The image of Qana

During the BBC's live coverage of the Qana atrocity (with Fergal Keane doing a fine job), a reporter interviewed an Israeli government spokesman. He asked: "Doesn't [the massacre] damage Israel's image in the world?" The spokesman paused before replying: "This isn't about image, this about the tragedy of 50+ innocent lives being lost." Sometimes, even for the villains, the BBC can be too craven!

Correction, absolution

AC of the blog Slightly Bluestocking has been reading Correction, her first Thomas Bernhard. Now that must be an experience! (Not that I would recommend this particular novel for new readers; Concrete is more representative).

In light (or darkness) of this, it might be of interest to report that Roithamer in the novel has built a cone for his sister to live (and die) in and that 'cone' in German is 'kegel' and that, today, I received a spam email from a persistent fellow which normally filters into trash but today happened to be viewed and so informed me that:

History records indicate bowling started around 300 A.D. at German monasteries. The monks had churchgoers knock down a bottle-shaped object called a kegel with a rolled ball to show their devotion to God. The kegel meant the devil, and knocking it over gave complete absolution from sin.

Fixed in facility: more on Updike's Terrorist

TEV draws my attention to Bryan Appleyard's astonishing tirade in favour of John Updike's Terrorist and against all the reviewers who trashed it. Well, all but one.

What's astonishing is that a prominent cultural commentator should foreground feet-stamping and generalisations rather than precise analysis. After quoting a few negative reviews, he snorts:

Updike is just too good for them. They can’t stand being constantly exposed to somebody who just writes so well.

What a strange accusation! Do the same critics have the same response to every writer who is similarly blessed? I know that one of them (Jonathan Raban) is a great fan of Saul Bellow's, whom Appleyard places in the same exalted category as Updike. So Appleyard's accusation doesn't explain his trashing. I'm sure other people know enough about the taste of the other critics to disprove it for each of them.

Really, it's a childish suggestion. He even wheels out the oldest chestnut, comparing the critical reception with the public's "enthusiasm". This, he suggests, is evidence that it is "a very good book". If sales were a mark of goodness, then it follows that every Harry Potter novel is infinitely greater than Terrorist. I'm sure Appleyard wouldn't agree to that.

"Public enthusiasm" is proves little anyway, as the act of buying a novel says only that the individual wants to buy it, not that they already believe it to be a good book. If anything, it points to extra-literary hype and/or a wish for a more nuanced approach to terror than one gets in the news. Unfortunately, reviewing is indifferent (or should be) to the extra-literary, and it is precisely the portrayal of the terrorist of which the reviewers are critical. Appleyard does then edge toward literary critique by complaining that the critics "want their terrorists to be explicable in the most banal terms" rather than in the "opacity" of Updike's characterisation. But in not mentioning James Wood's brilliant dissection of Terrorist, Appleyard reveals that he cannot comprehend the real problem at hand is precisely Updike's mastery.

While the other critics express disbelief in the main character, Wood argues that "[i]t is the otherness of Islamicism that is missing in this book." By enveloping the terrorist in his familarly seductive language, Updike obscures what makes the muslim terrorist such a mesmerising presence in our culture (contrasting him, I would add, to the pilot who obliterates dozens of muslims each week without becoming a focus of public fascination). As I wrote the other day, Updike would have had to frame his narrative differently for the novel to face that otherness. This has nothing to do with fine writing. It is finding the relation of literature to life; the real relation, not a quality of the suspension of disbelief.

The same problem is shared by Ian McEwan, the writer to whom Appleyard turns to back up his opinion. For all McEwan's and Updike's talent for quotable sentences - beautiful writing and all that - both writers resist the self-annihilating force of art. It's why their novels fail as art while succeeding in the stagnant pool of the popular literary novel. No wonder the booklovers are bewildered and offended when it is mentioned.

Appleyard's blind desparation causes him to score own goal after own goal: "Gore Vidal described Updike as being fixed in facility, as clear a case of the revenge of mediocrity on genius as I have ever heard." But in three words, Vidal provides the most succinct and accurate critique of Updike's fiction that anyone will ever hear. Were that other critics so mediocre!

Destruction is our Beatrice

To begin a fiction seems to me an act of great daring. What temerity - to write, and a fiction! The temerity of inventiveness! Perhaps I am like those who distrust fiction writers who would usurp the place of God. But then I remember that certain fictional works are more like a destruction rather than a creation: the world is pared down, 'reduced' as is said in phenomenology, and now in such a way the author is the opposite of God.

From Spurious, which also discusses certain of those fictional works.

Why am I telling you this?

The reviews of John Updike's Terrorist seem almost universal in their unease with him, of all people, telling the story of a half-Irish, half-Egyptian teenage Muslim fanatic, albeit one familiar with life in the US. It's rare that such unease is expressed about a novel, perhaps because most do not present such an obvious disjunction between author and protagonist. Unfortunately for Updike, his personal fame rather foregrounds his attempted disappearance.

Whatever, it highlights something which has long bothered me about fiction (and to which I return under various guises often enough but never to my satisfaction; perhaps that's what literary blogging is all about). At the beginning of every novel written in the third person, one question I always ask is: why I am being told this? And when a narrator begins to speak, I ask: why are you telling me this? If these questions remain unaddressed, much as I might enjoy the novel - and I enjoy them as much as anyone - ultimately it seems to fail as a novel. It's this conclusion that often makes me appear to be unduly antagonistic toward many supposed 'literary' novels.

