The Smiths: A Novella reads as an ekphrasis, or a literary description of a work of art, which is to say an ode to the Smiths. Although the Smiths serve, for the English writer Michael Bracewell, as a memory-laden madeleine to enter the 1980s, they are the obvious anchor for the book. To read Bracewell’s prose is the equivalent of sauntering the streets of one’s youth, not knowing where it will lead or whom you will see. If, that is, you will see someone, anyone, anything, or find only phantoms silhouetted against grey-leaden skies.
The book is a Proustian, circuitous meditation on the zeitgeist, shaped by personal recollections of the Smiths. For the nameless narrator, they were the soundtrack to his 1980s. Or, accurately, a lifeline, where music floats over and under you, carrying you along as if you have no say in the matter, a witness to beauty as much as a victim, ceaselessly stupefied. The narrator is, of course, Bracewell, who knows that we know that he is writing about himself. However, is Bracewell, the public persona, also a fictional character here?
The Smiths: A Novella is, in part, a highly stylized and elliptical diary of Michael Bracewell’s time in the 1980s, when, as a gauche, indistinguishable, 20-something white-collar office worker in London, life ended before it began. Yes, a dead-end job, the kind that leaves your soul crushed like waste in a garbage truck, where you might as well be, it seems at times when boredom grips you with terror and fear, but mostly with emptiness. It’s an emptiness that can never be filled, like a leaky bucket waiting to be kicked over for no reason at all—not even for sadistic laughter.
Whereas Bracewell’s most recent novel, 2023’s Unfinished Business, a sequel to his The Conclave (1992), may well be loosely based on Bracewell, Martin Knight, the 57-year-old protagonist, makes you forget about the author. Here, the distinction between the narrator and Bracewell is so nebulous that the two blur into one, a mask for a face, a face for a mask; the two cohering like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966).
In The Smiths, Desire Is the Desire of the Other
Set in 2009 or 2010 (equivocation is key to this book and mirrors the Smiths’ ambiguous lyrics), the narrator imagines meeting Carole Bouquet, the co-star of Luis Buñuel’s film That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), who looks exactly how she did in 1977. Yes, you heard it right, a book about the Smiths—the enigmatic band whose songs were about fantasy, though, ironically, not often sexual in nature; in fact, Morrissey, the lyricist, publicly advocated sexual abstinence—has a narrator imagining meeting the co-star of a film that deals with the thwarting of sexual desires. There must be a joke in here, somewhere.
Certainly, The Smiths is self-reflexive and metatextual; occasionally, this gets in the way of the story, if not the emotional impact. For instance, when the narrator says about the film, “anarchy, illogicality…”, well, we know Bracewell is also referring to this novella. If one were to compare this book to Bracewell’s 2021 masterpiece, Souvenir, one would find a significant difference. In the latter, the personal is absent and vacant; the power of that book comes from the feeling that the lost, forgotten 1980s is, somehow, directing the story.
Like Virgil to Dante, or Dean Moriarty to Sal Paradise, Carole Bouquet is a cicerone to the narrator. While peregrinating around London, viewing the flats where he used to live from the street below, as if a threshold he cannot cross, the narrator recounts where he first heard a record or first saw the single sleeve of, say, “This Charming Man”. The story between the narrator and Bouquet is skeletal, a sketch, a daub of paint, a flickering of light. Both characters walk around ghostlike, stalking the past in London, as if it were T.S. Eliot’s wasteland and the aftermath of the First World War was in the 1980s.
Are we to take the narrator walking around with Carole Bouquet at face value? Of course not. We are in the world of pop—romantic fantasies and private hopes—and in the world of pop, logic goes out the door. Thus, some will view The Smiths as a magic-realist novel, but it is more akin to a pop fantasy. The beauty of the story lies in the disjunction between what happened and what is remembered, the truth from the lie, the lie from the truth, to the point that one questions whether the entire narrative is in the narrator’s imagination.
Where The Smiths stops being a novella and starts becoming a memoir is a futile question. There is enough of a story to warrant labelling this book a novella: the narrator hints at having feelings for Bouquet, mirroring the Smiths’ established theme of unrequited love. Yet, rather than the pangs of youthful love, this is a late-middle-aged love story, making the melancholy greater. “Might this, I wildly wondered, be the season of sudden amours after all?”
The Smiths‘ Non-Fiction/Fiction
The real story of the Smiths was in their antagonistic and antithetical relationship to the ordinary, hence their name, which is both ironic and sincere. On the one hand, they prided themselves on being the Other, away from the common British surname; on the other, they were the expression of that sobriquet: outsiders living within the society of, figuratively speaking, the Smiths.
