EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | Out to brunch with a filthy new writer

Tshidiso Moletsane is lucky hijackers didn’t murder him a few years back. He was drunk when he got hijacked on a date night out with a woman. He reckons being drunk made him not think clearly, and so he foolishly argued with the criminals, and they got pissed off, predictably. They only listened to his request to not harm the woman. Then they shot him in the leg before driving off with the stolen vehicle.

He was lucky a witness helped him out. Remarkably, he did not have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath, and his leg was not hurt so badly that he couldn’t, which was his fear, walk again. He can recount the story with an uncanny amount of nonchalance and does so when recalling how the first version of his novel, Junx, disappeared. It was on a phone in a bag in the hijacked car. So, the version that won him this year’s Sunday Times Fiction Prize is one he had to start writing from scratch. The criminals sit with the incomplete original copy.

I asked him to pick a place to meet for brunch. I got an answer that the snob in me didn’t expect, “The Mugg & Bean in Cresta”. The Mugg & Bean is so last year, surely? That is like choosing Spur for a dinner date. Granted, my first date was at Spur in Grahamstown, but I was 18 and poor, and the American exchange student who was going to pay for the meal got to decide. Also, it is Grahamstown and choices are few. In Johussleburg, there is no excuse for boring choices. As for Cresta, ja swaer... let’s swiftly move the conversation along!

Or actually, not quite yet. I arrive a few minutes before Tshidiso, and I felt like I had violated the Group Areas Act. The Cresta Mugg & Bean was filled with mostly elderly white folk, and I took a seat at the far end of the restaurant, in self-imposed exile from the near racial homogeneity. I was here to get to know the 29-year-old first-time author who won arguably the most prestigious fiction award in SA. Among others, he beat Damon Galgut (The Promise) and Joanne Joseph (Children of Sugarcane) to the top literary spot.

As he approaches the table, I get up and we greet casually. Tshidiso looks younger than he is, which makes me feel guilty for thinking silently just how dangerously handsome he is. I must remind myself to not lower my journalistic guard too much nor overcompensate for that fear by being too unkind either. He talks energetically, almost in staccato form, and seems like he could yet be a candidate for a nervous twitch when he gets older. For now, he looks innocent and sounds like a very smart young author who is emotionally and intellectually mature beyond his proverbial years. As with his novel that has taken the local literary scene by storm, our conversation meanders between myriad themes over the next 90 minutes, from sex and sexuality, to drugs, animal ethics, writing technique, mental health, ethical relativism, sex work, playing with language, the dangers of false analogies, authorial intentions compared with readers’ responses to our works, and the continued grip of Sello Duiker on, especially, readers and writers of my age group.

Junx, in one sense, is a simple novel. It is about an unnamed narrator from Dobsonville who gets ready to go to one of the biggest parties of the year, called SEXY-HONEY-SUPER-CHUBBY, in Braamfontein. The entire novel plays out over just one evening. We join the narrator a few hours before he will go to Braam, and we are introduced too to his imaginary friend, Ari, who is always with him. But the narrator is not very good at making sober decisions and takes a lot of drugs. He ends up in misadventures throughout the evening, from — how shall we put this — dispossessing some tourists of their money and their rented car, to spending time at a brothel in Johannesburg and ending up with student mates later on before being chased by police when some of the earlier actions catch up with him.

What gives the novel its creative power that has made it instantly loved by so many reviewers, the judging panel of the Sunday Times Literary Awards, and many readers and book clubs, is the skill with which the unnamed narrator’s story is told. There are no chapters, and it is almost impossible, in terms of flow, to not read the novel in one single sitting. As Tshidiso put it to me over brunch, “I wanted it to feel like you are listening to a friend telling you what had just happened!” When you read a reviewer saying they had read the novel in one sitting, they are not recycling an overused literary compliment. I normally roll my eyes when I read that phrase in book reviews. Not so with Junx. The pace of the book is achieved, not just by a short timeline for the entire novel but also because of the stream-of-consciousness effect achieved by the quick, meandering, chapter break-missing approach to the writing.

