Carcanet Press is a UK publisher founded in 1969. Originally a student magazine and then later with an emphasis on poetry, Carcanet has expanded today to include a number of imprints, including Anvil Press Poetry, Aspects of Portugal, and Little Island Press. It’s the last one that we’re concerned with today. They have a nice little run of books set in a similar format – Midnight in the Kant Hotel, which we’ve talked about before, Gabriel Josipovici’s Forgetting, and Rosanna Mclaughlin’s Double-Tracking. Double-Tracking was the last on my list – it’s been there since 2020, and I finally picked it up over Christmas. It’s about the idea of appearing counter-cultural when you’re really part of the establishment. In Melbourne terms, it’s about living on the north side, setting up in some squalid post-industrial bunker while your parents own a mansion in the south. It’s about pretending to be poor when you’re rich. The blurb really gives you the full thrust of the argument:

“To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, rich and poor, a bum with the keys to a country retreat, an exotic addition to the dinner table who still knows how to find their way around the silverware.

In the 1970s Tom Wolfe located the apex of doubletracking as the art world, but today, it’s a cornerstone of the middle classes, and a full-blown commonplace of contemporary life. At root, it’s a state of mind born of an ambivalent relationship to privilege, that, when perfected, allows those with financial resources the economic benefits of leaning right, and the cultural benefits of leaning left. It curls around the vocal chords of private school alumni as they drop their consonants, sprays the can of legally sanctioned graffiti on the side of the pop-up container shopping mall, and tones the cores of sweaty executives attending weekly parkour classes, prancing about the concrete furniture of housing estates they do not live on.

Comprising essays, fiction and art criticism, this is a merciless, witty satire of the middle classes – a venturesome, intelligent debut which cuts to the very core of our duplicitous lives.”

In honesty the book is a little scrambled? It’s bad in an interesting way, which between this and the Minesweeper book sort of feels like my focus at the moment. Double-Tracking is split into two parts. The first section, ‘The Origins of Double-Tracking’, gives a theoretical account of the idea and some historical antecedents. The second part, ‘Case Studies’, explores the idea through fiction, interviews, and essays. In the theoretical exposition, Mclaughlin notes that the basic idea isn’t really hers. It comes from Tom Wolfe in the context of the art world in the 1970s. Mclaughlin’s twist is to extend the idea into the middle class – she suggests that today it’s a “cornerstone” of the middle class. We saw all this in the blurb, which is really just the key parts of her theoretical essay quoted verbatim. And there are some useful comments in there about gentrification and fetishizing labour. “Up and up rises the detritus of yesterday’s working class, until the junk of an old market is a £40 vegetable crate on sale at an inner-city vintage fete.” We’ve all seen how historical sites of labour are transformed into sites of contemporary entertainment and hospitality. People go to trendy coffee shops in converted warehouses, almost play-acting at inhabiting these sites. You have unsanded wobbly tables and mismatched teacups, in some way summoning the specter of rough old-timey labour as an aesthetic reference, so that people who are rich (or even just middle-class) can play at being poor.

That’s all fine as an analysis of the consumer – I think there’s probably a little more to say here about some of the producer side of the economics, but fine. That is – you know, why is it that we’ve got all these empty warehouses sitting around? Why are these industrial areas no longer in use? There’s been a shift over time in the type of work we do, in what types of work are done and in who does them – that is, which countries pick them up. Companies are encouraged to boost their profits by outsourcing labour to countries with low wages. They mass produce plastic crap because it’s efficient, taking advantage of economies of scale. In response, when people reach for things like refurbished warehouses turned into cafes, these aren’t just markers of historical labour in some undifferentiated way. People are reaching for markers of labour as craft. They set wood, stone, brick – the craftsman’s materials – above the industrial forms of plastic, concrete, or steel. The flashpoint for this distinction is your classic small vendor at a farmer’s market. People don’t buy Kelly’s $35 artisanal soap because they’re pretending to be poor. It’s about the craft, the individuality, the locally sourced, as set in symbolic opposition to the global and the mass-produced. It’s about knowing that it was made by someone who cares, rather than some commercial monolith. Where Mcloughlin sees the rustic as a symbol of appropriated lower-class labour, I think I’d see it more as a symbol of care and craftsmanship. Obviously the rustic can be deployed in a cynical, self-serving way, but I just don’t accept this frankly kinda miserable account of why it appeals. It feels very focused on the sins of the consumer, so to speak, without much eye to the broader global and economic conditions that govern our desires and dreams.

