I wrote about Stewart Home a while back in a Scarecrow Editorial and I reviewed his recent novel Memphis Underground for 3AM.A recent article on The Guardian Online asked readers to declare who they feel are the 'unsung heroes' of contemporary Literature. For me, it has to be Stewart Home. He’s a literary and artistic tour de force who has produced some of the most thought-provoking Literature and Art in the last 30 years. Very much ahead of his time he is often labelled as a prankster – maybe he is? Yet, there is no denying the serious rivulet of analytical thought that feeds his work: collectively Stewart Home’s output is a swipe at the ridiculousness of our commoditised times; the emptiness of our art; our egos; our productivity. He shows us for the communal sham we are . . .
This can only be healthy. In a recent post, at his marvellous blog This Space, the literary critic Stephen Mitchelmore posits:
“It's why I tend to stop reading literary novels after a few lines [ . . . ] because it relies on conventional elisions to maintain itself rather than by undoing the elision.”
Hasn’t Stewart Home been doing just this? Undoing our shoddy silence; unravelling piece by piece the truths we choose to leave out, to ignore and compress? Stewart Home’s anti-narratives are just that: an unscrambling of what we choose to remove. And in doing so he reveals to us the vainglorious, empty state we’re in.
