"Against Cliche"
Jul. 23rd, 2024 11:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeMartin Amis's book reviews offer some very nice lines, but he mostly reviewed books that I haven't or don't want to read, so it's hard to feel strongly about his opinions, especially about books he loved.
__ no behaviour. We can well imagine the male wasp’s response to such a verdict: his initial shock and hurt; his descent into a period of depressed introspection; his eventual decision to behave more intriguingly.
__ Post-1970, the Enlightened Man became the New Man, who isn’t interested in getting away with anything – who believes, indeed, that the female is not merely equal to the male but is his plain superior. {？！}
__ Anyway, here’s the difficulty: in England iron (iron hoof) means ‘poof – just as ginger (ginger beer) means ‘queer’, and oily (oily rag) means ‘fag’. Iron means ‘poor.
__ It hardly needs to be pointed out that Bly is phallocentric to the ends of his hair,
__ At the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover Mellors tells Connie that everything would be all right if men sang and danced every evening, dressed in tight red trousers. Bly, who likes his Lawrence, can think of nothing to do about the modern landscape except turn away from it.
__ Feminism (endlessly diverging, towards the stolidly Benthamite, towards the ungraspably rarefied),
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__ The great social torments and exhilarations of these years do not buffet the narrative. What Professor Donald offers is the verisimilitude of marathon anxiety.
__ when, in 1850, the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska were opened up for pan-American settlement; hostility to the extension of slavery saw the formation of a new and exclusively northern party, the Republicans.
__ As the fighting became dirtier and wearier and crueller, Lincoln needed an ideal, a palpable good, to counterbalance ‘the moral rot of war’, in Churchill’s phrase. He had to go back past the constitution to the Declaration of Independence.
__ The prose is continually defaced by that scurviest of false graces, Elegant Variation. (... as he follows ‘seemed to support’ with ‘appeared to back’. )
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__ She came to Washington, with her new broom, and the institutions duly defeated and deformed her. Everything she touches turns out to have the word gate tacked on to the end of it: Cookiegate, Cattlegate, Travelgate, Fostergate, Whitewatergate;
__ What matters is the way things can be made to look. In American politics, you go through the gates and you get to the doors: the doors of ‘perception’.
__ But we don’t want her sounding like a flake. Every joke, therefore, must wear a joke badge: it must be accompanied by a plump exclamation mark. As in ‘Sometimes Mother knows best too!’
__ we can then wind down into the sanitized anti-poetry of soft jargon, with its follow-up and outreach, its skills, tools, goals and roles,
__ Larkin was a great poet (see below), but in his personal life he was a clear example of UK toilet-training run amok.
----------------
__ The End of Nature has been compared to Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, which is certainly the set text on the nuclear question. But the two books have little in common apart from the necessary immodesty of their titles. To put it simply, Mr McKibben lacks weight of voice. Speaking on behalf of all human life, Schell attained a pristine impersonality,
__ In The Fate of the Earth Schell had a murderous – or suicidal – mentality to oppose, with its institutions, its jargon, its pedantry and euphemism. He had the bang, whereas Mr McKibben is stuck with the whimper. He must deal with the slow accretions of human folly, human weakness, human accident.
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__ There was the usual eighteen-year-old in his bed on the last morning, as Elvis lay dying in the bathroom next door. ‘My baby is gone. My baby, Dee,’ said Vernon.
__ He goes to the opening of an escalator at Bergdorf Goodman, to Regine’s for Julio Iglesias’s birthday, to an icecream-shop unveiling in Palm Beach, to Tavern on the Green for a ‘thing’ (this is a word that Andy has a lot of time for) to announce that Don King is taking over the management of the Jacksons... It strains you to imagine the kind of invitation Andy might turn down. To the refurbishment of a fire exit at the Chase Manhattan Bank?
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__ For most of its length Blessed Assurance reads like an analysis of the richest, the most elaborate brew of credulity that human beings have yet concocted. Along the way, though, the phenomenon starts to look more familiar. It looks like religion. An implausible quest for implausible solace, outlandish suffering set against outlandish reward, a way of thinking (or emoting) about the unthinkable. Here, religion has adapted to the nuclear reality.
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__ What Mr (Richard) Rhodes gives us, in any event, is a cataract of embarrassment. Making Love is a hot book, right enough; but the heat is all in the armpits.
As so often when Mr Rhodes gets grateful and reverent, you have to read the sentence twice, even though you didn’t want to read it once.
__ Not so. Three pages from the end of the book we have G—– haggardly confessing that she doesn’t want fourteen orgasms per afternoon.
~~~~~~~~~~~
__ Pritchett never rubs life up the wrong way, and is happy to leave only a faint shine on its fur.
__ All artist-critics are to some extent secret proselytizers for their own work; they are all secret agents.
__ If fiction is imagined as a globe, with realism at its equatorial belt, then Borges occupies a spectral citadel in the North Pole, while Pritchett sweats and smarts in the tropics.