So I have some reservations about this theory. At times, it honestly just feels hateful. One review on the Carcanet website observes that “the book’s greatest challenges are to avoid snideness or preaching to the choir.” The review thinks Mcloughlin pulls it off: I do not. She makes a whole thing out of her mother’s gluten-intolerant whippet: “Like the many hapless children of the borough, designated Gifted and Talented at the behest of over-eager parents who have fallen prey to the common mistake of confusing class for intelligence, Tip is an animal upon whom a variety of special statuses have been bestowed.” Are we – against the idea that dogs can be gluten intolerant? It’s obviously not an auspicious topic, and there are, yes, undoubtedly issues around people infantilising their pets, trying to make out that they’ve got special this and special that as a way of fulfilling some weird provider need – but I’m not sure if gluten intolerance is the place to make that stand. It’s honestly sort of boomer-coded. In a way, this whole book comes off like nobody can do anything right. Its conceptual universe revolves around the mediocre, the falsely inflated, and the appropriative. Kids don’t have talent – they are mistakenly forced into Gifted and Talented programs by delusional parents. There’s not much said here about the genuine or the heartfelt. There’s no conceptual space for Kelly’s soap stall. It’s all just miserable.

The case studies I think then serve as an interesting illustration of that problem. I sort of went in expecting something like Amber Husain’s Replace Me, or even Eda Gunaydin’s Root & Branch – autobiographical, drawing on past experience, maybe literary but in an analytical sort of way. In practice, it’s two short stories and two essays of art criticism. The art criticism is disappointing. Mclaughlin’s innovation, in Double-Tracking, is to move the concept beyond the arts and into the middle class. The essays in the case study section retreat from that shift and go straight back to fakey art curators – essentially just repeating Tom Wolfe’s original observation. When we learn about Jay Jopling, owner of White Cube gallery, who has a hundred million pounds, we might wonder – where did the middle class go? The two short stories are about the same. One is about an art curator, again, and the other is about a bunch of friends celebrating a warehouse that they recently converted into a home. I don’t want to litigate the exact definition of middle class, but we’ve moved a long way from getting coffee in the industrial quarter. One of the earlier illustrations in the first section was concerned with Marie Antoinette, which seemed a bit out of place for a book supposedly concerned with double-tracking in the middle class. By the time you finish the case studies, she fits right in.

It also feels telling – and this is a little mean, I’m probably going to step back from this criticism – but it feels telling that half of the case studies are fiction. It almost implies that Mclaughlin couldn’t find actual historical examples to substantiate her claim. I wouldn’t lean too hard on this criticism, again, but the optics are pretty funny. You come up with a theory, and then to prove it you make up some stories where it happens just like you said. Double-tracking is a cornerstone of the middle class, and as evidence, here’s a story I wrote where everyone behaves in a way that conveniently illustrates my theory. It’s a silly problem, and the sort of thing that could be fixed with some minor tweaking – by calling the case studies ‘Explorations’ or ‘Instances’ or some other term – but it’s a problem the book is stuck with.

And I want to be clear that I’m not against using fiction to communicate or explore ideas. That’s a long and storied practice. The Picture of Dorian Gray, for instance, is philosophical fiction, exploring ideas around aestheticism that Wilde also published in essay form. Steven L. Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell explores existentialism and the scope of infinity. The essay is not the only way to go about things, and it’s not even always the best choice. We can imagine a book that mixes fiction and essay in a really potent way, giving play to the imaginative and analytical by turns, maybe connecting more deeply with the reader by way of evocation rather than argument. Double-Tracking I think shows us a situation where that mix doesn’t work. It’s not just that the focus is off-topic – it is, but that’s not the biggest problem. I think at the heart of this book is an empathy problem. It claims to be about the middle class and then retreats to caricaturing property developers, to interviews with the mega-wealthy and made-up stories about curators. It seems uncomfortable in the presence of the people it’s ostensibly about. It’s similarly silent about solutions or ways forward, seeming much more at home with criticism and critique. Isn’t that ultimately another form of double-tracking? Scoring points off satire without looking to change or advance anything? The final short story (sorry, the final case study) has a witchy anti-capitalist incorporated into the art world, where her critique of patriarchy is neutralised by being absorbed as performance art. It’s a defeated, flat ending. Nobody learns anything and the critique is silenced. What’s left for anti-capitalism, then? What’s left for any of us?