Clear: A Transparent Novel

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I couldn’t even begin to tell you why, exactly, but my head was suddenly buzzing with the opening few lines of Jack Schaefer’s Shane (his ‘Classic Novel of the American West’. Remember?). I was thinking how incredibly precise those first lines were, and yet how crazily effortless they seemed; Schaefer’s style (his—ahem—‘voice’), so enviably understated, his artistic (if I may be so bold as to use this word, and so early in our acquaintance) ‘vision’ so totally (and I mean totally) unflinching.

‘I have huge balls.’

That’s what the text’s shouting:

‘I have huge balls, d’ya hear me? I have huge fucking balls, and I love them, and I have nothing else to prove here.’

The rest- as they say- is all gravy.

Because let’s face it, when you’ve got balls that size, you automatically develop a strange kind of moral authority, a gung-ho-ness (for want of a better word), a special intellectual certainty, which is very, very seductive to all those tight-arsed and covetous Princess-Tiny-Meats out there (the Little-Balls, and the No-Balls-Good God, let’s not forget about them, eh?).

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