Looking for Mrs Dextrose

This review originally appeared in November 2010′s Le Nurb

You know you’re a proper journalist when people give you free stuff to review. While I make no claim to be a proper journalist, it seems that publishers aren’t as discerning as I am. The reason for their generosity is that this book is being advertised as, “The World’s First Student-Only Edition”, so, appropriately enough, they want reviews from student media. Looking for Mrs Dextrose, by Nick Griffiths, is the sequel to In the Footsteps of Harrison Dextrose, which some of you may have thoroughly enjoyed, and some of you will never have heard of, myself included.

At first I have to admit I wanted to like this book. After all, being given something for free is a very pleasant sensation, but as I read, any goodwill I felt began to vanish. Looking for Mrs Dextrose is a rambling, purposeless mess of a book. The protagonist has one objective – to find his missing mother – but I estimate only 10% of the book is actually centred on that search, and that’s probably being generous. Doubtless this was intended as more of a coming-of age story, but then all that seems to have been left in the previous volume, as far as I can tell.

When things are actually happening which are relevant to the plot, Looking for Mrs Dextrose is readable, in fact I found myself thoroughly enjoying it, but Griffiths seems to take a perverse pleasure in bogging down his protagonist with meaningless tangential objectives. At one point, the main character is saddled with someone else’s parking ticket, and gets in the queue to pay for it. He stays in this queue for several pages, and Griffiths conveys the irritation of this situation by attempting to drag out this sequence interminably. For the first time in my life, I found myself wanting to punch a book. I then proceeded to punch the book.

As part of the “Student Only Edition” promotion, I was given the opportunity to meet up with the author for an interview. I met Nick outside a pub on Baker Street, and I immediately began to feel a bit guilty about the quite scathing things I had already written. This feeling was exacerbated when he briefly disappeared, before returning with a pint for me. He shrugged off my attempts to pay him back, insisting “You’re a student. You have better things to do with your money.” As soon as I was seated, he proceeded to take out a copy of his first novel, In the Footsteps of Harrison Dextrose, and presented it for me to keep. I felt like the biggest wanker in existance.

One of the first things I spoke to Nick about was the seeming confusion over who the target audience should be. The book was described to me by the publishers as a cross between The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy and The Mighty Boosh, although how they reached this conclusion is beyond me. Griffiths hasn’t read THGTTG, but he does see a definite connection with The Mighty Boosh– “LFMD does go through some fantastical lands with some stupidly named people, and The Mighty Boosh, I’m a massive fan of them, they’re pretty surreal and stupid. I think surrealism does come from stupidity.”

My theory had been, given the bizarre combination of gross-out humour and obscure classical references within the first few pages, that the book was aimed at English Literature students. Drunk English Literature students. I thought that this might have been the idea behind the student focus of the marketing strategy, but Nick was quick to correct me, “It was my idea actually; the reason was that on the net you’ll find a lot of people who named In the Footsteps of Harrison Dextrose as one of their favourite books of all time, and they all tend to be intheir early 20s. If students love it we’ll get a bit of a buzz going, and then when the mass market edition comes out next May, hopefully there’ll be a bit of impetus behind it already.”

Looking for Mrs Dextrose definitely isn’t all bad, while the structure of the novel isn’t particularly coherent, Griffiths definitely has a way with words, and the humour of the book lies, not with the situations, but rather the descriptions, which are filled with idiosyncratic similes. This seems to be a hallmark of Griffiths’ approach to writing, perhaps even to life in general – “I sort of do that in conversations as well; I’m not the personwho sits down for an earnest philosophical discussion about politics, I’ll be the one chipping in with stupid glib comments now and then, which is sort of what my book does.”

Griffiths is clearly aiming for laughs rather than plot, and he succeeds, but at the end you’re left wondering if there was any real substance to what you just read. For all the aspiring writers out there, Nick had some succinct advice: “Don’t.” However, for those not deterred by this, he has these words of encouragement: “The brilliant thing is, as a kid who loved reading, the idea of having a book out is amazing, so to see these books is quite incredible, it’s a dream come through, it’s an ambition fulfilled, but there’s so little money in it; you have to live off the glow that comes with being published. In terms of actually getting a novel written, just write and write and write and write because you can only keep improving.”