In Jon Ronson’s new collection of his newspaper columns, this most provocative of commentators turns the spotlight on his own life and family, where things are not quite as normal as you might think.
Fans of documentary maker and writer Jon Ronson will be aware that his first two books Them! and The Men Who Stared At Goats constituted definitive studies of various freaks, conspiracy theorists and extremists operating on the fringes of society and within the US military machine.
His latest, Out Of The Ordinary, is, on the face of it, a departure into more mundane climes. A selection of his journalism for The Guardian, it turns the spotlight on himself and his family, and by extension, those of us who live reasonably comfortable suburban lives. The conclusions many of the pieces arrive at are as amusing as they are disturbing: there’s just as much mondo bizarro lurking behind the façade of middle-class respectability as there is in End Times communes or Aryan Nations strongholds.
“If people know Them! and Goats, I think it makes sense,” Ronson says, sipping tea in the suite of his Dublin hotel. “I’m just doing to myself what I do to other people. It’s quite easy and comforting to go off and say, ‘Look at that person, he’s fucking nuts,’ but it’s almost like sedating yourself against your own life, which I suppose is why people watch Celebrity Big Brother and stuff. I think it’s quite important to keep writing about this stuff, even if sometimes you do come in for criticism for being too middle-class or whatever. People who are very political think, ‘Why waste your time writing about little things that affect people on a daily basis?’ when you should be fighting the system.”
Thing is, if Orwell were around, he’d be documenting what Kavanagh called “the miasma of the middle classes”. Even grand old dystopians like JG Ballard have for the last decade aimed their socio-satirical brickbats at the gated estates. Modern life is insane. Professional 30-something parents driving their offspring half a mile to school in monstrous SUVs while agonising over obesity levels. Or barricading themselves inside kid-friendly compounds and wondering why their spawn grow up spoiled rotten and utterly bereft of horse-sense or social skills.
“Or £12,000 a year just to keep a kid in some crappy private school,” adds Ronson.
The school he’s referring to crops up in the book’s key chapter ‘Blood Sacrifice’, where the writer draws unfavourable parallels between the mind control techniques practised by cults like The Jesus Christians, a religious order he’d investigated, and the sinister insularity of the private school his son attended for a time.
“That school was horrible,” Ronson says. “A lot of it was to do with fear of kids who live on council estates, it just chills you to the bone. And it’s real. The fact that you have kids in this shite, fucking private school, stuck inside this horrible bubble, and then you go into another bubble which is your Land Rover, and then you take them home to the third bubble, which is a big Georgian house. And there’s a council estate behind the Georgian house where you hear all the kids playing together, but the kids in the Georgian house are stuck on their own. And they’re saying that David Icke is nuts! That’s why I wanted to write this stuff. I wonder if there’s a whole book in it?”
Most certainly. It’s the metropolitan English equivalent of The Stepford Wives. And, as Ed Power pointed out in his recent Bloc Party album review, the majority of the planet’s population now resides in urban and suburban territories.
“My wife is sort of encouraging me to write about that stuff,” Ronson admits. “She likes Them! ’cos she likes the way it’s written, but she sees it as a sort of boys’ book, it doesn’t really talk to her. But we live in a weird mixed area where you’ve got people from all classes, and the really posh ones are so dysfunctional, they’re like the stuff I write about but times a hundred. We’d go to their houses for dinner, and I’d say, ‘What a lovely coat’ and they’d say, ‘It’s perfect for the school run on a crisp autumn morning.’ And I’d say, ‘Did you go anywhere nice on holidays?’ and they’d say, ‘We went to the Bahamas; the children played barefoot in the sand.’ Everything they say is about how they think they appear to other people, so they’re seeing themselves from the perspective of passers-by happening to notice their perfectness. That is a fucking weird way to live your life! Kind of aesthetic lunacy. Like Leni Riefenstahl’s films. Isn’t that what Hitler was all about? ‘We must look fabulous!’”
Out Of The Ordinary is published by Picador.
