Issyvoo

He is a Post-Modernist in a very literal sense, treating the Modernist inheritance in much the same way as [T. S. Eliot] bagged decorative fragments from earlier cultures. The Dead Father […] is a Pop Art resumé of a central theme from Finnegans Wake.

At Swim-Two-Birds can be read as an assault on Joyce’s ambitions, an attempt by a talented young writer to destroy Joyce’s synthesising process, to dismantle the great controlling ambition and mapped-out plenitude of Ulysses. The aim of Joyce’s book was not to destroy the novel but to re-create it and make it larger, more inclusive, more faithful to life and life’s complexities. The aim of At Swim-Two-Birds was to lose control, to take the pieces and refuse to reconcile them, to insist that it was too late for such trickery.

For the next ten years, writing and shopping proceeded in a dialectical relationship. Pamuk would buy objects that caught his eye, and wait for the novel to ‘swallow’ them…

Towards the end, as Quintana fades out of the picture Didion writes about herself as she is now: frail, uncertain, unsteady, childless; afraid to get up from a folding chair; afraid to admit she might not know how to start a strange car; afraid that she is no longer able to tell a story, that she will ‘never again locate the words that work’…

… he isn’t a writer to go to for three-dimensional depictions of reality. His characters tend to be variations on a limited number of figures: a passive yet stubbornly resourceful male protagonist; a wife with an unguessed-at hinterland; a kooky, flirtatious, sexually unavailable girl; a mysterious, confident, sexually available older woman; a creepy, slick professional man and so on.

As always, the experience is a bit like watching a Hollywood-influenced Japanese movie in a version that’s been dubbed by American actors. This time, sad to say, it also reminded me of stretches of the second season of Twin Peaks: familiar characters do familiar things, with the expected measure of weirdness, but David Lynch has squabbled with the network and left the show.

Franzen is a novelist whose primary technique is aggregation; he piles on the pages and incidents in the steady hope that the text is deepening.

Making Love and Running Away are as Heraclitan as the rest of Toussaint’s novels; but in Running Away the flow takes on a more proairetic character […] The effect, in terms of the prose, is quite hilarious—like a James Bond novel written by Beckett…

Beyond the nuts-and-bolts level, [Farrell’s] novels have also benefited from changing fashions in Irish historiography and even from a certain absorption into Irishness. Postcolonial studies looks more kindly on him, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have refreshed his ‘unintended topicality’.

…there is such a lot of plot to get through, all told in a restrained sober prose at a steady tempo which aspires to the dispassionate, objective rhythm of Tolstoy, but which in reality becomes a little too leisurely as the beat of the book gets steadily more soapy

…the first section, set in a country house in 1935, is a brilliant feat of storytelling, whereby McEwan manages both to sound like McEwan and not quite like himself.

The sea of poppies is also a sea of languages, a mind-boggling array of—to me, to most of us—inscrutable words and phrases that various unremembered populations have devised to communicate effectively in complex circumstances.

“I am perpetually tidying the room after him,” Dickens wrote. Peters suggests that Collins took quiet revenge by making finickiness a signal trait in Percival Glyde, one of the villains in The Woman in White.

James, like most artists, knew what he was doing only some of the time.

He has always been something of a genre novelist […] It’s just that the genre is never quite the same when he’s finished with it.

Long after Wharton herself had escaped first into writing and then to Europe, her narratives enter the cul-de-sac in which Lily passively colludes in her own destruction. But tugging at that furniture also gave her energy—so much so that she gleefully screwed it to the floor again and again.

Henry James was snooty about Hardy, but I wonder how James would have done, if given as a kind of literary test a cow’s udder to describe?

McEwan seems highly alert to the comic possibilities of this story, which could well be a bawdy ballad, and, as a way of keeping the reader’s face straight, manages a tone of almost reverent care for all their responses, for each moment in their history.

Chabon’s writing has always preyed and played on traditionally disparaged forms, the pulp of fiction, with an unfashionable and unmodernist pleasure in plot…

This is a portrait of self-pity that believes it is a portrait of self-laceration. But it isn’t: it’s just a portrait of self-pity.

Roth’s particular brand of misogyny is often almost excusable—merely an ineffective answer to the important questions he raises about the relationships between sons and mothers or husbands and wives. And it’s not really the misogyny […] that takes the breath away as much as the gynophobia, the refusal to understand that women might have a stake in the most serious political questions of their time […] and so might want to do something to address those questions.

