As you’ve surely noticed by now, STML is rather fond of Metronome Press, the English-language publisher set up in Paris by Clémentine Deliss, and not just because they shamelessly chucked a couple of free books our way. No, we like them because they promote their books unequivocally as art, a rare thing in fiction these days. That they don’t have to rely on the whims of the booksellers and the great unwashed to survive in these hard times is paraded in the list of patrons at the back of each edition, much to the chagrin of others.

Even the great Pete Ayrton himself, founder of Serpent’s Tail, had to be reminded on Front Row this evening that culture is not the same thing as market goods, and that what sells is not a barometer of taste. He lamented that only in Britain is “a local prize” (the Booker) deemed more worthy that the Nobel, but it is not our place to moan about the lack of money or celebrity afforded our corner of the arts, but to find new ways to ensure that it is made available and, if nothing else, survives. It’s what wealthy patrons have been enabling in the arts for centuries, and if the market won’t support this stuff, we’d better find someone who will.

Thank you then, Mr Harold Falckenberg (Hamburg), Mr Antoine de Galbert (Paris), one Anonymous Patron (Barcelona), the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (France), the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (the French again, we presume), the American Center Foundation (New York) and the Hessische Kulturstiftung (Frankfurt) for their generous support without which we would not have had the pleasure of Phyllis Kiehl’s Fat Mountain Scenes, or any of the other Metronome titles.

Fat Mountain Scenes is a story about an exclusive diet clinic, the Weiko Sud, where the fatties (her words, not mine) have taken over the asylum. Ebba, a new arrival, is just settling into the bizarre but surprisingly unstressful routine, which includes regular self-administered blood tests, sharply sloping dinner tables, and paper punishment suits for those who put weight back on (they stick to sweaty folds of skin and chafe until they rupture…), when a new physician struggles up the 180-step entranceway and attempts to institure a new regime. What follows is a cross between Lord of the Flies and Fat Camp, as Dr Tense’s followers square up against the mysterious Dr Sago, unseen head of the institute and gatekeeper to its mysteries.

While certainly not as experimental in form (Remainder, Stunning Lofts) or stunningly resurrected (The Young & Evil) as other Metronome titles, Fat Mountain Scenes still gets successfully under the skin, leaving a sense of deeper secrets buried beneath the flab than even the narrator reveals (although to what extent this is due to the translation - see here) - is unknowable). The connections with Kiehl’s other work, described as “plump, textile sculpture” which manifests when “the more extraordinary visual elements of her stories renounce their status as printed matter” must be fascinating - please let STML know if you find any examples…

Lovely Metronome Press recently sent STML some books and the latest issue of Metronome magazine, which comprises a sheaf of ‘teaser’ magazines in the style of Maurice Girodias’ promotional jazzmags for the Olympia Press. These feature extracts from the Metronome Press titles, as well as specially commissioned texts and images, which form an impressively varied, if expensive, collection.

Far more affordable at a mere £6.99, their paperbacks continue to astound. Tom Gidley’s Stunning Lofts tells two tales in alternate chapters (and, rather helpfully, alternate typefaces): the slow descent and disengagement from society of an urban planner, and the tribulations of a homeless man on the streets of London. What makes the form particularly intriguing is that although the conclusion is quite predictable half-way through the book, this does not lessen its impact or make the story any less compelling. The tension is maintained by a structure of numerous short chapters, each containing some minor revelation, altercation or imaginative event (a pile of office papers billows from the architect’s balcony across a run-down, East End square; the vagrant wakes in Finsbury Park, surrounded by beer cans poking through the newly fallen snow). The accompanying mental disintegration, the ease of dropping out of society and out of mind, is brilliantly evoked and sustained.

Stunning Lofts is in fact extremely close in style to another Metronome title, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, much lauded in these parts. The exact dimensions of this style are hard to define, but it is characterised by a couple of strong narrative tics. Firstly, there sounds a strong tone of detachment exemplified by a refusal to name narrators and a seeming intention to provide as few details as possible about their personal histories, and only the most perfunctory and scientific about their present lives (in Stunning Lofts occasional references are made to a disastrous old relationship, but when the narrator spies his former lover in the street, he flees in panic, and no more information is provided). This is echoed in the deadpan descriptions of rooms and streets, the bland recitation of street names and locales, if such things are mentioned at all.

Secondly, there is a focus on process which is typical of conceptual as opposed to narrative or descriptive art. The latter is hardly surprising. Gidley and McCarthy are both artists and curators who deal regularly in the conceptual (McCarthy’s International Necronautical Society claimed in its first manifesto “That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit” - a claim we missed in our original review of Remainder but which suggests a possible rereading of that book as an exploration of limbo, a Jacob’s Ladder-style approach to the afterlife). While turning away from the more lurid excesses of so-called ‘experimental’ fiction (see Steve Mitchelmore’s recent post for arguments on this), both artists are clearly engaged in radical work, both attempting in the tradition of conceptual art to make the book more artifact that object - a piece to be viewed from more than one angle and with the viewer’s full interaction - and striving to outstep traditional narrative while still retaining the recognisable form of a novel.

That both are successful speaks volumes about the way in which the currents of contemporary literary taste are in thrall to the same reactionary, middle-brow knee-jerkery that greets each new evolution of the conceptual in the visual arts. Is it to be hoped that Metronome represents a new kind of publisher, one more equivalent to a curator, who will guard, support and exhibit such work in the face of market indifference? We will have to wait and see.

We’ll return to these themes, perhaps, in a forthcoming review of the fourth and final of Metronome’s current list, Phyllis Kiehl’s Fat Mountain Scenes.