Nightlife has long been favoured territory for novelists. That is a given. F. Scott Fitzgerald jazzed us out in the Hamptons and along the Riviera. Patrick Hamilton smoked us out in backstreet Fitzrovia boozers. Colin MacInnes gave us caffeine induced palpitations in Soho Coffee Bars. But to my mind, the big gap comes from the late ‘70s onwards, specifically to do with music and dancing. Where is the definite nightclub novel, and who is going to write it?
For an art form that has seemingly covered every youth culture movement, this is the one glaring oversight. Rave has been covered in detail; Irvine Welsh and Kevin Sampson give excellent examples in their ‘90s novels, with their depictions of grimy venues: churches of E, illuminated by strobes, and sodden with beer. Every short story collection from that era was nothing without a couple of barely-disguised bad ecstasy confessionals.
I too tipped my hat a little in that direction with my first novel We are the New Romantics, with its focus on the reality of disco gloom - how daylight was for repentance, but night-time a guilt-free trip of electronica, so-so drugs, and good outfits. It came complete with specific chapters where dancing is the main event, and where something as seemingly mundane as remix can drive the narrative forward. (Actually, it was no different to how Zelda Fitzgerald did things in her only novel Save Me the Waltz, but using traditional ballroom over ear-bleed Techno and Handbag.) But in general, it seems that writers are loath to dissect the alchemy between a pair of feet, a clear spot on the dance floor and 120 BPM. The reason for this puzzles me. Writers are often thought of as drinkers . . . but are they dancers?
New York is conspicuously quiet. The city that was the flag bearer for Disco and its successor – House – continues to jealously hold onto its secrets. There is photographic evidence of Capote cutting a rug on the ‘70s clubbing circuit, but somehow he was never compelled to write about it in detail. Studio 54 was notoriously a hack-free zone. New Yorkers relied on Page 7-style gossip snippets to perpetuate the myth that this was the high altar where the most beautiful and fabulous self-affirmed and danced their asses off. Studio's epochal successors, Paradise Garage and Sound Factory were too music-oriented or too sexual to attract the hacks in droves. Only the DJs or the clubbers themselves were there to tell the story. We are still waiting . . .
Is this reason why we should rely on gay-themed novels to tell us how it was? Alan Hollinghurst showed the energy of the scene in The Swimming Pool Library, and stateside, writers such as Ethan Mordden, whose sense of milieu in How Long Has This Been Going On and We're Not in Kansas Anymore made the bar and nightclub environment take on the significance of a self-sufficient eco system rather than a local to simply get trashed at. Still, even Mordden, for all the community spirit, doesn't give significant space to the dance floor epiphany we've all experienced at one time or another.
The reality is that disco is unfairly steeped in ‘naff’, and this naffness is a barrier to serious fictional exploration. In my book, however, naffness is a key component of what motors inner lives - the fearing of, aspiring to, and disgust with the glamour of disco is a story that should be told. Its conspicuous consumption and route out of the daily grind has already been depicted many times over in novels about football and hip hop; and in Credit Crunch ’09 when fantasy is needed more than ever, there is no better time than now for disco, and dancing to take the next step. All together now, Do the Hustle . . .
Niven Govinden is an ex-Surrey-ite with no discernable track or field ability. He is the author of one previous novel, We Are The New Romantics, and is currently hard at work on his third book.
