Comedy in long-shot

Camille Bordas’s skilful, engrossing novel The Material tells the story of a single day in the lives of a group of writers. One or two dramatic things happen, or almost happen, in the course of it, but mostly what happens is that the writers think, take notes and talk to one another in the perpetual hope of using the day’s events, its “material”, in their writing.

The writers are all practising or aspiring stand-up comedians. Some are teachers, some students, and all are affiliated with an unspecified Chicago university’s MFA programme in stand-up comedy. In the novel’s imagined world their programme was the first of its kind in an educational landscape now filled with them. Bordas establishes this premiss with such unfussy authority that I, a US higher education humanities lifer, wondered briefly whether I had missed this new development in graduate training.

Comedians, a character in The Material argues, “are to the twenty-first century what novelists had been to the twentieth, the artists that the public turned to for enlightenment, for comfort and understanding”. The comedian to whom she is speaking wonders if it is actually true that “more Americans had streamed his special the week it had come out on Netflix than would read a novel that year”, but anyone in the US who survived the early Noughties thanks to Jon Stewart will understand her feeling.

The fact that stand-up comedians have notably featured in “cancel culture” headlines makes them especially useful to Bordas. The author has much to say about Americans’ impassioned and frequently incoherent relationships with their cultural heroes, as well as about the matters that bring those heroes to public grief. A plotline about an older male comedian in the midst of a minor scandal allows her to confront such themes head on, but her wider cast of characters, male and female, famous and striving, young and old, Black and white, forms a more intricate instrument on which she can riff.

The characters are fully realized, immediately present to the reader, and Bordas’s observations are sharp. One male character has, “in order to repair centuries of injustice toward women, pretty much decided never to contradict one again, even though it seemed to make every girl he knew uninterested in having any kind of conversation with him”. An older female comic reflects on the days when she felt competitive with all the other female comics, “like there could be a shortage of good jokes to make about being a woman, like the indignities of being a woman could run scarce – that was a joke in itself”.

Bordas’s real subject is the writing life. She is less interested in what people find to say about their lives than in how the need constantly to say something shapes a person’s mind. In the midst of managing a medical crisis one student reflects that “everyone talked too much. She was so used to editing sentences, combining three words into one, cutting adverbs, that she’d started doing it to people’s speech in her head now”. A teacher reflects on Charlie Chaplin’s adage that life is tragedy when seen in close-up and comedy in long-shot, and worries that “it was taking her too long to get in long-shot today, to get back to the third-person narrator within her that made life bearable”.

If none of this sounds particularly funny, that’s because it isn’t. These comedians’ lives are no funnier than anyone else’s, and Bordas’s writing is nowhere better than in describing their lowest moments. The characters are always looking for the perfect “bit”: as dark as the audience can imagine, real enough to be moving, artful enough to be funny. Bordas herself nails such moments, as when a woman recalls her childhood molester’s penis: “she remembered the exact shade of pink and how soft it had been, and warm, too, like the gumball from the gumball machine by the newsstand her mother worked at, the one that was always in the sun in the afternoon”. A student’s observation of the parasocial relationship she has struck up with a hologram at the Holocaust Museum is particularly memorable too.

Camille Bordas hardly needs the extra credit, but it seems unfair not to mention that The Material is only her second novel in English, following two in French. Her native language’s loss is our gain. One feels she is only beginning to show what she can do with her material.

Heather Cass White teaches English at the University of Alabama

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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