__ Pritchett’s prose is full of these jangles – ‘Sitting behind the screen of the machine’ is a random example – but the effect is entirely appropriate to his way of looking at life. Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time. Life can often be pure doggerel.
__ like Dickens, he has great trouble establishing to what extent dead things are alive. A disused electric fire looks like ‘a modern orphan’.
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__ The book contains as many elegant paragraphs as slovenly ones and for somebody who writes so fast Miss Murdoch writes dismayingly well. But it is bloated and it sags.
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__ ‘To be responsible for the happiness of the Universe’, as W.H. Auden points out, ‘is not a sinecure.’ Equally, the apocalyptic-epiphanic mode in fiction is not for minor talents. It should be clear that the more superbly an author throws away the crutches of verisimilitude, the more heavily he must lean on his own style and wit. Experimental novels may have a habit of looking easy (certainly easier to write than to read), but their failure-rate is alarmingly high
In science fiction Ballard had a tight framework for his unnerving ideas; out on the lunatic fringe, he can only flail and shout.
__ //Ballard: Night and silence settled over the motorway system. The sodium lights shone down on the high span of the overpass, rising into the air like some disused back entrance to the sky.
__ Essentially, his fiction does not propound, it embodies; the prose is simply the rhetoric of an obsession, as dense, one-colour and arbitrary as the obsession requires it to be, and it’s no use squaring such a writer with standard fictional procedures.
__ Its successor, Crash, a novel born of quite immeasurable perversity,
__ For Ballard is the rarest kind of writer – an unselfconscious stylist: it is the measure of his creative narcissism that he has his eye on no audience.
__ Ballard is neither believable nor unbelievable, just as his characterization is merely a matter of ‘roles’ and his situations merely a matter of ‘context’: he is abstract, at once totally humourless and entirely unserious.
__ Here as elsewhere, Ballard gives meaning to blurb phrases like ‘hypnotic power’, ‘maniacal logic’, and so on; with Ballard, fantasy takes on a vertiginous steepness, giving the reader a sense of near-depersonalization.
__ The bathos of the enterprise is perhaps attributable to the fact that Ballard’s work is quite unprotected by irony. His eye for the comedy of human variety is non-existent, and this is why landscape naturally dominates his fiction.
__ Like all obsessions, Ballard’s novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest.
__ the hard stare of Crash, which is about the sexuality of road accidents and doesn’t blink once in 225 pages. {from 1973-1996, digesting Crash}
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__ Anthony Burgess: Alas, the failure is, (vexingly, boringly, ineffably) a failure of language.
__ The ultimate moral, or theological – or theodicean – irony (whereby divine intervention preserves the life of the future cultist mass-murder) is stark and ferocious; it is the kind of challenge that the literary Catholic enjoys throwing out to the world, as if to testify to the macho perversity of his faith. Graham Greene did it in Brighton Rock, Evelyn Waugh in A Handful of Dust; but Burgess is more vehement than either.
__ In this last activity he was assisted by a seigneurial attitude towards domestics, traditional female generosity in wartime, a first wife who espoused and practised free love, and a typically recondite ploy for delaying climax:
__ his grip on Newtonian reality has always been contingent (‘occasionally I see the impossibility of walking and have to stumble to a bench’); and his spiritual dreads have been lifelong and omnipresent. But he has built many mansions with this peculiar house of cards:
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__ Success is well known to be a risky business for writers: sometimes the mere fact of social mobility is enough to maroon a talent.
__ Stylization, however, inevitably puts style under the limelight, and Weldon’s prose – normally a crisp and functional performer – makes a somewhat bashful leading lady. As she aspires more and more identifiably to the wise, otherworldly manner of Muriel Spark,
Cliché spreads inwards from the language of the book to its heart. Cliché always does.
__ Here, alas, he lets his hair down. Mantissa is serious all right, but it permits itself to be ‘deliciously irreverent’ too. There are conundrums for the erudite, but there is also honey for the bears.
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__ but Brideshead is Waugh’s most hated novel too. Equally enthralling and distasteful, it is a problem comedy, like Mansfield Park – worrying, inordinate, self-conscious,
__ Modern critics have by now accused practically every pre-modern novelist of pacifism, or collaboration, in the class war.
__ Try this, though, for authentic hatred of the common age: ‘These men [Lady Marchmain’s brothers] must die to make a world for Hooper … so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince nez, his fat wet handshake, his grinning dentures.’
__ Waugh’s snobbery is revealed here as a failure of imagination, an artistic failure; it is stock-response, like sentimentality.
