Coffee fanatic Benjamin Obler is originally from St Paul, Minnesota, and studied creative writing in Glasgow. His first novel, Javascotia, is published this week by Hamish Hamilton. It follows the story of a naive young American who travels from Chicago to Glasgow to set up a coffee franchise. Here Obler presents his notes on his favourite significant appearances of coffee in literature.
Buy Javascotia at the Guardian bookshop
1. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Janie went down and the landlady made her drink some coffee with her because she said her husband was dead and it was bad to be having your morning coffee by yourself.
So clearly coffee is about companionship, and promotes healing. Coffee has a chameleon-like nature: though it's the consummate non-prescription upper, it's also a balm, a salve. It fosters community and the repair of sorrow. It is a bridge between the despairing and the hopeful. (This scene also contains, later on the page, the brilliant "sankled", a combination of ambled and sank: "Janie sankled back to her room.")
2. The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
...he grew restless, attributing it to the coffee settling in his stomach.
Vladimir Girshkin suffers restlessness in varying degrees throughout the novel, except when he's hungover, which is frequently in the last half of the book. But, crucially, this appearance of coffee is an early occurrence, when he is still in New York and restless in a larger sense. He's unhappy with his girlfriend Challah, unhappy with his bickering parents and paranoid grandmother, and unhappy with his desk job at the Immigration Society. Coffee is a small measure of this generalised ennui - a microcosm. And it only stands to reason that he's drinking coffee, as he's numbed by romantic boredom, tired of bureaucratic red tape, and sexually stymied by his girlfriend's occupational promiscuity (she's a dominatrix). He seems to be living the American dream, yet it's an American nightmare. A sleepless nightmare. He seeks stimulus, inspiration! He wants to be alert! The coffee doesn't make him restless - it only awakens him to his true feelings. Thus coffee is a truth serum! Coffee lifts the veil of self-delusion!
3. Running Dog by Don DeLillo
Glen Selvy stuck his head around the edge of the partition to say good night. Lightborne asked him in for coffee, which was perking on a GE hotplate in a corner of the room. Selvy checked his watch and sat in a huge, dusty armchair … [Lightborne] poured three cups. Moll believed she detected an edge of detachment in Selvy's voice and manner.
This appears relatively early. Interesting that it brings these three characters together: Selvy, tasked with covertly buying erotic art for a senator; Lightborne, the erotic art dealer; and Moll Robbins, the reporter doing the story on the sex business - whatever she can find. In a Psych 101 class 15 years ago, a professor gave an example of a psychological phenomenon, in which a man and woman meet over coffee, and their accelerated heart rates give them a false impression of excitement: they might mistake their physical symptoms as sexual arousal or emotional interest. Is that what happens here? Moll and Selvy later become involved romantically. Was the impetus a coffee-driven sense of arousal? The hotplate dates the story: 1978. "Perking" is interesting. DeLillo is too gruff to be satisfied with the domestic-sounding "percolating." And of course perking is loaded. Coffee makes you perky and has its perks.
4. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
DECEMBER 16
I'm sick for real. Rosario is making me stay in bed. Before she left for work she went out to borrow a thermos from a neighbour and she left me half a litre of coffee. Also four aspirin. I have a fever. I've started and finished two poems.
Coffee as litmus test. Coffee as a baseline, a standard. A token of caring, requiring a suitable vessel. A lover wanting her coffee gift kept warm while she's away. Does it stay in the thermos? Does it grow cold? Coffee appears in many scenes in the first 100 pages of this book: at the cafes where Juan hangs out with the infamous Visceral Realists, and where a girl performs a sex act on him; at Maria's house, where he breakfasts with the whole crazy family. But coffee's presence is like the many poems that are allegedly written and never seen. "We're poets, and we drink coffee!" Sounds like when I was 19. Whether Bolaño is glorifying literary poserdom or poking fun is for someone else to say.
5. Good Evening, Mrs And Mr America and All the Ships at Sea by Richard Bausch
The waiter came to take their orders. He stood in front of them, holding his pad and waiting - a balding, heavyset man with a tattoo of a falcon on one arm.
"Oh," she said. "Let me see. I'll have a cup of chilli with onions and crackers, and the pork chops, with a baked potato, and a salad. And these chicken wings. Am I going too fast?"
The waiter looked at her with drowsy eyes. "Salad - " he said.
"And milk. And coffee. Oh, and sour cream and butter on the potato."
What a scene! One of the best, in one of the best books I've read in the last year. That's Alice Kane ordering, girlfriend of Walter Marshall. In the end, she cancels the feast and gets only an ice cream sundae, after her sweetheart Marshall orders the same, though he also gets coffee. I'm still not sure if Alice is kidding, or if this is her regular diner and assumes the waiter will know she's kidding. But it hardly matters, the way things take off from here, and that's the beauty of it. It shows us how much more she wants than Marshall, how eager she is, how hungry. It plants that seed in the reader's mind. The pressures of romance on the young and idealistic. Diner-weak joe in a white ceramic mug. American dreams. These thing are eternal.
6. Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence
What will you drink – coffee?
Paul Morel speaking, a mere 360 pages into my 366-page edition, a more accurate title to which would be Mama's Boy. 360 coffee-less pages. Early on, the Morel family is established for who they are: a brutish, drunkard father; a domineering and doting mother; inconsequential William who escapes the mother only by an early death; Annie and Arthur, siblings hardly mentioned; and Paul, a boy full of promise, brightness, vigour and talent, but bound by Oedipal cords. They are established as such, and for hundreds of pages, remain so. If ever a novel needed a double shot, it was this one. For seven years Paul "goes with" Miriam, hating her all the while. That's a long seven years to consider marrying someone. Here coffee drinker Miriam is taking initiative, setting goals, and striving towards them, aware of her course, a destination in mind. She's engaging with her future in the now. Despite the great murk in this story, verisimilitude reigns.
7. A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
I met her in autumn nine years ago, when I was twenty and she was seventeen.
There was a small coffee shop near the university where I hung out with friends. It wasn't much of anything, but it offered certain constants: hard rock and bad coffee.
This early paragraph is marked by Murakami's hallmark plainness of language, and unencumbered, even detached, narration. After this short chapter, we leap ahead eight years, and it is not Murakami's style to make sweeping statements or paint overviews. To understand what transpires in those eight years, we must compare the details ourselves. And in this instance, the difference in coffee habits are illuminating. So, for starters, we know the coffee shop "isn't much of anything" and it serves bad coffee. Other things we learn about this coffee shop in the next page or two are that the 17-year-old borrows books, and makes certain sexual swaps with men willing to pick up her coffee and cigarette bill. Then the next section, eight years later. The protagonist is not drinking bad coffee any more. Though the hard rock on the radio may be the same, our man's fresh-ground manual drip extracted at the right temp and allowed to bloom is certain to yield something better than the "bad coffee" of yesteryear. Are one's coffee habits a gauge of quality of life? Certainly. Of one's emotional state? One's maturity, one's level of detachment or engagement? For this reader and perhaps Murakami too, yes.
8. The Comforters by Muriel Spark
"Tell me about the voices," he said. "I heard nothing myself. From what direction did they come?"
"Over there, beside the fireplace," she answered.
"Would you like some tea? I think there is tea."
"Oh, coffee. Could I have some coffee? I don't think I'm likely to sleep."
Isn't it terribly English of the Baron to offer tea to Caroline, who's just fled a religious centre (not a nunnery, not a retreat), has separated from her husband, and is now suffering delusions - hearing the clacks of typewriter keys and a voice narrating her very thoughts! Take comfort in tea. It is in character of the Baron to think so: he's a man of affected intellectualism, calling the sections of his bookshop "Histor-ay, Biograph-ay, Theolog-ay," and addressing everyone as "my dear". But only coffee is up for the job. This is coffee as antidote to madness. What else to clear her head in this fix? They've already had Curaçao - that didn't help. Coffee as realignment. Coffee to reconnect with your own synapses, to reset the senses and solidify reality in the forefront.
9. George Saunders's short story The Barber's Unhappiness from his collection Pastoralia
Mornings the barber left his stylists inside and sat outside of his ship drinking coffee and ogling every woman in sight.
This quote is the opening line to the story. I like it because the casualness of drinking a cup of coffee in the morning mixes with his other activity: woman-ogling. There's a suggestion that one activity is casual, and so perhaps is the other. One is daily, ritualistic - so perhaps is the other. One is a gratifying sensory experience - so perhaps is the other. Or it's meant to be anyway. After all, what about that title? What is the titular barber's unhappiness? It's not the coffee, I'll tell you that. Might it be the other thing?
10. John Cheever's short story O City of Broken Dreams from The Stories of John Cheever
The Malloys found their way, that afternoon, to the Broadway Automat. They shouted with pleasure at the magical coffee spigots and the glass doors that sprang open.
The Malloys didn't forge a course or stride confidently; they "found their way" to their destination, as if ambling about aimlessly, dreamily. Crucially, it's not a city of dreams, it's a city of broken dreams. The Malloys are innocent and doomed. They are like a cluster of Red Riding Hoods setting into the forest. Cut off any section from the Cheever body of work, and you'll see marbling of these themes. Are these mere two sentences a sufficient microcosm of Cheever's oeuvre? An American family embarking upon enjoyment of innocent pleasures, amid the temptations of the modern world? No, not a sufficient one. But I think it's wonderful to have people in American fiction shouting with pleasure. So often we start with the broken dreams, and from there it's hard to get to redemptive exclamations such as Cheever's famed closing to A Vision of the World: "Valour! Love! Virtue! Compassion! Splendour! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!" And any story that includes "magical coffee spigots" is a winner in my book.