Most writers and readers seem to believe access to the inner life of a character or the freedom to ventriloquise another's story are natural givens of literature (what James Wood in his review of Terrorist calls "the temptation toward negative capability"). But for me, the primary experience of literature, the experience that impels me to read and to write, the experience that makes literature, is the experience of distance, the distance (which can include extreme closeness) between oneself and another, which is also the distance between oneself and the fiction, as author and as reader.

In concluding his review, James Wood says "[it] is the otherness of Islamicism that is missing in this book". The question then becomes: how best frame that otherness, that distance? Updike's answer is evidently an evasion, so it will be interesting to see how other writers answer if Wood's suggestion, that the novel is harbinger of novels whose subject "will be religious fundamentalism and its relation to Western secular society", is correct, as it surely is.

An 'ordinary' post

Grumpy Old Bookman is especially grumpy over the success of Sam Bourne's novel The Righteous Men:

I have a well documented antipathy towards Mr Bourne and his book [he explains] based on the old-fashioned idea that there are other writers out there who deserve this kind of success far more than he does.

Well that's something to which we can all relate!

He goes on to provide the detailed background to Mr Bourne's success, all of which one could sum up as old-fashioned snobbery and professional jealousy. Surely his popularity is well-deserved having done a good professional job for the reader? Alternatively, one could sum it up as a passionate concern for good literature. But where would that leave GOB's familiar disdain for "literary" writers who write it?

GOB also introduces us to best-selling author Susan Hill's new blog which, she explains:

came about because several books-and-reading Bloggers feel that the review pages of the major newspapers - with honourable exceptions - do not cater for the enthusiastic 'ordinary' reader and book buyer, but for a small, minority audience, or perhaps series of audiences according to the often obscure subject matter of the books under review. And the book prizes, too, are not judged by the general reader and often bear no relation to what they admire and enjoy. Only Richard and Judy choices seem to relate at all to the mass of readers who are often keen members of book groups and blog regularly about books.

Notice the almost complete lack of any examples here. Why do these low-to-middlebrow types trade almost entirely in impressions and stereotypes? Perhaps because they rely on self-perpetuating prejudice rather than fact. (I've noted her literary prejudices before by the way). Of the dozens I subscribe to, not one book blog discusses Richard & Judy novels.

When I read the book pages of newspapers, I prefer to be surprised, to learn something new, to discover new writers. An old-fashioned desire perhaps. But I'm not an ordinary reader. I realise that. I don't know any one else who hangs from a trapeze holding the book upside down.

Going back to the beginning, GOB is frustrated by Sam Bourne's success because it has more to do with connections and marketing than the writing of a great book. Ironically, one of the reasons Sam Bourne is so successful is due to Richard & Judy promoting his novel, prompting large numbers of 'ordinary' readers to decide that they want to read it. Presumably they didn't invite Michael Dibdin to discuss the book. But it seems that literary criticism isn't congenial to 'ordinary' admiration and enjoyment, yet - and this the heart of their resentment - the 'ordinary' readers still crave the prestige and "recognition" offered by literary awards and coverage in book pages. Why else do they complain?

Rather than complain though, book bloggers need to champion specific books and argue why they rate them. The rest is business.

There's more to life than books, you know

Writers hate getting stuck. Most drink tea. Some take to the bottle. Others go for long walks. A few give up altogether.

Those left write blogs.

Sophie Ratcliffe continues her review of Jane Smiley's study 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel with the background to the author's stuckness. It began after 9/11: "Fear was everywhere. Fear of anthrax, fear of nuclear terrorism, fear of flying, fear of the future." And fear of writing novels? Well, despair perhaps. To mitigate the condition, Smiley decided to read 100 novels and try to distil their essence. "Her broadest claim" Ratcliffe reports "is for the novel’s commonness". Commoness "enables a reader to relax with a novel as with another person, and also to feel as though the novelist might have something to say of relevance to the reader’s common life."

Overall, Ratcliffe finds Smiley's ideas grandiose and programmatic. Not only that but the book as a whole is "symptomatic of the worst aspects of the criticism of our climate: it sees novel-reading as a sort of salvation."

It is indeed odd to imagine salvation coming through relaxation and hearing something of relevance to one's life. Unless that something is the distance between oneself and another, and between oneself and salvation (distances which are equally common as Smiley's commonness). Perhaps that wouldn't be relaxing to the majority of readers though, because then reading would be vital rather than sedative. It is easier to turn to tea, the bottle or a long walk. Some people don't read at all. In each of these, however, not reading is no different to reading (just as graphomania is no different to writer's block); salvation comes through ignorance of the question itself.

Ratcliffe contrasts Smiley's grandiosity with Michael Dirda's "brilliant" Book by Book: Notes on reading and life:

He makes suggestions for what to put in a guest bedroom bookshelf, shares the quotations that he keeps around his desk, and reminds us that flossing our teeth is just as important as reading. 'There’s more to life than reading', he points out.

Yes. But not much more.

Help me to develop more grudges

In a discussion about writers and politics on RSB's blog, Andrew Stevens of 3AM Magazine writes that:

Dan Rhodes tried to get the other writers on the 2003 Granta Young British Authors list to participate in some joint declaration against the Iraq war. A handful made positive noises and the rest told him to fuck off. Some pundits said it wasn't the business of writers to do that sort of thing.

I didn't know about this. While I would have signed such a declaration had I been an GYBA, I also believe it's not the business of novelists as novelists to make such declarations. What interests me instead is the number of (US and British) novelists who have expressed support for the invasion and occupation. For I reserve a special kind of fascination, horror, disgust, deep loathing and hatred for these people, whoever they are. So far, I have read supportive statements from Patricia Duncker, Alan Sillitoe, DM Thomas and the incomparable Ian McEwan. It's the ninth circle for them! Any others?