__ Whether the reader feels much uplift during Julia’s voluble trance is more open to doubt. What the reader senses, I suspect, is the fat wet handshake and grinning dentures of bad art.
__ It was Waugh’s conversion too, but to the Baroque in its decadent, bastardized literary form... never again did he attempt the grand style. Certainly the prose sits oddly with the coldness and contempt at the heart of the novel, and contributes crucially to its central imbalance.
__Wodehouse loved to play on the genial insensitivity to suffering that centuries of thoughtless privilege produce.
__ There is almost something sub-literary in the derisory demands Wodehouse makes on his audience; his ghost hovers over the book like the solicitous Jeeves, only wishing he could turn the pages for you. It is quite unlike any other sort of writing. But then Wodehouse was unique in every way: he had boundless comic genius and a laughably limited range.
~~~~~~~~~~~
__ It seemed that the fossil record was jumping with fresh talent. <> Here comes The Lost World, and here come the answers.
__ When you open The Lost World you enter a strange terrain of one-page chapters, one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences. .. Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of clichés, roaming free.
__ Elmore Leonard: We are in a kind of marijuana tense (Dawn saying), creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. Such sentences seem to open up a lag in time, through which Mr Leonard easily slides, gaining entry to his players’ hidden minds. He doesn’t just show you what these people say and do. He shows you where they breathe.
__ As almost invariably happens in the Big Picture narrative, the second half becomes a zestless hireling of the first. Our author has so many structural chores to get done (like the transfer of Conrad from Santa Rita to Croker’s house in Buckland, Atlanta: real product-humping, this) that there’s little room or energy for the incidental pleasures of Wolfe’s satire.
__ I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre),
~~~~~~~~~~~
__ Nabokov points to the thing itself, the art itself, trying to make us ‘share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author’.
__ Vivid intimacy begins with The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, a two-handed tragi-comedy in which Vladimir steadily outsoars the limited, custodial and fatally envious Edmund.
__ To his absent wife Véra: ‘The eastern side of every minute of mine is already colored by the light of our impending meeting. All the rest is dark, boring, you-less.’ To his sister Elena (the theme here is parental love, and how children seem to stay the same even as they grow): ‘See – you must grab and hold in the fist of your soul everything about Zhikochka today: that way it will all shine through him, too, for a long time.’
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__ He isn’t frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn’t frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn’t frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses. Perhaps he ought to be a little less frightened of being frightened.
__ Mailer thinks on his feet and writes off the top of his head.
__ The devastating paradox of Mailer’s life and work is that this pampered superbrat, this primal-scream specialist and tantrum expert, this brawler, loudmouth and much-televised headline-grabber, suffers from a piercing sense of neglect.
For all his wit, irony and high spirits he is essentially humourless: laughs in Mailer derive from the close observation of things that are, so to speak, funny already. The humour can never turn inward. Besides, one smile in the mirror at this stage in his career and the whole corpus would corpse.
__ Towards the end of the book, Vidal confides that he dislikes social gatherings. Still, this hater of parties clearly went to several thousand of them, perhaps just to make sure.
__ ‘Never have children, only grandchildren,’ Vidal was told by his grandfather, T.P. Gore. Having lost his sight in two different accidents, one for each eye, and then gone on to become the first senator from the state of Oklahoma, T.P. was an inspirational figure for the whole nation.
__ Philip Roth has always been a rich but miserly comic genius. Comedy is hoarded, and Roth receives his compound interest in the form of more sophisticated perversities and contortions.
__ The dangers of writing concertedly about sex are numerous, and Roth skirts none of them. To his left, the Scylla of schlock; to his right, the Charybdis of pornography.
__ Erotic prose is either pallidly general or unviewably specialized. Universality crumbles into a litter of quirks.
__ The Counterlife was a work of such luminous formal perfection that it more or less retired post-modern fiction, and may well have proved to be a heavy trophy for its author.
__ a work of moral and comic near-perfection, Mother Night. Mother Night remains to my knowledge the only funny book about the Third Reich ever written, or indeed ever attempted.
__ One of the purest delights of early Vonnegut was the phrasing. As with Elmore Leonard (in this respect, at least, a comparable popular artist), you can read for hours without hearing a single false quantity.
__ DeLillo writes, ‘what happens to all the unexpended faith?’ It’s not that people will start believing in anything: they will start believing in everything. ‘When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottletops.’
__ Right from the start – Americana (1971) – DeLillo appeared tricked out and tooled up, his prose hard-edged, pre-stressed, sheet-metalled.
__ that beautifully tender anxiety-dream, White Noise. And then Libra, the through-the-roof masterpiece. And then the cool formal artistry of Mao II. And then this.
