David Jays
SMILE PLEASE by Jonathan Keates (Chatto & Windus)
Adam, the central character in Smile Please, has a favourite gay sleazepit where you can take a break from the business of grapple and groan to “discuss early Antonioni or the Shostakovich cello sonata”. As in Alan Hollinghurst and Edmund White, Jonathan Keates’s novel ripples with gay men who combine dizzy aesthetic discrimination with unremitting goatishness, romping through the metropolis like centaurs.
Recreational sex, Adam reflects, is like an act of exegesis on a biological standard text – a nice idea, especially in this teasing story of lives that struggle to find a sense of purpose. Adam is a happy humper but can’t help angling for love, especially from Frankie, a devastating Manhattan choreographer. His flatmate Theo is enmeshed in a perilous liaison with a banker who hides beneath a “great canopy of reticence”.
Keates peppers both narrative and dialogue with literary allusions. Characters lift surnames from Restoration literature, suggesting a smart social comedy of contemporary men of mode. The novel certainly tinkles with petty vanities and is striped by barcodes of last year’s allusions.
Like a Restoration play, Smile Please examines an affective but edgy clutch of friends, seen both on the urban range and marooned together for weekends in the country. Keates, unlike Hollinghurst, admits interesting female characters, from Daisy the cultural fixer to country wife Serena, who gouges the mud from her husband’s wellingtons.
But literature for Keates also has an unyielding moral force. In one of the stories from his last collection, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, a style queen is saved from superficiality by a fortuitous gift of Cranford and devours Gaskell’s ample domesticity. Here, too, the references carry weight – Shakespeare and Austen, but from their least ingratiating works, particularly Troilus and Cressida and Mansfield Park.
This is a world where faking it – interest, happiness, desire without strings – is second nature, no more difficult to apply than moisturiser. Smile Please, always entertaining, becomes increasinging sympathetic and absorbing as we chase through the tendrils of clause and sub- clause.