Addiction does not have a narrative; it is cyclical, interminable. "Giving up" doesn't have a narrative either; it comes flooded with pain and loss, over and over, and the same possibility that "giving up" might end at any moment. This was the triumph of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, and its episodic, picaresque feel; there was only a small continuity to its chapters, because by and large they rehearsed the same two states of being: using heroin, and not using heroin. People who have never smoked do not spend their lives not-smoking; they live. People who have given up smoking do spend their lives not-smoking. Everything they do is overlaid by an awareness of what they are not doing.
In The Smoking Book, in a series of fifty-four meditations, reminiscences, theories, therapy – Lesley Stern explores smoking. Or desire. Or renunciation. Or – one suspects – writer's block. Throughout the book, Stern's persona ("she") is not having the happiest time; giving up a problematic lover and giving up cigarettes seem to go hand in hand, and it is unclear which hurts most. It is also unclear what relation writing, smoking and loving have to each other for Stern; sometimes they seem to be linked metonymically, sometimes analogically, sometimes substitutionally (like methadone for heroin addicts): "For even though it might be true that a photograph is no substitute for a thing, and so on and so on, it is only through a serial meandering of substitutions" and transformations that we survive desire, that desire survives." Stern's hybrid genre does manage, over its entire distance, to consider most of these questions, and often to enact the moods that accompany them. She can be lyrical, about the pleasure of tobacco or food and drink; she can be lecture-note informative, on the history of tobacco, or the farming and trading of it in Africa (she spent her childhood in Zimbabwe); she can be confessional, about drunken debasement during love affairs or episodes of mental instability. There are also familiar dips into Continental theory, whether psychoanalytic, anthropological, existentialist or whatever. Some of this can be hard going, some of it tenuous: and there have already been a number of books applying this sort of attention to smokers' addiction, notably Richard Klein's Cigarettes Are Sublime (reviewed in the TLS, May 27, 1994).
The dullness, though, may be deliberate. At her best, Stern conveys memory, desire and pain with a clarity and accuracy that can jolt the reader into memories of his own; at her worst there are whole passages that seem hopelessly overwritten and overwrought, and irritatingly self-conscious. But as she says,
There's a genre of which I partake – the writing-through-addiction genre. Writing as enabled by addiction; and its obverse: writing through it as in a thriller, driving through a roadblock, coming out the other side. This genre is designed to be diaristic, tediously personal, acutely experiential . . . . Those repressed gestures of the voice emerge as temperamental snarls, idiosyncratic whines, and murderously solipsistic mutterings. To engender a voice – gravely, generically traced by its own dissolution: this is to not-give-up.
This apologia does follow some "tediously personal stuff", several pages of writing about writing, writing about not writing, and a visit to her psychoanalyst. It is, however, more road block than thriller, and it doesn't encourage a reader to continue. Which would be a shame; there are some pleasing observations and anecdotes, and the wrestling with addiction and unhappiness evident in the writing is very effective when she gets it right; in her childhood memories of Zimbabwe ("Tobaccoland", as one journalist called it) particularly.
Ultimately, The Smoking Book does create a misty, disorienting sense of the economies of desire and memory, of consumption, residue and need. Its vaguenesses are sometimes unsatisfying (do her parents really get murdered, or does she merely dream this while watching Spellbound on television, and having, as far as one can make out, a miscarriage?), and her descent into depression (and even madness?) is offered in opaque fragments. The chapters of film criticism (Stern's other books are non-fiction essays on the cinema) are not sufficiently interesting or germane, and feel bolted on in times of low inspiration. There are various clues that the narrator wishes to write a novel ("she felt it all fall into place, the massive accumulation of meaningless experience, the miasma of diaristic tedium . . . she could at last aspire to fiction") but cannot manage it; that dealing with addiction, to men or drink or cigarettes, or with her past, has hampered her. The book concludes, epiphanically, with these lines: "She begins, for the first time, to imagine writing. To imagine writing, rather than to imagine smoking." It has been a long process, getting to that point; and, as a reader, it feels a little like paying for someone else's psychotherapy.