__ And novelists don’t age as slowly as poets, some of whom (Yeats for instance) just keep on singing, and louder sing for every tatter in their mortal dress. Novelists are stamina-merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
__ (students of literary economy should examine its comma): ‘The mouth was very good but stretched extremely wide when she grinned, when she wept.’ While you love, that which is innate in you becomes malleable; so love shapes you.
__ When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page – stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author. Or, in this case, with something even more fundamentally his. Bellow’s first name is a typo: that ‘a’ should be an ‘o’.
~~~~~~~~~~~
__ Bill Buford is an American; and, as the creator of Granta, he is, to put it no higher, one of the eminent literary middlemen of his time.
__ Updike reminds you that the review can, in its junior way, be something of a work of art, or at least a worthy vehicle for the play of ideas, feeling and wit. His stance is one of ultimate serviceability: the alert and ironic layman unanxiously detached from the world of literary commerce
__ Updike is a Protestant of the small-town Dionysian sort, and that does his writing no harm; yet he is also a Humanist, of the numinous Apollonian sort, and this does seem to account for that vein of folksy uplift which underlies his novels as well as his criticism.
__ Dale Kohler seeks the designer universe. I direct him to the fiction of John Updike. It is a very dinky place – too dinky, perhaps. I sense genius, but not the heavy impact of greatness, not yet.
__ Updike is above all an embarrassing writer: it is his recurrent weakness, and his unifying strength. He is always successfully taking you to where you don’t quite care to follow.
__ Not for Updike the kind of prose that takes a vow of poverty. Such vows, besides, are more easily taken by the pauper than by the prince.
__ John Updike even knows what’s going on in a novel by Iris Murdoch.
__ Despite or because of the Jewish lineaments of his consciousness, Kafka saw the artist’s isolation as Christlike – an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, yet capable of wincing laughter. Grateful as we are for the reissues of the Diaries
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__ The Latin-American novel has always been Quixotic – playful, self-conscious, magical-realist. In the fiction of the North Atlantic mainstream, however, realism provides a heavier undertow, modified not by magic but by irony.
__ The progress towards the Austen marriage tends to be one of self-improvement rather than self-discovery: each protagonist has to turn into the sort of person whom the other deserves to marry
__ Frye sees the structure of a Dickens novel as a conflict between two social groups, the family-orientated ‘congenial’ society (normally based round a quite young, and quite boring, couple) and the institutionalized ‘obstructing’ society (normally old, hide-bound and corrupt).
__ Who reads it? Who curls up with Ulysses? It is thoroughly studied, it is exhaustively unzipped and unseamed, it is much deconstructed. But who reads Ulysses for the hell of it?
__ He is also a genius. One says this with some confidence: he makes Beckett look pedestrian, Lawrence look laconic, Nabokov look guileless. Throughout the course of his oeuvre one watches Joyce steadily washing his hands of mere talent:
__ Space – and the book’s most ravishing sentence: ‘The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.’
__ * After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds.
__ Books are partly about life, and partly about other books. Some books are largely about other books, and spawn yet other books. Augie March is all about life: it brings you up against the dead-end of life.
__ As a critic, therefore, you feel no urge to interpose yourself. Your job is to work your way round to the bits you want to quote. You are a guide in a gallery where the signs say Silence Please; you are shepherding your group from spectacle to spectacle – awed, humbled, and trying, so far as possible, to keep your mouth shut.
__ Like all narrators, Augie is a performing artist (as a young man). And it is Bellow who provides his Portrait.
__ Generally, in literature, goodness has always been bad news. As Montherlant said, happiness – the positive value – ‘writes white’. Only Tolstoy, perhaps, has made happiness swing on the page. And goodness writes purple.
__ Style, of course, is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception. We are fond of separating style and content (for the purposes of analysis, and so on), but they aren’t separable: they come from the same place. And style is morality. Style judges.
__ The path of self-love is always a rocky one. But the love shared by Humbert and Humbert, for all its rough and smooth, is unquestionably the real thing.
__ Nabokov was the more ‘complete’ player. Joyce appeared to be cruising about on all surfaces at once, and maddeningly indulged his trick shots on high-pressure points – his drop smash, his sidespun half-volley lob. Nabokov just went out there and did the business, all litheness, power and touch.
dislocatingly naive / the landlocked egotisms / the protective glaze of his pedagogy
One would give Wilson the benefit of these grave doubts if it weren’t for...
the orderly heartlessness of his adult life / obsequiously conventional / insatiably empathetic
- but I was very moral when it came to literary criticism. I read it all the time, in the tub, on the tube; I always had about me my Edmund Wilson – or my William Empson. I took it seriously. We all did... Literature, we felt, was the core discipline; criticism explored and popularized the significance of that centrality, creating a space around literature and thereby further exalting it.
- it now seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push.
- Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon.
