GLITTERBALLS by Michele Howarth

Samuel Richardson Award Finalist

“Soldier Playing the Theorbo,” Ernest Meissonier, The Met

Glitterballs deserves more attention than 6 reviews on Goodreads. Howarth is a talented writer, and she easily rose to the top of my pile of novels for the Samuel Richardson Award from the first paragraph of the introduction:

1978

Sometime between the birth of the world’s first IVF baby and Jim Jones blowing out his brains in Guyana. Sometime between The Hair Bear Bunch and Granada Reports. Sometime between masturbating into a face flannel and noodling on his guitar, seventeen-year-old Neville ‘Howie’ Howden’s mother shouted, ‘Fancy a Vesta?’ up the stairs. And, in that moment, Howie’s planets lined up like Ray Reardon’s snooker balls. A stellar pop career launched off the back of a rehydrated ready meal.

I was immediately more interested in this novel than the one about a guy addicted to porn, or the historical fiction detective story, or the autofiction. I won’t look up “The Hair Bear Bunch,” or a “Vesta,” or “Ray Reardon,” or even what a “face flannel” is (I think it’s a hand towel? There’s nine of them in the novel, and Howie “wanks” into three of them, “masturbates” into three more, and plans to jack off into three others but doesn’t), but despite some of the problems that happen later in the novel, I continued to enjoy the allusions. Howarth emphasizes the cheap, fast, and stupid aspects of British culture: songs called “Fancy a Vesta?” played by dirtbags named Neville who go by Howie who eat TV dinners. Howarth also uses the odd sentence fragment. At first a tasteful amount. Then too many.

Howie is from the north of England. I also liked this. I’m from the middle of the U.S., and just like people in the north of England, we’re forced to read so, so many novels set in New York City (London) and almost none set where we live.

The novel skips all of Howie’s adolescence and most of his middle age and plunks him straight into a time when he should be retiring. From 1978, the action quickly shifts to April 2019, with Howie on the way to visit his ailing mother in a nursing home. He finds “those 200 miles from his home in Surrey to his birthplace of Stockport [to be] the most grueling of slogs.” I’d heard of Surrey before GLITTERBALLS; it’s that place where all the rich people in 19th century British novels already live, somewhere near London. Stockport, not so much: turns out it’s near Manchester, and despite decades of deindustrialization, still has about 200,000 people in it. Let’s call it the Milwaukee to the Chicago of Manchester. I have no idea if this comparison if fair, true, or accurate.

58-year-old rock stars who spend all of their time chasing women, doing drugs, driving expensive cars and staying in expensive hotels need to keep making money. It’s not as if they’ve saved any during their career. So we need to know about Howie’s neglected girlfriend, Stina, his melancholic manager Eddy, and his manager’s assistant, Tony, and the ways that Howie continues to debase his (already mediocre) music to keep the cash flowing. The novel switches between these four perspectives in short chapters, and the first 41 pages are a whirlwind: Howie’s mother dies, Stina and her child are basically ignored by Howie at the funeral and the wake, and Tony has to fill in for Eddy because he’s suffering from some unknown injury. It’s a lot. Maybe a bit much, though it’s justified by passages like this, from Eddy’s perspective:

But although the drift into mainstream pop had afforded middle-of-the-road success, any creative satisfaction had melted away as Howie migrated from John Peel to Dave Lee Travis, before finding a permanent home on Steve Wright in the Afternoon. Howie’s later songs had failed to garner the critical acclaim of his early work, but his long-standing female fan base were reliable as bums on seats, and his back catalogue provided a decent income through occasional use in adverts, TV and films. But Eddy had found himself sidelined by Howie’s money men: wily characters who struck deals in private members’ clubs, and on golf courses and grouse moors. They’d invested Howie’s wealth into offshore tax avoidance schemes – his money helping to fund the construction boom that had thrown up bland office blocks and identikit housing estates on brownfield sites across the north-west. Howie, seeing his wealth accumulate with little input or effort, had done nothing to counter it. He seemed happy to be the cash cow for the sycophants and Yes Men who’d burrowed their way into his life. Eddy had become the only person prepared to stand up to him. The only person in Howie’s circle brave enough to say no. He knew it was an endgame.

This first section of the novel is full of these kinds of details, narrated by Eddy or Tony or Stina, marveling at Howie’s gluttonous venality. In Howie’s sections, he is nothing but a monster of sensation, constantly hoovering up drugs and alcohol, groping women (not Stina), and whining (or “whinging,” truly one of my favorite Britishisms) about how Eddy or Tony or Stina are profiting off of his hard work. It’s a little unpleasant, but Howarth’s keen irony, short chapters, and fine-grained details kept me interested.

The problem in GLITTERBALLS starts on page 42, when the novel backs up to “Mid March, 2019.” The giant middle section of the novel, from 42 through 312, takes place two weeks before the death of Howie’s mother, and it is simply too long for a flashback.