Although a quintessential 1980s band, the Smiths were steeped in the kitchen-sink realism of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, not unlike Roxy Music, who were rooted in 1920s Modernism in the 1970s. The Smiths endowed the decade with a paradoxical voice: a grounded grandiloquence. This is to say flights of fancy enmeshed in kitchen-sink realism. Their songs were replete with yearning: flesh and fantasy, desire acted and thwarted, the inviolable as violable, a Genet-esque transvaluation. Their music was a home to the disenfranchised, full of unrequited love, soul-crushing ennui, and heart-aching loneliness.
The blurb reads as, “… this is not a book about The Smiths but one that emerges from their music, their emotional register and their literary resonance.” Although this is accurate, the Smiths’ music features more than I was expecting. In fact, the book is a terse but chronological account of each of the Smiths’ studio album releases; by the time of the release of their fourth and last studio album, Strangeways, Here We Come (1987), the narrator had lost interest in the Smiths. Moreover, when Bracewell directly writes about the band, the writing is exquisite; the best music writing—writing in general—you have likely read for some time.
Indeed, you will find many beautiful descriptions of the Smiths’ music. For example, “The singer’s voice is heartfelt, rising once more to wordless lamentation – a sung moan, the daylight lingering – to return as ever in song to the inevitability of impossibility.” Or, “I thought of Johnnie Ray, that emotional extravagance, but refracted through a northern English regional town library on a wet afternoon; the fire smouldering, the blaze intact within. Resurgent but still hopeless longing, and memories like paper cuts.”
Like the Marxist art critic John Berger leading you through a Caravaggio, or the cultural critic Greil Marcus walking you through different versions of the Australian folk song “Jim Jones”, Bracewell guides you through the Smiths’ songs—“Back to the Old House”, “Miserable Lie”, and “Pretty Girls Make Graves”. Bracewell achieves a Frankenstein resurrection: the Smiths come alive with their Romantic melancholy and English feyness, as if you are hearing the Smiths for the first time as a 16-year-old and have finally discovered a world you belong to; simultaneously an ache of memory, a heartbeat of despair, confound you within these pages, as this is no walk down memory lane but a sharp thorn-prick reminder of time having passed.
Was Proust a Mancunian?
Lost time is at the heart of this story. What happens to the people you meet in your youth? What happens to you? It brings to mind, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” from T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem, “The Waste Land”. The elliptical nature of the book echoes the fragmentation of Modernism, cue again Eliot, who is clearly an influence on Bracewell—especially in terms of temporality.
To read The Smiths is to feel time slipping away, like a waning evening light. A beauty turns inside out to reveal an interior world: flesh into memory, present into past, buildings turn into rubble. Here, ephemerality is painterly distilled into a melancholic threnody worthy of Italo Svevo. Yes, truly, Bracewell is an elegist, and, like all great elegists, he honours life. Our Rilke?
The book wouldn’t be as convincing if it weren’t written obliquely, if the story were presented as how it was lived. Instead, the story is as much about Bracewell as it is about the Smiths. The book, then, is a miasma of fragmented memories floating in the ether. There, the narrator draws down and examines a memory associated with a song; each track is a mirror, reflecting a younger version of Bracewell. Without the Smiths, he seemingly wouldn’t be writing this book.
Bracewell Writes as a Painter with a Brush
Is there a better prose stylist currently writing than Michael Bracewell? His prose is lithe, laconic, sybaritic—imagine if Fleur Jaeggy bumped into Patrick Modiano at a chippy, where they started talking about the Swiss post-punk band LiLiPUT and decided to write a book together on the Smiths instead. Seriously, Bracewell writes as a painter with a brush: an all-seeing eye scanning the terrain of a canvas with exactitude and imagination.
Like Modiano, obsessed with post-war Paris, Bracewell is preoccupied with 1980s London. It is as if he is revisiting the past not to satisfy a deep-aching nostalgic longing, but as if things were missed the first time. Also, metaphysically, he is still there, alone and stranded, needing to be rescued from the sands of time.
The Smiths is not without humor: “A government office of sorts. I had seen it for the first time with a mixture of emotions. These included hostility, boredom, weariness and resentment. Notably lacking had been pride, excitement, curiosity and optimism.” Or, when describing the transvaluation of values which imbued the Smiths’ music, Carole Bouquet says, “’ Like Genet?’”, “’Had Genet played Middlesbrough Town Hall in 1986,’” the narrator rejoins.
The Smiths are and were the Object of Desire, which is to say elusive, a phantom, a fantasy; thus, it makes sense for the Smiths to be the subject of a book, which is a meditation on lost time, time regained, and thrown back in your face, where you feel struck and stuck. Needless to say, Bracewell couldn’t have found a better fit than in the Smiths to carry his theme along; they grasped the hand of God in miserable heaven or Manchester in time, and time alone.