Draught fiction

Bel Mooney compares Nick Hornby with Anne Tyler. "But Anne Tyler would never be dismissed as a 'popular' novelist".

Sigh. She is a popular novelist. Nothing wrong with that. It's not a dismissal. It's a literary definition. Why does Mooney feel that the label is a dismissal? Who is being the snob here?

Every so often somebody complains, as Mooney does, that popular authors are shunned by 'literati' solely because they're popular. No evidence is ever offered. Instead, as in this case, extra-literary achievements are thrust to the fore. With Fever Pitch Hornby got "young men wearing Arsenal shirts to pick up a book — and keep picking them up almost as often as they sink a pint". Great, if you assume reading literature is necessarily a good thing. But not only that:

His paperback sales total 6 million, excluding the US and translations. A Long Way Down went straight to No 1 in Italy, Robert De Niro’s production company paid £2 million for the rights to About A Boy. And so on. Hornby books make movies — and money. It is enough to make the average literary hack reach for the poisoned arrows.

The arrows Mooney provides as exhibits seem to have their points disguised, as far as I can see they're nothing other than routine literary critical opinion. She says many reviewers were unconvinced by the scenario of A Long Way Down and claims this is nonsense. The opening to Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is, she says, even more unrealistic. But are these writers' modes comparable? One a comic realist, the other a magical realist? And did Rushdie's novel get good reviews? Not as far as I can remember. There's only one reason why The Satanic Verses is so famous. Perhaps Mooney should be directing her ire at the Ayatollahs for shunning her hero?

Yet even if the reviews are indeed inaccurate and unfair, it doesn't prove that the motivation is due to Hornby's popularity.

Mooney goes on to offer a more subtle reason: critics think a great writer cannot be comic and serious (hence perhaps the dismissive reviews received by Muriel Spark and Saul Bellow).

This is fiction transforming pain into the archetypal comic mode — through pity and laughter to purge the emotions. Hornby’s accessibility should be celebrated — offering millions the gripping possibility of redemption.

The gripping possibility of redemption! One can imagine what the pint-sinking young men in Arsenal shirts might say about that.

The literati might appreciate that though, so it seems odd that they're so negative. But who makes up this mythical grouping? Mooney names only one member. It's a helpful reference as Adam Mars-Jones' conclusion that A Long Way Down is "emotional truth processed into convenience food, insight that you boil in the bag" might well be the best explanation as to why Hornby sells so well.

Random sentences in random novels

Having written a few reviews lately with increasing dissatisfaction, I realise that what I would really like is to review how a novel is written at a very local level rather than outline the story (stories don't interest me really). Each sentence seems to say something about the whole. I suspect the writers I prefer know this and those that I don't like don't.

So, to find out what might be revealed in this way, I picked up a three novels from three large piles on a colleague's desk (thanks J!) - popular novels, genre novels, fashionable literary hits - and opened each to a random page, usually two thirds in. I then copied out the first descriptive sentence - that is, not dialogue. All were written in English. Can anybody guess from whence they came?

She turned away from him to gaze at the ceiling.

Thomas watched his father swill straight from the carafe of day-old, cold coffee.

He did not notice that the gentleman was at least as uncomfortable as himself.

Then come the three picked at random in the English novels in my collection (precious few!).

They nest in those grass bowers and lose the clutch at a fell swoop.

He stands at the window, his face in the shadow of the wall.

A month has passed.

Well, that didn't help much. But I do so much like sentences.

Hearing through the whine

The radio was on as I did the washing up. I'd just abandoned some writing and was fed up. So much housework still to do. Getting late.

First up, Henry Purcell. Very nice. Then, without intro, two pieces by John Cage including some spoken words. I guessed it was Cage because of the prepared piano sound. As that faded out, in came the familiar tune of Wichita Lineman as sung by its composer Jimmy Webb. I prefer Glenn Campbell's version but hearing this, and all these, without warning, was wonderful. Oh for a radio station that did this all day ...

Well, I'll be watching the Masters

But on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday night there's a evening marking the Beckett centenary. In addition to Embers starring Michael Gambon and Krapp's Last Tape with Corin Redgrave, there's a documentary presented by the actor Stephen Rea about Beckett's relationship with his actors. You can listen live online and later through the archives. Sorted.

It's a shame they haven't thought to include the perfect reading of Stirrings Still that I recorded from R3 in March 1989. It's read by the late Norman Rodway, whose name know only because I recognised his voice while watching an episode of Inspector Morse. Still have the recording too. (Of Stirrings Still I mean, not Inspector Morse.) I didn't know Beckett's work then. Soon did.

He is a sex addict

Caveh Zahedi looks like he makes fun films. He came to my attention after making Tripping with Caveh in which the film-maker and Will Oldham go to the local park and eat some mushrooms. I also liked the title and concept of In the Bathtub of the World.

He's also written about what drives his film-making, citing Kafka and "his spiritual heir" Blanchot as influences. And I thought it was just me and Lars Spurious who include Bonnie Prince Billy and Blanchot within their charmed circle! The essay is well worth reading by the way.