- Gore Vidal said this first, and he said it, not quite with mockery, but with lively scepticism. He said that, nowadays, nobody’s feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else’s. This is the new credo, the new privilege. It is a privilege much exercised in the contemporary book-review,
- Leavis’s besieged intensity was ridiculous. His shaping embarrassment, however, was to nominate as his model for sanity the person of D.H. Lawrence).
- Emotional egalitarianism, for example, looks hard to attack. I honour it, in a way, but it has to me the pale glow of illusion.
- Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember.
- The most muscular literary critics on earth have no equipment for establishing that /Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears/ is a better line than /When all at once I saw a crowd/
- Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart... When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice.
__ no behaviour. We can well imagine the male wasp’s response to such a verdict: his initial shock and hurt; his descent into a period of depressed introspection; his eventual decision to behave more intriguingly.
__ Post-1970, the Enlightened Man became the New Man, who isn’t interested in getting away with anything – who believes, indeed, that the female is not merely equal to the male but is his plain superior. {？！}
__ Anyway, here’s the difficulty: in England iron (iron hoof) means ‘poof – just as ginger (ginger beer) means ‘queer’, and oily (oily rag) means ‘fag’. Iron means ‘poor.
__ It hardly needs to be pointed out that Bly is phallocentric to the ends of his hair,
__ At the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover Mellors tells Connie that everything would be all right if men sang and danced every evening, dressed in tight red trousers. Bly, who likes his Lawrence, can think of nothing to do about the modern landscape except turn away from it.
__ Feminism (endlessly diverging, towards the stolidly Benthamite, towards the ungraspably rarefied),
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__ The great social torments and exhilarations of these years do not buffet the narrative. What Professor Donald offers is the verisimilitude of marathon anxiety.
__ when, in 1850, the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska were opened up for pan-American settlement; hostility to the extension of slavery saw the formation of a new and exclusively northern party, the Republicans.
__ As the fighting became dirtier and wearier and crueller, Lincoln needed an ideal, a palpable good, to counterbalance ‘the moral rot of war’, in Churchill’s phrase. He had to go back past the constitution to the Declaration of Independence.
__ The prose is continually defaced by that scurviest of false graces, Elegant Variation. (... as he follows ‘seemed to support’ with ‘appeared to back’. )
------------
__ She came to Washington, with her new broom, and the institutions duly defeated and deformed her. Everything she touches turns out to have the word gate tacked on to the end of it: Cookiegate, Cattlegate, Travelgate, Fostergate, Whitewatergate;
__ What matters is the way things can be made to look. In American politics, you go through the gates and you get to the doors: the doors of ‘perception’.
__ But we don’t want her sounding like a flake. Every joke, therefore, must wear a joke badge: it must be accompanied by a plump exclamation mark. As in ‘Sometimes Mother knows best too!’
__ we can then wind down into the sanitized anti-poetry of soft jargon, with its follow-up and outreach, its skills, tools, goals and roles,
__ Larkin was a great poet (see below), but in his personal life he was a clear example of UK toilet-training run amok.
----------------
__ The End of Nature has been compared to Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, which is certainly the set text on the nuclear question. But the two books have little in common apart from the necessary immodesty of their titles. To put it simply, Mr McKibben lacks weight of voice. Speaking on behalf of all human life, Schell attained a pristine impersonality,
__ In The Fate of the Earth Schell had a murderous – or suicidal – mentality to oppose, with its institutions, its jargon, its pedantry and euphemism. He had the bang, whereas Mr McKibben is stuck with the whimper. He must deal with the slow accretions of human folly, human weakness, human accident.
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__ There was the usual eighteen-year-old in his bed on the last morning, as Elvis lay dying in the bathroom next door. ‘My baby is gone. My baby, Dee,’ said Vernon.
__ He goes to the opening of an escalator at Bergdorf Goodman, to Regine’s for Julio Iglesias’s birthday, to an icecream-shop unveiling in Palm Beach, to Tavern on the Green for a ‘thing’ (this is a word that Andy has a lot of time for) to announce that Don King is taking over the management of the Jacksons... It strains you to imagine the kind of invitation Andy might turn down. To the refurbishment of a fire exit at the Chase Manhattan Bank?
-------------
__ For most of its length Blessed Assurance reads like an analysis of the richest, the most elaborate brew of credulity that human beings have yet concocted. Along the way, though, the phenomenon starts to look more familiar. It looks like religion. An implausible quest for implausible solace, outlandish suffering set against outlandish reward, a way of thinking (or emoting) about the unthinkable. Here, religion has adapted to the nuclear reality.
-----------------
__ What Mr (Richard) Rhodes gives us, in any event, is a cataract of embarrassment. Making Love is a hot book, right enough; but the heat is all in the armpits.
