Prize mediocracy

Sir Howard Davies, chairman of the Booker Prize committee, calls for "more diversity in the sort of people who review novels". While the literary editors get on with that, let's also have more diversity in people who judge literary prizes. In this particular case, how about a group of people who have the slightest clue about literature?

Hitchens watch

Martin Amis's buddy speaks at the Freedom from Religion Convention. Pharyngula provides the ghastly details: "Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide."

Richard Seymour reckons he's been proven right. I wasn't arguing.

Current reading

When it had already grown late, Mother suggested that we retire; we wished each other goodnight in front of the weapons cabinet and went to bed.

I'll give you a clue: it's not Jane Austen.

Cultural amnesia anyone, part 2

There's more to Clive James' review of Exit Ghost than gossipy prurience. Actually, that "more" means it's still less than a proper review because, apart from the gossip, there's also chat about such pressing cultural matters as the "preponderance" over the years of US writers. This, James says, has drawbacks "in culture as in military strength":

The big guns get a sense of mission, and their very confidence invites questions about their vision, even about their ability to gaze within. Just as Bellow, in his factual writings, never asked himself the awkward question about divisions within Israel, so in his fictional writings he stifled a question that would have multiplied his range: he never made a subject out of his succession of discarded wives, when you would have thought — must have thought — that for a writer otherwise so brilliantly introspective, there lay the essence of his subject. Similarly, Mailer, unceasingly writing advertisements for himself, never delved far enough into his own psyche to make a subject out of his complicity in the death of Jack Abbott's victim: the great writer could face every embarrassment except the one that pierced to the center of his responsibility as a public writer. [...] It is only Roth who takes himself entirely to pieces. Has he been cruel to leave recognizable the outlines of discarded loved ones? Yes. Has he made a subject of that? Yes again.

One of the drawbacks, it would seem, is that writers like Bellow and Mailer haven't provided enough fodder for the prurient, attention-seeking literary critic. Everything here is slanted toward James' self-service: the writers' brilliance lies in "introspection"; Bellow's ex-wives were all "discarded"; Mailer avoids his "complicity" out of "embarrassment". We're being directed to think along with the writer in a way that Bellow, for one, avoids in his novels. His brilliance lies precisely in this ability to disrupt the controlling introspection of the writerly central figure - usually by souls less doubtful than themselves, but also by events such as the aftermath of an accident that haunts Rexler in By the St Lawrence.

The lungs in the roadbed as pink as a rubber eraser and the other organs, the baldness of them, the foolish oddity of the shapes, almost clownish, almost a denial or refutation of the high-ranking desires and subtleties. How finite they looked.

That is his essential subject; the dynamic intermingling of soul and world, mental life and bodily death. This is more than introspection. And it's not as if Bellow's novels are bereft of troubled relationships. James, in comparison to Bellow's subtleties, is a bald intellectual organ.

I'll leave defence of Mailer to those more interested in his work, but then there's that peculiar reference to the big guns' responsibilities as public writers. What on earth are they? It seems to mean taking oneself to pieces. Of the American big guns, James has a problem with Gore Vidal for keeping himself in one piece.

Vidal has never admitted, let alone explored, the question of whether his criticisms of the American power elite might not be compromised by his membership in it. Does he really think, when he argues that F.D.R. tricked Japan into World War II, that the Japanese right wing, currently making a comeback, will not take this as an endorsement of its views?

So Vidal's responsibility is not toward telling it like it is (as he sees it) but to how truth might be used by others? What about any praise he might have for the same power elite; is that compromised? Should he worry that Bush might use it to bomb more civilians? The only option, it seems, is silence. However, James evidently isn't worried by how his own criticisms of Vidal might be used. The form of defence he employs has disturbing consequences. It means any criticism of one's own side is immediately out of order. How dare anyone criticise the system under which they flourish! This was popular opinion in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. But where they had dungeons, we have media gate-keepers writing at length about others' private lives.

James spends much time defending the joys of this relativism: "In effect, Stalin dropped an atomic bomb on his own citizens once a month for as long as he was in power. Mao Zedong staged a My Lai massacre every fifteen minutes." We shouldn't worry, he's saying, because our crimes aren't as bad as our enemies! But again, this is self-serving. One might replace the examples here with Suharto's massacre of a million "Communists" in Indonesia, or his East Timor bloodbath, or with the millions more in Vietnam, or with Reagan's 30,000 dead in Nicaragua, or the death squads in El Salvador, or Pinochet's Chile, or Saddam's Iraq or the million dead in post-invasion Iraq, or even the poverty-stricken millions dying each year in "the developing nations" – dying right now, not just in history books. I wonder how many of these feature in the index to Cultural Amnesia. Once this is done, Vidal's criticisms can be seen as precisely a product of cultural rememberance, of exploring one's membership of the human race rather than arming oneself to the teeth with Received Opinion.

That final phrase is Vidal characterising James' style of argument. It comes from an exchange of letters between the two seven years ago in the TLS over Vidal's "revisionist" take on Japan's entry into World War II. (The phrase then was that FDR "provoked" rather than "tricked" Japan into war – another example of James' spin). James says "the international craze for revisionism ... has essentially been a strenuous effort to offset disappointment at Communism's failure". After a series of lengthy letters, Vidal is finally lost for words. "Surely at the heart of revisionism" he asks "is Socrates' injunction that the unexamined life is not worth living." Oh dear, where's the hemlock?

Cultural amnesia anyone?

I've been slowly reducing a two-foot high pile of old TLSs; ripping out everything I might want to keep. The back page of the first I picked up featured a review of Clive James' memoirs by Christopher Hitchens. The first paragraph refers to James' aspiration "for a mass audience that would be large enough for his elite audience to despise". What happened to the truth at all costs? This copy was also first on the recycling pile.