Tonight I accessed Apple's movie trailer site for the first time and saw one for I Am A Sex Addict, his new movie. It "tells the story of how [Zahedi's] attraction to prostitutes and compulsive honesty combined to destroy each of his past relationships". I hope we get to see it over here along with his other work. Something for BBC4 perhaps.

And if you watch it, what's the Jonathan Richman song that comes in toward the end of the trailer? On his blog, Zahedi writes about receiving clearance to use it but doesn't mention the title.

Popular literary essays

I really don't understand why collections of good literary essays aren't more popular. Since the rise of the reading group, people not studying the subject at university are stuffing themselves with literature at a greater rate than they have done for years; and an intelligent piece of writing on the subject can illuminate not only the work, but everything round it. Just as these do.

Nicholas Lezard reviews Gabriel Josipovici's The Singer on the Shore.

He also says that it is a distinguishing [...] mark of Josipovici's sensitivity to his subject and his audience that - and I can't stress this too much - that you don't have to be that familiar with his subjects to get something out of what he says about them.

This is what surprised me so much about the collection. It opens with three short essays on the Bible that say more about modern fiction than most essays (by other writers) on modern fiction. But you can read Borges and the Plain Sense of Things, one of his essays on modern fiction, at RSB.

Treasonable clerks

This post was prompted by a coincidence*. Peter Stothard blogs about the TLS's double review in 1928 of Julian Benda's La Trehison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals). A book in which

he famously argued that his intellectual contemporaries had let down their fellow men by rejecting the pure philosophical idealism of their predecessors and allying themselves with practical political movements in support of nationalism or class.

Along the way Stothard mentions the influence of Dreyfus Affair on Benda's case and its current relevance to the Iraq Invasion. He provides a link to a bracing essay that makes the connection explicit (something that would be nice to see in Sir Peter's publication rather than the witless contributions of Edward Luttwak).

The fissure over the first case within intellectual salons in France inspired the dynamic in Proust's novel. His character Marcel is a convinced Dreyfusard surrounded by dimwitted or venal anti-Dreyfusards or closet Dreyfusards masquerading as anti- for social advancement. It furthered his apprenticeship to worldly signs, as Deleuze put it. Today the distinction is between those who see the invasion for what it is - what reason and commonsense sets out plainly (i.e. nothing to do with opinion) - and those who don't, for whatever unreason. The fissure is telling.

Stothard tries to make Benda's stricture apply to opponents of the war: they too can be condemned as treasonable for

their failure to recognise the lofty philosophical motives [i.e. to 'spread reason and justice'], in the best Benda tradition, which spurred many of the war's most prominent supporters.

But reason and justice had to be dispensed with in order to support the invasion. One had to keep faith with the myth of good intentions despite the trail of false promises, lies and dodgy dossiers; the patriotic forgeries as latter-day Charles Maurrases would no doubt have it. In this way the stylish prose of the pro-invasion commentators shares the same discomfort with rationality of the mealy-mouthed phrasings of BBC hacks and the racist propaganda of the tabloid press. It's not for nothing that Chomsky refers to a secular priesthood.

*Here's where I come to the coincidence. I've just received in the post Jean Paulhan's The Flowers of Tarbes, or, Terror in Literature from the University of Illinois Press. This has been described by Allan Stoekl as a response to what was lacking in Benda's agenda: religious impulses, what Stoekl calls "moral enthusiasm". Paulhan's was

a late attempt at reconciling abstract reason and sacred violence, language and that which exceeds it, in a new version of the intellectual, the Rhetorician.

This essay isn't online but a fine alternative is Michael Syrotinski's introduction to The Flowers of Tarbes at Ready Steady Book. In the same place, see also Chris Knight's remarkable essay on Chomsky in which he highlights the blindspot in Chomsky's own supreme rationality.

My interest in Paulhan's book was driven by Blanchot's famous essay review, which I've mentioned before. I intend to write on it, although it seems I need a private income to gain the necessary time. Heretics don't usually get on the priesthood's payroll after all. What started out as a wish to complicate the simplistic opposition of literary and genre fiction seems now to have widened into a metaphysics. But really, literature has always been that.

ADAM on the eve

There is no true editorship when everything is prosperous. It is the essence of a literary magazine's life to be always uncertain of tomorrow... to run the gamut of monthly printers' bills and yet to be determined never to give up the fight.

So said Miron Grindea, editor of ADAM International Review from 1936 to 1995.

I remember reading about this publication and its extraordinary contents and contributors, and I once saw a crumbling collection of half a dozen of them in a secondhand bookshop. In those days, I subscribed to Granta which, even then, before it became completely allergic to literature, was unsatisfying. I longed for a regular, modern version of ADAM, at least in its indifference to marketing*. That was before the internet. Only another 50-odd years to go then Mark!

*In one of my earliest blogs for Splinters, I reacted against some of Granta's junk mail.