As he drove Alan talked about Alexander Trocchi’s work ...

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I announced that I felt like the narrator in Tania Kindersley’s novel Goodbye, Johnny Thunders. Alan said he’d given up on the book at page 13 when the narrator described a man who’d shafted her as having politics to the left of Lenin. Alan thought that it was the job of novelists to deal with specifics not generalities. He’d wanted to know whether the shit in question was a Bordigist or a councilist, whether he favoured the politics of Rosa Luxemburg or Otto Rühle. Lenin had attacked the entire proletarian milieu in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder and Alan snorted that it simply wasn’t good enough to say that someone’s politics were to the left of a right-wing reactionary. I defended Kindersley, saying the whole point of her novel was its pointlessness. The story wasn’t worth writing, a poor little rich girl playing at being bad and having a hard time getting over an affair with a complete loser. Besides, Kindersley clearly didn’t intend readers to take her book seriously. No one was going to find characters whose musical tastes incorporated both Johnny Thunders and mid-period Pink Floyd in the least bit credible. The book was arch and ironic. It was futile to dismiss it as a complete waste of time. Goodbye, Johnny Thunders was aimed at avatars of boredom, individuals who were seeking out new ways to waste their time and found tedium comforting. It was a book for sad tossers who considered drugs both glamorous and dangerous.