Advertisements for Myself: On Alex Gilvarry’s ‘Eastman Was Here’

Alan Eastman poses a problem for Alex Gilvarry. As self-important as he is self-pitying, and a writer who thinks literature is warfare, Eastman is surely a fool. But how to avoid making him also a caricature?

Gilvarry manages to avoid this, making him a “real person” as well as a buffoon, because he understands that the problem is one of distance—narrator to Eastman; reader to Eastman—and that this problem translates in terms of craft into a question of tone. He is wise to waste no time establishing the kind of distance we’ll be enjoying for the rest of the novel, which begins like this:

Eastman, the timid bastard, look at him! Sat in his reading chair, all worn and tousled, face behind a book (The Metaphysical Poets, an anthology), hiding from a world he had come to fear. The month was May in the year of the polymorphous perverse, 1973. This is Eastman at the beginning of his journey, not the end. And what was he doing? Paralyzed? Hardly. Eastman was cowardly ducking.

Look at him we readers do; we look at his “poor man’s corduroys” and his “well-formed belly, testament to better years,” we look at him moping, at him reading maudlin poetry and doing his back in reaching down to pick up a