His tale is not told but recounted, not felt but described. The first three-quarters of this 423-page book are characterised by a near-absolute reliance on summary story-telling—this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened—an elaborate outline relayed in language that is relentlessly, aggressively, annoyingly talky.

Falling Man is a modest and quiet book about a large aftermath. It captures the turn in the three years after 9/11 to a new feeling, still active in 2007, of a contemporary American state of suspension, after the worst had happened and the nation perhaps played its hand all wrong.

It is family, of course, that is at the heart of the novel. What it is, what it means, what it does to you. Enright writes brilliantly about the family gathering. It is dangerously familiar, in terms of atmosphere and the provisions made for it: the ham sandwiches, the shop-bought coleslaw. As if they meant something.

For the novelisation, his sources—a narrow range—aren’t so much embellished as systematised, artfully reshuffled and newly dealt.

The March is constructed from brief episodes, each narrated from the perspective of a single character. […] Any attempt to achieve a more comprehensive view fails. When a British reporter climbs a tree to watch a battle from above, all he can see is a ‘terrifying vision of antediluvian breakout’. Then the tree is struck by a cannonball, and the fall from it kills him.

The most extraordinary and best of the stories in Gilead are to do with the quarrels Ames remembers between his father and grandfather; these are the hub of the novel’s arguments about the transforming power of religious faith.

Long before the sin of Orientalism was discovered, Paul Bowles had frequently been guilty of it, in word, in thought and in deed.

Pushkin complained about Byron’s characterisation by saying that he has a conspirator ‘even order a drink conspiratorially, and that’s absurd’. Saturday comes close to something similar—having a neurosurgeon order fish neurosurgically.

It would be easy to describe the relationship between Capote and the people who helped him with his book as cynical and staged, but it was more interesting than that. His charm did not only work outwards. He grew to love those whom he charmed.

Just as cliché is freely used, and animal imagery freely employed to describe the locals, sex is always close by.

Banville suspects that all forms of self-creation, including writing, are forms of necessarily bad faith, and he manages to make this suspicion heartening. There is no contemporary writer so subtle or so gleeful about the inevitable shams and feints of character.

This intensely confessional style seems to pour from Oates’s pen. It has great advantages, lending dynamism to the prose, tussling a reader into the plot.

Tanizaki had an abhorrence of the well-lit toilet, the distant nocturnal view ruined by urban electric lighting, the white ceramic tableware which took away the mystery from a bowl of soup.

It may be that The Tattooed Girl says less about America than it does about the stranglehold of certain conventions and cultural standards on American fiction.

Yet Wani is the rawest embodiment of Thatcherism in the novel: brutally rich, peerlessly selfish, with a rapacious, insatiable appetite—for cocaine, sex, pornography, power, money. Wani can’t last: by the end of the book, he is dying of AIDS. Not that there is a simple moral to be drawn from this: AIDS strikes indiscriminately, in the novel as in life.

These two worlds, Ohio and New York, flawed in symmetrically opposite ways, were essentially what made up Powell’s life experience, and in all her work there is a mythical undercurrent—the wanderer in the wilderness, embarked on an improbable search for redemption.

He and his characters are tireless explainers and theorisers. […] Vidal can be a brilliant stylist, but in The Golden Age the writing labours under the enormous task he has set himself.

The Corrections has an interesting relation to the Great American novel that it is claimed by some to be: it is a compendium of attempts, and its sentences are never entirely themselves, which might be a definition of literary Postmodernism.

It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief.

Franzen has that tendency common among younger American novelists to medicalise everything. A postman can’t walk up a path and, as it were, deliver a letter, without his actions being garlanded in super-conscious irony about the meaning of corporate gardens, the infernal consciousness of dogs, and wised-up statements about the general homeostasis of the postman,

Austerlitz is like Sebald’s previous heroes: reflective, curious, increasingly isolated, genteel, unhappy—people for whom the only honourable reaction is despair.

Atwood’s stories about writers consistently show that narrative is dangerous and difficult, and that narrative control is dubious. Although Iris in The Blind Assassin says you write truth only when you think no one will read it, that sentiment is in tension with other intimations and other truths, both within this novel and elsewhere in Atwood.

Carver’s world is something like a room in which the television is always on, unless you happen to be subjecting the neighbours to home movies. The ashtrays are overflowing. There may be an alcoholic, active or reformed, lying on the living-room sofa.

