Bright Young Things

Scarlett Thomas
was born in London in 1972. Her other novels include
PopCo
,
The End of Mr. Y
, which was longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, and
Our Tragic Universe
. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent.

Also by Scarlett Thomas

The End of Mr Y

PopCo

Our Tragic Universe

Monkeys with Typewriters

This paperback edition published in 2012 by Canongate Books,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

Copyright © 2001 by Scarlett Thomas
Introduction copyright © 2012 by Scarlett Thomas

The moral right of the author has been asserted

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Hodder and Stoughton
A division of Hodder Headline

www.canongate.tv

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 85786 380 5
Export ISBN 978 0 85786 392 8
eISBN 978 0 85786 381 2

Typeset in Centaur MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire

This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books

In memory of Dreamer

1999-2011

Thanks . . .

When I wrote
Bright Young Things
, people still played tapes on Walkmans, and the most interesting thing you could do with a mobile phone was to play
Snake
on it. People still rang each other on landlines. People watched videos. There was email, just about, but SMS messaging had yet to take off. There was no Wikipedia and Google was not a verb.

It was 1999 and everything had gone a bit millennial. Tins were beginning to appear in shops with use-by dates beginning with the number 2, and for a while it was pretty exciting trying to spot them. At least the people who produced canned goods thought the year 2000 was actually going to happen. Looking forward to (and being terrified at the thought of) the world ending on 1 January was one of the few exciting things left in my life. I ’d ended up in Torquay with a huge overdraft and a lack of enthusiasm for the three mystery novels I ’d published. I was twenty-seven years old and still wondering what to do with my life. I was a writer, yes, but not yet a very good one. I hadn’t developed any real style of my own, and although there were some good lines in my crime novels, characters still did things like smile cynically and sniff the air tentatively. Where was the emotional truth? If people weren’t killing each other in horrible ways they were doing things like inwardly berating themselves. Everyone else I knew seemed to be writing cool books about people doing nothing, or taking drugs and doing nothing. In my books, if people took drugs they
died
. Looking back now, I guess I’m pleased that Lily Pascale, my heroine, smokes all the time, forgets to eat and wears too much lipstick. That was me, once upon a time. But once upon a time I ’d also taken drugs and not died. I’d done quite a lot of nothing.

There I was in Torquay as autumn set in; using my old lacrosse sticks as window locks, unable to have a bath because the electric boiler never got the water hot enough. Luckily I had a gas oven, which made things a little cosier. (It was that Torquay kitchen that ended up being the basis for the one in
The End of Mr. Y
, several years later.) I didn’t have my dog Dreamer yet; but somewhere in the slums of Plymouth her mother must have been pregnant with her. The following year she would find me, and although she loved sleeping as much as I did – maybe just slightly more – she taught me to go outside and look at natural things. She also taught me responsibility. But in 1999 I still spent most of my time trying to come up with money-making ideas, playing videogames or wasting hours in internet chatrooms. I smoked, ate junk food and wondered why I felt so crap all the time. I’d done what I’d always dreamed of and become a published writer. But it hadn’t stopped me feeling lonely. It hadn’t helped me with relationships. It hadn’t made me feel like a success. It was as if I was still waiting to be discovered. I wanted a miracle job advertisement. I wanted someone to come along and say, ‘Just do what you’re good at and we’ll give you enough money for your rent, bills, cigarettes and some nice food and clothes.’ I guess I also wanted the satisfaction of being recognised for doing something well.

I decided that I wanted to write something authentic about this feeling of wasted ambition that I knew many of my generation shared. (I realise now that it must be much worse for the generation that is just now graduating from university with even less hope than we had.) In 1995 I’d left university with a First. I went to London to seek my fortune but ended up working in a nightclub, taking speed to stay up all night. During the day I played Super Mario games. I looked at the job ads in the Media
Guardian
every week and even applied for some of them. The only interview I ever got was with MTV Europe, which was pretty exciting at the time. In the end I was runner-up for what must be the most meaningless job in the world: creating the MTV-logo inserts that appear between the music videos. All of this came back to me as I sat in my fat in Torquay in 1999. Why hadn’t I tried harder? I could have been part of an internet start-up, or gone into advertising, or made documentaries. OK, so my car was always breaking down and I didn’t have the right clothes. But those were surely just excuses. What was stopping me? And where were all the cool friends I was supposed to have? At one point my closest friends were characters in video games. I had conversations in my head with the sort of people I never met but wished I did. People a bit like the characters in
Bright Young Things
.

In 1999 I was reading a lot of Raymond Carver, and discovering that real literature could be about things like broken fridges and could be written in quite simple sentences. I realised that I didn’t like adverbs although I ’d been using them all the time because I thought that’s what writing was. I was also a big fan of Douglas Coupland, the first person I’d ever read who wrote about something that resembled my life. At the time I was writing
Bright Young Things
there was a real buzz about Magnus Mills’s first novel,
The Restraint of Beasts
. This was an authentic story about fencing (the working-class kind) told in a deadpan, minimalist style, full of conversations that went nowhere. I loved conversations that went nowhere; I’d fallen in love with both Beckett and Albee as a teenager. Thinking about it now, I’m pretty sure I read Mills long after I ’d finished
Bright Young Things
, which probably means I can’t cite it as an influence. But for some reason I still think of
The Restraint of Beasts
as being important to me when I wrote my novel. Maybe I read an extract in the paper. Or maybe I just heard somewhere that it was now acceptable to write a book like that in the UK: gritty, raw, authentic, funny and minimalist. And not about posh people.