Howarth adds another character, Eddy’s estranged wife Una, and five perspectives is too many. To name an example of a novel I recently read that pulled off five perspectives: Howarth isn’t Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections. The five main characters in that novel were all compelling in completely different ways. In the Mid-March section of GLITTERBALLS, I always enjoyed Tony’s sections and often enjoyed the sections from Howie or Stina’s perspectives, but I almost always hated the sections from Eddy and Una, and those sections end up unfortunately dominating this flashback. While I enjoyed his caustic cynicism in the first 41 pages, I didn’t need more of it in this section, and I definitely didn’t enjoy Una’s perspective on how Eddy had sold his soul by working for Howie for forty something years.

Una had seen the work he’d put into strategising Howie’s career; how he’d micromanaged every twist and turn, how he’d delegated work to other people, only to double-check they’d done it, then do it all over again himself. She knew the toll this had taken on both their relationship and his mental health.

‘No one gets to the top by themselves,’ she’d argued, during one of their many spats on the subject. ‘Even Bowie had help, whatever your man might think.’

‘Leave Bowie out of this,’ Eddy had said, sitting at the kitchen table, finishing off a bowl of breakfast cereal at two in the afternoon.

Una knew she was dangerously close to stepping over a line by taking a pop at one of Eddy’s heroes, but she was furious enough not to give a shit. She’d been loading the dishwasher at the time and was paying little heed to the crockery that she was chucking in. The clatter of plates echoed her rage.

‘I mean it. He hadn’t a pot to piss in when Angie styled him, it was Ronson’s missus who came up with the haircut and his manager bankrolled him when he was skint.’

‘So what? It was all about Bowie’s talent.’

‘Yeah, but take away their contribution and instead of Ziggy Stardust you’ve got some bloke with pipe dreams and bills.’

The novel spends too much time in sections like this, where these two miserable people talk about how much of an asshole Howie is and drop allusions to the dark side of rock and roll instead of getting into the more interesting business of why anyone keeps coming back for more. Or even worse: a long section of the middle part of the novel involves Eddy’s ill-fated trip to London for Howie’s appearance on the Graham Norton Show and his struggle to return to Stockport without a wallet or cash after a Howie-initiated bender goes sour.

Tony is the one who pulls these sections through; she’s a working-class lesbian tuba player with crushing student loan debt from her conservatory education who Eddy brought in as his personal assistant because he was impressed with her work at the nursing home with Howie’s mother. Tony’s ex-girlfriend is trying to use her proximity to Howie to make some extra cash and Tony’s trying to keep Eddy from killing himself after the debacle in London. If the middle part of the novel was shorter and featured only Tony rather than the other four characters, I could wholeheartedly recommend Glitterballs.

But as is, the soggy middle of the novel doesn’t exactly lift up in the novel’s ending, the last forty pages after the flashback is over and it returns to April. Howarth attempts to shove something of a mystery into the the latter half of the middle of the book, and the resolution of the mystery in the final pages doesn’t justify the slog in the middle. The bad guy (Howie) gets punished, the flawed ones (Eddy and Una) get a new start, and the good ones (Tony and Stina) get a new boost. It’s not exactly a moral vision as much as it’s a requirement: the music industry’s mediocre misogynism must be defeated somewhere, so the reader can feel like the middle of the book meant something. But (besides Tony) it really didn’t.

Howarth still writes some beautiful sentences in these last pages. Here’s an example from the last time Tony visits Eddy at his house. Meredith is her dastardly ex-girlfriend:

Despite her taped wing mirrors sitting at the wrong angle, Tony skillfully manoeuvred her car into what appeared to be the last space in the postcode, her textbook parking skills testament to the teenage joyrider who’d taught her in stolen vehicles. She’d spent hundreds of hours driving the East Lancs Road in cars, vans and even once a milk float. She’d explored the flatlands of Cheshire in a footballer’s Ferrari, which they’d left abandoned but undamaged, with only a half-sucked Chupa Chup stuck to the leather upholstery to indicate the age of the driver. Tony dreamed of owning a more reliable car. Her own was held together with little more than gaffer tape and prayers to St Christopher. She remembered the Mini Convertible that Meredith’s parents had bought for her birthday, the keys in a gift box, the car wrapped in a bow. It was the same car Meredith had written off, having flipped it onto its soft roof – an accident she’d walked away from, like most things in her life, blasé and unscathed.

Again: I’d love a Tony novel. I’d have loved to know more about her childhood, or what it was like to work at the nursing home before Eddy recruited her as an assistant, or what happens after GLITTERBALL’s denouement. There’s a whole novel in there worthy to Howarth’s skill.

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I didn’t end up loving this self-published novel, but it was the best of the ones I read for the Samuel Richardson Award contest, run by Naomi Kanakia at Woman of Letters. I originally joined as a reviewer of these novels because I read a lot of old stuff and I liked an excuse to read something newer, and because I have a college acquaintance who sent me her sci-fi novel in the spring as part of a novel exchange (I sent her my pandemic novel) and I thought it was one of the better things I’d read that month, certainly superior to the novel that I wrote in 2020-21. As far as I know, she’s gotten an agent but hasn’t gotten any bites in the world of sci-fi genre publishing, and I thought that lack of interest was kind of annoying. Naomi writes a lot about how often this happens, and so I thought I’d help her use her platform to get a worthy novel more attention.

I’d read Howarth’s next book, especially if it’s a novella. This one’s not a disaster, and it could end up being my favorite of the Samuel Richardson entries I had.

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