Neil Aspinall, the man who George Harrison said deserved to be called "the fifth Beatle," has died.
When the American manager Allen Klein was brought in to sort out the Beatles’ finances, Mr. Klein fired much of the staff but was told by John Lennon, “Don’t touch Neil and Mal, they’re ours,” referring to Mr. Aspinall and his assistant, Mal Evans, who had also been with the group since its Liverpool days.
Mal Evans died in a run-in with the LAPD in 1976.
James Wood reviews Peter Carey's His Illegal Self and Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions in The New Yorker.
Ever since the attack on the World Trade Center, we have all heard a lot about “the Professor,” the chilling anarchist in Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” who walks around with a bomb strapped to himself and one hand on the detonator. Far more attention has been paid to this ruthless fanatic—unsuggestively reprised by Cormac McCarthy as Anton Chigurh, in “No Country for Old Men”—than to Verloc, the harried, soft, pithless entity who is the novel’s actual protagonist. But Verloc is more interesting than the Professor because he is so much less confident. The Professor is an arrow; Verloc is a target, helplessly bearing the gouges of the various assaults made on him. He works for the anarchists, but he also works against them, as a double agent; he is despised by his handler at the embassy, and feels bullied into following the diplomat’s order to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, a job that he fatally bungles; he is a minor London shopkeeper, who sells pornography under the table; he moves through his shabby domestic existence sluggishly, as if under water.
By being taken into the arms of new generations: "Gatsby's green light beckons a new set of strivers."
Jinzhao’s teacher, Meredith Elliott, and other teachers at Boston Latin and other urban schools, say their students see in “Gatsby” glimmers of their own evolving identities and dreams. The students talk about the youthful characters — Gatsby; Daisy Buchanan, the married woman he loves; Tom, Daisy’s husband and a onetime Yale football star; and the narrator, Nick Carraway — as if they were classmates or celebrities.
The Economist and TLS and the New Statesman on James Wood.
Related: A James Wood Q&A in Dazed Digital.
The gang at Holt has put together a truly spiffy Benjamin Black website, which includes a video in which Mr. Black discusses his nettlesome alter ego, John Banville.
And if you're looking for some more Hot Banville Video Action (sorry, we don't know what's become of us today), TEV reader Rory O'Connor alerts us to this clip and this one from a recent Irish TV documentary.
(We do promise to discuss the new book in detail but we will say that The Silver Swan is even better than its predecessor - more compact, richer, a truly fascinating read.)
We're off for a brief overnighter to Scottsdale to see Mrs. TEV and her horse in competition, back in these parts tomorrow.
Until then, do check out John Freeman's interview with the "fearsome" James Wood, in which Wood credits his students with his most recent developments:
“I became aware of a curious dual track,” Wood says, slightly wincing. “I would be polemicising in pieces about things I didn't like, but almost never doing that in class. You can't do that with students, it's not fair to prejudice them.”
Wood's concise and readable new book, How Fiction Works, grew out of this engagement with students. It is an attempt to show what he does like, and explain the novel as he sees it.
(Thanks to Dave Lull.)
UPDATE: The Saturday Guardian essay, to which many of you have alerted us, is actually the lengthiest excerpt found to date from How Fiction Works.
But a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction - from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to "know" them; they should not be "stereotypes", they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. A glance at the thousands of foolish "reader reviews" on Amazon, with their complaints about "dislikeable characters", confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader "couldn't find any characters to identify with", or "didn't think that any of the characters 'grow'".
The serialization of The Lemur - written by none other than Benjamin Black/John Banville - commences in the Sunday Magazine with Chapter 1: Glass Houses. (Thanks, Scott.)
The researcher was a very tall, very thin young man with a head too small for his frame and an Adam’s apple the size of a golf ball. He wore rimless spectacles, the lenses of which were almost invisible, the shine of the glass giving an extra luster to his large, round, slightly bulging black eyes. A spur of blond hair sprouted from his chin, and his brow, high and domed, was pitted with acne scars. His hands were slender and pearly pale, with long, tapering fingers — a girl’s hands, or at least the hands a girl should have. Even though he was sitting down, the crotch of his baggy jeans sagged halfway to his knees. His none-too-clean T-shirt bore the legend “Life Sucks and Then You Die.” He looked about 17 but must be, John Glass guessed, in his late 20s, at least. With that long neck and little head and those big, shiny eyes, he bore a strong resemblance to one of the more exotic rodents, though for the moment Glass could not think which one.
If you haven't tried the Black books yet, Christine Falls has just been released in paperback by Picador, giving you plenty of time to catch up for the release of The Silver Swan. (Picador will also release The Lemur in its entirety later this year.)
One of the few things that can rouse us from our headache stupor: James Wood on J.M. Coetzee. (Via.)
The pieties of current criticism are supposed to forbid one to inquire about Coetzee’s relation to this strain of theology. We are warned that it is naïve to confuse author and character, even when—especially when—that character is also a novelist. But if Coetzee’s novels deflect such inquiries, they also invite them, not least because of the provoking extremity, even irrationality, of their ideas. In the last entry of this novel, “On Dostoevsky,” Señor C writes:
I read again last night the fifth chapter of the second part of The Brothers Karamazov, the chapter in which Ivan hands back his ticket of admission to the universe God has created, and found myself sobbing uncontrollably.
It is not the force of Ivan’s reasoning, he says, that carries him along but “the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world.” We can hear the same note of personal anguish in Coetzee’s fiction, even as that fiction insists that it is offering not a confession but only the staging of a confession. His books makes all the right postmodern noises, but their energy lies in their besotted relationship to an older, Dostoyevskian tradition, in which we feel the desperate impress of the confessing author, however recessed and veiled.
We can't help but note, with a pleasure that longtime TEV readers will understand, that we also fastened on the Karamazov reference - albeit with considerably less elegance. (See our Recommended sidebar.)
James Wood considers the new War and Peace translation for The New Yorker. (Thanks to Dave Lull)
Tolstoy is the great novelist of physical involuntariness. The body helplessly confesses itself, and the novelist seems merely to run and catch its spilled emotion. A friend of the novelist’s, the critic Aleksandr Druzhinin, ribbed him about it in a letter: “You are sometimes on the point of saying that so-and-so’s thighs showed that he wanted to travel in India!” The old patriarch Prince Bolkonsky, for instance, loves his son, Andrei, and his daughter, Marya, so fiercely that he cannot express that love in any form except spiteful bullying, yelling in the presence of his spinsterish daughter, “If only some fool would marry her!” His hands register “the still persistent and much-enduring strength of fresh old age,” but his face occasionally betrays suppressed tenderness. As he says farewell to his son, who is going to war, he is his usual self, gruffly shouting “Off with you!” Yet “something twitched in the lower part of the old prince’s face.”
Pure coincidence, we just reached for Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's The Brothers Karamazov, with which we've decided to spend our afore-mentioned unplugged Thanksgiving.
Now, academics get their share of abuse, some deserved, some not. And although the news of a James Bond conference at Hofstra isn't prima facie a reason for ridicule, observations like this one are:
Joseph Allegretti, a professor of business and religious studies at Siena College, correctly pointed out during the conference that Fleming's first novel, "Casino Royale," was really a character study of Bond.
In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.
