Issyvoo

…there is a slightly pompous solemnity—almost didacticism—in the atmosphere that prevails in The Golden Notebook, as though its author were not searching out the truth, but stating that she knows it—always a dangerous thing for anyone to do.

It almost seems as if Hollinghurst is refuting the most commonly made criticisms of his work: that he’s not very interested in women; that there’s too much sex; that his writing is too lush; that his characters are not likeable.

Desai writes about the secret part of all human beings that can create no matter how wretched our circumstances, a precious gift she suggests must at all costs flee the roaring, vacuous maw of 21st-century media.

Hollinghurst has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today. He offers surely the best available example of novelistic ambition squared with the highest aesthetic standards. Where so many fiction writers seem stylish but austere, or full of life but messy, Hollinghurst has his cake and eats it.

Love of life, like all human talents, weakens with age. But love of language, in his case, never did begin to fade.

A character can scarcely blow his nose without Fowles giving us a lecture on conditions in the Salford handkerchief factories.

The novel, originally entitled The Godgame, makes a game of what is real and what is artifice, of perception and of identity.

The Tiger’s Wife is a frisky tiger cub chasing its tail—it covers a lot of ground, growls a lot, and never quite gets there, but we have fun along the way. What the novel lacks in emotional depth, it makes up for in personality and sheer wackiness.

What do women want? Sally Jay wants champagne and adventures and true love. But beneath all the irony and understatement, you sense that she wouldn’t mind being taken seriously, too, even if only just for a minute.

The Stranger’s Child is a profoundly nostalgic book, in the strict Greek sense of “homesickness”: it longs to go home to the prelapsarian past, from whose sensuous immediacy (two lovers in a wood) we have been exiled into the rootless present. The modern world (and indeed the world of modernism) appears to have few positive qualities.

We have here a control over the material which is so tight it is almost claustrophobic (and novelists really like constricted spaces). It is just as well it is only 70-odd pages long. I mean that as a compliment.

All this could easily have been up-own-fundament annoying, and is sometimes a touch too cute for its own good. But it is all redeemed in the telling by the charm and skill of Yu’s voice, pitched somewhere in that interDouglas space between Coupland and Adams.

Franzen’s daring has been to take on soap operas and HBO mini-series, demonstrating that if you want modern emotional dramas, the novel can provide them today as effectively as it did in the 19th century.

…satire of the highest quality.

May in Ayemenem is a hot brooding month, where the days are long and humid, crows gorge on bright mangoes and too many overwrought descriptive passages pile up in a car-crash of a creative writing tutorial.

In any case, this is a book about emotions rather than events. However grim, its drama is there only to articulate the flow of sensibility, the endless poetic filtering of significance out of circumstance.

Collins’s storytelling talents were utterly mesmerising for Victorian readers—and they are no less captivating for readers today. He was the master of the “cliff-hanger”, and given the 40 or so of them that strategically punctuate The Woman in White, it’s not difficult to see why this Victorian novel continues to thrill us.

The plot is hardly labyrinthine and there’s no neat resolution, but Kureishi’s blunt treatment of race, politics and sexuality is sure to grab the reader’s attention as he confronts uncomfortable home truths about British attitudes towards foreigners.

Updike was congenitally unembarrassable and we are the beneficiaries of that. He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom.

Mantel keeps too close an eye on facts and emotions to make her story an arch allegory of modern Britain’s origins, but her setting of such unglamorous virtues as financial transparency and legal clarity against the forces of reaction and mystification is interesting and mildly provocative.

Frank’s “voice” is the important thing, and here too Banks must have a literary precedent in mind, and one appropriate for the theme of “horror”. Frank’s father might make us think of the original twisted amateur scientist, Victor Frankenstein.

Farrell said that he wanted to show “yesterday reflected in today’s consciousness”, but by association, of course, he also holds a glass up to the modern world.

There is much to commend in this novel, a witty parable of India’s changing society, yet there is much to ponder. The scales have fallen from the eyes of some Indian writers, many either living abroad, or educated there like Adiga.

George Orwell, who was reviewing Brideshead on his own deathbed, thought that the passing of Lord Marchmain and other kitschy scenes demonstrated the impossibility of being simultaneously grown-up and a Roman Catholic.

