From one hustler to another

Dear James, Thanks for sending me a copy of your … what shall we call it? Memoir? Novel? Anyway, I really enjoyed it. You’ve completely captured what it was like to be an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-80s — all that Sloane Ranger crap, the Pimms, the seccies. Every time I turned the page I had a horrible jolt of recognition. ‘Oh Christ,’ I kept thinking. ‘Were we really that bad?’ (We were, we were.) The drug stuff, too, is absolutely spot on. I don’t think I’ve ever read such an accurate account of what it’s like to smoke dope. Or drop acid. Or take shrooms. You have this wonderfully colloquial, casual style, like you’ve just tossed it off between a couple of spliffs on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean, but actually you’re this really diligent reporter. You have an eye for the telling detail. It all comes leaping off the page in vivid technicolour. You’re like Hunter S. Thompson in a pair of green wellies.

The thing is, mate — and I know this isn’t what you want to hear — I don’t think it’s quite ready for publication. For starters, I don’t quite get this is-it-or-isn’t-it-an-autobiography thing. It comes across like you’re trying to be all tricksy and post-modern, like Martin Amis including a character in Money called ‘Martin Amis’, and, well, to be frank, it’s a bit irritating. I mean, it’s basically a memoir, right? This Josh Deveroux character, he’s you, isn’t he? It reads like you’ve essentially written your autobiography, but you don’t want to name names for fear of embarrassing anyone who might be in a position to harm your career so you’ve decided to make a virtue out of your cowardice by pretending it’s a deliberate, genre-straddling bit of literary experimentation. My advice is to drop all that poncey stuff, come clean about the fact that it’s a memoir and name the guilty men.