Aberdeen rocks: review of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess by Stewart Home.

…I really don’t think anyone who is at all interested in the study of literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home. No one and nothing, least of all the work itself, is saying you have to like it: if Home wanted his work to be likeable, he could just set about copying Nick Hornby, same as everybody else. But Home is using writing for a different purpose. Writing is power, ideology, an instrument of domination; it’s a huge, filthy, stinking machine. Yes, it’s possible – and can be rewarding in all sorts of ways – to use this machine for writing amiable, authentic, sincere-seeming prose. But that is only a tiny part of what writing is about, whether or not one chooses to acknowledge the power relation head on.

In his work, Home avoids all the nice bits of writing to focus in tightly on what is difficult, ugly, ambivalent about the process. So pulp gets in, and pornography, and violence; philosophy is allowed, so long as it is not being consoling; and political theory is fundamentally what the whole thing is about – Home sometimes calls his method ‘proletarian Postmodernism’, and he doesn’t mean that entirely as a joke. Much of Home’s work is extremely funny, if you are comfortable enough with the tradition it comes out of to be able to see the humour. But it isn’t warm, it isn’t compassionate, it doesn’t make you feel good as you read it. The irony is almost total. It’s satire, unsweetened and unadorned.

London Review of Books