Small in scope, as intense as Frankie Addams’s fevered imagination, The Member of the Wedding is magical in effect, properly an American classic. Its mixture of comedy, pathos and tragedy (for there is a shock of an ending, beyond Frankie’s personal humiliation) is rendered with such seeming effortlessness, one might be inclined to call it ‘artless’. There is no higher praise.

Like Tolstoy, Soueif interleaves history and political discussion with family life, and as in Tolstoy, family life is more fun to read about.

It is in a new Ireland, torn between nostalgia and a contempt for nostalgia, that novelists like Patrick McCabe work.

Colm Tóibín’s austere, monkish prose, in which everything is exactly itself and redolent of nothing else, belongs to this anti-Revivalist legacy, as do his political opinions. The novel explores ambiguous feelings in an unambiguous world.

In the extended family of American writers Vonnegut is the crazy uncle, the old codger full of wit and wisdom and more than a little bullshit.

In the conservative contemporary American literary landscape, Philip Roth is the only one of our anointed writers still willing to re-invent himself and his writing, to experiment with new forms in a public venue and so risk failing before his large and adoring audience, and for that alone he deserves admiration.

Paul Auster is so implicated in his own fictions that it is often hard to tell whether his covert appearances there represent a Modernist textual teasing or a baser vanity; whether his walk-on parts are self-mocking or aggrandising.

The textual history of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is typically complex but in detail unusual. Shelley made many changes in Mary Shelley’s original manuscript and the proofs, changes that seem by no means always to be improvements.

What makes the book’s success even more noteworthy is that it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and—perhaps especially—uncontrolled.

…Proulx comes by her knowledge of hard living the hard and honest way.

A story about time and morals, delicately poised between a feeling that its abstinences were a horrible waste of spirit and a feeling that they represented a fineness of judgment since lost to the world.

Reading the novel is akin to listening to short wave on a boat radio. Voices (particularly the thoughts of Alec and Elspeth, but of others as well) alternate unpredictably, static intervenes, there is a constant surf of background noise as though the airwaves were awash.

Far from wishing to satirise the society which her characters may be thought of as representing, Murdoch scarcely acknowledges its existence. Her attentive gaze is fixed on deeper realities: the fundamentals of the human condition, which she thinks of as cutting across and below the contingent map of wealth and class. The concept of society obstructs her contemplation of the meaning of life, so she does her best to ignore it.

As a novelist, lain Banks writes with crystalline economy, on the principle less is more. As an SF writer, more is never enough.

As sea horses do not typically sleep, so a placenta does not slosh, at any rate not when it is functional in the womb, as here, by analogy, it is imagined to be. For figurative language to succeed it must work at the level of ordinary meaning as well as at the level of allusion. Ondaatje’s images fail sometimes to achieve this balanced ambiguity.

Ian, we may say, is the accidental hero of a novel – a character who implicitly upbraids his creator for making so much fuss about him.

Anne Tyler’s stories are set in Baltimore, a city which many readers will neither know nor feel guilty about not knowing.

… Wonderland’s brand of Science Fiction owes more to the winning cartoonism of Kurt Vonnegut (touched perhaps by Raymond Roussel’s delight in deliriously over-elaborate explanations) than to the dirty cyberpunk realism of Sterling and William Gibson.

… at some points Francie is ahead of us—Hey yup! away and off up the street on his travels—while at others he is painfully slow to catch on, oblivious to the writing on the wall.

Set in Tokyo just five minutes into the future, this double-decker narrative divides into the distinct genres of Science Fiction and fantasy.

In the thriller spectrum Philip Kerr is operating somewhat left of centre: as his choice of a private-eye hero makes clear, he is nearer to the acrostic or detective-story end of the spectrum than he is to the relatively straightforward adventure (Ian Fleming, Geoffrey Household, Jack Higgins), in which the difficulties and dangers of the mission are more important than its secrets.

The freedom of language heralded by the acquittal of Lady Chatterley, the freedom of sexual action offered by the pill, and the distrust of almost any kind of organisation plus an overwhelming stress on the importance of individual fulfilment, combined to impress readers who loved the hyperbole and rhetoric, shared the narrator’s ecstasies and despairs, and happily looked for profundity in the confusion about what actually happened.

Kapuscinski is neither an intellectual nor an evangelist; politics as such is of no interest to him. Using his press accreditation, he has simply spent years insinuating his way into unlikely situations for his own purposes as a writer. Yet there is a fund of sympathy in this dubious character which always earns him the benefit of the doubt.