As so often when Mr Rhodes gets grateful and reverent, you have to read the sentence twice, even though you didn’t want to read it once.
__ Not so. Three pages from the end of the book we have G—– haggardly confessing that she doesn’t want fourteen orgasms per afternoon.
~~~~~~~~~~~
__ Pritchett never rubs life up the wrong way, and is happy to leave only a faint shine on its fur.
__ All artist-critics are to some extent secret proselytizers for their own work; they are all secret agents.
__ If fiction is imagined as a globe, with realism at its equatorial belt, then Borges occupies a spectral citadel in the North Pole, while Pritchett sweats and smarts in the tropics.
__ Pritchett’s prose is full of these jangles – ‘Sitting behind the screen of the machine’ is a random example – but the effect is entirely appropriate to his way of looking at life. Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time. Life can often be pure doggerel.
__ like Dickens, he has great trouble establishing to what extent dead things are alive. A disused electric fire looks like ‘a modern orphan’.
-------------
__ The book contains as many elegant paragraphs as slovenly ones and for somebody who writes so fast Miss Murdoch writes dismayingly well. But it is bloated and it sags.
------------
__ ‘To be responsible for the happiness of the Universe’, as W.H. Auden points out, ‘is not a sinecure.’ Equally, the apocalyptic-epiphanic mode in fiction is not for minor talents. It should be clear that the more superbly an author throws away the crutches of verisimilitude, the more heavily he must lean on his own style and wit. Experimental novels may have a habit of looking easy (certainly easier to write than to read), but their failure-rate is alarmingly high
In science fiction Ballard had a tight framework for his unnerving ideas; out on the lunatic fringe, he can only flail and shout.
__ //Ballard: Night and silence settled over the motorway system. The sodium lights shone down on the high span of the overpass, rising into the air like some disused back entrance to the sky.
__ Essentially, his fiction does not propound, it embodies; the prose is simply the rhetoric of an obsession, as dense, one-colour and arbitrary as the obsession requires it to be, and it’s no use squaring such a writer with standard fictional procedures.
__ Its successor, Crash, a novel born of quite immeasurable perversity,
__ For Ballard is the rarest kind of writer – an unselfconscious stylist: it is the measure of his creative narcissism that he has his eye on no audience.
__ Ballard is neither believable nor unbelievable, just as his characterization is merely a matter of ‘roles’ and his situations merely a matter of ‘context’: he is abstract, at once totally humourless and entirely unserious.
__ Here as elsewhere, Ballard gives meaning to blurb phrases like ‘hypnotic power’, ‘maniacal logic’, and so on; with Ballard, fantasy takes on a vertiginous steepness, giving the reader a sense of near-depersonalization.
__ The bathos of the enterprise is perhaps attributable to the fact that Ballard’s work is quite unprotected by irony. His eye for the comedy of human variety is non-existent, and this is why landscape naturally dominates his fiction.
__ Like all obsessions, Ballard’s novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest.
__ the hard stare of Crash, which is about the sexuality of road accidents and doesn’t blink once in 225 pages. {from 1973-1996, digesting Crash}
------------
__ Anthony Burgess: Alas, the failure is, (vexingly, boringly, ineffably) a failure of language.
__ The ultimate moral, or theological – or theodicean – irony (whereby divine intervention preserves the life of the future cultist mass-murder) is stark and ferocious; it is the kind of challenge that the literary Catholic enjoys throwing out to the world, as if to testify to the macho perversity of his faith. Graham Greene did it in Brighton Rock, Evelyn Waugh in A Handful of Dust; but Burgess is more vehement than either.
__ In this last activity he was assisted by a seigneurial attitude towards domestics, traditional female generosity in wartime, a first wife who espoused and practised free love, and a typically recondite ploy for delaying climax:
__ his grip on Newtonian reality has always been contingent (‘occasionally I see the impossibility of walking and have to stumble to a bench’); and his spiritual dreads have been lifelong and omnipresent. But he has built many mansions with this peculiar house of cards:
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__ Success is well known to be a risky business for writers: sometimes the mere fact of social mobility is enough to maroon a talent.
__ Stylization, however, inevitably puts style under the limelight, and Weldon’s prose – normally a crisp and functional performer – makes a somewhat bashful leading lady. As she aspires more and more identifiably to the wise, otherworldly manner of Muriel Spark,
Cliché spreads inwards from the language of the book to its heart. Cliché always does.
__ Here, alas, he lets his hair down. Mantissa is serious all right, but it permits itself to be ‘deliciously irreverent’ too. There are conundrums for the erudite, but there is also honey for the bears.
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__ but Brideshead is Waugh’s most hated novel too. Equally enthralling and distasteful, it is a problem comedy, like Mansfield Park – worrying, inordinate, self-conscious,
__ Modern critics have by now accused practically every pre-modern novelist of pacifism, or collaboration, in the class war.
