Genesis Book

Well, Genesis is not a novel on a par with Jim Crace's tour de force, Being Dead. It's generally well-written, sometimes funny and insightful, but here's the thing: Lix Dern, our protagonist, isn't very good with women, so the way to make his travails into a semi-continuous story, Crace offers a gimmick he only half, if that, exploits.

Lix always impregnates the women he has sex with. That's the gimmick. Usually they take the lead in getting into bed with him because he's not a much of a Lothario--although he's a well-known actor and singer--and usually they drift away from him, or dump him, but when they go, they've always got his seed worked into one of their eggs.

Well, okay, but it raises the question, What about the ensuing kids? And that's a question Crace doesn't answer, or exploit. They are named, they are referred to, but like the women, they are not major features of Lix's life. Their significance doesn't really bloom until the closing pages of Genesis, and even then, what we get is a smooth chunk of Crace's prose, not three dimensional characters.

Lix is not portrayed with unflagging sympathy, so this isn't a novel about how difficult women can be for men. It's more a novel about a firecracker (or firecrackers) that didn't go off. I'm going to read another of Crace's novels fairly soon. I didn't hate this book. I just found it more forced than fanciful and completely out of keeping with the demonic man Crace's publishers chose to place on the dust jacket.