I ask Tshidiso what he makes of so many early reviews interpreting the novel as a dystopian depiction of black life in SA. While it is not an incoherent reading of the novel, I am curious about the analogising from the narrator’s wild night out, to analytical conclusions about the politics of our country. Reviewers love to infer larger moral and political conclusions from the particular life of a protagonist in a critically acclaimed work of fiction. Indeed, I suspect an important part of the judging panel’s justification to itself must have been that they were impressed by how much this little novel makes big political and moral statements. That is not totally untrue, but it is an interpretation trope we should interrogate. I ask him to reflect on this for me, starting by telling me what he had set out to do. I am always fascinated by how the author’s intentions compare with how their works land.

“I know I wanted to write something filthy!” I laughed my arse off. He speaks with the same raw authenticity as both the narrator and the ever-present Ari. “I also wanted it to be a fun story!” I am so glad I asked him because the backhanded compliment that his novel is usefully dark, or depressing, does not match his intentions. Of course, that is not to say the text, as a freed object living in the literary world now, outside the author’s control, can’t be interpreted in all sorts of ways. He recognises that many of the readings make sense, and some are beautiful and complimentary, but he did not intend for this to be depressing stuff. The only intentional aspect to the “gloom” is, he tells me, that he wanted the narrator to be a challenge for many readers. I think what he means by this, though I did not explore it for long, is that some of the hedonism and nihilism of the narrator would be an aesthetic or moral affront to some readers.

He is right, but I suggest to him that depends on the reader. For some of us, the narrator is living the examined life, and there is a kind of existential freedom there to be celebrated rather than bemoan. Even the sex worker the narrator ends up with is not depicted as a woman with diminished agency who should be pitied and assumed to be making non-ideal work choices thrust on her (as it were) by the conditions of economic and social injustice in our society. We have to fill in blanks because the story is too quick for the author to give a detailed backstory to each character who makes an appearance. The upshot of this is that some readers will reveal more about themselves in their reactions to the story rather than merely describing the “point” of the novel in some objective sense. It is not morally prescriptive; it is a text that is susceptible to reasonable disagreements about many aspects of the story.

Inevitably, novelist Sello Duiker comes up. Tshidiso confesses he still has not read the mythical Duiker, and when we leave, he pops into Exclusives to buy Thirteen Cents. He already had been gifted a copy of The Quiet Violence of Dreams by a book club that hosted him and could not believe he did not know Duiker’s work. We had a good laugh, and I reassured him despite my own superfan obsession with Duiker, he should not feel bad. I bring him up to speed on who the guy was, how he died, why and how his work influenced so many of us as readers and writers and, most interestingly for him, why Junx reminds some people of Duiker. It is a terrible burden to be compared to Duiker but also a wonderful compliment. I assure him that after reading Thirteen Cents, he will have a good idea why. “Like you, Duiker’s writing choices were filthy!” Inevitably, I also recommend he read The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera and Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe. It is annoying to get too many book recommendations, so I resist further filthy titles.

Just as I am about to leave, he asks me an almost uncomfortable question. “What didn’t you like about the book?” Within minutes of us chatting, I had felt connected to him, and I could not — yet — share with you the majority of our conversation, because an instant trust overtook us both. I think? So when he asked me this parting question, I knew it would be wrong to lie or to give a vague answer. I settled for honesty.

On my first reading of his novel, I tell him I was unsure whether I thought it excellent or just OK. Either I was having an off day or the reviewers who were being superlative were fetishing the idea of a “fresh” voice, and/or reading it too allegorically. However, I said to him, what changed my mind was not going back to the text. This may seem an odd basis to settle one’s indecision about a book, but listening to him talk about the novel in interviews, both recorded ones and ones written up, I recognised just how bloody excellent he was, and could comfortably err on the side of giving him the benefit of the doubt. When he talks about writing technique choices — such as inventing Ari as a device to avail the narrator’s internal monologue to the reader or hilarious one-liner political comments that serve as emotional breaks in the absence of chapter breaks — then I knew the apparent simplicity of the story masks a beautiful mind.

Next year Tshidiso turns 30. We had a complicated conversation about suicidality. I hope, selfishly, that unlike Duiker with whom he is compared and who died by suicide at 30, he will be around beyond 30 and producing much more good filthy stuff. But living is hard and life unpredictable, and for now his commitment to filth, fun and honesty are the important goods to appreciate in his first work.