In Britain in the 1990s, postmodernism was in full swing. As Fredric Jameson said, this was a culture that was depthless, meaningless and driven by pastiche and nostalgia. It was all surface. It wantonly mixed high and low culture. Everything referenced everything else. Quentin Tarantino had become a famous film director not by going out into the world and experiencing things, but by learning about films by working in a video shop! I’d spent most of my time as a Cultural Studies undergraduate writing passionate love–hate essays about postmodernism. And while postmodernism is everything Jameson says it is and worse, it probably also enabled me, a cultural misfit who’d grown up on a council estate in East London, to think I could probably write a proper novel. Would it be a great novel? No. But that didn’t matter (yet). In a world where someone like Chris Evans could present a live TV programme full of mistakes, self-referentiality and, well, complete bollocks, it seemed that anything was possible. This was a time where dead air on the radio could be ‘read’ as ironic, and people stopped pretending they didn’t use auto-cues on the TV. So I ditched the murder, adverbs and predictability. Then I wrote a novel full of the literary equivalent of dead air. This is the book you’re holding now.

The characters in
Bright Young Things
don’t know they are in a book, but they do know that they are in a story. Thanks to
Scream
and similar films, metafiction was all the rage in the 1990s, and it was very common to have characters comment on the genre in which they found themselves. To me, this refected an increasing anxiety about hyperreality. After all, when the world is covered in billboards and people talk to each other using rhythms and expressions from TV, and when, for a while, a whole culture seemed obsessed with saying ‘Whassup?’ in the style of a Budweiser commercial, what’s the difference between being in real life and being in a story? With this in mind, I wanted to take some characters out of the culture through which they defined themselves, put them somewhere else and see what happened. My theory was that they would bring their culture with them, as settlers have throughout history, and continue to use it to define themselves and each other. In other words, this was going to be a book in which young people, deprived of TV, music and video games, sit around talking about TV, music and video games. My original draft of
Bright Young Things
didn’t even have the dead man in it. My characters just sat around and talked. My publisher at the time asked for something sinister to happen, and so I created the dead man. Looking at the book again, I think it works. Perhaps it’s not the most plausible thing I’ve ever written, but it adds some drama and tension in a place where it’s probably needed.

My original idea must have popped straight out of the zeitgeist, because I was already well underway with my novel when the first mainstream reality TV shows
Castaway
and
Big Brother
were announced in the UK. By the time they both aired in 2000,
Bright Young Things
had been delivered to the publisher. But, publishing schedules being what they are, it didn’t actually come out until February 2001. I lost count of the reviews that declared confidently that my book was a satire on reality TV, a term that didn’t even exist at the time I was writing it. Of course I was annoyed that people didn’t realise that I’d independently come up with this idea of young people sitting around having half-meaningful, half-meaningless conversations in a house cut off from society. But, to be honest, I was thrilled to be reviewed at all.

When
The Face
(now sadly defunct) reviewed
Bright Young Things
, it was broadly positive, but the reviewer did point out that the novel was so full of current pop-culture references that it would date easily. It’s true that many expressions are now extinct, twelve years on. No one talks about ‘city-girl’ novels any more, although perhaps it was a better term than chick lit. Even I don’t remember who or what ‘Another Level’ was. I think maybe a boy band. But a lot of pop-cultural space-junk has survived. Emily, we learn at one point, has all the episodes of
Friends
on videotape. Anne hums a Britney Spears song. Perhaps the book needs to be left to marinate for a bit longer to feel truly dated. Or perhaps it doesn’t feel that dated to me because it’s full of all the stuff that I remember.

Something about living at the end of a millennium seems to make people nostalgic, or at least pre-nostalgic. When I was writing
Bright Young Things
you could buy time-capsule kits (or make your own, as demonstrated on
Blue Peter
) in order to bury some of your community’s material culture: to tell future archaeologists, historians or aliens how you lived in 1999. I wanted to do something similar with my novel. I wanted it to be a kind of time capsule that you could open ten years, twenty years, fifty years later and be surprised both by the things in it that still exist and by the things that are only faint memories. In a sense, every good novel is a time capsule. And while novels sprinkled with pop-culture and material-culture references can become tiresome quickly, I still believe in an unembarrassed and authentic representation of the detail of everyday life. Jane Austen presumably didn’t worry that in 300 years people wouldn’t know what a barouche was, and so in this spirit I threw in every current thing that interested me, whether it was likely to ‘date’ or not. Every cultural reference in my novel is real. Of course, while this is (I hope) interesting, and serves some historical as well as future-nostalgic purpose, the main focus of any novel has to be more sophisticated than that.
Bright Young Things
is also a novel about postmodern culture: a world in which grand narratives have been replaced with cheap narrative. It asks whether it is possible or even desirable to disrupt this. It asks whether it is possible to find meaning in a world overflowing with it.