Squat’s structure is bite-sized, episodic vignettes (many chapters are one or two pages) and essentially two interrelated stories. One is a linear diary of Safran’s experience of squatting for a week in various parts of a mansion that belongs to Kayne West and happens to be deserted. The other is a mishmash of Safran and his girlfriend doing research into West’s life, his social networks and beliefs, via interviews, social events and sometimes posing as other people. It also deals with the relationships between religions, society and identity.
One last preamble – Safran is Jewish. This he never lets you forget. Not for a page.
Early in the book, the premise seems intriguing, with Safran meeting up with a previous West estate squatter and his friend. It’s delightfully Lynchian and harks of strangeness to come.
However, once Safran enters Kayne’s grounds, the question arises as to the purpose of him squatting there at all, other than to show that he can. As the book proceeds, it becomes increasingly unclear what Safran could do on Kayne’s estate in a week that he couldn’t simply do in a day. Throughout the book, the question sits like a squatter in the reader’s mind.
By the hundredth page, the constant focus on Jews, Hitler, the Holocaust and antisemitism begins to feel forced and unnecessary. Is Safran just seeing things he wants to see?
The continual leapfrogging between present tense (at the house) and past tense (chasing down anything related to West, Jews and antisemites), makes it difficult to get invested in either story – whether we are either sleuthing around a character we never see, like a classic MacGuffin, or being drawn into the tense atmosphere of squatting. Either could be good, but these two literary garments have been thrown into the same wash and both their colours are fading.
Furthermore, any humour in the book, of which there’s a bit, is all but suffocated by the topic matter –antisemites, the Holocaust, persecution, and lots of it – meaning that laughter just doesn’t happen. Safran’s naming of the life-sized dolls he finds in one of West’s rooms as ‘Holocaust monkeys’ is an example, but the humdinger is when he sees a parade of models from a range of ethnicities, all with shaved heads, and comments that it looks “as if Auschwitz had been more diverse”.
Black comedy has its place, but it needs a lead-in and a punchline. This jarring, flippant reference to Auschwitz is like Safran sneaking up behind you, slapping you in the face and running away, hoping you are laughing with him. Or maybe it isn’t meant to be funny – it’s difficult to tell.
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Perhaps Safran feels he’s entitled to make such comments because he’s Jewish, akin to people making snide remarks about a culture to which they happen to belong. But even his girlfriend, at one point, says he is coming to strange and illogical conclusions. This reader became inclined to agree.
Having said all this, it’ll probably still be a bestseller – with the royalties Safran can brainstorm a more solid premise for his next literary outing.
Squat, John Safran
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781760890179
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320pp
Release date: 22 October 2024
RRP: $36.99
