Exhibitionism <BR. Toby Litt
304pp, Hamish Hamilton, £10.99 It is hard to avoid Toby Litt, one of the most prolific of the newer generation of British novelists and young master of a scarily dynamic prose. As its title suggests, Exhibitionism turns up the style and comes at us as a deliberate display of his remarkable talents. The collection is billed by the tacky B-movieish blurb as "a brand-new production starring Polly Morphous, Lee Perverse, The New Puritans, The Virgin Mary and the Audioguide to the Museum of Inside-Your-Head", all "from the writer who brought you Adventures in Capitalism " (Litt's first book, another set of short stories). Such gross showmanship hardly seems necessary after the high praise won by Beatniks, an ingenious English On the Road of the mid-1990s, by Corpsing, a successful raid on the manor of the crime thriller (both due to become movies), and especially by last year's deadkidsongs, a dark, lyrical picture of 1970s middle England as seen through the eyes of murderous boys. Fortunately, Litt has a lot to show us.
Half the stories are listed under the heading "SEX"; the rest under "Other subjects", though "Unhaunted", a tale of sexual obsession in which Litt daringly offers a lesbian first-person narrator, surely belongs in the first group. Litt occasionally indulges us for a paragraph or two in the delusion that sex is fun or romantic, but mostly he marches us inexorably on into the heavily dysfunctional, as in "Alphabed", a cleverly disgusting story of slime in 26 measured paragraphs: "He pissed for what seemed like a long time. It was more satisfying than his last orgasm."
Here, sexual extremity heads in Gothic fashion towards a deliquescence akin to Dickens's spontaneous combustion; elsewhere, the fulfilment of sexual fantasy (often porn-fuelled) brings complications and frustrations. Two stories flirt with the early stages of pregnancy, only to emphasise that this is a world before babies, a world of surreal, vertiginously free sexual agency - though also of inescapable anxiety. If, as in the opening story, "Dreamgirls", fantasy becomes real, and you meet and have "the greatest sex ever" with "the girl of your dreams", you're liable to discover that "some kind of barrier has been broken". New fantasies become necessary as the old desires are (undesirably) realised, in an infinite regression.
The clarity and rapidity of Litt's narrative movement in most of these stories are hugely impressive and queasily enjoyable: one imagines him having no difficulty with a Hollywood pitch, and his combination of verbal fluency with a genius for intriguing plot is enviable. These are not subtle mood-pieces, and the fact that Litt recently wrote an introduction to Henry James's late novel, The Outcry, doesn't seem a mark of significant spiritual kinship - see the very title of "On the Etiquette of Eye-Contact During Oral Sex". (On the other hand, maybe there is something Jamesian in that fusion of the prim and the rude.)
Most of the stories have a hard, tight centre and echo with the sound of nails being struck on the head in relentless ironic succession. Litt, a really gifted storyteller, knows where to dig for interest. Escapist young alien-abduction fans inadvertently swap underpants ("Of the Third Kind"); pornographic-video copiers are embarrassed by sexual predators ("The New Puritans"); Berlin tourist strays into nostalgic private thriller world ("My Cold War [February 1998]"); movie agents and restaurateurs have implausible gun-battle over the right to employ a failing young screenwriter ("A Higher Agency"); voyeuristic Rossetti student gets locked in Radclyffe Hall's tomb by vengeful lesbians ("Mimi (Both of Her) and Me (Hardly There At All)").
The image of a high-rise apartment as a fishtank is dramatised with hypnotically persuasive force in the surrealism of the final story, "The Waters". Set in the future, this is a creepily Kafkaesque allegory of something indefinably important about modern (virtual) experience. Only the hero, Elyot, can sense the water seeping into, eventually filling, his flat on the 150th floor, in a world of IT where the old laws of physics don't necessarily apply.
Litt can be too quick and slick; his startling facility sometimes seems a power used more to dazzle than to define. His wordplay and occasional mannerisms - "she thunderstormed out", "a post-spark relationship", "a flash of fuckworthiness", "she will let their every question fall, colonial, into a European silence" - tend to remind us that, like any exhibitionist, he is there in the margins wanting applause for his brilliance. It's the same with some of his experimentalism and many of his allusions. Elyot's two women in "The Waters" are called Vivian and Valerie, his best friend Ezra; maybe to evoke "Death By Water" in The Waste Land , but then again, so what?
The world Litt frequently occupies, of mostly shitty young men out for themselves, in which drugs and pornography are cool givens of a new laddish pose, may epitomise a generation, but the attitudes may also come to seem dated and the question will be how far into bed he got with them. His sense of humour - or rather of intellectual fun, if "humour" sounds too humane - is brutal and not always very funny, though readable enough ("Legends of Porn" is a thin Boogie Nights spin-off).
And yet, carpings aside, it is undeniable that Litt writes with rare assurance and verve, enveloping even the reluctant reader of these stories in their air of encroaching menace. His interest in states of self-division, of dream and fantasy and obsession, in troubled relationships and self-destructiveness, gives a decent grounding to his pyrotechnics. Though this is not Litt at his best, several of the stories here are serious entertainments of the highest order, and Exhibitionism is well worth the price of admission.
· Philip Horne's Henry James: A Life in Letters was published by Penguin last year.