What can one say of Elizabeth Smart more than that she loved a poet who by the conventional standards they both rejected treated her badly?

Karim is a brash, streetwise version of that literary perennial, the young man from the provinces, a jokey portrait of the artist as a younger man.

Billy Bathgate starts with a sentence which is 144 words long. Immensely extended syntax is the novel’s stylistic signature and the looping intricately-linked clauses witness to Billy’s skill as a verbal juggler. But there is also a mystery embedded in the diction of Billy’s confessions, something that seems implanted to tease the ear of the reader.

Its deftness and scholarly style go with great good humour, more like Ariosto’s than Voltaire’s; and while its deadpan exposition of historic cults and mysteries is both hilarious and absorbing, its nuggets of generalising ‘wisdom’, most frequent in the book’s final chapters, never lapse into pretentiousness.

Well, you are an interesting fellow, yes, indeed, and a queer fellow. Your name is Freddie Montgomery, and in prose of enviably luminous, ironic elegance you reveal your disastrous moral malfunction, an inability to relate thought to action, action to consequence, consequence to those structures of commitment and responsibility that frame the lives of less interesting fellows.

The place is Middle America, East Coast-style, but it’s also the dead-centre of almost everywhere else, from Surrey to Japan, if not from China to Peru. Middle-class culture, among the middle-aged, is almost as homogeneous now as the uniforms of the Young – and, being middle-aged, much steadier, less volatile, though no less sad.

…a dazzling, burnished, stilt-walking stylistic exercise, like that of a very clever student who had been nourished on a forced diet of John Cleveland, George Barker (The Dead Seagull) and Craig Raine, and who had once heard the plot of a novel by Iris Murdoch.

I admire what she is doing, can see how well she does it, yet can’t persuade myself that I like it. She is a connoisseur of uneasiness; she makes me feel nothing but unease.

For better or worse, I am an instinctual writer rather than a writer working out a programme or finding stories to fit particular themes. There are certain obsessions that I have and try to give voice to: the relationships between men and women, why we oftentimes lose the things we put the most value on, the mismanagement of our own inner resources.

Carey, like his two main characters, is a gambler: he has a bet on with the reader. He lays his plots in exuberantly meticulous detail, each segment carefully slotted into its proper place in the slowly emerging pattern, until we’re led to that silly, beautiful conceit, the glass church, and find it, like the novel, plausible, irresistible.

Her plot, however, which is revealed in stages by four principal characters, is just a little too simple to justify the labyrinthine processes of its disclosure, and most readers will solve its few mysteries well before the last character has had his say.

… unmediated transmission of Wolfe’s words succeeds only in reminding those who may have forgotten how truly dreadful a writer he is.

Like Henry James’s, Iris Murdoch’s style is high, in the sense that she writes about lofty matters—the nature of morality, the reasons for existence, how we should live and love, how we should die—as they arise in stories about the upper middle classes, stories about people who have the leisure, education, civilisation, plausibly to think and speak about these lofty matters in a suitably lofty way, stories about people who live at a level of society supposed, for the sake of the convention, to be above the distracting contingencies of everyday life.

Mailer and Capote, more than anyone else, used television and the popular press to create personae in a culture where art objects and ideas are considered indigestible except in a solution of strong personality.

Farrell’s three structures are all based on siege situations, which gave him the right setting, tempo and psychological precipitation. In fact, he could probably not have written novels without such a situation, or the correlative of one, and its accompanying atmospheres.

…the reader may receive an illusive impression that the whole thing must have been translated from the French, in which language it would at least sound very much more natural. And yet, amazingly, the emotion, the true and abject affliction, come through, and begin to move the reader, and even to awe him.

As always with Waugh’s fictions, the most compelling point for the reader, and the secret of their continuing popularity, is the suggestion of a more complex, more fashionably fascinating, more exotic world just outside the novel, which the novelist himself is a member of, and of which he is giving the reader offhand telegraphic glimpses in dazzling black and white.

No reposing on the past, or our own sense of Amis’s. Indeed that is the theme of the novel: that the past is never safely in place but keeps coming round again in the obsessive chatter of the continuum. Older people need each other because of it.

This seems to me quite a good sick joke, worthy of Terry Southern. Forty years after his death, Hitler is still almost a taboo subject for jokes. We remember ‘Springtime for Hitler’. Survivors of the Titanic disaster don’t care for jests on the theme.