Ireland’s history is so much more rich, exciting, varied and complicated than we had realised. What I’m trying to do is gather in as much as I can. It’s not to accuse, it is just to state that it is so.

It’s the literary equivalent of Coldplay; securely pedestrian, slightly patronising, tinged with the exotic, referencing far better work, but ultimately dull and pointless.

Chabon is a language magician, turning everything into something else just for the delight of playing tricks with words. He takes the wry, underbelly vision of the ordinary that the best of noir fiction offers and ratchets it up to the limit. Nothing is allowed to be itself; all people and events are observed as an echo of something else.

Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.

This is not so much a novel about memory as an examination of what it is to have a memory at all, to have had experiences that seem to be on the brink of slipping away.

One of the commonest complaints about Amis’s novels (as opposed to his poems, interestingly) is that for all their surface engagement with familiar life they are in fact cold-hearted.

The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. Abandoning gruff but profound male camaraderie, McCarthy instead sounds the limits of imaginable love and despair between a diligent father and his timid young son, “each other’s world entire”.

Everything is presented with Amis’s customary élan and intelligence. He will go the long way round to avoid a cliché, sometimes he will coagulate from trying too hard and sometimes he will be a pedant—all this is to be expected.

He is a writer of stern and bleak ambition, but with a tender concern for the people who find themselves adrift and inadequate—for their particularity, for the singularity of their broken stories.

In the 40s, Waters has found a historical period of transformation as fertile as the Victorian era of her previous books, and as ripe for her project of writing lesbians back into history.

David is prim and reckless. He is achingly camp—at one point he is in danger of serving a cheeseboard which is “too recherché” for his guests.

Ames is descended from preachers. He is old, vaguely Republican, delightfully lifeloving, sententious and irritatingly given to homily. He can on the one hand make water sound miraculous and on the other make a reader as nervous and fidgety as a long morning in church.

Ironically, Proulx, who had so far—for 57 years—considered herself “a roving citizen of the northern tier of North America”, found, in her research for Postcards, a home…the vast spaces of Wyoming “moved me deeply”; she decided to move there as soon as she could, which turned out to be 1994; she intends to stay.

And yes, this is certainly a novel that explores the concepts of cultural identity, of rootlessness, of tradition and familial expectation—as well as the way that names subtly (and not so subtly) alter our perceptions of ourselves—but it’s very much to its credit that it never succumbs to the clichés those themes so often entail.

Kundera is a man of the Enlightenment, and is not loath to champion reason over emotion, pointing out, as he has frequently done in his essays as well as his fiction, that many of the worst disasters mankind has suffered were spawned by those who attended most passionately to the dictates of the heart.

There’s the deadpan, surreal-verging-on-absurdist comic tone, a willingness to bend the edges of reality in stories set in an otherwise mundane setting, and the underlying melancholy observed in everyday middle-class rituals.

This was an innovative book in 1963 – not that I knew that then – and it still, today, flashes its own disguising Schiaparelli dress, with the beauty of youth pressed close against youth’s bewilderment. Innocence is abruptly overturned in these pages, but Spark has structured her novel so that we realise we are about to be blown into tragedy.

People think, this guy hasn’t left the house for five years, but in the house it’s hot. That’s what you look for.

Gore Vidal once joked that the advantage of bisexuality was that it doubled your chances of a date on a Saturday night. By extension, hermaphrodites could be said to have the third option of a good night in on their own. But in this epic novel narrated by an American born with twin-set genitals, Jeffrey Eugenides silences such cheap jokes with a rich comedy of his own.

Her world is ignited by belief. She believes in everything: true love, veridical visions, magic, monsters, pagan spirits. She doesn’t tell you how the household cat is looking, or even feeling: she tells you what it is thinking.

Tóibín’s main business in the novel seems to be the denial of expectation. He has deliberately written neither the default gay novel (polemical and operatic) nor the required Irish one (superstition, bigotry, whimsy.)

The novel deals with sin, guilt, obsession, compulsion, the nature of religious belief and the destructive innocence of God’s elect but nothing rumples the bright precision of the writing and the observation behind it.

[Jim] is a wonderful comic creation, lazy and despicable like Evelyn Waugh’s picaresque heroes, but triumphant in the end.