Play The Devil by Scott Laudati

I’ve followed Scott Laudati on whatever Twitter is called this week for a long time. I’ve interacted with Scott Laudati on social media and watched Scott Laudati interact on Twitter with other people I follow and whose work I enjoy. I have – you can tell because I’ve read it and have started to write a blog post about it – bought a copy of one of Scott Laudati’s books, yet – in spite of all this – it is only right now, right this second – the evening of the 24th August 2023 on the Northern line homeward bound – that I have realised something that should have been apparent to me a long, long time ago: Scott Laudati and I have the same first name.

Maybe I missed this because encountering someone else with my first name is such a rare experience in the circles I have blisslessly spent my life amongst that I essentially presume it just isn’t possible.

People called “Scott” – which I genuinely do forget is my first name because it just really really doesn’t… like… vibe with my personality or personhood, like, at all – appear-

in fact I think I’d quite genuinely forgotten “Scott” was actually my name because it’s just not like right for me, y’know, and I think I do forget that there are people who do associate that name with me and my sad bodily waste, in spite of its wider sociocultural meanings and contexts (which may well be very different in the USA compared to here?) and maybe those people don’t find it (the name and me who possesses it, legally if not spiritually) as confusing as I do, but maybe they do, because they don’t really ever tend to use my name when addressing me except when they’re trying to make me feel small, ashamed, or otherwise trying to remind me that no matter how many books I publish, how many great outfits I wear, how much [redacted] I [redacted], how many [redacted] middle class [redacted] I [redacted], I can never ever ever ever ever – and they know this fucking hurts me to my core – I can never ever ever ever ever forget that I’m pondlife provincial fuck scum, the kind who would be named “Scott”.

I don’t think the name has these connotations in North America, which is maybe one of the reasons why I am always less uncomfortable when outside of England. My name doesn’t reveal I was bred to be inferior, disposable dredge in other countries, like it does here. Here I am forced to confuse people who have met other Scotts by not being a normal Scott, and am guffawed at by people who have never met another (and likely never will!) and can tell that it means I’m probably (definitely) mentally ill.

As a word, it’s just so sonically blunt and so fucking hard and I hate it and it hates me.

I don’t suit that name as that name doesn’t suit me.

Here, England, anyway. I mean, I just hate being here.

It’s nearly my birthday again and though I don’t think I’m so quantitatively minded to see a birthday as a signifier of the passage of time any more meaningful that the horrors of fucking waking up every day do, I I I I i- yes am still affected???

“Scott”. “Scott”. It sounds like fucking “scat”. Why would you name a person after fucking effluence???

It’s not even a normal fucking first name. It’s a surname. Like Captain Scott, who died pointlessly trying to reach the South Pole . Like Scott Fitzgerald. Like Ridley Scott (better example). Like [insert other Scott here]. It’s a surname or it’s a nationality, isn’t it? A nationality I do not have!

It’s not, right, the name of a poet, is it? Scott isn’t the first name of someone who writes (which do I even do that any more???)? Certainly not in England.

[search thru the blog archive and see if I’ve ever referred to a writer called “Scott” before]

Unless there’s a paragraph above where currently there is a note to self within square brackets, I’ve never read a proper book before by someone whose first name is “Scott”, and that’s intentionally excluding my own, because I don’t really count as a person. (I’ve read my own books and they’re very good, in spite of being written by an English person called Scott.)

This sudden flash of awareness of my own nomenclature has overshadowed – suddenly – my entire reading experience of this book, unfortunately, even though it hadn’t impacted that experience while I was reading it…

I genuinely hadn’t noticed this biographical connection, consciously (I mean obviously, of course, maybe I had noticed it subconsciously and this was enough of a reason for me to not only notice and engage with Scott Laudati on social media, but also for me to feel a pull to purchase his book and then not only to buy it but also to, like, literally read it. Like, literally . Like I have literally read it)—

What I will do, though, especially as I’m now back off the tube (after changing at Euston onto the Victoria line which I’ve lived close to basically all my time ever in London lol whoops lol) is to remember to forget about my weird reaction to realising that Scott Laudati and I share a first name, and put my phone away for 12 hours and come back to comment on the novel after I’ve had a sleep.

Yeah. Let’s do that.

–///–

Ok, it’s a different day.

But, yeah, it really did blow my mind when I made that first name connection.

Wild.

You have to remember that I’m not well.

Anywaaaaaaaaay.

–///–

Comments on the book begin here:

Play The Devil is a novel about being young and being badly behaved, particularly about being badly behaved while at work, which is something that I too enjoyed doing when I was young.

The novel takes place mostly over a single day (with a bit of context set up before the actual day) where a college drop out who’s just been kicked out of his parents’ house (seemingly motivelessly? Like he had his own room in the house and was an adult and hooked up with someone in that room but then a woman being in his room in the morning was apparently grounds for ejection from the family home, which I just didn’t understand: surely not even in America would people be happier thinking their 24-year old children were sex-starved losers than knowing that they’re not??? This is the only part of the book that I didn’t understand.)

Anyway, the protagonist – a wannabe writer (aren’t we all???) – is out of cash, out of prospects, out of the family home, though is hopeful he might get to, once again, rail the woman the banging of which got him kicked outta home, but even if that doesn’t happen he’s glad that it did. A “better to have loved and lost” kinda guy.

With nothing to lose, he takes a job cleaning pools, and the remainder of the novel covers a single day travelling around the New Jersey suburbs meeting all sorts of people who own pools that need cleaning: there are gangsters, more sexy women, there’s a male stripper, there’s a Nazi war criminal, there are others, and all through the day the pool boys (pool men, perhaps?) drink (all sorts of drinks) and smoke (all sorts of smokes) heavily, do a bit of gambling, get into a rivalry with another pool cleaning company, try to balance the pros and cons of the boss of the pool company being deep into a midlife crisis…

It’s about messy people and messy lives and is a great entry into the ever expanding and ever joyful world of – what I know to be called – picaresque literature. The Picaresque.

Yes, the characterisation is sparse, yes, the action is almost repetitive but not quite, yes… not much happens, but this does kinda feel like – to me at least – a representative day in the life of a cheeky pool boy man (pool man boy? man pool boy?) in Obama-era America.

Lots of blood, lots of vomit, lots of excrement and lots and lots of piss; the sex scenes are all, unfortunately (for who?), off screen (as it were) with Laudati perhaps trying to shag his cake and eat it too, by including quite a bit of sleaze, but always in the mouths and in the conversations of his man pool boys rather than fresh on the authorial ticket – there’s enough distance there for claims of authorial innocence when the sleaze starts to drip, which is a technique I’d probably adopt if I was undepressed enough to be writing again.

Yes, sleaze! (I’m pronouncing that so it sounds a lot like “yes, please!” spoken joyfully.)

Play The Devil is fun, it’s trashy and sleazy, it’s full of piss and grime and dead vermin and intoxicants and pathetic middle age and awkward youth and insecurities.

I liked it a lot!

It’s the kind of thing I used to read and I used to [try and?] write, too. Maybe I should rub off the dust from my long-shelved sleaze manuscripts as maybe – just maybe – sleaze is back on the menu, boys..?

Or maybe it isn’t? What do I fucking know? I can’t even remember my own name…

Published by Bone Machine. Order it via this link.

Thank you for reading 🙏🙏🙏