The Review of Contemporary Fiction

X20: A Novel of (Not) Smoking by Richard Beard
Kent D. Wolf

Richard Beard. X20: A Novel of (Not) Smoking. Arcade, 1997. 320 pp. $22.95.

With X20, Richard Beard takes a novel approach to the concept of addiction. Gregory Simpson, in the wake of a friend’s lung cancer death, quits smoking. Replacing cigarettes with a pen, Gregory reflects on a ten-year habit. Love and tobacco tempted Gregory in his college years in the form of Lucy Hinton, a chain smoker who had attempted to seduce him with both her body and her butts: “She could lick smoke from the corner of her mouth like sugar . . . The archetypal co-ordination of hand to mouth, the same as a sudden thought or a cautious tasting or the blowing of a kiss”. Gregory’s journal jumps from past to present, moving from memories of a lost love to his meetings with the Suicide Club, a group formed to combat anti-tobacco crusaders and to enjoy a smoke-filled environment. Among the club’s members is a cranky centenarian, Walter, who remains healthy despite almost a century of smoking.
Although Beard tackles a timely issue, the unscrupulousness of the tobacco industry, he avoids the preachiness associated with anti-smoking fascists. The sardonic humor of X20 carries the novel; I believe we all have much to learn from cantankerous Walter who rather wryly reveals the message at the novel’s heart when he quips, “Death is natural.” [Kent D. Wolf]