Matt Greene’s dystopian novel is about memory loss

Matt Greene is like a brother to me and that’s probably why we are arguing within a minute of the commencement of the interview. I am instantly transported back to my 20s, when we would spend our days collaborating on scripts. Oscar Wilde said of writing: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

Lucky old Oscar should have tried writing with a partner. Most of the day would have been spent bickering over who got to sit at the typewriter and the thorny comma issue wouldn’t even have been broached.

Greene’s first novel, Ostrich, was published in 2013, followed by a memoir, Jew(ish), in 2020. Now The Definitions has arrived, a timely novel about a group of individuals relearning how to navigate the world and language after an illness strips them of their memories. This might be bracketed under the dystopia banner, yet it has more to say about our haunted present than any number of history books. Greene’s novel explores ideas about the limits of language and the importance of human connection – the stuff of life that has somehow become acceptable to outsource.

When I eventually hit upon a question he is happy to answer, the author explains how The Definitions came to be: “The motivation is never to write a certain type of thing… It’s always to mine down into a feeling and see if you can articulate something about it and to present that to people as a question to see if they feel that way too.”

Both the personal and the political inspired a novel that was published on Yom Kippur. Greene is lapsed enough to have emigrated to Crystal Palace and only became aware it was the Day of Atonement when news of the Manchester attack filtered through. The Definitions is not didactic but the insidious threat of AI and the inarguable rise of fascism are never far from the surface.

Perhaps less obviously, another major impetus for Greene writing the book was seeing his son start school. “Watching the effect of even a benign institutionalisation was a driving force… You see the way they are able to assimilate or not assimilate to a set of rules that are not articulated to them… You recognise how much that determines their lives through an institution.”

He feels this paradigm is true of most institutions and perhaps the defining one of his childhood was Judaism, something that struck him as “confusing” since his family were “always on the lookout for loopholes. You can’t write the word ‘God’ but you can write ‘G-d’ so it’s like he was winking up at you from the page, a co-conspirator in the trick you’d just pulled. We weren’t allowed meat in takeaways unless we ate it in the garden because, presumably, God can’t see your garden.”

This all struck Greene as hypocritical but, with age, he grew to understand the “communal element of religion. It can reach backwards and sideways as much as it needs to reach up.”

While Jew(ish) was more explicitly, well, Jewish, the author believes his background is also integral to understanding the narrator of The Definitions. “What I get from Jewishness is a sense of assimilation and the degree to which I’m assimilating and being assimilated… That semi-observational perspective is adopted by the narrator of this book and encourages them to try and make sense of the institution.”

It is easy to see why interviewer and interviewee struggled to fit in on FZY Israel tour in the summer of 2001 and sniped from the sidelines as our peers merrily regaled strangers with chants of, “Tour 3, how fit are we?”

Humour was as integral to Greene then as it is now and thus The Definitions is a dark novel with comic undertones throughout. He believes “humour is almost as automatically a culturally Jewish process as breathing – it’s completely essential.”

He is 500 pages into a new book on the contemporary Jewish experience and “the degree to which it is defined by the legacy of the Holocaust”. When he heard the news from Manchester on the day of publication, Greene felt like promoting a book was the last thing he wanted to be doing. “One of the things about belonging to a minority is that you don’t get to control the times when that identity is brought roaringly to the fore and will supplant everything else that’s going on in your life. The Definitions isn’t an explicitly Jewish-themed book but my Jewishness does inform it to some degree because my Jewishness informs everything I write and everything that I think.”

The attacks seemed the starkest example yet of “the way in which something external can feel more personal to you than the thing that you worked on for a number of years”.

That Jewishness is a fundamental part of my friend, however far he ventures from home. That desire to think and argue and make jokes will never leave Greene. The interview ends when we both have to set off to pick up our sons from school, the boys fast approaching the age we were when we met at the end of the last century.

I had wondered whether Greene would put on a show when we began recording but the man who has written a novel about the very concept of selfhood was absolutely himself throughout the conversation. In his words, “I wish I could be that spiky in every interview.”

The Definitions is published by Dead Ink Books, £10.99