I'm Leaving You Simon, You Disgust Me... By William Donaldson

Anglo-Saxon platitudes

William Donaldson is no Gustave Flaubert." That sort of sentence is an example of a platitude. But that sort of platitude interests both writers. They are united, if not in genius, then in a fascination with the brainless credulity of their fellows.

Flaubert loathed the lazy complacency of middle-class opinions and tastes. He made it the subject of his ambitious novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet, left unfinished on his death in 1880. This concerns two humble clerks who, after an inheritance, set out to acquire all worldy knowledge. And naturally fail.

Flaubert's intention was to publish a second volume full of idiocies, an anthology of fashionable misconceptions, bourgeois noises and lazy cliché, to act as a sort of gazetteer of banality. This was never completed as the work on the novel destroyed him, but fragments of the Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues were published as a separate volume in 1913. Since then it has been a literary curiosity, in and out of print.

William Donaldson created The Henry Root Letters, a classic of late-Seventies humour. The conceit was to puncture the pomposity of celebrities by writing them grotesquely embarrassing letters, attaching money, and then publishing the usually hilarious replies. This was a splendid act of psychological sabotage, which proved for Donaldson a difficult act to follow.

Now he has published I'm leaving you Simon, you disgust me..., which with its subtitle - "A Dictionary of Received Ideas" - is clearly a hommage-à-clef to Flaubert. Try as I might, I could not see the grumpy old Frenchman actually mentioned. But another link to Flaubert is there in Posy Simmonds. Her delightful Gemma Bovery was an ironic bande dessinée inspired by Flaubert's tragic masterpiece. And she provides the dustjacket for Donaldson: a hideous collection of braying and arfing tossers saying "150k and a golden hello - wouldn't get out of bed for less" and "Small place in Tuscany, of course... won't divulge its name". We know the sort of thing all too well.

Flaubert had been collecting material for his Dictionnaire since his youth. There is a French tradition of this: a sotissier is a catalogue of stupidities or howlers. Flaubert's sotissier had two purposes. First was a "prosecutor's address" against complacent bourgeois opinion and, second, a working source for his literary imagination. Many of the entries surface somewhere or other in the novels.

Both Flaubert and Donaldson aim to fix the chatterers by cataloguing their chatter. The problem with Flaubert, as Philip Toynbee pointed out, was that his very accuracy made his Dictionnaire date very quickly. In addition, some entries must have been feeble even in their day: "Lord: wealthy Englishman" is one example. But others still ring true and retain their humour. What Flaubert's bore said about trains applies today to aeroplanes.

Donaldson attempts something similar, but while Flaubert's Dictionnaire was designed to supplement a novel, this book has the alphabetical entries punctuated by the conversation of a grisly cast of characters gathered in a tapas bar in Islington. These, naturally, include the disgusting Simon of the title and his partner, Susan, a tense North London academic.

It is a brave conceit which does not really work. In a sense, Donaldson's ear is as true as Flaubert's, but a great deal of what he has been listening to has come from the idiot's lantern, or television. Thus any reader not familiar with Richard and Judy or the tropes and tics of sports commentators will miss references and, indeed, many jokes. Donaldson can be very funny in his absurd wordplay: "Compton Pauncefoot: Either a picturesque village in Somerset, or a West Indian fast bowler. The debate continues. See also: Upton Snodsbury". Elsewhere, however, the material sits uncomfortably between intellectually credible stuff (the short entry on Cervantes, perhaps) and impressively sharp observation before it slips into fatiguing here-today celebrity-based silliness. Mick Jagger did not, in my opinion, make Kylie Minogue's bottom possible.

There is a problem with books about cliché, as Flaubert discovered. A cliché was originally a set of words so often used together that printers did not bother breaking up the type. But even in his Dictionnaire, Flaubert has clichés of his own, thus demonstrating the folly he intended to ridicule. While the satirical content is clear, so too is the impression that Flaubert was very pleased with some of the stuff. Of course, Flaubert mocked his subject matter, but to demonise an idea is to legitimise it in a way.

It is exactly the same with William Donaldson. Of course, he thinks his Islington twerps are gruesome, but his own relationship to his material is ambiguous. Surely Simon and Susan are the very people who will buy the book?

Curiously, there is no entry on Zeitgeist. The glib reliance on Hegel's term for Spirit of the Age is, I imagine, as familiar in a certain sort of Islington tapas bar as an order for jamon and Marques de Riscal. I mention Zeitgeist fully conscious of how very irritating this most over-used term has become. Donaldson's book may have some faults, but does prove the timeliness of an idea. There's something in the air that demands we nail clichés right now. Another take on Flaubert's fascinating Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues will appear soon - or as soon as the publisher can be persuaded to leave his Islington tapas bar. I know this, because both book and publisher are mine.