__ Try this, though, for authentic hatred of the common age: ‘These men [Lady Marchmain’s brothers] must die to make a world for Hooper … so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince nez, his fat wet handshake, his grinning dentures.’
__ Waugh’s snobbery is revealed here as a failure of imagination, an artistic failure; it is stock-response, like sentimentality.
__ Whether the reader feels much uplift during Julia’s voluble trance is more open to doubt. What the reader senses, I suspect, is the fat wet handshake and grinning dentures of bad art.
__ It was Waugh’s conversion too, but to the Baroque in its decadent, bastardized literary form... never again did he attempt the grand style. Certainly the prose sits oddly with the coldness and contempt at the heart of the novel, and contributes crucially to its central imbalance.
__Wodehouse loved to play on the genial insensitivity to suffering that centuries of thoughtless privilege produce.
__ There is almost something sub-literary in the derisory demands Wodehouse makes on his audience; his ghost hovers over the book like the solicitous Jeeves, only wishing he could turn the pages for you. It is quite unlike any other sort of writing. But then Wodehouse was unique in every way: he had boundless comic genius and a laughably limited range.
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__ It seemed that the fossil record was jumping with fresh talent. <> Here comes The Lost World, and here come the answers.
__ When you open The Lost World you enter a strange terrain of one-page chapters, one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences. .. Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of clichés, roaming free.
__ Elmore Leonard: We are in a kind of marijuana tense (Dawn saying), creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. Such sentences seem to open up a lag in time, through which Mr Leonard easily slides, gaining entry to his players’ hidden minds. He doesn’t just show you what these people say and do. He shows you where they breathe.
__ As almost invariably happens in the Big Picture narrative, the second half becomes a zestless hireling of the first. Our author has so many structural chores to get done (like the transfer of Conrad from Santa Rita to Croker’s house in Buckland, Atlanta: real product-humping, this) that there’s little room or energy for the incidental pleasures of Wolfe’s satire.
__ I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre),
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__ Nabokov points to the thing itself, the art itself, trying to make us ‘share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author’.
__ Vivid intimacy begins with The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, a two-handed tragi-comedy in which Vladimir steadily outsoars the limited, custodial and fatally envious Edmund.
__ To his absent wife Véra: ‘The eastern side of every minute of mine is already colored by the light of our impending meeting. All the rest is dark, boring, you-less.’ To his sister Elena (the theme here is parental love, and how children seem to stay the same even as they grow): ‘See – you must grab and hold in the fist of your soul everything about Zhikochka today: that way it will all shine through him, too, for a long time.’
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__ He isn’t frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn’t frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn’t frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses. Perhaps he ought to be a little less frightened of being frightened.
__ Mailer thinks on his feet and writes off the top of his head.
__ The devastating paradox of Mailer’s life and work is that this pampered superbrat, this primal-scream specialist and tantrum expert, this brawler, loudmouth and much-televised headline-grabber, suffers from a piercing sense of neglect.
For all his wit, irony and high spirits he is essentially humourless: laughs in Mailer derive from the close observation of things that are, so to speak, funny already. The humour can never turn inward. Besides, one smile in the mirror at this stage in his career and the whole corpus would corpse.
__ Towards the end of the book, Vidal confides that he dislikes social gatherings. Still, this hater of parties clearly went to several thousand of them, perhaps just to make sure.
__ ‘Never have children, only grandchildren,’ Vidal was told by his grandfather, T.P. Gore. Having lost his sight in two different accidents, one for each eye, and then gone on to become the first senator from the state of Oklahoma, T.P. was an inspirational figure for the whole nation.
__ Philip Roth has always been a rich but miserly comic genius. Comedy is hoarded, and Roth receives his compound interest in the form of more sophisticated perversities and contortions.
__ The dangers of writing concertedly about sex are numerous, and Roth skirts none of them. To his left, the Scylla of schlock; to his right, the Charybdis of pornography.
__ Erotic prose is either pallidly general or unviewably specialized. Universality crumbles into a litter of quirks.
__ The Counterlife was a work of such luminous formal perfection that it more or less retired post-modern fiction, and may well have proved to be a heavy trophy for its author.
__ a work of moral and comic near-perfection, Mother Night. Mother Night remains to my knowledge the only funny book about the Third Reich ever written, or indeed ever attempted.
__ One of the purest delights of early Vonnegut was the phrasing. As with Elmore Leonard (in this respect, at least, a comparable popular artist), you can read for hours without hearing a single false quantity.
__ DeLillo writes, ‘what happens to all the unexpended faith?’ It’s not that people will start believing in anything: they will start believing in everything. ‘When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottletops.’
