Familiarity and contempt

I've used the Stephen Fry expression to describe friendship before. The Nation's favourite Wildean uncle claimed that he 'likes to taste his friends, not eat them'. Aside from the obvious innuendo, it's a sentiment with which I agree. Some of my favourite people are those that I don't see for a couple of years, and when we do meet up, it's like we've never been apart. I've just spent a week in the states with a friend I hadn't seen for 3 years (we keep up only through twitter) and it led to some of the most enjoyable, entertaining and easiest conversation you could imagine. Some people like to surround themselves with a small group of close friends, and these people act like a kind of social comfort blanket. Friendship lines are drawn, everyone knows which topics are there to be debated and which are off-limits, opinions are generally well-known, and conversation can be dominated with everyday chit-chat.

I'm certainly not saying that the better I know people, the less I like them, or even the less interesting I find them; I do consider however that the friendship of those people that I rarely converse with and meet up with even less often can be just as valuable. It's like music and books. Some books you are happy to read and re-read, and there's some music that you never tire of listening to. There are other books that you loved first time around, but you have no desire to read again, at least not in the immediate future. Some music is like this too; I love it, and then I love re-discovering it, but only at a much later date.

As I'm on holiday at the moment, I've had the opportunity to do quite a lot of reading. I've been reading a couple of authors that I thought I liked a lot: Malcolm Gladwell and Jay McInerney. The more I've read of them, the less I like them. Maybe that's a little strong, but the less interest I have in them; their freshness is notable by its absence. In McInerney's case, I've read him pretty much chronologically, starting with the fantastic 'Bright lights, Big City'. His later novels (less so the short stories) resemble less good versions of his earlier work. The themes are similar, the humour more forced, the material less fresh. People say that you write about what you know, but he seems to have written about all that he knows in the first couple of books, and has spent much time re-hashing old material after that. Gladwell is more odd, because I read Outliers (2008), then What the dog saw (2009) then his breakthrough novel The Tipping Point (2000). Gladwell certainly has a brilliant easy-reading style, and it has been said of him that he 'makes you feel as though you are the genuis'. It's a very leading style though, and many of the conclusions that he comes to, which appear watertight at first, do not stand up to any kind of rigorous scrutiny. His standard technique is to take a one-off event, re-tell it as an incredibly entertaining story, and then to draw far reaching conclusions from this single event that usually challenge general thinking on the subject. Thought and discussion-provoking certainly, but hard evidence? almost certainly not. The more I read, the more I feel that I'm being worked on, albeit very gently, into believing the genius of Gladwell, and I find that irritating, and just a little bit subversive.

This isn't the case with all authors. If one reads Orwell chronologically, things culminate with 1984, and all of his other writing and experiences feel like a build-up to this. It helped that he died young, and knew that he was dying, and maybe that's the key: to die before one's output starts to tail off. Morrison, Dean, Fitzgerald have nothing duff in their back catalogue; they simply didn't have time. Conversely, the longer that Jagger or McCartney hang on, the more hapless the material they produce has become. This is similar with Dave Grohl, who sounds more like un-edgy bad Nirvana with each album. I used to think that Dali was a genius, until you realise that you've seen all the good stuff in the first 10% of his output, and the rest of his career was a re-hash of former ideas.

Perhaps there's a limit to creativity, and it's best to stop when you feel genuine creation is harder to come by. Bowie and Picasso manage to stay creative forever by continual re-invention. They are the genuine outliers; these are people with whom one can be fully familiar, and feel nothing but admiration for their genius.