After a while I took a break and looked at blogs. By coincidence, Conversational Reading was quoting James' latest, interminable review-essay on Exit Ghost:

In the last rumor I heard on the subject [of whether Roth is "in thrall to his virile member"], one of the most luxuriantly beautiful young Australian female film stars had thrown herself at Roth’s feet lightly clad — I mean she was lightly clad, not Roth’s feet — and demanded satisfaction.

And in the next paragraph:

Roth has been catnip for upmarket women all his life, and never not renowned for it. In London, when he lived there, Roth would enter a fashionable drawing room with Claire Bloom on his arm and you would wonder how he had got into the house without a band striking up "Hail to the Chief."

After a while I returned to the pile. Within minutes I opened an edition from February this year with a 5000-word headline review of The Life of Kingsley Amis. The subtitle sums up the review's theme: "Obsession with Kingsley Amis's private life has distorted appreciation of his work". Can you guess the name of the review's author?

Another day

words

Metaphysical ache: JM Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

When Booker Prize judge Giles Foden brushed aside the challenge of JM Coetzee's new novel as "a piece of radical literary theory" and because "theory is not fiction", I was prepared to let this go as an overstatement based on the novel's apparent aesthetic astringency. From glancing at reviews, the impression was that the novel consisted of self-indulgent essays written by lightly-disguised Coetzee figure with a cursory and slightly pervy sub-plot about his friendship with a much younger woman. I could appreciate how this might not appeal to consumerist demands, even those pretending to Literature. Bring on Mister Pip.

However, now that I've read Diary of a Bad Year, Foden's judgement appears at best incompetent, at worst disturbingly intolerant. To say this novel is "a subversion of the whole commercial and promotional mechanism whereby books are distributed" is about as accurate as saying The Last King of Scotland is about the British constitution. Yes, the novel is aesthetically astringent – the relationships remain formal, the opinions under-developed and on each page the narrative jumps from one voice to another - but these constitute much of the novel's originality as well as providing its emotional and intellectual ballast.

Diary of a Bad Year is an exceptionally moving investigation of what it means to have singular opinions in a plural universe. The short, diverse essays at the top of each page signal a diminishment of writerly power. They might evoke a hollow echo if published alone. At least one reviewer (no longer online) sees this as a problem to the success of the book. Yet if they were more fully-developed, they would crust over what is currently an open wound. And it is the gaping wound with which Coetzee's is concerned. Success, in this sense, would be failure.

The writer character begins by making a distinction between freedom and democracy. He sees the hand-over of power to the state in liberal democracies as irreversible. Freedom is threatened for the sake of democracy. It leads to another brand of totalitarianism. As readers we can agree, disagree or remain indifferent; that goes without saying. The point is: how might our response be included in such opinions? Or rather, how might the opinion appear if it tries to include the plural? How can we reconcile democracy with freedom? Such is the task of the novelist, hence the distinction, albeit narrow, between the author JM Coetzee and the writer in this novel.

The writer asks along the way: "Why can there no discourse about politics that is not itself political?". We might wonder in turn: why can there be no novel that is not also just a novel – a work of a masterful imagination? The questions are essentially the same. To say the least, Diary of a Bad Year is as close to answering as any published this year. The writer praises Harold Pinter's trenchant Nobel acceptance speech for its brave indifference to the scorn it would attract: "there comes a time when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act, that is to say, speak." The same words can be applied to the form of the novel we're reading, where calculation and prudence would have demanded fully-developed essays and a rounded relationship between writer and muse.

Instead, Coetzee imagines two people of the world – Anya and Alan – with whom he has nothing in common. You know all this from the innumerable reviews. He lusts after the body of one and perhaps for something else. Below the essays, we read his apparently private observations on the couple and how he pursued the "metaphysical ache" Anya aroused in him by getting her to type up his dictaphone ramblings. At first this undercuts the writer's seriousness with the petty concerns of bodily existence. But then Anya's voice appears below his, engaging with his ideas, setting them against her assumptions and suspicions about his person, as well as discussing her own life with Alan, a philistine, commercially-minded brute. This suggests the ache is more than prurient. You might say it is religious.

Then Alan's voice appears too. The intertwining of each separate voice, how one influences the other and how the ideas find their way in the world, encourages us to think not of the specific greatness of the novel with regard to our own readerly demands, but of the possibilities for a different kind of discourse. Not one of self-isolating opinions but something more inclusive, even if isolation (and low sales) is inevitable.

In this case, we can think of a new kind of novel; one that resists both the spirit of impotent scorn to which the isolated writer tends and the self-assured denial of prize-winning novels in which the freedom of the imagination is an unquestioned good. That someone considered fit to judge Britain's most prestigious literary prize did not notice any of this and indeed dismisses such an intrepid novel as "theory", suggests there is something very wrong at the heart of British literary culture.

I didn't expect a nihilistic Romanian philosopher

Did anyone else's jaw suddenly discover gravity last night watching Michael Palin's New Europe on BBC1? He was on a train to Bucharest and got chatting with a young man reading a book by EM Cioran. Ex-Cardinal Ximénez read from the blurb. It was On the Heights of Despair.

I feel that I am dying of solitude, of love, of despair, of hatred, of all that this world offers me. With every experience I expand like a balloon blown up beyond its capacity. The most terrifying intensification bursts into nothingness. You grow inside, you dilate madly until there are no boundaries left, you reach the edge of light, where light is stolen by night, and from that plenitude as in a savage whirlwind you are thrown straight into nothingness.

That or ITV3.