“Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.” This is the wisdom of one Forrest Gump, a fictional film hero famed for his kindness, and it sums up quite neatly Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits, a book as wide-ranging in subject matter as it is in cultural reference.
From the qualities of narrative non-fiction itself (“vomiting after you’ve eaten candyfloss and ridden the Wurlitzer”) to the etiquette of holiday packing (“a linen suit is dashing but will never see the light of day”) to his personal quest to define his sexual identity (like a “Penis Poirot”), in this collection of confessional cultural explorations Smith reveals himself to be part-philosopher, part-prurient provocateur.
Smith would perhaps reject the invocation of Gump to describe the chaotic, random, hot-potch patchwork of his book. Indeed, he disputes Gump’s existential optimism outright in the opening lines. “Life is nothing like a box of chocolates,” he begins, “it’s more like drunk-biting into a kebab on a night-bus . . . Like a kebab, our lives have countless ingredients; the dominant flavours and hidden additives are interlocking, co-dependent parts.”
The dominant flavour of Smith’s own life, which he exposes intimately in the book by “nit-combing his personal history”, is exotically spiced wit, with undertones of cultural analysis so subtle that you might indeed miss them.
As a former columnist with Vogue, Smith’s flashy literary style glitters on the surface, with thick description and original, adjective-laden prose. However, despite the density of detail there is little substance behind the slippery streams of consciousness that carry the book along.
At 32 (an age he has been for several years, his author biography tells us), Smith is having a sort of existential crisis about what he hoped would be “the hog-roast years” of his life, but in reality is all “£4 carby sides”. Settled down with his partner in London, he has come to terms with his “gayness”, but he is not quite as easy with all the domestic duties and trappings involved in a long-term relationship.
Smith’s “trivial pursuits” involve trying to find meaning in the madness of his giant fridge, negotiating the “notice-me-fications” of social media and the culture of always-on email (“the Braxton Hicks of connectivity”), as well as accepting the contradictory complexities of his compulsive need for self-revelation, which has given him a legitimate, even lucrative, career.
Sense of repetition
The book is structured as a series of discrete chapters, but the subject matter is largely overlapping and the exhaustingly descriptive language redoubles the sense of repetition in some of the essays.
Smith, a passionately prolix showman, cannot resist a metaphor or a simile. Indeed, he gleefully admits that the contentious literary tools “Jackson Pollocked out of me” when he was putting his first draft together, and he either forgot, or declined, to take them out. Ikea “is like a stepping stone rather than a destination”. His “pithy tweets . . . get torn to shreds by the rabble-like chicken in a burrito”. “A long-term relationship is like following a very complex Agatha Christie novel.”
The comparative references, meanwhile, are gleefully high and low. Smith moves from the Sistine Chapel to Supermarket Sweep in a single sentence. In a single paragraph, meanwhile, he masturbates in front of Eurotrash while imagining himself as Gulliver in Brobdingnag. Imagine “Antony and Cleopatra on Gogglebox” and you get the picture.
Napkins and Serviettes, a meditation on etiquette and good taste, draws inspiration from My Fair Lady and Masterchef, Cinderella and Countdown, Madonna and the Mitford Sisters. From Disney to Dotovesvky, Smith has seen and read it all, or at least enough of it to have fun picking apart and inverting standard interpretations.
Vernacular style
Like a child in a sweetshop, Smith also can’t resist a good pun. As he discusses the finer points of a pre-holiday diet, he takes the following liberties with popular texts. His “naughty inner toddler wants ice-cream for dinner, like the French aristocracy in Les Miserables: I creamed a cream.” Giving in, he hits the gym to the beats of the Sugarhill Gang: “Hotel. Motel. Holiday. Thin.” Committed once again to a restricted regimen, he forgoes his favourite cafe chain: “Auf Wiedersehen, Pret.”
To draw a comparison he might enjoy, Smith’s writing evokes the contrary verbose and vernacular style of popular American songwriter Cole Porter, only Smith has no melody to catch our attention. A popular Porter lyric perhaps sums the quandary up neatly, as well: “Good authors too who once knew better words/ Now only use four-letter words/ Writing prose/ Anything goes.”
Smith can currently be read weekly in the Sunday Times Style supplement, where his musings across a similarly wide-ranging territory of contemporary life are vibrant and funny; candyfloss, he might say himself, before the vomiting begins. In the long-form of an essay collection, however, the effect is both overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.
