Joe Stretch disquieted by culture
Joe Stretch
JOE Stretch strides into the cafe wearing a dark suit, leather tie and wraparound shades, an artfully dishevelled 21st-century gent.
He immediately begins describing how he recently ended up in a fight in Manchester.
"A real fist fight. I’m not a violent person. I don’t really know how that happened," he protests.
Despite his diffident manner, you don’t get the impression he’d back down easily.
Stretch is notorious for venting his spleen with style and, even before his success as a novelist, he garnered a reputation for bombastic sound-offs as front man of Manchester band (We Are) Performance.
His fiction writing is similarly pitched, and critics have situated him in the esteemed company of caustic satirists such as Chuck Palahniuk, JG Ballard and Michel Houellebecq.
Sexual mores
Debut novel Friction, a dark satire on the sexual mores of hyper-consumerism, takes modern culture’s titillating promise of strong language and sexual content to gruesome extremes.
"I wanted to make it a known fact that porn is part of the world," explains Stretch, expressing nostalgia for the days when smut was truly licentious.
"I was 15 when I saw a porno and my heart skipped beats."
By contrast, his characters are numb to the point of inhumanity from venereal over-exposure. They pursue emotional reawakening by pushing sexual experimentation to its limits.
This eventually results in a girl frying herself to death with a Japanese-made electric sex aid, not to mention the arrival of recreational abortion.
Darker side
"I never really understood why they did that," he confesses. "why they kill the babies."
We agree it has to do with recasting the forces of nature as accessories to consumer recreation, but what motivated him to take it so far?
There’s a line in the book when Rachel, a stripper and key participant in the ‘Newsex’ experiment, is explaining her motivation. ‘Culture,’ she says, ‘is daring us to do what the **** we like.’
"That’s what it’s about, really," says Stretch. "I was making a stand."
By his own account, engaging with the darker side of sexual practice was a burden not cheerfully borne.
"It was very unpleasant to write," he admits. "It was ugly and angry. I’m a prude really– I hate this kind of stuff. I sit on my own at home listening to Women’s Hour and cooking spaghetti. I don’t want to think about it."
The quality of writing and the ideas in Friction have been widely praised; the structure and delivery has been criticised as patchy.
Nevertheless Stretch remains uninterested in subjecting the novel or its reception to much analysis.
Rough edges
"You can’t please everyone. I don’t give a shit. I really don’t give a shit," he laughs.
"I didn’t plan it, I just wrote it down. I like its errors, its rough edges; it’s as honest as I could have been at the time. The kind of books other people like, I’m just not really into."
So what of follow up, Wildlife, out later this year?
"Compared to [Friction] the characters are even more lonely, but it’s more of a comedy. It looks heavily at internet culture and this whole notion of 'online presence'."
Violent jarring
"It’s about identity in the modern age, the ramifications of people telling lies almost constantly. It’s an attack on the idea that humans are in any way interesting just because we walk around with haircut and hat combinations.
"Human beings are shit. Aren’t they though? They’re shit. Facebook is not the lie, that’s the lie - that human beings are at all interesting."
It’s this violent jarring with the myths of the zeitgeist that enables Stretch to throw them into such painfully sharp relief. He’s incensed by the vainglories of modern culture and he’s not planning on taking it quietly.
Joe Stretch is picking a fight whether he likes it or not.
Joe Stretch is reading at Trof @ The Deaf Institute on Sunday October 19, at 7:30pm. For more information, visit the link on the right.
Published: Wed, 15 October, 2008
Comment on this article
You need to be logged in to comment. Login | Register