How, hypothetically, would one review Exit Ghost if it were a first novel by an unknown?Asks Carlin Romano in his review of Roth's new novel.
Few people so completely English can have travelled so far and observed so feelingly what he saw. He seemed always on some journey of his own, ever restless and curious. Perhaps towards the end he felt himself to be an anomaly, a body out of place in its own time. Yet with his passing went a little of the breath of the English past, its poetry and its spirit.Brian Cummings remembers Stephen Medcalf, legendary tutor at the University of Sussex.
It's odd to find characters in a science-fiction novel repeatedly announcing that they hate science fiction. I can only suppose that Jeanette Winterson is trying to keep her credits as a "literary" writer even as she openly commits genre.It's also odd for a reviewer to admit to such a lack of imagination. Or humour: could it be possible that Winterson is having a laugh at her own expense? Reading without humour might lead one to think in the present case that Le Guin is sublimating her own inferiority complex as a sci-fi writer by openly giving credit to Winterson for being "literary" whilst also suggesting genre is a crime. There's more:
Surely [Winterson's] noticed that everybody is writing science fiction now? Formerly deep-dyed realists are producing novels so full of the tropes and fixtures and plotlines of science fiction that only the snarling tricephalic dogs who guard the Canon of Literature can tell the difference. I certainly can't.I wonder why she does not name one of these guard dogs. Who are they?! She does not even name one of these "formerly deep-eyed realists"! Could she mean Cormac McCarthy and his novel The Road from last year? She claims not to be bothered by the distinction between literary and genre, but even she's not convinced.
I am bothered ... by the curious ingratitude of authors who exploit a common fund of imagery while pretending to have nothing to do with the fellow-authors who created it and left it open to all who want to use it. A little return generosity would hardly come amiss.How is ingratitude shown in the novel toward this common fund? It would be fascinating to follow such close reading. And how might such generosity toward it manifest if not through usage – a theft that is also a gift? Should Cormac McCarthy have to acknowledge the genius of Louis L'Amour? Does Winterson have to pay homage to the senior in the department? I wonder who that might be. It's frustrating not to be told. Actually, maybe Le Guin is displaying her own generosity toward the common fund of self-pitying, axe-grinding, example-free whining that frequently passes for literary criticism in the serious press.
Communism and friendship are words Blanchot will often use in proximity to one another. Reviewing a book by his friend Dionys Mascolo in 1953, Blanchot argues that there is an alternative to the account of need and value as it is found in Marxism. Friendship, for Blanchot, suggests a way in which we might look to a future world that is not comprised of human beings who have become little more than things. We must live two lives, says Blanchot - one in which we struggle against the values that conceal the truth of our condition from us, and another wherein we live according to what we share, which Blanchot, from the late 1950s onward, will call speech.UPDATE: And don't miss wood s lot.
Over the years ... he's turned out many similar books, some of them marred by his slightly sour personality.Mmm, this is what I have enjoyed in particular about Paul Theroux's books! It's the bitterness of VS Naipaul's shadow that makes the book fascinating, despite its longueurs. Actually, it wasn't until Claire Messud's recommendation of Bernhard's The Loser that I realised how taboo it seems to be that "dislikeable characters" dominate a narrative. Even Michael Dirda succumbs to this easy route of criticism. Twenty years ago, Jonathan Raban - in his review of Theroux's best novel My Secret History - observed what really mars the work: he "has sometimes slipped into a routine professional ironising and knowingness, a magisterial garrulity, that has made him seem on his off days like a revenant Somerset Maugham."
Maugham was comparably disdained by critics as just an entertainer, a marketer of commercial fiction and travel journalism. Yet he wrote clearly and powerfully, and once he started telling a story, it was nearly impossible to stop turning the pages.For such a stage, shouldn't we expect better arguments than this? One turns the pages of flip books far more quickly than any Maugham or Theroux novel, so does that mean they're unfairly disdained by literary critics? An example of such disdain would have been enough. The lack of one here suggests the disdain for commerce and entertainment is Dirda's, as it is for all those who feel the need to sublimate their inferiority complexes by writing about unnamed others' snobbery.
[My Secret History] is a book whose sentences lead their own secret lives, where meaning is doubled and redoubled as in a hall of mirrors. Read it warily; read it twice, and more: it is darker and deeper than it looks.PS: There are two coincidences between the two reviews. I've already mentioned Somerset Maugham. Then there's Raban report that My Secret History "is Paul Theroux's 27th book" while Dirda says that "The Elephanta Suite is his 27th work of fiction." Wow.
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