__ Right from the start – Americana (1971) – DeLillo appeared tricked out and tooled up, his prose hard-edged, pre-stressed, sheet-metalled.
__ that beautifully tender anxiety-dream, White Noise. And then Libra, the through-the-roof masterpiece. And then the cool formal artistry of Mao II. And then this.
__ And novelists don’t age as slowly as poets, some of whom (Yeats for instance) just keep on singing, and louder sing for every tatter in their mortal dress. Novelists are stamina-merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
__ (students of literary economy should examine its comma): ‘The mouth was very good but stretched extremely wide when she grinned, when she wept.’ While you love, that which is innate in you becomes malleable; so love shapes you.
__ When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page – stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author. Or, in this case, with something even more fundamentally his. Bellow’s first name is a typo: that ‘a’ should be an ‘o’.
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__ Bill Buford is an American; and, as the creator of Granta, he is, to put it no higher, one of the eminent literary middlemen of his time.
__ Updike reminds you that the review can, in its junior way, be something of a work of art, or at least a worthy vehicle for the play of ideas, feeling and wit. His stance is one of ultimate serviceability: the alert and ironic layman unanxiously detached from the world of literary commerce
__ Updike is a Protestant of the small-town Dionysian sort, and that does his writing no harm; yet he is also a Humanist, of the numinous Apollonian sort, and this does seem to account for that vein of folksy uplift which underlies his novels as well as his criticism.
__ Dale Kohler seeks the designer universe. I direct him to the fiction of John Updike. It is a very dinky place – too dinky, perhaps. I sense genius, but not the heavy impact of greatness, not yet.
__ Updike is above all an embarrassing writer: it is his recurrent weakness, and his unifying strength. He is always successfully taking you to where you don’t quite care to follow.
__ Not for Updike the kind of prose that takes a vow of poverty. Such vows, besides, are more easily taken by the pauper than by the prince.
__ John Updike even knows what’s going on in a novel by Iris Murdoch.
__ Despite or because of the Jewish lineaments of his consciousness, Kafka saw the artist’s isolation as Christlike – an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, yet capable of wincing laughter. Grateful as we are for the reissues of the Diaries
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__ The Latin-American novel has always been Quixotic – playful, self-conscious, magical-realist. In the fiction of the North Atlantic mainstream, however, realism provides a heavier undertow, modified not by magic but by irony.
__ The progress towards the Austen marriage tends to be one of self-improvement rather than self-discovery: each protagonist has to turn into the sort of person whom the other deserves to marry
__ Frye sees the structure of a Dickens novel as a conflict between two social groups, the family-orientated ‘congenial’ society (normally based round a quite young, and quite boring, couple) and the institutionalized ‘obstructing’ society (normally old, hide-bound and corrupt).
__ Who reads it? Who curls up with Ulysses? It is thoroughly studied, it is exhaustively unzipped and unseamed, it is much deconstructed. But who reads Ulysses for the hell of it?
__ He is also a genius. One says this with some confidence: he makes Beckett look pedestrian, Lawrence look laconic, Nabokov look guileless. Throughout the course of his oeuvre one watches Joyce steadily washing his hands of mere talent:
__ Space – and the book’s most ravishing sentence: ‘The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.’
__ * After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds.
__ Books are partly about life, and partly about other books. Some books are largely about other books, and spawn yet other books. Augie March is all about life: it brings you up against the dead-end of life.
__ As a critic, therefore, you feel no urge to interpose yourself. Your job is to work your way round to the bits you want to quote. You are a guide in a gallery where the signs say Silence Please; you are shepherding your group from spectacle to spectacle – awed, humbled, and trying, so far as possible, to keep your mouth shut.
__ Like all narrators, Augie is a performing artist (as a young man). And it is Bellow who provides his Portrait.
__ Generally, in literature, goodness has always been bad news. As Montherlant said, happiness – the positive value – ‘writes white’. Only Tolstoy, perhaps, has made happiness swing on the page. And goodness writes purple.
__ Style, of course, is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception. We are fond of separating style and content (for the purposes of analysis, and so on), but they aren’t separable: they come from the same place. And style is morality. Style judges.
__ The path of self-love is always a rocky one. But the love shared by Humbert and Humbert, for all its rough and smooth, is unquestionably the real thing.
__ Nabokov was the more ‘complete’ player. Joyce appeared to be cruising about on all surfaces at once, and maddeningly indulged his trick shots on high-pressure points – his drop smash, his sidespun half-volley lob. Nabokov just went out there and did the business, all litheness, power and touch.
dislocatingly naive / the landlocked egotisms / the protective glaze of his pedagogy
One would give Wilson the benefit of these grave doubts if it weren’t for...
the orderly heartlessness of his adult life / obsequiously conventional / insatiably empathetic