The accounts by the lowliest of the palace officials are the most interesting. Something of Oliver Sacks in the other ‘verbatim’ accounts. It’s not always easy to believe these articulate and over-literary witnesses or to trust that words are not being put into their mouths.

What is delicately mocked, in this impeccably straight-faced prose, is writing itself: the ambitions and stiffness and poverty of writing, in the face of the multiple, shifting, unwritten world.

‘I do not comprehend all that I am,’ St Augustine wrote, and he followed this declaration with the question: ‘Is the mind, therefore, too limited to possess itself?’ Eudora Welty conveys self-possession by self-dispersal, not by consciously, or even unconsciously, concocting an instantly recognisable ‘personality’. Rather she defines and displays herself in the act of seeping into other minds and bodies.

By some it has been cast as a comedy of manners, a charming period divertissement on life in middle-class America during the Vietnam era. Others have seen it as a diseased farce, a bilious Thersitical outpouring, soured by a deep-seated misogyny. I think it is both these things and more, all at the same time, which is why reading it is such a queasy experience…

[Rhys] wrote three different beginnings; she wrote the whole book with Antoinette as narrator; she thought of cutting the whole of Part Three. She worked and worked to smooth Antoinette’s dreamlike experience into a ‘plausible’ story…

With its wide-eyed barbarities and absurd protocol, The Emperor reads like a cross between a Ruritanian operetta and the last act of a Jacobean tragedy. The medieval atmosphere and a purblind obsession with dignity and esteem virtually guaranteed the collapse of Haile Selassie’s court and empire and closed another bizarre chapter in the history of modern Africa.

Theories of laughter and of blackbird populations occur, and yet there are no digressions. Everything is beautifully and amazingly in place.

Realism does its job, so that when they conclude that their story has their love in it, this is convincing. A happy love story is a rare event in the Post-Modernist novel.

García Márquez has, in the past, taken sides in his fictions only where affairs of state were concerned: there are no good banana company bosses in his stories, and the idea of the masses, ‘the people’, is occasionally […] romanticised.

We see everything differently through different eyes: in this respect, the realism isn’t at all old-fashioned but of a modern and relativistic kind.

She loves her characters, but her ploy is to demonstrate that any assumption about them, favourable or not, is likely to be wrong.

About the inadequacy of the endings – consider, for example, the melodramalic death of Harriet in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine – this is an understatement. What this inability to produce an adequate ending for a tale suggests is that the novels may, quite inadvertently, make a case for the pointlessness of morality…

Reduced to its bare bones, this is a story of alienation, failure and collapse—and there is no attempt to disguise the bare bones. Yet it is told in language of such radiance and clarity that the taste it leaves behind is of lyric grace, not desolation and squalor.

What Grass’s novel in its own blasphemous way aims to convey is the paradox (whose supreme illustration is the death of Christ) that everything is ordinary and everything is special.

…his meticulous strategies for making a successful life in the trees twine and interwine to form thick forests of marvellous ideas, and make The Baron in the Trees one of the most haunting images of rebellion, of determined nay-saying…

Herodotus’s books were named after the Muses, but in Vidal’s a parodic spiral of initiation takes place in which increase in knowledge and experience brings obfuscation and blindness rather than enlightenment.

Julian was also technically interesting in going beyond the I, Claudius autobiographical procedure to an autobiography interpolated and interpreted by records written from other viewpoints. The effect of this was both to intensify the feeling of actuality which is one of the main fascinations of the historical novel, and to create, from the plentiful and contrasting sources available, a historiographical demonstration of the merely partial reliability of such sources.

The Portrait of a Lady ends with a conclusion so elusive as to trouble readers ‘hot for certainties’—the married virtuous heroine’s friend exhorts the rejected Caspar: ‘Just you wait.’ There is nothing in the plot for Caspar to wait for—except Life itself; losing his dream, he will live and change.

There is, after all, only a limited range of actuality in Henry James’s novels: the two great driving forces of human existence, financial pressure and physical need, are hardly more than alluded to in them.

Nothingness, like so much else in Djuna Barnes, never quite sheds a wrapping of finery. I cannot find her, in the modern world, a reliable guide to Hell…

As in romance, the plots involve a good deal of coincidence. And as in romance, the suggestion is that the world is orderly. But Vonnegut finds this orderliness to be an extremely disagreeable fact—an attitude which is perhaps his single most original quality as a writer.

There is also an approximation to the terrible simplicity of Tolstoy, which produces what critics have called the ‘strangeness’ of his writing.