.

This passage, which occurs early in the novel, comes to mind later when Bordas is having fun at the expense of one of the comedy students. Phil is the least convincing member of the novel’s varied cast, more a vehicle for sending up liberal pieties than an actual character: ‘In order to repair centuries of injustice toward women, he’d pretty much decided to never contradict one again, even though it seemed to make every girl he knew uninterested in having any kind of conversation with him.’ Some people – Phil would presumably be one of them – might describe this as punching down. Bordas isn’t wholly unsympathetic towards their perspective. She permits Phil some reasonable questions about the sardonic humour that’s her prevailing mode: ‘Wasn’t there a way to incorporate the new without the latency period of calling it stupid? His fellow students all blamed the times for declaring certain topics off-limits, but wasn’t that exactly the kind of challenge a great comedian should want to tackle?’ But he can’t escape the ground rules of the novel that contains him. ‘As interested as he was in thoughts of fairness and equality … he still found them hard to make funny.’

It helps that Bordas is so funny herself. Her observations about the narcissism and insularity of creative types are very good (‘you were supposed to say you didn’t want your kid to follow in your footsteps,’ Manny reflects at one point, ‘but then when your son became a lawyer, you had to wonder where you fucked up’) and her deadpan delivery means they tend to land. She proceeds with a spry, associative logic and takes impulsive detours when she senses that a joke can bear being dragged out, as when Manny spends ten pages having his ear chewed off by the checkout guy at an airport newsagent. (‘He would never scan the Red Bull, Manny realised, that second beep would never come and put an end to this.’) Even so, The Material doesn’t feel formless. Each of its three parts is loosely constructed around a set piece. Two of these concern gun violence, which Dorothy calls ‘the white noise of American life’. In the first part, Dorothy and Sword take shelter in a classroom after an active shooter alert pops up on their phones. They agree that it’s probably just a drill, but they can’t help being scared, and to distract themselves they maintain a whispered conversation. Unfortunately, in spite of their best attempts to keep it light, they circle back repeatedly to violence and death. Sword tries to steer them onto the subject of movies, mentioning Brad Pitt’s ‘interesting trajectory’, but ‘of all of Brad Pitt’s career, the scene that came to Dorothy’s mind in that moment was the one where he gets shot in a closet in Burn after Reading.’ Another part of her mind is already weighing the experience as possible material. ‘If she survived today, she’d have to write about it. The thought made her a little sad.’

In the second part, Kruger visits his father in the nursing home. The old man – a flagging tyrant, openly derisive of his son’s lifestyle and career – becomes suddenly fixated on Kruger’s inability to shoot. He reveals that another resident, Tony, has a gun and proposes that the three of them go into the woods for a lesson. When Tony produces a second gun, which it seems he’s amenable to selling, Kruger’s father instructs Kruger to make an offer on his behalf. ‘At his age you had to have one, he said, which Kruger decided to take the less depressing of the two ways he could think of to take it.’ As they trudge back to the home for a dinner of egg-lemon soup, Kruger has also begun to view the experience as material:

They hadn’t laughed today, he knew that much. Yet he also knew that the shooting lesson would become a bit. He knew it in his heart. It had made him too sad not to rewrite and try laughing about. He was already thinking about how he could frame it. It could be presented as quirky, ‘the day I learned to shoot at a nursing home and then ate egg-lemon soup with everyone’, or go dark, ‘the day I bought my sick father a gun’. Dark was funnier, especially if his father did end up killing himself with that gun down the line.

The final set piece is the comedy battle, which results in a series of narrative crescendos. One student slips out of the venue to make a conciliatory phone call to his brother, a heroin addict; another confides to a classmate that she was sexually abused by her stepfather. After Phil collapses (it turns out he’s epileptic), Manny goes on stage in his place, and launches into a long, rambling speech about his son’s harrowing childhood illness before surrendering to tears ‘for a solid thirty seconds’.

It isn’t news that being funny is often a strategy for fending off gloom, but Bordas is interested in how well it actually works. The comedy students think that if they can make lots of people laugh, they’ll feel good about themselves. Their teachers have been around long enough to know better. ‘Void was at the centre of any comedian’s career,’ Kruger tells his class. ‘The blank page, the doubt once it was filled, the silence when a joke crashed, the abyss you faced onstage, the emptiness you felt afterward’. It seems like Bordas is teeing up another analogy for writing fiction. For Manny, though, the problem is endemic to the situation of the stand-up comic:

He hadn’t expected much from his fans, historically (when hoping for success, no one ever spent time imagining the audience that would come with it), and yet they’d still managed to disappoint – to sadden him, more exactly. He did all this so these guys would laugh? He’d turned the question over in his head for decades now, how it could be that nothing felt better than a crowd laughing, and little worse, an hour later, than individuals from that very group telling him what it was he’d said that made them laugh. It always sounded so small, what he’d written, when a fan repeated it. That’s why he’d wanted for his son to be a novelist. Novelists could go their whole career without meeting a reader.